-Quote from Thomas Shepard, Certain Select Cases Resolved, in The Works of Thomas Shepard (New York:  AMS Press, 1967), 1:306.

Back to the point, namely why money won (unearned) isn’t sweeter than money earned and why the project of educating towards a virtuous citizenry matters now more than ever: Lottery studies have shown that money won is negatively correlated with long-term happiness about life in general (see Brooks, pp 75-81).   If this is true, then the current generation of college students is being sold a bill of goods about how this economic mess will get fixed once and for all.  Brooks argues that “If money without earned success does not bring happiness, then redistributing money won’t make for a happier America” (81).  I agree with him.  But redistribution has been the underlying (although often an unspoken term by its advocates) strategy to counteract the recent evils of Wall Street.  So what?  What bearing does all this have on educating the millennial generation? Brooks points out that a majority of late teens to early thirty-somethings tend to be quite comfortable with socialist policies.  A 2010 Gallup poll proves it.

I’m simultaneously concerned and not concerned about these stats.  Not concerned because it won’t take long for millennials to understand the hollow promises of an increasingly socialist-leaning government.  Concerned, because once we start down this road as a country, it’s really hard to right the ship.  Earned success increases overall happiness about one’s life, unearned success doesn’t, and those of us who have been in the working world for longer than a few years know it.  If higher education has anything to do with helping young bearers of the imago dei to flourish in the deepest sense, then can we really afford to continue educating on this issue in the smorgasbord-kind-of-way that has become the norm?

Several days after that conversation it occurred to me that perhaps this student was trying to dig down deeper than what I had realized at the time. This week in reading the last chapter of University of Southern California philosopher Dallas Willard’s book The Spirit of the Disciplines (HarperCollins, 1991), I paused to contemplate an old ’60′s slogan he poses: “suppose they gave a war and nobody came?” He goes on to explain that “in the case of a complex phenomenon such as war, the righteous must reach must deeper than resistance or noninvolvement.” Here Willard is referring to authentic Christ-followers to are seeking to make a difference in the world. He concludes that Christ-followers “must reach into the dispositions that make war seem a plausible course of action and make people come when the battle cry is sounded. War is not an isolated phenomenon but rides upon the coattails of cultural, economic, racial, and even religious practices, ideas, and attitudes that have their life in the social context. These are the sparks that kindle the raging holocaust of war” (231). The point here is not to determine whether or not Willard is a pacifist or an Augustinian just-war theorist. Rather, his point is simply this: that the world’s seemingly impersonal power structures, independent of any one single person’s will though they may be, are “dependent for their force upon the general readiness of normal people to do evil.”

Further reflection on Willard’s claim regarding our readiness to do evil brings up questions that atheists, agnostics, and even theological liberals are challenged to answer with any degree of intellectual satisfaction. Here’s one: If human nature is basically “good,” then how do we explain atrocities such as those committed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and, more recently, the horrendous events in Darfur? The atheist is challenged with the very concepts of good and evil anyway. If he is intellectually honest, he’ll have to say that since there is nothing transcendent we simply make up what is good and evil and then create laws around what we make up. Those laws could and should perhaps change over time, because in the end there is only behavior and survival of the fittest, plain and simple. The theist who tilts to the left theologically of course is in better shape (arguably), but still misses the mark. She acknowledges God’s reality and perhaps even his active involvement in the world. But her assumptions about the nature of humanity–that people are basically good–cause her to explain away such human atrocities as resulting from a lack of education, scarcity of resources, or even psychological disorders caused by brain physiology gone haywire. Not that these cannot be factors, BUT, isn’t the problem running a bit deeper? Is it possible for normal people, as Willard suggests, to have a general readiness to do evil? Could it be that human perversity cannot just be explained away by faulty hard-wiring or improper schooling, but rather is the result of faulty character that actually prefers to immerse itself in the tempting subtleties of a culture deeply pervaded by evil itself? Why is it, Willard asks, that we want to live vicariously through the personalities of “Miami Vice?” (A quick aside to the mosaics out there–if you haven’t seen this show, just check TV Guide for reruns on TBN.) Why is that title met with intrigue deep within us, whereas a title such as “Miami Virtue” probably strikes us as hopelessly dry, dull, and boring?

The Spirit of the Disciplines is Willard’s attempt to encourage Christ-followers to recapture an understanding and regular practice of the spiritual disciplines, which he defines as “nothing but an activity undertaken to bring us into more effective cooperation with Christ and his Kingdom” (156). Pacifism on its own is an inadequate solution to war in that it merely solves the crisis of conscience of some via active non-participation. What about this instead: Recapturing the spiritual disciplines can assist us in improving our ability to see evil for what it is in all its cultural subtleties. What if community, national, and world leaders actually believed this? Perhaps that could go a long way in actually addressing the root causes of war itself.

“…why do we experience suffering and evil as unjust?  If we are purely material beings, then we should no more object to mass murder than a river objects to drying up in a drought.  Nevertheless we are not like rivers.  We know that evil is real, and we know that it is wrong.  But if evil is real, then good must be real as well.  How else would we know the difference between the two?  Our ability to distinguish between good an evil, and to recognize these as real, means that there is a moral standard in the universe that provides the basis for this distinction.  And what is the source of that moral standard if not God?”*

Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity (Washington, DC:  Regnery, 2007):  276-77. 

“To serve God wittily, in the tangle of one’s mind!  These are powerful and wonderful words.  They draw us away from an excess of solemnity, which is death to witty scholarship.  And they draw us into the tangle that is the human mind–that great and glorious instrument we either squander; use badly, or use well–ad Dei gloriam.  To use well means, I believe, to recognize that our minds have not and cannot escape the noetic consequences of sin.  Our minds cannot be perfect.  Our knowledge is never complete.  Humility is in order.  Yet even allowing for all this, there really is, or can be, light shining in the darkness.  Our epistemic urgency, our quest for knowledge, flows directly from creation itself.  God would not have created us with intelligence to develop and use if this were not central to his pronouncement that creation is good.  After all, we are asked to throw ourselves on God’s love and mercy rather than into an abyss of ignorance.  Critics of Christianity historically could point to such pronouncements as Tertullian’s unfortunate “I believe because it is absurd” as proof positive that faith demands the resignation of intellect.  Even Augustine’s quite different and justly famous credo ut intelligam, “I believe in order to understand,” came in for derision in many quarters, sometimes from those who failed to distinguish Augustine’s position from Tertullian’s, and sometimes from those confusing Augustine’s position with a too-simple fideism or pietism that views the intellect with deep suspicion or even hostility.  The relationship between faith, reason, and learning that finally made sense to me was and is unafraid of intellectual engagement and is deeply committed to the life of the mind.  It is embodied in a tradition that historically gave rise to such monumental tributes to the human mind’s understanding through faith as St. Augustine’s City of God, St. Thomas’s Summa theologiae, Martin Luther’s great works–this despite Luther’s deep suspicions of overreliance on such pre-Christian philosophers as Aristotle–and Calvin’s Institutes.  Even the great mystics stressed certain attributes of the mind–receptivity, a profound emptying of self in order that the mind and heart might be set afire by God’s fierce love.”

Source:  Jean Bethke Elshtain, “To Serve God Wittily, In the Tangle of One’s Mind.” In Douglas V. Henry and Michael D. Beaty (eds.), Christianity and the Soul of the University: Faith as a Foundation for Intellectual Community (Grand Rapids, MI:  Baker Academic Press, 2006):  39-40. 

-T.S. Eliot

An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful.  But an open mind about ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or Practical Reason is idiocy.  If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut.[1]

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, ch. 2, p. 60.