Jesus' public preaching style was elliptic, even to the point of being cryptic. Scripture makes clear that his apostles were often unable to interpret his public preaching, despite their familiarity with his style, and relied on the private interpretations he offered later. In some cases, these private interpretations are preserved in scripture, but in many cases they are not. Our problem in trying to interpret Jesus' public pronouncements in those later cases is much greater than the apostles; for not only do we have a far more limited corpus of Jesus' teaching than they had, the public messages we do have have passed through many additional filters: the original gospel writers, the transmission of their works through many hands, our participation in a very different culture, and finally, the translation of the resulting texts into English.
A practical consequence of these difficulties is a lack of consensus over the most fundamental concepts of Jesus' preaching, two thousand years worth of the development of doctrine notwithstanding.
Today, I'd like to consider one of these concepts: the kingdom of God, or as Matthew calls it, the kingdom of heaven.
I believe it that Jesus was presenting the kingdom of God as an alternative to the earthly kingdom of Rome. His essential claim is that God deserves our complete allegiance, not the Emperor. This claim is easily adapted, mutatis mutandis as us math types like to say, to the present day. Indeed, the good news of Jesus' ministry is the coming of the kingdom of God.
Luke 4:43 ... he said to them, “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose.”
But what and where are the kingdom of God? In Jesus' language, the kingdom of God is near, or far. It is something that we might hope to enter, and indeed, unless we get our righteousness together, tax collectors and prostitutes might enter before us! It is the good news.
One interpretation of the kingdom of God comes from what might be called “great reward Christianity.” These are Christians who believe that their duty is to follow the law, to believe the right things about God/Jesus, and to endure, so that they might obtain personal salvation through a life in heaven. For Christians such as these, the kingdom of God is the great reward, essentially synonymous with an afterlife in heaven. The good news for them is that they get to go to heaven, whatever the disappointments of this life.
I am not this kind of Christian, and I consider this kind of thinking to be misguided. This is not to say that I consider great reward Christianity to be a ticket to hell, for I also believe that through the mercy of God, the afterlife will be a joy for the many and not the few. But I also believe that by failing to participate in the kingdom of God in this life, these Christians have not only failed to let the Word of God thaw their hearts, they've cheated themselves out of the joy that comes from being so close to God, even momentarily, that your will is submerged into his will.
So what do I believe? I believe that the kingdom of God is emergent in this world. I believe that when we act in just ways, e.g., protecting and providing for the weak and caring for God's creation, we bring the kingdom of God closer. And when we act in unjust ways, e.g., by failing to protect and provide for the weak, or by damaging God's creation, we drive the kingdom of God further away. I don't believe we will ever achieve a perfected kingdom of God on earth—our status as fallen beings won't allow that. And I don't believe we can ever drive it completely away—God is too powerful for that. But I do believe that we all benefit if it is closer, as we all suffer if it is further away, and that it is God's will for us that it be nearer rather than farther. In short, we are asked to provide our complete allegiance to God now, not later, and this means that we are to live our lives in the present as his agents in the world.
A common theme of the kingdom of God parables is the tremendous change that a little bit of the kingdom of God can have on the world. How else can we interpret the parable of the yeast, or the parable of the mustard seed? What can these parables possibly mean if kingdom of God refers only to the hereafter?
As for the afterlife itself, it is not something that I think about very much, and I think it gets much more attention in Christian thinking than it deserves. Indeed, I think we should limit ourselves to this: those who have served God on earth will have the opportunity to serve him in heaven, and those who have worshipped God on earth will have the opportunity to worship him in heaven. Probably others will too—it is for God to choose, and we know of his mercy and love. And just to be clear here, I am not advocating works righteousness, but I am advocating that we seek peace and justice in this world, and that we do whatever works that requires, not because this will result in our personal salvation (only Jesus acting through us can do that—Lutherans may insert the formula “by faith through grace,” which is the same thing), but rather because God wants us to.
Peace
17 comments:
Stu --
Where your thinking strays a bit is in the idea that we can push the kingdom of heaven away.
It is manifest in this world. All we can do is turn ourselves away from or towards it.
Jesus's great accomplishment was living entirely in the kingdom of heaven -- rejecting the world of Rome and embracing the world of God.
Here we see various versions of what the Gospel means. GM believes we can totally embrace the world of God. I think Stu does, too, but there's more wiggle room there with Stu.
What about the parable of separating the wheat from the chaff. Servants ask Jesus shall we go ahead and pluck out all the weeds? Jesus says, no, you're just going to muck it up. Let me do that, toward the end.
This confuses me. Because I think we have to try to keep a clean and hygienic kitchen for instance. And I think we ought to be against one-party states, whether they are in Iran, Nazi Germany, or in the communist states of China and its client states such as N. Korea and Myanmar, or Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
States that have decided that they ARE pure, and that they can pluck out all the weeds, and decide who's good or bad, more or less illustrate Christ's dictum that we can't reliably do that. But doesn't that mean that they themselves are the problem rather than the solution (the final solution is meant to chime in here in an understated but present manner).
Too much purity makes me nervous.
I don't think Christ thought we could either achieve this or understand this, and he wanted us to leave well enough alone.
Lest we become monsters of purity, as they did already in the French Revolution, and in every revolution since then that has been based on that, or which in any way resembles it.
Purity can easily become evil. They form a Moebius strip.
Too much of a demand for purity can become evil. This is why I insist we cannot permanently cleanse ourselves of our sins, and that we remain completely depraved.
It's essential to not becoming a monster of purity. I hope this makes sense.
GM --
Where your thinking strays a bit is in the idea that we can push the kingdom of heaven away.
I said we can push, I didn't say whether we moved, or the kingdom moved :-). But indeed, I think we can move the kingdom further or closer. When our greed or indifference injures someone else, don't you think we've moved ourselves further from the kingdom of heaven, but that we've also moved the kingdom further from that person?
Wouldn't you say that the kingdom of heaven was pushed pretty far back in German occupied Poland? And that saints like Mother Teresa moved it into contact with the poor of Calcutta?
Kirby --
You raise the parable of the good seed and bad seed [Matt 13:24-30]. This immediately follows the parable of the sower, which is interwoven with Jesus' interpretation.
In the parable of the sower, the seed is a person who hears the word of God. Various seeds have various fates, some producing nothing, others multiplying 30, 60, even 100 fold. Seeds are judged by what they produce, but clearly Jesus judges that even the 30 fold, under-achieving seed, is still good seed.
If we transpose this interpretive framework to the parable of good seed and bad seed, we'll see that there are some seeds that (because they were bad seeds, sowed by the enemy) are simply incapable of producing wheat. They are fated to live their lives, just like the good wheat, enjoying God's rain and his sun, but at the end of their life, they will have nothing to show. In this, the weeds are really not different from the good seed that falls in the rocks, or among the thorns.
So, indeed, there are those who are not of the kingdom of God, and who will compete with the kingdom of God for room, water, light, and nutrients. But their presence does not, in the end, interfere with the harvest, nor with the increase in God's word.
Stu,
Ok, I think, but I think it meant in an overall sense that we are all both good and bad seed, rather than one or the other. Because he doesn't really say that we are good seed. He is asked rather whether his servants should cull the bad. He said you're not perceptive enough, let me do that.
You think we can tell the difference.
But that's not what Jesus says. He says we can't, and to leave well enough alone.
Which I take him to mean don't be a maniac of terror -- like the twit shot the guard at the Jewish Museum, or the knuckledraggers who shoot abortion doctors, or the garbage faces who set up one-party systems whether it's a Nazi or a communist or an Islamic system.
We're not sapient enough to pull that off. All we can do is set up a government, and follow the ten, if we can even manage that.
We can't be holy, in other words. People who think they are holy, are double sinful.
Not only do they not have humility, but they rise up, like Robespierre, or Stalin, and create terror.
We are closer to worms than we are to angels. After all, we have ascended from worms, not descended from angels, on your own admission.
We remain wormy.
Or do you believe that worms too will rise, and go to heaven with us? Can worms be saints?
Kirby -- You're picking at a disagreement between us that I'm not entirely sure is there.
Ok, I think, but I think it meant in an overall sense that we are all both good and bad seed, rather than one or the other.
This seems like a modern way of saying that we're simultaneously saints and sinners, per Luther. I agree with this as theology, but that doesn't mean that I buy it as an interpretation of this parable.
You think the point is that we can't tell the difference. But it's not the wheat that asks if it can pull out the weeds, it's the farmer's servants. Perhaps the farmer is God, and his servants are the angels. I'd like to think that they could do a better job than we could.
If we take this point of view (and I want to be cautious here, because I think its easy to overanalyze a parable, and the quickest way to do that is to try to extend analogies beyond the first obvious one or two), then the parable might have two quite different points from those that we've considered so far:
1. It recognizes that the kingdom of heaven exists in an imperfect world, and that the individual good plants are destined to live intertwined with individual evil plants; and
2. Even the intimate presence of evil all around us (or as you might say, and I'd agree, even within us) cannot prevent the multiplicative increase in goodness that comes via the kingdom of heaven.
But your comment about being both good and bad simultaneously resonates with me at another level -- I don't think highly of the doctrine of the elect, nor indeed to any doctrine that turns God into a cosmic puppet-master, and us into his puppets. I think he loves us, and is genuinely curious as to how we'll turn out. He can give us help and guidance from time to time, but anyone who has raised more than one child knows that the outcome depends on the kid! But this in its own way comes back around to your point -- maybe even the angels can't tell.
You think we can tell the difference.
I don't believe I've ever claimed this in general. Indeed, I argued explicitly in the last paragraph of "Tax Collectors and Sinners, II" that we are too quick to judge in such matters.
I think we can judge consistently and accurately the very good and the very bad. But the great majority of people live in the middle, and we risk doing great damage by judging in any but the most obvious cases.
We can't be holy, in other words. People who think they are holy, are double sinful.
I think we can be momentarily holy, with God's help. We can touch the kingdom of God while we live. But I agree that people who believe that they have perfected holiness are guilty of deep hubris, and indeed blasphemy because God alone is perfect. And indeed, I think that many people have touched the kingdom of heaven in the way that I describe -- momentarily. It's like being a saint -- if it's common, it's not distinctive, and certainly is no cause for overweening pride.
Or do you believe that worms too will rise, and go to heaven with us? Can worms be saints?
We are worms. And saints. So yes, there will be saintly worms in heaven.
But perhaps you are asking about the animal kingdom, and the theological problem as to whether non-human animals can have a soul. Because of the theory of evolution, we know that man is biologically an unexceptional animal. We know that there were intermediate forms between us and worms. So at what point would the soul have entered? It is not clear. Perhaps it is not given for us to know.
I will say this, though. Dogs have a sense of I, and a sense of we. They know when they've been good (i.e., contributed to the overall welfare of their adopted pack) and when they've been bad (i.e., put their own selfish interests above the overall welfare of their adopted pack). Dogs know shame. But do they have souls? I'd be reluctant to rule it out.
I'm more skeptical about cats.
Ok, this is more nuanced. I'm not just picking an argument, I'm trying to find the contour of your thinking, the outer limits, and simultaneously, trying to figure out where I stand on some issues.
I like animals, and when i was mowing the yard yesterday for four hours (it's been very wet here), and very cold this month, I tried to let the bees escape, and even some very pretty burnished gold moths, so that they weren't shredded in my machine.
But I don't know if I did shred them whether a bee can go to heaven. It can't possibly determine good and bad except in terms of the immediate interests of pollen collection, which is instinctive, and is no more complex than the on/off of binary computerese (which some AI people claim is all that we are, too).
Somewhere between animals, and computers, here we are.
I don't think we are either one, because we have souls.
Dogs may have a conscience, but is this a soul?
They do chase frisbees, which look like what Plato described as souls (discs). But this might indicate that they want to have one, but don't.
I think that Luther would argue that especially when we feel we are being saintly it is then that we are most monstrous. It is then that the devil most securely has us.
That's the downfall of the Anabaptists (GM is an Anabaptist).
And the Catholics, too (JH is a Catholic and believes therefore in saintliness and in saints).
Luther rejected this idea, and said we are always in bondage to sin, and cannot free ourselves. God forgives us anyway. But we can't do it.
And we are always selfish.
It's the worm in us, I guess! the inner worm, the tubular aspects!
I'm totally against haloes except as a kind of sarcasm.
I see I pulled you back a bit, or got you to admit that this is harder than you thought. I'm taking a great big gulp of air. After all, we're Lutherans, and Luther was an Augustinian, and Augustine fought a long hard battle against the Pelagian cupcakes and their doctrine that through reason we could become saints.
That way lies Marxism, and the Gulags, ever perfecting the proletariat.
Jesus said leave it alone. We are intertwined with evil. The best we can do is follow the ten c's, and believe, and be a bit sad.
I think that Luther would argue that especially when we feel we are being saintly it is then that we are most monstrous. It is then that the devil most securely has us.
Likely so, but this is (anticipating GM) where love comes in. Love is not boastful, etc. And I'm not at all prepared to back down from the basic point -- what we cannot do for ourselves, Christ can do through and for us. The doctrine of total depravity sets the stage for the doctrine of sanctification. The doctrine of total depravity says that Christ is necessary, the doctrine of sanctification says that he is sufficient.
I see I pulled you back a bit, or got you to admit that this is harder than you thought.
Is that what happened?
But let me make a quick political point in here. What bothered me so much about George W. Bush was his lack of humility, his lack of curiousity, and his lack of respect for other people. He struck me very much as the kind of guy you are complaining about now -- the guy who is completely sure of his own righteousness.
He seemed only to care about what he, "the decider," was going to do -- he never seemed to consider what his opponents might do in response.
The whole excursion into torture, and secret surveillance, are cases in point. He never thought about the precedents he was setting for our current and future opponents to use against us, and he seemed never to believe, until the very end, that he would have to hand over the surveillance machinery he built to his opposition.
You think he was strong because he was aggressive. I think he damaged the country because he shot from the hip, and did not think through the consequences of his actions.
Whereas I think Obama is actively considering his opponents move, his countermove, etc. And this is why, I believe, bin Laden has said that Obama is a much more dangerous opponent than Bush -- he can't game the predictable overreaction.
Time will tell, of course.
We only have two choices in this country: Calvinist or communist.
Bush was Calvinist, and has all the virtues and vices of that group.
Lutherans are too small to mount a presidential candidacy. The only one we had was the guy from Illinois, the senator. I can see his face but blank on his name. He didn't make much headway, but I loved the man thoroughly although he was a Democrat. Paul Simon.
We did have John Hanson. I actually think that was his name. He was the president under the Articles of Confederation. He was a Swedish Lutheran. His father was even a pastor in Delaware.
Maknig up only 3% of the electorate, we are not well understood, and have no natural base.
Catholics make up about 35% of Christians in the country. A huge base.
But most of our citizenry is either Calvinist, or communist.
The communists don't realize that they are communists, but the Democratic party is now a communist party. Read the communist party of the USA platform at some time. It's indistinguishable from the Democratic party platform.
Democratic contenders have no principles except what they imbibe via Lakoff or some other jerkoff from academia. All of whom are crypto-Marxist if they are not openly Marxist.
They divide in order to conquer and now use demographic criteria such as race or gender instead of class, but they have no other principles.
They don't even care if Zimbabwe has gone bad under Mugabe. It's a black guy, and that's all that matters to them.
He's black, so he's good.
They think the same way about China or Myanmar or Vietnam. They are a different color, so they are fine.
Straight white men on the other hand are always evil no matter whether its Schweitzer or Mozart or Hitler. They are all the same.
It's a mindlessness that drove me out of the Democratic party.
So between the Calvinists and the communists, I'll take the Calvinists, thank you very much.
We only have two choices in this country: Calvinist or communist.
I don't buy this.
George W. Bush is Methodist big-money conservative. Clinton is a Baptist centrist technocrat policy wonk. George H. W. Bush is Episcopalian big-money conservative. I don't believe Reagan was religious in any meaningful way, and he was arguably the first movement conservative. Carter is also a Baptist centrist technocrat. Ford is irrelevant, but he was Episcopalian center-right. Nixon was a power-mad Quaker. Kennedy was a Catholic centrist.
I'll grant you Barack Obama, who is UCC and pragmatic center-left, comes from a Calvinist tradition. LBJ was Disciples of Christ (thus Calvinist), but politically a blue-dog.
All Democrats ran in their primaries to the left of their actual governing stance, Obama among them; just as all Republicans (even GWB) ran to the right of their actual governing stance.
The counterexamples seem to outnumber examples here.
The only one we had was the guy from Illinois, the senator.
Paul Simon was a great man. LCMS, which should make you proud these days. Of course, he was one of those crazy folks who felt that faith was a cause for action, not just introspection.
... the Democratic party is now a communist party
Instead of trying to demonize the opposition, you might like to try an actual argument.
The Republican Party had a legitimate opportunity to dominate US politics for a generation. Unfortunately, but entirely predictably, greed and hubris tend to limit the political success of any one party, and the current crop of R's certainly wear those adjectives with pride. What I think was unexpected though, was just how stunningly incompetent these R's proved to be in the business of government.
Greed, hubris, and incompetence. Quite the legacy. But if US political history holds, you guys will get another crack at this in 12 years, give or take, after the D's have an opportunity to generate enough greed and hubris too that an offended electorate throws them out in turn. Of course, the risk you face, and this time it is a real risk, is that a third party will arise that will succeed the D's, rather than you. If the Libertarians, for example, decide they want to win and govern, instead of just scoring rhetorical points that only they care about, they might sneak in ahead of the R's, especially if the R's continue on anything like their current trajectory.
"don't you think we've moved ourselves further from the kingdom of heaven, but that we've also moved the kingdom further from that person?"
No, I think the sad thing is that we've moved that person further from the kingdom.
The kingdom of God is always at hand.
Whether or not we choose to embrace it is up to us.
Now about the Calvinist/Communist argument -- there is good argument starting (or restarting) here that Communism is simply a hyperactive, a-theistic version of Calvinism.
I mean, you've got the elect, the rabble of the party, and the outcasts damned to Hell. You know, all that exclusion Jesus warned us against.
Communism and Calvinism both being born of exclusion and exclusivity.
The closest "working" economics we have to what Jesus taught is capitalism as envisioned (not corporatism, mind you) -- {small} manufacturers and service providers offering identical product, etc, etc, where you do things not because they are laws (like in a planned economy) but because they are the right thing to do (as in a market economy).
We don't divorce our wives because we took a vow that some law says we can break anyway, we don't divorce our wives because doing such violence is wrong.
With Jesus everything comes down to personal responsibility and choice -- which is to say, capital F Freedom.
His life & death paved the way for our lives and deaths freed from the shackles of law and legalism.
Now, we still have to have a society (and societies are instilled by God [some as punishments?] -- and civilizations exist within the law.
That's why we see Jesus conforming to Roman law but ignoring (what is presented as) misapplied religious law. One can hardly call healing or eating (or indeed working) on the Sabbath not keeping it "holy" yet that is what Jewish law can do when interpreted in some (generally the most common) ways.
What Jesus constantly pointed out was legal traps were not the point of the law.
The "whole of the law" was love.
Again, I'm talking about religious law. Secular law is a whole other ball of wax that starts with Kirby's reassertion that all have fallen.
Personally, I'm a little worried by laws made by the fallen. That's why there should be as few of them as possible. . .
dare i refer to tomas d'aquino once again
for tomas and for his interpretation of aristotle he could not conceive of law coming from any other place than through the minds of men trained in moral judgement..and for him this was serious business...i think he today would question the consideration of virtue as it relates to the higher courts of the land...tomas believed that jesus changed the way people of the west had to do law...he agreed completely with augustine on this point....and that yes it is incumbent upon those who hear the words of jesus to take into account the reality of secular law but then know too that they must follow a law that was (is) based on a morally superior code or a higher virtue might be the better way to put it
catholicism has learned a great deal from the periods when the understanding of the kingdom of heaven and the harsh realities of the kingdoms of earth were in complete discord when one had more or less trumped the other
here again it is like dance
one of the partners is pretty clumsy even defiant at times but as the music goes along the feet begin to move in a good way
an example in today's paper a young man was drunk and he hit a lady in a parking lot and panicked and ran over her again when he left the scene...the drunk driver ended getting 8 yrs for negligent homicide and drunk driving...but the ladies' husband came to court with a bible and said he completely forgave the guy...he'd thought about it cried about and come to undersatand that on a different night it might have been him driving...he was ready to give the guy who killed his wife another shot at life...but the distict attorney was indignat hewas quoted as saying something like "i hope he enjoys every minute of his incarceration he deserves every minute of the sentence" i guess the judge tacked on two more years to make a point...and the defendant was visibly penitent in court
so it seems to me the only one given to virtuous behaviour as pertains to law was the husband...tthe judge like so many of them was the adamant upholder of the maximun the law will allow and then some the DA was cynical an asshole
i think a DA can be compassionate or just shut the hell up it sounded to me like he just wanted the constituents to know he's really doing his job
i'd say the job was botched
moral judgement based on gospel values might bring us around to the sort of jutice jesus envisioned
what is that
i think jesus expected judges who knew him to consider all litigation with an eye toward charity
gnight
j
Stu, I didn't mean the actual president was a certain communist or Calvinist. I meant that the bulk of their party was, and they had to pay at least lip-service to that party's central weight.
The kids who voted in Obama are now largely Marxists although they didn't know it. They have been indoctrinated by their college years to be de facto Marxists.
Race gender and class are their values.
To the right, as you yourself admitted, the party-goers must run to the right of themselves, thus, speaking in the languages of Calvinism.
Baptists are Calvinists. Methodists are Wesleyans, but in this country at least they are difficult to differentiate between that and Calvinists.
Even Lutherans are blending fairly thoroughly with Calvinists (Niebuhr was from a denomination that was half-Lutheran and Half-Calvinist).
As was Schweitzer.
Your larger points are more difficult to answer, and I have to chew on them some more.
Nice blog you have going here! you make a good pot of coffee!
Race and gender are values that come directly out of Marxism as you probably know. Simone de Beauvoir was quite thoroughly Marxist, even Maoist, and wrote an important history of Mao, called The Long March. She implies throughout that the feminist movement should learn from Mao. Julia Kristeva who is probably number two in feminist circles also wrote an important book on Mao, and a book called Chinese Women, about women under Mao, and how well it was working out, and how women should look to Mao for inspiration.
Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and others explicitly use Marxist thought as their point of doctrine. These ideas have been filtered through almost all women's studies courses, and all ethnic studies courses (via Frantz Fanon, and others), to make the substance of all the ethnic studies courses in the country which students are now obliged to take.
Students from disciplines other than the humanities might take these courses as their sole introduction to values, and since they have no other church in many cases, swallow it whole.
There are no competing voices in the academy (at Duke out of 500 humanities professors 497 of them profess to being either Democrats or green). 3 said that they were Republicans.
That's pretty much what you find at any college or university. They are one-party states.
And the kids quickly adapt.
The other school is church, and this is largely a Calvinist concern in this country. The hardliners are often Calvinists (I include Baptists).
I'm with them of the two big choices because I think they walk with fire around their feet and a sense of a holy mission.
Of course I belong to a more diffident tradition in political terms. Lutheranism is a lot more two-kingdoms than either of these one-kingdom ideologies -- Marxism denies religion totally (although one could make the case that it is the most messianic of all and that in this country as GM says it has taken its cue from Calvinism), but on the other side you have an almost total denial of the animal side of humanity (even denying evolution in many cases, or arguing for intelligent design).
It's a funny country. But those are the two elephants in the room.
Anyone who wants to be president has to make friends with one or the other.
I didn't mean the actual president was a certain communist or Calvinist. I meant that the bulk of their party was, and they had to pay at least lip-service to that party's central weight.
Ah. A much more plausible contention.
I buy the Calvinist pole, more or less, but I still reject the Communist pole. I feel that this (1) greatly overstates the case, and (2) is language that is prejudicial to moving the dialog.
Nice blog you have going here! you make a good pot of coffee!
Thanks! It's a privilege to have such good contributors. It keeps me on my toes...
Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and others explicitly use Marxist thought as their point of doctrine. These ideas have been filtered through almost all women's studies courses, and all ethnic studies courses (via Frantz Fanon, and others), to make the substance of all the ethnic studies courses in the country which students are now obliged to take.
Ethnic and gender studies are not particular interests for me, but it hardly surprising that special cases of "the studies of the oppressed" would have a strong left-wing stance -- they want to change the status quo, after all, and the right isn't going to do that. But business schools and econ departments are pretty hard right. Of course, the schools at Chicago are exemplars of this. The rest of the social sciences tilt left, although the sociology department at Chicago has enough on the right to average out. And although Chicago doesn't have an engineering school, they typically have a medium right tilt to them. If there's a tilt to the linguists, I haven't picked it up yet. My connections to philosophy are so idiosyncratic that I'd hesitate to generalize. Math types are generally not political, but those that are political seem to be hard right or hard left, in a theoretical way. Science departments typically have a soft-left tilt, but that seems to be as much a reaction to the systematic denial of scientific truth on the right as anything. I do know some pretty hard right characters in the basic sciences. Chemists are definitely more likely to be R's than physicists, for example. It's probably all that Pharma money.
There are no competing voices in the academy (at Duke out of 500 humanities professors 497 of them profess to being either Democrats or green). 3 said that they were Republicans.
This seems extreme, but I'm not really that surprised that there's a very strong lean. A more difficult question is why? These days, the party identification is roughly 2-2-3 republican-independent-democratic, with the center number being highly dependent on pollster push. So there's one modest factor (of many). I suspect that R's tend to be less interested in Humanities than Econ -- after all, you don't get to steal the retirement savings of grandmothers in California if you major in Gender Studies. Getting an advanced degree in the Humanities requires an original contribution, and arguments in favor of preserving the status quo don't usually qualify. Lefties see more in society that they believe needs to change, and I suspect that this provides a *lot* of thesis topics, along with the energy required to pursue them. So there's a crucial hurdle that is structurally easier for lefties than righties. I'm sure you'll point out that it's hard to get an R thesis through a D committtee. I don't doubt that this happens. Once you have your degree, and your first academic job, it's publish or perish. Again, lefties will see a lot in the status quo to criticize, and there articles will be of broader interest to their left-leaning colleagues. This means more articles, and more visibility for those articles. So I'm willing to believe that the tenure barrier tends to increase the already high D/R ratio.
That's pretty much what you find at any college or university. They are one-party states.
Chicago sure isn't a one-party state. And those big engineering departments make the big state schools feel more centrist, although students who are not in engineering won't experience that.
I suppose what I'm saying is that I can believe that the college experience of a typical humanities student is highly politicized, with strong left-lean, but I'm much more skeptical that this is so for typical students in other areas. In the hard sciences and mathematical sciences, instructor politics almost never come up in the classroom -- they're simply not material to the subject matter, and there's too much content to cover.
Post a Comment