Facing Hard Times with Humor: In Defense of Holiness in a Technological Age

Reflections on Bob Goudzwaard, Part II

Dean Dettloff

After what was a vitalizing encounter with Bob Goudzwaard, a fixture of Reformational thought at ICS, we had the opportunity to hear Goudzwaard again, this time at convocation. Receiving his honorary doctorate, he took the opportunity to reflect on the history of ICS. The fundamental observation of the Institute, said Goudzwaard, was that neutrality is impossible. As we hear in Deutoronomy, there stands before us the choice between good and evil—and we are called to choose good. This decision is the axiomatic foundation for philosophy at ICS; not ontology, not metaphysics, not even philosophy, but a decision. For this reason, the initials “ICS” might just a well stand for “In Christ’s Service,” said Goudzwaard. He recalled that Bernard Zylstra, an early ICS Senior Member, was among the first to see the connections between imperialism and apartheid in South Africa (Zylstra was also the last to interview Steve Biko before his death in prison). In a context where Reformed Christians were largely the oppressors, Zylstra’s stance, motivated by his philosophy, was radical. Goudzwaard also named his friends Jim Olthuis, Henk Hart, and Cal Seerveld, who were in attendance, as innovators at work in service of the Lord Jesus. At their mention, I watched as these three nudged one another, smiled, and grasped for a fleeting moment the energy of their past experience.

Goudzwaard was not, however, receiving an honorary doctorate because of his ability to drum up a useful nostalgia. His address turned to the cultural climate, donning the rhetoric of a seasoned cultural and critical theorist. We are entering a world of extremes, he noted. Such a world is all the more dangerous given the rapid development of new technologies. While technologies bring with them incredible opportunities for advancement and human flourishing (Goudzwaard is no Luddite), they also hold the potential for the yet unimaginable catastrophe. Society has no unified vision to decide how to utilize and develop these technologies. Who will decide on their use? Money? Arrogance? Benevolence?

With the rise of polarized culture, ICS has a unique place—it must offer, in Goudzwaard’s words, an academic defense of holiness. We have lost the idea of healthy restraints, given up in favor of collective illusions. “Holiness” seems passé, cliché, at best a vestigial term from a bygone era of so-called righteous Christendom. Modern autonomy and postmodern resignation have won the day; we now face, in the words of Baudrillard, the will not of persons or powers but of the objects themselves. We have left the dialectics of meaning. We inherit a nebulous space devoid of purpose. The decision called for in Deuteronomy, so necessary in a technological and ambivalent age, is paralyzed by an endless string of qualifiers.

But Goudzwaard does not leave us in the void! To combat this pervasive nihilism, we require a living faith and a living God who overcomes resignation—a God who tells us to choose life or death. Alluding to Ephesians, Goudzwaard said ICS must become the helmet of hope. It must uphold respect for the truth, that most unpopular and unfashionable of girdles. The Word of God, its sword, must become its offensive weapon against mechanization and the airy nothing of contemporary society. This stays true to the history of ICS, which has a reputation for fighting on all fronts, both culturally and ecclesially, to the point of publishing a magazine called Vanguard. Aware of and sympathetic to those theorists who rend their theoretical clothes, the thinkers of ICS have sat in sackcloth; yet they also hear God in the whirlwind, and they begin again.

As he concluded, Goudzwaard offered one criticism of Paul’s military uniform. Paul, he said, sadly did not include humor among the armor and weapons he listed in Ephesians. Perhaps it was because he persecuted others and his heavy past invoked a stark seriousness. But humor is very strong; it disarms enemies, catches people off-guard. Communists and fascists, he said, have no humor. The Jewish people, however, have humor—and ICS has always had humor. As it proceeds, ICS must be a humorous place, allowing laughter to ring subversively through its halls. Ending with a joke, Goudzwaard left it to us, current Senior and Junior Members, faculty, staff, and supporters, to choose: life or death.

The opportunity to hear from this Reformational giant was among the many ICS experiences I will not forget. When the weekend was over, it was clear why Goudzwaard received this honor at ICS, and we left invigorated with the possibility that ICS might be the helmet of hope, with a good dose of humor, in a society in desperate need of truth, justice, and peace.

Dean Dettloff is a Junior Member at the Institute for Christian Studies, pursuing an MA Philosophy, and is the author of the blog Re(-)petitions.

First image used from http://www.refdag.nl/kerkplein/kerknieuws/eredoctoraat_voor_dr_b_goudzwaard_1_608006; second image used from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_helmet#mediaviewer/File:Helmet_centurion_end_of_second_century.jpg.

When the West has Lost its Way: A Reformational Take on Free-Market Capitalism

Reflections on Bob Goudzwaard, Part I

Dean Dettloff

On May 10th, at convocation, the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS) granted an honorary doctorate to Dutch economist and longtime friend of the Institute Bob Goudzwaard. Dr. Goudzwaard was kind enough to make time to speak with ICS students informally the day before. I thought I might share some of the highlights of our discussion, culling together some observations from my notes.

Dr. Goudzwaard slowly paced his way into our humble ICS classroom with a smile. With a significant and charming Dutch accent, he told the few of us gathered there that he was glad to be in Toronto with his wife, Elaine Botha. Over coffee and cookies, we shot the breeze about his recent move to South Africa and waited for students to trickle in. Soon enough, the conversation switched gears from pleasantries to philosophy, opened by Junior Member Josh Harris’s question about an exchange he was reading between Dr. Goudzwaard and American economist Michael Novak. Novak, a Catholic thinker, came to prominence discussing the relationship between Catholicism and free-market capitalism. Given Goudzwaard’s primary career as an explicator of Reformational philosophy and its criticisms of capitalism, the exchange was inevitable.

Goudzwaard began, in typical Reformational fashion, by rehearsing the need for a dynamic, multi-dimensional view of reality. In contrast to what he called a mechanistic worldview, he suggests speaking about society with organic, living metaphors. There is a biblical precedent, of course, as Goudzwaard reminded us of Paul’s decision to describe the Church as a body; organic relations between persons, he said, should have priority over mechanistic ones. He proceeded to note the positive contributions of Catholic social teaching in economics and politics, something Goudzwaard is particularly acquainted with given his experience in Dutch Parliament and the recent political cooperation between Catholics and Calvinists in Holland. Practically, he told us, Catholics and Calvinists often agree. Catholic labor movements focus on the family, which leads them to see the worker as part of a family—the worker is situated in a complex social matrix, and Catholics attempt to see the worker as imbued with human dignity. Reformational thinking finds significant points of contact here, given its commitment to seeing reality as multi-modal.

The two differ, however, ecclesiastically and ontologically. Catholicism, explained Goudzwaard, requires the Church to sanctify life; there is a hierarchical relationship at work. Reformational thinking, however, is a bit more horizontal. For Reformational thinkers, all of life is holy and sanctified. Humans are always responsive—with a glow of Calvinist mysticism (if there is such a thing), the world itself, he said, “is an expectation of an answer.” Reformational thinking, like Catholicism, wants to see the worker as participating in a variety of social and ontological relationships, but it prefers to conceive of things in terms of the well-being of the whole, of which the church is a part. In other words, the authority of the Church is dislodged in order to account for the organic, interrelated modes of all of reality and society. This calls to mind the “sphere sovereignty” of Abraham Kuyper, a founder of Reformational thinking, who argues that the spheres of reality each have a legitimate function and role to play, yet they are not to impinge upon other spheres. Governmentally, this means, according to Goudzwaard, there is room for a “need-based” intervention, but no more, thus the state has a legitimate role to play in social affairs but should not over-reach its sphere. Government must answer to the call and norm of justice, using its power not to do whatever it wishes but to act with reference to particular mandates.

This led us back to the particular problem of Novak and free-market capitalism. (Novak’s own stance does not entail many of the labor-oriented ideas of Catholicism noted above, preferring entrepreneurial freedom.) Goudzwaard brought up an example of a popular phrase from Margaret Thatcher, abbreviated to “TINA”—“There Is No Alternative.” In response to this acronym, he recalled some of his students came up with another, “TATA”—“There Are Thousands of Alternatives.” Conversation naturally came to consider the problem of economic and political pluralism. Each culture, said Goudzwaard, deserves its own economy, referring specifically to Japanese culture as an example. There, we find alternative values and relationships which should be expressed in their particularity, rather than reduced to the dominant models of value in the West.

But what, we asked, should the West be concerned with? Goudzwaard says we must ask the question: “What is enough?” This question came to his attention with the work of American author John Perkins. Individuals, Goudzwaard says, should face this hard question and decide according to their lives and needs. The question should be hard, however, and situated not within the context of economic “growth” but economic health. He provided the metaphor of a tree. A tree grows, but it is wise enough not to grow to the heavens and burden the earth. Instead, the tree gets tall enough—and then, it branches out and grows in fertility. A common misconception today is that growth is a good in itself, yet Goudzwaard wishes to contextualize growth with reference to other, more important and lasting issues.

Our conversation turned to more pervasive cultural problems. Goudzwaard brought up the example of Jean Baudrillard, a postmodern social theorist, whose notion of “strategy fatale” proved to be a useful way of articulating the contemporary climate. It is no longer the case that human agency determines the matrix of meaning, but we are subject to the will of the objects we encounter in daily life. Spanning theorists like Arendt, Foucault, Adorno, Marx, and Nietzsche, Goudzwaard weaved together a narrative of cultural nihilism. We have lost “our way.” The West needs a renewed “way orientation,” something different from a “goal orientation.” Today, the West has many “half-ideologies,” Goudzwaard noted, alerting us specifically to the religious language at work in popular politics. Campaigns that use the language of salvation are particularly troubling, assuming something like growth will “save us.” Be careful making applause for economic growth, he said, because before you know it, it will be commanding you; this is the power of a goal orientation. Peace, he concluded, is never a goal but a way.

Dean Dettloff is a Junior Member at the Institute for Christian Studies, pursuing an MA Philosophy, and is the author of the blog Re(-)petitions.

First image used from http://www.nieuwwij.nl/interview/er-moet-minder-focus-komen-op-geldgroei/; second image by bfshadow, used from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NASDAQ_stock_market_display.jpg.

Robocop Takes on Philosophy of Mind

by Matthew E. Johnson

Alex Murphy had no idea that tracking down some dirty cops in his department would turn him into a cyborg. After a car bomb and some 2028 AD technological wizardry, Alex Murphy wakes up as the first half man, half robot, all awesome crime fighting machine: Robocop. Now more machine than human, what has Alex Murphy become? Does he have free will, or is he nothing more than a computer program in the body of a cyborg?

Set to be released on DVD and Blu-ray today (June 3), the 2014 reboot of the classic science fiction film Robocop (1987), has received some fairly poor reviews. A lot of reviewers seemed to think it was a watered down remake of the original. Others thought it was okay for a sci-fi/action movie but was nothing special.

It’s (Not) All About the Cake

This is the first in a series of posts on the recent Are We There Yet?: Economic Justice and the Common Good Conference, which took place in Edmonton on May 12-13.

by Allyson Carr

Have you ever been to a county or school fair and participated in a cake walk? It's a bit like musical chairs, only it's pay-to-play, there's no sitting, and the last person standing gets a cake instead of a grab bag. But it's a winner-take all game that is focused entirely on the promise that there will be cake[1]—a promise that doesn’t come through for most of the players. There isn't even usually a prize for second place, so if you really want that carrot cake and you didn't get lucky this time, you'll have to either plunk down more money on the proverbial table, or go home empty handed. If any of the losers can’t afford to play again, and want to get a piece of the cake, they have to rely on the generosity of the winner, who might be willing to share some. In a cake walk, win or lose, it’s all about the cake.

In many ways, our current global economy reminds me a bit of a cake walk. There are many more losers than there are winners. People play on the promise that they will get the “cake,” when only a very small percentage of the players actually manage to do so. Because you have to pay to really play--or to put it another way, because it takes money to make money--the more resources you are willing to throw onto the table, the more likely you are to win, because you can just keep trying. Those who do win get their cake and can eat it too (carrots and all). While it’s considered generous for “winners” to share, there is no real social or legal mandate to do so. And, increasingly, there are a lot of people going away hungry.

This kind of cake-walk approach to the global economy is unsustainable, and no matter how many charitable and sincerely generous cake-winners there are out there sharing their wealth with people who are cut out of the game, it will not be enough. It is not a system founded on justice, and where justice (in a rich, robust sense) is not a founding mandate in any system, injustice is not only bound to happen, but is bound to happen systematically. One person’s carrot cake is another hundred, or even thousand, peoples’ stick. What can be done to change this?

Just a short while ago, the ICS' research centre, the Centre for Philosophy, Religion, and Social Ethics, co-hosted a conference on economic justice with the King’s University College in Edmonton. The conference looked at many different sides of economic justice, with panels on the oilsands resource extraction, business, aboriginal rights and land use, climate change, poverty, urban food security, law, and others. It tried to avoid the aforementioned cakewalk mentality, and instead worked on the founding belief that the economy (and wealth) deals with more than money: the economy is about the whole, about knowing how to work with and care for all the things around us that make living possible. In the words of one of our keynote speakers, economist Bob Goudzwaard:

So often the word ‘economic’ is trivialized into a matter of money or the distribution of money. The problem of economic justice then boils down to the question of how much money should be reserved for provisions for the poor. What poverty lurks behind this view of poverty! For in the Biblical context the word economy, oikonomia, is always related to the mandate of stewardship, which means the responsible governance of all goods and resources of the earth, including vulnerable eco-systems. Then all people can sustain their lives in such a way that nature can survive and future generations can live with dignity.  

We can hear in this formulation of the word “economy” an acceptable description of the common good. For it deepens the idea of justice. Economic justice is not just about pursuing more provisions for the poorest people. It also deals with the needs of future generations and demands continuous care for vulnerable ecosystems and the preservation of threatened species. There is no economic justice in a country or a region where these interests are systematically neglected.

What does it take to let economic justice flow like the river Amos speaks of? On Goudzwaard’s account, it takes a continual pursuit of the common good--where the common good is understood to include not only all humans, but all creation. This requires a fundamental shift in how we understand the economy and our actions within it, but it is a shift that more and more people are making. As his talk amply demonstrated, we are not there yet, but that doesn’t mean we should give up. Just the opposite.

In the coming months, we will continue to populate the conference website with more resources for people to draw on in our collective pursuit of economic justice, including videos and notes from the conference itself, as well as other resources. If you have any suggestions about resources to include, please send them our way! In the meantime, may we grow in our ability to understand and actively pursue the common good of all.

Allyson Carr is the Associate Director of the Centre for Philosophy Religion and Social Ethics at the Institute for Christian Studies.


[1] Yes, that is a Portal reference for you gaming geeks out there

First image by jeffreyw, used from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mrs_Js_Famous_Carrot_Cake_(4992072384).jpg. Second image used from http://www.nieuwwij.nl/interview/er-moet-minder-focus-komen-op-geldgroei/.

Fantastic Philosophy or Gaggles of Geese? Highlights from Winter 2014

“So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would just like to emit an inarticulate sound.”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §261.

Another semester comes to a close, and I’m starting to wonder if the honking I heard the other day was really geese making their way north now that spring has finally come or if it was the collective “inarticulate sound” of philosophy students nearing the end of their semester. Maybe a bit of both?

Nevertheless, 2014 has been full of novel ideas and brilliant insights at the Centre for Philosophy, Religion, and Social Ethics, and we haven’t even gotten to the best part yet. On May 12 and 13, the CPRSE will be hosting a conference in Edmonton, Alberta on economic justice called Are We There Yet? Economic Justice and the Common Good. Make sure to take a look through the line-up on the website—it’s sure to be an excellent and thought-provoking conference.

As we move into summer mode, where professors scramble together lesson plans and solidify syllabi and second year MA students painstakingly piece together theses (trying not to panic) and others get to take vacations, we should take a second to remember the best of Winter 2014 on Ground Motive.

Most Viewed - Trading Hell for Hope: An Interview with Nicholas Ansell

In light of the recent release of Dr. Nicholas Ansell’s new book The Annihilation of Hell, Ground Motive sits down to chat with Dr. Ansell about the publication, discussing some of the most fascinating and compelling aspects of the work. Due to the buzz that the book generated and the quality of Dr. Ansell’s scholarly work, this interview scored the most views of any post so far this year.

Most Comments - Celebrating Limitation

Dr. Shannon Hoff graced Ground Motive with an eloquent reflection on Hegel and how freedom and creativity can flow out of limitation. The article was a pleasure to read--rich and engaging--and inspired a series of comments from readers who were serious about interacting with Dr. Hoff's piece and about exploring its implications and connections with other ideas.

Best Discussion Starter - On Being Against “Being Against Metaphysics”: A Case of Peter Hacker
In this piece, PhD candidate Joshua Harris from the Institute for Christian Studies targets philosopher Peter Hacker, cautioning against the increasingly popular tendency to move away from metaphysics. Harris suggests that metaphysics is the meat and potatoes of philosophy, a claim that started a cascade of substantive responses and a lively discussion.

Most Innovative Post - Evolution or Emergence? Freedom and Paradox on a Saturated Beach
Throughout his contributions to Ground Motive, Joseph Kirby has consistently proven his knack for combining creative thinking with rigorous philosophy. This post navigates between science and religion, offering some reflections on the limits of what science and religion can tell us about who we are.

Best Three-Part Literature Review for the “Justice and Faith” project -

1. The Quest for Salvation and Our Social Engagement: Are they Reconcilable?
2. Whose Reformed Tradition? Which Kuyper?
3. A Replacement Hermeneutic & An Individualist Soteriology

As you may know, the CPRSE has partnered with the Centre for Community Based Research and the Christian Reformed Church of Canada to examine the connections between personal and public faith and conceptions of justice. The collaboration has resulted in a literature review outlining three areas where these themes meet:

Best ICS Alumnus Post - A Multiplying Fruitfulness: Meaning and/or Nihilism in Procreation
Drew Van’t Land, recent graduate from ICS’s MA program, writes on how family values can slip into looking a lot like nihilism or biological reductionism. He puts forward a new way of thinking about what it means to be fruitful and to multiply life.

Post about the Most Ridiculous Controversy - Explosions in the Twitterverse: Coca-Cola and the Canonization of “America the Beautiful”
This article analyzes the hidden sentiments about music and community identity that motivated the weird controversy over the Coca-Cola commercial during the Super Bowl and what they might mean for our ability to connect with others through music and in general.

Best Metaphor - Being in Three Places at One Time: Economic Justice from the Riverbanks and the Middle of the Stream
Reflecting on the ways in which we’re all implicated in systems of injustice, Associate Director of the CPRSE Allyson Carr suggests that all of us are simultaneously pushing people into the river, trying to save ourselves from drowning in the river, and trying to pull others out. We can’t approach problems of social injustice from outside—we’re always already deeply involved in systems of injustice in multiple ways.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to Ground Motive this semester, and we hope Ground Motive’s articles have made you wonder and ponder as much as they have for us at the CPRSE.