James Turner Johnson: The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western Cultural History.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, October 14, 1988.

 

A tradition cannot validate itself. When confronted with another, contradictory tradition, it can either retreat into cultural solipsism or appeal to something beyond itself: revelation, nature—some authoritative source of principles. Historicists deny that any trans-traditional framework exists, except for ‘History’ itself, which simply moves onward and cannot in principle offer guidance. Some historicists—Hegel and Marx most prominently—posit an ‘end of History’ wherein all contradictions must cease. The evidence they offer for this promise seldom convinces any but the most wishful thinkers.

Many historians today are also historicists. James Turner Johnson does not consistently think through his historicist assumptions, but he surely does have them. They mar an otherwise informative, well-ordered account of Christian and modern Western civilization’s not entirely successful “quest for peace.”

Johnson identifies three “traditions” of peace-seeking: that animated by ‘just war’ doctrines; that of sectarian pacifism; and that of political peacemaking. He proceeds, however, not by isolating and discussing them thematically, but by describing their historical unfolding.

Challenging pacifist historians, he denies that the early (pre-Constantinian) Christian Church adhered to absolute non-resistance. Jesus and His disciples rejected violence because they expected the Second Coming within the first Christian generation; they felt no need to elaborate a political modus vivendi that included warfare. As the Church gradually adapted to the historical long run, Christians generated several views concerning warfare. Pacifism was only one of them.

Johnson’s claim rests on two unsteady pillars. First, he questions the pacifism of the major early Church fathers: Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen. He does not always summarize their arguments accurately—failing to quote (for example) Tertullian’s explicitly condemnation of military service based upon Jesus’ rebuke of Peter’s swordplay at Gethsemane. Second, he defines the Church not by the authoritative teachings of the fathers, but by the actual practices of all the baptized, many of whom did serve in the Roman legions. Thus may some historian two millennia from now argue that the Roman Catholic Church endorses artificial contraception, because so many Catholics use it. It may be that Johnson, in both these instances, displays something of the historicist tendency to deny the cognitive status of ideas, preferring to look at ‘concrete’ historical practice.

Johnston stands more firmly when discussing the just war tradition, on which he is an authority. He observes that Ambrose and Augustine formulated the first just-war theories, marrying Christianity to Ciceronian political philosophy. Christian love in the political realm aims at justice; warriors moved by the desire for a just peace partake in Christian love. This brilliant and perhaps somewhat unstable synthesis appalls pacifists, who often describe it as the Church’s fall from Christianity, back to a new form of paganism.

For centuries, such post-Augustinian pacifists tended to withdraw from this world many of them surviving not in cities but in the apolitical countryside. Those sects such as the Waldensians, who did try to live non-violently among their fellow-men, were soon driven away by just-war Christians scandalized by pacifism.

Johnson identifies the first stirrings of political or secular peacemaking in the writings of Dante and Marsilius of Padua. Both undercut “the temporal supremacy of the Church and its clergy,” arguing that the disorder “resulting from [the clergy’s] unwarranted pretensions impedes justice and the other supreme value in medieval political thought, peace.” Stressing the importance of good institutions as a substitute for rulers’ goodness, they anticipated such modern writers and Rousseau and Kant.

Johnson sees that sectarian pacifists in the last two centuries adapt many of the plans of secular peacemakers. Gandhian “nonviolent defense” represents one attempt to reconcile radical idealism with realism. Thus have sectarians become more worldly, more politically ambitious, without necessarily becoming very realistic. Gandhi especially (it might be added) inflamed the political ambitions of Christian pacifists by making it seem that the spiritual warfare of Christianity might be transferred to the realm of social action in some decisively effective way. The results have been mixed.

Purely secular peacemaking offers scarcely more realism than does sectarian pacifism. The champions of internationalism almost invariably require a prior commitment to peace among the nations—who, Johnson notes, if they were committed to peace, would already be internationalist. Johnson’s criticism here is too narrowly voluntaristic. It would be more just to say that secular peacemakers seek moments favorable to peaceful sentiments in order to establish or strengthen institutions that re-channel warlike sentiments when, inevitably, those sentiments reappear. This can work; General Douglas MacArthur transformed Japan into a commercial republic whose worst wars now are only trade wars. Whether such peaceful republics can ever come into existence worldwide, and maintain themselves, remains an open question.

Johnson hopes his historical work can help others committed to the quest for peace. It can, but only if peacemakers combine Johnsonian realism with an in-Johnsonian rejection of historical relativism.

First published in THE GAMBIER JOURNAL, Volume 4, No. 5, May 1985.

 

It moves sour critics to cries of ‘film classic!’ It makes otherwise mature adults dream, with respect, of the old Hollywood. Four and a half decades after its first showing, it still attracts millions of viewers, none of whom is heard to emit event the politest complaint.

Has no one noticed the elaborate silliness of Gone With the Wind?

The silliness goes beyond the main characters—although, to be sure, they partake of it. It goes beyond Melanie’s idiotic benevolence, somehow confused with Christianity. It goes beyond Ashley’s despairing gentility—despite which, we are expected to believe, he commanded soldiers during four years of war. It goes beyond Rhett Butler’s heart-of-gold cynicism, with which he would seduce his beloved the better to redeem her. It even goes beyond the silliness of Scarlett O’Hara, whose name might be considered a pun on the Biblical Scarlet Whore of Babylon, were we to credit Miss Mitchell with acerb wit she displays nowhere else.

While still in a relatively generous mood, let us credit Miss Mitchell and/or the scriptwriters with giving the title a dual meaning. “Wind” means the war, of course, particularly General Sherman’s incendiary expedition therein. It must mean rhetoric, too; if nothing else, the film exposes the silliness of Confederate orotundities. Judging from the antics at “Tara,” the old South had “gone with the wind” years before the rebels brought their case to Fort Sumter. Regrettably, the film wants us to admire not only admirable courage in a “lost cause” but the sham elegance of a “civilization”—so Miss Mitchell calls it—apparently compounded of little more than chattel slavery and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Worse, this anti-rhetorical film has an rhetorical afflatus of its own.

For Hollywood substituted visual for verbal inflation, offering rather too much of something for everyone. We get, at first, grand photography of trivial persons—the O’Hara’s and the Wilkes’s—minor Dickens characters with Southern accents. We then see these persons impelled into a brutal context, also grandly photographed—which may distract us from their continued triviality. Spectacular improbabilities ensue. Finally, we see them during Reconstruction, repelling trashy whites and uppity blacks with the short sword of Scarlett’s petty Machiavellianism. (“If I have to lie, cheat, steal, or kill, I’ll never go hungry again!” she explains to God, Who has seen far more engaging purposes served by similarly dubious means). The photography remains grand.

We are, I suspect, intended to learn something from this epic melodrama. The film’s makers conceive of illusion as a verbal phenomenon. Each character loves someone who doesn’t return that love, or who cannot return it openly, because words obscure passions, not only for the hearer but for the speaker. Even the self-styled realists, Rhett and Scarlett, manage to confuse each other in the end, with nothing but words.

Done well, this might illuminate something. But Hollywood merely replaced deceptive words with deceptive images. The film is a big truck, a vehicle for carrying ‘scenes’; the ‘scenes’ are receptacles for ‘drama,’ that is, an effort to arouse sentiments. The film-makers load their truck with more and more drama, more and more scenes, and keep the tank filled with theatrical gas. Disasters multiply with each reel, and the last thirty minutes veritably teem with deaths, delusions, and broken hearts.

I once watched the film with a woman of sense who endured it all until the Butler daughter died in a riding accident. “Everything happens to these people,” the lady murmured. One might say the same of Job and his family, but that plot had God, not Miss Mitchell, for its author, which tends to enhance its significance. With Miss Mitchell and the film-makers taking turns at the wheel, the rip only ends when their overloaded rig breaks down—prefigured by the horse that drops dead under Scarlett’s lash and symbolized perfectly by Scarlett herself, microcosm within the macrocosm, collapsed on the stairs, sobbing for the lost Rhett but truly in love only with her real estate. Love of land, of a thing that seems real and lasting, replaces love of unstable humans; love for something photographable overrides love of man, that verbal animal who cannot be captured whole in a picture. It is a Hollywood morality play, that is to say a contradiction in terms insofar as one can say that such a thing has terms.

When Scarlett gets up to declaim, “Tomorrow is another day,” one may take it as a threat to film a sequel. And indeed, as the European philosophical tradition may consist of a series of footnotes to Plato, the Hollywood cinematic tradition may consist of a series of sequels to Gone With the Wind. André Malraux called the techniques of mass ‘culture’ “the arts of satiation”; a photograph, a representation of the surface of things, more nearly satiates us than words do because it shows the appetites what they want instead of trying to tell them about it. Words have a tendency to evoke reason (the Greek word for ‘word,’ logos, also means reason), or faith (“the Word”). Hollywood will not have them. At best, it can only celebrate the earth, beautiful but dumb.

Jeremy Rifkin “in collaboration with Nicanor Perlas”: Algeny. New York: Viking Press, 1983.

 

Consider, if you will, two books. Both are polemics against ‘bioengineering,’ the process whereby scientists combine genetic material from different organisms to produce new genetic structures, and thus new organisms. Both works are intended for what publishers call “the intelligent general reader.”

The author of Book ‘A’ observes that for some centuries we have lived in what he calls a Promethean age; men have transformed their live by “turn[ing] the earth into an extension of themselves” “with the aid of fire” (5). The name Prometheus, he reminds us, means “foresight” (5); men have used fire to conquer nature, to control future events.

A new technology begins to supersede this “pyrotechnology.” “Biotechnology” does not merely reshape nature from the outside, as, for example, dynamos power machines that reshape ore into new machines, or as modern tyrants attempt to reshape men by machinelike institutions. Rather, it reshapes organisms from within eschewing the crude and superficial techniques of industrialism. “Biologists now view living organisms as information systems” (208). Using artificial information systems, computers, engineers will in effect “program” organisms, “mesh[ing] living material and the computer into a single form of production” (21). “[C]ybernetics is the organizing framework for the coming age, the computer is the organizing mechanism, and living tissue is the organizing material” (213).

The author of Book ‘A’ uses the popularization of Darwinism as an example of what is to come. Darwin himself acknowledged his debt to smith and to Malthus; the author contends that Darwin’s doctrine owed much of its popular success to its compatibility with the ethos of capitalism. Attacking Darwin’s theory of evolution as empirically baseless and logically false or tautological, he contends that a civilization’s “ruling metaphor is usually sub-philosophical. As bioengineering metaphors become popular, men should ask themselves if they are not in the thrall of a new myth, replacing Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” with the “survival of the best informed” (221). This myth would reduce nature to a mass of manipulable data.

“Information,” then, replaces “knowledge” as “change itself is honored as the only timeless truth;” “we saturate knowledge with temporality” (240). “The belief that there are no ironclad truths or some objective reality that human beings can discover does not mark the end of the great self-deception that has long plagued humanity, but only the beginning of a new chapter,” animated not by humility but “bravado” (243). “Nature is being made anew, this time by human beings” (244), and our biological tinkerers will surely botch the job.

Book ‘A’ should not be represented as a pathfinding effort or a profound one, but its author states issues clearly and with energy. It is a skillfully-written polemic. As with all polemics, its author reserves the hardest questions for his opponents, not for himself. He fails to ask himself, for example, the question Socrates asks Cleinias: As we would be no better off for having all the gold in the world, effortlessly, if we did not know how to use it, could knowing how to make men immortal benefit us if we do not know how to use immortality, if we do not know how to live? Will men free of genetic disease, served by docile, manufactured slaves, and capable, at least, of that immortality the transmission of one’s exact genetic structure to another organism would bring, really imagine that they had solved any fundamental problem?

Book ‘B’ is far more polemical than Book ‘A’ and much less skillfully written. Its author complains that “we have invaded the long-silent burial grounds of the Carboniferous age” for the fuels that enable us to construct the dwellings, factories, machines, clothes, and roads that “exist as a kind of ghoulish testimonial to our violation of the past” (3). This attempt to make the reader feel guilty over man’s necrophiliac trifling with extinct cycads and equisetums is a mere foreshadowing of absurdities to come.

Theories, he tells us, are “tools, perhaps, but not truths” (31). They merely legitimize a “society’s” economic, political, and other activities while “at the same time” removing “all responsibility for those activities” (35). The theories of St. Thomas Aquinas, that apologist for feudalism, exemplify this dangerous human propensity toward the “legitimacy without responsibility” that “is the ultimate dream of every political elite” (36). “[S]mall snippets of physical reality… have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions” (41). Morality is “humanity’s chief accomplice in the appropriation of nature” (53); “goodness” is only “a mask for our nihilism” (56).

The author of Book ‘B’ cites Darwinism as the most influential nihilism of the hundred years. He calls Darwin’s lifelong interest in collecting biological specimens a characteristically bourgeois obsession. He claims that Darwin based his theory on an analogy between the Galápagos Islands and the British Isles, neither of which offers a sufficient variety of organisms upon which to base a theory of nature; however, the biographer quoted by the author actually refers to Darwin’s study of vampire bat and jaguars—organisms inhabiting that somewhat larger place, South America. The author also claims that “Darwin himself couldn’t believe” that the eye could be the product of evolution (151), although in the passage cited (The Origin of Species, Chapter VI, fourth section) Darwin goes on to explain his reasons for overcoming this doubt.

This tendentiousness combines with sentimentality. With each advance in bioengineering, “cell by cell, tissue by tissue, organ by organ, we give up our bodies as we give up our political power, a piece at a time” (237). This is a locution that might allow us to ignore to whom we are giving up our bodies: ourselves, at least as long as we maintain our political liberty. But the author of Book ‘B’ believes the collaboration of science and commerce so reprehensible, men’s weakness for myth so damaging, and his own condemnation of both so compelling, that in the penultimate chapter he reassures his readers: “Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, Charles Darwin… these were not evil men” (242), only misguided ones. One supposes that their shades will be as touched by the magnanimity as they are relived by the mercy of this soft-hearted miniature Nietzsche. In the meantime, he tells us in his concluding sentence, “the cosmos wails” (255).

Book ‘B’ will find its admiring readership among the devotees of what Professor Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. has called “cucumber liberalism”: persons (they would shrink from being called ‘men’) who derive their morality from Erich Fromm, their politics from Charles Reich, their theology from Harvey Cox, their economics from E. F. Schumacher, their military science of Jonathan Schell, and their vision of history from William Irwin Thompson. Readers, in short, more general than intelligent.

The problem, as you have guessed, is that Book ‘A’ and Book ‘B’ coexist between the covers of one book, Jeremy Rifkin’s Algeny. The resulting chimera issues from at least two causes.

First, according to the publicity material accompanying the book, Mr. Rifkin “has authored five books in the past five years on economic, political, cultural, philosophical, and theological themes.” This suggests that Mr. Rifkin partakes of the very industrialism he condemns, but without sufficiently rigorous ‘quality control,’ as assembly-line managers say.

The second cause is more fundamental. Mr. Rifkin is not quite sure how to think about nature, although he does have a fairly clear idea of what he thinks about it. Nature, he writes, consists of interdependent parts; it “asks us to surrender to the oneness of which we are a part” (47) and to be as “participatory” (56) as it is. Life begins “where security is nonexistent, where all things are vulnerable, where there are no hierarchies, no pecking orders, only relationships and mutual dependencies” (249). Life means undifferentiated “comradeship” (253). The human attempt to organize life is unnatural, “not of life but of death” (254).

Presumably, Mr. Rifkin exempts his own book from the latter dictum. But the problem remains: how does one think, much less write, about Mr. Rifkin’s genial chaos? The cosmos does indeed contain many things, more than Darwin or the cyberneticists see, but how does one assess the relative significance of, for example, competition and love? Mr. Rifkin cannot say. In an utterly mediocre man, this would cause random thinking. In Mr. Rifkin, who is not utterly mediocre, it causes patches of sense and nonsense stitched into a motley banner for a band of miscellaneous crusaders.

“[T]he new world we are entering is alien to the vision of all the great theologians, philosophers, and metaphysicians of the past” (218-219). On the contrary, it is an extension of the Machiavellian project as elaborated by Bacon. Understanding this project remains as important as ever, and few contemporary writers have understood it as well as the late Hans Jonas. His last book, Philosophical Essays, contains several pages on bioengineering, an activity he understands better than Rifkin does because he understands thinking better than Rifkin does. To an intelligent general reader who wants to know more about this issue, my advice is: skim Rifkin, read Jonas, study Bacon.