Books and the University

An Informal Journal Discussing Books Pertinent to the University by Faculty of Samford University

III:1

Fall, 2002

Collected and Administrated by Dennis Sansom Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy

Contents:

  1. Review by Wilton Bunch, Jean Reith Schroedel. Is the Fetus a Person? A Comparison of Policies Across the Fifty States, Cornell University Press, 2000.
  2. Review by David Chapman, Martha C. Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Liberal Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.
  3. Review by William Collins, Garry Wills. Why I Am A Catholic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.
  4. Review by Randolph Horn, Jared M. Diamond. Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.
  5. Review by Dennis Sansom, Albert William Levi. The High Road of Humanity: The Seven Ethical Ages of Western Man. Edited by Donald Phillip Verene and Molly Black Verene. Rodopi: Amsterdam-Atlanta. 1995.

I. Jean Reith Schroedel. Is the Fetus a Person? A Comparison of Policies Across the Fifty States, Cornell University Press, 2000.

Review by Wilton H. Bunch, Professor of Christian Ethics; Beeson Divinity School,

(First appeared in Christian Ethics Today, volume 7, number 4, "A Seamless Garment of Love: A Review and Reflection on Is the Fetus a Person?")

The divide between advocates of fetal rights and women's rights advocates is deep and wide. These differences rest on explicitly defined, but not always well articulated philosophical assumptions. Fetal rights advocates assert that there is no fundamental difference between a day-old single-cell embryo and a twenty-five year old man. Each has the requisite forty-six chromosomes that determine a person's unique genetic identity. As one has said, "Contained within the single cell who I once was, is the totality of everything I am today."

In contrast, women's rights advocates believe that the interests of the fetus cannot be separated from those of the woman. Just as the fetus and woman are biologically united during pregnancy, so should their interests by viewed as unitary, and the woman should be empowered to make decisions for both. To women's rights advocates, the distinction between a day-old, one-cell fertilized ovum and a twenty-five year old man is patently obvious; to deny this difference is the worst form of biological reductionism.

Intertwined with these assumptions of what it means to be a person are two narratives concerning the intentions and motivations of these who advocate fetal rights. The pro-life narrative is that fetal life is sacred and must be nurtured and protected. The strength of this fetal rights position is its moral imperative that society must take care of its weakest and most vulnerable persons The pro-choice narrative is that this talk of concern for the fetus is nothing but a smoke screen for the continued subjugation and oppression of women.

Jean Reith Schroedel, in Is the Fetus a Person? A Comparison of Policies across the Fifty States (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000) looks for data that might suggest which of these two narratives is more creditable. The first aim of this study is to compile and understand the legal policies of the various states regarding fetal protection. The second is to examine the relationship between state fetal policies and the role of the states in protecting society's most vulnerable citizens. By examining what citizens do through the police, courts and legislatures one is able to infer what citizens believe to be important. This study is conducted to determine is there is a consistency between what the citizens of a state say about fetal status and how they act toward it.

The pro-life advocates have as their guiding principle that every innocent human being has a right to life. It should follow that states where this view is widely believed would have laws and legal practices that make fetal well being a top priority. Policies that protect and nurture human life would protect the fetus from harm and provide good prenatal medical care. Pro-choice proponents believe that most "fetal protection" policies are hypocritical because the real purpose is subjugation of women, not a defense of the fetus. If this view is correct, states with a large pro-life population may support criminal actions against pregnant drug users because the policies target women for punitive actions, but there is no reason to treat battering of pregnant women as two crimes or to expect them to support benign policies such as adoption and prenatal care.

Schroedel and her graduate assistants have combed the laws, court cases and arrest records, state by state, to develop an impressive data base of actions concerning the fetus. The book contains extensive compilations of information on laws restricting abortion, laws and police actions against pregnant women who abuse drugs or alcohol, and laws against third parties (men) who batter pregnant women. She has uncovered information about state support for prenatal care, adoption and early education. Finally, she correlates this with the 1988-1990 National Election Series Senate Panel Study that provides information about what people say concerning abortion and protection of fetal life. Schroedel found a great deal of variation in the actions taken by the various states, but there are general trends that can be summarized. Pro-life states are more likely than pro-choice states to adopt restrictive abortion laws for both adults and minors. Local district attorneys in pro-life states are far more likely than those in pro-choice states to prosecute pregnant women who use drugs or alcohol often using existing criminal statues, such as child abuse laws. There is no relation between the strength of the pro-life opinion and laws concerning battering women that results in the death of the fetus.

Having gathered and analyzed the data, Schroedel returns to relate it to the two narratives. If the fetal rights narrative is correct, we should expect pro-life states to have bans on abortion, laws against maternal drug use and third-party killings. Also, because of the moral imperative, saving lives should outweigh secondary considerations such as the cost of such policies. Conversely, if the women's rights story is accurate, states should differ int eh protection they accord fetuses, with policymakers caring deeply about fetal life threatened by the actions of the woman and caring less when that life is threatened by men who commit acts of violence against pregnant women and their fetuses. She concludes that, overall, the evidence supports the women's rights proposition because pro-life states do not consistently treat the fetus s a person in these other areas of the law. This opinion is buttressed by finding that the percentage of low birth weight babies is higher in pro-life states. There is an inverse correlation between adoption subsidies and pro-life sentiment of states. Foster care payment rates are lowest in pro-life states. The willingness of the state to aid needy children who remained with their mothers was negatively correlated with pro-life content of the laws. In other words, pro-life states are determined to prevent women from having abortions but seem unwilling to provide a decent level of support for those children after birth.

The final measure of state willingness to aid children-the level of education spending per child enrolled in kindergarten through twelfth grade-also was negatively correlated with the pro-life content of state abortion statues. In fact, it appears that the pro-choice states are more committed to providing for the society's weakest and most vulnerable than are the pro-life states. Schroedel has thrown down the gauntlet to people who claim to be concerned about the life of children. Her data clearly show a compete disconnect between opposition to abortion and a more global concern for protection and care for the fetus and child. This cries out for a response of action.

I believe that such a response can be based on three assumptions. First, that people who oppose abortion do so from a genuine concern for the fetus. Second the great disparity between the vocal concern for the fetus and the lack of supportive actions has been unrecognized and unintended. Third, any response should have a scriptural basis. We now turn to a tentative outline of how Scripture might lead people to think and respond.

I would suggest that, in the past, the scriptural basis for opposition to abortion has been based on an appeal for justice, a constant theme in both Testaments. Justice is rooted in laws that produce obligations, but also provide rights. Thus, it was appropriate to frame opposition to abortion as respect for a "right" to life and as an obligation of society to provide that right. It was appropriate to include unborn children within the commandment against killing the innocent. These were legitimate, but had the consequence of focusing all of the attention on abortion and missing the larger issues of protection and support of fetal and early life.

Another approach to using Scripture to guide our ethics is to remember and respond to the love of God as manifest in the life and ministry to Christ Jesus. This is summarized in the new commandment given at the final meal with his disciples: "As I have loved you, so you should love one another." This command was not only for the original disciples, but also for all subsequent Christians, who also share in the obligation to love one another as Jesus has loved us. The Gospels are filled with examples of how Jesus modeled for his disciples, and for us, what it meant to love. Specifically, he welcomed children to him and rebuked those who tried to keep them away. He was attentive to women in need (Mary, Martha, Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well). These provide guidance as to how we might express love for women and children.

The term "seamless garment of life" was developed by Cardinal Bernardin as an attempt to link together all human life as valuable. We can have a more modest goal as we think about a "seamless garment of love" for children, born and unborn, and the women who nurture them. A seamless garment of love for children could include laws to restrict abortion including waiting times and, in the case of minors, parental permission. It would include medical treatment, not incarceration, for women addicted to drugs or alcohol. Love would take this stance recognizing that drugs are widely available in prisons and that babies born to prisoners are frequently of low birth weight and do not thrive. This seamless garment of love for unborn children would demand severe laws against men who batter their pregnant wives.

A seamless garment of love for unborn children would recognize their need for medical care similar to all children and demand that pre-natal care be available to all pregnant women. It would anticipate dn pay for preventative care such as immunizations for the young child. It would assist in adoptions when the mother could not adequately care for the child and provide support if the mother kept the child despite difficult circumstances. A seamless garment of love for children would support education.

Doubtless there are other ways to respond scripturally to the challenge presented by the data of this book. Others may find more creative ideas to link opposition to abortion with a program of broad support for life. But there must be an active response. The world for those who oppose abortion is not the same as it was before Schroeder's research. No longer can opponents of abortion focus on the fetus and forget the child. Schroedel has shown that, at the present time, "anti-abortion" and "pro-life" are not synonyms. They must become identical in meaning if opposition to abortion is to remain a respected moral enterprise.

II. Martha C. Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Liberal

Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997, 328 pages.

Reviewed by David Chapman, Dean of Howard College of Arts and Sciences, Samford

When Allan Bloom fired off the first shot in the "culture wars" of the eighties and nineties, he made a plea for a return to what he considered the roots of a liberal

education--cultivating the mind through exposure to the great books. One of his first critics was Martha Nussbaum who now holds a chair in philosophy at the University of

Chicago, where Bloom himself taught for so many years. Cultivating Humanity, written ten years after Bloom's Closing of the American Mind was released, is in many ways

Nussbaum's extended reply to the charges that Bloom made in his book. Bloom's work was a bestseller because it charged universities with pandering to special interest groups,

knuckling under to student pressure, politicizing the curriculum, and generally lowering expectations.

Nussbaum's outlook on higher education is considerably more sanguine. She, in fact, lauds the changes that have occurred in higher education: opening up the curriculum, emphasizing diversity and multiculturalism, and improving educational opportunities for women and minorities. Nussbaum is well aware of the cold reception given to many women in higher education. She notes, for instance, that when she arrived at Harvard in 1969, she was not permitted to eat in the main dining room of the faculty club, even as a member's guest. What seems even more shocking is that only a few years earlier women were not allowed to use the undergraduate library at Harvard. Clearly, the golden age of education in the 1950s that Allan Bloom remembers so fondly was not a golden era for many who were refused entrance into that elite club.

Interestingly, Nussbaum and Bloom ground their arguments in the same classical sources. Bloom turns to Plato for the cultural foundations of Western civilization--that

intellectual inquiry is the highest pursuit of humankind, that just government depends on rational deliberation, that universities are essential to government because they provide a safe place for intellectual inquiry and rational deliberation. Bloom argued that universities had given up their Platonic birthright by attempting to become more relevant and more practical. The humanities no longer claimed to offer truth on the great questions confronting all humans, and without such claims, they had become largely irrelevant to students and to society. The sciences had become dominant in the modern university partly because they did provide a coherent, if limited, view of the world.

Nussbaum finds the inspiration for her curricular agenda in Socrates. In order to do so, she must distinguish between Socrates, who holds open the possibility of rational

inquiry for all citizens, and Plato, who believes that such inquiry is the province of a gifted elite who deserve to rule over the common horde. Nussbaum is aware that other

scholars do not find the ties between Socrates and Plato quite so easily divisible. She rejects the notion, however, that a belief in rational inquiry inevitably leads to a hierarchical order in society. Rather, she finds in Socrates a champion of democracy and natural advocate of universal education. In short, Bloom lionizes Plato of The Republic; Nussbaum extols Socrates of The Apology.

For Nussbaum, the intellectual heirs of Socrates are not Plato and the Academy, but the Stoics. From Seneca she takes the principles that undergird her educational

philosophy. Ideally, Socratic education (reflective inquiry) should be universal, personal, pluralistic, and skeptical. Just as Socrates' questioned the authorities of ancient Athens, she believes that liberal education must do more than simply accept conventional wisdom. She doesn't necessarily repudiate "Great Books" programs, but she insists that turning to these books as "cultural authorities" can undermine the Socratic enterprise of critical examination of ideas. The thoughtful examination of tradition will not lead, as Bloom suggests, to cultural relativism, but to a greater commitment to justice and equity.

In one area, Nussbaum does part company with the more radical of the cultural critics. Given the history of cultural imperialism enacted by the West, some activists

have questioned the logocentrism of the Western intellectual tradition. Nussbaum identifies enemies of Socratic reason on both ends of the political spectrum. Conservatives insist on unquestioned obedience to traditional values. They fear that an examination of these values will weaken the moral foundations of society. But some advocates for women, minorities, and non-Western people, feel that logical argumentation is simply a tool for state-mandated oppression. Although Nussbaum acknowledges that oppression may go under the guise of logical argument, she maintains that seeking the truth through rational inquiry is ultimately the surest vehicle to freedom, both intellectually and politically.

III. Garry Wills, Why I Am A Catholic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002, pp. 390.

Reviewed by William Collins, Political Science

Gary Wills' Why I Am Catholic asks, How is it possible for a devout, well-educated Catholic to come to terms with the institutional history of his Church? The current scandal in the American Catholic Church makes this question an important and compelling one. Wills pulls no punches. The sense of betrayal and the glaring deficiencies in leadership which the current crisis reveals is not a new phenomenon. By Wills' account the entire history of the Church represents a prolonged, sorrowful record of institutional corruption. After sympathetically describing his youth and young adulthood as a Catholic, Wills takes us through the history of the Church starting from its claim as the successor to St. Peter. Relying heavily on two well-known books, Klaus Schatz's Papal Primacy: From Its Origins to the Present, and Bernard Schimmelpfenning's Papacy, Wills tells one horror story after another and shows us in no uncertain terms that the Church's history is indeed a sordid one. In presenting his story Wills is able, as he goes along, to debunk the spurious history and dubious claims the Church has used to justify its claims and prerogatives. It is a remarkable story which all Christians, and every Catholic especially, should know and reflect upon. How can an institution which claims to be the repository of the Faith handed down from the Apostles at the same time have compiled such a staggering record of fraud, violence, theft, betrayal and pride of place? Wills does not hesitate, he pronounces the judgment of the Modern World "The Papacy, the very Church itself is a failure, and Catholics should look elsewhere if they are to understand what it means to be a Christian."

Wills' response is to turn to the Apostles' Creed. The last chapters of his book set out the articles of faith with Wills providing a running commentary on their meaning. After all has been said about the Church, its history and its moral teachings, for Wills the creed remains the one constant, fundamental truth, central to the Church. It is the Creed which Wills relies upon it as the compelling reason for why he is and will remain a Catholic.

Wills' rhetorical strategy is a familiar one. He sets out a particular reading of the Church's history, a reading he then places beside the Creed. He then makes a great case for accepting the Creed and so demonstrates his orthodoxy. At the same time, he rejects the history of the Church with all the wicked and corrupt things associated with that history. This history is the inauthentic dimension of the faith and can be rejected as part of his practice as a Catholic. By making this argument Wills gives the Catholic reader a convenient way to say what it means to be Catholic; stay with the Creed and ignore the history which goes with it. Non-Catholic readers are also reassured by being told that ´reasonable' Catholics do not have to agree with all the bad things and grave injustices done in the name of and on behalf of the Church. It is good piece of writing very much in tune with the modern style, pick out what you like ,throw away the rest as irrelevant. However, this approach is not that straightforward and Wills probably, more than most, knows there is much more to consider.

There is first the fact that the current Pope is well aware and has acknowledge the historical record of the Church. In a remarkable letter to the universal Church, Ut Unum Sint [That They Might Be One] the Pope says as clearly as it can be said that the Papacy has been stumbling block for Christian unity and has invited all Christians to respond and engage in discussion concerning the issue of papal primacy. This is an amazing concession given the history Wills details and interestingly Wills makes no mention of it. The first step in any movement toward making up for past deeds has to be acknowledgment for those deeds and this can be seen as one step among the many that have been made during this pontiff's time in office. It is most convenient to say as Wills does "O the horror, I want no part of it," quite another to openly acknowledge the wrongs done and seek reconciliation.

Is it possible to come to terms with the Church's history simply by acknowledging the fact that enormous wrongs have been done in her name? Wills' answer is clearly no, what the Church has done as an institution is what the Church is at this moment. This is an important point and deserves comment. One of Wills' intellectual heroes, C.K. Chesterton provides an insight into this. In Wills' biography of Chesterton, it is put this way, for there to be truth it is important that there be a limit, a dependence on some defining form which gives account of what something is. However, Chesterton offered a further idea, there is more than an ever be contained by our forms of knowing. "Compared with Being's boundless act all things we know are small in compass and possessed on sufferance, an infinite good in a finite container." It is as if what we know operates like a cookie cutter on the dough which has been given to us and what there is, is much, much more than that cutter can encompass. Our individual and collective life reflects this tension between the form which limits and everything else which is there. The Greeks who thought about these things a lot emphasized the cookie cutter, avoid extravagance, and seek the mean. To know, for the Greeks, is to define the boundaries. When the Christians appeared the story changed. As Wills describes Chesterton's thinking,

"Dilution and moderation are not the appropriate response to the wild act of existence. The dialectic between activity and form in things should be echoed by distinct intense responses in man--heights of pride and depths of humility balanced and sustained by creative tension and response, not simply diluted. This is the ethic by which we must judge Christian saints [extravagant egoists by the pagan norm, their flaming love and humility shattering the level of safe compromise among the virtues]. By it we must judge the entire history and art and achievement of Christendom, a thing of energy and tension, like the sprung and sustaining arches of Gothic which leap higher and stretch wider than the balanced structures of a Greek Temple."

The man who wrote these words describing Chesterton's Orthodoxy must know that while the Church has a corrupt history probably beyond any account that could be given, and that without doubt its authoritarian structure is flawed and has failed time and again, it must also be true that there is certainly more than this. How does one simply pick one thing and make that one thing equal to the Church? The Church is the Creed surely, there is also the history as sorry as it is, but there are as well the preachers, the monks, the sisters, the teachers, which Wills praises with such fondness, the servants to the sick, the great lovers of God who surrender it all for a glimpse, an enormous cloud of witnesses extending through time. This is the superabundance of Being Chesterton talks about, visible and invisible, in time present, in the time past and in the time to come and it is this superabundance which is the universal church. There is the form which is the history, the institutions, the men in charge, there is, as well, the plentitude, the witnesses, they come together, the being and the form combining and interweaving, and time like an ever-rolling stream carries it all forward. For anyone at all to be among these witnesses, as the Greek dramatist Sophocles says is "Deinos" wondrous and scary all at the same time. Do not be misled, it is not easy to be Catholic, but, as Wills has shown us, there it is. He has done us all a service by raising the crucial question, the link between faith and history. But his sense of history, if Chesterton is right is too formal and his view of the faith, again if Chesterton is on mark, is much too narrow. So, if I had to deal with the question Why I Am Catholic I would probably get a better answer by reading Wills on Chesterton or better still by simply reading Chesterton himself.

IV. Jared M. Diamond. Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. 1999: W. W. Norton & Company.

Reviewed by Randolph C. Horn, Associate Professor of Political Science, Samford University

Ornithologist, ecologist and MacArthur Foundation Fellowship winner Jared Diamond is once again making hay by dabbling in someone else's discipline. Thank goodness. Diamond applies the methods of ecologists and evolutionary biologists to solve a puzzle that transcends the normal limits of biology. This time he addresses a question generally left to historians: why are some cultures conquerors and other conquered? While the question is not a new one, Diamond's approach results in an engaging treatise covering 15,000 or so years of human prehistory and history within the context of a persuasive argument. In the process he tells the compelling stories of human

settlement of the globe, the effect of environmental conditions on cultural development and subsidence, and debunks myths of innate racial superiority. Diamond applies Darwin's simple precepts to human history and produces an elegant and convincing book.

A chance conversation with Yali, a New Guinean politician, while on an ornithological expedition prompted Diamond's inquiry into human history. Yali asks why some people are conquered and others are not. The question intrigues Diamond given his observation that the people of New Guinea possess equivalent or superior "native intelligence" to Europeans. In other words, while not educated in the European sense, they do amass knowledge of vast literatures of flora, fauna, environmental conditions, hunting techniques, languages, mythology, etc. and demonstrate what Diamond might call superior creative and problem solving skills. Given similar intelligence and noting the infinitesimally small genetic differences between peoples, Diamond looks outside the physiological to explain, for example, why the Spaniards conquered the Aztecs, instead of Aztecs invading Spain.

If people the world over are essentially biologically identical, then the differences in technological, military or cultural achievements must lie in environmental factors. For example, Diamond argues that while all subsequent cultural and technological development is predicated first on the development of agriculture, people in the Fertile

Crescent were not smarter than people in other parts of the populated world. Rather, they simply had access to more domesticable species. Seed and bone evidence from archaeological digs indicates that there were 32 species of large-seeded grasses (potential grains), and 72 species of large mammals present in the Mediterranean when agriculture

began to evolve. In other centers of early agriculture, the average number of large-seeded grasses was only seven and the average number of large mammals was only 25. Clearly, the Fertile Crescent had more raw material to work with than any other region of the world. More candidates for domestication yield more successes. The process of

domestication is a natural outgrowth of human interaction with the environment. Plants or animals with favorable traits are given human assistance in reproduction. While

there were numerous early centers of agriculture, only the Fertile Crescent was favored by both climate and so many candidates for domestication. Not only were the odds

better for domestication of a single candidate but for a variety of candidates. Successfully domesticated species and a series of subsequently developed hybrids and

varieties were quickly adopted by neighboring agriculturalists.

The diffusion of agricultural innovations spread rapidly across the Eurasian landmass as more and more people adopted productive crops. Successive adoption

allowed crops to spread so quickly that wheat even made it to Southern England by about 5000 BCE, a mere 3000 years after its domestication in the Middle East, a rate of

almost one mile per year. (p. 179-81) Crops domesticated on other continents spread more slowly. Domesticated species in the Americas and Africa tended to be much more

localized. Was this because Europeans were smarter? No, argues Diamond, the faster diffusion is simply the result of each continent's geographic orientation. The Americas and Africa both stretch across a North-South axis, meaning that significant temperature and photoperiod changes accompany any significant movement up or down the continent. Even though parts of North and South America have similar climates that could support similar crops, getting corn to the South or potatoes to the North would

require a long and difficult journey across an equatorial environment, hostile to these temperate-zone crops. Even if equatorial farmers were crazy enough to invest their

efforts in poor producing exotics, it is unlikely that they could have made them grow in such a radically different climate. Conversely, the Eurasian landmass stretches across and East-West axis, allowing crops transported either East or West to find appropriate temperatures and photoperiods. In other words, the Eurasian land mass is conducive to diffusion of innovation in agriculture.

From the development of agriculture flow many other features of civilization. For example, both the abandonment of nomadic life and the demand for labor at different times during the growing season make agricultural people more reproductive. Increased populations, blessed with sufficient surpluses, have greater capacity for specialization or the development of a division of labor. Further, larger populations seem to have increased capacity for innovation, the intellectual equivalent of mutation. In other words, there are simply more people around to have ideas. If there are more ideas, there is a better chance of there being some good ones. Ideas and their manifestations in technology have distributive properties similar to agricultural innovations, albeit less dependent on climate: good ideas spread.

Diamond illustrates this phenomenon by detailing the spread of writing systems. Ancient peoples recognized the value of writing and record keeping by example. They

did not need to adopt another's language to use the idea. Often characters or letters were borrowed by adjacent language groups. While a number of systems were developed

independently across the globe, the spread of writing and language follows the same diffusion patterns of other technologies. Like writing and crops, other technologies

follow a similar pattern of diffusion, although the development of more "advanced" technologies builds of past development. In other words, one doesn't wake up one day

and decide to smelt iron. Iron technology spread among peoples who already had some investment in metallurgy. Different parts of the world developed technologies at

different times, but follow a similar pattern: first agriculture, then metallurgy, then writing. Conversely, when technologies or cultural elements are not advantageous, they evolve away. Like the kiwi, a flightless New Zealand bird with no indigenous predators, cultures reflect the demands and opportunities of their habitat. For example, some erstwhile seafaring Pacific islanders abandoned that way of like for one that required less effort.

Some areas can get far enough ahead technologically that conquest and dominion becomes feasible. On this point, Diamond concentrates on a couple of the largest and most dominating examples, although broader applicability is fruitful. So while the Chinese developed advanced weapons and nautical technology before the West, they chose not to take over the world, closing their borders and concentrating on maintaining cultural purity instead. In an ununified Western Europe, on the other hand, competing states financed and promoted a 500 year program of colonial expansion andsubordination of less technologically advance peoples. In some sense, different parts of the world have different "technical cultures" that we might differentiate from cultural practices. For example, the commonality of agricultural technology across Eurasia stands in contradistinction to the variety of linguistic, religious, and social practices in that same area.

Diamond concludes his work with a plea for students of history to take advantage of science as a superior instrument for understanding the past. His call to arms is a bit vexing as it implies that the authors of history are ignorant of the contributions of archaeology and other scientific discipline intent on digging up the past. Put another way, in recognizing that documentary history has limits, as do all disciplines, Diamond urges all to drop their dusty letters and take up the trowel and the sieve, as though documentary history is moribund. As written and electronic culture becomes pervasive, the utility of documentary history will increase. The shift from bits of paper to bytes of data may require innovations in methods, but the trowel will prove no substitute to textual analysis in more recent periods. Similarly, Diamond's intuition that the difference between history and other approaches to understanding the past is technological rather than methodological falls flat. The power of his approach lies not in technical superiority, but in having a good theory. Despite crying wolf in the concluding chapter, Diamond presents a clear and convincing argument about cultural contact and domination. His perspective is not only refreshing, although it is certainly refreshing, but instructive. Guns Germs and Steel is fascinating and worthwhile.

V. Albert William Levi. The High Road of Humanity: The Seven Ethical Ages of Western Man. Edited by Donald Phillip Verene and Molly Black Verene. Rodopi: Amsterdam-Atlanta. 1995. 156 Pages.

Reviewed by Dennis Sansom, Philosophy

Albert William Levi taught philosophy at Washington University of Saint Louis for over thirty years and for most of that as the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities. This is his last published book. It came out seven years after his death of 1988. Two former students eventually secured Rodopi to publish the work in their Value Inquiry Book Series. While I was a graduate student at Washington University I read part of the manuscript and talked often with Levi about its main theme, and hence I was glad to learn that the book finally found a publisher.

The High Road of Humanity is both a descriptive and hortatory book. It is descriptive of the ethical ideals of seven period in the Western cultural development, starting with what Levi's calls the "The Greek Aristocrat" and concluding with the "The Professional Man of Today". Though each chapter has a summary approach to each of the epochs, Levi gives a good amount of detail about the philosophical, artistic, sometimes religious and political, and important persons of each era. The reader gains an understanding of what Hegel would call the "idea" of a culture's period. It's Levi's contention that people make culture, and culture reflects through its tangible forms the basic commitments of the people. Human life is not determined by an implacable law, which uses the struggles, pains, achievements, and failures of persons, families, groups, and societies as mere moveable parts within a huge, morally blind machine. Rather, as scientific, social, artistic, moral, and religious interpreters of life, we make the value-world in which we live. This making is not rhapsodic or unintentional. It reflects the determining "idea" of our era.

Levi told me he was having a hard time finding a publisher. He sent the manuscript to an influential university press, which had published most of his books. He asked them not to send the book for review to professional, academic ethicists but to readers interested in the history of ideas and culture. However, the press sent it to two academic ethicists who rejected the book because it lacked the technical, logical methodology of professional ethics. Levi was disappointed, and he died before he could find a publisher.

For most academics, such a rejection would signal a failure in academic acumen and professional specialization. Though a brilliant and engaging lecturer and accomplished professor (Levi held an endowed Chair and had won the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson award with his Philosophy and the Modern World, 1959), Levi felt the academy, especially philosophy, had failed its primary mission–the teaching of wisdom and the development of the whole person. He was more concerned with how individuals learn from their cultural legacy how to live an informed and morally reflective life than producing articles, books, and students aimed at a very specialized and professional audience.

In some ways this book represents the overall aim of Levi's philosophical agenda. "It should at the outset be made clear that these views are due to my profound conviction that the entire enterprise of modern Anglo-American ethics is bankrupt, and that the so-called ´linguistic turn,' the new emphasis upon ´modes of expression' rather than real moral substance, has made contemporary ethics trivial, irrelevant, and almost totally abstract" (p. 7). In Levi's opinion two factors have contributed to this trivialization–"One is the slow loss of the historical sense. The other is the gradual abandonment of confidence in the deliverances of the moral imagination" (p. 16). These two factors are basic to any intellectual and reflective sorting out of how to live a meaningful life. First, we must know the history of our lives. Our values, ethical narratives, and social norms come from a tradition and we echo a legacy of heroines and heroes of that tradition. Second, we are not just parrots of that tradition and legacy. We adjust, evaluate, and reform our heritages, and it takes an imaginative position to make this type of fundamental criticism. It's a mistake to think imagination is only the producing of fantasies. It's a way of considering ideals and real and needed alternatives to one's context. And, when considering what it means to be ethical in the sense of a serious reflection on who we are as moral beings, imagination is the most advanced state of moral intellect. Imagination enables us to envision what we should be, what is the ideal to which we should inspire. Every age has such an ideal, and we can read the history of culture by the progression of moral ideals expressed in its philosophical, scientific, religious, and artistic manifestations. This is what Levi has attempted to do.

Levi describes seven periods of western culture. First, there is The Greek Aristocrat of the classical Greek period. Honor and nobility were the dominant virtues. The Greeks felt they embodied a great civilization which must be preserved, and they should be ruled in all ways by the best (hence "aristocratic"). It takes a noble person, not necessary a powerful one; to rule a civilization fully developed in its self-consciousness. The highest of these noble people are what Aristotle called the "Great Souls" who expected a lot and drew a lot out of life. Levi sees Pericles (d. 429 BCE) as the quintessential Greek Aristocrat who was the moral ideal behind the great ethical writings and teaching of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Second, there is The Stoic Sage. After the death of Aristotle in 322, the classical Greek civilization became fractured due to the divisions of the Alexandrian Empire and culture splintering. The emphasis shifted from the nobility of a particular civilization to the security of a cosmopolitan mindset. The Stoics, with their teachings of a universal soul, reason, and apathy towards what cannot be changed, became the social leaders. In a time of social tumult, their teaching of self-sufficiency (autarkeia) was fitting for a distraught culture. The ordered soul became more important than an ordered society. Through self-management one could reach the highest of virtues–wisdom. The exemplary texts are Epictetus's Discourses and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, with Cato the Younger (the Roman general) and Seneca (the Roman statesman and philosopher) as the prototypical sages of this time.

Third, there is The Christian Saint. This moral ideal covers a long period from around the 4th to the 17th centuries. The key commitment of this period was purity of heart towards God developed by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. A pure person is inviolable to the struggles of life, because he or she has secured true inwardness and charity to all. Levi presents two 13th centuries saints as indicative of this moral ideal–St. Bernard and St. Francis. They express the ideal in different ways. St. Bernard represents the church militant of the Medieval Age; St. Francis embodies the familial unity of all humanity and nature. Each is dedicated to the glory of God.

Fourth, there is the Renaissance Prince. Instead of the aim of society in service of the Church, the focus is on the glory of the prince and the prosperity and cultivation of the courtly associates. The demand for learning was a way to lift the court above the common person. Manner and formal behavior became more important than virtue. The prince is to show excellence through his courage, courtesy, and culture. The philosophical and literary expression of this moral ideal are found in Machiavelli's The Prince, Erasmus' The Education of a Christian Prince, and Castoglione's The Book of the Courtier, and the personal example of this ideal is Sir Philip Sidney (d. 1586) of the Elizabethan court.

Fifth, there is The Enlightenment Gentleman. A bit of Stoicism is resuscitated during this period. As a way to reject and avoid the superstition and authoritarianism of the sectarian wars, the emphasis was put on universal citizenship and rationality. Rather than authority and faith, the values are being sociable, good-natured, humane, merciful, grateful, friendly, generous, and beneficent. The prime philosopher of this moral ideal is David Hume (d. 1776) of Scotland (An Enquiry Concerning the Principle of Morals) with his skeptical approach to the received heritage and promotion of a sophisticated reasoner, and Lord Chesterfield who in his Letters to His Son extolled the manners of good-breeding in manners and education and self-control as the highest of virtues.

Sixth, there is The Nineteenth-Century Merchant Prince. This is the period of great wealth and power. The most representative writing is Dale Carnegie's famous "The Gospel of Wealth" (1889). It is at once an apotheosis of capitalism and unrestrained acquisition but also a tract for philanthropy. Though the pursuit of wealth is a good, the disregard of class division is harmful. Hence the Merchant Prince acts sort of a trustee of society to guide it through his or her possessions and power. Though such families as the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Mellons, and the Fricks lived lavishly, they built a nation with their industry and philantrophy. Yet, they did not leave a moral ideal did much to erase the moral sense of Aristotle and St. Francis which had driven Western culture.

Seventh, there is the Professional Man of Today. According to Levi, the emphasis today is on what a person does, not what he or she morally is or religiously believes. We are doers, and the aim of a professional is the performance of a service valuable to society. But the professional also has a sense of vocation, which has a commitment, dedication, and devotion to a particular profession. Such an individual is the ideal person of today, and Levi picks the Supreme Court justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes (d. 1935) as the explicit example. Holmes championed a positivist commitment to the Law. The literary representatives of this ideal are James Gould Cozzens (By Love Possessed, 1957) and C. P. Snow (The Masters, 1951) with their emphasis on solid characters who live an ambiance of steady careers, quiet ambitions, and professional accomplishment.

In the final chapter, Behind the Curtain of the Future, Levi makes a prediction that we are moving into a new moral ideal–a citizen-artist who wants to make public life reasonable and private life creative. He contends that since the business of art is to impose an idea onto matter in a interpretative, creative way, there is more need for such a moral ideal today than ever to revive a sense of human dignity and worth.

As the reader can tell–the book is not a detailed, methodologically precise treatment of ethics or ethical issues. For some reviewers, editors, and publishers the intellectual life and academic work must be divided into compartments in which each has its own modus operandi and vocabulary. Perhaps this is why Levi could not find a typical academic publisher for this book, which seems to defy such compartmentalization. Instead of writing a technical piece meant only for other professionals accustomed to idiosyncratic vocabulary and modes of presentations, he aspires for wisdom in the book. Of course the professional can learn facts and method from the book, but the book is at the service of a bigger picture than augmenting a self-enclosed academic circle.

There are two kinds of scholars–the technician and the theoretician. Though both must have the appropriate evidence, state it clearly and logically, and be open to dialogue with other scholars, the emphasis is different. The technician is a researcher who gives the facts. The theoretician is an organizer who gives the big picture. Both are needed. The first without the second has no relevance for how we use knowledge to make a difference to the way we view the world, formulate values, and build communities. The second without the first has no connection to the real and tangible affairs of history, nature, and daily life. Kant once said that concepts without experience are empty and experience without concepts are blind. Something similar could be said about the two ways of doing scholarship–factual research without a humanistic agenda is blind of value; grandiose ideas without facts and logic are empty rhetoric and prone to sophistry.

Some people contend that we think in images, and the more vivid the image, the more likely we are to retain it and all that it encompasses. Whether we think in words or pictures, the point is well taken. We need "pegs" to hang facts on. If there is no view of the world without it being an interpretation, then how we provide "pegs" is as much of the business of the academy as research and data accumulation. Though we don't make up the facts, we make up the way we interpret the world. We should not leave this "making up" to wily nilly thinking. We need wisdom to view the world in a way both honest about the facts and constructive to formulating a meaningful life as thinkers, believers, and moral agents. Levi has provided such a book.