The mad scientist himself

Conservatives are, so the story goes, overly concerned with other people’s sexual mores, and they also hate science. To that end, I’d like to call attention to the rather thought-provoking work of biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, as Peter Leithart covers it in First Things. Sheldrake recently caused a stir in a TEDx talk when he suggested that science might, gasp, entail more than materialism. In other words, there might be more to the world, and to what we can be said to “know”, than just what we can deduce from our senses and the scientific method. As Leithart describes it, “What [Sheldrake] objects to—and quite rightly—is a commitment to materialism that determines what kinds of answers are possible before questions are ever asked and before any evidence is examined. And along the way he gives a tantalizing, mind-altering taste of what science might look like once materialist assumptions are shed.”

Science as it stands today, of course, can’t take immaterial considerations into account; hence Judge Korman’s demand for scientific evidence that an 11-year-old girl shouldn’t be taking the morning-after pill. But if Sheldrake is right, if science can get beyond its exclusively materialist lens, then the dichotomy I assumed in my post about Judge Korman’s override of the HHS limitations on access to the morning-after pill might be a false one. Maybe there could be a “credible scientific justification” to uphold limitations for 11-year-olds seeking access to the morning-after pill, since, I don’t know, there might be more to the 11-year-old girl than just her physical body. Better yet, science might even be able to talk about it.

Wild suggestion, but Sheldrake, it seems, might take it seriously.

A federal judge has ruled that all age restrictions on access to the morning-after pill be removed. In doing so he has overridden Kathleen Sebelius’s – yes, Kathleen Sebelius’s – evident stodgy conservatism, or something; Sebelius and the Obama administration had, in 2011, set restrictions on access to the morning-after pill to girls and women ages 16 and older.

Mr. Obama called that decision “common sense.” Judge Edward Korman called it “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.” Arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable to restrict potentially abortifacient drugs to girls – girls, not women, girls as young as 11 years of age. Judge Korman said that Sebelius’ actions were “politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent.”

I don’t deny that there is a medical and scientific side to this issue. But come on. This is a disagreement over morality; that’s why the President (even if disingenuously, as the judge charges) referred to the decision as “common sense.” We’re not talking about common sense science; we’re talking about common sense morality. We all shudder at the thought of 14-year-old girls having sex and running to Walgreens to take the morning-after pill. Somehow, our common sense tells us that this is a bad thing, most of all for those girls.

But morality isn’t admissible here; to the judge, this is about science and technical expertise. Says Lewis Grossman, a law professor at American University: “If they’re [i.e., the administration] going to interfere with decisions of expert regulatory agencies, they must find credible scientific justification; otherwise judges will be inclined to step in and stop them.” A moral justification, then, just won’t do. Hence, Judge Korman’s verdict (such as it is): restricting access to emergency contraceptives to an eleven-year-old, because it is not based on science, is an “arbitrary” and “politically motivated” act.

Isn’t there something in the space between “scientific justification” and “arbitrary”? Why is a moral justification precluded outright?

(There’s a related constitutional question here – if it is left to the states to regulate public health, safety and morals through the police powers, can states still regulate Plan B et al.?)

Jeremy Beer over at The American Conservative posted, presumably in recognition of our recent holiday of love, a profile of David L. Schindler, a theologian at the John Paul II Institute here in DC entitled “Philosopher of Love.” The good news, if we can call it that, is that I think Schindler is, perhaps, right. The bad news is that that means that liberalism is the problem and we’re all in trouble because we don’t even have a system within which we can really work, at least not with integrity or hope of lasting succes. Why? Because

all of our political, economic, legal, and religious institutions are necessarily grounded in some conception of order—in a metaphysics—even if they reject or ignore the Christian claim. From the Christian view, liberal institutions foster a problematic “mode of being”—a distorting matrix for the formation of our intentions, attitudes, and ideas. Thus, the idea that just putting “good people,” or at least those with the “right ideas,” into political office will make a decisive cultural difference is insufficiently attentive to the shaping power of this matrix in a liberal regime.

Is Schindler right?

Dan recently posed the question, “how self-referential are we?”, and I’d now like to take a stab at answering that: A lot. How do I know? Three potential answers:

a) I live in Washington, DC

b) I teach undergraduates, or

c) I recently sat through two and a half hours of “dialogue” on diversity, engaging difference, and the Jesuit tradition of liberal arts education.

True, (a) is a strong contender, but the answer is (c). (I’m pretty fond of my undergrads, at least today, and in any case we can probably just expect them to be a bit self-referential at this stage.) The event started off well enough, with a Jesuit historian asking whether “engaging difference” is something that is consonant with 450 years of Jesuit liberal arts education tradition. He answered that yes, of course, a liberal arts education produces, as one of its happy side effects, the student’s ability to come out of himself, to expand his mind and, yes, engage different ways of thinking and seeing the world. Furthermore, though by no means perfectly, the Jesuits themselves have served as missionaries to just about every culture on earth, usually learning the local language and adopting local customs (in dress, food, lifestyle, etc.). So, you know, yes. We can both have a liberal arts education and engage people who are different from us.

This would all be just fine, if a bit, well, obvious (again, if we’ve been doing this for 450 years, why are we hosting a half-day symposium on the matter?), but then everyone else spoke. Topics included seminars for students on experiences and differences among socio-economic classes, racial identities, sexual orientation, etc. Very little was enlightening. In fact, the only genuinely thought-provoking question from the audience – asking why a program in which students have cross-cultural skype conversations as part of certain courses would insist on using only English, for this presumes that “we can understand the world in English alone” – was left unaddressed.

Before I’m hauled off by the thought police for hating diversity, though, I would like to repeat, for the record, the Jesuit’s point: we should engage people who are different from us. Yes. I’m sorry, but duh. At what point was that idea lost within the liberal arts? Was it when we were forced to read philosophy that challenged our core assumptions about the world? When we had to tackle the depths of Shakespeare – Western white man that he was – which provokes the imagination to see beyond the pale images of the life it sees on its own? Or was it through the study of history, which puts our own moment in time – and our own lives – into proper perspective as at once tiny and potentially earth-shattering?

Evidently that’s not enough, though. Rather, after the initial nod to the liberal arts, panelists, including current students, were lauded for having had “experiences” and “dialogues.” These experiences were usually a form of encounter rather than real engagement – e.g., a student studied in Egypt but lived in a dorm with the American students, falling into the habit of meeting with her assigned Egyptian family maybe just once a month instead of their scheduled weekly meetings. The dialogues were ways of talking about differences, rather than actually working with different people.

I don’t mean to be overly critical; I’m thrilled that these students are studying abroad and I’m thrilled that they at least have planted within the themselves the notion that their own perspectives are not the only ones. But what was missing from the entire conversation was a mention of truth. What mattered was that students had “experiences” and “dialogues”;  nowhere was the entire point of the liberal arts tradition – to come to know the world, oneself, and the truth – allowed to interfere with whatever impressions and feelings those experiences elicited.

I include the picture above in part as protection against the Thought Police/Academia Guardians (look! I like people who don’t look like me!) but actually to illustrate a point about engaging difference. The picture is of a man from Azilal, Morocco, with whom I worked to train rural association members in grant-writing and project-planning (water projects, ecotourism, aid for the disabled, etc.) The point I mean to make is that yes, we engage difference. But not for its own sake; for the sake of something higher. My boss in the Peace Corps, a very thoughtful Moroccan man who had studied in both Morocco and America, made an important point during our training. Yes, Peace Corps exists for the two-fold purpose of a) filling needs in developing countries for skills and knowledge and b) facilitating cultural exchange between Americans and the people of host countries. But as he pointed out, if you do (a) you will get (b) thrown in with it; if you aim only for (b) you won’t really get either. Getting to know another culture does not happen in a dialoguing vacuum. When you work side-by-side with Moroccans on a project, you will – of necessity – learn about their culture, ways of life, and different perspectives. But if you shirk your work duties and content yourself with drinking tea (er, “dialoguing”) with locals, yes, you may learn something about the culture. But you’ll never understand it. In my experience, those who only talk and absorb the culture mistakenly believe they really know something about it. Those who do the hard work of learning the language, working with people who initially make no sense to you (or drive you crazy) – or to whom you make no sense – find that there is infinitely more to learn about these people than they can ever hope to gain. They acquire at once a humility – not claiming to know everything that every Moroccan would say or do in situation X – and a firm understanding of at least some things about those people who are different.

And so it is, I think, with truth, including the truths we learn when we “engage difference.” If we just talk about it, we are likely to congratulate ourselves on having really learned what it’s like to be the person on the other end of the Skype conversation, because, well, they spoke your language and you never had to see them when they weren’t talking to you. But if instead you simply go about life seeking truth – in Dan’s words, “that truth that is independent of its adherents” – you’ll go ahead and work with those people that are different from you precisely because you are learning that you don’t know it all, nor will all the scattershot experiences and contrived dialogues get you there.

There is plenty of room in a liberal arts education for more exposure to great works of other cultures and to engage all kinds of differences. But this is no reason to abandon the mission to educate human beings in seeking truth – especially not in favor of the poor substitute of adding up “experiences”.

A while back I blogged about Brian Leiter’s book, Why Tolerate Religion?, or at least a review of the book by the A in GAG (see Greg’s post). While I would rather be addressing the really important questions Greg raised about marriage, I’m afraid I’m in the process of digesting Leiter’s book and think that the issue of the reasonableness of religion needs some attention. (I promise this actually has to do with the issue of the defense of marriage; I’m just taking it bit by bit.)

Leiter thinks that religious claims are not fundamentally different from other claims of conscience, at least as far as claims for legal protection go. This isn’t a book review, so I’ll just go ahead and say that one of the key premises to get him there is the supposed ‘fact’ that religion is “insulated from the standards of evidence and reasons that have been vindicated a posteriori since the scientific revolution”. In other words, we religious people do not have to provide evidence for our beliefs; we can simply aver them. This is distinguished from what we might still term “beliefs” in science, because “beliefs based on evidence are…revisable in light of the evidence,” whereas  even in the most intellectual traditions of religion (i.e., in which doctrines/beliefs might answer to evidence in some way), “the whole exercise is one of post-hoc rationalization, as is no doubt obvious to those outside the sectarian tradition.”

Ok, fine. I’m going to go ahead and admit that the resurrection of Christ, the Trinity, any number of miracles – these probably don’t stand up to the scrutiny of normal scientific reasoning. (Leiter has yet to answer why it is that these are the only acceptable reasons in the public sphere or in law, and I’ll go ahead and blaspheme one of the superstars of legal theory and say that he should know better.) Does this mean that I am unreasonable to hold them as truth? No, and my goodness, has ink been spilled defending that proposition. Since I assume I’m writing largely to a friendly audience, let’s not repeat it for the time being.

What I want to ask, rather, concerns education. Are we as Christian…intellectuals, parents, educators, people, name the hat and put it on – are we doing enough to educate young Christians about the, er, reasonableness of Christianity? Leiter’s view of religion – “insulated from evidence” – is far, far from the fringe; if I had to guess I would say that he is friendlier to religion than the average academic, though that would have to be qualified quite a bit. But as a teacher of undergraduate students, many of whom were raised Christian, I wonder if we’re doing enough to provide young people with a third way, as it were. That is, they do not need to leave their beliefs wholly unexamined, but nor do they need to exalt science (or philosophy) in the place of God and insist that all truth appear in the same form.

I worry about this in large part because of the peculiar mix of students I teach. Georgetown undergraduates, speaking from experience are somewhat more religious than average college students,  above average in intelligence and motivation, and probably average on my imaginary scale of Figuring-Things-Out. That is, perhaps they were (as many in fact were) raised in Catholic schools their whole lives but don’t quite know if tradition has enough to get them through this new, confounding and exciting world they face at university (and in Washington). Or maybe they were raised as Evangelical Christians and are very enthused about the new opportunities to practice their faith that college, a new city, and new ideas present them with. Or they’re secular, having been raised by well-educated parents who themselves never placed a high priority on religion, and a Jesuit school requires – sometimes meeting with interest, other times not – that they study at least some theology and philosophy.

So what are we offering them? While entirely conceding that no culture has been evangelized (or re-evangelized) by arguments alone, I nevertheless think it’s critical that the Catholic student learns how her dry introduction to the Summa is every bit as profound as the (not making this up) Freudian reading of Genesis she is now being subjected to (by which I mean, infinitely more so, but I would settle for parity). The Evangelical student, who, in my experience, has usually had church (faith) and school (reason) separately up until this point, needs to be exposed not only to the wonders of the scientific revolution but also to Christian metaphysics. And the secular student often needs to learn that those weird religious people might not just be brainwashed or supremely old-fashioned; maybe Augustine actually was really smart, after all. And maybe he’s worth considering, even with all of the fancy Freud and physics and lit crit he is learning for the first time.

Why? Let me use Plato to defend the use of Plato. In Book VII of the Republic, Socrates and Glaucon are discussing the need for prudence in bringing philosophical enlightenment to those still living “in the cave.” There are risks, Socrates implies, in pulling individuals away from justice-by-convention, i.e., living according to how one was raised (see students above) and directing them towards the philosophical life.

(Socrates): But what happens when such a man confronts the question: what is honorable? After giving the answer he learned from the one who taught him the laws, he is refuted in argument. Many and diverse refutations follow, upsetting his faith and making him believe that there is really difference between being honorable and being base. When he goes through the same thing with justice and goodness and all the things he values most, will he honor and respect them as before?

(Glaucon): Impossible.

 (Socrates): Then when he no longer regards the old beliefs as binding and true principles still elude him, will he not be likely to settle in to the life that feeds and flatters his desires?

He will.

Then he will have ceased to be a law-abiding man; he will have become an outlaw.

Necessarily.

So what will happen when my students, raised to live as “good Christians,” start to think about “what is the good?”  When the Brian Leiters of Georgetown and University of Wisconsin and Carroll College teach them that their beliefs are mere belief, not tested by or answerable to either philosophical or scientific standards, will they be able to turn to other professors, pastors or parents to keep both their faith and intellects alive? Or will they be offered the mutually exclusive choices of either convention–including their Christian upbringing–or the philosophical life?

I don’t think that important issues like the defense of marriage or religious freedom will be settled by Christians making the best philosophical arguments available; culture and face-to-face relationships matter so much more directly in so many more cases. Nevertheless, I’m glad that GAG and others like them are making those arguments and doing the hard work of presenting the reasonableness of Christianity to a generation raised on Leiter-esque attitudes toward religion. Why? Because the people who will be building culture and establishing those face-to-face relationships in the future are more likely to be Christians if, when presented with scientific and philosophical challenges to their faith when they were 19-year-old freshmen in college, they also knew a professor who could nurture their intellects while also, if indirectly (and probably better that way), feeding the faith in their souls.