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We are off today and tomorrow for the US Independence Day holiday. Also included, a song that hews carefully to archaic rules about prepositions at the end of sentences.
The post Off for the US Holiday — More Grammar appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Jean Eustache’s famous elegy for a left-wing generation is, at its heart, reactionary.
This essay is part of Public Discourse’s Who’s Who series, which introduces and critically engages with important thinkers who are often referenced in political and cultural debates, but whose ideas might not be widely known or understood. The series previously considered the life and work of Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Maritain, Michael Oakeshott, Charles De Koninck, and Harry V. Jaffa and Allan Bloom.
Every year I teach a class on the collapse of Christianity in western society, asking the question why it was so easy to believe in God in the year 1500 and yet so difficult today. And in helping students to answer that question, my most useful guide has been Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Indeed, the question itself is drawn from one of his major works, A Secular Age.
Taylor is a remarkable philosopher. He has made significant contributions to studies of Hegel, the importance of language, and the nature of politics. He has also developed theories of selfhood, of which Sources of the Self and its successor, A Secular Age, form a stunning tour de force. In addition, Taylor has also been active politically, helping to found New Left Review and standing for election in Canada as a candidate of the New Democratic Party on three separate occasions. Even though he’s a man of the left, those of a more conservative bent have much to learn from him.
Given the wide-ranging nature of Taylor’s philosophical interests, an introductory essay such as this must be highly selective. Yet there is a theme that ties Taylor’s work together, from Hegel to his interest in language: philosophical anthropology. This subject investigates the question: what is it that makes human beings and their social existence distinctive? This question is central to his arguments in Sources of the Self and A Secular Age as he investigates how individuals imagine themselves.
The Failure of the Popular Narrative
Perhaps the most common explanation of religious decline in western society is that religious belief is now obsolete thanks to the growth of scientific knowledge. This account views religion as a means of control over nature that, in the wake of scientific and technological developments, has lost its importance. Thus, where once the farmer prayed for rain, now we have irrigation. Where once the villager at the foot of the volcano engaged in sacred rites to placate the volcano god, now we understand that seismology, not animal sacrifice, is a better predictor of eruption. Sometimes this is called the subtraction narrative: it accounts for the modern world by seeing it as what is left after religion has been removed or replaced by science.
This is in many ways the classic Enlightenment account of secularization, found variously in Kant’s notion of enlightenment as humanity reaching adulthood, Freud’s critique of religion as infantile, and Darwin’s proclamation of evolution. Taylor’s concern, however, is that it is too simplistic an account for it never asks a very important question: why does science come to have such authority that it is able to displace religion? The point is profound. Most people in the West do not believe in the authority of science because they are deeply read in scientific matters. Rather, they live in a world where science is intuitively plausible, just as five hundred years ago people lived in a world where religion was intuitively plausible. The question of the replacement of the latter with the former cannot therefore be answered simply with reference to science. The question of how and why science has been granted such authority is the real issue, and one that the standard narrative assumes rather than explains.
Where once the villager at the foot of the volcano engaged in sacred rites to placate the volcano god, now understand that seismology, not animal sacrifice, is a better predictor of eruption.
The Social Imaginary
In light of this, Taylor points to what he calls the social imaginary. The phrase is somewhat inelegant, using the adjective “imaginary” as a noun. Yet the concept is important. The social imaginary is the set of beliefs and practices that reflect and reinforce the intuitions of a given culture or society. Saluting the flag, celebrating July Fourth as a holiday, and believing in the wisdom embodied in the U.S. Constitution would be three examples of things that have traditionally informed the American social imaginary. Few people ask why they do or believe these things; they are simply intuitive to those who belong to the culture of the United States and provide the framework or the lens through which the nation and its relationship to its citizens and to other nations are understood. Families too have their ritual, rhythms, and assumptions that inform how their members understand themselves and relate to others.
Thus, for Taylor, the question of how religion moves from being the default intuition of the members of a society to being optional or even marginal is a question of how the social imaginary has been transformed. The shift to scientific supremacy is a matter of the imagination, not of the blunt facts of science intruding upon us.
The Disenchantment of the World
Central to this transformation is what Taylor (borrowing from Max Weber) calls disenchantment. While the medieval world was enchanted, the modern world in which we dwell is disenchanted. A naïve response to this might be that our world too is full of interest in the supernatural—not simply in terms of traditional religious commitments, where church, synagogue, temple, and mosque continue to find a place in the lives of many people—but also in the plethora of other spiritualities, from yoga to tarot cards. Do these things not prove that we still live in an enchanted age?
Such an objection carries some weight with those who wish to read “disenchanted” as connoting the wholesale rejection of religion or mystery, but it does not really address what Taylor is pointing to. A disenchanted age is not necessarily characterized by complete repudiation of the supernatural. Rather, it is characterized by a fundamental shift in the function of the supernatural. And a world where we now have a choice of enchantments, so to speak, is a world that is differently enchanted—and arguably disenchanted—because the supernatural no longer stands in the same relation to the world as it once did.
A couple of examples help clarify Taylor’s point. Take a traditional Catholic who believes in the ecumenical creeds. In so doing, he believes the same thing that Christians committed to those creeds have believed throughout the centuries. But there is a difference: today’s Catholic cannot believe them in the same way as, say, a Catholic in 1500. This is because today’s Catholic chooses to believe them, and that in the face of a cultural default that does not do so. The Catholic in 1500 really had no choice and, in believing, reflected the cultural intuitions and dispositions of his day. On this level, such faith represents something different today.
A disenchanted age is not necessarily characterized by complete repudiation of the supernatural. Rather, it is characterized by a fundamental shift in the function of the supernatural.
As a second example, imagine being a Christian believer in 1500 and waking up one morning to find that one does not believe in God any more. Everything fundamentally changes at that point. Up until then, you believed that the only thing keeping the universe in order, the only thing that guaranteed that the sun would rise each morning, was the existence of God. To cease believing in him is therefore virtually impossible and, if done, requires a fundamental rethinking of everything.
Today, doubt among religious believers and even complete loss of faith are rarely accompanied by a deep existential crisis about the entire universe, even if they precipitate a certain localized angst about relationships or personal mortality. This is because even religious believers are accustomed to living in a world that seems to operate effectively for believer and unbeliever alike. For example, experience teaches that antibiotics are a more reliable form of medical treatment than prayer alone. One can, of course, see antibiotics as a gift of God and an answer to prayer, but one does not need to do so. Nor does their efficacy depend on that belief. Our world is thus at least much less enchanted than that of 1500, even if individual groups maintain certain supernatural beliefs.
The Buffered Self
At the heart of this disenchantment for Taylor is not the traditional science-versus-religion narrative we noted at the start. Rather, he sees the key as being a transformation in the way in which the self is understood. By self he understands not merely the awareness individuals might have of themselves as individual self-consciousnesses. For Taylor, selfhood is how people understand themselves as individuals in connection to the world around them, and what they see as the nature of being a human person. The contrast between the Middle Ages and today is one that Taylor characterizes as between the porous self and the buffered self.
The porous self is one that does not draw a sharp boundary between the inner and the outer, between the psychological and the material, between the physical world and the spiritual. The buffered self is the self that does make a clear distinction between these things. And it is the rise of the latter that connects to the disenchantment of our current age.
The distinction is important but also complex. Indeed, both Sources of the Self and A Secular Age spend significant time exploring the distinction, and any summary runs the risk of oversimplification. Nonetheless, a couple of examples can again illuminate Taylor’s argument.
One example he uses himself is that of depression. In medieval times, depression—or melancholy as it was called—was connected to the notion of black bile. Today, we connect it to physiological issues such as a hormonal imbalance. One might be tempted to say that the difference between the two is thus simply one of depth of scientific knowledge: we now know that black bile does not exist, but both medievals and moderns see that a physiological cause for psychological dysfunction is in play. But this would be to misunderstand the difference between the two. While we moderns see hormonal imbalance as causing depression, the medieval mind sees black bile as being itself the melancholy. In other words, we distinguish the self—a psychological entity—from the physical, which acts on the real “us” as an external force; the medieval sees the self as in the grip of the physical and inseparable from it or, better still, permeable by it.
The physical world carried a powerful authority that extended to the spiritual and determined the nature of the self. But we moderns do not live in such a world. Ours is a world of immanence, not transcendence, explicable in terms of itself and where the supernatural does not plausibly blend with the natural.
A second example is that of the relationship between the supernatural and the natural world. For the medieval mind, the spiritual or supernatural boundary was a physical presence in the natural world: religious relics possessed an intrinsic power, for instance. Thus, when the king touched the one suffering from scrofula, the power of the physical touch healed the illness because the king, by virtue of his status as king, possessed supernatural healing powers. Likewise, when a fragment of the true cross was adored, the pilgrim was blessed. On the negative side, goblins, demons, and even the devil himself were physical realities within the material word. The physical world carried a powerful authority that extended to the spiritual and determined the nature of the self. But we moderns do not live in such a world. Ours is a world of immanence, not transcendence, explicable in terms of itself and where the supernatural does not plausibly blend with the natural. Even Christians who may well believe in a personal devil will typically not imagine him as a discrete physical presence in a particular place, but rather as a supernatural influence that cannot be specifically localized.
The displacement of the porous self with the buffered self is a long story, but with the crisis of the papacy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and with the Reformation of the sixteenth, the nature and stability of external authority started to become more and more equivocal. Add to this changes in technology, above all the printing press (with the correlative rise in literacy and then private reading), and economies (with the move from dependence on the land and the seasons to production and trade).
These changes meant the old external framework for identity and a sense of self started to weaken and then plunge into constant flux. The material world became less authoritative. The result was that there was an inward move, so that identity and security came to be found more in the individual psychological sphere than in the given external world. Montaigne gave a literary focus to the first person as Descartes did the same from a philosophical perspective.
The exploration of the inner space became critical. And as this happened, so the porous self gave way to the buffered self. Such a self will tilt toward finding science, for example, an increasingly plausible way of understanding the universe, not because it understands the elaborate arguments, but because the scientific way of looking at the world—as material that in itself possesses no intrinsic spiritual significance—resonates with the intuitions of the buffered self. The really important things for the individual are psychological. The material world is a separate sphere.
There is far more to Taylor’s philosophical analysis of modernity than can ever be covered in the space of this article. But above all is the central key to his thinking: to understand our world, we need to understand how human beings intuitively relate to that world. That requires understanding the changes in the notion of selfhood that have taken place over the last five hundred years. Only then will we come to a better understanding of why religion and religious people find themselves in such a highly contested position in our culture.
Image credit: Makhanets – Own work. Previously published here.
The film critic Roger Ebert died 10 years ago today.
I came late to his work: I remember seeing him on TV when I was a kid, but I only really started reading him post-cancer, around 2010 or so, when he was in the middle of his great blogging explosion caused by losing his voice due to his health complications.
Something I wrote in 2011 about his blogging:
what makes Ebert such a brilliant blogger is that he’s doing it wrong—in the age of reblogs and retweets and “short is more,” he’s writing long, writing hard, writing deep. Using his blog as a real way to connect with people. “On the web, my real voice finds expression.” Man loses voice and finds his voice. “When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.” Blogging because you need to blog—because it’s a matter of existing, being heard, or not existing…not being heard.
He died while I was working on Show Your Work! and he has a whole section in that book called “You can’t find your voice if you don’t use it.” It might seem weird, but I thought the best way to start that book about putting yourself out there was to talk about death and what you do with your time — here was a writer who knew his time was short and he was sharing everything he could think of before he left.
One thing I’d like to call out that I don’t think a lot of people know is that Ebert was a writer who draws!
He wrote a blog post, “You Can Draw, and Probably Better Than I Can,” where he explained how he met a woman named Annette Goodheart in the early 1980s, who convinced him that all children can draw, it’s just that some of us stop.
He wrote beautifully about the benefits of drawing, how it causes you to slow down and really look:
That was the thing no one told me about. By sitting somewhere and sketching something, I was forced to really look at it, again and again, and ask my mind to translate its essence through my fingers onto the paper. The subject of my drawing was fixed permanently in my memory. Oh, I “remember” places I’ve been and things I’ve seen. I could tell you about sitting in a pub on Kings’ Road and seeing a table of spike-haired kids starting a little fire in an ash tray with some lighter fluid. I could tell you, and you would be told, and that would be that. But in sketching it I preserved it. I had observed it.
I found this was a benefit that rendered the quality of my drawings irrelevant. Whether they were good or bad had nothing to do with their most valuable asset: They were a means of experiencing a place or a moment more deeply. The practice had another merit. It dropped me out of time. I would begin a sketch or watercolor and fall into a waking reverie. Words left my mind. A zone of concentration formed. I didn’t think a tree or a window. I didn’t think deliberately at all. My eyes saw and my fingers moved and the drawing happened. Conscious thought was what I had to escape, so I wouldn’t think, Wait! This doesn’t look anything like that tree! or I wish I knew how to draw a tree! I began to understand why Annette said finish every drawing you start. By abandoning perfectionism you liberate yourself to draw your way. And nobody else can draw the way you do.
“An artist using a sketchbook always looks like a happy person,” he said.
(Come to think of it, I quoted some of those bits of him on drawing in Keep Going. So Ebert features in not one, but two of my books.)
Knowing that Ebert was a drawer means a lot to me, because, as far as I know, the only time our paths really ever crossed is when he praised my drawing of the Ross Brothers’ 45365 on his Facebook page.
I could go on — the “Roger Ebert” tag on my Tumblr is about 30 posts deep.
RIP to a great one.
The issue of prostitution in Canada has been left mostly uncovered. The debate in the public sphere tends to centre around questions of “women’s choices,” and the left chants “sex work is work” in an effort to frame the problems in the sex trade as being resolvable via regulation and labour standards. Meanwhile, the men who pay for sex and exploit women in trade are ignored.
In this episode, I speak with Andrea Heinz and Kathy King, co-authors of a soon-to-be-released book, When Men Buy Sex: Who Really Pays? Canadian Stories of Exploitation, Survival, and Advocacy.
Andrea Heinz is a Canadian feminist who spent seven years in Edmonton’s licensed and regulated sex trade. She is completing a University degree in Governance, Law & Management and is married with three young children.
Kathy King is a clinical social worker (BA, BSW, MSW) with over five decades of professional employment and volunteer advocacy. In 1997, her passion became personal when she lost her only daughter to drug addiction, mental illness, and exploitation. Her story is shared at MissingCara.ca. Kathy lives in Edmonton with her husband.
The post Beyond a woman’s choice: the real story of prostitution in Canada appeared first on Feminist Current.
This essay is part of Public Discourse’s Who’s Who series, which introduces and critically engages with important thinkers who are often referenced in political and cultural debates, but whose ideas might not be widely known or understood. The series previously considered the life and work of Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Maritain, Michael Oakeshott, Charles De Koninck, and Harry V. Jaffa and Allan Bloom.
Readers of this series should take special interest in the thought of Leo Strauss. Whereas most political thinkers devote themselves to developing a set of political theories, Strauss took the radical turn of investigating the possibility of political knowledge or political science generally, and whether such knowledge could ever rise to wisdom.
Situating these questions along the path of his thinking over his whole life is an important task, to which, unfortunately, we cannot possibly do justice here. We can nevertheless offer a shorter path that might guide those who seek political knowledge, perhaps even political wisdom, out of a concern for our current political situation. Such readers—curious but skeptical, worried yet hopeful—will find in Strauss surer guidance for these sentiments than anywhere else.
Positivism and Historicism
Strauss often accused his discipline, political science, of a serious dereliction of duty, a failure to address the spiritual crisis the West faced from within and the political crisis it faced from Communism in the East. Notoriously, Strauss charged the new political science with “fiddl[ing] while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.”
The basis of this accusation was Strauss’s assessment of the predominant approach in political science, positivism. Positivism attempted to model the social sciences on the natural sciences, which had enjoyed in modernity an uncanny advancement that had meanwhile eluded the study of political things. The primary concept the social sciences borrowed from the natural sciences was the distinction between facts and values. In taking his bearings solely from facts, and refusing to the best of his ability to make judgments of value, the social science positivist eschewed his basic task. Herein lies the fiddling, and the ignorance thereof: to busy oneself with surveys and the like while calling oneself a political scientist, a knower of the things pertaining to our communal life, is to fiddle; but since this accusation of fiddling is itself a value judgment, the political scientist cannot possibly know that he fiddles, nor can he know that he does so as Rome burns. The risk, Strauss shows us, is that the very discipline tasked with guiding the community will busy itself with trifles instead.
In taking his bearings solely from facts, and refusing to the best of his ability to make judgments of value, the social science positivist eschewed his basic task.
As a matter of fact, however, social scientists who subscribe to positivism tend to be advocates of liberal democracy, at least in Strauss’s time and in the West. But Strauss showed that their devotion to liberalism, decent as it may be, is unscientific according to their own standard, just one value among many. Herein lies a still greater risk. If we assert with the positivists that our values do not admit of scientific or even intelligent assessment, then from where will we receive our opinions about good and bad, noble and base, just and unjust? What determines “the direction of interests … which supplies the fundamental concepts” in the social sciences? Strauss concluded that the answer came to be something like fate or history, “a fateful dispensation.”
Positivism thus devolved into historicism, according to which there are no absolute or transcendent truths, certainly not as regards the ends of our actions, or morality and the good; all values, all goals, indeed every thought is historically determined. The decent and earnest liberal positivists populating political science departments in American universities turned out to be professionally and intellectually ill-equipped to counter the most illiberal thinkers of late modernity, even susceptible to them, including some of Strauss’s most notorious contemporaries, like Heidegger and Schmitt.
Historicism, in turn, threatened to exploit the value-neutrality of social science positivism and infiltrate the American academy. Once there, both liberal inclinations and even positivism itself would be seen as just one value among many, since there were no longer any accepted standards for determining the good in truth. Those newly at the university’s helm could thus exploit the void positivism created and steer the “direction of interests” away from liberal ends. Positivism, Strauss effectively showed, had the same weakness as the Weimar Republic; what awaited was the academic equivalent of the Enabling Act, which surrendered the republic to Hitler’s dictatorship.
The History of Political Philosophy
Confronted with these crises, Strauss engaged in a thoroughgoing reappraisal of the history of political philosophy. As one might expect, that reappraisal came with no small measure of controversy; for it involved abandoning contemporary paths and reopening old questions long deemed settled by the leading lights of academic political science. Early in his career Strauss wanted to revive two such questions. First, through his study of the roots of liberalism in Hobbes, he saw that the quarrel between the ancients and moderns—apparently concluded some centuries before the triumph of the moderns—had not been settled adequately and had to be reopened. Second, amid the Jews’ hopes in liberal tolerance being dashed, culminating eventually in the Weimar Republic’s falling to Hitler’s Reich, Strauss was led to study the author of these hopes, Spinoza. Strauss ultimately found Spinoza’s critique of orthodoxy inadequate, so that his advocacy of liberal democracy, with its religious and philosophic tolerance, failed to counter the very premodern views he sought to overcome. Strauss thus made his way back behind the moderns, most decisively in his labyrinthine study of Machiavelli, to what he called “the secret vitality of the West,” Jerusalem and Athens. These cities represented the dilemma that had preoccupied premodern man: the question whether the good life is lived in obedience to divine revelation or lived by unaided human reason. Thanks to Strauss, this dilemma stood before modern man once again.
Strauss saw early on that a critique of our Enlightenment hopes entailed a reevaluation of the relationship between science and society or between the philosopher and the political community. The locus of this relationship is the act of communication, typically in writing; he focused, therefore, on how philosophers of the past communicated, including many modern philosophers, and what they sought to achieve by that communication. This might appear to be “a merely literary question.” Strauss maintained, however, that the question of communication constitutes “an important part of the study of what philosophy is.” It is on this point that Strauss has stirred up the greatest controversy: he suggested that the philosophers of the past have, so to speak, written between the lines to hide their true thought behind publicly salutary teachings. At a minimum, their surface-level teachings need to be restated in light of circumstances surrounding their writings; at a maximum, such philosophers might not have meaningfully held those teachings at all.
It is on this point that Strauss has stirred up the greatest controversy: he suggested that the philosophers of the past have, so to speak, written between the lines to hide their true thought behind publicly salutary teachings.
The implications of this thesis generated the controversy. It exposed nearly the whole of academic historiography as fundamentally inadequate in its interpretive approach to philosophical texts. It required that most, if not all, prior scholarship be heavily qualified, some of it even rejected entirely. And it therefore demanded, finally, that the historiographer see his work more humbly than he might like, as he was asked to bow anew before thinkers whose doctrines had until then been easily digested and thereafter disposed of.
Needless to say, the academy has been slow to warm, even hostile, to Strauss’s Copernican revolution in the study of the history of philosophy. But Strauss was also quite modest in his expectations. In a rare personal statement regarding nothing less than his own happiness, Strauss remarked, “I would be happy if there were suspicion of crime where up to now there has only been implicit faith in perfect innocence.”
As a result of his historical inquiries, Strauss was successful in reopening the question of an evaluative social science, a more robust or fuller alternative to the value-neutral positivism of his day. It would be a mistake, however, to understand his thought through this narrow lens alone. Strauss was not a simple moralist, driven by disgust with the present state of the social sciences to a wholesale endorsement of, say, Aristotle’s Politics. Though he exposed positivist social science as theoretically untenable and spiritually impoverished, he did so while also transforming the study of the history of political philosophy from the moribund old man of political science into an open frontier that awaited young and intrepid pioneers. Strauss succeeded in bringing the fundamental questions of the tradition back to life, against the dogmatism that would deem them already answered and the skepticism that would deny that they even exist.
Classic Natural Right and Socrates
We see, then, that Strauss sought to recover classical philosophy as a still viable alternative, and that this move had a twofold goal: one philosophical and the other moral or political. The moral or political goal involved demonstrating the possibility that human beings have access to trans-historical standards of justice, to natural right. But that goal can be achieved only if one demonstrates first that human beings have access to nature—that is, that philosophy is possible at all. Historicism denies the latter claim, which is more fundamental. Strauss rightly saw this denial as a philosophic and political crisis, especially for the United States, whose founding relied on an appeal to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Yet he also saw this crisis as a philosophic opportunity. Historicism, especially in its most radical form, was a welcome ally in the fight against philosophic dogmatism in any form. Though he was suspicious that historicism was merely the contemporary form of dogmatism, he also anticipated that engaging the historicist position, as a peculiarly anti-dogmatic dogmatism, would help “to legitimize philosophy in its original, Socratic sense.”
Historicism benefited the philosopher by exposing the limitations of all philosophic positions or systems. It argued that the apparently linear progress in the history of philosophy actually involves only a development in one area at the cost of regress in another. It thus compelled defenders of natural right to do so on a fundamentally non-dogmatic basis, prior to any particular philosophic position or system yet still properly philosophic. Strauss argued that, prior to arriving at any position, the philosopher had first to grasp the problem—the fundamental problem, as Strauss often put it—to which that position purported to be a solution. The radical historicist, Strauss surmised, would respond with a denial that there even are fundamental problems; he would assert, instead, that the whole the philosopher seeks to understand is always changing, that there is nothing stable about it that would be true for all times.
Strauss responded that the historicist has not adequately understood the history of philosophy, nor even historicism’s own history. He therefore lacks clarity about the fundamental problems with which prior philosophers concerned themselves, what Strauss referred to as “genuine understanding of the thought of the past.” He thus called for a rereading of the history of philosophy outside of the lens of historicism, as well as a critical history of the origins of historicism. Strauss’s historical inquiries were intended in part to answer this call.
A more pressing question for readers, however, is whether the recovery of Socratic philosophy does or does not culminate in the recovery of the classic natural right teaching. Strauss devoted the last decade of his life to an investigation of Socratic philosophy, an investigation he died before completing. Readers should not be surprised, then, if we do little more here than sketch the problem.
Knowledge of the problem of justice is, in Strauss’s account, knowledge that justice rests on mutually exclusive principles. To know the problem of justice is to know its insolubility.
Demonstrating the possibility of philosophy would seem to open the door to natural right; yet Strauss defended the philosophic life on grounds in tension with all philosophic positions, natural right included. Socratic knowledge of ignorance culminates in knowledge of the fundamental problems, among them the problem of justice. Knowledge of the problem of justice is, in Strauss’s account, knowledge that justice rests on mutually exclusive principles. To know the problem of justice is to know its insolubility. From this vantage point, any solution to the problem of justice, including natural right, seems to be untenable.
One suspects that Strauss’s attack on historicism in defense of classic natural right was intended to divert our attention from Socratic philosophy’s more formidable critique of natural right. Strauss created enemies and allies as suited his purposes. But we should approach this suspicion with due sensitivity. Knowledge of ignorance, of the mutual exclusivity of principles, does not mean that there is no objective way to discern which principles apply in particular situations and how. That discernment constitutes the prudence or practical wisdom of the philosopher.
Strauss lived the philosophic life as had all philosophers before him: with one eye on the demands of necessity and the other on the full scope of the questions. His continual emphasis on this twofold character of philosophic writing has the twofold benefit of cultivating both theoretical and practical humility, humility about what can be known and what can be done. By separating these domains, Strauss restored the ancient understanding of the relationship between science and society, philosophy and the city, thereby injecting both with a much-needed dose of moderation. It is this lesson, both urgent and profound, that Strauss offers his concerned and thoughtful readers.
Enlarge / WHO's COVID-19 technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, looks on during a press conference at the World Health Organization's headquarters in Geneva, on December 14, 2022. (credit: Getty | FABRICE COFFRINI)
While the World Health Organization says it's continuing to urge China to share data and cooperate with investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the United Nations' health agency is calling out another country for lack of transparency—the United States.
WHO officials on Friday said that the US has not shared reports or data from federal agencies that have assessed how the COVID-19 pandemic began. That includes the latest report by the Department of Energy, which determined with "low confidence" that the pandemic likely began due to a laboratory accident.
"As of right now, we don't have access to those reports or the data that is underlying how those reports were generated," Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's technical lead on COVID-19, said in a press briefing Friday. "Again, we reiterate, that any agency that has information on this, it remains vital that that information is shared so that scientific debate, that this discussion, can move forward. Without that, we are not able to move forward in our understanding."
Enlarge / People queue for clean water on February 9, 2023, in Hatay, Turkey. (credit: Getty | Burak Kara)
Deaths from the massive earthquake and aftershocks that violently struck parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria in the early hours of Monday have now surpassed 20,000—a staggering toll of devastation.
As of Thursday, Turkey’s national emergency management agency reported more than 17,000 deaths, as well as over 70,000 injured. Syrian Ministry of Health, meanwhile, reported 1,347 deaths and 2,295 injured. Rescuers in rebel-held northwest areas of the country reported at least 2,030 deaths and at least 2,950 injured.
As heroic rescue crews continue sifting through the rubble of collapsed structures, concern is growing for those tens of thousands injured and countless others made more vulnerable by the crisis.
Thirty years ago, Parker Palmer wrote a new preface for the paperback edition of his book, To Know as We are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey.1 Reporting there on his experience traveling the country to explore the issues raised by the book, he writes:
Everywhere I go, I meet faculty who feel disconnected from their colleagues, from their students, from their own hearts.2
Thirty years later, that sense of disconnection has calcified into alienation.
The processes and practices that shape our academic lives are badly out of joint with the purposes that give our lives meaning.
Palmer puts it this way:
Most of us go into teaching not for fame or fortune but because of a passion to connect. We feel deep kinship with some subject; we want to bring students into that relationship, to link them with the knowledge that is so life-giving to us; we want to work in community with colleagues who share our values and our vocation. But when institutional conditions create more combat than community, when the life of the mind alienates more than it connects, the heart goes out of things, and there is little left to sustain us.3
It’s not just that institutional conditions have an alienating effect on the communities that give them life, but our institutions themselves are disconnected from the mission they profess to advance. As we put it in the HuMetricsHSS white paper:
The values that institutions of higher education profess to care most deeply about — articulated through university mission statements, promotional materials, and talking points — are often not the values enacted in the policies and practices that shape academic life. This disparity has led to a growing sense of alienation among faculty who entered higher education with a deep commitment to certain core values, values that are themselves very often articulated in the founding documents of institutions of higher education.4
Palmer’s book looks to spiritual traditions for a path forward in the face of such pervasive personal and institutional alienation. He writes:
In the midst of such pain, the spiritual traditions offer hope that is hard to find elsewhere, for all of them are ultimately concerned with getting us reconnected. These traditions build on the great truth that beneath the broken surface of our lives there remains — in the words of Thomas Merton — “a hidden wholeness.” The hope of every wisdom tradition is to recall us to that wholeness in the midst of our torn world, to reweave us into the community that is so threadbare today.5
To cultivate the wholeness to which Palmer points requires discipline and intentional practice. To reweave ourselves into community, reconnect ourselves with our purpose, and realign university values with institutional practice, we need to create structures and cultivate habits that reinforce the work that gives our personal and institutional lives meaning.
In this effort, it is helpful to have examples. I am grateful to work with imaginative colleagues who have managed to create a few. The appointment of Morgan Shipley as the inaugural Foglio Chair of Spirituality is a tangible effort to integrate what Palmer called “authentic spirituality” into the life of the University. “Authentic spirituality,” writes Palmer,
wants to open us to truth—whatever truth may be, wherever truth may take us. Such a spirituality does not dictate where we must go, but trusts that any path walked with integrity will take us to a place of knowledge. Such a spirituality encourages us to welcome diversity and conflict, to tolerate ambiguity, and to embrace paradox.6
This fall, a trusted path led us to a place of wholeness where we celebrated the Ascension of the new Department of African American and African Studies. This event marked the opening not only of a new Department, but also of new possibilities for deepening our connections with one another and with the reciprocal, community engaged work our torn world needs most urgently.
At the heart of these efforts to put the heart back into things beats the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative, a framework and a process designed to elevate the quality of teaching, research, and engagement by integrating practices of wholeness into the life of the university. We have tried to capture something of the spirit of this initiative in the video below.
Beneath the din of anxiety that animates our public conversations about the future of education, concrete steps are being taken to reconnect higher education with the “hidden wholeness” that gives it life and purpose and transformative power.
Enlarge / US President Joe Biden speaks to members of the media on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, Jan. 30, 2023. (credit: Getty | Chris Kleponis/Bloomberg)
President Joe Biden plans to end two national emergency declarations over the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11, which will trigger a restructuring of the federal response to the deadly coronavirus and will end most federal support for COVID-19 vaccinations, testing, and hospital care.
The plan was revealed in a statement to Congress opposing House Republicans' efforts to end the emergency declarations immediately.
“An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system—for states, for hospitals and doctors’ offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Statement of Administration Policy.
Colorized scanning electron micrograph of Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria, which causes gonorrhea. (credit: NIAID)
The most highly drug-resistant cases of gonorrhea detected in the US to date appeared in two unrelated people in Massachusetts, state health officials announced Thursday.
The cases mark the first time that US isolates of the gonorrhea-causing bacterium, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, have shown complete resistance or reduced susceptibility to all drugs that are recommended for treatment.
Fortunately, both cases were successfully cured with potent injections of the antibiotic ceftriaxone, despite the bacterial isolates demonstrating reduced susceptibility to the drug. Ceftriaxone is currently the frontline recommended treatment for the sexually transmitted infection.
Enlarge / Passengers wearing face masks wait to board a high-speed railway train in Guangzhou South railway station on January 15, 2023, in Guangzhou, China. China is currently experiencing Spring Festival travel season, where millions of Chinese travel around the country before celebrating the Chinese or Lunar New Year. (credit: Getty | Vernon Yuen/NurPhoto )
China is now reporting that nearly 60,000 people had died of COVID-19 since early December when the country abruptly abandoned its zero-COVID policy and omicron subvariants began ripping through its population. The new death toll is a stark revision from China's previously reported figure for that period, which was just 37. But experts remain skeptical that the new, much larger tally is a complete accounting, and the World Health Organization continues to press the country to release more data.
In a Saturday press conference in Beijing, the Medical Administration Director of China's National Health Commission (NHC), Jiao Yahui, told reporters that the country recorded 59,938 COVID-related deaths between December 8 and January 12. Of those, 5,503 deaths were specifically linked to respiratory failure, and 54,435 were associated with underlying conditions, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.
The new figures double the country's tally of COVID-19 deaths due specifically to COVID-19 respiratory failure, bringing the pandemic total to 10,775. Previously, those deaths—the ones due to COVID-19 respiratory failure or pneumonia—were the only deaths that China counted as caused by COVID-19, which drew criticism from WHO officials, who called the classification "too narrow."
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