The Scholar`s Vocation: The Search for the True-the Search for the Good
By Robert N. Bellah
[Dr. Robert N. Bellah is Elliott professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley where he taught sociology 1967-1997. Born in Altus, Oklahoma and graduated from Harvard, he has played a major role in the development of sociology and social ethics for half a century. I am indebted first to Baylor University`s Graduate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Larry Lyon, for giving me his permission to print this address prepared for Scholars` Day at Baylor and subsequently printed in Baylor`s publication Colloquium and second to Dr. Bellah himself who gave me his personal permission to use here the original manuscript of that address with such revisions as he chose to make. As the editors of Colloquium said, Dr. Bellah`s "influence moved beyond the discipline of sociology when, in 1975, his book, The Broken Covenant, analyzed the political and social upheavals of the 1960s and how they affected our historic understanding of religious meaning and national destiny. In 1984 his role on the public stage grew even larger with Habits of the Heart and later, in 1992, The Good Society, best sellers by Bellah and junior colleagues that initiated a continuing debate on the limits of individualism and moral responsibility to the community and society." This is good medicine. And strong. Take it.]
It is a great pleasure to be with you and to take part in your celebration of scholarship, though as those of you who know my work will expect, my celebration will be contentious, but that, too, is a legitimate part of scholarship. As a Christian I sometimes feel that I am living in the belly of the beast at Berkeley. In any case what I will say today comes out of a lifetime spent at secular universities and so may not apply to you at Baylor. Yet we live in the same society and are subject to the same academic pressures, so there will probably be some relevance after all.
As I sat down to write this talk I realized that the very title I gave to Larry Lyon, "The Scholar`s Vocation: The Search for the True; the Search for the Good," is an illustration of the problem I want to address. I should rather have suggested a much shorter title, but one that expresses the burden of my argument, namely, "The True Scholar." For when we say of someone that he or she is a true scholar, or a true scientist, we mean not only that he or she is knowledgeable or skillful, though we do mean that, but that the person has qualities of character, of stance toward the world, that I think are clearly normative or ethical, not merely cognitive. In our common use, then, though not in our reigning philosophies, the true and the good are not two different things, but aspects of one thing. Everything I want to say this afternoon is an effort to make that common sense perception more conscious and defensible in the argument about what scholarship in its multiple meanings, including teaching, is all about. Let me turn to that cantankerous but very intelligent philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, to open my argument. He writes:
What contemporary universities have characteristically lost, both in their practice and in their theorizing, is an adequate grasp of the relationship between the intellectual and the moral virtues… For while the university thinks of itself as a place of enquiry, it happily rejects the thought that such enquiry should be envisaged as having any one overall telos or good and that that good might itself be adequately intelligible only as an ordered part of the human good. What goods enquiry is to serve and how they are to be envisaged is instead to depend upon the choices and preferences of the enquirers and of those who supply their material resources. [I shall return to that.] For academic freedom on a liberal view of it requires that rival beliefs about the human good, including denials that there is such a good, should be encouraged to coexist in a university which is itself to be uncommitted. [Here I would differ to some degree with MacIntyre in that I think one of our problems is that arguments about the human good are not encouraged at all in the contemporary university.] What enquiry needs from those who practice it is not moral character, but verbal, mathematical and problem-solving skills. A few qualities of character are of course highly valued: industriousness, a show of deference to one`s professional superiors and to the academic system, cheerful collegiality, and sufficient minimal honesty to ensure reliability in reporting research findings. For these are qualities of character functionally necessary, if
skills are to be successfully put to work. [Here I would note that even the most value-free conception of scholarship nonetheless requires some virtues, however limited, and implies others, not so limited.] But there is no overall end to be served by those qualities or those skills, no agreed or presupposed ultimate good in view. What is the outcome?
It is fragmentation, so that by and large what goes on in one area of enquiry has little or no connection with what goes on in other areas. ("The Mission of a Dominican House of Studies in contemporary North America," unpublished ms., 1991)
Here I would point out that the fragmentation that MacIntyre accurately points out is perhaps the result not so much of the lack of a notion of the human good as by the presence of a kind of notion of the human good that is left undiscussed. I will be returning to this matter.
A major source of our problem (or what I think is our problem-I don`t expect that all of you will agree) is the iron curtain drawn by Immanuel Kant between the cognitive and the ethical, between, in his terms, pure reason and practical reason. According to Kant, and we are all of us in the university more or less Kantian in this regard, there is an unbridgeable gap between the two realms so that we cannot get to one from the other but each requires a beginning from scratch on its own terms. As a result, our modern quasi-Kantian university has decided to commit itself to cognitive inquiry and push ethical inquiry to the margins, a sub-field in philosophy or something we`ll let the professional schools worry about. I will be arguing that the quasi-Kantian university carries a much more substantive ethical message than it admits to, but before going into that I want to explore alternative possibilities.
While for Plato the Good, the True, and the Beautiful have an ultimate unity, for Aristotle there is a clear distinction between the intellectual and the moral virtues, and it was Aristotle more than Plato who influenced the subsequent tradition in the West. So, long before Kant, we have a problem with how the two sets of virtues are to be related. But for Aristotle, unlike Kant, there is a relationship, one set forth in the Nicomachean Ethics, though sufficiently unclearly that it continues to be debated by scholars. While from one point of view wisdom, sophia, is the highest virtue (and I would remind you that wisdom is not to be equated with scientific knowledge in the post-Kantian view), from another point of view the governing virtue is phronesis, inadequately translated as prudence or practical reason, not to be equated with Kant`s practical reason. Let me translate phronesis as judgment, remembering that this is judgment in a very high sense of the term. One could say, pushing Aristotle just a bit, that judgment is the most theoretical of the practical virtues and the most practical of the theoretical virtues: in other words it is the place they come together. Judgment in this use of the term involves a sense of proportion, of larger meaning, of what a situation requires, at once cognitively and ethically.
When we say that an action or a person is "truly human" we are using phronesis, judgment. We are saying simultaneously that this action or person is such as humans can be and such as they ought to be. We are not saying that this is what human beings on average are, but we are also not saying that this is what human beings in some ideal and unrealizable sense ought to be. Similarly when we call something inhuman, like ethnic cleansing, we are saying that it falls below not only the level of what humans ought to do, but what we expect human beings to do. I would also argue that in describing an event like the massacre at Srebenica without using the term "inhuman" or one of its synonyms would be mistaken. It would not only be an inaccurate description of what happened, but it would give a wrong moral evaluation of what happened, for it would not be neutral at all. It would imply, whether intentionally or not, that this action was not only normal but acceptable.
I would argue that, and not only in the humanities and the social sciences, we use judgment in this sense all the time, and could not conduct the scholarly enterprise without it. Thus we rely not only, as MacIntyre claimed, on the "functional virtues" supportive of a limited view of scholarship, but as a matter of empirical fact on judgment, which, as I am using it, is one of the highest virtues. But MacIntyre`s criticism is correct insofar as we do not take responsibility for what we are doing, we claim to be devoted to pure cognitive inquiry without any other intent, and we argue that the only normative basis for our inquiry is freedom, not taking conscious responsibility for the fact that, as I would argue, freedom without judgment would self-destruct.
Let me illustrate my point with a natural scientist. I would say that E. O. Wilson is a true scholar, a true scientist. By which I don`t mean that he agrees with me, because he certainly doesn`t. There is nothing I detest so much in our current intellectual life as sociobiology (well, we will see that there is one thing that I detest even more). Nor is it just that I admire Wilson`s forthright stand in favor of environmentalism, with which I do agree, though that is part of it. What I admire about Wilson that leads me to call him a true scholar or scientist is the passion with which he pursues his work and his conviction (mistaken in my view, at least if we think of his overall theory and not of his many superb studies) that he is contributing to the human good. I also admire his recent attempt in Consilience (Knopf, 1998) to overcome fragmentation in our cultural life, when so many refuse even to see the problem, even if I don`t believe he has chosen the right way to do so. Nor do I think I am alone in my admiration for him. I think Wilson`s stature in the scholarly world is related to this assessment of him as a person, though it is also enhanced, alas, because his views contribute to certain reigning paradigms in our culture. I celebrate Wilson because he is a mind to be reckoned with and worth reckoning with at every level. And he is far from alone in the American academy. So, though I intend to be as critical as MacIntyre in these remarks, I do hope to be somewhat more benignly critical, and to insist that in spite of many disturbing tendencies in theory and practice, all is not wrong and indeed a lot is as it should be.
Let me address where I do think we have gone wrong. In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry MacIntyre describes three notions of what the university is today, which I will call, adapting his terminology, traditional, positivist, and postmodernist. Traditional is of course where we came from, the tradition of liberal education with its strong ties to the classics and in America to theology. It has been gradually displaced from the last decades of the nineteenth century by the positivist model of untrammeled inquiry, embracing subjects never included in the older curriculum (it is worth remembering that the great achievements of early modern science took place almost entirely outside the university) and throwing off the narrow conception of what a classical and Christian education ought to be, but also, in part inadvertently, throwing out any defensible notion of phronesis or judgment that might have held the enterprise together in the face of positivism`s penchant for fragmentation. Quite recently, postmodernism has arisen in part as a criticism of what it believes is the false cognitive neutrality of the positivist university and has argued, not without evidence, that the university exists only to support existing structures of power, particularly in the areas of class, race and gender. But postmodernism rejects tradition as much as positivism as just one more form of power play and so is unable to bring back any notion of judgment as a governing virtue. Indeed the very idea of a governing virtue would be abhorrent to our postmodernist friends, even though, I would argue, they can no more do without it in practice than can the positivists.
But changes in the university, and therefore necessarily in scholarship, over the last one hundred years are not due only to changing intellectual understandings: they are also due to changes in the relation of the university to society. For one thing the university has never been a place devoted solely to the formation of character or to pure inquiry. The university has always been, in America as elsewhere, an avenue of social mobility. One`s life chances are enhanced by attaining a university degree-about that there is plenty of empirical evidence as far back as one can go. Mobility aspirations have long placed pressures on universities but for a long time they were gentle pressures. By and large the university`s authority to tell upwardly mobile young men, and later young women, what they needed to know was not basically challenged. And the liberal arts as a central core of the curriculum continued to draw most students even after the positivist model of the university had gained dominance. But in recent decades and in part because a much higher percentage of the relevant population goes to college but perhaps even more due to changes in our environing culture, students have begun more and more to tell us what they want to know, with drastic consequences for the curriculum, and so for hiring, and so for scholarship, that I will describe in a moment. In a world of consumers, consumer students now make decisions, for better or for worse, that were once made by faculty.
But consumer students are not the only pressures that universities have faced. Universities, and so scholarship, have been seen as serving external purposes, above all for the state and for the economy. The most influential outside purpose deriving from the state by far has been the pressure to contribute to war efforts. The university was mobilized, if briefly, during World War I; more totally during World War II; but even more significantly, for the long twilight period of the Cold War lasting until just about a decade ago. During these years universities grew accustomed to large government research grants, not only in the natural sciences, but in the humanities and social sciences as well, for things like area studies. Since the end of the Cold War the external purpose that the university is supposed to serve above all has been the economy, though economic usefulness has been a university purpose to some degree at least since the founding of land-grant colleges in the nineteenth century. I have written of these pressures in the current issue of Academe so I won`t do more than mention them here.
I think it might be helpful to look at some evidence of changes in the university relative to my theme. My theme, as I said at the beginning, is the true scholar, and the true scholar, I will argue, requires, at least in the long run, a true university, or at least something like one. I have suggested that the very notion of a true university depends on the survival of what MacIntyre means by traditional inquiry, one in which the link between the intellectual and the moral virtues is not entirely broken, one in which something like judgment has at least a degree of influence. Now it is clear what area in the current understanding of the university is closest to this understanding, even though it is at the moment rent by civil war, namely, the humanities. So let us look at the fate of the humanities in recent decades.
Fortunately I have a recent survey of trends in the humanities that appeared in Harvard Magazine (Vol. 100, No. 5, May-June, 1998, pp. 48-55, 111.) last year. It was written by James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield and is entitled "The Market-Model University: Humanities in the Age of Money." (Sometimes there`s a lot in a title.) I cannot give you all their findings but let me convey some of the most important ones:
Humanities represent a sharply declining proportion of all undergraduate degrees. Between 1970 and 1994, the number of B. A s conferred in the United States rose 39 percent. Among all bachelors degrees in higher education, three majors increased five- to ten-fold: computer and information sciences, protective services, and transportation and material moving. Two majors, already large, tripled: health professions and public administration. Already popular, business administration doubled. In 1971, 78% more degrees were granted in business than in English. By 1994 business enjoyed a [400%] advantage over English and remained the largest major. English, foreign languages, philosophy and religion [as well as history, all suffered absolute declines].
They then point out that:
Measured by faculty salaries–a clear sign of prestige and clout-the humanities fare dismally. On average humanists receive the lowest faculty salaries by thousands or tens of thousands of dollars; the gap affects the whole teaching population, regardless of rank.
Humanists teaching loads are highest, with the least amount of release and research time, yet they`re now expected, far more than three decades ago, to publish in order to secure professorial posts.
Humanists are also more than others, increasingly compelled to settle for adjunct, part-time, non-tenured appointments that pay less, have little or no job security, and carry reduced benefits or none. (p. 50)
There`s even more, but I don`t want to be too depressing. Perhaps none of this has happened at Baylor but there is a useful inset in the article about my own alma mater: it shows that the same trends have occurred at Harvard: fewer majors, lower salaries, higher teaching loads in the humanities, even if, compared to many schools the humanities are not too badly off. But it would seem that few schools have entirely escaped these trends.
Having observed that by all measures "the humanities` vital signs are poor," our authors seek an explanation and find it in what they call the Age of Money:
When we termed the last 30 years the Age of Money, we were in part referring to the dollar influx of research grants, higher tuitions, and grander capital improvements. But there`s another, more symbolic, aspect to the Age of Money, and one not less powerful for being more symbolic. The mere concept of money turns out to be the secret key to "prestige," influence, and power in the American academic world.
They argue that there are "Three Criteria for the power of money in Academia, whose rule is remarkably potent, uniform, and verifiable. Academic fields that offer one (or more) of the Three Criteria thrive; any field lacking all three languishes." And this by any measure you would want to take. "In the Age of Money," they continue, "the royal road to success is to offer at least one of the following:
A Promise of Money. The field is popularly linked (even if erroneously) to improved chances of securing an occupation or profession that promises above average lifetime earnings.
A Knowledge of Money. The field itself studies money, whether practically or more theoretically, i.e. Fiscal, business, financial, or economic matters and markets.
A Source of Money. The field receives significant external money, i.e., research contracts, federal grants or finding support, or corporate underwriting. P. 52)
If this picture of the contemporary university is true, and it would be hard to argue that it does not contain at least some truth, then our life together in the university is governed, again to the extent that this description is true, by neither the intellectual nor the moral virtues but by a vice: namely cupidity, acquisitiveness, or just plain avarice, the same vice that dominates our society as a whole in the Age of Money. To the extent that this is true, and I think it is not the whole truth, it has come about, I believe, more through default than intention: it is the result of many small decisions made by administrators and faculty concerned to keep their institutions afloat in a changing society. Yet to the extent that we are dominated by one of the classic vices rather than the intellectual and moral virtues, we have ceased to be a true university and therefor it is increasingly difficult for us to be true scholars.
I am sorry to bring up these sordid realities at a moment when we are celebrating scholarship, but if we are to celebrate true scholarship then we must not hide from reality, but celebrate it in the teeth of reality. And so I must pursue my critical inquiry at least one step further and discuss the emergence of a master-theory in the social sciences that mirrors changes in the general society-namely what is called rational choice or rational actor theory, which as you might have guessed, is the one theory I detest even more than sociobiology.
In America, and to some extent in the world, we seem to have returned in the last thirty years to something like the last decades of the nineteenth century, that is, laissez faire, unconstrained, capitalism. And just as the strident capitalism of the late nineteenth century was mirrored by the theory of social Darwinism, so the rise of neo-laissez faire capitalism in the last thirty years is mirrored by the rise of rational choice theory-more subtle, more technically sophisticated than social Darwinism, but, I would argue, an offspring of the same lineage which ultimately goes back to utilitarianism, the commonsense philosophy of the Anglo-American world at least since the eighteenth century.
Rational choice theory, which as we will see in a moment, was not originally received with open arms in economics, is now taken as common sense there and has spread out into many neighboring disciplines: political science, sociology, law, even religious studies, where it enjoys quite a vogue. Now you may ask what`s wrong with that? Isn`t it perfectly appropriate that a new theory should rise and have widespread currency in the university? I will argue in response that this theory is not only too uncomfortably close to general trends in our society, such as what has happened in the humanities in the last thirty years, but also what has happened to medicine, the family, religion, etc., but also that the theory is itself an apologia for just the dominant vice I described as taking over society and with it our universities. If the theory were true, however, we would just have to admit not only that acquisitiveness is the fundamental human motive, but that, as it was put in the 1980s, "greed is good." If rational choice theory is true, then we were mistaken all these years, in all the religions and philosophies of mankind, in thinking cupidity a vice-no, rather it is our chief virtue. The full implications of that we are only beginning to learn in our society and our universities today.
Yet I think a powerful argument can be mounted against rational choice theory as an adequate explanation of the human condition, and that consequently all is not lost in the defense of the intellectual and moral virtues. Before suggesting that counterargument, however, I want to talk a bit about the history of rational choice theory, because the history of something often tells us a great deal about it. I learned about this history only recently from a graduate student in the history of science at Berkeley, S. M. Amadae, who is completing a brilliant and illuminating dissertation on the history of rational choice theory, "Rational Choice Theory in Economic, Political and Policy Science, 1944-1975: A New Chapter in Economic and Political Liberalism." Surprisingly, this is the first attempt to write the history of this influential movement.
Do you know what institution is primarily responsible for the emergence of rational choice theory after World War II? Take a guess. I`ll give you a hint-it`s not a university. No, it`s the RAND Corporation. I`m sure we have all heard of the RAND Corporation, but I wonder how many of you, like me, never knew exactly what it was or when it began. It began in 1946 and its most significant founder was Donald Douglas, of the Douglas Aircraft Company (thus its Santa Monica location), with the initial infusion of ten million dollars from the United States Air Force. It was an effort to maintain the collaboration of scientists, scholars and the military after the end of World War II in a quasi-governmental, quasi-private institution. I can`t go into the whole history of RAND but it became closely associated with the Ford Foundation in the 1950s, and involved the participation of virtually every major contributor, in no matter what field, to the emergence of rational choice theory. To quote Amadae directly:
Locating the development of the conceptual apparatus for rational choice theory within the national security environment counters a basic myth frequently perpetuated about the origin of rational choice theory.
The myth, she says, consists of two parts: 1) that the idea of the rational actor in the rational choice sense was always at the heart of economics, and 2) that rational choice theory involves the export of economic models to other disciplines. The recognition of the importance of RAND, however, allows for a correct understanding. She writes:
This lineage [that is the origin of rational choice theory in RAND] reveals two crucial facts which are otherwise hopelessly obscured. The conceptual framework for rational choice theory was developed to solve strategic, military problems and not problems of economic modeling. Furthermore, this idea set was developed to inform policy decisions, not merely retrospectively to analyze behavior as the social sciences often claim of their own methodology. Thus, the first strategic "rational actor" as conceptualized in game theory and the decision sciences was a nation-state locked in the icy and treacherous grip of the cold war. The theory of rational action had interlocking descriptive, normative, and prescriptive components, and was developed to inform action respecting nuclear strategy and complex questions of weapons procurement.
Indeed the first real classic of rational choice theory in economics was Kenneth Arrow`s Social Choice and Individual Values, published in 1951 but written largely in 1948 when Arrow was at RAND where he had been, according to Amadae, "assigned the task of deriving a single mathematical function which would predict the collective political outcomes for the entire Soviet Union."
I don`t want to dispute at all that rational choice theory had become by the 1980s central in economics, nor that in recent years economic rational choice theory has had an enormous influence, particularly through the University of Chicago Economics Department, on many other fields, including my own, partly because of the direct personal relationship between the economist Gary Becker and the sociologist James Coleman at Chicago. I want to set the record straight on the origin of rational choice theory, however, by showing that it did not originate in disinterested theorizing in some university ivory tower but in the very practically oriented RAND Corporation and that it had, in that context, as Amadae puts it "interlocking descriptive, normative, and prescriptive components." Probably the single most important theoretical source of rational choice theory was Von Neumann and Morgenstern`s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, published in 1944, a book which was regarded as unimportant to mainstream economists until Arrow`s work had finally been absorbed by them.
Whatever one thinks of game theory, rational choice theory as developed at RAND was prescriptive, and it did indeed determine action. It`s first great empirical test came when one of its primary devotees, not a professor but a former president of the Ford Motor Company and then Secretary of Defense, Robert MacNamara (and I won`t develop the chain which links MacNamara to RAND but it is a tight one), had a chance to use it as the basis of decision making in the Vietnam War. I think it is safe to say that that test was not a success. And the reason was that the North Vietnamese would not behave as rational actors are supposed to behave because they had absolute value commitments, or ideological zealotry, or whatever you want to call it, which simply was not explicable in rational actor terms.
I want to suggest two things from this example. One is that rational choice theory is wrong, not because much human action cannot be explained in such terms–much human action can indeed be explained in such terms–but because all human action cannot be explained in such terms. For a theory that claims to be total, the existence of such exceptions is fatal, particularly when the decisions the theory cannot explain turn out not to be minor cases of unexplained variance, but decisions critical to the understanding of human action.
Let me give you an example of the flaws of rational choice theory from my own experience. An early review of Habits of the Heart published, interestingly enough, in the Wall Street Journal, was by William Riker of the University of Rochester. Riker said, in effect, what are the authors of Habits talking about? We have traffic lights, the credit system works, who needs community? That response remained to a degree mysterious to me until I finally learned of Riker`s position as the leading American exponent of rational choice theory in Political Science.
You may think I have gone a long way round given the topic of my address this afternoon, but I haven`t. I hope to have shown, and could show in much greater detail if there were time, that a theory, born not in the university but in the intense engagement of the Cold War and as a tool for the prosecution of that war, is now ensconced in the university and taught to students as scientific truth. When Gary Becker writes A Treatise on the Family to show that choices involving marriage and family are explicable in terms of each individual maximizing his or her competitive, strategic, self-interest, is that a treatise about the True or the Good. Or, indeed, is it about virtue or vice? Is there any way of teaching that as though it had no practical intent? Even a student who says, "Well, I`m not really like that," will conclude that "if other people are, then I had better behave in strategic terms or I will be taken advantage of." Gary Becker`s wife, as we know, turned out to be one of his best students. In their divorce decree she asked for a declaration that if he won the Nobel Prize she would get half of the stipend. He, thinking that a very unlikely possibility, agreed. She won.
I haven`t left much time for my counter-argument, but I can think of no better place to begin than the recent book of the Dutch primatologist, Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Harvard, 1996). De Waal argues that strategic action for the individual`s benefit as the sole or main explanation of action is not true even in the animal realm. He shows that the presence of generosity to the point of self-sacrifice, is documented for higher mammals, including not only our nearest primate relatives, but whales and dolphins as well. According to de Waal, not only sympathy and nurturing, but even a sense of justice, are things we share with higher mammals, are part of our nature. Indeed if that were not the case we would not be social–here de Waal rediscovers one of the deepest truths of sociology, namely Durkheim`s argument for the fundamentally normative nature of social existence. As de Waal puts it:
If group life is based on a social contract, it is drawn up and signed not by individual parties, but by Mother Nature… Even in our species, which prides itself on free will, we may find an occasional hermit who has opted for reclusion; yet we never encounter someone who has consciously decided to become social. One cannot decide to become what one already is. (p. 170)
I think the empirical evidence for the fundamentally social, and therefore normative, character of human life is overwhelming and that it is only the ideological blinders of our current cultural mood that leads so many people, including academics, to overlook it. I don`t expect to make any converts with these brief assertions and I am fully aware of the convoluted explanations of ethical and unselfish behavior which the rational choice school can supply. I merely want to assert that those of us who would defend the intellectual and moral virtues, and judgment as the virtue where they come together, and true scholarship and a true university which is dependent on that virtue, have a lot of evidence going for us, not only in the social sciences but also in biology, not to speak of the humanities.
Let me conclude by recounting an exchange between one of my ablest recent students and myself. He wrote, quoting a well-known French sociologist, that all human action is motivated by a competitive struggle to increase some form of capital. I said to him, "Is that true of you? Are you just out to increase your capital? How could I ever trust you if that were true?" I don`t say there was an instant conversion, but my reaction had a very sobering effect on him. It began by his saying, "I never thought of applying this theory to myself." Well theories do apply to ourselves and they have tests that are both empirical and ethical, and often it is impossible to tell where the cognitive leaves off and the ethical begins. Scholars live in a world, and the world we live in right now is dominated, as Engell and Dangerfield point out, by money. If we believe that the struggle for strategic advantage is the truth about human beings then we should realize that we are not just teaching a scientific truth, we are preaching a gospel. We have been there before in our intellectual history and we decided that it was wrong; but a lot of things we imagined had gone away have returned in recent years. And if we don`t think that the struggle for strategic advantage is the whole truth about human beings then in our scholarship and our teaching what we say will be at the same time scientific and ethical. Put differently, that would be to begin consciously to accept that our work is governed by the virtue of judgment, at least in aspiration. That alone would be an enormous contribution in our present situation.
The postmodern view that the regime of knowledge and the regime of power are the same is false, like all such absolute theories, but like many false theories it has a grain of truth: knowledge of the true and the good is always involved with power. To be true scholars we must realize that we will be engaging not with ivory tower abstractions alone but with the real world and with real consequences. The best work being done at Berkeley and at Baylor, and at many other universities today, is, I believe, an expression of that realization.
