RE-ENCHANTMENT

Dominic Green
Soul Survivor
Charles Mathewes
Can You Change Your Life?
Anna Marazuela Kim
Re-enchantment and Iconoclasm
Matthew Scherer
Nietzsche’s Smile
Chad Wellmon
Sacred Reading
Eugene McCarraher
What Disenchantment?
Benjamin Schewel
The Blackbird of Religion

FALL 2015

WWW.H EDGEHOG R E V IE W.COM

 Praise for New Releases from the Faculty and Fellows of the

“The crisis of the university in the age of

MOOCs and the new media? As Chad Organizing

Wellmon shows in this learned and lucid Enlightenment

study, we’ve been there before, several times.

Tracing the development of the university,
Wellmon gives us a thought-provoking account i n f o r m at i on ov e r loa d

of an astonishingly resilient institution. He and the invention of the modern researc h university

also offers rich material for reflection on

the meaning of the life of the mind, whether C h a d We l l m o n

pursued in the classroom, the library, the

laboratory or online.”
—Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for
the History of Science, Berlin
Organizing Enlightenment:
Information Overload and the Invention of
the Modern Research University
Chad Wellmon
Johns Hopkins University Press

“The World Beyond Your Head is an enormously

rich book, a timely and important reflection on an
increasingly important subject. Pay attention.”
—Ian Tuttle, The New Criterion

“Persuasive, entertaining—and sometimes disturbing.”

—Sarah Bakewell, Financial Times

The World Beyond Your Head:

On Becoming an Individual in
an Age of Distraction
Matthew B. Crawford
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

iasc-culture.org
Fall 2015 / Volume Seventeen / Number Three
17.3

FROM THE EDITOR / 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS

Overheard and Overlooked / 9
Wilfred M. McClay

Academic Inequality / 11
Chad Wellmon, Esther Vinarov, Anne Manasché, and Andrew Piper

Naming the Modern Discontent / 13

Joseph E. Davis

RE-ENCHANTMENT
Soul Survivor: Metaphysics as Intraphysics in
the Age of Re-enchantment / 18
Dominic Green

Can You Change Your Life? Reflections on Peter Sloterdijk

and the Confoundments of Religion in Our Time / 34
Charles Mathewes

Re-enchantment and Iconoclasm in an Age of Images / 48

Anna Marazuela Kim

Nietzsche’s Smile:
Modern Conversion and the Secularity Craze / 56
Matthew Scherer

Sacred Reading:
From Augustine to the Digital Humanists / 70
Chad Wellmon

We Have Never Been Disenchanted / 86

Eugene McCarraher

Seven Ways of Looking at Religion / 102

Benjamin Schewel
ESSAYS
Escaping the Matrix: The Case for the Liberal Arts / 118
Wilfred M. McClay

Across the Great Divides:

Why America Needs a More Confident Pluralism / 126
John Inazu

AA Envy / 138
Helen Andrews

BOOK REVIEWS
Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890–1923
by R. F. Foster / 146
Reviewed by Charles Townshend

The Road to Character by David Brooks / 149

Reviewed by James K. A. Smith

Book of Numbers: A Novel by Joshua Cohen / 152

Reviewed by Charles Thaxton

Teaching Plato in Palestine:

Philosophy in a Divided World by Carlos Fraenkel / 154
Reviewed by Frank Freeman

A War for the Soul of America:

A History of the Culture Wars by Andrew Hartman / 156
Reviewed by Johann N. Neem

SIGNIFIERS
Blast / 159
Matthew Walther

FORTHCOMING
THIS SPRING:

WORK
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but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

—Archilochus
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Not quite what the old master expected.

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5
 FROM
THE
EDITOR

RE-ENCHANTMENT: WHAT IS IT? WHO WANTS IT? GOOD QUESTIONS, AND

ones that we explore from various angles in this issue. But some readers may question
why we bother to address the topic at all. They may share the general outlook that
informs The Joys of Secularism, a volume of sharply reasoned essays dedicated to the
proposition that “building our world on a foundation of the secular is essential to
our contemporary well-being; and that such a world is capable of bringing us to the
condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised.”
One of the contributors to that volume, Bruce Robbins, a professor of literature at
Columbia University, announces his position in the title of his essay: “Enchantment?
No, Thank You.” He then proceeds to address the murkiness of the word itself, begin-
ning with the ambiguities of Max Weber’s concept of disenchantment. As Robbins
helpfully reminds us, Weber used the German word Entzauberung (the elimina-
tion of magic)—itself a loose appropriation of the poet Friedrich Schiller’s word
Engotterung (de-divinization)—when he introduced the concept in his seminal 1917
lecture, “Science as a Vocation.” But what Weber meant was never exactly clear. If he
intended the word to mean the eclipse of religion in the modern world, then what
did he mean in his earlier work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
when he argued that religion, and particularly Christianity, had been responsible for
the elimination of magic?
Elusive as it is, Weber’s concept has been generally taken to mean the displace-
ment of the numinous (including, but not restricted to, orthodox belief ) by the pow-
ers of reason and science, the so-called “rationalization” of the world. And as Robbins
notes, “Orthodox belief is not the object Weber is chiefly mourning. Whatever magic
is a figure for, nonbelievers suffer from its loss as much as believers do.” Well, some
nonbelievers may, but Robbins is clearly among the many who don’t. Indeed, many
secularists—and particularly those who might be called secular fundamentalists—see
the advance of the rational-scientific perspective not only as a good in itself but also
as strong justification for excluding religion from public and political life. To them,
the disenchantment of the world is a consummation greatly to be desired.
Up until the last two decades or so, even more moderate believers in the rising
tide of secularization, including most Western scholars and intellectuals, regarded
disenchantment as the inevitable corollary of progress and enlightenment. But facts
on the ground, including certain epochal events, defied received ideas and theory.
Not only did religions and religious passions reassert themselves around the world (in
both inspiring and terrifying ways), but growing doubts about the overly reductive
claims of scientific reason opened the door to new understandings of cause and value,
and of their possible connections. If the world had been truly disenchanted in the

6
first place, was it now undergoing a kind of re-enchantment? Or were at least some
secularists beginning to have second thoughts about the once and final disenchant-
ment of the world?
At the very least, we appear to have entered a liminal age, poised somewhere
between the secular and the postsecular, when the deepest questions about value,
meaning, truth, human well-being, and community are being re-examined in light of
new understandings (or at least a renewed appreciation) of religion, religious experi-
ence, and the very dynamics of religious change. As Benjamin Schewel shows in his
contribution to this issue, explanations for the persistence and transformations of
religion and our conceptions of the sacred are themselves very much part of today’s
global religious and spiritual landscape.
It is hardly news that we moderns tend to see and do religion in highly self-
conscious, even consumerist ways. Less and less is religion something into which
a person is born and raised; increasingly, for those who choose it at all, religion
or some looser form of spirituality is a choice from among (or even within) many
possible alternatives, a choice which is subject to the individual’s ongoing subjec-
tive evaluations and, in some cases, creative modifications. A remarkable instance
of the latter, as contributor Dominic Green points out, is the growing number of
self-declared American Christians who quite comfortably embrace reincarnation or
other notions that orthodox traditions have long deemed heretical. So, then: Are
we all gnostics now?
If the Sea of Faith’s “melancholy, long withdrawing roar” was only a tidal fluctua-
tion, the reverse flow is not bringing back “that old-time religion” so much as exposing
the complex interconnections among things we once considered separate and distinct
from one another, or even at odds. Some even insist that the world only passed
from one form of enchantment to another (see Eugene McCarraher’s essay). Debates
about the sacred take subtle and interesting form in our time, whether in attempts to
understand the power of images in contemporary culture (see Anna Marazuela Kim’s
essay) or in scholarly efforts to subject texts to computational analysis in ways that
possibly redefine the meaning of reading and literature (see Chad Wellmon’s essay).
Secularity itself, as contributor Matthew Scherer argues, might best be understood as
the product of something close to the process of religious conversion:

It is particularly difficult to see how modern secularity is produced

by a process of conversion because of the deeply entrenched assump-
tion that “the modern” and “the secular” are the opposite of “the
religious”—or, if they are not the opposite of the religious, that they

7
 are nonetheless categorically distinct from it…. Conversion seems to
require the production of a simplifying narrative that posits a stark
rupture with the past.… Modern secularity, I will suggest, is just like
this: It presents a stark and simple surface of a free-standing, self-
reflective rationality, but this surface enfolds contradictory depths,
including persistent attachments to an unacknowledged but inescap-
able religious past.

Yet at the same time, as contributor Charles Mathewes elaborates, religion, and
the deepest impulses that drive people to seek meaning through it, cannot be relativ-
ized or explained away by describing them merely as elements of a self-transformative
enterprise, a “practice” (in philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s formulation) whose disci-
plines have little relation to transcendent claims that such a practice may (or may
not) make. In short, the locus of authority and agency matter—and indeed matter
supremely to those who believe that “fullness” can be found only through acknowl-
edgment of an authority beyond the self.
But the modern world is one in which a modus vivendi must be found among
those claiming radically different first principles. Although his essay, “Across the
Great Divides” is not part of our thematic treatment, legal scholar John Inazu makes
an apposite case (drawn from his forthcoming book) for a stronger, more confident
pluralism in American society—a pluralism that, in law and civil behavior, respects
real differences of principle and the reasonable expression of such differences: “The
right to differ,” says Inazu, “means that we must be able to reject the norms estab-
lished by the broader political community in our own lives and voluntary groups.
We must be able to dissent from those norms…. A political community that fails to
honor this right to differ is not pluralistic—it lacks confidence in itself.”
Re-enchantment: Who wants it? The various and often opposing answers to that
question animate our times. We can only hope they do so in ways that leave us hon-
oring those differences.

8

Notes and Comments
OVERHEARD AND
OVERLOOKED
So there I was in New York
on business, at the end of a
wearying day of travel and
meetings. I decided to grab a
quick dinner at the fashionable
bistro near my hotel. A lively
but crowded place, with tables
bunched together so closely
that just getting situated would
be a major effort, and once I
was seated, there would be no
question of getting up again
for light and transient causes.
New York seems to abound in
such places, as well as in little
dramas like the one that was
about to enfold me.
At the next table were two
women, I would guess in their
late twenties or mid-thirties,
sipping large glasses of white
wine, utterly absorbed in con-
versation. So absorbed that
they barely noticed me squeez-
ing in next to them, and con-
tinued conversing at full blast
even as I was reading the
menu. And I soon noticed—
how could I not?—that they
were intently comparing notes
about their respective boy-
friends, and doing so with
unsettling specificity. No inti-
mate detail was too intimate to
be related, analyzed, praised,
disparaged, rated on a scale of
1 to 10, or otherwise disclosed,
dissected, and dispatched with
clinical precision. I’m sure the
conversation was therapeutic
for them, but for me it was
almost unendurable, and there
was no escape. Fortunately,
I had brought a book with
me, although I merely held it
in front of my face as a prop,
staring at it with frozen blank-
ness like a subway rider at rush
hour, occasionally turning a
page for show, as I listened in
table-locked captivity to their
NOTES AND COMMENTS
tales of adventure and depriva-
tion in the jungles and deserts
of male companionship.
This triumph of analytic can-
dor went on for what felt like
an eternity. I knew they weren’t
trying to shock or provoke me;
instead, they were working
from the assumption that for
all practical purposes I didn’t
really exist. And all would
have been well had I not made
the mistake of glancing up
from my book to take a peek
at the woman facing me. She
caught me looking—and regis-
tered, not embarrassment, but
barely suppressed outrage that
I appeared to have been listen-
ing to their (quite inescapable)
conversation. And I was sum-
marily judged an unspeakable
creep for having done so. “Let’s
go somewhere else, Mona,”
she huffed, as she pulled out
a twenty-dollar bill, slapped
it on the table, and stormed
9
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
away. I was incredulous. What
more could I have done? Worn
a blindfold and earplugs? Make
like a potted plant?
“ Wisdom, said William
James / Is learning what to
overlook. And I am wise /
If that is wisdom.” So wrote
Randall Jarrell in his poem
“Next Day,” in words well
worth taking to heart. But in
actual practice, overlooking
and overhearing seem increas-
ingly beyond our control in a
world in which basic etiquette
is dead, most barriers are per-
meable, and countless unruly
presences crowd around us,
insisting on our attention.
Much as I wanted to insulate
myself from them, no one
seated in my chair could have
overlooked, or failed to over-
hear, Mona and her friend. Yet
they apparently were offended
to discover that their conversa-
tion was being overheard. In
fact, weren’t Mona and friend
the ones doing the master-
ful job of overlooking … my
presence? Until, that is, the
moment when they noticed
me, and noticed me noticing.
Perhaps it is not so easy to
know what to overlook.
A great part of the allure
of New York and other great
metropoles is the freeing com-
bination of intimacy and ano-
nymity they offer, or appear to
offer. In such places, you gen-
erally don’t need to think much
about who might be overhear-
ing you from the next table,
10
since they don’t know you and
you will never see them again.
By contrast, at the Mayberry
diner, or even Charlottesville’s
College Inn, it is always wise to
check out the people in the next
booth, and take care not to be
overheard by them, particularly
if you live in the same town.
But in the end, mere anonym-
ity is insufficient. Being over-
heard by me was an offense to
these two women, not because
I knew them and sought to hear
them, but because I was hear-
ing things that were not meant
for me—or perhaps more
accurately, because I failed to
pretend that I was not hear-
ing things that were not meant
for me. Such is the nature of
conversation at its best, that it
demands a limited cast of char-
acters, and a commitment to a
certain privacy and exclusivity,
as preconditions for the integ-
rity of its communion. To be
overheard—or overlooked—
violates conversation’s calling
to serve as a hortus conclusus,
a garden enclosed—the proper
setting for a particular form of
human flourishing.
We find a certain delight in
having conversations in a res-
taurant, a simmer of excitement
at conversing around others
who are similarly conversing.
Ideally, the company of oth-
ers can amplify our pleasure in
conversation without compli-
cating it. We might even catch
a snatch of what is being said
at another table, and others
may similarly overhear us, and
that can be fun and enlivening,
playfully transgressive, with
no harm done. But all notions
of conversational interplay
change when the buffer zone
between tables is eliminated,
and all sense of enclosure or
exclusivity is erased with it.
The late sociologist David
Riesman consistently refused
to be interviewed on television.
When I asked him why, he
replied that the conversational
word was inherently contex-
tual, and he always wanted to
know to whom he was speak-
ing, rather than wonder about
how his words would be con-
strued when overheard by
random interlopers. Which is
the burden of writing in any
venue, since when one writes,
one must think not only of
one’s “ideal reader,” but of how
one’s words might resonate in
the minds of countless others,
not only right now but at times
in the indefinite future. And
that, of course, marks a differ-
ence in the very nature of the
enterprise. For a genuine con-
versation to take place, there
must be an enclosure, real or
imagined, a commonality that
is presupposed as the condi-
tion for going forward. Being
overheard amounts to an intru-
sion and a violation, a breach
in the necessary walls, and an
undermining of the necessary
presuppositions.
We hear a lot of talk about
how our country “needs to
 NOTES AND COMMENTS

have a conversation about” this
or that issue or condition. But
this way of talking about “con-
versation” is unhelpful, and
not only because it is so often
a disingenuous way of nudging
an orthodoxy into being. It is
unhelpful because it perpetu-
ates an egregious category error,
precisely by missing the spe-
cial character of conversation.
Most of the communications
to which we are subjected, par-
ticularly through our electronic
media, are of precisely the
opposite character. Overlook-
ing and overhearing are their
stock in trade, since they are
required, by their very nature
as the output of mass media,
ACADEMIC INEQUALITY erode the hegemony of the aca-
demic elite, a close look at hiring
When people talk about and publishing patterns might
inequality these days, they typi- come as a surprise.
cally mean economic inequality, Several recent studies have
disparities in income, assets, or shown a high degree of concen-
other financial measures. But tration in academic hiring from
inequalities come in other forms a small number of PhD-grant-
as well, and the academy is home ing institutions. One study of
to some of the more entrenched political science programs in the
and persistent ones. To those United States found that the top
who think the democratizing five programs placed 20 percent
effects of gender equality and of all academics at research insti-
digital technology had begun to tutions; another study found that
Graduates Dominating Scholarly Publications, by Schools
Frequency of PhD−Granting Institutions
15
3
38

to be devoid of all delicacies of

2
37

context. Advertising, journal-

ism, popular culture, political
campaigning and speechify-
Percent of Total PhD−Granting Institutions

ing: For better or worse, these 10

things serve a public purpose,

and can foster public forms of
memory and understanding we
5

badly need. They are at their

19

3
18

worst, though, when they try

8

to be something they are not,

14

and fall into the dishonesties

9
9
11
11

4
11

7
10

of false personalization. The

10
91

intimacy of free and full con-

61

versation, which some of us

49
47
47
46
38

consider the crowning glory

35
34
34
33
30
29
28
24
24
23
23
22
18
18
18
16
16

of a civilized society, is the last

15
15
14
14
14
14

0
thing they are capable of foster-
ing. For that, Mona, I’m afraid
Harvard
Yale
UC Berkeley
Columbia
Chicago
Cornell
Stanford
Oxford
Princeton
Cambridge
Hopkins
Univ. of UVA
Michigan
IV
UPenn
UCLA
Duke
Wisconsin−Madison
NYU
Toronto
London
Indiana
Iowa
Minnesota
Heidelberg
Paris
Brown
Hill
Brandeis
Humboldt−Universitat
Northwestern
SUNY Buffalo
Rochester
Washington
LSE
Barbara
ENS
Freie−Universitat
Strasbourg
UC Irvine
Harvard
Yale
UC–Berkeley
Columbia
Chicago
Cornell
Stanford
Oxford
Princeton
Cambridge
Hopkins
VA
Michigan
ParisIV
UPenn
UCLA
Duke
Wisconsin–Madison
NYU
Toronto
London
Indiana
Iowa
Minnesota
Heidelberg
deofParis
Brown
UNC ChapelHill
Brandeis
Humboldt-Universität
Northwestern
SUNY–Buffalo
Rochester
Washington
London School of Economics
Barbara
École Normale Supérieure
Berlin
Strasbourg
UC–Irvine
Paris

UNC–Chapel

that you will indeed need to go

of of

University
de of

Freie Universität
UC Santa
Johns

University
University

UC–Santa
Université
Johns

someplace else.
University
Université

—Wilfred M. McClay

11
 100
As indicated in the graph, all journals have
a history of under−publishing women;
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
However, all show a steadily increasing
Percentage
percentageof
of Women
women published perPublished
in Leading Humanities Journals Per Issue
75
Journal
Critical Inquiry
New Literary History
Percent of Women Published
Representations
50
Percent
25
0
1970 1980
graduates of eight universities
were hired for half of all tenure-
track jobs. In our study of long-
term publishing trends in three
leading humanities journals, the
patterns were similarly striking.
In the first phase of our study,
we surveyed publication data from
those journals—Critical Inquiry,
New Literary History, and Repre-
sentations—during the last forty-
seven years. For each journal, we
analyzed authors’ PhD-granting
institutions, institutional affilia-
12
Authors
year
journal
1990 2000 2010
Year
tions at the time of publication,
and gender. In sum, there were
1,984 total authors, 3,318 total
articles, 273 PhD-granting institu-
tions, and 504 author institutions.
What we found was sobering.
As the graph on the preceding
page shows, the top ten PhD-
granting institutions account for
more than half (56 percent) of all
articles published. Authors with
PhDs from Harvard, Yale, Uni-
versity of California–Berkeley,
Columbia, Chicago, Cornell,
Stanford, Oxford, Princeton,
and Cambridge wrote 1,843
of 3,318 articles. Authors with
PhDs from just two universities,
Harvard and Yale, accounted
for more than one-fifth (21 per-
cent) of all articles. As indicated
in the second graph (left), all
three journals also have a history
of Critical Inquiry
publishing articles primarily
NLH
from male contributors. Only
oneRepresentations
volume of one journal, Rep-
resentations in 1990, had an issue
in which at least half of all pri-
mary contributors were women.
All three journals, however, did
show a steadily increasing per-
centage of women being pub-
lished annually.
Studies such as ours suggest
that the hegemony of a few
elite institutions continues well
beyond who gets the prized ten-
ure track jobs right out of gradu-
ate school. The influence and
power of a few institutions also
extends to publishing—and so
to the production and transmis-
sion of knowledge more directly.
This raises a basic question: If
graduates from only a few elite
institutions account for an out-
sized proportion of high-profile
published work, then aren’t their
ideas bound to have an out-
sized impact and influence? Do
Harvard and Yale, which have
not only unparalleled financial
means to shape American higher
education, also have the insti-
tutional prestige to determine
what counts as knowledge?
—Chad Wellmon, Esther Vinarov,
Anne Manasché, and Andrew Piper

NAMING THE MODERN
DISCONTENT
When he published his dramatic,
book-length poem The Age of
Anxiety in 1947, W. H. Auden
gave an enduring diagnostic
name to the emotional malaise
of the postwar era. To be sure,
anxiety was not a new concept
or concern. It had figured cen-
trally in the work of the Danish
philosopher Søren Kierkegaard,
acquired wider notoriety in the
turn-of-the-century outbreak of
a catch-all collection of nervous
symptoms labeled neurasthe-
nia, and become the subject of
best-selling self-help books dur-
ing the Great Depression. After
World War II, however, anxiety
became the defining disorder of
the times. It was the name for
the manifold fears, struggles, and
uncertainties of life in a rapidly
changing world, with new per-
ils and new expectations, shift-
ing social and work conditions,
and an intensified emphasis on
individuality. In what is “almost
universally regarded as the Age
of Anxiety,” Time observed in a
1961 cover story, “The Anatomy
of Angst,” “the greatest single
cause of anxiety” may be a “kind
of compulsory freedom.” This
was a freedom that required self-
creation, constant effort, and
productivity—in sum, the over-
coming of limitations in the rest-
less pursuit of possibilities.
Yet within a mere three
decades of its Time, Inc., apo-
theosis, anxiety was dethroned,
its position as the signature
affliction of the Western world
appropriated by depression.
How had Sovereign Anxiety
fallen? Among the many expla-
nations, three are especially
noteworthy.
First, from World War II
through the 1960s, Freudian
psychoanalytic ideas were in
the ascendency in the United
States. For Freud, anxiety was
the chief characteristic of the
“neuroses”—the common wor-
ries, psychological problems,
and psychosomatic complaints
of otherwise normal people.
When Freudian theory was
challenged in the 1970s, so
was the fundamental, explana-
tory role of anxiety. Depres-
sion, hitherto considered a rare
psychotic disorder but favored
by the up-and-coming neuro-
psychiatrists, was accorded a
new and prominent place in
the diagnostic hierarchy, albeit
in expanded and redefined
form. What had formerly been
called “anxiety” was increasingly
labeled “depression.”
Second, when the first psy-
chopharmaceutical blockbust-
ers—Miltown, Librium, then
Valium—came on the market
beginning in the mid-1950s,
they were labeled and pro-
moted as “minor tranquilizers”
or “antianxiety” medications.
Advertisements promised relief
from a wide range of daily prob-
lems, from stress, insomnia, and
fatigue to “marital tensions,”
psychosomatic complaints,
NOTES AND COMMENTS
“inadequacy,” and much more
(see sidebar). For the next two
decades, the minor tranquil-
izers dominated the market.
In 1971, some 15 percent of
Americans reported using one
in the previous year. However,
as these drugs fell out of favor
in the late 1970s, assailed by the
media for being addictive or for
being used to help keep women
in their place, so too did the
“anxiety” they were prescribed
to treat.
Finally, in the late 1980s
a new class of drugs came
on the market, the selective
serotonin reuptake inhibitors
(SSRIs), of which the first was
the iconic Prozac. These drugs
were labeled “antidepressants”
and marketed as the energiz-
ing replacements for the sedat-
ing Valium. Ads promised that
they would provide relief from
insomnia, fatigue, sadness,
anxiety, and much else (see
sidebar). Diagnoses of depres-
sion increased rapidly, and sales
of these antidepressants soon
eclipsed those of the tranquil-
izers. And though there was no
Auden to announce the change,
a psychiatrist writing in Psychol-
ogy Today declared that the “Age
of Anxiety” had become “the
Age of Depression.”
But here was the curious
thing: While the conditions have
different names, the forms of
suffering characterized by anxi-
ety and depression have much
in common. Not everything,
of course, but many of the key
13
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
symptoms that defined anxiety
were the same as those that came
to be associated with depression.
These included nervous tension,
fatigue, sleeplessness, distract-
ibility, and somatic complaints.
Tellingly, three-quarters of pre-
scriptions now written for anti-
depressants are for conditions
other than depression, includ-
ing anxiety syndromes, back
pain, headache, and sleep disor-
ders. Further, both anxiety and
depression converge around the
problem of “compulsory free-
dom,” to use the Time coinage
of a half-century ago. Depres-
sion might even represent an
intensification of this peculiarly
modern challenge to the self—
one characterized by a lack of
energy and productivity, a sense
of inadequacy, an unhappiness
at not measuring up or fitting
in, a weariness with all the effort.
There are reasons to think
the Age of Depression might
be passing. The patents for the
SSRI drugs with real cultural
status—Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft—
have all expired, which has led
to their replacement by generics
and little-noticed alternatives.
Seeing less potential for profit,
many pharmaceutical compa-
nies have discontinued new
research and put far less money
into marketing antidepressants.
Another class of patented and
more profitable drugs, the so-
called atypical antipsychotics,
have sometimes been marketed
as antidepressants, but these
medications shift the center
14
of gravity toward other dis-
orders. And at least since the
early 2000s, the SSRIs have
received a lot of bad public-
ity, from concerns about their
potential addictiveness and side
effects—leading to Food and
Drug Administration safety
warnings for pediatric use and
class-action lawsuits—to scien-
tific challenges to their efficacy.
With less marketing push and
more controversy, antidepres-
sant prescribing has slowed,
and “depression” may have less
appeal as an all-purpose cat-
egory.
Nothing about this change,
I should note, has much to do
with the real suffering of indi-
viduals, or even with some
decisive change in the types
of suffering that people have
experienced over time. Rather,
what the move from anxiety to
depression suggests is a change
in how clinicians and patients
characterize what appear to be
similar discontents and chal-
lenges. The change in language
I am suggesting—and I am not
the first—reflects contingen-
cies, such as professional orien-
tations and the availability and
reputation of particular classes
of drugs, more than any seismic
shift in the actual character of
mental distress or social expec-
tations.
The language might be
changing again. One possibility
is a return to anxiety. The media
campaign against Valium is long
out of memory, and Xanax,
a chemical cousin of Valium,
is the single most frequently
prescribed psychiatric drug on
the market. Others of its class
are also widely used. Certainly,
the symptoms these drugs treat
have not diminished. It is not
uncommon to hear claims
such as “forty million Ameri-
can adults suffer from anxiety
disorders.” Popular coverage is
beginning to appear again. A
2012 cover story in New York
magazine, for instance, was
titled “Xanax: A Love Story,”
and asked “what happened to
Prozac Nation?” As age-defin-
ing disorders go, however, anxi-
ety lacks the neuro-appeal that
now seems mandatory. And the
greatest use of antianxiety med-
ications is concentrated among
the middle-aged. Perhaps hint-
ing at their awareness that this
might be the last gasp of an old
story, the editors of New York
chose a retro, comic-book-style
image for their Xanax cover.
There is another possible way
forward, this one using another
popular category of disorder—
attention deficit—that covers
some of the same symptoms
associated with the other two
categories of affliction and is
virtually defined in terms of
the discontents of “compulsory
freedom.” Ads for the drugs that
are prescribed to treat attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD) promise help for frus-
tration, feelings of being over-
whelmed, lack of mental focus,
restlessness, forgetfulness, and,

Treating the Modern Malaise
Above: Serax
(medical journal, 1967)
was marketed as an “anti-
anxiety” medication for
treating a “sense of inad-
equacy,” “agitation,” and
“irritability.”
Left: Paxil
(popular magazine, 2002)
was sold as an “anti-depres-
sant” to address “loss of
interest,” “agitation,” and
“difficulty concentrating.”
Left: Strattera
(popular magazine, 2005)
was promoted as an atten-
tion-deficit medication for
distractibility, disorganiza-
tion, and not “getting things
done at work and at home.”
NOTES AND COMMENTS
most centrally, an inability to
live up to one’s potential (see
sidebar).
Further, ADHD is consid-
ered a neurobehavioral con-
dition, and has undergone a
progressive redefinition from
a childhood disorder to a life-
long disorder (with less and less
emphasis on hyperactivity). The
percentage of children with a
diagnosis has been rising inexo-
rably for many years. The Cen-
ters for Disease Control and
Prevention reported growth of
approximately 5 percent each
year from 2003 to 2011, when
some 11 percent of all children
between the ages of four and
seventeen (6.4 million) had
received an ADHD diagnosis.
But the sharpest rise in recent
years is among adults. Prescrip-
tion data from drug manage-
ment companies show that the
number of adults on ADHD
drugs grew dramatically in the
decade ending in 2010. For
women ages twenty to forty-
four, the rate of use rose 264
percent, and for men in the
same age range by 188 percent.
By 2012, women ages nineteen
to twenty-five had a higher rate
of medication use than girls
from four to eighteen. If antide-
pressants were the psychotropic
of the Baby Boom generation,
the same emblematic status
appears to have been conferred
on ADHD drugs, taken, with
or without prescriptions,
among Millennials. Estimates
vary, but some surveys have
15
 THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

found that as many as one-third growth is expected to continue. as one of the few “labor-saving
of students on selective college The Age of Depression may devices” in the “mental kitchen,”
campuses have tried an ADHD well become the Age of Atten- he used it to sustain his work-
medication illicitly to improve tion Deficit. If so, we will day discipline. The drug was
performance. Consumer spend- have come full circle. The poet Benzedrine. It is the grandfa-
ing on ADHD medications has Auden lived what he called “the ther of the drugs, from Ritalin
correspondingly increased, and chemical life.” For twenty years, to Adderall to Dexedrine, that
in recent years has risen at a beginning in 1938, he began we now know as medications
greater annual rate than expen- each day by taking a drug. But for ADHD.
ditures on any other traditional it was not to quell “anxiety.” —Joseph E. Davis
class of pharmaceuticals. This Rather, referring to the drug

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16
RE-ENCHANTMENT
visions and revisions of
the sacred in our time

17
 Soul Survivor
Metaphysics as Intraphysics in
the Age of Re-enchantment

Dominic Green

R
eports of the death of religion have been exaggerated. Should we be surprised?
“Man is, by his constitution, a religious animal,” said Edmund Burke, the
Dublin-born statesman and sage, posthumously beloved by liberals and con-
servatives alike.1 But constitutions, political and religious, may change. Burke wrote
during the French Revolution, which was anticlerical enough to despoil churches and
priests, but religious enough to instantiate Robespierre’s state-sponsored Cult of the
Supreme Being. The new dogma was inscribed above the lintel of the cathedral of
Clermont-Ferrand: “The French people recognize the Supreme Being and the immor-
tality of the soul.” Plus ça change ...
... plus c’est la même chose. The same, that is, in the sense of Tancredi, the cynic in
Giovanni di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958): “If we want everything to remain the
same, everything must change.”2 We remain constitutionally metaphysical, and con-
stitutionally social, and constitutionally optimistic that, despite all prior experience,
we can resolve our spiritual and social dilemmas at a stroke. “Man is the Religious
Animal,” wrote Mark Twain in 1896, in a scathing rejoinder to Burke. “He is the only
Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has True Religion, several of them. He is
the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t
straight.”3 The knives are always out. The substitutions, displacements, and deferrals of
the sacrificial system defend old meanings and build new ones, like a historical insur-
ance policy covering past, present, and posterity against acts of a possibly vengeful God.
We know that we are in a turbulent age because our sense of the past is changing.
The French Revolution announced the West’s twinned grand narratives, secularism and

Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts,
teaches political science at Boston College. His forthcoming book, The Religious
Revolution, is a history of modern spirituality.

Right: Kerze II, (B.66) (detail), 1989, by Gerhard Richter (b. 1932); private collection/photo ©
Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images; licensed by Atelier Gerhard Richter, Cologne, Germany.

18
 S O U L S U RV I V O R / G R E E N

socialism. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the unraveling of the Soviet Union
after 1989, marked the contraction of those narratives from state policy to petty cults.
The European ideas that shaped two centuries are diminished by their failure, and
historicized by their loss of magic. Atheism, a child of the opportunistic union of philo-
sophical materialism and political anticlericalism, is now an orphan without posterity.
Marxism, its implausible economic base wholly obscured by an implausible aesthetic
superstructure, has returned to its birthplace, the departments of the humanities and
social science, to grumble in tenured senility. And socialism in general now shows the
aspect that Marx expended so much ink on effacing: an attempt to replace Christianity,
by answering metaphysical needs with political methods, whether by Robespierre’s Cult
of the Supreme Being or Jacques Hébert’s Cult of Reason.
The exhaustion of secularism and socialism has not reduced the ambitions of the
last best hope of the Enlightenment: science. The Great Instauration, Francis Bacon’s
grand scheme for the restoration of Paradise through the knowledge and methods of
the new sciences, is, like the rapture of the evangelicals, always just over the temporal

19
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

horizon, and the straitened path to its fulfillment ever visible to the believer. But the
unmaking of deterministic certainties in politics seems to have reduced the horizon of
certainty. Scientists, for so long allies in the philosophical argument for pure materi-
alism and the political argument for the ratio-
nalization of social life, are increasingly agnostic
Scientists, for so long allies in the about the meanings of knowledge. The universe
philosophical argument for pure really is, as J. B. S. Haldane said, “not only
queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we
materialism and the political can suppose.”4 Science’s belated humility toward
argument for the rationalization of its subject is accompanied by a false modesty
toward its object. Chronic specialization, the
social life, are increasingly agnostic premise by which scientific knowledge expands,
about the meanings of knowledge. has caused a contraction in the kinds of syncretic
and unified thinking by which scientific ideas are
applied to society. Scientists continue to repeat
the old gospel of pure materialism with total confidence, but when they do so, they
seem quaintly intemperate. These days, Richard Dawkins resembles less Thomas Henry
Huxley, defender of Darwinian evolution, than Huxley’s antagonist in the famous “Apes
and Angels” debate of 1860, “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford.

Spicing Up the Orthodox

So we can be sure that, religiosity being constitutional in human and social terms,
religion has survived. The reformulation of its American constitution, and the not-
unrelated failure of atheism to achieve critical mass, is visible in recent Pew Research
Center surveys of the “religious landscape,” most recently “America’s Changing Religious
Landscape” (2015), as Figure 1 shows.
The big loser here is Christianity, down from a 78.4 percent share of the US pop-
ulation in 2006 to 70.6 percent in 2014. The biggest winner is the church of the
“Unaffiliated,” up from 16.1 percent in 2006 to 22.8 percent. Yet this does not repre-
sent a sudden swing vote from belief to unbelief and an impending landslide victory
for atheism. The atheist vote rose from 1.6 percent in 2006 to 3.1 percent in 2014:
a trivial slice of the electorate, and a purely symbolic success. Richard Dawkins is the
Ralph Nader of militant atheism, and the Party of the Godless is about as likely to win
the popular vote.5
The Unaffiliated, like members of all religions, are a sectarian lot (see Figure 2). An
earlier exercise in Pew’s spiritual psephology, “Religion and the Unaffiliated” (2012),
established that the Unaffiliated remain believers.
The Pew survey found that only 12 percent of the Unaffiliated are atheist, and 17
percent agnostic. The great majority, 71 percent, describe themselves as “Nothing in
particular.” A ruling coalition (62 percent) of these Nothings retains religious ideas
and practices: 23 percent see themselves as “religious” and 39 percent as “spiritual, not
religious” (see Figure 3). A total of 68 percent of the Unaffiliated and 81 percent of the

20
 S O U L S U RV I V O R / G R E E N

FIGURE 1

Christians Decline as Share of US Population;

Other Faiths and the Unaffiliated Are Growing

2007 2014 Change*

% % %

Christian 78.4 70.6 -7.8

Protestant 51.3 46.5 -4.8
Evangelical 26.3 25.4 -0.9
Mainline 18.1 14.7 -3.4
Historically black 6.9 6.5 –
Catholic 23.9 20.8 -3.1
Orthodox Christian 0.6 0.5 –
Mormon 1.7 1.6 –
Jehovah’s Witness 0.7 0.8 –
Other Christian 0.3 0.4 –

Non-Christian faiths 4.7 5.9 +1.2

Jewish 1.7 1.9 –
Muslim 0.4 0.9 +0.5
Buddhist 0.7 0.7 –
Hindu 0.4 0.7 +0.3
Other world religions** <0.3 0.3 –
Other faiths** 1.2 1.5 +0.3

Unaffiliated 16.1 22.8 +6.7

Atheist 1.6 3.1 +1.5
Agnostic 2.4 4.0 +1.6
Nothing in particular 12.1 15.8 +3.7

Don’t know/refused 0.8 0.6 -0.2

100.0 100.0

* The “change” column displays only statistically significant changes; blank cells indicate that the
difference between 2007 and 2014 is within the margin of error.
** The “other world religions” category includes Sikhs, Bahá’ís, Taoists, Jains and a variety of
other world religions. The “other faiths” category includes Unitarians, New Age religions, Native
American religions and a number of other non-Christian faiths.
Source: 2014 Religious Landscape Study, conducted June 4–September 30, 2014. Figures may not
add to 100% and nested figures may not add to subtotals indicated due to rounding.
Pew Research Center

21
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

FIGURE 2

Composition of the Unaffiliated

Atheist
12%

Agnostic
Nothing in 17%
particular 71%

Source: Aggregated data from surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the
Press, January–July 2012. Based on those who are religiously unaffiliated.
Pew Research Center

FIGURE 3

Identity as a Spiritual, Religious Person

Religious Spiritual Only Neither

65 18 15
US general public

18 37 42
Unaffiliated

7 34 57
Atheist/Agnostic

23 39 36
Nothing in particular

75 15 8
Affiliated
Source: Pew Research Center survey, June 28–July 9, 2012. Combined Q97a–b. Figures show those
who think of themselves as a religious person, as spiritual but not religious, and as neither a religious
nor a spiritual person. Those giving no answer to Q97a are not shown.
Pew Research Center

22
 S O U L S U RV I V O R / G R E E N

FIGURE 4

Belief in God or a Universal Spirit

Absolutely Fairly Not too/ Other/

Yes certain certain Not at all No Don’t Know
% % % % % %

US general public 91 69 17 6 7 2 = 100

Unaffiliated 68 30 25 13 27 5 = 100
Atheist/Agnostic 38 9 15 14 54 8 = 100
Nothing in particular 81 39 29 13 15 4 = 100

Affiliated 97 77 15 5 2 1 = 100

Christian 98 78 16 4 1 1 = 100
Protestant 98 84 12 3 1 1 = 100
White evangelical 100 93 6 2 0 • = 100
White mainline 95 63 26 6 3 2 = 100
Black Protestant 100 93 6 2 0 0 = 100
Catholic 97 67 24 6 2 1 = 100
White Catholic 96 71 19 6 3 1 = 100
Hispanic Catholic 97 58 36 4 3 0 = 100
Source: Pew Research Center survey, June 28–July 9, 2012. Q53–Q54. No too/Not at all includes those who did
not give an answer to Q54. Whites and blacks include only those who are not Hispanic; Hispanics are of any
race. Figures may not add to 100%—and nested figures may not add to total—due to rounding.
Pew Research Center

Nothings believe in “God or a Universal Spirit” (see Figure 4). Clearly, the Nothingness
they contemplate is not empty.6
Friedrich Nietzsche suspected that as Christians navigated the “path of nihilism”
from the death of their communal god to the birth of a multiplicity of personal gods,
a “European Buddhism would perhaps be indispensable.”7 The accuracy of Nietzsche’s
forecast is confirmed in a Pew survey conducted in 2009 that was published under the
headline “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths.”8
Believers always spice up orthodox admonitions with heterodox admixtures. What
is significant here is the flavor of the spice, and that the appetite for it runs across the
three major subdivisions of Pew’s American soul: Unaffiliated, Affiliated, and Christian.
Just as modern church architecture dispensed with the classical language of the arch and
pediment, thus cutting a figurative link with its Mediterranean origins, so belief in the
evil eye has fallen; the Unaffiliated, being in large part lapsed Protestants, score lower
here, because the churches that they no longer attend frowned on the evil eye as a super-
stition for Catholic peasants. Meanwhile, the New Age superstitions are thriving: belief

23
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

FIGURE 5

Spiritual Beliefs
Percent saying they believe in each of the following

Unaffiliated Affiliated Christian

% % %

Spiritual energy located

in physical things such as 30 25 23
mountains, trees, and crystals

Yoga, not just as exercise, but

28 23 21
as a spiritual practice

Reincarnation, that people

25 24 22
will be reborn again and again

Astrology, that the position of

the stars/planets can affect 25 25 23
people’s lives

Evil eye, that certain people

can cast curses or spells that 12 17 16
cause harm

N 302 1,678 1,565

Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
survey, August 2009, Q291a–c, e, f. Other responses and those who did not give an answer are not
shown.
Pew Research Center

in astrology, reincarnation, yoga as a “spiritual practice,” and the “spiritual energy” of

physical objects. And the Unaffiliated are only slightly more credulous than affiliated
Christians (see Figure 5).
The most significant belief of all here is that “people will be reborn again and again.”
The extent of belief in reincarnation is fairly consistent across the spectrum: 25 percent
among the Unaffiliated and 24 percent among the Affiliated. Affiliated Christians score
slightly lower (22 percent).9
To believe in reincarnation is to deny not just the Christian understanding of time
but also the entire eschatology that rests upon it. Christian time proceeds in a long and
straight line, from Creation to Apocalypse. Life is a brief chance to obtain credit, and
avoid debits, for the afterlife. The dead must wait until time’s terminus before they can
enjoy any kind of rebirth. Tertullian’s On the Testimony of the Soul, written in the early
third century CE, is quite clear on this: “We affirm that thou existest after the extinction

24
 S O U L S U RV I V O R / G R E E N

of the bodily life, and awaitest a day of judgement, and art destined, according to thy
deservings, either to torture or to refreshment, in either case eternally.”10 Theologies
of reincarnation posit time as circular. The soul hibernates between uses, like clothes
packed in suitcases, orbiting on a baggage carousel in a celestial airport. The credits and
debits of each life are reflected in the karmic passport issued at each reincarnation. The
soul that evolves to the highest level of enlightenment is freed forever from the curse of
consciousness. These ideas may be appealing, especially to a nation that was founded
as Europe’s second coming, and whose bankruptcy laws are more forgiving than most.
But they are a clear challenge to Christian theology—and, for that matter, to Jewish and
Muslim accounts of the soul and its passage through time and history.
We are witnessing a massive heresy within American Christianity: a popular move-
ment to change the religious constitution.

Reformulating the Sacred

We are accustomed to the Enlightenment assertion that disaffiliation and skepticism are
stations on the road to atheism. It is not clear if this ever was the case for most people,
especially if we consider revolutionary political doctrines to be substitute religions. But
it is clear that, in modern America, disaffiliation is not a sure path to atheism, and

FIGURE 6

Supernatural Experiences
Percent saying they have experienced each of the following

Unaffiliated Affiliated Christian

% % %

Been in touch with someone

who has already died 31 29 28

Seen or been in the presence

19 18 17
of a ghost

Consulted a fortuneteller
15 15 14
or psychic

N 302 1,678 1,565

Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
survey, August 2009, Q292a–c. Other responses and those who did not give an answer are not
shown.
Pew Research Center

25
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

skepticism is not always carried along for the ride. In fact, Pew’s 2012 survey shows that
disaffiliation leads to a greater incidence of belief in supernatural experiences involving
contact with, or apprehension of, an immaterial living personality (see Figure 6).
The Unaffiliated are slightly more likely than Affiliated Christians to believe that
they have “been in touch with someone who has already died” (31 percent of the
Unaffiliated, versus 28 percent of Affiliated Christians). The Unaffiliated are more likely
to believe that they have seen or “been in the presence of a ghost” (19 percent of the
Unaffiliated, versus 17 percent of Affiliated Christians). It is unfortunate that Pew did
not publish a breakdown of how Unaffiliated atheists, agnostics, and “Nothings in
particular” responded to these questions. Judging
from how these three Unaffiliated sectors respond-
It goes without saying that people ed to other questions, we must assume that agnos-
who can believe in the survival of tics and, especially, those Nietzschean “Nothings
in particular” showed even higher rates of positive
someone else’s soul can believe in response.
the existence and immortality The middle ground between old traditions
of belief and the newer tradition of unbelief is
of their own soul. expanding rapidly. That territory was staked out
in the 1850s and 1860s under the working titles
“secularism” and “agnosticism.” Today, this no man’s land is not being annexed to unbe-
lief, either traditional or innovative. It is being settled by innovative believers. They
are exploratory parties from the territory of traditional Christianity. As has been the
case since Martin Luther’s time, most of these emigrants are Protestants, distrustful of
institutions and confident in their intuitions. The group most active in the formulation
of this emergent theology is the “Nothings in Particular.” They might more usefully
be called the “Everythings in General.” Their intuitions include confident knowledge
of ghosts, the spiritual content of matter, and the survival of personality after physical
death. It goes without saying that people who can believe in the survival of someone
else’s soul can believe in the existence and immortality of their own soul.
The successful planting of these ideas in the disputed territory of Not-Knowing is a
Lockean assertion of rights. The philosopher Charles Taylor has shown how the realm
of the “secular” does not wholly expel the sacred or the spiritual, but reformulates it.
The ongoing spiritualization of the agnostic realm is a similar process. The whirring
sound that accompanies it is Thomas Henry Huxley spinning in his grave.

Thriving in Agnostica

When, on the morning after the geese and prayers of Christmas 1859, the Times carried
Huxley’s review of On the Origin of Species, the breakfast tables of Britain witnessed a
more than seasonal indigestion. Yet the dyspeptic reaction, soon to be compounded by
Huxley’s predilection for public combat with the clergy, obscured the subtlety of his
position. Huxley combined his praise of Charles Darwin’s “noble” work with the admis-
sion that Darwin had inferred the mechanism of natural selection from the “artificial

26
 S O U L S U RV I V O R / G R E E N

selection” practiced by human farmers. The workings of the mechanism remained to

be proven. Huxley also admitted his “indifference” as to whether Darwin’s “doctrine of
Evolution” would “prove to be final or not.”11
These were not just rhetorical tactics, but were integral to Huxley’s theory of knowl-
edge. A relentless defender of what he knew to be true, he was scrupulously candid
about the limits of his certainty. Huxley had no time for Christianity, but he accepted
Blaise Pascal’s argument about the rational flaws of atheism. Nor could he accept the
secularist’s philosophical finality: Scientific knowledge was a process, not an end state.
If, like Boethius and Donald Rumsfeld, Huxley dwelt in a Cloud of Unknowing, it was
in the expectation that the mists would clear. An empirical scientist worked from what
he knew to what he did not know, like a man assembling an infinite jigsaw puzzle. To
advance a hypothesis, he had to identify some aspect of the missing piece. There was
nothing wrong with not knowing. It was the premise of discovery. The experts would
inherit the earth, because the scientist, unlike the pope, the emperor, or the poet,
understood the laws of nature. Further, George Holyoake, who had coined the word
secularism in 1851, was a socialist. Huxley might have shared Holyoake’s faith that “sci-
ence is the only Providence which can be depended upon,” but he wished to minimize
the political risks inherent in the remaking of social ethics.12
From the territory of the known, Huxley advanced into the old mysterium of
faith. Beyond the frontier lay the soon-to-be known, the zone of inference and anal-
ogy, of absurd facts whose sense escaped like night before the early rays of the sun.
Metaphysical questions, lately expelled from the
mysterium of science, dwelt in this realm. Huxley As the evolution of knowledge
believed that scientific truth was the higher knowl-
edge, and that the mysterium of religion was not enfolded religious ideas and
an independent and equal sphere, but a realm soon institutions, the old interpreters
to be settled by science. For now, though, science
could not be certain whether God existed or not. would retire, grumbling like
Metaphysical questions, lately expelled from the appendices, and the new
mysterium of science, dwelt in this realm. Huxley
believed that scientific truth was the higher knowl- language would develop.
edge, and that, like parts of the United States, the
mysterium of religion was not an independent and equal sphere, but a realm soon to
be settled in the modern style. For now, though, science could not be certain whether
God existed or not. “I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of Man,” he told
Charles Kingsley in 1860. “I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand,
I have no means of disproving it.”13
In 1869, Huxley called his not-knowing “agnosticism.” He intended agnosticism to
be a method, not a faith. It was part of his campaign to spread the scientific mentality.
It portrayed religious intuitions as forms of partial knowledge, awaiting their develop-
ment into scientific facts. As the evolution of knowledge enfolded religious ideas and
institutions, the old interpreters would retire, grumbling like appendices, and the new
language would develop. The generals of science would rename the monuments and
citadels without sacking the city, for they came from within it. Like an unproductive

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tract of Africa or Asia, the unworked terrain of Agnostica would be conquered by the
Western system, and put to some rational employment.
Huxley promulgated the doctrine of agnosticism at a meeting of the Metaphysical
Society. The location suggests what happened next. The agnostic method had come
to license the faith it was supposed to superannuate. Huxley annexed the badlands of
Agnostica for science. Yet, as Americans knew, the frontier was unpredictable, a magnet
for undesirable elements and elementary desires. A settler staked his claim to the land
by working it, well or badly. Until science regulated these borderlands, any agnostic
could settle there and erect a shrine to a new cult. Its principles need only clear the
lowest fences of scientific possibility: If its dogma could not be proven, neither could it
be disproven under current conditions of knowledge. And as the frontier of knowledge,
unlike the American frontier, was capable of per-
The old ideas of divinity, the petual advance, the territory of the unknown was
equally capable of perpetual recession.
soul, and Providence all thrive Paying its tithe to reason, the religious impulse
in Agnostica, our land of entered the liberty of faith and desire like a nine-
teenth-century Mormon among his wives. The old
Not-Knowing, where we know ideas of divinity, the soul, and Providence all thrive
Nothing in Particular, but tend in Agnostica, our land of Not-Knowing, where we
know Nothing in Particular, but tend to feel good
to feel good about it. about it.
“There will soon be no more priests,” Walt
Whitman prophesied in 1855. “Their work is done. They may wait awhile … perhaps
a generation or two … dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place
… the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. A new order shall
arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest.”14

The Consolations of Monism

We have, as the reincarnated say, been here before. The idea of the soul is part of
the hypothesis of immortality. That hypothesis has remained consistently unproven—
despite the testimonies of the nearly one-third of Americans who believe that they have
contacted the dead—but it has varied in time and place. Conceptions of the soul, and
its duties and expectations, have varied accordingly.
The essence has not always been essential: The early iterations of Israelite religion
offered immortality without adumbrating a complex theology of the soul and the after-
life. Two subsequent encounters shaped Judaic thinking on the soul, creating important
legacies for Christian theology. During the Babylonian Exile, suffered by the Jews in the
sixth century BCE, the Judean priests encountered the Manichaean theology of dual
creation—a theology that cannot function without conceiving of the soul as the fulcrum
between distinct worlds of good and evil. Two centuries later, as the Hellenistic civiliza-
tion overran Judea, the Judeans were obliged to confront the Platonic system. Christian
thinking about the soul emerged from the controversies of that extended confrontation.

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Three further phases can be seen in the Christian passage of the soul. The first was
the development of an elaborate theology of the afterlife in the early Latin church, as
described by Peter Brown in The Ransom of the Soul. If this first phase was predicated on
one dualism, the separation of body and soul, the second phase was predicated legally
on the separation of public and private, and philosophically on Descartes’s separation of
the generic physical body from the particular individual mind. That second phase was
the Great Privatization of property, capital, and identity in the early modern period.
The third phase, whose early rumblings include the prosecution of Galileo and the dual
excommunications of Spinoza, erupted as a matter of public interest in the 1840s with
the controversy over Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation (1844), and again in 1859
with the publication of On the Origin of Species.
This third phase is ongoing. Along the way, the soul in question has been renamed,
from “Christian” to “modern” or “Western.” The shift in nomenclature is appropriate,
for it reflects the life of the thinker who might be its prophet or patron saint: Baruch
Spinoza, the martyred non-god of the emergent beliefs that Aldous Huxley’s renegade
accomplice Alan Watts called “the religion of no-religion.”15
Evolutionary theory shook the pillars of Cartesian dualism, but they had already
been undermined by Spinoza’s monism, his insistence on the singular unity of all life.
Nietzsche’s Samson-like assault on the temple of knowledge followed and responded
to Darwin’s dissolution of the division between mind and body. Yet dualism emerged
unscathed from the rubble, though changed by
the experience. Hans Jonas, a pupil of Martin
Evolutionary theory shook the pillars
Heidegger who sought to create an “ethics
of responsibility” for what he recognized as of Cartesian dualism, but they
a new era of environmental awareness, iden-
had already been undermined by
tified how this happened. The experiential
“rupture” between “man and total reality,” an Spinoza’s monism, his insistence on
assumption of historic religion, endures in the
the singular unity of all life.
post-Darwinian age, but now it is reformulat-
ed in “monistic naturalism,” the new language
of evolution. In the typology of religion, this is panentheism: The divine and infinite
cannot be separate from matter, but infuse every particle of it. Yet because the natural
world remains a theater for the commission of good or evil acts, the dualisms of man
and nature, good and evil, survive.
Spinoza anticipated this reconciliation in rational terms; by intuitions of the unity
of living forms, so had the mystics of every religious tradition. The problem that
then arises, Jonas wrote, is how the ontology of monism, the doctrine of singularity,
accommodates and expresses the perception of dualism. Jonas called the results of this
collaboration between historic inheritances and modern science “a dualism without
metaphysics.”16 Hence Heidegger’s sly observation that Nietzsche, by becoming the
first explicator of this confusing paradox, was really “the last metaphysician.”
Nietzsche was not the first modern Western metaphysician to arrive at this position;
that was Spinoza. Nor was Nietzsche the last metaphysician. He was part of a cohort of
“last metaphysicians.” In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the challenge

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of evolutionary theory elicited a lurid flurry of spiritually inclined monisms. Nietzsche,

who took the high road of German philosophy, was slightly ahead of the pack, but
he ended up at the same low pass as the Russian mystic and mountebank Helena
Blavatsky, and slightly behind her. In 1888, as Nietzsche entered his final descent into
madness, Blavatsky issued The Secret Doctrine, her definitive version of Theosophy, the
Eastern-tinged system of mystical beliefs she had assembled after 1878. In this monist
reconciliation of “science, religion, and philosophy,” she predicted an imminent “death
blow” to “materialistic science,” and the survival of a soul reinvigorated through an
ordeal by science, and reincarnated from the flux of matter: Buddhism for Europeans.
As Blavatsky and Nietzsche predicted, the 1890s saw the triumph of the monists.
For those who preferred the earlier, Hindu-inflected version of Theosophy, and a mod-
ish dash of anti-imperial politics, the Neo-Vedanta of Swami Vivekananda placed the
dualist metaphysics of the Yoga Sutras within the framework of Advaita (“not two” or
“non-dual”) monism. Even the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, whose heart was in
the eastern Mediterranean, believed that his hazy conception of God was “after all,
Spinozistic,” and approaching “the natural philosophy of the monists.”17
This perception was nothing if not timely. In the last years of the nineteenth century,
a series of scientific discoveries revealed a new physics. As Blavatsky had promised, the
rending of the Veil of Nature granted a new perception of the world inside matter, notably
by electromagnetic “wireless waves,” remote control, x-ray photography, radioactivity, and
the electron. Émile Durkheim, who noted these changes, observed in The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life (1912) that religion binds a society by defining the sacred in
space and time. For decades, science and technology had eroded and compressed those
concepts; the Darwinian controversy stood for a wider crisis. The new physics weakened
the structures of Euclid’s geometry and Newton’s universe. The deep history of geological
time dwarfed the sacred history of Christianity. The new cities disrupted established social
hierarchies. The new communications permitted the kind of near-simultaneous experi-
ences that had previously belonged to the mad and the visionary.
Monism contradicted none of this. If anything, it complemented it all. No other
philosophical doctrine seemed capable of containing the wisdom of both the yogi and
the physicist. In an age of religious doubt, monism saved the soul: Spirit existed within
matter, as the essence of the atom. In an age of culture wars, monism brokered peace:
The racial scientist, like the priests he displaced from authority, also saw a spiritual
essence at the heart of human biology. In an age of political passions, monism con-
soled and inspired: Amid radical subjectivity and secret doctrines, monism united all
in a single objective truth, a revelation of shared identity, clear as a radio signal. As
Vivekananda taught his pupils, “I am the universe.”18

Abolishing the Idea of Man

“So it happened,” Hans Jonas reflected in 1958, just under a century after Huxley’s
review of Darwin, “in that, in the hour of the final triumph of materialism, the very
instrument of it, ‘evolution,’ implicitly transcended the terms of materialism and posed

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the ontological question anew—when it just seemed settled. And Darwinism, more
than any other doctrine responsible for the now dominant evolutionary vision of all
reality, turns out to have been a thoroughly dialectical event.”19
What are the properties of this emergent, reformulating soul, forged in the hope-
ful smithies of monist Agnostica? Its clearest properties are inwardness in theory and
practice, and a panentheist reverence for nature. Apart from its descent from Romantic
Innerlichkeit (inwardness), it is defined by where science has driven it to dwell. The
monist hides the metaphysic inside matter, then peers within for the reflection of the
sacred mystery: another of those inversions for the production of rabbits from the hat of
German Idealism. We should acknowledge this inward locus, and speak of Intraphysics,
the metaphysic of interiority.
Jonas hoped that the post-Darwinian “dualism without metaphysics” would pick its
way between “a stare at isolated selfhood” and a Nietzschean naturalism that, though it
cured the loneliness, would also “abolish the idea of man.” That middle way, he hoped,
must involve a social ethic, an environmentally informed “ethics of responsibility.” The

FIGURE 7

Feeling a Connection With Nature

How often, if at all, do you feel a deep connection with nature and the earth?

Often Sometimes Rarely/Never Don’t Know

% % % %

US general public 58 26 13 2 = 100

Unaffiliated 58 26 15 • = 100
Atheist/Agnostic 56 27 16 • = 100
Nothing in particular 59 25 15 • = 100

Affiliated 59 26 13 2 = 100

Christian 59 26 13 2 = 100
Protestant 60 24 14 2 = 100
White evangelical 61 24 13 2 = 100
White mainline 64 25 10 2 = 100
Black Protestant 52 26 20 2 = 100
Catholic 55 30 13 2 = 100
White Catholic 58 30 11 1 = 100
Hispanic Catholic 51 31 15 3 = 100
Source: Pew Research Center survey, June 28–July 9, 2012. Q21b. Whites and blacks include only
those who are not Hispanic; Hispanics are of any race. Figures may not add to 100% due to rounding.
Pew Research Center

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American respondents to the Pew survey seem to have taken steps along that verdant
path (see Figure 7).
Welcome to the future of your environmentally aware, democratically sensitive soul.
When it comes to Emersonian intimations of unity with nature, the Unaffiliated and
Affiliated concur with each other, and with the sentiments of the public at large. Only
13 percent of Americans, Unaffiliated and Affiliated, confess to the sin of not feeling
part of the physical environment; a majority of us (58 percent) are strongly attracted to
the consolatory Intraphysics of its healing trees and crystals.
Yet this has yet to translate into a social ethic. As Tocqueville warned, the privati-
zation of religion is dangerous, in that private satisfactions erode the public duty of
virtue. Peter Sloterdijk’s most recent variation on Nietzsche’s theme, You Must Change
Your Life, compensates for this now familiar deficit with an unconvincing philosophical
prestidigitation. We do not need to decide what to do with religion, the cursed legacy
that “binds” people into a society, because we never had religion in the first place. There
are only “practices,” and life’s task is to improve our practice. Sloterdijk has little to say
about society, other than that the weak will go under. “In order to endure the thought
of recurrence,” Nietzsche wrote, “freedom from morality is necessary.” He might have
added “freedom from society.”
The Nietzschean, like the communer with nature, practices most productively in
solitude. If the rest of the species are present at all, they are unwilling observers to the
spectacle of a superior in an act of self-gratification. This is not so much evolution, as
involution. Take away the dubious Superman fetish for physical fitness, and Sloterdijk’s
practitioner evokes Aldous Huxley’s description of Marcel Proust, “a hermaphrodite
toad-like creature spooning his own tepid juice over his face and body.”

Redefining the World’s Inner Life

Secular posterity is as ironic as the posterity of purgatory was tragic. Voltaire the god-
less mocker becomes the deist stick-in-the-mud of a “conservative” Enlightenment.
Spinoza the heretic becomes the father of secular Zionism. A spiffed-up Nietzsche pass-
es for a sentimental Nazi. Thomas Henry Huxley’s strategy for dissolving the Cloud of
Unknowing has become a program for life in the Cloud of Knowing, where the long
view of knowledge is occluded by storms of information and squalls of self-publici-
ty. The missing link between Thomas Huxley and Steve Jobs is Wilhelm Reich, the
Cloudbuster who turned Freud’s positivistic science toward vitalism and biological mys-
ticism, notoriously in the “verticality” of his energy-capturing contraption, the orgone
box. And so all our solipsism and irrationality shall turn out to be entirely compatible
with the age that they claimed to oppose—and may yet become its clearest expression.
In the decades after Darwin, the Anglophone Protestants who dominated the world’s
economic life dominated the redefinition of the world’s inner life. But we are no lon-
ger in the 1890s. The nineteenth-century reversal of the world’s economic polarity is
being reversed. The clever people, and even the American president, advise us to stop
worrying about the weakening of democratic liberalism, learn to love the “multipolar”

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future that is already here, and turn a blind eye to the congeries of bigots and tyrants
with whom we must deal. The dilemmas of sophisticated Euro-American Protestants
no longer define those of the entire world, and the Euro-American present is not the
only prologue to the rest of the world’s future.
It is therefore not clear that all religions, monotheistic or not, will undergo the tor-
ments endured by Christianity during the peculiar and unique age of Western privatiza-
tion. But if they do, the monist theology of the Intraphysical soul is waiting for them.
As the Psalmist said, “Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers.”20

Endnotes

1 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993),
89. Original work published 1790.
2 Giovanni di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1960).
Originally published as Il Gattapardo (Milan, Italy: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1958, 2002).
3 Mark Twain, “The Lowest Animal” (1896); repr. in Letters From the Earth (New York, NY: Harper &
Row, 1962; HarperCollins, 2004), ed. Bernard DeVoto, 175–84.
4 J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Papers (London, England: Chatto and Windus, 1927), 286.
5 “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” Pew Research Center, Forum on Religious Life, May 12,
2015; http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape.
6 “2012 Religious Landscape Survey: ‘Nones on the Rise,’” Pew Research Center, Forum on Religious Life;
http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise-religion/.
7 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 132 (1885) trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed.
Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968), 80.
8 “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” Pew Research Center, December 9, 2009; http://www.pewfo-
rum.org/2009/12/09/many-americans-mix-multiple-faiths/.
9 “2012 Religious Landscape Survey,” Pew Research Center.
10 Tertullian, On the Testimony of the Soul, Chapter 4, trans. T. H. Bindley; http://www.tertullian.org/
articles/bindley_test/bindley_test_05test.htm. Accessed August 6, 2015.
11 Thomas Henry Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, two vols., ed. Leonard Huxley (New
York, NY: Macmillan & Co., 1903) I, 183.
12 George Jacob Holyoake, Limits of Atheism: Or Why Should Sceptics Be Outlaws?, (London, England: J. A.
Brook and Co., 1874), II, 291–92.
13 Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, two vols., ed. Leonard Huxley (New York, NY:
Macmillan & Co., 1903), I, 314.
14 Walt Whitman, 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, ix, The Walt Whitman Archive online; http://www.
whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/figures/ppp.00271.018.jpg. Accessed August 7, 2015.
15 Alan Watts, Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion (Boston, MA: Tuttle Publishing, 1999), passim.
16 Hans Jonas, “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism,” The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical
Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 234.
17 Theodor Herzl, The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. and trans. Marvin Lowenthal (London, England: Victor
Gollancz Ltd., 1956), 231.
18 Swami Vivekananda, Vivekananda, World Teacher: His Teachings on the Spiritual Unity of Humankind, ed.
Swami Adiswarananda (Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths, 2006), 83.
19 Hans Jonas, “Philosophical Aspects of Darwinism,” The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical
Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 58.
20 Psalm 124:7 (King James Version).

33
 Can You Change Your Life?
Reflections on Peter Sloterdijk and
the Confoundments of Religion in Our Time

Charles Mathewes

I
n “The Figure in the Carpet,” Henry James fashioned a failed semiotic detective
story, a foiled epistemological treasure hunt, a tale as acute as it is exquisite. The
plot is simple: A nameless protagonist, a young literary striver in London, is tor-
mented by a clue, dropped by the respected novelist Verecker, during a weekend at a
country house, that a secret pattern lurks in his, Verecker’s, books. This fundamental
theme, this core idea, as yet undiscovered, driving all his work, is “the figure in the
carpet.” The story unfolds inevitably from there, as the striver tries and fails to uncover
what that secret is. Later, others claim, possibly accurately, to have unlocked the answer,
and they report, via correspondence, that they have the great author’s imprimatur on
their analysis. But then the self-proclaimed discoverers die; Verecker dies; and everyone
else who possibly knew the answer dies; and the secret dies with them. The story ends
with the young striver, no longer quite so young, infecting, as it were, another person
with the exegetical obsession that has ensnared him.
“The Figure in the Carpet” must be considered among James’s most prophetic works.
Despite the noisier claims of a gothic ghost story like “The Turn of the Screw,” this work
remains for me James’s spookiest and most postmodern. The puzzles of epistemology it
explores are almost Pynchonian in their paranoia, and Borgesian in their bafflements.
To ponder the story is to confront the question of what parts of our world are flagrantly
obvious to some (when asked for a clue at one point, the novelist Verecker replies “I’ve
shouted my intention in [the critic’s] great blank face!”) and utterly invisible to others;
it puzzles over the fundamental conditions of our epistemic solitude, and perpetual sur-
prise, at what others have always already known. In a world of vast and radical cultural

Charles Mathewes teaches at the University of Virginia, where he is Carolyn M. Barbour

Professor of Religious Studies and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies
in Culture. His books include The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts in Dark Times
(2010), Understanding Religious Ethics (2010), and A Theology of Public Life (2008).

Right: Yoga oceanside by Sigrid Kolbe/Getty Images, New York.

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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

diversity—and James’s was the first real generation for which that sort of diversity could
come, however faintly, into widespread view—the befuddlement the story explores is a
situation increasingly available to us; James even hints it may just be our fate.
Given that we live in a world with manifestly different “obviousnesses,” with multi-
tudinous and contradictory “common senses,” and given that all of us must in the end
rely on one of them, what are we to do? From at least Montaigne forward, the struggle
to recognize and then learn to live with this diversity has been one of the most endur-
ing epistemological and political projects of modernity. At their heart, James’s works
analyze human efforts to navigate these archipela-
goes of otherness; his characters are always com-
Sloterdijk’s book represents his ing up against the varieties of human experience,
best effort to identify religion’s to adapt a line from his brother William. In this
one, the tension is refined and accentuated by the
“figure in the carpet,” its real palpable proximity of the incommunicate mentali-
meaning, from the perspective of ties. Nothing substantial in the way of language
or class or culture separates the nameless narrator
someone who is himself resolutely from Verecker. The only distinction is that one of
not religious, in the curiously them knows, while the other does not.
I kept thinking about this story while I was
ironic and postmodern way that
reading Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your
so many European and American Life.1 Not because I think Sloterdijk is our age’s
Verecker, and not because I am the story’s name-
intellectuals are not religious.
less young reviewer. (For starters, I’m not that
young.) But Sloterdijk’s book represents his best
effort to identify religion’s “figure in the carpet,” its real meaning, from the perspective
of someone who is himself resolutely not religious, in the curiously ironic and post-
modern way that so many European and American intellectuals are not religious. It is
his attempt to bridge this chasm between belief and unbelief—to explain the world of
religion, and in fact to show that it’s not a different world after all. Of course, it’s about
much more than that. Indeed, much, much more: While it begins by purporting to be
about religion, it ends by claiming to have named not just the modern condition but
the fundamental dynamic of the human situation. Indeed, it proposes to reinterpret
religion on the way to a global redescription of the human as a “practicing animal,” a
creature who needs to “make itself,” and perpetually remake itself, in order to be fully
human. The question, then, is whether this account can comprehend the “data” that
religion, historically and today, offers for analysis.

Toward the Anthropotechnical

A professor of philosophy and aesthetics at Karlsruhe School of Design in Germany,

Sloterdijk is not unique in undertaking such a magnum opus et arduum. It has increas-
ingly become apparent in the past several decades that the difference between belief
and unbelief is not a difference in stages of human development, with belief being

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the wishful adolescence of the species and unbelief its clear-eyed maturity. Despite the
clamorous yappings of the so-called New Atheists, whose views are neither very new nor
morally serious enough to earn the label “atheist,” serious philosophical, sociological,
and even demographic scholarship points to an inescapable fact: Religion is not going
away; belief is not withering with the expansion of voting or antibiotic use or gender
equality. Our societies are not secularizing so much as pluralizing, becoming sites that
host multiple and quite radically different ways of being human in our common world,
many of them religious. This is a different challenge from the one imagined by nine-
teenth-century positivists, and we would be better off taking our bearings from people
like the James brothers than from Auguste Comte or Ludwig Feuerbach or Karl Marx.
Not everyone realizes the challenges we face, but many have grasped at least part
of the problem and are trying as best they can to address it. Recent years have seen a
remarkable “turn to religion” among bien-pensant intellectuals in Europe. Consider the
late Jacques Derrida’s shift toward messianic thinking, Jürgen Habermas’s recent work
on the rhetorical power of religious symbolics, Alain Badiou’s formulation of a “New
Paul,” or Giorgio Agamben’s idea of, as his book title has it, Homo Sacer:2 In these works
and others, “political theology” has returned, often as an attempt—perhaps a last-ditch
one—to save something of the radical core of 1968 that gave so many of these thinkers
their start. Whether any of this amounts to a scholarly advance in our understanding
of religion, or even of the nature and challenges of our societies’ pluralism, is another
matter altogether.
In this context, Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Our societies are not secularizing
Your Life is genuinely welcome. He recognizes that
the older secularist battles are in some important so much as pluralizing, becoming
ways beside the point. He sees that the real issue sites that host multiple and quite
is what to do with the ever-growing plurality of
beliefs and behaviors we manifest. He knows that radically different ways of being
our common life is best enriched not by refusing human in our common world,
to talk directly and publicly about this diversity
of beliefs but by engaging in such intercourse as many of them religious.
we can have with one another on just these mat-
ters. His book is by no means perfect, for reasons I will go into, but we can forgive its
self-regarding, self-referential, and parochial character because its argument at least has
the advantage of being genuinely fresh, of manifesting the advantage of actually new
thinking. But has he found the figure in the carpet? Has he managed to find for us a
global key to all our mythologies?
Well, what does his vision amount to? Most basically, Sloterdijk recontextualizes
what we call “religion” as simply one extended episode in a much longer and wider
history of human effort at self-transformation, which he calls “anthropotechnics.” For
him, there is no such thing as religion; it is a modern invention that tries to distinguish
a cluster of practices in our lives that are somehow more continuous with premod-
ern practices than others are. And such an effort, he thinks, is absurd. All we really
have are practices cannibalized from the corpses of earlier cultural configurations of
belief, behavior, and ritual. To label some as “traditional” and “religious” and some as

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innovations is to miss their most interesting facets—interesting both in how they retain
continuity with past practice, and in how they innovate from them.
What he offers, then, is not a theory of religion but a “general ascetology,” a study of
how humans exist within three “immune systems”—societal, psychological, and what
he calls “anthropotechnical”—which collectively (and concentrically) give the human
sufficient integrity to inhabit a not entirely hospitable world with enough stability to
flourish, more or less, over the course of a typical human life. From this perspective, “all
history is the history of immune system battles,” he says, intentionally echoing Marx.
The story of what we call “religion” is just one moment in that history. From this base,
Sloterdijk retells the history of the modern world, then the Middle Ages, then antiquity,
as a series of attempts at human self-fashioning. In modernity, where he spends most
of his time, he charts the emergence of a “general training consciousness” that emerges
from modern peoples’ “unscrewing from religious codes” and the “informalization of
asceticism”; this eventuates in the development of an ethical “acrobaticism,” a regime
of practices for self-transformation that he sees saturating modern life, particularly the
twentieth century. As he puts it, in the typically inelegant translation, “Modernity …
secularized and collectivized the practicing life by breaking the long-standing asceti-
cisms out of their spiritual contexts and dissolving them in the fluid of modern societies
of training, education and work.” (He seems not to notice the tension between his cri-
tique of “religion” as a modern concept and his unrepentant commitment to a secular-
ization myth of modernity, but let that lie for now.) Sloterdijk tracks the development
of this modern “acrobatic ethics” across the past few centuries, notes our movement
from “production” to “practice” or exercise, remarks upon the importance of “repeti-
tion” as a technique, and in general seeks to sketch the structure of the “practicing life”
in its various moments as a sort of abstract, functionalist philosophical anthropology.
The aim of all this, as he says, is self-transformation, the revolutionizing of our very
being from within. In broad terms, Sloterdijk’s project is materialist and naturalizing,
offering a “natural history” of the human in loosely skeptical Humean terms, with a
politically Marxist (or post-Marxist) materialist spin on it as well.

The Seduction of Re-interpretation

The ambition of this work is obviously vast, and to accomplish its aims the author uses
an argumentative strategy that is nothing if not “big picture.” Basically, Sloterdijk aims
to recontextualize the phenomena under observation—first of all modern “religious
beliefs,” but quickly expanding to all forms of human practice in general—in the hope
that he can thereby convince his readers that this recontextualization offers a more
inclusive and coherent narrative. This is a popular and powerful method employed
most often by thinkers who are hunting big philosophical game. In modernity, this
approach was inaugurated by Hegel, and counts among its more recent practitioners the
likes of Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue), Charles Taylor (A Secular Age), and Jonathan
Israel (Radical Enlightenment)—all thinkers who have offered powerful and seductive
re-interpretations of the entire modern world.3

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Invariably this strategy irritates pedants, who feel more at home using a jeweler’s
loupe to inspect one specimen than a telescope to see the whole landscape. They
screech that the evidence has been manhandled, the narrative massaged beyond all
recognition, the logical steps in the argument never firmly set in place, but merely
juxtaposed in the hope that the audience won’t ask too many questions. Since I am at
least partly a pedant, permit me a little space to complain in this way. Most basical-
ly, Sloterdijk exhibits an astonishing insouciance in
parading his ignorance of the scholarship on the mat- As a writer and thinker,
ters of which he treats. His reading is wide—indeed,
for a book on the value of asceticism as a modern way Sloterdijk is part Friedrich
of life, this one is singularly unable to resist temp- Nietzsche, part Buckminster
tation—but his learning is not particularly deep. In
fact, he has no “learning” at all, in the sense of firm Fuller: not a huckster, exactly,
disciplinary knowledge of anything. Despite thirty- but perhaps an untutored yet
three pages of densely packed endnotes, in which he
manages to discuss Thomas Mann, L. Ron Hubbard, talented megalomaniac.
Moroccan circus troupes (no, really), and the inevi-
table Slavoj Žižek—the European literati’s version of Oprah Winfrey, although with-
out her firm aesthetic taste or moral fiber—what is remarkable is the absence of any
mention of scholars of religion such as Talal Asad, Catherine Bell, Robert Bellah,
Peter Berger, Robert Orsi, J. Z. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and Anne Taves.
The citations are parochially European, and even more so German. As a writer and
thinker, Sloterdijk is part Friedrich Nietzsche, part Buckminster Fuller: not a huck-
ster, exactly, but perhaps an untutored yet talented megalomaniac.
For all the book’s limitations, though, it is still an impressive effort. Perhaps inevi-
tably, one finishes it thinking that it is more interesting than right, and interesting in
ways that Sloterdijk may not fully appreciate. In one very basic thing, he is absolutely
correct: Alongside the question “Why do some people still pray?” we ought to ask the
question “Why do more and more people work out?” The story of modernity is best
understood not as a story of decline but of advance, not the waning of something but
the empowering of many other things; decline is largely a relative matter, a matter of our
changing perspective. Our fixation on religious decline in the past century has led us
to miss how the energies that the forms of religiosity previously captured remain active,
coursing through our world. Sloterdijk’s main aim is to track those energies, back and
forth, as they take different formulations throughout history. Recognizing that these
energies are not going away is a major and worthwhile insight, and one that largely
rewards the effort of sloshing through the translation’s muddy English.

Revelations Already Received

Despite that, the account ultimately disappoints, for several reasons. First, the story he
tells, despite its self-presentation, isn’t new. Consider his basic anthropological claim
(which is the closest approach the book makes to an original contribution), that the

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human is an open-ended creature who needs culture to be complete. This is common-

sense sociology restated in his own neologisms. The German philosopher and anthro-
pologist Arnold Gehlen made this point, powerfully, sixty years ago (although perhaps
in part because of Gehlen’s unrepentant Nazism, Sloterdijk only grudgingly admits to
his existence).4
Second, Sloterdijk’s reheated critique of religion as a modern category is disappoint-
ingly pedestrian. One of the major research fronts in the academic study of religion
began with precisely this insight. It has been more than fifty years since Wilfred Cantwell
Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion (published in 1963) first made this point,
even if more recent scholars like Talal Asad lead us to believe they stumbled upon it
after reading Michel Foucault. (In fact, the point
has premodern analogues, too: Augustine was at
Sloterdijk’s is an essentially lonely,
least as comfortable calling Christianity “the true
not to mention exhausting, philosophy” as he was describing it as religio, a
concept that had complicated connotations for
grammar of human life.
him.) Had Sloterdijk known about this work, it
might have saved him some time—and his read-
ers several hundred pages—and he could have used the rescued energy to explore more
fully what should come after “religion,” which is one of the most topical questions
in contemporary scholarship on religion. To do that, however, he would have had to
explain how his rather self-referring theory of “anthropotechnics” moves the ball further
downfield than did the work, say, of Gehlen, above.
And finally, the larger story of modernity as a story of growth as well as decline—
this too is a revelation we have already received. It is at least as old as aristocratic
critics of modernity such as Tocqueville and Nietzsche, and was thoroughly explored
in the twentieth century by thinkers such as Max Weber and Foucault. Furthermore,
Sloterdijk’s most powerful idea, that an imperative to change is latent in human culture,
is remarkably akin to Charles Taylor’s discussion of modernity’s “drive to reform,” but
Sloterdijk never mentions Taylor’s work. Of course, Sloterdijk formulates this impera-
tive in a different idiom, and for a different audience, but it would have been handy
had he looked around to others toiling in nearby fields.

The ur-Moment of Modern Individualism

Still, those are minor, in some ways pedantic, quibbles. The book’s main flaw is
not its specious assertions of originality but the way it misrepresents reality, and
thereby exemplifies the flaws of a much larger modern intellectual project. Sloterdijk’s
“ascetology” proposes a phenomenology of human experience, that is, a description
of what that “felt” experience is like. Even more centrally, it offers a phenomenol-
ogy of religious experience. And this phenomenology is, I think, crucially flawed. It
assumes that all religious experience—indeed, pretty much all experience—can be
described in terms of autonomous agency, that is, agency determined fundamentally
by the individual’s own initiative and effort. This assumption (which may be the first

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principle of the modernist creed) leads, I believe, to a mistaken picture of what reli-
gious belief looks like from the inside. Sloterdijk talks continually about our practices,
our efforts to make ourselves into something other than what we are. For him, humans
act out of their subjectivity in a fundamentally passive world. We have agency. Or,
precisely, each I is a solo agent. Everything else is merely acted upon, by physics or
instinct or gravity or whatever. Sloterdijk’s is an essentially lonely, not to mention
exhausting, grammar of human life.
This exclusive emphasis on agency complete-
One common feature of premodern
ly misses the way people often understand the
changes in their lives, not in terms of what they (or anti-modern) depictions of
do but in terms of what happens to them and,
human existence is their emphasis,
in some cases, what is done to them. Sloterdijk
is not alone in this mistake; I would bet that not on the prospects of human
nine out of ten readers of that last sentence freedom, but on the radical
would imagine that things “done to them” are
almost by definition bad. And that just shows conditioned-ness and constrained-
the degree to which we today are captive of a ness of human agency.
terrible picture of ourselves and our relation to
the world.
To begin to get a better picture, ask yourself: Was I cared for by others, at least
when I was a child? If I am in love, did I choose to fall in love? Did I decide what my
vocation would be? In truth, many of the most mundane and the most momentous
events in our lives happen because of a complicated dialectical dance between what
we do and what we suffer—what, that is, is done to us. To imagine that we are essen-
tially agents, that behind all the appearances of things happening to us is our own
agency, or that of some other humans, and that we understand our lives most basi-
cally as a pattern established and shaped by practices that we do—this fundamentally
traduces our own most basic experiences of life.
Martin Luther is famous for saying “Here I stand, I can do no other,” and inadver-
tently making himself thereby the archetypal example of the solitary person standing
up to the clamorous pressures of the crowd. But few people realize that he finished
that declaration with “My conscience is captive of the will of God.” This great ur-
moment of modern individualism rests on Luther’s claim that he is unable to act, to
do what his interlocutors wish him to do, that he is in fact, as he will spend many
thousands of pages over the rest of his life making clear, an instrument of another,
greater, actor—as, in his thought, we all inescapably are.
Luther wasn’t unusual in stating this so frankly. A claim like this is unusual nei-
ther among Luther’s fellow Christians nor among religious thinkers more generally.
It is not unusual even when compared with the findings of putatively non-religious
thinkers such as the Stoics, whose analyses of human agency, for all their longing
for a radical autonomy of the self, frankly recognized how rare such autonomy was,
and how accidentally (or graciously) it was bestowed. Indeed, one common feature
of premodern (or anti-modern) depictions of human existence is their emphasis,
not on the prospects of human freedom, but on the radical conditioned-ness and

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constrained-ness of human agency. It is we moderns who are unusual, in finding this

emphasis odd. And it is only in modernity that we have begun to imagine ourselves as

self-begot, self-raised
by our own quickening power….
Our puissance is our own; our own right hand
Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try
Who is our equal.

That the voice speaking those noble and aspirational sentiments is Satan (in John
Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 5, lines 860−61, 864−66) ought to make us wonder wheth-
er this ambition is one that it is in our best interest to affirm.
It ought to make us wonder that, but it probably won’t. The reason it won’t seems
invisible to Sloterdijk, as it often is to the rest of us moderns, at least most of the
time. That reason is one of the crucial facts about religious life—and much premodern
life—that make it so hard to get into focus for moderns in general, Sloterdijk among
them. Here his ignorance of scholarship sabotages his project. For decades, scholars
have explored the genuinely unprecedented quality
attendant on modern religiosity, what they call its
Sloterdijk argues that asceticism reflexivity, the peculiarly self-conscious way that peo-
was quarantined in Christian ple are religious in the modern world. Scholars have
used insights from these studies to advance moderns’
monasteries in late antiquity, understanding not just of their religiosity, but also of
although he misses how later the nature of human agency in general. Consider the
simple fact that modern people can know religion as
Christian reformers (from a discrete and, in some important way, contingent
Augustine through Calvin) part of themselves; because of the unavoidable fact of
religious plurality, moderns know that their religious
pushed it perennially back into views are not natural or inevitable. Their religion
the world, into the saeculum. is contingent, and the relaxed connection between
their beliefs and their selves makes those beliefs easily
begin to feel like a “preference,” an “option,” rather
than a primordial attunement to the ontological basis of the cosmos. This is just as true
for the “fundamentalists” among us, who can only be fundamentalists because they
know there is another way to be; “fundamentalists” are, after all, intentionally opting
out of a certain mode of being modern—but in the very act of “opting out,” they are
affirming the more fundamental framework of agency into which modernity seduces
us. (Scholars of fundamentalism from Martin Marty to Olivier Roy have made this case
across different religions.)5
This inescapable reflexivity and imputed voluntariness make modern religiosity sig-
nificantly discontinuous with earlier forms of the same phenomenon: Moderns think
that our deepest convictions are always at best shellacked onto an undeniable, hence
inescapable, exercise of human volition. The ironies of this situation are manifold:
Modern religion, indeed, all modern agency, operates under what Peter Berger has

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THE FITNESS IMPERATIVE

The fifteen-minute workout routine of Danish

gymnastics instructor J. P. Müller sparked
one of the first fitness crazes to sweep the
Western world. Set forth in strongly moral-
istic language in his 1904 book, Mein System,
Müller’s regime—his “practice”—was followed
with something close to religious fervor by
millions of Europeans, including the Prince of
Wales and the writer Franz Kafka.

Left: original cover of Mein System (1904) by J. P. Müller;

right: Portrait of Franz Kafka (1883–1924); private collection,
Prismatic Pictures/Bridgeman Images.

called “the heretical imperative.” This “imperative” is indeed unquestionable, and so

we are in the paradoxical situation of being, as it were, compelled to choose, heterono-
mously autonomous.6

Self-mastery of the Most Monadic Sort

We need not explore those paradoxes at all here; suffice to note that Sloterdijk’s pre-
sumption of the primacy of our agency reveals that he assumes this heretical impera-
tive to be the natural human condition. He does not see how much of what he takes
to be generically human is in fact distinctively modern. In this, he is a creature of the
Enlightenment, equipped not only with the Enlightenment’s many virtues but also
with some of its vices, including a smug, unquestioning, Whiggish confidence in the
progress of history and a deep blindness to the parochialness of what the Enlightenment
took as “common sense.” He projects his own mindset backward to include thinkers
remarkably different, and distant, from him. Augustine is condemned, Marcus Aurelius
is commended, Indian gymnosophists are seen as making choices akin to those made by
early twentieth-century French aesthetes, and never is there any evidence that Sloterdijk
has contemplated the possibility that these historically distant figures might see the
world in a way very different from how he does. This blindness hampers his account
of the past, when even “pagan” philosophers like the Stoics had a less reflexive under-
standing of human beings and their place in the world. It also damages his account
of the phenomenology of religion, even today—even under conditions of “the hereti-
cal imperative.” Weber called himself “religiously unmusical,” and a similar condition
afflicts Sloterdijk, but more generally, across his consideration of whole swaths of his-
torical human behavior, religious and non-religious alike.

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Consider his account of asceticism, arguably the most fundamental category in his
discussion of anthropotechnics. Sloterdijk argues that asceticism was quarantined in
Christian monasteries in late antiquity, although he misses how later Christian reform-
ers (from Augustine through Calvin) pushed it perennially back into the world, into
the saeculum. But fundamentally, he misses the inner logic of the monastic life. He
presents that life as a frank expression of a desire for self-control: “Whoever joins the
path of philosophical practice … does so not in full possession of their self-control, but
because they realize a lack thereof—and at once in the hope … of one day mastering
the art of self-governance.” The paradigm he assumes here is a withdrawal of the self
from the world, a withdrawal that creates the possibility of talking about “the world” at
all, of bringing “the world” as a whole into view, as if from a perspective fundamentally
outside of it. This presumes that the self is what is hived off from the world. Asceticism,
so understood, is primarily renunciatory, a matter of secession; its aim is autarkeia, self-
mastery of the most monadic sort.
But this is not in fact what Christian asceticism was about, at least not as manifested
in Christian monasticism, if we are to believe the testimony of Benedict’s Rule, or the
writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, or Bonaventure, or Augustine. The aim was not con-
trol but compassion, charity, and above all mercy, a movement toward an ever-deeper
communion among members, collectively beseech-
ing God for God’s presence. And what goes for mon-
Sloterdijk’s depiction of the asteries goes, for a thinker like Augustine, for the
whole of the saeculum, the “world” in this dispen-
ancient world as a place
sation. Saeculum autem hoc eremus est, he said once
populated by people longing for in a sermon: The world itself can be our hermitage.
yoga classes is precisely where We needn’t flee to a monastery to live a holy life.
Christian churches are best understood not as train-
Nietzsche prophesied the ing camps for theological ninjas but as hospitals ded-
“last men” would end up. icated to the healing of wounded souls. (Augustine
intentionally used the metaphor of “hospital” for
the church, in contrast to the metaphor favored by
his Pelagian opponents, who talked about the life of the faithful as a gymnasium—
although even the Pelagians left space for the gracious energies of God.) To assume that
the whole history of religious thought is uniformly a matter of the exercise of agency
misses the fact that premodern thinkers understood the human not as primarily acting
but primarily responding: responding, precisely, to a set of conditions and dynamisms,
sociopolitical and metaphysical, that were seen as fundamental to the human condition.

Warring with Finitude, Longing for Infinitude

Seen in this light, Sloterdijk’s account is nothing more than a sloganeering version
of the Nietzschean vision of the Superman—and a reheated and shallow version at
that. Nietzsche understood the power and glory of asceticism, especially when used for
(what he called) life. And he also understood that human “individualism” is a terrible

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misconstrual of who we are and what the cosmos is, and that human agency is not
the most basic force in reality, and that our fantasy of being our own causa sui was
simply another part of our blinkered (and post-Christian) bourgeois vision—what
Nietzsche himself called “the best self-contradiction we have invented so far,” as if
one could, “with more than Münchhausen’s audac-
ity, pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of
the swamps of nothingness.”7 In large part precisely He is what Wittgenstein once
because he saw the inanity of this view, Nietzsche
called a bourgeois thinker—one
was the greatest tragic thinker of the modern age.
This view also explains why he was so contemptu- who thinks “with the aim of
ous of the formation of moderns, and particularly
clearing up the affairs of some
our formal education, regarding it as rendering us
largely insensate to the full dimensions of human particular community,” not of
beings and the real perplexities of the human condi- asking basic questions.
tion. Recall that Nietzsche was, first and foremost, a
classical scholar, trying to recover for our world the
vision of the Greeks and Romans; as such, he saw the emptiness of the sort of historical
imagination that Sloterdijk presumes. Sloterdijk’s depiction of the ancient world as a
place populated by people longing for yoga classes is precisely where Nietzsche proph-
esied the “last men” would end up. And he didn’t think that was a good thing; in fact,
he called it nihilism.
I don’t think it’s nihilistic. I think there is a core vision of the good that is driving
Sloterdijk’s proposal: a vision of endless human dynamism, creating ever-new kinds of
creatures out of ourselves. But I suspect that that vision only partly describes the world
we live in today, is far more ambiguous and ambivalent in itself, and has more tangled
roots than Sloterdijk can allow. Modernity is definitely driven by a vision of reform,
and that vision definitely has both distinct and indistinct religious roots. Thinkers from
Nietzsche and Weber through Gerhart Ladner and Charles Taylor and Philip Gorski
have repeatedly made this point.8 Sloterdijk’s book would have been much better, more
profound, if he had contemplated that fact, and tried to account for it. And it most
definitely would have made for a better and richer account of religious belief as itself
not entirely different, in its inarticulacies, from the secular confidence that we ought,
and consequently can, radically reform our own lives.
But Sloterdijk’s refusal to think about this, his almost faith-based confidence that this
must be right, that there is no alternative to this vision of hyper-agency, is what makes
him so interesting as a symptom of our age. His work crystallizes the correct opinions of
a certain class—European intellectuals—and even more specifically a subspecies of that
class, namely German post-1968 secular intellectuals. He is what Wittgenstein once
called a bourgeois thinker—one who thinks “with the aim of clearing up the affairs of
some particular community,” not of asking basic questions.9
The very radicality of Sloterdijk’s misapprehensions, the subterranean level at which
his errors most properly belong, and the way in which he manages to miss the point all
give us some sense of the particular difficulties we moderns have in coming to under-
stand what often goes today under the label of “religion,” whether “traditional” or not.

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It is no surprise that those moderns to whom some such religion has been given, and
who have taken it upon themselves to try to communicate it to other moderns—mod-
ern evangelists, if you will—have overwhelmingly tried to speak in tones of indirection
and irony. It is the focus on the You, in Sloterdijk’s title, that these authors confront:
How do we escape thinking we are the most important thing about ourselves?
Indeed, perhaps strategies of “indirect communication,” such as Kierkegaardian irony,
Nietzschean aphorisms, and other modes of what Michael Sells has called in his book of
the same title “mystical languages of unsaying” (University of Chicago Press, 1994) really
are the best kind of rhetoric to communicate religious insights to so fundamentally and
hopelessly irreligious an age as our own—to people so self-trained to misapprehend what
is being said. But then, after saying that, I think: That cannot be the whole story because,
seen in another light, no age is more religious, in many senses, than this one—consider
the vast and unquestioning moral pressures put upon us by what Taylor has called “the
drive to reform.” Certainly this age is no less religious than any other before it (when
great piety was often paired with great inhumanity). Here we give due weight to the idea
that, as Sloterdijk’s Rilkean imperative has it, you must change your life. Whence does
this imperative, this must, arise? This imperative is most definitely felt by all, even if we
typically misconstrue it in the thin terms of modern liberal individualism. So the ques-
tion remains: How is it possible for religious
insight to be delivered to a people simulta-
How is it possible for religious insight to neously so fundamentally unattuned to its
be delivered to a people simultaneously frequencies yet so unquestioningly driven
by its energies?
so fundamentally unattuned to its
Perhaps things are fundamentally no
frequencies yet so unquestioningly different on this front than they have
ever been. Perhaps we have always been
driven by its energies?
engaged in a battle against the bewitch-
ment of our spirits by the means of our
amour-propre. Signs and wonders abound, had we but eyes to see and ears to hear
them. But this generation, like all before it, seeks signs on its own terms, and those
terms will never be honored. Speaking confessionally, and perhaps perilously, from
one religious perspective, I would say this: One core manifestation of the miraculous,
one central thread in pretty much any revelation, is the rupturing, rapturing, and
refiguration of our terms, their transformation and transfiguration into something
altogether other. The problem is most deeply described not as the next step in anthro-
potechnics but as the ever-new, and ever-old, struggle of the human spirit at war with
its finitude from the perspective of its longing for infinitude.
Sloterdijk might well dismiss this redescription, seeing it as one more version of
“the error that theologians are ex officio constrained to make,” confusing the “vertical
tension” of human subjectivity with God’s call. And admittedly, it’s not clear that
there is any neutral ground on which to stand to deliberate about which side is right.
It may just be that we are, on matters of this most fundamental issue, ships passing in
the night, finally cut off from one another. That would be sad, but something’s being
sad is not an argument against its being true.

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“You must change your life”: The dispute is in some ways about the grammar
of this statement. Is it best said in the imperative, that you are the agent who will
and must effect this change? Or is it better said in the indicative, so that you are the
subject whose life is changed, perhaps by an agency beyond you? That is the crux of
the debate. Sloterdijk’s proposal is to date the most systematic, perspicacious, oro-
tund treatise for the former. I suspect that most of the religious folk I know—and
I myself—would boost for the latter. It remains to be seen whether either side can
make itself properly understood to the other. But we can at least thank Sloterdijk for
presenting the issue as frankly, and as fully, as he has.

Endnotes

1 Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge,
England: Polity Press, 2013).
2 See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (New York, NY: Routledge, 2001); Jürgen Habermas, Religion
and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Alain Badiou,
Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Giorgio
Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2003).
3 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1981); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Jonathan
Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001).
4 Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillen and Karl Pillemer (New
York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1988), 109–10.
5 See, e.g., Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic
Character of Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam:
The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
6 Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City,
NY: Anchor Press, 1979).
7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufman
(New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989), §21.
8 Along with books mentioned already, see Gerhart Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian
Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), and
Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
9 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 2nd rev. ed., ed. G. H. Wright (Oxford, England: Wiley-
Blackwell, 1998), 24e.

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 Re-enchantment and
Iconoclasm in an Age of Images

Anna Marazuela Kim

I
mages are a particularly strong form of enchantment. They captivate us by means
of a mysterious double effect, oscillating between visual immediacy and their clear
status as illusion. At least since antiquity, the nearly magical, delusional potential
of images has been an issue of serious concern. (Perhaps it was so even in the caves of
Lascaux, where images of bison sprang to life, animated by prehistoric fire). Before
modern societies were captivated by motion pictures, then television, then the ever-
expanding array of iPhones, iPads, and computers that now capture our gaze, Plato
likened our human condition to imprisonment in a cave of flickering images (eidola): a
shadow world of appearances removed from the sunlit reality of the world of true Forms
that lay outside.1 In this primal image, Plato seems to have anticipated a significant
feature of our contemporary milieu: the thoroughgoing mediation of information and
experience through images and image-rendering screens.
Philosophy, Plato argued, was the only means of escape from the delusional enchant-
ment of the image-world. Disenchantment, which could be achieved only through
exposure to the potentially blinding light outside the cave, was vital to the welfare of
the citizens trapped within.

The Iconic Turn

Many centuries later, in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein,

who survived both the trenches and a prison camp in World War I, described our epis-
temic condition in similar metaphoric terms: “A picture held us captive.”2

Anna Marazuela Kim is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld

Institute of Art, London, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Culture, University of Virginia.

Right: A projection by Zhang Xinyu and Liang Hong of the tallest Buddha in Bamyan Valley,
Afghanistan, June 2015. The Bamyan Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001; © Zhang
Xinyu/Xinhua Press/Corbis.

48
49
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

By picture, Wittgenstein meant the “picture” of language. Our imprisonment was

our inability to get outside it, or beyond it, even in our philosophical critique. But the
critical task of philosophy was not escape to another realm. It was, instead, to make vis-
ible the limits of our rational confinement, as beings inescapably bounded by language.
What lay beyond was a domain inaccessible to philosophy: the ineffable realm of the
“mystical” (mystisch).3
The reflection upon language as fundamental to the
human condition—the “linguistic turn” inaugurated by
The reflection upon language
Wittgenstein and others—was crucial to the intellectual
as fundamental to the landscape of the twentieth century. In our own century,
that ground has been transformed by what has been
human condition was crucial
called the “pictorial turn,” and more recently the “iconic
to the intellectual landscape turn.”4 What does this signify? It has been said that the
vast digitization and global interconnection of images
of the twentieth century.
has created an environment that operates in ancient,
iconic fashion. In other words, images increasingly func-
tion not simply as visual representations. They also actively mediate distant persons and
worlds, rendering them virtually, luminously “present.” Whether as avatars of the self or
sites of spectacular display, images have never been more lifelike, more enchanting, than
they are today. It would seem, then, that our task is once again to disenchant them: to free
ourselves from their grip through a critical, philosophical iconoclasm.
But is there a brighter, ideal world outside the shadow world of images, as Plato
argued—or are we inescapably part of the picture?

Images as Visual Terrorism

In order to grapple with the iconic turn and the distinctive challenges it poses, we might
begin by noting some of its more paradoxical features. Despite the unprecedented pro-
liferation of images in contemporary culture, certain of them still affect us with great
force. Consider the searing image of passenger planes striking the Twin Towers. In
coming to symbolize the fall of an American icon, the World Trade Center, this image
of iconoclasm has itself become “iconic.” Or take the empty niches of the two great
Buddhas at Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban—iconic absences that powerfully evoke
the statues’ former presence. Another paradox is that in an age of sophisticated, tech-
nological, and “secular” advance, ancient concerns and language regarding old forms
of enchantment, notably idolatry, have retaken center stage in global affairs. Much like
the old wars of religion that shook and shaped early modern Europe, the new wars are
increasingly fought on the ground of the image: Not only do adversaries contest the
relationship between the image and the sacred; they also destroy images as “idolatrous”
objects, or deploy images in acts of religious violence, strategically publicizing these
acts through mass media. In the modern “society of the spectacle,” as French theorist
and filmmaker Guy Debord has argued, spectacle is capitalized to such a degree that
everything becomes image.5

50
 RE-ENCHANTMENT AND ICONOCLASM / KIM

As the archaic power of images is transformed by new technologies that hold us in

thrall, images have become a primary weapon of terror, a form of visual terrorism. Like
apparitions, they intrude unbidden upon the visual field of laptops and communication
devices so as to merge with the flow of consciousness or perception, much like the flick-
ering images on the wall of Plato’s cave. The decapitation of statues and the beheading
of living people go hand in hand, each reifying the other, their images blurring and
merging into one spectacular nightmare.
Yet, clearly, images also hold the potential for transcendence and positive transfor-
mation. They re-present the world in remarkable ways, transporting us beyond the cave-
like confines of our physical and imaginative limitations. Far from being epistemically
or ethically bankrupt, art and aesthetic perception can illumine otherwise-unrecognized
dimensions of the world and ourselves, prompting much-needed reflection upon our
place within it. And although we no longer bend at the knee, as Hegel once said, before
the altar of art, the idea of art as a locus of the sacred—as a privileged site of epiphanic
revelation and transcendent mystery—is widely held across cultures. Through art, the
memory of cultures and civilizations long past is preserved—as is the possibility of
understanding and experiencing them across time and history. This is brought into
tragic clarity by the destruction of globally revered monuments by the Islamic State
in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and other radical groups. As hammers and dynamite destroy
irreplaceable artifacts and religious shrines, our common humanity seems at stake.

To Re-enchant or Disenchant?

From the biblical story of man made in the image of God to the iconoclasm of ISIS,
the history of our complex relationship with images is bound up with dialectics of
enchantment and disenchantment: the sacralization of images and their subsequent
destruction on the grounds that they are empty, illuso-
ry, and corrupting. The image was Janus-faced from the
beginning: a potentially transcendent “icon”—with Christ As hammers and dynamite
as the exemplary eikon of the invisible God—or a trou- destroy irreplaceable
bling “idol,” a golden calf invested with delusory mean-
ing. “Enlightenment,” a key concept in early Western artifacts and religious
modernity that also has resonance in Eastern religions, shrines, our common
has long been formulated in imagistic terms: principally
as the destruction of idols, whether external or internal.
humanity seems at stake.
Yet for all our efforts to free ourselves from the enchant-
ment of images, every age continues to re-enchant them. Max Weber’s characterization
of modernity as die Entzauberung der Welt—the elimination of magic from the world—
describes not an end-state, as Weber himself supposed it did, but a phase in what seems
to be a historically recurring dynamic.
The question of whether to re-enchant or disenchant the image has become
increasingly fraught. For centuries, the West has claimed the disenchanting method
of “critique” as its intellectual and moral weapon against irrationality and religious

51
 THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

superstition. The Protestant

Reformation was only the
first in a series of iconoclasms,
material and ideological, that
gave rise to the so-called secu-
lar society and its freedoms.
Now, as iconoclasm has been
appropriated as a global strat-
egy, and so brutally realized
by ISIS and other extrem-
ist groups, the West is left in
something of a quandary. In
certain thought-provoking
respects, the Islamist critique
of idolatry replays, to the let-
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY.

ter, arguments central to the

West’s own drama of refor-
mation and modernization.
For example, in justifying the
eradication of the Buddhas
of Bamiyan—an important
precedent for the image wars
now being prosecuted by
ISIS—the Taliban spoke in
terms that might have been
lifted straight from the homi-
lies of the sixteenth-century
Protestant reformers. If the
Technology, 1991, by Nam June Paik (1932–2006). statues, they argued, were
empty idols—mere stones—
why the uproar about their
destruction? The value accorded these artifacts by the international community was
plausibly criticized as outweighing any concern for the desperate humanitarian condi-
tions in the region. By bestowing such significance upon artifacts, the West effectively
affirmed for the Taliban the statues’ idolatrous potential, and in so doing revealed its
own, secularized form of image-enchantment.

Recovering the Infinite Within the Immanent

As the philosopher Bruno Latour reminds us, iconoclasts are those who destroy with
the belief that a utopian order lies behind or beyond the structures they shatter.6 But as
ISIS threatens to eradicate entire cultures and the monumental images by which they
are remembered, it seems that the former iconoclasts of the West are now the ones to

52
 RE-ENCHANTMENT AND ICONOCLASM / KIM

stay the hammer’s blow. We want again to re-enchant the world, perhaps now with the
urgent sense that it is the only world. We want to claim that art bears the sacred for
the ages, and that stones can speak across time and historical distance, to preserve our
common humanity for as long as humans survive.
Perhaps we are, in this moment, more like Wittgenstein than Plato. In describing
Wittgenstein’s view of the world, Michael Saler examines the idea of “disenchanted
enchantment.” By this Saler means to capture Wittgenstein’s belief that “critical rea-
son and imaginative wonder could co-exist.”7 In demarcating the limits of rationality,
philosophy does not imprison us in the proverbial “iron cage” lamented by Weber.
Rather, it frees us from it, not through escape to another realm in the Platonic sense
but through the recognition that the world is infinitely more complex, contingent, and
various than any partial description or explanation of it. In an ancient sense, philosophy
begins, but also should end, with wonder.
In his meditation on the value of such a stance, Saler praises the potential of the
Internet to foster a Wittgensteinian form of secular transcendence: the “Fictionalist
recovery of the infinite within the immanent,” founded upon the awe that flows from
recognition of our limited grasp of infinity’s many
dimensions. As a space of imaginary realms and the
communities dedicated to them, the Internet would The fictive image-domains
indeed seem to hold the promise of re-enchanting the of the Internet, while
world by means of an “infinite outlook.” Yet we might
be cautious in making the Internet our primary realm potentially infinite, are but
of wonder and commitment. Much as Wittgenstein a pale reflection of a robust,
required of philosophy that it seek to understand the
hidden limits of its confinement, we should consider physical, and infinitely
critically the invisible constraints of the seemingly “lim- more complicated world of
itless” Internet. To return again to the metaphor of
Plato’s cave: The fictive image-domains of the Internet, human persons, objects, and
while potentially infinite, are but a pale reflection of a interpersonal relations.
robust, physical, and—in many significant respects—
infinitely more complicated world of human persons,
objects, and interpersonal relations. Consider, for example, the growing cultural phe-
nomenon of people who prefer sexual and other relationships with virtual images to
relationships with actual people.8 Should we praise those who choose to spend much
of their lives sequestered within a virtual reality? Or should we instead recognize this
shift as one of the pressing ethical challenges of our newly re-enchanted image world?
While the realm of the imagination is a space of freedom to be prized, we should
also acknowledge that, historically, it has also been a place of retreat, particularly under
conditions in which freedom is extremely constrained. Thus, the prisoner under torture
imagines being in another body or place. In a parallel way, virtual images now enable
such imaginative escape, and to a degree and an extent never before imagined. Whether
this is progress or regress remains to be seen; the image always was Janus-faced. Last year,
when the Spanish government enacted measures sharply curbing freedom of expression
and the public right to protest, imaginative citizens responded by projecting holograms

53
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

that marched outside the parliament in their stead.9 More recently, the empty niche
of one of the mighty, ancient Buddhas was set aglow, the statue reconstituted by the
miracle of laser technology.10 Is this is our new era of “enlightenment”? And if it is, are
we masters of the infinite—or prisoners of the cave?

Endnotes

1 Republic, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series
LXXI (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 747–49.
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations), trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, fourth edition (Chichester, West Sussex, England/
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 54.
3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden, intro. Bertrand Russell
(London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), 90.
4 Gottfried Boehm and W. J. T. Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn: Two Letters,” Culture, Theory and
Critique 50, 2−3 (2009): 103−21.
5 Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle, troisième édition (Paris, France: Les Éditions Gallimard, 1992), 21.
6 Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” New Literary History 41 (2010), 475.
7 Michael Saler, “Rethinking Secularism: Modernity, Enchantment, and Fictionalism,” The Immanent
Frame, December 20, 2013; http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2013/12/20/modernity-enchantment-and-fiction-
alism/.
8 Anita Rani reports on the existence of this phenomenon in Japan in “The Japanese Men Who Prefer Virtual
Girlfriends to Sex,” BBC News, October 24, 2013; http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24614830.
9 Zachary D. Boren, “Spain’s Hologram Protest: Thousands Join Virtual March in Madrid against New
Gag Law,” The Independent (United Kingdom), April 12, 2015; http://www.independent.co.uk/news/
world/europe/spains-hologram-protest-thousands-join-virtual-march-in-madrid-against-new-gag-
law-10170650.html.
10 Edward Delman, “Afghanistan’s Buddhas Rise Again,” The Atlantic, June 10, 2015; http://www.theatlan-
tic.com/international/archive/2015/06/3d-buddhas-afghanistan/395576/.

54
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 Nietzsche’s Smile
Modern Conversion and
the Secularity Craze

Matthew Scherer

O
ne of the defining features of our particular historical moment is the very
idea of its being freshly broken from the past. Across many fields of endeav-
or—history, the arts, philosophy, politics, and so on—this is perhaps the
defining feature of modernism: To be modern is to be aware of oneself, to be reflective
about oneself, as standing at the end of a tradition, and as breaking from that tradition
precisely by coming to awareness of it. Political modernity began, it is said, with the
late-eighteenth-century French, American, and Haitian revolutions that ushered in the
age of democratic self-determination. Artistic modernity began as writers and painters
shifted focus from the world to the writerly and painterly process of representation
itself. At a certain point of industrial development, modernity was born, as the bour-
geois representatives of capital become the chief agents of history, spawning a world
market and deliberately remaking the surface of the earth in their own image. Modern
spirituality emerged along with a new experience of “secularity” as a self-reflective, plu-
ralistic stance enabled by the retreat of hegemonic, organized religions.
We tell many stories about modernity. And the basic assumptions that underpin
these stories are probably true—more or less. Yet as they reveal their particular images
of modernity, these assumptions leave other facets obscure. For example, in many of
the most influential stories, we become modern through a process of conversion. While
this goes unremarked, we are, as it were, converted to modernity. We narrate the birth
of modernity as a rebirth, telling stories about the passage from premodern naiveté
through a crisis of that condition, to a rebirth within a reflective modernity. These are
conversion stories, and they resonate deeply with key metaphors of the Enlightenment

Matthew Scherer is an assistant professor in the School of Policy, Government, and

International Affairs at George Mason University. He is the author of Beyond Church and
State: Democracy, Secularism, and Conversion (2013).

Right: Friedrich Nietzsche, 1994, by Werner Horvath (b. 1949); courtesy of the artist.

56
57
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

and the New Testament. Without acknowledgment, one enters and inhabits moder-
nity as through a religious conversion. This may happen because we inhabit a broadly
Protestantized culture in which identity is understood and lived in terms of conversion.
It may be because any narrative of self-identity requires this kind of structure (within
which, the thinking goes, one can produce the space necessary to look back and relate
one’s story only by taking a step away from the former self one wishes to narrate).
While it may seem obvious that modernity is constituted as what breaks from past tra-
dition, it is much less obvious that this break is narrated and experienced as a process
of conversion. There are many ways to be converted, of course, but there is nonetheless
a pronounced tendency to overlook the process of conversion that underlies modern
secularity, and thus also a pronounced tendency to construe the experience of modern
secularity too narrowly.1
It is particularly difficult to see how modern secularity is produced by a process
of conversion, because of the deeply entrenched assumption that “the modern” and
“the secular” are the opposite of “the religious”—or, if they are not the opposite of the
religious, that they are nonetheless categorically distinct from it. An ironic blind spot
emerges from this: Modern secularity is grounded upon, but must not acknowledge,
the process of conversion that sustains it. Conversion seems to require the production
of a simplifying narrative that posits a rupture with the past. One dies and is born
again. But conversion also exceeds the simple narrative of an instantaneous break: One
acquires new habits, new ways of valuing the world, new communities of affiliation,
for example. All of those changes take time and are consolidated gradually. What's
more, despite the notion that one has died and
been born again, a great deal of one’s former self
While it may seem obvious that persists within the new. Modern secularity, I will
modernity is constituted as what suggest, is just like this: It presents a stark and
simple surface of a freestanding, self-reflective
breaks from past tradition, it is rationality, but this surface conceals contradicto-
much less obvious that this break ry depths, including persistent attachments to an
unacknowledged but inescapable religious past.
is narrated and experienced In many parts of the world today, it is difficult
as a process of conversion. to ignore the conflicts and apparent contradic-
tions between two of the key facets of modernity,
that is, between democracy and secularity. This is
true of the collisions around the “separation of church and state” and “religious free-
dom” in the United States and also of the evolving challenges to France’s laïcité, as its
stricter regime of separation is called. It is true as well of contests over the proper place
of Islam and Islamic parties that are playing out differently in, for example, Turkey
and Egypt. There are profound differences between each of these cases, but considered
together they remind us at least that politics in modern democracies is not secular in
the sense of freeing itself from religion; politics and religion instead have remained
intricately entwined in the modern world.
If this suggests that one of modernity’s simplest conversion narratives, in which a
secular democracy is born from the death of a traditional, religious order, is difficult to

58
 NIETZSCHE’S SMILE / SCHERER

apply anywhere in the world, there are nonetheless subtler and more promising stories
to be told about democracy, secularity, and conversion. If modernity emerges neither
as the conversion to the post-metaphysical politics proposed by secularist sloganeers
nor as the counter-conversion to a radical orthodoxy professed by their opposite num-
bers, secularity might nevertheless come into focus as a tentative, conflicted, and com-
plex process of conversion irreducible to either of those poles. To make that out more
clearly, I will consider one of modernity’s most infamous slogans, Friedrich Nietzsche’s
announcement that “God is dead.” Beneath the simple surface of that statement lies the
kernel of an argument about modern secularity as conversion.

The “Death of God”

Nietzsche is widely known as the archetypical modern nihilist who announced “The
Death of God.” However, his less-remembered but clearly related remarks about “secu-
larization” make that pungent little pronunciamento a much more ambiguous, compli-
cated, and apt response to the modern condition than it may at first seem. About the
same time that Nietzsche was writing about the death of God, he was also developing a
sophisticated stance toward the politics surrounding secularization—although he con-
signed those remarks to notebooks that were long left unpublished. Read with an eye
to the problem of conversion, they shed new
light on the death of God and perhaps, more
importantly, on our contemporary predica-
About the same time that Nietzsche
ment. was writing about the death of God,
Nietzsche’s apparent proclamation of the
he was also developing a sophisticated
demise of the Deity is grounded in section
125 of The Gay Science (first published as stance toward the politics surrounding
2
Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft in 1882). This
secularization—although he consigned
key section is too long to quote in full here,
but I can offer a paraphrase: A “mad man” those remarks to notebooks that were
enters the marketplace bearing a lantern at
long left unpublished.
midday and calling out that he seeks God; he
is mocked by onlookers who do not believe
in God; he calls out not simply that God is dead but that “we have killed him,—you
and I!” Carrying on about our inability to properly conceive, let alone cope with, what
we have done, he sings requiems for the Deity in a variety of churches, which he calls
“tombs and monuments of God.” As this briefest of paraphrases might suggest, it is a
wonder that Nietzsche’s remarks here could ever have been so compacted, so reduced,
to the idea that “God is dead.” While books have been written about the curious recep-
tions of Nietzsche’s works, it’s important for our purposes here to consider how elusive
his remarks on God actually are.
To begin with, Nietzsche could not have meant to tell us that God is dead, or that
the world around us has been disenchanted, in any straightforward sense. He certainly
would have known that there was nothing new in the idea of God’s death: When Hegel

59
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

René Girard has taken pondered the fate of religion at the conclusion of
his book Faith and Knowledge, published eighty
Heidegger to task for avoiding years before Nietzsche’s Gay Science, he wrote of
essential existential questions by “the feeling that ‘God himself is dead,’ upon which
the religion of more recent times rests.” Hegel
substituting “the God of Being” also had the grace to note that Pascal had already
for “the Christian God”—a expressed that same recognition about modern
religion nearly 150 years earlier in his Pensées. If
substitution Girard bitingly Nietzsche could not have intended this announce-
describes “a little ludicrous really ment of the death of God as news, what was he
saying, and why might it matter to us now?
and unworthy of Heidegger.” Nietzsche himself offered his own interpreta-
tion in a later section of The Gay Science: “The
greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead,’ that the belief in the Christian god has
become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe” (sec-
tion 343). Martin Heidegger would build on that interpretation in what has become
the baseline for scholarly engagement with Nietzsche’s text:

From this sentence, it is clear that Nietzsche’s pronouncement con-

cerning the death of God means the Christian god. But it is no less
certain, and it is to be considered in advance, that the terms “God”
and “Christian God” in Nietzsche’s thinking are used to designate the
suprasensory world in general. God is the name for the realm of Ideas
and ideals. This realm of the suprasensory has been considered since
Plato, or more strictly speaking, since the late Greek and Christian
interpretation of Platonic philosophy, to be the true and genuinely real
world.… The pronouncement “God is dead” means: The suprasensory
world is without effective power. It bestows no life. Metaphysics, i.e.,
for Nietzsche Western philosophy understood as Platonism, is at an
end.3

According to Heidegger, Nietzsche’s real concern is with the philosophical tradition

rather than the sociology of religion, and while he writes about the death of God, what
he really means is the end of metaphysics. Heidegger’s claims about Nietzsche’s critique
of metaphysics are not wrong, but it is worth thinking a bit about what Heidegger
leaves out of his story.
The philosophical anthropologist René Girard has usefully taken Heidegger to task
for avoiding essential existential questions by substituting “the God of Being” for “the
Christian God.” In Girard’s biting phrase, that substitution “is a little ludicrous really
and unworthy of Heidegger.”4 Girard points out that Heidegger bypasses Nietzsche’s
intense interest in the problems of violence, sacrifice, and redemption that are central
to the Christian Gospels, section 125 of The Gay Science, and Nietzsche’s oeuvre more
generally. And Girard is right: It is amazing that Heidegger glides by that section’s
emphasis on God’s murder and our culpability.

60
 NIETZSCHE’S SMILE / SCHERER

Friedrich Nietzsche—God Is Dead!, 2013, by Werner Horvath (b. 1949); courtesy of the artist.

One could go on for quite some time with the commentary, but as is the case with
much of Nietzsche’s best writing, the interpretive difficulties presented by section 125
cannot be easily resolved. I want to turn now to Nietzsche’s notes to suggest that section
125 does not so much announce a shift in the status of God or the nature of enchant-
ment, but, rather, that, it serves to alert Nietzsche’s readers to their own implication in
a process of conversion they have as yet failed to grasp.
I picture Nietzsche smiling as he wrote about the death of God. Sometime in the fall
of 1881, during the composition of The Gay Science, Nietzsche made a note that should
change the way we think about the critical passage and, perhaps more important, the
way we think about secularity and enchantment. Here is the key part of his note:

The political madness, at which I smile just as my contemporaries smile at

the religious madness of earlier times, is above all SECULARIZATION,
the belief in the world and the rejection of a world “beyond” and
“behind.”5

In the next sentences, he depicts socialism as the “fruit” of secularization. Behind this
characterization are Nietzsche’s misgivings about the rise of mass democracy—and what
he saw as the disastrous consequences of this emerging political form for European
culture and society. Because individuals had come to conceive of themselves as fleeting
beings rather than as bearers of eternal souls, they were seeking their happiness in the
here and now through the means of socialism instead of waiting for happiness in the

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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

hereafter. In the next sentence of his note, he sketches an alternative response to the
transiency of the individual and the absence of an afterlife, invoking both the idea of
the eternal return and the love of fate, in the teaching that “the task is to live such that
you must wish to live this way again—you will in any case!”
The connection of secularization with madness in Nietzsche’s note places the “mad
man” of section 125 in a distinct light. Nietzsche smiles at secularization as a “political
madness” that he glosses as a “rejection” of regnant ideas about a world beyond this one.
More specifically, he smiles at the secularization craze in precisely the same way his con-
temporaries were smiling at the religious crazes of earlier times. Nietzsche’s smile is thus
similar to that of his contemporaries, but heightened, as he claims a historical perspec-
tive upon his own moment—insofar, in other words, as he knows himself to be smiling.
Significantly, Nietzsche’s smile—which anticipates the cheer and high spirits of The
Gay Science—is directed neither at a religious phenomenon nor simply at the phenom-
enon of secularization, but rather at the political madness, at the craze, that accompanies
both phenomena. It is not the newfound worldly orientation of his contemporaries that
amuses Nietzsche, for as Heidegger emphasizes, Nietzsche also seeks to do away with the
idea of a world beyond this one (Jenseits) or beneath it (Hinterwelt). Rather, the intense
arousal his contemporaries experience in contemplating the apparent transformation of
religion, the craze that accompanies the transposition of redemption from another world
to this world, the wave of feeling that accompanies the movement from salvation to
socialism, is what elicits Nietzsche’s smile. Nietzsche was often a biting critic of democ-
racy and democratic culture. (Many contemporary theorists continue to find his analyses
insightful despite disagreeing with his assessment of democracy.) And his response to the
political madness of his time should be seen against the larger background of the democ-
ratization of nineteenth-century Europe. However, Nietzsche’s smile entails more than
simple mockery of the culture of mass democracy. Nietzsche’s grin might also welcome
the arrival of a new faith in the world, a faith that is no less a political madness than the
religious madness of earlier times. Nietzsche himself was absorbed with the prospect of
reconceiving a faith in the world—and while he cannot bring himself to share in the
particular faith projected by his contemporaries, he nonetheless seems to be moved by the
spectacle their striving produces—not merely disapproving.
What would it mean to smile as Nietzsche does here? For his own part, he generally
sought to resist urges to repair the world, to correct or redeem its errors. His smile is
not intended to transcend the religious and secular madnesses of his time. Immediately
before smiling on secularization, Nietzsche notes that for any degree of consciousness
to be possible, a world of error is necessary, that error is a requisite for life just as the
drive to knowledge is premised upon an erroneous faith. He proposes that “we must
love and care for error, it is the womb of knowledge,” and suggests that “art as the care
of madness” will be “our religion.” A few notes later he promises to “teach a higher
form of art,” namely, “the invention of festivals/celebrations.” His smile suggests that
Nietzsche is embroiled in his historical moment, but, all the same, distant enough from
it to establish another perspective.
In my reading, Nietzsche does not so much announce the death of God—which is
old news—as direct our attention to the irrational frenzy that marks responses to the

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gradual transformation of religion, which resonates with the upheavals that accompa-
nied the introduction of mass democracy. In a world of becoming, such as Nietzsche
envisions, such transformations are inevitable. Secularity, he suggests, is neither more
nor less than the particular form taken today by our confused responses to the neces-
sary, continuous, concrete transformations of political and religious life. Nietzsche’s
remarks on the “death of God” and the “craze
for secularization,” then, are directed less at the
Nietzsche does not so much
shifts in the formation of European Christianity
(i.e., secularization or disenchantment writ large) announce the death of God—
and more at the responses, confusions, and exag-
which is old news—as direct our
gerations they provoke.
These responses—affective, narrative, fictive, attention to the irrational frenzy
erroneous, artful, even “mad”—to a large scale,
that marks responses to the gradual
long-term, open-ended process of secularization
have themselves become phenomena worthy of transformation of religion, which
attention in their own right. I would argue, fur-
resonates with the upheavals that
ther, that this new wrinkle in the incorporation
of tradition can be thought of in terms of con- accompanied the introduction of
version: A simplifying narrative posits a rupture mass democracy.
with the past that feeds into and motivates a con-
tinuous process of transformation that underlies
and, in turn, sustains it. Nietzsche is himself working to incorporate the truth of his
new doctrine of “the eternal return of all things,” a doctrine that he believes has radi-
cally changed his life. His craze for this idea pushes him along to propose new festivals
and a new art worthy of its conception and sufficient for its sustenance. He smiles, I
think, without the contempt his contemporaries were directing toward those who got
caught up in the religious crazes of old. He smiles at those caught up in the craze for
secularization because he recognizes in them the frenzied madness of a new experiment,
of a new experience of conversion. If there is a glimmer of disapproval or sadness in this
gaze, it may be because he sees too few of us smiling back at him.

Religion and Politics in Secular Modernity

The idea of secularity as conversion might seem a bit richer if it can be applied to some
of the questions that interest us today. As an example, I will offer a closer consideration
here of the relationship between religion and politics that provokes Nietzsche’s smile.
Religion and politics have been tightly entwined in the theory and practice of what
we think of as the Western tradition and in contemporary scholarship. However, there
is much disagreement about the nature of that relationship. Early in the twentieth
century, for example, Carl Schmitt and Ernst Kantorowicz articulated two general and
powerful theses that continue to orient contemporary work on the topic of political
theology (the rubric under which theorists consider this relationship). They are not
necessarily compatible theses.

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The first thesis is that modern politics grows directly from medieval religion. Schmitt
frames the process of secularization as one of inheritance in a famous passage from his
text Political Theology, asserting that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of
the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical devel-
opment…but also because of their systematic structure.”6 This is the simpler and more
influential thesis: Modern politics is “secularized” religion. The second thesis frames the
transfer from religion to politics differently, emphasizing that both fields have continu-
ously borrowed from or contaminated one another. Kantorowicz outlines this different
notion of secularization in a tour de force passage in The King’s Two Bodies:

Infinite cross-relations between Church and State, active in every cen-

tury of the Middle Ages, produced hybrids in either camp. Mutual bor-
rowings and exchanges of insignia, political symbols, prerogatives, and
rights of honor had been carried on perpetually between the spiritual
and secular leaders of Christian society. The pope adorned his tiara with
a golden crown, donned the imperial purple, and was preceded by the
imperial banners when riding in solemn procession through the streets
of Rome. The emperor wore under his crown a mitre, donned the pon-
tifical shoes and other clerical raiments, and received, like a bishop, the
ring at his coronation. These borrowings affected, in the earlier Middle
Ages, chiefly the ruling individuals, both spiritual and secular, until
finally the sacerdotium had an imperial appearance and the regnum a
clerical touch.7

In Schmitt’s view, there is a linear and progressive transfer from religion to politics; in
Kantorowicz’s, there is a series of relays between these fields. In both views, however,
there is the recognition that modern politics is in some essential sense not merely politi-
cal but necessarily theologico-political. The point for both is that politics and religion
are inescapably entwined. However, the nature (including the temporality, causality,
and trajectory) of that relationship is the subject of deep disagreement.
Insofar as the modern age is understood as a secular age in which religion has either
receded or been contained, the notion that political theology is ineliminable causes a cer-
tain amount of anxiety and confusion. As Schmitt and Kantorowicz were keenly aware,
if a political theology sustained kings and emperors from antiquity through the medieval
world, this political theology would have to be revised as kings gave way to representative
democracies at the cusp of modernity. In his recent book The Royal Remains, Eric Santner
traces precisely that problem. He argues that the displacement of sovereignty from the
body of “The King” to the collective body of “The People” produces strange, unexpected,
and often profoundly uncomfortable consequences. Following Kantorowicz’s concep-
tualization of the ineliminable excess that was once uneasily grafted onto the body of
the king—his thesis of the king’s two bodies—Santner argues that this excess becomes
the “flesh” of the people in the age of popular sovereignty. Far from being a triumphal
rendering in which the people inherit the power of the king, Santner’s view is that the
sovereign people inherit and find themselves subjected to a wounded flesh.8

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I am only scratching the surface of Santner’s argument, which is itself only one rep-
resentative of a broad and timely conversation about the meaning of political theology
in modern democratic societies. But I want to return to the idea of conversion, and
to Nietzsche’s smile, to suggest that our moment may come into sharper focus if these
debates are given a different twist. Santner aims to track “a single structural shift that
marks the threshold of modernity: the relocation of the dimension of the flesh from the
body of the king to that of the people,” a trajectory that posits modernity as an epochal
break constituted through the rejection of royal transcendence in favor of democratic
immanence.9 The argument posits the death of the royal sovereign and seeks to trace
the birth of its heir: popular sovereignty. It is a powerful, tidy, and compelling narrative
that implicitly pictures modernity as emerging through a process of conversion that
rends it from the past. Taking Nietzsche’s cue, however, I want to probe that seculariza-
tion narrative and suggest that our condition may come into focus more clearly when
the underlying continuities are acknowledged along with the surface disjunctions.
Portraying the death of the king (which stands for the end of medieval sovereignty)
in different words, Schmitt, Kantorowicz, and Santner nonetheless echo Nietzsche’s
proclamation of the death of God. Nietzsche did not mean for us to take the death of
God quite so seriously, however. In overlooking Nietzsche’s smile, what do these stories
about the transformation of political theology miss about the process of conversion that
they would record? What, by extension, do they leave out about the modern experi-
ence of secularity? Schmitt, Kantorowicz, and Santner favor conceptions of political
theology in which religion and politics are imagined as two related but fundamentally
distinct fields. They also favor similar conceptions
of modernity as related to the medieval order but
fundamentally distinct from it. But what if our This is a story of political theology
transition to modernity is far from complete? as a ground continually contested
Furthermore, what if politics and theology were
never two distinct fields in the first place? What by overlapping religious and
I am getting at here is a simple but nonetheless political fields that are constituted
important dimension: This is a story of politi-
cal theology as a ground continually contested and sustained in a close struggle
by overlapping religious and political fields that through which each continually
are constituted and sustained in a close struggle
through which each continually remakes the
remakes the other.
other. While this continual process of mutual
production and transformation may be punctuated by spectacular disjunctions (e.g.,
the Protestant Reformation), those are underpinned by profound continuities (e.g., the
persistence of Roman Catholicism, and of its forms within Protestantism). Modern sec-
ularity emerges through an ongoing process of conversion comprising crazes of conver-
sion to religion, crazes for secularization, and intermittent crazes about the end times.
Enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment, in such a view, are not stages in
a linear progression, but instead coexisting layers of a crystalline present. Experimental
crazes and the stark narratives that accompany them punctuate the surface of our dis-
courses and our ideas about religion and social order—all while various underlying

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layers of commitment, habit, drive, and need are entangled, mutually constitutive, and
slowly, continuously becoming otherwise. While we tend to see modernity as supremely
self-reflective, it might also be defined as a distinct un-reflectiveness about those under-
lying layers.

Nietzsche’s Conversion, and Egypt’s

In the summer of 1881, Nietzsche took up residence in Sils-Maria, Switzerland. One

day, walking around a nearby lake, he tells us, he was struck by an “inspiration” that
we should understand as his own conversion experience. The idea that so moved him
was that of the eternal return of all things—a perspective on “eternity” within the
time of this one and only world of becoming—and it was this idea that presented
Nietzsche with a satisfactory alternative to the Christian concept of redemption. It was
in this frame of mind—having made what he viewed as a discovery of world-historical
consequence, an idea that he expected to spend the rest of his life expounding—that
Nietzsche contemplated the craze for secularization and democratization taking place
around him.
Nietzsche wrote about this conversion experience in his notebooks, in letters to
friends, and in his autobiographical work Ecce Homo. In the published account, he
writes of being “reborn” in an instant while listening to music with his friend Peter
Gast. Nietzsche describes his inspiration as a

revelation in the sense of something suddenly becoming visible and

audible with unspeakable assurance and subtlety, something that throws
you down and leaves you deeply shaken.… You listen, you do not look
for anything, you take, you do not ask who is there; a thought lights
up in a flash, with necessity, without hesitation as to its form,—I never
had any choice. A delight whose incredible tension sometimes triggers
a burst of tears.… All of this is involuntary to the highest degree, but
takes place as if in a storm of feelings of freedom, of unrestricted activ-
ity, of power, of divinity.… The most remarkable thing is the invol-
untary nature of the image, the metaphor; you do not know what an
image, a metaphor, is any more, everything offers itself up as the closest,
simplest, most fitting expression.10

While this conversion is portrayed here as instantaneous, Nietzsche describes it elsewhere

as a protracted, eighteen-month-long “pregnancy.” In Ecce Homo, he suggests that his
inspiration occurred as he walked around Silvaplana Lake in 1881, but also that it may
have struck him on a walk around the bay at Portofino in 1886, or perhaps in a process
that extended over the five intervening years. Like Augustine’s retrospective account
of his conversion in the Confessions, Nietzsche’s published account was written many
years after the event, and it is not clear when the moment of inspiration he recounts
occurred, or indeed even if such a moment ever did occur.11 “We have no reason to

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doubt the details of his description of

inspiration,” Rüdiger Safranski, one
of Nietzsche’s biographers, writes.
“Still it is very difficult to imagine
that this insight came to him so
abruptly, since there is evidence to
indicate that the idea was already
quite familiar to him.”12 Conversion,
as Nietzsche must have discovered, is
a rich and complex process; it might
easily be flavored by a touch of mad-
ness and require a great deal of art
to sustain.
Nietzsche’s smile, in my last
estimation at any rate, is directed
toward his contemporaries’ and his
own experiments in secularity. By
putting the words of section 125 in
the mouth of a madman, Nietzsche
seems to suggest that the death of
God is greatly exaggerated, but in
Friedrich Nietzsche—The Three Metamorphoses, 2005, by
thematizing madness as he does, he Werner Horvath (b. 1949); courtesy of the artist.
also seems to suggest that this exu-
berant announcement is itself a work
of art, itself an experiment. Nietzsche’s sensibility here is doubled—he recognizes an
error for what it is, but he doesn’t imagine that he can eliminate it. Looking at European
culture, Nietzsche smiles at the alternating surprise, alarm, glee, and distress at the dis-
covery that religion is itself being transformed—that it is subject to human transforma-
tion, along with political formations. An emergent consciousness of that fact is part of
what is now experienced as secularity; Nietzsche suggests that this second-order experi-
ence—the experience of change and of artifice, as well as the responses to these—can
take a range of forms from casual or passive nihilism, to melancholic delusion, to giddy
exultation (the political madness of secularization), to artistic reinvention. He does not
propose a theory of secularization that would cover this range of experience exhaus-
tively, but he does identify secularism as a particular problematic—the conscious expe-
rience of transformation within “religious” life—and brings to our attention some of
the ways in which we are invested in misunderstanding and avoiding that problematic.
Nietzsche warns us that some of our most indispensable narratives about moder-
nity—that God is dead, that we have broken with tradition—at one and the same
time produce modern experience and blind modern subjects to the fine-grained, often
contradictory, crystalline processes that underlie, and belie, those narratives. In staging
the death of God as an event that at once has already taken place and not yet arrived,
Nietzsche locates secularity in the middle of a process of transformation, suggesting
that theories of this process will always be inadequate and that mastery of it will be

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imperfect, but that we are nonetheless responsible for giving it direction. Nietzsche had
neither a naive Enlightenment faith that we stand at a new beginning nor a desperate
eschatological premonition that the end is upon us. He urged us, instead, to return to
ourselves, to find that while we are always becoming otherwise, we nonetheless find
ourselves lodged squarely in mid-process. We might say that modern secularity emerges
through a distinct break with the religious past, although this is not quite true. And
therein lies an occasion to smile.
With all this in mind, we might briefly reconsider the example of recent politics in
Egypt. In 2011, a confluence of forces—including structural changes in the national
economy, the emergence and coordination of social movements and media, and popu-
lar discontent shared across the greater Arab
Nietzsche had neither a naive world—combined to force President Hosni
Mubarak’s autocratic regime from power. These
Enlightenment faith that we stand events seemed to open the possibility for a new
at a new beginning nor a desperate politics in Egypt and perhaps in North Africa
and the Middle East more broadly. As much of
eschatological premonition that the the world watched, captivated by what seemed
end is upon us. a truly revolutionary moment, the uprisings
seemed to stall, and then to be decisively reversed
with the election of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as presi-
dent in 2014. Between 2012, when Mohammed Morsi and an “Islamist” parliament
assumed power as the result of plausibly democratic elections, and the denouement of
2014, preceded by a military takeover, democracy’s elusive promises were shown to be
tightly and unavoidably entangled with religion’s persistent claims at this leading edge
of political modernity.
Nietzsche might have smiled at the minor frenzy of our collective responses—fear,
jubilation, enthusiasm and denunciation, airy promises and dire warnings, hope and
foreboding—at seeing religion and politics so plainly enmeshed at the center of our
world. He might also have urged more of us to smile upon and enter the ranks of pro-
testors, activists, and amateur politicians that included both secularists and Islamists
in the joint madness of their efforts to create new festivals, traditions, and possibilities
worthy of a future made possible by Mubarak’s fall. Indeed, it would seem, if it is to be
democratic, that modern secularity must be broad enough to smile upon such revolu-
tionary ventures, capacious enough to welcome all players on its stage.
In retrospect, the odds against Egypt’s democratic revolution were quite long. But
a certain kind of conversion on the part of Islamists, secularists, those in between, and
those who observed from a distance may have gone some way toward shortening the
odds. This would not have been a conversion to or from Islamism or secularism. It
might instead be imagined as a conversion to the early protestors’ demands for “bread,
peace, and social justice.” That might seem at once mundane and infinitely demanding,
but conversion often seems that way—perhaps that is why theologians tend to attribute
conversion to the agency of God rather than to that of humans. Thinking of modern
secularity in terms of conversion might remind us of our persistent attachments to the
patterns of religious experience, of the challenges posed by a politics that would make

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the world something other than it is, of the continuous contention between religious
and political fields characteristic of public life, and of the promise that our as yet unreal-
ized modernity might still hold.

Endnotes

1 In this essay, my argument is broader and more impressionistic than a similar argument about secular-
ity as a process of conversion made in my book Beyond Church and State: Democracy, Secularism, and
Conversion (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
2 Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke und Briefe (eKGWB), a critical edition of Nietzsche’s works and
letters in the original German, based on the critical text of Colli and Montinari, can be accessed at http://
nietzschesource.org.
3 Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead,’” in The Question Concerning Technology and
Other Essays (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1977), 61.
4 René Girard, “Dionysus versus the Crucified” MLN 99, no. 4 (1984): 821.
5 Nietzsche, eKGWB/NF-1881,11[163]; my translation.
6 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), 36.
7 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 193.
8 Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), xvii.
9 Ibid., 100.
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and
Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 126–
27.
11 Matthew Scherer, “Authorized Narrative and Crystalline Structure: Conversion in Augustine’s
Confessions,” in Beyond Church and State, 30–70.
12 Rüdiger Safranksi, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York, NY: Norton,
2002), 223.

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 Sacred Reading
From Augustine to the Digital Humanists

Chad Wellmon

W
hen Max Weber suggested in 1917 that the world had been disenchanted,
he meant that modernity was best understood by the expansion of “tech-
nical means” that controlled “all things through calculation.”1 The real
power of these technical means lay not in the techniques and technologies themselves
but in the disposition of those who used them, in their unshakable confidence that
there were in principle “no mysterious, incalculable forces” they could not calculate
and control. Such a technical rationality had replaced the “magical means” premodern
people had used to placate gods and spirits. In Weber’s account, which was both elegiac
and supercilious, when the “technical” superseded the “magical,” wonder disappeared
from the world. The confident, calculating scientist, the intellectual hero of the modern
world, was incapable of “wonder” and inured to “revelation.” Nothing surprised him,
and nothing could be revealed to him.
Having conquered everything else, the calculating machines of modernity are now
coming for our books. Or at least that’s what anxious writers in the New Yorker, the
Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New Republic have suggested as they warn of the
cultural collapse being ushered in by the digital humanities.2 These critics rarely discuss
what most scholars do with their digital tools––marking, annotating, visualizing, and
collecting texts as our literary archive gradually moves from print to digital form. They
focus, instead, on the grandiose pronouncements of Franco Moretti, a professor of
literature at Stanford University and founder of Stanford’s Literary Lab. “The trouble
with close reading,” Moretti claims, “is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small
canon.… At bottom, it’s a theological exercise––very solemn treatment of very few texts
taken very seriously.”3 In place of “close” reading, Moretti proposes a “distant” reading,

Chad Wellmon is an associate professor of German Studies at the University of Virginia

and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is the author most
recently of Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the
Modern Research University (2015) and co-editor of Anti-Education: Friedrich Nietzsche’s
Lectures on Education (2015).

Right: The Angel’s Visit, 2003–2004, by David Kirk (b. 1960); private collection/Bridgeman Images.

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in which gradually emergent and long-term patterns in literary history are studied
through the application of computational and quantitative methods to the analysis
of massive numbers of texts. To critics of the digital humanities, Moretti has come to
represent all humanities scholars who use a range of computational and quantitative
methods to model plot structures in novels, analyze literary periods, map metaphors,
track lexical changes, and, yes, read texts.4
For instance, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the novelist Stephen Marche
argues that these new computational ways of reading are not the incidental quirks
of a few misguided English professors.5 Rather, they are symptoms of a larger cul-
tural tragedy that began when the Google Book Project and the Hathi Trust started to
digitize millions of printed books in the early 2000s. The data-fication of books repre-
sents a cultural shift not only in what counts as a book but in what counts as reading.
Lamenting the leveling effect of digitization on literature, Marche claims that turning
books into data treats all literature “as if it were the same. The algorithmic analysis of
novels and of newspaper articles is necessarily at the limit of reductivism. The process
of turning literature into data removes distinction itself. It removes taste. It removes all
refinement from criticism.”
In their opposition to machine reading, Marche and his fellow critics join the mel-
ancholy moderns who, in similar fashion, bemoaned the loss of coherent and fully inte-
grated forms of life. To Friedrich Nietzsche’s last man, Max Weber’s disenchantment,
and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s lament for a lost Lebenswelt (“world of lived experience”)
we can add the loss of “literature” and the reduction of reading to a rationalized, techni-
cally determined process bereft of meaning.
Just as Weber’s elegy for a lost, magical world presupposed a specific form of knowl-
edge, so too does criticism of “distant” reading presuppose a particular form of reading.
And just as Weber’s disenchanted modernity needed its enchanted premodernity, so
does Marche’s distant reading need its close reading.
Just as Weber’s elegy for a lost, But what is so sacred, so solemn about reading a few
books so intensively? And if close reading is, to quote
magical world presupposed a Moretti, a “theological exercise,” what kind of exercise
specific form of knowledge, is “distant” reading?
Judging from the jeremiads against Moretti and his
so too does criticism of colleagues, “distant reading” is a profane, disenchant-
“distant” reading presuppose ed exercise, a technological intrusion into an ethical
practice. When we read, our eyes should move line by
a particular form of reading. beloved line, page by precious page. Such immersive,
personal reading makes possible emotional and intel-
lectual experiences of recognition that transform us. Distant reading treats books as
though they were elements in the regular, law-governed order of nature––particles to
be calculated and measured.
On the other side of the debate, arguing for distant reading, we have scholars such as
McGill University’s Andrew Piper. To read “topologically,” as he terms it, is not to begin
a personal transformation but to discover patterns and scrutinize relationships among
not several but dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of books. Readers in a modern

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close-reading tradition read syntactically, sentence to sentence, and regard words and
sentence as authoritative “keys” with the potential to transform readers themselves from
a state of humble incomprehension and distanced curiosity to one of privileged clarity
and critical insight.6
When Piper reads topologically, by contrast, he uses computational methods to map
relationships among multiple elements (such as lexemes, morphemes, and phonemes)
and categories (genre, format, publication information) of multiple texts. Reading, in
his account, is less an exercise in fixing meaning (x means y) than in discovering the
ratios that constitute texts and bind them together. Topological reading eschews tradi-
tional reading’s focus on the sentence and embraces,
instead, the lattice-like structure of language itself.
Where did this notion of
Instead of attempting to provide a lexical mean-
ing of “love” in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young reading as transformative, even
Werther, Piper says simply that “love” is “equivalent
sacramental, come from? And is
to 0.00109 (the percentage of times it appears rela-
tive to all of the words in the novel) compared to “distant” reading such a radical
0.00065 in Faust.” Reading in this way undoes the departure from it?
attachment to individual books and the expectation
that they will change readers in a particular way.
Piper is looking for patterns, not a better self. Reading with numbers, he writes, “privi-
leges the latency of the manifest … all of those words that have historically resisted our
attention through their over-familiarization, their presence, and their over-availabili-
ty.”7 Computational reading reveals a “lexical unconscious,” and every new graph or
diagram constitutes a distinct “totality,” a different way of seeing the whole of literature.
So for its critics, “distant” reading is a desecration because it does not treat indi-
vidual books as precious objects worthy of the devotional practice that reading is. But
where did this notion of reading as transformative, even sacramental, come from? And
is “distant” reading such a radical departure from it?

Reading as Ascent

When Augustine of Hippo recounted his conversion in the Confessions in 398 CE,
he challenged an ancient ambivalence about writing and tied reading to self-trans-
formation. In Book 8 of the Confessions, distraught and tormented by an internal
battle of wills, he leaves his friend Alypius on a garden bench in Milan to seek soli-
tude under a fig tree. There, weeping and crying out to the Lord, Augustine hears
the repeated words of an unseen child that would echo beyond the garden in Milan
and throughout the history of reading in the West: “Pick up and read, pick up and
read.”8 The child’s refrain sets off in Augustine a series of memories of other conver-
sions by book. He immediately recalls how another Christian was “amazed and set
on fire” while reading The Life of Antony. This conversion story had been related to
Augustine by his friend Ponticianus, who, in turn, began his account after picking up
a Bible to discover that it was opened to one of the Apostle Paul’s letters.9 The unseen

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child’s hortatory refrain incites a series of memorable scenes of reading and ultimately
prompts Augustine to interpret the refrain as a divine command to “open the book.”
Augustine then hurries back to his friend Alypius and grabs his Bible. “I seized it,
opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit,” he writes. He
reads Romans 13:13−14, in which Paul exhorts his Roman brothers and sisters to
turn away from their past lives of sexual excess and
debauchery and be made anew, to “put on the Lord
What made Augustine so Jesus.”10 This brief, glancing reading, which begins
confident in the transformative in the middle of the text and lasts but a minute,
changes Augustine forever. It allows him to attend
potential of reading?
to an internal state apart from the external world,
and thus to avail himself of a “light” that comes
from beyond himself and the text itself. When he opens the book and turns its pages,
he opens his soul and prostrates himself. Here reading is a vulnerable act. A word, a
verse, a page—all are potentially transformative.
Augustine’s autobiography is also a bibliography.11 He recounts his conversion
through a series of bibliographic events: He cried over Dido while reading Virgil’s
Aeneid, fell for philosophy while immersed in Cicero’s Hortensius, attained new intel-
lectual heights while perusing the Neo-Platonists, and, finally, became a Christian by
reading the Bible. Augustine understands reading to be a process of identification, in
which readers witness their own actions in the events of a story, in the life of another,
and are compelled to change their lives. Narrative is a divinely inspired activity that
makes a self possible.12 When Augustine finally reaches for his Bible in the Milan
garden, reading has already transformed him, many times over. And this is why he
intends the Confessions to be a similar site of transformation for his readers.
But what made Augustine so confident in the transformative potential of reading?
In the Phaedrus, Socrates expressed deep doubts about writing, and thus reading,
because of the “promiscuous” nature of writing––the writer can never control how
and to whom his words might be disseminated.13 For Augustine, however, words are
a divine gift given to all in common. And they needn’t be jealously husbanded: “What
do we possess that we have not received it from another? And if we have received
it from another, why give ourselves airs, as if we had not received it?”14 Augustine
argues that spoken words “cease to exist as soon as they come into contact with the
air.”15 Words recorded in texts live on and bear the imprint of divine and human
intention. All texts, and particularly the Scriptures, are laden with intention and
purpose. They are the transcription, however imperfect and distant, of the divine will
framed as narrative.
Before his garden conversion, Augustine underwent, as he tells it in the Confessions,
what might be termed a readerly conversion. While still under the influence of the
Manichaeans’ doubts about the legitimacy of the Old Testament, Augustine had
long considered the Christian faith “defenseless” against commonsense arguments
that pointed out undeniable contradictions and conflicts between the Old and
New Testaments. It was only when Bishop Ambrose of Milan, the biblical scholar
who helped convert Augustine, taught him that such difficult passages had to be

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“figuratively interpreted”––that is, read not ad litteram but spiritaliter––that he could

become the mature reader we meet in the Confessions.16
Had God so intended, wrote Augustine, he could have given “the gospel to man
even without human writers or intermediaries.”17 But God didn’t. Augustine explained
the ontological difference between humans and angels through their different rela-
tionships to books and different ways of reading. Unlike their mortal kin, angels read
without mediation. They read, Augustine said, without “syllables requiring time to
pronounce, they read what your eternal will intends.… Their codex is never closed, nor
is their book ever folded shut.”18 The books of humans, by contrast, are closed, cut off
from one another, and often illegible. Nevertheless, the book still serves as the medium
through which God may reveal himself, and reading is a purposeful and deliberate
practice in which the separation of the human and the divine can be gradually, if not
fully, healed.
Augustine’s account of reading doesn’t fit into Weber’s neat narrative of disenchant-
ment. Humans are neither born nor divinely––or “mysteriously,” to use a Weberian term––
transformed into readers. Reading is a rational, methodical, seven-step technique that
humans follow, a discipline they are formed into.
In On Christian Doctrine, for instance, Augustine
preemptively responds to those who may doubt
An Augustinian reader is humble
the need for “rules” for reading and interpreting and full of wonder before he even
the Scriptures on the grounds that, as he put it,
takes up the text.
“all worthwhile illumination of the difficulties of
these texts can come by a special gift of God.”19
Augustine warns against the hubris of the presumption that mere humans, fallen and
finite, can read without being taught language and the practice of reading. “The human
condition,” he writes, “would be wretched indeed if God appeared unwilling to minister
his word to human beings through human agency.”20 Augustine’s ideal reader progresses
from docility to love and compassion to truth and finally to divine contemplation. The
first step in the Augustinian practice of reading is a “fear of God,” which should prompt
reflections on human finitude and mortality.21 An Augustinian reader is humble and
full of wonder before he even takes up the text. Reading so conceived forms the self by a
divine power that operates through the medium of the book and the practice of reading.

The Augustinian Legacy

Augustine’s model of reading had a lasting impact in the West. In twelfth-century Paris,
Hugh of Saint Victor wrote a manual for students of the Paris cathedral schools on the
rules of proper learning. In it, he describes reading as both a technical method governed
by rules and a teleological activity aimed at the restoration of the human’s “divine like-
ness.”22 Practiced properly, he writes, reading “takes the soul away from the noise of
earthly business” and offers in this life a “foretaste of the sweetness of the eternal life.”23
Reading exercises the mind and prepares it for meditation, or what Hugh describes as
concentrated and sustained thought “upon the wonders of God.”24

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Hugh embraces reading as a necessary and transformative technique, but, like

Augustine before him, insists that reading has always had a purpose other than read-
ing itself. The desire to read can even become inordinate, a form of libido dominandi,
a desire unconstrained by anything but itself. There are, he writes, those who wish to
read everything. But, he warns, “don’t vie with them. Leave well enough alone. It is
nothing to you whether you read all the books there are or not. The number of books
is infinite; don’t pursue infinity! Where there is no rest, there is no peace. Where there
is no peace, God cannot dwell.”25
Hugh’s counsel for avoiding information overload relies on a distinction between
reading for knowledge and reading for ethical transformation. The pursuit of “infin-
ity” through reading—acting on the desire to read everything––forecloses the pos-
sibility of a personal transformation, because it turns reading into ceaseless activity
and precludes the meditative openness so central to an Augustinian tradition. The
pursuit of knowledge through reading is good only when subordinated to the desire
for that which exceeds the text and practice of reading: an encounter with the divine.
During successive centuries, however, reading for the sake of knowledge, or as an
end in itself, progressively eclipsed the Augustinian conception. One of the perhaps
paradoxical consequences of this gradual shift was the sacralization of the text itself.
For Augustinian readers, the book or text always gestured beyond itself, never simply
toward itself. Its very materiality was a constant reminder of the difference between
humans and God. The Scriptures were sacred because they bore traces of God’s divine
word and will, but they were a finite and ambiguous medium.
On April 26, 1336, the Italian scholar and poet Petrarch wrote a letter to Father
Francesco Dionigi of Borgo describing his ascent of Mont Ventoux in southern
France. Since at least the nineteenth century, Petrarch’s letter has been celebrated as
the work of “the first truly modern man,” the product of a modern “individual per-
sonality.”26 But Petrarch’s climb was also a key scene
In contrast to Augustine, who in the history of reading, and its Augustinian echoes
are unmistakable: the ascent, the discussion of conver-
confidently took hold of his sion, the inner eye, and the role that reading plays in
Bible, Petrarch opened the forming a self.27 Like the Confessions, Petrarch’s letter
is a testament to a life lived with books and shaped
Confessions tentatively. by reading. He writes that he was prompted to scale
Mont Ventoux by reading Livy’s History of Rome,
which includes a description of the Macedonian king Philip V’s climb of Mount
Hemus. The rest of the letter is filled with quotations from and allusions to Cicero,
Virgil, the Gospel of Matthew, Psalms, Job, Ovid—and, perhaps most famously,
Augustine’s Confessions.
In contrast to Augustine, who confidently took hold of his Bible, Petrarch opened
the Confessions tentatively. It simply “occurred to” him to read whatever passage
“chance” might lead him to.28 He describes an almost mindless leafing through the
pages of a book. For Augustine, reading was an encounter with the traces of a divine
will; reading had a proper and certain end. But for Petrarch, reading was just as likely
to be an encounter with the “surging emotions” and “vague, wandering thoughts” of

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an ambivalent and uncertain self––an encounter, that is, not with the divine but with
the all-too-human stuff of books.29

From Humanism to Modern Literature

With the rise of humanism and modern critical scholarly practices in subsequent
centuries, texts began to be treated as material objects to be fixed and plumbed for
meaning, even independent of divine (or human) intent. Scholars became concerned
with ascertaining the intentions and meanings of authors and the reliability of the
texts. Instead of merely pointing to or recount-
ing the truth, books could, as Walter Ong put With the rise of humanism and
it, “contain truth, like boxes.” 30 The human-
ists who followed Petrarch treated the works of modern critical scholarly practices
Cicero and other classics of antiquity as “clouded in subsequent centuries, texts
windows which proper treatment could restore
to transparency, revealing the individuals who began to be treated as material
had written them.”31 objects to be fixed and plumbed
Humanism raised a basic question about the
ends of reading: Should readers be concerned for meaning.
primarily with “getting the text objectively right”
or using it, as Augustine might have put it, for “obtaining what you love”?32 Their
doubts about the power of reading to enable communication between minds and
worlds––to relay the kinds of intention and purpose that Augustine understood to
be at the core of reading and books––would only grow stronger.33 But so too would
the notion that books constituted an order or world of their own.
Humanist doubts and assumptions about reading and books reached an apotheo-
sis of sorts in late-eighteenth-century German classical philology. Scholars turned
practices and techniques honed on biblical criticism into advanced methods and
applied them to ancient pagan texts. From the beginning, they assumed that modern
philology’s demand for technical mastery was compatible with ethical cultivation.
“By mastering and criticizing the variant readings and technical rules offered by the
grammatical books and scholia,” wrote Germany’s greatest eighteenth-century philol-
ogist, F. A. Wolf, in Prolegomena to Homer, “we are summoned into old times, times
more ancient than those of many ancient writers, and, as it were, into the company of
those learned critics.”34 The careful study of ancient manuscripts, scholia, and com-
mentaries according to pre-established methodological conventions enabled a better
understanding of the ancient world, which, in turn, facilitated an encounter with the
moral exemplars of antiquity. But such study could also undercut the authority of
the ancient texts, as did Wolf ’s conclusion that the Odyssey was not the work of one
author, Homer, but the product of textual accretion over time—a conclusion similar
to the one biblical scholars had reached about the authorship of the Old Testament.
While biblical and classical philologists were worrying about the authority of
ancient texts, a new generation of scholars began to raise similar concerns about more

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modern ones as well, the latter having been thrown into question by the destabilizing
effects of the proliferation of print. In 1803, Wilhelm Schlegel, a German Romantic
and one of the first scholars of literature in its more exalted sense, lamented the piti-
ful state of German reading and writing, invoking what he termed “literature prop-
er.”35 Given the ready availability of printed texts, German readers no longer read
with “devotion but rather with a thoughtless distraction.” To remedy this situation,
Schlegel differentiated literature as a particular kind of writing that had been filtered
and sorted from among the surfeit of all that had been printed. In his view, literature
was not simply a “raw aggregate of books”; it was
the manifest expression of a “Geist” (“spirit”), the
Critics such as Schlegel made expression of a common life. And it was this com-
reading and literature a cultural mon spirit that gave literature its unity and made
it a “store of works that are complete as a type of
problem that required its own system.”
practices, its own liturgies. Critics such as Schlegel made reading and lit-
erature a cultural problem that required its own
practices, its own liturgies. In an age of media
excess, reading had to be redefined as a practice, and literature has to be organized
and fixed as an autonomous, distinct order. An entire genre of how-to-read books
appeared, dispensing advice not only on what to read, but on how to read in order
to become an active reader who approached books not with fear or wonder but with
the confidence that his real task was to “assist” the author.36
The counterpart to the active reader was the critical editor, whose role, as the
German folklorist and philologist Jacob Grimm wrote, was to recover the “essence” of
a text and “to purify” it of the “filth and corruption” of time, the unavoidable degra-
dations wrought through textual transmission.37 Philology fixed the boundaries and
lineage of literature and made it an object worthy of solemn, devoted, close reading.
These scholarly editors sought, as Karl Lachmann put in a discussion of the complex
and fragmented manuscript tradition of the Nibelungenlied, to create an “authentic”
text—a critical edition purified of all corruptions and transcription mistakes.
Animating this philological project was the assumption that literature was a sec-
ond nature with its own laws, patterns, and order. Instead of the eschatological read-
ing of Augustine in which the experience of divine wisdom was deferred to a moment
beyond itself and the text––a moment of wisdom, contemplation of the divine––the
philologists projected that meaningful potential into the text itself. Critical reading
and editing did not begin with wonder, but they ended with it.
Yet for some, modern philology’s unchecked desire to recover a lost literature
reduced philology, and reading more generally, to methodological pedantry. As phi-
lology detached itself from its objects and from questions about why one ought to
read in the first place, wrote the great German philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-
Moellendorff, the “common method[s]” of modern philology came to stand in for
the unity of knowledge and culture.38 Modern readers were bound not by books or
even the love of books, but by technical methods. The objects of the application of
these methods were fungible or even incidental.

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New Criticism, New Historicism, and Points Between

The scholarly commitment to the order of literature and method took new shape in the
1940s and 1950s with the “New Criticism,” a formalist literary movement that insisted
that the meaning and value of a literary work derived primarily from a formal integrity
that was intrinsic to great literature. In his manifesto for the New Criticism in 1937,
John Crowe Ransom derided contemporary university teachers of literature as “learned
but not critical men” who had reduced literary study to “moral studies.”39 Modeling
the literature professor’s now standard reprimand of non-scholarly readers, Ransom
lambasted those who turned literature into a grab bag of ethical options and encour-
aged a facile identification with texts. He and his fellow advocates of the New Criticism
were, in turn, accused of turning the study of literature into a science, a charge that
typically meant denial of the subjective character and ethically transformative potential
of literature.40
The New Critics were not cowed by such characterizations.41 They were motivated
by a particular relationship to the text and a notion of what reading ought to be.
Reading poems or novels for their ethical content would, they believed, be like studying
nature for moral guidance. More often than not, such reading would ultimately be little
more than a self-centered imposition of one’s personal predilections. Ransom asserted
that to constrain the contemporary compulsion to read like a consumer, the critic

should regard the poem as nothing short of a desperate ontological or

metaphysical maneuver. The poet himself, in the agony of composition,
has something like this sense of his labors. The poet perpetuates in his
poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crumbling
beneath his touch. His poem celebrates the object which is real, indi-
vidual, and qualitatively infinite.42

The object of wonder was the well-ordered literary object itself, but only as revealed by
the work of the critic as reader of the organic order of literature.
As literary criticism careened during the twentieth century from the New Criticism
to structuralism to deconstruction to the New Historicism, one assumption remained
consistent: Literature had its own internal structure that required an autonomous dis-
cipline of study and an active, critical reader. When Jacques Derrida and his decon-
structive epigones read against the grain, they claimed to unmask the hidden logics of
substitution and metaphor, to reveal how literature conceals its relationship to an exter-
nal reality. They desacralized the text, but sacral-
ized reading: Reading, especially as performed by The object of wonder was the well-
a smart reader, was revelation.
As scholars continue to hone and revamp ordered literary object itself, but
their methods in the present century, read- only as revealed by the work of the
ers of another ilk—public intellectuals, by and
large, who cleave to a more practical criticism— critic as reader of the organic order
cry heresy and charge their academic kin with of literature.

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vivisecting literature and reducing reading to theory or science. With the rise and fall of
each new method and theory, a chorus of critics accuses literary scholars of reading “sci-
entistically” and lectures them on what reading really is. For instance, the critic Edward
Mendelson asserts that literature is not written “to be read objectively or dispassionately,
as if by some nonhuman intelligence.”43 Here, “nonhuman intelligence” is intended
to stand in for technique and technology—all forms of reading that aren’t grounded
in personal experience. Interpreting a novel, in Mendelson’s view, is best done “from
a personal point of view, not from historical, thematic, or analytical perspectives.”44
With their stress on the transformative potential of reading, public-facing critics
echo a key conceptualization in the history of reading that extends from Augustine to
the neo-humanists of the early nineteenth century. In its present reformulation, how-
ever, such a notion of reading is cast by Mendelson and myriad like-minded critics as
an exercise whose ultimate end is self-discovery, though most certainly not through an
Augustinian encounter with the divine. The best of these critics, however, Mendelson
and James Wood included, base their essayistic style on an abiding skepticism about
reading’s potential even to guarantee such self-discovery, much less serve as an entirely
reliable source of ethical reflection and judg-
ment.45 “Fiction,” Wood writes, “is the game
Without the promise of its of not quite.”46 In their skepticism not only
consummation in wisdom or about fiction but about language more broadly,
they follow in the footsteps of Montaigne, the
revelation, reading, like writing, is inventor of the essay form.
less transformative than therapeutic. Without the promise of its consummation
in wisdom or revelation, reading, like writ-
ing, is less transformative than therapeutic.
Underlying this idea of reading as therapy and self-discovery is a very modern anthro-
pological claim, which Mendelson explicitly acknowledges: “The most intellectually
and morally coherent way of thinking about human beings is to think of them as
autonomous persons.”47 Reading, as Wood writes, is a “secular version” of a sacred
liturgical act, which reveals not a god or the impossibly foreign but a human personality
struggling to calm her anxieties and craft a life for herself.
This way of reading is a complete inversion of Augustinian practice, the first step
of which was humbling oneself before a fearsome God. Reading required, to use a
more modern phrase, a recognition that personal experience was insufficient to read
well. What was needed was a radical openness to something that exceeded both the self
and the text. And such a recognition and disposition required practices, methods, and
theories that formed the reader before any particular experience of reading could be
produced. Without Montaigne’s principled skepticism, or Wood’s, public-facing read-
ing can become a form of moral consumerism in which literature is simply a means
of uplifting identification. Instead of a shadowy realm of doubt and “as if,” literature
becomes what the critic Mark Edmundson joyfully calls a “major cultural source” for
choosing a way of life.48 After the death of God, literature, on this account, is our only
hope for a “secular rebirth.” Read Plato, Jesus, or Whitman, and choose who you’d like
to become.

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Werther Cluster: Identifying the unrecognized correlation between artist biographies and Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther is one indication of the extent to which topological reading has the
potential to introduce new knowledge into our scholarly understanding of the literary past. The
question that follows from this more global insight is this: What kind of structuring effect does the
Wertherian language have on the overall corpus? This topological diagram by Andrew Piper consists
of the nine works that correlate most strongly with The Sorrows of Young Werther (see key).
Each tile represents a unit of 200 words, or the average length of a page from the first edition of
Werther. The diagram arranges the pages of the individual works according to how similar they are
to one another in their use of Werther words. Diagram courtesy Andrew Piper/.txtLAB.
Key: Pink = Werther (first edition, 1774); Red = Werther (second edition, 1787); Orange = Wilhelm
Meister’s Travels Part I; Blue = Biography of Philipp Hackert; Green = Conversations of German
Refugees; Light Pink = Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Books 7–8; Purple = Rameau’s Nephew; Light
Blue = The Outraged; Gold = The Wager; Light Green = Anecdotes on the Joys of Young Werther.

Wonder in a Digital Age

In some respects, computational reading is a refreshing corrective to modern tenden-

cies to turn literature into liturgy, bearing burdens it cannot possibly sustain. And this
is why, in response, the most vociferous critics of machine reading consider it a heresy.
When scholars such as Piper, Ted Underwood, Tanya Clement, or Matthew Jockers
read with numbers, they loosen reading’s attachment to the particular book and, thus,
“our emotional attachment” to the idea that reading a book must change our lives.49
Some of the hyperbolic reactions to “distant” reading have helped disclose the enchant-
ed status literature still holds for some readers.

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And yet, “distant” readers embrace another modern shibboleth. When Schlegel
and Ransom invoked the autonomy of literature, they claimed a distinct ontological
status for it. Literature was no longer merely a medium marked by the traces of divine
intent or cultures past. It was a distinct order on par with nature, one worthy of a
particularly modern form of wonder.
Just like their method-preoccupied predecessors in nineteenth-century philology
and twentieth-century literary theory, scholars exploring the potential of computa-
tional methods and quantitative analysis for the study of literary texts have continued
to shift the object of wonder. Whereas for Augustine reading began with wonder,
for digital humanists reading ends in wonder: The object of interest and wonder is
less a particular literary text than a visual or diagrammatic unity produced through a
method.50 Unity is not given; it is revealed through technologically enabled assembly.
This dislocation of wonder from the beginning to the end of reading might explain
the predilection in much computationally based scholarship for graphs, maps, and
diagrams that visualize what was once hidden. The
distance of distance reading is a function not just of
Whereas for Augustine machines but of these new diagrams and graphs that
intervene in the reading of literature. They are them-
reading began with wonder,
selves texts to be read, interpreted, and marveled at.
for digital humanists reading When readers encounter the work of digital
ends in wonder. humanists such as Piper, Underwood, Jockers, or
Clement, they are awed not by Augustine’s awesome
God or the possibility of encountering and engaging
the spirit of a past culture but by the process that reveals, as Lorraine Daston puts
it, the “deep unity underlying apparent miscellany.”51 For critics of distant read-
ing, that sounds like heresy, but it is also the epitome of a modern enchantment.
Computational reading is the culmination of a long tradition in the West in which
knowledge-seeking curiosity outweighs transcendent longings. We are awed by our
human capacities to organize, reveal, and explain what seems so radically particular
and discrete. What is revealed is an order unbound by individual books and, as Piper
observes, the “nostalgia…for bibliographic reading.”52 The wonder of literature is
exemplified not by Augustine grasping his Bible but rather by the scholar mining and
then explaining an order that exceeds the bibliographic, an order as regular, as univer-
sal, and as beautiful as nature itself. When joined with the irrepressibly human desire
for comprehensiveness, the skepticism about reading the single precious book holds
out a nonhuman possibility. To read, as Piper says, “without the material boundaries”
of any one book, is to read like the angels for whom, as Augustine wrote, “the codex
is never closed.”

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Endnotes

1 Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf [Science as a vocation] (Stuttgart, Germany: Reclam, 1995). Originally
published 1919.
2 See, for example, Adam Kirsch, “Technology Is Taking Over English Departments: The False Promise
of the Digital Humanities,” New Republic online, May 2, 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/arti-
cle/117428/limits-digital-humanities-adam-kirsch.
3 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000), 57.
4 See, e.g., Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods in Literary History (Champaign, IL: University
of Illinois Press, 2013); Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2013); Brad Pasanek, Metaphors of the Mind (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press,
2015); Andrew Piper, “Conversional Novel,” New Literary History 46, no. 1 (2015): 63−93.
5 Stephen Marche, “Literature Is Not Data: Against Digital Humanities,” Los Angeles Review of Books,
October 28, 2012.
6 Andrew Piper, “Reading’s Refrain,” ELH 80 (2013): 373–99.
7 Ibid.
8 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2001), 152;
see also Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electric Times (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2012), 1–25.
9 Augustine, Confessions, 143.
10 Ibid., 153.
11 Charles Mathewes, “Theology as a Kind of Reading” (unpublished manuscript, Summer 2015), Microsoft
Word file; see also Paul Griffiths, Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Reading (New
York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 53.
12 For a detailed account of Augustine and transformative reading to which I am indebted both here and
in the following paragraph, see Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996), especially pp. 243−80.
13 John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 47.
14 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6.
15 Ibid., 32.
16 Augustine, Confessions, 88. See also Carol Everhart Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1998), 46–47.
17 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 123.
18 Augustine, Confessions, 283.
19 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 3.
20 Ibid., 5.
21 Ibid., 33.
22 Hugh of Saint Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 1991), 47.
23 Ibid., 93.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 130.
26 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (New York,
NY: Macmillan, 1904), 300.
27 See Brian Stock, Ethics through Literature: Ascetic and Aesthetic Reading in Western Culture (Lebanon, NH:
University Press of New England, 2007), 26–29.
28 Letters from Petrarch, trans. Morris Bishop (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966), 49.
29 Ibid., 51.

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30 Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1983), 313.
31 Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 8. See also Grafton, “The Humanist as Reader,” in A
History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1999): 179–212.
32 MaryJ. Caruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 156; Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 9.
33 Stock, Ethics through Literature, 39.
34 F.A. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, trans. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 55–56. Original work published 1795.
35 Wilhelm Schlegel, “Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst [Lectures on Literature and Art],” in
Vorlesungen über Ästhetik I (1798–1803), ed. Ernst Behler (Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh,
1989), 484.
36 Johann Adam Bergk, Die Kunst Bücher zu lesen: Nebst Bemerkungen über Schriften und Schriftsteller [The
Art of Reading Books: With Observations on Writings and Authors] (Jena, Germany: Hempelsche
Buchhandlung, 1799), 66.
37 Jacob Grimm, “Rede auf Lachmann [Speech in Honor of Lachmann],” in Kleinere Schriften, vol. 1
(Berlin, Germany: Ferd. Dümmler, 1864), 151.
38 Ulrich
von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Reden und Vorträge [Speeches and Lectures] (Berlin, Germany:
Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1901), 132.
39 John Crowe Ransom, “Criticism, Inc.,” Virginia Quarterly Review 13, no. 4 (1937); http://www.vqron-
line.org/essay/criticism-inc-0.
40 Iam indebted to Barbara Herrnstein Smith for highlighting how this entire pattern began in the New
Criticism and for her discussion of Ransom in particular in “What Was Close Reading? A Century of
Method in Literary Studies,” a lecture delivered at Columbia University, May 6, 2015.
41 See, for example, James Wood’s description of New Criticism and academic literary criticism more gener-
ally in The Nearest Thing to Life (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2015), 77.
42 Ransom, “Criticism, Inc.”
43 Edward Mendelson, The Things That Matter (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2006), xii.
44 Ibid.
45 Stock, Ethics through Literature, 36–37.
46 Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life, 87.
47 Mendelson, The Things That Matter, xv.
48 Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life, 13; Mark Edmundson, Why Read? (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2004),
2–3.
49 Piper, “Reading’s Refrain.”
50 I am extending the argument of Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park about wonder in early modern
natural science to modern notions of humanistic reading. See Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order
of Nature, 1150–1750 (Boston, MA: Zone Books, 1998).
51 Lorraine
Daston, “Wonder and the Ends of Inquiry,” The Point 8 (2014): 105-11, http://thepointmag.
com/2014/examined-life/wonder-ends-inquiry.
52 Piper, “Reading’s Refrain.”

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 We Have Never Been
Disenchanted

Eugene McCarraher

“Beautiful demon of Money, what an enchanter thou art!”

—Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age

One of the stories modernity tells about itself is titled “The Disenchantment of the
World.” Friedrich Schiller coined the phrase while lamenting the demise of the gods of
Greek antiquity, but it was Max Weber who turned it into melancholy shorthand for
the modern condition of secularity.1
The broad outlines of the tale are familiar to most educated people in the contem-
porary world: Before the Protestant Reformation, the earth was suffused and enveloped
by “enchantment,” an invisible universe of spirits and deities who inhabited the natural
world and could shape the course of human affairs. These spirits animated objects,
dwelled in mountains or forests, and delivered messages through dreams, oracles, and
prophets. Whether they were capricious or governed by providential design, these forces
could be mastered or entreated through practices of magic, divination, and prayer.
The medieval Church built a Christian enclave for these beings in its system of saints,
holy places, and sacraments, but its Protestant (and especially Calvinist) antagonists—
suspicious, in Weber’s words, of “magical and sacramental forces”—commenced the
demolition of the enchanted sanctuary. And with the victories of science, technology,
and capitalism, we discovered that the cosmos of enchantment was unreal, or at best,

Eugene McCarraher is an associate professor of humanities at Villanova University. He

is the author of Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social
Thought and the forthcoming The Enchantments of Mammon: Capitalism and the
American Moral Imagination.

Right: The Worship of Mammon, 1909, by Evelyn de Morgan (1855–1919); © The De Morgan
Foundation/Bridgeman Images.

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utterly unverifiable; we cast most of the spirits into oblivion, and made room for their
withered but venerable survivors in our chambers of private belief.2
Among the North Atlantic intelligentsia, at least, this story in some form is so
widely hegemonic that even religious intellectuals accept it. For instance, in A Secular
Age (2007), Charles Taylor—a practicing Catholic—affirms, albeit in his own peculiar
way, the consensus of “disenchantment.” In the pre-modern epoch of enchantment,
Taylor explains, the boundary that separated our world from the sacred was porous
and indistinct; traffic between the two spheres was frequent, if not always desired or
friendly. “Disenchantment” began with the church’s rationalization of doctrine and the
growing awareness that Christianity was not the world’s only religion. Now, having left
the enchanted universe behind, we disenchanted dwell within the moral and ontologi-
cal parameters of an “immanent frame”: the world as apprehended through reason and
science, bereft of immaterial and unquantifiable forces, structured by the immutable
laws of nature and the contingent traditions of human societies.3
What Taylor calls the “buffered self ” is a kind of “immanent frame” that insu-
lates the inner from the outer world, thus precluding any sense of the numinous or
any notion that “nature has something to say to us.” Although attempts to re-enchant
the world have surfaced periodically—Romantic
“Disenchantment” poetry and philosophy, “New Age” spirituality, vari-
ous religious fundamentalisms—none of these bids to
began with the church’s revitalize enchantment has succeeded in wrecking the
rationalization of doctrine “immanent frame.”4
So goes the consensus. Yet Weber himself left
and the growing awareness clues for a rather different account of our condition.
that Christianity was not the In this story—adumbrated in “Science as a Vocation”
(1917)—we abide between two eras: “We live as did
world’s only religion. the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted
of its gods and demons,” Weber speculated—“only we
live in a different sense.” Antiquity witnessed a long twilight of the gods, only to be
followed by the dawn of a new one—whose own demise appeared to be the final senes-
cence and annihilation of all enchantment from the world. Indeed, Weber observed,
while “many old gods ascend from their graves,” they are quickly “disenchanted,” taking
“the form of impersonal forces.”5
But is that the only way to understand the “different sense” to which Weber alluded
so nebulously—that modernity marks the crossing of the Rubicon of disenchantment?
Perhaps the sociologist who considered himself “religiously unmusical” heard faint
notes of enchantment in modernity; perhaps, despite their wounds, the old divinities
had not risen to give consent to their deaths. Were they really “disenchanted” when
they assumed their “secular” form? Or do they still roam among us in the guise of
“secularization”?
There are good reasons to think so, and some of them lie within one of the more
tumultuous and aggressive of the allegedly “disenchanting” forces of modernity: capital-
ism, whose “laws of the market” Weber had identified as one refuge for the phantoms
of divinity. Of course, capitalism has long been presumed to be a powerful solvent of

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enchantment. “All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned,” as Marx and
Engels proclaimed in The Communist Manifesto. Far from being bastions of piety, the
bourgeois masters of capitalism have “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious
fervor … in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” What if those waters of pecuniary
reason constituted a baptismal font, a consecration of capitalism as a covert form of
enchantment, all the more beguiling on account of its apparent profanity?

The Fetishized World

I want to explore two ideas in this essay that With money as its ontological
amount to a claim that we have never been disen-
chanted. (That’s a deliberate echo of Bruno Latour, marrow, it represents a moral and
who once argued that “we have never been mod- metaphysical imagination as well
ern”—that we have never differentiated nature
and society as clearly and rigidly as we believe.)
as a sublimation of our desire
First, capitalism has been a form of enchantment, for the presence of divinity in the
a metamorphosis of the sacred in the raiment of
secularity. With money as its ontological marrow,
everyday world.
it represents a moral and metaphysical imagina-
tion as well as a sublimation of our desire for the presence of divinity in the everyday
world. Second, the most incisive forms of opposition to capitalist enchantment have
come in the form of what I will call “the sacramental imagination,” a conviction that
the material of ordinary life can mediate the supernatural.6
In this view, capitalism perverts both the sacramental character of the world and
our consciousness of that quality—neither of which can ever be extinguished, only
assaulted, damaged, and left in ruins. As Gerard Manley Hopkins summarized it so
well in the Romantic idiom of the sacramental imagination, “the world is charged with
the grandeur of God…. There lies the dearest freshness deep down things”—a freshness
spoiled, he ruefully added, “seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil.” The world
does not need to be re-enchanted; its enduring and ineradicable enchantment requires
our belated recognition and reverence.
One source of the idea that capitalism is a metamorphosis of the sacred is the
Marxist tradition, which has always been nonetheless ambivalent, if not contradictory,
about the secular and the sacred in modern economic life. As Terry Eagleton writes in
Culture and the Death of God (2014), his recent survey of “surrogate forms of transcen-
dence” in the wake of God’s (alleged) demise, capitalism is “fundamentally irreligious…
and totally alien to the category of the sacred”—yet “the only aura to linger on” in our
postmodern era “is that of the commodity or celebrity.” In the Manifesto itself, capi-
talism is a ruthless assassin of enchantment, drowning ecstasy in a pool of mercenary
rationality. But the capitalist himself is also “a sorcerer, who cannot control the powers
of the nether world he has called up with his spells.” Rhetorical flourish, to be sure, but
it also reflected Marx’s reading in ethnographical literature on “fetishism,” the attribu-
tion of magical or supernatural powers to natural or fabricated objects.7

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Fetishism is “a religion of sensuous desire,” Marx had written in 1842, in which the
worshipper fantasizes that an “inanimate object will give up its natural character in order
to comply with his desires.” In his unpublished “1844 manuscripts,” Marx linked fetish-
ism to “alienation”—the social process by which people lose control of their own labor
and products, which is to say, to Marx, the sources of their own selfhood. Under capital-
ism, where the wage laborer is divorced both from
the means of production and from control over his
The domination of labor by own actions and products, alienation takes a fetish-
capital took the form of a modern istic form, an ascription of life to objects produced
by none other than the worker himself. “The life
animism, a capitalist variety of
which he has given to the object sets itself against
enchanted objects—“enchanted” him as an alien and hostile force,” Marx mused. “If
the product of labor does not belong to the worker,
by the worker’s own powers.
but confronts him as an alien power, this can only
be because it belongs to a man other than the work-
er.” The domination of labor by capital took the form of a modern animism, a capitalist
variety of enchanted objects—“enchanted” by the worker’s own powers.8
During the next two decades, the anima of capitalist animism in Marx’s anatomy
of enchantment shifted from estranged labor to money, even as both continued to
represent the unresolved alienation of human agency. In the 1844 manuscripts, as well
as in the unfinished Grundrisse (1857) and in the first volume of Capital (1867), Marx
portrays money as the ontological foundation of a uniquely pecuniary way of being in
the world—a metaphysics of money that resembles and supplants traditional forms of
enchantment. On one level, money is another marker of alienation: Like divinity, it
betokens “the alienated ability of mankind.”9
Here, as elsewhere in Marx, rhetorical brio serves philosophical insight. Having
drowned religious faith in the arctic of pecuniary reason, money becomes “the almighty
being,” the “truly creative power,” the de facto ontological basis of reality in capitalist
civilization. “The power of money in bourgeois society” extends farther and deeper than
the market in commodities; like the God of Genesis, it brings things into being from
nothing, and consigns all indigent objects and desires to the void of nonexistence. “If I
have the vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study—that is,
no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for study
but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it.”10
As the metaphysical common sense of market society, money defines and even
bestows all manner of qualities. “I am stupid, but money is the real mind of all things
and how then should its possessor be stupid?” Money can even buy you love: “I am
ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for
the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money.” Like the fetishes of
tribal peoples, money confers extraordinary powers once believed to belong to shamans,
priests, and gods.11
Money’s enchanting powers are even more evident in Marx’s analysis of “the fetish-
ism of commodities, and the secret thereof,” one of the more trenchant passages in
Capital. From the sardonic opening of the chapter—the commodity is “a queer thing,

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abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”—through the exposure

of “all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they
take the form of commodities,” Marx maintains that commodity fetishism amounts to
the sacramental system of capitalism. (At one point, Marx compares the commodity
fetish to the Eucharist.)12
The “secret” of fetishized commodities lies in their twofold character as “use-value”
and as “exchange-value.” The use-value of objects resides in their particular, qualitatively
different uses—shoes for feet, food for eating, shirts for adornment. Their exchange-
value rests in their status as commodities, objects produced for sale in the market for the
purpose of capital accumulation. In order for these commodities to be exchanged for
money, their incommensurable use values must be obscured; they must somehow be
rendered qualitatively identical to other commodities.
The “universal equivalent” of money—“the god among commodities,” as Marx had
dubbed it in the Grundrisse—performs this act of ontological prestidigitation. Objects
become “worth” so much in money; their value is defined in terms of money, not
in terms of their utility for human purposes. In the market, this pecuniary alchemy
induces the spell of “fetishism,” by which people
attribute a kind of agency and independence to
commodities, the products of their own labor. Marx maintains that commodity
Pervaded and commanded by the “god among fetishism amounts to the
commodities,” objects are enchanted, enlivened,
by money—the metaphysical substratum of capi- sacramental system of capitalism,
talist society. Thus commodity fetishism is a spe- even at one point comparing the
cifically capitalist form of alienation, a modern
recipe for the opium of the people.13 commodity fetish to the Eucharist.
Despite the allures of capitalist enchantment,
Marx was confident that revolutionary theory and
practice would dispel the sacramental glamour of capitalism. When money and com-
modity fetishism were finally exposed as the lustrous guise of alienation, workers would
retrieve the means of humanity, and the communist society of the future would have
no need for magical compensations.
Yet Marx provided ample reason to doubt that what he called the “pre-history” of
the species would end in a Götterdämmerung of disenchantment. It was never clear that
the reduction of workers to industrial servitude would lead eventually to revolution, as
money, that “god among commodities,” exercised an increasingly potent and untram-
meled authority in capitalist society. If capitalism enervates or demolishes all traditional
sources of moral and ontological truth—if indeed, as proclaimed in the Manifesto, “all
that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” all that is enchanted is disen-
chanted—nothing but capitalism could generate resistance to the rage to accumulate.
But as the metaphysical regime of capitalism, monetary and commodity fetishism
was at least as beguiling as any previous order of enchantment, especially as all its rivals
were evaporating. If the proletariat is thoroughly permeated by pecuniary enchantment,
why would the oppressed ever desire the transcendence of alienation and servility? With
sufficient technical and political ingenuity—mass production, consumer culture, the

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welfare and regulatory policies of modern liberalism and social democracy—the sacra-
mental tokens of commodity fetishism could retard and even extinguish the growth of
revolutionary consciousness.

A Sacramental Alternative

Yet if Marxism accounts for the persistence of enchantment in a scientific and technologi-
cal age, it does so in large measure, as Simone Weil once remarked, because it is also “the
highest spiritual expression of bourgeois society.” It always bears repeating that capitalism,
in Marxist eschatology, is a necessary stage in historical development, and that it shares
with its nemesis a commitment to expanding productivity as a vehicle of “progress”—
defined as the achievement of material abundance through the technological exploita-
tion of nature. For both the bourgeoisie and its revolutionary antagonists, progress is
fuelled, under capitalism, by the rage to accumulate
If Marxism demonstrates through commodity production; if capitalists do not
see “fetishism” or “enchantment” in the primacy of
that we have never been money or the circulation of commodities, Marxists
disenchanted, it would also seem who (rightly) see both must nonetheless consider
them progressive in character, aiding in that “devel-
to prove that the enchantments opment of the productive forces” that must precede
of capitalism will be well-nigh the construction of socialism and communism.14
Thus the progress of history is driven by enchant-
impossible to eradicate. ment; money’s moral and ontological charms sanc-
tion “primitive accumulation,” the dispossession of
producers from the means of production and their conversion into wage laborers; the
industrial division of labor and the ecological despoliation of the planet; the prole-
tarianization of agricultural, artisanal, and eventually professional skills, all increasingly
monopolized by a techno-managerial elite beholden only to capital; and the construc-
tion of a gorgeous symbolic universe of advertising, marketing, and entertainment, the
arsenal of what David Graeber has characterized as capital’s “war on the imagination.”
If Marxism demonstrates that we have never been disenchanted, it would also seem to
prove that the enchantments of capitalism will be well-nigh impossible to eradicate.15
Weil traced the failure of the Marxist revolutionary imagination to its species of
materialism. Like other nineteenth-century materialists, Marx conceived of matter as
an inert and lifeless ensemble of forces; however “historical” his materialism claimed to
be, the inertia of matter entailed subjection to the inviolable laws of the natural—and
only—world. But if matter—including historical matter—is governed only by force,
then the mechanisms of capitalist matter were, on Marx’s own terms, invincible. “Marx’s
revolutionary materialism,” Weil observed, “consists in positing on the one hand that
everything is exclusively regulated by force, and on the other that a day will come when
force will be on the side of the weak. Not that certain ones who were weak will become
strong … but that the entire mass of the weak, while continuing to be such, will have
force on its side.” While Weil praised Marx for his acute portrayal of the apparatus of

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capitalist domination, she realized that the political implications of inanimate material-
ism were anything but emancipatory.16
Rather than reactively dismiss materialism altogether in favor of some “spiritu-
al” ontology of politics, Weil hinted at a sacramental alternative. Shortly before her
untimely death in 1943, Weil—by then what could be described as a fellow-traveler
of Christianity, someone lingering in the vestibule but never entering the sanctuary—
speculated that just as “yeast only makes the dough rise if it is mixed with it,” so in
the same way “there exist certain material conditions for the supernatural operation of
the divine that is present on earth.” The knowledge of those “material conditions” for
“supernatural operation” would, Weil surmised, constitute “the true knowledge of social
mechanics.” If matter is not exactly “animate,” the material world of society and history
could be a conduit for divinity. Because we have “forgotten the existence of a divine
order of the universe,” we fail to see that “labor, art, and science are only different ways
of entering into contact with it.”17
Weil’s gesture toward a “true knowledge of social mechanics” suggested a politics
of the sacramental imagination. “Sacramentality” is a key but somewhat amorphous
and elusive concept in Christian theology, referring not only to the official roster of
sacraments but to the character of created reality as well. Just as a sacrament is a visible,
material sign and vessel of divine grace, so matter itself is similarly “trans-corporeal,” as
theologian Graham Ward puts it. As Rowan Williams explains, sacramentality entails
the belief that “material things carry their fullest
meaning … when they are the medium of gift, not
instruments of control or objects for accumulation.”
Weil’s gesture toward a “true
In what I am calling the sacramental imagination, knowledge of social mechanics”
“the corporeal and the incorporeal do not comprise a
dualism,” as Ward asserts; the visible, material realm
suggested a politics of the
“manifests the watermark of its creator.”18 sacramental imagination.
This sacramental critique of Marxist metaphysics
would not be that it is “too materialist” but rather
that it is not materialist enough—that is, that it does not provide an adequate account of
matter itself, of its sacramental and revelatory character. Sacramentality has ontological
and social implications, for the “gift” that Williams identifies is “God’s grace and the
common life thus formed.”19
Theologians concerned with consumer culture employ sacramentality as a critique
of commodification. “Commodities are transubstantiated into sacraments … in a world
empty of the presence of God,” Terence Tilley contends, becoming Williams’s “instru-
ments of control” and “objects of accumulation.” Yet this way of putting it may concede
too much to the conventional narrative of disenchantment—God, if not dead, has
been eclipsed. But if the world is never “empty of the presence of God,” commodifica-
tion—and the fetishism from which it is inseparable—might better be characterized as
a perversion or parody of the sacramental nature of material life.20
Since the Enlightenment, the hegemony of modern scientific and technological
rationality has rendered belief in the “sacramentality” of the world, at best, a beautiful
article of private faith. But even after the triumph of disenchantment among those

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Friedrich Schleiermacher dubbed the “cultured despisers” of Christianity, a sacramental

imagination endured among its cultured, if not necessarily orthodox, admirers, espe-
cially among Romantic writers and intellectuals.

An Aesthetic Asylum

As the doyen of scholars of Romanticism, M. H. Abrams, explained, secularization has

not been “the deletion and replacement of religious ideas” but rather their “assimila-
tion and reinterpretation.” Romantics, in his view, provided an aesthetic asylum for the
spirits of pre-modern enchantment. Like Thomas Carlyle’s Professor Teufelsdröckh,
the philosopher-prophet of Sartor Resartus (1831),
they longed to “embody the divine Spirit” of the
Conveyed in a poetic rather than gospel “in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and ves-
a theological idiom, Romantic ture, that our Souls … may live.” But Romanticism
did more than preserve an interior enclave for the
ontology envisioned a reality that supernatural; as Bernard Reardon perceived, it also
both transcended and pervaded named “the inexpungeable feeling that the finite
is not self-explaining and self-justifying” and that
the sensible world. “there is always an infinite ‘beyond’”—a beyond
that lived in the midst of us, leaving numinous
traces in the world of appearance. In other words, Romanticism is the modern heir to
the Christian sacramental imagination.21
Conveyed in a poetic rather than a theological idiom, Romantic ontology envisioned
a reality that both transcended and pervaded the sensible world. Some of the signature
passages of Romantic poetry are modern sacramental epiphanies. In his “Auguries of
Innocence” (c. 1803) William Blake beckoned us

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.

Later, in “Tintern Abbey” (1798), William Wordsworth reported

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

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The sacramental rapture of those passages might serve to reinforce the caricature
of Romantic hostility to reason. Yet for Romantics the enemy was not reason per se,
but rather what Blake cursed as “single vision”: the occlusion of sacramental sight, the
optics of mastery and exploitation, the inability to see the world as anything more than
material resources.
Although divorced from orthodox theology, Romantic humanism echoed the tra-
ditional harmony of reason, love, and reality. When Romantics praised “enthusiasm,”
“reverence,” and “imagination,” they restated the venerable Christian wisdom that rea-
son is rooted in love, that full and genuine understanding precludes a desire to pos-
sess and control. Against the imperious claims of “Urizen”—Blake’s fallen “Prince of
Light” and your reason reduced to measurement and calculation—Blake countered that
“Enthusiastic Admiration is the First Principle of Knowledge & its last.” “To know a
thing, what we can call knowing,” Carlyle surmised in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840),
we “must first love the thing, sympathise with it.” Arising from a sacramental sense of
the world as a “region of the Wonderful,” Carlyle’s incessant admonitions to “reverence”
and “wonder” were, at bottom, exhortations to love.22
“Imagination” was the name Romantics gave to this erotic and sacramental con-
sciousness. Yet imagination was not only a subjective enchantment; in the Romantic
sensibility, imagination was the most perspicuous form of vision—the ability to see
what is really there, behind the illusion or obscurity produced by our will to dissect
and dominate. To Samuel Taylor Coleridge, if reason is “the power of universal and
necessary convictions, the source and substance of truths above sense,” then imagi-
nation is its vibrant sacramental partner, “the living Power and prime Agent of all
human perception … a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in
the infinite I AM.” For Romantics, imagination did not annul but rather completed
rationality. During the French Revolution, Wordsworth observed, reason seemed “most
intent on making of herself / A prime Enchantress.” Though warning of the brutality
of instrumental reason—“our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of
things; / We murder to dissect”—Wordsworth described imagination as “Reason in her
most exalted mood.” Imagination was, for the
Romantics, the ecstasy of reason.23
As the sacramental imagination in its most Although divorced from orthodox
reputable form after the Enlightenment, theology, Romantic humanism
Romanticism has been, as Robert Sayre and
Michael Lowy have argued, “a vital component echoed the traditional harmony of
of modern culture,” pervading an extraordinary reason, love, and reality.
array of aesthetic, political, and religious figures
and movements—some of which were explicitly
opposed to capitalism, though not necessarily from what we call “the Left.” Indeed,
the fondness for the Middle Ages displayed by some Romantic intellectuals has led
to dismissal of Romanticism as a lovely incubator of irrationalism, reaction, and even
fascism. But many other Romantic anti-capitalists did not seek to resurrect the past;
they invoked the past for a critical perspective on the present more ontologically pen-
etrating and politically promising than the futures held out by the disenchanted heirs

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of the Enlightenment. Though in no way systematic, the sacramental imagination of

Romantic social criticism—better described, perhaps, as Carlyle did, as “Prophecy”—
began from an ontology of sacral materialism, in terms of which the injustice and
indignity that attended the accumulation of capital comprised a desecration.24
The lineage of Romantic anti-capitalism is too long and motley to delineate here,
but its first representatives, Carlyle and John Ruskin, sketched the outlines of a pro-
phetic sacramental imagination for subsequent critics of capitalist enchantment. In
Sartor Resartus, “wonder” is Carlyle’s term for both the awareness and the ontological
condition of sacramentality. “The Universe is not dead,” he declares, but rather “god-
like,” pervaded by “an Invisible, Unnameable, Godlike, present everywhere in all that
we see and work and suffer.” Against this sacral materialism Carlyle poses the “Gospel
of Mammonism” in his indictment of industrial England, Past and Present (1843).
Mammonism is the good news that money possesses and bestows a trove of “miraculous
facilities.” Money conjures a “horrid enchantment”—“enchantment,” to Carlyle, is the
counterfeit of wonder—in which owners and workers walk “spell-bound” in the midst
of “plethoric wealth.”25
While Ruskin’s contemporaneous prominence as an acerbic critic of industrial capi-
talism is being recalled today by many on the post-Marxist Left, his sacramental con-
ception of reality and especially of human beings is usually overlooked. First exhibited
in his renowned work on art history and criticism, Ruskin’s sacramental imagination
soon embraced his social and ecological concerns as well. In the fifth volume of Modern
Painters (1860), Ruskin declared that the “direct-
While Ruskin’s contemporaneous est manifestation of Deity to man is in His own
image, that is, in man.” Earlier, in a passage in the
prominence as an acerbic critic fourth volume of Modern Painters (1856), he had
of industrial capitalism is mused that “in the midst of the material nearness
of these heavens” God desires that we “acknowledge
being recalled today by many His own immediate presence.”26
on the post-Marxist Left, his Ruskin’s eloquent critiques of industrial capital-
ism were embedded in this sacramental ontology
sacramental conception of and humanism. His condemnation of mechaniza-
reality and especially of human tion—that it “unhumanizes” human beings of their
creative skills—stemmed from his conviction that
beings is usually overlooked. the industrial division of labor was a sacrilege against
“His own image.” The broadside against what he
called the “nescience” of economics in Unto This Last (1862) reflected Ruskin’s “amaze-
ment” at a world that “reaches yet into the infinite.” His celebrated maxim, “there is no
wealth but life,” arose from this sense of an “infinity” that cherished and enlivened the
whole of creation—a creation that mercenary plunder was reducing to a disenchanting
wasteland. In The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), Ruskin’s eerie premo-
nition of ecological calamity, capitalist depredation corroded and perverted the planet’s
sacramental character. Because of industrial pollution, the climate exuded “iniquity”;
the clouds announced “bitterness and malice”; smoke and sludge befouled “the visible
Heaven” of nature.27

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La Ilustración Artística, 1896; private collection; photo © Tarker/Bridgeman Images.

Mammon, in the New Testament of the Bible, is material wealth or greed, most often personified as
a deity; drawing by Alejandro Schneider; colored engraving by J. Weber.

The Dustbin of Disenchantment

Well after the classic age of Romanticism, its sacramental dialect shaped the vernacular
of a host of non-Marxist radicals in Europe and the United States. Before the success of
the Bolshevik Revolution gave Marxism a near-monopoly on the radical imagination,
Romanticism flourished among a motley range of critics. It animated the transatlantic
Arts and Crafts movement, one of whose American devotees described craftsmanship as
“the sacrament of common things.” God, another artisanal ideologue put it, is “woven
in tapestries and beaten in brasses and bound in the covers of books.”28
A disciple of nature in the California redwoods, John Muir saw “sparks of the
Divine Spirit variously clothed upon with flesh, leaves, rock, water”; the human body
was a “flesh-and-bone tabernacle.” Developers who wanted to ravage the landscape
for profit were “temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism.” In search of
what he called a “passionate vision,” William James affirmed “saintliness” as a human
ideal in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1905) on account of the saint’s “rapture”
and “ontological wonder.” Contemptuous of capitalist society’s reduction of life to
moneymaking, James upheld the saint as an emissary from “another kingdom of
being”—this world, apprehended in rapturous ontological wonder. Our proper atti-
tude, as James wrote in “What Makes a Life Significant” (1900), is to be “rapt with
satisfied attention … to the mere spectacle of the world’s presence.” The Christian
socialist Vida Dutton Scudder outlined a sacramental counter to Marxist materialism
in Socialism and Character (1912), arguably an early document of liberation theology.

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“The material universe,” Scudder contended, “is a sacrament ordered to convey spiri-
tual life to us.” Since work and technology were material vessels of grace as well as
forces of production, class struggles were conflicts over the means of beatitude.29
After World War I, the sacramental critique of capitalism abided, fraying or sever-
ing its connection to socialist politics and linking up with a more freelance radicalism.
James Agee, for instance, considered his report on Alabama sharecroppers beaten down
by the Great Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a meditation on the
“predicaments of human divinity.” Only a recollection of the image and likeness of
God, Agee thought, could reveal “the true proportions of the savageness of the world.”
Agee’s description of one family’s house—a “tabernacle,” he wrote, a sacred space “not
to me but of itself ”—conveyed the intrinsic, indestructible sacramentality of even the
most wretched of the earth. Later, Allen Ginsberg exclaimed in “Howl” (1956) of the
“heaven which exists, and is everywhere around us” being consumed by “Moloch,” a
behemoth of mercenary and technological nihilism:

Moloch whose mind is pure

machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! …
Moloch whose love is endless
oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! …

Kenneth Rexroth—anarchist, grey eminence of American bohemia, and syncretist of

Catholicism and Buddhism—wrote of “the world as streaming / In the electrolysis of
love.” In both The Making of a Counterculture (1969) and Where the Wasteland Ends
(1972), Theodore Roszak praised the Romantics for their “sacramental consciousness,”
which he hoped to enlist against a technocratic capitalism that now enjoyed a perverse
“monopoly of the sacramental powers.” Consigning Marxism and other secular revolu-
tionary theories to the dustbin of disenchantment, Roszak called on a new generation
of radicals who knew that “politics is metaphysically grounded” to draw upon “primor-
dial energies greater than the power of our bombs.”30
As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton realized, those “primordial energies” could
be as gentle as the rain. In “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” a haunting essay in Raids on the
Unspeakable (1966), Merton imagined the sad perversity of a world reduced to invento-
ry. As he listened to showers in the forest near Gethsemani, the Kentucky abbey where
he lived, Merton hastened to convey the beauty of the rain before it “becomes a utility
that they can plan and distribute for money”—they meaning business, determined to
take everything free and incalculable and make it a paying proposition.31
To Merton, this insatiable avarice indicated an evil much deeper than moral perver-
sion; it emanated from a capitalist enchantment that only masqueraded as secularity.
Business was launching an ontological regime in which “what has no price has no value,
that what cannot be sold is not real”; in the cosmology of capital, “the only way to make
something actual is to place it on the market.” Graphing the rain on the commercial
axis of effective demand and scarcity of supply, the alchemists of commerce cannot
“appreciate its gratuity.” Yet for those who saw the world as the lavish largesse of a lov-
ing and prodigal God, “rain is a festival,” a celebration of its own gifted and gloriously

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pointless existence. “Every plant that stands in the light of the sun is a saint and an
outlaw,” he exulted. “Every blade of grass is an angel in a shower of glory.”32
Who are the acolytes of Romantic sacramentalism in our own age of mercenary
enchantment, when the specter of ecological catastrophe forms a global storm-cloud of
the twenty-first century? Pope Francis I, for one, who in his recent encyclical, Laudato
Si’ (2015), provides an erudite and often moving manifesto of the sacramental imagina-
tion. Opening with his namesake’s “Canticle to the Creatures,” the Pope proceeds to
excoriate the economic system for pillaging the earth and its inhabitants; the biosphere
“groans in travail,” as he cites Paul’s warning to the Romans.33
But as Francis insists in his own epistle to the disenchanted, the root of the violence
wrought upon the planet lies in an ontological blindness. Divine love is “the fundamental
moving force in all created things,” Francis writes; the world is “illuminated by the love
which calls us together into universal communion.”34 No doubt this will all seem foolish
to the shamans and magicians of neoliberal capitalism, whose own imaginations are lav-
ishly imprisoned in the gaudy cage of disenchantment. The Romantics would remind us
that our capacity to act well relies on our capacity to see what is really there. For there are
more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

Endnotes

1 Schiller referred to the “de-divinizing of the world” in “The Gods of Greece” (1788); Weber used the
phrase in “Science as a Vocation” (1917–1919), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth
and C. Wright Mills, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009 [1946]), 155.
2 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, NY:
Routledge, 2005), 61. Originally published 1905.
3 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2007), 539–93.
4 Ibid., 37–42, 358, 711–72.
5 Essays in Sociology, 148–49.
6 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1993),
esp. 32–35. Originally published in 1991 as Nous n’avons jamais été modernes.
7 Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2014), ix, 8, 192.
8 Karl Marx, “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung” (1842), in Marx and Engels,
Collected Works, Vol. 1 (New York, NY: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 189; “Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts” (1844), The Marx-Engels Reader), ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, NY: Norton, 1978),
70–72.
9 The Marx-Engels Reader, 104.
10 Ibid., 104–05.
11 Ibid.
12 Karl Marx, Capital (Oxford, England, and New York, NY: Oxford, 2008), 42, 26. Originally published
1867.
13 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New
York, NY: Penguin, 1993), 139. Translation originally published 1973. On the process of fetishization,
see Marx, Capital, 42–50.
14 Simone Weil, “Fragments, 1933–1938,” in Oppression and Liberty, trans. Arthur Wills and John Petrie
(New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 124. Translation originally published 1973.

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15 DavidGraeber, Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (New York, NY:
Dubois, 2011), 6.
16 Weil, 183.
17 Weil, 157, 159.
18 Graham Ward, Cities of God (London, England, and New York, NY: Routledge, 2000), 81–96, 157;
Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford, England: Oxford 2000), 218.
19 Williams, On Christian Theology, 218.
20 Terrence Tilley, Inventing Catholic Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000), 131.
21 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, NY:
Norton, 1973), 13; Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London, England: Chapman and Hall, 1872), 134;
Bernard M. G. Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism: Studies in Early Nineteenth-Century Thought
(New York, NY: Cambridge, 1985), 3.
22 William Blake, “Annotations to the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of
William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1982), 647; Carlyle, Heroes and
Hero-Worship (London, England: Chapman and Hall, 1840), 99; Sartor Resartus, 187.
23 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Aids to Reflection” (1825) in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(New York, NY: Harper, 1884), 241; William Wordsworth, “The French Revolution as It Appeared to
Its Enthusiasts at Its Commencement,” in Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth, ed. Mark Van Doren
(New York, NY: Modern Library, 1956), 58; “A Few Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey,” in William
Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008), 131;
“The Prelude,” Selected Poetry, 583.
24 Robert Sayre and Michael Lowy, “Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism,” New German Critique 32
(Spring-Summer 1984), 42; Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 130.
25 Sartor Resartus, 99; Carlyle, Past and Present (London, England: Chapman & Hall, 1843), 2, 4, 7, 124,
166.
26 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. V (London, England: Smith, Elder and Co., 1860), 202; Modern
Painters, Vol. IV (London, England: Smith, Elder and Co., 1856), 89.
27 Ruskin,excerpt from The Nature of Gothic in Unto This Last and Other Writings, ed. Clive Wilmer (New
York, NY: Penguin, 1985), 84; Unto This Last, 222, 226; The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century
(New York, NY: J. Wiley and Sons, 1884), 34, 43, 71.
28 Quoted in T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American
Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1981), 73. Horace Traubel quoted in Michael
Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 2008), 264.
29 John Muir, The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, ed. Lianne Wolfe (Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1979), 138; Muir: Nature Writings (New York, NY: Library of America, 1997), 161;
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, NY: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1928
[1902]), 254–369; Vida Dutton Scudder, Socialism and Character (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1912), 147.
30 James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001 [1941]), x,
94, 117, 121; Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1956), 21;
Kenneth Rexroth, “The Signature of All Things,” in The Collected Shorter Poems (New York, NY: New
Directions, 1967), 177; Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic
Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969); Theodore Roszak, Where The
Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972),
277–465.
31 Thomas Merton, “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” in Raids on the Unspeakable (New York, NY: New
Directions, 1966), 9.
32 Ibid., 106.
33 Francis I, Laudato si’ [Encyclical on care for our common home], sec. 1–2. http://w2.vatican.va/content/
francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.
34 Ibid., sec. 76–77.

100
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101
 Seven Ways of
Looking at Religion

Benjamin Schewel

Among the twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
—Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

The blackbird in Wallace Stevens’s famous poem is many things at once. It is a living
center of perception, a creature that inhabits the earth, an entity swirling through the
natural world, an expression of the universal whole, a beautiful melody, a passing shad-
ow, and various other things, depending on the observer’s perspective. Yet in making
his point about point of view, Stevens does not argue that the blackbird has no essence.
Indeed, he tries to suggest a more profound truth: that the blackbird is something that
exists beyond the ways it can be viewed. My intention here to suggest that something
similar holds true for religion. Up to a point.
There is nothing new about approaching religion in a perspectival way. Indeed,
it is commonplace today to find long lists of the things religion is: It is practice and
observance. It is prayer. It is tradition and culture. It is morality and belief and faith—
and much else as well. We are routinely enjoined to appreciate the particularities and
differences that characterize religious traditions, and there is something useful in this
relativizing move. It helps us avoid collapsing rich religious diversity into an abstract
and constructed ideal. Nevertheless, it would be false to conclude that religion is noth-
ing more than the many different things that assorted religious traditions do.

Benjamin Schewel is a fellow at the Centre for Religion, Conflict, and the Public Domain at
the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and also an associate fellow at the Institute
for Advanced Studies in Culture. This essay is adapted from his book, Seven Narratives of
Religion, forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Right: A raven on a snow-covered tree branch, c. 1910, by Ohara Koson/Shoson (1877–1945); private
collection, Alfredo Dagli Orti/Art Resource, NY.

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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015

I want to suggest that we can proceed toward the kind of balanced perspectivism
Stevens champions by examining the various ways scholars narrate the history of reli-
gion. I suggest focusing on these narratives because one of the greater challenges in
thinking about religion today comes precisely from the multiplicity of approaches to
explaining how, and to what effect, religions change. Certainly, we know that religion
has somehow evolved from its tribal beginnings through the archaic, axial, and medi-
eval periods. We know how it changed under the pressures of modernity, and we are
beginning to speculate about its transformations in the current global age. Yet there
is no clear consensus about the dynamics—social, psychological, economic, politi-
cal, intellectual, cultural—that have driven these changes. Has religion been gradually
declining? Has it been “improving”? Do the same dynamics appear again and again
and work in the same ways? Have we fallen away from some ideal religious orientation
of an earlier time? Or has religion undergone a series of qualitatively neutral changes?
Regardless of the story they ultimately adopt, even the most learned observers can and
do see religious history in profoundly different ways.
To show what we might learn from these various explanations of religious change—
but also to argue how one of them in particular might help us benefit from the insights
of the many—I will focus on seven major narrative frameworks that shape the con-
temporary and largely (but not exclusively) academic discourse on religion. I call these
narratives (1) subtraction, (2) renewal, (3) trans-secular, (4) construct, (5) perennial,
(6) post-naturalist, and (7) developmental. Each narrative tells us something impor-
tant about the history of the world’s various religious traditions, even while displaying
certain limitations that insights from the other narratives help compensate for. The
challenge is to appreciate the deeper complementarity holding these seven narratives
together without overlooking their respectively unique insights and features.

The Subtraction Narrative

The so-called “major religions” or “universal religions,” far from being

the quintessential embodiment of religion, are in fact just so many stag-
es of its abatement and disintegration. The greatest and most universal
of them, our own, the rational religion of the one god, is precisely the
one that allows a departure from religion. So we must change our per-
spective. When dealing with religion, what appears to be an advance is
actually a retreat. Fully developed religion existed before the bifurca-
tion which, somewhere around 3000 BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt,
plunged us into another religious world, one capable of existing without
religion—our own.
—Marcel Gauchet 1

Subtraction narratives depict religion as a means of dealing with the ignorance and
powerlessness that characterized early human societies. By this account, as humans
grow in knowledge and extend their mastery over the world, they become less religious.

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Not surprisingly, subtraction narratives posit an inverse relationship between modernity

and religion: The more modern we are, the less religious, and vice versa.
Auguste Comte (1798−1857), the French philosopher often credited with founding
modern sociology, articulated one of the first fully developed subtraction narratives.
He argued that humanity was steadily moving away from its primitive belief that all
things possessed a human-like spirit, and toward a modern “positivist” view that rejects
supernaturalism and concentrates entirely on the immanent tasks of science, technol-
ogy, and practical morality. In Comte’s telling, this process involved three intermediary
stages. Humans first went beyond animism by
positing a plurality of semi-transcendent divin-
ities.2 Then they collapsed these divinities into Not surprisingly, subtraction
a single transcendent God. Later, they began narratives posit an inverse
treating God as a “mere abstraction, which
can furnish no basis for any religious system of
relationship between modernity and
real efficacy, intellectual, moral, or, above all, religion: The more modern we are,
social.”3 Finally, this abstract deistic philoso-
phy began to give way to the age of positivistic
the less religious, and vice versa.
naturalism, in which supernatural belief would
entirely disappear.4
Although many scholars still tell similar subtraction stories today, they must now
explain why religion has not disappeared as quickly as Comte and others imagined it
would—and even why, during the last several decades, it has appeared to make a vigor-
ous resurgence. Often instanced in this regard is the eminent sociologist Peter Berger,
who in 1968 famously declared that “by the 21st century, religious believers are likely
to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.”5
In 1999, however, Berger was among the first to acknowledge that the world was “as
furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever.”6 Although this
realization led him to abandon his subtraction narrative outright, other scholars have
simply modified it to make sense of religion’s continued importance.
One of those who have made such adjustments to subtractionism is the philoso-
pher Daniel Dennett, whose work on consciousness has made him a favorite among
neuroscientists. Describing the evolution of religion in broadly Comtean terms,
Dennett acknowledges that religion remains attractive for many people today and is
therefore unlikely to disappear soon. Yet far from embracing or even celebrating reli-
gion’s persistence in the way that, for example, Berger does, Dennett seeks to mitigate
its influence. To that end, he calls not just for better science education and stronger
natural-scientific explanations of religion, but also for policies and media campaigns
that would seek to minimize what he sees as religion’s more pernicious social and
psychological effects.
Subtraction narratives are of most value in showing how certain aspects of religious
belief or practice are likely to fall by the wayside—or at least come under wide sus-
picion—with the advance of human knowledge and mastery over the world. Indeed,
most thoughtful people believe that sun worship, voodoo, caste systems, systematized
gender inequality, child sacrifice, witch-hunts, inquisitions, and Bible-based science

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were deserving victims of civilizational progress. However, acknowledging the merit of

these subtractions does not mean we must also believe that all religious practices and
beliefs ought to eventually decline.
Indeed, many great religious thinkers have celebrated the fact that their traditions
have shed certain problematic practices and beliefs, and have often called for further
“subtractions.” Yet they insist that this subtractive process need not eliminate everything
about their respective traditions, and they argue that religion is an indispensable cor-
rective to the excesses that beset purely materialistic modes of thought. “Science can
purify religion from error and superstition,” wrote Pope John Paul II, while “religion
can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.”7

The Renewal Narrative

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of com-

munity within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be
sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And
if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last
dark ages, we are not entirely without hope. This time however the
barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been
governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of
this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a
Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.
—Alasdair MacIntyre 8

Supporters of the renewal narrative claim that the decline of some specific religious
configuration—high medieval Catholicism, polytheistic pre-Socratic Greek spirituality,
“Golden Age” Islam—caused the many problems we face in the modern world, and
that the only way to solve these problems is to restore parts of the lost dispensation.
Renewal narrativists agree with subtraction narrativists that modernity brings about
the marginalization and decline of (true) religion. They simply reverse the subtractivist
claim that this marginalization and decline is a good thing.
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has presented a highly influential version of the
renewal narrative. His basic claim is that the “virtue tradition” of moral inquiry, which
arose in ancient Greece and culminated in Thomistic Catholicism, gave rise to the
best moral intuitions that we now associate with the West. However, modern Western
civilization fell into a state of pernicious moral confusion after Enlightenment thinkers
rejected the virtue tradition. Indeed, MacIntyre argues that the only way out of our cur-
rent state of moral degeneration is for small groups of people who recognize the virtue
tradition’s truth to abandon the modern world and begin working to build up “local
forms of community within which [the virtue tradition] can be sustained through the
new dark ages which are already upon us.”9
The challenge facing every renewal narrative is to show both how the decline of
a specific religious dispensation caused the problems of the modern world—anomie,

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moral confusion, cultural decline, materialism, The challenge facing every renewal
gross economic inequality—and how its renewal
might help us overcome these afflictions. The narrative is to show both how
burden of proof is quite high for such categori- the decline of a specific religious
cal claims. Indeed, the simple fact that multiple
renewal narratives persuasively argue that the dispensation caused the problems
decline of their preferred religious dispensation of the modern world and how its
caused the major problems of the modern world
suggests the tenuousness of all such exclusivist
renewal might help us overcome
claims. Thus, for example, whereas MacIntyre these afflictions.
attributes the moral chaos and degeneration of
the modern world to the decline of the virtue
tradition, Martin Heidegger claims that it arose as a consequence of the ancient Greeks’
decision to elevate a unified, monotheistic account of Being over a more pluralized,
polytheistic one.10 For his part, the famed Pakistani philosopher and poet Muhammad
Iqbal sees the source of decline in the collapse of the evolutionary worldview that char-
acterized the “Golden Age” of Islam.11 Though subsequent interpreters have challenged
certain elements of each of these authors’ historical narratives, thoughtful and learned
people continue to embrace their renewalist critiques of the modern world.

The Trans-secular Narrative

Religion is not essentially a conversation-stopper, as secular liberals

often assume…. Neither, however, is religion the foundation without
which democratic discourse is bound to collapse, as traditionalists sup-
pose…. Each of these positions thrives mainly by inflating the other’s
importance. They use each other to lend plausibility to their fears and
proposed remedies. Each of them needs a “force of darkness” to oppose
if it is going to portray itself as the “force of light.” The result of such
posturing is the Manichaean rhetoric of cultural warfare.
—Jeffrey Stout 12

Subtraction and renewal narratives both assert an inverse relationship between moder-
nity and religion. The crucial difference is in whether they consider the advancement of
modernity, and hence the decline of religion, to be a good or bad thing. Trans-secular
narratives aim to overcome this dichotomy by presenting modernization as a force of
religious change.13 Such narratives assert that the disruptive dynamics identified by
both subtraction and renewal narratives are the cause not of religion’s marginalization
and decline, but of its transformation.14
Prominent among trans-secular thinkers is the philosopher Charles Taylor, who
argues that the “conditions of belief ” in Western culture were transformed during the
modern period.15 Whereas medieval peoples could hardly envision the possibility of
atheism, we moderns see unbelief as a viable position. This does not mean that the

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modern West is now dominated by unbelief. Modern Westerners simply learned how to
view the world without reference to a transcendent realm or being. Dubbing this new
perspective the “immanent frame,” Taylor argues that its emergence has stimulated an
ever-expanding “supernova” of new reli-
Trans-secular narratives suffer from the gious perspectives and beliefs. It is there-
fore not religion as such that has declined
tendency to replace the Eurocentrism of during modernity, but, rather, the kind
subtraction and renewal narratives with of unreflective and unproblematic belief
that characterized premodern periods.
an American-centric vision of modernity. Although trans-secular narratives play
an invaluable role in helping us move
beyond straightforward visions of religious decline or renewal, they often suffer from
the tendency to replace the Eurocentrism of subtraction and renewal narratives with
an American-centric vision of modernity. Thus, whereas subtraction and renewal nar-
ratives present secularized Western Europe as the culmination of the modernizing proj-
ect, trans-secular narratives often identity the much more religious United States as
their proper telos. This tendency is evident in many recent trans-secular accounts of
the “resurgence” of religion. Consider the opening remarks of John Micklethwait and
Adrian Wooldridge in God Is Back:

Ever since the Enlightenment there has been a schism in Western thought
over the relationship between religion and modernity. Europeans, on
the whole, have assumed that modernity would marginalize religion;
Americans, in the main, have assumed that the two things can thrive
together…. For most of the past two hundred years the European view
of modernity has been in the ascendant…. [Yet] the world seems to be
moving decisively in the American rather than the European direction.
The American model of religion—one that is based on choice rather
than state fiat—is winning.16

Though sophisticated trans-secular thinkers such as Taylor do not make such aggressive
pronouncements, they still tend to favor the analysis of American religious life in their
efforts to understand our (trans-)secular age.

The Construct Narrative

All of this raises the question of how and when people came to con-
ceptualize the world as divided between “religious” and “secular” in the
modern sense, and to think of the religious realm as being divided into
distinct religions, the so-called World Religions.
—Brent Nongbri 17

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Construct narratives also challenge the assumption that modernity entails the margin-
alization and decline of religion. But instead of advancing this challenge by presenting
modernity as a force of religious change, construct narratives question the very idea
that there was something called “religion” that could decline or be transformed in the
first place. Rather, constructivists believe, the idea of religion as a general phenomenon
that is variously instantiated throughout history and around the world was constructed
by modern Western thinkers and projected outward and backward onto non-Western
peoples.
The historian Brent Nongbri, for instance, argues that the modern concept of reli-
gion arose through a “projection of Christian disunity onto the world.”18 In response
to the period of conflict in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries known as the “Wars
of Religion,” modern Europeans developed the idea that “different religions stand in
tension” with one another and offer “competing ways to salvation.”19 People cannot
decide among such competing religious visions by resorting to reason or empirical data.
Hence, modern Europeans felt that religion must be removed from the public sphere
in order to prevent further social conflict. Although the development of such a secu-
larized vision of modern society is significant in its own right, Nongbri is particularly
interested in how modern Europeans subsequently used this new concept of religion
to interpret and control the diverse cultures they encountered through their imperial
and colonial projects.
Not all construct narratives are so critical of the modern discourse on “religion.” The
historian Guy Stroumsa claims that the development of a general concept of religion
was one of the great scientific discoveries of early modernity.20 Of course, early mod-
ern thinkers tended to conceptualize religion through what now appears to us to be a
narrow biblical lens. Nevertheless, Stroumsa argues,
these scholarly efforts to develop a notion of “reli-
gion in general” provided researchers with a power- A growing number of construct
ful tool for investigating and comparing the many narratives seek to show that the
aspects of human culture that relate to the divine.
Furthermore, a growing number of construct nar- modern discourse on religion
ratives seek to show that the modern discourse on is not an exclusively Western
religion is not an exclusively Western phenomenon.
Another historian, Steven Wasserstrom, has shown
phenomenon.
how modern European notions of religion were
deeply influenced by the extensive comparative inquiry pursued by the twelfth-century
Islamic scholar Al-Shahrastani,21 while the anthropologist Peter van der Veer has illus-
trated how modern India and China developed their own distinct notions of religion
through their ongoing interactions with the modern West.22 Instead of banishing the
concept of “religion” because of its problematic Western formations, as Nongbri and
others23 seek to do, the insights of the construct narrative framework call us to develop
a sharper critical awareness of the origins and contemporary usages of “religion,” as well
as greater care in our use of this increasingly ubiquitous term.

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The Perennial Narrative

The most highly developed branches of the human family have in com-
mon one peculiar characteristic. They tend to produce—sporadically it
is true, and often in the teeth of adverse external circumstances—a curi-
ous and definite type of personality; a type which refuses to be satisfied
with that which other men call experience, and is inclined, in the words
of its enemies, to “deny the world in order that it may find reality.” We
meet these persons in the east and the west; in the ancient, mediaeval,
and modern worlds. Their one passion appears to be the prosecution of
a certain spiritual and intangible quest: the finding of a “way out” or a
“way back” to some desirable state in which alone they can satisfy their
craving for absolute truth.
—Evelyn Underhill 24

Perennial narratives assert that all religions display a certain unity or likeness. The word
perennial can be used to describe either eternal or recurrent phenomena. The golden
rule is a perennial (eternal) truth, while perennial (recurrent) flowers blossom every
year. That same duality appears in the perennial narrative lens, with some renewal nar-
ratives highlighting eternal religious truths and existential structures and others describ-
ing recurrent sociological patterns of religious life. Nevertheless, all renewal narratives
explain religious diversity in terms of a more fundamental commonality.
Many eternal-perennial narrators argue that all religions are pathways to the same
higher truth. This perspective is particularly common among those who call themselves
“spiritual but not religious.” Indeed, the very idea of non-religious spirituality arose
through the interaction of Enlightenment notions
of a universal “natural” religion and new, esoteric
If we want to claim that different
visions of a trans-traditional mysticism.25 Yet not
religions are manifestations of all eternally oriented perennial narratives proceed
in this direction. The arguments of scholars who
the same underlying experience of
say that all religions arise from similar experi-
mysterium tremendum, are we ences—an encounter with transcendence26 or an
experience of mysterium tremendum27—also exem-
imposing a Procrustean one-size-
plify the eternal-perennial approach.
fits-all on what are, in reality, Though unreservedly cyclical visions of reli-
distinct living traditions? gious history are less common than in previous
epochs, many perennial narratives still empha-
size recurrent historical processes. Consider,
for example, how Arnold Toynbee and Ibn Khâldun narrate the history of religion
according to the cyclical rise and fall of religious civilizations.28 Furthermore, a wide
variety of existential thinkers claim that our religious life operates in a cyclical man-
ner. In this regard, consider how the Buddhist thinker Steve Hagan asserts that the
“perennial problem” of human life is our tendency to become trapped in an illu-
sory cycle of suffering and desire,29 while Søren Kierkegaard similarly explains that

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religious consciousness gradually matures as we proceed through a perennial cycle of

inauthenticity and despair.30
The main charge leveled against both kinds of perennial narrative is reductivism. If
we want to claim that different religions are, for example, manifestations of the same
underlying experience of mysterium tremendum, are we imposing a Procrustean one-
size-fits-all on what are, in reality, distinct living traditions? Some who employ a peren-
nial narrative framework are clearly unable to defend against that charge. For example,
the famed Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky, who played a major role in the founding
of the historically important Theosophical movement, elaborated a perennial narrative
that makes outlandish and reductive leaps in order to show how “every theology, from
the earliest and oldest down to the latest, has sprung not only from a common source
of abstract beliefs, but from one universal esoteric, or ‘Mystery’ language.”31
Some perennial narratives do a better job of defending against the reductivist charge.
The philosopher John Hick, for example, bases his claim that all religion emanates
from the human encounter with transcendence on the commonsensical observations
that human nature is one and that all people interact with the same reality.32 It would
therefore be wrong to entirely reject the perennial narrative framework because of the
immodesties of some of its more enthusiastic supporters.

The Post-naturalist Narrative

There is no real conflict between theistic religion and the scientific

theory of evolution. What there is, instead, is conflict between theistic
religion and a philosophical gloss or add-on to the scientific doctrine of
evolution: the claim that evolution is undirected, unguided, unorches-
trated by God (or anyone else).
—Alvin Plantinga 33

Champions of the post-naturalist narrative argue that modern science rightly disrupted
premodern views of nature but has subsequently been burdened by a false identification
with naturalism. Indeed, they argue that naturalism’s influence has actually hindered
the advance of our scientific understanding by preventing us from investigating non-
material entities and forces that humanity has long known to exist. Post-naturalist
narratives also argue that recent developments in
natural science are leading us to a place where we
can begin considering the reality of these non- Thomas Nagel argues that
material entities and forces anew. neo-Darwinian naturalism has
The philosopher Thomas Nagel has articulat-
ed a fascinating and controversial post-naturalist hindered our ability to investigate
narrative.34 Nagel argues that neo-Darwinian the world by forcing us to discount
naturalism has hindered our ability to investi-
gate the world by forcing us to discount all ideas all ideas that appear to legitimize
that appear to legitimize a religious worldview.35 a religious worldview.

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Nagel is particularly concerned that neo-Darwinism blocks us from engaging with the
quite obvious fact that mind is a non-material reality.36 His reasoning on this front is
clear: If we accept the idea that mind is non-material, then we must also accept the idea
that the metaphysical structure of the world contains non-material dimensions, a claim
that appears to legitimize certain religious worldviews.37 Though himself an atheist,
Nagel concludes that we should entertain such directions of thought, and he specifically
recommends that we begin considering again the kind of Platonic-teleological visions
of nature that religious believers of various sorts have long embraced.38
Philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead offered another interesting
post-naturalist narrative, arguing that modern science is one fruit of the new scientific
mentality that arose during the modern period.39 Whitehead described this scientific men-
tality as a “union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract
generalization,”40 and explained that it arose in modern Western civilization through a
combination of religious, philosophical, social, economic, political, and technological
developments. Unfortunately, the rapid advance of modern science led modern Europeans
to falsely claim that embracing the scientific mentality required us to also accept a natu-
ralistic worldview. Nevertheless, Whitehead, writing in the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury, believed that recent developments in philosophy and post-Newtonian physics were
facilitating a dissociation of naturalism from the scientific mentality and the re-situating of
scientific inquiry within a much wider, and more spiritually oriented, worldview.
Though post-naturalist narratives significantly advance our understanding of the
relationship between science and religion, they tend to overestimate the role naturalism
played in diminishing the legitimacy of religious ideas in the modern West. The intel-
lectual historian Stephen Gaukroger, for example, has persuasively argued that histori-
cal critical studies of the Bible did far more than reductive materialism to undermine
the intellectual authority of traditional Christianity.41 Additionally, Guy Stroumsa
argues that the “intellectual and religious shock caused by the observation of formerly
all-but-unknown religious rituals and beliefs” during the Age of Discoveries challenged
Europeans’ taken-for-granted belief in Christianity’s truth, particularly when they
observed the sophistication of other traditions and the savagery displayed during the
European Wars of Religion.42 None of this suggests that the emergence of naturalism
was the key cause of religion’s intellectual displacement, or even a central cause. We
would wrongly assume that defeating naturalism would somehow restore religion to
the position of eminence it enjoyed in the premodern world.

The Developmental Narrative

But the progression [of finite religions] is a condition for the arrival of
religion at its absolute truth.… These determinate religions are definite
stages of the consciousness and knowledge of spirit. They are neces-
sary conditions for the emergence of the true religion, for the authentic
consciousness of spirit.
—G. W. F. Hegel 43

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Developmental narratives claim that religion has long been undergoing a process of
evolution. The developmental narrative framework took root in the modern West
among thinkers who wanted to present all religions as rungs on a progressive ladder,
the topmost of which being something resembling European Christianity, usually of a
Protestant sort. As Guy Stroumsa explains, the idea was that

there was an evolution in history and that God revealed Himself and
His will gradually: Moses offered a religion truer than that of the
Sabians. Jesus permitted a higher, more spiritual way of serving God
than the ritual laws of Moses. And finally, the Reformation proposed a
better Christianity than Catholicism, a religion with too many rituals,
remnants, as it were, of earlier stages of religious life.44

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel presented one of the most exten-
sive versions of this developmental story.45 He argued that religion began with a kind
of diffuse pagan nature worship and culminated with the Protestant realization that
the triune God manifests himself in
the development of the Christian
community. Along the way, magi-
cal religion, Daoism, Hinduism,
Zoroastrianism, Egyptian religion,
Greek religion, Judaism, and Roman
religion (in this particular order)
intervened, advancing humanity’s
understanding of God.
Although some authors still
advance Christo- and Western-
centric developmental narratives, 46
most endeavor to develop more
open-ended and globally nuanced
accounts. The late Robert Bellah, for
example, argued that the evolution of
religion played a central role in stim-
ulating the advancement of human
cognitive capacity. 47 He made this
argument by highlighting the iso-
morphic resemblances between the
mimetic, mythic, and theoretic stag-
es of cognitive capacity 48 and the
tribal, archaic, and axial phases of
religious history. This isomorphism
exists, he explained, because at each
stage of history religion concentrates
Wheatfield with Crows (detail), 1890, by Vincent Van Gogh
human energies upon creating and (1853–1890); HIP/Art Resource, NY.

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sustaining cultural structures that sustain our continued cognitive advance. During
the tribal phase of religious history, religion launched the very process of cultural
evolution by establishing sacred rituals. It was only through indefinitely preserved
ritual that humans who lacked complex narrative language and external symbolic
storage could generate knowledge. During the archaic phase, religion facilitated the
emergence of an encompassing mythological framework by concentrating society on
the mediating role of a divine king. And during the axial phase, religion helped gener-
ate theoretic capacity by centering humanity’s energies on sacred texts derived from
the teachings of prophetic figures.
In evaluating the developmental narrative framework, one must acknowledge the
ambiguity that complicates our use of the term development. On the one hand, we
use this term to describe neutral processes of growth: a cough develops, and so does
a culture of migration. On the other hand, we use it to describe ideal or progressive
processes. This is what we mean when we speak of social, moral, and spiritual develop-
ment. Bellah’s developmental narrative exemplifies the neutral perspective well. As he
said, “Religious evolution does not mean a progression from worse to better. We have
not gone from ‘primitive religion’ that tribal peoples have had to ‘higher religions’
that people like us have…. Religious evolution does add new capacities, but it tells
us nothing about how those capacities will be used.”49 Hegel’s philosophy of religion
exemplifies the second, progressive perspective. Yet it is possible to articulate a vision of
religious progress without embracing Hegelian triumphalism. Following Karl Jaspers,
one can argue that humanity’s powers of self-consciousness and understanding of uni-
versality have steadily expanded throughout religious history without necessarily posit-
ing a concrete endpoint of religious evolution.50

✴ ✴ ✴

Each of the seven narrative frameworks makes a weighty claim about the history of
religion. Yet it can be difficult to know how to make sense of their often contradic-
tory conclusions. Is there any way to reconcile subtractivist and renewalist accounts
of the modern disruption of religion? Can perennialist claims about the unity of reli-
gion, developmental visions of religious evolution, and constructivist efforts to show
how “religion” was created during the modern period all be true? Although trans-sec-
ular accounts of modern religious transformations and post-naturalist re-evaluations
of science make less polarizing claims, authors often use them to support one of the
other, more ambitious narrative views. Thus, for example, philosopher Alvin Plantinga
advances his post-naturalist narrative as part of a broader project of orthodox Christian
renewal,51 while Alfred North Whitehead’s post-naturalist narrative grounds the devel-
opmental account of religious history he presented in other works.52 How, then, should
we interpret the truth-value of each of these seven narrative lenses?
I see three possibilities. First, we can approach each narrative as a largely incommen-
surable view of religious history that must compete with the others in order to vindicate
its truth. Second, we can embrace the kind of perspectivism Wallace Stevens employs in

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his poetic meditation on the blackbird and see each narrative as a partial yet authentic
insight into the irreducibly complex phenomenon of religion. Or, third, we can try
integrating the insights of each narrative into a broader narrative whole.
My personal view is that the third approach provides the best way forward. More
specifically, I find it helpful to approach the subtractivist, renewalist, trans-secularist,
constructivist, perennialist, and post-naturalist dynamics as facets of religion’s broader
developmental trajectory. Such an approach indicates that, as part of religion’s histori-
cal development, certain aspects of earlier religious epochs are rightly left behind, while
others are problematically abandoned and ought to be revitalized; that the distinctive
forces of modernity stimulate religion’s transformation, not necessarily its marginal-
ization and decline; that recent developments in natural science help us see beyond
naturalism and understand non-material phenomena more deeply; that a problematic
concept of religion has taken hold of modern Western discourse and skewed our per-
ceptions of both historical and contemporary religious dynamics; and that many reli-
gious structures, cycles, and ideas perennially appear in different contexts and settings.
Such a broadened developmental narrative provides us with a flexible yet coherent
framework within which to think about the changing place of religion in the world
today. Thus, when we see, for example, secularists deploying subtraction narratives in
order to argue for further curtailing religion’s ability to influence the public sphere,
fundamentalists drawing upon the renewal narrative lens in order to argue for some
renewed form of public orthodoxy, or those who identify as “spiritual but not religious”
employing perennialist tropes in their attempts to articulate some vision of modern
spirituality, we can perceive all these efforts as facets of the global process of religious
transformation that will lead, through various fits and starts, into a new stage of global
religious evolution. Admittedly, our understanding of what precisely this new stage will
entail must, for the time being, remain somewhat vague. Yet by keeping this broadened
developmental perspective in mind, we are able to interpret the many profound and
often contradictory religious stirrings that are taking place throughout the world today
as part of a coherent, global process of religious evolution.53

Endnotes

1 Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999), 10.
2 Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, ed. and trans. Harriet Martineau (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 202. Originally published 1853.
3 Ibid., 231.
4 Ibid., 550–53.
5 Cited in Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent
Religion and Global Politics (New York, NY: Norton, 2011), 1.
6 “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent
Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter Berger (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 2.

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7 John Paul II, “Letter of His Holiness John Paul II to Reverend George V. Coyne, S.J., Director of the
Vatican Observatory,” Libreria Editrice Vaticana, June 1, 1988; http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-
ii/en/letters/1988/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19880601_padre-coyne.html.
8 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2007), 263.
9 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 263.
10 See Mark Wrathall and Morganna Lambeth, “Heidegger’s Last God,” Inquiry 54, no. 2 (2011), 160–82.
11 Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2013). Originally published 1930.
12 Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 12.
13 Indeed, the trans-secular narrative and each of the subsequent four narrative frameworks seek to move
beyond the dialect of subtraction and renewal narratives in their own particular way.
14 Because of the connection of this narrative to the ideas advanced by both subtraction and renewal nar-
ratives, I choose to use the term “trans-secular” instead of “trans-subtraction.”
15 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 2–3.
16 John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the
World (New York, NY: Penguin, 2009), 9–25.
17 Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2012), 5.
18 Ibid., 174.
19 Ibid., 86.
20 Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010).
21 “There is general agreement among historians of the history of religions that Islamicate civilization pro-
duced the greatest pre-modern historical studies of world religions. Indeed, Western scholarly appro-
bation of this literature has been sustained and enthusiastic, based on the observation that historical
science was pioneered by Muslims. Considering the extent to which the Muslim contribution has been
neglected, this point can bear reiteration…. But the history of religions waited until the nineteenth
century for any other historian to take the religions of others as seriously as Shahrastani did.” Steven M.
Wasserstrom, “Islamicate History of Religions?,” History of Religions 27, no. 4 (1988): 408.
22 Peter van der Veer, The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 63-89.
23 See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam,
Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World
Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2012).
24 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (Mineola,
NY: Dover, 2002), 9–10.
25 Advocates of this mystical perennialism have included Emmanuel Swedenborg, H. P. Blavatsky, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Aldous Huxley, and Swami Vivekananda. See Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but Not
Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001), 13-74.
26 John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2005), 1.
27 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1958), 26.
28 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, vols. 1–2, ed. D. C. Somervell (Oxford, England: Oxford University
Press, 1987); Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, ed. and abridged N. J. Dawood,
trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).
29 Steve Hagan, Buddhism Plain and Simple (Boston, MA: Broadway Books, 1997), 13–24.
30 Søren Kiergegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and
Awakening, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980), 38. Originally published 1849.

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31 H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, ed. Boris de Zirkoff
(Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Society in America, 1978), 266. Originally published 1888.
32 Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 1–3.
33 AlvinPlantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2011), xii.
34 Fora review of the controversy surrounding Nagel’s work, see Andrew Ferguson, “The Heretic: Who Is
Thomas Nagel and Why Are So Many of His Fellow Academics Condemning Him?,” Weekly Standard
March 25, 2013; http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/heretic_707692.html.
35 As Nagel says, “The political urge to defend science education against the threats of religious orthodoxy,
understandable though it is, has resulted in a counter orthodoxy, supported by bad arguments, and a
tendency to overstate the legitimate scientific claims of evolutionary theory. Skeptics about the theory
are seen as so dangerous, and so disreputably motivated, that they must be denied any shred of legiti-
mate interest.” See Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002–2008
(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2009), 42.
36 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1986).
37 Nagel, Secular Philosophy, 16–17. For other influential post-naturalist narratives, see David Bohm,
Wholeness and the Implicate Order (New York, NY: Routledge, 1980); Bernard D’Espagnat, On Physics
and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in
an Age of Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Henry P. Stapp, Mind, Matter, and
Quantum Mechanics, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Springer, 2009); Pim van Lommell, Consciousness beyond
Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience, ed. Laura Vroomen (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2010);
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, NY: Free Press, 1997), originally
published 1925.
38 Nagel, Secular Philosophy, 16–17.
39 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1–3.
40 Ibid., 3.
41 StephenGaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210–
1685 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 23–24.
42 Guy Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010), 2–7.
43 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition, the Lectures of 1827, ed. and
trans. Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006), 204–05.
44 Stroumsa, A New Science, 97.
45 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, passim.
46 See Rodney Stark, Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief (New
York, NY: HarperCollins, 2007).
47 Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), passim.
48 Bellahborrows his account of humanity’s tree major cognitive capacities from Merlin Donald. See:
Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
49 Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, xxii–xxiii.
50 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), passim.
51 See:Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
52 See Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967, originally published
1933); Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making, reissue ed. (New York, NY: Free Press, 1967,
originally published 1926); Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.
53 For an example of how this posture can lead to novel analyses of contemporary religious dynamics,
see Richard Madsen, “The Future of Transcendence: A Sociological Agenda,” in The Axial Age and
Its Consequences, eds. Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2012), 411–29.

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 Escaping the Matrix
The Case for the Liberal Arts

Wilfred M. McClay

IT NEED HARDLY BE SAID THAT THE IDEAL
of a liberal arts education, for so long regarded
as the gold standard of American undergraduate
education, now finds itself embattled and widely
disdained. And not for the first time. Such an
education has always been regarded by many
Americans as impractical, disorienting, and self-
indulgent, even wasteful. Its current struggles
have a great deal to do with the insistent pres-
sures of economics, particularly excessive costs
and uncertain returns on students’ investment,
and the effects of those pressures upon the insti-
tutions that provide it. Those problems will need
to be addressed if liberal arts education is to enjoy
a less precarious institutional future. Serving on
the board of a small, venerable, liberal arts col-
lege, I know firsthand what immense challenges
such institutions are facing, particularly in the
wake of the Great Recession.
But we need to remember that saving institu-
tions is not the same thing as saving the educa-
tional activities the institutions were created to
house. We do not want to achieve the one at the
expense of the other. And if we are to make any
kind of case for the liberal arts, we must first
have before us a reasonably coherent notion of
what the liberal arts are, and what they are for,
and why they are worth preserving. That means
clearing away some persistent misconceptions.
First of all, we need to banish the notion
that the term liberal arts is a synonym for the
humanities, or for those “soft” disciplines that are
offered as complements to the “hard” disciplines
of science and mathematics. On the contrary, a
liberal education must include both. Instructing
people in the liberal arts is not just a matter of
imparting certain analytical techniques, even
if universities do an excellent job of imparting
those skills—readily transferable to other areas of
human endeavor—as a byproduct of their work.
Nor, though, does liberal arts refer to a particular
body of knowledge, although the proper exercise
of the liberal arts may well involve the acquisition
of such a body of knowledge. They are not reduc-
ible to a lengthy list of books that must be read,
languages that must be mastered, theorems to be
memorized, or concepts with which one must
be demonstrably conversant—although all those
things will contribute in indispensable ways to
the pursuit of a liberal education.
Instead, what marks a genuinely liberal educa-
tion is its success in instilling a set of qualities that

Wilfred M. McClay is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of
Oklahoma.

Left: Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, and Keanu Reeves in The Matrix Reloaded, 2003; Archive Photos/Warner
Brothers/Getty Images.

119
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
are often quite fiercely at odds with one another.
Those qualities can be grouped under two broad
rubrics: the capacity for serious inquiry and the
capacity for full membership. Let me explain with
an anecdote.
A number of years ago, when I was still a fairly
junior professor at Tulane, I went to an academic
conference in San Francisco whose subject was
the purpose of the modern university. It was well
attended, and featured two outstanding plenary
speakers, each of whom was received very warmly
by his audience.
The first was the distinguished historian
C. Vann Woodward, who was accepting an award
for his long and illustrious career, particularly for
his commitment to the ideals of free speech and
free investigation. In his remarks, Woodward
put forward a bold and uncompromising view
of what the university’s appropriate work should
consist. The university, he declared, was the
place where the unthinkable could be thought,
the unspeakable could be said, the inconceivable
could be conceptualized, and the unfashion-
able could be entertained. The university, and it
alone, offered the world a place consecrated to
the most precious and most imperiled aspects
of human freedom: our freedom of thought,
freedom of inquiry, and freedom of expression.
Without strong institutional protections for such
freedoms against the forces that always seemed to
spring up against them, we would lose the benefit
of them, including the benefits that come of a
culture that is bent upon seeking and finding the
truth, without fear or favor. Visibly stirred by
these words, the members of the audience, myself
included, applauded loud and long.
Later in the conference came an address by
a scholar of equal distinction, James Q. Wilson,
also speaking on the theme of the university’s
purpose. In his speech, the noted political scien-
tist argued that the modern university was best
understood as the chief conservator of the rich
but fragile civilization of the Western world,
the keeper of our chief intellectual, moral, and
120
artistic treasures and our collective historical
memory. That heritage had made us what, and
who, we were, he said, but our dynamic commer-
cial and intellectual cultures were all too likely to
toss that heritage aside, in the pell-mell pursuit
of The Next Big Thing. If the university did not
take care to look after the older things, he asked,
who else would? Without a strong institutional
commitment to the conservation and propaga-
tion of that cultural inheritance, we would lose
the benefit of it, including the benefits that come
of sustaining a vital connection to the past, and
to the best that has been thought and expressed
in the human experience. For these words, too,
the audience applauded loud and long, and again
I joined in enthusiastically, though by now expe-
riencing a bit of puzzlement at my fellow audi-
tors, and at myself.
Membership without inquiry is bland
and unthinking traditionalism; inquiry
without membership is little more than
captiousness or kibitzing.
Puzzlement, because it struck me that we
seemed to be applauding, with equal enthusiasm,
two entirely different, and seemingly incompat-
ible, ideals of the university. Woodward seemed
to be holding up the university as a place of
constant unsettlement, even creative destruction,
in which everything that is taken for truth today
is open at every moment to being rethought,
reframed, and reconstituted, even discarded, a
place in which no dogma is safe and no compla-
cency is tolerated—a place in which ideas and
ideals can have validity only so long as they can
stand up to the intense and uninhibited refining
fire of today’s most impertinent questions and
searing criticisms.
Wilson, on the other hand, was pushing for
an ideal of the university as a cultural institution

standing precisely against the arrogant and self-
absorbed tendency of the modern world to
appoint itself the plenipotentiary judge of all
things, to deny and disparage the authority of
all that has come before it, and, in so doing, to
ensure that those who come after us will accord
us the same derisive treatment, in the fullness of
time. Wilson’s university was, instead, a place
of intergenerational comity, where the young
would be educated to take up gladly the fullness
of their cultural inheritance, to become literate
and conversant in its many features, and to fully
appropriate all that it had to offer them.
These are two very different-sounding ideas
about the nature of higher education. Yet we
applauded them both with roughly equal fervor.
Were we, the audience, being mindless fools? Or
might there be a logic linking them both, one that
neither speaker sought to stress, but that we need
to take to heart in our own attempt to understand
the value of a university education, particularly
one in the liberal arts, in the present day?
I think there is, in fact, a deeper sense in which
these two different accounts of the university are
merely different aspects of the same vision: a
vision of education as a preparation for freedom,
for liberty in the fullest sense of the term. This
freedom is not mere license; nor is it the ability
to live unfettered by all constraints or coercions
or traditions, nor, for that matter, to live in the
easygoing, conflict-free adjustment of one’s wants
and expectations to the world as one finds it. It
is, instead, freedom as a form of rational self-
government, as a regimen of risks and rewards,
an intellectual and moral freedom grounded in a
healthy combination of membership and inquiry,
of reverence and criticism. It is a freedom that
releases us from the unquestioned tutelage of
the past and empowers us to scrutinize each and
every one of the world’s givens, but does so in a
way that enables us to draw sustenance from the
past rather than make us entirely disdainful of
it, or worse, entirely alienated from it. Wilson’s
university would bring to its charges the blessings
E S C A P I N G T H E M AT R I X / M CC L AY
of a more fully conscious and informed member-
ship in the long historical stream of which they
were already a part; Woodward’s university would
give them ample space for inquiry, the ability to
engage in the acts of radical questioning and
criticism, including civilizational self-criticism,
that represent one of the chief means by which
that civilization has been induced not only to
redress its deficiencies but to improve itself. The
best university, the one that teaches the liberal
arts, is the one that does all of these things at the
same time.
We were right to applaud both speakers at
that convention because we need both messages.
Membership without inquiry is bland and
unthinking traditionalism; inquiry without
membership is little more than captiousness
or kibitzing. The proper end in view is that of
substituting informed loyalties for blind ones,
and substituting conscious reasonableness, and
un-coerced love, for fear and dependency and
superstition and reflex action. It is a freedom that
comes of seeing all that one has formerly known
in a larger arena, within a larger frame, as a part
of a larger reality—to see it all, as we say, in a
new light.
That image, of seeing all things freshly when
they have been freshly illuminated by the emer-
gence of greater sources of light, makes many of
us think of one of the most imperishable parables
of education: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in the
seventh book of The Republic. It is a strange, even
weird, tale of benighted people who have been
compelled since birth to view shadowy images
projected upon a wall as if they were the only real
things in existence, and of the revelations that
come to them when they are released from their
bondage and brought into the blinding light of
day—brought to see things as they really are.
Something like the same parable has appeared
in various forms all over the world, throughout
human history: the various understandings of
the veil of maya in Hinduism and Buddhism;
the “evil demon” in Descartes’s Meditations, who
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
so orders the world as to deceive him; the 1999
science-fiction movie The Matrix, in which most
of humanity has been constrained to experience
only a simulation of reality created by all-control-
ling, life-devouring computers; even something
as familiar as the all-American movie The Wizard
of Oz, in which the “great and powerful” title
character is revealed in the end to be a manipu-
lator and a fraud.
Those illuminati who return to the cave,
Plato tells us, are likely to be killed by
those who have never left it and prefer not
to have their illusions disturbed. Education
can be a risky business.
What all these narratives reinforce is a
powerful and sometimes haunting apprehension
that we may be living our lives under the spell of a
complete illusion, whether imposed by others or
by ourselves; that the process of freeing ourselves
from that illusion is painful and unsettling; that
it can involve a transformation of all that was
familiar and a complete re-description of reality
itself, in the name of the search for truth. And
the stakes are very high. Those illuminati who
return to the cave, Plato tells us, are likely to be
killed by those who have never left it and prefer
not to have their illusions disturbed. Education
can be a risky business.
But reality is rarely so dramatic and extreme as
that. Plato’s great allegory, and the other versions
of this theme, are not the whole story about
education, which is just as often a tale of delight
and discovery as one of pain. I fear that Plato’s
allegory may mislead us by emphasizing only one
part of the effort of liberal education, the process
of freeing us from our illusions, of weakening the
hold of the present and the past on us so that
we might better apprehend the possibilities that
beckon from beyond.
122
An argument I find more helpful and reli-
able comes from a small book by the late histo-
rian Jaroslav Pelikan called The Vindication of
Tradition. Drawing upon an essay by Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Pelikan offers a distinction
between “tradition” and “insight,” and then goes
on to show how unsustainable that distinction
actually is:
A “leap of progress” is not a standing
broad jump, which begins at the line
of where we are now; it is a running
broad jump through where we have
been to where we go next. The growth
of insight—in science, in the arts, in
philosophy and theology—has not
come through progressively sloughing
off more and more of tradition, as
though insight would be purest and
deepest when it has finally freed itself
of the dead past. It simply has not
worked that way in the history of the
tradition, and it does not work that way
now. By including the dead in the circle
of discourse, we enrich the quality of
the conversation. Of course we do not
listen only to the dead, nor are we a tape
recording of the tradition…. But we do
acquire the insight for which Emerson
was pleading when we learn to interact
creatively with the tradition which he
was denouncing.
Pelikan concludes his examination with a charge
to the reader, taken from Goethe’s Faust:
What you have as heritage,
Take now as task;
For thus you will make it your own.
In this view, the point of studying “the tradi-
tion” is not to absolve us of the need to think
for ourselves, or relieve us of the responsibility
to build things of our own. On the contrary.

Such study helps us to recognize the work we
are meant to do. Our heritage is our task. It
gives our world its defining contours, its hori-
zons, and its specific problems and possibilities.
We cannot know or undertake our task without
the benefit of our heritage. But it is by doing
our task that we can come into the full posses-
sion of that heritage—perpetuating it as some-
thing living, rather than something inert and
finished—and thereby make it possible for us
to have a free and full relationship with that
heritage, like that of children who have fully
grown up, and can at last see and embrace their
forebears for the people they actually are, and
can come into fully adult possession of their
inheritance.
So Plato’s Allegory of the Cave may not be
fully adequate to the task of describing educa-
tion. But then neither is Woodward’s descrip-
tion of the university as a free-fire zone of
relentless and unsparing critique, or Wilson’s of
the university as an agency of cultural transmis-
sion. What might fit Pelikan’s description best
is the idea of education as a bildungsroman, but
only if one adds the qualification that it is an
adventure culminating in a homecoming, the
kind of story that our literary tradition has
taught us to call an odyssey. “We shall not cease
from exploration,” wrote T. S. Eliot in “Little
Gidding,” “And the end of all our exploring /
Will be to arrive where we started / And know
the place for the first time.” Such is the task
of a liberal education, rightly understood—to
be a liberating exploration that results, not in
our being rendered permanently uprooted and
alienated, but in our becoming more fully at
home in the world that we already inhabit,
and more fully able to enhance it, beautify it,
ennoble it, and sustain it. This involves being
what the political theorist Michael Walzer has
called a “connected critic,” one whose inquiry
draws upon, challenges, but ultimately affirms
and strengthens the sense of membership in
that world, this inquiry being part and parcel
E S C A P I N G T H E M AT R I X / M CC L AY
of membership, like a reciprocating engine in
which tradition and insight are partners, rather
than foes. The wisest cosmopolitan knows what
Dorothy famously told us: There’s no place like
home.
The chief public benefit of liberal education,
when it is functioning successfully, is the forma-
tion of a particular kind of person, a particular
kind of citizen, who robustly embodies the virtues
of both inquiry and membership, and therefore is
equipped for the truth-seeking deliberation and
responsible action a republican form of govern-
ment requires. Such a person has an ability to
draw back from the flow of events and reflect
upon them, the ability to consult the voice of
reason and the wise testimony of the past. Such
a person has the cognitive and moral strength
to see the world as it is, and not be fooled into
mistaking a succession of images projected onto
the walls of caves, or conjured on screens, for
reality, no matter how large the images or how
pervasive their presence. And no matter how
many proximate others have been gulled or
deceived into believing in those images.
One might describe the idea of education
as a bildungsroman, but only if one adds
the qualification that it is an adventure
culminating in a homecoming, what literary
tradition has taught us to call an odyssey.”
Hence Plato’s great allegorical image of libera-
tion remains at the core of education, even if it
does not constitute the whole of it. Before we
can do anything truly magnificent and lasting, in
art or craft or love, we too must be drawn out
of our various caves. In particular, we must be
liberated from the sirens of propaganda, or the
enchantments of virtual experience, before we can
accomplish anything worthwhile. One doesn’t
have to believe that we are inhabiting our own
123
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
soft-core version of the Matrix to believe that an
unhealthy proportion of our experience has come
to be mediated and directed and channeled and
simulated by the artificial instrumentalities we
use to apprehend the world, and by what others
instruct our imaginations to believe such a world
might be. Such a tendency carries with it great
dangers, both for our ability to think clearly and
attentively and for our ability to use our imagi-
nations with vividness and independence. It also
threatens to undercut the patterns of restrained
and civil public deliberation that a genuinely
democratic society requires. This tendency toward
A guide for the perplexed
The Hedgehog Review
Read • Think • Subscribe
www.hedgehogreview.com
434-243-8935
hedgehog@virginia.edu
124
immersion in mediated experience inhibits the
flourishing both of our inner life and the mutu-
ality of our common life. It can easily become a
form of cognitive imprisonment.
In the years to come, it will be a greater and
greater part of a genuine liberal education to
counteract these confinements imposed upon
us by our ghostly electronic cave and restore us
to ourselves—restore our ability to hear and see
and touch the earth for ourselves, to gaze at the
night sky for ourselves, and to extend and explore
together the real possibilities of our human
freedom.
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125
 Across the Great Divides
Why America Needs a More Confident Pluralism

John Inazu

OBSERVERS OF CULTURE WARS, PAST AND
present, would be hard-pressed to find two more
fiercely antipodal figures than Jerry Falwell and
Larry Flynt. Falwell (who died in 2007) was a
Southern Baptist preacher and the founder of the
Moral Majority, a conservative Christian politi-
cal organization that rose to prominence in the
1980s. Flynt is the founder of Hustler magazine
and a giant of the pornography industry. Falwell
blamed the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
on “the pagans and the abortionists and the femi-
nists and the gays and the lesbians, … the ACLU,
People for the American Way—all of them who
have tried to secularize America.” Flynt once

John Inazu is an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. This article is adapted
from his book Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference (University of Chicago
Press, forthcoming 2016). Twitter: @JohnInazu

Above: Protestors for and against Planned Parenthood, 2015; © Matt Rourke/AP/Corbis.

126

called on God to afflict a conservative news
anchor “with a brain aneurysm that will lead to
his slow and painful death.”1
The two men did not think much of each other.
During the 1970s, Falwell repeatedly condemned
Flynt’s line of work. As Flynt said, “He called me
every terrible name he could think of—names as
bad, in my opinion, as any language used in my
magazine.” Flynt eventually took offense. In 1983,
he published a parody of Falwell using a then-
famous advertisement for Campari liqueur. The
advertisement relied on a double entendre that
compared the “first time” a particular celebrity
had tasted Campari to the celebrity’s first sexual
experience. In Flynt’s spoof, Falwell described
his “first time” as being with his mother, while
they were “drunk off our God-fearing asses.” In
the parody, Falwell explained that “Mom looked
better than a Baptist whore with a $100 dona-
tion,” and claimed he decided to have sex with
her because she had “showed all the other guys
in town such a good time.” For good measure,
Flynt threw in a line about Falwell’s preaching: “I
always get sloshed before I go out to the pulpit.
You don’t think I could lay down all that bullshit
sober, do you?”2
Flynt’s spoof led to a famous Supreme Court
decision that, among other things, upheld Flynt’s
right to publish the parody.3 The litigation proved
contentious throughout. During his deposition,
Falwell’s lawyers asked Flynt if his objective in
the spoof had been to destroy or harm Falwell’s
reputation. Flynt, not one to mince words,
replied: “To assassinate it.”4
The End of Pluralism?
“It is impossible,” said the French philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “to live at peace with
those we regard as damned.” Falwell and Flynt
certainly seemed to fulfill Rousseau’s dire pre-
diction. Many of the rest of us do, too. From
hostility to civil-rights protests in Missouri, to
A C RO S S T H E G R E AT D I V I D E S / I N A Z U
anti-Muslim protests in Oklahoma, to culture
wars boycotts, we struggle to live with those
whose views we regard as irrational, immoral, or
even dangerous.
Sometimes our disagreements play out in
overblown rhetoric. Consider the ferocious
debate that erupted over an Indiana religious
liberty law in March 2015. Conservative radio
host Mark Levin contended that opponents
of the law “hate America.” Family Research
Council president Tony Perkins argued that any
changes to the law “would gut religious freedom
in Indiana.” In the other direction, Apple CEO
Tim Cook was just as hyperbolic, calling the law
a “very dangerous” effort to “enshrine discrimina-
tion” and “rationalize injustice.” And journalist
Ben Kepes worried that the law “feels very much
like a prelude to another Kristallnacht.”5
The actual legal debate focused on whether
a few Christian florists and cake bakers (and,
apparently, one hapless pizza joint) could refuse
to provide their services for a same-sex wedding.
That question is not trivial, and had powerful
symbolic meaning for both sides, but the policy
implications did not merit the overheated rhet-
oric—or portend the kind of consequences the
rhetoric suggested.
Sometimes our antipathy toward others
extends beyond words. In 2012, North Carolina
voters approved an amendment that constitu-
tionalized the state’s definition of marriage as
being between a man and a woman and invali-
dated other forms of “domestic legal union.” The
amendment potentially jeopardized protections
for gays and lesbians in family law, domestic
violence law, estate planning, and employee
benefits.6
In November 2014, Alabama voters approved
a constitutional amendment prohibiting state
courts from applying foreign laws that would
violate state or federal law. The amendment—the
result of much fear-mongering about the incur-
sions of sharia law—had no legal consequences; it
was, as University of Alabama law professor Paul
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
Horwitz noted, “completely redundant” in light
of existing laws. But it was not without symbolic
effect, and traded on anti-Muslim hostility to
draw voters to the ballot box. More than thirty
states have considered similar amendments or
legislation.7
Across the state of California today, many
conservative religious student groups are no
longer welcome on the campuses of many public
colleges and universities. And it’s not just a West
Coast thing. Vanderbilt University, Bowdoin
College, and a number of other schools have
also forced such groups off their campuses. These
schools rely on “all-comers” policies that require
student groups to admit as members—and even
leaders—any student who wishes to participate.
The Republican club must accept Democrats.
The pro-choice club must accept pro-lifers.
Conservative religious groups with membership
or leadership restrictions are unable to comply.
These policies send a clear message to these
groups: Change or leave.8
Instead of the elusive goal of E pluribus
unum (“Out of many, one”), confident
pluralism suggests a more modest
possibility—that we can live together in our
“many-ness.”
Even as some of us struggle to coexist, others
feign agreement by ignoring or minimizing our
stark differences. We hold conferences, attend
rallies, and sign statements expressing unity and
solidarity. But most of us do not actually think
that our differences are so easily overcome. And
most of us do not actually want to see a thou-
sand flowers bloom. We can all name things we
think the world would be better off without.
This is especially true when it comes to questions
of morality and ultimate conviction. We might
prefer a society in which everyone agreed on
128
what counted as a justifiable homicide, a mean
temperament, or a good life, but that is not the
kind of society in which we actually live.
There is another possibility that better
embraces the reality of our deepest differences:
confident pluralism. Confident pluralism insists
that Rousseau was wrong: Our shared exis-
tence is not only possible, but necessary. Instead
of the elusive goal of E pluribus unum (“Out
of many, one”), confident pluralism suggests
a more modest possibility—that we can live
together in our “many-ness.” It does not require
Pollyanna-ish illusions that we will resolve our
differences and live happily ever after. Instead, it
asks us to pursue a common existence in spite of
our deeply held differences.
Constitutional Commitments
Confident pluralism is built upon the twofold
premise that our common existence remains
possible in both law and society. We can think
of these possibilities in terms of constitutional
commitments and civic practices, respectively.
Constitutional commitments give us the practi-
cal ability to coexist with meaningful differences.
This possibility is captured in a well-known pas-
sage in which Justice Robert Jackson defended
the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses to abstain from
saying the Pledge of Allegiance during World
War II:
We apply the limitations of the
Constitution with no fear that freedom
to be intellectually and spiritually
diverse, or even contrary, will disin-
tegrate the social organization.…
Freedom to differ is not limited to
things that do not matter much. That
would be a mere shadow of freedom.
The test of its substance is the right to
differ as to things that touch the heart of
the existing order.9

The right to differ from prevailing orthodoxy
transcends any one viewpoint or belief. In the
1940s, the Jehovah’s Witnesses confronted the
orthodoxy of patriotism. In the 1960s, civil-
rights groups stood against the orthodoxy of
Jim Crow. In the 1980s, gay rights groups chal-
lenged the orthodoxy of heterosexuality. Today’s
orthodoxies have shifted yet again. But we retain
the right to differ.
The right to differ means that we must be
able to reject the norms established by the
broader political community in our own lives
and voluntary groups. We must be able to
dissent from those norms. As Justice William
Brennan argued, “Collective effort on behalf
of shared goals” is “especially important in
preserving political and cultural diversity and in
shielding dissident expression from suppression
by the majority.”10
Dissent is not unbounded—every society
imposes limits. But within those limits, the
right to differ will sometimes mean that citizens
and the groups they form will choose to reject
the norms of the political community—they
may be illiberal or inegalitarian, or they may
ignore the civic practices of confident pluralism.
A political community that fails to honor this
right to differ is not pluralistic—it lacks confi-
dence in itself.
Protecting the right to differ and realizing
the constitutional commitments of confident
pluralism requires redefining and reimagining
three aspects of constitutional doctrine: the right
of association, public forums, and public funding.
The Right of Association
The most important constitutional commit-
ment of confident pluralism is reinvigorat-
ing associational protections for the voluntary
groups of civil society. The Supreme Court first
recognized a constitutional right of association
in 1958.11 Twenty-six years later, the Court split
A C RO S S T H E G R E AT D I V I D E S / I N A Z U
the right of association into two flavors: “inti-
mate association” and “expressive association.”12
Intimate association is an “intrinsic” feature of
the right of association that focuses on “highly
personal relationships” and “deep attachments
and commitments.” This sounds promising—
but in practical terms, intimate association
extends only to close family relationships and
adds almost nothing to the balance of our civil
liberties.13
“Freedom to differ is not limited to things
that do not matter much. That would be
a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its
substance is the right to differ as to things
that touch the heart of the existing order.”
Under the right of expressive association,
a group is eligible for constitutional protec-
tion only to the extent that its purposes and
activities further some other First Amendment
interest, such as freedom of speech, the press,
or religion. Expressive association instrumental-
izes the associational right—it must be enlisted
toward some purportedly more significant end.
And this precisely and effectively ignores the
ways in which most people actually form beliefs,
practices, and modes of resistance—through
informal and even non-expressive gatherings
that facilitate friendships, relationships, and
solidarity.
A law restricting a non-expressive association
faces almost no constitutional obstacles—it need
only pass “rational basis” scrutiny, and almost any
law will meet this threshold. That means that a
voluntary group deemed non-expressive can be
regulated if a state or local government concludes
that the group’s membership requirements are
out of step with majoritarian norms, if elected
officials want to promote public order or discre-
tionary zoning preferences, or if law enforcement
129
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
officials want to limit the size or composition of
the group for purposes of crowd control.
Moreover, even those groups that qualify
as expressive associations confront a vague
doctrinal framework that too easily balances
constitutional protections out of existence. For
instance, some judicial decisions are remarkably
unsympathetic to expressive associations that
impose membership restrictions on the basis
of gender or some other characteristic.14 But
at least part of the right of association entails
discrimination—a meaningful right of associa-
tion will permit voluntary groups to exclude.
Wellesley College discriminates against men
and unexceptionally performing high school
students. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir
discriminates against non-Mormons and bad
singers. Within the voluntary groups of civil
society, we tolerate forms of discrimination that
would elsewhere be impermissible. The current
law surrounding the right of association fails to
recognize this distinction.
Public Forums
The second important constitutional commit-
ment is to strengthen the protections for public
forums—the physical and virtual spaces where
citizens come together to voice their dissent,
opposition, and discontent. Public forums can
be actual places, such as town halls, but they can
also be non-physical or virtual spaces. Public col-
leges and universities create public forums when
they allow students to form their own organi-
zations; local governments often create public
forums when they solicit comments on a website.
Public forums are essential to our democratic
experiment. They provide a practical mechanism
for citizens to gather, express, and engage—on
topics and issues of their choosing, in their own
ways and on their own terms. The ideal of the
public forum represents one of the most impor-
tant aspects of a healthy democracy. It signifies
130
a willingness to tolerate dissent, discomfort, and
even instability. These intuitive connections were
not lost on the writers of the hit television show
Parks and Recreation. When a delegation from a
municipal parks and recreation department in
Venezuela visits the fictional town of Pawnee,
Indiana, their leader, Raul, expresses dismay
upon observing a public forum: “This is outra-
geous. Where are the armed men who come in
to take the protesters away? Where are they? This
kind of behavior is never tolerated in Boraqua.
You shout like that, they put you in jail. Right
away. No trial, no nothing. Journalists, we have a
special jail for journalists.”15
The ideal of the public forum represents
one of the most important aspects
of a healthy democracy. It signifies a
willingness to tolerate dissent, discomfort,
and even instability.
We are not as far from Raul’s vision as we
might like to believe. The suppression of public
outrage in Ferguson last fall in the immediate
aftermath of Michael Brown’s death (and the
detention of journalists who covered the protests)
is only one example of the ongoing violations of
the public forum in this country. Under current
law, political protestors in public forums are
often relegated to physically distant and ironi-
cally named “free-speech zones.” Labor picketers
confront oppressive restrictions in public areas.
Churches are prohibited from renting generally
available public facilities. Occupy movement
protesters in New York City parks, antiabortion
counselors on Colorado sidewalks, and political
protesters in the North Carolina capital have
all been silenced by government officials over-
reaching their authority. The public forum in
practice is quite unrecognizable from its ideal,
and that departure should give us great pause.

Public Funding
Finally, it is important that we preserve access to
generally available public funding, regardless of
ideology. The government has the authority to
use much of its tax-generated revenue for its own
purposes. But in the case of venues that func-
tion in ways similar to public forums, such as
the forum for student organizations at public
universities, government should not be permit-
ted to demand conformity to any one prevailing
orthodoxy as a condition of eligibility for gener-
ally available funding.
Another example is tax-exempt status under
the federal tax code.16 Within the vast domain of
groups that qualify as tax exempt under the Internal
Revenue Code, every one of us could find not only
groups that we think belong but also groups that
we find harmful to society. And, of course, our
lists of reprehensible groups would differ. The
pro-choice group and the pro-life group, religious
groups of all stripes (or no stripe), hunting organi-
zations and animal-rights groups—the federal tax
deduction benefits them all. Furious calls from left
and right to strip the tax-exempt status of groups
on the other side of the ideological spectrum are
misguided. We can’t begin with the premise of
confident pluralism and then work to exclude the
groups we don’t like.
Confident Pluralism as Civic Virtue
Some aspects of confident pluralism lie beyond
the reach of the law—they are up to us. We can,
of course, argue for the importance of constitu-
tional commitments and then ignore the norms
underlying those commitments in our own lives.
But it is better to reflect our aspirations for the
law in the way we live.
Confident pluralism requires three aspira-
tions to secure its civic practices: tolerance,
humility, and patience. These three aspirations
are not self-evidently “confident.” We might
A C RO S S T H E G R E AT D I V I D E S / I N A Z U
think of them as concessions that would come
from a lack of confidence. But it is in fact the
confidence in our own views and beliefs in the
midst of deep difference that allows us to engage
charitably with others.
Tolerance, humility, and patience function
within confident pluralism as aspirations, not
finely tuned philosophical concepts. We need
only set out an idea of how we might act, recog-
nizing that for some those actions will reflect
deeply held commitments, and for others they
may be little more than pragmatically justi-
fied concessions. But if enough of us embrace
these aspirations, we may be able to sustain a
consensus for confident pluralism, even as we
draw from eclectic and blended antecedents. As
the philosopher Charles Taylor has suggested,
“We would agree on the norms while disagreeing
on why they were the right norms, and we would
be content to live in this consensus.”17
Think back to Falwell and Flynt. Falwell was
what we might call a conservative moralist. He
followed a set of rules from a text or community
that governs and constrains behavior, telling you
what is right and what is wrong. Flynt is what
we might call a liberal progressive. He desires
“autonomy” in the fashion of contemporary
liberalism: “autonomy” as the freedom in most
cases to make your own decisions apart from
a text or community and to follow your own
passions wherever they lead you. Falwell and
Flynt disagreed strongly about matters of religion
and sexuality.
Falwell and Flynt were also both white, male,
heterosexual, about the same age, and in roughly
the same income bracket. In other words,
their differences, though stark, would be even
more complicated if we introduced other real-
world factors that contribute to our real-world
pluralism.
Most of us are not reducible to either Falwell
or Flynt. Labels like “conservative moralist”
and “liberal progressive” do not fully specify or
even reach many of the issues that divide us.
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
But Falwell and Flynt reflect something about
our approaches to some of the most contested
cultural issues today. For this reason, they will
be helpful in exploring the three aspirations of
confident pluralism.
Tolerance
Tolerance is the most important aspiration of
confident pluralism. It accepts genuine differ-
ence, including profound moral disagreement.
Achieving it is no easy task. As the philosopher
Bernard Williams has observed, tolerance is most
needed when people find others’ beliefs or prac-
tices “deeply unacceptable” or “blasphemously,
disastrously, obscenely wrong.” The basic dif-
ficulty of tolerance, Williams notes, is that we
need it “only for the intolerable.”18
Parsing the difference between tolerance
and approval requires the hard work of
distinguishing between people and ideas.
There is, however, a tolerance that does not
require embracing all beliefs and viewpoints
as good or right. The philosopher Edward
Langerak reminds us that “toleration is derived
from the Latin tolero, which primarily connotes
the enduring of something.” Heeding these
connotations, “we should distinguish toleration
from indifference, resignation, timidity, and
approval.”19 We should aspire not to an “anything
goes,” happy-go-lucky tolerance but to a prac-
tical enduring for the sake of coexistence. Falwell
and Flynt held views about the world that were
fundamentally at odds with one another. The
depth of their disagreement precluded anything
like ultimate approval.
Parsing the difference between tolerance and
approval requires the hard work of distinguishing
132
between people and ideas. We should not under-
estimate how difficult that work will be. Tolerance
asks that Falwell treat Flynt with respect. It doesn’t
mean he will respect Flynt’s ideas. The tolerance
of confident pluralism does not impose the fiction
that all ideas are equally valid or morally harm-
less. It does require respecting people, aiming for
fair discussion, and allowing for the space to differ
about serious matters.
Humility
Humility requires even greater self-reflection and
self-discipline than tolerance. It leads Falwell and
Flynt to recognize that their own beliefs and intu-
itions rest upon tradition-dependent values that
cannot be empirically proven or fully justified by
forms of rationality external to those traditions.
That does not mean Falwell or Flynt must sec-
ond-guess their beliefs or lack confidence in their
own convictions. Humility is instead a reminder
of the limits of translation, and the difficulty of
proving our deeply held values to one another.
This kind of humility is based on the limits of
what we can prove, not on claims about what is
true. For this reason, it should not be mistaken
for relativism. Humility leaves open the possi-
bility that there is right and wrong and good and
evil. Humility does not impugn our confidence
in truth, but it calls for a recognition that our
beliefs often stem from contested premises that
others do not share. Falwell’s notion of “morality”
and Flynt’s notion of “autonomy” emerge from
particular traditions and practices whose basic
premises are not endorsed by all people or by all
of the voluntary groups of civil society.
Humility also recognizes that our human
faculties are inherently limited—our ability to
think, reason, and reflect is less than perfect, a
limitation that leaves open the possibility that we
can be wrong. That is one reason why all of us,
whether religious or not, live and act on a kind
of faith. As theologian Lesslie Newbigin observes,

A sticker displayed by a business owner opposed to Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act; © Amy Harris/Corbis.
“We are continually required to act on beliefs
that are not demonstrably certain and to commit
our lives to propositions that can be doubted.”20
Patience
Patience involves restraint, persistence, and
endurance. Here it is important to recognize
that Falwell and Flynt both think they are right
in a profoundly deep way. They structure much
of their lives around their ethical commitments,
and they often want their normative views to pre-
vail on the rest of society. But confident pluralism
recognizes that dialogue and persuasion usu-
ally take time. Conversely, a lack of patience too
often gives way to coercion and even to violence.
Many of us will need patience to get to know
one another across our differences, to stumble
toward dialogue across the awkward distance that
A C RO S S T H E G R E AT D I V I D E S / I N A Z U
separates us. Sometimes we will need patience
to endure differences that will not be over-
come. Patience also encourages efforts to listen,
understand, and perhaps even to empathize.
Those activities are not the same as accepting or
embracing another view. It may turn out that
patience leads us to a deeper realization of the
evil or depravity of an opposing belief. But we
can at least assume a posture that moves beyond
caricatured dismissals of others before we even
hear what they have to say.
Patience does not always mean passivity. In
some cases, we will urge action rather than inac-
tion when we confront what we believe to be evil
and injustice in the world. But in most ordinary
circumstances, patience counsels toward restraint,
persistence, and endurance. Even though Falwell
and Flynt may detest one another’s lifestyles and
beliefs, patience asks them to endure one anoth-
er’s existence. And it holds open the possibility
133
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
that such endurance can lead to greater under-
standing and empathy.
Enacting Confident Pluralism
The aspirations of tolerance, humility, and
patience will often play out in individual acts
and relationships. Yet as difficult as it may be
to bridge differences on an individual level,
bridging institutional differences can pose even
greater challenges. Institutional partnership is
particularly difficult at the national level. It is
perhaps more attainable at the local level.
One example comes from Portland, Oregon.
In the spring of 2008, recognizing that evangel-
ical Christians in the city were known more for
what they were against than for what they were
for, Christian evangelist Kevin Palau reached
out to Sam Adams, Portland’s openly gay mayor.
Seeking to build relationships with the commu-
nity, Palau decided to do “the obvious thing,”
and asked Mayor Adams what religious believers
could do to help the city.21
Adams was not particularly fond of evangeli-
cals, but he needed volunteers to help address
Portland’s educational, environmental, and
health needs. He knew that evangelicals viewed
his sexual conduct as sinful (“I’m sure that’s
Kevin’s view”), but he “decided to set that differ-
ence aside and go ahead with the partnership for
the sake of mobilizing people to aid his city.”
For Adams, “the fundamental challenge was
overcoming the way we’ve been conditioned—
of changing the presumption that if we disagree
with someone, then we must hate each other.”
The very real question for Adams and Palau
was “Can you simultaneously disagree on some
things and act together on others?”
Three years after Adams and Palau first met,
ABC News reported that 26,000 volunteers
from 500 local churches were “helping the city
do everything from renovating parks to coun-
seling victims of sex trafficking and feeding
134
the homeless.”22 One church focuses its efforts
on Roosevelt High School, which is attended
primarily by low-income students of color. As
the New York Times observed in a 2013 article,
“Throughout the school year, members of
SouthLake Church in the prosperous suburb
of West Linn serve as tutors at Roosevelt. A
former NFL quarterback in the congregation,
Neil Lomax, helps coach the football team.
SouthLake pays for another member, Heather
Huggitt, 26, to work full-time at Roosevelt
helping to meet the material needs of students
who often lack sufficient food, clothing and
school supplies.”23
Both Palau and Adams emphasize the
importance of relationships across differences in
addressing these problems. Adams stresses the
significance not only of relationships between
church leaders and city officials but also of
those between individual parishioners and city
employees. Adams has not forgotten his signifi-
cant differences with Palau. But he does not
want those differences to get in the way of their
shared goals. Palau agrees, and said so in a 2014
public dialogue with Adams: “Precisely because
we may not find common ground on every-
thing, let’s work all the harder to find common
ground on what we can. We all care about a more
livable Portland.”24 The possibilities in Portland
depended upon finding common ground, not
overcoming deep and painful differences.
Another story of finding common ground
across difference comes from an effort to secure
confident pluralism’s constitutional commit-
ments. In 2000, the Supreme Court upheld
what it deemed to be “content-neutral” limita-
tions that restricted the speech and expression
of antiabortion protesters on public sidewalks
outside abortion clinics in Colorado.25 In a
dissenting opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy
argued that the Court’s decision left unpro-
tected core political expression conducted “in a
peaceful manner and on a profound moral issue,
to a fellow citizen on a public sidewalk.”26

Fourteen years later, the Supreme Court
decided another case involving antiabortion
protesters on public sidewalks outside abor-
tion clinics, this time in Massachusetts.27 The
Massachusetts restrictions at issue in McCullen v.
Coakley were even more severe than the Colorado
restrictions. They criminalized any gathering of
two or more people on public sidewalks outside
abortion clinics.28 They also prevented the plain-
tiff, Eleanor McCullen, from using the sidewalk
outside an abortion clinic to sing or pray quietly.
It’s not every day that Catholic bishops,
Southern Baptists, and the Hare Krishnas
agree with one another. But all of them
recognized the shared importance of the
public forum to their otherwise divergent
interests.
Like many Supreme Court cases, McCullen
drew an avalanche of legal briefs arguing various
legal theories. Many of those briefs filed in
support of the plaintiff quoted Harvard Law
School professor Laurence Tribe’s assertion
that the Court’s earlier decision was “slam-
dunk simple and slam-dunk wrong.”29 Quoting
Professor Tribe in a brief to the Supreme Court
was not itself unusual; he is a well-known legal
scholar who taught a number of the justices
when they were law students. But what made
his words so important in this case was that he is
also a staunch defender of abortion rights.
Nor did the unusual alliance end there. The
American Federation of Labor and Congress of
Industrial Organizations submitted an amicus
(“friend of the court”) brief arguing that the
sidewalk restrictions were unconstitutional.
The AFL-CIO’s brief cited a number of labor
decisions that supported a robust public forum,
and it emphasized the “vital interest in the First
A C RO S S T H E G R E AT D I V I D E S / I N A Z U
Amendment rights of citizens to disseminate
their views on the public streets by picketing,
handbilling, and engaging in other forms of
protected expression.”30
Stanford Law School professor Michael
McConnell and I coauthored an amicus brief on
behalf of a number of religious organizations.31
We argued that the Massachusetts restrictions
were an unconstitutional infringement on the
public forum and the right of assembly. We
enlisted a coalition of religious groups, some
of which had very little in common with one
another. It’s not every day that the Conference
of Catholic Bishops, the Ethics and Religious
Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist
Convention, and the International Society for
Krishna Consciousness (the Hare Krishnas)
agree with one another. But all of them (and
many other groups) joined our brief, recog-
nizing the shared importance of the public
forum to their otherwise divergent interests.
In June 2014, the Supreme Court struck
down the Massachusetts law, in a welcome
development that edges us closer to more mean-
ingful protections for public forums. Writing in
the New York Times, Professor Tribe praised the
decision: “That I don’t share Ms. McCullen’s
views is beside the point. The great virtue of our
First Amendment is that it protects speech we
hate just as vigorously as it protects speech we
support.”32
But that’s not the end of the story. Days after
the Supreme Court’s decision, a federal district
judge in North Carolina relied on McCullen
to dismiss criminal charges against dozens of
“Moral Mondays” protesters who had chal-
lenged recent actions by the North Carolina
legislature. 33 Many of those protesters were
progressives, including members of Planned
Parenthood who had joined the Moral Mondays
protests to argue on behalf of abortion rights.
They, too, benefited from meaningful protec-
tions of public forums. That’s precisely how
the constitutional commitments of confident
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
pluralism are meant to work. And in McCullen,
a broad array of ideologically diverse people and
organizations found common ground around
that principle.
Burying the Hatchet
Jerry Falwell died on May 15, 2007. Five days
later, in an essay in the Los Angeles Times, Flynt
recounted a surprising turn of events, sometime
after the Campari spoof, when he and Falwell
appeared together on the Larry King Show. At
some point during the program, Falwell leaned
over to give Flynt an awkward but apparently
heartfelt embrace. Shortly thereafter, Falwell unex-
pectedly paid a visit to Flynt’s office: “We talked
for two hours, with the latest issues of Hustler
neatly stacked on my desk in front of him. He
suggested that we go around the country debating,
and I agreed.” Here is how Flynt concluded his
tribute to Falwell after the latter died:
In the years that followed and up until
his death, he’d come to see me every time
he was in California. We’d have inter-
esting philosophical conversations. We’d
exchange personal Christmas cards. He’d
show me pictures of his grandchildren.
I was with him in Florida once when
he complained about his health and his
weight, so I suggested that he go on a
diet that had worked for me. I faxed a
copy to his wife when I got back home.
The truth is, the reverend and I
had a lot in common. He was from
Virginia, and I was from Kentucky. His
father had been a bootlegger, and I had
been one too in my 20s before I went
into the Navy. We steered our conver-
sations away from politics, but religion
was within bounds. He wanted to save
me and was determined to get me out of
“the business”….
136
He was definitely selling brimstone
religion and would do anything to add
another member to his mailing list. But
in the end, I knew what he was selling,
and he knew what I was selling, and we
found a way to communicate.…
I’ll never admire him for his views
or his opinions. To this day, I’m not
sure if his television embrace was meant
to mend fences, to show himself to
the public as a generous and forgiving
preacher, or merely to make me uneasy,
but the ultimate result was one I never
expected and was just as shocking a
turn to me as was winning that famous
Supreme Court case: We became
friends.34
It is fair to say that Falwell and Flynt are unlikely
models for confident pluralism. But if they could
move toward its aspirations of tolerance, humil-
ity, and patience, then maybe we can, too.
Endnotes
1 Bill Forman, “Candidates of the Week: Hustler’s Larry
Flynt vs. Porn Actress Mary Carey,” Sacramento News
& Review (August 14, 2003); Marc Ambinder, “Falwell
Suggests Gays to Blame for Attacks,” ABCNews.com
(September 14, 2011, quoting Falwell).
2 The details about Falwell and Flynt are taken from
Rodney A. Smolla, Jerry Falwell v. Larry Flynt: The First
Amendment on Trial (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press,
1988), and Larry Flynt, “My Friend, Jerry Falwell,” Los
Angeles Times (May 20, 2007).
3 Hustler Magazine, Inc., v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988).
4 Mary Battiata, “‘Felt Like Weeping,’ Falwell Tells Jurors,”
Washington Post (December 5, 1984).
5 Gabriel Arana, “Gays Hate America and Other Right-
Wing Talking Points on Indiana,” Huffington Post (April
3, 2015, quoting Mark Levin); Family Research Council,
“Religious Freedom Should Not Be Held Hostage to Big
Business, Family Research Council Urges Veto” (April
2, 2015, press release); Tim Cook, “Pro-discrimination
‘Religious Freedom’ Laws Are Dangerous,” Washington
Post (March 29, 2015); Ben Kepes, “Salesforce.com
Makes a Stand Against Bigotry,” Forbes.com (March 26,

2015); Jon Healey, “The Backlash against the Backlash
against Indiana’s New Religious Freedom Law,” Los
Angeles Times (April 2, 2015, describing the threats and
boycotts against Memories Pizza after the owners said in
response to a local television reporter’s question that they
would not cater a gay wedding).
6 North Carolina Constitution art. XIV, § 6; David
Zucchino, “Marriage Amendment Vote Puts National
Focus on North Carolina,” Los Angeles Times (May 5,
2012). Not everyone agreed about the potential effects
of the amendment. See E. Gregory Wallace, “The Sky
Didn’t Fall: The Meaning and Legal Effects of the North
Carolina Marriage Amendment,” 22 American University
Journal of Gender Social Policy and Law 1 (2013), in
which Wallace argued against “predictions of dire conse-
quences that have yet to occur—and likely never will.” In
2014, a federal district court ruled North Carolina’s ban
on same-sex marriage unconstitutional in General Synod
of the United Church of Christ v. Resinger, 12 F.Supp.3d
790 (W.D. N.C. 2014).
7
Greg Garrison, “Amendment Banning ‘Foreign Law’
in Alabama Courts Passes; Will Be Added to Alabama
Constitution,” AL.com (November 4, 2014); Paul
Horwitz, “Amendment One Is Useless, Costly, and
Wrong,” AL.com (October 30, 2014); Liz Farmer,
“Alabama Joins Wave of States Banning Foreign Laws,”
Governing.com (November 4, 2014).
8 Michael Paulson, “Colleges and Evangelicals Collide on
Bias Policy,” New York Times (June 10, 2014), A1.
9 West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.
S. 624, 641–42 (1943).
10 Roberts v. U.S. Jaycees, 468 U.S. 609, 622 (1984).
11 NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958).
12 Roberts, 609.
13 The Supreme Court recently mentioned the right of inti-
mate association in Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 1039
(2015). Obergefell incorrectly characterized an earlier case,
Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2004), as relying on inti-
mate association. Lawrence overruled Bowers v. Hardwick,
478 U.S. 186 (1986). Bowers had drawn two dissents, one
from Justice John Paul Stevens that emphasized substan-
tive due process, and one from Justice Harry Blackmun
that drew upon intimate association. Lawrence relied on
Stevens’s dissent and never mentioned intimate associa-
tion.
14 Roberts, 609; Christian Legal Society.
15 Alan Yang, “Sister City,” Parks and Recreation (NBC tele-
vision program), season 2, episode 5, directed by Michael
Schur, aired October 15, 2009.
16 See 26 U.S.C. § 170(c) (2006), authorizing deductions;
26 U.S.C. § 501(c)(3) (2006), specifying which tax-
exempt organizations are eligible to receive deductions.
17 Charles
Taylor, “Conditions of an Unforced Consensus
on Human Rights,” in Dilemmas and Connections
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), 105.
A C RO S S T H E G R E AT D I V I D E S / I N A Z U
18 Bernard Williams, “Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?” in
Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 18.
19 Edward Langerak, Civil Disagreement: Personal Integrity
in a Pluralistic Society (Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press, 2014), 78.
20 LesslieNewbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and
Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1995), 102.
21 Portions of this narrative draw from a video dialogue
between Kevin Palau and Sam Adams. See “Redeemer
City to City,” Portland Case Study: Kevin Palau and Sam
Adams, available at https://vimeo.com/66596545.
22 Dan Harris, “Evangelicals Team with Portland’s Gay
Mayor for Charity,” ABC News online, December 25,
2011; http://abcnews.go.com/US/evangelicals-team-
portlands-gay-mayor-charity/story?id=15218876.
23 Samuel G. Freedman, “Help from Evangelicals (with-
out Evangelizing) Meets the Needs of an Oregon Public
School,” New York Times, August 9, 2013.
24 “Redeemer City to City.”
25 Hill v. Colorado, 530 U.S. 703 (2000).
26 Ibid.,
765 (Kennedy, J., dissenting).
27 McCullen v. Coakley, 134 S. Ct. 2518 (2014).
28 Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 266, § 120E½(b).
29 Laurence Tribe, quoted in “Colloquium, Professor
Michael W. McConnell’s Response,” 28 Pepperdine Law
Review 747, 750 (2001).
30 McCullen, Brief Amicus Curiae of the American Federation
of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations,
in Support of Petitioner Eleanor McCullen, 1; http://
www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/
supreme_court_preview/briefs-v2/12-1168_pet_amcu_
aflcio.authcheckdam.pdf. Accessed July 20, 2015.
31 McCullen, Brief Amicus Curiae of the National Hispanic
Christian Leadership Conference et al., in Support of
Petitioner Eleanor McCullen; http://www.americanbar.
org/content/dam/aba/publications/supreme_court_pre-
view/briefs-v2/12-1168_pet_amcu_nhclc-etal.auth-
checkdam.pdf. Accessed July 20, 2015.
32 Laurence
H. Tribe, “The Supreme Court Was Right to
Allow Anti-Abortion Protests,” New York Times, June 26,
2014.
33 Anne Blythe and John Frank, “Wearing Pink, Opponents
of Abortion Restrictions Join ‘Moral Monday’ Effort,”
News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), July 8, 2013 (not-
ing that “Janet Colm, president and CEO of Planned
Parenthood of Central North Carolina, was among the
more than 60 arrested”); Anne Blythe, “Judge’s Ruling
to Dismiss ‘Moral Monday’ Cases Could Have Sweeping
Effect,” Charlotte Observer, August 4, 2014.
34 LarryFlynt, “My Friend, Jerry Falwell,” Los Angeles Times
(May 20, 2007).
137
138
 AA Envy
Helen Andrews
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, BELIEF IN
temperance as a political cause was usually one
item in a larger constellation of progressive and
enlightened views. A man who favored greater
legal restrictions on the sale of alcohol tended
also to be a believer in women’s rights, public
sanitation, sex education, and all the other right-
thinking causes of his day. The British feminist
Josephine Butler, whose life’s work was to cam-
paign against a law that penalized prostitutes
who had venereal disease but not the johns who
infected them, found that the only men willing
to join her fight against Victorian double stan-
dards were “the temperance men.” No surprise
there, she wrote: “They are the leaders in good
social movements.”1 On the other side of the
Atlantic, the American South remained hostile
to temperance for years because the cause was so
closely identified with Boston progressivism.2
This is not the picture of a temperance activist
in anyone’s mind today. We think of the Bible
thumper brandishing Proverbs 23 (“Be not among
winebibbers”), H. L. Mencken’s puritan haunted
Helen Andrews is a policy analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia, and has
written for National Review, First Things, and other publications.
Left: Still Life No. 1, 1962, by Tom Wesselmann (1931–2004); Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin, Germany/Bridgeman Images; art
© estate of Tom Wesselmann/licensed VAGA, New York, NY.
by the fear that someone somewhere is having a
good time, the Salvation Army prude who needs
only a few Bacardis-and-milk with Sky Masterson
to set her bell a-ringing. The elegant and refined
temperance man of history, if he could see the
temperance man of our imagination, would be
surprised, affronted, and most of all puzzled. He
would tartly point out that modern society has
embraced all the views that earned him a repu-
tation as a starry-eyed radical—public provision
of education, shorter hours for factory workers,
industrial safety regulations, animal cruelty laws.
All of his favorite causes, in fact, except temper-
ance, which, far from being taken for granted, is
roundly reviled.
Or is it? The branch of the temperance move-
ment that wanted legal prohibition is a universal
punching bag, but what about the older strain
that put its faith in moral suasion? It is hard not
to notice that when modern man speaks of vice,
he reaches instinctively for the vocabulary of
addiction. When a public figure is caught out,
the standard way to demonstrate contrition is
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
not by resolving to find a good church or a good
therapist but by promising to enter a twelve-
step program. This is true even when the sin
in question has nothing to do with intoxicants.
Journalist Buzz Bissinger went into rehab for his
shopping addiction, singer/songwriter Ke$ha for
her eating disorder, singer/serial batterer Chris
Brown for “anger management.”
The branch of the temperance movement
that wanted legal prohibition is a universal
punching bag, but what about the older
strain that put its faith in moral suasion?
What could possibly account for this wholesale
pilfering of a specialized set of terms and proce-
dures designed for the very particular problem
of uncontrollable alcoholism? The answer would
make Carrie Nation smile for the first time in
her life: We are all as green as a bottle of Rolling
Rock with AA envy.
We Are All Alcoholic Personalities Now
No wonder we feel this way, considering the kind
of press AA gets. Today, if a fictional character is
revealed to be a recovering alcoholic, it invariably
means that he is the kind of guy who would drop
everything and drive over if you called him for
help at 2 a.m., who is tough but never judgmen-
tal, who gets to be as sage and saintly as a monk
without sacrificing his street cred. This holds true
whether the character appears in a lowbrow pri-
metime drama, a middlebrow New York Times
bestseller, or a highbrow critical darling. The
most celebrated book of experimental fiction of
the past twenty years, Infinite Jest, is a 1,079-page
love letter to recovery programs.
Progressives who think it the height of fashion
to smash the icons of traditional morality will pick
140
up a dishcloth to burnish the halo of the “Friends
of Bill” (as AA is sometimes called, “Bill” being
an allusion to one of its founders, Bill Wilson).
The same dime store Screwtapes who would
count it a mitzvah to pour a backwoods Baptist
his first drink will solemnly abstain from having
wine with dinner rather than be complicit in a
recovering alcoholic’s tumble off the wagon. A
Sex Addicts Anonymous sobriety chip and a True
Love Waits promise ring mean exactly the same
thing—The bearer has given it a lot of thought and
ultimately decided it would be a bad idea to sleep
with you—but only one of them will successfully
call a moral halt to an attempted cocktail bar
pickup.
Why this special treatment for twelve-step
programs? Because all the other moral languages
in which modern Americans are fluent, the
languages that sound so inspiring and correct
when they are talking about politics, turn useless
in the face of addiction. Trying to analyze addic-
tion-like behavior with the tools of modern
liberalism—ideas like consent, personal choice,
scientific evidence, or better education—is
like trying to put a key in a combination lock.
These concepts cannot account for the behaviors
that make twenty-first-century Americans feel
ashamed of themselves, which is why we can’t
stop grasping at AA jargon.
Indeed, the inadequacy of liberal language
was the reason AA jargon was invented in the
first place. The evolution of alcoholism treat-
ment in the United States is a century-long
chronicle of the failure of modern man’s favorite
moral concepts. The first to fall was consent.
Consensual is a magic word for us: Without it,
no interaction between two people can be moral;
with it, anything goes. The founders of the first
hospitals for the treatment of alcoholism thought
they could operate their facilities within the
bounds of consent. Either their patients would
check themselves in voluntarily, in which case
consent would be down in writing, or they would
be involuntarily committed, in which case the

patient would be deemed incapable of consent
by reason of insanity.3
The flaw in this theory was pointed out by the
superintendent of the Boston Lunatic Hospital
in an 1880 article for the Quarterly Journal of
Inebriety. The chronic drunkard may indeed be
incompetent when the judge commits him, the
author wrote, but “in a surprisingly short time he
is on his feet, under perfect control, and looking
around for a lawyer.”4 One word to the judge
and the man would be released again, even if his
first stop thereafter were the liquor store, as it
almost always was. Legally recognized exceptions
to the consent rule, like fraud and incompetence,
were no help to these nineteenth-century treat-
ment pioneers, and as a result, many inebriate
asylums had already gone bust before Prohibition
put them officially out of business in 1920.
The next idea to be discredited was “root
causes.” The pivot to root causes is a progres-
sive standby: Criminals are not motivated by
depravity but by economic inequality; low test
scores are not caused by poorly run schools but
by poverty, etc. They used to say the same thing
about booze. According to one Herbert Yahraes,
author of Alcoholism Is a Sickness (1946), the
social ill of alcoholism would disappear if we
could build “a society in which the individual is
better fed and housed, has better medical care,
has better facilities for mental hygiene, has fewer
money worries, and has the facilities and the
encouragement to engage in recreational activi-
ties besides drinking.”5
But as they say in AA, if money could cure this
thing, millionaires wouldn’t die. It is no coinci-
dence that the golden age of “social-problem films”
about alcoholism—from 1945 to 1962, according
to scholar Lori Rotskoff, who counts thirty-four
such films in this span—fell right in the middle of
the postwar boom, when more families were more
prosperous than at any time in American history.6
Films like The Lost Weekend, Bigger Than Life,
and Days of Wine and Roses were popular precisely
because moviegoers were nervously coming to
AA ENVY / ANDREWS
realize that a two-car garage was no protection
against the lure of the bottle.
Others argued that the root cause of alco-
holism was emotional repression, the cure a more
liberated society. Exhibit A for this theory is
author John Cheever, who is generally thought to
have guzzled scotch in order to avoid confronting
his repressed homosexuality. But, as Olivia Laing
points out in her book on alcoholic writers, The
Trip to Echo Spring, no one was more out-and-
proud than Tennessee Williams, and he drank
himself to death as efficiently as Cheever did.7
A more accurate rule of thumb might be that
alcoholism tends to strike people who are not
comfortable in their own skin, but although this
uneasiness can sometimes be blamed on social
expectations, it seems to flourish just as well in
their absence.
Trying to analyze addiction-like behavior
with the tools of modern liberalism—ideas
like consent, personal choice, scientific
evidence, or better education—is like trying
to put a key in a combination lock.
One by one, a modern alcoholic will try to
apply to his own situation the same solutions he
prescribes for other people’s, and one by one the
standard solutions will fail. There isn’t a pill that
can keep him sober the way Adderall keeps his
friends focused and productive. Antabuse has
been around since the 1950s (it makes people
violently sick if they drink so much as a near
beer), but most alcoholics fail to respond to the
drug, either because they can’t bring themselves
to take it consistently or because they can’t keep
themselves from drinking even when they do
take it. In 1953, a physician wrote to the British
Medical Journal to describe this latter phenom-
enon: “A small group of patients has emerged
who, in spite of recurrent terrifying experiences
141
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, 2010; © John Van Hasselt/Corbis.
with the reaction, repeatedly ask to be put back
on antabuse … even carrying antabuse tablets
with them in some cases and swallowing more of
them whilst drinking.”8
Nor can alcoholics embrace the solutions
successfully employed by sufferers of the other
“disorders” that filled mid-century insane
asylums. Chronic alcoholism is unlikely ever to
be depathologized in the way that, say, homo-
sexuality has. Nor will alcoholism ever become
a hip handi-capability, like high-functioning
Asperger’s syndrome, or the subject of a Mad
Pride campaign, like bipolar disorder. Unlike the
transgendered, alcoholics can’t even lobby for
protected-class status, suing their employers for
discrimination when they get fired for turning up
with the shakes. Poor alcoholics—their friends
have all talked their way past Nurse Ratched, and
now it’s just them and the big Indian.
One last factor has cemented the near-universal
142
acclaim now enjoyed by the AA system: We are all
“alcoholic personalities” now. AA’s long-standing
characterization of the alcoholic personality is
“childish, emotionally sensitive, and grandiose,”
which just about covers every story on the
Millennial generation since that cohort began
coming of age.9 Ours is an era of man-children
who think it’s cool to play video games at thirty-
five, grievance connoisseurs who record ten
“microaggressions” a day on their Tumblrs, and
entry-level interns who drive their bosses crazy
with their preening sense of entitlement.
The grandiosity is especially acute. In 2001,
David Brooks christened “the Organization Kid”
and declared himself content to live in a future
run by such overachievers. Five years before
that, in Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace had
already spotted these monsters of the meritocracy
and decided that what the Hal Incandenzas of
America needed more than anything was a stint

in a halfway house for substance abusers. In retro-
spect, the novelist had the better eye. The drive to
get into the best school, land the best job, one way
or another be recognized as special—these are the
same psychological drives Bill Wilson had, back
before he learned to take life One Day at a Time.
Another AA saying: “One newcomer in a million
doesn’t belong here, and if you think you’re that
one-in-a-million, you definitely belong here.”
The View Through the Window
So what exactly is the nature of this system that
has everyone so transfixed? It should surprise no
one, given its genealogy and its particular popu-
larity with the postreligious, that AA could fairly
be described as Christianity with certain bits left
out and other custom-designed bits thrown in.
It has jettisoned enough of Christianity that its
secular admirers don’t have an allergic reaction
but has kept enough that their God-starved souls
get a taste of what they’re hungering for. At least
that’s how a Christian might put it. An atheist
would say that AA has torpedoed Christianity’s
silly parts and rendered religion basically sensi-
ble, provided that your idea of a Higher Power
is sufficiently abstract and you think of prayer as
a form of meditation. Either way, it seems clear
that the very things your average David Foster
Wallace fan likes most about AA are the things
he hates about organized religion: the admission
of powerlessness, the submission to authority,
skepticism about the value of thinking for your-
self, and the rote repetition of phrases that to an
outsider seem facile or sentimental.
Some people lump AA in with the therapeutic
tradition, painting it as a child of psychology
as much as religion, but this is a misconcep-
tion. Knockoff groups like Co-Dependents
Anonymous and Sex Addicts Anonymous were
founded in the self-help seventies and retain
something of the flavor of their birth decade, but
Alcoholics Anonymous grew up under Truman
AA ENVY / ANDREWS
and Eisenhower. That’s why AA meetings (tradi-
tionally, at least) feature less talking and more
listening, less narcissism and more emphasis on
service, and almost none of the standard group
therapy in which everyone weighs in on everyone
else’s problems. Most self-help groups tell their
members: You’re not a bad person, you’re just
a nice guy who gambles/eats/sleeps around too
much. In AA, the cliché among those who’ve
completed the Fourth Step is: I used to think I
was just a nice guy who drank too much. The
Fourth Step, of course, is the “searching and fear-
less moral inventory.”
It should surprise no one, given its
genealogy and its particular popularity
with the postreligious, that AA could fairly
be described as Christianity with certain
bits left out and other custom-designed
bits thrown in.
Molly Monahan used to think she was just a
nice nun who drank too much. Then she joined
AA—an unusual step for a nun, though not as
unusual as you might think. As she describes
it in her memoir Seeds of Grace, she found in
AA many of the practices she was drawn to in
convent life but that had been swept away by
Vatican II: “weekly confession, the daily exami-
nation of conscience, or the ‘examen,’ prac-
ticed by me twice daily as a young nun,” and
the emphasis on personal salvation rather than
“social concerns like poverty, racism, hunger, and
homelessness.”10 Monahan doesn’t say it, but her
reflections leave the reader wondering whether
AA hasn’t preserved the spirit of Christianity
better than some churches have.
Whether fairly or unfairly, churches have
developed a reputation for being quick to judge.
Secular Americans have the vague idea that if
143
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
they were to admit their faults to a group of
churchgoers, a gang of old biddies would start
shooing them out the door with great whacks of
their pocketbooks. AA, on the other hand, has
somehow managed to uphold strict moral expec-
tations while still reassuring the public that it
really means it when it says that the only require-
ment for membership is a sincere desire to stop
drinking. This despite the protestations of the
churches that Mark 2:17 (“It is not the healthy
who need a doctor”) is their line.
It must also be admitted that AA has
comported itself better than many religious
denominations in the face of the skepticism of
our age. When taunted by the New Atheists, for
example, Christians do not always maintain the
serene dignity for which their religion’s saints
have such a reputation. AA members tend to
respond to similar taunts with less sputtering
and more shrugging. The source of this attrac-
tive equanimity is the knowledge, often drawn
from experience, that without the program they
will die. So anyone else can think what he likes.
Technically, Christians need their own program
just as desperately, but for some reason they’re
still more likely to get defensive about it. They
have not quite adopted “attraction rather than
promotion” (AA Tradition Number Eleven) as
the basis for proselytism, either.
AA has comported itself better than many
religious denominations in the face of the
skepticism of our age.
This disparity in reputation is not entirely the
churches’ fault. Sister Molly tells a story about
the time she was on an airplane and the flight
attendant paged “any friends of Bill Wilson” to
the rear of the cabin. It turned out that a young
woman on her way to rehab was afraid she would
drink on the flight. I suppose there’s no reason the
144
attendant couldn’t have paged “friends of John
Wesley” or “friends of Jorge Mario Bergoglio” on
behalf of a Methodist or Catholic in equivalent
distress, and no reason the suffering individual’s
coreligionists wouldn’t have leapt at the chance
to put their faith into action, as several passen-
gers on Sister Molly’s flight did. It simply doesn’t
occur to non-AA members to make that kind of
request. Perhaps it should.
In its most severe form, our modern AA envy
manifests itself as a secret wish that one could
become an alcoholic, just to get the wonderful
moral radiance that recovery imparts. Obviously
this is perverse, as any addict can confirm. But
there is no reason why we should not experiment
with thinking about our own worst faults in
twelve-step terms and using twelve-step methods
for self-improvement. Those who have been raised
to denigrate the very idea of prayer (and there are
many such in America) may find it easier to begin
praying themselves if they start with the common
AA recommendation of bookending the day with
chats with your Higher Power, in the morning to
ask for help and at night to say thank you. As for
the First Step, the admission that sheer willpower
is not enough to save you from your worst vices
will make any person less blind to the workings
of grace in his life.
These simple steps have been helpful to many
non-drunks, because they cut through the self-
deceptions that modern people use to justify
their bad behavior. But cribbing from AA’s
playbook doesn’t get you fellowship, and people
whose addictions are nonalcoholic are left
wishing there were some kind of support group
for them. Some kind of—Sinners Anonymous.
It would be contrary to the spirit of One Day
at a Time to make sweeping predictions, but
that may be how the story of our collective AA
envy ends: with the lost children of the postre-
ligious world realizing that the very things that
inspire such longing when glimpsed through
church basement windows can also be found
one floor up.
 AA ENVY / ANDREWS

Endnotes

Signs
1 Quoted in Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians
(London, England: Faber & Faber, 1971), 28. Full quote:
“The temperance men almost always lead in this mat-

of the
ter—abstainers, steady men, to a great extent members
of chapels and churches, and many of them are men who
have been engaged in the anti-slavery movement and the
abolition of the corn-law movement. They are the leaders
in good social movements, men who have had to do with
political reforms in times past, and who have taken up
our cause. They may not be the majority, but they are the
times
men of the most weight and zeal in their towns.”
2 Joe L. Coker, Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause:
Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement
(Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2007), chs.
1 and 3.
3 Sarah W. Tracy, Alcoholism in America: From Reconstruction
to Prohibition (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2005), chs. 3 and 4.
4 Ibid., 159.
5 Ibid., 291.
6 Lori Rotskoff, Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and
Alcohol in Post–World War II America (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 211.
7 Olivia Laing, Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking
(New York, NY: Picador, 2013), chs. 2 and 6.
8 L. C. F. Chevens, letter, British Medical Journal, 1:1450,
27 June 1953.
9 Alcoholics Anonymous, The Twelve Steps and Twelve
Traditions (New York, NY: Alcoholics Anonymous World
Services, 1953, 2012), 42, 122−23, 180. Full quote:
“When AA was quite young, a number of eminent
psychologists and doctors made an exhaustive study of
a good-sized group of so-called problem drinkers. The
doctors weren’t trying to find how different we from one
another; they sought to find whatever personality traits, if
any, this group of alcoholics had in common. They finally
came up with a conclusion that shocked the AA members
of that time. These distinguished men had the nerve to
say that most of the alcoholics under investigation were
still childish, emotionally sensitive, and grandiose. How
we alcoholics did resent that verdict! … In the years since, Follow
The Hedgehog
however, most of us have come to agree with those doc-
tors.”
10 Molly Monahan, Seeds of Grace: A Nun’s Reflection on
the Spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous (New York, NY:
Review
Riverhead, 2001). Kindle edition. on
Facebook
and
Twitter.

145
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
BOOK REVIEWS
Talkin’ ’bout Their Generation
Charles Townshend
Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation
in Ireland, 1890–1923
R. F. Foster
New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2014.
R. F. Foster, the Carroll Professor of Irish History
at Oxford University and author of a celebrated
biography of W. B. Yeats, here turns his atten-
tion to the people Yeats called “them.” In 1916,
these people were rather more obscure than Yeats,
who wryly noted in his poem “Easter 1916” that
when he had from time to time “met them at
close of day / Coming with vivid faces / From
counter or desk,” he had exchanged “polite
meaningless words” with them before going on
to make some “mocking” comment about them
at his club. They were not clubmen, for sure; but
just what kind of people they were has never been
altogether easy to say.
In Vivid Faces, Foster’s aim is to re-examine
the period up to the 1923 establishment of the
Irish Free State in order to get beyond traditional
approaches to understanding revolutionary
change in terms of class or ideology, which, he
says, seem inadequate today. “We search now,”
he writes, “to find clarification through themes
of paradox and nuance.” And, as Foster suggests,
we have also become interested not just in what
changes but also in what does not.
To recover their world, and answer the ques-
tion, “When did the revolution begin?,” Foster
embarks on a kind of collective biography of the
revolutionary generation whose reputation was
“changed utterly” when it launched the 1916
rebellion—an event that also changed the course
of Irish history. He has unearthed letters and
146
diaries that provide a uniquely intimate view of
that generation’s socialization into “separatism.”
Although some of his hundred-plus cast of char-
acters contains what are household names in
Ireland, including such prominent literary and
political figures as Constance Markievicz, Roger
Casement, and Éamon de Valera, many are less
familiar—people such as Desmond FitzGerald,
Piaras Beaslai, and Liam de Róiste, who left rich
evidence of their thinking about the movement
that took over their lives. Foster continues and
perhaps completes the restoration of the Belfast
Quaker Bulmer Hobson to his centrality in that
movement, while also breathing life into some
who remained auxiliaries, notably Min and Mary
Kate Ryan and the remarkable Rosamond Jacob,
another Quaker.
All of these, and many more, formed “a gener-
ation bent on self-transformation.” Perceptively
comparing them to their Russian equivalents,
Foster observes that they had a sense of deep
differentiation from the generation of their
parents, and were affected by currents of religious
purism. In half a dozen gerund-titled chapters—
“Learning,” “Playing,” “Loving,” “Writing,”
“Arming,” “Fighting”—he explores key constitu-
ents of their collective life experience: education,
drama, publishing, sex, and (for some) violence.
His concluding chapters, “Reckoning” and
“Remembering,” provide a concise analysis of
the changing nature of the armed struggle after
the Easter Rising in 1916 and through the War
of Independence (1919–21) and the subsequent
Civil War (1922–23), a grim, fratricidal struggle
pitting supporters of a treaty to make Ireland a
“free state” within the British Commonwealth
against anti-treaty Irish Republican Army parti-
sans. Foster’s scintillating excursion through
the vagaries of memory and commemoration
concludes on a rueful note: “The mechanisms

The cause of Irish Home Rule could even divide families, as this satirical postcard from 1915 shows.
of public memory and amnesia continued to
operate by keeping the two Irelands in mutual
isolation, preserved by mutually exclusive views
of history.”
The influence of education in the creation
of separatist nationalists has long been recog-
nized, but measuring it with any precision is
by no means easy. Foster’s people demonstrate
not just the role of the schools but also of the
Irish language movement, the Gaelic League,
and the new universities like University College
Dublin—the last especially significant for
women. The correspondence of the Ryan sisters
of Wexford “vividly conjures up the liberation,
fun, and intellectual excitement” of UCD before
1916, and he finds a wonderful subject in the
spiky Mary Kate Ryan, perhaps the nearest thing
to a heroine in this book.
As for writing, Foster notes that 1916 has
often been labeled a poets’ revolution. Poetry gets
its due here, but “playwrights and actors were far
more prominent,” and his analysis of Irish drama
BOOK REVIEWS
© Grenville Collins Postcard Collection/Mary Evans Picture Library.
is particularly acute and convincing. The battles
over Yeats’s direction of the Abbey, Ireland’s
national theater, are well known, but the anti-
Yeats campaigners were not all wedded to crude
nationalist fantasies. It is interesting to note that
Terence MacSwiney (whose Revolutionist Yeats
eventually put on at the Abbey, after MacSwiney’s
death on hunger strike in 1920) revered Ibsen.
The central puzzle of this generation, perhaps,
is that of radicalization: why they moved from
apparently reasonable nationalist politics—the
campaign for home rule—to take up the cause of
absolute independence, secured by force if neces-
sary. This was not a uniform process. Foster notes
that while some revolutionaries came from nation-
alist or republican families that had “kept the faith”
since Fenian times, others “decided autonomously
to challenge the assumptions with which they had
grown up.” It would be tempting to see conver-
sions such as that of Seán O’Faoláin at a perfor-
mance of Lennox Robinson’s Patriots as central,
but they were just one among many strands of
147
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
experience. A striking number of the revolution-
aries were, Foster suggests, “at an angle” to family
life, having a dead or absent father. But while there
were elements of youth rebellion in the movement,
it was not simply a generational conflict.
Foster’s account reminds us of the reduced
role of Protestants in the republican guerrilla
struggle after 1919, relative to their involvement
in the pre-1916 separatist movement, and of
their even smaller part in the post-revolutionary
power dispensation. The rebuilders of the Irish
Republican Brotherhood (the forerunner of the
Irish Republican Army), Bulmer Hobson and
Denis McCullough, were key figures in the secret
organization that would launch the 1916 rebel-
lion, and women such as Alice Milligan, Susan
Mitchell, and Mabel McConnell equally mani-
fested the intensity of the republican ideal. Still,
although McCullough might voice a Protestant
contempt for Catholics—too fearful for their
“miserable souls” to risk violent action—they
came increasingly to form the movement’s
center of gravity. Thomas MacDonagh tempo-
rarily lost his Protestant faith; Maud Gonne and
Casement (under sentence of death) converted to
Catholicism.
Not just education but “a number of other
cultural phenomena,” as Foster says, had “always
taken on a political and religious complexion.”
One such phenomenon that does not come into
focus here is sport. (Foster’s index has entries
for homoeroticism, homosexuality, and homosocial
bonding, but not hurling.) Not all the revolu-
tionaries were enthusiasts, of course, but many
were, and games “racy of the soil” were a central
element of the Gaelo-centric “Irish-Ireland”
movement. The Gaelic Athletic Association
(GAA) operated alongside the Gaelic League as
a pervasive constituent not only of the cultural
movement but also of revolutionary separatism.
A significant proportion of the officers of the
Irish Volunteers military organization were
elected because of their prominence in the GAA,
and it can be argued that the GAA’s intolerance
148
of “English” games was one of the vital impulses
that propelled separatism from the cultural to
the political sphere.
Besides the impulse toward radicalization, the
other great puzzle of the revolution is its subse-
quent—and steady—loss of radicalism after 1916.
For instance, the elements of sexual liberation in
the “revolutionary temperament,” as Foster says,
seemed at that point “to disappear with alac-
rity.” Feminism was choked off, and the kind
of romantic relationship enjoyed by Kathleen
Lynn and Madeleine ffrench-Mullen before 1916
disappeared from public view, at least. Women’s
eclipse as the revolution rolled forward remains
something of a mystery, although Foster makes
clearer than most the deep misogyny that afflicted
Sinn Fein as much as any Irish organization:
“The natural Irish feeling of both sexes has some
contempt for women in it,” as Rosamund Jacob
put it. Women played their part in this. Mabel
FitzGerald’s radicalism gradually ebbed away; she
followed her husband’s line in supporting the
treaty that established the Irish Free State, and
eventually lost faith in the people. “I find the
masses always wrong, they seem to stand for the
worst in man…. Adult suffrage seems to have led
only to the supremacy of the people without stan-
dards and values and of the half-baked education-
ally.” Min Ryan, displaying the “survival sense of
a Balzacian heroine,” married the leading treaty
supporter, Richard Mulcahy.
Sex was a victim of the dour mentality that
governed post-revolutionary Ireland; there had
also been a strong puritan strain in the revolu-
tionary movement. Was it the case that, as Todd
Andrews (a teenager—apparently not in love—in
1916) said, that “the absence of sexual relations
between the men and women of the movement
was one of its most peculiar features”? Foster
shows that it was certainly not, in any simple sense,
although his most extravagant examples—such as
Casement (who tried to conceal his homosexu-
ality) and the remarkable Northern nationalist,
antiquarian, and folklorist F. J. Bigger—did not

break this rule. But he agrees with Andrews that
revolutionaries tend to be “puritans by nature.”
Finally, Foster acutely unpacks the ideal of
“freedom” that radicalized this generation. It is,
as he says, “extremely striking how seldom a sense
of economic or class grievance comes through the
recollections recorded by the Bureau of Military
History.” Although they lived lives that by all
appearances were free—often “spectacularly” so,
Foster suggests—separatists felt enslaved by the
simple fact of being part of the United Kingdom
(a reasonably democratic state in whose legisla-
ture Ireland was arguably overrepresented). This
capacity for experiencing something more imag-
ined than real is perhaps a key part of the revo-
lutionary urge.
The breadth of Foster’s survey raises the ques-
tion of whether it is possible to write the collec-
tive biography of a generation, or to analyze it as
one would an individual. The richly differenti-
ated picture of “them” he presents may suggest
not, yet the sense of unity underlying the variety
is unmistakable. This was a “movement,” a social
process defying precise delineation and able to
accommodate a surprising range of ideas. After
1916, that began to change. The kaleidoscopic
brilliance of this generation is an almost bizarre
prelude to the dour monochrome of post-revo-
lutionary Ireland. As Hobson sadly remarked to
his old Irish Republican Brotherhood comrade
Denis McCullough in the 1950s, “The phoenix
of our youth has fluttered to earth such a miser-
able old hen.” Such disappointment left Hobson
with no heart to write their generation’s history.
In Roy Foster, that generation has found a worthy
stand-in.
Charles Townshend is an emeritus professor of his-
tory at Keele University, Staffordshire, England.
His recent books include Easter 1916: The Irish
Rebellion and The Republic: The Fight for Irish
Independence.
BOOK REVIEWS
Profiles in Humility
James K. A. Smith
The Road to Character
David Brooks
New York, NY: Random House, 2015.
David Brooks clearly intends his newest book
to be nothing less than a moral education, an
invitation into a different “moral ecology,” as he
puts it. What’s sad is that such a remedial offer-
ing is necessary. In a healthy culture, we don’t
need such books: We have parents and teach-
ers and aunts and uncles and priests and rabbis
who walk with us on the road to character. Our
moral educations should happen at dinner tables,
in classrooms, on football fields, in synagogues
and churches. But when an entire society’s moral
ecology is captive to self-expression and the nur-
turance of “Big Me,” even these traditional spaces
become outposts of Self-Esteem, Inc. That’s why
we need books like The Road to Character—as
a summons to remember what even our “tradi-
tional” schools of virtue have forgot.
Brooks is forthright about this countercultural
posture: “The answer must be to stand against, at
least in part, the prevailing winds of culture. The
answer must be to join a counterculture. To live
a decent life, to build up the soul, it’s probably
necessary to declare that the forces that encourage
the Big Me, while necessary and liberating in
many ways, have gone too far.” In the end, such
“standing against” comes down to remembering.
To cultivate such virtues, he concludes, “it’s
probably necessary to revive and follow what we
accidentally left behind: the counter-tradition
of moral realism”—what he describes as the
“crooked-timber school” of Augustine, Reinhold
Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin. In a society captive
to romantic dreams, life is one big adventure of
releasing “my” inner goodness, realizing “my”
precious uniqueness. For the crooked-timber
school, life is a call to self-combat, the arduous
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
quest to master our disordered nature. (Brooks
doesn’t shrink from calling this, simply, “sin.”)
As he tried to do in his 2011 book The
Social Animal, Brooks uses names and places to
concretize abstract concepts. The book is framed
by a distinction, drawn from the writings of
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, between “Adam I”
and “Adam II.” These two “characters” represent
two sides of our nature. Adam I is driven, ambi-
tious, career oriented. He is fixated on “résumé
virtues”—the traits and accomplishments that
land you the next job up the ladder. Adam II,
in contrast, is playing a longer game, cultivating
“eulogy virtues”—the sort of character traits “that
get talked about at your funeral.” Adam II culti-
vates a life of introspection. He is a member of the
crooked-timber school precisely because when he
looks inside he sees the demons and monsters of
his own nature. Adam II is on the road to char-
acter, and Brooks wants us to join him.
The book’s implied audience is probably
narrower than the author expects. The presumed
reader is a meritocratic animal of the kind you
find living on the coasts, in urban centers, and
in training at the nation’s best colleges—a type
bred for achievement and bent on success, of a
sort. (A mentor to Ivy League undergraduates
once described his students to me as “world-
class hoop-jumpers.”) Having written in the past
about the bobos in paradise, Brooks is now largely
writing to them. In terms of Charles Murray’s
trope in Coming Apart, Brooks has written a
book that will speak to those in Belmont; I’m
not sure readers in Fishtown will see themselves
in it. Which is a shame, because it’s not just the
meritocracy that needs to rediscover the virtues.
Aristotle emphasized two ways to acquire
virtue: through practice and by watching exem-
plars, imitating those who embody a virtuous
life. Appropriately, Brooks’s method in The Road
to Character picks up on the second track: He
pictures virtues in people, tethering them to lives
well lived, ranging from Augustine and George
Eliot to Dorothy Day and George C. Marshall
150
(as well as some less canonical candidates like
Frances Perkins and Bayard Rustin). The result is
a series of profiles in humility, a hall of fame of
character stocked with figures who eschewed the
spotlight and would likely cringe at the attention.
But of course that’s exactly why we need to look
at them, despite the fact that Kim Kardashian
and Kanye West keep trying to jump into the
frame. It is the quiet, understated beauty of these
exemplars that gives them their allure and makes
them curiosities that might get our attention in
the age of the selfie.
Many of these profiles are both informative
and moving, introducing character through a
cast of characters who often experienced failure,
disappointment, and suffering. The animating
conviction of the crooked-timber school is that
virtuous people are made, not born. (It’s romantic
devotees of Rousseau who fancy that our good-
ness is original.) So Brooks is interested in the
backstories of great leaders and activists; in each
profile, he focuses on childhood formation as the
fount of later virtue. Indeed, the “moral country”
he invites us into is one where home is often an
incubator of character, without pretending these
homes are always idyllic. Dwight D. Eisenhower
was apprenticed in humility, self-control,
and patience in a tiny dwelling on the Kansas
plain. Augustine was a going concern of his
mother, Monica, to whom he paid tribute in his
Confessions. Despite deep differences that engen-
dered a veritable “Holy War” with her father,
after his death George Eliot asked, “What shall
I be without my Father? It will seem as if part of
my moral nature were gone.”
Perhaps the most heartening takeaway from
The Road to Character is that many of these
greats—including Eisenhower and Marshall—
were “stumblers,” as Brooks calls them, folks
who learned humility the hard way. There is not
a hint of hagiography in these portraits: The cele-
bration of character comes complete with warts
and foibles and disappointment. Brooks calls this
“the U-curve”: “They had to go down to go up.

They had to descend into the valley of humility
to climb to the heights of character.”
Marshall’s story is particularly affecting in this
regard. Lacking academic prowess, dismissed by
his father and mocked by his brother, he none-
theless submitted himself to the disciplines and
rigors of the monastery-like Virginia Military
Institute. Its traditions and routines were like
grooves his soul could run in: “He found a
way of living and a pattern of discipline exactly
to his liking.” He could breathe and work and
become his own man in the military. But even
then he was passed over for promotions and field
commands. So Marshall began to devote himself
to acquiring a masterful command of logistics
and operations—“not exactly the glamor side
of military life.” He cultivated the “institutional
mindset” so in danger of becoming extinct today.
Perhaps his greatest heartbreak was being passed
over as commander of Operation Overlord,
the Allied invasion of France in World War II.
Marshall’s response was magnanimous: Not only
did he devote himself to the (no less important)
logistical side of the operation, he even saved a
copy of the memo appointing Eisenhower to the
command, later sending it to Ike with a hand-
written note of congratulations. Marshall’s quiet
leadership would later win him the Nobel Peace
Prize as well as the unstinting respect of everyone
around him, who, Brooks relates, uniformly
recognized him as “great-souled.” Upon his
death in 1959, it became known that he wanted
no state funeral, simply a “short, plain service at
Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, using the stan-
dard Order of the Burial of the Dead from the
Book of Common Prayer, with no eulogy.” One
who most deserved words of praise was the one
who refused them. Brooks makes up for it in his
chapter here.
Not until I read The Road to Character
would I have regarded David Brooks as a
kind of twenty-first-century Samuel Johnson.
But Brooks’s profile of Johnson’s tenacity,
humanism, and self-examination might double
BOOK REVIEWS
Judd Mehlman/New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images.
Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.
as a peek into both Brooks and this new book.
As he succinctly puts it, “Johnson more or less
wrote himself to virtue,” and readers of Brooks’s
New York Times columns over the last several
years might say the same of him. Indeed, it’s
hard not to read his description of Johnson as
aspirational self-description: “Especially toward
the end of his life, it becomes hard to catego-
rize his writing. His journalism rose to the level
of literature; his biographies contained ethics;
his theology was filled with practical advice. He
became a universal thinker.”
The big challenge for this book is that it will
be ignored, even dismissed, by those who need it
most. Those eager to read The Road to Character
are likely already receptive to its argument,
whereas those who inhabit the moral ecology
of self-expression and so-called authenticity are
also most comfortable with ironic distance and
haughty confidence in their own righteousness.
Brooks’s argument cuts to the root of this: There’s
no character without discipline. There’s no disci-
pline without submission. And there’s no submis-
sion without something beyond me. How do
you get people to want to submit? How do you
open people to something beyond themselves?
How do you invite people to sign up for ancient
traditions? Our best shot is to paint portraits of
virtuous lives that have a strange allure about
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
them, whose old-souled strangeness exerts an
inexplicable tug on our souls.
Maybe you just have to wait people out.
“Adam I aims for happiness,” Brooks notes, “but
Adam II knows that happiness is insufficient. The
ultimate joys are moral joys.” After the way of
self-expression fails to arrive at satisfaction, the
road to character will remain open.
James K. A. Smith is a professor of philosophy at
Calvin College and editor in chief of Comment
magazine. His most recent books include Who’s
Afraid of Relativism? and How (Not) To Be
Secular: Reading Charles Taylor.
Adventures in Algy-Land
Charles Thaxton
Book of Numbers
Joshua Cohen
New York, NY: Random House, 2015.
“I’ve heard that Internet is ‘banned’ by the rabbis
in various Jewish religious communities,” runs a
typical question to Chabad.org’s Moshe Goldman.
“Obviously, however, Chabad does use the Internet
as a tool to serve G‑d. What does the Torah say
about using this medium?” Or—to quote the title
of that advice column—“Is the Internet evil?”
(Goldman’s answer: No, it is neutral, like a knife.)
Such Jewish responsa (rabbinic Q&As) are
abundant online: Tikkun runs a service, as does
the Reform movement. They also appear in a
fictional form in Joshua Cohen’s new novel,
Book of Numbers, as when a concerned reader
writes to askandtherabbianswers.com to ask if it is
permissible to write out the name of God online.
(Answer: Yes, because “the digitized Name is
purely symbolic.”)
In a similar way, Book of Numbers attempts
to sift through online phenomena in order to
152
answer an array of similarly anxious questions
about the Internet. The resulting novel is a
eulogy for book culture, a polemic against the
online-content economy that has replaced it, and
an international, interreligious romp. (It’s also a
breakup novel and a satirical pseudo-biography
posing as a ghostwritten memoir.) It is interested
in the place of the sacred (or that which has taken
its place) in a culture increasingly premised upon
degradation, searchability, and metrics.
To explore these questions, Cohen has created
a fictional identity: Our narrator, also named
Joshua Cohen (or “JC”), is a struggling writer
whose struggles were compounded by the publi-
cation date—9/11/2001—of his first novel. He
also shares a name with the founder of tech giant
Tetration.com—a third Joshua Cohen. (Tetration
is a kind of amalgam our modern tech empires:
Apple, Facebook, and, most of all, Google.)
JC receives an assignment from his editor and
confidante, Aar, and is spirited out of years of
content-farm obscurity to write the other Cohen’s
memoir (no “as told to” appendage necessary on
the jacket). Soon enough, JC is whisked away to
NorCal, to corporate campuses, and then to Dubai
to meet with “Principal,” his subject and double.
The interviews between JC and Principal
constitute the great bulky middle of the novel.
In them, Principal expresses himself in the
same cryptic, Zennish CEO wisdom Steve Jobs
specialized in. He shorthands things like “cur”
(curious) and “algy” (algorithm). His pronoun is
the corporate first-person plural, “We.” His very
being seems hyperlinked with his technology.
It’s fantastic high parody, but between the
corporate-speak and company history, we sense
Principal’s concerns are mounting. Principal
speaks ominously of that fast-approaching
metric, that singularity of supply and demand:
“The time and/or distance required for luxuries
to become staples, for wants to become needs, for
consumption to consume us.”
While at Stanford, Principal developed a
search-engine technology called “tetration,”

(a technical math term, a kind of exponential
exponent) that becomes the industry standard.
Capital is ventured and “Tetrate” enters the
public lexicon. Principal also falls under the spell
of a programmer named Moe who is at work on a
kind of self-duplicating, self-powered computing
process that would solve the problem of entropy
by way of hedonistic Hindu practice.
As our fictional
Joshua Cohen writes
the story of his subject’s
Jewish heritage (a story
his Principal wishes to
efface), we get the sense
that so too does our real
life Cohen wish to write
the story of contempo-
rary Jewishness before
one of contemporary
technology. In the final
Google logo embroidered on yarmulke.
pages of the book, our
narrator is contractu-
ally prohibited from being online, and he finds
himself wandering the halls of the Frankfurt Book
Fair. In his unlinked, dazed state, he composes a
virtuoso meditation on the history of the book,
of printing, publishing, platforms, cataloguing,
computing—all implicated in family, Jewishness,
genocide.
Book of Numbers arrives at a time when many
marquee male fiction writers are approaching
technology in the same speculative, science-fictive
way. Ever since David Foster Wallace’s Infinite
Jest, it seems as though the cautionary tech novel
has come to constitute a genre unto itself.
In tech terms, of course, book publishing has
been thoroughly disrupted by more seductive
platforms of entertainment—the stream, the feed.
These books arrive at a time when Silicon Valley
unquestionably exercises a decisive influence over
our economy. While the profound economic and
behavioral effects of startup culture are visible all
around us, its cultural implications are hard to trace. and criticism have appeared in The Washington
Tech ideology seeks to “culturize” economy
BOOK REVIEWS
as much as it “economizes” culture. Thus we
see the practice of culture continually effaced
by a small range of modal-verbal representa-
tive currencies: “Connect,” “Share,” “Like,”
“Follow.” For Cohen, this standardization of
means, the technological industrialization of
mediums of expression, necessarily means a
standardization of expression itself.
All of this is bad
news for the book,
particularly for fiction.
Cohen, who is also a
book critic at Harper’s
(a famously net-averse
magazine), has his
Adam Berry/Getty Images.
fair share of animus
for the current state
of fiction. He takes
it for granted that a
culture of content is
supplanting a culture
of meaning—and by
turns the meaning of culture. Literary culture
has historically had a fundamentally playful or
joyous or spontaneous relationship to language,
while online culture operates through a predic-
tive, auto-filled, algorithmic one.
Behind this book there seems to be an
ongoing battle between conceptions of time. If
technology has successfully collapsed space, it
is now hard at work on time. (These are feats,
not coincidentally, that the book has tradition-
ally managed.) There is, beneath the globetrot-
ting romp of Book of Numbers, a battle not only
against, but also for time—in status updates,
in publication dates, in calls to prayer. It’s a
crowded field. But as anyone who’s watching
knows, this market favors monopoly, consoli-
dation, and aggregation. And platform agnosti-
cism has its costs.
Charles Thaxton is a freelance writer whose reviews
Post, The New Inquiry, and Full Stop.
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
Truth and Reconciliation
Frank Freeman
Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy
in a Divided World
Carlos Fraenkel
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
In his foreword to Carlos Fraenkel’s Teaching Plato
in Palestine, Michael Walzer writes, “Fraenkel
aspires to an Athens where the people don’t kill
Socrates but imitate him.” This classical aspira-
tion could also serve as the book’s theme.
Fraenkel, the author of Philosophical Religions
from Plato to Spinoza (2013) and a teacher of
philosophy and religion at McGill University
and Oxford, spends the first part of his book
describing his attempts to encourage this Socratic
imitation in Palestine, Indonesia, New York’s
Hasidic community, Brazil, and the Akwesasne
Territory, which straddles the US–Canada border
and is “one of the largest Mohawk reserves in
North America.” In the second part, he argues his
case that “making philosophy part of our personal
and public lives is something worthwhile.” As he
puts it in his preface, the first part of his book
is an “intellectual travelogue,” while the second
presents a “more systematic argument.”
As part of the travelogue, Fraenkel goes
to Israel to teach philosophy at the Jerusalem
campus of a Palestinian university, Al-Quds.
There, he works with the Palestinian philoso-
pher Sari Nusseibeh, who believes “even if
the Middle East isn’t yet ready to be saved,
philosophy can make an important contribu-
tion.” Fraenkel and Nusseibeh use the Socratic
method to get their students to think about
al-Haqq, which means “the truth” in Arabic
and is also one of the names of God as entered
in the Qur’an. Nusseibeh is a heroic figure. His
own political party has physically attacked him
for collaborating with Israelis, and he now goes
everywhere with bodyguards. In the tradition of
154
Socrates, he is paying a price for his practice of
philosophy.
When he travels to Indonesia, Fraenkel deals
with a very different Islamic society. There, Islam
came relatively late, and peacefully. Indonesia
practices religious pluralism under the umbrella of
a tolerant Islam. There is a problem with “concep-
tual coherence,” however, because Buddhists and
Hindus have had to contort their beliefs into an
uneasy monotheism in order to secure tolerance
under the law. Fraenkel worries that Indonesians
have no criteria for deciding between a true
and a false religion. “The students,” he writes,
“simply take for granted the truth of the impor-
tant historical religions up to Islam.” But when
he presses them about the Bahá’í religion—why
it is called “merely human” and why its founder’s
claim to divine revelation are dismissed while
Muhammad’s are accepted—they don’t know
what to say. The positive side to this problem,
Fraenkel points out, is that “perplexity … can
also be a gate into philosophy.”
Which is the case for the skeptical Hasidic
Jews Fraenkel teaches in New York City. They
are even forced to meet secretly with Fraenkel in
a room above a SoHo bar because their rabbis
forbid them from reading most philosophy.
These doubters live double lives: studying the
Torah by day and Spinoza (whom they especially
like) at night. “All attempts to integrate secular
life and Jewish tradition ultimately ring false to
them, “says Fraenkel. “In a sense they keep the
Torah and the secular world as strictly apart as
their rabbis do; they only have switched alle-
giances (secretly at least).”
The next stop is Brazil, where, since 2008, all
high-school students have had to take philosophy.
But Brazil’s academic philosophers, who focus
mainly on the history of philosophy, sneer at
the education these students receive. They doubt
that high-school students are capable of learning
philosophy and refuse to link it with contempo-
rary issues. Fraenkel tries to help those teachers
who are enthusiastic about teaching high-school

Louvre, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images.
Bust of Plato (c. 427–347 BC).
kids philosophy by leading Socratic conversa-
tions about the terrible inequality that exists in
Brazilian society, whether it’s financial or racial.
(Light skin is preferred in Brazil, no matter what
the official line may be.)
In the final chapter of his “intellectual trav-
elogue,” Fraenkel focuses on the practical ways
philosophy can help the Mohawks deal with
questions of internal government, relations with
the Canadian government and nearby land-
owners, and the alien concept of private prop-
erty. Traditionally, the Mohawks have agreed
with Plato that, in Fraenkel’s words, “we will
work toward the common good only if private
property is abolished.” But the consensus toward
which the Mohawks are now being compelled to
move is far more Aristotelean: that, as Fraenkel
paraphrases it, “human nature just doesn’t work
that way: we only really care for things we own.”
Fraenkel’s emphasis on philosophy as practice
can be a problem in itself, however. He defines it
BOOK REVIEWS
in terms of a curriculum focusing on “the prac-
tice of philosophy … [to acquire the] techniques
of debate—logical and semantic tools that allow
us to clarify our views and to make and respond
to arguments.…” It also means teaching the use
of the Organon, the “tool kit” of a philosopher,
as well as “cultivating virtues of debate—valuing
the truth more than winning an argument and
trying one’s best to understand the viewpoint
of the opponent.” This is fine and good as far
as it goes. But it is a description of how you do
philosophy, not what philosophy itself is—the
love and pursuit of wisdom. Fraenkel defines
philosophy as you would logic or rhetoric. It’s as
if a car mechanic were to mistake the contents of
his toolbox for the vehicle itself.
Despite this disagreement over definitions,
I found the second part of the book lucid and
compelling. Fraenkel makes an eloquent case for
a culture of debate that requires strong convic-
tions tempered by a sense of one’s own fallibility:
My point is simply that if we take
ourselves seriously, we must be
convinced that what we believe is true.
When … my Muslim friends and I
discussed God’s existence and how one
should live, we meant our claims to be
universally valid. In general we take the
reasons we have for holding our beliefs
and values to be reasons for everyone
to hold these beliefs and values. This
doesn’t mean that we cannot be wrong
about some, many, or even all things
we believe. However, conceding that we
may be wrong does not require us to
give up the conviction that, in fact, we
are right. It requires us only to recognize
our fallibility.
These words add up to a refreshing perspec-
tive, as do the following: “If either relativism or
skepticism were true, there would be no point
in a culture of debate. We would be wasting our
155
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
time if we could not get closer to the truth by
critically examining our beliefs and values.”
Teaching Plato in Palestine is the work of a
modern philosopher interested both in finding
the truth and in acknowledging that there is
truth to be found. And he is willing to share this
search with others both within the academy and
without, as if philosophy had something to do
with life itself and how it is lived.
Frank Freeman has reviewed for America Magazine,
Commonweal, First Things (online), Gilbert, The
Literary Review, The Rumpus, Touchstone, and
Weekly Standard, among others. He has also pub-
lished poems and stories.
Unbinding a Nation
Johann N. Neem
A War for the Soul of America: A History
of the Culture Wars
Andrew Hartman
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
“The logic of the culture wars has been exhaust-
ed,” concludes Andrew Hartman at the end of
his comprehensive blow-by-blow account of the
battles over God, race, gender, art, music, and
education that have roiled American society and
politics during the last five decades. Hartman, a
professor of history at Illinois State University,
makes his own position clear. As he sees it,
whether the issue was civil rights in the 1950s
and 1960s or gay liberation following the 1969
Stonewall riots in New York, the New Left even-
tually obliged “the nation’s cultural gatekeepers”
to open up America to racial minorities, women,
gays, and the non-religious. Those who resisted
these changes—people whom Hartman defines
as “normative America”—have been obliged to
come to terms with “a new America, a nation
156
more open to new peoples, new ideas, and new,
if conflicting, articulations of America itself.”
But if Hartman largely endorses this
outcome, he differs with others on the Left about
the substance and ultimate consequences of the
struggle. In his influential polemic, What’s the
Matter with Kansas? (2004), for example, critic
Thomas Frank argued that the culture wars were
little more than a distraction to keep working-
class whites in states like Kansas from paying
attention to their economic interest. Not so,
Hartman argues. The culture wars were real, and
they were about ideas. And while the Right did
well in “economic policy and electoral power,”
Hartman believes “the Left was successful” in
matters of culture.
Hartman organizes his book thematically, with
his early chapters setting forth the “liberation”
agenda of New Left intellectuals and activists of the
Sixties as well as the response of neoconservatives
(notably Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb,
and Norman Podhoretz) and others (from Daniel
Bell to Christopher Lasch) who concluded that
“American culture was in decline.” As neocon-
servative ideas were taken up by culture warriors,
Hartman demonstrates, they lost their complexity,
depth, and nuance. Although intellectuals critical
of the liberation agenda may have offered good
reasons to be worried about the costs of declining
religiosity, changes in family life, or the growth of
big government, it was unnecessary, in Hartman’s
view, for such warriors as Phyllis Schlafly to charge
that liberals aspired to “undermine the traditional
family” and put government bureaucrats in charge
of everything. One could be concerned that revi-
sions to the American history curriculum threat-
ened history’s civic function without arguing, as
did one letter writer to the Wall Street Journal, that
historians are “haters of America.”
Perhaps because Hartman takes sides early
on, he pays less attention to the deeper sources
of the culture wars than a number of scholars
have. For example, in Culture Wars (1991),
James Davison Hunter offered an institutional
 BOOK REVIEWS

analysis of the strug-

gles’ origins, arguing
that greater religious
pluralism, coupled with
declining membership in
and loyalty to mainline
denominations, enabled
“para-church and special
agenda associations” that
were focused on partic-

Barbara Alper/Getty Images.

ular issues (like abor-
tion) to monopolize the
public sphere. From an
economic perspective,
Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’
Alive (2010) explored
how white Americans’
downward mobility in the 1970s raised real
anxieties and hostilities that were expressed in
cultural terms. In the world of ideas, Daniel
Rodgers’s Age of Fracture (2011) concluded
that both sides of the culture wars expressed
similar ideas about individual liberation, which
emerged from underlying intellectual shifts in
how Americans understood self and society.
Hartman might also have taken a cue from
James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963). At a
time when rage was everywhere and, in his view,
justifiable, Baldwin urged his nephew (to whom
he directed the book) to “accept” white people
“with love.” Baldwin wanted his nephew to
recognize the existential anxieties unleashed by
challenging racism. He knew that when people’s
basic cultural premises were at risk, they would
respond defensively: “The danger,” Baldwin
wrote, “in the minds of most white Americans,
is the loss of their identity.”
Because Hartman believes the culture wars
were necessary for aligning American culture
with “transformations in American life,” it is
not until the end of the book that he acknowl-
edges the “profound sense of loss” felt by most
normative Americans. And it’s also not until the
end that he admits that cultural liberation came
at the cost of the “social solidarity necessary for
social democracy.”
Invoking the “cultural contradictions of
liberation,” Hartman ultimately grants more
credence to the perspective of Bell, Lasch, and
others who worried that the sixties’ celebration
of individual liberation would leave Americans
without the cultural resources to resist market
forces and the ethos of “Madison Avenue and
Silicon Valley [in which] authoritarian individ-
ualism has become a commodity.” Hartman is
right that it may be time to turn our attention
to the nation’s pressing economic problems, but
doing so will require the Left to appreciate what
has been lost and to begin the difficult work of
restoring the bonds that tie Americans together.
Johann N. Neem, professor of history at Western
Washington University, is a visiting faculty fellow
at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
at the University of Virginia. He is author of
Creating a Nation of Joiners (Harvard University
Press, 2008).

157
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158
 Signifiers

Blast
Matthew Walther

“Bernie Sanders Blasts Greece’s Creditors,” reads
a headline at the Huffington Post. At Reuters:
“Republican presidential hopeful Rubio blasts
Iran deal.” “McConnell refuses to blast fellow
Kentuckian Rand Paul,” CNN tells us. (Senator
Paul is not so courteous—Google autocompletes
“Rand Paul blasts” with “John McCain,” “Hillary
Clinton,” “Dick Cheney,” and “Ted Nugent.”)
But blast me no blasts, please. It is such an
ugly word. Garish and offensive, too. I am so
sick of seeing it that I am thinking of giving up
the news.
Before administering the last rites customary
for mortally abused words, it is worth acknowl-
edging the distinguished past of blast. In
Chaucer’s House of Fame (c. 1380), the narrator
finds himself atop a hill where, at the request of
Lady Fame, the North Wind alternately blows
respect and ignominy at passersby with a rather
sinister-sounding musical instrument:
“Thow Eolus,
Herestow not what they prayen us?”
“Madame, yis, ful wel,” quod he,
“And I wil trumpen it, parde!”
And tok his blake trumpe faste,
And gan to puffen and to blaste.
Transposed into a modern headline as “North
Wind Blasts,” Chaucer’s use of the word makes
lyrical and lexical sense. By contrast, blast in the
sense of “to criticize” has no entry in the Oxford
English Dictionary. “To din or denounce by
trumpeting,” like Chaucer’s Aeolus, is the closest
one comes.
But journalism is seldom heedful of careful
usage. When Senator X blasts the administra-
tion at a press conference, and the administra-
tion blasts right back at a briefing the next day,
and Senator X ripostes with yet another blast at
the misleading nature of the response—it is all
reported with an air of breathless importance. It
is hard not to identify with Chaucer’s melancholy
pilgrim.
Thirty years ago, Senator X’s blasts, if they
were recorded at all, might have made their way
into the penultimate paragraph of a write-up on
page A10 of one our national newspapers. Now,
they are stories in their own right, rushed online
as quickly as they can be assembled. As details
in longer pieces, such “blasts” could serve to
provide some color. But when they are expected
to stand on their own, headline, lead, and all,
their banality becomes evident—especially when
scrupulous editors see “critics blasted” and realize

Matthew Walther is assistant editor of the Washington Free Beacon. His work has also appeared in the
Spectator of London, First Things, and many other publications.

159
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / FALL 2015
that they would only be making the story more
ridiculous by changing “blasted” to “criticized.”
Part of the trouble with blast is simply that
it is journalese, that would-be pidgin of false
titles (“Author A. N. Wilson”), attributive nouns
(“White House source” instead of “source close to
the White House”), corny verbs (“boost”), abbre-
viations (“spox”), and acronyms (“SCOTUS”)
that everyone can read but no one save on-air
news anchors has ever been known to speak.
Journalese is ugly, of course, and repeti-
tive, and, in its present form, almost risibly at
odds with the historical norms of English usage
and syntax. But it is also serviceable and, when
political reporters are working frantically to meet
deadlines and story quotas, not hard to forgive.
It is easier to write this way—using the prose
equivalent of cinder blocks—than to think care-
fully about each word.
But blast is not simply a tired word. When we
read about blasts on Capitol Hill, we are implicitly
invited to think of it as a combat zone. This, I
think, is where the real case is to be made against
its use. It is an insult to anyone living under the
threat of violence to use such language in refer-
ence to our political goings-on, even when they
are contentious. There is something grimly comic
about noting who is blasting whom over tax policy
and reading in the pages of the same newspaper a
story headlined “40 Dead in Nigeria Blast.”
In her book, Wounding the World, Joanna
Bourke laments the incursion of military violence
into the political and social life of Britain and
the United States. I am surprised that she does
160
not mention the casual militarization of English
prose, of which blast is so odious an example.
Unlike Bourke, who blames video games and
victory parades for the Iraq War, I have a modest
sense of the cultural stakes here: The subsump-
tion of our political discourse into the language
of bloodshed, while pernicious, has not made us
more violent. Yet language need not be dangerous
to warrant criticism; being ugly is enough.
Metaphor should always be deliberate. When
Senator X is said to be blasting away—or attacking
or slamming or grilling or hammering—he is, of
course, actually doing no such thing. “Today via
e-mail this reporter received a document from a
member of Senator X’s staff that contained criti-
cism of the administration” is neither surprising
nor compelling. This sad truth should not lead
journalists to adorn their facts with uninspired
military tropes.
In The Parlement of Foules (1382), another
of Chaucer’s narrative poems, a very silly argu-
ment between a trio of eagles is brought to a
sudden end by Dame Nature, allowing them and
the rest of the feathered assembly to spend their
Valentine’s Day in peace. No helpful goddess is
likely to descend from on high to “unbynde” us
from “this noyse.” Politics is not going away; nor
is the pace at which news is gathered, reported,
and consumed likely to ease up.
Still, might I direct reporters and their editors
to that old friend of less-put-upon scribblers
everywhere, the thesaurus? Condemn, denounce,
disparage, reproach, admonish away! But give
that other word a rest.
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RE-ENCHANTMENT

Dominic Green
Soul Survivor
Charles Mathewes
Can You Change Your Life?
Anna Marazuela Kim
Re-enchantment and Iconoclasm
Matthew Scherer
Nietzsche’s Smile
Chad Wellmon
Sacred Reading
Eugene McCarraher
What Disenchantment?
Benjamin Schewel
The Blackbird of Religion

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 INSIDE

RE-ENCHANTMENT
Dominic Green, Charles Mathewes, Anna Marazuela Kim,
Matthew Scherer, Chad Wellmon, Eugene McCarraher,
Benjamin Schewel

ESSAYS
Wilfred McClay on escaping the matrix
John Inazu on confident pluralism
Helen Andrews on AA envy

REVIEWS
Charles Townshend on Vivid Faces
James K. A. Smith on The Road to Character
Charles Thaxton on Book of Numbers
Frank Freeman on Teaching Plato in Palestine
Johann Neem on A War for the Soul of America

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