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September 24, 2003
Hello everyone,
Welcome to another issue of Le Penseur Réfléchit. As is so often the case in my world, I have more pieces in place in my ever-evolving puzzle and this week I wish to share some of what I have assembled. Today, as always, I do not claim to be as solidly researched as I might like, nor do I claim by any stretch of the most imaginative imagination to present a comprehensive picture. Someday, perhaps, once my schedule clears somewhat, I might sit down and attempt to tackle the construction of a book, incorporating information strewn over many issues of these newsletters into a single volume, though “rounding it out right”: that is to say, taking the time to research as I truly ought rather than off the cuff when I can grab a spare moment or two. Despite these limitations, maybe together we can learn as we go and fit whatever missing pieces we incur together later as opportunity presents itself; then again, maybe you already hold a far more intimate acquaintance with my subject matter, in which case I ask for your patience as you endure my tedium and request that you sketch me in on any particulars I might have overlooked.
You may recall the passing mention of sociology in Who Can It Be Now? Father God, Mother Church: for the sake of setting the stage and offering a brief review, we’ll take a rapid second look at this section. After first noting that “if my source textbook is any indication, [sociology] resembles socialism and communism at times despite some of its truly noteworthy contributions,” I continue:
The basic premise of sociology can be summarized with the following thoughts: a) the world has a limited amount of resources, and b) the solution to the ills of the world can be found in the fair and equal redistribution of these resources. Sociology concerns itself greatly with the “haves” and the “have nots,” and is not always known to be consistent in its perspectives. A part of this complication is brought about by anyone wishing to objectively deal with the problem of a pluralistic society: with so many voices represented, how does one deal with them all in a way that does not favor one over the other? Sociology makes a noble attempt at doing this very thing, though I remain convinced such an effort is destined to fail, for several reasons, among them being that truth is truth and we can only speak in relative terms for so long before there begins to be a breakdown in the consistency of our logic. There is not a single human being alive who does not hold some basic assumptions or presuppositions and sooner or later these are bound to be exposed, however subtly.
Earlier in the year, I had a conversation with an individual who was keen on sociology and as I have stated other times in the past, I have always tended more toward psychology when it comes to the study of human behavior. The idea of the microcosmic view versus the macrocosmic perspective surfaced in this exchange and I left persuaded to re-investigate life from a macrocosmic view rather than my usual philosophic meanderings. For those of you who are a bit sketchy on all the “ology’s,” sociology is the study of groups and society at large, whereas psychology deals with the single individual (hence the micro- and macrocosmic descriptors). I noticed then, however, that her thoughts tended toward a much more socialistic response to the world and that she was very down on capitalism. This factor could be attributed to the clash between those highly controversial political parties—the elephants and the donkeys, the donkeys and the elephants—but I don’t really think so. In any case, I told her that I agreed with her that capitalism was not the utopian ideal but I also pointed out some of the well-documented problems with socialism as well. My conclusion was that we are dealing with sinful man and there will be no perfect form of government under the sun until Christ returns. This will be the only form of perfect government, not only because its ruler is Divine, but because the citizens of that City will be inwardly motivated by adoration for its ruler and love for their neighbor as themselves.
The discussion of sociology in this issue was largely subjugated to other points dealing with the total spiritual life and reference was made not only to Lewis but also to Evelyn Underhill. Knowing what I do now, I realize that Underhill ties in with this idea of sociology in ways I could not have envisioned then, my intuition perhaps on to more than I even knew. If you are familiar with Evelyn Underhill, keep her in the back of your mind and we’ll return to her role in this whole world stage upon which we strut and dance about, on display (like the apostles) before both men and angels. For now, let’s settle back and put some scenery in place so that we can position ourselves against the backdrop of history.
I will begin by telling the tale of America, not because it is a nicer story than that of Europe or the other Western powers (or any other in the world, for that matter), but simply because I know it better and because it represents (with the substitution of a few of its particulars) the whole of the Western sphere of thought and influence during this time period. We will necessarily leave much out, not just because everything within the past two hundred years cannot feasibly be included in a single newsletter but because my own ignorance stands in the way. Any discussion of history must start someplace—we will begin ours somewhere around the 1870s, during the “coming of age” of America as we know her today.
During the nineteenth century America was still a gold mine of potential. Immigrants from the world over came to seek a better way of life where they could own land and prosper. The government encouraged such activity, and with the passage of The Homestead Act of 1862, anyone willing could stake a claim on an 160 acre tract of land, and provided that they built a house, dug a well, and cultivated the land, it would pass into their sole possession after five years. Many of the new arrivals, however, were not “homesteaders” but rather “settlers.” This distinction is made between those who took advantage of the free land (homesteaders) and those who paid for it (settlers), for speculation became an increasingly common practice: that is to say that speculators—people who snatched up the free land and sold it at a profit—caused land prices to skyrocket (The American Promise, Volume II: From 1865, 577). Needless to say, this quest for land and massive immigration was bad news for the Native Americans (called the “First Settlers” in Canada), and the Indians were driven westward as more and more covered wagons invaded the central plains of the United States. Though the picture of cowboys and Indians has become romanticized to the point of tarnish, it nonetheless portrays an awareness that many were the bloody battles as the pioneers gradually took over and killed off a large percentage of Indians, forcing those that remained onto the reservations where many still subsist to this very day.
In addition to farming and speculation, cattle ranching was also a big business, no fences enclosing the west as there are today. Open grazing was the norm, cowboys herding cattle over the hot western sands like so many Bedouin tending their flocks (Ibid., 578). However, it was to be the railroad companies that triumphed the most both in profits and in the quest for land. To encourage their development, the United States gave away an approximate 180 million acres of land, an area the state of Texas could fit in with room to spare (Ibid., 620). Not surprisingly, towns quickly sprang up along the railroad and in 1869 the first transcontinental railroad stretched across the entire continent, a golden spike driven at Promontory Summit in Utah where the rails met to commemorate the occasion (Ibid., 619).
Among the tycoons of the railroads, Jay Gould became one of America’s most hated men when his shrewd business practices capitalized on the stock market and fostered a near monopoly on this new form of transportation. As the second volume of The American Promise reports: “The railroads that fell into his hands fared badly and often went bankrupt, but Gould’s genius lay in cleverly buying and selling railroad stock, not in providing transportation” (619). While Gould does not reflect all railroad owners (men such as James J. Hill of the Great Northerner built with quality even without the aid of subsidies or land grants), he certainly does demonstrate how power can corrupt, a power also enjoyed by the likes of Richard Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington, and Leland Stanford or the Big Four railways in the West (Ibid., 621). While the railroad “paved the way,” it was not the only business that prospered during the early days of American history.
The earliest railways were built of iron, a temperamental metal subject to frequent breakage, making locomotive travel a precarious enterprise. This danger largely disappeared in the 1850s. Henry Bessemer’s discovery of the efficient manufacture of steel from iron was imported from England and put to use on the rich deposits of iron ore found in the Great Lake region. A Scottish immigrant who landed in New York in 1848 at the age of twelve and began work cleaning bobbins in a textile factory was to emerge the champion of this new industry. His name? None other than Andrew Carnegie, the American entrepreneur who became a millionaire before he ever reached his thirtieth birthday—an enviable portrait of the great American dream, at least outwardly (Ibid., 621–2). While he was known for his philanthropy, donating some $300 million or more to charitable causes before his death, he nonetheless demanded a great deal out of his workers. They endured “long hours, low wages, and dangerous working conditions” toiling “twelve hour a day in his plants, and when the shift changed every other week, they worked twenty-four hours straight” (Ibid., 622).
The railroads changed the face of the American frontier and more and more people began moving to the cities, cities that to large degree formed around the railroads, springing up like weeds wherever the rails led. Industrialization was born, and technology began replacing the life of the land. Those that remained on the farms were helped along by new machinery that yielded tenfold increases or more in production, making a marked transition from farming to agribusiness: fewer people producing much more of the world’s food supply (Ibid., 584–5). The mass immigration to the cities meant more and more jobs to support urban life: roads to be paved, houses to be built, banks to be opened, bars to cater to the vices of the night, and the whole gamut of city living.
Edwin Drake discovered that Pennsylvania was rich in oil, which at the time was used to lubricate machinery in the factories and light houses before the advent of the electric light bulb and the automobile. The cost of oil refineries was relatively low and much competition ensued until the Standard Oil company (the origination of the present day ExxonMobil Corporation) gained nine tenths of the market. Another big name in American business headed up this organization: John D. Rockefeller. He grew up as the son of a business-savvy New Yorker named William Avery Rockefeller, or Big Bill for short. Big Bill was less than a model father (see Quentin Duroy’s article for more) and he made his living speculating and selling bogus cures for cancer. What he didn’t teach his sons in morality, he made up for concerning the rules of business. However, it was his mother who provided him with his religious convictions, and Rockefeller became an avowed Baptist, a cause he openly championed even if his life would render some of the basic tenets of the faith open to question.
Rockefeller’s secret to success was due in part to his use of maneuvering tactics and integration. Rockefeller received cloak-and-dagger kick-backs from the railroads who wanted his business so badly they ended up paying him(!) to transport his goods, squeezing his smaller competitors out of business. He also used a form of horizontal integration through the establishment of a trust, a now illegal form of organization that created a union of stockholders. This meant that Rockefeller now maintained a near total monopoly on the oil refinery process valued at $70 million while the unsuspecting public failed to see how such an enterprise was tied together behind the scenes. When the government put pressure on the formation of trusts (citing violation of free trade), Standard Oil then became a legal holding company (Ibid., 624). My lecture notes illustrate the crucial difference: with trusts there is control but not ownership, outlawed with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. With holding companies there is ownership as well, which on a practical level meant that Rockefeller did little more than shuffle his deck of playing cards for the sake of the law.
Like Carnegie with his steel production, it was not strictly horizontal integration that Rockefeller used, but also vertical integration. This meant that he came to control “all aspects of the oil business, from the well to the consumer,” not just the refineries—if he owned a restaurant chain, vertical integration would mean that he not only cooks the food, but grows it, harvests it, makes the plates it is served on, builds the establishments in which it is served, buys the equipment to make his own commercials, the television stations to air them, and so on up (and down) the vertical ladder until all aspects of restaurateuring are under his control (Ibid., 624). Rockefeller now owned the wealthiest organization in the world, with a hundred thousand employees and control of a full ninety percent of the entire oil industry (Ibid., 624). Yet despite his Baptist piety, conservative ways, and his many contributions to charity, he symbolized to Americans the overwhelming power of big business gone haywire (Ibid., 631).
There were others, of course, who played their part in the process—most notably perhaps is banker J.P. Morgan who bought out Carnegie Steel, literally “America’s banker” who saved the country from crisis on several occasions—but the fact remained that big business was indeed just that: big business. In its early days, America ranked fourth or fifth in industry on the world market; by the 1880s it not only led the world but amassed more than the combined total of all the other leaders in the Industrial Revolution combined! There was a downside to all this industrialization and technological progress of course, a downside that the discovery and urban implementation of electricity at the turn of the century did nothing to quell. That downside was in the treatment of the “little guy,” for not all could share in the wealth else there would be no one to call wealthy, eh? ;)
Unskilled laborers were particularly oppressed. Many of these men, women, and children were immigrants with little recourse but to abide by whatever mandates the big business owners prescribed. Twelve to fourteen hour days were standard and there were no laws that protected children from working in the factories or the coal mines where nimble little fingers were useful. When it came to the political arena, big business owners advocated laissez-faire politics, which means they held that the government should not interfere with business. Not surprisingly however, they welcomed the influence of the government when it came time to put down strikes with the use of federal troops, as happened on several occasions. Time and again the workers would rally together to form unions to enact higher wages, better working conditions, an end to child labor, and eight hour days and time and again they would be put down, overruled by the Supreme Court which failed to sympathize with their plight.
The tyranny of the wealthy was justified by citing the theory of social Darwinism and the Gospel of Wealth. According to the second volume of The American Promise:
John D. Rockefeller Jr., the son of the founder of Standard Oil, once told the Brown University YMCA that the Standard Oil Company, like the American Beauty rose, resulted from “pruning the early buds that grew up around it.” The elimination of smaller, inefficient units was, he said, “merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.” The comparison of the business world to the natural world formed the backbone of a new theory of society based on the “law of evolution” formulated by British scientist Charles Darwin. In his monumental work On the Origins of Species, published in 1859, Darwin theorized that in the struggle for survival, the process of adaptation to environment triggered a natural selection process among species that led to evolutionary progress. In the late nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer in Britain and William Graham Sumner in the United States developed a theory called social Darwinism. Crudely applying Darwin’s teachings to human society, the social Darwinists concluded that progress came about as a result of relentless competition in which the strong survived and the weak died out.
In social terms, the doctrine of “survival of the fittest” had profound significance, as Sumner, a professor of political economy at Yale University, made clear in his 1883 book What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. “The drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things,” Sumner insisted. Any efforts by one class to aid another only tampered with the rigid laws of nature and slowed down evolution. Social Darwinism’s claim that human interference hampered evolutionary progress acted as a strong curb to reform at the same time that it glorified great wealth. In an age when men like Rockefeller and Carnegie amassed hundreds of millions of dollars (billions in today’s currency) while the average worker earned $500 a year (the equivalent of about $8,800 today), social Darwinism justified economic inequality.
Andrew Carnegie softened some of the harsher features of social Darwinism in his “The Gospel of Wealth,” published in 1889. The millionaire, Carnegie wrote, acted as a “mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they could or would do for themselves.” Carnegie preached philanthropy and urged the rich to “live unostentatious lives” and administer surplus wealth for the good of the people.” But although his Gospel of Wealth earned much praise, it won few converts. Most millionaires followed the lead of J.P. Morgan, who amassed private treasures in his marble library rather than distributing his wealth as Carnegie counseled
For these reasons, the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with their triumph of the working class began to seem quite attractive to many people. In Sociology (Seventh Edition), Richard T. Schaefer writes of these two theorists (p. 14):
In 1847, Marx and Engels attended secret meetings in London of an illegal coalition of labor unions, known as the Communist League. The following year, they prepared a platform called The Communist Manifesto, in which they argued that the masses of people who have no resources other than their labor (whom they referred to as the proletariat) should unite to fight for the overthrow of capitalist societies [or bourgeois]. In the words of Marx and Engels:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. . . . The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE! (Feuer 1959:7, 41).
The concept of communism has become so vilified to most of our minds we rarely stop long enough to consider its meaning. We would do well to pause for a moment and examine it more closely in an effort to understand its appeal. Implied in the meaning of the word “communism” is the idea of communal living, not a bad thing in itself, unless we are prepared to dismiss the account of the early church in the book of Acts. According to the Microsoft® Encarta® World English Dictionary, the word comes from the French word communiste, itself derived from commun, “common,” and from the Latin word communis, literally “duties together,” from munia, (plural) “duties.”
Closely associated with communism, at least to the American mind, is the Soviet insignia. Karl Marx himself was German, though his life was marked with poverty and he spent the vast majority of his life in exile, England and France countries in which he found refuge. German or not, his ideas knocked at the door of the Russian imagination, many of her people finding solace in Marx’s teachings. The year 1917 saw the culmination of the Russian Revolution into the Civil War, the latter of which was fought between the “Red Russians” (those sympathetic with communism) and the “White Russians” (those opposed to communism) and lasted until 1922. The “Reds” won and established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) taking as their insignia the hammer and sickle as the symbol of communist rule, prominently displayed on the Russian flag and coat of arms. The hammer and sickle again triumph the working man, for the sickle represents the peasants, the hammer the worker. The red background represents the blood of the worker poured out in his quest for emancipation. (Additional information about the symbolism of the Soviet flag and coat of arms can be found at this Soviet Union page.)
It is interesting to note as an aside that Marx was an atheist. It is unlikely, however, that Marx would have justified the large scale genocide enacted on behalf of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin who replaced Lenin in 1924 after the latter’s death, though it does provide a counterargument against those who like to point to the atrocities committed in the name of Christ: such persons often overlook the sheer number of atrocities committed in the name of an atheist ideology. Still, it is as patently unfair to lump all atheists together in one category as it is to do the same with those who claim the name of Christ; given the chance to “argue down” an opponent with the preceding argument, it would be wise to point this fact out if opportunity presents itself. Marx’s rationale would have been something like this: “Ideas of god are false because they have caused social repression” as reported under the subheading “Sociological Atheism” in What is an Atheist? (In fact, this page was written by Richard Packham, a retired college professor and attorney who was raised in Mormonism before converting to atheism, and he does an excellent job in demonstrating that indeed: all atheists are not created equal.)
There is, of course, much more that could be said about Karl Marx, communism, socialism, atheism, and the gamut of ideas that keep them company. However, suffice it to say that in America, as in other industrialized nations, the “might is right” philosophy of the wealthy and the laissez-faire system supported by the government caused the ideas of Marx and Engels (and others like them) to seem rather attractive to the man who had none: capitalism was seen as a bane, and if not communism, certainly socialism (in Marxist theory, the stage between communism and capitalism) was seen by many as an increasing boon. If government refused to protect the people, who would? Yet change was already in the air, a new breed of people rising to the challenge of correcting the ills of unbridled capitalism.
A new philosophy began to emerge as people took up the cause of bringing about reform to “The Gilded Age,” a term supplied by Mark Twain for his satirical book of the same name. (Mark Twain enthusiasts will be interested in checking out the online scrapbook from PBS which not only features the original cover artwork of the book, but also chronicles much about his dearly beloved wife and life-long companion Lily.) Advocates of change were called progressives, a label that went beyond political ties, making it possible for one to be a Republican progressive, Democratic progressive, Populist progressive, or any other kind of progressive for that matter. Some were quite moderate in their position, wishing only corrections made to the existing system. Others were far more radical, triumphing socialism and calling for the overthrow of the capitalistic government in true Marxist fashion. Reform Darwinism replaced social Darwinism, and, write the authors of The American Promise, “the uniquely American philosophy of pragmatism” was born:
The active, interventionist approach of the progressives directly challenged social Darwinism, with its insistence that the world operated on the principle of survival of the fittest and that human beings were powerless in the face of the law of natural selection. Without abandoning the evolutionary framework of Darwinism, a new group of sociologists argued that evolution could be advanced more rapidly if men and women used their intellects to alter the environment. Dubbed “reform Darwinism,” the new sociological theory condemned laissez-faire, insisting that the liberal state should play a more active role in solving social problems. Reform Darwinism provided a rationale for attacking social ills and became the ideological basis for progressive reform.
In their pursuit of reform, Progressives were influenced by the work of two philosophers, William James and John Dewey, who argued for a new test for truth, insisting that there were no eternal verities and that the real worth of any idea was in its consequences. They called their pluralistic, relativistic philosophy pragmatism. Dewey put his theories to the test in the classroom of his laboratory school at the University of Chicago. A pioneer in American education, he emphasized process rather than content and encouraged child-centered schools where students learned by doing. By championing social experimentation, the American pragmatists provided an impetus for progressive reform. (732)
The textbook introduced this section by speaking of “the cult of efficiency” and conclude by noting that “efficiency and expertise became the watchwords in the progressive vocabulary” (Ibid., 732). This is of particular interest because it ties in well with Evelyn Underhill, the Christian author I mentioned at the onset of this newsletter. She was not an American, though the events in America were happening at more or less the same rate as those in Europe and other Western superpowers. Her life (1875–1941) corresponded to the same time period this new consciousness was being unfurled; she herself was influenced by Darwinian philosophies in her early years. I was delighted to find Charles Williams’s introduction to The Letters of Evelyn Underhill online, though I was distressed to see it suffers from a number of small errors likely due to OCR scanning. (Click here for a link to this book from Amazon—the only company that now seems to carry a handful of copies—here for a copy of the book’s introduction online.)
Williams reveals an interesting admission that flowed from her pen: “‘I wasn’t,’ she wrote, ‘brought up to religion.’ At home it seems to have been of no importance; at school it was something more, for she was certainly confirmed (11 March, 1891, at Christ Church, Folkestone, and made her first Communion at St. Paul’s, Sandgate, on Easter Sunday), and a few great names had passed across her mind [that is, according to the gloss: Milton, Martin Luther, Ruth Erskine, and Spinoza].” Perhaps because of this lack of early Christian education and the fact that the Catholic Church did not debunk Darwininism—or for that matter, hardly anyone in Christendom at the time—a young Evelyn Underhill was attracted to the idea of the soul in an upward pursuit toward perfection much like the ascent of the amoeba from the mud, if I may take the artistic liberty to caricature macroevolutionary theory. The derivation of her rationale aside, she positively adored efficiency in all that she did and actively sought to minister to the poor and afflicted. She could well be seen as exemplifying Zeitgeist—that is, the spirit of the age—and the circle in which she traveled would further support this hypothesis: she was well-educated (a graduate of the prestigious King’s College) and relatively wealthy, though I am reading my own inferences into history and have not seen my observations verified by those more knowledgeable than myself. (Incidentally, much more information on Underhill can be obtained from Evelyn Underhill 1875 - 1941: Mystic and Teacher; there is also a copy of her classic books The Spiral Way and The Spiritual Life posted in their entirity on Mr. Renaissance as well as a general introduction entitled Meet Evelyn Underhill.)
Evelyn Underhill aside, Reform Darwinism is not the only philosophy to emerge during this time period, as a new so-called “social gospel” was also emerging within the Christian community, seeing its duty reaching beyond the individual to the effecting of change on the larger societal level. Clearly, something needed to be done to correct the abuses of capitalism, regardless of one’s opinions of this system of government as a whole. Among those who rose to the challenge in America was Jane Addams, founder of Hull-House in Chicago, Illinois, a so-called “settlement house” where well-educated volunteers lived in the middle of the slums with the poor and provided education and activities, fostered a sense of community, fought for the legal rights of the impoverished, and generally helped out in whatever other ways they could.
In her provoking autobiographical account Twenty Years at Hull-House, she writes that her father had always held a significant (and positive) influence over her. Her mother died when she was young and she was one of the youngest in her family, her father a solid Quaker and a relatively well-to-do man who owned several mills and served on the Illinois Senate for sixteen years. She adored her father and he in turn instilled in her values that would serve her life well. She attended Rockford Seminary, which was in the process of converting to a standard college—eventually to be renamed Rockford College—though it still possessed a strong evangelistic stance. During her travels to Europe in 1887–88 (Evelyn Underhill would have been a twelve-year-old girl then), Jane Addams became aware of the settlement house movement, visiting Toynbee Hall, the establishment that gave her the model and inspiration for her own Hull-House in Chicago.
Unlike its European counterpart, however, Addams did not center it around Christian Socialism, or Christian anything for that matter, partly out of respect for the diversity of immigrants, many of whom were Jewish. Moving into the poorest part of Chicago, she set up shop, acquiring the Hull-House in which many noteworthy names came and resided, lending brain and brawn to the effort and in general having a grand time despite the early untoward conditions and numerous setbacks. In the preface to her book (p. xxi), she writes that she began her work “without any preconceived social theories or economic views,” but this hardly meant she was well-received by all:
Miss Addam’s [sic] earlier activities on behalf of labor laws and slum clearance and the rights of the poor and the despised had earned her the suspicion and hostility of some businessmen and of some conservative politicians; her later activities on behalf of what we would call the welfare state, and the cause of peace, won for her the hatred and contumely of the professional patriots. The American Legion denounced her as un-American, and the Daughters of the American Revolution stigmatized her as “a factor in a movement to destroy civilization and Christianity.” [. . .] (p. xviii)
Whatever else we are to make of such allegations, I find it interesting to note that when one champions the cause of the poor, controversy is the invariable result. Yet Addams’ observations interest me, making me feel as though I might like to be a part of such a project:
In those early days we were often asked why we had come to live on Halsted Street when we could afford to live somewhere else. I remember one man who used to shake his head and say it was “the strangest thing he had met in his experience,” but who was finally convinced it was “not strange but natural.” In time it came to seem natural to all of us that the Settlement should be there. If it is natural to feed the hungry and care for the sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young, comfort the aged, and to minister to the deep-seated craving for social intercourse that all men feel. Whoever does it is rewarded by something which, if not gratitude, is at least spontaneous and vital and lacks that irksome sense of obligation with which a substantial benefit is too often acknowledged. (71–2)
This paragraph was chosen for its succinct summation of what went on at the Hull-House, though the surrounding accounts and incidents really give flesh and bones to this paragraph’s skeletal structure. Addams writes with an eloquence and vivacity that is truly inspiring. Perhaps most interesting to our discussion of sociology, however, is this paragraph from the book’s forward:
As Miss Addams saw it, there was nothing dramatic about the opening of Hull-House; yet it was a historic event. For here was the beginning of what was to be one of the great social movements in modern America—the Settlement House movement; here, in a way, was the beginning of social work. As yet there was no organized social work in the United States—the beneficent program of Mary Richmond was still in the future—and there was not even any formal study of sociology. It was no accident that the new University of Chicago, which was founded just a few years after Hull-House, came to be the center of sociological study in America, and that so many of its professors were intimately associated with Hull-House—Albion Small and John Dewey [the father of pragmatism] and the wonderful Miss Breckenridge and the two famous Abbott sisters, Edith and Grace, and thereafter two generations of academic reformers. (Twenty Years at Hull-House, p. ix)
Here we read that sociology, at least in the United States, received its greatest thrust through the working of Jane Addams and others interested in advancing the social concerns of the poor in the face of capitalism’s abuses. What is truly ironic, however, is that the University of Chicago would be the center for such studies: a university founded, no less, by John D. Rockefeller, the very man who exemplified all that early social reform tried to safeguard against. In fact, Chicago has consistently been a hotbed for much of the political and social theory emanating from the United States right up until the present day and is a name well worth studying. As you may have noted from the earlier quote on the origination of pragmatism, the The Chicago School reports that John Dewey “founded the Chicago School of Pragmatism during his ten years at the University of Chicago, from 1894–1904.” (Further detailed study centering on prominent pioneers of the field can be found at the Dead Sociologist’s Index.)
There is one last thinker to whom we should turn our attention before we close; a man who also has a claim staked in Chicago. His name is Allan Bloom and he is perhaps most famous for writing The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 while teaching at the university. Bloom checks the reins on the negative aspects of the social sciences being championed in classrooms today. Christians are especially affected by the hyper-tolerance exhibited, being among the first to be labeled bigots if they chose to express their faith as being anything other than the personal convictions by which they abide. Bloom credits this as owing to the success of what I shall call the “new sociology” of redefining the social consciousness in its attempt to “weaken the sense of superiority of the dominant majority” frequently labeled as WASPs—white Anglo-Saxon Protestants—though Catholics fall under the sickle as well (p. 31). Bloom takes a comprehensive and coherent look at such paradigm shifts in The Closing of the American Mind, and I wish to cite several passages before closing. There is so much in his book that is pertinent, I would buy you all a copy if I could afford to do so—at least all my American subscribers—but for now I will limit myself to two paragraphs and call it a day (one can, however, find the entire chapter online from which these paragraphs derive via the philosophy department at Phoenix College):
History and social science are used in a variety of ways to overcome prejudice. We should not be ethnocentric, a term drawn from anthropology, which tells us more about the meaning of openness. We should not think our way is better than others. The intention is not so much to teach the students about other times and places as to make them aware of the fact that their preferences are only that—accidents of their time and place. Their beliefs do not entitle them as individuals, or collectively as a nation, to think they are superior to anyone else. John Rawls is almost a parody of this tendency, writing hundreds of pages to persuade men, and proposing a scheme of government that would force them, not to despise anyone. In A Theory of Justice, he writes that the physicist or the poet should not look down on the man who spends his life counting blades of grass or performing any other frivolous or corrupt activity. Indeed, he should be esteemed, since esteem from others, as opposed to self-esteem, is a basic need of all men. So indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is discrimination. This folly means that men are not permitted to seek for the natural human good and admire it when found, for such discovery is coeval with the discovery of the bad and contempt for it. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is to be replaced with an artificial one. (p. 30)
Bloom brings his argument to a head when he writes:
Actually openness results in American conformism—out there in the rest of the world is a drab diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here we can create all the life-styles we want. Our openness means we do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing. No longer is there a hope that there are great wise men in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life—except for the few remaining young people who look for a quick fix from a guru. Gone is the real historical sense of a Machiavellian who wrested a few hours from each busy day in which “to don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them.” (p. 34–5)
This aspect is where the real cultural battle is being waged. It is in the battle for the mind, the battle for truth. On the one hand you have voices like Bloom crying out for a recognition that tolerance as the preeminent virtue above all others including goodness, beauty, and truth is the death to all that is good, beautiful, and true; on the other you have a society programmed to believe that all views are created equal: that we should not merely tolerate the views of others, but champion them—celebrate them—as we would our own. Much of the discipline of sociology has become saturated with this aspect of hyper-tolerance, contributing to its tendency toward notions that border on socialism. Human nature has not changed and our discussion today further documents the “sin problem.” Forcing individuals into cookie-cutter molds is surely not the answer: the reason why socialism, communism, and the new hyper-tolerance are destined to end in dismal failure.
To my mind, this new “social consciousness” is merely the logical outworkings of reform Darwinism—a Godless philosophy designed to correct another Godless philosophy (social Darwinism)—in its attempts to bring about equality and justice for all. In an effort to stifle the greed and avarice that can arise with capitalism, certain sectors of humanity have now bent over backward the other way in trying to ensure no one gets stepped on. Yet in embracing a sort of neo-socialism, superiority of any sort is not tolerated—this would represent an infraction: it would be intolerant—and in its own way, like the older form of socialism, “the nail that sticks up gets pounded down.” But whether nails get pounded down or whether they are allowed to tower over their fellows, there is still the “sin issue.” That is why in a society where the loose nail gets pounded down, someone is certain to be there to do the pounding, resulting not in the utopian ideal of socialistic theory but rather in an oppressive oligarchy, the very thing socialism seeks to escape. In a parody of the proud country boy and his sense of country pride, you can take the boy out of the sin, but you cannot take the sin out of the boy: if you try, the result ’tis but a con in a three-piece, the devil in a red dress.
In the conversation cited with the unnamed individual in the opening of this newsletter, I wrote that “I agreed with her that capitalism was not the utopian ideal but I also pointed out some of the well-documented problems with socialism as well. My conclusion was that we are dealing with sinful man and there will be no perfect form of government under the sun until Christ returns. This will be the only form of perfect government, not only because its ruler is Divine, but because the citizens of that City will be inwardly motivated by adoration for its ruler and love for their neighbor as themselves.” No mere human agency will bring an end to the oppression and the bloodshed; no merely human agency will usher in the utopian peace after which so many people today desperately scramble. As long as there remains a sinful nature to man, freedom is not the answer (as much as I love freedom) nor will tougher laws change the inner workings of the heart (as invaluable as tougher laws might very well be).
As Lewis stated in Who Can It Be Now? Father God, Mother Church mentioning sociology, all men are not created equal nor do they have intrinsic worth or value apart from God; however, in Christ, like the individual members of a body, their differences are complementary, the lesser as invaluable and indispensable as the greater. Indeed, there is but one answer and in Him is found the only true balance—true unity in true diversity—the bride and body of Christ, her founder and head. The Christian person, whether a lawyer, politician, or ordinary citizen, has to make up his own mind as to what God has called him to do in regard to the laws of the land. We live in the world and are subject to its laws rendering unto Caesar what is his, even as inwardly we follow a higher way. Yet I maintain that if there is to be any genuine transformation brought to bear upon our world for the good, it will have to be wrought through the inner workings of Christ on—and through—His bride and body, “evoked by an energy, a quickening Spirit, which comes from beyond the soul, and ‘secretly initiates what He openly crowns’” (Evelyn Underhill, 123).
God bless,
Eric
“For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.”
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