The
Center for
Multiethnic and
Transnational
Studies
Stephen Toulmin
(Thomas Jefferson Lecture, March 24, 1997)
A Dissenter's Life
I
My story today begins in Washington nearly 200 years ago. Thomas
Jefferson was inaugurated as President on March 4, 1801. Less than
three weeks later, he wrote to a friend who had come to the United
States as a political refugee from England in 1794, and had built up
his reputation here as a natural scientist, and as a writer on
philosophy and religion. Yours [Jefferson wrote] is one of the few
lives precious to mankind, and for the continuance of which every
thinking man is solicitous. Bigots may be an exception. What an effort,
my dear sir, of bigotry in politics and religion have we gone through!
The barbarians flattered themselves they should be able to bring back
the times of the Vandals, when ignorance put everything into the hands
of power and priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as
innovations. They pretended to praise and encourage education, but it
was to be the education of our ancestors. We were to look backwards,
not forwards, for improvement. . . . . This was the real ground ([he
continued] of all the attacks on you. Those who live by mystery and
charlatanerie, fearing you would render them useless by simplifying the
Christian philosophy, - the most sublime and benevolent, but most
perverted, system that ever shone on man, - endeavored to crush your
well-earned and well-deserved fame. Jefferson was writing to a man whom
we know today for books on electricity, oxygen and other scientific
subjects, but who was known at the time as the Unitarian Minister in
Birmingham, England, and had his church and home burnt down for
defending the French Revolution. Joseph Priestley was now settled in
Northumberland, Penna., and had three years to live. Why was
Priestley's fame of such concern to Jefferson? What made a scientist of
Unitarian persuasion the target of politically contrived resentment and
violence? This alliance of two distinguished figures [I will argue]
throws light on British and American attitudes 200 years ago that had a
wider historical significance, and still survive among us today.
Priestley was a Freethinker and Nonconformist - a
"dissenter," the term then was. He reached his own opinions on any
subject he took up: in religion or philosophy, in science or politics.
As well as Science, he wrote on a dozen other subjects: not just the
nature of factitious airs (what we call gases) but also rhetoric, free
will and the origin of language: Jefferson and he had corresponded
since the early 1780s. As Minister of the Unitarian New Meeting in
Birmingham, he had taught a common sense Christianity that avoided all
doctrinal technicalities. The Trinity and Transubstantiation were [for
him] "ideas at which the common sense of mankind will ever revolt."
Jesus' teachings were (he said) intelligible today to the kinds of men
and women who were the first disciples: this was what Jefferson meant
by simplifying Christianity, and defending the laity from power and
priestcraft. What then got Priestley into trouble: his theology,
science, or politics? Nowadays in the United States, Unitarian
Universalism is hardly a matter for scandal, but in 1794 it was still a
cutting edge system: at Philadelphia, Priestley gave the series of
lectures that firmly linked Unitarian theology to Universalist natural
philosophy. Nor need we assume that Unitarianism no longer has
political overtones nowadays. The religion of Bosnia (e.g.) originated
in the theological debates of 11th century Constantinople. The Bogomils
of the Balkans saw Jesus as the best of human teachers, skirting around
the mystery of how he could be both God and Man. In a word, they were
not Trinitarians, but Monophysites: the nearest thing in the year 1100
to Unitarians. Only later, coming under criticism from the Roman Church
to the West and from the Orthodox Church to the East, both of which are
Trinitarian churches, did the Bosnian Bogomils join Islam; and they did
so for theological as much as political reasons: if Jesus had been a
human "messenger" from God, after all, his standing was like that of
Muhammad. (At a time when people in this country are tempted to
demonize Islam, we need to recall just how much in theological history
Islam and Christianity have shared.)
Still, a Birmingham mob in the 1790s would not have rioted about
theology alone; so what about Priestley's scientific ideas? There too
he took a solitary road, which led him to conclusions that sound more
innocent in the 1990s than they did in the 1790s. Though widely
respected, he was an idiosyncratic scientist who walked a cusp between
the respectable and the unorthodox. From the 17th century on, European
discussions of Mind and Body had been (as we say) dualistic: treating
Mind and Matter as distinct and separate realms, so that the question
was, "How do the two interact?" A minority of writers argued that
mental activity needs bodies or brains to support it, not a separate
mind or soul; but they were denounced as materialists and Epicureans -
wrong headed, immoral, or worse. When news arrived that the liveliest
of these writers, Julien de la Mettrie, had died of food poisoning at
the Court in Berlin, the reaction was that he had met his just reward.
Priestley also belonged to this despised minority, and he put up a
plausible defense of his beliefs. The point of the Resurrection [he
said] is not that we survive death as immaterial souls: it is that, at
the Last Day, God restores our Material Bodies, so that we can resume
our interrupted lives in the flesh.
Priestley could afford to take such eccentric positions, because
socially he did not belong to the English Establishment. He was always
a religious Nonconformist, and this - looking back - was an advantage:
as such he was barred, not just from joining Parliament and the
professions, but from attending Oxford and Cambridge University, where
he would have learned only Ancient Literature and the mathematics of
Newton. Instead, he went to the Dissenters' Academy at Daventry in the
Midlands, where the students had a richer curriculum. With this as
background, he could read La Mettrie's polemic against the narrowness
of 17th century physical theory, and speculate about the spiritual
potentialities of the material world.
Yet, once again, the Mind-Body Problem was scarcely a
reason for riot. What got Priestley into trouble was his support for
the French Revolution. He was a colleague of Richard Price, whom Edmund
Burke pilloried in his Reflections on the Revolution in France - and he
himself wrote a reply to Burke. Why was it so shocking to applaud the
French Revolution? At first, many English people saw 1789 as continuing
the 1688 English Revolution, when the Dutch Protestant Prince William
of Orange replaced the Catholic James II; and also the Revolution of
the 1580s, in which the Dutch reacted to Spanish religious persecution
by abjuring their earlier loyalty to Philip of Spain. After the Terror
of 1791, however, Anglican preachers attacked dissenters as enemies of
the British Monarchy, and for 30 years events in France traumatized
respectable England, as the Russian Revolution of 1917 traumatized
mid-20th century America. Calling Priestley a Dissenter thus meant only
a religious Nonconformist, who did not accept the teaching of the
Anglican Church. Yet feeling against dissenters cut deep. The
Revolution in France convinced many people in England that religious
conformity was needed in order to defend the State from sedition. (The
word keeps cropping up in sermons and pamphlets in the 1790s.) After
the American War of Independence, the British monarchy had been frail,
but the execution of Louis XVI was the last straw: from then on, anyone
with a good word to say for the French was suspected of plotting
against George III, and damned as a "regicide" or King-killer. How
wonderful is the power of Denial! In his History of the Peloponnesian
War, Thucydides tells us how, flushed with pride at their victories
over Persia, the Athenians would not let the colony of Melos declare
its neutrality between Sparta and Athens, but put to death all the
grown men they took, and sold the women and children as slaves. This
barbarism was not acceptable in the city of Pericles and Phidias; and
the name of Melos - like My Lai for us - was one the Athenians prefered
to forget. Likewise, when they executed Charles I in 1649, the English
had set an example of the very "regicide" they now chose to condemn;
yet, by 1790, most people in England found the memory of that event
unacceptable. Priestley might insist that Unitarians had nothing
against the Royalty - indeed, had no political agenda at all - but by
this time blood was stirred, and a riot was easily whipped up.
The bigotry that burnt Priestley's home and church was
just the pigheadedness that led the Founding Fathers to reject any
establishment of religion. Before Independence, the history of Europe
taught them that, for the sake of civil peace, no country could risk
religious war. Priestley's last public act in England was a sermon On
the Present State of Europe that forecast a replacement of feudal
monarchies by more egalitarian r�gimes. He spoke in the measured tones
of Vaclav Havel today; but, after his own misfortunes, he feared
changes as violent as those in France, and looked to America as a
Laboratory of Toleration in which the contrast of Establishment and
Dissenters finally lost sense. For, in America, there were no
established doctrines for Dissenters to dissent from.
Priestley's arrival in Philadelphia did not end his
troubles: once here, he was still open to attack. Jefferson hoped to
attract him to Monticello, where they might jointly pursue their shared
interest in natural science together. As it was, Priestley was active
in the American Philosophical Society to which Jefferson (the Society's
President from 1797 to 1815) gave papers on paleontology -- e.g., on
the large fossils from Paraguay of a clawed animal known to scientists
today as the Giant Sloth, Megalonyx Jeffersoni. Still, despite
Jefferson's support for education, his scientific interests did him no
good politically: notably, when he put the bones of ancient vertebrates
on show in the East Room of the White House. Even in religion,
Jefferson was an ambiguous ally, for his views made him plenty of
enemies among the Churchmen of his time -- The Christian priesthood [he
wrote] finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding,
and too plain to need explanation, saw in Plato materials with which
they might build up an artificial system which might give employment
for their order and introduce it to profit, power and pre�minence. The
doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the
comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet
explained the Platonisms grafted on them. . .for this obvious reason,
that nonsense can never be explained -- But, in saying this, Jefferson
based his views on ideas set out in Priestley's own book, A History of
the Corruptions of Christianity. So, as a refugee from England,
Priestley did not set up a new home in Pennsylvania expecting his life
to be one of pure peace. It was not obvious that the U.S. he actually
came to was exactly the U.S. he idealistically foresaw: a place where
religious toleration was the rule in fact, not just an article in the
Consitution. But that did not matter to him: he had never shirked a
good argument.
To sum up this story: I am not arguing that Priestley was
right in all he believed and everybody else was wrong. I am not saying
that he was right to be a Republican not Monarchist in politics, a
Materialist not an Idealist in philosophy, or a Unitarian not a
Trinitarian in religion. None of his dissenting opinions taken alone
explains why he was attacked quite as violently as he was. As we shall
see, the explosive mixture was made up of all his opinions taken
together. But again, even that is not the point: the point is, that he
was entitled to hold and argue for his opinions; many of his English
contemporaries were too intolerant to respect this right; and the first
question to ask is, "Why?"
II
Let me now step aside, and look at the backdrop to this episode.
Neither Priestley nor Jefferson was just a scientist or a mere
essayist. Neither of them may have been a William Shakespeare or an
Isaac Newton, but both combined literary sensibility with scientific
talent. Ask my old friend, the late C.P. Snow, which of his "Two
Cultures" they belonged to - Natural Sciences or Humanities - and he
could not put either of them on one side only: their minds transcended
that division, so he would have had to reply, Both. So let me now take
a wider angle lens, and set the present episode at a point half way
between the Gutenberg revolution of the late 15th century, and the new
revolution in communication in which we are living today. Snow's Two
Cultures - I will suggest - separated as a result of two different
innovations that followed Gutenberg's invention, each of which carried
its own distinct philosophical preoccupations. Around 1500, it was at
last economic to distribute knowledge in printed form, not as
manuscripts. Along with this, came a revival of the old tradition of
Humane Letters: what we now know as the Humanities. The worlds of
learning and public service were opened to a lay public, who could now
study texts that had been closed to them before. Print taught readers
to recognize the complexity and diversity of our human experience:
instead of abstract theories of Sin and Grace, it gave them rich
narratives about concrete human circumstances. Aquinas had been all
very well, but figures like Don Quixote or Gargantua were irresistible.
You did not have to approve of, or condemn such figures: rather, they
were mirrors in which to reflect your own life. Like today's film
makers, 16th century writers in the Humanities from Erasmus and Thomas
More to Montaigne and Shakespeare present readers with the kaleidoscope
of life. We get from them a feeling for the individuality of
characters: no one can mistake Hamlet for Sancho Panza, or Pantagruel
for Othello. What count are the differences among people, not the
generalities they share. As Eudora Welty said in appreciation of V.S.
Pritchett, who died just recently at the age of 96:
The characters that fill [his stories] -- erratic, unsure, unsafe,
devious, stubborn, restless and desirous, absurd and passionate, all
peculiar unto themselves -- hold a claim on us that cannot be denied.
They demand and get our rapt attention, for in the revelation of their
lives, the secrets of our own lioves come into view. How much the
eccentric has to tell us of what is central!
What an "unscientific" thought Eudora Welty here
offers us - that the eccentric explains the central, rather than the
other way around. No wonder the Humanities contributed as little as it
did to the creation of the Exact Sciences. As late as 1580, Montaigne
still questioned whether any universal theories about Nature were
possible at all: let alone, mathematical ones like Newton's were to be.
Given the uncertainties, ambiguities and disagreements in our
experience, that ambition struck him as presumptuous.
The creation of the Exact Sciences was, thus, a separate, 17th-century
story, which I turn to now. In 1618, the final and most brutal of
Europe's religious wars broke out. Henri IV of France set an example of
toleration, by treating his Protestant and Catholic subjects as equal
citizens: this had led a fanatic to murder him in 1610. From then on,
things went only downhill. From 1618 to 1648 Central Europe was laid
waste: during thirty years of war, one third of the population of
Germany were killed, half of its cities destroyed. (From Grimmelshausen
to Brecht, playwrights have written of this horror.) One event was
especially ironic. To commemorate the slaughter of a Protestant army
outside Prague, in 1620, a pearl among Rome's smaller churches was
built. Dedicated to the Holy Mother of the Prince of Peace, it was
called Santa Maria della Vittoria -- or Saint Mary of the Victory. With
Europe split by War, the 16th century Humanists' modesty about the
human intellect and their taste for diversity came to look like
luxuries. Instead, new and more systematic ways of handling problems
were devised, what we call disciplines, whose standardized procedures
could be taught as a drill, which students learned to perform step by
step, in one-and-only-one right way. Devised by the Flemish scholar
Lipsius, this method was put to practical use by Maurits van Nassau,
the Dutch Prince whose military academy at Breda in Holland was a Mecca
for students from all across Europe. Maurits was struck by the
consensus achievable in mathematics. If religion had been discussed
with the same kind of neutrality, what miseries Europe might have
escaped! Even while dying, he was no partisan. A Protestant Minister
asked him to declare his beliefs: he replied, "I believe that 2 + 2 are
4, and 4 + 4 are 8. This gentleman here [pointing to a mathematician at
his side] will tell you the details of our other beliefs." Soon, this
mathematical ideal took a more general hold. In theory and practice
alike - in jurisprudence and philosophy, as much as in the training of
infantry - Skill gave way to Technique, Artistry to Artisanship.
The young Descartes himself visited Maurits's Academy
after dropping out of Law School in 1618, and before he joined the Duke
of Bavaria's staff. Caught up in the prevailing Religious War, he
looked for a rational alternative to those rival theological systems
that had lost their credibility: ideally, for a mathematical system,
free of the uncertainties, ambiguities and disagreements that Montaigne
had seen as unavoidable. Following Galileo's example, Descartes adopted
as goal a universal system of physics in mathematical form. So began
both those philosophical inquiries that John Dewey was much later to
call The Quest for Certainty, and also the scientific investigations
that would lead, in 1687, to Newton's Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy.
The two independent products of the new print culture -
first the Humanities, later the Exact Sciences - embodied different
conceptions of philosophy, and also different ideals of human reason.
On the one hand, the humanists saw arguments as expressing human
disagreements, in whose resolution Rhetoric had a legitimate role: on
the other, exact scientists saw arguments as formal inferences, which
appeals to Rhetoric could only distort. In the Humanities, the term
reason thus referred to reasonable practices: in the Exact Sciences,
rather, to rational theories. The Humanities recalled the variety in
our experiences: in real life, generalizations are hazardous and
certitude too much to ask. The Exact Sciences sought to put everything
in theoretical order: formal certainty was their goal. So, a tension
between the claims of rationality and reasonableness - the demand for
demonstrably rights answers to questions of Theory, and respect for
honest disagreements about matters of Practice - posed a challenge
which (as we shall see) has lasted to our own time.
III
The Thirty Years War ended in 1648, with the Peace of Westphalia. From
it there emerged the forms of the World in which we live in today:
forms so familiar we forget they were then brand new. The Peace
introduced three novel elements: a new System of States, a new policy
in Church/State relations, a new concept of Rational Thought. Political
power was vested absolutely in individual Sovereign States: within each
State power was exercised from the top by a Sovereign, and outside
States did not meddle in each other's affairs. Religious conflict was
overcome by compromise: reviving an old formula from the 1555 Treaty of
Augsburg - cuius regio eius religio - every Sovereign was free to
choose the Church for his or her particular country. So, for the first
time, the Westphalian System created Established Churches - Anglican in
England, Calvinist in Holland, Catholic in Austria. Finally, the new
idea of Reason took as starting point Descartes' claim that true
Knowledge must have the certainty of a geometrical system: opinions
unsupported by theory were just that -- unsupported opinions. On the
face of it, the three parts of the Westphalian system - Absolute
Sovereignty, Established Religion, Logical Demonstration - were
distinct and separable. As a matter practical politics, they were
closely related, in two respects. (1) All of them operated Top Down,
and gave power to oligarchies - political, ecclesiastical and academic
- that supported one another. (2) They formed a single package. As
Voltaire commented, "One leaves Dover, where Space is Empty, and
everything happens through Attraction, and lands in Calais, where Space
is Full, and everything happens through Vortices." In a word, the three
elements of the Westphalian scheme formed, not just a package, but an
ideological package. Challenging any one of the three axioms was thus
viewed as attacking them all. This was what got Priestley finally into
trouble. For late 18th century Englishmen, Newton's physics was part of
a larger ideological scheme. As it mapped God's Plan for the Creation,
and proved the stability of the Solar System, its success was political
as much as astronomical: bolstering the English self-image, of
Hanoverian Monarchy, Anglican Church and all. By rejecting the odd
blend of Newtonianism, Anglicanism and Monarchism that passed as
"respectable opinion" - talking at the same time as a Nonconformist in
religion, a Republican in politics and a materialist in philosophy -
Priestley was throwing himself into hot water. From then on, he was
regarded less as a man of unusual beliefs than as a trouble-maker: less
a Dissenter than a Dissident.
It was is, and remains, the fundamental defect of any
public ideology, that it makes it impossible for people to put forward
unorthodox, or even unfamiliar views, without being accused of
promoting hostility to the Powers that Be. The Birmingham Mob was not
ready to let Priestley explain his opinions: let alone ready to listen
to him, and see if they might learn anything from his views. For them,
Priestley was a source of trouble, and they prefered to drive him out
of town. Nor was this habit merely English. After 1650, States required
that people's loyalties be exclusive: no citizen could be a subject of
more than one Sovereign. Established Religions, similarly, expected
their adherents to avoid Churches of other Faiths: the English were as
harsh to Papists in their midst as the French and Austrians were to
Protestants. As for Rational Knowledge: from Leibniz on, most
philosophers relied on formal deductions, rejected appeals to Rhetoric
as irrational, and so on. The Westphalian Settlement thus imposed
exclusive attitudes on religious, political and intellectual life
equally. Things had not always been that way. Medieval rulers never
exerted the exclusive sovereignty that Nation States later claimed:
after Thomas Becket's murder, Henry II of England found that the
Church's criticisms could shame him into changing policies. Nor was
Sovereignty necessarily linked to Nationhood: the Habsburgs' subjects
spoke not just German, but Polish, Portuguese, Magyar and Dutch . Nor
is Religion always and everywhere exclusive. It is our custom to
practise one-and-only-one religion, and other people's open mindedness
can be a surprise. Friends from Tokyo who joined us in Chicago for
Christmas sang carols at the Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan
Avenue from memory. As they told us, many people in Japan build their
lives around ceremonies from several religions. Baptised in Shinto,
married in a Christian service, buried as Buddists: for them, the three
religions peaceably c�exist. Nor have philosophers always been
exclusive in demanding formal proofs. When things go well, they have no
objection to humane arguments. Diderot's Encyclopedia shows his passion
for the activities and instruments of practical crafts: and his concern
for physical theory was purely pragmatic. When things went badly, on
the other hand - in the Thirty Years War, the French Revolution or the
First World War - they are again tempted to insist on rigorous
geometrical proofs. So, the history of philosophy has ended as an
intellectual see-saw.
The Westphalian Settlement was, thus, a poisoned chalice -
a mixture of intellectual dogmatism, political chauvinism and sectarian
religion whose effect endured into our century. Priestley was right to
decline it: the establishment of religion was, indeed, a policy of
temporary necessity for countries that had lost their earlier habits of
toleration. In 1794, the American Constitution enshrined the values of
toleration, and Priestley seized on the opportunities it provided. To
be more exact: the Westphalian System ended as a poisoned chalice.
Initially, all its terms met needs of the time. Sovereign States,
Established Religions, and Formal Rationality: at the time, all of
these served as ways of ordering life and thought, and tempering the
conflicts among countries and religions. (Again, a parallel with Bosnia
and Dayton is to the point.) From 1650 to 1950, then, the States of
Europe lived in an International Anarchy: each went its own way,
without fear of outside criticism. Established Churches were
emasculated Churches: State and Church were tied at the ankles, in a
three legged race that spared any State the indignity of moral reproof.
Even in philosophy, the charms of Rationalism were reinforced by the
needs of the day. Leibniz had hoped that his formal arguments might
succeed where Diplomacy and War had failed: by ensuring agreement
between the rival religions that had devastated his native Germany.
But, in time, these devices outgrew their initial efficacy; and, at the
end of our terrible Twentieth Century, they need to be reconsidered as
new ideas or institutions come on the stage. Above all, the facts of
global interdependence are no longer reconcilable with claims to
unfettered national sovereignty: especially as such claims are
expressed most stridently nowadays by such palpable villains as the
military r�gime in Burma. For his image of the 17th century Sovereign
State, Thomas Hobbes chose the Sea Monster he called the Leviathan - a
natural image for a theorist from the British Isles: nowadays, a
nuclear Superpower calls to mind rather a 900-pound gorilla, who sleeps
wherever he pleases. The general interest lies in moderating the force
of Nation States, not increasing it: so we find States joining together
in larger units such as the European Union, which limit their
Sovereignty. Meanwhile, on a global level, non-governmental
organizations are becoming more influential: "voluntary associations"
of the kind that - as George Abdo points out - Hobbes himself, sounding
for once like the Government of Nigeria, called "worms in the
intestines of Leviathan" that need to be "purged".
These transnational NGOs remind us of an earlier stage
when Sovereigns were still subject to reproof. NGOs like Amnesty
International are not emasculated: as the voice for the conscience of
Humanity, they keep a distance from National States, which are agents
of Force. NGOs cannot force Governments to act as they would please,
but in suitable cases they can shame them into changing policies:
recalling in this way that the politics of shame which the Church used
to reprove Henry II is sometimes as effective as the politics of force.
Here again, the Westphalian System has outlived its efficacy, and the
older tension between the Church and the State is re�merging on a new
level. From now on, the Governments of States need to retune their
ears, and listen to those unofficial institutions that speak, not for
the special interests of any particular nation or party, but for "the
decent opinion of humankind."
IV
In closing this discussion, I have three chief points to make:
(1) We must not unthinkingly assume that Dissenters, as such, are
Dissidents. We too easily conclude that we need not listen to those
groups that "cause trouble" - Islamic militants, maybe - instead of
arecognizing that they may end by causing trouble just because we
refuse to listen to them. Having begun as "dissenters", they become
"dissidents" in despair that their views will not otherwise be heard.
For those who learned from the Thirty Years War, it is no longer
permissible to make religious or ideological differences a casus belli;
and for serious politicians in the United States to speak of this
country as involved in a Religious War is a mark either of ignorance,
or of irresponsibility.
(2) We cannot safely leave the building of what is now known as
civil society to the Governments of separate existing States that serve
as (e.g.) Member States of the United Nations: that perpetuates the Top
Down relations of the Westphalian System. States and the power they
wield will not, of course, disappear overnight: nor is it wholly
desirable that they should do. But, increasingly, their powers will be
qualified and criticized by other rival global, or transnational
organizations that link together people in different countries: as
subscribers to Amnesty International or whatever. As time goes on,
indeed, it becomes ever harder for States to control the activities of
the transnational organizations: Leviathan can no longer "purge the
worms" from its intestines. Here, the renewed revolution in
communications has a part to play in overcoming the International
Anarchy of the Westphalian System. The Soviet Government's monopoly of
power was undermined by e-mail, and the Beijing Government has given up
tryng to stop the transmission of Faxes to China from other countries:
so, too, the Internet - particularly, the World Wide Web - is becoming
a main locus of transnational communication and institution-building.
Ever since the 1992 United Nations meeting at Rio de Janeiro, on
Environment and Development, the Association for Progressive
Communication has provided a channel of communication and exchange of
views to non-governmental agencies and individuals on a transnational
basis; and these channels serve as foundations for a Civil Society that
has a power to bind together peoples and groups that were kept apart by
the exclusivity of the Westphalian tradition. (In this we hear echoes
of Schiller and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy": deinen Zauber bindet wieder
was der Mode streng beteilt.)
(3)
Finally, for Joseph Priestley, what made the country we call the United
States extraordinary in 1794 is the chance it had to escape horrors to
which more ordinary countries were exposed. But it had this chance only
to the extent that it understood the inevitable failure of any
Established Religion, maintained its policy of religious toleration,
and held at bay all the temptations of religious and cultural
particularism. The rhetoric of "Americanism" - all attempts to impose
ideological conditions on the opinions and activities of America's
citizens - thus undermine the central ideals on which the country was
built by Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues.
America's poets have captured these truths. Listen, for
one, to Wallace Stevens. Writing early in World War II, near the end of
his Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, he refers at the contrast I have
emphasized here, between reasonableness and rationality. For him, too,
Reasonableness is more important than Rationality; and its importance
is itself more than an intellectual one. It is the expression - as he
puts it - of a "more than rational distortion - the fiction that
results from feeling." I recall one of my Chicago colleagues lecturing
on the theme, "Is it rational to act reasonably?" Unless reasonable
actions could be proved to fit his abstract moral theory with
geometrical precision, respect for human frailty was for him
intellectually suspect. Yet, rather than ask, "Is it rational to be
reasonable?", we might equally well ask, "Is it reasonable to argue in
rational terms alone? In what situations can we reasonably rely on
formal theories?" Since 1960, we have seen a turn of the tide, which at
last lets us overcome this tension. As technological skills in
Engineering and Medicine meet the limits of practical wisdom, we are
learning to match the virtuosity of the Exact Sciences with the
reasonable claims of human need. These days we are not - as some will
argue - confronting the End of Modernity so much as its Fulfilment.
Rationality did not fail us. It was just that, in a technological age,
we did not always ask when or how far formal calculations alone can
give us humanly relevant answers, and when or how far practical
circumstances leave room to pursue or balance legitimate interests in
their human detail. We too easily forget how recent this change is.
Forty years ago, you could read the Washington Post or the Chicago
Tribune a whole month, without finding any articles about moral issues
in medical practice: nowadays, such issues are raised every week. It is
not that clinical medicine is now less ethical, but that medicine can
no longer be - as we used to say - "clinically detached." We now
understand the part that lay people have to play in helping to resolve
moral problems in medicine. Increasingly, clinical practice requires a
moral analysis of particular cases; and, as the old maxim has it, the
Devil lies in the details. So, when physicians today face moral
problems, they cannot fasten their eyes on a disciplinary high road,
and plug straight ahead. More and more, they have to recognize that
other parties to any case - a patient's parents, or life partner, or
spiritual adviser - need to be listened to; since the stakes they have
in these issues are not merely legitimate, but crucial. The key word
here is, once again, Listen. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring appeared 35
years ago, in 1962, at a time when the role of Ecology in politics was
near to zero. By now, the environmental effect of technological
projects can raise problems of global concern, and no self-respecting
government lacks an agency to deal with these issues. Figuring how to
build a dam at this or that location calls for rational virtuosity; but
the decision to build such a dam at all - asking if we can reasonably
accept its side effects - does not call for calculations alone. As in
medicine, the Devil lies in the details, and the voices we must listen
to most carefully are those of all the other human beings who will be
on the receiving end of those side effects.
To sum up: like the uniqueness of names, the individuality
or particularity of cases and characters divides the world of practice,
in its actuality, from the world of theory, with its abstractions.
Behind the contrast of the reasonable and the rational, behind the
rival attractions of Nation State and Global Future, underlying the
survival in a time of general toleration of the things Jefferson called
bigotry and priestcraft, lie abstractions that may still tempt us back
into the dogmatism, chauvinism and sectarianism our needs have
outgrown. To this extent, the conflict between Joseph Priestley and his
English enemies is alive today, even on American soil. Nor is this
conflict likely to be resolved permanently. It is another of those
conflicts that demand eternal vigilance. So listen again to Wallace
Stevens, writing in 1942: They will get it straight one day at the
Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture,
Pleased that the irrational is rational . . . .
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.
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