Gen Eds P11: Philosophy of Art

So we come to the last category in philosophy, the philosophy of art or aesthetics. Last week we looked at the philosophy of history.

This is the tenth and final philosophy post in a series called, "General Education in a Nutshell." Philosophy is the first of ten subjects to overview in this series. These are the subjects a person normally takes in college (or high school) as part of a general education (most of them also make up what is sometimes called the "liberal arts").

The first ten philosophy posts were:

• Philosophy Overview
• Philosophy of Religion
• Epistemology
• Critical Thinking
• Philosophy of Science
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of the Person
• Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Philosophy of History

1. Art is often thought to be a subjective matter: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Certainly this is true from one perspective. One person thinks landscapes are beautiful, another likes abstract art. One person likes Mozart, another loves rap music. Someone else denies that techno is really music.

We might therefore say that art is anything that some person considers to be art. Normally, there is an artist involved, someone who believed he or she was creating something that was an expression of something in some sensory medium that can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. Sometimes it is the person experiencing that medium who considers something art, an expression or an embodiment of something.

Of course we might ask, what does God consider to be art? Why the whole creation is a work of art by God's hand, a work of beauty! "The heavens are telling the glory of God" (Ps. 19:1).

2. There are those who would say that there are objective criteria for what is beautiful. Symmetry is often considered an objective basis for beauty. What about rounded figures as opposed to jagged or square ones? Some would say there are aspects of the human brain, parts that "light up" with certain visual and auditory stimuli, such that they can actually objectify beauty.

Most of us at this current time would probably say that this approach misses the point of art, which is not scientific but oriented around pleasure. But as we will see, our perspective is only one perspective, one that fits where we are situated in history, and not the only one.

What does God consider beautiful? "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31). Everything that God has created, insofar as it is not marred by Sin, is beautiful. Who knows, perhaps even that which is marred by Sin is beautiful to God in a way, for Sin only exists because of the possibility that we might choose the good. Even the unrepentant sinner remains beautiful to him, because he or she is still the image of God. God is able to love the sinner even though he does not love sin.

The laws of physics are beautiful. They are indeed elegant. There is a mathematical beauty to the universe. These are manifestations of God as an artist.

3. The sense of the purpose of art and what therefore constitutes good art has changed from time to time in history. For example, both Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece assumed that the purpose of art was to provide a representation of reality. [1] For Plato, this sense of art implied that it was a bad thing, just as for similar reasons it mean for Aristotle that art was a good thing.

Plato believed that anything we experience with our senses is only a shadow and a copy of reality itself, which is something we access with our minds. The idea of a table is the reality. A physical table is a shadow and a copy of that reality. So for Plato, a piece of art was a copy of a copy of reality. It took one farther from the truth and thus was bad. It also could play on the emotions, which for Plato was bad.

By contrast, Aristotle believed art was good for similar reasons. Unlike Plato, he did not believe that the idea of something--its essence or form--was something that truly existed independently of substance. When I identify something as a table, my mind has abstracted the essence of a table from the table. Art is helpful in this regard, because art focuses on the essential form of something.

And while art often evokes an emotional response, Aristotle believed this experience could be cathartic in a way that actually helps clear our minds. Music might purge us of emotions so that we can think straight.

4. So Plato and Aristotle both judged the value of art on whether it led to greater rationality. Quite the opposite for the Romantics in the late 1700s and early 1800s. For them the emotional irrationality of art was what made it art and what made it good. The artistic ideal was the eccentric artist who seems possessed of something greater than him or herself. The artist is someone swept away by genius, someone with whom the rest of us cannot really relate.

This Romantic paradigm has more or less dominated our sense of art up until the present time. Good art evokes strong feelings which, while irrational, are good.

 Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) had a slightly different perspective on art. He agreed with the Romantics that art was largely about feeling. But he disagreed on what constituted good and bad art. The Romantics viewed art as an individualistic matter. It didn't matter whether you or I recognized the meaning or genius of a work of art. It was a matter of the individual artist and individual taste.

But for Tolstoy, art was only good art if it evoked universal feeling and values. And the values of importance were things like the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. If a work of art made us feel more loving toward each other, then it was good art. If a piece of art helped us feel solidarity with one another as human beings, it was good art.

4. All of the above, in their own way, believe that art is good if it is constructive. If it builds rationality, Plato and Aristotle would have said it was good. If it built individual or corporate feeling, the Romantics and Tolstoy would have said it was good, respectively.

With Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), art becomes good if it has a destructive function. Building on the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Marcuse suggested that art serves a psychological function in relation to repression. Repression, for Freud, was the result of human beings not being able to fulfill their deepest drives and desires. This energy gets pent up inside us and can be destructive.

Marcuse saw art as an outlet for these repressive drives. Art allows a person to release these repressed feelings. In that sense, his perspective bears some resemblance to Aristotle's.

5. But we might end with Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), who thought all these perspectives failed because they all evaluate art on the basis of what we might call its "instrumental value." Art is good or bad depending on what it does. For Wilde, art has intrinsic value. Art doesn't have to do anything at all. Art is valuable for its own sake.

Next Week: Summary of Philosophy's Value

Classic Reading

• Plato's Republic
• Aristotle's Poetics
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
• Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?
• Oscar Wilde, Intentions
• Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization

[1] I have drawn the general pattern of what follows from Robert Paul Wolff's About Philosophy.

Gen Eds P10: Philosophy of History

Today we look at the philosophy of history. The last post tried to cover the gamut of perspectives on social and political philosophy, including economics.

This is the ninth philosophy post in a series called, "General Education in a Nutshell." Philosophy is the first of ten subjects to overview in this series. These are the subjects a person normally takes in college (or high school) as part of a general education (most of them also make up what is sometimes called the "liberal arts").

The first nine philosophy posts were:

• Philosophy Overview
• Philosophy of Religion
• Epistemology
• Critical Thinking
• Philosophy of Science
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of the Person
• Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy

1. Story is a fundamental category of human thinking. Whether it be ancient old men sitting at the city gates, "Homer," or the medieval bard, we tell each other stories to amuse each other and, more importantly, to capture our values and philosophy of life. Families tell stories that capture the eccentricities of our personalities, along with our strengths, weaknesses, and values.

In short, we use stories from our history to define who we are, what we believe, what we hope, and how we should live.

Mind you, these stories are more short vignettes than they are long over-arching, uber-narratives. There has been a movement to say that we interpret reality from within a certain narrative--a version of the older idea that we interpret reality from within a certain worldview. But the stories and paradigms that inform our understandings of the world are far more granular and atomistic than they are grand and large. [1] They are more like short stories that have affinities with each other than some long grand ecrit.

It was Jean-François Lyotard (1924-90) who first described the "post" modern situation as a resistance to such "grand narratives," by which he referred to the attempt to reduce reality to simplified stories that claim to explain everything. These simplifications help us process an extremely complex world by reducing it to something you can tell a child, but they inevitably skew and spin it. As a colleague of mine once said, all "taxonomies" are inherently skewed, where a taxonomy is an attempt to reduce the truth to a list.

2. Perhaps a primary goal of the liberal arts with regard to history is to catch a glimpse of "your people's" "myths" from the outside and to catch a glimpse of other people's "myths" from the inside. A myth is a story that expresses a mystery or some fundamental perspective on life. When we tell the story of the founding of America, that story is meant to capture our values and to reinforce certain perspectives on the present.

When the "Tea Party" adopted that name, they were taking an image from America's past that they valued and applying it to our current situation. Russians tell stories from Russia's past. The Chinese tell stories from their past. All these stories are no doubt skewed in comparison with any videotape or critical examination a critical historian might give. The point of the story is something slightly different than "telling it just as it really happened."

In the "Western world," Herodotus (ca. 484-25BC) is often called the father of history, because he told the story of the Persian Wars not just from the Greek perspective, but from the perspective of other players as well. He also told the story without reference to gods causing events--he focused on human causes and effects. Finally, he drew on some historical evidence rather than hearsay alone.

Plutarch (46-120) called him the "father of lies" rather than the father of history. Why? Because Plutarch didn't like equal time for non-Greek perspectives. Plutarch represents the default human tendency to privilege the perspective of your group and not to consider fairly the perspective of other groups.

3. So there are twin problems here. On the one hand, you cannot escape your own perspective to achieve something like a God's eye or bird's eye view. The modernist goal of achieving objectivity is a "myth" of objectivity that can never be attained. Indeed, the Western "myth of progress" is itself a skewed view of history, another "grand narrative" that skews the story.

Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) suggested that the goal of the historian was to tell history "as it really happened." The historian was to base all conclusions on evidence. He or she was to question their sources rather than assume the correctness of certain ones just because you liked their perspective or trusted the source. You should focus on concrete realia rather than abstract ideological constructs.

These are indeed good goals that should steer the ship of the historian. The problem is that they are unattainable. You cannot tell history "as it really happened" because all history telling involves the selection and deselection of data. All history telling requires us to prioritize and arrange. Historical events tend to be complex, and we cannot look inside another person's head to know what they are thinking. We never totally know what we ourselves are even thinking.

As Michel Foucault (1926-1984) said, "knowledge is violence." Reality is complex, and every act of knowing it skews and does a certain violence to it.

So the myth of objectivity is a star to steer by, but one we will never arrive at. Ernest Troelstch (1865-1923) expanded on the criteria of good historical formulations. All historical conclusions should be open to revision. We should presume the laws of cause and effect. And we should interpret the past on analogy with how things happen now.

There was a clear "anti-supernaturalist" bent to Troeltsch's philosophy of history. The analogy principle, for example, would mean that we cannot infer a resurrection in the past if we do not see resurrections happening now. But you cannot prove such a thing. By what proof would we suggest that there could not have been unique events in the past?

4. More on some key historical "myths" in a moment. So if the one problem is that we aim at objectivity but cannot attain it, the other problem is that while we must acknowledge our inevitable "tribalism" we should not use it as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I use the word "myth," I am not using it as something that is false or necessarily bad. Our myths shape who we are and how we engage the world. They are not only important; they are inevitable.

Our myths are often based in facts and real events. But they are storied interpretations of those facts and events. But the world is arguably not a better place when "storied tribalism" is allowed to reign supreme. We can't talk to each other because you have your version and I have my version of the story, and never the twain will meet. Washington DC right now is a tale of two tribal narratives that cannot speak to each other.

So we must acknowledge our subjectivity but not acquiesce to it. We cannot transcend it but we must aim to do so. Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95) indeed suggested that we ground our being in the subjectivity of the other--being subject to the other--rather than in our own subjectivity.

The "multicultural" approach suggests that when we pretend that there is only one, objective perspective--the one we have--we simply empower the perspective of our group. And as a society as a whole, we empower the dominant culture or group without it even knowing it has a perspective. When a "white" person speaks of a color blind society, there will inevitably be a tendency to be blind to the situations and perspectives of non-whites. [2]

A multicultural approach suggests that we acknowledge our differing situations and perspectives and then work to transcend them. We do not acknowledge them to stay in them but to move toward "intersubjectivity." We move to find common ground and thus to create one story out of two.

These are the twin poles of historical investigation--objectivity and situatedness. We are situated and we must fully acknowledge that we are situated in a particular tribe and culture. We are situated in certain myths and constructs. But our goal is to understand the other from their storied perspective as well and to help them understand me within my story. Our goal is to unite our stories and transcend them, to create a larger story that includes the both of us.

In the meantime, the star of objectivity, the "myth of objectivity" remains valuable, even though we will not reach it. The star of objectivity insists that we root our interpretations of history in the events of history. It insists we favor the concrete over the abstract and ideological. We favor primary sources over secondary ones because the further we get away from the events themselves, the more layers of interpretation we have to work through. It insists that we work within the framework of cause and effect.

5. As an example, let us briefly consider the myth of Western progress. First, what is "Western" in the first place. What does Greek history really have to do with me? I am not Greek (although I married a quarter-Greek). There is no essential connection between what people like Plato or Aristotle thought and who a guy like me is who's a hodgepodge of English, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, German, and Welsh.

The only reason the Greeks are important to my story is because someone connected to my past made them so. When the European story was being assembled at the beginning of the "Renaissance," they formulated it as a rebirth of the Greeks and Romans. Of course, it was a selective "rebirth." The majority of ancient Greeks--the ones that did most of the living and dying--probably had little idea who Socrates or Plato were.

Indeed, think of the term, "Renaissance," "rebirth." It implies that culture was more or less dead for a thousand years. Think of the term "Middle Ages." Middle between what? The very term, as Foucault might say, did violence to the people who lived for a thousand years by imagining them to be in the middle between good and the rebirth of good.

In short, the very idea of Western history is an imposition on history. It ignores the equally considerable--indeed in many cases superior achievements of other cultures such as the Chinese and the Indian. Egypt is pulled into the story because it is on "our side" of the globe and it is present in the biblical texts, which were important and part of the "Western story."

6. We will have recourse to consider the American story as it is currently told when we dive into history in three weeks. The American story is also told from within varying mythical frameworks. The progressive "myth" sees America as a series of improvements, with the best yet to come. The Civil War improved us in relation to slavery. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were improvements made in regard to unbridled capitalism. The twentieth century improved us with regard to women's rights and civil rights. Our current task is to keep that trajectory of progress going.

The conservative "myth" is quite different. It looks back to the founding of America as a Golden Age when everyone believed in God and the greatest principles of society were captured in a sacred document, the Constitution. When the world is in trouble, it calls on us for help because we are the best and the strongest. We saved Europe's butt in WW1, then again in WW2. But we are in danger. We need to get back to the days when America honored God. We need to elect leaders like Ronald Reagan, who captured the ideals of conservative values. We are on a spiraling downward trajectory that will lead to our destruction if we don't take America back.

Of course both of these narratives are "myths" in the sense that they both oversimplify an incredibly complex reality. They are tribal narratives. We will get nowhere unless we can supercede our own stories and begin to understand the story of the other.

6. There are of course other stories that are of historical significance because they impact us. Nationalism is the tendency of a particular nation to privilege its story and destiny over all others. [3] "American exceptionalism" is a form of nationalism. It says, "Americans are better than every one else" or perhaps, "God likes America more than he likes everyone else." The American story is told accordingly.

Karl Marx (1818-83) had a philosophy of history. His perspective was that history was the story of class struggle. It began with kings and slaves, a thesis and antithesis that conflicted until they resolved in a synthesis with lords and serfs. [4] That thesis-antithesis pair lead to a synthesis of aristocrats and merchants, which lead to a synthesis of the bourgeoisie and proletariat (worker). He believed that he was living in the final thesis-antithesis pair, and that it would lead to bloody revolution and finally a classless society.

That communist "myth" had immense influence in the twentieth century. It influenced the formation of the Soviet Union and countless other revolutions. "Ideas are dangerous," G. K. Chesterton said. But they are only dangerous in the hands of dangerous people. And they are only powerful in the hands of those who can use them to light a fire. "Ideas have consequences," not because of the ideas themselves but because of the power they can wield in the hands of charismatic figures.

7. There is some truth in the parable that says, "Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it" (George Santayana). There are cause and effect patterns that stand outside my apprehension of them (critical realism). There is a "history itself" even though I only know history as it appears to me.

Certain actions tend to lead to certain effects. If we completely reject any truth to history outside of our own perspective on it, we are lost in a whirlpool of solipsism.

So what of the Christian story of history? There are those who have suggested it is an existential myth that has no need for historical foundation. [5] But if there is no historical reality to the Christian story, then it would seem to lose its power. Christians do not want to believe that the Christian story is a mere story that we tell to ground who we are and how we live. We want to believe it has some basis in objective fact.

So if you had been at Jesus' tomb two thousand years ago, might you have witnessed him coming from the grave? This is not a question of subjective perspective. It is a question of historical event. Either his body was there and then it was not or the story is not historically accurate.

Will there be a point in the future when Jesus returns again in a visible way? Either he will or he won't. It isn't a question of intersubjectivity. It either will happen or it won't.

So history is either linear (headed on a trajectory) or it isn't. The other option is the cyclical view, that history more or less repeats itself, over and over again.

Of course "historic" Christianity views these core events as historical events rather than subjective perspectives. God exists as a Being distinct from our existence or belief in him. God as real being interacts with history in a way that is like the cause and effect of humans interacting with history. Jesus was a real person who really died on a cross and really became alive again such that his human body was no longer dead in a grave but is in continuity with the body he has now.

Objectivity and situatedness capture the twin poles of critical realism when it comes to historical investigation. There is such a thing as history itself. God knows it because he knows all the events of history in all their interrelationships with each other. No human has the capacity, the access, or the intelligence to have a God's eye view. We are stuck in our tribal perspectives. But we must aim to supersede them.

Next Week: philosophy of art

Classic reading

• Augustine, The City of God
• G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto
• Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
• Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
• Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

[1] We might expect that our paradigms would have certain commonalities and affinities, family resemblances. We can loosely speak of collections of similar paradigms that constitute a worldview. But these should be balanced with our formative stories, along with our key practices and symbols.

[2] The very terms "whites" and "blacks" arguably reflect the kinds of historical shifts that Michel Foucault wrote about so forcefully in some of his writings. Before the slave trade, there was no such thing as a "black" race. There were only individual tribes. When the differentness of African slaves was pitted en masse against their captors and "owners," black became a descriptor for a collection of people who before would have distinguished their "races" from each other.

So "white" is created in counter-position to "black." Black is created by a new paradigm, and white is created in consequence. But in America, "white" was not a title given simply because of skin color. When Italians first immigrated to America, they were not immediately considered "white." All this is to say that these perspectives have a history, and it is not the "story" we tell ourselves today.

[3] The very idea of the nation-state is arguably a modern development. In older times, ethnicity was more the basis for societies. Empires, by contrast, involved the subjection of other groups by a dominant group ruling the other groups, rather than a singular identity for the whole.

[4] This philosophy of "dialectical materialism" was loosely based on G. W. F. Hegel's (1770-1831) sense of history as the story of the conflict of opposing ideals moving toward absolute spirit. The language of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, however, came more from a simplification of Hegel than from Hegel himself.

[5] Rudolph Bultmann did not believe Jesus historically rose from the dead but considered the myth very meaningful as a metaphor for creating meaning in a meaningless world.

Gen Eds P9: Social and Political Philosophy

Social, political, and economic philosophy are all ethics written large. The last post tried to cover the gamut of perspectives on individual ethics. This post addresses the more complex question of how the individual might relate to the many.

This is the eighth philosophy post in a series called, "General Education in a Nutshell." Philosophy is the first of ten subjects to overview in this series. These are the subjects a person normally takes in college (or high school) as part of a general education (most of them also make up what is sometimes called the "liberal arts").

The first eight philosophy posts were:

• Philosophy Overview
• Philosophy of Religion
• Epistemology
• Critical Thinking
• Philosophy of Science
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of the Person
• Ethics

1. There have been philosophers who have believed that living in society tends to make us happier and potentially better as humans. Then there are others who see society and social structure as an inevitably corrupting force. They suggest we should try our best to remove ourselves from society or, if necessary, live in as small a society as we can. [1]

So Aristotle (384-22BC) said that humanity is a "political animal," destined to live together in an orderly society. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) believed that society was a corrupting force and idealized the "noble savage," the Tarzan like individual uncorrupted by society. Karl Marx (1818-83) believed that society on its own would eventually arrive at a classless society, a position interestingly similar to anarcho-capitalists who believe an optimal economic situation will result if we just remove all restraint on economic systems altogether.

Sociologically, we can suggest that homo sapiens is essentially a herd animal. Western culture is somewhat unique in its individualism. Most cultures throughout history in most places and times have been collectivist or group cultures. We should not be surprised at political phenomena like nativism (hostility toward immigrants), states rights movements, Brexit, political party loyalties, and nationalism. We are built to gang up, especially in smaller "tribes."

The further you go in human history, however, the larger and larger the collections of empire and nation become. No doubt most historians would conclude that the United States would not have become nearly so strong nor its people have prospered so much if the earlier confederacy model had prevailed. So there tend to be twin forces at play in human history, the one of which pulls toward smaller human groupings according to clan and "tribe," and the other of which pushes toward empire and nation.

Some philosophers have taught that you can only be happy in a just society (e.g., Plato, Aristotle). Others have taught that you can be at peace in any society (e.g., Stoics, Paul, Victor Frankl). The Stoics taught that you should "love your fate" (amor fati). Paul told the Philippians that he had learned how to be content with any circumstance. Frankl said that "a man can live with any 'how' if he has a 'why.'"

2. Philosophers have endorsed different forms of government over the years, often in keeping with whatever governmental form was most in play at the time they lived. Plato suggested that a well-structured society would mirror a well-balanced person. Just as we have a head, a chest, and an abdomen whose virtues respectively are wisdom, courage, and self-control, so society is best governed by philosopher kings, who rule with wisdom a soldier class and a worker class.

Aristotle ranked the best and worse forms of the state depending on the quality of the ruler. Writing at the tail end of the age of the city-state, he suggested a benevolent monarchy had the most potential for goodness, while an evil dictatorship would be the worst. A rule by a few good men (a genuine aristocracy) would be second best, and by a few evil men the worst. A city-sized democracy, such as had just ended at Athens when he was there, the third best, a mob-rule the third worst.

Note that I have said men. Unlike Plato, who believed women had the same access to the ideal realm that men did, Aristotle did not believe that women were normally fit to be in charge. He set down household codes whose structure we find in the household codes of the New Testament. The household structures of Ephesians and Colossians are thus cultural in nature rather than distinctively Christian.

3. As the age of kings reached a climax in the 1600s just before it began to wane, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) gave a defense of monarchy as the best form of government. He described society as a social contract between a king and his people. The people surrendered their rights to a king and, in return, the king protected and nurtured them. Hobbes did not believe, however, that the people could take back that reign if the king failed to keep his end of the bargain.

But even as Hobbes' life reached its end, we had the English revolution and the ever increasing power of Parliament. Representational government was on the rise and would reach a crucial turning point with the political experiment we now call the United States of America. As Hobbes' life was entering its twilight, John Locke (1634-1704) was taking the idea of a social contract in a different direction.

For Locke, society is also a kind of social contract between its various members. We bind ourselves to each other to our mutual benefit. Each person has certain inalienable rights such as "life, liberty, and property." (Thomas Jefferson was thus drawing on Locke as he penned the Declaration of Independence.) Once we choose to remain in a society, we give "tacit consent" to agree by its contract.

Montesquieu (1689-1755) wisely suggested that the ideal government would have a "balance of powers" so that no one branch could have complete sway over the others. As Lord Acton (1834-1902) would later say, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." But if the branches of government have a system of "checks and balances" against each other, it will help protect the state from one part taking over.

Montesquieu proposed three branches--an executive branch that served as the administrative lead, a legislative branch based upon representation from the populace, and a judicial branch that held the others accountable to the laws of the land. Obviously his thinking was of tremendous impact on the structure of the American government and of representational democracies ever since.

4. Modern governments build upon the strengths of the various ethical philosophies we looked at in the previous post. They are broadly utilitarian in many respects--the good of the many is meant to take priority over the good of the few. Yet in keeping with duty-based ethics, certain basic rights are considered inviolate. The rights of an individual cannot be superseded by the will of the majority. The majority doesn't just get what it wants if what it wants violates the rights of an individual or minority group within the society. This principle stands near the heart of the social contract.

Within this general framework, the individual is free to do whatever he or she wants. The tendency toward liberty allows a default space for the egoist who is looking out only for him or herself. The main challenge is virtue. You can create a system of this sort that does it's best to keep the selfishness and reckless ambition of individuals in check, but without an educated and virtuous populace, without just laws, the benefits of such a society are always in danger. Public, universal education is a key systematic way to push back against the default human tendency to unravel the balance.

5. Parallel to the rise of representational democracies is the rise of the capitalistic system and industrial societies. Without question, the rise of capitalism and industrialism has introduced an exponential growth in the total wealth of the world. It of course has not done so evenly. The wealthy class of the world is richer than it has ever been, and at times wealth has grown at the expense of those who serve as its machinery.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) is often called the father of capitalism. His intent was to create a free enterprise system where the laws of supply and demand would create an ideal balance where those selling goods would get as much as they could while those buying would pay as little as they could. [2] With both parties acting in their self-interest, a mid-point would be reached. Each would get the maximum advantage.

His intention was to improve the condition of the common person. His intention was to empower the "nobody" in society to be able to start a business and excel. He assumed the basic self-interest of human beings and saw competition as the key to maximizing human thriving.

He could not have anticipated the scale on which capitalism would be implemented in society, nor the ways in which its abuse could actually enslave the very people he hoped this economic system would empower. Sweat shops, monopolies that stomped out competition, power that at times almost rose to the level of government itself--these were not the directions he thought the "unseen hand" of market forces would lead.

At a key moment of capitalism's history, Karl Marx (1818-83) thought he saw the writing on the wall. Capitalism would eventually lead to bloody revolutions when the workers (the proletariat) overthrew the bourgeoisie industries that oppressed them. Then a classless society would evolve. [3]

There were some revolutions to be sure. 1848 was a year of German economic revolution. Looking back, Marx considered the French Revolution of 1789 part of the process. 1917 saw the communist revolution in Russia and the mid-twentieth century saw similar revolutions in Cuba and South America.

However, places like England and the United States enacted reforms that staved off their societies reaching such boiling points. Marx himself conceded at least that his communist end point might be reached in more peaceful ways in some societies.

6. Of course history has not been kind to Marx's ultimate destination. True, capitalist societies where various protections have not been put in place have often ended in violent situations. These sorts of protections include anti-trust laws that ensure that competition can take place and that no one business control an entire market. Protections for workers who blow the whistle are key, as are protections for workers in relation to striking, health, etc. [4]

Here we have to step back again and remember the function of a social contract. It is for individuals to come together to bring about a greater good. Any capitalistic system that only maximizes the benefit for a few at the hands of the many is contradictory, in fact irrational. The benefit of the many supersedes the benefit of the few. In that sense, profit is not the ultimate goal. It is a means to a bigger end.

As far as communism is concerned, Marx's vision has proved to be a complete failure. Anywhere that communism has tried to go, it has failed to create anything but impoverishment. The Soviet Union failed and capitalistic reforms were implemented. Communist China is currently implementing measured capitalistic reforms. Just comparing pictures of East Berlin with West Berlin immediately reveals the failure of Marx's vision. North Korea is one of the most unhappy places to live on the globe, so much so that its people find unbelievable the idea that a store could be completely stocked at some time.

In fact, Marx's communism--a utopian, classless society where everything more or less runs on its own--has never been realized. Communist experiments have always resulted in autocratic, oppressive regimes and dictatorships that are socialist rather than truly communist. Socialism is when the state controls all the economic systems. The people work, as it were, for the state, which provides for the people.

There are, of course, socialist systems that are not oppressive. There is a spectrum of economic services provided or regulated by the state. Some European countries have far higher taxes but provide many more services to their people. The United States has much lower taxes and provides fewer services. It is a spectrum of more or less socialist, more or less capitalist. To implement one area of economic control does not make a country or a politician socialist, although it has sometimes been a useful rhetorical move in elections. :-)

7. In the early twenty-first century, we can wonder if the global economic system has entered a new phase of scale. The economic recession of 2008 suggests that the bundling of debt, betting against the market, the electronic buying and selling of stocks--these sorts of innovations require attention to ensure that the economic structure of society remains beneficial to the majority of the society. The rise of technology is finally eliminating the middle tier of employment, resulting in the polarization of society into a few who have fantastical amounts of wealth and an economic bottom that can hardly survive.

In this context, simply playing out debates between Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and Friedrick Hayek (1899-1992) probably won't do. [5] The greatest economic and philosophical minds need to envision how to adjust our economic systems so that they continue to do what they are meant to do, namely, to maximize human thriving and to economically empower every member of society.

Next week: Philosophy 10: Philosophy of History

Classic Reading

• Plato's Republic 
• Aristotle's Politics
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
• John Locke, Two Treatises of Government 
• Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
• Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws
• Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
• John Stuart Mill, The Principals of Political Economy
• Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

[1] I've often thought that you could probably correlate the respective personalities of each perspective with philosophers who were extroverts and those who were introverts.

[2] Other terms associated with "free enterprise" are "laissez faire" economics ("to allow to do") and classical liberalism, where "liberalism" here means "free" enterprise. "Liberalism" in economics around the year 1800 amounts to economic conservatism in the US today.

[3] Marx formulated his philosophy in his version of G. W. F. Hegel's dialectical philosophy of history. More on it in the next post.

[4] John Stuart Mill (1806-73) pushed back on the bare bones capitalism and utilitarianism of Smith, One of his most quoted statements of political philosophy is that, "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others" (On Liberty).

[5] Hayek argued for an extreme form of deregulation of economic systems. Keynes for a more regulatory approach that controlled prices and such to make sure the market didn't get out of whack.

Gen Eds P8: How should we live as individuals?

This is my seventh philosophy post in a series called, "General Education in a Nutshell." Philosophy is the first of ten subjects to overview in this series. These are the subjects a person normally takes in college (or high school) as part of a general education (most of them also make up what is sometimes called the "liberal arts").

The first seven philosophy posts were:

• Philosophy Overview
• Philosophy of Religion
• Epistemology
• Critical Thinking
• Philosophy of Science
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of the Person

1. Ethics, along with metaphysics (what is real) and epistemology (what is truth), is one of the three ancient branches of philosophy. Its core question has to do with living in this world. How should we then live or, perhaps, what constitutes the "good life"?

Ancient philosophers focused more on what virtue itself is than on the question of what makes an individual act right or wrong, "virtue based ethics" rather than "act based ethics." They assumed there was a "highest good," a summum bonum, and that a person should orient his or her life accordingly. So the focus was more on "being" than doing. How I should act is a secondary question. What kind of person I should be is the most important.

Aristotle suggested that happiness (eudaimonia) was the greatest good because every other good was good because it ultimately led to happiness. So pleasure is good, but we like pleasure because it leads to happiness. Participating in society is good, but it is good because it leads to happiness. Contemplation of truth is good, but it is good because it leads to happiness. Of the three paths, though, Aristotle considered contemplation the highest of the paths to happiness. Aristotle also spoke of the Golden Mean, "moderation in all things."

Plato and others spoke of "four cardinal virtues," which were intrinsically good for humans to cultivate. They are wisdom (which pertains to the head), courage (which pertains to the chest), self-discipline (which pertains to the abdomen, aka temperance), and justice (which pertains to all three working in proper balance and relationship.

As good pre-moderns, Aristotle, Plato, and others used reasoning to talk about these virtues and ethics, but they didn't really offer any strong basis for each one. Wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice are values that most cultures have affirmed, and happiness seems intrinsically desirable. In the late twentieth century, Alistair MacIntyre wrote a scathing critique of modern ethical thinking, wanting to go back to the age of virtue. [1] However, he provided no real basis in argument for doing so, in effect rejecting argument as a basis for ethics.

2. Jesus' ethic and New Testament ethics in general are also virtue based. In Mark 7, Jesus says that it is not external action that stands at the center of good and evil. Rather "from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts" (7:21, NASB).

Accordingly, the New Testament summarizes God's expectation for humanity in only two commands: "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (Matt. 22:37-40).

It seems difficult for people to leave God's expectations so general. Of course we must ask, "What does it mean specifically to love one's neighbor and enemy?" The New Testament plays out these general principles in a number of different contexts. But it is impossible to anticipate every circumstance before it happens. In every generation, communities of faith must reapply these principles again to new situations. Even then, no set of rules can anticipate every possible situation (which is arguably what the Pharisees tried to do).

3. Nor can we hide behind labels like "absolutism" and "relativism." The Bible frequently points to exceptional situations. Thus while we are to submit to those in authority (Rom. 13), there are clearly instances when we must disobey the government (Acts 4). Therefore, not every moral principle was meant to be "absolute," which by definition means without exception.

Similarly, there are instances where God's will is "relative." In Romans 14 Paul says that what makes eating meat offered to idols wrong is not intrinsic to the eating, but whether an individual's conscience is clear to eat it. Personal convictions are thus instances of God-approved relativism.

In other words, while crying "absolutism" and "relativism" may seem to make Christian ethics simple, it does nothing of the sort. First you must know whether God considers a particular issue absolute or relative in the first place. For this reason, these labels are little more than slogans. They do not answer the real question, which is what the love of God and neighbor looks like in a particular situation.

4. The drive to reduce ethics to do's and don't's seems pervasive. Popular Christian ethics often reduces God's expectations for humanity to whether or not we measure up to some perfectionistic standard. Take the (incorrect) NLT translation of Romans 3:23: "All have sinned and fallen short of God's glorious standard," as if God is concerned about whether we are absolutely perfect or not. [2] In popular thought, mistakes are considered a form of sin, even if they do no harm to anyone.

But the New Testament almost exclusively speaks of sin acts in terms of intentional acts. That is to say, there is almost no mention of unintentional wrongdoing in the New Testament. [3] Theologically, Christians rightly believe that there is such a thing as unintended sin, wrongs done to others unintentionally, but "unintentional sin" plays no role in New Testament theology.

Similarly, the idea that Christ had to suffer the penalty of every last sin in an almost mathematical way, a theory of atonement known as "penal substitution," is more a medieval and modern development than a biblical concept. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Father graciously forgives his sinful son without anyone having to pay back his debt at all. The idea that Jesus had to suffer hell for at least a moment to satisfy some legalistic justice equation finds no support in Scripture.

So we see that less mature ethical understandings have made their way even into many Christian conceptions of God and atonement. [4] God's love comes to be something that fits within the overall context of his justice rather than his justice fitting within the overall context of his love. Sin comes to be conceptualized primarily as the violation of a perfect standard than as a matter of intention or one's "heart." [5]

Rather, God is love. His justice is usually redemptive or protective rather than punitive, and final justice is not unloving. Atonement satisfies the order of things, not least our intrinsic human sense of justice. But atonement is a matter of God's choosing, not some higher standard to which he was obligated.

5. The desire to express human ethics in terms that can be specified in detail with certainty has thus often lead to an inferior "act-based" rather than a "heart-based" ethic. There are two basic act-based approaches to ethics: duty-based ethics and consequence-based ethics.

Duty-based or deontological ethics is a right and wrong based ethics. In modern times, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is the best representative of this approach. His "categorical imperative" was an attempt to set out a rational way to decide whether an action was right or wrong. Choose as absolutely right any course of action that you rationally can argue should be a moral law. If doing the opposite in every situation would lead to disaster or contradiction, then you must not do that action in any situation.

This is embarrassingly ridiculous thinking, as most ethical thinking inevitably involves exceptions. By Kant's reckoning, all "must do" actions are absolute without exception. If something is right or wrong, then it is right or wrong categorically. His sense of how reasoning might work in such cases was so unconvincing that he tried to re-express the idea more than once. But the flaw was not in his communication of the idea. It was in the coherency of the idea.

"It basically is the Golden Rule," he finally said. The Golden Rule is to do to others what you would have them do to you. The Golden Rule is of course biblical (Matt. 7:12) and an excellent expression of God's command to love our neighbors and enemies. However, it does not seem to say anything close to what Kant was trying to say.

6. Consequentialist ethics evaluate action in terms of its consequences. What effect will this action have? We can question whether this approach should be the ultimate approach, but there is no question that a great deal of our ethical thinking does center around the consequences of our actions.

Egoist ethics is arguably a lower form of consequentialist ethics. It basically says that you should take that course of action that will most benefit you as an individual. Ayn Rand (1905-82) raised this approach to the highest level, considering self-centered action to stand at the center of moral thinking. To act altruistically--helping others at personal sacrifice--she considered immoral and evil.

More attractive is ultilitarianism, which asks what action will bring about the greatest good for the greatest number. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) is often considered the father of modern utilitarianism. In an attempt to change a world where being born into a certain family meant you were more important than others, he proposed that decisions of the state be made in accordance with what would bring the greatest pleasure to the greatest number.

John Stuart Mill (1806-73) would make some modifications to his approach. Some pleasures were more important than others. Further, there were other considerations to be made. Some courses of action should not be taken even if they bring a great deal of happiness to the majority (e.g., genocide).

We are generally taught that "the end doesn't justify the means." From a Christian perspective, that is certainly true in many cases. I cannot murder an innocent person even if they stand in the way of something that is really, really good. However, in everyday life, there is usually more than one way to reach a goal and most of them are equally ethical. This statement only applies to violating genuinely moral values to reach a goal.

And our values exist more in a hierarchy rather than all values being of equal priority. For example, being truthful is a universal moral value, but it is not likely as high a value as saving life. When Corrie Ten Boom's family lied to the Nazis about hiding Jews in their house, they did no wrong. They simply chose to keep a higher value (saving life) over a value that was slightly lower in the hierarchy (telling the truth). Or to put it in terms of virtue--they loved their neighbor rather than harming their neighbor.

7. As the existence of God and special revelation came into question during the Enlightenment, it became increasingly hard to find a natural basis for morality. David Hume (1711-76) suggested that morality was nothing more than sentiment. There was a "fact-value problem." Hume argued that it was impossible to base our values in facts.  In the twentieth century, J. L. Mackie spoke of us "inventing" right and wrong.

In the late 1800s, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) saw morality as something that "supermen" invented and then convinced broader culture to go along with. There really was no actual right or wrong. Christianity, to him, was a "slave morality," invented by the weak to stop the strong from persecuting them. It was like the person who tries to convince someone else not to punch them because you just don't hit someone with glasses.

Nietzsche thought it dangerous that the common person come to realize that "God is dead," even though Nietzsche firmly did not believe in God. But a world without God, he predicted, would be a world where the worst of atrocities would take place, because they would not fear the consequences of their actions. [6] In that regard he is sometimes considered a prophet of Hitler and the Holocaust.

8. Recently, Jonathan Haidt has categorized the moral impulses of people around the world. [7] He comes at the topic from an evolutionary and atheistic perspective, but his categories for human moral thinking nevertheless seem to capture some significant truths.

Let me rephrase the six moral categories he thinks describe human values (not prescribe, but describe):

• care for others, don't harm
• act fairly, don't cheat
• be loyal, don't betray
• respect authority, don't subvert
• honor the holy, don't defile
• fight for freedom, overthrow the tyrant.

The negatives seem to hold more power over us as moral thinkers than the positives. This is why, he would say, conservatives tend to have more political power than progressives. For example, Hillary Clinton's, "stronger together," is a fairly weak motivator next to "take America back."

Westerners today often do not have a well-developed sense of holiness and defilement. Even Christians often have different intuitions on certain moral issues because one person has a stronger sense of the sacred while another does not. Should you dress up for church? Are some sins "defiling" and thus worse than other sins?

Two people can even hold the same moral position and yet arrive at it from a different moral direction. One person believes that gay marriage is not God's plan for marriage but sees his or her presence at a gay wedding as the loving, Christian thing to do. Another person places homosexuality in the category of defilement and would see his or her presence at such a wedding as an endorsement and participation in sin. Even though both have the same position on the morality of gay marriage, they are approaching it from within differing moral categories.

9. Perhaps one of the most important insights of Haidt is that while most of us appear to use reasoning in our moral discussions, the basis for our moral impulses are usually not very rational at all. He likens our moral reasoning to a rider on an elephant, where the elephant represents our moral intuitions and the rider is our rational arguments and explanations.

The elephant generally goes where it wants to go, often in the company of other elephants. The rider can steer it a little, but not much. And the rider generally can only see in the same general direction that the elephant is already headed.

So it is with religion and politics. People pretty much believe what they want to believe. Few people actually change their minds about such things on the basis of argument or reasoning. For most people, it never mattered who the Republican or Democratic nominees for president would be. Their "elephant" was always going to vote for their party's candidate. [8] Their "rider's" job is to come up with any argument it can to support the elephant's foregone conclusion.

There is thus little of reason in religion or politics. We just play a game with ourselves to pretend like there is. [9]

Relationships stand a much better chance of changing the direction of elephants. This is why apologetics as a matter of rational argument mostly just makes the elephants who already believe feel better. Few people come to Christ through rational arguments.

Telling the "riders" of teenagers that they shouldn't have sex or teaching a set of orthodox ideas in a catechism will have little effect on someone faced with elephant-oriented forces. Ideas are the weakest of human motivators. Only the ideas that engage us on an elephant level have true power.

10. As Christians, we believe that the Holy Spirit can transform our elephants. "Walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh" (Gal. 5:16, NASB). The law of the Spirit can set us free from the law of Sin and death (Rom. 8:2). "If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!" (2 Cor. 5:17).

Next Week: Philosophy 9: How should we live together?

Classic Reading

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
• Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
• John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
• David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
• Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness
• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
• Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue

[1] Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue

[2] A better paraphrase would be, "All have sinned and are lacking the glory that God intended them to have within the creation."

[3] Only Hebrews 9:7, referring to the old covenant. James 3:2 alludes to the extreme difficulty of being perfect in our use of the tongue, but it does not use the word sin in relation to this wrongdoing.

[4] Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-87) set out stages of moral development, which probably should be seriously critiqued for their overly rational focus. However, as far as the rational side of moral thinking is concerned, there still seems some merit in his proposal. Stage 1 relates to moral thinking that is focused on either punishment or self-interest. This is the lowest kind of moral thinking. Stage 2 relates to a society based thinking--what pleases my group or what is the law. He then considered Stage 3 the most advanced morality--thinking in terms of a rational social contract with broader society and finally, being true to my principles (he assumed there were universal moral principles).

[5] Wesley reflects a more mature moral understanding when he defines sin "properly so called" as an action that intentionally goes against what someone knows God's expectation is. "A willful transgression of a known law of God." Of course this definition is still very "act-based."

[6] Nietzsche thus agreed with Fyodor Dostoevsky's sense that, "If there is no God, then everything is permissible." Nietzsche agreed, but unlike Dostoevsky did not believe in God.

[7] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.

[8] Ironically, the Republican "elephant" does vote for an elephant, while the Democratic "elephant" votes for a donkey. :-)

[9] One of the most powerful forces in American politics is media that feeds its elephants what its wants to hear with one sided propaganda. The older approach, which at least aimed at objectivity and a fair presentation of all sides (the "fairness doctrine"), has faced serious financial difficulties in recent times.

One of the more ingenious "rider" rationalizations is to villainize rationality itself. Experts become subversive traitors. Media that presents contrasting points of view becomes the subversive "liberal media" (ignoring that the media decrying the liberal media is usually the far more powerful media).

Gen Eds Series: P1. Philosophy Overview

School of Athens, by Raphael

Last week I started a series, "The Gen Eds in a Nutshell." The first subject in the series of ten general education topics is philosophy. So for the next few weeks, I will slowly be summarizing the primary take-aways a person should have if they have taken a college (or high school) class in philosophy.

1. It is traditional to say that philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, but this definition isn't really that helpful. It's vague and doesn't really tell you anything. Philosophy is the exploration of all the ultimate questions. What is real? What is true? What is right?

Philosophy is the ultimate "meta" discipline. It stands alongside all other disciplines and asks what they are doing. Philosophy of science asks what science is really about. Philosophy of the person asks what people really are and what psychology is really about. Philosophy of history asks what history is really about. Philosophy of art asks what art and beauty are? Social and political philosophy ask what the best ways are for humans to live together. Philosophy of religion asks what God and religion are really about.

2. The following ten posts overview these topics in philosophy as an introduction to this entire series on a general education and the liberal arts. We will pursue these topics in the following order:

• philosophy of religion - Does God exist and how does he relate to the world? What is the meaning of life?
• epistemology - How do I know that I know what I think I know? (what is true)
• logic - What does good thinking look like? (critical thinking)
• philosophy of science - How do we go about discovering truths about the world?
• metaphysics - What is real?
• philosophy of the person - What is a human being?
• ethics - What is right? What is valuable? How should we be and live as individuals in the world?
• social and political philosophy - How can people best live together in the world?
• philosophy of history - Does history have a direction? How do humans go about telling their stories? How do those stories relate to "what really happened"?
• philosophy of art - What is beautiful? What is art?

Let philosophy begin.

Next Week: Philosophy 2: Does God exist and act in the world?

Classical Reading

• Plato's Apology

Wednesday Gen Eds

I want to start a series on Wednesdays something like my series I do on Saturdays. My Saturday series is "Seminary in a Nutshell," and I am going through a seminary curriculum over the course of perhaps several years. Today I want to start a series called, "Gen Eds in a Nutshell."

1. Most colleges and universities, indeed, pretty much all high school curricula, cover what we might call "general education" topics. Colleges often consider most of these topics to be something called the "liberal arts." The term is an old one and one that does not always communicate well, not least because of the connotation that the word liberal has.

The "liberal arts" are the liberating arts. [1] That is to say, education presents possible options on various topics that might not have occurred to a person previously. In that sense, a people becomes "freer" to make their minds up because they have more information and know more of the previous discussion experts have had on those topics.

When we only know one option, we are a slave to that option. We cannot possibly pick another one because we do not know any other options. A good education opens up new possibilities and brings a critical eye on existing ones. Ideally, this process creates greater freedom for our thinking. We become liberated from past blind spots.

Of course there is a very important caveat here. You may know the saying, "The more you know the less you know." Socrates (470-399BC) is reported to have said at his trial that true wisdom is to know that you really know nothing. [2] In some respects, education is as much about "unlearning" as it is learning. That is to say, education tends to reveal that there are rarely easy answers. If you think the answer is always obvious, you are probably missing something.

2. Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, told a story that has come to be known as the "Myth of the Cave." [3] In the story, some people are chained in a cave in such a way that they can only see shadows of people walking in front of the cave entrance. Because all they can see are the shadows, they assume the shadows are the reality.

Then one of them gets free and comes to realize that the reality is not the shadows but the figures in the light outside the cave. Having reached this Enlightenment, he returns to those who are still chained and shares with them. In response, they kill him.

While this story relates strongly to Plato's philosophy of what is real and how we can best apprehend it, the story has also come to symbolize the quest for knowledge. [4] There is an enlightenment that can take place with education. Indeed, Socrates' statement that "The unexamined life is not worth living" is often quoted. [5] Whether the statement is too extreme is a topic for another time, but he suggests that knowledge is virtuous for its own sake. A reflective life is arguably a more meaningful life than one in which we only eat and drink our way through life until we finally die.

A group known as existentialists in the twentieth century suggested that we do not really have a life until we make some choices about who we want to be. Our bodies may exist, but we have no identity until we decide who we are. [6] Albert Camus put it another way. The only serious philosophical question is "Why not suicide?" [7] This is perhaps another way to look at Socrates' statement on the unexamined life. If we have never reflected on the meaning of our lives, are we really living? What reason do we have to live?

Of course these questions take on added significance in a Christian context. There is a sense in which a Christian might say that a person does not fully existence until he or she has found their ultimate identity in God. As Augustine said in the late 300s, "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you." [8]

3. In the series that follows, I propose to summarize in a nutshell some of the most important insights that one should receive from a "gen ed" education, whether in high school or at a university. Indiana has helpfully created an agreement between most of its colleges that 30 credit hours of such general education will be a package that can be exchanged from one to another. So if you do these 30 hours at IWU, you have potentially fulfilled all your gen eds for IU, Purdue, or Ball State.

What will follow is thus ten "courses," a series of posts on each subject. The intention is to capture, in a nutshell, the main learning that a roundly educated person would have after a solid liberal arts education. The courses are:

• Philosophy
• World History
• World Culture and Language
• World Literature
• World Art and Music
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Written and Spoken Communication
• Basic Mathematical Skills
• Basic Scientific Knowledge

Let the liberal arts begin!

Next Week: Philosophy 1: Philosophy Overview

[1] The original sense was that the liberal arts were the kind of education worthy of a free citizen in Athens. My redefinition is more appropriate for our modern context. In the history of education, the liberal arts are classically discussed in terms of the "trivium" and "quadrivium" of the Middle Ages. The trivium laid the foundation of education for a free person in grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Then the quadrivium formed a second story build upon it that was more mathematical: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

[2] Plato's Apology.

[3] In Plato's Republic.

[4] Since Socrates was put to death by the Athenians, there is also the allusion to Socrates' death as a martyr for philosophy.

[5] Also in Plato's Apology.

[6] Jean Paul Sartre, "Existence precedes essence."

[7] The Myth of Sysiphus.

[8] Augustine's Confessions.

A Pitch for Gen Eds

1. One of the courses I taught this semester was a "First Year Experience" (FYE) course. This is a brilliant idea of having all new students take a general education course with a high touch that connects them to each other and a professor from the very start.

So we met as a class before the semester even began. We did orientation together. We did a service project together. We had pizza parties and did coffee together. I think we all feel really close to each other. It's just an all around great experience.

2. One of the goals of the orientation was to convince the students that a liberal arts education is valuable. Elaine Bernius gave a great pitch during orientation, but I'm not sure she persuaded them.

I would contend that the phrase, "liberal arts," is part of the problem. We academics know the phrase. It has a very, very long history. It has nothing to do with being liberal (unless truth in itself is liberal).

But it communicates nothing to the uninitiated. You'll notice I titled this post as a pitch for "gen eds," for "general education" courses in a college curriculum. Not as grand, but an easier sell, I think. Academia has a penchant for putting unnecessary obstacles in the way of achieving its goals.

Since fostering an appreciation for the liberal arts was one goal of this FYE course, I gave it the old college try for this essay on the final--"What is the benefit of studying the 'liberal arts' at a place like Indiana Wesleyan University?" I gave a 10 minute pitch for the role of gen eds in a college curriculum at a place like IWU.

3. I moved from what I thought would be the easier sell to the harder one. Since a Christian education in a Christian environment is probably the main reason to come to a place like IWU, I figured the Christian component was a no brainer.

Students on the residential campus take OT Survey, NT Survey, Theology, and Philosophy as part of their gen ed program. OT and NT give you biblical foundations. Theology organizes those foundations into a systematic form. Philosophy then gives you a Christian worldview. You might argue that the goal could be accomplished in three courses, but it seems to me that these courses are the core of a Christian education.

4. My next slide had history, psychology, and sociology on it. These courses help us see ourselves. The human default is to assume that the way our tribe does things is the only way. We don't see the long view. We don't see that we are doing something dangerous that was done before. We don't realize what's going on with our inner psychology. We don't realize the social dynamics that are taking place.

In other words, these courses are key to the success of civilization. They help us see ourselves. They disabuse us of the strong impression that anyone with a brain will see things like we do. Without a sense of history, society, and ourselves, we are little different than herd animals in a woodland.

5. My next slide was on writing and communication. These are very, very important skills for the workplace. I remember hearing a study that said some tech businesses would rather hire an English major with communication skills than an MBA who doesn't have them. The ability to communicate is essential in the marketplace. This, again, I think is a no brainer.

6. The last slide was the hardest sell, I thought. What is the value of having to take courses in art, literature, and science?

For art and literature, I put that these courses help us not to be communists. In the Soviet Union, everything took on a utilitarian value. What value does x have for the nation? The USSR engaged in art and sport to be the best, in competition with other nations. No doubt the individual artists did it for love the art, but one gets the feeling that they were pawns in a bigger machine.

The arts and literature are about being human. The view that everything has to do something, has to give a life skill, in and of itself is wrong. The psalms are not in the Bible to teach us things. They are in Scripture as expressions of worship, thanksgiving, sadness, and anger. They validate art and literature as part of God's plan for the world. Without them we are not yet fully human.

Finally, science and math teach us that God has rules we can't break. The most extreme relativist doesn't jump off buildings. S/he knows that the science doesn't work. These disciplines should teach us that our opinions of global warming don't matter a lick. What do experts on the subject think?

7. We perhaps have not taught these courses in ways that bring out their value. Those who teach them love them (which is valuable), but when a professor like me is allowed to teach what he or she likes (rather than in accordance with why that course is in the curriculum), students often don't see the value.

For this reason, unless the students are given a smorgasbord of options, these general education courses have to be carefully designed. They are not the property of the division or professor who teaches them. They are the property of the "liberal arts" goal as a whole.

Well, I don't know if I convinced anyone, but I gave it a shot.

Liberal Arts at a Christian College 8

This is my eighth and final post in a series on the importance of the liberal arts for civilization. Previous posts include:

1. A Vision for the Liberal Arts
2. The Value of Philosophy
3. The Value of History
4. The Value of Music and Art
5. The Value of Literature, Writing, and Speech
6. The Value of Science and Math
7. The Value of Psychology and Sociology

1. The last thing I want to cover in this series is the intersection of the liberal arts with Christianity. What particularly Christian spin will these subject matters have at a Christian college? Indeed, are some of these subjects that Christians should reject (e.g., psychology, sociology)?

I would say a resounding, "No!" These subjects can all peacefully co-exist with Christianity. Indeed, I would say that they must.

2. The "integration of faith and learning" is often a BIG topic of conversation on Christian campuses and, believe it or not, there are debates and books on the subject. My friend Steve Lennox has given a paper several times that has gained some traction in my own circles, and now he has become President of Kingswood College in New Brunswick, Canada, where he can try to implement a sense of a Christian college in the Wesleyan tradition as a "sanctifying context."

He has presented what we might call a "formational" model of a Christian college, which fits very well with the most typical underlying goals of a liberal arts institution. The overall goal of such a Christian institution, beyond education itself, is to see students formed in faith, which includes seeing them redeemed and restored to the image of God. This eternal goal goes well beyond curriculum to the co-curriculum.

There are of course other dimensions of integration. Perhaps the most important is the person of the professor and administration. If the faculty themselves serve Christ, love God, and love others, that is perhaps the most important way in which a Christian college can be Christian.

3. I have not yet mentioned content integration, which reflects my sense of what the priorities are and should be in the integration of faith with learning at a Christian institution. The personal and contextual are the most important. But there are two very key ways in which the content of teaching is usually affected significantly by a Christian context.

The first is ethical or applicational. After presenting the mechanics of a subject, a Christian professor will be keenly interested in how to evaluate and apply those mechanics. So you can use physics to built a nuclear bomb. Should you? So economics work in a certain way if you poke it this way. Should you? This element of a Christian college does not greatly change the content of teaching but its application.

The second and most controversial is presuppositional. All interpretation of the world involves assumptions. For some Christian colleges, those assumptions are vast. In the current climate of retrenchment, the boards of Christian colleges have been drawing lines in the sand. "If you are to teach here, you cannot draw certain conclusions. Rather, you must more or less start with such and such a conclusion and work backward to find arguments to defend it."

Of course a better way is only to hire professors who, as scholars, freely hold the positions you want to be taught. You can see a potential tension here, though, with the purpose of the liberal arts in freeing students intellectually. If every option is not truly on the table for discussion, then Christian colleges themselves become enemies of civilization in the manner I have been discussing.

4. That is because truth is not just revealed. It is discovered as well. That is to say, God is "in on" the method of logic and evidence.

Indeed, if you look at the crazy variety of Christian belief that exists, tens of thousands of little splinter groups who believe LOTS of idiosyncratic things, the content of revealed truth gets rather murky rather quickly. I would identify the following at least as key to a Christian worldview, although even here you will find nuances among the many Christian groups:

• God exists as a person and is involved with the world.
• The world is not as it could be. All around us is a need for redemption.
• God has and is reconciling the world to himself through Jesus Christ.
• Every human being has intrinsic value because we are created in the image of God.
• There are two great ethical absolutes--love of God and love of others.

Different Christians and Christian groups will play these out in different ways. For some Christian colleges, being Christian means filling in a whole lot more details to these presuppositions down into the content of specific courses. At some, discussing any of these options is part of the education. At others, these and other details are not really open for discussion. At them, the goal is to indoctrinate the students in the specifics of belief, and that is what they mean by integrating faith with learning.

5. This latter type of Christian institution is ultimately an enemy to civilization and by their very approach cannot really be said to be liberal arts institutions. They are enslaving arts institutions. They are brainwashing arts institutions. Truth is both revealed and discovered. The true alternative is not "Truth is only revealed."

After my first year of seminary, I became troubled with the way Matthew 2 interprets Hosea 11:1: "Out of Egypt I have called my son." I had a lovely chart in the back of my Thompson Chain Reference King James Bible as a teenager that gave all the prophecies in the OT that were fulfilled in Jesus. But I had never really gone back to the OT and read them.

Then in college we did. I had expected to find clear cut predictions. So with regard to Matthew 2, I had expected to find Hosea 11 to say something like, "When Messiah comes, he will be pursued by an evil man and will go down to Egypt for a time. Then out of Egypt I will call my Son."

But that is not what we find in Hosea 11. Hosea 11 says that when Israel was a child, God brought them out of Egypt in the exodus. But then instead of serving him, they pursued other gods and idols and did not worship him.

Woah! That was very troubling to me. It shouldn't have been, mind you. It was the Christian teaching of my context that set me up by making me think this would be a straightforward prediction. That is the problem with an overwhelming amount of Christian teaching today. It makes a lot of people feel wonderful as long as they don't go poking around to see if it actually matches up with the truth. Then Christian professors are made out to be the enemy when the problem was the "feel good" ignorance of popular Christian rhetoric.

For me I found myself asking horrible questions like, "Is this a test?" "Does God want to see if I'm willing to submit my intellect to him by willing myself to believe things that he has made to look false?" In other words, does God want me to believe lies as an act of submission?

6. What a horrible position the ignorant teaching of my Christian context had put me in!

But God is not a God of lies. He is a God of truth. God has not made the world irrational to test our faith when all the evidence is screaming, "This is false!" That was my final conclusion after much angst. Mind you, I don't think having our understanding right is God's first order of business. I don't believe he is troubled by those with the right heart but kind of messed up understandings.

But God does not demand that I be irrational to be a Christian. God is complicit in the discovery of truth. God has set up logic to work. God has made a world were the preponderance of evidence tends to point toward the right verdict. And if we get it wrong intellectually, that also is not greatly worrying to God.

7. My point is that we need not fear the open pursuit of faith seeking understanding. We can consider all the options fairly, even if we favor certain ones over others. All the disciplines of the liberal arts and general education have the values we have been discussing, even in Christian contexts.

They have those values because truth is both revealed and discovered, and the two do not normally conflict with each other. If they do, then we have made a mistake in one or the other. Science changes. The twentieth century corrected even the great Isaac Newton, even the great Euclid was modified. Science is open-ended; it is not finalized.

But it is also immensely true that Christians disagree massively on the interpretation of revelation. It is not as though the meaning and implications of the Bible are agreed on by all. They soundly are not. So it can also be possible that the problem in conflict between revelation and discovery is our misinterpretations of revelation.

I believe in the liberal arts because I believe truth is both revealed and discovered. God is complicit in this framework. A Christian need not fear the liberal arts. And the liberal arts need not fear the Christian.

And least that's where I am at on my own journey, at 7:10am on July 17, 2015.

Liberal Arts 7: Psychology and Sociology

The seventh post in my series on the importance of the liberal arts for civilization, finishing up the usual general education curriculum at a non-Christian school. Previous posts include:

1. A Vision for the Liberal Arts
2. The Value of Philosophy
3. The Value of History
4. The Value of Music and Art
5. The Value of Literature, Writing, and Speech
6. The Value of Science and Math

1. We've covered literature, philosophy, art, music, history, writing and (indirectly) speech, science and math. With those we have covered the classical liberal arts. Two more courses often fill out a general education curriculum: psychology and sociology.

Psychology has to do with our human minds, how we think, our personalities, why we behave the way we do. Sociology has to do with how people behave as groups, how different groups interact, and the various layers of a society. These are incredibly significant concepts that potentially help us understand ourselves and others more clearly.

I would argue that these are areas of a vast lack of self-awareness in American culture. We do not understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do. We do not understand what it's like to grow up in a different place in a different social setting. So we evaluate others on the basis of our norms and possibilities rather than having a realistic sense of what the lives of others are truly like.

These courses are thus of potentially immense value for individuals, groups, and nations. If we understand ourselves and others, we can potentially get along better with each other. We can potentially build a better society. So these courses are of immense value to the advancement of civilization.

2. In psychology, we get to know ourselves and how we are different from others. How did the events of my childhood help make me what I am today? What is my personality type and how is it different from people with other personality types? Ideally, I stop considering other people weird, abnormal, or inferior because they do not think the way I do or act the way I do. I realize they're just different.

From a Christian standpoint, I become less judgmental of others. I realize that I have weaknesses others do not have, and others have strengths I don't have. Young individuals can catch a glimpse of what it is like to be older. Hopefully, students develop some empathy for others.

In psychology, we hopefully can see our own bad habits and move toward healthier ones. Do I make excuses for my bad behavior? Do I vent my frustrations in a healthy way? Do I have any unhealthy ways of relating to other people? Do I have any bad habits or addictions? How can I change?

How do emotions work? How does memory work? These are all incredibly useful things to know. They give you an advantage in almost any field because they help you understand and relate to others more effectively.

3. Sociology tends to be more controversial, because it gets at some of the most unreflective assumptions of our herd. These are assumptions that give us a sense of meaning and belonging in the world, so we can become incredibly defensive, angry, even violent when they are exposed.

What if a very male-oriented society comes to find out that women are just as smart as men? What if it turns out that black people are just as smart as white people? Sociology exposes prejudices and privileges we either don't think we have or we mistakenly think are true.

So sociology can be very controversial to the group it is analyzing. A white person may not like being shown that a black person faces more traffic stops, more scrutiny and suspicion, more obstacles in day to day living than he or she does. A religious person may not like his or her prized religious experience being described as a predictable experience typical in certain cultures or subcultures.

But these insights, hard though they are, can help diverse groups get along together. They can help us check ourselves and correct our course. Why is it that one person sees only good in President Obama but someone else sees only bad? Why would someone associate being against abortion with being against gun control? Group behavior is very predictable and is the stuff of sociology.

4. If taught right, you can see that sociology is especially an important course for a healthy society. You could argue that homo sapiens is at root a herd animal. We survived in the past by forming clans that made alliances and fought together against others.

But civilization moves beyond the level of the clan, just as Christianity does. Christianity calls us to love our enemy and not just our herd. As such, an understanding of sociology is an incredible tool for the advancement of civilization.

Liberal Arts 6: In Honor of Pluto

Sixth post in my series on the importance of the liberal arts for civilization. Previous posts include:

A Vision for the Liberal Arts
The Value of Philosophy
The Value of History
The Value of Music and Art
The Value of Literature, Writing, and Speech

1. Last evening, something happened that hasn't happened in the history of the universe. A probe launched in January 2006 passed less than 8000 miles from the cold dwarf planet we call Pluto. It carried some of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh with it, the man who discovered Pluto in 1930. He died in 1997.

It is a truly remarkable thing, that we could throw a baseball from a pitcher's mound spinning at 1000 miles per hour while moving at over 66,000 miles an hour around the sun accurately enough that would hit Pluto nine years later 3 billion miles away. I thank God, who deigns to let mere mortals know such things.

And he has let them know these things, not through the Bible in this instance, not through a special revelation given to a prophet in a congregation. But God has deigned to let us discover such things through science. Math and science are also the language of God.

2. I am truly amazed that so many Christians mock science. Do they mock the planes they fly on, the GPS devices they steer by, the cell phones they call and text by? Do they mock the medicines they are cured by, the computers they write by, the flat screen TVs they spend most of their time by?

No. I strongly believe that Christianity can co-exist peacefully with science. I shudder to think of the other alternative. I do not hold to the other alternative.

3. Science gets at one of the most important foundations of Western civilization--evidentiary thinking rooted in a quest for objectivity. Science tries to proceed with as few presuppositions as necessary. It proceeds to make hypotheses that it then tests until it arrives at one that works well enough to be called a theory. But even then, it does not rest on theories past. Theories are always open to revision or even abandonment, especially if new data arises that points in another direction.

This is the scientific method. It asks what the most likely interpretation of the evidence is. We all have biases. Scientists have biases. But evidentiary thinking requires us to suspend our desires for the truth to be a certain way in order that we can move toward what is more likely to be the truth, toward the best explanations of the data we have.

Many of us pretend to operate on the basis of evidence. We talk the language of evidence. But what we are really doing is trying to find a possible way to make the evidence fit our preconceived notions or desired theory. Science teaches us to determine what the most probable interpretation of the evidence is and to modify our preconceived notions accordingly. Again, I shudder to think of what the implications would be if Christianity could not survive such a method. I firmly reject that suggestion.

This quest for objectivity is the great hope for a democratic nation, indeed for a civilized world. Along with its companion, logic, it is essential for the success of civilization. Without it, society disintegrates into tribes and interest groups whose only common ground is the fact that they are all out for their own interests. Those who cannot think in an evidentiary way are liabilities to civilization.

4. Science and math play an important personal function for most of us. They humble us. At least they should. Dare we think we understand the thoughts of God when we cannot understand algebra? God is greater than algebra. Yet every yahoo thinks he or she knows what the Bible teaches. The evidence suggests they are hilariously wrong.

I am not, of course, suggesting that mathematicians and scientists should be leading society and making all the decisions. The gifts that enable a person to think in these ways can produce glaring blind spots in other ways of thinking. There are other inabilities that should humble the scientists of the world. Scientists need the other liberal arts to balance them out, including a sense of religion, as much as we need math and science to balance us out.

Nevertheless, if philosophy did not teach the student that the wise person is the one who realizes how little he actually knows, science and math are always around to help--if we listen.

5. It would be wise for all college-educated individuals to have some basic knowledge of the conclusions of science. Everything is made out of atoms. Space is expanding. Trees and humans exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with each other. All living things have DNA that maps out what they will look and be like.

These things are so basic to me that I can't imagine the view of the world people have when they don't know them. I seriously knew someone once who questioned whether we had really gone to the moon. I shudder to think about how that person decides how to vote. And woe to the person on trial who might have someone like that in the jury.

Everyone today seems to have an opinion on climate change, evolution, pollution, and so forth. But few get their opinions from science. They get their opinions from cable news. An educated person should be exposed to arguments on these subjects from someone trying to be objective who is an expert in science and hasn't been handpicked by a certain channel because of their target audience.

6. Most people do use some math in their lives. They have bank accounts. They submit taxes. THEY BUY LOTS OF STUFF. Perhaps not everyone needs to know algebra, but how to make a budget? Yes. Math can be taught in a relevant way.

7. Learning math and science can actually make a person a better thinker. Math is closely related to logic. Geometry teaches inference and proof. Algebra involves deduction.

When people ask, "When am I ever going to use this stuff?" The answer is that your brain will use these skills every day if you are a person who thinks clearly and reads the world around them well. Math expands your mental capacity. Becoming better thinkers is always a benefit to you as an individual and to society as whole.

8. Most people have such a narrow view of the world, yet everyone thinks they know everything about everything. If they are taught well, math and science expand our horizons beyond ourselves and our experiences to things we could not have imagined. They expand our "common sense" beyond what's true in Marion, Indiana, to what is true in the universe. They point us to God.