In recent history, there has been a surfeit said about what it means to be a man. Indeed, presently, there exists a veritable deluge of perspectives and opinions informed by everything from biology to psychoanalysis. The result of this has been a range of beliefs which span from antipathetic to quixotic in their assessment of manhood and masculinity, making it exceedingly difficult to see what being a man actually means. However, literature, and Pulp Fiction, specifically, might be the key to recovering a robust and rousing vision of masculinity from the present cacophony, and thus, this paper will examine how the male leads in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, Zane Gray’s Riders of the Purple Sage, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, respectively, are portrayed in the hopes that a survey of their commonalities and distinctions might elucidate (and encourage!) masculinity in the present day.

At first glance the main men of Red Harvest, Riders of the Purple Sage, and Tarzan of the Apes, are almost laughably distinct. The Continental Op is a middle-aged, fleshy, private eye with a penchant for getting other people to fight (and to die). Lassiter is a loner with a quick draw and a bone to pick with Utah’s Mormons. And Tarzan is an English lordling raised by apes who finds enjoyment in hurling pineapples at his lion nemesis’ face. And yet, despite their manifold and manifest differences in personality, place, and circumstance, there is one thing that all three men possess: power. Per Oxford English Dictionary, power is defined as “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events,” and in Red Harvest, Riders of the Purple Sage, and Tarzan of the Apes, power, so defined, is something all of the men, have in spades, though, admittedly, it manifests in different ways.

For the corpulent Continental Op, his principal power lies in rhetorically stirring things up: “Plans are alright sometimes… And sometimes just stirring things up is alright—if you’re tough enough to survive and keep your eyes open so you’ll see what you want when it comes to the top.” To his fellow operatives, he contends, “If we can smash things up enough—break the combination—they’ll [the crooks of Personville] have their knives in each other’s backs, doing our work for us.” That is precisely what occurs, proving that the Continental Op’s first and best weapons are his words. However, Riders of the Purple Sage’s Lassiter is notably taciturn, his power resting in his commanding presence and fearsome reputation rather than in being a backroom provocateur. Indeed, his bellowed surname alone can make a gaggle of gun-toting Mormons tuck tail and go home. Finally, Tarzan is the consummate man of action who can subdue a whole village of cannibals on his own and dispatches a lion, single-handed, with only a knife and bit of rope. All three men, despite their differences, have the capacity to realize their desired ends, whether through words, reputation, or physical force and acumen. From this, we can glean that Hammett, Grey, and Burroughs all agree: when it comes to the leading men in their stories, power, in one form or another, is a necessity. Indeed, its absence, in men, is a personal failing. 

This is made clear across all three books through the inclusion of male characters who, despite having the correct equipment, so to speak, are all, in some way or another, weak. In Hammett’s Red Harvest, the most egregious example of this is Dan, a man who, enamored with the irrepressible and avaricious Dinah Brand, permits her to beat him: 

She caught one of his thin wrists and twisted it until he was on his knees. Her other hand, open, beat his hollow-cheeked face, half a dozen times on each side, rocking his head from side to side. He could have put his free arm up to protect his face, but didn’t. 

Dan could move to defend—or even merely protect—himself, yet he stays his hand, taking the beating in silence. In the aftermath, he does attempt to shoot the Continental Op, the lone witness to his humiliation, but he doesn’t stand a chance. With barely any effort, the Continental Op knocks him unconscious, demonstrating another of Dan’s shortcomings: impotence. Impotence, the desire but inability to realize one’s preferred ends, is a trait Dan shares with Bern Venters from Riders of The Purple Sage, who, at the outset of the novel, is shown to be no match for Mormon Elders on a whipping rampage: “‘Will you take your whipping here or would you rather go out in the sage?’ asked Tull [one of the Elders]. ‘I’ll take it here—if I must,’ said Venters.” While he doesn’t passively submit to being beaten like Dan, Venters is too weak to take on the Mormons. Nevertheless, while he doesn’t have the physical capacity to fend off the whipping, he does refuse to abandon Jane Withersteen to save his own skin, showing that he possesses both a sense of honor and personal grit. In contrast to this, Professor Porter in Tarzan is willing to essentially sell his daughter in order to settle his debts, saying to her potential purchaser/suitor, Mr. Canler, “Jane is a most obedient daughter. She will do precisely as I tell her.” Professor Porter is a feckless parasite, even a pimp, willing to capitalize on and debase his daughter in order to make life easier for him.

Thus, it is clear that in Hammett, Grey, and Burroughs’ estimation, possession of male appendages is no guarantee of achieving a laudable form of masculinity. Being weak is an impinging, if not disqualifying, characteristic if one wishes to be termed a man because however it manifests, whether in passivity, impotence, and/or being a parasitic pimp, weakness ineluctably engenders pity and/or contempt. However, while demonstrable weakness in musculature and/or morals strains the grounds on which one can be called a man, there is a sense in which weakness and power are relative. In fact, among the three leading men—Continental Op, Lassiter, and Tarzan—there is a gradient, and the rest of this paper will be dedicated to determining which one exhibits the highest and most laudable form of masculinity. To best accomplish this, each man will be measured against two questions: 

1. Are they strong enough to provide others with protection?
2. Are they strong enough to overcome pernicious influences?

Embedded in these questions are the assumptions that men ought to do all they can to safeguard the people around them and that they ought to do so with integrity and discernment. In a word, men, in the normative sense, ought to be virtuous. Whether and to what extent the Continental Op, Lassiter, and Tarzan are will now be determined. 

When it comes to providing others protection, the Continental Op comes in dead last. Within hours of arriving in Personville for his latest assignment, his first client is shot dead. The man’s father, Elihu Willsson, quickly retains him, not only to investigate his son’s murder but to clean up the city on his behalf, saying, “‘I want a man to clean out this pigsty of Poisonville for me, to smoke out the rats, little and big. It’s a man’s job. Are you a man?’” The Continental Op assents, but the plan for Personville’s purification quickly becomes one driven by retaliation and revenge, with the Op admitting, “‘I don’t like the way Poisonville has treated me. I’ve got my chance now, and I’m going to even up.’” According to the late philosopher Rene Girard, 

Vengeance is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process. Every time it turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body. There is the risk that the act of vengeance will initiate a chain reaction whose consequences will quickly prove fatal to any society of modest size. 

Sadly, Girard is right. Within a fortnight, the Continental Op has stirred things to the extent that the streets are running blood red, and one morning, he wakes up to find an ice pick buried in the breast of his quasi-romantic interest, Dinah Brand. She wouldn’t be dead but for events he set in motion, and the night before he’d admitted to her that he could have gone about cleaning up the city a different way: 

I could have [swung the play legally]. But it’s easier to have them killed off, easier and surer, and now that I’m feeling this way, more satisfying… It’s this damned town. Poisonville is right. It’s poisoned me.

Clearly, whatever his original intent, the Continental Op was unable to protect the people in his orbit or hold the line against Poisonville’s corrupting influence. 

Lassiter fares markedly better in comparison. His first act upon arriving in Cottonwoods is to protect Bern Venters from being whipped, and he quickly commits himself to keeping the Mormon Elders’ proverbial yoke from being sealed around Jane Withersteen’s neck, even when she tells him she’s willing to accept it.  Indeed, he goes as far as killing Bishop Dyer, the incarnation of the creed that was draining Jane’s vitality. At first, she doesn’t understand his motivations and pleads with him to stay his hand:

‘You’ll kill [Bishop Dyer]—for yourself—for your vengeful hate?’

‘No!’ 

‘For Milly Erne’s sake?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘For little Fay’s?’ 

‘No!’ 

‘Oh—for whose?’ 

‘For yours!’

Overcome with emotion shortly thereafter, Jane beseeches Lassiter: “Kiss me!… Are you a man? Kiss me and save me!” He does save her, but her salvation comes at tremendous expense, requiring not only the slaying of Dyer but the destruction of Jane’s home, a frantic flight from her community, and being entombed within a valley. Thus, while Lassiter wasn’t taken in by the Mormon creed or the Elders’ tyranny, he wasn’t able to overcome either completely. The best he could manage was to kill a personification of the creed, fire Jane’s property to keep the Mormons from benefitting, and seal himself, Jane, and Fay in a place where they couldn’t be reached, and while the valley appears to be a wonderful, prelapsarian place, the fact remains, Lassiter, for all his protective power, had to take the girls and run away. 

Tarzan is a different case. From the moment he lays eyes on his Jane, her protection and well-being become his singular aim: “He knew that she was created to be protected, and that he was created to protect her.” He won’t be run off for anything. In fact, even when Jane herself appears to abandon him, Tarzan resolves not to do the same: 

‘What are you, Tarzan?’ He asked [himself] aloud. ‘An ape or a man?… If you are a man, you will return to protect your kind. You will not run away from one of your own people, because one of them has run away from you.’

Indeed, elsewhere the other jungle visitors testify that this is true: “‘He had ample opportunity to harm us himself, or to lead his people against us. Instead, during our long residence here, he has been uniformly consistent in his role of protector and provider.’”  Of the three leading men, Tarzan is the most capable, competent, and consistent in coming to others’ defense. And not only in the physical sense. At the conclusion of the novel, having asked Jane to marry him only moments after she’d promised herself to another man—his cousin, as it happens—Tarzan, always with her welfare in mind, asks her how they should proceed because he doesn’t want to make her a pariah in society:

‘You have admitted that you love me. You know that I love you; but I do not know the ethics of society by which you are governed. I shall leave the decision to you, for you know best what will be for your eventual welfare.’ 

When Jane admits that to jilt his cousin would be ruinous to her reputation, Tarzan concedes, refusing to admit even to Jane his true identity as rightful Lord of his cousin’s title and estates:

Here was a man who had Tarzan’s title, and Tarzan’s estates, and was going to marry the woman whom Tarzan loved—the woman who loved Tarzan. A single word from Tarzan would make a great difference in this man’s life. It would take away his title and his lands and his castles, and—it would take them away from Jane Porter also. 

Tarzan could have brought his cousin’s world down around his head. More than overcoming, Tarzan could have overtaken him. He had more than enough power to do it. The laws of British high society would have honored his rightful claim. He may have even been able to one day be with Jane. But doing so would have brought her to shame, and because he’d committed himself to a higher end than his own satisfaction—her protection—he chooses to take the supererogatory course of action: self-renunciation. Self-renunciation, or sacrifice, as Rene Girard describes it, is “a deliberate act of collective substitution performed at the expense of the victim and absorbing all the internal tension, feuds, and rivalries pent up within the community.” When Tarzan refuses to claim his true identity, that is exactly what he’s doing. It is an act of total self-donation, an abnegation of his title, his estates, and his romantic satisfaction, all for Jane’s sake because as he’d told her elsewhere, “‘I would rather see you happy than to be happy myself.’” And when it comes to “being a man,” a real man, total self-donation is what it’s all about. 

The relevant proof of this is the paradigmatic man of Western literary canon Jesus of Nazareth who not only gave up His divine privileges as God but His very life in order to secure others’ salvation.  In John 10:18, He says, “No one takes my life from me. I lay it down. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again,” and a little earlier, in John 10:10, He explains His purposes: “I have come that they might have life and have it in abundance.” Jesus was never powerless nor was he ever corrupted. His entire life was one of self-emptying—kenosis—and His example stands as the example of what it means to be a man, redounding through the centuries and leaving an indelible mark on our imaginations. 

In the twentieth century, British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch made the observation that while our words are stable, their related concepts often change, making it difficult, at times, to comprehend the meaning of what’s being said and, indeed, to communicate. When it comes to manhood and masculinity, this has certainly been the case, with countless voices, particularly in the hard and soft sciences, struggling to articulate what “being a man” means today. However, in the literary world, there seems to have been very little change, which should come as no surprise given that the literary paragon of manhood said in Hebrews 13:8, “I am the same, yesterday, today, forever.” The ideal man has not changed, and every man, fictional or otherwise, can be measured against the example Jesus set. The closer they are, the more manly they get. And thus, when it comes to discerning what it means to be a man today, it’s not a revolutionary but a reminding process that needs to take place, and through reading the words great writers—pulpy or otherwise—have put to page, we can be reminded that for 2000 years, the answer has remained the same.

Pulp Fiction Spring 2022.

For the last several centuries, there has been an on-going and vituperative dispute over what is and what is not religion’s purview, and in the recent past, a number of disciplines have seen fit to jettison insights from religious texts, clerics, and theology departments on account of the fact their contributions are increasingly seen as nonsensical, déclassé, and irrelevant. Nowhere is this truer than within the sciences. A stunning majority of scientists operating today, when it comes to the question of God (and religion, generally), say, as 18th-century polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace said, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” Indeed, a vocal segment of scientists have said that God is not only not needed but not wanted in their labs and experiments. And yet, ambivalent and/or antipathetic receptions have hardly kept the good and faithful at bay. On the contrary, they’ve historically set the stage for electrifying religion versus science debates. That being said, if one were to take a survey of the most memorable dust-ups between science and religion, science would seem to have carried the day. The inquisition of Galileo Galilei, the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and the more recent Dover Trial in 2005 all live on in infamy as noteworthy moments of what is widely seen as unabashed religious overreach, making contemporary religious adherents cringe and scientific materialists congratulate themselves on the fact that, in the words of Elizabeth Bennet, religious believers “made [themselves] ridiculous.” However, despite those not insignificant moments of egg on face auto-da-fé, when it comes to religion and science debates, religious adherents just will not go away. Indeed, they display an aggravating capacity, having been humiliated and splayed across the mat, to pop back up again with nary any discernible dispiritedness. In response to this, many within the scientific community, perturbed and incensed at the fact religious people are seemingly made of rubber or else endowed with an apparently limitless second-wind (perchance the Breath of Almighty Providence), have decided that the best defense against religious incursions is a strong offense, and as Enlightened Russian Despot Catherine the Great once said, they now contend, “I am ordinarily gentle, but in my line of business I am obliged to will terribly what I will at all. I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.” And so they have. Not wanting to barricade themselves inside their labs waiting for the indefatigable religionist advance, many scientists have taken to blowing glass, creating an exhaustive and (they hope) impenetrable materialist snow globe that encompasses not only their lives and labs but the universe in aggregate. “After all,” they contend, “methodologically, science deals in real things—testable, observable facts. None of that wooly supernatural nonsense. And furthermore! Metaphysically, the universe is all there is. As the late, great astrophysicist Carl Sagan put it: ‘The Cosmos is all there is or was or ever will be.’ The supernatural does not exist empirically. We are scientists. We know so, and we say so. So there. Our materialist snow globe stands, and NO DEITY SHALL PASS.” However, something—or Someone—appears to be tapping on the glass. In fact, both practical and philosophical materialism have inherent and ineluctable cracks, and this paper will contend that the materialist paradigm so many scientists defend cannot hope to last because it is, in point of fact, incoherent in both the methodological and the metaphysical sense.   

In order to best see the short-comings and cracks intrinsic to methodological materialism, it’s important to first get a definition of the term and a sense of how it has become an ideological bastion within the sciences. Helpfully, former Executive Director of The National Center for Science Education Eugenie Scott has offered both, explaining what methodmat is and why so many scientists hold it close: 

Most scientists today require that science be carried out according to the rule of methodological materialism: to explain the natural world scientifically, scientists must restrict themselves only to material causes (to matter, energy, and their interaction). There is a practical reason for this restriction: it works. By continuing to seek natural explanations for how the world works, we have been able to find them. If supernatural explanations are allowed, they will discourage – or at least delay – the discovery of natural explanations, and we will understand less about the universe.

For Scott, as well as many other scientists, methodological materialism has proven its effectiveness again and again to such an extent that in the words of atheist and evolutionary biologist Dr. Jerry Coyne, science and methodmat are now “deeply wedded.” A divorce would be costly and onerous, and the last thing any scientist would want to be accused of is faithlessness. They’ll not have any roving eyes, certainly not heavenward. Certainly not towards the divine. However, that being said, even Coyne himself admits that the marriage between science and materialism was no cradle betrothal—it arose over time—a union born of utility and successes. Hardly romantic, but such is life. And yet, there are scientists who object to the marriage. Who claim it was entered into under false pretenses, and that, far from aiding scientific advancement, methodological materialism has been less of a help and more of a hindrance.   

Theoretical physicist, fellow of The Royal Society, and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne is one such scientist who has argued that methodological materialism has had an intellectually stultifying effect, writing, “The laws of nature… which science itself has simply to treat as given brute facts, are held to display a character that makes it intellectually satisfying to terminate the search for understanding at this point.” Far from being a genial and fecund relationship, the union of science and methodological materialism, per Polkinghorne, has been brutal and abortive, forcing scientists to cut short their exploration of the things they find, lest they be accused of introducing aspects of the divine. Mathematician and statistician Dr. William Dembski has been even more forthright, alleging that the powers that be within the scientific community have engaged in “conceptual gerrymandering.” In fact, he further writes that their preferred modus operandi of methodological materialism is based on a lie:  

Methodological materialism presents us with a false dilemma: either science must be limited to natural explanations or it must embrace ‘supernatural explanations,’ by which is meant magic. But there is a third possibility: neither materialism nor magic, but Mind.

Eugenie Scott’s aforementioned list of permitted scientific causes—matter, energy, and their interaction—does not include mind, a short-coming that even fellow atheist, notable NYU Professor Emeritus Thomas Nagel, says must be rectified: 

The great advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world. This has permitted a quantitative understanding of that world, expressed in timeless, mathematically formulated physical laws. But at some point it will be necessary to make a new start on a more comprehensive understanding that includes the mind… 

For Nagel, Polkinghorne, and Dembski, minds are real things. They may be immaterial, but their existence and effects are certainties worth including in the concatenation of scientific inquiry. Frankly, few thinking people would disagree, and yet, many scientists do so quite heartily. They claim all there is is the brain—we are just “meat machines”—and the deterministic firing of the three pound pink slime between our ears determines all our thoughts and the course of our lives. It’s a spicy position to take, made more so by the fact that, philosophically, they’re somewhat awkwardly out of date as it was almost a full four-hundred years ago that polymath Rene Descartes provided a proof that the body (i.e. the brain) and mind are self-evidently not the same:

There is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible. For, as a matter of fact, when I consider the mind, that is to say, myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire; and although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, yet if a foot, or an arm, or some other part, is separated from my body, I am aware that nothing has been taken away from my mind.

For Descartes, the fact we can easily conceive of a body absent a mind (ex. a corpse) and a mind without a physical body (ex. spirits/souls/ghosts) is proof that they are different in kind, not just in degree. And yet monists, like Richard Dawkins, are bound and determined (pun intended) to be mindless. At least philosophically. Practically, though, it’s a different story because as triple doctorate and Oxford Professor Emeritus John Lennox has pointed out, for scientists to say their minds are the same as their brains (that is, the end product of what they themselves claim is a mindless, unguided, evolutionary process), is to admit they have no reason for believing their thoughts are in any way trustworthy or significant. In fact, any “thoughts” they might have are essentially an intellectual gag-reflex predetermined by the laws of physics. And thus, Lennox contends, materialism doesn’t just shoot itself in the foot, it shoots itself in the head. That makes it quite hard to do science experiments. 

“Alright, alright!” the aggrieved scientific materialist cries. “I admit it! I have a mind.” But like any good scientist, he’ll want to be parsimonious about that hypothesis, and as a materialist, he’ll want to do everything he can to downplay the admittance. After all, it’s a sledgehammer to his methodological commitments. Thus, his mind and his alone will be the only one allowed existence and the only one permitted anywhere near his laboratory experiments for if materialism must permit a crack, it will be the skinniest one the adherent can get away with. “I think, therefore, I am—the rest of you yayhoos are pink slime meatheads.” Ironically, this position, helpfully illumined by physicist, astronomer, and religious Brother Guy Consolmagno in his book God’s Mechanics, leads the materialist—one committed to seeing matter as the alpha and omega of existence—to say everything is just an illusion:

Solipsism—the philosophical theory that suggests that the universe is just a projection of an individual’s own imagination—starts with the mindset that “I am the only mind that exists.” The story goes that one such-minded amateur philosopher once said to George Bernard Shaw, “I am a Solipsist, and most of my friends are, too.” Shaw was understandably amused.

Clearly, “no mind but mine” simply will not do. Setting aside the hubris it takes to assume everyone in the room is a pink slime meat cube except you, taking that view turns all matter into something you can see straight through, a move that would seem to intrinsically torpedo a materialistic worldview. And if that wasn’t enough to prove, for the materialist, that solipsism simply will not do, Professor Nagel swings in to further pop their egomaniacal balloon: 

The understanding of mind cannot be contained within the personal point of view, since mind is the product of a partly physical process… by the same token, the separateness of physical science, and its claim to completeness, has to end in the long run.

Not only is the no-longer-quite-so-committed scientific materialist’s mind not the only one in existence, his entire methodological position, per Nagel (who is, once again, himself, an atheist), must come to an end. Minds exist independent of our own personal experiences and science has to be able to give an account for them. Matter, energy, and their interaction alone simply aren’t up for the task and because of that, the materialists’ methodological snow globe suffers an earth-shaking CRACK! Mind has swung its hammer, and there’s no going back. 

“Okay,” the scientific not-quite materialist admits, shivering at the sudden breeze and tightening his lab coat around him, “we’ll let minds inside our laboratory experiments—but that’s it! There’s no need to be gratuitous—no need to extend the argument. Actually, I’m quite content to leave it. Parsimony! Parsimony! A few minds (our minds) will be more than sufficient.” 

“We cannot leave it,” another white-frocked scientist indignantly says, brow furrowed, tone mellowed by a distinctly British accent. “Science is not content with ignorance. That’s something for those meathead religionists. The argument must be extended.” 

“But Dick,” his quivering lab mate says, “don’t you… don’t you sense that if we grant mind in excess—that is, beyond the bounds of our experiments, though we could maybe grant some to a few amusing lyricists like John Lennon. He has that great line about imagining there’s no Heaven—that could have, eh-hem (his voice cracks), broader metaphysical consequences?”

“As long as my genitals are left alone, I am okay with that.”

In 2017 during a debate with previously mentioned triple doctorate (and committed Christian) John Lennox on the topic “Has Science Buried God?”, Richard Dawkins, self-professed monist and materialist, admitted,

You could possibly persuade me that there was some kind of creative force in the universe. Some kind of physical, mathematical genius who created everything… You could possibly persuade me of that, but that is radically and fundamentally incompatible with the sort of god who cares about sin, a sort of god who cares about what you do with your genitals, or the sort of god who has the slightest interest in your private thoughts and wickedness. 

That Richard Dawkins—scientific atheist poster man—of all people would admit he could be convinced “some kind of physical, mathematical genius created everything” is nothing short of miraculous. And yet, as evinced by his rejection of any such genius that would have an interest in our sins, private thoughts, and wickedness, Dawkins made it very clear that while he might admit a higher mind, he will not admit a higher interest. His life and genitals are OFF LIMITS. He doesn’t want to be messed with. And that is the rub, isn’t it? Because for all that scientists must now increasingly admit that they use their immaterial minds to intervene—to “mess with”—their laboratory experiments, the idea that another, higher mind might reach into their lives cannot be countenanced. However, while scientific atheists might not like it, science, we are told, is not about preferences. It’s about evidence. And the question, having admitted that a higher mind might exist, is is there any evidence for it? That is, when we observe the world, do we see occurrences and events that smack of an interested, intervening genius? (I’ll call Him God from here on for the sake of being typographically parsimonious).

According to scientific atheists, the answer is no. They see zippo signs of Divine intervention within the cosmic snow globe. Indeed, everything is precisely as we should expect in a universe of “blind, pitiless, indifference.” And! They hasten to add, even if we were to run into something unexpected, dare we say, miraculous, all that would indicate was that we hadn’t discovered a scientific explanation. Yet. Nineteenth century French skeptic Anatole France put it like this: 

If an observer with true scientific spirit witnessed the regrowing of a man’s severed leg after immersion in a sacred pool or the like, he would not say ‘Voila—a miracle!’ Rather he would say, ‘A single observation like this would lead us to believe only that circumstances we don’t fully understand could regrow the leg tissue of a human—just like they regrow the claws of lobsters on the tails of lizards, but much faster.’ 

According to biologist and atheist Dr. Jerry Coyne, to have real confidence in a miracle, one needs “massive, well-documented, and either replicated or independently corroborated evidence from multiple and reliable sources.” He immediately adds, “No religious miracle even comes close to meeting those standards.” 

In Ezekiel 36:26, God says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” Today, a massive quantity of people—over 2.3 billion strong—claim to have had this same, that is, replicated, experience. Spanning the globe and coming from all walks of life, they all nevertheless attest that they’ve encountered and been changed by one Jesus Christ. 

In C.S. Lewis’ book Miracles, he writes, “Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write…” 2 Corinthians 3:2-3 declares: “You show that you are a letter from Christ… written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” If Dr. Coyne wants well-documented miracles, there are 2.3 billion living letters walking around. They might be a good place to start. 

“But how,” he and others will doubtless ask, “can their claims be corroborated?” Well, Galatians 5:22 says: “The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control,” and for anyone claiming to have met Jesus, there’s a very simple test to assess whether or not they have the indwelling Holy Spirit. Bite them. Taste and see if the fruit of their life indicates they’ve undergone supernatural heart surgery. 

“But hold on,” Coyne and crew object, “we have a ‘non-divine explanation’ for people being nice. Selfish genes and cultural indoctrination work for us just fine.” And they might most of the time. But an honest person would be hard pressed to say Corrie ten Boom, Rachel Denhollander, and Brandt Jean were driven either by selfish genes or by cultural indoctrination in offering their abusers and enemies forgiveness and clemency. In the words of physicist-priest John Polkinghorne, “Theistic belief is more comprehensive and fully explanatory than atheism can manage to be” because, as a simple fact, in a universe of “blind, pitiless indifference,” such love should be an impossibility. It is entirely ridiculous. It makes no sense. And yet, love is an irrefutable part of our lived experience. Moreover and more to the point, love is, at the end of the day, the heart of the great Christian claim which states a divine hand reached into the world—not to castigate or (as Richard Dawkins fears) to castrate—but to offer us Jesus Christ. Love incarnate. 

That is the miraculous offer on the table. That is what scientific atheists have to face. And now all there is to do is watch and wait because while 2 Peter 3:9 states that “God is not slow as men are slow, but He is patient, that all might come to repentance,” He’s also promised to come back someday. 

For Christians, we say Jesus is coming to take us home. For atheists like Dr. Coyne and Richard Dawkins, they say, in five billion years or so, the sun will swallow the only earth they’ll ever know. In either case, none of us will be stuck inside a hermetically sealed snow globe. Presently, though, for those who choose to persists as methodological and/or metaphysical materialists, making the cosmic dome their home, it has to be said that as time goes on, their oxygen is going to start running low, and anyone who’s ever been intoxicated before knows that in that state, clear vision and good decisions go out the window. You go cross-eyed, you shrink back from the light, and eventually, given time, say several decades of life, you go blind, unable to see what’s right before your eyes. In an interview with The Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson, Dr. David Berlinski, author of the Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions put it like this: “It seems to me that those who cannot see [God’s] handiwork will not be able to see [His] countenance either. There is a limitation, a kind of aspect blindness at work.” And so there is. But it will not always be like this, and in the end (the Christian says),  “every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is the Lord to the glory of God the Father, forever and ever.” Amen.

 Amen.

Religion & Science Spring 2022.

In Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks’ 2015 novel, The Secret Chord, the Biblical account of King David is reimagined through the eyes of the prophet Natan. Through exposition and dramatization, along with more than a little extratextual interpretation, Brooks gives voice and vitality to the ancillary characters in David’s story, allowing them to spotlight the strengths and shortcomings (i.e. the humanity) of “a man after God’s own heart.” In this respect, The Secret Chord is a fictional tour de force; however, it is not without its controversies, the preeminent being the depiction of Jonathan and David as having had a sexual relationship. In this, the tale departs markedly from traditional exegetical understandings of the actual Biblical text by capitulating to the perennial, albeit erroneous, sense that deep relational intimacy requires sex, and while this departure might entice readers who would otherwise pass over the story of David, in adding sex to David and Jonathan’s relationship, more is lost than illuminated. In fact, in eroticizing the nature of David and Jonathan’s relationship, Brooks not only collapses love as a multivalent category but also, in an ironic twist, implicitly justifies David’s mistreatment of women and extends that same mistreatment to Jonathan. In this paper, I will provide a brief illustration along with an analysis of the long-standing cultural confusion surrounding relational intimacy and sex, argue that Brooks falls prey to it in her eroticization of Jonathan and David’s friendship, and further argue that readers’ understanding of both David’s wife Mikal and Jonathan suffer for this. In sum, I hope to present a defense for the position that David and Jonathan are best understood as friends, and far from being a lesser form of love for its platonic-ness, their love is all the more exalted because of it.

Geraldine Brooks’ decision to eroticize David and Jonathan’s relationship did not emerge in a vacuum. Frankly, there has long been a sense that deep relational intimacy, that is, love, and sex go hand in hand; however, if there is one recent cultural artifact that encapsulates their conflation it would be the 2019 Kygo remix of “Higher Love” by Whitney Houston. Right from the get, the first verse begins: “Think about it, there must be a higher love/ Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above/ Without it, life is wasted time/ Look inside your heart, and I’ll look inside mine.” At first glance, the lyrics give the impression that the song is about a quasi-transcendental, even divine, form of love, but the moment the accompanying music video is viewed (and it has been viewed over 155 million times) that impression must be swiftly given up. While Houston’s words might be directing listeners to look to the heavens or deep inside, in the video, it’s not hearts or stars that are being exalted but boobs and backsides. Indeed, the lofty audio and lewd video combine to make the message clear: the highest form of love is focused on posteriors. Diotima’s scala amoris was incorrect. Beautiful bodies and sex aren’t on the bottom rung of the ladder of love–they are on the summit. At least according to Kygo’s remix, and given that it has been viewed by roughly half of the United States’ population and actively liked by close to a million, it stands to reason that a sizable number of people agree with him. This is significant because if Kygo synthesis of high love and sex is correct, Geraldine Brooks’ depiction of Jonathan and David is not only logical but requisite because the Bible itself says David loved Jonathan more than anyone—including any woman. Therefore, if sex is the apotheosis of love, it must mean that he and Jonathan shared a sexual relationship. 

But is Kygo correct? Is it true that the highest form of love requires, indeed, is exemplified by, sex? Psychologists and social scientists would seem to think no, but for a more culturally relevant analysis, it is worth turning to rapper, singer, and armchair philosopher Post Malone. In 2019 (the same year that “Higher Love” was remixed by Kygo), Malone released  “Circles” wherein he serenades an ex-lover, crooning: “You thought that it was special—special/ But it was just the sex, though—the sex, though.” Clearly, in Malone’s estimation, sex is nothing special, which would imply that it is not representative of the highest love imaginable. And Malone isn’t alone. In the last decade, other significant cultural artifacts have seemed to echo this stance. 

Early on in award-winning 2012 film Silver Linings Playbook, sex is presented as not a higher love but merely instrumental when protagonist Pat (Bradley Cooper) is told by his therapist in reference to a neighbor (Jennifer Lawrence) who he thinks is stalking him, “Maybe she [Tiffany] just needs a friend, and she thought that if she offers you sex, it will be easier for you to become friends with her.” In this, Pat’s therapist presents Tiffany’s offer of sex as a tool to elicit a deeper and higher relationship. Sex is a means, not an end, which once again indicates that it is not the highest form of love there is. Indeed, we now have a contender for that very position in the form of friendship. In his 2015 novel Purity, National Book Award-winning writer Jonathan Franzen put an even finer point on this when his protagonist, Purity “Pip” encounters a man she hopes to know better, and Franzen describes her inner musings like this: “[S]he found herself at a crossroads: either risk friendship or retreat to the safety of casual sex.” For Pip, the risk is in pursuing friendship. That’s the more exalted, the riskier bid because it is more intimate, more involved, than a casual exchange of bodily fluids. Thus, even amidst the Kygorian equivocation of love and sex, there has persisted a sense that sex is not the highest love there is, and yet, as evidenced by Brooks’ decision to eroticize Jonathan and David’s friendship, the confusion persists. In 2016, author and speaker Sam Allberry offered a poignant analysis of why he thinks this is:

In our culture we’ve really mashed intimacy and sex into one another, and so we can’t conceive of any intimacy that isn’t ultimately sexual intimacy. We hear previous generations talk about friendship and the depth of friendship, and we we roll our eyes and think, ‘Oh, they must have been gay or something.’ But the Bible shows us you can have a lot of sex in life and no intimacy. It also shows us you can have a lot of intimacy in your life and not be having sex.

Reading The Secret Chord in light of Allberry’s cultural analysis, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Brooks fell prey to the “Oh, they must have been gay” line of thought Allberry describes; however, she is not unique in that respect. Indeed, over sixty years ago, that kind of thinking was already on the rise. 

In his 1960 book The Four Loves, Oxford Don C.S. Lewis noted, “It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.” For Lewis, that troubling theoretical shift was indicative of the shifters’ insufficient personal experience with friendship: “Those who cannot conceive Friendship [Philia] as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.” Thus, in Lewis’ estimation, the eroticization of Jonathan and David’s relationship is symptomatic of an impoverished view of friendship, and for the sake of this paper, a discussion of its nature and substance is therefore warranted. 

What is a friend? In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle contends that a friend is an indispensable good without which “no one would choose to live.” Indeed, he writes that “in poverty and in other misfortunes… friends are the only refuge… for with friends, men are more able both to think and to act. David and Jonathan’s relationship coheres with this in both the Biblical account and in Brooks’ version, with Jonathan sheltering and assisting David when his father, King Saul, is making every effort to kill him. However, providing refuge and assistance do not capture the whole of friendship, and in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley builds on this description through narrator Captain Robert Walton who early on writes to his sister, saying, “I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine… I bitterly feel the want of a friend.” For Walton (and ostensibly Shelley, too), a friend is someone who not only acts as a refuge when their dad is trying to kill you but is also a companion who really and truly sees you, and once again, the Biblical account and Brooks’ representation of David and Jonathan’s relationship clears this bar, with both of them seeing each other as they really are. And yet, clear vision and understanding still fall short of what it means to be a friend. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine goes even further, saying, “Someone had well said of his friend, ‘He was half my soul.’” In Augustine’s view, friends are the people who help make us whole. In The Secret Chord, Mikal, David’s first wife, describes Jonathan (Yonatan) and David’s relationship like this: 

It was a different thing with Yonatan. [David] didn’t need a reason. He just loved. It was as if one soul had been sheared in half, breathed into two separate bodies and then cast adrift in the world, each half longing to find it another. That was how they came together, or so it seemed to me.

Mikal’s description of Yonatan and David’s relationship here aligns with Augustine’s view on friendship perfectly; however, Mikal (and Brooks) remains silent on what could impel this relational oneness. Augustine doesn’t. He writes, “[T]rue friendship… is not possible unless you bond together those who cleave to one another by the love which ‘is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us.’”

For Augustine, friendship is a supernatural event, one which requires Divine intervention and equipment in order to answer the question Ralph Waldo Emerson said must be asked of all friends: “Do [they] see the same truth I see?” Arguably, that Jonathan and David saw the same truth of God and trusted Him implicitly was their highest common denominator and the greatest source of their friendship and unity. Regardless, by all accounts, secular and spiritual alike, David and Jonathan had a friendship par excellence, so why add sex to it? Indeed, it is now worth asking, what does Brooks’ addition of sex do to it? To answer this, it is helpful to examine David’s other relationships.

In the Biblical account, David has a number of wives, and in The Secret Chord, Mikal, Avigail, Batsheva, all get some face time. Of the three, Mikal is the one who features most prominently, her testimony illuminating the tumultuousness and degradation of her relationship with David. Speaking to Natan about her marriage, Mikal says, “I loved him. You know that, I suppose?… The truth is, at that time, the other love [for Yonatan] consumed him. There was a little room for me…” Elsewhere, she reflects on how David’s treatment of her made her feel understandably less than when they had sex. As if she was a masturbatory vessel—a stand-in blow-up doll for Yonatan: “What young girl does not wish to be loved for herself. And not as some pale, soft version of her brother?” And yet, Mikal is made to say that at one point in time, that was A-okay, explaining, 

‘Yonatan had already given David everything… I was just one more gift, laid down upon the altar of that great love. And I was grateful. It was enough joy for me to share David with my brother. I was glad I could be a bond between them.’

This is the stuff of nightmares. That Mikal would be made to believe that she was, in this case, not a burnt but a sexual offering on the altar of her brother and her husband’s philandering, is utterly horrifying. And yet, at the same time, it is unsurprising. After all, David’s treatment of women within the Biblical narrative, especially when it comes to his sexual impulses, is infamous, the classic example being his rape of Bathesheba (Batsheva) and the subsequent murder of her husband. Given this, it is a wonder that Brooks’ wanted to spread David’s sexual attentions to Jonathan because we have no evidence that his sexual abuses would cease when presented with a different object. Truly, it is far more likely that Jonathan would have become a victim of David’s sexual selfishness. In fact, I would argue that a significant part of the reason why David and Jonathan were even able to have such a deep an intimate friendship was because sex was not part of the equation. 

Here, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles together provide a clear framework for the essential thrust of the argument because Proverbs 17:17 says, “a friend loves at all times,” and, in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, love is helpfully defined: 

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

David did not love Mikal. Not in the original text and certainly not in Brooks’ reimagining of it. No one, having read The Secret Chord, could argue otherwise. He was not kind. He did not honor her. He was not selfless on her behalf. He did not offer her protection. In failing to do all of that, David was failing to be her friend—not just occasionally—but habitually. Again and again. All, in no small part, because he supposedly preferred to have sex with her brother Jonathan. In Mikal’s words:

You know what he’s [David’s] like, he seeks love like food or warmth, and he doesn’t turn it away. But David was at the height of his passion for my brother when he took me in marriage. When we made love, he made no pretense. He asked me to do things in the dark that recalled my brother to him.’ 

Mikal’s description of David’s sexual appetite here is strikingly reminiscent of pre-redeemed Augustine’s:

My soul was in rotten health. In an ulcerous condition it thrust itself to outward things, miserably avid to be scratched by contact with the world of the senses. Yet physical things have no soul. Love lay outside their range. To me it was sweet to love and to be loved, the more so if I could also enjoy the body of the beloved. I therefore polluted the springwater of friendship with the filth of concupiscence. I muddied its clear stream by the hell of lust. 

In the cult-classic romcom When Harry Met Sally, Harry tells Sally,  “You realize of course that we could never be friends… men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” That “sex part,” as Harry says, is the typical encumbrance for clearing the Proverbs 17:17 and 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 hurdle in friendships because when it comes to sex, it is very easy to be unkind, to dishonor, to self-seek, and to put our desires over others’ protection and well-being. This is true between men and women but also true between any people who want to have sex. David and Jonathan are not exempt, and while the Bible gives us no sense of Jonathan’s sexual proclivities, David’s live on in infamy. Therefore, it is entirely unlikely that he could have been Jonathan’s friend if he was in any way sexually interested in him. He simply did not have the self-control or discipline. Thus, when the Nevi’im commentator says, “David’s statement that Jonathan’s love was wonderful to him more than the love of a woman (for him) does not hint at homosexual relations, but is an expression of deep friendship,” it can be understood as a defense of traditional teachings on sexual morality but it can also be read as an admittance that David did not have the capacity to really, truly love someone in whom he had sexual interest. From the Biblical text, David’s sexual attentions would be the stuff of nightmares to experience, leading to rape, murder, and a child’s death. In Geraldine Brooks’ The Secret Chord, they lead to objectification, abuse, and neglect. It is, therefore, incredibly strange that she decided to eroticize David and Jonathan’s relationship because, as Saint Augustine said, “[the] reign of inordinate desires savagely tyrannizes and batters a person’s whole life and mind with storms raging in all directions.” Jonathan would not have been spared David’s sexual inordinances, and Brooks’ failure to see this is difficult to account for but for the fact that culturally, we’ve long struggled to grasp that deep intimacy and love are not the same as sex. Indeed, so many have lost the ability to distinguish between “love’s serenity and lust’s darkness.” In eroticizing Jonathan and David’s relationship, Brooks not only forfeits the serenity of friendship between them, exchanging it for an erotic zeal, she excuses David for doing the same to Mikal and even Batsheva and Avigail, implying his wives’ less than stellar treatment could be contextualized, even justified, because Yonatan was the only one David really wanted to be warming his bed at night. And in my opinion, this is a serious interpretive and moral oversight.

Introduction to Jewish Civilization Spring 2022

During the last century, the Western World has seen a marked and even jarring improvement in standards of living, thanks, in no small part, to advances in the material sciences. Vaccines. Air-conditioning. Indoor plumbing. Chemotherapy. All are good things. However, alongside these creature comforts and salubrious aides, darker developments and practices have emerged along the way. The atom bomb. Zyklon B. Unit 731. Tuskegee. None of these can be swept beneath the rug of history or smothered by appeals to creature comforts and extended longevity. Their stains remain. And yet, today, there appears to be little in the way of sober and studied reflection on how such scientific undertakings came to be. It seems much more the case that the scientific community, or at least its most ardent materialist apologists, wish to prevaricate. The missteps of science are one-offs. Blips. Dismissed with an embarrassed shrug and purse of the lips followed by an exasperated, “Really? You’re bringing that up again? How tiresome. You know the crusades were very, very bad. You don’t see us bringing them up every third breath. Let’s let bygones be bygones. It’s all in the past.” But whether in the case of the crusades or the human slaughterhouses that punctuated the twentieth century, the past never becomes a matter of indifference to the present. In fact, as philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, “[i]t is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.” Therefore, all parties have an obligation to step back and assess, not only the manner in which they’ve swung but what they’ve been swinging at. Science is not distinct in that respect, and if we want to prevent future fouls, so to speak, the ends and the means of scientific inquiry warrant careful scrutiny because to boldly swing where no man has swung before without first pondering what exactly science is for seems a sure fire way to hurtle humanity towards destruction’s door. Therefore, this paper will examine the multifarious ends offered by the scientific community in the hopes that by juxtaposing them, it will be easier to see what ought to be the highest end of all forms of scientific inquiry. 

Knowledge

In the broadest sense, the purpose of scientific inquiry is to gather knowledge. In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins clearly articulates this and contends that the principal difference between scientists and people of religious persuasion is the latter’s contentment with ignorance. Religious people, Dawkins says, are satisfied with a “god of the gaps.” They glory in what they cannot explain because human ignorance permits such a milquetoast god to retain a place. However, for men of science, such as himself, human ignorance does not breed contentedness. On the contrary, it compels them to do science:

It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests. As my friend Matt Ridley has written, ‘Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.’ Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: it gives them something to do.

Knowledge, according to Dawkins, is what scientists are meant to pursue. However, it’s worth asking, once they secure that knowledge, what exactly are they going to do? After all, greater knowledge is no guarantee that those who possess it will be more benevolent, humane, or trustworthy. Indeed, history provides ample evidence to the contrary. As philosopher and professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr has noted, greater scientific knowledge enabled man “to transform his dagger into a nuclear bomb without having gained any greater control over his passions.” In vicious or intemperate hands, knowledge has proven disastrous because it has no inherent ethical limits. As rock band King Crimson said in their 1969 song “Epitaph,” “Knowledge is a deadly friend, when no one sets the rules. The fate of all mankind, I see, is in the hand of fools.” In light of this sobering reality, the aim of many in the scientific community has long been on the move because perspicacious and enterprising scientists throughout the centuries have been quick to see that if they wanted to combat and/or control the so-called fools, they had to be the one to set the rules. And for that, they needed to be powerful. 

Power

According to Buddhist contemplative Dr. Alan Wallace, “Science has overwhelmingly focused on understanding the objective, quantifiable, physical universe in order to gain power over the natural world.” For Wallace, the principal aim of the sciences has not been a disinterested accruement of knowledge (as Dawkins would contend) but a dedicated attempt to bring the natural world to heel beneath the microscopes of man. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that—man’s power over the natural world has, after all, secured countless life-saving benefits from vaccines to cancer treatments—C.S. Lewis well said that “[w]hat we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” Wallace’s assertion about the power-seeking nature of science does not preclude this because under the mantle of the natural world, human beings are certainly included, and when some men gain power over others whether through science or other means, the question invariably becomes quis custodiet ipsos custodes? After all, regardless of their sesquipedalian degrees and heavy brocade of government funding, members of the scientific community remain prey to every kind of folly. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and either has the capacity to make even the most dour scientists intolerant and greedy. Indeed, it has even led some to demand not only resources but intellectual and personal fealty:

These unapologetically anticlerical scientists insisted that empirical, naturalistic science provided the only reliable knowledge of nature, human, and society… They sought to ‘expand the influence of scientific ideas for the purpose of secularizing society rather than for the goal of advancing science internally. Secularization was their goal; science, their weapon.’ 

Thus, in either the material or intellectual sense, for the more imperial-minded, both science and its fruits are a means to an end—a way to dominate and make others subservient. And some observers, both within and without the sciences, have rightly sensed that it will not be long until such industrious and determined scientists come for them. Given this, they take a more existential approach towards science.

Survival

For individuals and communities that do or have felt the hot breath of power-driven science wafting across the back of their necks, scientific inquiry is driven largely by necessity. Far from being a leisurely exploration of nature’s mysteries, the enterprise of science is a matter of some urgency because the knowledge and power science can provide are seen as requisite if they are going to survive. Within Muslim and Jewish communities, this attitude obtains in degrees. According to Professor Nasr, awareness and dread of the West’s military and fiscal dominance has meant that “[t]he interest of Muslim governments in science and technology today is almost always because of what they feel is their need to gain power, whether it be economic or military…” Dr. Norbert Samuelson, a scholar of Jewish studies, has written that even exceedingly conservative Jewish communities which are typically suspect of, if not outright hostile towards, modern science and its discoveries, are willing and eager to utilize the latest in reproductive technology because “[p]ost-Holocaust the number of living Jews is dangerously low. Hence, to ensure the future survival of the people, help is welcome from every corner.” Thus, according to Nasr and Samuelson, the enterprise of science can be a means of survival and resistance—a secular instrument of deliverance. And once science fulfills that end, rescuing the oppressed and giving them reprieve and rest, “the hope… is that science enables human beings to improve the quality of human existence.” That is, once science has made sure that its practitioners will survive, the further hope is that it can give them (and us) more comfortable lives. 

Comfort

That science can be a means to alleviate suffering and increase standards of living is a nigh on self-evident fact. Whether enabling us to grow and distribute more food or laying the groundwork to colonize Mars and the moon, science has been a tremendous boon, keeping people fat and happy and promising ever more elbow room. Moreover, according to Professor of Philosophy and Neurobiology Owen Flanagan, the successes of sciences don’t appear to be stopping anytime soon: 

We have been very successful as a species at overcoming obstacles, e.g. our inability to fly, by inventing prosthetics. Airplanes get us to fly, and microscopes and telescopes get us to see beyond nature’s endowment. Past success at overcoming physical or cognitive barriers may partly explain why we are not inclined to accept any limit as insurmountable. 

And why should we accept any limit or boundary? After all, if science can improve human existence, providing us with ever more comfort and happiness, why limit it? The answer, per Dr. Wallace, is a matter of ethical judiciousness because comfort and happiness, or “hedonic well-being,” as he terms it, “is contingent upon outer and inner pleasant stimuli, and is often pursued with no regard for ethics…” A lack of ethics, even when wedded to comfort and happiness, is a dangerous and dehumanizing thing. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, this can be clearly seen because while there is much in keeping with “hedonic well-being” from soma to feasts to sex-parties, the people are little more than pleasure-seeking, puerile beasts. An outsider to the New World Order, John “The Savage,” at one point asks the inhabitants, “‘But do you like being a slave?… Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking!… Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?’” He’s later told by “The Controller” Mustapha Mond,  “‘Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness.’” And, as The Savage witnesses, the results of the teleological shift are utterly tragic. For the Brave New World-ers, the cost of comfort and happiness is their very human-ness. They have become the savages. And Huxley isn’t the only one who’s offered a prescient warning of the risks of being driven by comfort and happiness. Over two-thousand years ago, in his Politics, Aristotle noted much the same thing, writing,

For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice. For unrighteousness is most pernicious when possessed of weapons, and man is born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue, which it is possible to employ entirely for the opposite ends. Hence when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals, and the worst in regard to sexual indulgence and gluttony. 

Comfort alone won’t satisfy the human soul. Its pursuit and acquisition do not invariably make men noble, and while some might argue that “most ethical knowledge is local,” I contend that ethics, properly understood, must be global. Indeed, universal. And I’d further argue that when it comes to identifying science’s ultimate end, both ethics and a sense of what it means to be human must figure in.

Flourishing

The belief that there is such a thing as human flourishing stretches back into antiquity and is couched within a sense that human beings have a purpose. There is something that we are for—beyond mere happiness and comfort—and whatever that ultimate end is, great thinkers across time and space have agreed, we should muster our all resources, including science, to achieve it. So what does it mean to be a human being? According to Buddhist philosophy, answering this question “begins with ethics, then focuses on the cultivation of mental balance, and finally centers on the cultivation of wisdom, particularly that stemming from insight into one’s own nature.” So what is the nature of a human being? According to Richard Dawkins, “living organisms and their bodies are best seen as machines programmed by the genes to propagate those very same genes.” We are, in the words of late MIT Professor Marvin Minsky, “meat machines.” Human beings are nothing special, really. Our highest and best end is to have endless and procreative sex, which means Viagra and Octomom are the pinnacle of human achievement. Perhaps. But there are other perspectives. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine observed that our highest end was to rest in the One for whom we were created, writing, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Chair of Rice University’s Department of Chemistry and practicing scientist Dr. James Tour holds Augustine’s view, and in describing the work he and his lab are doing in nanotechnology, he says this: “What we’re trying to do is make the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, and have the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” That is a different perspective entirely. There are many more, and whichever prevails will ultimately decide what science is for. But until then, it might be best for scientists to be a bit more cautious and reflective about their ends. After all, history has made it clear that Frankenstein-esque experimentation has been a costly and tragic heuristic again and again. Personally, I think Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr put it best:

Only a science that issues from the source of all knowledge, from the Knower, and that is cultivated in an intellectual universe in which the spiritual and the ethical are not mere subjectivisms but fundamental features of the cosmic, as well as the meta-cosmic Reality, can save humanity today from this mass suicide that parades as human progress. 

Religion & Science. Spring 2022

Prompt: Based on your expertise in Comparative Political Systems, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has requested a meeting with you to discuss the “most pressing issue(s) in comparative governance and development around the globe.” 

Dear Secretary Blinken,

During the last two centuries, millions, if not billions, of people have ceased to believe in the divine right of kings and dismissed the idea that some men are born to follow and others to lead. Indeed, in the West, the belief that every human being is endowed with equal and inalienable worth and dignity has made it such that almost all citizens believe the difference between themselves and their leaders is not one of kind and barely even one of degree. Anyone could ostensibly lead, and thus, those that do occupy a governing seat have to work that much harder to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, many leaders are presently experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, causing their respective soils and spheres of influence to rumble with insecurity. The consequences of this are significant, posing an imminent threat to regional and global security, since, without legitimate authority, the likelihood of violent conflict rises significantly. Therefore, it behooves you, Mr. Secretary, to take this crisis seriously. As such, this briefing will first analyze the reasons why leaders’ legitimacy around the world is under siege and offer historical and present day insight into the potential consequences if it does not cease.

In Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” he argues that states are legitimized by one of three ways: tradition, charisma, or rational-legal authority. For Weber, the rational-legal paradigm has won the day with legitimacy coming by citizens giving their ascent to be governed by a system of laws and norms that they can apprehend and have the ability to inform. In brief, legitimacy begins and ends with the governed’s consent, and according to Francis Fukayama, this belief has become increasingly widespread. In fact, Fukayama contends that in the realm of systematic political philosophies, liberalism is human history’s final end. There is no other game in town besides governments derived from and upheld by the people’s consent. And yet, in the last few decades, consent of the people has become increasingly hard to get. 

There are a myriad of reasons for this, but high and chief among them is the fact that large groups of people, even whole countries, feel as if they have drawn the short end of the stick. On an international level, Andre Gunder Frank has argued that certain countries, by dint of their history as heavily exploited colonies, have been systematically undeveloped, and in The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto goes even further, claiming, “The triumph of capitalism only in the West could be a recipe for economic and political disaster.” Both men grasp, and Ted Robert Gurr would confirm, that continued feelings of “relative deprivation” could very well lead to an unpleasant, if not cataclysmic, global situation as poorer countries come to resent and contest the dominant place of the West. However, we need not only look at clashes between the “West and the Rest” to see that widespread feelings of deprivation and disillusionment pose a problem for any authority that wants to retain its legitimacy. In “Brexit’s False Democracy,” Kate McNamara contends that Brexit was a function of similarly discontent sentiments as the more “parochial” minded, who knew they were to be the losers in the pan-European dream, rescinded their consent and wrested back their sovereignty. 

In either case, the sense that a whole swath of people has drawn the short end of the stick makes it difficult to see those in charge, the “winners,” whether regionally or globally, as legitimate. To that end, Andreas Wimmer’s “like over like” paradigm, despite being initially confined to an ethnocentric argument, provides some helpful insight because while liberalism has impelled many to believe that their leaders differ from them only in their positional authority, a significant amount of people look at global leaders today and think, “they are not ‘like me.’” That is a problem for legitimacy because as Benedict Anderson has said, nations must be bound by a deep sense of “horizontal camaraderie,” and without that camaraderie, indeed with a felt sense that one’s rulers are irreconcilably distinct from the people they are ruling, consent of the governed will be exceedingly hard to achieve. Theologian John Courtney Murray put the problem like this:

“The fact today is not simply that we hold different views but that we have become different types of men… We are therefore uneasy in one another’s presence. We are not in fact present to one another at all; we are absent from one another. That is I am not transparent to the other, nor he to me; our mutual experience is that of an opaqueness.”

That sense of unease and opaqueness can do nothing but precipitate a legitimacy crisis, both between and within nations, as those who have drawn the short stick or else have different values, experiences, and/or historical grievances denounce winners and rulers as illegitimate. When this occurs, the risk of conflict increases dramatically because states that lose (or never secure) their legitimacy become much more susceptible to revolution, anarchy, and tyranny. Historically, Theda Skocpol has discussed the way state breakdown, of which a crisis of legitimacy is doubtless a piece, provided a necessary condition for French, Russian, and Chinese revolutionary activity. More recently, Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills have shown that a lack of legitimate authority in the Congo, even with the presence of foreign investment and backing, has led to insecurity and instability, ceding large chunks of the country to anarchy. Finally, in Hong Kong presently, the growing sense that the Chinese Communist Party is not a legitimate government has led many to take to the street in protest and led the Party to crack down with tyrannical viciousness. 

Unfortunately, Mr. Secretary, there is no “technical solution” to the crisis of legitimacy. Some thinkers, like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have argued that government officials, specifically in democracies, should maintain legitimacy by warding off extremes. However, doubling down on leaders’ gatekeeper-ness may only inflame hostile sentiments because as Hanna Pitkin has pointed out, there is an ongoing and raging debate about whether representatives govern as individuals or under the people’s mandate. If the latter, going against the people’s will, however extreme it may be, will only feed the crisis of legitimacy. Indeed, it might actually be too late to arrest the growing legitimacy crisis because as Francis Fukayama has observed, “A nation’s well-being… is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in the society.” If trust is essential for a nation’s well-being, it must be all the more key for the health of the global community. And yet, as has already been discussed, there has been a real and pervasive decline in trust on almost every front, and in such conditions, the best that can be achieved appears to be little more than an uneasy peace. At the domestic level, Arend Lijphart has suggested as much with his “consociational model” whereby power sharing and group autonomy are both guaranteed. Unfortunately, it is doubtful this would do much to build trust and legitimacy, and there is no clear way to implement this globally. 

Sorry, Mr. Secretary. Things are pretty bleak, but I hope you have a nice holiday.

Sincerely,

Sarah Christine

Comparative Political Systems Fall 2022