The video of Blond’s March 22nd talk at Villanova (with intro by yours truly) is now available online, under the title “After the Market State”:

http://www.youtube.com/user/villanovauniversity#p/a/u/1/S2LWc5DIQrc

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Mt. Airy, Philadelphia, 9-11-09. Eight years ago today, and in the days immediately following, Americans found themselves bewildered. An unprecedented mood had fallen upon them, an unfamiliar atmosphere surrounded them. It was hard to identify or even describe. It seemed like an awakening, but from what and to what?

These at least were the impressions that I found myself wanting to try to account for. In the face of events of such magnitude, so many lives destroyed or shattered, it was hard to take one’s own concerns quite so seriously, and it almost seemed an embarrassingly absurd pretension to speak in one’s own name. But I could not help but feel that this awakening, or the potential moment for an awakening, would soon pass, and that one ought to try to see more deeply into whatever revelation was dimly and fleetingly available before it was too late.

As I sought for some means to bring the national mood into focus, what occurred to me were these words of Simone Weil:

Perhaps all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer violence; yet this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men’s eyes…. The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection…. These men, wielding power, have no suspicion of the fact that the consequences of their deeds will at length come home to them – they too will bow the neck in their turn…. For they do not see that the force in their possession is only a limited quantity; nor do they see their relations with other human beings as a kind of balance between unequal amounts of force. Since other people do not impose on their movements that halt, that interval of hesitation, wherein lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity, they conclude that destiny has given complete license to them, and none at all to their inferiors. And at this point they exceed the measure of the force that is actually at their disposal. Inevitably they exceed it, since they are not aware that it is limited. And now we see them committed irretrievably to chance; suddenly things cease to obey them. Sometimes chance is kind to them, sometimes cruel. But in any case there they are, exposed, open to misfortune; gone is the armor of power that formerly protected their naked souls; nothing, no shield, stands between them and tears.

(Weil wrote these words, from her essay on the Iliad, in 1940 in Marseilles, having escorted her parents there from Paris after the Germans had done the previously inconceivable: crossed the Maginot Line and invaded France itself. Perhaps she shared the same sense of difficulty I felt in presuming to speak directly of what had happened. She wrote under a pseudonym.)

Americans, most of us, lived through much of the twentieth century separated by just such a fog of un-opposable force, one that kept us unbelievably secure from most nations of the earth, and thus insulated from the human condition shared by most nations of the earth. Above the obscuring clouds, we long lived the blessed and relatively carefree lives of bourgeois Olympians.

In the days following the attacks, we began to notice the clouds obscuring the reality, but they did not clear, for most of us were too accustomed to living above them. I remember listening to radio interviews with inhabitants of Los Angeles. One interviewee after another spoke, but never to the point. Finally a man, who sounded young and bright and was unmistakably black, observed: “Now we know how the rest of the world feels.” One suspects that, as a youngish black man in LA, he was not accustomed to “walk through a non-resistant element” in which “nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.”

There seems to be increasing reason to believe that we have exceeded the measure of force at our disposal. Certainly things no longer seem so readily to obey us, exposing us to chance and misfortune. One wonders how much truth we can bear. One wonders whether or not we should look forward to finding out. It is the kind of truth from which we reflexively seek to protect our children. Perhaps we should prepare them to face it instead.

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Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. As I read Matt Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, I thought often of Simone Weil, that young champion of the workers of the world who took it into her head to find out first hand what it was like to be a worker. Weil, like Crawford, was very alert to the dangers of losing a grip on reality within a world spun by intellectual fantasy and fashion – after all, she was active in the communist party for a time, until she realized that revolution was the amphetamine of the intellectual. In the factory, she discovered that Taylorized work destroyed one of the great graces of manual labor: the intellectual and aesthetic contact with reality through the hands, which can give the worker a firmer and truer sense of the world than the dreams of philosophers, poets and artists often afford them.

The connections between Crawford’s reflections and Weil’s are not accidental. Aside from being concerned with some of the same questions Weil pondered, Crawford also relies at crucial points on Iris Murdoch’s Sovereignty of Good, which is inspired primarily by Weil’s thought. The central theme uniting all three authors is the one made poignant first by Augustine: the vitiating effects of self-enclosure on thought, imagination, sentiment and character. But it is a particular virtue of Weil and of Crawford to see into and spell out the way in which manual labor bears on this theme.

Whatever advantages Weil may possess as a thinker, Crawford has weighty advantages as an experienced worker. No one of Weil’s acquaintance would ever be so foolish as to ask her to fix anything. She knew intimately the soul-crushing power of factory work, and the revelatory joys and gratifying weariness of farm work, but never the satisfaction of repairing a broken machine. This difference turns out to be quite important.

For, although Weil is hailed as a reviver of Platonism in the twentieth century, she entirely misses a crucial dimension of Platonic thought, namely Plato’s basic psychological analysis. One will search in vain in her writings for a discussion of thumos, the spirited aspect of the soul that is concerned with anger, pride, dignity, offense, overcoming obstacles and rising above one’s limitations. This represents a serious lack of self-knowledge on her part, for she was widely recognized as a willful character and an extreme ascetic, determined to overcome and eradicate what she called the “mediocre” aspects of the soul. Her writings issue an uncompromising call to direct one’s love and attention wholeheartedly to the Good that transcends all the limiting considerations of this limited world in which we live out our days.

Crawford raises at least by implication a question that Weil needed to face up to, namely the problem of the puzzling relationship between our spirited passions and the pursuit of the Good. Following Murdoch’s Weil-inspired idiom, he characterizes the mechanic’s responsibility to the demands of the broken machine as a kind of “unselfing”, but at the same time recognizes the desire for mastery, dignity and self-sufficiency as a driving force of this responsiveness. Is it unselfing or self-affirmation that is at work here? We could take an easy way out and say that our motives are complicated, but the reality seems a bit more, well, complicated than that.

Spiritedness has a peculiar relationship to truth. While we all want some kind of recognition, we also want some assurance that we actually deserve it. We recognize that, to receive recognition worth having, we must possess some kind of excellence, skill, or responsible agency. Hollow recognition provides hollow satisfaction, and we can’t ultimately escape consciousness of this condition, paper over it as we may. But conversely, a competence that we can take satisfaction in (and that can make real creativity possible) depends on an apprenticeship, a submission to the non-arbitrary demands of the thing to be made, grown or fixed. This, Crawford emphasizes, is an apprenticeship in love of truth:

Any discipline that deals with an authoritative, independent reality requires honesty and humility…. If we fail to respond appropriately to these authoritative realities, we remain idiots. If we succeed, we experience the pleasure that comes with progressively more acute vision, and the growing sense that our actions are fitting or just, as we bring them into conformity with that vision.

While spiritedness may lead us to exaggerate how responsible we can ultimately be for the goods of this world – and so lead to empty reactionary or revolutionary ire – it can also lead us to contempt for the world and the desire to overcome it completely through renunciation. But it can only find its satisfaction in a responsibility for the goods of this world that accepts both the demands of love and the reality of failure.

Thus Simone Weil’s recovery of the Good as a metaphysical principle, profound and important as it is, ultimately hollows out the world of its rich variety of concrete goods for which we can bear responsibility and love. For her, the Good is beyond being, but not constitutive of beings themselves. Working in the factory is a submissive awareness of the stark Necessity that reigns supreme in this world; working the land, for her, adds the enchantment of the sublime natural poetry that carries our love beyond this world. But caring responsibly for children, for neighbors, for animals and plants, for stuff – this is where the subtle dialectic of self-assertion and submission to reality works its way toward the satisfaction of resigned loving responsibility, which sometimes attains to the stature of virtue.

For reasons more essential than marketing value, Crawford’s book combines a personal narrative with philosophical reflection on work, knowledge and character. It offers much material for reflecting on this dialectic by which the spirited element of our souls is guided to its fulfillment by both seeking to make for itself a very personal, dignified place in the world in which it can be effective, and also submitting to the impersonal demands of what is good and true in that world in which it seeks to stand upright. I for one would have been delighted to see a more sustained reflection on that theme, as I suspect Crawford has much to offer here. But it is part of the broad appeal of Crawford’s book that it puts us on the trail of any number of important questions and reflections without insisting that we follow him at great length down any one of those trails.

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I’ve been accused (at least by association) by so many pomocon partisans of being pro-Obama, I’m almost starting to believe it myself. So here’s great news. Obama’s much-publicized concern about our obesity problem has spawned suggestions, yes even on national news, that we should require things like, you know, sidewalks in neighborhoods, and maybe even find ways to encourage having things to walk to nearby, like grocery stores. This will save enough of the money we spend on treating obese people to make socialized medicine affordable. I don’t know whether the Presidential Commission on Fighting Obesity by Zoning Localism will cost enough to cancel out those savings; but since I’ve also been accused of supporting big government regulation and social engineering, I guess I must be in favor of this new inititiative to make us a slimmer nation.

Now I’m going to leave this cyber-cafe and drive 8 blocks back to the inaccessible-by-foot one-block cul-de-sac where I’m spending my summer. I exhort you all, in the Marxist spirit I am said to be possessed by, to eat more corn-oil fried corn-syrup products so we can continue to precipitate the obesity crisis that will lead inexorably to the Great Localist Revolution.

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Democratizing eighth-grade algebra promotes social justice. (Brookings Institution)

Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. Complete analogy. (Simone Weil)

Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there, but odds are that not many raise alarms about the fact that students in America and elsewhere are taught algebra before geometry. Yet this may be one of the more potent means by which the vision elaborated by Descartes works its way into the very foundations of how we imagine the natural world.

We are all familiar with the coordinate system devised by Descartes (or rather modified from the one devised by Descartes) – the x axis and y axis that enable us to describe the location of any point in a plane. Add the z axis for 3-D plotting, and we have a way of imagining and quantifying space abstractly. This kind of analysis of spatial magnitude provides the basis for the exact measurements of motion at the foundation of modern physics. Since modern physics provides most of us with our basic understanding of the character of reality or “nature”, it is fair to say that this understanding, in its imaginative dimension, is largely a Cartesian picture. And since most students who make it through high school get the Cartesian picture of mathematical space worked deeply into their imaginations (whereas very few are sufficiently imbued with a grasp of physics to have their imaginations deeply formed by it), it is fair to say that it is by means of coordinate-plotted geometric algebra that our imagination of the physical world gets shaped.

At the basis of this new analytic geometry is a profound transformation in what I will call the metaphysical imagination. (While crucial aspects of this transformation were accomplished by Francois Viete half a century before Descartes, it is still Descartes who elaborates most completely both the stance toward the world of appearances that enacts this new metaphysical sensibility and the conceptual and mathematical tools that direct the pursuit of the kind of knowledge that corresponds to it.) This transformation has everything to do with how we understand number.

Consider what the coordinate axes tell us. Each of them is a “number line.” That is to say, between any two numbers on the x axis, there will always be another number; and if we imagine taking this process to the limit, what we approach is a continuum of numbers. There is no fundamental difference between number and extension in length, or, in other words, between multitude and magnitude.

For the classical tradition, there is an important distinction between multitude (number) and magnitude (extension). Number or multitude is discrete; extension or magnitude is continuous. A number, according to Euclid, is a “multitude of units.” We call these the “natural numbers” (justly so), and consider them one subset of a more inclusive set of numbers that encompasses others types, like rational and irrational, real and imaginary, positive and negative. For the classical tradition, the “natural numbers” are the numbers period (though when it comes to computation, there is some difficulty figuring out what to call fractions). This is because when we speak of a number, we are ultimately referring to a multitude of things. Beings that can be counted exist in nature as unities.

For the ancients, the problem of number leads directly and explicitly to metaphysics. The basic question is how it is possible for there to be two of something. They can only be two of something if that something is the same; but they can only be two of that something if they are different. And of course this leads us back to the question of how each of these things is able to be a unity in the first place. And this leads to identifying form as the principle of unity for each being.

Form is most evident to us in the bodily shape of a thing. This bodily shape is as it is because of the way that body is organized and articulated. But in the case of a living being, the body has this organization and articulation because it serves as the material basis for the various capacities and life-activities that are characteristic of that living being and constitute what it is to be such a being. The living being’s self-sustained complex of capacities for its array of characteristic life-activities is what Aristotle calls its form and its soul, or the governing principle of the living being that it continues to be. Thus the form that appears to my senses gives me access to the form that is the very being of the living thing itself.

It is number, then, and the question of the natural unity and integrity of natural beings, that guides our understanding of nature for the ancients. Extended magnitude is a secondary characteristic of beings, incident to their material aspect. Form is the more fundamental aspect of its being, because it is the form that dictates what material (and how much of it and in what proportions) will be present in the living being or artifact.

Descartes changes this. When he develops his algebraic geometry, he chooses to represent numbers by lines, collapsing the distinction between magnitude and multitude. The emphasis is on quantitative relationships, and what we take as our unit is arbitrary. When he analyzes the basic characteristic of the being of the “external” world, he finds it in extension, not in the presence of given unities. As a result, we have a science that examines processes rather than beings, for a process is a change over time of the relationships among various measurable magnitudes. And we have the analysis of those beings into their simplest parts, the parts most easily described in purely algebraic-quantitative terms. We lose a sense of the integrity of beings as active wholes, a formal integrity that makes them what they are. Thus Dawkins, in insisting that the organism is not a unity but rather a “colony of genes”, is being a genuinely Cartesian biological theorist.

But it is not only the integrity of natural beings that is lost; it is also a sense of place. We imagine the world as abstract space. Quantities of matter are present in parts of that space, and can be moved to other parts of that space. It’s just a change of coordinates. The x and y axis meet at the “origin” of the coordinate system, but that origin itself is arbitrarily placed. All space, as space, is interchangeable.

In classical Greek, in Aristotle’s physics, there is no word for “space”, only for “place”. That is certainly not because Aristotle didn’t know his geometry. On the contrary, it is because he knew it deeply, and knew its difference from his arithmetic. He knew that the world is a world of beings actively maintaining their unity and integrity in their places, and that geometry is an abstract representation of a limited aspect of things in that world, and indeed more abstract than arithmetic because arithmetic deals in wholes.

In Euclid’s Geometry, two of the thirteen books deal with number. He proves many theorems about proportions among numbers that he then proves all over again for continuous magnitudes in the subsequent books. To the modern mind, trained by Descartes’ geometrical algebra to collapse this distinction, this seems terribly inefficient. But Euclid seems to have thought it important to maintain this clear distinction. It is a matter of fidelity to the nature of reality rather than to sheer computational power and convenience.

The rest of Euclid’s geometry is perfectly intelligible independently of numerical expression. There is a marvelous beauty to the way the relations of figures are revealed when Euclid proves that the area of the square on the hypotenuse of the right triangle is the sum of the areas of the squares drawn on the other two legs. This beauty is entirely missing in the formula “c squared equals a squared plus b squared,” and it is astonishing that we can study geometry for a year without ever realizing that these “squares” refer, not to numbers multiplied by themselves, but to actual square areas. We are in this condition of cluelessness because, before we ever study geometry, we have already pre-interpreted it through the lens of the Cartesian grid and the operational equivalence of number and extension.

To lose (or be prevented from recognizing) the distinction between multitude and magnitude is to lose (or be prevented from attaining) a sense of the natural world as a world of distinct and integral living beings in their places; it is to be prepared to see it under the aspect of arbitrarily located quantities of material to be relocated according to our arbitrary will. For Aristotle, the formal integrity and unity of each living thing (which is to say its full flourishing as the kind of thing it is, adapted to the kind of place in which it lives) constitutes the good of that thing, toward which its development and actions and processes are ordered. In Platonic terms, one is the number of the good, and goodness is a constituent of the being of things. When Descartes reconfigures the natural world in terms of extension, and thus displaces natural unities in favor of quantitative relations, this amounts to evicting goodness as a principle of being. In other words, it is what I have elsewhere been describing as Gnosticism, and it prepares the way for Locke’s Gnostic economics, or the forgetting of limits and place.

The “argument” that supports such a view is embedded deep in our metaphysical imagination and habits of mind by a Cartesian mathematical education, one that perpetuates in our sensibilities Descartes’ own Gnostic alienation of spirit from world.

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Many who are alarmed at the prospect of the “abolition of man” have found in Huxley’s Brave New World a dark and salutary warning – an imaginative rendering of our post-human future that, as that future continues to arrive, looks ever less like prophecy and more like rapportage. We Americans (and especially those of us who first read Brave New World in the context of Cold War politics) are immediately struck by the totalitarian character of the society Huxley depicts. Under the complete dominion of the central planning of life, from in vitro fertilization to cremation (and reclamation of valuable bodily chemicals), there is a total absence of free thought, personal development, choice and civil liberty that disgusts us. While central economic planning and time-management shape the goals and rhythms of social life, the means by which technocratic control pervades every intimate aspect of life is socialized medicine.

The extremities to which Huxley pushes his portrayal make it rather easy, at least in these respects, to congratulate ourselves on living in what is still the land of liberty. But if we crop out the central planning from Huxley’s portrait (and set aside the question of how far we actually are from it), I think we can only be struck by how effectively our own society has taken on many of the same features by means of freer institutions. After all, though characters in the novel are named after Marx and Lenin, the revered figure of its civil religion is the democratizing industrial capitalist Henry Ford, the man who did more than any other to liberate Americans from the confinements of place.

Here is an example that goes to the heart of the matter. In the second chapter, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning explains to a new crop of technicians why children are conditioned to hate flowers.

If the children were made to scream at the sight of a rose, that was on grounds of high economic policy. Not so very long ago [they] had been conditioned to like flowers—flowers in particular and wild nature in general. The idea was to make them want to be going out into the country at every available opportunity, and to compel them to consume transport.

“And didn’t they consume transport?” asked the student.

“Quite a lot,” the D.H.C. replied. “But nothing else.”

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy…. The problem was to find an economically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes. It was duly found.

“We condition the masses to hate the country,” concluded the Director. “But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport.”

Americans, to be sure, are free to enjoy the gratuitous loveliness of the natural world. But the conditioning we receive from our media and pervasive advertising, and from our built and paved and wired environments, effectively discourage it. And although businesses like REI do a brisk trade in tents and sleeping bags, which allow you to spend time surrounded by the restorative beauty of the great outdoors, the majority of floor space in the store is taken up by the elaborate gear and gadgets required by those who want to move through the outdoors at high speed, on wheels or water.

The alienation from the natural world in Huxley’s dystopia is carefully engineered to distract its denizens from the cosmic realities of beauty, mystery and infinity as well as from the bodily realities of fecundity and mortality. At the end of the workday, released into the open air atop the Hatchery building, the deviant Bernard Marx scans the azure sky and wide horizon, remarking to Lenina Crowne, “Isn’t it beautiful!” Lenina: “Simply perfect for Obstacle Golf!” That evening Lenina and her hookup Henry Foster walk, shielded from the “depressing stars” by video billboards projected onto the sky, to a dance hall in which the effects of sunrise and blue sky are artificially produced and coordinated with the music. Afterward they wend their way, in “happy ignorance of the night,” off to their rigorously scheduled tryst, kept docilely in the track of routine by the mood-stabilizing drugs that maintain “a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.”

One of the most alarming and disgusting sights Lenina sees when she goes with Bernard to the Indian reservation is a woman nursing her baby. Nursing flies in the face of the ingrained notion that “Civilization is Sterilization,” and encourages all the particular attachment and emotional intensity that might threaten to ruffle the smooth surface of this harmonious and productive society. And besides, it is just too inconvenient in a world where everyone is so busy on behalf of everyone else, producing goods for them to consume and providing them with sexual gratification.

These are a few of the many details by which Huxley depicts what, elsewhere on this site (by myself and Jason Peters), has been described as the Gnostic character of modern life: a deliberate alienation from the created world and from the humanizing drama of bodily life within that world’s order. Perhaps we can give the name “Neo-Gnosticism” to this modern rejection of the goodness of creation, which is expressed in the effort to remake the world as a thoroughly artificial environment, the hermetic home of human distraction.

The character who rebels against this constricted horizon is John the Savage, accidentally live-born to a “civilized” tourist who gets lost while visiting the reservation. John champions the Truth and Beauty that have been sacrificed to controlled contentment. One of the high points of the novel is John’s conversation with European World Controller Mustapha Mond. We have earlier seen Mond engaged in censorship of some brilliant scientific research on the grounds that it might lead to the notion that happiness consists not in contentment, but in

some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible.

It is just such a notion of happiness that John defends against the degradation of human existence to wretched contentment and physical well-being. John has learned from the Indians amongst whom he was raised that belief in God is a cornerstone to a more elevated existence:

If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn’t allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices. You’d have a reason for bearing things patiently, for doing things with courage…. If you had a God, you’d have a reason for self-denial.

Mond replies:

But industrial civilization is only possible when there’s no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning…. You can’t have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.

This is the opposition in the novel: On one side, the project of orderly and comfortable communal self-preservation, premised upon economic productivity and the elimination of passionate attachments; on the other, the intense feeling of one’s existence that comes with self-restraint, self-denial, and self-reliance – including the intensification of love through the practice of chastity.

In the end, however, John’s position (and Huxley’s) remains another form of Gnosticism, one more directly descended from the ancient version. This lineage is traced in Denis de Rougemont’s brilliant study, Love in the Western World. The core of Rougemont’s argument is that the medieval Cathars are the connecting link between the old Gnosticism and the courtly love poetry that becomes one of the principal currents of modern European literature concerning love. The courtly celebration of chastity, Rougemont notes, is directed not toward cultivating a social virtue that prepares for the goods of marriage and family life, but rather toward the intensification of the individual passion of the lovers, and toward their tragic immolation in that passion. Such chastity serves not life, but death. It carries forward the Gnostic repudiation of childbearing (which is the social dimension of rejecting the goodness of creation), and builds this repudiation into a spirituality of love that is ultimately nihilistic.

Huxley’s own Gnostic tendencies will be clear to anyone who reads his florilegium The Perennial Philosophy, a thematically organized collection of extracts from mystical and wisdom traditions. Where the wonders of the natural world enter into this collection, they serve as symbolic means to elevate the spirit beyond the world. As Jason Peters has eloquently observed, this one-sided elevation into the transcendent, neglecting the unity of finite and infinite that gets crystallized in the Incarnation, is one of the hallmarks of Gnosticism. (And if you want to learn about Huxley’s discovery of the shortcut to intensified consciousness through dropping acid, read The Doors of Perception.)

Huxley’s portrayal of this Paleo-Gnostic response to Neo-Gnosticism underscores the unifying principle of the two, which is the rejection of the goodness of the created order. John the Savage defends the elevating power of the True and the Beautiful, but has little to say about the grounding and vivifying potency of love of the Good. This Paleo-Gnosticism is often at the heart of visions that pass for conservative (for example, those of Peter Viereck and Allan Bloom), because they share the Nietzschean contempt for the contentment and mendacity of the “Last Man.”

Moreover, as the final gambit of John the Savage suggests (when he goes off to live alone and grow his crops), such revulsion can even motivate the glorification of agrarian self-sufficiency. John’s agrarian project involves no concrete embodiment of the natural goods of community and animal husbandry (and indeed the novel notably lacks any significant presence of animal life). This reactionary agrarianism in the void can (symbolically speaking) only end as it does, in suicide. The good cannot be real to us as a mere ideal, counterpoised against what is contemptible. It can only be real in its concrete embodiments in the lives for which we bear ongoing responsibilities and which elicit our love and cherishing. In the absence of such cherishing, we are left with the varieties of Gnosticism, whose other name is Nihilism.

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I wonder whether anyone else finds it, if not quite ominous, at least suggestive, that the National Constitution Center is now hosting a traveling show on the Emperor Napoleon. The Center’s President and CEO, in promoting the exhibit, describes Napoleon as “one of history’s most iconic political figures.” Bureaucratic imperialism with an icon at its apex: not what the authors of the constitution envisioned (except maybe Hamilton), but arguably what we have come to.

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If you aren’t already a fan of Rémi Brague, the most learned man alive, you will be after you read this interview with him about his new book of essays on medieval Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought. I only offer for reflection the marvelous last words with which he responds to a question about our “post-Christian” condition:

Who can say that Christianity has had the time to translate the totality of its contents into institutions? I have the impression that instead we are still at the beginning stages of Christianity.

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Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. About a week ago our dishwasher started to issue a loud grinding sound from its hidden depths. After a few days I decided to call an appliance guy, and yesterday he came to have a look. Verdict: Replace the motor for $500+, or for about the same price get a new dishwasher.

(Incidentally, the repairman recommended a place to buy a new one, primarily on the grounds that “It’s a local business.” I took this as confirmation that those who really have to deal extensively with businesses whose responsibility matters to them can see quite clearly that local is better.)

This dishwasher is about ten years old. It must have been put in at about the time of a well-conceived kitchen renovation that turned a cramped kitchen and a cramped breakfast room into a roomy family eat-in kitchen with lots of natural light. Before moving into this Philadelphia house, we lived for ten years as a married couple (and then family of three) in an apartment with no dishwasher. In a life that has become busier as we’ve had a second child and now have two full-time jobs, it has seemed like a helpful bit of machinery to have handy.

Now an obvious oddity of this scenario is that it’s cheaper to buy something new than to fix something old; but that’s a commonplace these days. We also (by choice) obtained cell phones when we moved here. When the battery in mine became incapable of maintaining a charge after three years, I went to get a new battery, and found out that my phone replacement plan had me scheduled for an “upgrade” at a deep discount. My three-year-old model had become obsolete, and so had its battery. It was about the same price (and faster and easier) to get a new phone with a new battery than to get a replacement battery for my old phone. Cell phone technology “advances” a lot faster than dishwasher, but the same principle is at work: slight performance advantages via more complicated technology that generates incompatibility and obsolescence and waste.

The real question for us (since repairing it really doesn’t make sense) is whether we ought to replace the old machine or not. From a monetary point of view, not replacing it has obvious advantages. From the point of view of convenience, I can’t say I’ve yet missed the dishwasher. It doesn’t take so much longer to hand wash than to load. Besides, it occasionally happens that neither of us remembers to turn the machine on before we go to bed, whereas you can’t fail to notice whether you’ve washed up by hand or not.

The usual pro-dishwasher argument is that it uses less water. I’m not sure this is true if one is a frugal water-user. Certainly the machine uses non-renewable electricity and my hands do not.

But I think the stronger considerations are the household ones. Should we have machines doing work we can do for ourselves with not much more time and effort? My older son is ready to have more household responsibilities. Why not make dishwashing a collaborative family effort, letting us share in responsibility for the immediate consequences of our eating? This is one of those changes in habit that leads to greater awareness of and responsibility for the texture of one’s life more generally, as well as a sense that such responsibility is familial. Then we could also put the money we don’t spend toward buying something like a piano, that would be a delight to all for years to come.

Yesterday evening, when I told her the results of the repairman’s visit, my wife immediately assumed we would replace the defunct machine, and I did not pursue the question then. She grew up in a suburban home partly designed by her electrician father with all the modern conveniences. (My favorite feature is the 1970′s futuristic vacuum system, with apertures in the walls that activate the central suction apparatus when you snap the vacuum hose onto them.) On the other hand, she has just been re-reading Berry’s essay on computer non-ownership, which she considered recommending to a student assigned to write a “position paper” on computer use. I picked it up from beside her on the table this morning, and she asked me if I was looking for ammunition to make a case against replacing the dishwasher – which means that the thought had already been forming in her mind too.

So it looks like the old machine will stay and become just part of the decor. Or perhaps of the cabinetry: we’ve been needing more storage space for pots and pans anyway.

(Side note on tradesmen: My limited experience suggests that plumbers are better conversationalists than men who fix appliances. Might this have something to do with the fact that the latter are concerned with the gizmos of convenience, whereas plumbers are occupied with the more fundamentally human concerns of cleanliness and the outflow of bodily and household wastes? I suspect plumbers have something of a Rabelaisian comic perspective on the human condition and household life.)

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April was “Media Awareness Month” at our sons’ school. I took a couple weeks off from the Porch, and I also published a first draft of this piece in the school’s weekly newsletter.

When my wife and I met as graduate students, neither of us kept a television around. We always had reading to do, lectures to attend, friends to hang out with. When we married, she brought along her ancient black and white TV from her childhood home, and we would regularly watch The News Hour on PBS and then (to recover from news) The Simpsons before dinner. When our son was born, we put it away in a closet. We took it out on 9/11/01, and returned it to the closet three days later. It did not get packed when we moved to Philadelphia, and we have not replaced it.

Originally, we did not have televisions because we always had something better to do. This to me is the first question to ask yourself with regard to watching television: Is there something better I could be doing – something better for me, for my family and household, for my community? As it turns out, the answer to that question is always yes. Even when we need to relax, there is always a better way to do it than in front of a screen of moving images pumping them directly into our minds.

But clearly, that was not enough for us. For awhile, we kept the TV around, and benefited in a way from programs offering somewhat thoughtful perspective on the news and providing a good laugh. The final decision against it was made on the basis of what kind of family life we wanted to have and what living environment we wanted to shape for our children. A television in the house is always a temptation to slothful self-enervation, always something to negotiate and fight about, and sends a message that this piece of equipment and the programming it invades us with has a place in our household life.

Obviously, the content is nearly always bad. As Mark Mitchell observed, even sporting events are saturated with the loudest and most wretched commercials. There is really nothing happening on television that we can’t afford to miss. When Villanova makes it to the big tournament, I have no objection to walking down to the local pub (on the rare occasions when I have time) to watch the game on a silenced screen. It also gives me a chance to commune with a different cross-section of my neighbors, and at their most festive.

In an odd way, I am glad I saw the Twin Towers collapse and shared dramatically in the national horror of that day. But upon reflection, I can’t say that my life would really be worse in any way if I had missed seeing it. Again, that can be said about everything that is on (especially now that we can often get access to what we’ve missed online).

But our objection is just as much to the medium itself. The most thorough examination of the harm it does us is Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander (a former advertiser who gradually realized that his job was to undermine viewers’ power to make free and sensible choices, and for the last 15 years headed up an anti-globalization outfit). Mander looks at TV viewing from a lot of illuminating angles. Physiologically, it puts us in a state like sensory deprivation, making us susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, which it amply supplies. It stockpiles our minds with images fabricated by others, with virtually no participation on our part in appropriating or contextualizing those images and shaping their meaning for us. As a medium, it is incapable of capturing many important experiences (like the powerful living aura of an ancient redwood forest), and so bolsters the positions of those who would treat everything reductively and exploitatively. This is a small taste of Mander’s rich analysis.

In my own effort to make sense of my intuitive reservations about the medium, however, it has helped me to turn to one of my favorite writers, Simone Weil. One important thing she points out is the vital connection between love and attention.

The quality of our life depends to a great extent on the quality of our love. The quality of our love depends on the attention we give to other human beings and to our natural surroundings. Attention is not only a sign or expression of love. In an important way, it is the very substance of love, a central part of the very practice of loving. By receptive attention, we make space in ourselves for the presence of something or someone else. If we do not do this, we do not love.

What does television do to our habits of attention? It habituates us to see less, to see it less completely, and to engage it less actively and imaginatively. Our attention is strung along moment by moment, from one thing to the next. What we pay attention to is managed, packaged, enclosed in a frame according to someone else’s priorities for what we should see. We are encouraged to be passive and impatient at the same time.

The attention that constitutes love – love of others and love of the beauty of nature – requires patience and a kind of active receptivity. While a person, or a plant, animal, stream or valley is in front of us, we cannot take it all in at once. There is looking and listening to do, and this involves a real effort on our part, both to direct our attention and to quiet our distractions. We have to let it sink in, and reflect along the way on what is actually there before us and how it all fits together.

By habituating us to follow along impatiently and passively, to filter and frame the world before we’ve had the chance to see anything, television damages our capacity to love well, to love others and the natural world for what they are rather than for what they can do for us. Television is, after all, one of the great tools and purveyors of consumer culture. The culture of consumption and exploitation has every interest in encouraging our self-centered and unreflective egoism and our oblivion to the loveliness of the natural world. Why should we be surprised if the medium that is its most powerful tool encourages the same vices?

Ultimately the question is this: Does the presence of a television in a home ever increase the happiness of those who live together there? My suspicion is that, on the contrary, it mostly decreases their happiness by increasing their self-enclosure and alienation.

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Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. Before it became a science of supply and demand and the circulation of commodities, economics was originally understood as the wisdom of household management. The Greek word oikonomia derives from oikos (household) and nomos (the governing ordering of a place). The term originates with Plato and Xenophon (perhaps going back to Socrates), but it was Aristotle who gave it the precise meaning it maintained intact for nearly two millennia.

To understand the original meaning of economic philosophy, we must resist our impulse to think of the household as the “private sphere,” as if it were part of a system of artificial demarcations drawn between public and private domains. That way of thinking is a result of already having lost any understanding of classical oikonomia. Oikos has the more concrete meaning of dwelling-place, estate, household goods – that which makes up the site and the concrete form of the life of a family.

In Aristotle’s terms, there are ordering principles natural to the household, because the household itself is the concrete form of community of a family. The family has its own nature as a distinct form of community of persons ordered toward a good life. Thus oikonomia concerns the principles and practices that order and sustain the well-being of a family and its members in the place where they live out their shared life.

For Aristotle then, oikonomia can only be understood as a distinct and integral part of practical philosophy. Practical philosophy has three parts: Ethics, concerned with the right formation of character and the capacity to choose and act; Politics, concerned with the right formation and conduct of the city or community united by laws; and Œconomy, concerned with the right formation and conduct of the household as a place in accord with its nature.

These three parts of practical philosophy are distinct, but not separable, since they all take their bearings by the human good and shed slightly different lights on it. They inform one another, but are also sometimes in tension with one another. For example, the good order of the city may impose demands on the household that are somewhat at odds with the good of the household viewed on its own level.

On the whole, however, Aristotle sees each higher level as opening possibilities for fulfillment that are not available to the lower level left to its own confines. To give one example, he argues that the proper relationship between husband and wife is best understood as republican in character, an image of the relationship of fellow-citizens (rather than in terms of the monarchical king-subject model or the despotic master-slave model), and that one of the distinctive features of the Greek city-civilization is that it makes it possible to understand the relationship in these terms.

Oikonomia is necessarily, then, concerned with wealth, and the proper understanding of what constitutes wealth. Aristotle is at pains to distinguish the art of household management from the art of acquisition. Oikonomia looks to obtaining, preserving and using “those goods a store of which is both necessary for life and useful for partnership in a city or a household.” The acquisitive art, on the other hand, seeks to discern “what and how to exchange in order to make the greatest profit.”

Accordingly, oikonomia recognizes limits to acquisition, since it takes its measure by the standard of self-sufficiency with a view to a good life, which means a life embodying virtue and friendship. Those intent on profit, on the other hand, encounter no natural limit to their pursuit, since

they are serious about living, but not about living well; and since that desire of theirs is without limit, they also desire what is productive of unlimited things.

One of the principal functions of classical œconomics, then, is to warn us of the dangers of conceiving wealth in terms of money. First we must understand what constitutes the good life of a household, and construe as wealth only what contributes to that good life. A primary aim of the household will be productive self-sufficiency, and “self-sufficiency in possessions of this sort with a view to a good life is not limitless.” Barter exists “in order to support natural self-sufficiency.” The introduction of money as the medium of barter leads eventually to fixation on “what and how to exchange in order to make the greatest profit,” and “the wealth deriving from this sort of business expertise is indeed without limit.”

Thus, it is in accord with the nature of human life that we recognize limits to wealth, limits deriving from the shape of a life that is good and whole, that is shared in a healthy family and its well-ordered household. By changing the focus to mere life and its wish for limitless self-preservation, we lose any sense of natural limit on acquisition. Aristotle concludes from this discussion that “expertise in business relative to crops and animals is thus natural for all,” whereas making money from money through the charging of interest is “the most contrary to nature.”

This use of the word oikonomia that I’ve sketched out, which is explicitly restated by thinkers like Avicenna, Maimonides, Aquinas and Bonaventure, persists essentially unchanged for approximately 2000 years, until about 1650. The first occurrence in English of the word “economy” in reference to the regulation of the larger system of wealth of a nation is found in that classic of modern political philosophy, Hobbes’ Leviathan, published in 1651.

In chapter 23, on public ministers, Hobbes notes that some offices are concerned with the “economy of a commonwealth,” such as those that administer the public revenues. A word formerly used to denote the judicious management of the goods proper to a household here gets metaphorically extended to the management of the more abstract goods, especially monies, upon which the more abstract political association of the state nourishes itself. This metaphorical use eventually usurps the place of the original sense of the term, so that for us today economics concerns the market, and is emptied of the normative character that it can only derive from being concerned with what is good for a household. (In Hobbes’ nominalistic philosophy, only the individual has reality. Forms of community are entirely artificial, or “constructs” as we would say. Thus the family has no significant role in his political philosophy.)

In Hobbes the “economy” of the commonwealth does not yet refer to exchange in what we would call “civil society,” but specifically to the accumulation of money by the state itself. It is tempting to say, however, that the deformation of the domestic economy results from a kind of trickle-down dys-oikonomia. This results in part from what Adam Smith points out as a distinctive feature of the modern dynamics of history. Whereas formerly wealth and luxury led to national softness, and so vulnerability to hardier barbarians, after the invention of firearms and artillery the generation of wealth leads to strength rather than to weakness in relation to less luxurious nations. Smith thus provides the strongest case for Locke’s argument that the

Prince who shall be so wise and godlike as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and incouragement to the honest industry of Mankind against the oppression of power and the narrownesse of Party will quickly be too hard for his neighbours.

The modern acquisitive individual, considered in abstraction from the household and family and viewed as an interchangeable part in the vast division of labor, has proven to be a convenient and efficient motor of public industry and revenue for the military-industrial state. Is the unfettered, freely contracting, self-interested individual who serves as the libertarian’s archetype of the free human being really just the creature and instrument of the self-aggrandizing state? So suggest Locke and Smith.

Of course I don’t mean to suggest that this conceptual and linguistic change is the primary causal engine of our social ills, but rather something like the following. What for a while was distinguished by the name political oeconomy, but has now entirely usurped the name of economics, is by no means a neutral player in human moral life and in how we understand ourselves as human beings. On the contrary, “economics” is complicit from the start in the state’s reconceptualization of the person, because it neutralizes the distinctive claims that the life of the household makes on the moral shape of our lives.

In fact, its very semblance of methodological neutrality makes it complicit, because it recasts our imagination of the life of production and consumption in the image of the unlimited acquisition of money rather than in the image of choices about goods that contribute to a good life. It swears off any judgments about relative goodness, and so by default has to measure and compare in terms of value, which ultimately means by the medium of money. And by linguistically usurping the place of the original moral science of oeconomics, it cuts off one means of access to that alternative vision.

(The above has been excerpted and adapted from my contribution to The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, due out in 2010 from ISI Books.)

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The obscuring of the faith in creation is a fundamental part of what constitutes modernity.

As I survey all the perplexing shifts in the spiritual landscape of today, only these two basic models seem to me to be up for discussion. The first I should like to call the Gnostic model, the other the Christian model. I see the common core of Gnosticism, in all its different forms and versions, as the repudiation of creation.

—Joseph Ratzinger, “The Consequences of the Faith in Creation” (1979)

Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. Pope Benedict’s diagnosis of the ills of the modern world has been influenced deeply by the political philosopher Eric Voegelin. Voegelin identified Gnosticism as the central pathology of modern political thought. By Gnosticism, Voegelin meant the belief that we can achieve heaven on earth through our own efforts guided by superior knowledge. In this sense, Marxist utopianism serves as a prime example of gnostic modernism, both for Voegelin and for Benedict.

I think, however, that Benedict has improved on this thesis by identifying repudiation of creation as the heart of gnosticism. The ancient Gnostics (such as the Manicheans Augustine got mixed up with in his youth) looked upon the material world as bad, a prison for the pure spirit. If only the spirit could be liberated into its purity, it would be wholly good.

Thus Gnostics rejected the Hebrew Old Testament as a book of materialistic immersion in the things of the world. They saw the Creator God depicted there as the passionate evil spirit responsible for imprisoning our souls in matter and subjecting them to the passions. The New Testament, according to the Gnostics, depicted the spiritual and peaceful God in the person of Jesus. (This remains a perennially attractive reading of the two texts; as far as I can tell, most of my Catholic students are taught some version of it in their early religious education.)

At first glance, it is not easy to see the connection between this otherworldly spiritualism and the quite worldly materialism that dominates modern life. The key to recognizing the continuity lies in understanding that for moderns, the spirit is more or less identified with the will. The ancient Gnostics saw that the world was not as they wished it to be, and created a fictional world of pure spirit as an alternative. They avoided acknowledging that this other world was the construct of their escapist will. As Augustine saw quite clearly, the Manicheans refused to admit that there could be anything wrong with their own wills, and placed the blame on the flesh that a malevolent power had trapped them within. Moderns refuse to accept that there could possibly be a problem with their own wills, but for a different reason: for them the will is the source of all values. Both ancient and modern gnosticisms deny that the world is good, but the modern form acknowledges that this is an assertion of the will against the world, and proposes to take the world in hand and set it straight.

The doctrine of creation presented in the Book of Genesis tells us that the world is good, that human beings receive this world as an undeserved gift, and that this makes them dependent upon their creator and bound in humility to acknowledge this gift with gratitude. Central to that gratitude is acknowledgment of a responsibility to “till and keep” the earth given to us and not to abuse it. (See “Crunchy Pope, Part One.”)

Marxism opposes itself to this acknowledgment of dependence and limits:

Its place is taken by the category of self-creation, which is accomplished through work. Since creation equals dependence, and dependence is the antithesis of freedom, the doctrine of creation is opposed to the fundamental direction of Marxist thought …. The decisive option underlying all the thought of Karl Marx is ultimately a protest against the dependence that creation signifies: the hatred of life as we encounter it.

As a European writing primarily for Europeans, the then Cardinal Ratzinger rightly focused on Marxism. We have to recognize, however, that everything said here of Marx applies just as well to John Locke, the philosopher of British and American liberal political economy. Though less stridently and forthrightly than Marx, Locke just as deeply rejects the Christian understanding of creation and dependence.

In chapter five of his Second Treatise, Locke defends the individual right to property by arguing that the entire value of commodities derives from human labor. After reflecting a bit on the complexity of human economic activity, Locke ends up estimating that human labor contributes all but about 1/1000 of the value of things, whereas “Nature and the Earth furnished only the almost worthless materials.” The given world is essentially worthless, except as a source of the raw materials for human making. If a nation encourages industry, humans can use those raw materials for increasingly limitless increase in valuable commodities, and that nation will become wealthy and powerful. The rising tide will, Locke assures us, lift all boats.

No one can deny the importance of human labor for producing necessary and useful goods, and for improving the productive capacities of nature. At the same time, the attitude of Locke and Marx toward the given world can hardly be described as one exhibiting gratitude and reverence. It’s all what we make of it.

But not only is the world what we make of it. We are also what we make of ourselves.

Locke’s Second Treatise is the sequel to his less-often read First Treatise, in which he attacks the monarchist Sir Robert Filmer. Filmer teaches, in Locke’s paraphrase, that “Men are not naturally free.” What Filmer seems most directly to mean by this is that we are born dependent, that this dependence is ultimately constitutive of our way of being. Locke quotes Filmer as claiming that “A natural Freedom of Mankind cannot be supposed without the Denial of the Creation of Adam.” At bottom Locke is rejecting the principle of dependence that lies at the heart of Filmer’s understanding of our status as children of parents and as creatures of God. Locke’s account of the relationship of children to parents undermines gratitude for the gift of our own being every bit as much as his account of labor and value undermines gratitude for the gift of the world’s being.

In a sense, Locke treats the parent-child relationship as something accidental, a relationship of convenience between beings capable of free exercise of will. The child needs the parents because he is not yet capable of “the Freedom … of acting according to his own Will.” The parents provide nutrition and education during the period of preparation for independence, and the child’s duty to honor his parents is in exact proportion to the care taken for his education. The “bare act of begetting” carries with it no claim to gratitude.

The human body, like the rest of nature, begins as worthless material until it is labored upon by the will of the person whose body it becomes. It is by the action of our will that we develop all of our capacities beyond the merely nutritive. Education is the great labor by which the human species makes of itself something worthwhile, and whatever role the parents play in that education, it can accomplish nothing without the exercise of the child’s will. Hence my mind too attains its worth from the labor that I will to invest in it.

This is the sense in which Locke understands human beings as being their own individual property. All that they are that is of any value results from the labor they exercise upon themselves. Parents are, at best, the enablers of our self-creation, providing us with the material that is nearly worthless until improved by our own efforts.

In short, just as nature and the earth constitute the worthless world whose value lies in what humans can make of it, so too my body and mind are initially parts of that worthless world. It is when my will reshapes all this and turns it into some embodiment of itself that I lay claim to it. The world as given is essentially worthless, and the value things have results from our laboring to make the worthless material suitable to our wishes. It is the will that imparts value both by determining what will make something valuable and by causing that valuable something to be built up in it.

The older Gnostics turned away from the created world in revulsion; the newer Gnosticism turns against it in active opposition. By reducing the terms to world and will, modern Gnosticism more forthrightly declares that the world can only be good if our will declares it such.

On this view it is reasonable to understand our bodies as our own property. It is reasonable to understand the gestating child as the property of the mother as long as it remains part of her body and is far more the product of her labor than of its own. If we view human beings as abstract choosers, wholly equal as such, it is reasonable to view them as only accidentally related to other abstract choosers, such as parents, who are moved by whatever incentives nature has planted in them to help along our project of attaining independence. It is reasonable to understand life and the given world as in themselves negligible, as little to merit gratitude.

All this accords with Benedict’s description Gnosticism:

Human beings want to understand the discovered world only as material for their own creativity…. Gnosticism will not entrust itself to a world already created, but only to a world still to be created.

This means that Gnosticism will always be prepared to sacrifice what is, or “life as we encounter it,” to its vision of the unfettered life of the will, and to deny the reality of whatever places limits on our choices, such as the normative principles built into intergenerational relationships or into long-term sustenance of productive soil. Modern Gnosticism, under the guise of worldliness, is more thoroughly and intransigently world-negating than its ancestor.

As Benedict observes, this vision of the person confronting the world sets us in a new total antagonism to the created order:

Previously human beings could only transform particular things in nature; nature as such was not the object but rather the presupposition of their activity. Now, however, it itself has been delivered over to them in toto. Yet as a result they suddenly see themselves imperiled as never before.

Christianity, by contrast, recognizes the created order as a gift:

The fundamental Christian attitude is one of humility, a humility of being, not a merely moralistic one: being as receiving, accepting oneself as created and dependent on “love.” … The doctrine of redemption is based on the doctrine of creation, of an irrevocable Yes to creation…. Only if the being of creation is good, only if trust in being is fundamentally justified, are humans at all redeemable.

If we do not recognize the created order as harboring a goodness that comes to us from outside and makes claims upon us, we can recognize nothing as good except what is said to be so by our own act of valuing. Only if we are not the source of all value can we embrace the possibility of redemption.

Thus faith in creation is not (as modern theology too often treats it) “devoid of anthropological importance.” The question of creation, and of whether the creation and the Creator deserve our love and gratitude, goes to the very heart of what it means to be human, of what it means to be a laboring being, of what constitutes wealth and prosperity and an economy consonant with human aspirations and the human good.

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Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. Pope Benedict has recently gained a bit of credit with world media for emphasizing the urgency of addressing the environmental devastation we have wrought. This (combined with installing solar panels to make Vatican City the world’s only “carbon-neutral” sovereign state) has earned him the title “the Green Pope.” While journalists usually snip sound bites out of papal speeches for their own sensationalist purposes, so they can misrepresent their careful author as outrageous and inflammatory, here they employ their usual habits to make him more acceptable to the cosmopolitan liberal consensus. Consider the PBS coverage of Benedict’s speech to the UN last year:

He also spoke about the negative effects of globalization, especially experienced in Africa and other desperately poor parts of the world; scientific research and technological advances that, while they can bring enormous developments, can also lead, he claimed, to clear violations of “the order of creation, to the point where not only is the sacred character of life contradicted, but the human person and the family are robbed of their natural identity.” He also mentioned the necessity of swift, coordinated, and effective international action to preserve the environment. Overall, this was an uncontroversial—yet no less welcome for that—speech. It highlighted both Benedict and the Church’s internationalist credentials and went some way to gainsaying the idea that he is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative.

As PBS is there to remind us, you can’t be altogether conservative if you’re not in favor of allowing globalizing multinationals to devastate the earth.

Of course, the carbon credits the pope earns don’t make the rest of his teaching any more palatable. The Catholic expert voices consulted in a Newsweek piece on papal environmentalism make a well-meaning effort to point out the consistency of the papal message across the board. In the end, however, I don’t think they offer very helpful formulations. Lucia Silecchia of Catholic University observes

When you have an issue getting so much attention, there are a lot of voices talking about it. Benedict knows that and he wanted a seat at the table…. He saw this as a way to push the values of the church in a new context.

And Raymond Arroyo of EWTN insists

It’s all the same argument. I don’t think he loves the earth as an issue in itself, but he sees it as one thing of many that the creator designed. He’s just emphasizing it.

The truth is, however, that Benedict understands our loving and responsible relationship to God’s created earth as central to our human existence as created beings, and as fundamental to the integrity of Catholic teaching. The depth of this theme in his thought (which seems to have received little emphasis from his admirers and interpreters) comes out forcefully in his 1981 Lenten homilies in Munich (published by Eerdmans as ‘In the Beginning’).

Interpreting the symbolic significance of the seven-day creation, the then Cardinal Ratzinger points out the natural basis of the seven-day week in the lunar cycle. His explanation of the significance of this reads almost as if it could have been part of a neo-pagan ecofeminist invitation to dance naked beneath the full moon:

It becomes clear that we human beings are not bounded by the limits of our own little “I” but that we are part of the rhythm of the universe, that we too, so to speak, assimilate the heavenly rhythm and movement in our own bodies and thus, thanks to this interlinking, are fitted into the logic of the universe.

To understand clearly what he is saying here, it is crucial to note the reference to “the limits of our own little ‘I’.” As a student of Augustine, Benedict knows that self-enclosure is the essential form of sin. He also knows that the remedy for self-enclosure cannot be achieved purely “spiritually” by turning the soul to God, but involves the proper relation of love toward our human community and toward the created world—and that these are all fundamentally connected.

Exactly the same insight underlies his explanation, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, of the eastward orientation of the church building and the prayer of Christian worshippers. Praying to the east is “a fundamental expression of the Christian synthesis of cosmos and history.” Christian worship is not something that occurs within the walls of the church; it opens the worshippers to the whole integrated meaning of God’s creation and redemption of the world.

For all of humanity, the rising of the sun signals the return of light to the world after darkness, the dawning of new hopes and possibilities. Directing prayer to the place of the sun’s rising reminds us of the glorious creation we celebrate, the dawning of the world and time. But at the same time, when we look upon the sun as an image of Christ’s redeeming sacrifice, our bodily and emotional responses to the world and its rhythms become suffused with the significance of the redemption. The synthesis of the created cosmos and salvation history occurs viscerally in our oriented bodies.

A church not rightly oriented risks self-enclosure in two ways. Physically, it risks the enclosure of worship in the interior of its walls, losing mindfulness of its placement on the earth in relation to the cosmos and its emphasis on opening outward. But this physical enclosure has communal consequences: “The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle.” Worship risks becoming a theater of personality rather than a turning-together and opening-outward of priest and people toward Creator and Redeemer. Thus Ratzinger asks:

Are we not interested in the cosmos any more? Are we today really hopelessly huddled in our own little circle? Is it not important, precisely today, to pray with the whole of creation?

But of course our right relationship to the created world is not primarily a matter of our bodily response to rhythms of sun and moon. Above all, it concerns our living on and from the earth. As Ratzinger emphasizes, the creation account in Genesis portrays humankind as originating from “God’s good earth.” He helpfully contrasts this account to the Babylonian story it is opposing itself to. According to the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the earth and humanity originate from the body and blood of the sinister dragon slain by the just god Marduk. According to Genesis, on the contrary, the earth and its inhabitants are created by God from nothing and recognized by God to be good. Humankind is united by its relationship to the earth: by originating from it, being sustained by its goodness, and returning to it.

It is common today to claim that this “disenchantment” of the earth accomplished by Biblical religion has destroyed reverence for nature, and the injunction in Genesis 1.28 to “subdue the earth” has led to our culture and economy of utilitarian exploitation. Ratzinger shows convincingly that these dire outcomes result, on the contrary, from modern rejections of core elements in the creation teaching. The model for subduing the earth is given in these terms: humanity has the responsibility to “till it and keep it” (Genesis 2.15). This is a model of good agrarian tending, not of exploiting to the breaking point the productive possibilities of “raw materials.” Ratzinger emphasizes that “the world is to be used for what it is capable of and for what it is called to, but not for what goes against it.”

“Keeping” does not mean keeping hold of as a juridical property, but rather maintaining and sustaining the natural productivity of the land for future generations. Thus in this context Ratzinger observes:

Past, present and future must encounter and penetrate one another in every human life. Our age is the first to experience that hideous narcissism that cuts itself off from both past and future and that is preoccupied exclusively with its own present.

Overcoming self-enclosure in relation to both our community and the earth involves overcoming self-enclosure in our own here and now. (Compare Patrick Deneen’s discussion of “The Long Run” on this site.)

But overcoming self-enclosure in the here and now involves the reminder of eternity. This brings us back to the seven-day cycle, for the Sabbath is supposed to be the day devoted to mindfulness of our origin in time from God’s eternal being and our ultimate eternal destiny. The demand for unceasingly expanding the limits of human productive powers destroys the rhythm of the week that revolves around the Sabbath day of rest, in which we enter into God’s peace.

In this connection, Ratzinger cites the judgment of the Israelites on their own exile. The people had failed to observe the requirements of the land to enjoy its Sabbath by periodically lying fallow. They had also failed to observe the requirement of the community to periodically return to a Sabbath rest from accumulation (by observing distributist principles of land ownership and readjusting properties accordingly). Because of this, the people were removed from the land, so that the land “enjoyed its Sabbaths” (2 Chronicles 36.21). Ratzinger notes (clearly with our present condition in mind) that the people

fell into the slavery of activity. They brought the earth into the slavery of their activity and thereby enslaved themselves.

It may turn out that our “downturn” is really at bottom a sign of collapse of the global forward march toward enslaving the world to frenzied activity. As Pope Benedict observed at the celebration of World Youth Day in 2008:

Perhaps reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our earth: erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption.

The insatiable appetite for consumption (whipped up by the insatiable appetite to profit from production) enslaves us to activity that devastates the earth. A true love for the Creator, lived in the rhythm of Sabbath worship, would entail a love of the good gift of the created world and a reverent mindfulness of our place in it and responsibility toward it. The model for this love is the trans-generational tending of agricultural tilling and keeping. The recommendation of such love is more than merely the romantic sensibility of a man who witnessed the industrialization of his native Bavaria; it is integral to Pope Benedict’s understanding of the life of faith and the love of God.

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In case you missed the story on NPR, the Chinese government has come up with its own stimulus package to make up for dwindling US purchasing. As Marx laughs in his grave at the US government’s ownership of major business concerns, it looks like Madison Avenue may be called on to help complete the Cultural Revolution by convincing China’s thrifty peasants to stop saving.

Two key lines from the story:

China’s still facing problems turning its peasants into consumers.

“We Chinese have a tradition. We do not like to waste money.”

Go peasants.

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Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. Imagine human beings brought up from childhood in a cave, bound fast with their heads all facing one direction. On the wall before them they see only the motions of shadows, and they discuss these with each other as the only things that exist. In fact, however, they are shadows cast by plastic images carried back and forth above a wall behind them.

Also behind them, between them and the wall, stand others whose occupation is to observe the young, to pick out the cleverest ones and, removing them from the midst of their friends and family, to guide them through a doorway in the wall. Once on the other side, they see the plastic figurines and the people carrying them. They also see the dazzling source of light: an enormous light bulb set in the center of the cave floor.

While their eyes are still adjusting to the glare, one of the dwellers in this part of the cave guides them to a hole in the floor at the base of the great light. They descend a stairway to a lower level, partially illuminated through the hole above as well as by many small sources of light to either side. Their guide speaks to them thus:

“Youths, now that you are freed from your hereditary bonds of prejudice, you must choose one of the two disciplines of expertise. The lights to the right of you come from the machinery that sustains the great light above. Those who choose this direction will learn the workings of the light. They must help keep it running or discover how it may be made larger, brighter and more efficient. They will enjoy working together, and will greatly benefit those above who rely on the light to cast clear and distinct shadows for their entertainment and guidance.

“The lights to the left come from the games played by The Clever. Those who choose this direction will, by playing these games, attain clever and more orderly habits of mind, far superior to the confusion of those above. They will join the ranks of The Clever, who discuss all matters concerning our society and oversee the improvement of the images. Now make your choices.”

Now some go to the right, thinking to themselves that the others must be foolish to pursue such insubstantial knowledge; and they stay below concerning themselves with the maintenance and improvement of the great light.

But those who go to the left, excited by the myriad possibilities of cleverness awaiting them, soon approach a collection of enormous black boxes, with strange lights glinting out through their narrow openings. Outside of each one they see a small group of people arguing about the game played within. Though the new arrivals understand very little of these conversations, they are quite impressed by the debaters who seem so accomplished and clever.

Each novice approaches the narrow door of the game that sounds most appealing. There an instructor explains how to play. The students then seat themselves at the virtual-reality terminals within; they spend several years playing various games and conversing about them. Those who show the most proficiency go on to master some one game, and then become instructors, debaters and inventors of new games; or they return above to be designers of the plastic figurines and choreographers of those who carry them, trying to make the images and their movements more like the games they’ve learned.

Now imagine one ingenuous, thoughtful youth who does not choose quickly, but lags behind to question the guide: “Excuse me, but I was wondering — if there’s a way down from the other chamber, might there not also be a way up?”

“There is an ancient story,” responds the guide, “that on the other side of the great light there is a passage that leads up to another land, one warmed and illuminated by a light from on high that is not of human making. But this is only a myth – a more primitive version of our games, played by credulous men much less clever than our designers. They did not understand the subtleties of rule-fashioning and game-playing. No one who has looked past the light has seen this passage.”

Will the youth consider that the great light bulb might have obscured the hints of light filtering down from above and dare to search for the passage, braving the dangers of many false ways and the chagrin of being thought a naive fool? Does any other alternative offered deserve the name of education?

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Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. This is not an argument for intelligent design. It is, however, an argument that creation is the only scientifically acceptable explanation for the existence of the universe. I do not mean that we can use the methods of any science to demonstrate that the universe was created, or even to establish creation as the best answer to a question raised within any given science. But science as such is governed by principles of rationality. Those principles of rationality dictate that, if the question is “Why does the universe exist,” the only rational answer is that it was created.

By science, I mean the attempt to explain the causes of what we observe in the world on the basis of reason and evidence. One of the fundamental principles guiding scientific inquiry is that any observable effect has some cause. Given the option between no explanation of something’s cause and a rational explanation of something’s cause, the rational explanation is preferable.

Of course, proponents of intelligent design invoke this same consideration. In Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe famously argued that the bacterial flagellum (the tail a bacterium whips to move around) is “irreducibly complex.” This means that it is impossible to make sense of the evolutionary advantage of any of the stages of development prior to the full, complicated flagellum. Therefore it is better to attribute the flagellum to an intelligent designer, since this gives us an explanation that fits the evidence.

In a case like this, opponents have an obvious response to make. Someone as impatient of theology as Richard Dawkins may do so without civility:

Behe should stop being lazy and should get up and think for himself about how the flagellum evolved instead of this cowardly, lazy copping out by simply saying, oh, I can’t think of how it came about, therefore it must have been designed.

A scientist and man of faith like Ken Miller, on the other hand, will at least do Behe the honor of offering a plausible explanation (though, in this case, one that is still open to criticism). In either case, the operative assumption is that an explanation is possible but not yet found, and that it may be found with sufficient effort, ingenuity and resources.

The attempt to invoke an intelligent designer for any particular thing in the world for which we don’t have an explanation results in a “God of the gaps,” a God invoked to fill up a hole in our knowledge. It’s hard to put much confidence in a God whose job is put at risk by the progress of our understanding.

What about a question for which science cannot possibly provide an explanation? One such question often invoked is the classic philosophical problem of why there is something rather than nothing at all. Although this is a profoundly provocative question, I’m not sure it’s sufficiently clearly formulated to be a productive one. In any case, I have some sympathy for the puzzlement with which a defender of scientific reason might greet it. We would at least have to try to get a bit clearer about what kind of “something” we are trying to account for, about what it means to be a something. A cosmologist might offer an explanation of why there is matter, and possibly even why there is energy, and consider that this answers the question, while a metaphysical philosopher will insist that this does not address “being as such.” It might be difficult to move the conversation beyond this impasse.

Any explanation a scientist can offer of anything, however, presupposes that there is some kind of order upon which we can base an answer. Even someone who would argue that the laws of physics are changeable could only do so by explaining the principle that governs the change. Science necessarily recognizes that there is order in the universe. It can offer explanations of why the universe has the kind of order it has. It can never explain why there is any order at all.

Does this mean the question is not a rational one? No: it means it cannot be addressed within the confines of science, because the supposition of order helps constitute those confines. Faced with the question, we have two alternatives. We can say, “Order is simply a fact we observe and confirm, and we can’t explain it,” or we can attempt to give a rational account of its cause.

Creation is an answer to the question why there is order. Is it a rational explanation? Yes. It is the only rational explanation.

What shape would a rational answer to this question have to take? If there is a cause of the order of the universe, it cannot be explained in terms of the order of the universe. It is cause that shapes effect, not the other way around. This means that the cause of the order of the universe cannot be confined to or circumscribed by the principles that order the universe.

Thus, reason tells us that the only way to explain why there is order at all in the universe is to appeal to something that transcends that order. Something that transcends the confines that structure the universe transcends space and time. It transcends the confines of all finite limits and all oppositions. It transcends the opposition between changing and unchanging, between unity and multiplicity, between simple and complex. It transcends the requirement that everything that exists be caused by something other than itself.

If we want to give an account of what may be responsible for the orderliness of the universe, the cause (if cause is the right word) will unavoidably have some of the features of the God that Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in as the Creator. It is reason that tells us so.

Our choice, then, it seems, is between affirming creation as an explanation or refusing to acknowledge any explanation. If a perfectly rational explanation is better than no explanation, then the refusal to affirm creation cannot drape itself in the banner of rationalism. It will have to give some more rational explanation of its own causes.

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