Victimism

n Victimism

A reply to Gassalasca Jape, S.J.’s “On the Spread of Victimism.”

Notwithstanding the general lack of manners, there is thought and analysis going on today. But it’s easier and more fun to fight than listen and discuss. Slinging shit is real fun, and if you’ve got the money to do it on TV, radio, the Internet, it’s greater fun! We play politics like we play sports — we yell, insult, criticize, cheer, etc., from our living rooms, offices and classrooms.

Trying to suppress the fight by blaming both sides, or pointing out the mistakes and hypocrisies found on both sides, is Pecksniffian. It’s not as if we don’t know that we’re hypocritical when we accuse the other side of being pure evil. We know that, nobody needs to point it out to us. We like fighting, because fighting is a part of playing, a part of working, a part of living. Having to be told that we are hypocrites is a diversion; it’s like kids yelling and fighting on the playground during a ballgame, only to be interrupted by a teacher who’s reminding us to “play fair!” Oh, we will, you can count on it, after we kick the crap out of this guy or that guy.

It will never be otherwise. And for those who are just beyond or outside the fray, they might try finding a hobby, read more Albert Jay Nock, and seek holiness.

Bob Sale
San Diego

Fr. Jape replies…

Mr. Sale—

In my view, there is a place for intelligent satire and polemic which is not antithetical to analysis. I know for a fact that such stuff has cured many a soul. The young, brought up amid the dysfunctions you describe, are often ripe for “something more.” Indeed, this is the whole strategy of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is it not? ISI sponsors a hideously Limbaugh-like agitprop machine for college students and subsequently offers them contact with much more refined conservatism modeled by great men, both dead and living, such as your Mr. Nock. And it is no mere intellectual conversion that is sought; indeed, many of my evangelical friends believe that ISI is a Catholic conspiracy to steal away their young. Perusing the ISI book catalog, I am hard pressed to deny the evidence.

My best & finest regards�

+G.J.

Not Voting

he follow letters were received in reponse to Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S.J.’s irregular column, “The Japery.”

Fr. Jape,

I greatly enjoyed today’s entry. [Arguments Against Single-Issue Voting Lack Nuance, Honesty, and Guts 10/29] This paragraph in particular:

“Abortion, properly understood by pagans and religionists alike, pertains to end of life ‘issues,’ like euthanasia; genetic meddling on all kinds of life; economic and ‘social’ justice–and more. How we regard and treat life, especially human life, and the health of the family (the fundamental ordering structure of society) is a basic, foundational political concern that rightly precedes all others. One can vote on it as a ‘single-issue’ or litmus test because it impacts all issues profoundly. A person’s views on ‘abortion’ always tell you a great deal about that person.”

However, as much as I agree with this, I also regard Pres. Bush’s war policy as terribly misguided from the standpoint of both jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria, which is just as much an issue of how we regard and treat life. While I was never seriously tempted to pull the lever for Kerry, I think to endorse the current war policy (and I have a hard time seeing a vote for Bush as anything but a de facto endorsement) is to undermine respect for life in much the same way.

One could also mention the widely-publicized execution of Karla Faye Tucker (a born-again Christian if I recall correctly) who’s pleas for clemency were mocked by then-Governor Bush in an interview with journalist Tucker Carlson. Whatever you think about the death penalty, that kind of callousness does not speak well of the President’s character or reverence for life.

Whether opting out of voting for a major-party candidate bespeaks apathy or some other vice I’m not sure. But I don’t think it’s as clear as we would like who’s on the side of “life.”

Regards,

Lee McCracken

Fr. Jape replies…

Dear Lee–

I’m always happy to be appreciated–or objectionable, as the case may be. I agree with you completely. Nothing I have written should imply such unqualified support for the present neocon junto as one may read in the pages of certain journals of religion and public life. It is definitely a bad situation, with a choice between different kinds of free-wheeling death-dealers. My colleagues are divided on this election, and I am not all of one mind myself.

Best regards,

+G.J.

It seems to me that the question is really what responsibility we (as voters) have for the candidates for whom we vote. Specifically, when candidates take positions that are morally evil, are we (as Archbishop Chaput would say) morally obligated not to vote for them? And what happens if there are only two candidates, and both take evil positions?

With Mr. Kerry, obviously his stance on abortion is evil, and I would say the same for his stance on homosexual unions.

With Mr. Bush, his stance in favor of Aggressive War clearly violates Church “Just War” teaching, and the Church also condemns the willful use of torture (which Mr. Bush publicly opposes, but privately condones). Detaining people without trial (be they US citizens or foreigners) seems to me not a per se evil, but in its application these past 3 years, I would say that it has become so, because it has been excessive and erroneous. Particularly in a world where the USA is the preeminent power, the effects of these evils are grave indeed.

If one so concludes (as I believe a faithful Catholic must), one then faces a choice: to vote for him who is perceived as embodying the lesser evil, or not to choose between the candidates. Not choosing can mean voting for a third party or not voting at all. If Archbishop Chaput is correct, then we are obliged not to support politicians who advocate a known evil. But even assuming a more moderate position, we’re still obligated to make a prudential judgment as to the likely efficacy of a given vote – we could only cooperate with a material evil for grave reasons.

If I had to vote for one of the two candidates, I believe I’d vote for Mr. Kerry (largely because I don’t think it likely that enough pro-life justices will be confirmed to overturn Roe v. Wade, whereas I see the evils from a continued Bush presidency as unavoidable). But in my case, there is no need to make that judgment. I live in a solid “blue” state, it will go for Kerry regardless. Why should I take an act which may be morally wrong, when taking any such step is unnecessary? That is how I arrived at a decision to abstain.

I cannot speak for others who have reached this conclusion, but I believe such a position is clearly logical (and having Alisdair MacIntyre say so bolsters my confidence!). You may disagree with my conclusion that Bush’s advocacy of wrong acts implicates Bush voters in the same kind of cooperation with evil as Kerry’s advocacy of abortion. You may believe that the sin of abortion is more morally wrong than the sin of aggressive war, or the sin of wilful torture. I don’t know how to weigh these evils, except to ask whether they involve grave matter. I think I agree that failure to help the poor, etc., implies more negligence than intent, and would probably not be grave matter – so I agree that one cannot assume equivalence between that and abortion – but is this also the case with Aggressive War and torture? I would think not.

Regards,

Chuck Roth
Chicago, IL

Fr. Jape replies…

Dear Mr Roth–

There is nothing wrong with your thinking here; it is very admirable, but it is the wrong kind of thinking. What is called for, I think, is a willingness to sin boldly. Archbishop Chaput has put his finger on it: vote for Bush (or whomever) and then to confession. We’re all complicit in the structures of power in which politicians rise. If you’re not going to vote, why not stop using money, get out of the stock market, cancel your insurance, stop using fossil fuels?

Yours–

+G.J.

First Impressions

he following letters were received from readers immediately following the coverage that tNP received in The New York Times (July 17, 2004: 1A) this summer.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for finally arriving.

Tami Hughes

It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
     After reading the new pantagruel.

congrats!

Tony Carnes
Senior News Writer
Christianity Today

Came across you via today’s New York Times “Post Buckley” article.

I’ll cram my reaction to your “Welcome to the New Pantagruel” essay into one short sentence.

Christianity will continue imploding inexorably as long as there are hungry wretches living in squalor, sparkling young theoreticians with unlimited time to philosophise about America’s grossly overrated view of herself and a vast, vast majority, sadly in the first instance, mercifully in the second, who, frankly, don’t give a damn.

Regards,
David Marsden
Baruba W.I.

Dear Mr. Stegall,

Once upon a time, I read Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, and every copy of First Things – and reached for the kind of wit and wisdom you seem to be bringing together at The New Pantagruel. I’m glad to have been reminded. And I admire your “back page” piece on human-scaled sin. Thank you and best wishes.

Sincerely,
Ien Cheng

The definition of conservative was never more a problem than today when an officially ‘conservative’ government is in office that turns out to be anything but, tending as it does more towards the authoritarian or neo-fascist, interventionary style, hugely costly and insensitive to the environment and human rights.

From the time I read both Aristotle and Burke in the same term in graduate school, I have thought of conservative as meaning concern with the individual. The identification and realization of the qualities of the individual, the useful application and fulfillment of an individual’s nature and worth in society are the bedrock of responsible conservative thought, it seems to me, whether in the context of ancient Greece or 18th-Century England.

If we had a clear definition of the philosophical and practical under- pinnings of the conservative view, there would be more clarity in politics today, and more effective function of our Democracy. Perhaps one way to approach this is to say what ‘conservative’ is not.

Let’s look at some ideas, perhaps disabuse some illusions, on what the conservative movement, by its original definition, is not. First, it is not an obstacle to change. It nurtures and cohabits with change, manages it, uses it. Man is a rational animal, and if we do not use our heads to absorb and implement knowledge and insight learnt over the ages by the combined mental efforts of mankind in science, social politics, technology, psychology - then we are not being ourselves. Ideas cannot be resisted; they can only be delayed. In political terms, “conservative” has come to mean for many “reactionary.” Hold to the status quo. Never learn but never forget. Isolationism. All these terms are thrice-familiar throughout the centuries, and if there is one thing we have learnt, or should have, it is that resistance to change only leads to a big bang in the end, whether it is the French Revolution, World War, or economic depression and disaster or the music of Arnold Schoenberg.

Another thing conservatism is not is greed, or narcissism – though it often presents itself as such. One thinks immediately of the present US administration, which in the most shockingly obvious way is being first and foremost run for the betterment of it’s ministers and their business interests. One also thinks of Ayn Rand (1905-1982), the novelist (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) and proponent of Objectivism philosophy who was, incidentally, a close friend and mentor to Allen Greenspan when he was first starting his career. These entities are always tagged ‘conservative.’ They could not be further from it! The conservative citizen is at his best a caring person, a person who in one religious or ethical belief or another, recognizes an obligation to care of his neighbor and regard the integrity of context, i. e. Nature and environment. He is thrifty, but not foolishly so; he abides by the law, he thinks for himself and works for what he thinks is right. Liberals also do these things, but the classical conservative practitioner is a person who looks at man as a sacred entity and his realization as a sacred, and practically desirable, duty. His starting point is the individual, one might say, to the liberal view, which has a starting point of the group, just to differentiate – admittedly with a simplification. The conservative does not approach education as a matter of “testing,” rather as a matter of challenge, opportunity and support. And he regards as one of conservatism’s principle well springs the worth of Nature over that of the New York Stock Exchange or The First National Bank. He knows that Nature abounds in art forms and crafts of all kinds, and he equates the mind as equal to the body. He would, at least in theory, champion an Olympics of the mind, something the ancient Greeks should have established but never got round to. They were good thinkers and formulators but, alas, got overly involved with matters corporeal.

In the end, I suppose, there is no great difference between liberals and conservatives for we are all human beings who want the best outcome to our lives. Disparity comes in the process of getting there. The two Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin, are good symbols for what I am saying here – T. the quintessential proponent of healthy and I would say “true” conservatism, and F. the pragmatic liberal at its best, the man with a view towards doing a great deal to realize the potential of the individual, yet practical and not a socialist. I also like the late Senator Henry Jackson of Washington State who was wont to say: “Yes I am a liberal, but I’m not a damn fool!” More of these gentlemen, please.

James A. Van Sant
Santa Fe, New Mexico

A Dialogue on the Presidential Election

by The Editors of The New Pantagruel

Editorial Introduction

n election eve, “discerning” Christians are awash with unsolicited advice and testimonies on the subject of voting. A growing chorus of Christian notables, now including Mark Noll, Alisdair MacIntyre, and Paul Griffiths, find things so decidedly unsatisfactory that they aren’t voting at all. Meanwhile, veterans of the culture wars such as Charles Colson and Jim Wallis continue to invoke the moral duties of the Church in favor of one side or the other, while the sophisticated folks at Christianity Today don’t endorse any particular candidate but do encourage the faithful not to succumb to the temptation of being a “one issue” voter.

Our own Fr. Jape has opined on these subjects at length, arguing in less than kind terms against the foolishness of pining for an ideologically acceptable politics in which a Christian can comfortably rest, knowing that no evil is being done on his behalf. To the contrary, history is replete with the tragic lesson that political power is inherently corrupting of principle, yet the truth of principles cannot get any traction in the world without being in and of it. A moral man may choose sectarian withdrawal, itself a kind of politics by other means, or the tragedy of engagement on the edge of risk and ever-compromised necessities. But it is the immaturity of double-mindedness to choose one and pine for the other, and such a divided mind produces only instability where order is required.

The double-mindedness which produces electoral withdrawal as a kind of fortification against compromised engagement in the rest of one’s life is a symptom of the troubling trend among Christians to cocoon themselves in the “misunderstood minority” identity and abdicate any responsibility for power while simultaneously refusing to give up what power they have. We have become exemplars of the tendency to develop a mind so principled that it succumbs to either ideologism or an idealistic paralysis that comes from seeing through all the false choices.

Institutional power is what it is—always. If a system passes through revolution to the establishment of a new regime, it will merely play its own variation on the same old problems. Or as Pete Townsend put it, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” The best of our Christian political tradition teaches us, therefore, to align ourselves radically with the particular and the individual without actually believing that the institutional regime must be overthrown. One can thus work to mitigate and contain institutional power; living in love with the frail limits of existence—family, friends, community, and place—in service of truth, goodness, and beauty, yet knowing that even if good can be done, evil will be done too.

That said, the pathological death-wish of our current social and political order can hardly be understated. Our society—its businesses, schools, governments, families, communities, and even churches—has staked its economic and spiritual stability on the shifting sand of grand consumption and its exemplars: a young, single adulthood to and beyond the age of 30; childless or near-childless, “dual income,” “professional” couples; the managerial home in which children are shuttled from one structured consumption to the next, until they are finally released to “freedom” in an institution of higher learning; and retired or pining-to-be-retired “empty-nesters.” Our economy, media, and pop-culture worship these “lifestyle” demographics and encourage and reward their aimlessly selfish carousing. This means the propagation of a culture that at every level is oriented toward the most nihilistic individualism possible; the fetishization of self and one’s “personal freedom” that led Sartre to define hell as “other people”—i.e., people who coerce and constrain us with needs and desires that can be legally circumvented.

Abortion is the jewel of this culture, and is the “single issue” in which all other issues are subsumed. It remains the worst manifestation and keystone of our gospel of self-service; a gospel which is preached and propounded by exploiters across the political spectrum, everywhere from leftist campuses to comfortably “conservative” suburbia. The metaphor is apt: the false, exploitative freedom of the self-serve soda machine in fast food restaurants is the mechanism of choice in our poisonous soup of late liberalism and consumptive capitalism. The libido seeking freedom and pleasure “chooses,” pays for, and feeds itself at a trough filled with waste and ruin.

In light of these complexities, and the vexingly inadequate political leaders we are given to choose from, The New Pantagruel asked four of its Contributing Editors to discuss the upcoming election, their participation in it, and their thoughts on the general substance of Christian writing on the subject. As you can see from the ensuing dialogue, there is by no means a consensus of opinion beyond a deep antiliberalism. Our broader hope for this conversation, as for tNP, remains that it would foster a discourse that does not minimize differences to “spare feelings” because ultimately we believe life is tragicomic and eucatastrophic. While we are engaged with the crises and catastrophes, a serious, taxing and often debilitating business, we can always look at ourselves and our situation from an imagined eternity where it is, if not farcical, a tragic agon tempered by the comic finish of the marriage feast. In less elevated language, we think the matter debated here is very important stuff, so we refuse to trivialize it by treating it with an ultimacy of meaning or our associates with an unbreakable earnestness.

–Caleb Stegall and Dan Knauss

The following dialogue took place by email in October 2004 among four of The New Pantagruel’s contributing editors: Eugene McCarraher, Assistant Professor of Humanities and History at Villanova University; Bruce Berglund, Assistant Professor of History at Calvin College; Scott Moore, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and director of the Great Texts Program at Baylor University; and Eric Miller, Assistant Professor of History and director of the Humanities program at Geneva College.

__MTPAGINATE_PAGE_BREAK__

Eugene McCarraher:

Well, I’ll be the first out of the gate. I’m not going to vote in this election, even though I’d like to repeat my support for Nader in 2000. For me, my vote not to vote is based on two considerations, one specific and one general. If one opposed the invasion of Iraq and wants a clear idea of how and when we’re getting out, one does not have a candidate in this race. If one wants a genuinely pro-life agenda – in other words, one which opposes, not just abortion, but the whole culture and economy of death which is corporate capitalism – one does not have a candidate in this race. The choice, as I see it, is between Imperialism, Plutocracy, and Capital Punishment vs. Imperialism, Plutocracy, and Abortion. Nader, as usual, is the supreme diagnostician of our corrupt and comatose political culture, and many of his proposals are meritorious and visionary. But his one-man band of a candidacy marks a triumph of egotism over good sense, and his support for abortion rights, while not, I think, a completely debilitating stance (that’s a prudential judgment), gives me pause.

And yet, strangely, I feel hopeful. Things, I think, just can’t go on like this, and a lot of people, not just Christians, feel this in the marrow of their bones. To quote the old 60s canard, perhaps it’s darkest just before the dawn.

Bruce Berglund:

I also recognize the dilemma that [Mark] Noll faces: I did not push a lever for president in 1996, although not for the reasons he offers. I was distressed in that campaign by (in addition to the failings of the major candidates) the absence of any substance in the candidates’ exchange, in the way they skirted fundamental problems in society. I did not see any serious or creative thinking from either side; instead, they were trapped in phraseology, trading poll-tested but timid proposals.

I also voted for Nader in 2000. Leading up to that election, I was frustrated by a primary process that sidelined two people (Bradley and McCain) who recognized and addressed deeper issues in the country and presented instead to the electorate two demagogues. I saw Nader as a candidate who offered a serious critique to the standard practices of American politics and advocated policies outside the limited realm of options in which the major parties constrain themselves. After listening to Nader recently, though, I’ve judged, like Gene, that the valid points he can make have become drowned out by his ego.

It appears that, in the current campaign, the superficiality of American politics has only increased. The deep problems in society and in the conduct of politics are avoided, as the candidates exchange band-aid proposals on tax cuts and new programs. This lack of creativity in addressing serious issues and formulating responses is what I find disappointing in contemporary politics.

That said, I will be voting in November–for a candidate from one of the major party candidates. I judge the current administration a failure in many ways, and I will not stand aside to allow that administration another four years.

Scott Moore:

This is the first presidential election in a number of years in which I haven’t felt some deep anxiety (or guilt) about how I’ll cast my vote. That’s not because I’m pleased with the options before me. In 2000, I too voted for Nader, but not because I had any affection for him or because I believed he would make a good president. I was exercising my constitutional right to self-deception by convincing myself that I was helping make third parties more viable in Texas. But who was I kidding? We live ten minutes from Crawford. It wasn’t even close. I should have saved the gas.

I’m approaching this election year with less anxiety because I’m finally coming to terms with the end of my Constantinian Christianity. Though I’ve known for years that this epoch was over, I haven’t been able to shake a deep desire to find a candidate who approximated my beliefs, and who would, finally, “turn this country around and cure its ills.” Yes, I still believe that a pro-life, anti-war, universal health care democrat could win a national election, but it’s finally coming home to me that the problem isn’t just that these sorts of people don’t exist (or won’t run). The problem is that our country really does want the kinds of candidates that we get because these are the sorts of guys who will attempt what we have deemed “realistic” solutions to the problems we really want solved. This is a mindset which assumes that security–be it national, financial, or emotional–is not only the highest good but also to be achieved through a (kinder, gentler?) will to power. We Christians must never think that “security” is the highest good, and we must not give in to a culture of death which celebrates the ubiquity of war: the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illiteracy, etc.

At some point I’ve come to realize that I’m not just “disenchanted” by the political process; I’m really a citizen of another city. Hauerwas and Willimon popularized the theme of “resident aliens” almost ten years ago, but it is really the oldest of concepts. Its most beautiful expression is found in Philippians 3. This doesn’t mean that we have to withdraw from the political process altogether. St. Augustine, after all, encouraged us to make good use of the peace and resources of the earthly city; we just should not place our hope on that city bringing about a lasting peace because it is essentially predicated on the “inevitability” and centrality of war. Thus, I’ll probably vote, but not for Kerry or Bush. There are some local races that I’m interested in, but even here I must always be reminded of the delusion of the Constantinian and Utopian impulse. The Church’s political goal in a post-christian age is the development of a faithful, subversive counterculture.

Eric Miller:

What I’m seeing this fall is the American story playing out in diabolical farce. If it were just a farce, it would be good at least for an occasional chuckle. But since this particular story involves a cultural behemoth with imperial might, too much is at stake to make laughter easy.

How’s this for farce: of the two parties, the GOP is the one that retains at least some willful connection to the language that could expose most fully our own folly and evil: orthodox, Christian theology. Yet who has any confidence that this sorry “party” would ever allow the fluent speakers of that language to have significant authority—the sort of authority that could, say, provoke a re-thinking of its historic stances on health care, consumerism, or war? On the other side, the Democrats are the legatees of a tradition that makes possible keen vision in many crucial areas of our common life—including matters ecological, public health concerns, and wariness of the corporation. Yet over the past half-century it has energetically excluded (or, shall we say, aborted) any significant recourse to the language that had much to do with calling the party into being–again, Christian theology–and has in turn led us on a death march on “issue” after “issue.” Is this not farcical? And given the dimensions of the nation these parties lead, is it not diabolical?

I too went the Nader route in 2000, in the hope that a strengthened Green party might at least force the other two parties to take some turns, however minor, in their direction. But this time that possibility is gone. I don’t believe Bush deserves re-election. I don’t believe Kerry deserves election. I can’t see myself pulling a lever (or poking out a chad) for either.

Bruce Berglund:

I appreciated the connection that Scott draws between our shared sense of political homelessness and our citizenship in another city. Presumably then, we should take joy in our inability to find a party with which to place our allegiance.

But I am reluctant to choose the option of not voting, while congratulating myself that my political frustration verifies my status as a citizen of the heavenly city. Moreover, I am reluctant to cast a ballot that will be ineffectual. In 2000, I voted for Nader with the thought that he would gain a substantial share of the vote, enough to give pause to the major parties and, perhaps, to build a foundation for a viable third party. Well, it appears that he succeeded in capturing the vote of disaffected Christian academics who serve as contributing editors for this online journal (a journal which, oddly enough, was spotlighted by The New York Times in a survey of new trends in “conservative” thought). But I was sincerely disappointed by Nader’s overall showing in the last election.

In this election, the pressing question is: should the sitting president be entrusted with another four years? Absolutely not, I say. Although the stances of Kerry (whatever they may be) and the Democratic Party do not correspond to my own thinking on issues, I know that, by not voting for him, I concede to four more years of Bush.

I make this choice not simply due to my opposition to the current administration’s policies and my judgment that it has failed in the task of leading the country (I do agree wholly with Kerry that this is the “excuse presidency”). I am voting against the revival of Constantinianism that the Bush administration and the Republican Party represents, and too many Christians endorse: the stew of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld bowing their heads in prayer at the start of cabinet meetings, TV preachers telling me that a vote for Bush will save Christians in Uzbekistan from the oppression of their government, and political/religious organizations putting leaflets on my car, in the parking lot at church on Sunday morning, that rate candidates based on their “proper Christian” views on the Second Amendment and tax cuts.

There’s a letter to the editor in this month’s edition of Harper’s in which the writer laments about the progressives’ “ceding of God” to the Republican Party. By voting to defeat Bush, I wish to send the message that I will not allow the Republican Party or the administration to claim God’s side as their own (or, as it most often seems, the other way around). To do that, I recognize, I have to vote for Kerry.

Eric Miller:

I find myself agreeing with every particular point Bruce has made. Was it Kristof, Dionne, or some other columnist who wrote about the Cheneys’ Christmas card of last year? According to the column, it featured a Benjamin Franklin quotation to the effect that the course of this great nation was obviously being blessed and guided by providence, etc etc etc. This is enough to make one flee into the arms of any alternative, which is (almost) what I hear in Bruce’s decision. It brings to mind Christopher Lasch as a socialist in the fall of 1968 urging the readers of the New York Review to vote for Nixon–anything to repudiate and castigate the follies and evils of the Johnson/Humphrey-guided Democratic Party.

For all of the resonance I feel with Bruce’s points, I still come back to the basic fact that when electing a President, we cast votes for a political tradition as much as we choose a particular constellation of political figures. And to vote for Kerry is to side with a political tradition that has given itself over to enshrining a way of thinking about life that imperils life (daily), all in the name of “choice.” For me, this would make a vote for Kerry a very difficult one to cast, to say the least. To be sure, the very starkness of the practice of abortion (and the nexus of related and unfolding bioethical issues) has had the unfortunate effect of dimming the ability of many Christians to see the critical importance of other social, moral, and ecological concerns (many represented far better by the Democratic party than by the GOP).

Still, which party (and tradition) has the best chance in the long run of helping the country turn toward a more life-engendering way of seeing? Put this way, I would have to place more hope in the party that grants some epistemic authority to Christian perspectives. And that, it seems to me, is the GOP–despite the fact that I, as I said before, have no real confidence that it will in the coming years become more Christian rather than less Christian. Given the unpredictable nature of history, it might well be that in another fifty years the Democrats will have become reacquainted in some significant measure with their Christian heritage. At any rate, neither party today is interested in provoking a national discussion on the nature of freedom. I can’t think of a more damning thing to say about our present political moment.

But back to Bruce: it may truly be best, at this particular moment, to, for the sake of the Kingdom of Christ, be rid of Bush, precisely because of the “Constantinianism” that he represents. We need (and the world needs), it seems clear to me, a far more effective and sophisticated form of Christian politics than what we’ve seen from Bush and company.

When I ended my last remarks, I wrote that I couldn’t see myself voting for either ticket. I meant that literally. I very well could end up voting for one or the other. I just can’t see which one (if either), as of today. If nothing else, the equivocating nature of these comments gives further evidence why. For obvious reasons, I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of you out on all of this.

Eugene McCarraher:

I urge Eric, with a twist on the Bard, to screw his courage to the sticking place, and not vote. My only difference with him regards his assertion that the GOP affords Christian perspectives “epistemic authority.” Rhetorical status, yes – epistemic authority, no way. I was listening to Tom DeLay the other day using the phrase “culture of life,” and I almost put my foot through the set. That little snivel, and the mean-spirited forces he represents, are the very embodiments of a culture of death, in my view.

I speak from some experience when I say that Christians with our concerns are better off trying to establish connections with the secular left – I mean the real left of socialists, anarchists, etc., not the suburban liberals who want Anybody But Bush. Their opposition to Bush amounts, I think, to a narcissism of small differences, and I don’t think they’re at all sympathetic to anything that’s going to undermine their conception of life as a menu of “choices” and “options.” There’s at least a modicum of interest in Christian theology among people like Terry Eagleton or Slavoj Zizek, and I think we should cultivate this interest as much as we can. We should also be making connections with the labor movement – Christians, or at least Catholics, did in the 1930’s, and it’s one of the most remarkable derelictions of political duty that the churches have let these ties go attenuated.

Bruce Berglund:

Yes, I agree completely that Christians need to rethink their alliances. For the last two decades, too many Christian voters have chosen the same side as the gun lobby, Enron execs, and the raving acolytes of Michael Savage and his ilk. I was there myself at one time. But the need for new alliances is why I will choose to vote for Kerry. Call it Anybody-but-Bushism (just don’t lump me with the suburban liberals), but I don’t see how Christians and Republicans will be shaken out of their current alliance, or at least compelled to rethink the foundations of that alliance, unless the sitting president loses the election. In watching the debates, I was struck by Bush’s smugness (clearly, his scowls on night one reflected a sense that he, as President, should not be questioned) and by the thinly veiled motivation of his whole campaign: let’s send up some balloons to keep people happy and then we’ll coast for the next four years.

I am compelled to go back to Eric’s explanation for his hesitation about voting for Kerry, which presumably hinges on the parties’ stances on abortion. I must challenge the suggestion that the Republican Party “has the best chance in the long run of helping the country turn toward a more life-engendering way of seeing.” As Gene indicated at the very start, can we call the party that stands resolutely for capital punishment as the life-affirming party? Beyond the issue of capital punishment (which many Democrats support), I look to the Republicans as the party that allows the assault-weapons ban to expire and obstructs any attempt at gun control, the party that obstructs a rise in the minimum wage (at its current point, a full-time, minimum-wage worker makes $10,712/yr), the party that has done nothing (and likely will do nothing in the next four years) to address the health-care crisis in this country. That last issue is, to me a life-and-death issue.

But I challenge Eric not only on the suggestion that one party’s stance on a single issue makes it the party that promotes a “life-engendering way of seeing.” I reject the reduction of politics to that single issue and the suggestion that one party is “life-affirming,” which implies that the other is not. One of our colleagues on the editorial board offered a post in one of the online forums, suggesting that “that certain Republicans have a vested interest in NOT overturning Roe v. Wade.” I think there is some truth to that. As long as Republicans can galvanize Christians on the abortion issue, they can count on their votes. The Republican Party has been tarring its opponents on the abortion issue since when? We can go back at least to the 1984 contest between Reagan and Mondale. So, it has now been 20 years. For 12 of those years Republicans have controlled the White House. In how many more elections will Republicans play this trump card to gain the votes of Christians?

And if the upper level of the Republican leadership truly does wish to overturn Roe v. Wade, is it possible? Judges openly opposed to the 1972 decision can be Borked in the Senate. And the politics of court appointments means that considerations other than abortion often come to the fore. In 1981, the Reagan Administration clouded Sandra Day O’Connor’s pro-choice stance in order to get her past the conservatives. Twelve years later, O’Connor was an author of the opinion on Planned Parenthood v. Casey that affirmed the Roe decision.

Eric Miller:

Bruce makes several strong points against a position that I (allegedly) hold. Without devolving to a blow-by-blow reply, suffice it to say that I did not intend to imply that it is the GOP’s position on abortion that caused me to suggest that it promotes a more “life-engendering way of seeing.” What I did say (which Gene properly responded to) was that what hope I have for the GOP lies in the fact that it “grants some epistemic authority to Christian perspectives”–unlike the Democratic party, which is committed fundamentally to a liberalism that makes no place for religious authority (think Bob Casey). Put differently, the GOP holds open the door to a way of seeing (and to the people who promote and practice it) that might actually enable it at some point to correct the sorts of troubling inconsistencies that Bruce has underscored, and that I in the main affirm.

Is this sort of self-correction likely? As I said before, no. But to the extent that the battle is pitched on the field of language, I believe Christians have an obligation to seek to strengthen those groups and communities that continue speak their native tongue. This is why, I take it, people like Hauwerwas, and earlier, Christopher Lasch, were willing to associate with First Things, despite Neuhaus’s neo-conservatism, which to them is repugnant. Differences on political economy, and other policy issues, at some point must give way to the even more basic imperative of keeping the language alive and relevant for the day.

As to the matter of rethinking alliances: I couldn’t agree more. The great promise of the New Pantagruel, I think, is that it is actually creating space where Christians and others can freely draw from diverging political traditions in order to construct a way to meet the challenge of our day. And I don’t think we need to all agree on which traditions (liberal, conservative, radical, anarchist, agrarian, et al) are most salient for the moment; in fact, it is precisely this sort of discussing and disagreeing about these traditions that I see as most capable of animating an endeavor such as this.

With this in view, I’ll throw the question out there to Gene (or anyone else) – what is the reason for your hope in the secular left?

I would also like to hear a rebuttal to Bruce’s earlier argument (as well as the argument of one “Jape”) that sitting-out the election is itself an immoral choice. You who are choosing not to vote: how do you respond to those who say that we have a moral obligation to support the lesser of the two evils?

Eugene McCarraher:

Let me respond to two points. I don’t have any “hope” in the secular left. My remarks about making alliances with unbelieving socialists, anarchists, etc. amount to a tactical suggestion. Unlike the GOP, these groups keep alive that part of the Christian language which affirms social justice and solidarity. In Augustinian terms, the secular left affirms a perversion of the heavenly city – and if a perversion is a predatory, inadequate, but nonetheless dimly perceived version of a real good, then we should work with, converse with, and even seek to convert those forces. Besides, the secular left still has claim to a treasure trove of social and economic analysis which is indispensable in understanding capitalist modernity. We’re all indebted to this treasure ourselves, so an honest accounting of our own intellectual debts would be salutary.

Second, as to the morality of not voting. Voting for the “lesser of two evils” always leaves you with the evil of two lessers. It doesn’t even necessarily give you the lesser of the evils: voting against Hitler in 1933 didn’t prevent the triumph of fascism, mainly, one could argue, because the anti-fascist left didn’t get its act together to pose a real alternative to reaction. In the absence of such a clear and compelling alternative in this much less dire moment, not voting is itself a political act: it’s a way of saying that I refuse to countenance the current political culture. In effect, I’m voting – with my feet – against the system. Only if you accept the fundamental legitimacy of the system can you see that position as immoral or irresponsible. Again, I take an Augustinian position: I participate in the politics of the earthly city, but only in such a way as is consonant, in my judgment, with faith and morals. I’m cheerfully and unapologetically parasitic on the empire’s laws: I abide by them, but only because and to the extent that they further the work of the gospel.

When and if they don’t, so much the worse for them. So my not-voting is tactical, not principled: I’m not Mike Baxter or Mike Budde, both of whom refuse to vote on principle. (Even Hauerwas votes.)

Bruce Berglund:

My apologies to Eric for misrepresenting his stance. I had been chewing on your corrective to my remarks–and your point about the GOP holding the door open to a way of seeing that might lead to a resolution of the party’s inconsistencies. Then I turned through the channels on the way to the ballgame and came across the TV-preacher network’s news program. Here was all the vitriol and insolence of Fox News, wrapped in the cloak of religious certitude. I have to spit out any notion of “life-engendering ways of seeing” or granting “epistemic authority to Christian sources,” and turn back to my first position: this is a bad version of the Constantinian alliance. What is worse for the church, siding with the secular Left or the Constantinian Right? The latter, I say. And that is why I vote to defeat that alliance.

Scott Moore:

I have found this exchange to be quite helpful and I hope we’ve given our readers some new perspectives on which to reflect as we head toward next week’s vote. I too have learned a lot. I must admit however that, despite deep sympathy for the issues and questions Bruce raises, I am not persuaded by his eloquent arguments for Kerry and against Bush. However frustrated I am by the Constantinian Right (and I am very frustrated indeed), I do not believe that I can legitimize Kerry’s secular Left by supporting it. Yes, abortion is the principal obstacle there for me, but it’s also the case that for Christians, abortion is much more than simply “single issue politics.” It is about the nature of moral justification. Though I remain a registered Democrat, Kerry and the Democratic party have continued to offer not only moral justification but “normalization” for a culture of convenience and consumption versus a culture of hospitality and life. A world in which the private use of lethal force is not just morally justified but becomes the normal state of affairs is a world which Christians can never legitimize and a world in which our alienation comes to be written in ever larger and ever bolder script.

I will vote on Tuesday for some local candidates but I have decided not to vote for president. Neither one of these men and neither one of these parties does sufficient justice to the basic Christian commitment to the culture of life. I am deeply grateful that TNP exists and I hope it will continue to provide a forum where thoughtful Christians can reflect and argue about those matters that matter most.

Eric Miller:

Looking back on this exchange, and on many other similar conversations and debates, I realize that I’ve never seen such a broad, quietly bitter hopelessness during an election season. It’s no surprise that anxiety, anger, and confusion are the dominant states of mind among people I know, of whatever party.

1968 must have felt like this to many. Then, some on the left thought that the Democrats had so botched things up and compromised the nation’s soul that they must go at any cost. That cost, needless to say, was high. How might a Humphrey administration have altered the past three decades? Four days from election day, I’m still not convinced not-voting is not irresponsible.

Neither am I convinced that if I vote for either party I won’t leave a portion of my soul in the ballot box, for reasons I’ve already stated. The question that lingers with me is this: Is there one single issue that is so pliable and so consequential that at this moment it requires one particular party over the other? For many, this single issue is Iraq, and foreign affairs in general. For others, it is Bush’s Constantinian mode of governance. I find myself compelled by varying degrees by each. But what I’m wondering is this: might that single, hugely decisive issue of this moment be what Bill McClay, in the current issue of First Things, calls the “manufacturing of human being strictly for medical and quasi-medical uses,” as we continue on the futile, diabolical quest of, in his troubling phrase, “comprehensively remaking ourselves?” This is the question that haunts me as we move toward election day, and that may lead me to cast a vote for Bush.

Eugene McCarraher:

I’m anxious, angry, and confused, but I’m not bitter or hopeless. I like Gramsci’s advice: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” The only way to really hold those two things together, however, is not through faith in dialectical historical development, but through faith in Christ.

My analogy wouldn’t be to 1968 and Humphrey, but to 1960. Then, we had two candidates whom Dwight Macdonald dubbed “Burroughs vs. IBM.” In the same year, C. Wright Mills wrote “A Letter to the New Left.” What happened within five years? A new left, a new sense of possibility, both of which drew on thinking from the previous two decades. Could we be at the precipice of, or spark, yet another such moment? I’m enough of a believer in the cunning of the Spirit to think that we haven’t seen the last episode yet.

Thoughts on a Seussentenial

by John Fea

I.

hen it comes to learning how to read, American children have had plenty of tutors. In 1690, the New England Primer schooled Puritan young people in the Calvinist belief: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” William Holmes McGuffey sold millions of his McGuffey Readers and held a virtual monopoly on the way nineteenth-century young people were taught their ABCs. By the 1930s, elementary school students were “having fun” with Dick, Jane, and Spot. But as important as all of these developments are to the history of education in this country, they pale in comparison to the impact that Theodor Geisel has had in classrooms, libraries, and living rooms across America.

While most of us have probably never heard of Theodor Geisel, we are all familiar with his work. Writing under the name “Dr. Seuss,” Geisel helped millions of kids become literate and, in the process, exposed them to a set of ideas that have long defined America. His sheer commercial success (over 200 million books sold), the impressionable nature of his young audience, and his multi-generational staying power demands that we give him his due as one of the most important cultural figures in the post-war era. In a clever attempt to sell more of his books and extend his legacy into the twenty-first century (probably in that order), Random House has decided to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Geisel’s birth by declaring 2004 the “Seussentenial.”

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Geisel spent most of his life living and writing from his home in a remodeled naval observation tower in LaJolla, California. He and his first wife Helen did not have any children (Geisel once said that he did not particularly enjoy being around children), but his books–loaded with strange characters and outlandish story lines–made him, without competitor, the most popular and best-selling children’s author in American history. Dr. Seuss expanded our imagination, encouraged our sense of self-worth, and challenged us to make the world a better place.

Giesel had a subtle, unintended, but yet irresistibly strong influence on the way children understood America. He was not politically active, seldom lent his name or his time to social causes, and claimed consistently throughout his career that he rarely wrote with a particular agenda in mind (anyone familiar with the whimsical absurdity of works like Green Eggs and Ham or There’s a Wocket in My Pocket would certainly agree). In fact, twenty-seven publishers rejected his first book, To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, because it did not provide readers with a clear moral message.

Yet even as he tried to avoid writing morality tales, much of Geisel’s work reflects his deep and lifelong commitment to liberal individualism. Seuss’s books, through their celebration of opportunity, cosmopolitanism, and human rights, read like childhood primers on the American values. But at the same time, they remind us that the ideals of freedom, self-interest, and liberty have always existed in tension with the pursuit of a common life and the personal sacrifices that such a life requires. Dr. Seuss remains a window into the deepest convictions and paradoxes of American culture.

II.

Theodor’s Geisel’s commitment to liberalism began well before he became the national icon that he is today. During World War Two, Geisel wrote editorial cartoons from the pages of the left-leaning New York newspaper PM that scathingly criticized Naziism, Fascism, American isolationism (Charles Lindbergh was a favorite target on this front), and racial discrimination in the hiring of defense workers. PM and Geisel seemed to be a perfect match. At the time he began his work for the paper, he had gained only modest critical and commercial success with his first four children’s books, making the offer to write for PM an ideal way to introduce its 150,000 readers to the quirky style of Dr. Seuss. Drawing for PM also provided Geisel with a regular outlet for his emerging political sensibilities. “PM was against people who pushed other people around,” Geisel told his biographers shortly before his death, “I liked that.” Between 1941 and 1943, he published over two hundred cartoons on the pages of this crusading voice for America’s popular front.

Geisel’s PM cartoons foreshadowed the flavor of much of his post-war work. Until his death in 1991, he wrote and illustrated books for young people that addressed nearly every major concern of the American left. For example, Yertle the Turtle, the story of a turtle named Mack who topples a tyrannical turtle-king, mirrors much of the spirit of the American Revolution, the workers movement, and the Allied assault on Hitler. “The Sneetches,” from The Sneetches and Other Stories, offers a lesson against discrimination. Some Sneetches have stars (of David?) on their bellies and some Sneetches do not, but in the end both races of Sneetches put their differences aside and learn that “…Sneetches are Sneetches / And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.”

The Cat in the Hat, the book that catapulted Geisel to international fame, is an outright assault on the conforming tendencies of 1950s suburbia. A six-foot tall cat and his mischievous friends, “Thing One” and “Thing Two,” teach two middle-class children how to play more creatively, even if such rambunctiousness occurs in clear violation of their mother’s wishes. The Cat in the Hat not only replaced Fun With Dick and Jane as America’s preferred primer for young readers, but it also anticipated the general mood of the 1960’s counterculture.

In The Butter Battle Book, Seuss offers a stinging criticism of the nuclear arms race through the story of two nations—the Yooks and the Zooks—that find themselves on the brink of Armageddon over something as silly as how bread gets buttered. In one of his most controversial, chilling, and un-Suesslike endings, Geisel does not resolve the conflict on the final page of the book. Instead, he leaves the military representatives of both nations standing on a wall wondering who will be the first to drop their doomsday device (a “Big Boy Boomeroo”) and destroy the world.

Most prominent in Geisel’s work are the liberal Enlightenment values of progress, self-improvement, and cosmopolitanism. Perhaps more than anything else, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a movement defined by the principles of human potential and the advancement of society. The best citizens of the Enlightenment’s “republic of letters” were those individuals who maintained primary loyalty, not to family, friends, faith, or nature, but to an international commonwealth of humankind. Such citizens of the world were rational creatures and thus had little tolerance for those who were unable to rid themselves of parochial passions or who remained too committed to traditional ways of thinking, knowing, and living. Such a progressive mindset found a happy home in the United States and came to define much of twentieth-century American liberalism. As a political and cultural offspring of the Enlightenment, the liberal democratic tradition—as evidenced in both major political parties—has exalted the ability of the autonomous person who, through exercising freedom of choice, can shape his or her own destiny. Liberalism, particularly in its elite and academic manifestations, has also fought against all forms of provincialism and anything it deems to be “backward” in nature.

As a child of this liberal tradition, Dr. Seuss encouraged his readers to achieve the impossible, to overcome limits, and to rise above the troubles of life. His books celebrate mobility—both social and geographic. Kids should not be held down by the places they live, the social circumstances in which they find themselves, or the ideas to which they have been exposed. They should instead imagine what is possible and then go out and make it happen. This, for Geisel, was the essence of the American dream. And he taught it to children well.

In On Beyond Zebra, for example, Seuss challenges children to push the margins of received knowledge. The book begins in a classroom where Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell has just learned all twenty-six letters of the alphabet, prompting him to declare triumphantly: “So now I know everything anyone knows / from beginning to end, from start to close / because Z is as far as the alphabet goes.” But Conrad’s nameless friend, the narrator of the story, quickly informs him that his triumph is not complete. Didn’t Conrad know that there were letters in the alphabet that came after ‘Z?’ If he could only exceed the boundaries of traditional knowledge he could export himself to far away lands and encounter exotic creatures such as Glikkers, Sneedles, and even Floob-Boober-Bab-Boober-Bubs. By going “Beyond Zebra,” Conrad becomes a child of the modern era. He learns that knowledge is progressive, not fixed, and as a result can serve a variety of cosmopolitan ends. The moral of the story is summed up best in Seussian rhyme: “Oh the things you can find / If you don’t stay behind.”

This challenge to question authority and the received intelligence that often comes with it is also evident in McElligot’s Pool, the story of a young boy named Marco who spends his day fishing in a tiny self-contained pond. When a farmer informs him that no one has ever caught anything other than an old boot or can in this pool, the boy begins to weave a tale of possibility in order to counter such dour prospects. The farmer, carrying a pitchfork and wearing worn-out overalls and a rumpled old hat, represents the classic Jeffersonian yeoman. He is familiar with the landscape, knows from history and tradition that the pool is fishless, and tries to impart this local knowledge to Marco. But in the progressive spirit that defines many of Seuss’s stories, Marco rejects this agrarian wisdom and even implies that perhaps the farmer is the one who is the real “fool.” What if McElligot’s pool was not self-contained; but linked through underground tributaries to other bodies of water that, in turn, would connect it to the Tropics, the Arctic, or even Tibet? If this were true, it is possible that Marco could easily pull a “cow-fish,” a “2 headed eel,” or an “Australian kangaroo fish” out of the pool.

Marco’s tale is more than just a whopper of a fish story. It reflects the way many Americans have understood Enlightenment improvement. As the political party of progress, the nineteenth-century Whigs adopted an economic and cultural vision for America that encouraged people to move beyond the confines of their local places by building turnpikes, bridges, railroads, and canals that would unite them in a common national embrace. While the idea of such a national culture was first articulated by Alexander Hamilton and defended most vigorously by Henry Clay, it triumphed with Abraham Lincoln and the Northern victory in the American Civil War. The Union success secured a Whig nation and struck the deathblow to an older, decentralized, landed, and decidedly Jeffersonian understanding of America. Marco thus echoes Whig values when he constructs an imaginative infrastructure of waterways that allows him to overcome the parochialism of McElligot’s pool. In the end, Marco’s tale of possibility, fictitious as it is, has convinced the populist farmer (if the expression on his face is any indication) of the limited scope of his own agrarian world-view.

The book that perhaps best exemplifies Geisel’s cosmopolitan individualism is, fittingly, the last book he wrote. Oh the Places You’ll Go, published shortly before his death, reads like a Horatio Alger tale of self-improvement. It glorifies the individual right of choice in shaping one’s future (“You can steer yourself any direction you choose”). “You’re on your own / And you know what you know,” says the narrator, “And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.” Even when troubles come (and they do) Seuss tells his young readers to expect to face them alone (“All Alone / whether you like it or not / Alone will be something you’ll be quite a lot”). Self-improvement can be an isolating endeavor.

Oh the Places You’ll Go is an American sermon. It draws upon an older, but still powerful, historiographical tradition that celebrated the making of Americans through the courage of the first colonists, the rugged individualism of Westward migration, and the self-determination of immigrants. Like nineteenth-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s provocative and controversial interpretation of the American frontier, Oh the Places You’ll Go preaches that personal happiness comes through leaving home for more liberating spaces. If life does not yield the level of self-satisfaction that we might expect, then the narrator exhorts us to “head straight out of town / It’s opener there, in the wide open air.” For Seuss (and Turner) “Out there” is where liberated individuals are made This is a lesson in social Darwinism that Seuss probably learned from his own parents—German immigrants who settled in Springfield, gained moderate success as brewers, and were able to send their son to Dartmouth.

Midway through Oh the Places You’ll Go, Seuss describes the most dreadful of all places for Americans—“The Waiting Place.” It is here where people on the move get stuck. They stop being mobile and become confined to a specific locale where the pace of life is much slower. Patience, however, is not a virtue for those who are “off to great places.” If, for whatever reason, a “high flyer” is forced to land, he or she should not stay grounded for long. “NO!,” the narrator proclaims, waiting is “not for you.” “Somehow you’ll escape / all that waiting and staying / You’ll find the bright places / where Boom Bands are playing.” The sermon closes with the promise of America: “And will you succeed? / Yes, you will indeed! / 98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.”

Precisely because of its uplifting message of self-esteem and mobility, Oh the Places You”ll Go has enjoyed much commercial success. It has made annual appearances on best-selling book lists–especially during May and June when it has become a popular graduation gift. A quick look at the customer comments on the web pages of on-line booksellers like Barnes and Noble and Amazon reveal its continuing popularity. The praise for the therapeutic philosophy behind the book is astounding. One customer wrote: “Dr. Seuss acknowledges in this book that sometimes when all options are unattractive, we need to head right out of town. And how right he is.” Another reader noted that Oh the Places You’ll Go would help people “escape those unhappy times for good times to come.” Yet another enthusiastic commentator concluded: “Next to the Bible this is my all time favorite book.” And one reviewer reaped the scorn of Amazon customers when he or she dared to call the premise behind the book “flawed” and criticized it for teaching his or her son that “if you don’t like where you are, get up and leave it all behind for great adventure….” Needless to say, only 2 of 15 people found her review to be “helpful.”

III.

Oh the Places You’ll Go raises some interesting paradoxes in Geisel’s thought when compared with The Lorax, perhaps his most straightforward piece of social commentary. The Lorax addresses the environmental consequences of capitalism. The story begins on a dark and clearly post-industrial landscape. A young boy is walking down “The Street of the Lifted Lorax” in search of the “Once-ler,” a reclusive hermit who lives in a rickety shack at the end of the street. The boy wants to know more about the creature for whom the street is named. Who was the Lorax and why did he leave? These are questions that only the Once-ler can answer.

The Once-ler begins by explaining to the boy that the area surrounding the Street of the Lifted Lorax used to be a utopian-like countryside full of bright-blue lakes, green grass, and colorful “Truffula Trees.” Swomee Swans, Bar-ba-loot bears, and Humming Fish all lived happily within this Edenic habitat. But all of that quickly changed when the Once-ler (he describes himself to the boy in the third person) arrived and began chopping down trees in order to make “Thneeds,” an odd-looking piece of clothing made from the Truffula’s silky-soft tufts. While the Once-ler never quite tells us what one might do with a Thneed, he is sure about the fact that a Thneed is something “That-All-People-Need.” Enter the Lorax: a short, stumpy, orange creature with a thick mustache and a cranky personality who emerges from the stump of a Truffula and announces that he speaks “for the trees.” He demands that the Once-ler stop chopping Truffula trees and accuses him of being “crazy with greed,” since no one in his or her right mind would ever actually purchase a Thneed.

But the Lorax underestimates both consumer desire and the capitalist’s need to satisfy it. After a man in a business suit buys the first Thneed for $3.98, the Once-ler calls all of his relatives to come to this new land and join him in the Thneed-making business. Before long, the Once-ler has built machines to cut down Truffula trees and factories to manufacture them into Thneeds. The Lorax continues to protest, even to the point of sending the birds, bears, and fish elsewhere so that they can find food and clean air. The Once-ler, though saddened a bit by the havoc he is wreaking on the environment, remains ever the capitalist, affirming that “business is business / And business must grow….” Despite the prophetic words of the persistent Lorax he claims to have a “right” to expand his company in the way he sees fit.

Eventually, due to all the smoke in the air and the “glump” in the lakes, the Lorax exits his utopia, lifted away through the last “hole in the smog.” He does, however, leave a monument to himself and his message—a circular brick platform inscribed with the word, “UNLESS.” Seuss then takes us back to the conversation between the Once-ler and the boy on the now depressed landscape. The Once-ler, who has clearly repented of his environmental crimes by this point, claims that the boy’s arrival has enabled him to decipher the meaning of the Lorax’s inscription. “Unless” someone acts, he concludes, other places around the world will suffer a similar fate at the hands of industrial capitalism. The Once-ler gives the boy the last remaining Truffula seed and tells him to plant a new forest. Perhaps then, he hopes, the Lorax and his friends will return.

At first glance, Oh the Places You Go and The Lorax seem to be cut out of the same political mold. Post-war liberals from Harry Truman to John Kerry have defended both social mobility rooted in individual choice and the protection of environmental resources from the extremes of corporate capitalism. But when read together, these two stories shed more light on the paradoxes in the Seussian canon than they do on the ideological consistency of his work. They suggest that belief in personal self-betterment, as exalted in Oh the Places You’ll Go, can easily degenerate into crass self-indulgence. The “Once-ler,” who travels in a covered wagon reminiscent of the ones used by settlers of the American West, leaves home to find pastures suitable to his pursuit of personal happiness. The result of his move to the “wide open air,” however, is an environmental holocaust.

Similarly, when we are “off to great places… off and away…,” we are often doing so at the expense of the communities we leave behind. It should probably not surprise us that Seuss’s phrase, “Oh the Places You’ll Go,” has been used by Entrepreneur Magazine to promote the use of cell phones, laptops, and other technological gadgets that make up every businessperson’s “mobile arsenal.” The magazine informs its readers that “with the latest and greatest in mobile toys, you’ll be ahead of the other girls and boys. And wherever you are, you will succeed. (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed).” One has to wonder what the Lorax, that stubborn critic of the corporate world’s role in the destruction of place, would think of it all. When self-improvement and pursuits of happiness are defined entirely by social and geographic mobility, it makes it increasingly more difficult to care for natural and human places in the ways that the Lorax challenges us to do. Responsible conservation requires a care and love for places that can only come from staying put and obtaining an intimate knowledge of a particular landscape and its history. It demands the practice of virtues such as patience, neighborliness, and loyalty—character traits that run counter to the flow modern life.

These paradoxes in Geisel’s work have been part of the American experiment for over two hundred years. Thomas Paine’s defense of common sense rights has always been at odds with John Adams’ commitment to the public good. Such tensions have become the lifeblood of American historical and political interpretation. For some scholars, America was built on a Lockean foundation of individual rights, democratic choice, and the potential for economic and social improvement. Others have argued that the founders were civic humanists who, in the classical republican tradition, asked citizens to suppress self-interest (in exchange for virtue) and welcome a world defined by limits. More recent scholarship seems to suggest that indeed both sides of this historiographical tussle are correct. Americans in the past sought to creatively balance these two ideals. While Dr. Seuss was devoted to the belief that liberal individualism was essential to any democratic society, he also realized that it was often not sufficient to sustain the kind of communities needed for a republic to survive.

Geisel regularly used communitarian or classical republican themes to show that liberalism did have its limits. The popular How the Grinch Stole Christmas tells the story of the sinister Grinch who believes he can steal happiness from the “Whos down in Whoville” by depriving them of their Christmas presents. Though the Grinch’s master plan—to swoop down from Mt. Crumpet disguised as Santa Claus and quietly pilfer all the Who’s earthly possessions—has no moral grounding whatsoever, it is possible, at least early in the story, to sympathize with the Grinch’s critique of Who society. The Whos are clearly a people of material abundance. They bask in a host of luxuries, from the latest toys and noise-makers to the obscenely large feast of which they partake each Christmas. But we soon realize that there is more to the Whos than meets the eye. While the Whos certainly have a right as citizens and individuals to fulfill their holiday wants and desires with consumer products, and absolutely have the right to be disgruntled by the theft of virtually all that they own, their most important connections are not to their goods, but to each other. In the end they teach the Grinch (and us) that true happiness comes from being part of something larger than one’s self.

And who can forget the adventures of Horton, the kindly elephant who confronts the selfishness of the world around him by displaying traditional virtues amid difficult trials? In Horton Hatches the Egg, Horton must face the ridicule of the entire jungle when he agrees to protect the egg of a lazy bird named Mayzie who would rather sun bathe in Palm Beach than nurture her incubating offspring. Horton’s loyalty, patience, and trustworthiness are evident in his mantra: “I meant what I said / And I said what I meant… / An elephant’s faithful / One hundred percent.” In Horton Hears a Who, the heroic elephant comes to the aid of a microscopic civilization that he discovers on a speck of dust. When the Wickersham Brothers, a gang of rascally monkeys, threaten to boil the speck in Beezle-Nut oil, Horton goes to extraordinary measures to keep this newfound civilization safe. Even as Horton persistently informs us “a person’s a person no matter how small,” his actions remind us that the individual rights of personhood are often secured by the sacrifice of others.

In one of his lesser-known works, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, Geisel cautions his young readers that cosmopolitan ambitions do not always yield a more comfortable life. This is the tale of a young boy who was living a “happy” and “carefree” existence in the “Valley of Vung” before he encounters a series of personal mishaps—from stubbing his toe on a rock to getting bit by something called a Quilligan Quail—that prompts him, in the words of Oh the Places You’ll Go, to “head straight out of town.” The moment his problems start to overwhelm him, a “chap” arrives driving a “One-Wheeler Wubble” and asks him if he would like a ride to the City of Solla Sollew, “where they never have troubles, at least very few.”

The boy takes the Wubble-driver up on his offer, but along the way encounters a host of other, more difficult, tribulations. The driver, for example, exploits the boy’s labor by forcing him to pull the Wubble across rocky and steep terrain. He finally manages to shake his oppressor, but the trials do not abate. In the course of his journey the boy misses a bus to Solla Sollew, gets caught in a “flubbulous flood” that almost kills him, is recruited into an army engaged in a military battle it cannot win, and falls into a traffic-laden underground tunnel full of birds. When he finally does make it to Solla Sollew, he finds no celestial city, but rather a place that is permanently closed to outsiders. It is at this point that the message of Solla Sollew departs decidedly from that of Oh the Places You’ll Go. Realizing the futility of his quest, the boy decides to abandon his dream of cosmopolitan happiness and return to the Valley of Vung to face up to his original problems. Sometimes the way of improvement leads home.

The progressive commitments behind what historian Michael Kazin has called “the Seussian Left” have done much good for America. They informed a foreign policy that toppled Hitler and contained communist totalitarianism (a lesson that left-wing critiques of George Bush’s intervention on behalf of democracy in Iraq often fail to remember). Progressives (including the liberal Republican Teddy Roosevelt) “conserved” our environment amid the devastating destructiveness of Onceler-like industrialization. And liberals like FDR and LBJ fought for the rights of ethnic immigrants seeking American freedom even as these newcomers clung tenaciously to their Old World traditions and communities in a way that some believed was un-American.

But the contradictions in Seuss’s canon between individualism and community, cosmopolitanism and local attachments, and self-interest and self-sacrifice reveal the inability of the left to inspire us—to offer any hope for those longing for a different kind of human flourishing. Can liberalism prompt us to get out of bed with voices of praise on Christmas morning even when all of our gifts have been stolen? Does it give us strength to risk our lives for the preservation of others—whether it is Horton’s Whoville or those in the crumbling towers of the World Trade Center? What motivates one to surrender cosmopolitan ambition and return home to face, sin, suffering, and trial? Where do we find the courage to defend creation against those seeking to destroy it?

The paradoxes and tensions in Seuss’s work offer a window into one of the twentieth-century’s most influential liberals searching—maybe unconsciously—for answers to questions that his liberalism, even on its best days, cannot seem to provide. For all of his true brilliance, one wonders if Seuss really grasped the limits of his own optimistic faith in ambition and progress. In many ways, his books read more like an author trying to come to terms with the liberalism of his youthful days at PM and less like an uncritical celebration of that leftist legacy. Perhaps it is this very struggle—one that we all must face while living in a country that was founded as a great Enlightenment experiment—which has allowed the writings of Theodor Geisel to have such an enduring appeal.

On Being Contrary for its Own Sake

by James V. Schall, S. J.

“The mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it….”

–Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, March 24, 1750

HE INITIAL choice that each of us has to make in life is whether we think the world and ourselves already exist with some intelligible content to define what we are or whether there is nothing there but what we put there. The former position, it would seem, is rather demanding on us. It suggests that we are not our own self-creators, that what we are is something for us to discover, not make out of our own imaginary resources. But we are seemingly freer if there is nothing there in the first place, if we are solely responsible for our world and our own being. The trouble with being so absolutely free that nothing is presupposed, however, is that what is finally put there is also only ourselves. In such a view, everyone’s world is identical, full of only themselves, with their own laws enforced by no one but themselves. On this premise, no reason can be found not to be something else tomorrow. A world full of nothing but Schall, it strikes me, as utterly boring. A world in which Schall is never the same is even worse.

A student recently sent me a copy of Being a Dog Is a Full-Time Job (Andrews and McMeel, 1994). Charlie Brown and Linus are on a teeter-totter. As he rises to its height, Charlie, rather panic-stricken, yells, “It’s her!” A confused Linus responds, “Her who?” Up again, Charlie, smitten, explains, “Look, it’s the little red-haired girl!” They both get off the teeter-totter. Charlie makes a deal with Linus, “Do me a favor. Go over and talk to her. Say you know me. Try to find out if she likes me.” This is the great question – “Does someone else like us?” Do they “know that we exist or care?” We next see Linus determinedly walking towards the girl as Charlie cunningly tells him, “I’ll hide here behind this trash thing and listen.”

In the next scene, we see a pleased Charlie duly hidden but listening. “Hi there. My name is Linus. I believe we have a friend in common.” Charlie’s mood suddenly becomes more sober as Linus tries to describe him to the little red-haired girl, who evidently has never heard of him. “His name is Charlie Brown. He sits across the room from you in school…. No, by the windows, near the pencil sharpener. No, in the last row.” Charlie’s face droops even lower as Linus continues his description of him. “Well, kind of blond, I guess. No, you’re thinking of Mike. No, not as tall.”

By this time Charlie has slumped down into a kind of stupor, but he still hopelessly listens for some spark of encouragement. “A shirt with sort of a jagged stripe. No, not John, John is a lot bigger.” Finally, Charlie is flat on his back as he helplessly hears the final words that prove that the little red-haired girl has no clue about who he is, has never so much as noticed him, and does not “like” him.

“Sort of a round face,” Linus continues. “Doesn’t ring a bell, huh? No, Brown. Like in town. Just doesn’t ring a bell, huh? Nothing, huh?” In the end, we only hear Charlie, now reduced to “nothing,” muttering forlornly to himself, “I can’t stand it!”

That may be the saddest piece of modern literature I ever read. I cannot stand it either.

No one has to love us, not even the little red-haired girl. Love does not really use the form “has to” but “wants to,” “chooses to.” And because of this undetermined freedom, because Charlie is not even noticed, there can be romance and risk and excitement in the world. Some day she might choose to notice. The story of Charlie Brown and the red-haired girl would be even more poignant if the girl did not exist. But Charlie did not give her being. She is just there, in the school room. Created being does not cause itself to be. It is seen, encountered, across crowded rooms, even school rooms.

Josef Pieper remarked someplace that we cannot know that we are loveable unless we are first loved. He meant loved “unconditionally,” not for something we have or possess. And no one can see anyone as loveable who is concerned only with himself. In the beginning, we must suddenly discover that what is not ourselves also exists and is there before us. We are struck by it. Something unknown comes crashing into our world. Suddenly our world includes a newness that we did not imagine, could not imagine. Yet, like the little red-haired girl, many wonderful things pass our notice. We are beings not given to know everyone intimately but only some few, as Aristotle told us. The friend of everyone is the friend of no one, as the ancients also knew.

The most important thing in the world to know is whether we can freely give a gift to someone. Behind the gift lies the question of sacrifice: whether we can give ourselves and yet remain ourselves. We never just “give” gifts either. No gift is simply a gift. It is an effort to give the giver. But we do not want the giver, in his giving, to cease being the one who gives. Love does not consume but preserves the beloved as other. The what is of the other we want to remain, for that is what astounds us and opens us to more than ourselves.

I have entitled these brief reflections, “on being contrary for its own sake.” There is a certain romance to the word “contrary” – Mary, Mary, quite contrary. The word itself is reminiscent of St. Thomas’s sed contra by which he thinks it necessary to state accurately what he does not hold. He wants to see what truth there is in what seems not true, for there is always something. We cannot be wrong without also having something right. It is not possible to hold something in which there is absolutely no truth. This is why falsity and error are worth pursuing. We better know the truth, Aristotle told us, when we can explain why an error about it is possible.

But we ought not to be contrary for its own sake, that is, just to be contrary. We should be contrary to examine the truth of things. That is what our contrariness seeks. And it is not futile to seek the truth of things, including the truth of the claim that there is no truth, only contrariness, only our own free constructs presupposed to nothing but ourselves.

Aristotle also tells us that there are two very different kinds of things: those which exist for their own sakes, which cannot be “otherwise” and those which can be otherwise. Everything that we do or make in our lives can be otherwise, yet when we do something, it happens. We are not determined beings until we determine ourselves, until what we do has been permanently finished.

The great Samuel Johnson two and a half centuries ago told us told us that we are “never satisfied with the objects before us.” “Why is this?” we wonder. Plato’s excursions into the highest things always had about them a sense of soaring, that we find the best only by finding first what is less than the best. Yet, we begin from what is, from what is clearly less than the best. It is all right that less than the best also exists. Yet, the best can sometimes, often, prevent us from seeing that what is not the best still really is good. The best is not apart from the least, even in the least.

What indeed are “the objects before us?” Do we notice that they are there, before us? Our minds wonder if it is all right not to be “all things.” Is it all right that I am I and not someone else, the problem of the irreducible being of substance? But surely what I am is finite, clearly not the wholeness of being. By being myself, am I deprived of what is not myself?

We are given the power to know what is not ourselves so that we do not, in being ourselves, miss out on all that is not ourselves. It is all right to be a human being, a finite human being, because we, by being ourselves, know what is not ourselves. Yet, we want to know things “for their own sakes.” We have a power that simply wants to know what is, to know that it is, to delight in it. We become what we are not and remain what we are in so doing.

To be “contrary” means that we are aware of the inadequacy of our knowing, without doubting that we do know or that what we know is true. A limited knowledge is not no knowledge. It is only false if we affirm something that is not so.

The strangest part of our being is rooted in a certain unsettlement that reaches its most poignant stage when we are closest to real being and real knowing. We sense that our alternative is not being and nothingness but what is and everything else. We cannot begin in nothingness. To know nothing, as it were, we have first to know something and deny it. We have to be “contrary” even to imagine nothingness.

Is it, after all, all right to be a finite human being? If we are made, are we poorly made? If we make ourselves, what are we but ourselves? Is this enough? We know that we did not cause ourselves to stand outside of nothingness. We begin in medias res, amidst things that already are in spite of us. Our mode of being is discovery and gift. If it were necessary that we existed, we would not wonder why we exist. But if we wonder why we exist, we seem to be asking a question. Why would we ask a question if we make ourselves to be what we are?

The little red-haired girl did not see Charlie Brown in the classroom or in the world. His very existence was upset because she not only did not “like him” but, even worse, she did not even notice him. What does this suggest to us? It suggests that the completion of our being is not simply that we exist. Being is not complete unless it is acknowledged. And it cannot be acknowledged if what is is only ourselves. We know we do not give the being of things to themselves. As Eric Voegelin asked so often, “Why is there something, not nothing?” “Why is this thing not that thing?” If this thing were that thing, there can be no order in the world for contradiction does not hold things in place if this thing can be that thing.

What is it about our existence that we cannot “stand?” We cannot stand that it is unknown to others. “No one, “Aristotle tells us, “would be happy if he had all the goods and riches of the world but lacked friends.” Why not? Because the highest things of which we are capable exist in conversation with others about what is true and about how we live in this world. But conversation is not simply conversation for its own sake–chatter and contrariness just to be contrary.

We exist so that what is true can be affirmed. We affirm what is true best when we affirm it among friends on the basis of what is in fact true for them irrespective of our own self-made worlds. Descartes once suggested that we can imagine that what is is merely an illusion of the devil. He thought that he had to prove the existence of God in order to disprove the illusion. But we do not start in illusion. We can only be “illuded” if we first encounter something that we cannot doubt. We do not begin in theories, but in what is. But beginning there, we are “not wholly satisfied with the objects immediately before us,” as Dr. Johnson said.

Were we “contrary for its own sake,” we could never discover the world in which we exist. We would, like the sophists, imagine that we did not exist for the simple reason that we can imagine it. What calls us out of ourselves is our infinite perplexity that we are not the only things that exist. What calls for our gratitude is that what exists is there and that it is more admirable than anything we could make ourselves. If we are struck in amazement by what is, no matter how small, even “a little red-haired girl,” we can begin the only adventure that is worthwhile. This is the adventure that begins by our first wondering whether we are first loved and then come to be, or whether we are by ourselves to find a world containing only ourselves, our own imaginations and illusions.

We all need to send out a Linus to see if we are noticed. It is, as I say, the saddest story in our literature to find out that we are not liked or even acknowledged. Nothing tells us more about our own being than this upsetting experience of awaiting the recognition and love of someone else. But this is not a tractate in despair. Quite the contrary, we are loveable because we are first loved. That is what constitutes our being. Our freedom does not make the world, but allows us to accept it as already what it is, because what it is already is so much more than anything we could ourselves imagine or make.

Song of Childhood :: Lied vom Kindsein

by Peter Handke

When the child was a child It walked with its arms swinging. It wanted the stream to be a river the river a torrent and this puddle to be the sea. When the child was a child It didn’t know it was a child. Everything was full of life, and all life was one. When the child was a child It had no opinions about anything. It had no habits. It sat cross-legged, took off running, had a cowlick in its hair and didn’t make a face when photographed. When the child was a child it was the time of these questions: Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? Isn’t life under the sun just a dream? Isn’t what I see, hear and smell only the illusion of a world before the world? Does evil actually exist, and are there people who are really evil? How can it be that I, who am I, didn’t exist before I came to be and that someday the one who I am will no longer be the one I am? When the child was a child it choked on spinach, peas, rice pudding and on steamed cauliflower. Not it eats all of those and not just because it has to. When the child was a child it once woke up in a strange bed and now it does so time and time again. Many people seemed beautiful then and now only a few, if it’s lucky. It had a precise picture of Paradise and now it can only guess at it. It could not conceive of nothingness and today it shudders at the idea. When the child was a child it played with enthusiasm and now it gets equally excited but only when it concerns its work. When the child was a child It was satisfied with an apple and bread; it was enough then and still is. When the child was a child berries fell into its hand as only berries do and they still do now. Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw and they still do now. On every mountaintop it had a longing for yet a higher mountain. And in each city it had a longing for yet a bigger city. And it is still that way. It reached for the cherries in the treetop with the elation it still feels today. It was shy with all strangers and it still is. It awaited the first snow and it still waits that way. When the child was a child it threw a stick into a tree like a lance, and it still quivers there today.

Als das Kind Kind war, ging es mit hängenden Armen, wollte der Bach sei ein Fluß, der Fluß sei ein Strom, und diese Pfütze das Meer. Als das Kind Kind war, wußte es nicht, daß es Kind war, alles war ihm beseelt, und alle Seelen waren eins. Als das Kind Kind war, hatte es von nichts eine Meinung, hatte keine Gewohnheit, saß oft im Schneidersitz, lief aus dem Stand, hatte einen Wirbel im Haar und machte kein Gesicht beim fotografieren. Als das Kind Kind war, war es die Zeit der folgenden Fragen: Warum bin ich ich und warum nicht du? Warum bin ich hier und warum nicht dort? Wann begann die Zeit und wo endet der Raum? Ist das Leben unter der Sonne nicht bloß ein Traum? Ist was ich sehe und höre und rieche nicht bloß der Schein einer Welt vor der Welt? Gibt es tatsächlich das Böse und Leute, die wirklich die Bösen sind? Wie kann es sein, daß ich, der ich bin, bevor ich wurde, nicht war, und daß einmal ich, der ich bin, nicht mehr der ich bin, sein werde? Als das Kind Kind war, würgte es am Spinat, an den Erbsen, am Milchreis, und am gedünsteten Blumenkohl. und ißt jetzt das alles und nicht nur zur Not. Als das Kind Kind war, erwachte es einmal in einem fremden Bett und jetzt immer wieder, erschienen ihm viele Menschen schön und jetzt nur noch im Glücksfall, stellte es sich klar ein Paradies vor und kann es jetzt höchstens ahnen, konnte es sich Nichts nicht denken und schaudert heute davor. Als das Kind Kind war, spielte es mit Begeisterung und jetzt, so ganz bei der Sache wie damals, nur noch, wenn diese Sache seine Arbeit ist. Als das Kind Kind war, genügten ihm als Nahrung Apfel, Brot, und so ist es immer noch. Als das Kind Kind war, fielen ihm die Beeren wie nur Beeren in die Hand und jetzt immer noch, machten ihm die frischen Walnüsse eine rauhe Zunge und jetzt immer noch, hatte es auf jedem Berg die Sehnsucht nach dem immer höheren Berg, und in jeden Stadt die Sehnsucht nach der noch größeren Stadt, und das ist immer noch so, griff im Wipfel eines Baums nach dem Kirschen in einem Hochgefühl wie auch heute noch, eine Scheu vor jedem Fremden und hat sie immer noch, wartete es auf den ersten Schnee, und wartet so immer noch. Als das Kind Kind war, warf es einen Stock als Lanze gegen den Baum, und sie zittert da heute noch.

Further Scandal: Christian College Professor Doesn’t Teach from a Christian Worldview

by Jack Heller

The following essay reprises the author’s earlier contribution, “Christian College Professor Flunks Christian Worldview Tests.”

am now into my third year of teaching English at Huntington College, a member institution of the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities. Because of where I teach, students, parents, and administrators take it for granted that I will teach from a Christian worldview. But what does teaching from a Christian worldview mean? Is it my task to critique every work of literature from some doctrinal perspective? Do I say of Edith Wharton’s novella Ethan Frome that it presents from a naturalistic worldview the struggles of a man against his social isolation through his desires for his wife’s cousin? Do I then contrast naturalism to biblical theism and say that Wharton, for her naturalism (or her secular humanism, if one prefers), falls short of Christian belief, and therefore a proper response is a rejection of her ethos? I am very disinclined to let students evade the issues the text raises by dismissing it as stemming from a naturalistic worldview. I am more inclined to discuss how Wharton creates her fictional world and let students process for themselves how truthful they find that world to be. Worldview criticism too often depends on facile labeling that makes a work’s artistry mere window-dressing for amateur philosophizing.

My approach to teaching does not conform to some descriptions of a Christian college professor’s job. Claude O. Pressnell, president of the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, complains that “Tragically, a number of faculty within our own Christian colleges and universities struggle with how to think Christianly about their disciplines. We have lost the unification of knowledge under the lordship of Jesus Christ.” Pressnell defines the task of Christian college professors:

Christian scholars are charged with the task of teaching their academic disciplines with a well-informed knowledge base and from a distinctly Christian worldview perspective. The task requires rigorous study and a growing and intimate relationship with Christ. The need for attention to the sanctifying process of Christ is of utmost importance when we are dealing in the arena of ideas. Because of the fallenness of our intellect, we must always be kept in check by the standard of God’s Word and the community of fellow believers.

I have a confession to make: I don’t feel a connection with that description of my task. It splits apart for me in several directions. First, I do believe in the fallenness of the intellect, so much so that I don’t think it can be separated from that which is labeled as my Christian worldview. How does a person gain a sense of confidence in his worldview if, in fact, the intellect from which it proceeds is fallen?

On the other hand, I am not convinced that my teaching Shakespeare or Wharton successfully depends upon my having an intimate relationship with Christ. I certainly had no such expectation of my professors in graduate school, only two or three of which would have identified themselves as Christians and none as evangelicals. One professor I had who asserted the need to attend to Shakespeare’s Christian faith was gay and not a Christian. While I hope that I develop in my Christian faith, I don’t believe that the merit of my teaching should be measured by my faith.

Pressnell evades a question that his description of the Christian scholar’s task begs to have answered: What does he mean by “a distinctly Christian worldview?” As his reader and putative audience, I don’t take on the responsibility of defining this phrase for him. Pressnell sets up an incomplete contrast; at some point I am asking questions that he would find tragic. Why? What version of a Christian worldview should prevent my having these questions? The catch-22 for Pressnell is, of course, that if he defines his term, he moves from “a distinctly Christian worldview” to “the distinctly Christian worldview.” That might clarify whether or not my questions remain tragic, but it would also open the definition to critique from historical, sociological, theological, and other perspectives.

Pressnell’s essay appears in a collection entitled The Future of Christian Higher Education (Broadman and Holman, 1999). I was given this book for the orientation to my first year as a professor at Huntington. Its contributors include the presidents, provosts, and deans of such Christian institutions as Baylor University, Calvin College, Westmont College, Union University, and Beeson Divinity School, and such writers as Arthur Holmes and Millard Erickson. With varying degrees of nuance and qualification, most of the contributors speak of the Christian professor’s responsibility to teach from a Christian worldview while ducking the question of what that means. However, one of the volume’s editors, David Dockery, president of Union University in Tennessee, has no reticence specifying what a Christian worldview excludes:

Throughout education and culture, the very existence of objective truth is being challenged. We observe this in the academy in the poststructuralism of Lyotard, the deconstructionism of Derrida, the radical subjectivism of Foucault, the reader-focused hermeneutic of Stanley Fish; it is even found in popular culture, exemplified in the lyrics of country music artists like Diamond Rio singing that “it’s all interpretation, if you want to know the truth you have to read between the lines.” A normative view of truth and a Christian worldview are rejected or devalued, seemingly lost in our contemporary culture.

Recently, a high profile culture watcher [George Barna] observed this impact on Christians, noting that “an unbelievably small proportion of believers have what is called a Christian worldview … and because [most Christians] don’t think like Christians, they can’t act like Christians. Because they don’t act like Christians, they can’t have much impact on the world in which they live.”

This is utter rubbish. If Christians are not thinking or acting like Christians, it is not because of all the Lyotard and Derrida they are reading. There are many more likely candidates for blame than poststructuralist literary theorists-such as the weakness or sheer lack of teaching in many churches, insipid or pathological Christian bestsellers, and apologists for nationalism in the guise of faith. Or has there been a clandestine substitution of Of Grammatology into the covers of Glorious Appearing without anyone noticing?

Yet Dockery’s assessment is a good example of one of the inevitable problems with worldview discussions: the term is so fluid that sooner or later one must ask what is to be included and