THE BODY IN QUESTION

Christine Rosen
the flesh made word
David Bosworth
the new immortalists
Mark Edmundson
body and soul
Rebecca Lemov
the data-driven body
Gordon Marino
lessons from the ring SUMMER 2015

WWW.H EDGEHOG R E V IE W.COM

Summer 2015 / Volume Seventeen / Number Two
17.2

FROM THE EDITORS / 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS

A Disease Just Like Any Other / 8
Joseph E. Davis

Are We There Yet? / 10

B.D. McClay

Throwing Away the Key / 12

Lisa Lorish

THE BODY IN QUESTION / 15

The Flesh Made Word: Tattoos, Transgression,
and the Modified Body / 16
Christine Rosen

The New Immortalists / 26

David Bosworth

Body and Soul / 38

Mark Edmundson

On Not Being There: The Data-Driven Body

at Work and at Play / 44
Rebecca Lemov

Lessons from the Ring—Then and Now / 56

Gordon Marino
ESSAYS
The Witness of Literature: A Genealogical Sketch / 64
Alan Jacobs

On the Value of Not Knowing Everything / 78

James McWilliams

The Great Subversion: The Scandalous Origins

of Human Rights / 90
Ronald Osborn

The Common Core and Democratic Education / 102

Johann N. Neem

BOOK REVIEWS
The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in
Early Western Christianity by Peter Brown / 112
Reviewed by Karl Shuve

Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism:

The Humanistic Alternative by James Seaton / 115
Reviewed by Steven Knepper

Higher Education in America by Derek Bok / 117

Reviewed by Chad Wellmon

The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a

Misunderstood Writer and Thinker by Daniel J. Mahoney / 119
Reviewed by James L. Nolan Jr.

The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and

Religious Counterrevolutions by Michael Walzer / 121
Reviewed by Jay Tolson

SIGNIFIERS
Narrative / 125
Wilfred M. McClay
The fox knows many things,
but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

—Archilochus

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5
 FROM
THE
EDITORS

MARK BAUERLEIN, A PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT EMORY UNIVERSITY,

recalls a startling pronouncement once made by a fellow academic: “Oh, it’s very
important that everyone does something to the body!” What struck Bauerlein, even
more than his colleague’s words, was how he meant them: “as a general moral injunc-
tion, a necessity.” That hortatory urgency, almost religious in its intensity, resonates
with something deep and widespread in our culture, something powerfully antici-
pated in the famous closing line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”:
“You must change your life.”
As philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues (in a book that takes the poet’s line as its
title), Rilke was one of the early prophets of the self-transformative enterprise that has
become the object of so many religion-like practices that flourish in the late modern
world. Self-making, or self-remaking, is at once the great liberation, challenge, and
burden of our age, bound up as it with the larger project of identity (elective identity,
in particular) and what we have come to call identity politics.
What does all this have to do with the body? Quite simply that new ways of under-
standing and treating the body—the focus of the thematic essays in this issue—are one
strong expression of the relocation of the sacred that is bound up with our self-making
projects. What we make of our bodies, in short, testifies to a great rupture.
For most of human history, the body enjoyed special, even hallowed, status
because humans believed that it was a gift, bestowed upon them by a power greater
than themselves. To those within theistic traditions, this power was divine; to those
from nontheistic traditions, that power might be the inherent order of nature and the
cosmos—the Tao, for example, of many Asian spiritual traditions. The body, by both
understandings, was an endowment intended to support humans in their passage
through this world, ideally for the attainment of a good life marked by virtue, hero-
ism, or wisdom. It was also a forceful reminder of both the limits and commonality
of the human.
Modernity’s slow onslaught on the traditional gods, as announced by Nietzsche
and other thinkers, did not destroy the sacred itself. Instead, the sacred was relo-
cated, dispersed, renamed. And new understandings of the sacred were supported
by new dogmas, many of which were formulated and expounded in the academy. As
Bauerlein says, summarizing the philosophy of his colleague:

6
 The body is NOT a natural thing or divine form. It has no natural or
supernatural status. That’s what my friend meant when he insisted on
coloring hair, writing words on forearms, inserting studs in tongues,
and otherwise modifying the physique. We must de-naturalize the
body, redefine it as a human construct.… Yes, each one of us is stuck
with the one we’ve got (at this point in time), but we can re-create it,
fashioning it into an expression of the identity we prefer.

Champions of identity and identity politics who see this new understanding as an
unquestionable good might reconsider. Even those who see the modern turn to iden-
tity as a necessary and laudable challenge to older conceptions of a universal human
nature—conceptions that were often used to advance the interests of the privileged
few of the right class, race, or gender—may sense how a project intended to liberate
can easily be turned to opposite ends. Consider, for example, how the preoccupa-
tion with identity and difference has been exploited through the subtle (and not-so-
subtle) processes of objectification, commodification, and commercialization.
There are even larger stakes. The reduction of the body to a kind of billboard or
platform, to something infinitely malleable, inscribable, or plastic, comports all too
neatly with the denial of a common humanity—and of those rights attendant upon
that shared humanity—that is now in the ascendant around the world. Although
his essay is not a part of our thematic treatment, Ronald Osborn’s reflections on the
origins of our conception of universal human rights is an apposite reminder that it
descends from the particular and “scandalous” proposition that all humans deserve
equal treatment and consideration because all are created in the image of God, the
Imago Dei. The body—with all its imperfections, individual variations, and limita-
tions—tethers us to the sacred ground of our being. We deny that connection at our
possible peril.

7
 Notes and Comments
A DISEASE JUST
LIKE ANY OTHER
The suicide last summer of the
actor and comedian Robin Wil-
liams sparked the latest round in
our ongoing public discussion
of mental illness. Predictably,
once speculation about details
of his life subsided, the concern
shifted to “stigma” (prejudice
and discrimination) and how
mental illness is misunderstood
and misrepresented. Unlike the
reality of physical illness, the
now-familiar argument runs, the
reality of mental illness is denied,
shrouded instead in benighted
moral judgments. “It is NOT
cowardly to suffer or seek help,”
tweeted Williams’s daughter on
World Mental Health Day in
October, giving fresh voice to
this widely shared position.
As early as 1961, the Joint
Commission on Mental Illness
and Health—“the last word
8
of the mental health establish-
ment”—in its final report,
Action for Mental Health,
lamented how the public had
turned “deaf ears” to the psy-
chiatric “cardinal tenet” that
the “mentally ill…are sick in
the same sense as the physically
sick,” and therefore should be
understood and treated just as
nonjudgmentally as those with
somatic afflictions. This tenet,
the commission made clear,
was not only a scientific truth,
but also critical to overcoming
negative attitudes and fostering
“humane, healing care.”
That rationale has since
informed countless public cam-
paigns by government commis-
sions, professional associations,
and advocacy organizations to
promote mental health “liter-
acy” and improved treatment.
Adding a new twist in recent
decades, such campaigns now
place a central emphasis on
neuroscience, both to promote
the view that mental health
problems arise from neuro-
biological aberrations and to
undermine resistance to the use
of neurobiological (i.e., psy-
chopharmaceutical) solutions.
Pharmaceutical companies,
which actually fund many of
these campaigns, advance the
same viewpoint.
The strategy of promoting
disease theories to the public
arose long before the “decade
of the brain” (1990–2000), and
does not now reflect any actual
breakthrough in our under-
standing of brain abnormalities.
While there is constant talk of
“revolutionized thinking” and
“dramatic improvements in
understanding the biology of
mental illness,” the reality is far
more pedestrian.
Indeed, if anything, new
findings in genetics and neu-
roscience are doing more to

undermine current ideas and
diagnostic categories than to
provide new models or bio-
logical markers, and have so far
yielded no treatment discover-
ies. The effective medications
remain those that were discov-
ered serendipitously long ago,
the last jackpot being the class
of antidepressants referred to
as selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors (Prozac, for example),
introduced in the 1980s. Even
now, we don’t understand the
relationship between the action
of psychiatric medications (e.g.,
increasing serotonin levels) and
the causes of disorder. This is
not to downplay the scientific
research or its potential. It is
simply to observe that clinical
payoffs remain aspirational.
The brain-disease promotion
strategy rests not on scientific
advances but on an assump-
tion—one might even say a
wager—about personal respon-
sibility. The logic behind this
wager has three steps.
First, the root cause of the
stigma that attaches to men-
tal health problems lies in
misguided attributions of
responsibility by sufferers and
non-sufferers alike. Both mis-
takenly believe that problems
are caused by moral failings or
weak willpower. The effort to
combat stigma must begin by
undercutting this blame.
Second, treating a mental
health problem as a somatic
disorder or disease presupposes
the presence of some underly-
ing and dysfunctional mecha-
nism in the individual that
reduces volitional control. (Talk
of disease thus always implies a
removal of personal responsibil-
ity. The addition of overstated
claims from neuroscience,
which suggest that underly-
ing somatic mechanisms have
in fact been identified, fortifies
and justifies the disease model.)
Third, once the burden of
responsibility is lifted, sufferers
will be open to seeking help and
accepting and staying in treat-
ment. This, in turn, will have
the consequence of improving
how other people react to them.
This logic has an intui-
tive and, paradoxically, moral
appeal. Promotion of the “dis-
ease just like any other” view is
widely regarded, in the words of
one study, to be a measure of a
“liberal, knowledgeable, benev-
olent, supportive orientation
toward the mentally ill.” No
wonder anti-stigma promoters
have so doggedly conducted
campaigns in its terms.
But there is a catch. Studies of
the relationship between belief
in brain disorders and stigma-
tizing attitudes do not find
greater tolerance, either among
psychiatric patients or the gen-
eral public. If anything, they
show just the opposite.
Over the past two decades,
both the general public and
patients themselves—historically
quite resistant to disease models
of emotional and psychological
problems—have become rela-
NOTES AND COMMENTS
tively more biologically minded.
This change correlates with an
increased endorsement of seek-
ing professional help and using
prescription medicine, as well as
some reduction in attributions
of blame: three of the central
goals of the public anti-stigma
campaigns (and pharmaceuti-
cal advertising). The change,
however, also correlates with
more intensely negative attitudes
toward those with mental health
problems, attitudes that are
shared even by sufferers them-
selves.
Promoting the brain disease
model has had the intended con-
sequence of contributing to the
medicalization of distress and
boosting the sale of psychophar-
maceuticals. If that wasn’t trou-
bling enough, the campaign has
also had the unintended conse-
quence of promoting the very
stigma and discrediting attri-
butes it sought to reduce.
What went wrong? Is this just
more evidence of ignorant lay-
people drawing the wrong con-
clusions after finally catching
on to the brain disease idea? Or
does the problem lie with the
wager on responsibility itself?
My interviews with people
over the years suggest that trad-
ing personal agency for a kind
of medical absolution exacts a
high price. After all, what level
of brain abnormality is implied
by the claim that diagnosed per-
sons are not responsible for their
actions? Surely, it must be a high
level—one at which behavior is
9
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
effectively determined by forces,
disease processes, beyond a per-
son’s intentional control. And
this would be a level we nor-
mally associated with only the
most severe psychoses.
At stake in the mental domain,
but far less in the strictly physical
one, is our very notion of per-
sonhood. Should it be a surprise
that accepting a disease model
that effectively strips people of
their agency and freedom leads
to prognostic pessimism for suf-
ferers and avoidance of sufferers
by others? The model, as my
interviews suggest, implies a cat-
egorical difference, a situating of
sufferers outside the community
of viable selves in which persons
are responsible for their actions.
Contrary to the theory, remov-
ing responsibility results in a
less favorable and more patron-
izing view of sufferers—and as
a result, more stigma, and more
isolation.
—Joseph E. Davis
ARE WE THERE YET?
Books and articles diagnosing
America’s spiritual afflictions
often ask the same questions:
Can women have it all? Where
have all the men gone? Are we
bad parents? Why are college
students so dumb? And where,
oh where, are all the adults?
That last question has recently
acquired particular urgency,
perhaps because it now seems
10
to subsume many of the oth-
ers. Anxiety over adulthood
has even become a miniature
growth industry, feeding off the
concerns of the young as well as
their elders. Although each gen-
eration tends to doubt that the
ones following it will be capable
of launching themselves, some-
thing different appears to be
happening now: It’s the young
themselves who seem most to
doubt their ability to assume
adulthood.
Among my fellow late-ish
twenty-somethings, the word
adult has become a verb. “Who
let me adult?” an acquaintance
asked recently after purchasing
a home. When adult becomes a
verb, adulthood itself becomes
something new: more an act
to be performed than a state to
be once and fully attained. For
young people suspended between
dependency and independence,
the material touchstones of adult-
hood—a house, a car, a benefits-
bearing job—seem far beyond
their reach.
To assist the would-be per-
former of adulthood, one
organization, the Society of
Grownups, employs “profes-
sional grownups” who “help the
next generation embrace their
inner adult.” It offers classes in
building stock portfolios, nego-
tiating salaries, cooking adult
meals, and planning “grownup
trips.” (The last class is titled
“Beyond the Hostel,” implying
that a grownup trip is necessar-
ily a costly one.)
For those who would rather
help themselves, there is Kelly
Williams Brown’s best-selling
self-help book Adulting: How
to Become a Grown-up in 468
Easy(ish) Steps. The cover shows
Brown, wearing a retro-styled
blue cocktail dress, sitting in
a clean room on a tan leather
couch with a pizza box at her
feet. Adulthood here is not
only a verb but a lifestyle, one
that requires spending a cer-
tain amount of money on one’s
furniture and clothes. An adult
is someone who has attained
enough maturity and where-
withal to purchase a tan leather
couch and keep it clean. The
pizza box functions as a wink:
Even Brown isn’t an adult all
the time.
In 1962, the young woman
striking out on her own might
have purchased a very different
book (by a different Brown).
Sex and the Single Girl, by Cos-
mopolitan editor Helen Gurley
Brown, was not the first self-
help guide aimed at young pro-
fessional women. Vogue editor
Marjorie Hillis had helped break
that ground in 1936 with Live
Alone and Like It. But the title
of Brown’s book was significant
because it spoke to girls, not to
women—more specifically, to
women who aspired to remain
girls. “The single woman…is
emerging as the newest glamour
girl of our times,” Brown wrote.
“She is free to be The Girl in a
man’s life, whether he is married
or single himself.”

Sex and the Single Girl was
a book for the young woman
uninterested in shouldering the
old responsibilities of marriage
or the new political responsibil-
ities of feminism; it supported
a quasi independence that was
still defined around the needs
of men. Brown’s single women
were smart (but not too smart),
stylish, and thin. She offered
them “a study on…how to stay
single—in superlative style.”
Married life was cast, by con-
trast, as dull and full of thank-
less obligations (and, of course,
the promise of eventual faith-
lessness on the part of the hus-
band, who was sure to become
bored).
Was Brown’s advice bad?
Undoubtedly—but it resonated
with other critiques of the time,
including Sloan Wilson’s The
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
(1955), Rona Jaffe’s The Best
of Everything (1958), Rich-
ard Yates’s Revolutionary Road
(1961), and Mary McCarthy’s
The Group (1963). All of these
books expressed a deep skepti-
cism over whether the security
promised by American adult-
hood was worth the price. “The
worst fate,” McCarthy wrote of
her Vassar graduate heroines in
The Group, “they utterly agreed,
would be to become like Mother
and Dad, stuffy and frightened.
Not one of them, if she could
help it, was going to marry a
broker or a banker or a cold-
fish corporation lawyer, like so
many of Mother’s generation.”
As early as 1949, the journal-
ist William H. Whyte produced
his first article exposing the
docile products of the American
education system as potentially
“so tractable and harmonious
as to be incapable…of making
provocative decisions.” Ameri-
can middle-class adulthood, as
dissected by social critics and
novelists of the fifties and six-
ties, was simply unfit for adults.
The roles it provided were too
thin and flimsy for people with
real ideals or aspirations. But in
rejecting those roles, many of
the young rebels of subsequent
decades experienced different
kinds of frustration and strug-
gled with achieving adulthood
themselves. Perhaps not sur-
prisingly, those staid and secure
roles now look more appealing
to many of today’s young adults.
The historian Steven Mintz,
in his recent book The Prime
of Life: A History of Modern
Adulthood, tracks the shift from
adulthood “defined by…mar-
riage, a full-time job, home
ownership, and childrearing” to
adulthood “as an outlook and
self-image, defined by financial
independence, a distinctive state
of mind, and particular sym-
bols of psychological maturity.”
Mintz characterizes the Ameri-
can attitude toward adulthood
as ambivalence. But it’s also
anxiety about being unable to
escape adolescence.
The twenty-somethings of the
1960s share with the twenty-
somethings of the 2010s an
NOTES AND COMMENTS
anxiety over their choices and
their roles. Today, there are
fewer formal limits placed on
choices, but the choices seem
impossible to make. People
begin to think nostalgically of
roles. “If only nobody was tell-
ing us what to do” becomes “if
only we were told what to do
and how to decide.” But neither
of these is really the problem.
Even within the best possible
range of choices, choosing
one thing means not choosing
another. No matter how much
we should try to structure soci-
ety so that most people have the
best possible choices available to
them, there will still be people
who are unhappy, regretful, or
disappointed.
If Mintz is correct in conclud-
ing that we are shifting away
from an adulthood defined
by institutional and material
attainments, our new adulthood
will be one that is both easier
and harder to attain. If adult-
hood comes to be defined not
by success or financial stability
but by an acceptance of limits,
then the only person who will
truly know whether or not he
or she is an adult will be—you,
yourself. Such certainty is hard
to come by, and that difficulty
makes adulthood almost syn-
onymous with anxiety over
achieving adulthood. To those
graduating from college and
establishing themselves, take
heart: You already adult.
—B.D. McClay
11
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
THROWING AWAY
THE KEY
When he was eighteen, Rene
Lima-Marin and a friend robbed
two Colorado video stores of a
total of about $11,500, threat-
ening the employees of both
establishments with a gun.
Each man was charged with
two counts of first-degree bur-
glary and three counts of aggra-
vated robbery. Under pressure
from years of increasing gang
violence in Denver, Colorado’s
Eighteenth Judicial District had
answered the growing public
outcry with tough new sen-
tencing protocols. Lima-Marin
found himself labeled a chronic
offender. Offered a sentence of
seventy-five years if he would
plead guilty, he decided to risk
going to trial, hoping that a
lenient judge would find some
or all of the evidence inadmis-
sible. That didn’t happen, and
Lima-Marin ended up paying
what the National Association
for Criminal Defense Lawyers
calls a “trial penalty.” Convicted,
Lima-Marin was sentenced to
ninety-eight years.
What makes the case remark-
able is what happened next.
In what his attorney legiti-
mately believed was the result
of an appeal (but was in fact
the product of clerical error),
Lima-Marin came up for parole
after serving only a decade of
what was in effect a life sen-
tence. Released, he immedi-
ately moved in with his former
12
girlfriend and became her son’s
stepfather. He found and held
jobs. The couple married,
became regular churchgoers,
bought a home, and had a son
together. Lima-Marin men-
tored at-risk youth and coached
his stepson’s soccer team. He
committed no new crimes and
successfully completed his five
years on parole.
Then, in 2014, five years
and eight months after he was
released, Lima-Marin received
a call notifying him that his
release had been a mistake and
that a judge had signed the
order for his arrest. He was
picked up the very same day
and, after a quick hearing, was
taken back to prison, where he
faced at least seventy-five more
years before possible parole. He
was in his thirties at the time.
All students of criminal law
learn that there are five differ-
ent justifications for the pun-
ishment of those who commit
crimes: retribution, deterrence,
rehabilitation, restoration, and
incapacitation. In federal crimi-
nal practice, these rationales are
explicitly spelled out by stat-
ute. Yet with all of these con-
siderations supposedly in play,
the vast majority of criminal
sentences in the United States
are handled with two tools,
sometimes combined: fines and
incarceration (often followed by
a period of supervised release or
probation). The criminal justice
system’s bluntest tool—incar-
ceration—takes account of ret-
ribution (punishing a societal
wrong), incapacitation (keep-
ing someone dangerous off the
streets), and deterrence (pro-
viding a disincentive to oth-
ers to commit similar kinds of
criminal acts). Financial penal-
ties reflect the need for restora-
tion (making a wrong right), at
least in cases of fraud and theft,
though for the greatest num-
ber of offenses that result in
fines (driving offenses or other
“crimes against society”), the
imposition of a monetary pay-
ment appears to be more about
retribution and deterrence than
anything else. Moreover, when
fines with quickly accruing
interest go unpaid, incarcera-
tion often results.
But while fines and incar-
ceration satisfy most justifica-
tions for punishment, it would
be hard to argue that they do
anything toward rehabilitation.
Indeed, with many jails and
prisons now offering prisoners
little or no access to educational
opportunities, vocational train-
ing, or mental health or addic-
tion treatment, few would say
that incarceration is serving any
rehabilitative purpose.
Although not alone in doing
so, philosopher Jonathan Jacobs
makes a persuasive case that
incarceration, far from being
rehabilitative, usually has a cor-
rosive effect on the character of
prisoners. He points to several
contributing factors: a lack of
autonomy; the impression, at
least, that disciplinary regula-

tions and sanctions are arbitrary;
the constant threat of violence;
the lack of meaningful social
interactions; inadequate mental
health care. Additional post-
incarceration hurdles faced by
a convicted felon (lack of access
to government benefits and
loans, severely limited employ-
ment possibilities) only increase
the likelihood that he or she will
be driven back to crime.
The most recent US Bureau
of Justice Statistics study on
recidivism rates for state prison-
ers released from incarceration
(published in 2005) produced
staggering findings. Two-thirds
of the state prisoners tracked in
the study were re-arrested (not
necessarily re-convicted) within
three years of their release. That
figure jumped to three-quarters
within five years of release.
The case of Lima-Marin
should make us stop and ask
why we punish, and what hap-
pens to those we punish. No
longer used by the federal gov-
ernment and many states, the
parole system formerly pro-
vided for indeterminate sen-
tences, with the possibility of
earlier release depending on a
defendant’s behavior and dem-
onstrated rehabilitation. The
movement to abolish parole in
the 1990s coincided with the
push to legislate mandatory
minimum sentences, the aim
of both being the elimination
of discretion, and therefore
discrepancies, among criminal
sentences.
NOTES AND COMMENTS
But uniform sentencing is
both a blessing (arguably coun-
Signs
teracting racial and other biases)
and a curse (removing the abil-
ity of a judge or parole board
to assess individual offenders).
The elimination of parole also
of the
removes the political risk that
a recently paroled offender will
times
commit a crime that will spark
public outrage directed against
not only the perpetrator but
also elected officials and the
judiciary. Ultimately, though,
the demise of parole sends a
deeply demoralizing message
to the incarcerated: We don’t
care what you do to try to
rebuild your life while you are
in prison. In much-publicized
contrast with the American
system, Norway caps criminal
sentences at twenty-one years,
extending them in five-year
increments only if it is deter-
mined that an offender is not
rehabilitated by the end of his
or her initial term.
By rebuilding his life with-
out committing another crime
within five years after his
release, Lima-Marin beat the
odds, and he did so after serving Follow
only about a tenth of his sen- The Hedgehog
tence. In addition to making us
think about the sheer length of Review
the sentence he received at age on
eighteen, might his story sug- Facebook
gest that rehabilitation needs a
more prominent place in our and
thinking about the means and Twitter.
ends of punishment?
—Lisa Lorish
13
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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

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iasc-culture.org

14
 THE BODY IN QUESTION

O
ur bodies, ourselves? In one sense, of course. But the things
we now do to our bodies, whether through tattooing, piercing,
or sculpting, and the ways we attempt to perfect or transcend
them, whether through extreme fitness regimes, self-tracking, or artificial
enhancements, suggest new, if not fully articulated, conceptions of the
human person and the ends and purposes of human existence.
These conceptions have a history, of course. They derive in part
from a centuries-old confidence in the power of science to fix, extend,
and possibly even “immortalize” our physical selves. They resonate with
the American dream of self-remaking and the New Adam. And they
recast the Protestant concern with the born-again experience in secular
and material terms (see Bosworth’s essay).
But these ideas have been transformed and popularized through
association with assorted projects reflecting our highly individualistic
and commodified culture, from identity politics and transhumanism to
the Quantified Self movement to assorted cults of body modification.
“Today,” writes Christine Rosen in her essay, “devotees of body
modifications are a thriving subculture with their own social networks,
e-zines, websites, conventions, and celebrities.” However different in
particulars, all such projects share a view of the body as a malleable
object, subject only to personal whim or desire. That view prevails
because we now have bodies seemingly devoid of souls, and therefore
bodies quite different from what humans long thought them to be: as
part of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called a “stupendous antagonism”
(see Edmundson’s essay).
It may be the supreme irony that the death of the soul presages
the demise of the body. The merger of humans with smart machines—
the “Singularity” sought after by assorted futurists and high-tech
visionaries—is already underway. It is visible in the extensive human-
machine interactions of people at work and play. But as historian of
science Rebecca Lemov notes in her essay, the visible is often ignored:
“Despite the fact that the vacant or overly tracked body is increasingly
the condition of certain kinds of repetitive and exploitative work, the
body remains in the background of our awareness.”
And despite the various attentions we now lavish on the body, the
body itself may be losing its true magisterium (see Marino’s essay). No
longer a source of wisdom about human limits and potential, it is now
seen as a means of self-transformation, an instrument in the pursuit of
perfection—or an equally elusive immortality.

15
 The Flesh Made Word
Tattoos, Transgression, and
the Modified Body

Christine Rosen

I
n 1882, the Duke of York, who later became King George V of England, traveled to
Japan with his brother, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. Prince George had an
audience with Emperor Meiji and, according to historian Donald Keene, presented
Empress Maruko with two wallabies from Australia. He also visited a tattoo artist, who
inscribed a dragon on the arm of the future king (as well as one on his brother).1 They
were not the first royals to have themselves tattooed—twenty years earlier, their father,
King Edward VII, had had a Jerusalem cross tattooed on his arm during a visit to the
Holy Land. And in 1066, King Harold II’s tattoos were used to identify his body after
he died at the Battle of Hastings.
Human beings have always marked themselves. Özti the Iceman, a Bronze Age
man whose 5,000-year-old remains were found in the Alps on the Austria-Italy bor-
der, had several tattoos, including a small cross behind his left knee. Using a com-
puted tomography scan, researchers at the British Museum recently discovered that
a female Egyptian mummy dating from 700 CE had the name “Michael” tattooed
on her thigh. Tattoos and other body modifications have long been a way to mark
one’s membership in a group. Members of indigenous tribes, practitioners of certain
religions, sailors, prisoners, and gang members have all used permanent body mark-
ing as a way to signal belonging.
Today, devotees of body modification are a thriving subculture with their own social
networks, e-zines, websites, conventions, and celebrities. They embrace not only tattoo-
ing but also practices such as scarification (deliberate scarring of the skin), subdermal

Christine Rosen is senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society
and a Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation. She is the author of Preaching
Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement and The Extinction of
Experience (forthcoming).

Right: “My Tatts Are Personal” by Elizabeth Waugh; Photolibrary/Getty Images.

16
17
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

implants such as bumps and spikes on the forehead, various body piercings and dental
modifications, and stretching of the lips, earlobes, and nostrils, among other body
parts. The heavily tattooed men and women who used to be displayed as “freaks” at
carnival sideshows would barely get a second glance at a contemporary body modifica-
tion convention such as ModCon.
In an era of excessive individualism, our markings and modifications are viewed not
as a sign of freakishness or outlier behavior but as an expression of personal taste, devoid
of historical or cultural baggage. I doubt that the waitress at my favorite pizza place,
who has a delicate butterfly tattoo winding up
her wrist, thought much about the fact that
In an era of excessive individualism, her ink gives her a shared history, stretching
our markings and modifications are back centuries, with both British royalty and
prison gang members. “I just thought it was
viewed not as a sign of freakishness or beautiful,” she told me, when I asked her why
outlier behavior but as an expression she got tattooed. And it is.
But as body modification becomes more
of personal taste, devoid of historical individually expressive and less an expression
or cultural baggage. of affiliation, its cultural meaning becomes
clouded. What does the weakening of stigma
associated with some body modifications sug-
gest about cultural change? What does our embrace of the extremes of body modifica-
tion reveal about our understanding of the integrity of the human body? What do these
extremes have to teach us about more accepted cultural practices such as dieting and
cosmetic surgery? And what motivates us to do these things to ourselves?

A Personal Mantra

Tattoos are a useful case study because they have moved from stigma to acceptance and
back again many times in history. Once the province of criminals and other stigmatized
groups, in the past thirty years tattoos have become a mainstream feature of American
culture. You can find tattoos on people of nearly every class and race. Today, “It was spring
break” is just as likely to be the answer to the question of why someone got tattooed as “I
was in prison” was for previous generations. People now embrace tattoos to honor some-
one who died, to commemorate an important life event, or to have a permanent reminder
of a personal mantra. Julia Gnuse, an American woman with more than 95 percent of
her body tattooed, originally began covering herself with ink to mask the ravages of por-
phyria, a condition that leads to blistering and scarring of the skin.
A 2012 Harris Interactive poll found that one in five American adults has a tattoo,
with people thirty to thirty-nine more likely to be tattooed than members of any other
age group. Evidently, most people who get “inked” don’t regret their tattoos; 86 percent
of the respondents said they never had. The association of tattoos with deviance or
criminality has apparently faded; 75 percent of the people surveyed said that having a
tattoo didn’t make a difference in what they thought about someone’s likely behavior.2

18
 THE FLESH MADE WORD / ROSEN

Demographically, there are few differences among those who do and don’t get tat-
tooed: Slightly more Hispanic people than white or black people have tattoos, and
slightly more women than men. Politically, tattoos have nearly bipartisan appeal—17
percent of Republicans versus 22 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of independents
have them. The military has loosened restrictions on tattoos for enlisted personnel, and
popular musicians and celebrities frequently display their tattoos in movies and photos.
More extreme forms of body modification are even making appearances in the realm
of high fashion: The fall 2015 Givenchy runway show featured models with (fake)
pierced septums and glued-on stones meant to resemble cheek piercings, and a photog-
rapher, Christian Saint, recently published a book titled Tattoo Super Models. “I think
people are realizing that tattoos are not that different from fashion itself,” said Saint in
an interview with the British newspaper The Daily Mail. “Their artwork is as much of
who they are as the clothes they wear.”3
Extreme modification practices are also seeping into the mainstream. The checkout
clerk at my grocery store has two black stretchers in his earlobes. When I asked him
about them, he shrugged and said he “just wanted to try it out.” The holes are about
half an inch in diameter now and no more noticeable than a small pair of hoop earrings.
In a culture that has embraced cheek, lip, pectoral, and many other kinds of implants
and injections routinely sought by cosmetic surgery patients, it seems unfair to label a
man with stretched earlobes as any more or less freakish than a woman with distend-
ed, cosmetically enhanced lips. The line between cosmetic and therapeutic practices
appears no longer to exist in contemporary culture; judging by the amount of money
people spend on it every year (more than $12
billion in the United States in 2013), cosmetic
surgery is therapy for many people.4 It seems unfair to label a man with
As we begin to view body modification as stretched earlobes as any more or
an expression of individual aesthetic prefer-
ence and less as a marker of deviant behavior, less freakish than a woman with
cultural theorists have a harder time making distended, cosmetically enhanced lips.
sense of it. The field of cultural studies often
looks to the margins to better understand the
center, and often takes a celebratory rather than critical approach to those it deems
“transgressive.” This is problematic with regard to body modification. Only 25 percent
of the people with tattoos surveyed by Harris Interactive said getting one made them
feel more rebellious. (Far more claimed it made them feel “sexy.”) Once a practice is
mainstreamed and commodified and stripped of its subversive associations, can it really
be called transgressive?

Defining Deviance

The difficulty of defining deviance is one of the problems that bedevil Beverly Yuen
Thompson’s recent book, Covered in Ink, her “ethnography” of what she calls a “deviant
group”: heavily tattooed women. The author, herself one of these women, begins with

19
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

the obligatory discussion of her own victim status: “As a mixed-race Chinese/White and
petite woman, I face stereotyping.”5
Thompson is highly sensitive about what others think about her tattoos. Throughout
the book, she complains that strangers ask “silly and uninformed questions” about
them, such as “Did that hurt?” or “What does that mean?” She is offended when people
compliment her by saying “Nice tats,” because she feels that it sounds too much like
“Nice tits.” “I felt that my tattoos were beautiful and reflective of my inner self, yet
I feared misunderstanding from the general public,” she writes. Even so, most of the
other heavily tattooed women she interviews describe their experience in public space
as generally positive, and are less bothered by the unwelcome critical remarks they
sometimes receive.6
In spite of this diversity of experience, Thompson feels she must politicize the mean-
ing of the “socially sanctioning glares” she claims to receive on a regular basis. Citing
sociologist Erving Goffman’s pioneering work on social interaction in public space, she
argues that tattooed women face especially hurtful stigma and opprobrium in public
because they are acting in a way that transgresses social boundaries.7
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu claimed that evaluating the deficiencies of anoth-
er’s appearance is one of the ways the “petit bourgeois” exercise their power over oth-
ers whom they deem “vulgar.” “These refusals, almost always expressed in the mode
of distaste, are often accompanied by pitying
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu or indignant remarks about the corresponding
tastes. (‘I can’t understand how anyone can like
claimed that evaluating the that!’),” he wrote.8
deficiencies of another’s appearance But in a society where both the powerful and
the powerless embrace modifications such as tat-
is one of the ways the “petit toos, refusal goes both ways. Once, when I was
bourgeois” exercise their power over with my young sons, we encountered someone
who had visible, graphic tattoos of scantily clad
others whom they deem “vulgar.” women on his arms. My kids naturally asked
me about the tattoos (within earshot of the man
who was tattooed). I explained to them that he had the right to put whatever he wanted
on himself, just as they had a right to have an opinion about it. Although I would rather
not have had my five-year-old boys see highly sexualized images of naked ladies on a
man’s arm, I don’t think seeing those tattoos harmed them. But what if his tattoos had
included racist statements? Would I have been within the bounds of civil behavior to
say something about his uncivil display?
In his work, Goffman describes the rules of civil interaction in public space as akin
to a delicate dance—a give-and-take that requires the active and thoughtful participa-
tion of both people in a social encounter if it is to go smoothly. Thompson, by con-
trast, wants others, despite their understandable curiosity, to suppress their reactions
to and interpretations of her highly visible tattoos; there is no give-and-take, only her
autonomy. She even suggests that the non-tattooed can’t understand the culture of the
tattooed, and condescendingly describes the efforts of a young woman who wanted to
make a documentary about tattooed women by noting her failure to find participants:

20
 THE FLESH MADE WORD / ROSEN

Because the would-be filmmaker was “non-tattooed, her knowledge about the culture
was lacking, and this came through in her approach.”9

Spectacle, Performance, and Power

What emerges from Thompson’s approach is a need to impose her own categories
on others’ expressions of themselves. A woman with one tattoo isn’t transgressive,
Thompson argues, because it is now socially acceptable to have “small, cute, and hid-
den tattoos.”10 That tiny dolphin that you had inked on your ankle in college isn’t
transgressive enough—you are still laboring under false consciousness and trying to
live up to misguided standards of female
beauty. If your leg is tattooed with zombies
or skulls or snakes, however, you’ve struck a Trying to impose theory on such a
blow against the patriarchy. But what if you diversity of tattoo practices, as cultural
live in a conservative religious community
where tattooing is forbidden? One tiny, hid- studies practitioners are wont to do,
den, “feminine” tattoo might represent a far often sheds more heat than light.
greater challenge to authority than a sleeve of
tats would on an atheist barista in Brooklyn.
There is an inherent contradiction in the cultural studies work of scholars such as
Thompson. She wants tattoos (her own and those of others) to mean something, some-
thing that aligns with her view of power and social relationships in contemporary culture.
She wants them to show that women are using their power to upend social expectations
by embracing a previously masculine practice (heavy tattooing) and claiming it as their
own. But she also wants people to pretend not to notice the results of their upending of
expectations. The final chapter of her book includes a guide to “tattoo etiquette” in which
she advises non-tattooed people (that is, the majority of the population) how to behave.
You could glean far better tips on etiquette and a far more complex view of the cul-
tural tropes of body modification by watching one of the many reality television shows
that feature tattoo artists. Series such as Miami Ink and Black Ink Crew offer intimate
glimpses of the business of tattooing.
Some of the shows follow the model of cosmetic-surgery reality programming, fea-
turing botched procedures and sensationalistic personality clashes meant to fuel ratings.
But others offer insight into the motivations of people who want tattoos—and there are
as many motivations as there are styles of body modification. Trying to impose theory
on such a diversity of practices, as practitioners of cultural studies are wont to do, often
sheds more heat than light.
And what about the more extreme modification practices? Experimental performance
artist Ron Athey regularly inserts large needles and metal hooks into his skin, as well as
performing scarification and branding in front of live audiences. He calls this self-harm a
form of art, a commentary on being an HIV-positive gay man who grew up in a restrictive
Pentecostal household. “My work always has a philosophical question, a thesis,” Athey
told a reporter for Vice. One of his facial tattoos is a teardrop below his eye.11

21
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

Other extreme body modifiers have become celebrities and performance artists
who make their living displaying their modifications: Maria Jose Cristerna, a Mexican
mother of four and former lawyer who now works as a disc jockey, calls herself
“Vampire Lady”; she has had her teeth filed down to fangs, has been tattooed on
nearly every inch of her skin, and had titanium horns implanted in her head. Eric
Sprague, a performance artist from Texas who calls himself “Lizardman,” has pierc-
ings, tattoos, and implants along his forehead; he even had his tongue surgically
bifurcated to resemble a lizard’s tongue.
To many people, the more extreme forms of body modification suggest a kind
of debasement of the human form, a rejection of the body rather than a celebration
of it. Scholars such as Sheila Jeffreys have criticized body modifiers’ invocation of
autonomy and postmodern feminism to justify their practices. She calls body modi-
fication a form of “mutilation” and argues that it is “a result of, rather than resistance
to, the occupation of a despised social status under male dominance.” 12 She views
body modifiers as more like the young women who engage in self-harm practices such
as cutting or those who suffer from eating disorders.
On Tumblr and other social media platforms, you can find countless teenage boys
and girls hosting “nonjudgmental” pages documenting various forms of self-harm
such as cutting and eating disorders. What is it that makes one form of self-inflicted
violence “art” and another an expression of depression or other mental illness?
Many of the techniques celebrated by cultural theorists as transgressive (ear stretch-
ing, certain forms of scarification) are appropriated from indigenous people who
themselves have often been considered victims of oppression by cultural theorists.
Fakir Mustafar (born Roland Loomis), a self-described “Master Piercer and shaman,”
has been experimenting on himself for decades and is considered to be the founder of
a “modern primitivism” that embraces a range of body modification practices. Now in
his eighties, he offers “Fakir Intensives”—
workshops on the “art, skills, and magic
The notion of empowerment, like the of body piercing and branding”—and by
descriptor transgressive, can be used to branding he does not mean the techniques
of marketers and advertisers.13
describe so many things that it has lost In her book In the Flesh: The Cultural
much of its rhetorical force. Politics of Body Modification, scholar
Victoria Pitts describes a young man active
in body modification: “His attitude toward
the body is postmodern and cyberpunk—he mixes tribal and high-tech practices to
create a hybrid style and sees the body as a limitless frontier for exploration and tech-
nological innovation.” Pitts believes that his actions “create not only spectacle and
controversy but also new forms of social rebellion through the body.”14
But Pitts and other theorists must also acknowledge that many of their “transgres-
sive” subjects are white, middle-class Western men and women who are not acting
so much like “modern primitives” intent on “postcolonial discourse” as they are like
the customers at the Build-a-Bear stores that dot American malls: adding and sub-
tracting modifications to create an expression of something lovably personal, an ideal

22
 THE FLESH MADE WORD / ROSEN

Tattooed woman, Shanghai, China, 2007; PYMCA/UIG/Bridgeman Images.

expression of their individual aesthetic preferences, not a commentary on power and

social norms.

The Meaning of the Body

Cultures get the theory they deserve. The logical conclusion of our excessively indi-
vidualistic and commodified culture is memoir masquerading as theory, and personal
experience standing in for social empowerment. Take the work of Lianne McTavish,
a professor of art at the University of Alberta, who engaged in “embodied research”
by entering the Northern Alberta Bodybuilding Championships. Claiming that she
was not subject to the male gaze but appropriating it, she published a scholarly book,
Feminist Figure Girl: Look Hot While You Fight the Patriarchy, in which she describes
her pursuit of a “visibly muscular X shape, with wide shoulders and lats that taper into
a narrow waist then flare out again with chiseled glutes and hams.” She argues that
bodybuilding isn’t merely a stereotypically masculine domain; she found acceptance
of a wide range of physical appearances and an “open and flexible practice” not unlike
yoga. But unlike yoga, her punishing, months-long training and diet regimen ended
not with her achieving inner peace but competing against other women on a stage while
slathered with tanning dye and decked out in a “tiny blue velvet bikini” and plastic
high heels, a vision of female empowerment likely unimaginable to, say, the nineteenth-
century suffragists.15
Then again, the notion of empowerment, like the descriptor transgressive, can be
used to describe so many things that it has lost much of its rhetorical force. Is every

23
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

porn star who buys enormous breast implants empowering herself by enhancing her
body’s market value, or becoming a victim of patriarchy by conforming to its demands?
Some cultural theorists argue that plastic surgery can never be transgressive because
the women having it are conforming to beauty stereotypes (often while keeping their
conformity “hidden” by lying about their surgical alterations); plastic surgery junkies
pursue a “normative body project,” as one cultural theorist has argued. Body modifica-
tion advocates, by contrast, make a deliberately public statement about their bodies
that challenges norms. “Pierced, scarred, and tattooed…the body is a site of symbolic
resistance, a source of personal empowerment, and the basis for the creation of a sense
of self-identity,” declares Daniel Wocjik, an English professor who has written about
body modification.16
But what is normal? With the virtual increasingly replacing the real, perhaps the real
has to become more extreme to feel genuine. As we perform and live more of our lives
online, our memories and experiences and identities take on an increasingly ephemeral
and homogenized quality; a metal spike through the ear, by contrast, is a lastingly
corporeal statement.
And as body modification itself becomes normalized, the need to attach theories to
people’s motivations disappears. Both of my sisters are tattooed—my older sister has
one small tattoo (which cultural theorists such as Thompson would define as typically
feminine and thus not genuinely transgressive), and my younger sister is extensively
tattooed. Neither regrets getting inked. Nor do my sisters entertain complicated theo-
ries about what their tattoos might mean to anyone else. They got them because they
wanted to. Their tattoos are an expression of their sense of self, like the clothing they
wear or the hobbies they pursue.
Cultural theorists would say that that’s only the beginning of the story, not the
end. They would be right in one sense: Body modification is always a cultural signifier
because the body is the site of our views about what a person is (or should be) and how
that person should (or should not) behave. There are reasons why we modify our own
bodies, and there are reasons why social groups pressure their members to look a certain
way. Societies generally want conformity (and stability) from their members, but indi-
viduals within social groups often seek to highlight their difference and individuality.
If practitioners of body modification want the freedom to see their bodies as expres-
sions of their individuality, then they must also accept that others might freely express
their disapproval. In a world where we’re encouraged to rank, review, promote, “like,”
or retweet every meal we eat and item we purchase, why should someone else’s aesthetic
choices, however quixotic, be free from our relentless, instantaneous rush to judgment?
Our current approach to body modification—haphazard, arbitrary, and driven
almost entirely by individual preference—is not without its own risks. By embracing
modification as personal preference, we avoid wrestling with some important ques-
tions: What is the meaning of the body? Is it something sacred, a temporary gift that
we have a responsibility to use well? Is it a bequest from God, or nature, for which we
bear responsibility?
Today we treat our bodies like material possessions over which we have exclusive
ownership and, we incorrectly assume, total control. But questions about the human

24
 THE FLESH MADE WORD / ROSEN

body will only become more important in the near future, when we will have access to
a range of new technological and genetic enhancements that will force us to confront
what it even means to be human.
The conversations we should be having aren’t about deviance and power and the
fetishization of difference; they are about the integrity of the human body. After all,
our physical bodies are the means by which we understand ourselves and the world,
and the greatest proof of our shared history as human beings. They are what we have
in common with each other, no matter how much we attempt to change. That under-
standing, like the tattooists’ skill with needle and ink, is something we must cultivate
if we don’t want it to fade.

Endnotes

1 Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852−1912 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002), 811.
2 Harris Interactive, “One in Five U.S. Adults Now Has a Tattoo,” February 23, 2012; http://www.har-
risinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/mid/1508/articleId/970/ctl/ReadCustom%20
Default/Default.aspx.
3 Christian Saint, Tattoo Super Models (New York: Goliath Books, 2015); Maybelle Morgan and Toni
Jones, “Think Tattoos Are for Thugs? Think Again,” Daily Mail Online, March 13, 2015; http://www.
dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2990264/The-stunning-models-covered-intricate-tattoos-vying-make-
inkings-big-thing-catwalk.html.
4 “Statistics, Surveys, and Trends,” American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, March 20, 2014; http://
www.surgery.org/media/news-releases/the-american-society-for-aesthetic-plastic-surgery-reports-ameri-
cans-spent-largest-amount-on-cosmetic-surger.
5 Beverly Yuen Thompson, Covered in Ink: Tattoos, Women, and the Politics of the Body (New York: New
York University Press, 2015), 5.
6 Ibid., 3−4.
7 Ibid., 4, 19.
8 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1984), 58, 61.
9 Thompson, Covered in Ink, 12.
10 Ibid., 10.
11 Amelia Abraham, “Ron Athey Bleeds for His Art,” Vice, September 24, 2014; http://www.vice.com/
en_uk/read/ron-athey-performance-art-amelia-abraham-121.
12 Sheila Jeffreys, “‘Body Art’ and Social Status: Cutting, Tattooing, and Piercing from a Feminist
Perspective,” Feminism and Psychology 10, no. 4 (2000), 410; http://www.brown.uk.com/selfinjury/jef-
freys.pdf.
13 This information on Mustafar is from his website, www.fakir.org.
14 Victoria Pitts, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003), 2.
15 Lianne McTavish, “What I Learned by Becoming a Body-Builder at Age 45,” The New Republic, March
30, 2015; http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121408/professor-studied-her-own-stint-bodybuilder.
See also McTavish, Feminist Figure Girl: Look Hot While You Fight the Patriarchy (Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 2015).
16 Daniel Wocjik, Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995); Keith
Alexander, “About Piercing,” Body Modification Ezine, 1999, quoted in Jeffreys.

25
 The New Immortalists

David Bosworth

“In two hundred years, doctors will rule the world. Science reigns already. It
reigns in the shade, maybe—but it reigns. And all science must culminate at last
in the science of healing. Mankind wants to live—to live.”
—Comrade Ossipon, in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

Tattoos drilled into every curving surface from neck to feet to advertise our latest beliefs
and heartfelt allegiances; rings and studs protruding from every possible appendage;
Botox shots whose neurotoxin, paralyzing facial muscles, temporarily removes the history
of our moods by erasing laugh and frown lines; scalpel-sculpting surgeries that suck away
ungainly fat from sides and thighs or nip-and-tuck to iron out the shriveling caused by
too much sun and gravity; various and sometimes severe diets based on intricate theories
of human development (paleo, Viking, very low calorie); fanatical physical training pur-
sued either to hone a seductive appearance (the actor’s six-pack abs) or to win the laurels
of extreme achievement (the Ironman Triathlon); pharmaceutical fixes broadly advertised
and promiscuously prescribed for all manner of ailments, a new drug pitched, it some-
times seems, for every age-old pain and psychic misery: To borrow the title from a recent
group of so-called reality TV shows, ours has been an age of the “extreme makeover.” And
increasingly here in the land of opportunity, this radical remaking of the American self is
being pursued through the perfection of the flesh—through beautifying, fortifying, and
(just now commencing) digitizing the human body.
The remaking of the self is, of course, an old theme, and one central to the most tra-
ditional conceptions of the national character and the American dream. Both Protestant

David Bosworth is an associate professor of English at the University of Washington

and a widely published essayist. In addition to two prize-winning works of fiction, he
is the author of The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great
Recession, published last summer; a companion volume will be published in 2016.

Right: Photograph by Maarten Wouters; Photonica/Getty Images.

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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

theology’s special emphasis on the born-again experience (our Puritan legacy) and the
economic ambitions of the immigrants who landed here cultivated the expectation of a
dramatic transformation of the individual’s status. For a long time, the dualistic nature
of that expectation both energized and disciplined the American experiment in a liber-
ated individualism; in particular, religious revivals periodically counterbalanced an avid
pursuit of the main chance. Such a capacity for internal self-correction now seems to
have waned, though. Attendance at religious services here does remain high, at least
when compared to observance in Western Europe, but our fastest-growing congrega-
tions of late are ones that have replaced the old emphasis on the myth of the Fall with
various versions of a “prosperity theology.”
Rather than counteracting it, that newer religious message confirms and abets the
rampant materialism of a society whose every other domain is now being marketized
for monetary gain. Our coins are still stamped with “In God We Trust,” but the money,
not the motto, better defines the now dominant arc of American ambition. And as
the “good news” preached in mainstream pews begins to model itself after the get-rich
schemes of self-help gurus, the spirit of an age that idolizes its billionaires while obsess-
ing over the perfection of the flesh gravitates toward a kind of evangelical Mammonism.
Still, even as they are co-opted and cor-
rupted, those older beliefs do have an ongoing
Our coins are still stamped with “In impact on their replacements. The underlying
patterns of Christian theology and eschatol-
God We Trust,” but the money, not
ogy tacitly pre-shape the expectations of their
the motto, better defines the now most adamant opponents. Belief in a salva-
tional God has, for these secular evangelists,
dominant arc of American ambition.
been recast as faith in the redemptive power
of technological progress, and lately, among
the digerati especially, the old anticipation of the Second Coming is being replaced
by a parallel belief in the imminent arrival of the Singularity: that pivotal point when,
according to futurologists, we shall merge with our own super-smart machines and, in a
kind of second but self-initiated Genesis, become new beings entirely, “born again” into
a far better, if currently inconceivable, state. (“For now we see through a glass darkly;
but then face to face,” 1 Corinthians 13:12, King James Version.)
Under this scheme, the incorporeal soul, once thought to be the essence of selfhood,
naturally gives way to a purely physical conception of our core identity. Our bodies are
our selves, and, it is presumed, their animated clay can be re-scripted and re-shaped
according to our individual wills—wills empowered by our ever-improving technologi-
cal tools.
Those tools are impressive, but, as the list that opens this essay suggests, the human
desires they now bend to serve are as old as we can trace. Whether posting selfies, blo-
viating on blogs, or imbibing the products of today’s pharmacology, human beings still
want to call attention to themselves; they still desire to be socially admired and sexually
desired, to eliminate pain and escape disease. And, at once blessed and cursed with the
unique capacity to imagine the future (however darkly), they still greatly fear death and
seek any way possible to delay or deny it.

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Conrad’s Comrade Ossipon spoke prophetically. Now, as then, “mankind wants

to live—to live,” and although only one hundred years have passed, half of his pre-
dicted schedule, some of our physician-technicians are already focusing their “science
of healing” on a final cure for the human condition. Forget the Christian’s Heaven, the
Muslim’s Gardens of Paradise, the Buddhist’s escape from incarnation into Nirvana—
and forget the spiritual and ethical labors required to attain those eternal states in
otherworldly places. According to these latter-day doctors, death is not an inescap-
able fate but a technical problem, and one we soon will solve in the here-and-now by
immortalizing the body itself.

You Only Live Twice

“The Cryonics Institute is an ambulance ride to the high-tech hospital that we’re confident
will exist in the future. When the time comes and present medical science has given up on
you or your loved ones, we ask for a second opinion from the future. The choice is yours—Do
you take the chance at life or accept mortal fate?”
—“Why Choose Cryonics?”1

Recovering from battle wounds suffered during World War II, Robert Ettinger had
mortality on his mind when he ran across research in the field of cryogenics (the formal
study of materials subjected to extremely cold temperatures). Those readings led him to
speculate that fatally ill patients might be frozen alive and then preserved until medical
science had advanced sufficiently to revive them safely and provide new cures. His first
expression of that far-out notion was in a work of speculative fiction, “The Penultimate
Trump,” which appeared in 1948 in the magazine Startling Stories. Sixteen years later,
with the implicit endorsement of Isaac Asimov, who was asked by Doubleday to vet the
science cited, Ettinger published the nonfiction bestseller The Prospect of Immortality, to
much acclaim and controversy. Then, in 1976, with the intention of turning his uto-
pian theory into a real option, Ettinger’s Immortalist Society established the Cryonics
Institute.
For a one-time fee, this nonprofit institution
now “cryopreserves” its clients’ bodies, promising Death is not an inescapable fate
to store them until that day of reckoning when the but a technical problem.
ever-improving science of healing is ready to revive
them and cure their diseases. The current preferred
method, first practiced by the Institute in 2004, is called vitrification, and involves replac-
ing more than 60 percent of the water in the body with chemicals that prevent freezing;
saturated in such a way, clients’ flesh can then be stored at temperatures as low as minus
320 degrees Fahrenheit without the cellular damage that ice crystals normally cause.
Citing published abstracts and posting letters of support from researchers, the web-
sites of the Institute and its primary (and better-funded) rival, Alcor, emphasize the
scientific nature of their enterprise. But the fact remains that no one has been revived
after undergoing vitrification, and the whole process floats on grand hopes even as it

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challenges traditional definitions of life and death. Is the cryopreserved body a patient,
or is it a corpse? And are these new immortalists true physicians or merely high-tech
morticians, producing postmodern versions of Egyptian mummies for a second life that
will never come?
From a legal perspective, a client must be formally pronounced dead before cryo-
preservation can begin. In this sense, cryogenic intervention mirrors the dramatic
sequence associated with organ transplantation: constant communication with the fam-
ily of the mortally ill patient; an emergency team on standby to cool the body as soon
as death has been declared; a private flight back to the home base (Michigan for the
Institute, Arizona for Alcor), where vitrification commences and the body is stored to
await its high-tech cure. As a surgically removed
kidney is still viable for a time, so, too, these new
Is the cryopreserved body immortalists insist, is the whole body. Death is
a patient, or is it a corpse? not an on-or-off event but itself a process, and
only occurs when irreversible damage has been
done to our cells’ internal structures: a chaotic
state that normally takes four or five minutes, but that can be slowed by immediate
cooling after the heart has stopped and then suspended indefinitely via vitrification.
So long as their team arrives in time to “beat the Reaper” in this redefined way, their
clients, they claim, are true patients—unconscious, not dead, and as ready to be revived
when the time arrives as any heart attack victim on an ER table now would be.
Many illnesses, however, can cause significant internal damage prior to death,
diminishing the odds of a successful revival at some later date. This is especially true for
diseases of the brain—dementia, multiple ministrokes, voracious cancers—the organ
most closely associated with the very identity that the clients of cryonics are so desper-
ate to preserve. One temptation for true believers with those diseases, then, is to hasten
their entrance into cryopreservation in ways that society would define as assisted sui-
cide, an action still illegal in most states.
One such case did come to light in 1990. A computer scientist with terminal brain
cancer petitioned the California courts to force reluctant surgeons to fulfill his final
wish—which was to be decapitated before the tumor destroyed most of his brain cells.
He had an economic motive for the drastic means he had chosen. Although committed
to cryonics, he didn’t have the funds to purchase a whole-body procedure, and Alcor
was offering a “neuropreservation” special. It would store the brain alone, for about
one-third the cost of a whole-body treatment: $35,000 versus $100,000. From the
patient’s perspective, he was facing either decapitation then, when his brain was still
largely intact, or later, when his cancer would have destroyed much of his ability to
think at all. With the court’s permission, he was willing to sacrifice his remaining time
and most of his body in the faith that “he”—or at least the core component of the self
that he believed consisted of his brain alone—could be revived at a time when future
oncologists could cure his cancer.2
The courts did deny the petition of this bargain-seeking immortalist, and, given its
expense and the absence of anything like a scientific consensus on the viability of its
methods, cryonics more generally remains a movement on the fringes. In pursuing their

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Futuristic Adam by Mike Agliolo/Science Source/Getty Images.

utopian mission, these organizations have also been dogged by further litigation and
controversy. They have been sued by grieving family members who desire the finality of
a traditional burial or cremation service, and Alcor has been accused of harvesting the
DNA of its most famous patient, baseball great Ted Williams, for potential later sale.3
But even if true, that tawdry accusation doesn’t really capture the spirit of cryon-
ics. If there is a corruption at its core, the source isn’t the usual profiteering found in
our money-mad society but rather the inflation of hope—another key feature of our
national character—into the boundless sphere of hubristic fantasy. Conceived by a
mid-twentieth-century American, the movement supplies an extreme and thus illustra-
tive example of postwar boosterism, its cultivation of an ever-expectant attitude, the
irrepressible belief that Yankee can-do would do—whatever we wished, and soon. Fed
by ceaseless marketing, that attitude was pitched in the exhibits of world fairs and in
that mecca of American materialism, Disney’s Magic Kingdom; it was expressed in
corporate slogans like “Progress is our most important product” and by that therapeutic
mantra of perpetual self-improvement, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and
better.”
However meretricious those anthems to optimism may seem, they do have a deeper
source within the history of the West’s grand ideas. Since its origins in the seven-
teenth century, the logic of modernity has been promising us, to repurpose a phrase by
W.B. Yeats, the “profane perfection of mankind.” But as William Irwin Thompson has
observed, despite having donned the rhetorical robes of scientific probity, this “doc-
trine of progress cannot tolerate, or even perceive, disconfirmation.”4 Like millenarians
throughout history, our latter-day prophets of “profane perfection” tend to be blind to
their own predictive failures. Rather than recant, they keep resetting the date, place, and
specs for that extreme make-over—call it the Workers’ Paradise, the “end of history,”5

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or the Singularity—when the human predicament will be rationally solved once and
for all.
Unlike the schemes we graph in our minds, our bodies don’t continue to get “better
and better”; eventually, they do wither, sag, and weaken—they begin to die. And it is
just then, its teams on standby, that cryonics steps in to save the day. With the reality
of its patients’ deaths denied, the most devastating “disconfirmation” of the doctrine
of progress is once again deferred. Along with all those skull-less brains and headless
torsos, the incurable hopes of a utopian philosophy are cryopreserved.

Fantastic Voyage

“We have the means right now to live long enough to live forever.”
—Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near6

Still, it would be both inaccurate and ungrateful to deny that the science of healing has
made impressive progress. Since Conrad’s novel was published in 1907, life expectancy
has increased dramatically; and, insomuch as single-celled life forms reproduce through
division, creating duplicates of themselves ad infinitum, it also has to be admitted that
physical immortality of a certain sort is not utterly alien to the natural world. Cryonics’s
earliest advocates lacked convincing credentials, but a newer cast has recently emerged—
from prestigious labs and that epicenter of perpetual invention, Silicon Valley—to make
a science-based case for a self-generated
immortality in the near future.
3-D printing techniques could eventually Armed with new knowledge in many
eliminate the need for human donors, fields, these advocates insist that aging is
not a metaphysical fate but a biological pro-
and the body, like a classic car, might be
cess, and, as such, one that can be arrested
sustained indefinitely through a ceaseless and eventually reversed. Aubrey de Grey,
a Cambridge University−trained biogeron-
replacement of its various parts.
tologist who focuses on the mechanisms of
aging at the cellular level, claims that we
already possess the basic knowledge to pursue those goals and only lack sufficient funding
to make the dream come true. By 2100, he believes, “life expectancy will be in the range
of 5,000 years.”7 The medical means for that radical life extension will include genomic
and cellular repair using as yet undeveloped nanotechnologies, and the regeneration of
living tissue through the cultivation of personalized stem-cell lines. Other, computer-
based inventions are now also being applied to enhance the chances for life extension,
one example of which will have to suffice here. Progress has recently been made in the
field of 3-D printing by using “bio-ink” to grow replacement organs.8 If successful, this
technique will eventually eliminate the need for human donors, and the body, like a clas-
sic car, might be sustained indefinitely through a ceaseless replacement of its various parts.
Today’s most adamant apostle of self-generated immortality, however, is neither a
physician nor a biological scientist, but a high-tech inventor and entrepreneur—the

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professions most admired in a society driven by the profit motive. A prodigy whose
software skills have been much enhanced by his endless zeal, Ray Kurzweil has accom-
plished seemingly impossible feats before. Called the rightful heir to Thomas Edison,
he was instrumental in the development of digital scanning, revolutionized modern
music by designing one of the earliest and best synthesizers, and wrote the first software
program that could translate text into speech—a true boon to the blind that has already
placed him high in the pantheon of can-do angels. In a future eulogy that, according
to Kurzweil, no one will ever need to give, it would be fair to say that he was someone
who, in his brief stay on our planet, made a real difference.
The methods for achieving a triumph over death are defined in detail in three of
Kurzweil’s books, beginning with one he coauthored with Dr. Terry Grossman in 2004:
Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. In it, the authors complain that
“nature, for all its creativity, is dramatically suboptimal,”9 and insist that biological
systems will eventually be supplanted by better biotechnologies. This will occur because
of an exponential growth in our rate of technological progress—what Kurzweil calls the
Law of Accelerating Returns, according to whose calculations the twenty-first century
will produce the current equivalent of 20,000 years of high-tech advances. The chal-
lenge for us, then, is “liv[ing] long enough” to be the beneficiaries of the immortalizing
inventions sure to come—and the way to do so is to follow the prescriptions of Ray and
Terry’s Longevity Program, as it is detailed throughout Fantastic Voyage.
That program consists of three stages, or “bridges,” each timed to the predicted rate
of medical progress. In the first and current bridge, we are instructed to exploit all the
latest diagnostic tools and nutritional supplements even while heeding a series of psy-
chological bromides and age-old maxims, the sum of which the authors conveniently
supply in a long bulleted list of imperative advice, including “Take up a new hobby,”
“Use a starch blocker,” “Be optimistic,” “Schedule a fasting homocysteine determina-
tion,” and “Be like the wise bamboo, and bend.”10 Kurzweil himself swallows 250 self-
formulated supplements a day (that’s 91,000 capsules each year) and, once a month,
visits a medical center to receive intravenous treatments.11 His aim is to survive until
the second bridge, when, he predicts, the science of healing will have advanced suffi-
ciently to “turn off” the aging process, leading finally to the third bridge, when, utilizing
nanotechnologies, we will be able to rebuild our bodies and brains at the molecular
level, re-creating our selves in ever more intelligent and durable forms.
The later stages of this giddy evolution are further defined in Kurzweil’s next two
books, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005) and How to
Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (2012). In them, he predicts
that during the 2020s computers will pass the Turing test and not only become intel-
ligent but also “conscious.”12 In the following decade, we will replace most of our
biological organs with better human-made ones, and, by 2045, the Singularity will
have occurred—that is, an expansion of human intelligence by “a factor of trillions”13
through its merger with our super-smart computers—after which “there will be no
difference between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality.”14
Through new technologies, we will then “vastly exceed the refinement and supple-
ness of the best of human traits”;15 “human civilization” will become “nonbiological

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for all practical purposes”;16 and, along with reversing aging, this new civilization will
solve nearly all of our current social problems, including poverty and environmental
devastation17—utopia as re-conceived by a computer engineer and enacted through his
super-smart machines.
And that’s not all. In Kurzweil’s vision, the doctrine of progress is not limited merely
to the perfection of our planet and the eternal preservation of those now living. He is
also planning to use nanotechnology to resurrect the dead, including his own beloved
father and great historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson, so that we, the newly
immortalized, might forever converse with the best and dearest minds of the departed.
(Once again, a Christian belief, that we can be spiritually reunited with loved ones lost,
has been revived in materialist form.) Further, because “intelligence is more powerful
than cosmology,” this new non-biological civilization of ours “saturates the matter and
energy in its vicinity,” and then, “will overcome gravity” and expanding at “at least the
speed of light,” it will colonize the entirety of space-time and thereby “engineer the
universe it wants.”18
Omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, immortality—insomuch as we (if we
is still the proper pronoun) will achieve a status “as close to God as [Kurzweil] can
imagine,”19 all the other happy endings previously predicted by the doctrine of progress
seem picayune in comparison.

Genial Misanthropy

“Give me the folly that dimples the cheek, I say, rather than the wisdom that curdles
the blood.”
—Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

Kurzweil is, first and last, a software programmer, and so each problem to be solved—in
this case, death—is reconceived by him in the manner of the machinery that he knows
best. In his re-mapping of the human predicament, our minds are “software,” our bod-
ies “hardware,” and immortality, therefore, a technical problem in “data retrieval.” All
we need to do is find a way to “backup our mind files”—just as we now do our e-mails,
photos, and memos—and we will surely survive the inevitable demise of our original
“hard drives,” our digitized selves living forever in new physical “substrates” of our own
invention.20 “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dread-
ful,”21 for the superstitious station of a vaporous heaven shall soon be replaced by the
certified science of the digital cloud.
Yet as the poet Robert Frost warned, “unless you are at home in the metaphor…
you are not safe anywhere.… You are not safe with science; you are not safe in his-
tory.”22 Although our comprehension of the world is deeply dependent on metaphori-
cal reasoning, each likeness we fashion is always imperfect; each is shadowed by a set
of unlikenesses that, if left unacknowledged, can lead our thinking dangerously astray.
And, as Marshall McLuhan observed, this is especially true of pervasive technologies,
which, through their habitual use, can recast both our thoughts and actions after their

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own imagery. Instead of the masters of our new machines, we tend to become, in
McLuhan’s view, their “servomechanisms”;23 we see the world through their looking
glass, darkly—an observation confirmed daily by millions of smartphone users who, as
if expecting a summons from the president, submissively stop whatever they are doing
to open each incoming text.
So it is that in a society dominated by finance and marketing, people “shop” for a
church, worry about their personal “brand,” and measure the final meaning of any event
by its “bottom line.” Likewise, in an age when computers have become, for many, the
primary means for personal as well as commercial communications, the metaphors that
calibrate Kurzweil’s mind (hard drives, software, data retrieval) have also realigned the col-
lective common sense. But just as in Newton’s era the universe was not really a clockwork,
and in Freud’s the psyche was not a steam engine, people today are neither corporate
brands nor personal computers, and as that old master of metaphorical thinking warned
us, it isn’t safe—ethically, psychologically, or scientifically—to believe otherwise.
Kurzweil and his fellow cyber-utopians, such as Hans Moravec of Carnegie Mellon
University,24 need to deny the ultimate unlikenesses between the machines they design
and the nature they aim to emulate—they need to believe their machines can become
conscious—because those unlikenesses evoke the unknown and so, too, the uncontrol-
lable. For such thinkers, the uncontrollable (as epitomized by death) is always “subop-
timal,” which is why biology for them must not
only be improved on but finally transcended,
evolution itself fully replaced by human inven- For cyber-utopians, the
tion. So it is that a project that begins with cod- uncontrollable (death) is always
dling the flesh, as evidenced in Kurzweil’s own
fanatical devotion to supplements during the suboptimal, which is why biology
first stage of his Fantastic Voyage, is complet- must not only be improved on but
ed, ironically, by its obsolescence—that is, by
replacing our bodies with a new-and-improved finally transcended, evolution itself
series of material “substrates,” our digital selves fully replaced by human invention.
free to haunt the cyber-engineer’s new and ever
better series of robots.
It does make sense, then, that, despite his adoration of science, Kurzweil objects to
being called a materialist, preferring the term “patternist” instead.25 Reduced to a servo-
mechanism of the profession he practices, his thinking can conceive of the self only as a
software program’s digital pattern. For him, obsessing about the health of his body is just
a strategic phase on the way to escaping it entirely, to replacing its physical reality with his
virtual reality, where, he imagines, he can “engineer what [he] wants”—which is nothing
less than that ultimate boost in individual status, the remaking of himself into a god.
And, in the end, this gnostic-like flight from the limits of the flesh becomes a total
escape from nature as well. Expanding “at least at the speed of light,” our post-Singu-
larity intelligence will, Kurzweil insists, saturate the whole universe, in which case there
will be no more outer space or mysterious wilderness, no otherness at all to ponder or
probe, or to challenge by contrast who we are and what we ought to do. In Kurzweil’s
dream, the cyber-amplified “mind” not only becomes (as Milton’s hell-bound Satan

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desperately boasts) “its own place”;26 it becomes every place. As is commonly the case
for captains obsessed with control, the final port of call for his Fantastic Voyage is a
state of solipsism. Even if his utopian science were feasible—and the unlikenesses in the
metaphor he rides (yea, even unto infinity) discount that possibility—we would have
to ask if such a condition is finally desirable, or if instead the paradise he pitches is just
the punitive loneliness of the mythic Narcissus inflated to fit an astronomical scale.
In The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville coined the perfect term for American
modernity’s descent into folly while blindly following the doctrine of progress: “genial
misanthropy.” Melville saw that in a society increasingly dominated by chipper sales-
men and can-do engineers, the constant boosting of the next sure bet, free lunch, or
final cure for pain and death cloaked a fear and
loathing of the human condition as it actually is.
As is commonly the case for Material confidence was being mustered to mask
captains obsessed with control, the a metaphysical cowardice, providing a way to
dodge those final questions of meaning and pur-
final port of call for his Fantastic pose that our mortality imposes, and inducing in
Voyage is a state of solipsism. their place an undue hope, which could then be
exploited to close the sale on a whole series of the
con man’s dubious wares.
Normally, I am not given to prophetic utterances, preferring to cite instead, as
an antidote to arrogance, the Japanese aphorism “One inch ahead/the whole world/is
dark.”27 In an era of hype, though, sometimes the obvious needs to be said. And so I
will end with the following set of unexceptional predictions: Everyone reading this essay
will die, as will Ray Kurzweil, as will I, as will eventually our entire species, men and
women, enemies and friends, predators and prodigies alike. It is almost certainly the
case that the average duration of our stay here will be further extended by the science
of healing, for which we should be grateful. But “time and chance” will still “happen to
us all.”28 And if a beloved father is to be resurrected, whether Ray’s or mine, it won’t be
by our hands, for death and risk aren’t just technical bugs in our biological system but
fundamental features of reality’s existence.
The final escape so confidently pitched by these new immortalists is at its core a
fear-driven form of psychological denial and, as such, a betrayal of the gift of conscious-
ness itself. The Fantastic Voyage they promise us, whether in their deep-freeze vats or
nutritional labs, is just one more chapter in our passage on Melville’s “ship of fools.”29

Endnotes

1 “Why Choose Cryonics?” Cryonics Institute; http://www.cryonics.org/.

2 “Man Sues to Allow Freezing of Head before He Dies,” United Press International, May 2, 1990. See also
Louis Sahagun and T.W. McGarry, “Investigators Believe Woman Was Dead before Decapitation,” Los
Angeles Times, January 15, 1988.
3 “Report Says Williams’ DNA Missing,” Associated Press, August 13, 2003.

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4 William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 124.
5 After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that with the
triumph of the free-market democracies over communism, the perennial problem of political governance
had been solved, and we had reached the “end of history.” See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and
the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
6 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005), 371.
7 Quoted in Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
(Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2004), 14.
8 Dan Ferber, “An Essential Step Toward Printing Living Tissues,” February 19, 2014; http://www.seas.
harvard.edu/news/2014/02/essential-step-toward-printing-living-tissues.
9 Kurzweil and Grossman, Fantastic Voyage, 14.
10 See online companion to Fantastic Voyage, “A Short Guide to a Long Life”; http://www.fantastic-voyage.
net/ShortGuide.htm. Accessed March 11, 2015.
11 Ibid., 139–145.
12 Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind (New York: Viking, 2012), 209–10.
13 Kurzweil and Grossman, Fantastic Voyage, 123.
14 Ibid., 9.
15 Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 9.
16 Ibid., 352.
17 Ibid., 259.
18 Ibid., 364.
19 Ibid., 375.
20 David Kushner, “When Man & Machine Merge,” Rolling Stone, February 19, 2009, 57–61.
21 John Donne, Holy Sonnets, Number 6/10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
22 Robert Frost, “Education by Poetry,” Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly, February 1931: “What I am pointing
out is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education
in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t
know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it
and when it may break down with you. You are not safe with science; you are not safe in history”; http://
www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/edbypo.html.
23 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: New American Library,
1964), 51–56.
24 See, for example, Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
25 Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 4.
26 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 250–255 (New York: Penguin, 1998).
…hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
27 W.S. Merwin, Asian Figures (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 44.
28 “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither
yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and
chance happeneth to them all,” Ecclesiastes 9:11, King James Version.
29 Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 25. Originally
published 1857. An early skeptic in The Confidence-Man berates the passengers on Melville’s steamship
for their willingness to believe in the con man’s initial scheme: “You flock of fools, under this captain of
fools, on this ship of fools!”

37
 Body and Soul

Mark Edmundson

D
oes the body still exist if we do not have souls? It may sound like a flippant
question—or at least a sophistic one. I intend it as neither: Does the body
still exist if we do not have souls?
That we do not have souls is a palpable fact to many—I would even say most—
members of the educated classes in the West today. They don’t go to church. They don’t
spend a lot of time thinking about a possible life to come. They don’t bother themselves
terribly about the matter of God.
But no one denies that we possess bodies. We are all flesh and blood and bones. This
much is common knowledge and beyond any real dispute. We eat and drink and sleep
and copulate—and now, of course, we exercise. We have a pulse and a blood pressure.
We live and then we die.
But what happens to this body when there is no soul? What happens when we con-
ceive of existence in a way that is no longer dialectical?
Over centuries and centuries—beginning long before Christianity acquired its own
stand on the question—we believed that we possessed a dual identity. We have been
two entities: body and soul. Often—one may say almost always—we considered these
two forms of being to be in tension. They were, first, of a different nature. The body
perished. The soul was eternal. The body died and decomposed, while the soul returned
home to God, or flew to the other place. The body was mortal, the soul eternal.
And the body and soul, needless to say, were often in conflict. The body demanded
carnal satisfactions, which were, at least in many traditions, antithetical to the health of
the soul. Gluttony and lust and sloth: Three of the seven deadly sins involve excesses of
the body. The individual striving to achieve salvation, or simply to live a righteous life,
needed to defend against the tendency of his body to betray his hopes.

Mark Edmundson is University Professor at the University of Virginia. His new book, Self
and Soul: A Defense of Ideals, will be published this autumn by Harvard University Press.

Right: Liz as Cleopatra, 1962, by Andy Warhol (1928–1987); private collection/Bridgeman Images. ©
2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

38
39
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

Saint Augustine tells us that in the Garden of Eden, Adam was never overcome
by lust. Yet he was still in a position to be the father of the human race. Copulation
without lust? Sex without forbidden desire? Yes. In the Garden, according to Augustine,
Adam willed his erections: They were dependent on the free activity of his rational
mind. In Paradise, the body never got in the way of the soul.
Until, of course, it did. Aided by Milton, we commonly conceive of the fall of man
as an act of bodily indulgence: that gorgeous, lush apple. Pride was at the center of
the fall. Milton suggests that Eve and Adam desired to be like gods. But the fact that
the expression of that pride was a form of bodily indulgence—surely that matters, too.
Body and soul have not been on easy terms down through time.
In his poem “Among School Children,” William Butler Yeats imagines a state of
being in which “body is not bruised to pleasure soul.” He wants to enjoy the world
without outraging the aspirations of his spirit. But the line suggests that Yeats is aware
of the tension, knowing it to be endemic to Christianity and much of Western thought.
He is, I think, imagining a pagan dispensation (which may or may not ever have exist-
ed) in which the demands of the inner life are perfectly compatible with the pleasures
of the body. Yeats knows how remote this is from the realm of his inherited Christian
culture and (I suspect) from his personal possibilities. Yeats being Yeats, this makes the
state in which the body isn’t sacrificed to the longings of the soul—immortal longings,
one might imagine—all the more precious.
The phrase “immortal longings” is Cleopatra’s from the last act of Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra, when the queen is about to commit suicide rather than fall under
the power of the baleful Emperor Augustus. Cleopatra clearly refers to the immortality
that comes after a life of doing amazing deeds, the
kind of legendary immortality that Achilles sought,
Body and soul have not been on and that Shakespeare, among others, confers upon
her. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is not going to a heaven
easy terms down through time.
of any sort. She faces her death feeling that the life of
her spirit and the life of her body have not, overall,
been incompatible. Her immortality will come, in some measure, from the gusto with
which she indulged her bodily hungers. Before Antony became her lover there was
Pompey, before Pompey there was Julius Caesar (“He plough’d her, and she cropp’d”),
and how many more besides? Say what you like about Cleopatra as she is rendered by
Shakespeare (and history, give or take): Her body was not bruised to pleasure her soul.
Her body and her spirit streamed in the same direction: to pleasure and to power, and
then on to renown, a renown she still possesses. “Age cannot wither her, nor custom
stale her infinite variety.”
But to the heaven of the angels, of the thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues,
and powers, Cleopatra, one dares to say, will secure no admittance. It is only through
the harsh contentions of body and soul that the Christian spirit in the post-pagan world
can achieve salvation in the next world and virtue in this one. Virtue in this one? Yes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks of the harsh battle of fate in which souls are born—and
in which they grow to full potency: For virtue comes from the Latin word that means
strength. Cleopatra’s renown comes from her capacity to live the life of the body to the

40
 BODY AND SOUL / EDMUNDSON

full and to provide a beacon for aspirants to extravagant pleasure and sexual delight.
The individual who lives out the contention of body and spirit can overcome the bes-
tial part in himself—what Blake and Coleridge thought of as the Natural Man—and
achieve something else.
Sometimes he achieves self-conquest with an eye to heaven. But sometimes he
achieves it for the purposes of earthly life. The thinker and the warrior and the saint
struggle against the domination of the body and its baser appetites so that they can real-
ize their full potential on this earth. The thinker seeks truth; the warrior seeks victory;
the saint seeks a compassionate world, a world of brothers and sisters. These aspira-
tions may not be consistent with one another: Warriors and saints have their conflicts
(although they have some secret affinities, too). But
the truth is that these idealists see the hungers of the
body as impediments to their highest aspirations. It is only through the harsh
Pleasure, enjoyment, even happiness: These are contentions of body and soul
states tied to bodily satisfaction, although, abided
in too long, they will lead to inertia. To the idealist, that the Christian spirit in the
who seeks perfection, the body is both antagonist post-pagan world can achieve
and ally. Like that of the believing Christian, his life
is based upon tension. He lives a fraught dialectic salvation in the next world and
in which the kind of resolution that Yeats enter- virtue in this one.
tains and that Cleopatra (or at least Shakespeare’s
Cleopatra) achieves is radically undesirable.
Does the body still exist if we do not have souls? The question now may be a bit
more cogent, although still strange enough. What happens, in other words, if the dia-
lectic that has existed for believers and for idealists alike suddenly collapses? If there are
no souls, are there still bodies in the conventional sense—the sense that puts the body
in tension with the soul? If there are no ideals (and our culture is surely not in love
with ideals), what happens to the bodies (or what once were the bodies) of those who
might have been idealists?
The answer that follows from this line of thinking, provisional though it is, is that
our bodies become ourselves. Men and women are no longer and can no longer be
what Emerson called us, “a stupendous antagonism.” We are not a dragging together of
the poles of the universe for the purposes of salutary struggle. After the collapse of the
soul and the collapse of the ideal, after the death of the internal dialectic, what exists?
I do not think it is wrong to say that what we are left with, when our bodies become
ourselves, is the quest for pleasure. If the body is the only existence (and therefore not
quite the body as we knew it before), then we need to gear ourselves to living as enjoy-
ably as possible. The objective of life becomes the avoidance of pain and the stringing
together of as many moments of gratification as possible. What else could it be?
Surely there will be impediments to this life defined by what we might call the Body
Omnipotent (which is no longer the body of old). One will be too sick for enjoyment;
one will lack funds; one will not know which pleasure to choose among the many on
offer; one’s communications device will malfunction and mislead. No doubt there will
be internal impediments to the life of pleasure: Maybe there is a superego after all, but

41
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

in time and with the help of various drugs and therapies, we shall overcome it. And,
curses upon it, one must have a job. One must labor. But the aim of life becomes
clear: It is the utilitarian’s aim of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. The Body
Omnipotent cannot conceive of anything else. And why should it?
The Body Omnipotent will happily accept prosthetic extensions of itself to augment
power and pleasure. With the addition of the machine, one can enjoy more—which
is to say buy more and experience more. Will there still be a mind? Of course there
will: a mind enhanced and enlarged by one
electronic device after another. But the mind
Men and women are no longer and will not be disposed to think its way clear of
can no longer be what Emerson the Body Omnipotent. The mind will not
put the body’s hegemony in doubt. The mind
called us, “a stupendous antagonism.” will become a tool functioning strategically
to deliver as much pleasure as possible to the
self. What is the best dinner? Where the best car? How to possess the most lulling vaca-
tion? To string together as many beads of pleasure as possible will be to construct a life:
this meal, that trip, this dress, that suit. We came, we saw, we enjoyed.
Soul departs the world; body disappears to be resurrected as the god of itself. Homer,
Plato, and the Gospels recede. Cleopatra is eternal queen.

42
 Transition 117 celebrates diasporic vision and creativity
with a selection of new poetry and short fiction. It shares the
adventurous, the erotic, the audacious—each story embodying
“creation working on itself,” states Tope Folarin who introduces
the issue. Winner of the 2013 Caine Prize for his story, “Miracle,”
Tope writes, “Who knows? In time, you might notice that
something new is blooming inside you.”

Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling

ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in
Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid
transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a
leading forum of intellectual debate. Transition is a publication of
the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, edited by Alejandro de
la Fuente and published three times annually.

More about Transition 117:

http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/transition-117
SUBCRIBE: jstor.org/r/iupress
SUBMIT: https://transition.submittable.com/submit

Image credit: Umfundi. Afronauts series. Digital C-print. 12 x 12 in. ©2012 Cristina de Middel.

43
 On Not Being There
The Data-Driven Body at Work and at Play

Rebecca Lemov

T
he protagonist of William Gibson’s 2014 science-fiction novel The Peripheral,
Flynne Fisher, works remotely in a way that lends a new and fuller sense to that
phrase. The novel features a double future: One set of characters inhabits the
near future, ten to fifteen years from the present, while another lives seventy years on, after
a breakdown of the climate and multiple other systems that has apocalyptically altered
human and technological conditions around the world.
In that “further future,”1 only 20 percent of the Earth’s human population has sur-
vived. Each of these fortunate few is well off and able to live a life transformed by healing
nanobots, somaticized e-mail (which delivers messages and calls to the roof of the user’s
mouth), quantum computing, and clean energy. For their amusement and profit, certain
“hobbyists” in this future have the Borgesian option of cultivating an alternative path in
history—it’s called “opening up a stub”—and mining it for information as well as labor.
Flynne, the remote worker, lives on one of those paths. A young woman from the
American Southeast, possibly Appalachia or the Ozarks, she favors cutoff jeans and resides
in a trailer, eking out a living as a for-hire sub playing video games for wealthy aficionados.
Recruited by a mysterious entity that is beta-testing drones that are doing “security” in
a murky skyscraper in an unnamed city, she thinks at first that she has been taken on to
play a kind of video game in simulated reality. As it turns out, she has been employed to
work in the future as an “information flow”—low-wage work, though the pay translates
to a very high level of remuneration in the place and time in which she lives.
What is of particular interest is the fate of Flynne’s body. Before she goes to work she
must tend to its basic needs (nutrition and elimination), because during her shift it will
effectively be “vacant.” Lying on a bed with a special data-transmitting helmet attached

Rebecca Lemov is associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University and
the author of World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (2005) and
Database of Dreams (forthcoming 2015). She is also a coauthor of How Reason Almost
Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Rationality in the Cold War (2013).

Right: Photograph composition by Henry Sieplinga/HMS Images; Stockbyte/Getty Images.

44
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

to her head, she will be elsewhere, inhabiting an ambulatory robot carapace—a “periph-
eral”—built out of bio-flesh that can receive her consciousness.
Bodies in this data-driven economic backwater of a future world economy are aban-
doned for long stretches of time—disposable, cheapened, eerily vacant in the temporary
absence of “someone at the helm.” Meanwhile, fleets of built bodies, grown from human
DNA, await habitation.
Alex Rivera explores similar territory in his Mexican sci-fi film The Sleep Dealer
(2008), set in a future world after a wall erected on the US–Mexican border has suc-
cessfully blocked migrants from entering the United
The defining feature of this States. Digital networks allow people to connect to
strangers all over the world, fostering fantasies of
heavily mediated reality is our physical and emotional connection. At the same time,
presence “elsewhere,” a removal low-income would-be migrant workers in Tijuana and
elsewhere can opt to do remote work by controlling
of at least part of our conscious robots building a skyscraper in a faraway city, locking
awareness from wherever our their bodies into devices that transmit their labor to
the site. In tank-like warehouses, lined up in rows of
bodies happen to be. stalls, they “jack in” by connecting data-transmitting
cables to nodes implanted in their arms and backs.
Their bodies are in Mexico, but their work is in New York or San Francisco, and while
they are plugged in and wearing their remote-viewing spectacles, their limbs move like the
appendages of ghostly underwater creatures. Their life force drained by the taxing labor,
these “sleep dealers” end up as human discards.

Flickering In and Out

What is surprising about these sci-fi conceits, from “transitioning” in The Peripheral to
“jacking in” in The Sleep Dealer, is how familiar they seem, or at least how closely they
reflect certain aspects of contemporary reality. Almost daily, we encounter people who
are there but not there, flickering in and out of what we think of as presence. A grow-
ing body of research explores the question of how users interact with their gadgets and
media outlets, and how in turn these interactions transform social relationships. The
defining feature of this heavily mediated reality is our presence “elsewhere,” a removal
of at least part of our conscious awareness from wherever our bodies happen to be. As
MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle has shown in pioneering work that extends from The
Second Self (1984) to Alone Together (2012), the social ramifications of these new dis-
embodied (or semi-disembodied) arrangements are radical. They introduce a “new kind
of intimacy with machines,” a “special relationship” in the space beyond the screen,
and a withering away of once-central, physically mediated social bonds. Turkle’s focus,
and the focus of much literature on video-game playing and online behavior, is on
these engrossing relationships between humans (particularly children) and computers,
the social fallout of those relationships, and the resulting effects on self-formation, as
hauntingly described in an early work by Turkle on “computer holding power”:

46
 ON NOT BEING THERE / LEMOV

The [thirteen-year-old] girl is hunched over the console. When the ten-
sion momentarily lets up, she looks up and says, “I hate this game.” And
when the game is over she wrings her hands, complaining that her fingers
hurt. For all of this, she plays every day “to keep up my strength.” She nei-
ther claims nor manifests enjoyment in any simple sense. One is inclined
to say she is more “possessed” by the game than playing it.2

The young teens Turkle watched playing Asteroids and Space Invaders are now in
their mid-forties, and the dynamic of absorption, tension, possession, and disappearance
is, of course, no longer confined to games. Much discussion of data-gathering technolo-
gies in daily domains focuses on their inescapability, as Tom McCarthy recently pointed
out: “Every website that you visit, each keystroke and click-through are archived: even if
you’ve hit delete or empty trash it’s still there, lodged within some data fold or enclave,
some occluded-yet-retrievable avenue of circuitry.”3

Self-Knowledge Through Numbers

But seemingly undaunted by the extent to which we are now routinely subjected to
the data gathering of others, many people are now driven to accumulate endless quan-
tities of data about themselves, their bodies, their activities, their moods, even their
thoughts and reveries. The “most connected human
on earth,” Chris Dancy, a former information tech-
nology specialist who took to gathering data about
“I was coming slightly unhinged
himself after being laid off from his job, bills him- with the amount of information
self as a “Data Exhaust Cartographer,” “The Versace
of Silicon Valley,” and “Cyborg.”4 He bedecks his
I had about myself. It started to
body with myriad wearables and promotes himself make me feel slightly detached
as the locus of up to 700 devices or online servic-
from reality.”
es that collect, crunch, save, and collate the data
he generates. The metrics he tracks include pulse,
REM sleep, skin temperature, and mood, among others. Perhaps not surprisingly, all
of this self-tracking eventually led Dancy to a crisis of alienation. He became increas-
ingly aware that his intense connection was also a form of disconnection: “I was com-
ing slightly unhinged with the amount of information I had about myself. It started to
make me feel slightly detached from reality.” As a result, he says, he was “almost water-
boarded with awareness. It’s one thing to Google yourself. It’s another to Google…your
life. I could see too much.”5
Despite his discomfort, Dancy seems unable to disconnect, unhook, or go offline.
He is not alone. The focus of much recent interest in the entrance of tracking technol-
ogy, counting devices, and calculation strategies into the domain of self-understanding
is the Quantified Self (QS) movement. Founded in 2007 through the efforts of Kevin
Kelly, then of Wired magazine, and Gary Wolf, a Bay Area writer, the movement brought
together self-trackers ranging from the ardent to the merely curious. Under the banner

47
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

of “self-knowledge through numbers”—those numbers gathered through biometrics,

sociometrics, and psychometrics—enthusiasts combine platforms and tools to find new
ways of gathering data and teasing out correlations. “Once you know the facts, you can
live by them” is another guiding principle of the movement, and QS-ers continue to
form groups across the United States and in thirty
other countries, meeting weekly to share results.
Critics clearly saw the self-tracking During the week of March 15, 2015, for example,
groups came together in London, Washington, St.
obsession as navel-gazing, inward-
Louis, Denton, Texas, and Thessaloniki, Greece.
turning, computer-oriented geek Typically, such gatherings report on their tracking
of a range of phenomena from the mundane (cups
behavior, typical of those who
of coffee drunk per day, pulse rate, sleep hours)
have lost contact with the external to the more esoteric (“spiritual well-being,” scores
world, with other human beings, on personality tests or a “narcissism index,” or a
repository of “all the ideas I’ve had since 1984”) via
and with “what matters,” in their devices that might be attached to the wrist (Fitbit),
eagerness to render the world the lower back (UpRight), the chest (Spire), or
eating utensils (HAPIfork), if not stowed away in
knowable, computable. one’s pockets (as smartphone apps).
The movement marked its arrival in the cul-
tural mainstream with the publication in 2010 of
Wolf’s manifesto, “The Data-Driven Life,” in the New York Times Magazine. His fascina-
tion with the obsessively self-regarding project came through most clearly in his example
of the tracker who had kept all of his ideas for the past several decades:

Mark Carranza—[who] makes his living with computers—has been

keeping a detailed, searchable archive of all the ideas he has had since he
was 21. That was in 1984. I realize that this seems impossible. But I have
seen his archive, with its million plus entries, and observed him using
it.… Most thoughts are tagged with date, time, and location. What for
other people is an inchoate flow of mental life is broken up into elements
and cross-referenced.6

Wolf went on to describe how numbers inexorably enter the domain of the personal,
insisting that no place should be considered sacrosanct or beyond the probing sensors of
quantification.
Wolf was so surprised, he later told me, by the contempt and mockery he and his
fellow self-trackers came in for after the article appeared that he almost came to regret
writing it. Much of the online comment focused on the atrophied selves and dehumaniz-
ing effects seemingly produced by the self-tracking enterprise: “These unfortunate people
spend so much time with computers they have begun thinking about their own person
as a machine,” wrote one reader. Another comment was even more barbed: “This track-
ing seems like taking self-centeredness to the nth degree. It is basically OCD [obsessive-
compulsive disorder] behavior with a fancy title. How about ‘tracking outward,’ seeing

48
 ON NOT BEING THERE / LEMOV

how much time we spend on being with and helping others? Perhaps that is the secret to
a longer, healthier life.”
Those and other critics clearly saw the self-tracking obsession as navel-gazing, inward-
turning, computer-oriented geek behavior, typical of those who have lost contact with the
external world, with other human beings, and with “what matters,” in their eagerness to
render the world knowable, computable. At stake, it seems, is nothing less than the trans-
formation or deformation of the “human.” Writing in the monthly magazine Prospect,
literature scholar and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen raised the pertinent question:

Sifting through the talks, blog posts, and articles daily uploaded by
Quantified Self disciples, you soon become aware of an anxious insis-
tence on numbers as a means rather than an end. All this data is meant
to spur us to love ourselves better and run our lives more efficiently. And
yet it’s hard not to hear, lurking in this promise of self-possession, the
threat of numbers dispossessing us, of becoming a feverish addiction we
can’t kick. Can even the most adept multi-tasker really live the life they’re
simultaneously tracking?7

Other critics see the QS movement as part of information technology’s more widespread
induction of people into “a perpetual state of shallow performativity.”8
What is neglected or bracketed in both the criticism and the celebration of self-track-
ing is the curious status of the body that serves as the passively patient platform for a self’s
“remote” activity or as the hooked-up object of endless measurement and observation—or
indeed as both. Critics and enthusiasts of this strange reality both neglect the peculiar
Möbius-strip form taken by the body as the increasingly phantom-like self flickers in and
out of its confines. The status of the body that holds
these devices, the body as platform—the body that What is neglected or bracketed in
is vacated—is curiously invisible.
both the criticism and the celebration
of self-tracking is the curious
Clickworkers, Gold Farmers, Porn Zappers
status of the body that serves as the
Where the body can be seen, I believe, is in the passively patient platform for a self ’s
menial, low-wage, data-driven labor that is created
at the downtrodden edges of expanding econo- “remote” activity or as the hooked-up
mies where virtual domains meet brick-and-mortar object of endless measurement and
enterprises. One clear picture of the simultaneously
abandoned and surveilled body emerges in research observation—or indeed as both.
on the most menial work: collective labor markets
harnessing human computing abilities. “Clickwork” is the mass labor of many hands
on many keyboards, their collective output aggregated by means of Internet tools such
as Amazon Mechanical Turk. Through AMT, individuals and businesses (known as
Requesters) can crowdsource complex tasks that computer intelligence is currently
unequipped to complete. Amazon and other companies cannot afford to regulate

49
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

this labor through traditional means; instead, administrators filter it through “light”
automated management rather than top-down, heavy-handed control. Microwork
ethnographer Lilly Irani describes how, for example, management of a work force of
10,000 to 60,000 for a particular project can never affordably be handled by means of
Foucauldian “disciplinary” techniques, which carefully mold individual workers physi-
cally and mentally for their tasks. Rather, management must operate automatically,
with a light touch: Instead of using surveillance to assess performance, “requesters sort
desirable workers through faint signals of mouse clicks, text typed, and other digital
traces read closely as potential indicators.”9 Most often, workers work alone at home
on their own computers.
Repetitive work in the virtual sphere, in addition to being isolating, often necessi-
tates less attention to bodily postures and needs, and may promote ongoing abuse of the
body by motivating the worker to conform to algorithmically defined productivity goals
that affect the body at its performance limits. Two examples are China-based World of
Warcraft “gold farmers” and content moderators in the Philippines who zap porn and
disturbing images from social media sites for cash.
Many of them based in suburban Manila in former elementary schools and other
unlikely sites, the content moderators perform the unsavory job of repeatedly adjudicat-
ing whether images posted to Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, or other social networking
sites are sufficiently offensive to be eliminated from view. Moderators at PCs sit at long
tables for hours, an “army of workers employed
to soak up the worst of humanity in order to
Repetitive work in the virtual protect the rest of us.” By some estimates, the
sphere, in addition to being content-moderating army is 100,000 strong,
twice the size of Google’s labor pool, and many of
isolating, often necessitates less
its members have college degrees. Such workers
attention to bodily postures and suffer both physical pain and psychological dis-
tress. Jane Stevenson, of the British organization
needs, and may promote ongoing
Workplace Wellbeing, which supports trauma-
abuse of the body by motivating tized workers in high-pressure digital jobs, says
that even after a worker has quit such a job, he
the worker to conform to
or she may continue to be haunted by disturbing
algorithmically defined productivity images. Looking for hours at YouTube videos of
unspeakable abuse, many become paranoid and
goals that affect the body at its
uneasy about leaving their children with sitters.10
performance limits. In a profile of other potentially abusive digi-
tal-work environments, technology writer Julian
Dibbell emphasizes their “surreal” quality. 11
One such workplace is that of Chinese “gold farmers,” who participate in multiplayer
online role-playing games, known as MMOs. In these games, which can involve thou-
sands of participants, players advance by earning extra powers and levels of play not
only through hard hours at the keyboard but also (particularly among Europeans and
Americans who can pay real money for virtual gold or game goods) by buying them
online. In the early years of MMOs, these transactions took place on eBay, but now

50
 ON NOT BEING THERE / LEMOV

there are “high-volume online specialty sites like the virtual-money superstores IGE,
BroGame, and Massive Online Gaming Sales—multimillion-dollar businesses [that]
offer one-stop, one-click shopping and instant delivery of in-game cash.” Gold farmers
work shifts in “sweatshops,” advancing through MMOs so that richer players can jump
effortlessly to higher levels. Such digital toil is not so different from that of Chinese
laborers who work long hours to produce cheap real-world products for the global
market. Yet the alienation of the body is perhaps more extreme because it is more unac-
counted for. Dibbell describes the common condition of such laborers, exemplified by
the routine of one particular gold farmer:

Consider, for example, a typical interlude in the workday of the 21-year-

old gold farmer Min Qinghai. Min spends most of his time within the
confines of a former manufacturing space 200 miles south of Nanjing in
the midsize city of Jinhua. He works two floors below the plywood bunks
of the workers’ dorm where he sleeps. In two years of 84-hour farming
weeks, he has rarely stepped outside for longer than it takes to eat a meal.
But he has died more times than he can count. And last September on
a warm afternoon, halfway between his lunch and dinner breaks, it was
happening again.12

What was happening again was that Min was being “exterminated” online, within the
confines of the game. Although the Chinese gold farmers sit relatively motionless in their
rows of chairs facing screens in nondescript rooms, they are frequently subjected to tar-
geted “kills” by Western players who, playing purely for “fun,” regard the Chinese players
as mercenaries. Each time they “die” (in World of Warcraft or other games), their pace of
play slows down and they lose money rebooting their characters.13 Art imitates life in The
Peripheral, where Flynne Fisher does online gaming for hire and endures similar abuse: A
rich man who played the game himself instead of outsourcing got a charge from killing
the avatars of people like Flynne because “it really cost them.… People on her squad were
feeding their children with what they earned playing, and maybe that was all they had.”14
Economic inequality, whether in fictional 2030 or actual 2015, plays out in online
spaces and even extends to forced labor. Forbes magazine recently reported that Chinese
prisons forced inmates to gold-farm in twelve-hour shifts without pay.15 The coercive
element highlights arrangements that also exist in the putatively voluntary forms of
loot farming.
Extensive digital tracking of workplace activity adds to bodily stresses. An American
Management Association survey found that 66 percent of US-based employers monitor
the Internet use of their employees, 45 percent track employee keystrokes, and 43 percent
monitor employee e-mail. UPS uses a system, Kronos, under which each of its delivery
trucks is equipped with 200 sensors, which feed information back to headquarters about
driving speed, seatbelt use, and delivery efficiency. Even trying to cheat the system can hurt
the worker. Drivers commonly evade the seatbelt sensor by keeping the seatbelt locked but
not strapping themselves in. UPS can claim higher safety compliance even though workers
are actually more endangered. A driver recently described cutting corners, slapping delivery

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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

slips on doors, and sprinting from site to site to keep up with impossibly demanding quo-
tas. (After eight years, he sustained such extensive spinal damage that his doctor told him
it would be impossible to treat.)16 Work-force management systems such as Kronos and
“enterprise social” platforms like Microsoft’s Yammer, Salesforce’s Chatter, and (coming
soon) Facebook at Work operate on similar principles of efficiency and maximization.17
With the emergence of “flexible,” short-term regimes of service-based labor and the eclipse
of social welfare programs, the self can increasingly be seen as an entrepreneurial project
and a risk-taking device.18 If the self is risk taking, the body is risk absorbing.
New labor forces of clickworkers, gold farmers, porn zappers, Starbucks flextimers,
and Amazon warehouse fulfillers bring to light more clearly the consequences of both
the abandonment and extreme monitoring of the body. At the same time, because such
workers are often desperate for work and less picky about conditions, they are less likely
to incorporate practices or technologies that are becoming increasingly common among
upper management as methods of counteracting the physical toll of excessive “screen
time” and “chair time”: exercise regimes such as yoga or extreme fitness, or office equip-
ment such as “stand-up desks.”19

The Detachable Body and the Mobile Self

Despite the fact that the vacant or overly tracked body is increasingly the condition of
people at play, and (especially) at certain kinds of repetitive and exploitative work, the
body remains in the background of our awareness. It is perhaps no coincidence that
both Gibson and Rivera focus on situations of wrenching economic inequality across
globalized domains of capital transfer. At this level and scale of human activity, the
strangeness of bodily conditions becomes more obvious through a kind of exaggera-
tion that de-familiarizes what we have come to
take for granted. It is not that we are completely
Dystopian fiction only amplifies unaware of real stories of warehouse workers in
and catalogs the indignities of companies such as Amazon who are digitally
tracked and prodded as they go about the work
existing dehumanizing practices. of fulfilling online orders. Dystopian fiction only
amplifies and catalogs the indignities of existing
dehumanizing practices. “They’re Watching You at Work,” declares an Atlantic head-
line, while a public radio report on “the data-driven workplace of the future” describes
employees who ruin their bodies keeping up with “telematic” surveillance devices that
track every keystroke they make, every latte they whip, every package they deliver.20
These conditions are moving inexorably up the corporate ladder and economic stra-
ta, even as they dissolve ordinary hierarchies. The Quantified Self, once seen as a respite
from work, is arriving in the workplace in the form of perpetual self- and management-
imposed surveillance. (As mentioned above, the quality of this surveillance is “lighter”
and more flexible than traditional panoptical oversight.) Among higher-wage workers,
the Quantified Self at work takes the form of socially networked goal setting, in which
workers prod each other or companies target “millennials” (who are thought to respond

52
 ON NOT BEING THERE / LEMOV

Playing World of Warcraft, Gamescom 2011 in Cologne; © Ina Fassbender/Reuters/Corbis.

more readily to these new forms of what could be called cheerful tracking). Santa
Monica-based Enkata, for example, a human resources firm that hires out data-driven
platforms to prod claims and sales workers into higher productivity, explicitly eschews
keystroke monitoring in favor of “meaningful data” and “predictive analytics to help all
members of the sales organization work smarter and close more deals.”21
The body of today’s digitally driven worker evokes those images of bodies stored
in suspended animation in various movies from the 1970s onward, including Coma
(1978) and Altered States (1980). A number of films explored the horrifying possibil-
ity of human bodies being used as food (Soylent Green, 1973), batteries (The Matrix,
1999), or intelligence systems drained in the process of use (Minority Report, 2002). By
contrast, James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), itself the product of the work of thousands of
animators and digital engineers, strikes a more hopeful, even utopian note. It is a film in
which a disabled vet is enabled by technological prostheses to inhabit a mythical world
while leaving his wired-up body behind. The shocking vulnerability of his temporarily
discarded physical form becomes all too evident in the climactic battle, but the hero
ultimately prevails by sundering the connection to the body and living on in the fan-
tastic realm of the Na’vi, who have their own, organic way of “plugging in”—inserting
their braids into the neural cords of horse-like animals and operating them through
their thoughts. To be more fully human, or post-human, will mean finding a new way
of plugging in, jacking in, or transmitting.
Whether fantastic or horrifying, the picture presented in these films is that of a body
increasingly detached—or made detachable—from a mobile self. This body, because of the
systemic shocks it bears, its use as a platform or a source of energy, and even its inescapable

53
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

mortality, exemplifies what political scientist Timothy Pachirat in Every Twelve Seconds,
an ethnographic study of work in a Nebraska slaughterhouse, calls the politics of sight.
Exploring the conditions of a low-wage job typically sought by criminals, undocu-
mented workers, or other desperate souls, Pachirat finds that the slaughterhouse operates
to make the repetitive acts of killing—which take place “every twelve seconds,” hence the
title—invisible even to 99 percent of those who work there. Only one out of 280 workers
is responsible for firing the fatal shot into the head of the cow. The shooter’s work is visible
to only one or two others on the killing floor, and he becomes the subject of mythol-
ogy throughout the abattoir. (A common rumor is that the shooter undergoes constant
psychotherapy to fend off work-produced psychosis.)
Workers stationed throughout the rendering process,
To be more fully human, or
who spend hours each day repetitively detaching the
post-human, will mean finding limbs and extracting the livers and other viscera of the
recently executed creatures, suffer difficult work con-
a new way of plugging in,
ditions and marginalization that mirror the unseen
jacking in, or transmitting. suffering of the slaughtered animals. In the end,
Pachirat argues, this cultivated “invisibility” (which,
in a sense, is the main service offered by the modern
slaughterhouse and its disassembly lines) is supremely necessary social and political labor.
It allows most people in the “outside world” to act without knowing the consequences, to
consume without knowing the cost, and to benefit from others’ work without knowing
the source.
It is, in fact, on such exquisitely chosen “invisibilities” that the collective delusions
and collusions of the modern economy run, particularly as that economy merges with
the virtual realm. To extend the analogy, just as there is a public need for packaged meat
that does not bear the evidence of its origins or even of the fact that it once lived, there
is likewise a public desire for products (be they iPhones or UPS packages) that sleekly
obscure the conditions under which they were made or made possible. Pachirat tells of
“work that remains hidden from the majority of those who literally feed off such labor.”22
As literary scholar Katherine Hayles recently remarked, the body “has an inability to lie”
in the way thoughts can and do: “This is exactly what consciousness lacks.”23 The body
offers a kind of resistance and testimony to realities that some would like us simply to
ignore. We need to heed the body.

Endnotes

1 Gibson describes it in an interview with Karin L. Kross posted at Tor.com, “William Gibson on
Urbanism, Science Fiction, and Why The Peripheral Weirded Him Out,” October 29, 2014; http://
www.tor.com/blogs/2014/10/william-gibson-the-peripheral-interview. Spoiler alert: please skip the next
three paragraphs if you would rather not know some of the plot details of The Peripheral.

54
 ON NOT BEING THERE / LEMOV

2 Sherry Turkle, “Video Games and Computer Holding Power,” The New Media Reader (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003), 500. Originally published 1984; http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/
nmr-34-turkle.pdf.
3 Tom McCarthy, “The death of writing—if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google,” The
Guardian.com, March 7, 2015; http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/07/tom-mccarthy-death-
writing-james-joyce-working-google.
4 Chris Dancy website; http://www.chrisdancy.com. Accessed April 24, 2015.
5 Ibid.
6 Gary Wolf, “The Data-Driven Life,” New York Times Magazine, April 28, 2010; http://www.nytimes.
com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?_r=0.
7 Josh Cohen, “Quantified Self: The Algorithm of Life,” Prospect, February 5, 2014; http://www.prospect-
magazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/quantified-self-the-algorithm-of-life.
8 Dennis Tenen, “Writing Technology,” Public Books blog; http://www.publicbooks.org/fiction/writing-
technology. Accessed April 24, 2015.
9 Lilly Irani, “Microworking the Crowd,” Limn, no. 2, March 2012; http://limn.it/microworking-the-
crowd/.
10 Adrien Chen, “The Workers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed,” Wired,
October 23, 2014; http://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/.
11 Julian Dibbell, “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer,” New York Times Magazine, June 17, 2007; http://
www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17lootfarmers-t.html?pagewanted=all.
12 Ibid. Dibbell adds that “Min would like to explain to ‘real’ players that he is playing for different stakes:
‘I have this idea in mind that regular players should understand that people do different things in the
game,’ he said. ‘They are playing. And we are making a living.’”
13 Ibid.
14 William Gibson, The Peripheral (New York: G.P. Putnam Sons, 2014), Chapter 13.
15 Paul Tassi, “Chinese Prisoners Forced to Farm World of Warcraft Gold,” Forbes, June 2, 2011; http://
www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/06/02/chinese-prisoners-forced-to-farm-world-of-warcraft-gold/.
An estimated 80 percent of all gold farmers are in China, which, according to the CIA World Factbook,
has the largest population of Internet users in the world. China is thought to be home to 100,000 full-
time gold farmers.
16 The UPS monitoring system is described by Esther Kaplan in “The Spy Who Fired Me: The Human
Costs of Workplace Monitoring,” Harper’s Magazine, March 2015; http://harpers.org/archive/2015/03/
the-spy-who-fired-me/.
17 On the “actuarial self ” and “responsibilization,” see Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves, Chapter 7,
“Governing Enterprising Individuals” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
18 On the calculation of risk as it relates to the definition of self, see eds. Limor Darash and Paul Rabinow
Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases (Chicago: University of Chicago, in press).
19 Evgeny Morozov, “The Mindfulness Racket,” New Republic, February 23, 2014; http://www.newrepub-
lic.com/article/116618/technologys-mindfulness-racket.
20 Kai Ryssdal [interviewer], “The Data-Driven Workplace of the Future” Marketplace [radio broadcast],
March 3, 2015; http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/data-driven-workplace-future.
21 “Know More Close More,” Enkata website; http://www.enkata.com. Accessed April 14, 2015.
22 Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2011), Chapter IX.
23 Hayles made this comment at “The Total Archive,” a conference at the Centre for Research in the Arts,
Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge University, March 19–20, 2015. She has developed these
ideas in several publications, in which she figures the body as a site of feedback, not a reified thing. Cf.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

55
 Lessons from the Ring—
Then and Now

Gordon Marino

Y
ears ago, I had the honor of interviewing David Mamet, who, in addition to
being a fine playwright, is a longtime practitioner of the martial arts. After our
conversation, I asked him to give me one piece of advice I might pass along to
my students. He said, “Tell them to pick some physical art—ballet, boxing, judo, yoga,
whatever—and to stick with it. It will make them feel grounded and better able to deal
with adversity and rejection in this world.” By moving your body in a certain way, he
was saying, you will shape the way you feel and who you are.
Philosophy professors (including me) assume that we learn to negotiate these things
only by reflecting on them. It is as though we have become oblivious to the lessons we
can learn on the path leading from the body to the brain. Once, I confided about an
emotional problem to a yoga teacher. She replied, “The answer to the problem is just
to breathe.” At the time, I was deeply and rather unreflectively committed to the belief
that it is only by thinking that we can solve problems. The yoga teacher’s words awak-
ened me to something I should have known already.
After all, I had been training boxers for decades, learning and imparting some of the
lessons Carlo Rotella writes about so eloquently in Cut Time: An Education at the Fights:

The deeper you go into the fights, the more you may discover about
things that would seem at first blush to have nothing to do with boxing.
Lessons in spacing and leverage, or in holding part of oneself in reserve
even when hotly engaged, are lessons not only in how one boxer reckons

Gordon Marino is a professor of philosophy and director of the Howard and Edna Hong
Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota. The author of Kierkegaard
in the Present Age and the editor, most recently, of The Quotable Kierkegaard, Marino
covers boxing for the Wall Street Journal and Ring Magazine. He has trained professional
and amateur boxers for thirty years.

Right: Photograph by Mike Powell, Allsport Concepts; Getty Images.

56
57
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

with another but also in how one person reckons with another. The
fights teach many such lessons…about getting hurt and getting old,
about distance and intimacy…boxing conducts an endless workshop in
the teaching and learning of knowledge with consequences.1

In the sweat-and-blood parlor of the boxing ring, young people deal with feelings they
seldom get controlled practice with, such as anxiety and anger. And make no mistake—
the kind of people we become is largely determined by the way we negotiate those
dreadnought emotions.
Many of us come into this world with a surplus of anger. I used to work in a thera-
peutic capacity with emotionally troubled children. One young fellow was seething
with a rage he seldom directly expressed. I got the idea of putting on the gloves with
him and letting him knock me around. In our sessions, he discovered that his bottled-
up anger was not necessarily lethal. He could vent his destructive urges, and no one was
going to die or get seriously hurt.
Coming to terms with our most basic instincts is another thing we learn through
boxing. One of the hardest lessons, for instance, is learning how to counter an incom-
ing right hand. When a fist is flying at your face, there is a powerful, natural impulse
to pull away. However, when you retreat, your
chin often ends up meeting your opponent’s
When I catch a boxer obeying punch at the point where it’s most powerful,
instinct and pulling away, I bellow, and you are no longer in any position to deliver
a counterpunch.
“You’re in the ring with fear now— To help them overcome this reflex, I have
beat it down!” my boxers stand with their lead foot about
eighteen inches away from their sparring
partner. The boxer on offense fires a one-two
(a straight right jab), and the one on defense has to block or elude the fusillade, but is
forbidden to go back. This drill forces boxers to concentrate on standing their ground.
When I catch a boxer obeying instinct and pulling away, I bellow, “You’re in the ring
with fear now—beat it down!”
Whether or not learning to stand your place in the path of pain can help one hold
one’s ground in fighting injustice, I can’t be sure. But it is hard to lead a righteous life
when we quiver before the possibility of taking a hit. Nelson Mandela understood this,
and rigorously trained as a boxer with the conscious purpose of strengthening his mind
and will.
Forgive me for what might sound like stereotyping, but at least at this time, some
of the lessons learned through boxing are quite different for women. When they begin
training, many women won’t extend their fist to land a punch. They pull back before
the fist reaches its target. That is how deeply the inhibitions against violence and hurt-
ing are embedded.
On the other hand, there was a woman I once worked with who, when slipping on
the gloves for the first time, could not help exclaiming, “This feels cool!” “What?” I
asked. “Making a gloved fist!” she said.

58
 LESSONS FROM THE RING / MARINO

Woman and punching bag by Alfonse Pagano; Photolibrary/Getty Images.

The mere feeling of being ready to punch was exhilarating to her.

But most of boxing’s lessons apply equally to women and men. Søren Kierkegaard
once described anxiety as a “sympathetic antipathy or antipathetic sympathy”—a simul-
taneous attraction and repulsion. And so it goes with many who take up the sport. They
come for a few weeks, train, get a punch in the nose, and disappear. A few months later,
one of them will call and say, “I want to start training again.” They crave that grounded,
at-home-in-oneself feeling toward which Mamet was gesturing.
Women’s presence in the ring is obviously a relatively recent development. But I
would say that it is only one of the things that have changed in the world of boxing
since I began working and training in gyms in the early 1970s. As with everything in
life, some of those changes are for the better, some for the worse, and some are simply
mixed. Taken as a whole, they reflect what I think are changing attitudes toward the
body and the ends to which it may be put, whether for wisdom, self-understanding, or,
more recently, a kind of self-reinvention.

59
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

It used to be that there were boxing gyms in almost every neighborhood of our
major cities, as well as selected centers of rural life. They were dusky caves where men
got together. The elders, often former fighters, traded stories, and the younger guys
traded blows.
When I was in my early twenties, I trained in Gramercy Park Gym, at 116 East
Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. A few years before my time, world champions
Floyd Patterson and José Torres had practiced their craft there, under the tutelage of
Constantine “Cus” D’Amato, the legendary trainer who would become the mentor
and, ultimately, stepfather to Mike Tyson.
The clientele at the Gramercy was a mix of working-class guys, some cops, and a
few fellows the cops might find themselves chasing down an alley on any given night. It
was intimidating to tromp up the three flights of stairs and into this dark and stinking
den filled with experienced pugilists, many with faces reshaped by the torrent of blows
that had landed on them. But if you showed up on a regular basis and were able to give
and take a punch, you discovered a level of
So why did the hedge-fund managers mutual respect, friendship, and affection that
was hard to find elsewhere.
end up at Gleason’s Gym? Fourteenth Street was one of the mean
streets, and the Gramercy was an institution,
mainly for those who had aspirations to fighting under the klieg lights. But there are
places where boxing can serve an even more vital role. In depressed and crime-ridden
neighborhoods, these halls of limited warfare are often the closest thing to a safe haven.
In his landmark study of the culture of the boxing gym in late-twentieth-century South
Side Chicago, Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, French sociologist Loïc
Wacquant wrote:

Above all, the gym protects one from the street, and acts as a buffer
against the insecurity of the neighborhood and the pressures of every-
day life. In the manner of a sanctuary, it offers a cosseted space, closed
and reserved, where one can, among like-minded others, shelter oneself
from the ordinary miseries of an all-too-ordinary life and from the spells
that the culture and economy of the street hold in store for young men
trapped into this place scorned and abandoned by all that is the dark
ghetto.2

But these sanctuaries came upon hard times. In the 1980s, when rents and insurance
premiums in New York and other cities began to soar, many of the local gyms were
forced to turn out the lights. The seven or so dollars a month such places typically
charged as dues was not enough to cover the rent, and most students of the “sweet
science” could not afford to pay the kind of membership fees that would keep gyms
solvent. Fortunately, though, not all of them went under, thanks to the creativity of
certain gym owners. As rents and other expenses rose, these owners, starting in New
York City, began catering to a well-to-do crowd of corporate executives willing to pay
for private and semi-private lessons. This new twist was called “white-collar boxing.” In

60
 LESSONS FROM THE RING / MARINO

her superb book Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason’s Gym,
Lucia Trimbur has described the changes that took place:

This phenomenon…began in the mid-1980s in New York City when

a number of white male businessmen, lawyers, and doctors expressed
eagerness to pay substantial sums of money to be trained in the city’s
most famous gyms…. Gyms quickly instituted white-collar classes, pro-
grams, and leagues, and, at a time when the number of amateur and
professional boxers in New York City dwindled, the number of white-
collar clients expanded dramatically, keeping urban gyms afloat with
their dependable membership dues.3

This white-collar movement swept both the United States and Britain, and although
boxing gyms lost much of their old mystique, they were at least able to stay open.
In addition, professional and amateur boxers who had often been without work now
found gainful employment training the uptown aspirants.
When boxing was in its heyday, there was competitive collegiate boxing, but no
business executive would have thought of training at a place like the Gramercy. It
was widely believed that serious boxers—that is, those who aimed to improve the
lives of their families with their fists—needed to be hungry, and the hungrier the
better. So why did the hedge-fund managers
end up at Gleason’s Gym? The desire for an
enhanced sense of masculinity was at least The boxing gym is also a space where
one factor. (As Trimbur observes, “Clients repeated physical confrontation
can be obsessed with the perception that their
wealth has made them weak.”)4 But there breaks down stereotypes, fears, and
was also a race-related fantasy at work in the physical boundaries.
white-collar turn to boxing.
To be sure, race, ethnicity, and nationality
have always played a role in the world of boxing. In the early and mid-twentieth cen-
tury, bouts were promoted on the basis of barely sublimated ethnic rivalries: Italians
versus Jews, Irishmen versus Italians. Fighters changed their names in order to appeal
to the right ethnicities. Even today, some of the most lucrative matchups are between
Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. But race is perhaps the most complicated dimension
of gym life. Commenting on its role in the white-collar movement, Trimbur puts it
bluntly:

When upper-middle-class and upper-class white professionals pay for

the expertise of “authentic” black trainers, they are imagining and con-
suming a notion of blackness defined by the body, narratives of suffer-
ing, histories of criminality, and experiences of racial inequality. Clients
presume an authentic black identity, and, in turn, produce a form of
black masculinity.5

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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015

The boxing gym, however, is also a space where repeated physical confrontation
breaks down stereotypes, fears, and physical boundaries. I can recall an amateur bout
between two thirteen-year-old kids, one white and one black. They had never met
before and were from different worlds. For three rounds, they tried to decapitate each
other. After the decision was announced, they were hanging all over each other like old
friends. Later in the evening, I saw them in the parking lot exchanging phone num-
bers. However much it is exploited to promote boxers and the big fights, racism is rare
among boxers themselves.
Today, men and women with money not only can travel to exotic lands; they can
purchase experiences that lead to new versions of themselves. Yes, people have long
wanted to know how much they can take or how well they will react to a physical
challenge. As the narrator says in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, “If you’ve never
been in a fight, you wonder. About getting hurt, about what you’re capable of doing
against another man.” But now, for people for whom money is no obstacle, it’s possible
to purchase experiences of controlled violence that lead not simply to self-knowledge
but to the remaking of the self.
A recent issue of Men’s Health—“The Reinvention Issue”—shows a photograph of a
highly chiseled and tattooed Justin Bieber. Next to the teen idol is the boldface headline
“CAN HE REINVENT HIMSELF?” Mind you, it is the self, not the body, that is at
issue. Of course, the implied answer to the question is yes—he can reinvent himself,
and you can too, by changing your body.
Boxing has become one way to that end. Once a school of hard knocks, the boxing
gym has become an arena of self-reinvention. The place may endure, imparting some
of the same old lessons, but what many people now make of those lessons is indeed
something new and different.

Endnotes

1 Carlo Rotella, Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 2.
2 Loïc Wacquant, Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (New York: Oxford University Press,
2004), 14.
3 Lucia Trimbur, Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason’s Gym (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2013), 118.
4 Ibid., 137.
5 Ibid., 118–119.

62
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63
 The Witness of Literature:
A Genealogical Sketch
Alan Jacobs

My story is important not because it is
mine, God knows, but because if I tell
it anything like right, the chances are
you will recognize that in many ways
it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more
important than that we keep track,
you and I, of these stories of who we
are and where we have come from and
the people we have met along the way
because it is precisely through these
stories in all their particularity, as I have
long believed and often said, that God
makes Himself known to each of us
most powerfully and personally. If this
is true, it means that to lose track of our
stories is to be profoundly impoverished
not only humanly but also spiritually.
—Frederick Buechner1
Long ago at Calvin College’s Festival of Faith
and Writing—an enormous biennial gathering
of writers, would-be writers, and passionate read-
ers, most but not all of them Christians—I had
a curious and memorable experience. The fea-
tured speaker that year was Frederick Buechner,
a novelist and memoirist whose general fame
was greatest at the beginning of his career, in
the 1950s, and who, since then, had produced a
series of well-reviewed but not especially popular
books. His 1981 novel Godric was a finalist for
the Pulitzer Prize in fiction; this is as close as he
has come to winning a major literary award. Yet
among those attending the Festival of Faith and
Writing, Frederick Buechner was simply a rock
star.
My wife and I had known Buechner for many
years, and we arranged to meet him for coffee
and a talk, before having dinner later in a larger
group. But this private meeting proved difficult
to arrange. So many people wanted to see him, to
thank him, to get him to sign their often-reread
copies of his books—it was more than Buechner,
or anyone else, could handle, and he had to be
kept out of sight. So we were ushered in cloak-
and-dagger fashion to a small, out-of-the-way
room where the author was ensconced, so we
could recall old times and catch up a bit.
An awkward situation ensued. The kind
and efficient people running the festival clearly
expected us to have five minutes with the great

Alan Jacobs is a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University. A
prolific essayist, reviewer, and blogger, he is the author, most recently, of “The Book of Common Prayer”:
A Biography (2013) and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (2011).

Left: Joy Hulga’s Leg by Blair Hobbs; courtesy of the artist. Image inspired by Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good
Country People.”

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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
man and then depart; Buechner equally clearly
expected to spend some time chatting. So when
another visitor came in and we rose to leave,
Buechner insisted that we sit back down. As it
turned out, then, we spent most of the afternoon
there, having our conversation regularly inter-
rupted by new visitors. Some of these were other
festival speakers—for instance, Alfred Corn,
the distinguished poet and critic, dropped by,
and he and Buechner compared notes for a few
moments on shared friends and acquaintances
in New York—but most were simply lovers of
Buechner’s work who had managed through
some means unknown to us to gain brief admis-
sion to his presence. And almost all of them told
the same story: Your writing has meant everything
to my Christian faith. I don’t think I could be a
Christian without your books.
How did literary writers come to be seen
by many as the best custodians and
advocates of Christian faith?
Throughout that afternoon—rising to greet
strangers, then sitting down and striving to
remain inconspicuous as they poured out their
hearts—I couldn’t help reflecting on the sheer
oddity of the situation. These were people, by
and large, who knew the Bible, who attended
church, who had the benefits of Christian
community. Yet they testified, almost to a
person, that Christian belief would have been
impossible for them without the mediation of
the stories told by Frederick Buechner. I know
literary history fairly well, especially where it
intersects with Christian thought and practice,
and it seemed to me that such radical depen-
dence on literary experience would have been
virtually impossible even a century earlier. But
I also knew that Buechner’s role was anything
but unique, that other readers would offer the
66
same testimony to the fiction of Walker Percy or
Flannery O’Connor or C.S. Lewis.
How did such a state of affairs come about?
How did literary writers come to be seen by many
as the best custodians and advocates of Christian
faith? It is a question with a curious and convo-
luted genealogy, one worth teasing out.
* * *
HUMANITIES: grammar, rhetoric,
and poetry…for teaching of which,
there are professors in the universities of
Scotland, called humanists.
—Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768)
Cicero, in his Pro Archia, refers to the studia
humanitatis ac litteratum: humane and liter-
ary studies. This phrase caught the eye of some
early Renaissance scholars, especially the Tuscan
Coluccio Salutati, correspondent of Petrarch,
and his student Leonardo Bruni; it encapsulat-
ed their understanding of what education at its
highest level should be. In the Italian universi-
ties of the fifteenth century, one who advocated
this model and taught according to it was known
as an umanista—an inevitable coinage, since a
teacher of jurisprudence had long been known as
a jurista, a teacher of canon law a canonista, and
so on. So the term humanist, from which human-
ism in turn derives, was originally the product of
student slang.
As Paul Oskar Kristeller explained long ago
in what remains a useful treatment of the history,
in the early modern period and especially in
Italy, “the studia humanitatis came to stand for
a clearly defined cycle of scholarly disciplines,
namely grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and
moral philosophy,” pursued primarily by reading
the greatest Latin writers, though eventually, in
a secondary way, the major Greek figures were
also included. Other philosophical subdisci-
plines that had their own professors, such as

logic and metaphysics, played no part in the
humanists’ project. The studia humanitatis there-
fore were “concerned…neither with the classics
[as such] nor with philosophy [as such]”; their
focus “might roughly be described as literature.
It was to this peculiar literary preoccupation that
the very intensive and extensive study which the
humanists devoted to the Greek and especially
to the Latin classics owed its peculiar character,
which differentiates it from that of modern clas-
sical scholars since the second half of the eigh-
teenth century.”2
It is hard to imagine a scholastic
dialectician not being utterly scandalized
by Boccaccio’s claim that “theology is
nothing else than the poetry of God.”
Kristeller’s use of “peculiar” twice in that
last-quoted sentence is a stylistic infelicity, but a
telling one. The umanistas were doing something
unprecedented in keying the search for wisdom—
including, as we shall see, specifically Christian
wisdom—to the study of literature. This was,
to put the point mildly, not in keeping with the
dialectical approach of the medieval scholastic
tradition, which they scorned. How this literary
approach to the moral and social education of
young men emerged is not, I think, perfectly
understood, but some of the groundwork for it
may have been laid by Boccaccio, writing in his
Life of Dante in 1374. In the passage that follows,
Boccaccio uses the term “theology” to mean
“Holy Scripture”:
The subject of sacred poetry is divine
truth, while that of the ancient poets
is men and the gods of the pagans.
They are opposite in so far as theology
proposes nothing that is not true; poetry
supposes certain things as true which are
T H E W I T N E S S O F L I T E R AT U R E / J A C O B S
most false and erroneous and contrary
to the Christian religion.… I say that
theology and poetry may be said to be
almost one thing when the subject is the
same; and I say further that theology is
nothing else than the poetry of God.…
The sense of our Comedy…whether you
call it moral or theological…is, at what-
ever part of the work most pleases you,
the simple and immutable truth, which
not only cannot receive corruption, but,
the more it is searched, the greater odor
of incorruptible sweetness it emits to
those who regard it.3
It is hard to imagine a scholastic dialectician
not being utterly scandalized by Boccaccio’s claim
that “theology is nothing else than the poetry of
God”: Literature, and not philosophical theology,
becomes the foundational genre of God’s revela-
tion. And of course poetry demands to be read
as poetry, not as philosophy. So if Boccaccio is
right, then a wholly different intellectual toolbox
from that provided by Scholasticism is required
for the one who seeks Holy Wisdom.
If I am right in thinking that the Life of
Dante was a key text in the emergence of literary
humanism, it is noteworthy that Boccaccio
makes his case for the wisdom-giving power
of poetry through a recent text written in the
Italian vernacular—after all, this is not the
direction the umanistas would take. But soon
after he wrote about Dante, Boccaccio worked
on a far larger and more ambitious project, the
Genealogia deorum gentilium, or Genealogy of the
Pagan Gods, in which he showed that the then-
standard model of biblical exegesis—with its
identification of four distinct levels of meaning,
the literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical—
could usefully be applied by the Christian
interpreter to pagan myths. So, for example, the
story of how Perseus killed the Gorgon Medusa
and then flew away on winged sandals becomes,
on the moral level, “a wise man’s triumph over
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
vice and his attainment of virtue”; on the alle-
gorical level, “the pious man who scorns worldly
delight and lifts his mind to heavenly things”;
on the anagogical level, “Christ’s victory over
the Prince of this world and his Ascension.”4
Boccaccio thus shows in his Life of Dante
how a great Christian writer can use poetry to
convey to us “the simple and immutable truth,”
and in his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods how
shrewd Christian readers can use interpreta-
tive methods originally developed for the study
of the Bible to liberate the wisdom hidden in
pagan texts. It is a strategy encompassing the
Christian and the non-Christian, the writerly
and the readerly.
Gerson was especially frustrated by the
scholastic habit of addressing a disputed
question merely by piling up citations to
authorities, a habit already mocked by his
older contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer in
The Canterbury Tales.
Boccaccio died in 1375; twenty years later,
another important development in this story was
marked by the election of thirty-two-year-old
Jean Gerson as chancellor of the University of
Paris. In a superb work of scholarship on Gerson
and—in the words of the book’s subtitle—“the
transformation of late medieval learning,” Daniel
Hobbins shows how the French academic gradu-
ally distanced himself from scholastic dialectical
procedure and sketched out a new direction
for Christian intellectual writing. Gerson was
himself formed by scholastic education, and
warmly commended its emphasis on sound
logic: “We can never speak truly and properly
without correct use of logic.” But he also came
to believe that the ways the scholastics deployed
their logic had become stultifyingly rigid, and
68
he constantly sought alternative means of orga-
nizing and presenting ideas. Some of Gerson’s
devices, Hobbins acknowledges, “may seem
puzzling or contrived to modern tastes, but they
are evidence of a creative mind at work striving
for new forms of presentation.” It is noteworthy
that in the many dialogues Gerson composed
for varying contexts, including even sermons, an
especially prominent character is Studiositas spec-
ulatrix (Earnest Investigator), whose questions
seem never to end. How to satisfy this relentless
inquirer—this is a problem Gerson thought the
traditional scholastic models failed to solve.5
Gerson was especially frustrated by the scho-
lastic habit of addressing a disputed question
merely by piling up citations to authorities, a
habit already mocked by his older contemporary
Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales—for
instance, in the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” where
Chaunticleer the rooster uses a barrage of refer-
ences to out-argue his consort, Pertelote: “Oon
of the gretteste auctours that men rede/Seith
thus.… And certes, in the same book I rede/
Right in the nexte chapitre after this.… Lo, in
the lyf of Seint Kenelm I rede.… And forther-
moore I pray yow looketh wel/In the olde testa-
ment of Daniel.” It is far too easy, Gerson came
to believe, for the point of the discourse to be lost
in the apparatus. Hobbins again: “Abandoning
unnecessary citations and ‘coming to the point
and the heart of the matter as it seems to me,’
as he says in a French sermon—this direct and
personal approach is perhaps the most distinc-
tive trait of Gerson’s style.”6
For Gerson, the problem was that the scho-
lastics had paid but lip service to rhetoric as
one of the foundational disciplines of the artes
liberales: “We write, but we give no weight to
our sentences, no number and measure to our
words. Everything we write is flaccid, coarse,
and sluggish. We write not new things but old,
and when we try to pass them off as our own
by recycling them, we deform them and render
them absurd.”7
 T H E W I T N E S S O F L I T E R AT U R E / J A C O B S

It might appear that Gerson is merely another

of the umanistas discussed earlier, with whom he
was roughly contemporary, but he differs from
them in certain significant ways. First of all, he
retains far more respect for dialectical method
and logic than they did, which is precisely
why he soon became a marginal figure and was
almost forgotten after his death: For the umani-
stas he was too scholastic, for the schoolmen too
humanistic. He tried to be a mediating figure
in a time of intellectual war. But second, and
more important for my purposes here, Gerson’s
approach to rhetoric is not driven by a reverence
for the unique greatness of classical authors, but
rather by a desire to reach and move his audi-
ences, whether in pastoral or academic contexts.
Rhetoric for him is not a matter of conformity
to incontrovertible Ciceronian norms, but
rather the concern to find words that will stir Rhetoricians at a Window, c.1661–1666 by Jan Steen
people’s hearts as well as their minds. Hobbins (1626–1679); The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art
Resource, NY.
notes Gerson’s great reverence for the Italian
theologian and philosopher Bonaventure, who
a century earlier had written in his Collationes in immediate end soever it be directed,
Hexaemeron (Talks on the Six Days of Creation) the final end is, to lead and draw us to
that “not through hearing alone but through as high a perfection, as our degenerate
heeding [observando] is one made wise.”8 souls made worse by their clayey lodg-
If we combine Boccaccio’s insistence on ings, can be capable of.
the theological power of poetry with Gerson’s
desire to find a rhetoric that will move hearers What studies can bring about the “perfec-
and readers toward godly obedience, we end up tion” of which Sidney writes, can help our
with something like the argument Sir Philip souls acquire “true virtue”? Sidney answers that
Sidney makes in one of the great documents of though “some…thought this felicity principally
the English Renaissance, An Apologie for Poetrie to be gotten by knowledge,” they disputed which
(c.1579)—which nevertheless is to be distin- knowledge was the most valuable: astronomy,
guished from those predecessors in important natural philosophy, metaphysics, or music.
ways as well. At a crucial stage of his argument, Sidney rejects all of these as “but serving sciences,”
Sidney places his apologia within a general only truly useful if they “serve” the greater end,
account of the purposes of education: “the mistress knowledge, by the Greeks called
architektonike, which stands, as I think, in the
This purifying of wit, this enriching of knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic
memory, enabling of judgment, and consideration, with the end of well-doing, and
enlarging of conceit, which commonly not of well-knowing only.” In the art of moving
we call learning, under what name men to “well-doing,” “the poet is worthy to have
soever it come forth, or to what it before any other competitors.”

69
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
Here is a strong commendation, but again,
although Sidney’s identification of literature’s
power to move its audience to “virtuous action”
echoes some of the beliefs of Boccaccio and
Gerson, surely both of them would have found
his formulation woefully lacking in theological
specificity. And so as Renaissance humanism
comes into its pedagogical and literary matu-
rity, it simultaneously sheds its distinctively
Christian character; it seeks a language that
transcends—or, some might say, evades—theo-
logical detail. Surely this was a natural enough
response to a century that had seen the rise of
violent religious controversy that would not
subside for many more decades.
In the transition from Boccaccio to
Gerson to Sidney, we see an intellectually
powerful, literarily sophisticated Christian
humanism arise, only to clip its own wings
lest it contribute to a continent’s discord.
This process of moving beyond—or away
from—theology was not smooth and unruffled.
Almost a century after Sidney, John Milton
would strive for a more distinctively Christian
account of what education should do: “The end
then of Learning is to repair the ruins of our first
Parents by regaining to know God aright, and
out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate
him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by
possessing our souls of true virtue, which being
united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up
the highest perfection” (Of Education, 1644). It
seems likely that Milton’s definition is meant to
extend and correct Sidney’s: While Sidney speaks
of “degenerate souls” in “clayey lodgings”—a
formulation more Platonic than Christian—
Milton identifies our problem in the specific
terms of the biblical narrative, according to
which Adam and Eve brought “ruin” into the
70
world through disobedience. Sidney’s model
of education is ethical and in a certain sense
spiritual, but there is nothing specifically
Christian about it, and it may even run counter
to Christian orthodoxy, even though Sidney
himself was an earnest Christian.
So in the transition from Boccaccio to Gerson
to Sidney, we see an intellectually powerful, liter-
arily sophisticated Christian humanism arise,
only to clip its own wings lest it contribute to
a continent’s discord. Milton’s rearguard action,
in his verse as well as his prose—Paradise Lost
would form the last great monument of early
modern Christian humanism—had little chance
of achieving great influence. Paradise Lost is as
theologically and biblically specific a poem as
one can imagine, but its great fame in the two
centuries following its publication in 1667 was
perpetuated by many a poet who either ignored
Milton’s theology or, as William Blake famously
did—“Milton was of the Devil’s party without
knowing it”—set it at odds with the poem.
* * *
There in the desert I lay dead,
And God called out to me and said:
“Rise, prophet, rise, and hear, and see,
And let my works be seen and heard
By all who turn aside from me,
And burn them with my fiery word.”
—Alexander Pushkin, “The Prophet”
(translation by D.M. Thomas)9
It would seem, then, that the story of Christian
humanism was effectively over, especially given
the general decline of orthodox (or even unorth-
odox) Christian belief among the learned in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But with
the advent of Romanticism, matters took an
interesting turn, not because the Romantics were
(by and large) either Christian or humanist in the
senses in which I have been using those terms,
but because they provided, whether they meant

to or not, a new way in which a reconstituted
humanism, simultaneously Christian and liter-
ary, could reform itself.
The “way” I speak of here is a literary one, but
it is not the only such point of reentry. A distinc-
tively philosophical Christian humanism also
arises in the nineteenth century, largely at the
instigation of Pope Leo XIII in his 1879 encyc-
lical Aeterni Patris, which led to the enthrone-
ment of Thomas Aquinas as a model of Christian
thought and the subsequent claim, made by
many Catholic thinkers, most notably Jacques
Maritain, that Christianity is the only genuine
humanism. That new philosophical humanism
overlaps with the literary one to some degree—
certainly Maritain tries to draw them together, as
does Flannery O’Connor in her frequent refer-
ences to Aquinas in her correspondence—but,
practically speaking, they develop as largely sepa-
rate trends.
A distinctively philosophical Christian
humanism also arises in the nineteenth
century, largely at the instigation of Pope
Leo XIII in his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris.
The renewal of a literary Christian humanism
is illustrated by a highly representative Victorian
book, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford
(1882). Recounting an episode from his univer-
sity days, the author writes,
But one day in my third year, a day I
remember as well as Paul must have
remembered afterwards the day on which
he went to Damascus, I happened to
find amongst a parcel of books a volume
of poems in paper boards. It was called
Lyrical Ballads, and I read first one and
then the whole book. It conveyed to me
no new doctrine, and yet the change it
T H E W I T N E S S O F L I T E R AT U R E / J A C O B S
wrought in me could only be compared
with that which is said to have been
wrought on Paul himself by the Divine
apparition.
“Mark Rutherford” is the pseudonym of William
Hale White, an English civil servant who had
been raised in a Nonconformist home and stud-
ied to become a Congregationalist minister, but
abandoned that plan when he lost his faith. It
was William Wordsworth who restored that
faith—or gave him a new one: White’s rhetoric is
richly ambiguous on this point, as we can see by
continuing to read from the same passage:
God is nowhere formally deposed, and
Wordsworth would have been the last
man to say that he had lost his faith
in the God of his fathers. But his real
God is not the God of the Church,
but the God of the hills, the abstrac-
tion Nature, and to this my reverence
was transferred. Instead of an object
of worship which was altogether artifi-
cial, remote, never coming into genuine
contact with me, I had now one which
I thought to be real, one in which liter-
ally I could live and move and have my
being, an actual fact present before my
eyes. God was brought from that heaven
of the books, and dwelt on the downs
in the far-away distances, and in every
cloud-shadow which wandered across
the valley. Wordsworth unconsciously
did for me what every religious reformer
has done—he re-created my Supreme
Divinity; substituting a new and living
spirit for the old deity, once alive, but
gradually hardened into an idol.
On the one hand, White wants to say that
Wordsworth gave him “no new doctrine”; on the
other hand, he claims to have had a dramatic
road-to-Damascus conversion from “the God
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
of the Church” to “the God of the hills.” The
God of the Church had become an idol; now,
thanks to the poetry of Wordsworth, White has
a living God to whom he can give true worship.
This is a step significantly greater than the one
White’s older contemporary John Stuart Mill
took when he supplemented the dry rationalism
of his Utilitarian upbringing with the reading of
Wordsworth’s poems: That had merely been, as
Mill put it in his Autobiography (1873), “a medi-
cine for my state of mind” insofar as those poems
“expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states
of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling,
under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to
be the very culture of the feelings, which I was
in quest of.” Mill takes pains to insist that this
encounter with Wordsworth did not change in
any fundamental way his commitments or prac-
tices: “I never turned recreant to intellectual
culture, or ceased to consider the power and
practice of analysis as an essential condition both
of individual and of social improvement. But I
thought that it had consequences which required
to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultiva-
tion with it. The maintenance of a due balance
among the faculties now seemed to be of primary
importance.”10 White, by contrast, was given not
just a renewed “culture of the feelings,” but a
divinity whom he could truly worship.
Coleridge’s linkage of poetry and divinity
was often accepted in his time and after,
but his orthodoxy was generally deemed
optional or undesirable.
It is noteworthy that White’s mediator is
Wordsworth, because Wordsworth’s friend and
sometime collaborator Samuel Taylor Coleridge
had also articulated, in his Biographia Literaria,
a theological defense of poetry—but had done
so in a more emphatically orthodox manner,
72
in implicit and sometimes explicit dissent from
Wordsworthian devotion. When Coleridge
writes, “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to
be the living Power and prime Agent of all human
Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind
of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM,”
he is drawing a very clear line between poetic
making and the biblical God—the one who says
to Moses, “I AM THAT I AM”—not “the God
of the hills.”11 Coleridge’s linkage of poetry and
divinity was often accepted in his time and after,
but his orthodoxy was generally deemed optional
or undesirable.
In light of this history, we might compare
White’s self-accounting to one made some years
later by William Butler Yeats, who wrote, “I
am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and
Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded
religion of my childhood, I had made a new reli-
gion, almost an infallible church, out of poetic
tradition: a fardel of stories, and of personages,
and of emotions, a bundle of images and of masks
passed on from generation to generation by poets
and painters with some help from philosophers
and theologians.” The dogma of this church Yeats
states in these terms: “Because those imaginary
people are created out of the deepest instinct of
man, to be his measure and his norm, whatever
I can imagine those mouths speaking may be the
nearest I can go to truth.”12
Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall are
often referred to as atheists, inaccurately: Huxley
coined the term “agnostic” to describe his posi-
tion, and Tyndall never specified his religious
views. But both of them insisted that the claims
of religion had to be subordinated to those of
science—that only science was productive of
knowledge, although religious faith could be a
strong support of morals. In any event, to the
arguments of Huxley and Tyndall against tradi-
tional religion, Yeats had no answer—just as
William Hale White had no answer to the doubts
that assailed him—until literature and the other
arts came to the rescue. But what they rescued

was something very different from Trinitarian
Christianity, or any such “simple-minded reli-
gion” that a poet might associate with childhood.
We have come a long way here from Boccaccio
and Gerson and even Sidney, and yet there are
genuine continuities to be noted and accounted
for. In the aftermath of Romanticism, with its
cult of intuition and imagination as reliable path-
ways to truth, and its skepticism about the desic-
cating effects of reason as defined by the chief
figures of the Enlightenment, we hear an echo of
the humanist reinstatement of rhetoric, first as
supplemental to and then as superior to dialectic.
Only now, it is the aesthetic that complements
(in Mill) and then transcends (in White and
Yeats) the narrowly rational. The access to reli-
gious truth that philosophy and science seal off
is re-enabled by aesthetic, and especially literary,
experience.
To the arguments of Huxley and Tyndall
against traditional religion, Yeats had no
answer until literature and the other arts
came to the rescue.
This development seems to happen
throughout Europe in the latter half of the nine-
teenth century. It is responsible for the founding
of Browning Societies even during Robert
Browning’s lifetime, based largely on the belief
that the true religious spirit might be breathed in,
with unique ease and comfort, through poetry.
In a typical passage from the early papers of the
London Browning Society, an admirer wrote, “I
must claim for Browning the distinction of being
pre-eminently the greatest Christian poet we
have ever had. Not in a narrow dogmatic sense,
but as the teacher who is as thrilled-through
with all Christian sympathies as with artistic
or musical.”13 It is striking how strongly this
assertion resembles the claims made in Russia
T H E W I T N E S S O F L I T E R AT U R E / J A C O B S
for the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky—claims
that Dostoevsky himself endorsed by linking
himself with Pushkin’s poem “The Prophet”—
even though the history of Christianity and
Christian thought in Russia is so dramatically
different from its English counterpart. Thus,
Vladimir Solovyev, in a eulogy delivered just after
Dostoevsky’s death in 1881, wrote that “just as
the highest worldly power somehow or other
becomes concentrated in one person, who repre-
sents a state, similarly the highest spiritual power
in each epoch usually belongs in every people to
one man, who more clearly than all grasps the
spiritual ideals of mankind, more consciously
than all strives to attain them, more strongly
than all affects others by his preachments. Such
a spiritual leader of the Russian people in recent
times was Dostoevsky.”14 The Victorian era was
one dominated by sages of all kinds, but this is
an especially peculiar one: the poet as prophet, as
comforter, as vehicle of the sacred.
* * *
No eye his future can foretell
No law his past explain
Whom neither Passion may compel
Nor Reason can restrain.
—W.H. Auden,
libretto to The Rake’s Progress
For Victorian intellectuals, the versions of the
Christian faith that could not be taken seriously
were those of the previous generation: The faith
of one’s parents, whether biological, intellectual,
or aesthetic, will inevitably seem “simple-minded.”
But children eventually become parents. The early-
nineteenth-century Russian liberals whom Peter
the Great had done so much to create, who looked
back with scorn on traditional Orthodoxy, them-
selves came to seem absurdly naive to Dostoevsky,
who satirized them mercilessly, especially in the
character of Peter Verkhovensky in Demons (also
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
known as The Possessed ). Something similar came
to befall the English Victorian advocates of an
enlightened religion, or no religion at all.
Consider, for example, a story related by
C.S. Lewis, who lost his faith in early adolescence
and then went on to be tutored for some years
by “a ‘Rationalist’ of the old, high and dry nine-
teenth-century type,” a man named Kirkpatrick.
“At the time when I knew him, Kirk’s Atheism
was chiefly of the anthropological and pessimistic
kind. He was great on The Golden Bough and
Schopenhauer.”15 But while Lewis was studying
with Kirkpatrick, something happened: He
started reading the fiction of George MacDonald,
who, though a Victorian and not by every stan-
dard orthodox in his theology, was nevertheless
the kind of person Lewis called “a thoroughgoing
supernaturalist.” Lewis’s account of this experi-
ence is extremely telling:
What Phantastes [MacDonald’s 1858
novel] actually did to me was to convert,
even to baptize…my imagination. It did
nothing to my intellect nor (at that time)
to my conscience. Their turn came far
later and with the help of many other
books and men. But when the process
was complete—by which, of course,
I mean “when it had really begun”—I
found that I was still with MacDonald
and that he had accompanied me all the
way and that I was now at last ready to
hear from him much that he could not
have told me at that first meeting. But
in a sense, what he was now telling me
was the very same that he had told me
from the beginning.16
We might usefully compare this with Lewis’s rec-
ollection of encountering, a few years later, the
essays of G.K. Chesterton: “I had never heard of
him and had no idea of what he stood for; nor can
I quite understand why he made such an imme-
diate conquest of me,” since, Lewis wrote, “my
74
pessimism, my atheism, and my hatred of senti-
ment [should] have made him to me the least
congenial of all authors.” But without agreeing
with Chesterton (“I did not need to accept what
Chesterton said in order to enjoy it”), the young
Lewis was “charmed” by him. He concludes this
account by commenting, “In reading Chesterton,
as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I
was letting myself in for.”17
What Lewis had acquired from MacDonald
was not knowledge of or even mere
knowledge about Christian belief and
practice, but, rather, a disposition to
openness, a willingness to be charmed.
To grasp the import of this statement, one
must take it literally: Lewis did not know what he
was letting himself in for. What he had acquired
was not knowledge of or even mere knowl-
edge about Christian belief and practice, but,
rather, a disposition to openness, a willingness
to be charmed. This is why he says that reading
MacDonald baptized his imagination: Baptism is
the Christian rite of initiation, the beginning of
new life in Christ, and, in Lewis’s Anglican tradi-
tion, something that typically happens to infants.
Through MacDonald, he had been initiated into
habits of aesthetic experience that would later
make him receptive to Chesterton for reasons he
could not then have stated: Only later (“when it
had really begun”) would come the knowledge
that enabled him to give an account of what had
happened to him when he read those books.
A quarter-century after Lewis underwent his
imaginative baptism, a Frenchwoman of Jewish
parentage but no religious upbringing would
have an experience that bears notable structural
similarities to his, but through an encounter
with a seventeenth-century poet rather than a
Victorian writer of fantasy. In 1942, Simone Weil

wrote to the priest who had become her informal
counselor—informal because she refused to
be received into the Catholic Church—that in
1938 she had spent Passion Week at the monas-
tery of Solesmes, where she attended services
every day. There, she met a young Englishman
whose face seemed to register some extraordinary
experience when he received Communion, and
who “told me of the existence of those English
poets of the seventeenth century who are named
metaphysical.” George Herbert’s “Love III”—a
kind of allegory of the Lord’s Table—struck her
with particular force, and she memorized the
poem. Weil told her counselor, Father Perrin,
that “often, at the culminating point of a violent
headache, I make myself say it over, concen-
trating all my attention upon it and clinging with
all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines.” But
she did not know what she was letting herself
in for by reciting such a poem. “I used to think
I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but
without my knowing it the recitation had the
virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these reci-
tations that, as I told you, Christ himself came
down and took possession of me.”18
Here again, the imaginative or aesthetic expe-
rience precedes and paves the way for intellec-
tual understanding. The way of reason is not
rejected—indeed, the opposite is true—but the
reason has to be released from its bondage in
order to function properly. To borrow language
from the philosopher Charles Taylor in A Secular
Age (2007), the buffered self must become in
some respect porous, and the most vulnerable
buffer is the one that protects the imagination.
To use the language of “imagination” is to
employ a post-Romantic concept, one that
Boccaccio or Gerson or Sidney would have
found baffling. (In early modern translations of
the Bible, the word “imagination” is, without
exception, used in a highly pejorative way: “Yet
they obeyed not, nor inclined their ear, but
walked every one in the imagination of their
evil heart,” from Jeremiah 11:8, is typical.) The
T H E W I T N E S S O F L I T E R AT U R E / J A C O B S
twentieth-century British thinker Owen Barfield
best understood the recuperation and elevation
of the term: Its rise marks “the transition from a
view of art which beholds it as the product of a
mind, or spirit, not possessed by the individual,
but rather possessing him; to a view of it as the
product of something in a manner possessed by
the individual though still not identical with his
everyday personality.”19 My imagination, then, is
not identical with my conscious mind—it works
in some sense on its own, independent of my
volition—but it does not come from without, it
does not and cannot possess or (in older senses of
the term) inspire. But it is precisely because imag-
ination does not present itself as transcendent,
and therefore does not put up the buffers, raise
the shields, that it can become a vehicle of the
transcendent. It constructs a back door to God.
To use the language of “imagination” is to
employ a post-Romantic concept, one that
Boccaccio or Gerson or Sidney would have
found baffling.
I should note that imagination creates this door
for readers more than for writers, at least in some
cases. Writers may indeed dissent from the model
of reception I have described. Flannery O’Connor,
a lifelong Catholic rather than a convert or returnee
like Weil, Lewis, and Coleridge, placed dogmatic
belief front and center in her own thinking: “Your
beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they
will not be what you see and they will not be a
substitute for seeing”20—a point of view rather
different from the one that makes imagination the
light by which dogma is seen, and recognized as
desirable. But the key point for the reader is not
how the writer sees but that the writer sees. All
those who are led to and strengthened in religious
faith by writers must believe that writers have,
at the very least, superior powers of perception
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
enabled by superior imagination. Percy Shelley’s
claim that “poets are the hierophants of an unap-
prehended inspiration” merely states in extrava-
gant terms what all believers in the salvific witness
of literature must affirm.
Percy Shelley’s claim that “poets are
the hierophants of an unapprehended
inspiration” merely states in extravagant
terms what all believers in the salvific
witness of literature must affirm.
For this reason, it is typically sufficient that
the writer reveal the conditions against which he
or she dare not and need not preach. O’Connor
again: “We are now living in an age which doubts
both fact and value. It is the life of this age that
we wish to see and judge.”21 Likewise, Walker
Percy, a physician by training, found common-
ality between the doctor and the writer in the
act of diagnosis: “To the degree that a society has
been overtaken by a sense of malaise rather than
exuberance, by fragmentation rather than whole-
ness, the vocation of the artist, whether novelist,
poet, playwright, filmmaker, can perhaps be said
to come that much closer to that of the diagnos-
tician rather than the artist’s celebration of life in
a triumphant age.”22 The diagnostic novelist or
poet—Auden comes to mind as a poet with this
kind of forensic and etiological temperament—
certainly “judges,” but judges by portrayal and
implication. And this is certainly for the best, if
one would avoid triggering the powerful buffers
and shields of modernity.
“Tell the truth but tell it slant,” Emily
Dickinson famously counseled, and throughout
the long and meandering history of Christian
humanism we see an increasingly strong pref-
erence, among a certain kind of reader, for the
slanted truth. A defense of the powers of poetry
(what we would call “literature”) to carry Christian
76
truth faithfully and vividly—a defense that arose
in a period when dialectical method dominated
European universities—underwent a series of
transformations that seemed, at one point, to
culminate in the victory of a Wordsworthian
“God of the hills,” a deity composed wholly of
affect. At the end of the Victorian era, few could
have imagined that in the next century litera-
ture would become, for many readers, not just
the preferred but the only vehicle for conveying
and commending a strongly traditional form of
Christianity. But that is precisely what occurred.
When institutional Christianity came increas-
ingly to be despised, when preaching acquired a
largely negative connotation, stories and poems
took both their places. Perhaps no one from
Boccaccio to William Hale White would have
known quite what to make of this. I confess that
I myself do not know quite what to make of it,
especially since I do not see any obvious heirs
to Buechner—who himself is both less orthodox
and far less popular than Lewis, O’Connor, or
Percy. Perhaps the kind of thing I witnessed that
day at Calvin College—Your writing has meant
everything to my Christian faith. I don’t think I
could be a Christian without your books—will
prove to have been merely a local and temporary
phenomenon, a curious sideshow in twentieth-
century Western Christianity. I hope not.
Endnotes
1 Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 30.
2 Paul Oscar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic,
Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper,
1961), Chapter 1.
3 Boccaccio, Life of Dante, trans. G.R. Carpenter (New
York: Grolier Club, 1900), 142.
4 Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium,
trans. and ed. Charles G. Osgood (Indianapolis: Library
of Liberal Arts, 1956).

5 Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print:
Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval
Learning (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2009), 106.
6 Ibid., 109.
7 Ibid., 120.
8 Ibid., 120.
9 Cited as the epigraph to Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The
Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003).
10 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873), Chapter V;
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10378/pg10378.
html. Accessed March 23, 2015.
11 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), Chapter 13.
12 The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III: Autobiographies,
eds. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
13 The Browning Society’s Papers, Parts 1–3 (London:
Browning Society, 1881); http://books.google.com/
books?id=sWc4AAAAYAAJ. Accessed March 23, 2015.
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T H E W I T N E S S O F L I T E R AT U R E / J A C O B S
14 Quoted in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the
Prophet, 756.
15 C.S.
Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1955), 139.
16 C.S.Lewis, Preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001). Originally
published 1946, xxxviii.
17 Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 191.
18 Simone Weil, “Spiritual Autobiography,” in Waiting
for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper
Perennial, 2001), 27. Originally published 1951.
19 Owen Barfield, Speaker’s Meaning (Middletown, CT:
Weslayan University Press, 1967); https://www.google.com/
search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4MXGB_
enUS524US554&q=Owen+Barfield+.
20 FlanneryO’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional
Prose (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 91.
21 Ibid., 117.
22 Percy,“Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” Signposts in a
Strange Land: Essays (New York: Macmillan, 2000), 206.
Originally published 1991.
77
78
 On the Value of
Not Knowing Everything
James McWilliams

IN JANUARY 2010, WHILE DRIVING FROM
Chicago to Minneapolis, Sam McNerney played
an audiobook and had an epiphany. The book
was Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, and the
epiphany was that consciousness could reside in
the brain. The quest for an empirical understand-
ing of consciousness has long preoccupied neuro-
biologists. But McNerney was no neurobiologist.
He was a twenty-year-old philosophy major at
Hamilton College. The standard course work—
ancient, modern, and contemporary philoso-
phy—enthralled him. But after this drive, after
he listened to Lehrer, something changed. “I had
to rethink everything I knew about everything,”
McNerney said.
Lehrer’s publisher later withdrew How We
Decide for inaccuracies. But McNerney was
mentally galvanized for good reason. He had
stumbled upon what philosophers call the “Hard
Problem”—the quest to understand the enigma
of the gap between mind and body. Intellectually
speaking, what McNerney experienced was like
diving for a penny in a pool and coming up with
a gold nugget.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel drew popular
attention to the Hard Problem four decades ago
in an influential essay titled “What Is It Like to
Be a Bat?” Frustrated with the “recent wave of
reductionist euphoria,”1 Nagel challenged the
reductive conception of mind—the idea that
consciousness resides as a physical reality in the
brain—by highlighting the radical subjectivity
of experience. His main premise was that “an
organism has conscious mental states if and only
if there is something that it is like to be that
organism.”2
If that idea seems elusive, consider it this way:
A bat has consciousness only if there is something
that it is like for that bat to be a bat. Sam has
consciousness only if there is something it is like
for Sam to be Sam. You have consciousness only
if there is something that it is like for you to be
you (and you know that there is). And here’s
the key to all this: Whatever that “like” happens

James McWilliams is a professor at Texas State University and the author of A Revolution in Eating: How
the Quest for Food Shaped America and Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can
Truly Eat Responsibly. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The New Yorker online,
and The Paris Review.

Left: Stupor Mundi, 2010, by Mimmo Paladino (b.1948); Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy/© Stefano
Baldini/Bridgeman Images.

79
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
to be, according to Nagel, it necessarily defies
empirical verification. You can’t put your finger
on it. It resists physical accountability.
McNerney returned to Hamilton intellectually
turbocharged. This was an idea worth pondering.
“It took hold of me,” he said. “It chose me—I
know you hear that a lot, but that’s how it felt.” He
arranged to do research in cognitive science as an
independent study project with Russell Marcus, a
trusted professor. Marcus let him loose to write
what McNerney calls “a seventy-page hodgepodge
of psychological research and philosophy and
everything in between.” Marcus remembered the
project more charitably, as “a huge, ambitious,
wide-ranging, smart, and engaging paper.” Once
McNerney settled into his research, Marcus added,
“it was like he had gone into a phone booth and
come out as a super-student.”3
If what it is like to be human, much less a
bat, turns out to be empirically situated in
the dense switchboard of the brain, what
happens to Shakespeare, Swift, Woolf, or
Wittgenstein when it comes to explaining
ourselves to ourselves?
When he graduated in 2011, McNerney was
proud. “I pulled it off,” he said about earning a
degree in philosophy. Not that he had any hard
answers to any big problems, much less the Hard
Problem. Not that he had a job. All he knew was
that he “wanted to become the best writer and
thinker I could be.”
So, as one does, he moved to New York City.
McNerney is the kind of young scholar adored
by the humanities. He’s inquisitive, open-minded,
thrilled by the world of ideas, and touched with
a tinge of old-school transcendentalism. What
Emerson said of Thoreau—“he declined to give
up his large ambition of knowledge and action
80
for any narrow craft or profession”— is certainly
true of McNerney.
Without pretense, he says things such as “I
love carrying ideas in my head, turning them over,
and looking at them”; “I have my creative process
mapped out”; and “I’m currently incubating a
hunch and making it whole.” He uses the phrase
“connect the dots” quite a bit and routinely evalu-
ates the machinery of his own mind.
My favorite example: “I have this insane
problem—if I read 300 pages of anything I’ll find
something to write about, but the more I read
the less novel the idea seems and the less I want
to write about it.” Such are the phenomena that
preoccupy him. After our first phone conver-
sation, he called me a “new soul mate” before
signing off. Ever mindful, ever curious, he is a
poster boy for the humanities.
The Mosh Pit of Thought
But it’s unclear how much longer the humani-
ties can nurture the Sam McNerneys of the
world. Even at Hamilton—a solid liberal arts
college—McNerney was, by his own assessment,
something of a black sheep. As he indulged the
life of the mind, grappling earnestly with time-
less philosophical problems, his friends prepared
themselves for lucrative careers in law, medicine,
and finance. They never criticized his choice—
“They never said, ‘You’re going to live a shitty
life, Sam,’” he told me—but they didn’t rush to
join him in the mosh pit of thought, either.
For all of McNerney’s curiosity—one deeply
reflective of a humanistic temperament—it
has led him headlong into a topic (the Hard
Problem) that has the potential to alter perma-
nently the place of the humanities in academic
life. If, after all, Nagel is proven wrong—that
is, if subjectivity is in fact reducible to an iden-
tifiable network of neural synapses—what is
the point of investigating the human condition
through a humanistic lens? If what it is like
 O N T H E VA L U E O F N O T K N OW I N G E V E RY T H I N G / M CW I L L I A M S

Bat and Full Moon by Biho Takahashi (Yoshikuni) (b.1873); © UCL Art Museum, University College London, UK/
Bridgeman Images.

to be human, much less a bat, turns out to be
empirically situated in the dense switchboard
of the brain, what happens to Shakespeare,
Swift, Woolf, or Wittgenstein when it comes to
explaining ourselves to ourselves?
It’s perhaps because of this concern that
Nagel’s famous essay stays famous, playing a rear-
guard role in philosophy seminars throughout
the country. By challenging the very notion of
a biological understanding of consciousness, by
positing individual consciousness as an existential
reality that defies objectification, “What Is It
Like to Be a Bat?” breathes continual life into
a phenomenon—the inner subjectivity of expe-
rience—that science has yet to illuminate with
empirical exactitude.
The critic Richard Brody noted as much when
he wrote last year in The New Yorker that “the
ideas that Nagel unfolds ought to be discussed
by non-specialists with an interest in the arts,
politics, and—quite literally, in this context—the
humanities.” He continued:

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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
If Nagel is right, art itself would no
longer be merely the scientist’s leisure-
time fulfillment but would be (I think,
correctly) recognized as a primary mode
of coming to grips with the mental and
moral essence of the universe. It would
be a key source of the very definition of
life. Aesthetics will be propelled to the
forefront of philosophy as a crucial part
of metaphysical biology…. The very
beauty of Nagel’s theory—its power
to inspire imagination—counts in its
favor.4
And thus Nagel’s essay—and the humanities—
abide.
Humanities vs. STEM
Behind Brody’s optimism there’s a much-dis-
cussed backstory. You’ve heard it repeated like
a mantra: The humanities are in crisis. They’re
dying. There is a mass exodus of literature and
history and anthropology majors. Some say this
is overhyped angst. As a history professor who
has seen twenty years of change, I disagree. It’s
real. A shift is underway in higher education, and
that shift, in many ways, mirrors—or at least is
a microcosm of—the frenzied quest to solve the
mystery of the Hard Problem.
The numbers don’t deny it. Nationally, the
number of students majoring in the humanities
has fallen substantially since 1970.5 At Stanford,
45 percent of the faculty is trained in the human-
ities, but only 15 percent of students major in
humanities fields.6 At Yale, between 1971 and
2013 the proportion of humanities majors
dropped from 53 percent to 25 percent among
women, and from 37 percent to 21 percent among
men. Meanwhile, economics has skyrocketed as a
preferred major, with the number of economics
majors growing almost threefold at traditionally
humanities-inclined institutions such as Brown
82
University.7 The acronym STEM—science, tech-
nology, engineering, mathematics—is now part
of every university’s lingua franca.
It hardly helped the humanities when a 2012
Georgetown University study found that students
in non-technical majors had unemployment
rates ranging from 8.9 to 11.1 percent, while
graduates in engineering, science, education, and
health care had an overall unemployment rate of
5.4 percent.8 It is for good reason that the top
five majors at Duke are now in biology, public
policy, economics, psychology, and engineering.9
English majors must cringe a little bit when they
learn that STEM majors make $32,000 more the
year they enter “the real world.”10
Perhaps an even deeper reason for
the humanities’ shrinking status is the
intensification of a certain and perhaps
temporary habit of mind among today’s
undergraduates: the fierce adherence to
quantification.
Plausible explanations for the withering of the
humanities run the gamut. Writing in The New
Criterion, Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English
at Emory University, blames old-school identity
politics: “The minute professors started speaking
of literary works as second to race and queerness,
they set the fields on a path of material decline.”11
(Cranky.) The essayist Arthur Krystal points
to the rise of postmodern theory—particularly
deconstructionism—as a culprit. After a “defa-
miliarized zone of symbols and referents” gutted
Western thought, he explains, the result was “the
expulsion of those ideas that were formerly part
of the humanistic charter.”12 (Stodgy.) But by far
the loudest and most controversial response to
the crisis in the humanities comes from William
Deresiewicz. In his recent book Excellent Sheep,
 O N T H E VA L U E O F N O T K N OW I N G E V E RY T H I N G / M CW I L L I A M S
he highlights the scourge of “credentialism”
among “entitled little shits.” He asks, “Do young
people still have the chance, do they give them-
selves the chance, to experience the power that
ideas have to knock you sideways?”13 Run ragged
by status-driven career agendas, they seem not
to. They seem pre-channeled, alienated from the
whole notion of ideas for ideas’ sake. “Nothing
in their training,” Deresiewicz writes of his pres-
sure-cooked subjects, “has endowed them with a
sense that something larger is at stake.”14
Perhaps an even deeper reason for the
humanities’ shrinking status is the intensifica-
tion of a certain and perhaps temporary habit
of mind among today’s undergraduates, a habit
that Nagel reminds us has severe limitations: the
fierce adherence to quantification. Why this turn
has happened at this point in time is difficult
to say, but it seems fairly certain that a renewed
faith in the power of radical empiricism—not to
mention the economic advantages it can confer
when judiciously applied post-graduation—has
decisively lured students out of the humanities
and into fields where the defining questions are
reducible to just the facts, thank you.
Empiricism Run Amok?
Those left in the wake of this trend scratch their
heads and prove the rule. Consider the experi-
ence of Logan Sander, a Princeton freshman
majoring in comparative literature. In tenth
grade, Sander wrote a paper on Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five in her English class. As with
McNerney, the impact of the experience unex-
pectedly transformed her ambitions. She quickly
fell in love with literature and began to read and
study fiction with an inspired urgency, reveling
in more questions than answers, seeking insights
rather than data.
After graduating first in her class at Southview
High School in Sylvania, Ohio, Sander was
invited to an event celebrating valedictorians
from twenty-five public high schools. There she
discovered, a little to her dismay, that she was
the only valedictorian planning to pursue a non-
scientific field of study. Today, Sander has discov-
ered a dynamic humanistic bubble at Princeton,
but still, she observes, “there’s this assumption
that if you’re pursuing the humanities you’re not
likely to get a good job or make a lot of money.”
She remains committed to literature. “Those in it
seem to really love what they’re doing,” she told
me. Plus, she wondered, “Since when is the value
of the humanities based on money?”15
If we go about the business of being
ambitious humans armed with an
empiricism that grasps and gobbles up and
conquers everything up to and including
consciousness, it seems reasonable to
wonder if we’ll lose something essential to
the precarious project of being human—
something such as humility.
Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong
with an undergraduate shift toward empiricism.
Nor is there a problem with pursuing money.
Gathering and mapping and deploying objec-
tive data will produce everything from a cure for
cancer to an app for identifying the finest coffee
within a ten-block radius to the best fertilizer for
sub-Saharan farmers (and probably has, as far as
I know). The quality of human life will surely
improve because of such endeavors, and those
pursuing them are bound to live accomplished
and well-remunerated lives. The world will be
better off for their contributions. But…
As Sander says, “The humanities…touch the
inner parts of our minds and souls the way tech-
nology cannot.” Indeed, what about the inner
parts of our minds? Our souls?! What about
the shimmering but elusive beauty of subjective
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
experience? What about those things you can’t
measure or convey?
When it comes to these questions, it’s worth
wondering if empiricism hasn’t run amok in
the halls of academe. After all, if we go about
the business of being ambitious humans armed
with an empiricism that grasps and gobbles up
and conquers everything up to and including
consciousness, it seems reasonable to wonder if
we’ll lose something essential to the precarious
project of being human—something such as
humility. If nothing else, Nagel’s challenge reaf-
firms the value of humility.
I have no hard proof for this thesis, but I
think there’s something to it: Knowing that
there are things we don’t know—and may never
know—has a humbling effect on the human
mind. Humility is a form of modesty that asks
us to accept ambiguity. Ambiguity, in turn, is
ultimately what brings us together to explore the
mysteries of existence through the wonder-driven
endeavors we lump under that broad umbrella
known as the humanities. If we knew it all, if we
understood what it was like to be a bat, probably
even Logan Sander would not be a comparative
literature major.
In a way, to catch consciousness, to close
the mind-body gap, would be to eliminate that
humility. It would be to answer most of the big
questions—to collapse the umbrella and move
into a post-human world. And that might sound
great to logical positivists and atheists and neuro-
biologists. But as the essayist Charles D’Ambrosio
reminds us, “Answers are the end of speech, not
the beginning.”16
Are we really ready to stop talking?
Correlating Consciousness
Christof Koch is the chief scientific officer at the
Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle. In the
world of neurobiology, he’s a big deal. If Nagel
led the effort to popularize the Hard Problem of
84
consciousness, Koch leads the effort to solve it. In
April 2014, President Obama introduced the US
Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative
Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. With $60
million a year going to the Allen Institute, Koch is
poised to play a pivotal role in the scientific effort
to locate the mind in neurobiological space.
What Nagel says we’ll never find, Koch,
through the swagger of science, insists
we’ll own.
Of all the things he said to me in the course of
a lively conversation last November, this, deliv-
ered with risible enthusiasm, stood out the most:
“At some point, you will know what it’s like to
be a bat.”
Koch’s faith in empiricism is pure. His reality
is deeply physical. Driving his neurobiological
approach to consciousness is a deep conviction
that science, which he calls “humanity’s most
reliable, cumulative, and objective method for
comprehending reality,” is a project that “should
also help us explain the world within us.” What
Nagel identifies as the elusive subjectivity of expe-
rience, Koch, in his recent book Consciousness:
Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, refers to
as “properties of the natural world.” What Nagel
says we’ll never find, Koch, through the swagger
of science, insists we’ll own.
Koch first explored the mind-body problem
while doing a postdoctorate at MIT in the early
1980s. It was a time in his life, he explained, “when
I was young and brash and naive and didn’t like
the idea that something can’t be solved.” When he
moved to the California Institute of Technology
in 1986, he developed a lifelong intellectual and
personal friendship with the biologist Francis
Crick (of DNA double-helix fame), a man whom
he came to admire as “a reductionist writ large.”
Koch came under Crick’s wing and thrived.
 O N T H E VA L U E O F N O T K N OW I N G E V E RY T H I N G / M CW I L L I A M S
The two men worked closely together on
the Hard Problem, postulating what they
called “neural correlates of consciousness.” They
defined these as “the minimal neural mechanisms
jointly sufficient for any one specific conscious
percept.”17 When Crick died in 2004, Koch
carried the torch down the path of hard empiri-
cism, more confident than ever that “the weird
explanatory gap between physics and conscious-
ness” could be closed to produce to “a complete
elucidation of consciousness.”18
Koch’s current working hypothesis is elegant.
A précis of it might go something like this:
Consciousness begins and ends with neural infor-
mation. The mind is inextricably bound up with
verifiable information zipping through the brain
in the form of synaptic liaisons among skittering
dendrites. The integration of that information
lays the foundation of consciousness. Through
an integrated information theory, pioneered by
the University of Wisconsin’s Guilio Tononi, one
can viably posit a unified consciousness from the
seemingly endless causal interactions within the
relevant parts of the brain. Because one can theo-
retically calculate the extent of this integration, one
can feasibly identify consciousness. More so: One
can also measure it.
Koch is quick to caution that this is all a
postulate. Nothing has been finalized in the fren-
zied quest to map out consciousness. “We cannot
yet calculate the state of awareness for even the
simple roundworm with current computers, let
alone deal with the complexity of the human
brain,” he writes.19 At this point in time, in short,
we still have no idea what it’s like to be a bat.
It’s tempting to see the BRAIN Initiative
as a hubristic endeavor to reduce the
beautiful messiness of humanistic creativity
to the neatness of a mathematical
equation.
But that doesn’t mean we someday won’t.
What Koch has unequivocally discovered in
his impassioned search for an empirical under-
standing of consciousness is something critical
within himself: utter perseverance. He won’t
quit. “My aim in life,” he told me, “is to have a
grand view of how this all works.” Not to do so,
he explained, would be “scandalous.”
Evaluating Koch’s mission in light of the
humanities, it’s tempting to assess his project
in zero-sum terms—that is, as an endeavor that
seeks to replace imagination with information,
creativity with concreteness, subjectivity with
objectivity, the soul with the body. It’s tempting,
in other words, to see the BRAIN Initiative as a
hubristic endeavor to reduce the beautiful messi-
ness of humanistic creativity to the neatness of a
mathematical equation.
Koch’s aggressive rhetorical defense of science
does little to discourage such a concern. He writes:
If we honestly seek a single, rational,
and intellectually consistent view of
the cosmos and everything in it, we
must abandon the classical view of the
immortal soul. It is a view that is deeply
embedded in our culture; it suffuses
our songs, novels, movies, great build-
ings, public discourse, and our myths.
Science has brought us to the end of our
childhood. Growing up is unsettling to
many people, and unbearable to a few,
but we must learn to see the world as
it is and not as we want it to be. Once
we free ourselves of magical thinking we
have a chance of comprehending how
we fit into this unfolding universe.20
Magical thinking? This passage is enough to
make the humanist cringe. It’s time to grow up?
Be done with childish things? We recall our inno-
cent love for the blues of Robert Johnson, and
we think, “Leave my songs alone!” We consider
how stunned we feel reading the last paragraph
85
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, and we think,
“Don’t touch my novels!” We pause and re-read
Mark Strand’s reference to “an understanding
that remains unfinished,” and we say, “Stay away
from my poetry!” We enter the Rothko Chapel
and ride a wave of new-agey spiritualism, and
think, “Leave my architecture in peace.” We
ponder Nagel’s question, tapping the spirit of the
Beatles, and we say to ourselves, “Let it be.”
Wonder, in other words, might be integral
to the humanistic worldview, but as a state
of mind, it’s on the ropes.
But the reductionists are on hand to throw cold
water on our mystical musings: The majority of
today’s philosophers of mind defend Koch’s empir-
icism. (“We’d better figure out what it’s like to be
a bat,” Georgetown philosophy professor Bryce
Huebner told me.) Koch and his colleagues refuse
to accept the phrase “This will never be answered.”
(Koch told me that skeptics have uttered such
nonsense throughout history.) The humanities are
slowly ceding ground to the “neuro-humanities”
and the “digital humanities.” The federal govern-
ment is spending hundreds of millions of dollars
to map the circuitry of the mind. And the majority
of today’s best and brightest undergrads are alleg-
edly “excellent sheep,” moving zombie-like toward
STEM-related pursuits and jobs making apps and
managing hedge funds.
Chances are good, in other words, that
nothing will be left alone. And so we have to
ask: Will the humanities sink under the weight
of science? And if not, how will they respond?
What will be their role?
Can Wonder Save the Humanities?
The fear pervading the humanities these days
evokes what the historian of science Lorraine
86
Daston has recently called “the paradox of won-
der.” She describes it in the most eloquent terms:
The marvel that stopped us in our
tracks—an aurora borealis, cognate
words in languages separated by conti-
nents and centuries, the peacock’s tail—
becomes only an apparent marvel once
explained. Aesthetic appreciation may
linger…but composure has returned.
We are delighted but no longer discom-
bobulated; what was once an earthquake
of the soul is subdued into an agreeable
frisson.… The more we know, the less
we wonder.21
The world’s greatest scientific thinkers have always
been a little bamboozled in the face of this rela-
tionship. Descartes believed that wonder was a
necessary spur to scientific knowledge as well as a
seductive stimulus that could turn turbulent and
addictive. Bacon similarly understood wonder to
be “a dangerous passion,” deeming it a form of
“broken knowledge” that should only be sampled
in small doses and as a means to fixing that break.
Since the days of Descartes and Bacon, the
sensation of wonder—at least in the world of
contemporary science—has evolved into either
an embarrassing illumination of ignorance (think
astrology) or an affirmation of an Occam’s razor−
style scientific explanation (think natural selec-
tion). The generally pejorative connotation of
wonder, however, is such that, as Daston explains,
“humanists are even more chary [than scientists]
of expressing wonder.”22 Wonder, in other words,
might be integral to the humanistic worldview,
but as a state of mind, it’s on the ropes.
Christof Koch, for all his empiricism, suggests
how it might make a comeback. Hints that Koch
approaches life with a profound attunement
to its wondrous manifestations, and that such
wonder underscores his science, come through
in his personal website. There, you can find an
illustrated narrative of long solo hikes on the
 O N T H E VA L U E O F N O T K N OW I N G E V E RY T H I N G / M CW I L L I A M S
John Muir Trail, multi-hour trail runs in the San
Gabriel Mountains, and grueling rock-climbing
excursions in Yosemite Valley. There, you can
read dreamy commentary such as “At night, I
would contemplate the high alpine sky above me
and the moral compass within me” or “I discov-
ered the Zen of marathon running.”23
It’s evident that Koch is keyed in to the subtle
tremors of human experience, the kinds that give
you butterflies and make your heart race—the
kinds that the classical humanist is loathe to
reduce to an algorithm. When we spoke, Koch
lowered his voice almost to a whisper as he said,
“I find myself in this wonderful universe that’s so
conducive to life.”
Might it not be the very job of the
humanities to bring back certain
intangibles to the center of humanity and
to ask science to broaden its horizons to
accommodate mystery?
The subtitle of his book Consciousness confirms
this unexpected impulse animating his worldview:
Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. At the end,
he poignantly confronts the inevitability of his own
death—“the significance of my personal annihila-
tion”—and delivers an assessment that reifies the
romantic part of reduction. After “facing down
an existential abyss of oblivion and meaningless
within me,” he writes, he underwent “an uncon-
scious process of recalibration,” and arrived here:
I returned to my basic attitude that all
is as it should be. There is no other way
than I can describe it: no mountaintop
conversion or flash of deep insight, but
a sentiment that suffuses my life. I wake
up each morning to find myself in a
world full of mystery and beauty. And I
am profoundly thankful for the wonder
of it all.24
“The wonder of it all.” This grabbed me. Could
wonder save the humanities? Reading history
and literature has taught me that all ideologies
ultimately hit and crumble upon the brick wall
of reductionism. It has taught me that if ideolo-
gies proved completely true, something essential
about humanity would be lost. It has taught
me that the pursuit of knowledge (scientific or
otherwise) has meant different things to differ-
ent people at different times. Francis Bacon, for
one, would never have entertained an ambiguity-
crushing version of existence of the kind espoused
by today’s reductionists. So why should we?
Not to be glib, but why should there be only
one version of scientific truth today? Could it
be that Koch and his cohort have hijacked and
linearized the entire idea of science itself? Has the
desire for reductionism reduced science to a single
paradigm that marginalizes any phenomenon—
irony, for instance—that resists the explanatory
powers of brain mapping? And might it not be
the very job of the humanities to bring back these
intangibles to the center of humanity and cele-
brate them and ask science to broaden its hori-
zons to accommodate mystery?
I wondered. And then I reconnected with
Sam McNerney.
After moving to New York, he got a small
loan from his dad—“How many dads would do
that?”—moved in with his girlfriend, and started
to blog about the mind, the brain, business, and
philosophy. He ran out of money. “It sucked,”
he said. But he stuck to his ambition: becoming
the best thinker and writer he could be. After a
lot of online writing, he received a call from a
big publishing company asking if he was inter-
ested in writing an in-house blog about business
books. He was.
When I called him in early December, his job
with the publishing company had run its course
and he was back in his tiny Manhattan apart-
ment, writing freelance. “I finally have time to
think!” he said. We discussed an article he was
working on about how technology structures
87
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
information. “Technology advances,” he said,
“and we complain about information overload.
But it turns out we’re really good at organizing
information. And when we organize informa-
tion really well, something gets sacrificed.” He
wondered, “Is information too organized?” He
wondered, “What gets sacrificed?”
The answer he suggested is a word I hadn’t
heard in a while, but, given all the research I’d
been doing for this article, it initiated a kind of
convergence: “serendipity.” Serendipity, indeed.
Serendipity is so beautifully slippery. It situates
itself between Nagel and Koch, empiricism and
the humanities, wonder and science. Serendipity,
when you get right down to it, is at the beating
heart of wonder. It accounts for McNerney’s
epiphany, Sander’s love of literature, my own
distrust of reducibility, and Koch’s comfort with
his own “annihilation.” Serendipity interrupts
the linear view of science.
McNerney brought up Darwin. Darwin, he
explained, would never have read Malthus’s 1798
essay on population growth, and thus would
never have developed his theory of natural selec-
tion, had he been “searching for birds on Google.”
The comparative looseness of information, the
unchanneled nature of investigation, joined with
Darwin’s innate curiosity, is what led to one of
the most unifying explanations of physical exis-
tence the world has known. What sparked it all
was pure serendipity.
In our age of endlessly aggregated information,
the ultimate task of the humanities may be to
subversively disaggregate in order to preserve that
serendipity. After all, a period of confusion inevi-
tably precedes the acquisition of concrete knowl-
edge. It’s a necessary blip of humbling uncertainty
that allows for what McNerney describes as “the
call and response” between disparate ideas. As
long as that gap exists, as long as a flicker of doubt
precedes knowledge, there will always be room for
humanistic thought—thought that revels in not
knowing. As long as that gap exists, we will not
be reduced to the moral equivalent of computers.
88
“There’s a big benefit to not knowing the
answer to a question for a long time,” McNerney
said toward the end of our conversation. “The
trick is knowing enough but not too much, not
so much that you kill that sense of wonder.”
Endnotes
1 Thomas Nagel, “What’s It Like to Be a Bat,” Philosophical
Review (83) 4 (October 1974), 435.
2 Ibid.
3 Russell Marcus, e-mail message to author, November 28,
2014.
4 Richard Brody, “Thomas Nagel: Thoughts are Real,” The
New Yorker online, July 16, 2013; http://www.newyorker.
com/books/page-turner/thomas-nagel-thoughts-are-real.
5 “Bachelor’s Degrees in the Humanities,” Humanities
Indicators, American Academy of Arts and Sciences;
http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicator-
doc.aspx?i=34. Accessed on April 21, 2015.
6 Tamar Lewis, “As Interest Fades in the Humanities,
Colleges Worry,” The New York Times, October 30, 2013;
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/education/as-inter-
est-fades-in-the-humanities-colleges-worry.html?_r=0.
7 Sarah Sachs, “Economics sees growing pains as students
look for ‘marketable skills’,” The Brown Daily Herald, April
5, 2013; http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/04/05/
economics-sees-growing-pains-as-students-look-for-mar-
ketable-skills/.
8 Anthony P. Carnevale et al., “Not All College Degrees
Are Created Equal,” report from Georgetown’s Center for
Education and the Workforce, 4; https://www.cgsnet.org/
ckfinder/userfiles/files/Unemployment_Final_update1.
pdf; 4. Accessed April 21, 2015.
9 Duke University, Office of News and Communications;
http://newsoffice.duke.edu/all-about-duke/quick-facts-
about-duke. Accessed April 21, 2015.
10 Susan Adams, “Majoring in the Humanities Does Lay
Off, Just Later,” Forbes, January 22, 2014; http://www.
forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/01/22/majoring-in-
the-humanities-does-pay-off-just-later/.
11 Mark Bauerlein, “Humanities: Doomed to Lose?” The
New Criterion, November 2014; http://www.newcriteri-
on.com/articles.cfm/Humanities--doomed-to-lose--7989.
12 Arthur Krystal, “The Shrinking World of Ideas,” The
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 21, 2014;
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shrinking-World-of-
Ideas/150141/.
13 William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of
the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New
York: Free Press, 2014), 111.
 O N T H E VA L U E O F N O T K N OW I N G E V E RY T H I N G / M CW I L L I A M S

14 Ibid., 13. 19 Christof

Koch, “A Theory of Consciousness,” Scientific
15 Logan Sander, telephone interview with author, American Mind; 19: http://www.klab.caltech.edu/koch/
November 25, 2014. CR/CR-Complexity-09.pdf. Accessed April 21, 2015.
20 Koch, Consciousness, 152.
16 Leslie Jamison, “Instead of Sobbing, You Write Sentences:
An Interview with Charles D’Ambrosio,” The New Yorker 21 Lorraine Daston, “Wonder and the Ends of Antiquity,”
online, November 26, 2014; http://www.newyorker. The Point; http://thepointmag.com/category/examined-
com/books/page-turner/instead-sobbing-write-sentences- life. Accessed on April 22, 2015.
interview-charles-dambrosio. 22 Ibid.
17 Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic 23 Christof
Koch personal website; http://www.klab.caltech.
Reductionist (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 42. edu/koch/passions.html. Accessed April 21, 2015.
18 Ibid., 27. 24 Koch, Consciousness, 161.

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90
 The Great Subversion: The Scandalous
Origins of Human Rights
Ronald Osborn

WHEN BRITISH COMEDIAN STEPHEN FRY
declared in a January 2015 interview on Irish tele-
vision that if God exists, he is “utterly evil, capri-
cious, and monstrous,” his remarks drew headline
attention in newspapers and nearly four million
views on YouTube within less than a week of the
video’s posting.1 Fry was repeating an argument
with a very long history, extending back through
David Hume to the Epicureans of ancient Greece
and Rome (at least according to the Christian
apologist Lactantius, writing in the fourth cen-
tury).2 He was also echoing sentiments that may
be found in one form or another in any number of
recent books and articles, both scholarly and pop-
ular, whose authors declare that religious beliefs
are at best unnecessary and at worst antithetical to
humanistic values, human rights, or even morality
in general.
In a 2011 article in the New York Times titled
“The Sacred and the Humane,” for example,
Israeli philosopher and human rights activist Anat
Biletzki wrote, “There is no philosophically robust
reason to accept the claim that human dignity
originates with God.” 3 If anything, Biletzki
argued, belief in God is a threat to humanistic
values and to concepts of human dignity. Religion
should not even be admitted “as a legitimate player
in the human rights game,” she wrote, since those
concerned with defending rights out of a sense of
religious duty are not concerned with rights but
only with a kind of slavish obedience to the arbi-
trary commands of the deity.
Other non-religious thinkers, however, have
called into question the philosophical coherence
and long-term viability of secular humanism
and accompanying rights ideals in the wake of
the “death of God.” According to British polit-
ical scientist Stephen Hopgood, “The ground
of human rights is crumbling beneath us,” both
in theory and in practice: “The world in which
global rules were assumed to be secular, universal
and nonnegotiable rested on the presumption
of a deep worldwide consensus about human
rights—but this consensus is illusory.”4 What is

Ronald Osborn is an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Peace and Justice Studies Program at Wellesley
College and the author of Death before the Fall: Biblical Literalism and the Problem of Animal Suffering
(2014) and Anarchy and Apocalypse: Essays on Faith, Violence, and Theodicy (2010).

Left: The Rape of the Sabine Women, 1962, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973); Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre
Pompidou, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images. © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

91
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
more, Hopgood argues in The Endtimes of Human
Rights, notions of inviolable human dignity, rights,
and equality as universal norms must now be
unmasked as a historically contingent and meta-
physically dubious inheritance of Christianity:
It is only as a strategy for coping with
what Nietzsche called “the death of God”
in the West that we can begin to under-
stand the real social function of humani-
tarianism and human rights in the
twentieth century…. [The International
Committee of the Red Cross] was, I
argue, the first international human
rights organization. It was a secular
church of the international. The laws it
wrote and the humanitarian activism it
undertook were grounded by a culture
of transcendent moral sentiment with
strong Christian components. At the
heart of this was the suffering innocent, a
secular version of Christ. In other words,
bourgeois Europeans responded to the
erosion of religious authority by creating
authority of their own from the cultural
resources that lay scattered around them.
And they then globalized it via the infra-
structure that the imperial civilizing
project bequeathed to them.5
Hopgood’s bracing critique of rights talk and his
call for a less lofty, more pragmatic dispensation
forces us to face the implications of the loss of theo-
logical anthropology for concepts of human equal-
ity and dignity. Can we have a rationally coherent,
morally compelling, and historically sustainable
discourse as well as a practice of humanistic values
and human rights absent a “thick” metaphysical or
religious framework, such as the one provided in
the Western tradition for some two millennia by
Judeo-Christian sources?
Put another way, the question “Can we be
good without God?” does not strike nearly deep
enough. The urgent question is: Will we still be
92
good to the stranger in our midst, or good in
the same ways, once we have fully grasped the
contestable character of humanism and once we
have utterly abandoned the essentially religious
idea that every person is made, in the enigmatic
language of Scripture, in the image of God ? It
is a question that even committed atheists, for
the sake of good atheism, should find worthy of
consideration.
Doctrines of Inequality
Answering this question requires that secular
humanists attend more closely to the scandalous
particularity of the story of the God made vis-
ible as a manual laborer from a defeated backwa-
ter of the Roman Empire, who was tortured to
death by the political and religious authorities of
his day on charges of sedition and heresy. We can
imagine other religious narratives that could have
provided an equally powerful vision and inspira-
tion for humanistic values, but it was this narrative
that actually did provide the moral and intellectual
foundation for the rise of humanism, and finally
liberalism, in the Western tradition.
In classical antiquity, dignity was an
acquired rather than inherent trait. Some
persons were always deemed more fully
human than others.
In classical antiquity, dignity was an acquired
rather than inherent trait. Some persons were
always deemed more fully human than others.6
Infants born with mental or physical defects, Plato
and Aristotle both declared, have no right to share
in the life of the community and indeed have no
right to life at all. In The Politics, Aristotle writes,
“let there be a law that no deformed child shall
live.”7 In Plato’s Republic, Socrates says that those

“born deformed, [the Guardians] will hide away
in an unspeakable and unseen place, as is seemly.”
He goes on to encourage free sexual intercourse
among adolescents on one condition: that they not
“let even a single foetus see the light of day,” and,
“if one should be conceived, and, if one should
force its way,” that they “deal with it on the under-
standing that there’s to be no rearing for such a
child.”8 In both Greek and Roman thought, slaves,
women, and children possessed less dignity than
free males, while philosophers capable of attaining
heights of speculative philosophy possessed more
dignitas—prestige, status, or worthiness—than
those who labored with their hands.
The assumption of a rank-ordering or
natural hierarchy of human types, with only
a few individuals possessing true dignity
and so full social standing, may actually
represent the most nearly universal
political morality that we can identify.
Similar ideas about human inequality pervaded
(and continue to pervade) non-Western belief
systems. The caste system of Hinduism and classical
Buddhist doctrines of reincarnation (according to
which the less fortunate or “weak” members of
society—the poor, the physically handicapped,
and women in general—are born into “lowliness”
as a punishment for sins in previous lives) run
directly counter to concepts of inviolable dignity
and shared human rights. The assumption of a
rank-ordering or natural hierarchy of human types,
with only a few individuals possessing true dignity
and so full social standing, may actually represent
the most nearly universal political morality that we
can identify. These classical beliefs in the natural
inequality of persons did not give way to the idea
of shared human dignity and equality as a result
of detached philosophical reasoning. Rather, they
T H E G R E AT S U B V E R S I O N / O S B O R N
were radically subverted by the theological account
of personhood unfolded in the Hebrew Bible and
culminating in the Christian narrative of the life,
death, and resurrection of Christ—the climax
of the Jewish prophetic tradition with its radical
insistence that the Creator God of the universe
stands with the weak, the suffering, and the lowly,
judging rulers and nations according to whether
they have acted justly toward widows, strangers,
and orphans.
Sex, Lies, and Conquest
To grasp what Christianity opposed, and what it
historically overcame, we might consider a seem-
ingly trivial detail of life during the Pax Romana:
coins on which defeated nations were depicted
as violated women being trampled underfoot by
deified emperors or Roman gods. To comprehend
the deeper meaning of these symbols of imperial
consciousness, we must recall the foundational
myth of the city of Rome to which they alluded.
Central to the legend of the founding of Rome
by Romulus is “The Rape of the Sabine Women,”
a story whose theme is celebrated in Roman art
and literature. As told by Livy in his History of
Rome, written about thirty years before the birth
of Christ, the tale begins with Romulus offering
asylum to male refugees from other nations, who
quickly swell the city’s population and transform
Rome into a “match for any of the neighboring
states in war.”9 The sudden increase in the num-
ber of males of fighting age leads, however, to a
pressing dilemma: There are not enough women
to repopulate the city. Romulus sends ambas-
sadors to neighboring states asking them to give
their daughters as brides to the Romans, but this
request is met with refusals, and, as a result, ten-
sions rise. “The Roman youths were bitterly indig-
nant at this, and the matter began unmistakably to
point to open violence.”10
Romulus, “dissembling his resentment,”
according to Livy, nonetheless tricks the young
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
women of Sabine (one of the states that rebuffed
him) into coming to Rome. At a prearranged signal,
the Roman men pounce upon the Sabine maidens
and carry them off, those of “surpassing beauty”
being reserved for “the leading senators.” Romulus
attempts to mollify the traumatized women by
assuring them that they will “be lawfully wedded,
and enjoy a share of all their [Roman] posses-
sions and civil rights, and—a thing dearer than
all else to the human race—the society of their
common children: only let them calm their angry
feelings, and bestow their affections on those on
whom fortune had bestowed their bodies.”11 The
kidnapped women do not embrace their captors,
however, and the Sabine men soon launch a coun-
terattack. After some back-and-forth fighting, the
Romans gain the upper hand. Seeing their loved
ones on the verge of being slaughtered, the Sabine
daughters rush onto the battlefield, pleading that
the combat cease, lest they become widows through
the deaths of their Roman husbands or orphans
through the deaths of their Sabine fathers. Livy
relates that the “leaders thereupon came forward
to conclude a treaty; and not only concluded a
peace, but formed one state out of two…. They
united the kingly power, but transferred the entire
sovereignty to Rome.”12
Rape was the perhaps painful but
ultimately glorious way by which Rome
incorporated the Other within its civilized
laws and “civil rights.”
This story of the rape of the Sabine women,
religious studies scholar Davina Lopez writes, was
the paradigmatic model of, and justification for,
Roman expansionism. Its purpose as an origins
myth was to make imperial violence appear noble
and “like the natural order of the world.”13 Rape
was the perhaps painful but ultimately glorious
way by which Rome incorporated the Other
94
within its civilized laws and “civil rights.” The
story was “truly foundational to Roman imperial
ideology as it expresses relationships between self
and other on an international scale…. Conquest
rendered in these terms reflects gendered differ-
ence in hierarchy: the impenetrable masculinity
inherent in Roman rule is chosen to penetrate the
femininity of other lands and peoples.”14
The Shape of the In-Breaking Kingdom
In an article in the Boston Review, historian Samuel
Moyn writes that neither Jesus nor Paul had
“any truly political vision.”15 But John Dominic
Crossan, N.T. Wright, Richard Horsley, and a
host of other biblical scholars have shown in great
detail that the New Testament is in fact intelli-
gible only when read as a highly subversive and
politically charged collection of texts against the
historical backdrop of Roman imperial conquest
and occupation and the crushing social hierarchies
of the ancient world that find virtually unanimous
support in the canons of Greek and Roman phi-
losophy, religion, and myth.
According to the earliest Christian documents,
God had not only taken on human flesh but was
also incarnated in the person of a poor, provincial
laborer in the occupied territories of the Roman
Empire. Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a tiny village
about four miles from the town of Sepphoris,
which was struck by Varus’s legionary troops in
4 BCE. Josephus records another attack, led by
Lucius Annius at Gerasa just across the Jordan
River, and his account makes apparent the atmo-
sphere of violence and national trauma in which
Jesus was raised:
[Lucius Annius] put to the sword a thou-
sand of the youth who had not already
escaped, made prisoners of women and
children, gave his soldiers license to
plunder the property, and then set fire
to the houses and advanced against the

surrounding villages. The able-bodied
fled, the feeble perished, and everything
left was consigned to the flames.16
We can perhaps now better appreciate the
scandalous, as well as dangerously “unpatriotic,”
political significance of Christ’s declaration in the
Gospel of Matthew—at time of foreign imperial
occupation punctuated by periodic massacres,
mass crucifixions, and insurgency—that God’s
kingdom was breaking into history through his
own words and actions, and that the shape of
God’s in-breaking kingdom entailed an ethic of
radical love of one’s enemies beyond good and evil:
You have heard that it was said, “You
shall love your neighbor and hate your
enemy.” But I say to you, love your
enemies and pray for those who perse-
cute you, so that you may be sons of your
Father who is in heaven; for He causes
His sun to rise on the evil and the good,
and sends rain on the righteous and the
unrighteous. (Matthew 5:43–48, New
American Standard Bible)
Lest anyone interpret Christ’s words as a retreat
from the burning political matters of his day or as
capitulation to Roman imperialism, however, we
might ponder the Magnificat, the song of praise
by Jesus’s mother, Mary, in the first chapter of the
Gospel of Luke, which is presented as a prelude
to what her son’s entire life will be about: “He has
brought down rulers from their thrones, And has
exalted those who were humble. He has filled the
hungry with good things; And sent away the rich
empty-handed” (Luke 1:52–53). The very word
the Christian writers chose for the story of Jesus
was in fact an appropriation and subversion of
Roman political rhetoric; euangelion, translated as
“Gospel” or “good news,” was the word used by the
Caesars for their official imperial proclamations.
From all we know of Jesus’s words and actions,
he set his followers on a collision course with the
T H E G R E AT S U B V E R S I O N / O S B O R N
dominant pagan social and political structures of
their day, which could only be sustained so long
as classical ideas about what it means to be human
remained undisturbed.
In the Gospels, Christ is referred to several
times as a tekton and the son of a tekton—liter-
ally a “craftsman” or, as tradition would have it,
a carpenter. This already tells us much about the
revolution underway, for in the Greco-Roman
world, to be a laborer was to be inferior. Christ’s
public career was marked by his ministry to the
most marginalized and untouchable members of
society, whom he sought to restore to physical
wholeness and fullness of community. Prominent
among these were women, including one about to
be stoned to death by religious zealots for alleged
adultery (John 7:53–8:11) and one who had been
suffering from a bleeding illness for twelve years,
whom, according to Jewish law, no one could
touch without becoming defiled (Mark 5:25–34).
Jesus’s life ended in his torture and execution at
the hands of those religious and political authori-
ties possessing the most dignitas. The method of
execution was an emphatically political one, cruci-
fixion typically being reserved for the most serious
crimes against the Roman state.17
What is more, the writers of the Gospels of
Matthew and Mark both assert that in his final
agony, Christ was abandoned by God himself. The
cry of dereliction from the center cross is the cry
of one who has been not only humanly but even
cosmically betrayed: “My God, my God, why have
you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34)
Because Christ bids those who would follow him
to take up his cross and share in his sufferings, one
can only be a disciple if one has also, paradoxi-
cally, experienced the death of God. Yet for Christ’s
followers, the spectacle of Jesus’s agony and humil-
iation—the extreme depths of his identification
with the sufferings of humanity, and even with its
loss of faith or hope—had ironically unmasked the
“principalities and powers” once and for all, strip-
ping them of their sacral authority and revealing
them as unjust and oppressive forces.
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
Followers of the risen Christ were to coura-
geously emulate his example of self-emptying
service and reconciling enemy love, even to the
point of their own deaths, if necessary, for the sake
of others. The political implications of the claim
that the Godforsaken God has elevated the weak
and lowly to a status of equality and high dignity as
adopted sons and daughters through his incarna-
tion, suffering, death, and resurrection, are evident
in Paul’s revolutionary words from Galatians 3:28:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither
slave nor free man, there is neither male nor
female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In a
world in which the exposure of newborn infants
to the depredations of wild animals and mass
executions for public entertainment were regular
spectacles, in which slaves—whom Aristotle
refers to as “living tools”—were defined by law as
non habens personam (“not having a persona,” or
even “not having a face”), and in which a poly-
morphous polytheism led not to liberal tolera-
tion of difference, as some have claimed, but to
frequently unrestrained violence against anyone
who challenged the gods of the family hearth,
the tribe, and the empire, the Christian euange-
lion could only arrive, David Bentley Hart writes,
as a “cosmic sedition.”18 Christianity not only
offended the patrician sensibilities of Roman aris-
tocrats, as it would Nietzsche, by its undignified
concern for the weak and lowly; it also threatened
the entire social and political order of pagan antiq-
uity by dramatically redefining what it meant to
be human. “What for us is the quiet, persistent,
perennial rebuke of conscience within us was, for
ancient peoples, an outlandish decree issuing from
a realm outside any world they could conceive.”19
Discovering Dignitas
Even if the language of “rights” was not explic-
itly or formally used, the New Testament invest-
ed every person with a previously unimaginable
worth. Instead of struggling to attain dignitas as
96
a scarce commodity in competitive rivalry with
others, all persons were now summoned to live in
generous solidarity with their neighbors as persons
of dignity and worth equal to their own. Dignity,
in the Christian revaluation of values, could not
be earned, because it was bestowed as a gift from
God, although the gift could be lost or squandered
precisely by transgressing the dignity of the Other,
whether through violence or by indifference to
the Other’s welfare—by denying that that person
too was the privileged bearer of the divine image,
the divine image now being of a man broken, tor-
tured, and executed by the state.
One of the most potent expressions of the
Christian invention (if not discovery) of human
equality was the way the early believers gathered
together for table fellowships without regard for
social standing. In the rigidly stratified world of
ancient Greece and Rome, in which one’s status
determined with whom one could and could not
break bread, Christians transgressed all decorum
and standards of decency in their common meals
or communions. Whereas the model for the
incorporation of foreign bodies into the Roman
body politic was paradigmatically set by the myth
of the rape of the Sabine women, incorporation
of new believers into the body of Christ was
patterned upon the story of Christ’s last supper—
the memory of how Jesus washed the feet of his
disciples, the task of a slave, and generously gave
of his own body, symbolized by broken bread and
wine, so that others might live with abundance.
The new faith proved especially attractive to
women, sociologist Rodney Stark has shown from
a wide array of textual and archaeological sources.
By all accounts, Christianity disproportionately
drew in female adherents, whose status and power
were significantly enhanced by entry into the
Christian subculture.20 Women held positions
of high leadership in the fledgling church. They
could marry later in life (Roman families often
gave away prepubescent daughters in marriage),
and they benefited from Christian condemna-
tion of traditional male prerogatives in regard to

Saint Thecla and Saint Paul with a book, eleventh century; British Museum/Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
divorce, incest, infidelity, polygamy, and female
infanticide.21 Paul’s notorious statements about
wives’ “submission” to their husbands must be
read in full context if one is to grasp their radi-
cally equalizing message of mutual submission and
reciprocity patterned upon Christ’s own agape, his
selfless love. In Ephesians 5:22–23, Paul writes,
“Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as
to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the
wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, he
Himself being the Savior of the body.” Yet these
verses are part of an extended discourse on marital
relations in which Paul commands husbands and
wives to “be subject to one another” in reverence
of Christ (Ephesians 5:21). He goes on to instruct
men, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ
also loved the church and gave Himself up for
her…husbands ought also to love their own wives
T H E G R E AT S U B V E R S I O N / O S B O R N
as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife
loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh,
but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also
does the church, because we are members of His
body…each individual among you also is to love
his own wife even as himself, and the wife must
see to it that she respects her husband” (Ephesians
5:25–33). However problematic these statements
might sound to readers today, it is important
to judge their emancipatory force in the social
context of Paul’s day rather than our own. It was
in fact a common slur against Christianity that it
was a religion for women. Insofar as women in the
ancient world very often had their dignity violated
by powerful men, the slur was entirely accurate.
Paul’s letters do not include any explicit
condemnations of slavery, although in one of
his letters of ad hoc pastoral counsel he urges a
97
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
Christian slave owner, Philemon, to receive back
into his household a runaway slave, Onesimus,
in order to be reconciled to him. Some readers
have concluded that on the question of slavery
Paul therefore endorsed the status quo. But Paul’s
response was deeply subversive of the practice in
other ways.22 In his letter to Philemon, he rede-
fines the relationship between master and slave
in a way that rules out the Aristotelian view of
“natural” subjugation and inequality. Because
Philemon is now a Christian, Paul writes, he
must view Onesimus “no longer as a slave, but
more than a slave, a beloved brother” (Philemon
1:16). (Compare Aristotle’s Politics: “For that
some should rule and others be ruled is a thing
not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour
of their birth, some are marked out for subjec-
tion, others for rule.”)23
Deeply ingrained beliefs in human inequality
did not go without a fight; nor did Christians
cease being people of their time. Evidence of
this may be found within the biblical text itself,
which frequently lays bare the shortcomings of
the early believers. Paul chastises wealthy believers
in Corinth, for example, for excluding the poor
and uneducated from their common meals. He
could not force the churches he had planted to
change their ways, but he could appeal to their
memories of the Jesus story and to the witness of
his own life as a model worthy of emulation by
those of high social status, effectively reversing
the meanings of “high” and “low” so as to render
them meaningless:
We are fools for Christ’s sake…we are
weak, but you are strong; you are distin-
guished, but we are without honor. To
this present hour we are both hungry and
thirsty, and are poorly clothed, and are
roughly treated, and are homeless; and
we toil, working with our own hands;
when we are reviled, we bless; when we
are persecuted, we endure; when we are
slandered, we try to conciliate; we have
98
become as the scum of the world, the
dregs of all things, even until now….
Therefore I exhort you, be imitators of
me (1 Corinthians 4:10–13, 16).
A Tragic Double Subversion
The story of the Christian subversion of pagan
values would over time become the story of a
tragic double subversion. The retrenchment of
hierarchy and domination within the church—
particularly after Constantine made Christianity
the religion of the empire in the fourth cen-
tury, reversing several centuries of persecution
of believers—means that Christianity is today
vulnerable to the charge of being a net force for
inequality, hierarchy, violence, and oppression.
Yet such an indictment of Christianity can be
made, ironically, in large part only because of the
very moral and humanistic categories introduced
into the West by Christianity itself.
The Christian proclamation of the full moral
equality of all persons—revealed not by nature
or science but through the Imago Dei and the
Incarnation of Christ—led gradually but inexo-
rably to a dramatic overturning of the hierarchical
values of the ancient world.24 The early churches
and later monastic orders modeled ideals of self-
regulation, nonviolence, charity, freedom of discus-
sion, separation of spiritual from temporal power,
solidarity with the poor, and limited government
in imperfect but unprecedented ways.
With the spread of Christian moral intuitions,
the concept of community was decoupled from
tribal or ethnic bloodlines as well as from “natural”
hierarchies and was redefined as a voluntary asso-
ciation of individuals of all classes and ethnicities.
The highest models of heroism were no longer
warriors who conquered and subjugated their
rivals, but Christian martyrs—both men and
women, often of lowly origin—who displayed a
form of courage-in-weakness that was democrati-
cally open to all. With the increasing penetration

of the Roman state by believers, the rhetoric of
leadership also changed. Members of the urban
elite who aspired to high office were increasingly
compelled to speak (whether sincerely or prag-
matically) not of their own nobility, but, rather,
of their great “love of the poor.”25 Authority in
the emerging Christian “social imaginary,” to
use Charles Taylor’s phrase, was likewise relativ-
ized in decidedly moral terms, not as dominion
but as stewardship. Rulers would now be held to
account by clergy and ordinary people on the
basis of the subversive ideal of “slave morality”:
servanthood. To be a true “lord,” following the
example of Lord Jesus, was, paradoxically, to be a
humble servant—indeed, a “slave”—of all.
In his letter to Philemon, Paul redefines the
relationship between master and slave in a
way that rules out the Aristotelian view of
“natural” subjugation and inequality.
Although it would take considerable time for
these ideas to permeate European culture to the
point that they would come to be regarded as
virtually self-evident truths, there is an unde-
niable link between the story-shaped life of
the early Christian communities and the law-
shaped life of later Western civilization. The
idea of natural rights was inscribed in canon law
by medieval Christian thinkers as early as the
twelfth century.26 Principles of religious tolera-
tion and liberty of conscience often credited to
Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Voltaire
were already well established in the writings of
believers such as Erasmus, Sebastian Castellio,
Roger Williams, and the radical reformers in the
Anabaptist tradition.27
Legal scholar John Witte writes that the
Enlightenment “was not so much a well-spring of
Western rights as a watershed in a long stream of
rights thinking that began nearly two millennia
T H E G R E AT S U B V E R S I O N / O S B O R N
before.” This is not to deny or minimize the
contributions of Enlightenment thinkers to the
idea of rights, Witte asserts; rather, what these
later individuals “contributed more than anything
were new theoretical frameworks that eventually
widened these traditional rights formulations
into a set of universal claims that were universally
applicable to all.”28 The religious studies scholar
Bruce K. Ward argues that in place of the story
that has come to dominate much of the academy
as well as popular culture, of how the invention
of the secular saved the West from the violence
of religion, we should speak in terms of violent
forms of religion being challenged by nonvio-
lent ones, with the latter ultimately giving rise to
liberal values and legal formulations.29
There is nothing in this admittedly outra-
geously simplified brush-stroke history, of course,
that amounts to proof for the metaphysical
truth claims of Christianity. One might freely
acknowledge the centrality of Christian beliefs to
the historical and philosophical rise of concepts
of human equality and the overturning of ancient
hierarchies while asserting that these beliefs are
at best noble fictions and that the values could
just as easily have been arrived at by some purely
secular path (such that humanism can now float
free of its historical past and become, in the words
of Thomas Nagel, a “view from nowhere”).30
Alternatively, we might join Nietzsche and his
postmodern heirs in rejecting liberal and human-
istic values as masks for resentment and power
on the logically consistent grounds that the death
of God must also lead to the death of the image
of God in the Other—and all that went with it.
I will not attempt to answer the Nietzschean or
postmodern challenges to humanism here except
to say that Nietzsche was right: Christianity is
slave morality—unapologetically and transpar-
ently so. Unlike Nietzsche, however, I take this
on balance to be cause for celebration. If secular
humanists and atheists committed to liberal
values cannot believe in theism, they might still
find good reasons to be grateful for it.
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
Endnotes
1 18 David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian
“Stephen Fry on God: The Meaning of Life: RTE One”
[video], January 28, 2015; https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo.
2 19 Ibid.,
In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume,
through the voice of Philo, declares, “Epicurus’ old ques-
tions are yet unanswered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil,
but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not
willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing?
whence then is evil?” David Hume, Dialogues concerning
Natural Religion, second edition, ed. Richard H. Popkin
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), 63; Tim O’Keefe,
Epicureanism (London: Routledge, 2010), 47.
3 Anat Biletzki, “The Sacred and the Humane,” New York
Times, July 17, 2011; http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/
the-sacred-and-the-humane.
4 Stephen Hopgood, “The End of Human Rights,”
Washington Post, January 3, 2014; http://www.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-end-of-human-
rights/2014/01/03/7f8fa83c-6742-11e3-ae56-
22de072140a2_story.html.
5 Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), x.
6 Darrel W. Amundsen, “Medicine and the Birth Defects
of Children: Approaches of the Ancient World,” in On
Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics,
eds. Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), 681–92.
7 26 See Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Modern Protestant
Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1988), VII. 1335b.
8 Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic
Books, 1968), V. 460c–461c.
9 Titus Livy, Roman History, trans. John Henry Freese,
Alfred John Church, and William Jackson Brodribb (New
York: D. Appleton, 1898), 11.
10 Ibid., 11.
11 Ibid., 11−12.
12 Ibid., 15.
13 Davina Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining
Paul’s Mission (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 70.
14 Ibid., 70−71.
15 Samuel
Moyn, “Did Christianity Create Liberalism?,”
Boston Review, February 9, 2015; https://bostonreview.
net/books-ideas/samuel-moyn-larry-siedentop-christiani-
ty-liberalism-history.
16 Josephus, The Jewish War, Books III−IV, vol. 2), trans. H.
St. J. Thackeray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997), 301; see also John Dominic Crossan, God
and Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now (New York:
HarperCollins, 2007), 110.
100
17 See, for example, Martin Hengel’s classic study of the prac-
tice, Crucifixion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 46.
Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2009), 124.
169.
20 Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure,
Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious
Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996).
21 Stark
quotes from a letter dating from 1 BCE written by
a seemingly devoted husband, Hilarian, to his wife, Alis,
to illustrate the pagan world’s casual disregard of female
infants: “I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby
son, and as soon as I receive payment I shall send it up to
you. If you are delivered of a child, if it is a boy keep it,
if a girl discard it. You have sent me word, ‘Don’t forget
me.’ How can I forget you. I beg you not to worry.” Ibid.,
97−98.
22 See Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the
Politics of the Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006),
40.
23 Aristotle, The Politics, I. 1254a.
24 Iam especially indebted in this paragraph to Part II (“A
Moral Revolution”) in Larry Siedentop, Inventing the
Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 51–113.
25 Ibid.,
82.
Developments in Human Rights,” in Christianity and
Human Rights: An Introduction, eds. John Witte Jr. and
Frank S. Alexander (Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 155; http://www.cambridge.org/
US/academic/subjects/religion/religious-ethics/christiani-
ty-and-human-rights-introduction.
27 See
Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration
Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2003).
28 John Witte Jr., “Introduction,” in Christianity and Human
Rights, 40.
29 Bruce K. Ward, Redeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity
and Liberal Virtues (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010),
122.
30 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986).
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101
 The Common Core and
Democratic Education
Johann N. Neem

DAVID COLEMAN, A FORMER MCKINSEY &
Company consultant and the current president
of the College Board, is one of the key figures
behind the recent Common Core State Standards
initiative. He has been described as “an utterly
romantic believer in the power of the traditional
liberal arts,” and Time magazine named him one
of the 100 most influential people of 2013. He
is also a former Rhodes Scholar “whose conver-
sation,” Dana Goldstein wrote in The Atlantic,
“leaps gracefully from Plato to Henry V,” and
who has “advanced degrees in English litera-
ture from Oxford and classical philosophy from
Cambridge.”1

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).

Above: Illustration by Fanatic Studio/Getty Images.

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 T H E C O M M O N C O R E A N D D E M O C R AT I C E D U C AT I O N / N E E M
At least on paper, Coleman is precisely the
sort of person you would want in charge of a
national standards initiative. But when outlining
the kind of education he wants for American
children, he sets his sights much lower than you
might expect. When asked in 2012, for instance,
why he chose to become the College Board’s new
president, Coleman responded that he believed
that the organization could “help the movement
towards agreement that college- and career-
readiness is the goal of K−12 education in this
country.”2 That phrase, drawn directly from the
Common Core standards, reflects a diminished
understanding of democratic education.
Coleman’s fellow business leaders have been
more explicit. Chris Kershner, a member of the
Dayton (Ohio) Area Chamber of Commerce
(and a Common Core advocate) put it this
way: “The business community is the consumer
of the educational product. Students are the
educational product. They are going through the
education system so that they can be an attrac-
tive product for business to consume and hire
as a work force in the future.”3 For Kershner,
there is little doubt about whose interest public
education should serve.
We Americans once saw public education as
something more than just preparation for the
work force; we saw it as a means of preparing
citizens and developing human beings. The
Common Core signals an absence of one under-
standing of education, but also the presence of
something else. To understand this something
else, we must look to recent history.
From Charlottesville to the Culture Wars
The national standards movement began in
September 1989 at a two-day summit in
Charlottesville, Virginia, when President George
H.W. Bush and forty-nine state governors agreed
that the country needed to establish clear nation-
al goals and hold schools accountable to them.4
To that end, President Bush put together the
National Education Goals Panel, a body of six
governors, four members of the administration,
and four members of Congress. The panel con-
cluded that higher academic achievement should
prepare students for “citizenship, further learning,
and productive employment” through engage-
ment in “challenging subject matter including
English, mathematics, science, foreign languages,
civics and government, economics, arts, history,
and geography,” and by teaching students “to use
their minds well.”5
We Americans once saw public education
as something more than just preparation
for the work force; we saw it as a means of
preparing citizens and developing human
beings.
The Bush administration urged implementa-
tion of national standards and testing in five core
areas of study: English, mathematics, science,
history, and geography. In 1991, Congress autho-
rized the president to form the National Council
on Education Standards and Testing, which in
turn offered three reasons to improve education
standards: “to promote educational equality, to
preserve democracy and enhance the civic culture,
and to improve economic competitiveness.”6
To develop national standards, the council
called for the creation of a coordinating body
composed of public leaders, educators, and
members of the public, in keeping with the
belief that public education has civic, academic,
and economic purposes, as well as multiple stake-
holders. President Bush took action, working
with the Department of Education, the National
Science Foundation, the National Endowment
for the Arts, and the National Endowment for
the Humanities to bring together teachers and
professors who could formulate the standards.
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
On taking office, President Bill Clinton had
every intention of continuing Bush’s work, but
then things fell apart. The National History
Standards Task Force, set up by Clinton’s prede-
cessor and co-chaired by education professor
Charlotte Crabtree and history professor Gary
Nash, released a report recommending a focus
on “both the nation’s diversity exemplified by
race, ethnicity, social and economic status,
gender, region, politics, and religion, and the
nation’s commonalities,” as well as encouraging
students to understand “our common civic iden-
tity and shared civic values.”7 The op-ed pages
went wild, beginning with former NEH Chair
Lynne Cheney’s characterization of the standards
as offering “unqualified admiration for people,
place, and events that are politically correct” at
the cost of “traditional history.”8 Crabtree and
Nash released their own response to what they
called a “right-wing assault,” arguing that the
standards reflected the state of the field and that
democracies have an obligation to teach history
in a way that includes all people.9
By seeming to embrace multiculturalism,
the standards opened another front in the
culture wars.
A similar debate took place over the stan-
dards for English proposed by the International
Reading Association and the National Council
of Teachers of English in 1996. The very first
one recommended that students “read a wide
range of print and nonprint texts to build an
understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the
cultures of the United States and the world,” in
order “to acquire new information, to respond to
the needs and demands of society and the work-
place, and for personal fulfillment,” but there
was little about what might constitute America’s
literary tradition.
104
Another of the English standards called for
students to “develop an understanding of and
respect for diversity in language use, patterns, and
dialects across cultures, ethnic groups, geographic
regions, and social roles.”10 Conservatives balked
at what they perceived as the relativization of
English into dialects (although the report recog-
nized that “some varieties of English are more
useful than others”).11 By seeming to embrace
multiculturalism, the standards opened another
front in the culture wars.
To conservative critics, such standards proved
that most academics and educators could not be
entrusted with designing a balanced curriculum.
Not surprisingly, those academics and educators
thought the same of their critics.12
The Origins of the Common Core
Although initial efforts under Bush and Clinton
failed, the National Governors Association
(NGA) and the Council of Chief State School
Officers (CCSSO) continued to seek national
education standards. Hoping to avoid a repeat of
the 1990s, they turned in the following decade to
business leaders, like-minded foundations, and
testing companies. In 2008, Gene Wilhoit, the
CCSSO executive director, and David Coleman,
the future architect of the Common Core, trav-
eled to Seattle to meet Microsoft founder and
leading philanthropist Bill Gates and his wife,
Melinda. Soon thereafter, the newly created Gates
Foundation awarded more than $200 million to
the cause, including funds for policy groups, aca-
demics, and studies. The movement also won the
backing of the man who would become presi-
dent: Senator Barack Obama.13
Once the NGA and CCSSO decided to move
forward, they hired Coleman’s own organiza-
tion, Student Achievement Partners, to develop
the standards. It was clear from the beginning
that the standards would be designed in-house,
with little input from the academic community.
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The people appointed to the standards working
group were overwhelmingly from the business
and testing worlds: Out of ten members, only one
was a professor. Four came from the testing orga-
nization ACT, one from Student Achievement
Partners, one from Pearson–America’s Choice,
three from the College Board, three from
Achieve (a nonprofit directed by governors and
business leaders to promote education reform),
and one from the communications firm Vockley-
Lang. While there would be more academic
input through feedback groups and validation
committees, it was clear where the real power
was vested.14
Behind the decision by the NGA and CCSSO
to turn to the business world was a new set of
ideas about governance, reliant on the insights
of what is called “agency theory.”15 In their 1976
article “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior,
Agency Costs, and Economic Structure,” econo-
mists Michael Jensen and William Meckling
argued that in any organization in which owner-
ship is separated from direct control, owners (as
principals) must delegate authority to employees
(their agents) who have their own competing
interests.16 The problem is exacerbated when
it comes to skilled professional work, because
professionals—teachers, doctors, professors—
have traditionally exercised discretion and judg-
ment.17
According to agency theory, principals must
devise tools to align agents’ interests with those
of their principals, including close monitoring,
economic incentives, and market accountability.
When applied to school reform, agency theory
recommends that teachers’ remuneration be tied
to external measures of success (such as test scores)
and market accountability bolstered through
national scorecards or school choice.18 Nowhere
is agency theory’s influence on education reform
clearer than in New York City, where, under
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel
Klein, the public schools were granted autonomy
in return for achieving specific performance
goals. If schools failed, they would be sanctioned
or shut down.19
Under agency theory, professionals are
treated as rational actors seeking to maximize
their utility by responding to carrots and sticks,
but there is no accounting in agency theory for
how, absent strong professional communities,
the goods they stand for—education, medicine,
law, journalism—will be sustained. In short,
without the moral and political resources of
professionalism, the purpose of public educa-
tion is at risk of being manipulated by managers
to ends foreign to it.20
The people appointed to the standards
working group were overwhelmingly from
the business and testing worlds.
And that is exactly what is happening. Under
the first Bush administration, the civic, human,
and economic purposes of public education
were front and center in discussions of national
standards. Every student deserved access to
high-quality subject matter: “Students,” ran one
Bush-era report, “sometimes have not been intro-
duced to literature because the focus has been
on basic skills.”21 Studying “literature” would
“enrich life experiences, increase employability,
and enhance communication.” Such study served
egalitarian ends.
The Common Core got rid of all this, whit-
tling away the democratic and human purposes
of education, until all that was left were the basic
skills. The opening paragraph of the standards for
“English Language Arts & Literacy in History/
Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects,”
co-written by David Coleman, limits the stan-
dards’ goals to “college- and career-readiness.”22
Only in the final paragraph of the introduction
to the standards do the authors acknowledge
that learning to read and write well has “wide
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applicability outside the classroom and work
place,” including to the enjoyment of literature,
the parsing of data, and the preparation of people
for “private deliberation and responsible citizen-
ship in a republic.” These other outcomes are not
presented as goals, however, but as the “natural
outgrowth” of work force readiness.
Widening the Gap
The Common Core’s strength is its emphasis
on engaging texts seriously. In one of his more
(in)famous comments, Coleman has mocked
educators for caring more about what students
think than about teaching them to read and write
effectively: “As you grow up in this world you
realize people really don’t give a shit about what
you feel or what you think. What they instead
care about is can you make an argument with evi-
dence, is there something verifiable behind what
you’re saying or what you think or feel.”
But making arguments to what end? When
Coleman talks about preparing students for the
“world,” it is clear that he means the working
world. “It is rare in a working environment,”
Coleman continued, “that someone says, ‘Johnson,
I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I
need a compelling account of your childhood.’”23
One Coleman critic has responded that while
employers may not care about the personal and
civic lives of workers, in a democracy “citizens
have a sincere interest in what other citizens have
to say.”24 Empathy matters.
Knowledge also matters. The arts and sciences
offer students ways to make sense of the world
they inhabit. For Coleman, however, these intel-
lectual goals are secondary to career skills. In his
essay “Cultivating Wonder,” he begins, “So much
depends on a good question.” The right question
“invites students into a text or turns them away.”
The standards must “come to life,” which can
only be made to happen by exploring “specific
questions about particular texts.” He aspires to
106
help students “pay attention,” to get under the
surface of a work and truly understand it.25 So
far, so good. But what do these standards look
like in practice?
In an online lesson on Martin Luther King
Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Coleman
does not allow students access to historical
context or any other framing. To him, there is
only the text, and nothing should interpose itself
between the student and the text. The idea is to
enable students to deal seriously with the words
before them, to do what he calls “the hard work
of reading a text closely, carefully, and well.”
Such an approach ought to elevate, even
ennoble, texts. But Coleman seems to care little
about the impact that a good, close reading
might have on students as people and citizens.
Reading King is important because it develops,
as Coleman puts it at the beginning of his lesson,
“a college- and career-ready skill”—not because
of King’s insights into the human condition,
Christianity, or American history. From the
perspective of college- and career-readiness, the
content is arbitrary.26
In one of his more (in)famous comments,
Coleman mocked educators for caring
more about what students think than
about teaching them to read and write
effectively.
Coleman’s invitation to engage texts is under-
mined by his presumption that instrumental skills
matter more than the particular ends to which
they are devoted.27 By ensuring that King’s letter
is read in isolation from its historical context or
larger conversations, Coleman does not allow
students to learn much from King’s message. Far
from ennobling the text, Coleman has dismissed
what the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” might
teach us.
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This approach has similarities with that
of the American progressive education move-
ment, whose champions criticized traditional
academic subjects for being irrelevant to
students—or, as John Dewey put it in his 1916
Democracy and Education, “so much mate-
rial to be studied.” The curriculum had to be
made child centered and relevant to a diverse
student body. For some progressive reformers,
this meant a more intense focus on vocational
education, but for others, including progressive
education’s heirs in today’s schools of educa-
tion, the primary aspiration was to empower
students as democratic citizens.28
In her examination of progressive education’s
legacy to twentieth-century American education,
historian Diane Ravitch criticizes schools’ “flight
from content and from knowledge.” By denying
students access to the insights of the arts and
sciences, Ravitch worries, American schools will
Photograph by Chris Windsor/Getty Images.
widen the “gap between the educated haves and
the poorly schooled have-nots.”29 The same criti-
cism applies to the Common Core.
Evidence of Emptiness
The debate between skills and knowledge is older
than the Common Core. The Common Core’s
approach to reading and writing hearkens back
to the Renaissance, when new teachers called
“humanists” emphasized literary skills (gram-
mar, rhetoric, and logic). Renaissance humanists
believed that the study of ancient texts taught
students “to write and speak well,” skills vital for
employment in church or government and for
preparation for the higher university studies of
law, theology, and medicine.30
Well before the Renaissance revived interest
in ancient texts, the ancients themselves debated
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
the relationship between skills and knowl-
edge.31 In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates argues with
Gorgias, a famous sophist and rhetorician.
Socrates claims that all speech worthy of its
name is shaped by knowledge: Doctors speak
about medicine because they know medicine.
This, Socrates continues, is equally true for “the
other arts and sciences,” which are “concerned
with the subject belonging to the particular art
or science.”
Gorgias, favoring rhetoric, responds, “You
don’t have to learn the other arts and sciences,
only this one [rhetoric], and you’re on par with
the experts.” In turn, Socrates wonders whether
one should go to a doctor who understands how
to persuade people but does not understand
medicine. To Socrates, speech cannot be an
independent art because it depends on knowl-
edge.32
In The Ideal Orator, an influential text for
Renaissance humanists, the Roman statesman
Cicero claims that oratory requires both knowl-
edge and rhetoric. To Cicero, oratory is “some-
thing greater, and is a combination of more arts
and pursuits, than is generally supposed.” The
world has few orators, Cicero avers, because it is
impossible to be a good orator “unless [one] has
gained a knowledge of all the important subjects
and arts.” Without knowledge, Cicero argues,
“the orator’s speech will remain an utterly
empty, yes, almost childish verbal exercise.”
Society needs philosophers (Cicero wrote
that he “would prefer inarticulate wisdom to
babbling stupidity”), but not everyone must
become one. Instead, a liberal education would
develop the skills, knowledge, and dispositions
or virtues necessary to use philosophy’s insights
to inform action in the world. Unlike the pure
philosopher or sophist, the ideal orator “unites
wisdom and eloquence,” knowledge with skills
and virtue.33 That remains a worthy aspiration
for the graduates of our public schools, some of
whom will become philosophers and scientists,
but all of whom are human beings and citizens.
108
By favoring skills over knowledge, the
Common Core reduces education to soph-
istry. Common Core advocates might respond
to such criticism by claiming, as Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan put it in a 2013 speech
in Washington, that the standards “are the
goals,” whereas a curriculum “is what teachers
teach.”34 This distinction, while useful, is also
questionable. Given the Obama administra-
tion’s embrace of high-stakes testing, the skills
required by the Common Core may well push
out other aspects of the curriculum; indeed,
there is evidence that this is already happening
and that textbook companies are designing new
curricula geared to the Common Core. Because
test scores appear to be objective, school leaders
know that parents use them as a proxy for
quality. Schools will teach to the test even if it
means, as Mike Rose has written, diminishing
“our definition of human development and
achievement—that miraculous growth of intel-
ligence, sensibility, and the discovery of the
world—to a test score.”35
In our effort to evade the culture wars, we have
instead embraced a managerial understanding
of education shaped by agency theory and the
priorities of business leaders. The Common
Core offers students instrumental skills divorced
from the purposes for which those skills might
be used. In their book Winner-Take-All Politics,
political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul
Pierson argue that partisan gridlock helps those
with economic power.36 The same may be true
for cultural gridlock: It leaves the economic
as the only common ground for policymakers
to invoke. Agreeing on little, we have reduced
our national aspirations to “college- and career-
readiness.” Those words are evidence of a deeper
emptiness.
 T H E C O M M O N C O R E A N D D E M O C R AT I C E D U C AT I O N / N E E M
Endnotes
1 of the Great American School System (New York: Basic
Dana Goldstein, “The Schoolmaster,” Atlantic Monthly,
October 2012. See also Joy Resmovits, “David Coleman,
Common Core Writer, Gears Up for SAT Rewrite,”
Huffington Post, August 30, 2013; http://www.huffing-
tonpost.com/2013/08/30/david-coleman-common-core-
sat_n_3818107.html.
2 Grants for Common Core Standards,” Washington Post
Frederick Hess, “Straight Up Conversation: Common
Core Architect and New College Board President
David Coleman,” Education Next, June 4, 2012; http://
educationnext.org/straight-up-conversation-common-
core-architect-and-new-college-board-president-david-
coleman/.
3 Valerie Strauss, “The Quote That Reveals How At Least
One Corporate School Reformer Really Views Students,”
Washington Post (online edition), August 27, 2014;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/
wp/2014/08/27/the-quote-that-reveals-how-at-least-one-
corporate-school-reformer-really-views-students/.
4 For most of the narrative that follows, I rely on Maris
Vinovskis, The Road to Charlottesville: The 1989 Education
Summit (Washington, DC: National Education Goals
Panel, 1999), 34; and John F. Jennings, Why National
Standards and Tests? Politics and the Quest for Better
Schools (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998),
94. See also eds. Carl F. Kaestle and Alyssa E. Lodwick, To
Educate a Nation: Federal and National Strategies for School
Reform (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007),
92; and Lawrence J. McAndrews, The Era of Education:
The Presidents and the Schools, 1965–2001 (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 2006), 133–66.
5 Jennings, Why National Standards and Tests, 14.
6 and Contemporary Formative Ideas and Trends,” in The
National Council on Education Standards and Testing,
Raising Standards for American Education (Washington,
DC: US Department of Education, 1992), 3.
7 National Center for History in the Schools, National
Standards for United States History: Exploring the American
Experience: Grades 5–12 (Los Angeles: University of
California–Los Angeles, 1994), 3; Andrew Hartman, A
War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 275.
8 Lynne Cheney, “The End of History,” Wall Street Journal,
October 20, 1994.
9 Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn,
History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past
(New York: Knopf, 1997), Chapter 8. See also Diane
Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 429–52; Jennings,
Why National Standards and Tests, Chapter 7; and James
Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define
America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), Chapter 8.
10 International Reading Association and National Council
of Teachers of English, Standards for the English Language
Arts (Newark, DE, and Urbana, IL: National Council of
Teachers of English, 1996), 3, 16, 21–22.
11 Ravitch, Left Back, 437–38.
12 Diane Ravitch, “Hijacked! How the Standards Movement
Turned into the Testing Movement,” The Death and Life
Books, 2010), 15–30; Ravitch, “Education after the
Culture Wars,” Daedalus 131, no. 3 (2002), 5–21.
13 LindseyLayton, “How Bill Gates Pulled Off the Swift
Common Core Revolution,” Washington Post, June 7,
2014; Valerie Straus, “Gates Gives $150 Million in
(online edition), May 12, 2013; http://www.washing-
tonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/12/gates-
gives-150-million-in-grants-for-common-core-standards/
See also Anthony Cody, The Educator and the Oligarch:
A Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation (New York:
Garn Press, 2014), Chapter 14; Ravitch, Death and Life,
Chapter 10; and Donald Zancanella and Michael Moore,
“The Origins of the Common Core: Untold Stories,”
Language Arts 91, no. 4 (2014), 273–79.
14 Informationon the committees can be found at the web-
site of the National Governors Association in a release
titled “Common Core State Standards Development
Work Group and Feedback Group Announced,” July 1,
2009; http://www.nga.org/cms/home/news-room/news-
releases/page_2009/col2-content/main-content-list/
title_common-core-state-standards-development-work-
group-and-feedback-group-announced.html. See also
Mercedes Schneider, A Chronicle of Echoes (Charlotte,
NC: Information Age Publishing, 2014), 173–83; Joy
Pullman, “Five People Wrote ‘State-Led’ Common
Core,” Heartlander Magazine, June 7, 2013; http://news.
heartland.org/newspaper-article/2013/06/07/five-people-
wrote-state-led-common-core.
15 Charles Kerchner, David Menefee-Libey, and Laura
Steen Mulfinger, “Comparing the Progressive Model
Transformation of Great American School Districts: How Big
Cities Are Reshaping Public Education, eds. William Lowe
Boyd, Charles Kerchner, and Mark Blyth (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Education Press, 2008), Chapter 1;
Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands:
The Social Transformation of American Business Schools
and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 317–26;
Kathleen Eisenhardt, “Agency Theory: An Assessment
and Review,” Academy of Management Review 14, no. 1
(1989), 57–74. For context, see also Daniel Rodgers, Age
of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2011), Chapter 2.
16 Michael
Jensen and William Meckling, “Theory of the
Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs, and Economic
Structure,” Journal of Financial Economics 3 (1976), 305–60.
17 MalilehMansouri and Julia Adair Rowney, “The Dilemmas
of Accountability for Professionals: A Challenge for
Mainstream Management Theories,” Journal of Business
Ethics 123 (2014), 45–56. See also the thoughtful discussion
in Joseph Heath, “The Uses and Abuses of Agency Theory,”
Business Ethics Quarterly 19, no. 4 (2009), 497–528.
18 Kerchner et al., “Comparing the Progressive Model”; see also
ed. Paul E. Peterson, Choice and Competition in American
Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 29.
109
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
19 Paul T. Hill, “Leadership and Governance in New
York City School Reform,” in Education Reform in
New York City: Ambitious Change in the Nation’s Most
Complex School System, eds. Jennifer O’Day, Catherine
Bitter, and Louis Gomez (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Education Press, 2011), Chapter 1; Katharine Destler,
“Creating a Performance Culture: Incentives, Climate,
and Organizational Change,” American Review of Public
Administration, published online October 6, 2014,
doi:10.1177/0275074014545381.
20 Beryl Radin, Challenging the Performance Movement:
Accountability, Complexity, and Democratic Values
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006),
Chapter 4; Donald P. Moynihan, The Dynamics of
Performance Management: Constructing Information and
Reform (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press,
2008), Chapter 7. See also Jon D. Michaels, “Running
Government Like a Business…Then and Now,” Harvard
Law Review 128 (Feb. 2015); Robert Locke and J.C.
Spender, Confronting Managerialism: How the Business
Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance
(London, England: Zed Books, 2011).
21 National
Council on Education Standards and Testing,
Raising Standards, 22–24.
22 Common Core State Standards Initiative, Common Core
State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in
History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects,
2010; http://www.corestandards.org/wp-content/
uploads/ELA_Standards.pdf.
23 Schneider,
Chronicle of Echoes, 169.
24 Nicholas Tampio, “David Coleman’s Plan to Ruin
Education,” Al-Jazeera America, December 5, 2014; http://
america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/12/common-
core-collegeboardeducation.html. Martha Nussbaum,
in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), identifies
“empathy” as one of the essential dispositions of demo-
cratic citizenship, x.
25 David
Coleman, “Cultivating Wonder,” The College
Board, 2013, accessed April 29, 2015; https://
dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2901650/Blog%20Docs/
CultivatingWonder.pdf. Coleman’s approach plays into
a decades-old debate among scholars of literature about
how to read a text. For context, see Terry Eagleton,
Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008).
26 David Coleman, “Middle School ELA Curriculum Video:
Close Reading of a Text: ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’”
(Dec. 2012); https://www.engageny.org/resource/middle-
school-ela-curriculum-video-close-reading-of-a-text-mlk-
letter-from-birmingham-jail.
27 Asimilar critique is offered by Paul Deneen, “Common
Core and the American Republic,” The American
Conservative (online edition), November 20, 2013;
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/common-core-
and-the-american-republic/.
110
28 John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York:
Macmillan, 1916), 134. On progressive ideas’ influence
in schools of education, see David Labaree, The Trouble
with Ed Schools (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2004), Chapter 7.
29 Ravitch, “Education after the Culture Wars.” For his-
torical discussions of the origins of progressive pedagogy,
see Ravitch, Left Back; William J. Reese, “The Origins
of Progressive Education,” History of Education Quarterly
41, no. 1 (2001), vi–24; Herbert Kliebard, Struggle for the
American Curriculum 1893–1958 (New York: Routledge,
1995).
30 PaulOskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic,
Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains (New York: Harper,
1961), 13; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From
Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal
Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1986).
31 My discussion relies on Bruce Kimball, Orators and
Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education
(New York: Teachers College, Columbia University,
1986); and Francis Oakley, Community of Learning: The
American College and the Liberal Arts Tradition (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), Chapters 1−2.
32 All
quotes from Plato, Gorgias, trans. Tom Griffith; ed.
Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).
33 All quotes from Cicero, On The Ideal Orator, trans. James
May and Jakob Wise (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001).
34 Arne Duncan, “Duncan Pushes Back on Attacks
on Common Core Standards,” June 25, 2013, US
Department of Education; http://www.ed.gov/news/
speeches/duncan-pushes-back-attacks-common-core-
standards.
35 Mike Rose, Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of
Us (New York: New Press, 2009). There is evidence of
declining public support for the Common Core among
voters of both parties. See A. Jochim and L. Lavery, “The
Evolving Politics of the Common Core: Implementation
and Conflict Expansion,” Publius (forthcoming).
36 Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All
Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and
Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2011).
111
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
BOOK REVIEWS
The Great Accumulation
Karl Shuve
The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and
Wealth in Early Western Christianity
Peter Brown
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
When Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elect-
ed pope in the early evening hours of March 13,
2013, he took a name—Francis—that no previous
pontiff had chosen. It was a weighty decision to
link his papacy symbolically with Il Poverello, the
little poor man of Assisi, whose Order of Friars
Minor came to be viewed with suspicion by the
medieval Roman Catholic Church for its teach-
ing that Christ and the apostles owned no pos-
sessions. But in allowing the themes of humility
and poverty to shape his papacy, Pope Francis
has endeared himself to the many people, within
and outside the Catholic Church, who have dif-
ficulty reconciling the church’s immense wealth
with the teachings of Christ found in the Gospels.
Whether in the spectacular Gothic architecture of
Notre-Dame de Paris, the sumptuous surround-
ings of Vatican City, or the glittering mosaics of
San Vitale in Ravenna, one can sense the seeming
contradiction between the church’s lavish expen-
diture of resources and Jesus’s command to the
rich young man that if he wishes to obtain eternal
life, he must sell all that he owns and “give the
money to the poor” (Mark 10:21, New Revised
Standard Version). How can such ostentation
stand alongside the radical proclamation in Luke
6:20, “Blessed are you who are poor”? Something,
it seems to many, has gone remarkably wrong.
But why did the Catholic Church come
to have so much wealth in the first place, and
what have been the social, political, and cultural
112
implications of this great accumulation? These
are questions the eminent historian Peter Brown,
a professor emeritus at Princeton, has spent
much of the last two decades answering, nowhere
more directly than in his two most recent books.
The Ransom of the Soul, an expanded version
of lectures he delivered in 2012, follows on the
argument developed in his magisterial 792-page
tome Through the Eye of a Needle, which was
published earlier that same year by Princeton
University Press.
Although Brown’s scholarship speaks with
profundity and insight to the apparent contradic-
tion within the Catholic Church and Christianity
more broadly, his intellectual energy is focused
more directly on a problem of a different kind:
What was the relationship between the rise of
Christianity and the fall of Rome? In particular,
Brown challenges one of the central claims of
eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon,
who in the first volume of The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire laid much of
the blame for Rome’s flagging vigor on the influ-
ence of Christianity. Among other ills, Gibbon
charged, the Christian church had been respon-
sible for causing “a large portion of public and
private wealth” to be “consecrated to the specious
demands of charity and devotion” (I.39).
From the beginning of his career, Brown has
resisted narratives of decline, favoring instead the
language of transformation. In his seminal The
World of Late Antiquity (1971), he framed the
centuries before and after the cessation of Roman
rule in the West as a time of great religious and
philosophical innovation, which witnessed the
rise of the Christian church, rabbinic Judaism,
Neoplatonism, and Islam. In the years between
that book and his last two, Brown helped to
reshape the ways in which students of the
ancient world think about the development of

Christianity. Always trying to discover the deeper
streams of change that run beneath great political
events, he has consistently resisted notions of reli-
gious decline as much as he has challenged facile
accounts of social and political decline. Practices
and beliefs that earlier generations of scholars
dismissed as corrosive superstition, representing
a descent from enlightened antiquity to Dark
Age barbarism, now appear, thanks to Brown, in
a wholly new light.
The problem of the accumulation of wealth
that has gripped Brown so thoroughly over the
last four decades of his career arguably stands at
the nexus of two types of comprehensive change:
political and religious. The church’s growing
wealth can be viewed both as the cause of the
fall of Rome in the West and as a sign of the
“greed” that allegedly came to beset the Christian
church. Through the Eye of a Needle, which has
been amply discussed in other reviews, obliterates
Gibbon’s accusation that the flow of wealth into
the church’s coffers sapped the Roman state of
its treasure and strength. A long and demanding
read, even for the specialist, the book shows
precisely how Christian bishops from the late
fourth century through the sixth transformed
Roman civic benefaction into an ideal of care for
the poor.
The Ransom of the Soul takes up the problem
from a different perspective by examining the
way in which wealth served as a conduit between
the present world and the hoped-for hereafter.
Elegantly written and eminently succinct, the
book preserves in large measure the voice of the
original spoken delivery. It almost has the feel of
a travelogue, with Brown guiding the reader from
the fertile plains of third-century North Africa to
the harsh forests of eighth-century Germany. The
narrative reflects Brown’s long-standing insis-
tence that the first millennium of the Christian
era was a time of both continuity and change.
He opens with several Gospel texts that promote
the view that wealth is not so much divested as
“transferred” from this world to the next. Jesus
BOOK REVIEWS
Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.
Mosaic of the widow’s mite, Ravenna, sixth century.
is quoted as telling the rich young man to give
to the poor so that he might “have treasure in
heaven” (Matthew 10:21). As a way of demon-
strating how indebted medieval Christians were
to this conception of religious giving, Brown
juxtaposes Jesus’s words to the rich young man
with the story of a sixth-century Roman cobbler,
who each week gave alms to the poor at the
shrine of Saint Peter. Each time the cobbler
performed this act of charity, a pious man in
Rome received a vision of a brick being added
to a glorious heavenly mansion. The cobbler was,
quite literally, storing up treasure for himself in
heaven by divesting himself of it on earth. Where
other historians may imagine only a vast chasm
between the first and sixth centuries, Brown
reveals continuities and connections, in this case
by showing how the recorded words of Jesus
gave a distinctive shape to the medieval notion
of giving.
But, of course, there can be no historical
narrative without change, and this is what most
interests Brown. And to locate its sources, he
focuses primarily on changing views of the soul’s
journey after death and the shape of the cosmos.
If we are tempted to believe that the church
followed the money, Brown has it the other
way around: Attitudes toward wealth and giving
changed in response to new beliefs about sin and
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THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
the afterlife. Characteristically for Brown, these
changes are not explained away by major polit-
ical events, such as the accession of Constantine
in 306 and the deposition of the last emperor,
Romulus Augustulus, in 476. Far more determi-
native of the way the church thought about and
used money was a slow rethinking of how bonds
were formed between the living and the dead, and
what those in one realm could do for those in the
other.
Brown traces several broad movements. The
first is a change from concern with the afterlives
of martyrs to concern with those of ordinary
Christians who neither lived nor died heroically.
In the writings of the earliest Latin Christians,
it was imagined that martyrs were immediately
transposed to heaven, where they could inter-
cede on behalf of the living. Those who lived
more mundane lives were believed to abide in a
shadowy place of rest until the final judgment and
the resurrection of the dead. A new landscape,
however, opens before our eyes in the writings
of Augustine, who dominates the book’s middle
chapters. Inhabiting a far more thoroughly
Christianized world, Augustine trained his gaze
on the non valde boni—the “not altogether good”
who made up the vast majority of his congrega-
tion. Their lives were marked by the accumulation
of small debts—minor sins against God and their
neighbors—that could be expiated through alms
giving. Brown argues that it was Augustine of
Hippo who ensured that subsequent generations
of Western Christians would link repentance with
the giving of money to the poor and the church.
The second major movement is a complete
re-imagining of the cosmos itself. In the ancient
world, it was thought that the dead—or at least the
elite or holy dead—ascended to the stars, where
they enjoyed eternal life. Christians believed this
as fervently as their “pagan” neighbors. But in the
fifth century, especially in Gaul, the journey of the
soul after death became a much more hazardous
and uncertain proposition. It was no longer a rapid
ascent, but a bitter struggle in a foreign landscape
114
dotted with demons and devils. The only hope of
a successful journey lay in performing radical acts
of giving in life and in soliciting the assistance of
the saints and the living after death. If one could
construct an elaborate shrine to a saint and ensure
burial next to that saint, it was imagined that
one’s postmortem journey would be easier and
more likely to succeed. It is here that we begin
to move toward the medieval understanding of
purgatory, with Brown’s narrative ending on the
cusp of its emergence.
It would have been easy for medieval Christians,
as Brown so eloquently puts it, to see how “some
of that imagined treasure had, as it were, dripped
back to earth,” in the form of great shrines and
churches. And with little effort, we ourselves can
continue to witness the legacy of this new vision
of the cosmos and the afterlife, which encouraged
the wealth of innumerable Christians deposited
in heaven to drip back, sometimes slowly and
sometimes rapidly, into the present world.
Debates over the appropriateness of this great
accumulation of wealth will surely continue
unabated—as they have since before the time of
Francis of Assisi himself. But Brown’s Ransom of
the Soul provides a more nuanced, textured, and
sympathetic view of how this system, strange
though it may seem to us, came to be in the first
place. Brown presses us to imaginatively inhabit a
world in which the religious and the commercial
do not constitute separate zones, but collaborate
to hold the cosmos together. At the end of this
remarkable tour, we may even be inclined to agree
with our guide: “Perhaps it is we who are strange.”
Karl Shuve is an assistant professor of religious stud-
ies at the University of Virginia. His first book, The
Song of Songs and the Fashioning of Identity
in Early Latin Christianity, is forthcoming from
Oxford University Press.
 BOOK REVIEWS

Right Reading

School of Athens (detail) by Raphael; Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City/Bridgeman Images.
Steven Knepper

Literary Criticism from Plato to

Postmodernism: The Humanistic Alternative
James Seaton
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

James Seaton champions a tradition of accessible

literary criticism that today is more commonly
found in high-end periodicals and reviews than
in university departments of literary studies. To
adepts of this humanistic tradition, literature pro-
vides, in his words, “valuable insight into human
life in all its variety.” Seaton traces humanistic
criticism back to Aristotle and up through once-
influential but now-neglected twentieth-century
American critics. Among more recent contem-
porary practitioners of this sort of criticism we
might count Marilynne Robinson, Wendell
Berry, Adam Kirsch, and James Wood.
Seaton, a professor of English at Michigan
State University, contrasts this humanistic criti-
cism with the approach encouraged in much
modern and postmodern literary theory. He
claims that politicized frameworks—theoretical
cookie cutters like Marxism, feminism, and
psychoanalysis—turn great novels, poems, and
drama into little more than fodder for theory.
They encourage students to be detached critics,
insulated against the naive view that literary
works offer any lasting insight into human life.
The result, Seaton says, is predictable, jargon-
laden critique.
His diagnosis comes at a time when scholars
across the humanities are voicing similar
concerns about the dominance of a smug, flat-
footed hermeneutics of suspicion. Bruno Latour,
for instance, has called practitioners of formu-
laic critique “critical barbarians,” and Rita Felski
has examined the limits of suspicious reading in
her 2008 book Uses of Literature. A 2013 report
by Harvard College found that the humanities
have overemphasized theory at the expense of
other approaches to literature, including literary
history. Seaton contributes to such disciplinary
soul-searching in two significant ways. First,
he argues that the history of literary criticism
can be understood as an ongoing battle among
politicized Platonism, mystical Neoplatonism,
and sensible Aristotelianism. Second, he reha-
bilitates some twentieth-century practitioners of
this Aristotelian humanism—namely Edmund
Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and Ralph Ellison—
who still have something to teach literary studies
today.
Before weighing those contributions, I should
note a significant difference between Seaton and
scholars such as Felski. The latter works from
within the loosely defined parameters of “theory,”
drawing on phenomenology, hermeneutics,
and strands of feminism to articulate a critical
approach that is more open to the pleasures of
reading and the insights offered by literary works.
Seaton, on the other hand, is a seasoned veteran
of the culture wars who has been publishing

115
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
broadsides against theory for decades. So while
Felski criticizes literary theory from within,
Seaton criticizes it from without.
This outsider stance is both a strength and a
weakness. It positions Seaton to recover critics
such as Wilson, Trilling, and Ellison who have
been left out of the theory canon, but it also
makes him prone to blanket condemnations of a
diverse set of scholars, some of whom support the
reforms he advocates. At their worst, to be sure,
literary theorists pluck decontextualized dicta
from Foucault and Derrida and present them as
holy writ for a sort of poststructuralist catechism.
But a good theory course can introduce students
to debates about literature, language, aesthetics,
ethics, and politics that do indeed stretch back to
Plato. Likewise, not all theory-informed criticism
runs roughshod over literary works, and some of
it is even engagingly written.
Seaton’s polemic tends to brush aside the
claims of theorists rather than engage with them.
In this regard, one might be better served by
Felski or a radical humanistic critic such as Terry
Eagleton, who, after writing what many consider
the definitive book on theory in 1983 (Literary
Theory: An Introduction), launched a thorough
critique of theory’s excesses. In works such as
After Theory (2003), Eagleton defends the persis-
tence of the human condition as the justifica-
tion for “humanistic” criticism; in so doing, he
confronts postmodern challenges that are more
formidable than Seaton acknowledges.
Seaton offers a particularly one-sided treat-
ment of the Frankfurt School theorists, who
figure as the main villains in his account of the
decline of literary studies. The reader learns that
“the originality of the critical theorists derived
from their willingness to ignore or discount all
the economic, social, and political gains achieved
in the twentieth century.” But one would never
learn from Seaton that Walter Benjamin wrote a
suggestive piece on the eclipse of oral storytelling
or that Theodor Adorno had nuanced things to
say about the politics of lyric poetry. A renewed
116
humanistic criticism need not categorically
dismiss these German intellectuals.
Seaton relies on similarly broad strokes in his
attempt to sort all of literary criticism into three
rival traditions: the Platonist, which is “suspi-
cious of poems, plays, and fiction because they
reinforce the prejudices and false consciousness
of the unenlightened majority”; the Neoplatonist,
which values literature “as a vehicle for moral
and/or spiritual transcendence of conventional
common sense”; and the Aristotelian, which offers
a “middle way between the Platonic condemna-
tion of art and literature and the Neoplatonic
elevation.” This schema allows Seaton to point
out some affinities between seemingly far-
removed positions. It’s also a rhetorically effective
way to situate humanistic criticism as the sensible
alternative to two extremes. (Today’s politicized
theorists are “Platonists,” by Seaton’s account.)
But the categories are so capacious that they risk
obscuring the history of criticism instead of clari-
fying it. Seaton fully acknowledges that he uses
the notion of tradition loosely, as “a matter of
affinity and tendency rather than explicit philos-
ophy or theory,” and that this results in some odd
bedfellows, but the very word tradition is perhaps
misleading here. Seaton does not examine rival
traditions so much as he groups critics who reach
similar conclusions about the value of literature,
regardless of their reasons for doing so. In Seaton’s
schema, both a crude Marxist and Simone Weil,
a true intellectual descendent of Plato who offers
a striking reformulation of The Republic’s moral
critique of literature, would be in the same camp.
Seaton makes a much more compelling case
for revisiting three twentieth-century critics who
were influential in their day but seldom gain a
place in theory anthologies: Wilson, Trilling,
and Ellison. Seaton claims that Wilson “made
the literature of high modernism available to the
general reader not by slighting its complexity but
by refusing to accept its technical innovations
as ends in themselves and, instead, pointing to
their human meaning as responses to modern

life.” Trilling argued that, in its complexity and
ambiguity, literature “opposes the inevitable
one-sidedness of all political doctrines, even
the most benign.” Ellison, whose novel Invisible
Man (1952) is widely taught but whose criti-
cism is neglected, took up the tension between
artistic standards and democratic equality.
Seaton demonstrates that these humanistic critics
continue to offer insight into literature and its
relationship to society, and—perhaps more
important—provide exemplary models of demo-
cratic literary criticism.
While Seaton’s attempt to classify all critics
as Aristotelians, Platonists, or Neoplatonists
results in oversimplification, his take on the
recent history of literary criticism returns impor-
tant voices to the conversation. He also issues a
timely call for well-written literary criticism that
“conveys to the general public the pleasures and
insights that poems, plays, and fiction continue
to make available to all those willing to attend.”
Whether it takes its bearings from neglected
humanist critics or an immanent critique of
theory, such criticism provides at least a partial
tonic for what ails literary studies.
Steven Knepper is assistant professor of English, rhet-
oric, and humanistic studies at Virginia Military
Institute.
A Diminished Thing
Chad Wellmon
Higher Education in America
Derek Bok
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.
The University of Virginia, where I teach, does
many different things. It runs a medical system
with a 631-bed hospital, twenty-three research
centers, and a medical school. It manages an
BOOK REVIEWS
THR composite/Seamartini Graphics/Shutterstock, Inc.
entertainment business that hosts everything
from Pearl Jam concerts to monster truck rallies.
It supports a start-up incubator for new busi-
ness ventures. It coordinates a community-wide
sustainability effort. It feeds thousands of people
every day. It serves as an industry and govern-
ment research center. It fields twenty-five varsity
sports teams. And in addition to all that, it edu-
cates more than 20,000 students a year, while
supporting the research of some 2,000 fulltime
faculty members. Like most universities today,
the University of Virginia isn’t just an educational
institution. It’s a conglomerate.
In 1963 in the middle of the post–World
War II higher education boom, when college
enrollments were surging and federal research
dollars were flowing, Clark Kerr, then-president
of the University of California, christened this
new institution the “multiversity.” During the
twentieth century, he argued, the university had
ceased to be a unified community harnessed a
single purpose. It had fragmented into several
communities. This new institution, Kerr noted,
was to be neither loved nor loathed; it was to
be managed. Like any other modern institu-
tion, it was to be run by organization men and
117
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
women, administrators who managed a panoply
of corporate enterprises. The new, modern multi-
versity wasn’t the quaint collegiate community of
the past; it was a “mechanism held together by
administrative rules and powered by money.”
And its leader, as Thorstein Veblen had put it a
half century earlier, was not an intellectual leader
but rather a “captain of erudition.”
But even as Kerr defended the “multiversity”
as the epitome of higher education, he acknowl-
edged that its lack of a clear purpose made it
susceptible to competing visions of a univer-
sity’s purpose. Should the university primarily
prepare students for the work force? Should it
serve the public more broadly through technical
advice and public service? Should it lead the
advancement of new knowledge? Should it spur
economic growth? Should it educate students to
lead rich and full lives?
In his book Higher Education in America,
former Harvard president Derek Bok not only
embraces Kerr’s “multiversity” but also insists
that this institutional form, not the ones typi-
fied by the colleges of Oxbridge or the German
research university, has become a “model for
other countries around the world.” Indeed, he
claims that the pursuit of multiple ends has
allowed American universities to produce a
whole that is “greater than the sum of its parts.”
The dual imperative for faculty to teach and
conduct research makes professors better teachers
and better researchers. The pursuit of economic
development and research allows universities to
give their scientists access to industry databases
and resources. The commitment to public service,
whether expressed in undergraduates tutoring in
local schools or professors advising government
agencies, enriches the university. The university
benefits from the “synergies,” both expected and
unexpected, of its several pursuits. Its varied and
multiple goals make it a better institution.
And yet, like Kerr, Bok concedes that the
pursuit of so many different goals can make the
university a confused and conflicted institution.
118
As university interests and activities expand, so
too do the administrative staffs that manage
them. And as the number of deans, provosts,
program officers, and budget officers increases,
so too do the competing interests. The univer-
sity becomes a corporation, with its many divi-
sions vying for resources, prestige, and attention.
Within the modern day multiversity, the job of
university leaders is simply to manage, as Bok
puts it, “a proper balance” among the institution’s
multiple, oftentimes competing interests.
But how among these competing ends and
purposes is such a “proper balance” to be found?
Bok occasionally invokes the “basic academic
values of the university” as orienting guidelines.
He implores trustees, presidents, deans, and
faculty members to work together to preserve
“basic” and “important” values. He notes the
importance of “honesty” in research, “impar-
tiality and disinterestedness in scholarship,”
“freedom of thought,” and “quality teaching and
research.” But he only vaguely alludes to what
these are, where they come from, and how they
are to be sustained.
And it is because of this vagueness that one
senses that these values have no real home in
the multiversity. Of course, Bok insists that they
must have a place in order to provide multiver-
sity leaders with a common set of standards by
which to reconcile their competing interests.
This, however, is little more than a reduction of
academic values to instrumental ends and even
window-dressing. Without them, the multiver-
sity Bok describes so well would more closely
resemble General Electric than the venerable
institutions of Paris, Bologna, or Berlin.
The real home of these values is an institution
that, sadly, may be on the verge of extinction: the
research university or, perhaps more broadly, the
academy, where the ideals and traditions dedicated
to creating and sharing knowledge flourished. As
universities divert their resources from more clearly
academic ends, perhaps it’s time for academics to
think about what historian Johann Neem calls an
 BOOK REVIEWS

“academy in exile.” Consider, for example, the

myriad German research institutes founded in the
early twentieth century out of frustration with the
bureaucratic behemoths that German universities
had become. Maybe academics—now a pejorative
term for the socially irrelevant and economically
unproductive—should abandon the multiversity
and their managerial masters and discover again
what it’s like to think freely.

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
(Johns Hopkins University Press).

Laski Collection/Getty Images.

A Prophet Restored
James L. Nolan Jr.
The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth
about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker
Daniel J. Mahoney
South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), the Nobel
Prize−winning author whose writings did much
to expose the atrocities of the communist system
in the Soviet Union, was exiled by the Soviet
government in 1974. Four years later, while liv-
ing with his family in Cavendish, Vermont, he
was invited to give the commencement address
at Harvard University. Much to the surprise and
chagrin of many, Solzhenitsyn took aim not only
at the despotic system from which he had been
exiled but at the flaws of Western democratic
capitalism as well. Asking himself whether he
“would propose the West, such as it is today, as a
model to my country, ” he responded unequivo-
cally: “I would frankly have to answer negatively.”
Solzhenitsyn in Russia, 2002.
To put it mildly, the lecture was not well received.
From a number of camps, thereafter, both in the
West and in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn was
viewed with suspicion if not outright derision.
The author of The Gulag Archipelago has been
variously accused of being anti-democratic, pan-
Slavist, a Russian nationalist, an authoritarian
scold, an anti-Semite, a theocratic tsarist, even a
nostalgist for communism.
Daniel Mahoney’s new book, The Other
Solzhenitsyn, goes far toward debunking the cari-
cature of Solzhenitsyn that has emerged over the
past four decades, and demonstrates the courage,
wisdom, and trenchant thinking of the man who
first garnered worldwide notice with the publica-
tion of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
in 1962. Some of the misunderstanding,
according to Mahoney, a professor of political

119
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
science at Assumption College, in Worcester,
Massachusetts, stems from the lack of familiarity
with Solzhenitsyn’s later works, many of which
have yet to be translated into English. Mahoney
highlights, in particular, Solzhenitsyn’s work from
his years of exile and after his return to Russia
in 1994, including Two Hundred Years Together,
The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two
Millstones, Rebuilding Russia, Russia in Collapse,
and his magnum opus, The Red Wheel.
Drawing on these and earlier works, Mahoney
makes a convincing case that the image of
Solzhenitsyn constructed over the past four
decades is a grossly distorted one. Mahoney shows,
for example, that Solzhenitsyn was anything but
anti-democratic. Rather, he was an advocate of
“democracy in small spaces,” who urged Russians
to establish democratic self-governance from the
bottom up. As worthy examples of this model,
Solzhenitsyn pointed to the local governing prac-
tices of Switzerland and New England, both of
which he had witnessed firsthand. In addition to
these models, he urged Russians to look to their
own zemstvos—the small governing councils of
local Russian provinces in the nineteenth century.
“I have always insisted on local self-governance in
Russia,” Solzhenitsyn asserted in an interview in
Der Spiegel a year before his death.
Given this view of democracy, it is not
surprising that the Russian Orthodox believer
was an admirer of Catholic social teaching and
of Pope John Paul II, whom he met in 1993 and
whose election in 1978 he had described as “a
gift from God.” Solzhenitsyn’s view of democracy
(and his criticisms of both industrial capitalism
and socialism) was actually very much in keeping
with the subsidiarity principle of Catholic social
teaching and the distributist ideals advocated
by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. While
Mahoney touches on these “small is beautiful”
themes, the affinities between Solzhenitsyn’s
views, Catholic social teachings (beginning with
Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum),
and the writings of the English distributists are
120
developed more fully in Joseph Pearce’s biog-
raphy, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile.
In what may be the most intriguing section
of the book, Mahoney explores Solzhenitsyn’s
views on Russia’s last three major political
leaders. Never much of a fan of either Mikhail
Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin, Solzhenitsyn was a
qualified supporter of Vladimir Putin. This posi-
tion no doubt contributed to misapprehensions
about Solzhenitsyn and the view that he was
an authoritarian Russian nationalist. Mahoney,
however, demonstrates that here, as elsewhere,
critics misunderstand Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn
did give Putin credit for “his role in gradually
restoring the strength and self-respect of the
Russian people,” after the Russian leader had
“inherited a ransacked and bewildered country,
with a poor and demoralized people.” However,
there were also aspects of Putin’s political lead-
ership that displeased him, including the
continuing corruption, the lack of public repen-
tance for the crimes of communism, and the
slow pace toward the development of democracy.
That said, Solzhenitsyn also partially faulted the
West for Russian resistance to democracy. After
the instability of the 1990s—what Solzhenitsyn
referred to as Russia’s “third time of troubles”—
Russians tended to associate Western democracy
with the widespread chaos and kleptocracy of the
Yeltsin years.
That Solzhenitsyn would appreciate Putin’s
role in helping to restore the morale of the Russian
people is consistent with Solzhenitsyn’s broader
views regarding national character and of the role
of Providence “in the collective lives of nations
and peoples.” Solzhenitsyn placed high value on
the distinctive qualities of a people. As he put
it in his Nobel lecture, “Nations are the wealth
of mankind, its collective personalities; the very
least of them wears its own special coloration and
bears within itself a special facet of divine inten-
tion.” Some of the boundaries established after the
dismantling of the Eastern bloc were, according
to Solzhenitsyn, arbitrary, and effectively made

Russians aliens in the near abroad. In a 1994
interview, for example, Solzhenitsyn noted that
Crimea was gifted to Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita
Khrushchev “with the arbitrary capriciousness of
a satrap.” While such views may suggest support
for Putin’s recent actions in Ukraine, Mahoney
insists that Solzhenitsyn, were he alive today,
“would be more critical of Putin, especially of his
refusal to give up power.”
There is much to appreciate about Mahoney’s
book, not the least of which is the fuller and more
nuanced portrayal of the important Russian writer
and thinker put forth in its pages. Readers of this
illuminating and engaging book will be compelled
to read more Solzhenitsyn and will look forward
to the day when Solzhenitsyn’s more recent writ-
ings are finally translated into English.
James L. Nolan Jr. is professor of sociology at Williams
College and the author, most recently, of Legal
Accents, Legal Borrowing: The International
Problem-Solving Court Movement.
Return of the Repressed
Jay Tolson
The Paradox of Liberation: Secular
Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions
Michael Walzer
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015.
Michael Walzer has never thought small. The ori-
gins of radical politics, just war doctrine, equal-
ity, and toleration are among the topics on which
the political scientist, a professor emeritus at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has
shed invaluable light, usually by subjecting grand
theoretical abstractions to the particularities of
specific cultures, nations, and traditions.
The paradox explored in this short book,
which grew out of the Henry L. Stimson lectures
BOOK REVIEWS
at Yale University, can be summed up in a single
question: Why did so many states that gained
independence in the post–World War II era and
were founded on secular and democratic ideals
soon face the powerful challenges of religious
revivalism? Walzer’s inquiry into the inability of
“the leaders and militants of secular liberation…
to consolidate their achievements and reproduce
themselves” focuses on three cases: Israel, where
the secularist ideology of Labor Zionism now
meets with powerful opposition from champions
of a more messianic strain of Zionism as well
as ultra-Orthodox Judaism; Algeria, where the
secularist (and, briefly, democratic) ideals of the
National Liberation Front have been repeatedly
challenged and were nearly overturned by militant
Islamists; and India, where the ambitious reform
program of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress party has
come up against the fervor and electoral successes
of Hindu nationalists determined to assert their
primacy within the constitutional order.
To most leaders of assorted national liberation
movements of the early postwar period, attaining
independence and building modern states
entailed the creation of a secular public sphere
that, while not entirely dispensing with religious
influences in realms such as law and education,
moved them to the periphery. Nation-building
elites, largely Western-educated (or at least
educated in Western ideas), viewed religion as a
waning force, to be supplanted by what Nehru
called “the scientific outlook.” To these leaders,
national unity and equality required subduing
the divisive effects of religious and ethnic identity.
To that end, Israel’s Declaration of Independence
announced the creation of both a Jewish and a
secular state, guaranteeing the right of religious
and national minorities. Similarly, Walzer notes,
“[India’s] Congress militants rejected Mohammed
Ali Jinnah’s claim that the Muslims constituted a
nation of their own just as they rejected the claims
of Hindu nationalists.” It must be recalled, too,
that the very idea of a nation-state ran counter
to many religion-grounded suspicions. Early
121
 THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
Underwood Archives/Getty Images.
Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, 1946.
Zionist thinkers, including Theodor Herzl, had
to contend with a deeply rooted wariness about
statehood derived from the long exilic experience
of the Jewish people.
If Westernized elites met with early success in
moving their new states toward membership in
the society of secular states, “which in its origins,”
says Walzer, “was a European society but in its
ambitions a global society,” they soon encoun-
tered resistance from militants who yearned for
“a state shaped by their own interpretation or
reinterpretation of a particular religious tradi-
tion.” In some ways, the growing influence of
such militants was the doing of the secular elites,
either intentional (by creating democracies in
which alternative views could be voiced and
advanced) or unintentional (by trying too hard to
push religion out of the public sphere). It was no
small irony that religious militants would attack
the universalist regime of democracy and human
rights as a Western import even while using it to
advance their particularist agendas.
Walzer makes no secret of his affinity with
the secular orientation of the founding genera-
tion of these young states, but he gives ample
voice to their critics, many of whom faulted the
liberationist project for preserving the structures
of the imperial state or lacking “concrete cultural
content.” The latter created a vacuum into which
122
religious traditionalists and modernists, whether
Hindu, Muslim, or Jewish, would inevitably rush.
Walzer himself partly blames the ideological zeal
of the secularist leaders for the vehemence of the
various religion-inspired reactions: “It is the abso-
lutism of secular negation that best accounts for
the strength and militancy of the religious revival.”
Ancient religions and traditions that are denied or
suppressed return too often as modernist re-inter-
pretations that, ironically, may be far less amenable
to accommodation with pluralism, equality
(including gender equality), and democracy itself.
As a chastened liberal, Walzer hopes that political
negotiation and engagement will lead to work-
able compromises between truly tolerant secular
universalists and the best kind of religious particu-
larists.
Walzer’s brief excursus into one of the thornier
problems of the globalizing world cannot respond
to the many contradictions, differences, and excep-
tions that arise in the friction among various reli-
gious and secularist projects. Even the words religion
and secularism take on strikingly different hues in
different cultural and national contexts. How does
one think of such large cases as China, for example?
Did its Marxist variant on the national liberation
project more successfully eradicate the “opiate of
the masses,” with possibly deeply unsettling conse-
quences for a society in which no one now truly
believes the official (and secular) state ideology?
And how does Russia’s current leader encourage
and exploit an Orthodox revival to buttress
Russian nationalism and his own autocratic form
of “managed” democracy? However limited its
scope, Walzer’s book—including its brief discus-
sion of America’s difference—makes a convincing
case that a purely secular state is an impossibility,
and its hoped-for realization one of the greater
mistakes of the progressive imagination.
Jay Tolson is editor of The Hedgehog Review.
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124
 Signifiers
Narrative
Wilfred M. McClay
Academia has a lot to answer for when it comes
to the corruption and decay of our language.
We all know about the impenetrable prose that
has become academia’s stock in trade. But there
are certain untoward developments that seem to
be attributable to the rise of mass higher educa-
tion, which has broken down the barrier between
academia and public discourse, to the detriment
of both. It is no coincidence that the years since
World War II, which saw an astonishing rise in
college enrollment have also seen a great many aca-
demic words and concepts finding their way into
everyday speech. This is a process that has contin-
ued unabated, and it has nearly always tended to
undermine the vigor and directness of our speech.
So now, instead of changing our minds, we
undergo a “paradigm shift.” Instead of finding
something risky, it has become “problematic.”
Instead of a fanciful story being called a fable or
a tall tale, it is dubbed “an urban legend.” Instead
of identifying one’s intimate partner as some-
thing more or less determinate, he or she is one’s
“significant other.” Instead of being self-centered,
the insufferable young man is “narcissistic.” And
one could go on.
Wilfred M. McClay is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of
Oklahoma.
Some of these terms are older and more
established than others, some are more preten-
tious than others, but they have in common their
academic origins, and the fact that their everyday
usage misrepresents their original meaning.
Compare, for example, today’s use of “significant
other” to its use by the psychologist Harry Stack
Sullivan, the man who originated the term, who
meant it to refer to the person who directs the
primary socialization of a young child. Such tech-
nical jargon has a real value when it is confined to
the discourse of specialized academic communi-
ties. But the flow of such words into our public
speech is another matter.
A special case in point is the word narrative.
Although a word with a long history, and deep
roots in Latin, it has by now become an academic
term which has migrated into common speech,
bringing hidden freight along with it. Elite jour-
nalists, who are likely to be products of university
life, are perhaps the most likely to employ it, as a
way of signaling their intellectual sophistication.
But conservative populists like Rush Limbaugh
and Sean Hannity are just as likely to use it, too,
particularly in criticizing “the narrative” being
125
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW / SUMMER 2015
put out by establishment politicians or elite
media. Why is that so? What does this develop-
ment mean?
I think the answer is clear. The ever more
common use of “narrative” signifies a widespread
and growing skepticism about the general accounts
of events that are being provided to us. We are
living in an era of pervasive genteel disbelief—
nothing so robust as relativism, but instead some-
thing more like a sustained cognitive shrug—and
the word narrative provides us with a way of talking
neutrally about such accounts while distancing
ourselves from a consideration of their truth.
Narratives are understood to be “constructed,” and
it is assumed that their constructedness means that
they cannot possibly be true, or false, since all such
construction involves conscious or unconscious
elements of selectivity, acts of suppression, infla-
tion, and substitution, sleights-of-hand meant to
fashion a rhetorical instrument that conveys what
the narrator wants us to see and to believe. That
this is a shallow and simplistic view of narrative
ought to be obvious.
But such an understanding opens up the possi-
bility that anything that has been constructed
can be reconstructed, and that we have it in our
power to throw off the old narrative and envelop
ourselves in a new and better one, with only
the merest bow toward telling the whole truth.
Asked by Vanity Fair magazine why she chose to
resurface in public after years of silence, Monica
Lewinsky explained, “I’ve decided, finally, to
stick my head above the parapet so that I can
take back my narrative and give a purpose to
my past.” Now, I have considerable sympathy
for Lewinsky, who did not deserve to become a
worldwide object of sniggering derision. But one
is entitled to wonder, based on her subsequent
comments, and on the contents of her moving
TED speech, “The Price of Shame,” whether one
of the chief goals of “taking back her narrative”
will be to downplay, and even erase, her own
responsibility for her fate. I hope it doesn’t turn
out that way.
126
If all narratives are equally concocted, they
cannot be judged by any standard of truth, only
by the extent of their effectiveness as therapy or
public relations. Hence, the jaded commentary
of our sophisticated pundits, who ask of politi-
cians’ “spin” only whether it will “play” with
the booboisie, not whether it is a tissue of lies.
Hence, Lewinsky’s fond hope of reinvention: Ye
shall believe the narrative, and the narrative shall
make you free. But this very belief is self-under-
mining when we know that it is a “narrative” that
we are believing, or pretending to believe. Trust
the tale, said D.H. Lawrence, and not the teller.
His words would seem to be especially apropos
when the teller is oneself. When we turn narra-
tive into a conscious instrument of our will, we
will surely find it hard to show much reverence
for the thing we have preemptively devalued.
What is especially tragic about our era’s
emptying-out of the word narrative in public
usage is that it signifies not only systemic distrust
but also the loss of narrative as a legitimate form
of knowledge. This is an act of profound self-
impoverishment. There are stories that are true, in
deep, fundamental, and enduring ways; and there
are truths about human existence, and about the
natural world, and human events, that can only
be properly conveyed by means of stories—that
is, by a narrative account of a sequence of events
whose larger meaning is inseparable from our
sequential apprehension of them. The stories that
we share widely, particularly the ones we have
shared over the centuries, are a very large part of
who and what we are.
We live in and through such stories, which
allow our memories to reach back and our antici-
pations to leap forward, like searchlights that let
us gaze into the darkness behind and peer into
the darkness ahead. We have precious few other
tools available to us for performing that act of
discernment. We would be wise, then, to recover
the power of narrative and set it free, rather than
continue to keep it confined to the pinched
indignity of scare quotes.
New Releases from the Faculty and Fellows of
the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture

Confronting Political Islam:

Six Lessons from the West’s Past
John M. Owen IV
Princeton University Press
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Murray Milner Jr.
Polity Press
January 2015

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127
 What is Thriving Cities?
An initiative of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at
the University of Virginia, Thriving Cities offers important insights
for scholars, practitioners, and citizens in evaluating the well-
being of their communities. Thriving Cities is committed to turning
those insights into action-oriented tools that will empower key
stakeholders—including foundations, city officials, city planners,
religious leaders, politicians, educators, business people, academics,
non-profits, and residents—to ask and answer the question: What
does it mean and take to thrive in my city and how can I contribute?

Who is Thriving Cities?

We are a group of unconventional urbanists, coming from many
backgrounds and places, who believe that thriving will not be found
through the usual strategies and tactics involving technology, money,
and policy alone, but rather by situating these critical mechanisms
in the context of history, culture, geography, and power. In short, we
aim to fill a gap in urban thinking and practice summed up by the
question: “What do the humanities have to say to the urban planner?”
Out of this perspective, we are creating a conceptual paradigm for
urban assessment and a toolkit for putting that paradigm into action.
We believe working for the thriving of our communities is not only an
empirical science, but also a moral, civic, and political art.

Where to learn more info:

thrivingcities@virginia.edu
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REVIEWS
Karl Shuve on The Ransom of the Soul
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