While in graduate school I fortuitously encountered the works of Christopher Dawson, who significantly shaped my understanding and subsequent teaching of Western Civilization as meaningful only as a manifestation of the Christian Culture that emerged in the Medieval World. To him, a providential perspective on the study of history was fully justified: ‘”Whatever else is obscure, it is certain that God is the Governor of the universe and behind the apparent disorder and confusion of history there is the creative action of divine law.” Committed to this endeavor, he acknowledged that he “had to follow my own line of studies and plough a lone furrow for thirty-five years'” because “‘the subject to which I have devoted myself—the study of Christian culture—has no place in education or in university studies'” (p. 10).

In Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, c. 2007), Bradley J. Birzer, a professor at Hillsdale College, provides us both a biographical study and intellectual analysis of one of the major 20th century thinkers, rightly praised by notables such as T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Etienne Gilson and Thomas Merton. Standing beside them, witnessing the upheavals of the 20th century, alarmed at the ‘”dark forces that have been chained by a thousand years of Christian civilization . . . have now been set free to conquer the world”‘ (p. 11), Dawson necessarily assumed the role of a “Jeremiah, prophesying lament and doom as the world followed down the paths of the various ideologues. But he also played the role of the saint, using his considerable intellectual gifts to demonstrate the necessity of virtue and the light of the Logos to the modem world through his writing, his teaching, and his public speaking” (p. vii).

Born to a distinguished family in 1889 in a Welsh castle, Dawson grew up in a largely pre-mechanical rural world. “Distrust of urban areas and masses of men would haunt Dawson for his entire life and greatly shape many of his views on culture, politics and society” (p. 20). Largely educated by private tutors, he largely learned through exploring his family’s estate and extensive personal reading. Though his family was Anglo-Catholic, he converted to Catholicism in 1914, having embraced an Augustinian philosophy of history while attending Oxford University. Subsequently he devoted himself, for a decade, to the reading and note-taking necessary for “a writing career as a historian and general man of letters” (p. 28). Properly prepared, he began publishing a profusion of articles and books—more than a 100 all told—designed to remind his readers of the formative role of Christianity in the making of European civilization.

Though generally disinterested in academic appointments, accepted (at the age of 69) a position at Harvard University as the first Chauncey Stillman Chair in Catholic Studies, where he taught for four years until poor health demanded his retirement. Despite this university appointment, however, Dawson generally considered himself a writer committed to describing and explaining the role of Christianity in history. Thus, following his university years he joined a small circle of thinkers committed to “the Aristotelian/Thomist understanding of order” in society. They further embraced the position of “Edmund Burke, who had stressed the need for the ‘moral imagination’—the ability to see clearly beyond the here and now into the reality of eternal forms—thus allowing one to order one’s soul, one’s present community, and one’s soul to the eternal community” (p.  50).  Such order, as St. Augustine insisted, could come only as God’s grace restored a fallen world to its divine plan, and the Church was the agency called forth “to sanctify the world, and the individual person—if properly ordered in his soul—plays a vital role in the process of sanctification” (p. 57).

Deeply influenced by St. Augustine, Dawson found powerful parallels between the fifth and twentieth century worlds, and to Aidan Nichols his “work is itself ‘best thought of as a latter-day City of God”‘ (p. 66). Both men sought to affirm and advance classical, Christian culture amidst barbarian invasions—Vandals in Augustine’s fifth century world, secularized disciples of the French Revolution, the Deists and doubters and relativists in Dawson’s day. Both did so with words, which they thought more powerful than swords or plows, rifles or computers. “With St. John, Dawson proclaimed the importance of the Word to the human person as well as to history and culture. As ‘little words’—that is, human persons as imago Dei—humans pass on their civilization through the rational use of language” (p. 84).

During the 1930s, Dawson joined like-minded writers seeking to awaken the English to the importance of religious faith and practice, contending that ‘”the whole universe is, as it were, the shadow of God. and has its being in the contemplation or reflection of the Being of God'” (p. 110). He found in the Apostle John’s Logos theology the foundational truth that “Jesus ‘was not only the Christ, the Son of the living God; He was also the Divine Intelligence, the Principle of the order and intelligibility of the created world'” (p. 111). Discerning His Light we may conform both ourselves and our world to Him. Thinking thusly, he said: ‘”A Christian only has to be in order to change the world, for in that act of being there is contained all the mystery of the supernatural life'” (p. 112).

During the same decade he spoke out against some of the pernicious ideologies that were enlisting enthusiasts for centralized bureaucratic systems, critiquing not only Stalin’s Soviet Communism and Hitler’s German National Socialism but FDR’s New Deal “as a constitutional dictatorship'” (p. 124). Indeed, he thought: ‘”It may be harder to resist a Totalitarian state which relies on free milk and birth-control clinics than one which relies on castor oil and concentration camps'” (p. 125). “The Europe of the 1930s, Dawson believed, faced the same fate as Republican Rome in 43 B.C. It would either die, or it would remake itself under a centralized government. In either case, it would never find any meaningful spiritual fulfillment” (p. 136). So it was a time, as Pope Leo XIII had earlier declared, for the Church to ‘”set up a wall and a bulwark to save human society from falling back into barbarism'” (p. 133).

Barbarism, of course, had been vanquished as Christians patiently shaped European Civilization during the Middle Ages. Rooted in the cultures of Greece and Rome, Western Christian Culture preserved the best of antiquity. As Germanic barbarians inundated the Roman Empire, monks and missionaries such as St. Boniface patiently led them both to Christ and civilization, “creating what we would now recognize as the beginnings of Europe, a synthesis of the classical, Christian, and Germanic” (p. 167). Equally important, medieval scholars such as Aquinas (best popularized by Dante) understood “grace as a ‘new spiritual principle which transforms and renews human nature by the communication of the Divine Life'” (p. 174).

This medieval synthesis began dissolving in the 14th century, first under assault from nominalist thinkers and nation states and subsequent (16th century) Protestant theologians and princes. The leading 14 century nominalist, “William of Occam, according to Dawson, played one of the most important roles in the breakup of Christendom and in the growth of nationalism. As ‘the leading mind of his age,’ Occam ‘was the initiator—the “venerable inceptor”—of the via modema [nominalism] which took the place of the classical scholasticism of the 13th century—the via antiqua—as the accepted doctrine of the universities for nearly two centuries, down to the time of Luther'” (p. 178). To his theological nominalism Luther added a staunch nationalism and thus secured an unprecedented alliance between Church and State that tragically divided Europe into warring factions.

Those warring factions flared forth in WWII, a deeply distressing event to Dawson. During and after the war he continued to write articles and books (best evident in what Birzer considers his best work, The Judgment of the Nations) pleading for a restoration of Western Christian Culture, heeding Pope Pius XIPs “call for a new Crusade, ‘to bring men back from the broken cisterns of national interest to the fountain of Divine justice’ and to promote a new and international understanding of the natural law” (p. 194). The 20th century witnessed, he wrote, ‘”the unloosing of the powers of the abyss—the dark forces that have been chained by a thousand years of Christian civilization and which have been set free to conquer the world.’ Together, these dark forces have ‘the will to power.’ The darkest forces first emerged in the French Revolution, and then re-emerged in the Soviet Union, spreading ‘westward, into the very heart of Europe'” (p. 199). To do battle, all Christians (Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox) needed, above all, to employ the Sword of the Spirit, for only in His strength could the battles and wars be won.

Following the war, Dawson was honored by being asked to deliver the distinguished Gifford Lectures and appointed a professor at Harvard. His erudition and insight were rewarded with highly public recognition and an enduring legacy. Yet in many ways, he was an “oddity” immersed in Catholicism and committed to the Reality and role of God in His world. Summing up his fine, exhaustively researched and documented study, Birzer says: “He offered an Augustinian vision of culture and history to the twentieth century; he encouraged men and women to act like men and women in the best of the western tradition—through the virtue of love; he attacked the ideologues of the left and right as nothing more than false prophets promoting false religions and false gods; and, to revive the world through the imagination , he promoted a new an vigorous understanding of the liberal arts. …. He desired to sanctify the world, through grace, to embrace truth, beauty, and goodness” (p. 271).

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The Gifford Lectures, devoted to the subject of Natural Theology, in some ways resemble the Nobel Prize for thinkers in the history and philosophy of religion.  So Christopher Dawson was honored to be invited to deliver the lectures in 1947. He began with an anthropological and sociological analysis later published under the title Religion and Culture (London: Sheed & Ward, 1948). To explain his approach to Natural Theology he noted that until modern times it was simply a familiar aspect of Christian theology. Since the Renaissance, however, it has increasingly become a facet of humanism, with its scientific presumptions, rather than traditional faith-based reason.

As an historian Dawson insists we broaden our vision and take in the totality of human experience, acknowledging that from the beginning recorded history “we can never find a time or place where man was not conscious of the soul and of a divine power on which his life depended” (p. 41). Rightly understood, “All religion is based on the recognition of a superhuman Reality of which man is somehow conscious and towards which he must in some way orientate his life. The existence of the tremendous transcendent reality that we name GOD is the foundation of all religion in all ages and among all peoples” (p. 25). Thus Natural Theology was rooted in the basic human awareness “that man has only to look out and to look up in order to see the manifest proofs of Divine power and wisdom” (p. 30).

Discerning this Divine Reality, people developed cultures in accord with it. Consequently, Dawson insists: “Religion is the key of history” (p. 50). “Religion and art are older than agriculture and industry. In the beginning was the word, and man was a seer and an artist before he was a producer” (p. 132). Above all we are by nature homo religiosus, and “every great historic culture, viewed from within through the eyes of its members, represents a theogamy, a coming together of the divine and the human within the limits of a sacred tradition” (p. 54). Furthermore, “every culture, even the most primitive, seeks, like the old Roman civic religion, to establish a. jus divinum which will maintain the pax deorum, a religious order which will relate the life of the community to the transcendent powers that rule the universe.

The way of life must be a way of the service of God” (p. 62). Discerning the divine Design are prophets; propitiating the divine Power are priests; ordering society in accord with the divine Order are kings. “The Prophet is the organ of divine inspiration, the King is the organ of sacred power, but the Priest is the organ of knowledge—the master of sacred science” (p. 102). With enormous erudition—an encyclopedic knowledge of human history—Dawson illustrates the importance of religion in vibrant cultures. In sum: “It is the traditional teaching of Natural Theology that the elements of religious truth are common to the human race and accessible to every rational creature—that the Divine Being is the transcendent end towards which all the different ways of life converge and the divine law the universal norm by which all the different patterns of human behaviour can be co-ordinated” (p. 211).

Tragically, to Dawson, a “new scientific culture [that] is devoid of all positive spiritual content” has gained control of much of the world” (p. 214). What emerged in the 20th century could hardly be considered a culture at all! Given the tyrannies and bureaucracies and nihilism everywhere evident in the West following WWII, our culture “may become the enemy of human life itself (p. 215). Consequently: “We are faced with a spiritual conflict of the most acute kind, a sort of social schizophrenia which divides the soul of society between a non-moral will to power served by inhuman techniques and a religious faith and a moral idealism which have no power to influence human life. There must be a return to unity—a spiritual integration of culture—if mankind is to survive” (p. 217).

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The cultural integrity needed for mankind to survive was resplendently evident, Christopher Dawson argued, in the Christian Culture of the High Middle Ages. He articulated this case in one of his best books. Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1958; c. 1950 by Sheed & Ward), the second volume of his Gifford Lectures, delivered in the University of Edinburgh, 1948-1949. He declared (citing Lord Acton) that “‘Religion is the key of history'” (p. 15). The energy and creativity that have distinguished the West can only be explained in light of a spiritual vigor “independent of political power or economic prosperity” (p. 18). “The beginnings of Western culture,” Dawson says, “are to be found in the new spiritual community which arose from the ruins of the Roman Empire owing to the conversion of the Northern barbarians to the Christian faith” (p. 26). The missionary nature of Christianity shines forth in the patient work of monks and priests, soldiers and scholars, slowly making Europe Christian. They did so not with the intent of civilizing barbarians or orchestrating “social progress, but with a tremendous message of divine judgment and divine salvation. …. Only by way of the Cross and by the grace of the crucified Redeemer was it possible for men to extricate themselves from the massa damnata of unregenerate humanity and escape from the wreckage of a doomed world” (p. 35). Calling sinners to salvation, however, involved means whereby they could be sanctified. Thus liturgical worship and uplifting architecture and proper education were emphasized.

The men who made the West during the Medieval Era were mainly monks, doing the Opus Dei (work of God) by daily reciting “the divine liturgy of prayer and psalmody” (p. 48). Through them “religion exercised a direct formative influence on the whole cultural development of these centuries” (p. 44). Luminaries such as St. Boniface, the missionary “Apostle of Germany,” and Alcuin of York, who established Charlemagne’s school of the palace, bear witness to the grandeur of Medieval monks. They were “the watchmen or guardians who ‘kept the walls’ of the Christian City and repelled the attacks of its spiritual enemies” (p. 45). In addition to praying the monks worked—oro et labore. “It was the disciplined and tireless labour of the monks which turned the tide of barbarism in Western Europe and brought back into cultivation the lands which had been deserted and depopulated in the age of the invasions” (p. 53).

While Irish and Benedictine monks effectively converted the barbarians and established the Church in the West, equally effective representatives of Byzantium converted Magyars and Bulgars and Slavs and others in the East, dealing with “a series of Asiatic barbarian empires, which constituted a continual threat to the Balkan provinces and the capital itself (p. 104). Especially important, radiating from Kiev following the conversion of Vladimir in 988, a vigorous Russian Orthodox community expanded and flourished. Indeed “the conversion of Russia opened a new channel by which Christian culture could penetrate the pagan North, so that the whole continent seemed about to become a Christian orbis terrarum” (p. 114). The Mongolian invasions, along with the Islamic Turks’ assault on Byzantium, profoundly thwarted this possibility, but successful missionary endeavors of both Eastern and Western Christians in the Middle Ages certainly laid the foundation for Europe.

However externally successful, the Church constantly needed internal reform. Monasteries lost their integrity, bishops neglected their calling, priests flaunted their vows, and princes violated the central precepts of God’s law. To read reformers, such as St. Odo ofCluny in the 10th century, the Church had lost her way and needed the radical renewal evident in the High Middle Ages—the feudal world of chivalry, cathedrals and crusades, of universities and mendicant monastic orders, of saints and scholars such as St. Francis ofAssisi and St. Thomas Aquinas. Dawson surveys and documents the rich cultural life of this Medieval world, arguing (much like Henry Adams in Mont St. Michel and Chartres) that it was one of the finest epochs in human history. “It finds an almost perfect literary expression in Dante’s epic, and it was embodied in visible form in the great French cathedrals. But, above all, it found supreme expression in the philosophic systems of the thirteenth century—those great ‘cathedrals of ideas’, as Professor Gilson has called them, in which all the acquisitions of Aristotle and Arabic science have been organically incorporated with the Christian tradition in an intelligible unity” (p. 197). And it was fueled by fervent religious faith—a faith. Henry Adams declared, more powerful than the 19th century’s electric dynamos. Inevitably, the rich cultural synthesis in the Medieval World declined and dissipated. Reforming orders lost their zeal and wandered into the labyrinth of “ecclesiastical power politics” (p. 215).

Scholasticism lost its intellectual resiliency amidst overly rational speculation and increasingly skeptical nominalism. “This tragic crisis of the medieval spirit,” Dawson says, “is reflected in the greatest literary achievement of that age, the Divina Commedia of Dante. Nowhere can we find a more perfect expression of the power and the glory of the medieval cultural achievement which reached from Heaven to Hell and found room for all the knowledge and wisdom and all the suffering and aggressiveness of medieval humanity in its all-embracing vision of judgment. Yet at the same time it is a most drastic indictment of the medieval Church” (p. 216).

To Dawson, the grandeur of Western Culture, best displayed in the Medieval World, “is not to be found in the external order they created or attempted to create, but in the internal change they brought about in the soul of Western man—a change which can never be entirely undone except by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself (p. 224). Most importantly, that world exemplified “moments of vital fusion between a living religion and a living culture are the creative events in history, in comparison with which all the external achievements in the political and economic orders are transitory and insignificant” (p.224).

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Few of the past century’s developments rival the growth of big government in America.   Once upon a time Americans lived freely, barely aware of the federal government, for there were not income taxes, no Social Security payments, few if any regulations requiring permits and payments.  As Robert Higgs shows, however, in Crisis and Leviathan:  Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York:  Oxford University Press, c. 1987), such “days, alas are long gone.  Now, in virtually every dimension, our lives revolve within rigid limits circumscribed by governmental authorities; we are constrained continually and all sides by Big Government” (p. ix).  Government may now, Warren Nutter said, “‘take and give whatever, whenever, and wherever it wishes’” (p. 4).  Bureaucrats, “rather than private citizens effectively decide how resources will be allocated, employed and enjoyed” (p. 28).  

This remarkable growth of government has generally been supported by the public, especially since it has occurred during times of crisis.  Thus Rahm Emmanuel’s oft-cited remark, as the Obama Administration took control in 2009, declaring they could not let a crisis go to waste, reflects historical reality Given a sense of national emergency, individuals may easily ignore their own self-interest in order to support collective action (through taxation or regulation) portrayed as necessary for national security or economic justice.  During the 20^th century, three grand crises augmented government growth—the two world wars and the Great Depression.  Once the crises passed, however, the  government always retained its hastily-crafted, crisis-forged powers.  “As William Graham Sumner observed, ‘it is not possible to experiment with a society and just drop the experiment whenever we choose.  The experiment enters into the life of a society and never can be got out again’” (p. 58).  

To argue his thesis, Higgs first examines the “crisis under the Old Regime, 1893-1896,” when serious proposals to expand the federal government were debated and rejected.  The wrenching depression of the ‘90s ignited populist protests across the land, particularly in the South and West.  Giving voice to this discontent, William Jennings Bryan gained the Democrat Party’s presidential nomination in 1896 and promised to fundamentally change the American way in accord with the 1892 People’s Party platform which, “besides proposing unlimited coinage of silver and the graduated taxation of incomes, and called for the nationalization of the railroads, telegraph, and telephones and declared support for the organization and objectives of labor unions.  Americans of all political persuasions sensed that the future of the political economy lay in the balance.  ‘The election,’ said newspaperman William Allen White, ‘will sustain Americanism or it will plant Socialism’” (p. 78).  

What White termed “Americanism” was widely supported by the American people at that time.  To “James Bryce, perhaps the most perspicacious foreign observer of American society in the late nineteenth century,” the people believed “that certain rights of the individual, such as the ‘right to the enjoyment of what he has earned . . . are primordial and sacred.’  Moreover, all governmental authorities ‘ought to be strictly limited’ and ‘the less of government the better. . . .  The functions of government must be kept at their minimum’” (p. 83).  Rather than call for revolutionary changes to rectify economic inequities, Bryce continued, “‘the honesty and common sense of the citizens generally’” led them to insist “‘that the interests of all classes are substantially the same, and that justice is the highest of those interests.  Equality, open competition, a fair field to every body, ever stimulus to industry, and every security for its fruits, these they hold to be the self-evident principles of national prosperity’” (p. 83).  

Standing for these self-evident principles and resisting the Populist program was the Democrat elected in 1892, President Grover Cleveland, as well as the Supreme Court.  Philosophically opposed to the radicalism of men such as Bryan, Cleveland determined “to save the gold standard, threatened by silverite inflationists; to preserve an orderly and free labor market, jeopardized by unionist, rioters, and proponents of governmental work relief for the unemployed” (p. 78).  During his first term (1885-89) Cleveland had vetoed a bill calling for sending $10,000 to Texas farmers suffering from a drought.  That they were suffering was manifestly evident, but “he could ‘find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.’  Further, ‘A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of [the government’s] power and duty should be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people’” (p. 84).  

Supporting oneself—that was the American way in the 18^th century.  Thus the Supreme Court rejected (as unconstitutional) legislative efforts to impose a federal income tax.  Arguing for it, attorney James C. Carter “freely admitted that it was class legislation,” taking from a few rich folks to supply the needs of the less fortunate.  In response, the opposing attorney, Joseph H. Choate declared:  “‘there are private rights of property here to be protected. . . .  The act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communistic in its purposes and tendencies, and is defended her upon principles as communistic, socialistic—what shall I call them—populistic as ever have been addressed to any political assembly in the world’” (p. 100).  Justice Field, appointed to the Court in 1863, concurred with Choate, predicting “that ‘[t]the present assault upon capital is but the beginning.  It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness’” (p. 102).  

What Justice Field feared transformed within two decades, as the Progressive Movement and World War I substantially altered America’s political and economic system.  Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson led the way, frequently bolstered by muckraking journalistic pronouncements and reflecting a profound change in political theory, moving in a socialistic direction.  Inculcating socialism, were “‘literary socialists such as William Dean Howells and Upton Sinclair,’” and economists including Henry Demarest Lloyd and Richard T. Ely.  “‘Socialism supplied the critique, if not the technique for much Progressive reform; and though not always recognized, its effect was felt in all social sciences’” (p. 116).  

Progressivism’s impact upon America, however, was paltry when compared with the “war socialism” imposed upon the nation during WWI.  By the war’s end, “the government had taken over the ocean shipping, railroad, telephone, and telegraph industries; commandeered hundreds of manufacturing plants; entered into massive economic enterprises on its own account in such varied departments as shipbuilding, wheat trading, and building construction; undertaken to lend huge sums to businesses directly or indirectly and to regulate the private issuance of securities; established official priorities for the use of transportation facilities, food, fuel, and many raw materials; fixed the prices of dozens of important commodities; intervened in hundreds of labor disputes; and conscripted millions of men for service in the armed forces” (p. 123).  Amidst it all, President Woodrow Wilson assumed an alarmingly dictatorial stance.

Though many of the measures adopted during WWI were scaled back during the 1920s, an ideological shift had occurred, facilitating the enormous expansion of Big Government in the 1930s.  The Great Depression, to New Dealers, “John Garraty has written, ‘justified the casting aside of precedent, the nationalistic mobilization of society, and the removal of traditional restraints on the power of the state, as in war, and it required personal leadership more forceful than that necessary in normal times’” (p. 170).  The political rhetoric of class conflict was revealing:  “‘“Competition” became “economic cannibalism,” and “rugged individualists” became “industrial pirates.”  Conservative industrialists, veteran antitrusters, and classical economists were all lumped together and branded “social Neanderthalers,” “Old Dealers,” and “corporals of disaster”’” (p. 179).  

Rather than serving as a guardian of individual rights, the Constitution was construed by New Dealers and ultimately rationalized by the Supreme Court as an enabler of federal power.  Virtually anything desirable was deemed doable, leading many traditionalists to consider the Constitution shredded beyond recognition.  The New Deal’s radical innovations transformed the nation, putting the federal government in control of significant sectors of public life.  Beyond all the regulations and subsidies, social security and labor law, the New Deal’s “most important legacy,” Higgs insists, “is a certain system of belief, the now-dominant ideology” that justifies getting what one wants at the expense of others.  “To take—indirectly if not directly—other people’s property for one’s own benefit is now considered morally impeccable, providing that the taking is effected through the medium of government” (p. 195).  

The unrestrained government established by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal was further expanded during WWII—years which “witnessed the creation of an awesome garrison economy” (p. 196).  A plethora of federal bureaucracies controlled prices and dictated policies.  “Whether one calls the prevailing political economy ‘war socialism,’ ‘war fascism,’ or something else is largely a matter of linguistic taste, but capitalism it definitely was not” (p. 211).  Given the hand-in-glove relationship between government and industry (as well as government and labor), Higgs says, “vast profits and losses were at stake, and governmental officials had their hands on the levers that controlled how the mechanism would operate.  The politicians, observed Fiorello La Guardia (who knew something about politicians), ‘are drooling at the mouth and smacking their jowls in anticipation of the pickings once they get their slimy claws into the price administration’” (p. 209).   

Following WWII the powerful centralized government retained its war-time powers.  The laissez faire, free-market economy and limited government featured by the nation’s founding documents had lasted only into the 1920s.  As the distinguished economist Joseph Schumpeter noted, in the title of a talk delivered just nine days before he died in 1949, the U.S. had been taking a “March into Socialism” (p. 239), thus risking the tyranny generally associated with such an economy.  Big Government cannot but become a dictatorial Leviathan.  And it has materialized, in crisis-induced spurts, Higgs persuasively argues under the auspices of progressivism and liberalism.  

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Whereas Higgs, an economist, examines historical epochs that illustrate the expansive Leviathan, Kenneth Minogue seeks to explain the same phenomenon from a more philosophical perspective, wondering if “the moral life can survive democracy” in The Servile Mind:  How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (New York:  Encounter Books, c. 2010).   The democracy envisioned in the 19^th century hardly resembles what now flourishes throughout the Western world; though it once meant “a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them” (p. 2), illicitly “telling us how to live” (p. 3).  This reflects a profound ethical shift, substituting an imposed “politico-moral” agenda for the individually free and virtuous standard evident in Aristotle and Aquinas.  

As it has evolved, Minogue thinks, modern democracy “leads people increasingly to take up public positions on the private affairs of others.  Wherever people discover that money is being spent, either privately or by public officials, they commonly develop opinions on how it ought to be spent.  In a state increasingly managed right down to small details of conduct, each person thus becomes his own fantasy despot, disposing of others and their resources as he or she thinks desirable” (p. 214).  As Aristotle expressly warned, given the opportunity “the property-less will exploit those with property” (p. 237).  While once promoting liberty, today’s democracies righteously curtail any freedoms deemed injurious to either public or private well-being.  Independent individualists have been replaced by servile dependents.  “Voting yourself rich,” as P.J. O’Rourke quipped, sure beats working and saving!  And this is no minor matter, for:  “We should never doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step toward totalitarianism” (p. 3).  

Whereas 19^th century democrats (e.g. Thomas Jefferson) celebrated individualism, their 21^st century heirs (e.g. Lyndon Johnson) insist governments feed and house, comfort and care for everyone needing help.  Individuals once considered themselves duty-bound (to their country, spouse, community), but they now think their government obligated to them—thus food stamps, social security, health care, etc.  The right to be free from government control has morphed into the right to demand goods and services from the government.   Schools provide free lunches, whether or not students learn to read and write.  Churches once preaching personal salvation now promote “social justice.”  Replacing the right to pursue happiness one one’s own us the right to demand happiness at the breast of the nanny state.  Living virtuously has been replaced by efforts “to legislate the kind of society we want, or think we want” (p. 123).  Ironically, Minogue argues, the intellectual and political elites that celebrate the wisdom and maturity of “the people” treat them as incompetent children who need constant supervision and subsidies.  They flatter the masses when giving commencement speeches but enact policies predicated upon the assumption that environment (poverty, discrimination) dictates behavior.  

Pervading it all is the ethical utilitarianism birthed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and today evident in philosophers such as Richard Rorty and Princeton’s notorious Peter Singer.   Morality was reduced to sentiment by 18^th century skeptics such as David Hume; so a subjective, “sentimental moralism” has replaced the sturdy objective “natural law” principles of Christian ethicists such as Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Reid.  The “greatest good for the greatest number” has become the democratic imperative.  Outcomes—in schools and churches and federal agencies—become the singular criteria whereby we distinguish good from evil.  Whether taxing the rich or endorsing affirmative action, the question is not whether it is just but whether it promotes economic equality or compassionate feelings.  “Redistributionist taxation,” for instance, “is often defended as socially just, and therefore as being a moral as well as a civic obligation, but no one who observes the incompetence of governments in first raising large sums by taxation and then spending so much of it wastefully is likely to be impressed by this invocation of morality” (p. 64).  

Discrimination of virtually any sort violates the modern democratic creed—the “religion of equality” that has become our regnant “piety” (p. 83).   Though ignoring the evident reality of human nature by trying to mandate equality (racial, sexual, economic) is the equivalent of “making water run up hill” (p. 81), radicals routinely embark upon utopian endeavors designed to do so.   Even attitudes and “feelings” must be legislatively normalized—thus university speech codes and “hate crime” legislation!  “Liberation” movements inevitably promote the politico-moral agenda subtly “denying the basic reality on which modern Western Civilization is based” (p. 317).  

In brief, Minogue defines the servile mind “as the abdication of moral autonomy and independent agency in favor of either some unreflective collective allegiance or agency in favor either of some unreflective collective allegiance or some inevitably partial and personal impulse for illicit satisfaction” (p. 192).  Increased attention to “victims” (necessarily slaves rather than free men) and their “rights” has transformed modern democracies.  We have, he laments, sold our birthright (with Esau of old) for a mess of porridge!  

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In 1998 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a distinguished humanities professor at Emory University, gave the Kuyper Lectures at Eastern College in Pennsylvania.  The lectures appear in Women and the Future of the Family (Grand Rapids:  Baker Books, c. 2000).  As an historian, she sought to place current issues in their proper context; as a concerned woman she sought to contribute to the formation of better, stronger families.  She began by noting the problems of sex and violence among our young.  While many “experts” blame external factors such as pornography and firearms, something more profound is at work, and refusing to recognize “direct connections between the aberrant behavior of children and the nature of family life” (p. 16) is manifestly self-deceptive.  To the author, “even while it is impossible to blame a child’s family for his or her behavior, it is entirely appropriate to draw connections between prevailing types of families and prevailing patterns of behavior among children and youth” (p. 16).  

Discerning “the signs of the times,” she acknowledges that the modern family faces great stresses and that our children are doing poorly.   It is obvious “that children would fare better if their mothers did not work outside the home, or, at least, if one of their parents were at home when the children return from school.  These days only the most unreconstructed traditionalists—many with some hesitation—dare to suggest that a mother and a father may play different roles in a child’s life and, hence, have different responsibilities” (p. 17).  Disturbingly, there is an “astounding complacency toward the ominous tendencies of our political, social, and cultural life, for within a remarkably brief period we have, almost without noticing, embraced a cataclysmic transformation of the very nature of our society” (p. 17).  

In part this results from the historic rise of individualism.  Whether one considers economics, with men and women seeking salaried employment, or religion, where neither men nor women seem particularly heedful of their churches’ admonitions, Americans clearly value their freedoms.  To many, personal autonomy—releasing the chains that tie them to spouses or children or parents, communities or traditions, churches or theology—is life’s summum bonum.  This love of freedom flourished, particularly on the frontier, from the country’s earliest days, but it was, until recently, counterbalanced by strong families—still quite hierarchical and traditional—wherein the father assumed “authority over all, including his wife,” and parents assumed “authority over their children” (p. 21).  By reacting against any husband’s authority,  however, 19^th century feminists launched a liberation movement that subtly bore fruit in the 20^th century.  Yet, Fox-Genovese asserts:  “One thing is blindingly clear:  “The transformation of women’s lives and expectations during recent decades has no historical precedent, and its consequences reach into every aspect of family a societal life.  Above all, the changes in women’s lives and expectations are having a radical impact on families and the very idea of the family, and therefore on the lives of children, and therefore on the character and prospects of future generations” (p. 24).  

Much has improved for women, thanks to the feminist movement, and “the comparative improvement in the position of women relative to that of men has been revolutionary, vastly surpassing the improvement secured in a comparable span of time by any other working group in history” (p. 26).  But the very freedoms enjoyed by modern women bring with them another set of challenges.  Sexual liberation, secured by abortion rights, has certainly been less than an unmixed blessing!  Importantly, preeminently:  “Defense of abortion on demand has remained a sacred tenet of feminists, who regard it as the cornerstone of women’s sexual freedom and who oppose any restrictions on it” (p. 28).  Autonomous individuals cast aside all ties that bind!  Autonomous women must, above all, be freed from childbearing, even if it involves killing infants in the womb.  Recourse to abortion, of course, frees a woman from “children—the possible consequence of her sexuality.  This strategy effectively divorces children from any social institution by labeling them the concern of a woman rather than of a woman and a man” (p. 28).  The courts, notably the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v Danforth, declared “the husband has no more stake in his wife’s pregnancy than any other individual, which effectively strips him of any stake in the family and strips the family of any standing as an organic unit.  More disturbing, as Tiffany R. Jones and Larry Peterman argue, Danforth, but shredding the husband’s stake in children, establishes that ‘there is nothing of one’s own in the most serious sense left for husbands in the family’” (p. 29).  

Inevitably—it necessarily follows—the family loses standing, subject to the volatile desires of adults and children who may or may not choose to live together.  Sexual liberation cannot but cause “the disintegration of the family” (p. 31).  Though virtually all careful studies demonstrate how children suffer when their parents divorce, roughly half of them will spend at least part of their lives in a single parent home.  With an inexorable inevitability, in the wake of the “equality” of the sexes came the “skyrocketing number of out-of-wedlock births and the declining rate of marriage” (p. 32), developments hardly anticipated by the champions of women’s liberation 50 years ago.  Like it or not, Fox-Genovese says:  “The sexual liberation of women, combined with the feminist campaign against marriage and motherhood as the special vocation of women, has directly contributed to the declining birthrate, the proliferation of single-parent or single-mother families, and the number of children born outside of marriage” (p. 35).  

Even apparently bland feminist demands, including calls for egalitarian marriages and insisting men and women should abandon traditional roles with men cleaning and cooking and keeping house, spoil domestic tranquility, for “couples in which men share domestic tasks with their wives are more likely to divorce than those in which they do not; those in which the man earns more than 50 percent of the family’s income are less likely to divorce than those in which he does not; and the larger the share of the family’s income the wife earns, the more likely her husband is to abuse her” (p. 34).  Feminists insist that marriage be a “contract,” obligating both partners to share equally in all aspects of life together.  Consequently, a woman defending her “rights” within such a relationship easily feels umbrage when it seems she is doing more than her fair (i.e. equal) share.  Forgotten is the fact that marriage, unlike a business deal, demands surrendering rather than promoting one’s rights!  

Women asserting individual autonomy encouraged men to claim it as well, and “the sexual liberation of women has realized men’s most predatory sexual fantasies.  As women shook themselves free from the norms and conventions of sexual conduct, men did the same” (p. 31).  The permission granted our sexual license “effectively destroys the ideal of binding moral norms.  By definition, when morality becomes a matter of personal preference, it ceases to be a binding social norm, and personal preference is merely the logical application of the consumer choice vigorously promoted by global corporations.  The discrediting of binding social norms in turn undermines our ability to protect children, who themselves are now seen to enjoy virtually the same individual rights as adults” (p. 39).  

While this great social upheaval has transformed our social world, the only institution (the Church) capable of providing guidance amidst it all has “showed little enthusiasm for condemning the disintegrative forces out of hand” (p. 37).   Quite the opposite!  The churches have in fact become agents for sexual liberation and feminist theology.  To Fox-Genovese—so lately returned to the Christian faith—this poses a major challenge.  Indeed:   “The greatest danger of all may lie in the dissemination of sexual egalitarianism within our churches, for the core of Christianity has always lain in the simultaneous reality of our particularity and our universality” (p. 44).  

This brief book, composed of five succinct lectures, is followed by responses by Stanley J. Grenz, Mardi Keyes, and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, all taking exception to some of Fox-Genovese’s views.  Basically they all support some strain of evangelical feminism.  Other than illustrating enduring tensions within the Christian world, they merit only cursory attention.  

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In the 1980s Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was a lustrous fixture in the pantheon of academic feminism.  A decade earlier she’d aligned herself with militant feminists who  “supported a woman’s right to have an abortion, equal pay for equal work, a married woman’s right to keep her name, women’s equal access to credit, and no fault divorce” (p. 15).  Along wither her husband, Eugene Genovese, she articulated a Marxist vision of history, and she was selected to establish and head a department of women’s studies at Emory University.  Having done so, however, she found that the women she recruited as professors quickly envisioned themselves as social activists rather than serious scholars, and in time she was shoved aside by   supposed “scholars” determined to indoctrinate naive students.  

By the 1990s Fox-Genovese had become both disillusioned with radical feminism and drawn to the Christian Faith—and in particular the Catholic Church which she joined.  To better understand her final views on the subject one must read her “Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life”:  How Today’s Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women (New York:  Doubleday, c. 1996).  In writing the book Fox-Genovese blends an extensive number of interviews with the academic literature so well known to her.  She found that for ordinary women, almost without exception, “Feminism is not talking about my life” (p. 2).  Feminists talked incessantly about themselves and their theories, but they knew little or nothing about common women who love men and deeply treasure marriage and children.  The author’s “book is no conservative manifesto,” says Maggie Gallagher.  “Instead it is one feminist writer’s attempt to understand why, at a time when feminist ideas about work and equality are widely accepted, so few American women identify with feminism as a political cause.”  

Consequently most of these women avoid any association with “feminism.”  For example, to a “tough, independent and strikingly beautiful” New Mexico rancher’s wife, who routinely saddled up and helped work cattle, “feminism has nothing to do with her life and feminists, whom she views as soft as well as softheaded liberals, would no last two days on her ranch” (p. 22).   Such women bear bad news for feminists, for the “overwhelming majority of American women perceive feminism as irrelevant.  In their view, feminism has no answer for the women’s issues that most concern them” (p. 33).  And Fox-Genovese has increasingly identified with these hard-working common folks rather than her peers in the academic elite!  For example:  “I have always known that, faced with a choice, my marriage would come before my career” (p. 6).  As a childless academic, she never faced that choice, but in her heart she’d already decided—her man comes first! 

The author’s love for and commitment to her husband revealed her deeply feminine nature.  But feminists, she notes, “have not had much patience with femininity, which they see as a trap that distracts women from the pursuit of power and independence.  For what is femininity except a disguise that women adopt to appeal to men?  As it happens, most women still do want to appeal to men, which may help to explain why they do not have much use for feminism” (p. 36).  This conviction leads Fox-Genovese to justify and actually celebrate many of the alluringly feminine interests and endeavors so despised by prominent feminists—shopping with friends, fashionable dresses, sculpted nails, regular perms, etc.  Feminists who condemn femininity ignore the blatant truth that women themselves cheerfully embrace it.  

For many radicals, Fox-Genovese says, “feminism is mainly about sex,” and their fervent commitment to pre-marital sex, shacking up, no-fault divorce and abortion rights—“the litmus test” of the movement—illustrates it (p. 59).  Sexual activity has been freed from moral restrictions, reduced to a pleasurable realm wherein most anything goes.  Almost overnight (in the 1960s) “a solid majority of young people in their late teens and twenties saw no connection between premarital sex and morality at all” (p. 75).  Women could, at long last, enjoy unfettered sex as freely as men. “This much is clear:  The sexual revolution has irreversibly transformed the lives of American women, who are trying to understand what that transformation means for them” (p. 60).  For most women, however, the sexual revolution has proven problematic, and for a large number of them its consequences have been injurious.  “What these apostles of liberation were unwilling to imagine was that sex itself might make women unequal to men” (p. 63).  Unmarried, impoverished, rearing children by themselves, numbers of mature women pay the price of our nation’s sexual liberation!

Coping with their sexual liberation certainly challenges the women Fox-Genovese interviewed for this book.  Feminism “has convinced a surprising number of Americans that ‘fairness’ to women requires permitting them virtually the same sexual freedom as men, although they obviously face immeasurably greater risks.  Uncertainty about what that freedom should mean has undermined their willingness to defend any single public moral standard” (p. 90).  Cut loose from the firm standards once prescribed by Christian churches, left to devise their own “personal” perspectives, they struggle to make sense of their world and look critically at feminists’ promulgations.  “Slightly more than half have come to believe that the increased acceptance of premarital sex has been bad for society, and only 30 percent think more sexual freedom in the future a good idea” (p. 94).  Now that they’re rearing their own children, the promiscuous freedoms of the ‘60s generation seem less and less exciting!  “Teen pregnancy, AIDS, drugs, and pornography intertwine to threaten everything they believe in and, especially, everything they want for their children.  They do not view the collapse of traditional values as liberation” (p. 101).  While wealthy and well-educated women—the ruling class and leaders of NOW—insulate themselves from the consequences of their social engineering, ordinary women find themselves saddened by them.  

The feminist movement, of course, helped establish career opportunities for millions of women.  Indeed:  “Modern feminism emerged as a direct response to the economic revolution that has transformed our world” (p. 111).  Yet the sword that granted employment proved two-edged, effectively severing ties between mothers and children!  There’s a monumental difference between working women and working mothers!  And successful careerists, whether male or female, cannot but prioritize work—80 hour weeks for young attorneys, constant-on-call status for young doctors.  Charging up the career path, there’s simply no good time to pause and have children.  But normal women deeply desire children!  “Hence the grim threat of the economic revolution:  As workers women need to be liberated from children; as mothers, they need to be liberated from work” (p. 114).  Most all the alleged “inequities” women suffer in the workplace stem from their strong maternal desire to be present with and actively engaged in the lives of their children.  Feminists angrily insist they pursue careers, dispatching their young to day care centers and schools, content to spend a few hours of  the ever-elusive “quality time” each week with their kids.  But their children, inevitably, “know that they cannot count on their mothers’ always being there” (p. 123).  

To radical feminists, the mother simply should not be there, if by “there” you mean home!  Let nannies or day care workers do the nitty-gritty work of nursing babies and changing diapers.  A real woman should be working, breaking through the glass ceiling and making her mark on the world, proving herself the equal of any man.  “Feminists tend to see any talk of women’s responsibilities to mother as a male plot” (p. 188).  Most women, however, find motherhood important and rewarding, and “most would prefer jobs close to home with flexible hours and higher pay for the time worked.  Half would prefer not to work at all while their children are young” (p. 189).  Challenging the feminist elite which frequently condemns women who stay home with their children, Fox-Genovese defends their right to choose what suits them.  “By any reasonable standard,” she concludes, “the rearing of children is the most important thing that individuals—or, for that matter, societies—do.  And the evidence is mounting on all sides that, especially in a society as complex and dangerous as our own, that rearing takes time” (p. 197).  

Without question, Fox-Genovese says, children torpedo the feminist message of sexual equality and personal autonomy.  This message regarding marriage and family, succinctly stated, is “driven by two convictions:  first, that women should not be forced to marry in order to have children, and, second, that children do not need relations with parents of both sexes” (p. 235).  Such thinking, however, has little contact with reality.  “Children, not men, restrict women’s independence; children, not men, tend to make and keep women poor.  Few but the most radical feminists have been willing to state openly that women’s freedom requires their freedom from children.  Yet the covert determination to free women from children shapes much feminist thought and most feminist policies even, and especially those policies aimed at having the government assume a large part of the responsibility” (p. 229).   

Sadly enough—and despite so many mothers’ sacrificial efforts—children are not being reared well.  Symbolizing our disinterest in our young is the massive killing of the unborn through abortion.  In countries where children flourish, there are “significant limitations on abortion, which none of them defines as a woman’s ‘right’” (p. 244).  Given our elites’ support of abortion rights, however, it ought not surprise us that “the United States stands out among industrialized nations as the one in which women do best and children do worst.  Our society is unmistakably failing its children, who are increasingly being left to cope alone with a world that adults find daunting.  American parents spend 40 percent less time with their children than they did only a few decades ago—down from thirty hours a week to seventeen” (p. 201).  Thanks largely to radical feminists, firmly established in socially powerful positions (universities, media, and bureaucracies), neither traditional marriage nor devotion to children receives little praise and stay-at-home moms frequently find themselves subject to ridicule and discrimination.  

Yet women want men, as well as children, nearby.  They actually like men!  Unfortunately, radical feminists, pushing their cause beyond legal equity and economic opportunities, have launched “an assault on all manifestations of masculinity” (p. 145).  The ordinary women Fox-Genovese interviewed, however, consider “the struggle against men as actually an attack on their own femininity and sense of what it means to be a woman.  Increasingly, the ‘backlash’ against feminism is coming from women who are appalled by the claims and efforts presumptuously made on their behalf” (p. 145).  They appreciate and even celebrate the differences between the sexes and deeply crave a romantic union with a strong man who will protect and care for them.  However permissively they may regard premarital sex, they still want a lasting marriage with a faithful man.  Admittedly they frequently find their husbands “just plain impossible,” acting all too often like little boys!  But they still want to marry and stay married and, “with eyes wide open, women have clung to love and sex as central, if risky, to a woman’s life” (p. 168).  Contrary to the message conveyed by TV programs celebrating single mothers, ordinary women know how difficult it is to rear children without a husband, though large numbers of them are doing so.  “Ask any woman who as tried,” (p. 174) Fox-Genovese insists, and they will disabuse you of any fantasies regarding their lot.  Single mothers, unlike TV characters (or the elite female professors in universities) are overwhelmingly poor, and there’s usually too little money, too little time, too little help to make life enjoyable.  

In 2002—under the auspices of “compassionate conservatism”—President George W. Bush promoted affordable housing for all Americans, declaring:  “We can put light where there’s darkness, and hope where there’s despondency in this country.  And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home.”  A year later he proudly signed the “American Dream Downpayment Act,” implementing his aspirations.  Yet thoughtful critics, both academic and congressional, warned against such policies, with Barrons magazine prophetically decrying as spurious any compassion that exposed “taxpayers to tens of billions of dollars of possible losses, luring thousands of moderate-income families into bankruptcy, and risking the destruction of entire neighborhoods. . . .   Free down payments carry catastrophic risks. . .   Transferring the risk of homeownership from buyers to taxpayers does not endow virtue in America.  Giving people a handout that leads them to financial ruin is wrecking-ball benevolence’” (p. 46).  What a memorable phrase—“wrecking-ball benevolence”!  Six years later, looking bewildered amidst the economic meltdown, a baffled Bush asked his Secretary of the Treasury, “How did we get here?”  Amazingly, Thomas Sowell notes, “neither he nor many others in politics and the media saw any connection between their housing crusades and the economic crisis now facing the nation” (p. 100).  

Sowell’s The Housing Boom and Bust, rev. ed. (New York:  Basic Books, 2010) makes this connection and helps us understand the “great recession” of the past three years.  Though politicians such as Barney Frank and Barack Obama feverously blame “corporate greed” and Wall Street “fat cats” and unregulated capitalism, in truth:  “The development of lax lending standards, both by banks and by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac standing behind the banks, came not from a lack of government regulation and oversight, but precisely as a result of government regulation and oversight, directed toward the politically popular goal of more ‘home ownership’ through ‘affordable housing,’ especially for low-income home buyers.  These lax lending standards were the foundation for a house of cards that was ready to collapse with a relatively small nudge” (p. 57).  

As an economist (who has taught at prestigious universities such as UCLA) and syndicated columnist, Sowell deftly analyzes and explains what actually happened, beginning with “the economics of the housing boom.”  Housing sales skyrocketed during the first half-decade of the 21^st century largely as a consequence of risky policies promoted in Washington D.C. (Fannie Mae; Freddie Mac; HUD; the Federal Reserve System) and Wall Street (banks and brokers).  Underlying it all was a “smart growth” process launched in the 1970s that radically restricted land use in some areas, notably California, under the aegis of “preserving ‘open space,’ ‘saving farmland,’ ‘protecting the environment,’ ‘historical preservation’ and other politically attractive slogans” (p. 11).  In fact, “vast amounts of land for which the local inhabitants have paid nothing are nevertheless controlled by them politically for their own benefit, to provide a buffer zone between themselves and less affluent people” (p. 131).  Consequently, one could buy the same house in Houston for a fraction of what was required in San Francisco, so “most of the country was not suffering from skyrocketing housing prices, which were largely confined to particular communities in which there were severe limitations on the building of housing” (p. 16).  Housing prices and risky loans were, consequently, concentrated in these areas.  Add to this the “creative financing” that surged in the 1990s—low (or no) down payment loans, adjustable-rate mortgages, bundling mortgages—and there were soon millions of people “buying homes that they would not be able to afford in the long run” (p. 19).

Much of this resulted from political stratagems promoted by the likes of Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd (most recently co-authors of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the massive financial regulatory mandate imposed by the Obama administration), designed to insure “affordable housing” for everyone.  The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, hugely expanded by the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, enabled federal agencies to pressure banks and mortgage companies to finance “underserved” groups, especially low income and racial minorities.  When, under Clinton, HUD secretaries Henry Cisneros and Anthony Cuomo were given oversight of Freddie Mack and Fannie Mae—transforming staid conservative loan agencies into depositories for high-risk mortgages—new banking strategies were put in place, ripe for abuse.  And abused they were!  Community activists such as Jesse Jackson extracted millions of dollars from financial institutions fearing any accusation of racial profiling.  Crying out for “social justice,” these activists, including Saul Alinsky disciples such as Chicago’s Gale Cincotta, declared:  “‘We want it.  They’ve got it.  Let’s go get it’” (p. 117).  All told, Sowell calculates:  “Over the years, the sums of money extracted from financial and other business organizations by community activist organizations, using a variety of tactics, have amounted to more than a trillion dollars, according to the national Community Reinvestment Coalition—nearly all of this money being received since 1992” (p. 119).  

Having described the phenomena, Sowell succinctly analyzes the problem by distinguishing “enabling causes from impelling causes from precipitating causes” (p. 138).  Easy credit, available on virtually every street corner, was the primary enabling cause.  Impelling the process “were growing pressures from government regulatory agencies for mortgage lenders to reduce their lending requirements,” allowing most anyone who wanted a home to acquire one (p. 139).  The primary precipitating factor was the abrupt fall in housing prices, especially impacting those speculators (“flippers”) who banked on rapid, booming home values, resulting in the tsunami of defaults, leaving us amidst the ruins of lost savings and battered IRAs.  “Few things,” Sowell laments, “blind human beings to the actual consequences of what they are doing like a heady feeling of self-righteousness during a crusade to smite the wicked and rescue the downtrodden” (p. 162).  Declaiming themselves champions of social justice, politicians and community activists polished their images in the light of a pandering press and acted “like scavengers, able to extract large sums of money from banks and other institutions by raising claims of discrimination, whose power to delay government approval of bank mergers and other business decisions made pay-offs to these activists the only prudent course for those accused” (p. 162).  

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Paul Sperry, former Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily, begins The Great American Bank Robbery:  The Unauthorized Report about What Really Caused the Great Recession (Nashville:  Thomas Nelson c. 2011) with a somber note:  “It is official:  According to the Federal Reserve Board, the financial crisis has wiped out $14 trillion in American household wealth—an amount equal to the entire gross domestic product, and the worst loss of wealth since the Great Depression.  This equates to an average loss of more than $123,000 per household.  Yet Americans didn’t lose it.  It was taken” (p. xi).  And it was taken not by “predatory lenders”—the “fat cats” maligned by President Obama—but “by Washington social engineers and housing-rights-activists who used lenders to integrate them into the economic mainstream—regardless of their financial wherewithal” (p. ix).  In fact, the data indicate that the government, not Wall Street, was responsible for more than two thirds of the risky loans that caused the financial collapse.  

Leading the charge to close the “mortgage gap” by expanding the Community Reinvestment Act in the ‘90s was President Bill Clinton.  He issued executive orders, appointed activists to key bureaucratic posts in HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and used Janet Reno’s Department of Justice to further his agenda.   In 1995, and again in 2000, HUD pressured Fannie and Freddie to reduce their underwriting standards and approve loans they would have earlier rejected.  Clinton “plunged Fannie and Freddie into the subprime market and turned them into the twin towers of toxic debt they are today” (p. 10).  He “undercut traditional rules for lending” and “created an easy credit orgy” that resulted in the 2008 crash.  Before the crash, however, “Clinton’s top regulators boasted that their policies helped create both the primary and secondary markets for subprime loans” providing “minorities a ‘good option’ to buy houses and refinance debt.  Clinton himself at the time bragged about plundering banks for record hundreds of billions of dollars in loans for minority communities, before falling silent as those loans defaulted” (p. 4).  In retrospect, “Clinton’s brawnier CRA created a multitrillion-dollar shakedown industry that as devastated the financial industry.  The graveyard of banks bullied into making unsafe loans by ACORN and its clones piles higher and higher” (p. 153).  

At the time Republican Senator (and former economics professor) Phil Gramm, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, warned that Clinton’s policies enabled agitators “to blackmail banks for ‘kickbacks and bribes’” (p. 134).  And sure enough, fearing punitive measures from the federal government, banks “pledged billions of dollars in urban loans to ACORN and other radical community organizers to make them go away” (p. 134).  Consequently, Sperry calculates, “community organizers have shaken the banking industry down for an eye-popping $6.1 trillion . . . in total CRA agreements and commitments to poor and minority communities” (p. 134).  

Supporting, and profiting from, the Clinton policies of the ‘90s was a young “community organizer” in Chicago with close ties to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Barack Obama, whose “fingerprints are on the subprime scandal” (p. 37).  He was tutored by John McKnight, the Northwestern University professor who recommended him for admission to Harvard Law School. Implementing the strategies of Saul Alinsky, McKnight now directs the National People’s Action and trains street agitators to coerce banks to underwrite housing in minority neighborhoods.  Moving from Chicago to Washington, Obama determined to amplify, through executive orders, the Community Development Act far beyond Clinton’s goals.  Still more, claiming the financial crash was due to poorly regulated financial institutions, Obama established (through the Dodd-Frank Act) “the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a huge new federal bureaucracy that will, among other things, police lenders’ underwriting for ‘traditionally underserved consumers,’ and punish companies who do not do enough of it” (p. 45).  Rather than reverse the policies that precipitated the Great Recession, the president and his party have resolved to expand them!  “Overhauling the banking system without fixing Fannie and Freddie is like fighting terrorists without attacking the jihadist ideology motivating them.  All that’s changed with passage of the Dodd-Frank Act—which should be renamed the Fannie-Freddie Protection Act—is the size of government’s hand in the economy, now bigger than ever” (p. 216).  

This should awaken us, Sperry argues, to this reality:  “This country is in very serious danger of transitioning from an entrepreneurial economy to a parasitic economy—whereby race racketeers, grievance mongers, and street agitators (or as the First Lady euphemistically calls them, ‘social entrepreneurs’) along with group-identity politicians to such the lifeblood out of the real entrepreneurs in private industry” (p. 206).  Personifying the gravity of the danger is Elizabeth Warren, the Interim director of Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  A professor at Harvard Law School, she appeared in “Michael Moore’s market-bashing film, Capitalism:  a Love Story” and “is an anti-business crusader who favors nationalizing banks and capping the interest rates they can charge consumers” (p. 211).  To Sperry, she represents the “guilt-ridden country club radicals with their Ivy League pedigrees, who exploit underprivileged minorities and enlist them as foot soldiers in their romantic revolution for ‘social justice’ as atonement for their own privileged family status” (pp. 211-212).  They’re doing an inside job, not cracking safes but still looting the national treasury under the guise of remaking the world.    

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In Architects of Ruin (New York:  HarperCollinsPublishers, c. 2009) Peter Schweizer explains How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy—and How They Will Do It Again If No One Stops Them.  He rejects, as patently untrue and self-serving, assertions by Congressman Barney Frank and New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman that only the federal government can clean up and prevent the mess created by the unregulated private sector—what George Soros brands “free market fundamentalism.”  Au contraire, argues Schweizer:  American capitalism is, in fact, already tightly regulated; there was no deregulation during the decade leading up the Great Recession; and government agencies energetically policed and intimidated financial institutions.  

The title of chapter one sets the tone for Schweizer’s tome:  “The Robin Hood Agenda:  How a Gang of Radical Activists and Liberal Politicians Set the Stage for the Biggest Bank Heist in History.”  Their agenda rested “on the Marxist premise that all accumulated wealth is ipso facto an unjust expropriation of collective resources” (p. 39).  The progressive Robin Hoods were frequently community activists and lawyers working with organizations such as Operation PUSH and ACORN who sued banks,  accusing them of racist policies—i.e. red-lining loans in minority communities.  In a typical case, two plaintiffs received a total of $60,000 while their lawyers collected $950,000 of the million dollar out-of-court settlement.  “The charge of racism in banking launched a movement in the 1970s that has utterly transformed the American financial system” (p. 5).  

Targeting banks (the most vulnerable link in the capitalist system) was a basic strategy of Saul Alinsky, who spoke much of “helping people” but actually sought to gain access to power—taking it from the Haves and giving it to the Have-Nots.  Alinsky deeply appealed to a whole generation of young radicals—Caesar Chavez and Jesse Jackson, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  Less well-known, but especially important, was a Chicago housewife, Gale Cincotta, who made forcing banks to subsidize “affordable housing” her life’s work.  She organized the National People’s Action on Housing and sponsored a conference in Chicago that galvanized much national attention.  In time she brought together and coordinated an alliance of some 60 community organizations, all dedicated to changing the lending policies of area banks.  Congressional liberals, including Senator William Proxmire (its primary promoter), were impressed by her endeavors and ultimately passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1975.  

Though little noticed at the time, it laid the foundation for America’s financial collapse three decades later.  Alan Greenspan, testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in October 2008, said:  “‘It’s instructive to go back to the early stages of the subprime market, which has essentially emerged out of the CRA” (p. 45).  Subprime lending “increased twentyfold between 1993 and 2000” (p. 71), becoming a major lever wielded by President Clinton to “embark on a massive social engineering program that would, in the hallowed name of civil rights, dramatically undermine the lending standards of banks all over the country.  He thereby set into motion a series of events that would shake the financial foundations of the country—and the world—sixteen years later” (p. 47).  

Add to the expansion of the CRA Clinton’s take-over of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae—government agencies established during the Great Depression and heretofore “steady, even boring entities that simply served to lubricate the mortgage market so that middle-class Americans would find it easier to get a loan” (p. 77).  Such GSEs (government sponsored entities) are unique inasmuch that they “are private companies but are implicitly guaranteed by the federal government (that is, by us taxpayers)” (p. 79).  Once controlled by President Clinton they began to “redistribute wealth by taking on the affordable housing mission” (p. 80).  They—assisting lenders such as Countrywide Credit, the “largest lender to Hispanics and blacks in the country” (p. 94)—sucked up the subprime loans issued by banks and sold them to Wall Street institutions.  The big players in this highly politicized process naturally rewarded their allies.  Sweetly lucrative spots on the boards of directors of Countrywide and similar institutions were given prominent politicians—Henry Cisneros, following his stint at HUD; Nancy Pelosi’s son; California Governor Jerry Brown’s sister.  Fannie and Freddie, in their “private” role also gave generously to the political campaigns of friendly politicians—e.g. Kit Bond, Christopher Dodd, Barack Obama, Rahm Emmanuel.  And the fall-out of all this nearly defies comprehension.  “Today Fannie and Freddie are behemoths of debt and, as such, prime incubators of the economic crisis.  If you add together the mortgages they hold and the mortgages they have sold to investors around the world and on which they have offered a payment guarantee, these two companies hold potential liabilities of some $5 trillion.  . . . .  In effect, these two government-sponsored entities have liabilities equaling about half the current U.S. national debt” (p. 104).  

Suitably encouraged (or coerced) by the government, a litany of lending agencies—Wells Fargo, Washington, Countrywide, et al.—quickly entered the subprime mortgage business.  Some of them were led by “do good capitalists” such as Robert Rubin, a close friend of Bill Clinton, who envisioned themselves as part of a great societal transformation.  “Together, these two groups—the Washington and Wall Street branches of the emerging boomer overclass—forged a new form of liberal state capitalism” (p. 123).  Jon Corzine, accumulating a fabulous fortune working for Goldman Sachs before successfully running for senator and then governor of New Jersey, always identified himself as “a child of the ‘60s” and proved himself reliably liberal, championing “affirmative action, same-sex marriage, gun control, and universal health care” (p. 124).  Corzine and Rubin (and their financial institutions) prospered in the ‘90s, in part, because the federal government issued bailouts for countries such as Mexico and South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia, lest they default and endanger Goldman Sachs, Citibank, et al.  Such bailouts “made sure not only that the banks and investment houses were protected but that they made a nice return on their investments.  This is the essence of state capitalism:  the profits go to the financial firms, the losses are covered by taxpayers” (p. 138).  

Our Ruling Class assumed that their risky financial adventures would be covered by the federal government—as long as their businesses were “too big to fail.”  Less concern was evident for the ordinary folks who were borrowing money to buy houses.  People with no prospects of repaying them were granted loans on houses, and one cannot but wonder at such flagrant violations of common sense, but the Clinton social agenda mandated them and for a brief time “the number of minority homeowners soared” (p. 71).  In time, inevitably this “massive experiment in socially engineered housing equality created a whole new class of debtors in America.  And by far the greatest victims were the very people Clinton was trying to help” (p. 73).  Sadly enough:  “The mortgage crisis—and especially the meltdown of minority neighborhoods—is directly related to well-meaning efforts by liberals in government to tilt the housing market in their favor” (p. 159).  Joining the ranks of most revolutionaries they failed to heed the law of unintended consequences.  

“Experts,” according to an ancient and prescient adage, “should be on tap, not on top.”  Specialists of all sorts are invaluable—as brain surgeons or shortstops, actors or accountants, plumbers or professors—but they almost always err egregiously when they assume their mastery of a given subject qualifies them to pontificate on or control areas apart from their expertise.  This is especially true regarding “public intellectuals” determined to shape society.  The 20^th century, troubled by totalitarian regimes, sadly witnessed, noted Mark Lilla in The Reckless Mind, how famed “professors, gifted poets, and influential journalists summoned their talents to convince all who would listen that modern tyrants were liberators and that their unconscionable crimes were noble, when seen in the proper perspective.”  

Still more, as Eric Hoffer said:  “One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.  The intellectuals who idolized Stalin while he was purging millions and stifling the least stirring of freedom have not been discredited.  They are still holding forth on every topic under the sun and are listened to with deference.  [Jean-Paul] Sartre returned in 1939 from Germany, where he studied philosophy, and told the world that there was little to choose between Hitler’s Germany and France.  Yet Sartre went on to become an intellectual pope revered by the educated in every land” (Before the Sabbath).  Amazingly, says Thomas Sowell in Intellectuals and Society (New York:  Basic Books, c. 2009):  “As late as 1932, famed novelist and Fabian socialist H.G. Wells urged students at Oxford to be ‘liberal fascists’ and ‘enlightened Nazis.’  Historian Charles Beard was among Mussolini’s apologists in the Western democracies, as was the New Republic magazine” (p. 99).  “W.E.B. Du Bois was so intrigued by the Nazi movement in the 1920s that he put swastikas on the covers of the magazine he edited, despite protests from Jews” and celebrated, in 1936, the fact that “Germany today is, next to Russia, the greatest exemplar of Marxian socialism in the world’” (p. 99).  

As we all know, wisdom easily eludes highly educated individuals.  There are no “wise fools,” but “smart fools” populate most every coffee shop and faculty lounge.  Similarly, one may be highly intelligent without being an “intellectual,” and it is important to carefully define the “intellectuals” Sowell studies, for he restricts them to “an occupational category, people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas—writers, academics, and the like” (p. 2).  As “intellectuals” they easily take their own “notions” to be certain knowledge, and they often ignore the “common sense” of the multitude (living and dead) whose accumulated knowledge far exceeds their own.  Consequently, as Robert L. Bartley, late editor of the Wall Street Journal, stated, the free market “‘is smarter than the smartest of its individual participants’” and provides “more knowledge for decision-making purposes, through the interactions and mutual accommodation of many individuals, than any one of those individuals possesses” (p. 16).  

Given this guiding principle, Sowell applies it, in successive chapters, to various realms of society:  economics, social visions, the media and academia, the law, and war.  In economics (Sowell’s specialty) one finds utterly unlearned intellectuals (novelists and preachers, journalists and professors) making “sweeping pronouncements about the economy in general, businesses in particular, and the many issues revolving around what is called ‘income distribution” (p. 34).  Demonstrable factual errors—e.g. the “widening gap between the rich and the poor”—gain credence simply through endless repetition.  Renowned thinkers, ranging from George Bernard Shaw to Bertrand Russell to John Dewey, have made inexcusable (and elementary) mistakes when they become self-anointed authorities on the economy.  Decrying “greed” and calling for “compassion,” such intellectuals generally reveal the poverty of their understanding of basic economic principles and realities.  Apparently innocent of any historical grounding, they cite as true the Progressive muckrakers’ calumnies regarding “robber barons” and the New Dealers claims to having “ended” the Great Depression.  What actually happened is quite irrelevant as a fabricated past is promulgated to advance a current cause.  Sowell patiently—and cogently—shows the baneful consequences of taking seriously most intellectuals’ economic pronouncements.

Intellectuals in the media serve mainly as filters, promoting their social visions.  Thus in the 1930s Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for articles on Stalin’s Russia “‘marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity’” (p. 122).  That he failed to mention the massive starvation that killed millions of Ukrainians or the brutalities of the gulag hardly dented his reputation since he aired politically correct views.  Politicians from the heartland, such as Harry Truman, a voracious reader and thoughtful leader, are often tarred as country bumpkins, while the likes of Adlai Stevenson, who rarely read anything but “had the rhetoric and the airs of an intellectual,” are touted for their sophistication.  In our day:   “No factual information that could reflect negatively on homosexuals is likely to find its way through either media or academic filters, but anything that shows gays as victims can get massive coverage” (p. 126).

  The law too suffers at the hands of Progressive intellectuals who assume themselves superior to legislators past and present and determine to impose “social justice” through judicial fiat.  With justices such as Roscoe Pound (dean of Harvard Law School a century ago) and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, they find the Constitution to be a “living document” ever malleable in the hands of a select few.  Pound “advocated that an anointed elite change the nature of law to conform to what they defined as the ‘vital needs of present-day life,’ despite being at variance with (‘in advance of’) the public, with whose ‘moral sense’ the law was supposedly being made to conform.  Law, according to Pound, should also reflect what he repeatedly called—without definition—‘social justice’” (p. 164).  This is not the “legal justice” embedded in documents but a “social justice” emanating from the warm hearts of robed reformers!  

Sowell devotes two chapters to the intellectuals’ stance on war.  Anti-war sentiments have been cascading through our elite institutions since WWI, the “great war” that precipitated the laments of the “lost generation.”  Woodrow Wilson’s dream of a “war to end all wars” that would establish a “world made safe for democracy” lay shattered in the trenches of France.  Pacifism quickly became the mantra of the ‘20s and ‘30s, and anti-war novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front and A Farewell to Arms molded a new consciousness in the West.  School teachers (“one of the elements of the intelligentsia in the penumbra surrounding the inner core of intellectuals” {p. 294}) especially focused on the victims of the conflict who suffered and died, not the heroes who exemplified patriotic virtues.  While Hitler rearmed Germany, intellectuals in the West championed disarmament and “peace at any price.”  The Second World War would briefly revive support for the military, but within a decade the pleas for peace (especially with the USSR) resounded again.  

Evaluating this, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared, in his 1970 Nobel Lecture:  “The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smile.”  Anti-war activists, chanting pacifist slogans, subverted America’s effort to defend South Vietnam by alleging (with Walter Cronkite following the ’68 Tet offensive) that we were mired in stalemate” in an unwinnable “civil war.”  We now know Cronkite was wrong, for the guerrillas were crushed in Tet, but the “Communists political success consisted precisely in the fact that media outlets like the New York Times declared their military offensive successful” (p. 250).  As in France in the ’30s, so too in America in the ‘70s—anti-war forces demonized the military and championed appeasement, the Neville Chamberlain strategy which “became the leitmotif of media and academic discourse during the decades of the Cold War” (p. 259).  And it revived, with rancorous fury, as America invaded Iraq in 2003.  “Disdain for patriotism and national honor,” Sowell concludes, “was just one of the attitudes among the intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s to reappear with renewed force in Western democracies in the 1960s and afterwards.   How far history will repeat itself, on this and other issues, is a question for the future to answer.  Indeed it is the question for the future of the Western world” (p. 280).  

Should “intellectuals” continue to shape Western culture, there’s little hope for the future, Sowell suggests.  If the past century is a prelude for the next, there’s every reason to believe that intellectuals such as MIT’s Noam Chomsky and Stanford’s Paul Erlich, lambasting capitalism and predicting catastrophic ecological events, will continue to shape public policy.  “Many among the intelligentsia see themselves as agents of ‘change,’ a term often used loosely, almost generically, as if things are so bad that ‘change’ can be presupposed to be a change for the better” (p. 306).  But such is not often the case!  Indeed, should we entrust the future to the kinds of thinkers who have brought us to this point, we may very well witness the loss of those most precious goods secured by our traditions.  

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In logic one learns of the ad hominum fallacy—discrediting the argument by demeaning the advocate, shooting the messenger rather than considering the message.  Though logically fallacious, there remains a certain legitimacy in evaluating what’s claimed in accord with the character of the speaker.  Two decades ago the distinguished British historian Paul Johnson did precisely this when he penned Intellectuals (New York:  Harper & Row, Publishers, c. 1988), stressing that “the rise of the secular intellectual has been a key factor in shaping the modern world” (p. 1).    As many of these intellectuals were personally reprehensible, Johnson demands we consider this before taking as true their theories.  His work is perennially worth pondering, for by drafting biographical vignettes of eleven influential thinkers, he builds a case against trusting them for guidance in most all areas of life.  

To compress his case Johnson cites an illuminating 1946 essay wherein Evelyn Waugh enumerated these ten objectives of mid-century intellectuals:  “(1) the abolition of the death penalty; (2) penal reform, model prisons and rehabilitation of prisoners; (3) slum clearance and ‘new towns’; (4) light and heating subsidized and ‘supplied free like air’; (5) free medicine, food and clothes subsidies; (6) abolition of censorship, so that everyone can write, say and perform what the wish . . .; (7) reform of the laws against homosexuals and abortion, and the divorce laws; (8) limitations on property ownership rights for children; (9) the preservation of architectural and natural beauty and subsidies for the arts; (10) laws against racial and religious discrimination” (p. 316).  Rejecting any Christian foundations, they lead the public in “eroding social disciplines and rules” (p. 317).  That their objectives have been realized cannot be denied. 

Johnson begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau—“An Interesting Madman.”  That Rousseau largely shaped the modern world cannot be doubted, for his ideas guided the French Revolution and suffuse those subsequent revolutions designed to perfect both man and society.  Overcoming a variety of obstacles, sampling a dozen vocations, he failed in most everything for 30 years and was censored, by an employer, , the Comte de Montaigu, for exuding a “‘vile disposition’ and ‘unspeakable insolence’, the product of his ‘insanity’ and ‘high opinion of himself’” (p. 6).  The famed philosophe Diderot, who knew him well, “summed him us as ‘deceitful, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical and full of malice’” (p. 26).  He did, however, have a facility with words and wrote (at the age of 39) his Discours on the arts and sciences which established his reputation in Parisian circles.  To this he then added political prescriptions such as the Social Contract, novels such as Emile (containing his educational philosophy) and La Nouvelle Heloise, all igniting the fires of Romanticism that would impact the 19^th century.  He ingratiated himself in polite circles by acting impolite, highlighting “his ostentatious rejections of social norms by a studied simplicity and looseness of dress, which in time became the hallmark of all the young Romantics” (p. 12).  

Carefully examined, however, Rousseau appears eminently untrustworthy!  Touting himself for his commitment to truth and virtue, he filled his Confessions with half-truths, prevarications and distortions.  He wrote eloquently of love but showed remarkably little of it in his personal life, maligning his father and slandering his benefactors.  Quite authoritative in giving advice on educating children, he took an illiterate laundress, Therese, as his mistress for 33 years and heartlessly discarded their five children in an orphanage wherein two-thirds of all babies died in the first year.  Justifying himself, he asserted that children would have hindered his career as a writer and also declared:  “‘I know full well no father is more tender than I would have been’ but he did not want his children to have any contact with Therese’s mother:  ‘I trembled at the thought of entrusting mine to that ill-bred family’” (p. 22).  What he decided was that all children should be entrusted to the State—the perfect patrie he envisioned.  Therein they would be properly reared and become virtuous citizens.   But detached from his evil being Rousseau’s enthralling words took flight.  Few remembered him as the “monster” David Hume described.  Rather, he became, in the words of George Sand, “Saint Rousseau”—the guiding light for philosophers ranging from Kant to Schiller and Mill and novelists such as George Eliot and Victor Hugo.  Amazingly, “Tolstoy said that Rousseau and the Gospel had been ‘the two great and healthy influences of my life’” (p. 27).  

After devoting a chapter to “Shelley, or the Heartlessness of Ideas,” Johnson turns to Karl Marx, who “has had more impact on actual events, as well as on the minds of men and women, than any other intellectual in modern times” (p. 52).  He was reared in a “quintessentially middle-class” family headed by a father who “was a liberal and described as ‘a real eighteenth-century Frenchman, who knew his Voltaire and Rousseau inside out’” (p. 53).  Though inclined to scholarship, being “totally and incorrigibly deskbound,” Marx was actually much more a poet and moralist with an eschatological message; he was “not interested in finding the truth but in proclaiming it” (p. 54).  “In fact his greatest gift was as a polemical journalist.  He made brilliant use of epigrams and aphorisms” (p. 56).  

Marx marshaled copious quantities of data to support his arguments regarding the plight of the working man, but he seemed strangely indifferent to real workers “and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life” (p. 60).  Citing articles by his colleague Friedrich Engels, he routinely misrepresented economic statistics, portraying England as it was decades earlier and “omitting to tell the reader of the enormous improvements brought about by enforcement of the Factory Acts and other remedial legislation since the book was published and which affected precisely the type of conditions he had highlighted” (p. 66).  He treated both primary and secondary sources with “gross carelessness, tendentious distortion and downright dishonesty” (p. 66) and he deliberately falsified statements by statesmen such as Gladstone and economists such as Adam Smith.  Whatever the subject:  “He can never be trusted” (p. 68).  

Still more, what Marx wrote bears witness to what he was, showing “his taste for violence, his appetite for power, his inability to handle money, and, above all, his tendency to exploit those around him” (p. 69).  These traits are treated in depth by Johnson as he demonstrates the man’s utterly loathsome personality.  In the words of Bakunin:  “‘Marx does not believe in God but believes much in himself and makes everyone serve himself.  His heart is not full of love but of bitterness and he has very little sympathy for the human race’” (pp. 72-73).  Nor did he extend much sympathy to his immediate family, consigning wife and children to poverty through his Bohemian sloth.  His mother “is credited with the bitter wish that ‘Karl would accumulate capital instead of just writing about it’” (p. 74).  

“Of all the intellectuals we are examining,” Johnson says, “Leo Tolstoy was the most ambitious.   His audacity is awe-inspiring, at times terrifying,” for he imagined he could, through his own genius, “effect a moral transformation of society.  His aim, as he put it, was ‘to make the spiritual realm of Christ a kingdom of this earth’” (p. 107).  He declared he had never “‘met a single man who was morally as good as I’” and rejoiced to find within himself an “‘immeasurable grandeur’” (p. 107).  Without doubt he discovered and developed remarkable literary skills and penned some of the greatest novels ever written.  Indeed:  “There are times when he writes better than anyone who has ever lived, and surely no one has depicted nature with such consistent truth and thoroughness” (p. 112).  

But Tolstoy wanted more.  Controlling characters in his novels was not enough—he wanted to control actual persons, to mold them and their society into his vision of perfection.  Though haunted with guilt for his financial prodigalities and sexual indulgences, he deemed himself a Messiah called to rectify this fallen world.  As early as 1855 he aspired “to create a faith based on ‘the religion of Christ but purged of dogmas and mysticism, promising not a future bliss but giving bliss on earth’” (p. 124).  His religion seemed vaguely pantheistic with a sentimental sympathy for the poor (including the serfs on his own estate who occasionally elicited his attention).  He exemplified, as his wife noted, the intellectual who loves mankind but fails to love living persons, beginning with his own family.  “Tolstoy’s case is another example of what happens when an intellectual pursues abstract ideas at the expense of people” (p. 137).  Sadly for Russia, a cadre of intellectuals would take control of the country in 1917 and provoke an “infinitely greater national catastrophe” (p. 137).  Beyond harming himself and his family, his words helped ignite “a millenarian transformation of Russia herself . . . in one volcanic convulsion” that “made nonsense of all he wrote about the regeneration of society” (p. 137).    

“No intellectual history offered advice to humanity over so long a period as Bertrand Russell” (p. 197).  Making his reputation early on as a philosopher whose A History of Western Philosophy “is the ablest thing of its kind ever written” (p. 200), he  devoted most of his energies to advocating various social causes, especially pacifism, opposing armed conflicts from WWI to Vietnam and promoting nuclear disarmament.  Ironically, as Johnson notes, “Kingsley Martin, who knew Russell well, often used to say that all the most pugnacious people he had come across were pacifists, and instanced Russell.  Russell’s pupil T.S. Eliot said the same:  ‘[Russell] considered any excuse good enough for homicide’” (p. 204).  On a personal level, he not only married and divorced a handful of women but took and tossed aside a variety of mistresses throughout his life.  Calling others to be truthful, he lived dishonestly, even taking credit (and money) for articles written by others.  Lascivious, arrogant, dishonest, unkind—hardly a model worth emulating or lauding!

What’s true for Russell applies equally to the other intellectuals (including Ibsen, Brecht, Sartre and Hemingway, Edmund Wilson and Lillian Helman) Johnson describes.  What we should learn, quite simply, is this:  “beware intellectuals.  Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they week to offer collective advice” (p. 342).  “Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget:  that people matter more than concepts and must come first.  The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas” (p. 342).  

For 20 years I showed my ethics students Silent Scream, a moving anti-abortion film narrated by the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who died earlier this year.  He not only clearly described the abortion procedure (using an ultrasound) but shared his sorrow for playing a major role in legalizing it in 1972.  When he made the film he professed no religious faith, merely a humanistic concern for taking innocent life.  But in time, as he joined various anti-abortion endeavors, he came to faith and joined the Catholic Church.  To explain his spiritual journey, including his early commitment to abortion-on-demand, and to evaluate the evil of killing unborn babies, he wrote The Hand of God:  A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind Washington (Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 1996).  “This book,” he said, “will be semi-autobiographical, using myself as a paradigm for the study of the systematic fission and demise of one system of morality, no matter how fragmented, fatuous, and odious, and the painful acquisition of another more coherent, more reliable, and less atomistic one” (p. 3).  

His father, a brilliant obstetrician, “was a formidable, dominant force in my life and in many ways forged the ruthless, nihilistic pagan attitudes and beliefs that finally drove me to unleash—with a handful of co-conspirators—the abortion monster” (p. 5).  Though nominally Jewish, the Nathansons (father and son) were thoroughly secularized, much attuned to the relativism of modernity.  Highly intelligent, Nathanson moved easily through Cornell University and McGill Medical School.  Importantly, at McGill he “forged a strong, even compelling teacher-student relationship” (p. 45) with Professor Karl Stern, an alluring lecturer who had left Judaism to enter the Catholic Church in 1943—a journey beautifully portrayed in The Pillar of Fire.  While unaware of this at the time, 20 years later, “floundering in the wake of my hegemony of the abortion clinic and the doubts that were beginning to crack my own pillars of certainty,” Nathanson learned “that even as I had spoken to him on so many occasion about so many other things, he [Stern] possessed a secret I had been searching for all my life—the secret of the peace of Christ” (p. 46)   

While at McGill Nathanson impregnated a young woman.  To eliminate the problem his father sent him money to kill the baby, and he slipped easily “into the satanic world of abortion” (p. 58).  Years later he would impregnate another woman (who begged to give birth to the child) and performed, without remorse, the abortion himself, killing his own child.  “I have aborted the unborn children of my friends, colleagues, casual acquaintances, even teachers.  There was never a shred of self-doubt, never a wavering of the supreme confidence that I was doing a major service to those who sought me out” (p. 61).  Practicing medicine at Women’s Hospital in New York, he came to see abortion as a valuable service, particularly for the poor, making life better for the disadvantaged.  

His commitment to abortion rights led to a relationship with Larry Lader, an “ardent feminist and a great admirer of Margaret Sanger” who “was obsessed with abortion” (p. 87).  Nathanson and Lader teamed up to legalize abortion, forming the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) and other action committees.  Manipulating the media, recruiting ideological feminists and liberal clergy, fabricating statistics, making emotional appeals to pity and equity, they effectively orchestrated a repeal of New York’s abortion laws in 1970.  A year later Nathanson became director of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, an abortion clinic launched with the assistance of the Rev. Howard Moody and his Clergy Consultation Referral Service.  He continued practicing obstetrics and gynecology and toured the country urging politicians to legalize abortion (unexpectedly accomplished through judicial fiat in Roe v. Wade in 1972) and “was known as the abortion king” (p. 124).  

While promoting the cause, however, new technologies (preeminently the ultrasound) confronted and troubled Nathanson with the stark truth of abortion.  To actually see the fetus in the womb revealed its fully human form, and he began to see the vapidity of all the assorted pro-abortion arguments he’d earlier espoused.  He publically expressed his doubts and performed his last abortion in 1979, persuaded “that there was no reason for an abortion at any time; this person in the womb is a living human being, and we could not continue to wage war against the most defenseless of human beings” (p. 128).  He clearly describes pre-natal developments, insisting “we have a virtually unbroken series of quantifiable, noncontingent, scientifically verifiable and infinitely reproducible events that signifies the beginning of a new human life” (p. 138).  

His growing pro-life convictions led to an alignment with pro-life people—virtually all deeply religious and unusually at ease with themselves.  He was amazed at the “sheer intensity of the love and prayer” evident in those who gathered to protest outside abortion clinics.  His convictions regarding the sanctity of life, coupled with his amazement at Christians witnessing to their faith, led to an openness to the Lord and Giver of life.  So, “for the first time in my entire adult life, I began to entertain seriously the notion of God—a god who problematically had led me through the proverbial circles of hell, only to show me the way to redemption and mercy through His grace.  The thought violated every eighteenth-century certainty I had cherished; it instantly converted my past into a vile bog of sin and evil; it indicted me and convicted me of high crimes against those who had love me , and against those whom I did not even know; and simultaneously—miraculously—it held out a shimmering sliver of Hope to me, in the growing belief that Someone had died for my sins and my evil two millennia ago” (pp. 193-194).  

Now he is “no longer alone” (p. 196).  The lost is found.  The blind now sees.  The sinner’s saved.  With his mentor Karl Stern, Nathanson has discovered, as Stern wrote in a letter, that that “‘toward Him we had been running, or from Him we had been running away, but all the time He had been in the center of things’” (p. 196).  Along with Nathan’s earlier treatises—Aborting America and The Abortion Papers—this book provides invaluable insight into the monumental battle between the cultures of life and death.  

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In her junior year at Texas A&M Amy Johnson decided work as a volunteer in a nearby Planned Parenthood facility, persuaded she could help thereby establish equal rights for women.  Her compassion was ignited by a Planned Parenthood recruiter, who told her about anti-abortion zealots determined to deprive women of their rights and criminalize the procedure, “forcing women to choose between greater poverty and unwanted babies they couldn’t care for or dangerous back-alley butchers” (p. 17).  Johnson’s volunteer work morphed into a full-time job and she became director of the clinic, effectively working for eight years, engaged in what she believed to be a righteous endeavor, helping women prevent unwanted pregnancies.

One day, however, she was unexpectedly drafted to handle the ultrasound probe while an abortionist killed a baby.  Despite her role as director of the clinic, she had always avoided any involvement in the procedure, thinking of herself as a counselor providing birth control information and materials, helping women in need.  Holding the probe, however, she saw a twelve week-old baby and thought about her own little girl, who had looked the same at 12 weeks.  “What am I about to see?” she asked herself.  “My stomach tightened.  I don’t want to watch what is about to happen” (p. 4).  But she couldn’t escape.  Indeed she was a part of the team aborting the baby.  In those crucial moments she faced the enormity of the act:  “What was in this woman’s womb just a moment ago was alive.  It wasn’t just tissue, just cells.  That was a human baby—fighting for life!  A battle that was lost in the blink of an eye.  What I have told people for years, what I’ve believed and taught and defended, is a lie” (pp. 6-7).  

Johnson (with Cindy Lambert) tells the story of her transformation in unPLANNED:  The dramatic true story of a former Planned Parenthood leader’s eye-opening journey across the life line (Wheaton:  Tyndale House Publishers, c. 2010).  Her account is powerful not only because of her change of heart but also because it gives us a glimpse into the abortion rights world—populated by tender-hearted, church-going, professing Christians such as Johnson.  She grew up in a pro-life family and regularly attended a church that opposed abortion before going off to college.  There she turned into a party girl and became sexually involved with an older man, Mark, when she was 20.  This led (at his suggestion) to an unintended pregnancy’s termination.  The “problem” solved, she “had no regrets.  No sadness.  No struggle over whether I’d done was right or wrong.  Just a definite sense of relief.  Whew.  That’s behind me.  I can get on with my life now” (p. 25).  

She buried her abortion deep in her heart, determined to forever keep it a secret.  She and Mark married, and she returned to A&M where she pursued a degree in psychology.  The marriage soon collapsed, but just as the divorce was granted she found herself pregnant again.  So she procured yet another abortion, reciting all the rationalizations she was learning at the Planned Parenthood facility, where her volunteer work had flourished and she was on staff.  She also began interacting with pro-life protesters who stood and prayed outside the clinic, trying to persuade women to protect their unborn children.  At first she saw them as enemies to be attacked, but in time their love and sincerity prodded her to consider their position.  She was especially moved by Sister Marie Bernadette who silently prayed, serving as a “conscience” for them all.  

She also met and married and had a baby with Doug, a pro-life believer who challenged (without ever personally attacking) her to evaluate her position with Planned Parenthood.  They attended an evangelical church but were no allowed to join the congregation because of her work.  So they found an Episcopal church which officially approved abortions and affirmed her conviction that she was doing the Lord’s work by helping needy women.   Her conviction was reinforced by other “Christians” in the clinic, including some Roman Catholics, who claimed to be untroubled by promoting what their church decried.  (Indeed, one of the messages of this book is the relative impotence of church teaching—folks like Johnson pretty much make up their own morality independent of religious teachings.)    

Johnson loved her work, but as she received promotions and awards she moved into the upper echelon of Planned Parenthood management she grew distressed by what she encountered.  Money seemed to preoccupy the organization’s leaders, and since “abortion services” generated significant revenue they figured significantly in Planned Parenthood’s agenda.  Her own clinic in Bryan, which only scheduled abortions every other Saturday, was ordered to find ways to increase the numbers.  The bottom line, not needy women, dictated decisions.  Then came the day when she held the ultrasound wand and helped abort a baby.  “Now that the scales had begun to fall from my eyes, the guilt of countless abortions, including my own two, came crashing down on my shoulders” (p. 123).  

The next day she and Doug went to church, where she recited the liturgy’s confession of sin and did so with total honesty.  In that moment, as the ancient words “spilled out, I sensed God’s love and forgiveness pouring in” (p. 129).  She realized that this was a turning point for her, though she needed to find ways to rightly terminate her career with Planned Parenthood.  She found comfort and assistance in the folks she’d for years considered foes—the Coalition for Life pro-life protesters who gathered each Saturday to decry abortions!  They listened to her, loved her, and tried to help her.  And her husband, above all, totally supported her.  Her trusted colleagues at Planned Parenthood, however, betrayed her.  She confided to two of them she considered friends, and they assured her that they likewise wanted to sever their relationship with the clinic, even enlisting her help in filling out resumes for job applications.  But when Planned Parenthood initiated legal action (a restraining order) against her, it became clear that they “had not just turned against me but had apparently given false statements to the court” (p. 206).  When the case came to trial, however, she was ably defended by an attorney affiliated with the Coalition for Life and the judge dismissed the case.  

Amidst all the publicity generated by Johnson’s departure from Planned Parenthood—and the legal actions that followed—her decision gained national attention.  She appeared on such programs as The O’Reilly Factor and was enabled to bear witness to the wonderful workings of God in her life as she came to the Light.  Doors opened for her to speak and write to advance the pro-life cause, and when she tells her story she joins “in the legacy of prayer begun in Bryan, Texas,” and prays “for the women and men whom God is going to touch next, the lives He will save, the people he will use” (p. 256).  This treatise, unPLANNED, eloquently advances that endeavor.

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In Defending Life:  A Moral and Legal Case against Abortion Choice (Cambridge:  University Press, c. 2007), Francis J. Beckwith writes primarily “to provide a thorough defense of the pro-life position on abortion and its grounding in a particular view of the human person, a view I will argue is the most rational and coherent one that is at the same time consistent with our deeply held intuitions about human equality” (p. xi).  While focused on abortion, the book really argues that anyone defining man as the imago dei—the “intellectual scaffolding for the Declaration of Independence, the abolitionist movement, Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial” (p. xi)—automatically presumes the sanctity of life.  

Beckwith, currently a philosophy professor at Baylor University, succinctly summarizes his argument:    

1.  The unborn entity, from the moment of conception, is a full-fledged member of the human community.

2.  It is prima facie morally wrong to kill any member of that community.

3.  Every successful abortion kills an unborn entity, a full-fledged member of the  human community.

4.  Therefore, every successful abortion is prima facie morally wrong.  

Declarative statements (premises and conclusions to a syllogism) such as these obviously defy the pervasive moral relativism and tolerance so dominant today.  (That most moral relativists turn absolutistic is, of course, a given—the same Peter Singer who allows infanticide becomes utterly dogmatic when asserting animal rights!)  But when pro-abortion spokesmen address the issue they generally insist that moral decisions are simply personal or cultural preferences without objective standing.  Beckwith examines and rejects such relativism, proving it self-refuting.  If you’re truly a relativist you simply have nothing to say:  since nothing is true or false, right or wrong, why would one bother making any moral pronouncements?  

Yet moral relativists routinely impose their personal preferences through the judiciary!  Reversing a century of legal tradition holding that the “unborn is constitutionally a person protectable under the Fourteenth Amendment” (p. 22), today’s abortion laws, shaped by Roe v. Wade (1973) and Doe v. Bolton (1973), allow abortion on demand.  But during the past four decades, Beckman says, legal scholars have overwhelmingly rejected the spurious historical assertions (based upon two shoddy articles by a NARAL lawyer!) Associate Justice Harry Blackmun employed to make his case in Roe.  Inexplicably, Blackmun appeared utterly uninterested in scientific or philosophical evidence; he declared that the Court need not determine when life begins, thereby decreeing that the “unborn is not a human person” (p. 30)!  In his judicial fiat, Blackmun “seems to be confusing physical independence with ontological independence; he mistakenly argues from the fact of a pre-viable unborn’s lack of independence from its mother that it is not an independent being, a ‘meaningful life.’  ‘Once again,’ writes Hadley Arkes, ‘the Court fell into the fallacy of drawing a moral conclusion (the right to take a life) from a fact utterly without moral significance (the weakness or dependence of the child).  The Court discovered, in other words, that novel doctrines could be wrought by reinventing old fallacies’” (p. 36).  

Beyond the Court’s decisions, Beckwith addresses and declares vacuous the various popular and philosophical arguments set forth by abortion rights’ advocates.  He shows, scientifically,  that there is a being who is human living in the womb from the moment of conception:  it is “indisputable that at syngamy a new human being, an individual human being, exists and is in the process of development and is not identical to either the sperm or the ovum from whose uniting it arose” (p. 66).  Unlike a house or a bench, which we assemble over time, adding part after part, a fully human being appears in an instant!   “From this point until death no new genetic information is needed to make the unborn entity an individual human being” (p. 67), and “the unborn at any stage of her development looks perfectly human because that is what humans look like a that time” (p. 152).  

Pro-abortion advocates such as Judith Thomson, appealing to a multitude of fallacious arguments—pity, tolerance, feelings, etc.—almost always avoid this manifest reality:  what is killed in abortion in a fully human being.  And nothing justifies such killing!  With meticulous care Beckwith explains and rejects such “pro-choice” appeals and extends his discussion to the related issues of cloning, bioethics and reproductive freedom, for “the answer to the philosophical question lurking behind abortion—Who and what are we?—turns out to be the key that unlocks the ethical quandaries posed by these other issues” (p. 203).  It really matters that what is killed in abortion is truly an innocent human—a being different in kind from ants or antelopes.  

“This moral truth,” says Beckwith in the book’s final paragraph, “is the one strand in the tapestry of republican government that, if removed, will put in place premises that will facilitate the unraveling of the understanding of ourselves and our rights that gave rise to the cluster of beliefs on which the rule of law, constitutional democracy, and human equality depend.  As my dear friend Hadley Arkes has elegantly argued, if we are, as even the supporters of abortion must assume, bearers of moral rights by nature (including the ‘right to choose’), then there can be no right to abortion, for the one who has the ‘right to choose’ is identical to her prenatal self.  Consequently, the right to abortion can only be purchased at the price of abandoning natural rights and replacing them with the will to power.  It is a price not worth paying” (p. 229). 

“‘Statecraft,’ Aristotle wisely instructed his pupils, ‘is soulcraft,’ by which he meant that the moral premises embedded in the social and legal fabric of a political regime provide direction and sustenance for the character and beliefs of its citizens” (p. 42).  Our laws, as well as our schools, shape our minds.  Our abortion laws espouse a culture of death that cannot but destroy our body politic in the long run.  Deeply thoughtful treatises such as Beckwith’s, however intellectually challenging, are needed to restore the full equality of all persons to standing in our nation.  

Rodney Stark, a professor at Baylor University, clearly declares the thesis of The Victory of Reason (New York:  Random House, c. 2005) in his subtitle:  Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success.”  More precisely:  “Faith in reason is the most significant feature of Western Civilization” (p. 105).  He explores the historical processes within Christianity wherein “reason won the day, giving unique shape to Western culture and institutions” (p. x) beginning with Early Church thinkers such as Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine who insisted “that reason was the supreme gift from God and the means to progressively increase their understanding of scripture and revelation.  Consequently, Christianity was oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the superiority of the past” (p. x).  

To Stark:  “The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations” (p. xi), and, furthermore:  “the rise of the West was based on four primary victories of reason.  The first was the development of faith in progress within Christian theology.  The second victory was the way that faith in progress translated into technical and organizational innovations, many of them fostered by monastic estates.  The third was that, thanks to Christian theology, reason informed both political philosophy and practice to the extent that responsive states, sustaining a substantial degree of personal freedom, appeared in medieval Europe.  The final victory involved the application of reason to commerce, resulting in the development of capitalism within the safe havens provided by responsive states.  These were the victories by which the West won” (p. xiii).  

Uniquely among all religions, Christians urged individuals to reason.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  All things were made by Him, and without Him was nothing made that was made.”  With these words the Apostle John paved the way for a rational religion with mystical implications.  Accordingly, Augustine demanded:  “‘Heaven forbid that God should hate in us that by which he made us superior to the animals’” (p. 6).   Reason enabled believers to delve ever deeper into the storehouse of Scripture, better discerning God’s revelation, and successive Church councils refined doctrines as well as refuted heresies.  Creation and Scripture both reveal God, so Christians such as St. Albert the Great (Aquinas’ mentor) encouraged careful, scientific study of the world.  Consequently, as Alfred North Whitehead concluded, in his definitive Science and the Modern World, scientific development took place in the West as Medieval thinkers insisted “on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah with the rationality of a Greek philosopher’” (p. 15).  

Still more, as theologians pondered the mystery of the Trinity they developed a unique understanding of persons who freely think and will.  “Saint Augustine wrote again and again that we ‘possess a will,’ and that ‘from this it follows that whoever desires to live righteously and honorably, can accomplish this’” (p. 25).  As persons free to think and make decisions, we find freedom our natural milieu and our common human nature provides the foundation for natural rights and justice.  So while slavery was tolerated within Christian circles for several centuries, there was a strong bias against it.  As Lactantius noted, in his Divine Institutes, Christians considered others “brothers,” equal in worth before God.  “‘Since human worth is measured in spiritual not in physical terms, we ignore our various physical situations:   slaves are not slaves to us, but we treat them and address them as brother in the spirit, fellow slaves in devotion to God’” (p. 77).  Slavery simply disappeared in the Medieval world.   

Contrary to egregious stereotypes still circulating in many schools and  universities—“a hoax originated by antireligious, and bitterly anti-Catholic, eighteenth-century intellectuals” such as Voltaire (p. 35)—science flourished (often within  monasteries) throughout the Medieval period.  The “Dark Ages” were in fact hardly dark at all!  As the Roman Empire collapsed, millions of individuals were increasingly free to innovate and prosper.  New technologies—water mills, wind mills, horse collars and shoes increasing horse power, wheeled plows, fish ponds, cloth making, chimneys, eyeglasses, clocks, compasses—gradually improved the living standard of ordinary folks.  Simultaneous advances in high culture—pipe organs, harpsichords, violins, polyphonies, Romanesque and Gothic architecture, Dante and Chaucer, scores of universities such as Oxford and Salamanca and Prague—demonstrated the sophistication and originality of Christians throughout the Middle Ages. 

Capitalism developed in the ninth century as Catholic monks managing profitable farms sought to “reformulate fundamental doctrines to make their faith compatible with their economic progress” (p. 55).    As Stark defines it:  “Capitalism is an economic system wherein privately owned, relatively well organized, and stable firms pursue complex commercial activities within a relative free (unregulated) market, taking a systematic, long term approach to investing and reinvesting wealth (directly or indirectly) in productive activities involving a hired workforce, and guided by anticipated and actual returns” (p. 56).  As monasteries acquired more and more land, devout monks sought to manage them well, appropriating new technologies and envisioning a cash economy with just prices far better than antiquated barter systems, realizing the importance of property rights, profits, mortgages and credit.  Private property, Thomas Aquinas argued, must be defended “‘because human affairs are more efficiently organized when each person has his own distinct responsibility to discharge’” (p. 79).   Eminent theologians such as Aquinas “declared that profits were morally legitimate, and while giving lip service to the long tradition of opposition to usury, these same theologians justified interest charges” (p. 63).  They intuited the “miracle” of capitalism—“as time goes by, everyone has more” (p. 106).  

During the late Middle Ages a vigorous capitalistic system flourished.  Abacus schools (often called “Italian schools”) proliferated and trained clerks (adept at double-entry bookkeeping) for slots in burgeoning businesses.  International banks, bills of exchange, and venture capital loans all fueled a dynamic economy.  Additionally, as Christians “medieval capitalists often were concerned about the personal morality of those whom they employed” (p. 111) and stressed frugality and charity.  Within capitalist circles was an association of folks known as the Humiliati, devout Catholics who eschewed luxury and committed themselves to “‘austerity, prayer, fellowship and manual labour, while living with their families’” (p. 121).  They also “pledged to give all of their ‘excess income’ to the poor” (p. 121).  Moving north, capitalism subsidized the woolen mills in Flanders and Holland.  A “precursor to the modern stock exchange” was evident in Bruges, a booming city with a population of 90,000 as early as 1453.  In Antwerp and Amsterdam—and indeed wherever free enterprise capitalism thrived—prosperity ensued.  

When nation states developed in the 15^th century, however, these capitalist centers collapsed as the increasingly absolute monarchs of Spain and France determined to control (and expropriate for themselves) their nation’s wealth.  They extended their tentacles into Italy and Holland, crushing (through taxation and regulation) the industries that enabled Florence and Bruges to proper in earlier centuries.  What Adam Smith would label mercantilism led to economic stagnation and repressive policies subverting the common weal throughout Europe.  England also turned in a despotic direction under the Tudors as Henry VII and his descendents sought to centralize power and control the nation’s wealth.  But important historical events (e.g. as the Magna Charta) and traditions (e.g. a genuinely decentralized economy) countered the centralizing tendencies of absolutism and allowed certain kinds of representative government and free enterprise to flourish.  Consequently, Englishmen at home and abroad nourished a capitalist commitment and Alexis de Tocqueville described the United States “early in the nineteenth century as ‘one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world’” (p. 212).  

So “Christianity created Western Civilization” (p. 233).  Concluding his work, Stark cites “one of China’s leading scholars” who wondered why the West now dominates the world and “studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective.  At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had.  Then we thought it was because you had the best political system.  Next we focused on your economic system.  But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion:  Christianity.  That is why the West is so powerful.  The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics.  We don’t have any doubt about this’” (p. 234).  And, says Stark,  “Neither do I” (p. 235).  

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On September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI delivered an oft-misrepresented lecture at the University of Regensburg addressing “faith, reason and the university.”  Reminding his hearers of the historic importance of such scholarly conclaves, he pointed to an earlier gathering near Ankara, Turkey, in 1321, between Manuel II Paleologus, the Byzantine emperor, and a noted Persian intellectual.  Challenging the historic Islamic commitment to Jihad, the Christian ruler highlighted the blatant contradiction between one of Mohammed’s early declarations—“There is no compulsion in religion”—and his later endorsement and implementation of Jihad, holy war.  Manuel II issued a challenge:  “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”  

Spreading the faith with the sword is wrong, Manuel argued, because such violence violates the very nature of God.  “God,” the emperor said, “is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.  Faith is born of the soul, not the body.  Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak and reason properly, without violence and threats.”  To a Christian ruler, “shaped by Greek philosophy,” Pope Benedict says, “this statement is self-evident.  But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent.  His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality” (#14).  Unlike Muslims, Christians believe that in the Logos and an intricate harmony between faith and reason.  Unfortunately, this balance was lost as Nominalists (such as William of Occam) in the late Medieval world joined Muslims in elevating God’s Voluntas above His Logos.  

Protestants such as Luther further tended to dehellenize theology—even despising, in Luther’s case, reason itself.  Immanuel Kant’s 18^th century effort to anchor “faith exclusively in practical reason” (#35) arbitrarily reduced religious faith to a purely subjective response, making it a “personal experience,” and liberal theologians in the 19^th century (following Schleiermacher) effectively discarded the “God of the philosophers” in order to seek personal encounters with the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”  This complex historical development, cogently summarized by Benedict XVI, has led to the pervasive skepticism and relativism so baneful in the modern academy.  Removing reason from religion, voluntarists—whether Mohammed or Duns Scotus, Luther or Kant—paved the way for the pervasive irrationalism so evident everywhere.   With Kant, they mistakenly tried to protect religion by discarding metaphysics and setting “thinking aside in order to make room for faith” (#35).  So we now face a world clearly described by Socrates, in Phaedo, when he appraised the many conflicting philosophies pervading Athens and said:  “It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being—but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer great loss.”  However difficult the challenge, Benedict urges us to side with Socrates—and Emperor Manuel II—and discern the truth of being, the Logos whereby all exists, and find our real raison de etre.  

Benedict’s lecture, says James Schall in The Regensburg Lecture (South Bend:  St. Augustine’s Press, c. 2007), “is one of the fundamental tractates of our time” (p. 9).  It deserves extended commentary as well as reading and re-reading.  The Pope “has an amazing capacity to get to the heart of things.  He is a wise man in the proper sense of that term.  That is, he knows how to find the order in things.  He knows the foundational issues” (p. 5).  Open to Reality, he wants to “straighten out our minds about where we are and what we are about.  Acting correctly presupposes thinking correctly, presupposed understanding what is” (p. 10).  Rightly understanding what is about God rightly concerns us.  “Is He logos or not, is He sola voluntas or not.  We need to grasp the import of such inquiry” (p. 44).  Christians who worship a reasonable God and Muslims who worship an arbitrary, voluntarist Allah do, in fact, worship different gods!  Therein lies the radical, irreconcilable differences between these two religions.  Christian martyrs die for their Lord; Muslim suicide bombers randomly kill, taking others’ lives in the name of Allah.  

Remarkably akin to Islam, the modernity crafted by Western intellectuals such as Descartes and Rousseau and Marx assumes “that the first principles of reason are themselves subject to will.  Contrary to Aristotle, they do not ‘bind’ reason to what is.  Modernity, in its philosophic sense, means that we are bound by nothing.  There is no order in things or in the mind, for that matter, that would ground any order.  There is only the order we ourselves make and impose on things.  This view of modernity has developed, in large part, to protect us from the notion that truth obligates us.  The real question thus becomes, in the classical sense, what ‘limits’ reason?  The answer is what is, reality” (p. 106).  

Eminent Christian theologians, from Origen onwards, have relied on Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle as well as biblical revelation.  Western Civilization stands as witness to their invigorating intellectual work.  We need (personally and collectively) both good philosophy and theology.  As the 21^st century begins, the West has, sadly, fallen on hard times.  (I saw hints of this when, mid-way through my career as a history professor, World Civilizations replaced Western Civilization as a staple in the general core.  Jesse Jackson’s orchestrated marches at Stanford University toward the end of the ‘80s—chanting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Gotta Go”—memorably marks that transition.)  

Professor Schall’s exegesis of Benedict’s lecture amplifies and illuminates its message.  We must reestablish the truth at all things were made by the Word—God, essentially, is the Mind making all that is coherent.  As rational creatures, we are called to behold this Mind and conform our minds to His.  “Mind is universal, as Cicero often said” (p. 128).  Either God capriciously calls for Jihad or rationally pleads for brotherly love.  Between the two gods there is simply no common ground.  Reasonable discussion, the Pope hopes, might lead to a common commitment to what our minds, open to what is, simply must tell us what is true regarding the “One in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”  

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Roger Scruton—an academically trained English philosopher who now writes full time, the author of eminent treatises such as Modern Philosophy and The Aesthetics of Music—explores, in The West and the Rest:  Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (Wilmington:  Intercollegiate Studies Institute, c. 2002) “the vision of society and political order that lies at the heart of ‘Western civilization’” (p. x).  From its inception Christianity held aloft Jesus words:  “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”  Two realms, St. Augustine’s two cities—the religious and the political—should co-exist and retain their proper boundaries.  “The idea persists in the medieval distinction between regnum and sacerdotium, and was enshrined in the uneasy coexistence of Emperor and Pope on the two ‘universal’ thrones of Medieval Europe” (p. 4).  Consequently, “throughout the course of Christian civilization we find a recognition that conflicts must be resolved and social order maintained by political rather than religious jurisdiction.  The separation of church and state was from the beginning an accepted doctrine of the church” (p. 5).  While many religions are tribal or national, Christianity was ever a “creed community,” open to Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slaves and freemen.  Flourishing within the Roman Empire, it “adopted and immortalized the greatest of all Roman achievements, which was the universal system of law as a means for the resolution of conflicts and the administration of distant provinces” (p. 21).  In the secular realm, Christians were loyal, law-abiding citizens of the state; in the spiritual realm, however, they obeyed God only.  

Islam, on the other hand, insists there can be no separation of church and state—all is one under the sovereign authority of Allah and the ulama who claim divinely imparted knowledge and imams who interpret Mohammed’s edicts in the Koran.  Islam is not a political system, but it insists on controlling the political order.  “Like the Communist Party in its Leninist construction, Islam aims to control the state without being a subject of the state” (p. 6).  Islamic law, the sharia, minutely regulating all kinds of behavior, is envisioned as the perfect resolution to all social as well as religious issues. 

In Scruton’s judgment, the separation of church and state began to unravel during in the West during the Enlightenment.  This was because it is “impossible to understand the French Revolution of one does not see it as primarily a religious phenomenon” (p. 44).  Both the monarchy and the Church were to be destroyed by the Revolution’s “fanaticism and exterminatory zeal” (p. 45).  As revolutionary movements and ideologies grew empowered during the next two centuries, a “godless theology” gained momentum and a rather unanticipated “culture of repudiation” emerged, extending even to such hallowed entities as the family.  This is evident in a pervasive “demand for rights” wherein politics degenerates into “a scramble to claim as much from the common resources as they will yield” (p. 68).  Added to this is the postmodern repudiation of objective truth and, indeed, reason itself!  Enamored of Nietzsche, eminent intellectuals such as Foucault and Derrida recite his prescription:  “There are no truths, only interpretations.”  An inconsistent and self-contradictory relativism necessarily devolves from this, placidly holding that all cultures, as well as all viewpoints, are equally valid.  “All distinctions are ‘cultural,’ therefore ‘constructed,’ therefore ‘ideological,’ in the sense defined by Marx—manufactured by the ruling classes in order to serve their interests and bolster their power.  Western civilization is simply the record of that oppressive process, and the principal purpose of studying it is to deconstruct its claim to our membership” (p. 79).  Nothing can be judged, nothing condemned—except, of course, universal truths and objective values and anyone who dares challenge the regnant relativism.  

Thus today we have a newly-apologetic West facing a suddenly-militant and aggressive Islam.  In an economically globalizing world conflicts inevitably erupt and “the Islamists have identified the core component of the system that they wish to destroy” (p. 134).  Globalization’s tentacles, spreading into Muslim lands, revealed a secular society without foundation in divine law, challenging most all the traditions sacred to Islam.  “It is the very success of America in founding a common loyalty without a shared religious faith that so incenses the Islamist extremists” (p. 65).  Scruton’s analysis is fresh and insightful.  While not the whole story, it tells important truths regarding what distinguish “the West from the rest” (p. 159).  

“There are two rocks,” said F. W. Robertson, “in this world of ours, on which the soul must either anchor or be wrecked—the one is God, and the other is the sex opposite.”  Alarmingly, a recent study (“When Marriage Disappears” by Bradford Wilcox) notes we are witnessing “the inexorable unwinding of the American family.”  For many decades media, schools, and laws have successfully chipped away at society’s most vital cornerstone:  marriage.   What’s most precious has been ridiculed and subverted.  In response to this deterioration, resolutely defending marriage has become a singularly Christian task, as is evident in the work of the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, one of the pre-eminent equity feminists of her generation.  While teaching history at Emory University, she was the founding director of the Institute for Women’s Studies and launched the first doctoral program in Women’s Studies in the U.S.  (In time she would be excluded from the program by women more committed to ideology than scholarly inquiry).  In 2003 President George W. Bush awarded her the National Humanities Medal for “illuminating women’s history and bravely exploring the culture of America’s past and present.”  For many years she shared with her husband Eugene a deeply Marxist ideology before undergoing a remarkable conversion to the Catholic faith in 1995.  Accompanying her spiritual transformation came a fresh commitment to the traditional understanding of marriage expressed in a collection of essays entitled Marriage:  The Dream that Refuses to Die (Washington, ISI Books, c. 2008).  

In the Introduction to this treatise, Shiela O’Connor-Ambrose says Fox-Genovese was particularly alarmed by the successes enjoyed by advocates of abortion and same-sex marriage.  “Grasping the parallels between the movements for abortion and same-sex marriage in their clever use of rhetoric to obscure their shared goal of reducing or erasing communal claims upon the individual, Betsey strongly felt the urgent need to convince Americans—especially ordinary Americans—that behind the appealing rhetoric of same-sex marriage proponents lay a frightening new world in which all relations are ‘contracts or realizations of desire’  Such a theoretical unpinning renders human relations by definition ‘temporary and volitional,’ and serves, ultimately, to liberate the ‘individual from all binding engagements’” (p. xiii). 

  Male and female God made us to multiply and replenish the earth—so both the Bible and Fox-Genovese affirm.  After taking a brief historical tour to illustrate the inescapable importance of marriage as an institution, she concludes:  “We have no justification for seeking sexual symmetry in some mythic golden age and then blaming some putative rise of patriarchy for the imprisonment and brutalization of women within marriage.  . . . .  One culture and religion after another, notwithstanding differences on countless matters, have adopted the same foundational premises.  First, the human species divides into males and females who are at once mutually attracted and sufficiently different to be mutually antagonistic, but whose cooperation is necessary to the perpetuation of the human race.  Marriage binds them together into what Willa Cather brilliantly called a state of mortal enmity as well as into the bonds of sacramental love.  Second, and more importantly, from the perspective of civilization and the species, marriage proposes a reconciliation of the most fundamental natural difference among human beings—sex.  For to flee from engaging that difference is ultimately to flee from all the others” (pp. 20-21).  In short:  “history teaches that civilization has always been accompanied by—indeed grounded in—an ideal of marriage and the family that attempts to join the biological difference of men and women in the common project of responsibility for the next generation” (p. 127).  There’s more to marriage than two people deciding to share life together—there’s a much broader social aspect:  the good of society’s at stake.    

Great numbers of us, products of the 20^th century, celebrate “companionate marriage,” the result of more than a century’s effusion of novels, how-to manuals, sermons and songs.  Romance became the be-all and end-all of marriage.  Neither parents nor pastors nor theology now play formative roles in selecting one’s spouse.  Fox-Genovese is notably perplexed by the fact that Americans—and American women in particular—are highly religious without incorporating their faith into their marital decisions.  However much may be said in church, in this area folks just go their own way.  “A mere third of the women who value religion and attend church believe that their church has decisively influenced their view of abortion, less than a quarter credit religion with an important influence on their understanding of marriage, and only 13 percent credit it with influencing their understanding of gender equality” (p. 74).  “What are we to make,” she wonders, “of women who believe that their church offers them moral and ethical standards but who are not influenced by its teaching on abortion, marriage, or gender equality”” (p. 74).  What we must think of course is this:  individualistic Americans cede little authority to the church.  

Only feelings matter in our courting and marrying—or contracepting and divorcing.  Finding one’s “soul-mate,” enjoying ecstatic affection, living forever within the caresses of one’s beloved, are imagined.   Marry for love and only for love.  All this came about in the revolutionary era, particularly as the 18^th century flowed into the 19^th.  As Romanticism and its celebration of individual freedom seized the public imagination so too companionate marriage became the ideal.  Consequently many conditions for women improved during the 19^th century, during which “campaigns were underway to permit married women to control their own property, to liberalize divorce, and to permit mothers to retain their children should divorce occur.  Other campaigns focused upon women’s access to higher education and the right to vote” (p. 37).  But in the process of making women equal with men, challenging “men’s authority within marriage,” the focus shifted from the marital union to the individuals composing it.  The law of unintended consequences set in, ultimately weakening marriage itself, for by seeking leverage in that relationship women turned increasingly to the “draconian authority of the state” (p. 41).  “Ironically, the very emphasis upon love and mutuality between husband and wife and among parents and children that fostered the best features of this [companionate] family also opened the way to its erosion” (p. 124).  

What we now realize, Fox-Genovese argues, is that though Christians failed to perfectly balance the “equal but different” tensions within marriage the “secular theorists and activists, who are increasingly liberated from any limitations on the freedom and rights of the individual, have done much worse” (p. 42).  So today marriage itself is on trial, something without precedent in human history.  “The notion of marriage as the union of one woman and one man has been dissolved in a flood of options, reduced to the status of one ‘choice’ among many” (p. 45).  Court decisions, following the liberationist reasoning of “privacy” in Roe v. Wade, now validate same-sex marriages, insisting “that the weightiest questions about the value of human lie are matters of purely personal concern” (p. 45).  Less men and women marry and more children are born to single women.  The 60s mantra of doing “your own thing” has become the norm.  Individuals’ feelings and desires—not the good of spouses and children—have become ultimate.  Whereas children in traditional cultures are cherished they have been significantly betrayed in ours, where they “are increasingly being turned over to others or left to their own devices” (p. 78).

Acerbating this disinterest in children is the mounting toll exacted by abortion, one of the main reasons Fox-Genovese has turned increasingly critical of secular feminism.  Rooted in the recently unearthed legal rationale for personal “privacy” and proclaimed as an ultimate “right,” abortion on demand “has remained a sacred tenet of feminists, who regard it as the cornerstone of women’s sexual freedom and who oppose any restrictions on it” (p. 84).  Elevating personal privacy above familial well being “represents a significant departure from the legal norms of Western European nations.  Symbolically, the reduction of privacy to the privacy of the solitary individual effectively sounds the death knell of the family as an organic unit with claims on its members” (p. 85).  Now is the time, she says, to reverse this process.  

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I first heard of Eugene Genovese when I was in graduate school, studying history in the mid-60s.  He was somewhat notorious for his overtly Marxist approach in writing distinguished studies such as Roll, Jordon, Roll:  The World the Slaves Made.  (He notes, wryly, that he was “the only professor in America whom Richard Nixon personally and publicly campaigned to get fired.”)  Years later, attending a small session at a convention of the National Association of Scholars, I listened to him and his wife recount their struggles with the young leftists now ascendant in many American universities.  Their honest insights impressed me, as has his recent biography of his late wife:  Miss Betsey:  A Memoir of a Marriage (Wilmington DE:  ISI Books, n.d.).  As he begins this book he cites a remarkable letter from Benjamin H. Hill (a Georgia politician witnessing William Tecumseh Sherman’s march through his state in 1864) to his wife:  “‘You are so much better than I that I often feel humbled.  In qualities that elevate and dignify; in virtues that are pure, sincere, and steadfast, I never saw the equal of my wife. . . .  I have at least the very comforting reflection that is has ever been my business to serve you, my delight to please you, and my ambition to be like you. . . .  If to appreciate one’s companion be the virtue of domestic life, then this is my slight merit, for whether I have a country or not, even a home or not, I expect to die as I have lived—my wife’s worshiper’” (pp. 3-4).

Genovese met Betsey on a blind date when he was 38, she 27.  He was a noted historian, she a graduate student.  He’d had two failed marriages, she’d had none.  In that first encounter the “extraordinary breadth and depth of her reading and culture took me aback” (p. 8).  He was initially impressed—and grew ever more impressed thereafter.    From her perspective, Betsey resolved to marry Gene after their first date!  So their romance developed quickly, despite her parents’ objections.  They persevered and were married in a civil ceremony in 1969.  Accepting his proposal, however, “she made clear that she wanted a large family.  Soon to turn forty, I gulped:  ‘Uh, how many children do you want?’  ‘A lot—about ten,’” she replied!  Unfortunately they were unable to have the kids she longed for, but she adjusted beautifully to this loss—as she would to many more.  Refusing the make the domestic hearth a combat zone, refusing to make her husband a work in process, “she never nagged, harped or harangued” (p. 28).  

What they did work at was their academic careers, culminating in appointments to positions at Emory University.  Together they taught courses, wrote books, and addressed professional meetings.  Domestically, as Princeton’s Robert George noted in his obituary for Betsey:  “‘Gene was the head of the family.  Betsey managed everything.’  And so she did” (p. 51).  From Betsey’s perspective:  “With me in mind she liked to paraphrase Frances Butler Leigh, who ran a plantation in Georgia during post-slavery Reconstruction; ‘If you want a husband to do something, first tell him what to do, then show him how to do it, and, finally, do it yourself’” (pp. 56-57).  They further shared a spiritual journey culminating with their entrance into the Catholic Church.  He had abandoned his cradle Catholicism when (aged 15) he embraced Communism.  She was reared by atheistic parents and lacked any belief in “God, but she never felt at peace with her unbelief” (p. 65).  While sympathizing with her husband’s Marxism, “she found the American Left intellectually shoddy and, worse, devoid of moral and ethical criteria.  She and I agreed on the intellectual shoddiness and discussed the moral problem many times, always returning to Dostoyevsky’s haunting statement:  ‘If God does not exist, then all is lawful’” (p. 66).  Highly ethical herself—instinctively anti-abortion for instance—she needed a higher Source for her moral certainties.  So in 1994 she embraced the Christian faith; the next year Gene followed her, entering the Catholic Church of his childhood.  

Long before this, however, they had found themselves defending a traditional Catholicism then under assault from “liberation theology and other irrationalities” (p. 71).  Though Marxists open to assistance from all sides, they “considered an ideological blending of materialistic Marxism and Christianity an absurdity.  . . . .  In the end, we were driven to defend Catholic theology against ‘dissident Catholics’ who had no time for the fundamentals of Catholic theology, Church doctrine, and the teachings of the Vatican.  So there we were nonbelievers and committed Marxists, fervently defending the doctrines of original sin and human depravity against professed Catholics who replaced the ostensibly dated teachings of St. Paul, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas with those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Karl Marx” (p. 71).  When they entered the Church they wanted and found the real thing—the truth—historically evident since the time of Christ.  For Betsey, who admired both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, “‘Liberal’ and ‘progressive’ religion held no attractions” (p. 83).  

Genovese’s celebration of his wife ends painfully.  Betsey struggled, throughout her life, with a variety of physical infirmities.  Her final years found her battling allergies and rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, moving from cane to walker to wheelchair.  But she remained quite active until her final few months.  “Betsey had an extraordinary ability to endure pain” (p. 123), ever smiling and upbeat.  Reflecting on her impact upon him, he simply says:  “Our life together brought us inexpressible joy” (p. 134).  Would that each of us who have lost the love of our life could write so eloquent a testimony to the joyous blessings brought us by a wonderful wife!  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Alice von Hildebrand’s Man and Woman:  A Divine Invention (Naples, FL:  Sapientia Press, c. 2010) insists there is “a divine invention” manifest in God’s decision to “make man in our image.”  Consequently:  “male and female created he them.”  Embedded in our very nature is the primordial union of two sexes—a union regained in godly marriage.  “The plenitude of human nature,” says von Hildebrand, ‘is found only in the unity of male and female.  Homo (man) is not to be found only in the male (vir), nor is it to be found only in the female (mulier).  It is in both, together.  They are two beings of equal dignity, but complementary; therefore, they are mutually necessary for enriching one another” (pp. 1-2).  Given the enormity and pervasiveness of original sin, we are estranged from both God and each other, so any perfect union eludes us, but the fundamental reality endures:  male and female belong together.  Single males easily turn brutish; single females easily become seductresses.  To become what we’re designed to be we need each other.  

Denying this mutual need are secular feminists who are committed, she believes, to the “destruction of marriage, the family, the Church, and society” (p. 19).  Feminists disdain femininity, disliking, as G.K. Chesterton noted, “the chief feminine characteristics.”  Von Hildebrand shares, with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the sense that in their endeavor to masculinize women feminists reject reality—their very nature.  “‘It does destroy the feminine,” said Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward, “and in so doing it also destroys humankind.  It disassembles the female side of humankind and the male side also suffers’” (p. 24).  Until women recognize that their primary vocation is to be a wife and mother rather than careerists they will find mounting dissatisfaction with their estate.  For there is, she insists, a distinctive “feminine genius” eminently evident in motherhood.  At the moment of conception “God ‘touches’ the female body to create a child’s soul.  In this creation, neither father nor mother have any part, but because the baby’s soul is infused within the woman’s body, there is a closeness between the mother and her Creator that has no duplicate in fatherhood.  Her body, touched by God Himself, becomes a sacred ground” (p. 42).  Taking Mary as their exemplar, godly women joyously obey their Lord—“be it done to me according to your word.”  Rather than living for themselves, or for their husbands, they find ultimate satisfaction in conformity to God’s will.  Fundamentally, “the mission—the role—of women is essentially religious.  Their mission is intimately related to eternity.  This is why, when all the works of men will be destroyed by fire, the children that women have conceived, having an immortal soul, will live forever.  Only those willfully blind can fail to perceive that the devil has achieved his greatest triumph since the victory in the Garden of Eden by convincing women of their inferiority and waging war on maternity” (pp. 91-92).  

Commending this treatise, Thomas Howard declares:  “It is scarcely an overstatement to say that if this book were read, and heeded, by this epoch, the Gadarene Slide on which modern culture finds itself would be halted.   In this slender volume we find the authentic vision of what womanhood is.  Dr. von Hildebrand takes us to the very substance of the ineffable mystery of gender.”  

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In Becoming Your Husband’s Best Friend (Eugene OR:  Harvest House Publishers, c. 2010) Lisa and David Frisbie provide us with another (of now nearly a dozen) helpful treatise on building a healthy marriage.  They craft case studies with literary dexterity—attention to details, dialogue, character development—and cull insights worth pondering.  This publication, as the title indicates, targets women who long for improvements in their marriage but realize their husbands are disinterested in actively coming alongside to help.  (Would that they would!)  Women are generally more concerned with the quality of the relationship than their husbands (who often blissfully assume that all is, in fact, quite well!).  

Various women are portrayed, illustrating problems of unspoken expectations, unconscious pride, unrelenting criticism, unhelpful gossip, and unresolved bitterness.  Carrie expected her husband to duplicate her father’s romantic and helpful qualities—but never told her husband about it!   Maria pitied herself as a victim, heroically carrying out family obligations without her husband’s assistance or concern.  Darlene deluged her husband with relentless accusations and searing censures.  Melody surprised her husband while he was watching sexually explicit material on TV and shared her outrage with family and friends, leading to such toxic gossip that the couple had to move to another city.  Sharon angrily endured a lazy, unwashed beer-guzzling slouch who watched TV while she earned a living.  

All of these women have legitimate complaints.  All of them also realize, following counsel with the Frisbies, that they will have to try to initiate changes to improve things.  And they do, primarily by deliberately changing their own behaviour.  Once Carrie’s husband learns what she deeply desires he actually tries to act differently—he was simply clueless amidst his wife’s silent expectations.  Maria allowed God to deal with her hubris and discovered her husband slowly becoming the man she longed for.  Darlene began to bite her critical tongue and found her husband ever more open to a better relationship.  Melody learned, acknowledging her own less-than-perfect self, to forgive her husband and resolve to share confidential details regarding him only with appropriate persons.  Sharon joined a vibrant church, embraced the Christian faith, and found herself to begin living graciously, foregoing the bitterness that had soured her life.  Rather quickly her husband cleaned up, found a job, and joined her in the great adventure of married life.  

So the stories in Becoming Your Husband’s Best Friend all have a happy ending.  That’s not to say there are guarantees, sure-fire recipes for success.  But as Lisa and David Frisbie insist, when a woman deals rightly with her marital distress there’s real hope she can restore it.  

Whereas journalists generally write books based upon interviews and other journalists’ accounts,   Stanley Kurtz (a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center as well as a contributing editor of National Review Online) has diligently plowed through archival materials as well as available resources on the internet and in print to compose Radical-in-Chief:  Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (New York:  Threshold Editions, c. 2010).  In sum:  “From his teenage years under the mentorship of Frank Marshall Davis, to his socialist days at Occidental College, to his life-transforming encounters at New York’s Socialist Scholars Conferences, to his immersion in the stealthily socialist community-organizer networks of Chicago, Barack Obama has lived in a thoroughly socialist world” (p. 387).  When Kurtz began reporting on Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, he steadfastly refused to apply the “socialist” tag to the candidate, but subsequent research, and the radical slant of the president’s policies, have driven him to insist that the word is, rightly defined— in accord with European “democratic socialist” precepts—accurate.  Importantly:  it’s neither slanderous to say that Labor Party Prime Minister Tony Blair pursued socialistic goals nor pejorative to assert, with Kurtz:  “Evidence clearly indicates that the president of the United States is a socialist” (p. 15).  

By the time he arrived at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Barack Obama was, according to an acquaintance, John C. Drew (himself a “revolutionary Marxist” in those days) a socialist with a “‘hard Marxist-Leninist point of view’” (p. 88).  Moving to New York to attend Columbia University, Obama  experienced what Kurtz believes is a “transformational moment” while attending the Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference in 1983—one of the two or three such conferences he attended during his brief residence in New York.  Major socialist spokesmen such as Michael Harrington (who wrote The Other America, the treatise that had inspired the Democrats’ “War on Poverty” in the 1960s) presided over such events, and many of them urged their followers to advance the cause through “community organizing.”  

The celebrated success of Mayor Harold Washington in Chicago (a major influence on young Obama) had recently illustrated how black and Hispanic voters, activated by a voter-registration campaign and aligned with affluent progressive whites, could orchestrate social change.  “The buzz in the socialist world in April of 1983 was that blacks would be the leaders of a new socialist-friendly American political movement—a reincarnation of the sixties civil rights struggle, uniting all the races, but this time pushing beyond traditional civil rights toward egalitarian ‘economic rights’” (p. 43).  Importantly, at these conferences Obama encountered theoreticians such as Peter Dreier, who espoused the position of Andre Gorz (a French Marxist) calling for “transitional reforms” to slowly move capitalism in socialist directions.  Dreier called for “a ‘revolution of rising entitlements’ that cannot be abandoned without undermining the legitimacy of the capitalist class’” (p. 47).  A steady expansion of government spending will, in time he said, drive the country to the edge of “fiscal collapse.  At that point, a public accustomed to its entitlements will presumably turn on its capitalist masters when they propose cutbacks to restore fiscal balance” (p. 47).  Significantly:  “twenty-five years later, Peter Dreier would serve as an advisor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign” (p. 49).  

Inspired to become a community organizer, Obama briefly worked for a Ralph Nader group in New York before moving to Chicago to implement the strategies of Saul Alinsky in South Chicago.  Here he was weekly mentored by one of the founders of an organization that sought to radicalize the city’s Mexicans and work effectively “with local Catholic churches.  This was a continuation and development of Alinsky’s own church-based organizing techniques” (p. 101).  Obama tried to duplicate such strategies in the city’s black congregations, which led to his alliance with Jeremiah Wright.  He further met and was trained by Dr. John L. McKnight, a professor at Northwestern University who later recommended him for admission to Harvard Law School.  “McKnight is an expert in both health policy and community organizing” (p. 124) who helped make the Community Reinvestment Act a tool with which to pressure banks to “make high-risk ‘subprime’ loans to low-credit customers” (p. 125).  An open admirer of Sweden’s democratic socialism, McKnight “helped turn Obama into a prominent advocate of single-payer health care” (p. 126), a cause he espoused while in the Illinois State Senate.  

Obama’s Chicago success was significantly boosted by the Midwest Academy, an Alinskyite training institute founded by ‘60s radicals to train community organizers that quickly garnered clout in the Democrat Party.  Voluminous archival materials in the Chicago Historical Society reveal the Midwest Academy as “a window onto the inner workings of a modern-day socialist front group.  With the assistance of the archives, it is possible to identify numerous links between the Midwest Academy and both Barack and Michelle Obama” (p. 146).  Here the Obamas encountered Rahm Emanuel, Lane Evans, Jan Schakowsky, the brothers John and Bill Ayers, and other influential Chicago notables.  Here too they imbibed the ideas of Harry Boyte, “a longtime community organizer” who helped shape “the Academy’s concept of a stealthy brand of incremental socialism rooted in community organizing” (p. 153) by urging his acolytes to disguise their real agenda with words such as populist, progressive, or communitarian.  “In 2008, Harry Boyte was an advisor to the Obama presidential campaign” (p. 171).  He and another scholar wrote an Obama-approved policy paper that proposed linking his campaign with “grassroots movement building—very much a continuation of the Midwest Academy’s political strategy” (p. 171).  

President Obama’s Chicago connections with ACORN (The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) further illustrate his radicalism.  Kurtz devotes 70 pages to detailing Obama’s “broad, deep, longstanding, and intimate” (p. 192) ties to ACORN, which until its recent restructuring “was the largest and most influential community organization in the United States” (p. 191).  ACORN especially sought to use the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 to force banks to grant loans to lower lending standards for the poor and minority applicants.  By persuading powerful politicians—e.g. Henry Gonzales, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, and Bill Clinton—to pass laws mandating such policies, especially in regards Fannie Mae and Freddy Mack, ACORN clearly helped precipitate the financial crash of 2008.  Though the president has tried to deny his close links with ACORN, documents in the Wisconsin Historical Society prove the contrary.  Indeed, “it seems fair to say that Barack Obama knowingly lied about his ties to ACORN during the 2008 campaign” (p. 258), illustrating “a systematic and deep-lying pattern of deception about his radical political past” (p. 259). 

Obama’s ties to ACORN were strengthened by his positions in several foundations that provided both money and connections basic to his political career.  Here he worked closely with Bill Ayers, the notorious ‘60s terrorist.  For nearly a decade Obama and Ayers “were longstanding political partners” working together at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund, “two leftist Chicago foundations” (p. 261).  Obama publicly praised Ayers’s writings and funneled major financial support to the projects of him and his radical allies.  Obama also established lasting ties with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Afro-centric pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, which he attended (he claimed in 2004) “on a virtually weekly basis” (p. 323).  President Obama, of course, has disavowed close connections with both Ayers and Wright, but the documentary record, closely examined, reveals their role in his Chicago years.  

Now that he’s president, Obama seems committed, Kurtz argues, to moving America leftward.  Still following Saul Alinsky’s agenda, he conceals his real beliefs and objectives, posing as a pragmatist interested only in solving pressing problems.  But his administrative appointments, his support for the stimulus bill, his taking control of General Motors and Chrysler, his nationalizing the student loan program, and his commitment to health care reform reveal his real agenda.  He is enacting the “stealth socialism” that he “studied and absorbed as a community organizer in Chicago.”  It is “a new socialism, a stealth socialism that masquerades as a traditional American sense of fair play, a soft but pernicious socialism similar to that currently strangling the economies of Europe” (p. viii).  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

When he decided to write a book on President Obama, Dinesh D’Souza rejected socialism as the key to understanding him.  Rather, in The Roots of Obama’s Rage (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2010), he takes seriously Obama’s autobiography—significantly titled Dreams from My Father—seeking to understand him as both a man and a president in accord with it.  Though politically conservative D’Souza (born and reared in India) early rejoiced to see an African American elected president and never joined “the conservative chorus bashing” him (p. 4).  In time, however, he grew alarmed at the policies Obama both espoused and implemented, fearing that:  “If Obama serves two terms, he will likely leave America a very different country than it is now.  This is certainly his objective; he has set himself the task, as he put it in his inauguration address, of ‘remaking America’” (p. 18).  Amazingly, D’Souza concludes:  “We are today living out the script for America and the world that was dreamt up not by Obama but by Obama’s father.  How do I know this?  Because Obama says so himself.  Reflect for a moment on the title of his book:  it’s not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father.  In other words, Obama is not writing a book about his father’s dreams; he is writing a book about the dreams that he got from his father” (p. 198). 

Obama’s dreams clearly come neither from America’s founders nor from Civil Rights leaders but from his Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr.  The younger Obama himself is intriguingly enigmatic— certainly the most obscure man to vault into the White House—and the “political mystery of his agenda is compounded by the psychological mystery of the man” (p. 2).  In an effort to understand and explain him, D’Souza found that he, as a non-white native of India with similarly elite educational experiences in America, enjoys a unique perspective.  He also recognizes the “rich melange” of anti-colonial “political and intellectual figures” who shape Obama’s (and his father’s) world (p. 13).  “Fortunately for me, this is intellectual terrain that I know well.  Steeped as I am in the politics and history of the Third World, these are figures whom I have studied” (p. 14). 

In his effort to “distil the essence of the man,” D’Souza insists that Obama “is his father’s son, and his dreams are derived from his father’s aspirations and failures.  Everyone who knows Obama well says this about him.  . . . .  The son is realizing everything the father wanted.  The dreams of the father are still alive in the son’” (p. 26).  This Obama’s autobiography makes clear, for “his whole book is an elaboration of how he internalized his father’s dreams and goals.  Obama calls his memoir ‘the record of a personal, interior journey—a boy’s search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.’  And again, ‘It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself’” (p. 26).  This explains Obama’s decision, following his father’s death, to begin calling himself “Barack” instead of “Barry.” (His father, Barack Sr., beginning his studies in Hawaii, had adopted the American name “Barry” and his son had been called the same).  

This name change, D’Souza says, “was a very big deal.  He didn’t just take his father’s identity; he self-consciously rejected his father’s American name in favour of the senior Obama’s African identity.  He obviously “identified with his father more than anyone else, and undertook an intense psychological and ultimately actual journey to Africa in order to discover his dad and in the process to find himself.  Unable to actually find his deceased father, he did the next best thing:  he embraced his father’s ideals and decided to live out the script of his father’s unfulfilled life” (p. 27).  Though forced to acknowledge his father’s many flaws and failures, he could still maintain that his dad “had great vision, great ideals, a great plan of reform” and he could live out his “heroic mission.  In changing the world into the image of his father, he would complete the task that his father couldn’t, and thus he would become worthy of his father, a real African and a real man” (p. 27). 

Yet his father, from most every standpoint, seems unworthy of emulation!  All told, “Barack Sr. managed a grand total of three wives, one wife-to-be, and eight children.  He was a terrible husband and a worse father” (pp. 64-65).  He was, by all accounts, quite intelligent and charming; he easily impressed people and had striking rhetorical gifts; but he drank heavily and died when he crashed his car driving drunk.  Very little for his son to admire!  “What gave dignity and depth, however, to Barack Obama Sr. was that he was part of a much larger movement—the movement to build a free and independent Africa in the aftermath of colonial rule.  We know that this history made an impact on young Obama because he tells us so” (p. 66).  This became clear in a pivotal moment when Obama visited his father’s grave in rural Kenya.  While sitting there watching some hyenas devouring a wildebeest in the distance, awash with emotion, he fell to the ground and wept.  Finally, “‘I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin.  The pain that I felt was my father’s pain’” (p. 125).   To D’Souza this event signifies Obama’s “own death and rebirth” (p. 122).  Still more:  though he’d earlier “resolved to imbibe his father’s personality, his magnetic charm, his persuasiveness” it was here that “Obama receives something more fundamental.  In Obama’s own words, ‘I sat at my father’s grave and spoke to him through Africa’s red soil.’  . . . .  It is here that Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his father’s body but by embracing his father’s cause.”  He will pick up the family torch.  “As Obama himself puts it, the dreams of the father forge the dreams of the son, and through a kind of sacramental experience at the family grave, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright” (p. 126). 

Accordingly, D’Souza sets forth a theory—an hypothesis—rooted in Obama’s own words, to help explain him.  “My argument in this book is that it is the anti-colonial ideology of his African father that Barack Obama took to heart” (p. 34).  Obama’s dreams are the anti-colonial dreams of his father, and his “anti-colonialism is deeply felt, and it suffuses his writings and speeches” (p. 35).  Anti-colonialism explains the president’s continual criticism of and apology for America’s past behavior.  It explains why a president would offend the British by rudely returning a bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office for years.  Such behavior appears inexplicable.  “But with his anti-colonial background, Obama probably remembers Churchill as an imperialist who soldiered for empire in India and Africa” (p. 42). Anti-colonialism can certainly explain Obama’s continual commitment to “spreading the wealth,” redistributing income from the haves to the have-nots, for he considers the United States a “neocolonial giant eating up more than its share of the world’s resources” (p. 48).  

As an anti-colonist (following the positions his father set forth in a pivotal 1965 essay wherein even a 100% tax rate was justified) Obama “believes that the rich have become rich at the expense of the poor; the wealth of the rich have become rich at the expense of the poor; the wealth of the rich doesn’t really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just” (p. 167).   This explains why he sponsored, as U.S. senator, “the Global Poverty Act that would have committed the United States to spending over $800 billion over a decade or so to eradicate poverty in the Third World and also to enable Third World countries to follow Western environmental standards” (p. 156).  He also supports controversial legislative initiatives such as “cap and trade” less because of any environmental concern but because it affords an opportunity to equalize the world’s wealth.  “Obama’s basic assumption is that America and the West are using up too much of the planet’s resources.  This is a huge theme with Obama; he never stops talking about it” (p. 157). 

Anti-colonialism underlay Barack Obama’s decision to strongly identify with his African father rather than his American mother.  In part this was a political decision, for he “seems to have recognized that race was now a source of power in American society” (p. 97).  Obama attended Honolulu’s elite high school, Punahau, but he says little about his classes.  On his own, however, he read (rather voraciously) writers such as W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X and Franz Fanon, whose radicalism shaped his budding race-consciousness.  Though he seems to have encountered little actual race discrimination, his reading fueled a “black rage” that seemed to become part of his self-identification as an oppressed African-American (though his Kenyan father was neither American nor in the remotest sense affected by this nation’s history of slavery).  He was also quite taken by an elderly friend (and drinking buddy) of his grandfather’s, a black poet identified only as Frank (Frank Marshall Davis, who was well-know for his advocacy of radical, often overtly Communist causes). 

Obama’s academic studies appear to have buttressed his father’s anti-colonial understanding of the world.  At Columbia University he studied under Edward Said, the author of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism and a vigorous champion of the Palestinian cause.   “He seems to have had a lasting influence on Obama:  some of Obama’s writings are highly resonant with Said’s themes and arguments” (p. 94).  At Harvard Law School “his real mentor was Roberto Mangabeira Ungar,” reknowned as “perhaps the leading anti-colonial scholar in the field of legal studies” (p. 97).  Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial pastor of Trinity Church in Chicago further contributed to Obama’s anti-colonial convictions.  “The Audacity of Hope,” the first sermon Obama heard Wright preach (providing the title for the second of Obama’s books), was filled with angry references to suffering peoples around the world—all victims of the white man’s ways.  Moved to tears by the message, Obama decided to join the church, wherein he would be married and have his children baptized.  “The anti-colonial themes,” in Wright’s sermons, D’Souza notes, “are obvious here:  North versus South; rich, white Europeans versus the poor, dark-skinned people of Africa and the Caribbean.  These were the themes of Obama’s life, and he was drawn in from the start” (p. 197). 

This is a thought-provoking treatise.  D’Souza has carefully read President Obama’s published works and provides an interpretative hypothesis that does in fact help explain the man and his policies.  His footnotes are accurate, and he persuasively demonstrates his conclusions.  While anti-colonialism cannot explain everything about the man, if one takes seriously his autobiography many of D’Souza’s insights ring true.  And inasmuch as anticolonialism often incorporates a socialistic perspective, it may well be part of the president’s socialistic stance explored by Stanley Kurz in Radical in Chief.  

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Before he retired Werner Gitt was a professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology and the Head of the Department of Information Technology.  He wrote In the Beginning Was Information:  A Scientist Explains the Incredible Design in Nature (Green Forest, AR:  Master Books, Inc., c. 2005) to show how information “is a fundamental entity on equal footing with matter and energy” (p. 11).  Consider, for example, this:  “Every spider is a versatile genius:  It plans its web like an architect, and then carries out this plan like the proficient weaver it is.  It is also a chemist who can synthesize silk employing a computer controlled manufacturing process, and then use the silk for spinning.  The spider is so proficient that it seems to have completed courses in structural engineering, chemistry, architecture, and information science, but we know that this was not the case.  So who instructed it?  Where did it obtain the specialized knowledge?  Who was its adviser?” (p. 15).    To address such phenomena, to understand such questions, one thing is utterly clear:  information plays a vital (i.e. vitalizing, life-giving) role.  

To build his case, Witt first explains and classifies the laws of nature.  He then addresses the importance of information—a non-material, purely mental dimension of Reality defined by Werner Strombach as an “‘enfolding of order at the level of contemplative cognition’” (p. 51).  There is, Witt insists, “no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this” (p. 80).  Self-evidently, information “is an abstract representation of material realities or conceptual relationships” (p. 84), a “coding system” revealing what is.  As rational creatures sustained by the amazing DNA molecules, we daily process an incredible amount of information—some 3 x 10²⁴ bits—“more than a million times the total amount of human knowledge in all the libraries of the world” (p. 89).  

Understanding the extraordinary importance of information leads Witt to repudiate the naturalistic evolutionary paradigm regnant since Darwin.  No scientist knows how life began!  Various theoretical models have been proposed, but as of now they are all purely imaginary.  Such was recently made clear at the seventh “International Conference on the Origins of Life” in Mainz, Germany, where leading scientists from around the world concluded, according to Klaus Dose, that “all evolutionary theses that living systems developed from poly-nucleotides which originated spontaneously, are devoid of any empirical base’” (p. 106).  To Witt:  “The basic flaw of all evolutionary views is in the origin of the information in living beings.  It has never been shown that a coding system and semantic information could originate by itself in a material medium, and the information theorems predict that this will never be possible.  A purely material origin of life is thus precluded” (p. 123).  

The rightful role of information is, however, fully compatible with a biblical worldview!  As St John so presciently proclaimed:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The same was in the beginning with God.  All things were made by Him; and without him was not anything made that was made” (Jn 1:1-3).  God spoke the world into being, and He has revealed himself through words.  The Bible tells us who God is, why creation functions as it does, what is our nature as human beings, and how we should live and get to heaven.  Talk about important information!  It’s all right here at our fingertips!  Witt’s exposition of some of the basic truths revealed to us in Scripture is the work of a thoughtful layman, not a biblical scholar.  But he makes an eloquent point:  highly intelligent scientists find in the Scripture truths essential for us humans.  

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Responding to the recent spate of the militant atheists’ screeds, John C. Lennox recently wrote God’s Undertaker:  Has Science Buried God? (Oxford:  Lion Hudson plc., c. 2009), a book that originated in lectures delivered at the University of Oxford.  Lennox is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and has publicly debated both Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (two of the celebrated contemporary atheists).  There is clearly a “war of the worldviews” being waged, and Lennox seeks to clarify why thoughtful Christians “insist that faith and evidence are inseparable.  Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence” (p. 16).  Doing so involves, first of all, a proper understanding of science.  Today’s atheists claim to rest their case in science, but it’s important to see that they are fundamentally philosophical naturalists (not scientists) adhering to an alluring worldview (a reductionistic scientism that restricts all truth to empirical science) rather than reputable science. “Statements by scientists are not necessarily statements of science” (p. 19).   

Indeed, Lennox insists:  “At the heart of all science lies the conviction that the universe is orderly” (p. 20).  There is a rational dimension to all that is.  Historically, this belief developed within Hebraic monotheism, holding that One God rules the world.  In Him and according to His will all things cohere.  As Werner Jaeger insisted, “‘the Logos in the Hebrew account of creation’” provides “‘a substantialization of an intellectual property or power of God the Creator, who is stationed outside the world and brings the world into existence by his own personal fiat’” (p. 50).   Without this religious or metaphysical conviction  science simply could not exist.  “C.S. Lewis’ succinct formulation of [Alfred North] Whitehead’s view is worth recording:  ‘Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver’” (p. 21).  A “law,” properly defined, presupposes a lawgiver, for it simply describes how things work; a law is not the power (the agent) activating matter. Believing in a supernatural lawgiver has enabled many great scientists to discern “why” things are as they are as well as “how” they function.  Consequently, as Keith Ward says:  “‘To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is non-physical and of great intelligence and power.  Almost all of the great classical philosophers—certainly Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Locke, Berkeley—saw the origin of the universe as lying in a transcendent reality.’”  However much they differed on details, they all agreed “‘that the universe is not self-explanatory, and that it requires some explanation beyond itself’” (p. 58).  

Atheists who insist their conclusions come from scientific evidence wrongly portray the very nature of scientific investigation, failing to distinguish between mechanism and agency.  To carefully describe a machine says absolutely nothing about who made it.  Thinkers like Dawkins make a category mistake, violating an elementary canon of logic.  Take a Model T Ford engine, for example.  Fully understanding how the engine works cannot tell us anything about Henry Ford.  He’s not found within the machine, and it works quite well without his physical presence.  But if one “decided that his understanding of the principle of how the engine works made it impossible to believe in the existence of a Mr Ford who designed the engine in the first place, this would be patently false—in philosophical terminology he would be committing a category mistake.  Had there never been a Mr Ford to design the mechanisms, none would exist for him to understand” (p. 45).  

Richard Dawkins’ mechanistic atheism stands rooted in his dogmatic denial of design, though he confesses that biological beings certainly “‘look designed, they look overwhelmingly as though they’re designed’” (p. 79).  But, along with Daniel Dennett, he prefers to trust Darwin’s theory rather than his observational skills because Darwin provides “‘scheme for creating Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind’” (p. 79).  Following Darwin’s prescription in an effort to explain the universe, however, betrays the limits (if not falsity) of naturalistic evolution.  The deeper physicists and astronomers delve into the cosmos the more they find it remarkably well-designed—indeed, fine-tuned to facilitate life on earth.  Lennox cites the evidence proffered by eminent authorities such as Sir Roger Penrose, whose “calculations lead him to the remarkable conclusion that the ‘Creator’s aim’ must have been accurate to 1 part in 10 to the power of 10¹²³ . . . a ‘number which would be impossible to write out in the usual decimal way, because even if you were able to put a zero on every particle in the universe there would not even be enough particles to do the job’” (p. 71).  

Consequently, says Sir John Houghton, a physicist:  “‘The fact that we understand some of the mechanisms of the working of the universe or of living systems does not preclude the existence of a designer, any more than he possession of insight into the processes by which a watch has been put together, however automatic these processes may appear, implies there can be no watchmaker’” (p. 91).  The long derided watch analogy of William Paley has made a sudden comeback!  Reason leads us to conclude that Henry Ford designed Ford motor cars; reason leads us to believe there’s a watchmaker somewhere responsible for the existence of watches.  “So it is with God,” says Lennox.  “At the more abstract level of the explanatory of power of science itself, philosopher Richard Swinburne in his book Is there a God? says:  ‘Note that I am not postulating a “god of the gaps”, a god merely to explain the  things that science has not yet explained.  I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; . . . .  The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order.’  Swinburne is using inference to the best explanation and saying that God is the best explanation for the explanatory power of science” (p. 48).  Discerning design in creation leads, rationally, to a Designing Creator!  

In addition to the nature of the cosmos, the mystery of life suggests a Rational Creator as the Source of all that is.  Having described our finely tuned universe, wherein all seems (from the moment of the Big Bang) minutely orchestrated, Lennox emphasizes the mystery of life, especially on the molecular level.  For all the evidence regarding microevolution, “‘the origin of species—Darwin’s problem—remains unsolved’, thus echoing the verdict of geneticist Richard Goldschmidt:  ‘the facts of microevolution do not suffice for an understanding of macroevolution’” (p. 109).  The fossil record shows little evidence of Darwinian evolution.  Niles Eldridge, a distinguished paleontologist, has studied the rocks for decades, looking for “the kind of slow directional change we all thought ought to be there” but finding “instead that once species appear in the fossil record they tend not to change very much at all.  Species remain imperturbably, implacably resistant to change as a matter of course—often for millions of years’” (p. 115).  

Most puzzling is the origin of life, a truly “formidable challenge to challenge to naturalism” (p. 121).  Despite some scientists’ triumphant claims, no one knows how life on earth began.  As geneticist Michael Denton said:  “Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.’  Even the tiniest bacterial cells, weighing less than a trillionth of a gram, is ‘a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of 100 thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world’” (p. 122).  For even a single protein to emerge from lifeless matter is mathematically most improbable.  “Yet life as we know it requires hundreds of thousands of proteins, and it has been calculated that the odds against producing these by chance is more than 10^40,000 to 1.  Sir Fred Hoyle famously compared these odds against the spontaneous formation of life with the chance of a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and producing a Boeing 747 jet aircraft” (p. 129).  

Added to the mystery of life’s origin is the complexity of the genetic code.  How does one explain the massive amount of information in a strand of DNA?  More importantly, how does one explain the fact that DNA does not “create” life—rather, life seems to spawn DNA.  So why does anything live?  Whence comes the information basic to living beings?   No one makes more sense than St John:  God spoke the Word and all that was made reveals Him.  Basic to all, the most fundamental reality of all, is the Word.  

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I occasionally commend books that I don’t necessarily recommend people read because of the challenging nature of the material.  But that such works exist—and can be profitably read by folks with sufficient background—should be widely know.  This is true of Robert J. Sptizer’s New Proofs for the Existence of God:  Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy (Grand Rapids:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, c. 2010), in which he sets forth five arguments (two scientific, three metaphysical) designed to persuade the reader that God necessarily exists.  

Scientifically there are, firstly, “indications of creation and Supernatural design in big bang cosmology.”  Arno Penzias, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist, put it plainly:  “‘Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life.  In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan’” (p. 13).  Spitzer summarizes the evidence, all leading to the conclusion that “a universe without a beginning is impossible” (p. 36).  Secondly, there are “indications of supernatural design in contemporary big bang cosmology” supported by many eminent physicists.  Given the universal constants basic to the material world, it is highly improbable—“exceedingly, exceedingly, exceedingly remote” (p. 65)—that our anthropic universe could have accidentally emerged.  Evidence of this deflated Fred Hoyle’s atheism, for he concluded the facts indicate “‘that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.  The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question’” (p. 73).  

Turning to philosophical arguments, Spitzer insists that the same way of thinking we follow elsewhere applies equally to metaphysics.  Rigorous investigation leads to certain “reasonable and responsible” beliefs, as demonstrable as the fact that you and I exist or the laws of thought.  “Metaphysics and proofs for God’s existence do not require any more belief or force of will than an application of mathematics or logic to the world” (p. 109).  There is, then, a compelling “metaphysical argument for God’s existence.”  Thinkers including Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas have articulated a cogent case for the necessary existence of an “unconditioned reality” basic to all that is.  Secondly, Spitzer proposes a “[Bernard] Lonerganian proof for God’s existence.”  God, defined as the unconditioned Reality, is tacitly known in our minds as we sense that there is an ultimate answer to all our questions that necessarily exists.  Thirdly, there is the Kalam “proof against the infinity of past time” that dovetails with recent insights into the Big Bang.  Though we can imagine an infinite future, there cannot actually be an infinite past!  

Though the bulk of Spitzer’s work focuses on his five proofs for God’s existence, he concludes his study with a brief philosophical discussion (resonate with Platonic and Thomistic insights) of His nature, showing that “Love itself, Goodness itself, and Beauty itself exemplify the characteristics of perfect unity (absolute simplicity) identified with the unconditioned Reality (Being itself) and unrestricted intelligibility (Truth itself)” (p. 245).  Within the “divine mystery” there are five “transcendentals.”   God not only must exist—He is, necessarily, a certain kind of God.  Importantly, these attributes satisfy our deepest hungers.  As early as we can talk we ask “Why is that?”  And we’re never quite satisfied with the answers—ever asking more questions.  There is obviously an “inadequacy of partially intelligible answers, and that true satisfaction will only occur when complete intelligibility has been achieved” (p. 259).  We know, in our dissatisfaction with partial truths, that there an ultimate Truth—what Lonergan terms a horizon that serves “as a backdrop over against which I compare the ideas that I have understood” (p. 263).  We’re also attuned to the Reality of Perfect Love.  We not only realize our need for love—we know it should be perfect!  We admittedly never experience such love, but we both desire and know it must be.  

So too we desire perfect justice and goodness.  Children early declare “That’s not fair!”  They just know things should be just.  “Not only do human beings have a sense of good and evil, a capacity for moral reflection, a profoundly negative felt awareness of cooperation with evil (guilt), and a profoundly positive felt awareness of cooperation with goodness(nobility); they also have a ‘sense’ of what perfect, unconditioned justice/goodness would be like” (p. 268).  Conscience—so rightly celebrated by Immanuel Kant and John Henry Newman—truly seems to be the voice of God within the human heart.  Newman memorably declared:  “‘Conscience implies a relation between the soul and something exterior, and that moreover, superior to itself; a relation to an excellence which it does not possess, and to a tribunal over which it has no power.  And since the more closely this inward monitor is respected and followed, the clearer, the more exalted, and the more varied its dictates become, and the standard of excellence is ever outstripping, while it guides, our obedience, a moral conviction is thus at length obtained of the unapproachable nature as well as the supreme authority of that, whatever it is, which is the object of the mind’s contemplation’” (p. 273).  

Fourthly, we have a deep “desire for perfect beauty” that must be rooted in a Transcendent Beautiful Reality.  We rejoice in the beauty of the mountains or music, but in time we long for something still more beautiful.  One Rembrandt on the wall must be followed by another.  One Mozart symphony never quite suffices.  As Plato discerned in the Symposium, we move “‘from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty’” which must ultimately be “‘the true beauty, the divine beauty, I mean, pure and dear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colors and vanities of human life, thither looking and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine’” (p. 279).  Most beautiful of all, we want a “perfect home.”  Strangely enough, we feel ourselves strangers on earth, lost in the cosmos, hungry for a final resting place.  By nature, as C.S. Lewis so eloquently argued, we long for heaven.  Now and then we experience an ecstasy akin to the bliss of eternal life.

Consequently, Spitzer ends his treatise as he began, with the words of Sir Arthur Eddington:  “‘We all know that there are regions of the human spirit untrammeled by the world of physics.  In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in a yearning towards God, the soul grows upward and finds fulfillment of something implanted in its nature.  The sanction for this development is within us, a striving born with our consciousness or an Inner Light proceeding from a greater power than ours.  Science can scarcely question this sanction, for the pursuit of science springs from a striving which the mind is impelled to follow, a questioning that will not be suppressed.  Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead and the purpose surging in our nature responds’” (p. 1; p. 286).