In the course of describing a fascinating empirical study he’s spearheading on how field trips to art museums affect educational outcomes, Jay Greene eloquently argues that we need to widen our views of the purpose of education. Or rather, that the professional class of education policy people needs to widen its views:

The problem is that a good number of  policymakers, pundits, and others who control the education system seem to think that the almost-exclusive purpose of education is to impart economically useful skills.  Math and reading seem to these folks to be directly connected to economic utility, while art seems at best a frill.  If resources are tight or students are struggling, they are inclined to cut the arts and focus more on math and reading because those subjects are really useful while art is not.

This economic utility view of education is mistaken in almost every way.  Most of what students learn in math and reading also has no economic utility.  Relatively few students will ever use algebra, let alone calculus, in their jobs.  Even fewer students will use literature or poetry in the workplace.  When will students “use” history?  We don’t teach those subjects because they provide work-related skills.  We teach algebra, calculus, literature, poetry, and history for the same reasons we should be teaching art — they help us understand ourselves, our cultural heritage, and the world we live in.  We teach them because they are beautiful and important in and of themselves.  We teach them because civilized people should know them.

I’m with him on the main point, but I’m planning to cause some trouble in the comments. I’m not sure it’s true that math and reading aren’t as fundamentally economic as art. At a more basic level, I don’t think you can separate economic from “civilizing” motives that easily. As I wrote a while back:

These days, if a child asks why he should care about doing well in school, what kind of answer does he get? He gets the same answer from every source: from parents, teachers, and school administrators; from movies and TV shows; from public service announcements, social service programs, and do-gooder philanthropies; from celebrities, athletes, and actors; from supporters and opponents of education reform; from everybody.

The answer is always some version of: you need to do well in school in order to have prosperity later in life.

Well, if you scrape away the sanctimony, what is this but a “bribe” on a colossal scale? …

Now, as it happens, I would prefer that the cash motive not be the only reason we offer kids to do well in school. I think our culture has been remiss in emphasizing education as an opportunity to become a better person, both morally (through character formation, a concern that the government school system seems to have largely dropped or subordinated, though private schools make it a top concern) and developmentally (because those who learn more and develop their capacities more fully have richer, more blessed lives).

But I also think that denying the presence of a strong financial motive in education is a fool’s errand. Kids will always care about how their education impacts their material well-being. And so they should — looking after one’s own material well-being is a good and natural concern.

Moreover, kids aren’t fully able to appreciate the moral and developmental motives for education until well after their education is complete. The 30-year-old, looking back, may well say, “If I hadn’t worked hard in school and had such great teachers, my personal character and my capacity for a fully human life would have been infinitely poorer.” But try explaining that to a ten-year-old.

To train students at all, you need to motivate them primarily with something that they understand. That means either “bribes” or punishments for failure. Bribes are the more humane option.

What do you think?

“Welcome to the club!” – The Gang

Hearty congratulations to HT’s own Karen Rupprecht, who has just “high passed” her comps and is now over the bar for her master’s degree. As you can see, I’m rounding up all the masters for the victory celebration. (If you want to see who’ll be attending the party when she gets her doctorate, the list starts here.) Well done!

Here’s an interesting addendum to the discussion of religious institutions and modern society. Last week, Ryan Anderson posted a review of a new book (Why Tolerate Religion? by Brian Leiter) that claims the concept of religious freedom is unnecessary. Once we protect “freedom of conscience,” freedom of religion is superfluous. You couldn’t ask for a more clear illustration of the point I made in my last post:

The nones disallow the claims of our institutions to be what they are, not out of hostility but out of an inability to grasp that something important is at stake in those claims. They have no frame of reference even to understand the nature of our claim, much less to make that claim plausible.

Ryan spends most of his review taking apart Leiter’s naive and uninformed presuppositions about what religion is and what the typical religious believer thinks and does, as well as exposing his failure to consider some important counterarguments.

However, at the end of the review Ryan briefly attempts to offer a capsule version (one paragraph) of the constructive case for why we need both freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. That’s a tall order, and I don’t want to sound too critical, but I have to say I think he’s on the wrong track. Here’s what he says:

Both liberty of conscience and religious liberty ought to be protected. But conflating the right to religious liberty with a more general right of conscience fails to take into account the distinctive good involved with religion, and the ways it can be violated even when conscience is not. Many Catholics do not feel bound by conscience to attend Mass on weekdays. But a law that prevented them from attending, while not violating their rights of conscience, would violate their religious liberty rights. So, too, with the inner workings of religious organizations, their hiring decisions, their determinations of ministers and doctrine, and so on.

The problem with this approach is that the hypothetical law in question, banning attendance at Mass, does in fact violate the freedom of conscience of all people, even those whose consciences don’t tell them to attend Mass. If the law requires you not to attend Mass, your conscience is no longer free on that matter, even if your conscience doesn’t happen to require you to do what the law forbids. Thus Ryan’s example doesn’t really take us to the distinction between freedom of concience and freedom of religion. Ryan himself, earlier in the review, points out that the whole case for freedom of religion is that belief in religious truth is only valuable if it is uncoerced; the same is true for freedom of conscience.

Ryan does, however, start to open up the real heart of the distinction between freedom of concience and freedom of religion at the end of the paragraph, when he brings in religious institutions. As I wrote in my last post:

In the lawsuits over Obamacare, the administration has asserted the theory that a profit-making business or a hospital or a school cannot be said to exist primiarly for a religious purpose or mission. If the courts endorse this claim, Christianity has been made illegal. Christianity cannot be what it is if the total primacy of God’s claim on our lives and the mission he has given us in the world is not permitted to achieve institutional expression in all areas of life, rather than simply in churches narrowly defined. This is not to say that all Christians must attend distinctively Christian schools or work in distinctively Christian businesses; far from it. However, if the formation of such institutions is illegal, Christianity is illegal.

Looking forward to hearing what the rest of the HT team thinks!

“Hang” on to your seats, Hang Togetherites. We’re going to experience a Great Conjunction this week, as I’m about to propose a unified field theorem that ties together the three lines of discussion that are emerging on HT:

1) Religion and the social order. We have been asking to what extent the idea that every human person has intrinsic dignity is dependent on religion, rather than on the more universal bases of reason and experience. As a larger share of the population goes in for a highly individualizing and subjective Romanticism, Karen is challenging us to think about the role of religious institutions in shaping society.

2) The church and the poor. We have agreed that the church can’t wait for the welfare state to get out of the way; it must follow the lead of our Mormon friends and create a superior system of poverty alleviation that runs parallel to the welfare state. In a series of posts, Kyle has been giving us a front line pastor’s perspective on what that means.

3) Political theory. In another series of posts, Dan has been laying out his perspective on the most basic ideas underlying the liberal-democratic order, such as free enterprise and rights.

Ready to have your minds blown? Here we go.

As I have already commented over on Karen’s post, the rise of Romantic individualism has led to a decline in understanding of the social nature of religion among those who are not Romantic individualists. Rousseau understood very well that the chief danger to his project was not the abstract idea of “Christianity,” which could be refashioned through a judicious reinterpretation of its meaning, but the institution of the church. “The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” is really aimed not at displacing “Christianity” but at displacing the church. It attacks Christian doctrine, and in that sense it does attack Christianity, but the goal is to change the meaning of “Christianity” to something else rather than to overthrow it and set up “natural religion” in its place. What Rousseau does very much want to overthrow is the church. Hence in the Social Contract a politically controlled “civil religion” replaces the independent church.

The long-delayed spoils of his victory are today’s “nones.” They are not really in rebellion against Christianity; they don’t know enough about it to be in rebellion against it. They mostly believe in God and have what we would recognize as spiritual lives – not Christian ones, but not militantly anti-Christian ones, either.

What they are in rebellion against is institutions. I think numerous people have made this point, but I will quote the ever-valuable Ross Douthat:

The liberal image of a non-churchgoing American is probably the “spiritual but not religious” seeker, or the bright young atheist reading Richard Dawkins. But the typical unchurched American is just as often an underemployed working-class man, whose secularism is less an intellectual choice than a symptom of his disconnection from community in general. [ea]

See Charles Murray’s last book for more on this.

Here comes the unified field theorem that will bring about the Great Conjunction. I see two challenges arising from the disconnection of the nones from institutions. The first connects to Kyle’s discussion of the church needing a new approach to poverty; the second connects to Dan’s discussion of the political ideas necessary to liberal democracy.

The immediate challenge is to the religious freedom of we who practice a social religion. The nones fail to understand that other people’s religions – ours, for instance – presuppose institutional embodiment. Our religion cannot be what it is if it is only a matter of personal belief. So the nones disallow the claims of our institutions to be what they are, not out of hostility but out of an inability to grasp that something important is at stake in those claims. They have no frame of reference even to understand the nature of our claim, much less to make that claim plausible.

In the lawsuits over Obamacare, the administration has asserted the theory that a profit-making business or a hospital or a school cannot be said to exist primiarly for a religious purpose or mission. If the courts endorse this claim, Christianity has been made illegal. Christianity cannot be what it is if the total primacy of God’s claim on our lives and the mission he has given us in the world is not permitted to achieve institutional expression in all areas of life, rather than simply in churches narrowly defined. This is not to say that all Christians must attend distinctively Christian schools or work in distinctively Christian businesses; far from it. However, if the formation of such institutions is illegal, Christianity is illegal.

Who has a solution to such a dire predicament? Kyle Ferguson, of course!

While there is much important work to be done on this issue, the most immediate need is for Christians to start demonstrating the unique value of Christian institutions. Kyle is exploring one of the ways we can do that. Christian nonprofit minitries and (just as important) Christians in for-profit business can beat the welfare state at its own game. The ministries can provide the poor something no non-Christians are currently providing them: personal development to help them become good workers; and Christian businesspeople can provide another thing no one else is currently providing: job-creating businesses that are ready and willing to go into depressed areas and employ the poor, providing them the dignity of work and self-support.

But it won’t be just poverty. What can Christian institutions do to provide unique contributions to the flourishing of our non-Christian neighbors and society at large in arts and entertainment? In business? In neighborhoods? Even in politics?

That, however, is only the short-term need. The long-term need is not to rescue the church from the threat of persecution, but to rescue liberal democracy from the threat of moral fragmentation.

Religions and quasi-religions (let’s not reopen the debate over what counts as a religion) can’t be sustained without institutional embodiment. This is just a basic feature of human behavior. We need to have institutions that teach us, structure our behavior and hold us accountable. And since liberal democracy depends on a virtuous citizenry, in the long run it depends on religious and quasi-religious institutions.

Romantic individualism has a contradiction at its core: it is not as individualistic as it thinks it is. It has always sought, and achieved, institutional embodiment – all while denying to itself that it seeks this. The two chief places it has been embodied are in the state – hence the need for a state-controlled “civil religion” in the Social Contract – and in educational institutions. The near-total triumph of Romantic individualism in these two sectors has coincided with a continual contraction of actual liberty for the individual, as both these types of institutions have become more rigid in imposing Romantic individualism as orthodoxy.

Rousseau foresaw all this and laid it out plain and simple in the Social Contract – those who do not voluntarily find their freedom in submission to the general will must be “forced to be free.” Those words are widely misunderstood and abused – Rousseau was no totalitarian – but the indifference to the individuality of the individual was very real and deliberately chosen.

Who has a solution to such a dire predicament? Dan Kelly, of course!

What will be needed in the long run is a restoration of the idea – which predominated at the American founding – that participation in and voluntary financial support for religious institutions is a necessary virtue of good citizenship. We can’t impose this by law consistent with religious freedom; but in the long run we also can’t sustain religious freedom unless society once again sets the expectation that all good and decent citizens will be part of religious institutions. This principle must be incorporated into the premises of liberal democracy at the same level as free enterprise, rights, etc. Get to work on that, Dan.

A parting question for Karen: can we extend this principle to include quasi-religious institutions? Would that be sufficient for liberal democracy, or does it have to be “religion proper”?

(Image)

Karen is, as always, pushing me to ask the right questions. Here I’m going to take up her challenge on the question of what religion is. Soon (but not too soon, alas) I’ll circle back and take up her question of whether a religious revival would be a necessary precondition of rebuilding moral consensus.

She thinks Romanticism is not a religion: “I take religion to mean not only reason and reasoning about experience, which to me seems like ideology, but also some sort of worship of a unified figure that adherents recognizes as somehow divine.”

It seems to me by this definition only the Abrahamic faiths unambiguously qualify as religions. It is unclear to me whether Hinduism passes this test, particularly as regards “unifying figure.” And if the status of Hinduism is in doubt, all the more doubtful would be the other, less developed forms of – I almost wrote “of polytheistic religion,” but then, by this definition polytheism is not necessarily a religion. And Buddhism in its more serious forms clearly does not qualify.

Consigned to the “irreligious” bin as well would be all those great deist, pantheist and generally unclassifiable thinkers who believed in the divine and organized their whole thought around it, yet did not “worship” it in any sense we would recognize. It is not clear how we could reinterpret the whole 18th century project of “natural religion” to fit this scheme – was it an ideology that falsely believed it was a religion? Nor could we make sense of the many people who have taken with utmost seriousness Socrates’ claim to be on a divine mission, and who have in general made a religion of philosophy. Here is Book III, Chapter 4 of Augustine’s Confessions:

Among such as these, in that unstable period of my life, I studied the books of eloquence, for it was in eloquence that I was eager to be eminent, though from a reprehensible and vainglorious motive, and a delight in human vanity. In the ordinary course of study I came upon a certain book of Cicero’s, whose language almost all admire, though not his heart. This particular book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy and was called Hortensius.Now it was this book which quite definitely changed my whole attitude and turned my prayers toward thee, O Lord, and gave me new hope and new desires. Suddenly every vain hope became worthless to me, and with an incredible warmth of heart I yearned for an immortality of wisdom and began now to arise that I might return to thee. It was not to sharpen my tongue further that I made use of that book. I was now nineteen; my father had been dead two years and my mother was providing the money for my study of rhetoric. What won me in it [i.e., the Hortensius] was not its style but its substance.

How ardent was I then, my God, how ardent to fly from earthly things to thee! Nor did I know how thou wast even then dealing with me. For with thee is wisdom. In Greek the love of wisdom is called “philosophy,” and it was with this love that that book inflamed me. There are some who seduce through philosophy, under a great, alluring, and honorable name, using it to color and adorn their own errors. And almost all who did this, in Cicero’s own time and earlier, are censored and pointed out in his book. In it there is also manifest that most salutary admonition of thy Spirit, spoken by thy good and pious servant: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ: for in him all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily.” [Col. 2:8, 9] Since at that time, as thou knowest, O Light of my heart, the words of the apostle were unknown to me, I was delighted with Cicero’s exhortation, at least enough so that I was stimulated by it, and enkindled and inflamed to love, to seek, to obtain, to hold, and to embrace, not this or that sect, but wisdom itself, wherever it might be. Only this checked my ardor: that the name of Christ was not in it. For this name, by thy mercy, O Lord, this name of my Saviour thy Son, my tender heart had piously drunk in, deeply treasured even with my mother’s milk. And whatsoever was lacking that name, no matter how erudite, polished, and truthful, did not quite take complete hold of me.

Augustine’s response to the philosophy of Cicero is a religious experience. Admittedly he makes a connection to Christianity, but I don’t think that blunts the point. Having been trained to view Christ as the great authority of wisdom, he is not satisfied with Cicero but goes in search of wisdom from Christ. But he is not worshipping Christ, he is “worshipping” (if that’s the word) wisdom itself. This is exactly why his next stop after Cicero was to reject the Bible and fall in with the Manicheans. They were wisdom-worshippers but claimed to be offering the wisdom Christ taught.

With all this as background, I place before you the “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,” the section of Rousseau’s Emile dealing with religion. This section was so central to the development of the Romantic movement that it was widely published and read as a stand-alone book. I believe, though I’m open to correction, that many more people read the “Profession” than read the Emile entire.

Romanticism was always a religious movement. It did not worship a divine being but it made claims about what is divine and how we know the divine, and inspired people to reorganize their lives around those claims.

The heart of Romanticism is precisely the claim that our own reason and experience put us immediately in touch with the divine, and nothing else does. For them, reason and experience are the divine.

C.S. Lewis used to quote someone who said that Romanticism is “spilled religion.” The “cup” from which it has been “spilled” is the formal elements of religion – especially the sociological ones (ritual and institutions). But spilled milk is still milk.

Speaking of sociology, here is another reason to broaden the category of religion. We come to this discussion not as detached and disinterested speculators, like Socrates and his disciples. We are socially engaged; we are interested parties who come to this question with a practical problem we are trying to solve. That has implications for how we define our terms.

If our goal is to figure out how moral consensus could be rebuilt among people of diverse religious belief and practice in our society, it seems to me we would be well advised to adopt a definition of “religion” that tracks with what our society would treat as a religion. The practical problem before us is that the nones are treated as having a right to live as nones – to live in accordance with what Karen calls their “ideology.” And I do not see how we can maintain religious freedom without granting that right. So isn’t their ideology a religion at least for our practical purposes, even if it might not be one for other purposes?