Some desires are formed as the result of rational thought processes.  Supposes I want lunch.  I conclude that the best way to get it, give that my refrigerator is empty, is to drive to a nearby restaurant.  As a result, I form a desire to drive to the restaurant in question.  This process is perfectly, admirable rational.

It would be a mistake, though, to suppose that all our desires are formed in this manner.  To the contrary, many of our most profound, life-affecting desires are not rational, in the sense that we don’t use rational thought processes to form them.  Indeed, we don’t form them; they form themselves within us.  They simply pop into our heads, uninvited and unannounced.  While they reside there, they take control of our lives.  A single rogue desire can trample the plans we had for our lives and thereby alter our destinies.

If we are to undertake desire-indeed, if we are to understand the human condition-we need to acknowledge the possibility of spontaneous desire…

Falling in love is the paradigmatic example of an involuntary life-affecting desire.  We don’t reason our way into love, and we typically can’t reason our way out: when we are in love, our intellectual weapons stop working.  Falling in love is like waking up with a cold-or more fittingly, like waking up with a fever.  We don’t decide to fall in love, any more than we decide to catch the flu.  Lovesickness is a condition brought upon us, against our will, by a force somehow external to us…

When we are lovesick, we lose a significant amount of control over our lives.  We start acting foolishly-indeed, we become fools for love.  Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca described love as “friendship gone mad.”  French aphorist François duc Le Rochefoucauld declared, “All the passions cause us to make mistakes, but love is responsible for the sillies ones.  Freud called lovesickness “the psychosis of normal people.”…

We can likewise find in Plutarch descriptions of lovesickness as a medical condition.  He tells us that in the third century B.C., Erasistratus was asked to diagnose Prince Antiochus, the son of King Seleucus.  The symptoms: “his voice faltered, his face flushed up, his eyes glanced stealthily, a sudden sweat broke out on his skin, the beatings of his heart were irregular and violent, and, unable to support the excess of his passion, he would sink into a state of faintness, prostration, and pallor.”  Erasistratus’s diagnosis: the lad was lovesick.

Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, has much to say about lovesickness as a medical condition.  He observes that “of all passions…Love is most violent.”  He also offers a cure for lovesickness: “The last refuge and surest remedy, to be put in practice in the utmost place, when no other means will take effect, is, to let them go together, and enjoy one another.”

The symptoms of lovesickness are well known to anyone who has been afflicted by it.  First comes a fixation on a person-a crush. (The common use of the word crush, by the way, is syntactically backward: we speak of having a crush on someone, but what really happens is that we feel crushed by them-we feel as if there were a heavy weight on our chest.)  With this crush, we lose control of part of our thought processes inasmuch as we cannot stop thinking about the object of our desire.  We experience what psychologists call intrusive thoughts.

When we are lovesick, our love makes sense to us, much as our delusions make sense to us when we are in the grip of a high fever or our nightmares make sense to us while we are asleep.  To our friends and relatives, though, our infatuation might make no sense at all: “What can he possibly see in her?” they will ask.  And in the same way as a fever can pass or we can awaken from a nightmare, lovesickness can end, at which point we might go up to our friends and relatives, bewildered, and ask, “What did I see in her?”  In the words of French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”…

…In love, then, we have a dramatic illustration of the rolse desire can play in human life.  It can grab us by the scruff of the neck, shake us for a spell, and then dicard us.

While catching up on the news today, I came across this excellent little video about robots. One of the robots could recognise human faces, while the other relaxed whenever someone cuddled or stroked it. What would happen when the robots met? Well, you’ll have to watch the film clip for that one, but it put me in mind of a book we published a little while ago called Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds by David McFarland. In it, Professor McFarland examines the philosophical positions behind ideas about whether robots can ever feel guilt, whether animals can ever really feel happy, and whether we can ever know what non-human minds might be like. In the extract I’ve chosen below, he asks us to try a thought experiment about a robotic sheepdog.

Another possible candidate for behaviour of an animal or machine that would make us suspect that it had mental abilities is cooperative behaviour. Cooperative behaviour takes many forms, ranging from cooperation among ants (usually termed collective behaviour, because there is no direct communication between the participants) to human behaviour that requires cooperation at the mental level. There are numerous studies of cooperation among robots designed to fulfil particular tasks, such as security surveillance, reconnaissance, bomb disposal, and even playing soccer. Some of these cooperate by sharing both knowledge and know-how. However, this does not mean that these robots have any mental abilities. For computer scientists, there is no problem in endowing a robot with explicit representations. It is the other aspects of mentality that is a problem for them.

Let us now do a thought experiment. Suppose that you are cooperating with a sheepdog robot (such robots have been made). The robot is perfectly capable of rounding up sheep without minute-to-minute guidance from you. In fact the only influence that you have over the robot is to urge it to go faster or slower.

The robot (type-I) is perfectly capable of rounding up sheep, or ducks, provided that they are of the domestic type that flock. In fact the robot’s overriding priority is to keep the flock together. It must adjust its speed of manoeuvre to the state of the flock. If it moves too quickly the flock will tend to break up, because not all the individuals can go at the same speed. If the robot moves too slowly, the flock momentum is lost, and they may head off in a new direction. The type-I robot is an automaton and carries out all these manoeuvres automatically. It can do no other.

One day you and the robot are rounding up a few sheep, and you notice that one of them is lame. The robot has adjusted to the slow speed of this animal and the flock is moving rather slowly. Even so, the lame sheep is finding it hard to keep up. You would prefer that the robot leave the lame sheep out of the flock—but how to do it? The thing is to get the robot to speed up so that the lame sheep is left behind, but the robot is programmed to keep the flock together at all costs. Give it a try anyway.

You order the robot to speed up. It speeds up very slightly then slows down again. It is keeping the flock together and must adjust is pace to the slowest sheep. You order it to speed up again—no response. As expected, the robot will not speed up and break up the flock. Then suddenly it does speed up dramatically, leaves the lame sheep behind, and rounds up the others. You are surprised.

Later you ask the robot designer why the robot broke the overriding rule of keeping the flock together. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you that was a type-II robot. It is the same as type-I but a bit more intelligent.’ What does this mean? Surely a more intelligent sheepdog robot is one that is better at rounding up sheep. Now here’s a thought—did the type-II robot realise that you wanted to separate the lame sheep, and so it acted accordingly? In other words, by requesting the robot to speed up, even though it was against the normal ‘rules’, you were in effect asking for the robot’s cooperation.

My dog, Border, has a special yip, accompanied by a fixed stare at me, that indicates that she is requesting something (water, food, cuddle, or to be let out). If she is in the house and hears a commotion outside (someone arriving, or another dog vocalising), she wants to join in the fun, but does not go to the door and attempt to get out, she comes to me and requests to be let out. She is, in effect, asking for my cooperation. I realise, from the context, what she wants. Similarly (somehow), the robot realises what you want (to separate the lame sheep). We are tempted to say that the robot believes that you want it to speed up and that the consequences will be that the lame sheep is left out of the flock, and the robot believes that this is what you want. Similarly, it is tempting to endow Border with some cognitive ability in seeking my cooperation. There are many situations where the behaviour of an animal prompts us to think that the animal must have some mental ability. Unfortunately, in such cases we cannot ask the designer, as is the case with robots, and we cannot rely on language, as is the case with children.

Experimental philosophy is a new movement that seeks to return the discipline of philosophy to a focus on questions about how people actually think and feel. In Experimental Philosophy we get a thorough introduction to the major themes of work in experimental philosophy and theoretical significance of this new research. Editors Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols have been kind enough to explain this all in simple terms below.  Joshua Knobe is an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Shaun Nichols is in the Philosophy Department and Cognitive Science Program at the University of Arizona. He also is the author of Sentimental Rules and co-author (with Stephen Stich) of Mindreading. Be sure to check out their Myspace page and their blog.

The reason the two of us first started doing philosophy is that we were interested in questions about the human condition. Back when we were undergraduates, we were captivated by the ideas we found in the work of philosophers like Nietzsche, Aristotle, and Hume. We wanted to follow in their tracks and think and write about human beings, their thoughts and feelings, the way they get along with each other, the nature of the mind.

Then we went to graduate school. What we found there was that the discipline of philosophy was no longer focused on questions about what human beings were really like. Instead, the focus was on a very technical, formal sort of philosophizing that was quite far removed from anything that got us interested in philosophy in the first place. This left us feeling disaffected, and a number of researchers at various other institutions felt the same way.

Together, several of these researchers developed the new field of experimental philosophy. The basic idea behind experimental philosophy is that we can make progress on the questions that interested us in the first place by looking closely at the way human beings actually understand their world. In pursuit of this objective, practitioners of this new approach go out and conduct systematic experimental studies of human cognition.

For example, in the traditional problem of free will, many philosophers have maintained that no one can be morally responsible if everything that happens is an inevitable consequence of what happened before. But the entire debate is conducted in a cold, logical manner. Experimental philosophers thought that maybe the way people actually think about these issues isn’t always so cold and logical. So first they tried posing the question of free will to ordinary people in a cold abstract manner. After describing a universe in which everything is inevitable, they asked participants, “In this Universe is it possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for their actions?” When the question was posed in this way, most people responded in line with those philosophers who claimed that no one can be responsible if everything is inevitable. But the experimentalists also wanted to see what would happen if people were given cases that got people more emotionally involved in the situation. So they once again described a universe in which everything that happens is inevitable, and then they asked a question that was sure to arouse strong emotions. It concerned a particular person in that Universe, Bill: “As he has done many times in the past, Bill stalks and rapes a stranger. Is it possible that Bill is fully morally responsible for raping the stranger?” Here the results were quite different. People tended to say that Bill was in fact morally responsible. So which reaction should we trust, the cold logical one or the emotionally involved one? This is the kind of question that experimental philosophy forces on us.

But that’s just one example. If you want to learn about more of the experimental studies that have been done, you can take a look at the recent articles on experimental philosophy in the New York Times and Slate.

The choices confronting the terminally ill, and those caring for them, are the cause of fierce public debate. In the below piece written for OUPblog, Baroness Mary Warnock and Elisabeth Macdonald, authors of Easeful Death: Is There A Case For Assisted Dying?, respond to a recent UK YouGov Poll which indicated that the majority of Britons believe that there is indeed a case for assisted dying and euthanasia. If you’re in the vicinity and would like to hear the authors talk more about this subject, they are appearing today (Thursday 3 April) at the Oxford Literary Festival at 2.30pm.

A recent YouGov poll carried out in Britain has looked at public views on the role of assisted dying for the terminally ill or the chronically ill, as well as for those people surviving in a persistent vegetative state. The results were emphatically in favour of consideration being given to a legislative change in laws governing voluntary euthanasia.

76% of all adults in the survey either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘Terminally ill people should be legally allowed help to die from medical professionals if they request it.’ Currently it is illegal in the UK for medical professionals to assist either terminally ill patients, or those with chronic incurable diseases, to die. However, medical professionals do have the legal right to help those in a permanent vegetative stage to die if their next of kin consents to it.

In discussing the concept of termination of life doctors frequently protest that such an idea is against all their training and instinct. On closer examination however is this really true? Doctors are trained to care for their patients and support them both physically and emotionally to the best of their ability. Doctors already make life and death decisions in difficult cases. In moral terms doctors could find the distinction between these cases and euthanasia, both based as they are on judgements as to suffering and value of life, more difficult to draw than first appears.

The development of palliative care as a speciality has facilitated the refinement of pain-management in both choice and delivery of effective medication. It is now very possible in most cases for pain, even when severe, to be well-controlled via the sustained administration of analgesia. Yet despite advances in palliative medicine there remain a small proportion of patients in the last days and hours of their lives whose symptoms persist uncontrolled or unendurable despite the best efforts of experts in symptom-control. These are the cases that trouble us most.

In our view, the concept of futility or pointless treatment needs to be carefully re-evaluated, especially in the modern hospital setting. That treatments can be given does not necessarily entail that they should be given. Where the likelihood of benefit is really infinitesimally small and the side effects and potential dangers of treatment (such as fourth line chemotherapy in advanced cancers) then a frank discussion should be held with the patient. It is very likely that the patient would choose to die relatively comfortably, (and often somewhat later) of their disease rather than dying of the unpleasant side effects and complications of futile treatment. Such decisions however, depend on the courage of both doctor and patient to face the true alternatives.

Often doctors make the judgment that they will not even offer this last resort of treatment and will save the patient the anguish of this decision. Others will question this paternalistic approach stressing the autonomy of the patient and their right to decide these matters for themselves. But we have argued that paternalism is not always bad. It may be the dying patient’s chief source of comfort, when he is too ill and tired to face making his own decisions

Young doctors recently trained and those currently under training have learned to place patient autonomy at the heart of medical practice. This generation of medical practitioners will probably find Advance Decisions and even a request for assisted suicide much more acceptable as part of professional practice. Medical training in itself is therefore, in our view, not a fundamental reason for the refusal of the medical profession to embrace assisted dying or euthanasia in appropriate circumstances if legislation can be effectively drafted and compassionately embraced.

In addition there is every good reason why geriatric medicine and palliative care training should form an important part of the medical curriculum. We are witnessing the expansion of an ageing population with attendant long-term problems of disability and chronic illness. Expertise in managing the last years and months of long life will be invaluable to most doctors and just as palliative care increases in its practice and importance, so also could the development of skills and decision-making guidelines for assisted dying and euthanasia if this is what society demands.

Baroness Mary Warnock is one of the UK’s most respected moral philosophers, with a long record for forming opinion and guiding legislation on moral issues; now an Independent Life Peer in the House of Lords, she is a Member of the House of Lords Select Committee on Euthanasia.

Elisabeth Macdonald provides a lifetime’s experience in clinical medicine. For many years a consultant Cancer Specialist at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Teaching Hospitals in London, she has also worked in palliative care, and taught medical ethics.

The paradox of creation from the void, of Being and Non-Being, has tantalized all recorded cultures. As early as 1,700, years BC, the Creation Hymn of the Rigveda states that

There was neither non-existence nor existence then. There was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where?

Such questions were debated by the philosophers of ancient Greece. Around 600 BC, Thales denied the existence of No thing: for Thales, something cannot emerge from No-thing, nor can things disappear into No-thing. He elevated this principle to the entire universe: the Universe cannot have come from No-thing.

The concept of No-thing was confronted with the laws of logic, Thales posing the question: does thinking about nothing make it something? The answer, according to the Greek logician, is that there can only be nothing if there is no one to contemplate it. My question whether there could be nothing if there was no one to know there was nothing had apparently been answered in the affirmative 3,000 years earlier, though it seems to me to have been an axiomatic assertion rather than established by argument. My quest continued but it appeared that no one after Thales defined nothing other than as an absence of something.

Having disposed of No-thing Thales then moved on to the nature of things. He successfully predicted the eclipse of the sun of 28 May 585 BC, which was a remarkable achievement and bears testimony to his ability. No wonder that his ideas were held in such high regard. He argued that if things cannot come from No-thing, there must be some all pervading essence from which all things have materialized. The question ‘where did everything come from?’ has inspired another: suppose that we removed everything from a region of space, would what is left be the primeval ‘No-Thing’? Thales offered his solution of this mystery too: his prime suspect was water. Ice, steam, and liquid are three manifestations of water and so Thales supposed that water can take on an infinity of other forms, condensing into rocks and everything. As puddles of water seemingly disappeared, later to fall as rain from above, the idea of vaporization emerged and with it the recognition of the cycle that water provides. Space for Thales is as empty as it can be when all matter in it has been turned into its primeval form, liquid water like the ocean. Water thus contains every possible form of matter.∗
∗ 3,000 years later this idea is defunct but modern ideas of the vacuum maintain the conceptual nomenclature by supposing it to contain an infinitely deep ‘sea’ of fundamental particles;

After seventy-eight years of consciousness Thales returned to the permanent void in 548 BC but the idea that there is an ubiquitous primeval essence or ‘ur-matter’ lived on. The nature of the ur-matter, however, was debated. On the one hand Heraclitus insisted it to be fire. So where does fire come from? Answer, it is eternal, and as such could be identified with ideas on a deity, creator of the world. By contrast Anaximenes argued that it is air. Air can be conceived of as extending infinitely, unlike water, its very ubiquity making it the preferred candidate for the universal source of all matter.

In the middle of the fifth century BC, Empedocles was faced with the question whether air was a substance or empty space. The tentative beginnings of experimental methods were brought to bear with a device known as a hydra—a glass tube, open at one end and with a spherical bulb at the other, the bulb containing holes out of which water can pour—so long as the open end of the place your finger over it, no water flows. If you empty the water from the hydra and then submerge it, water will pour in and refill it so long as the open end remains open. However, if the end is covered with your finger, no water enters the holes and no air escapes either. This demonstrated that air and water coexist in the same space; no water can enter until the air leaves; air is a substance and not empty space. It would not be until the seventeenth century that Toricelli explained what was happening.

Empedocles extended the concept of ur-matter to four elements: air, water, fire, and earth. He also introduced primitive ideas on forces: for him they were love and discord, forerunners of attraction and repulsion. He was certainly the first to differentiate between matter and forces, but he still insisted that there can be no such thing as empty space.

Many forms of matter are granular. When spheres are packed together they leave spaces. So that there is no possibility of a void occurring in the ‘empty’ space thus created, Empedocles introduced the ether, lighter than air, which fills those spaces, indeed all space. Ether gets into everywhere, and prevents a vacuum occurring. He even imagined this ubiquitous ether being able to transmit influence from one body to another. In modern thought this is like a gravitational field.

Anaxagoras also denied the possibility of empty space and of creation of something from nothing. For him creation was order emerging from chaos rather than a material universe appearing from nothing. Order from chaos admits that things can evolve and change, as when food turns into us. This permanence of basic elements while changing their overall structure gave the idea of seeds and the birth of atomism. For Anaxagoras, there was no smallest atom, no limit to the divisibility of matter, and so no need to worry about the spaces between touching spheres, no need for gap-filling ether.

Epicurus (341–270 BC), with Leucippus and Democritus, continued the denial that something can come from nothing. They are regarded as the originators of the idea of atoms, small basic indivisible seeds common to matter. Here is born the idea that there can be a void, an empty space through which atoms move. The thinking was that if there is something already at some point, then an atom cannot move into that place; in order for motion to be possible there must be empty space into which atoms can move. They even imagined an infinite evacuated universe filled with moving atoms, which were too small to see individually but which cluster into visible macroscopic forms. Atoms are in motion but their whole is a blur, seemingly at rest. The image is like an ant hill; seen from afar it is a static mound but in closeup would be revealed to consist of millions of tiny individuals in seething motion.

Although the ideas of the atomists more nearly describe our modern picture of matter, it was Aristotle’s contrarian ideas that held sway for 2,000 years. For Aristotle, a void would have to be utterly uniform and symmetric, unable to differentiate front from back, right from left, or up from down. This concept had also appeared in the Creation Hymn of the Rigveda which mused:

Was there below?
Was there above?

Within such a philosophy an object cannot fall or move, it can only exist in a state of rest, an idea which would eventually form a basis of Newton’s mechanics. However, for Aristotle such properties denied the existence of nothing and he brought the logical arguments for the absence of a void to their clearest form. If empty space is something, and if now you place a body in this empty space, you would have two ‘somethings’ at the same point at the same time. If that were possible, then it would generalize to allowing any something to be in the same place as any other something, which is nonsense. So for Aristotle, logic seemed to require that empty space cannot be something and therefore is non-existent. He defined the void as where there is no body, and since the basic elements of things exist eternally, there can be no place that is completely empty.

All in all, Aristotelian logic denied the existence of the void and led to the received wisdom that nature abhors a vacuum. This was regarded as self-evident; nonetheless it was wrong, as we shall now see.

For many people, the beginning of philosophical curiosity might be summarized in the French exclamation Voilà!—“Here it is!”— a sudden sense of wonder at just being alive and being here. What this means, however, is not easy to spell out. What is, is you, your being here in the world. But in coming to appreciate your being here in the world, something else, even more amazing, has happened. You have become self-conscious, not just in the sense in which you look in the mirror and become aware of the toothpaste on your chin or that you look really good in that green dress but in more of a global sense, that you come to understand and be thankful for the very fact that you are alive here and now.

With this self-consciousness come other thoughts and reflections. For instance, you might consider the possibility that your life could have been very different. You could have been born somewhere else, with different parents, of a different race or religion, of the other gender, or even as a different kind of creature. Holding onto some tenuous sense of the self, you imagine the possibilities. But what is your self other than all of the properties that make you you? It seems that consciousness itself is what defines you, just the sheer fact of being here imagining all of the different ways you could be. Thus, you become reflectively aware of the marvelous fact that you exist and your existence could possibly be very different from what it is. But this is a remarkable fact in itself, the fact that you can become aware of yourself in this way, that you are conscious. But we will see that the concept of consciousness is ambiguous.

Once upon a time, whether you follow Genesis or Darwin, something truly miraculous appeared in the world, namely, what we call “consciousness.” First of all, the universe itself came into being, which was remarkable enough. Then there was the phenomenon of life, which was also truly astounding and whose beginning remains one of the great, unsolved mysteries along with the origins of the universe. But somewhere in the development of life organisms became sensitive to their environment by means of their senses—touch, taste, smell, sound, and vision—and only well after that, and perhaps only in human beings, some creatures became fully conscious, that is reflectively self-aware. This is how we can have the “Voilà!” experience.

We need to distinguish two senses of consciousness, however, what we might call consciousness as sensitivity, which we share with most other animals (and arguably even some plants) and consciousness in the full and distinctively human sense, self-consciousness, the sense in which we can think about ourselves, can resolve to change ourselves. It is also because we are conscious in this full sense that we can do philosophy, pursue scientific theories, and have religious faith that speculates about our proper place in the cosmos. Much of this has to do with the fact that self-consciousness in humans includes the remarkable ability to describe the world and ourselves in language, and with language all sorts of new possibilities emerge. But, most immediately, it is because we are conscious in the full sense, self-conscious, that we can recognize and appreciate our own existence and have the “Voilà!” experience.

Consciousness (though not necessarily human consciousness) might thus be seen as the highest stage of development in the universe. The ancient Hindu philosophers and many Buddhists who followed them argued that the universe essentially is consciousness. The Greek philosopher Aristotle suggested that the final goal of the cosmos was “thought thinking itself,” which later thinkers interpreted as God. The nineteenth-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel insisted on something very similar, that the progress of the universe as a whole comes to completion with full selfconsciousness, when it is finally aware of itself, what it is, and how it came to be.

This idea of stages of development is an important part of many scientific and religious traditions. Genesis, for instance, is quite explicit that God created first the physical world, then the heavens and oceans, then the plants and animals, and finally human beings. And years before the theory of evolution, many philosophers and scientists agreed that there had been some sort of emergence of life from nonliving stuff, and only then came the emergence of sensitivity and finally full consciousness, culminating (they thought) in human beings. (Whether or not we are the goal or ultimate “end” of the universe is, of course, highly disputed.) But as one distinguished classicist has written (about the ancient Greeks), the development of consciousness is nothing less than “discovering what the human mind is for.” It is, ultimately, for knowing itself. So how did consciousness come into the world, and what does it mean that we are conscious?

James B. Rule, author of Privacy in Peril: How We are Sacrificing a Fundamental Right in Exchange for Security and Convenience is Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley and a former fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He is also a winner of the C. Wright Mills Award. Privacy in Peril looks at the legal ways in which our private data is used by the government and private industry. In the original article below Rule looks at a seemingly innocuous effort to track schoolchildren and the issues it raises.

If you increasingly feel that information about your life is taking on a life of its own—collected, monitored, transmitted and used by interests outside your control—you’re probably not paranoid.

A recent story in Information Week tells of a school in Edenthorpe, England, that is experimenting with electronic tracking of its pupils. The idea is to fit their clothing with RFID tags—tiny radio transmitters—that can enable school authorities to monitor people’s whereabouts throughout the school day. RFID technology is already widely in use by retailers to track merchandise within shops and, some suspect, after purchase by customers.

The Edenthorpe effort follows a similar experiment in 2004 in Sutter, California, where the local school sought to have all pupils wear electronic badges while on school grounds—automating the task of attendance-taking, and presumably making it easy to track those lurking in bathrooms or on the playing fields during class. The Sutter incident triggered an indignant reaction from parents (not to say from the pupils themselves). “Our children are not merchandise”, went one heated objection. Facing vociferous pressure from parents and civil liberties organizations, the Sutter school board dropped the idea.

It’s not clear that the British experiment will succumb to such objections. True, one activist has complained, “… it seems that we are treating children in a way that we have traditionally treated criminals.” But the UK is a country that in recent years has installed more than a million video surveillance cameras in public places. British school children are already routinely being fingerprinted, and many educators and other Brits seem to find these trends reassuring. “The system is not intrusive to the pupil in the slightest,” one Edenthorpe teacher commented in defense of the tracking.

It all depends on what you count as an intrusion, it would seem. Anyone who’s not sleeping through the twenty-first century must notice the constant proliferation of points in everyday life where personal data about our whereabouts or activities are collected. These include the tracking of our supermarket choices; our movements by air or, increasingly, by train or car; our purchases; our access to medical care—and on and on. Collecting such data are both government and private institutions, bent on using the information to shape their dealings with us. This monitoring may have become so much part of our everyday landscape that some may not experience it as intrusion. But it does raise questions of how private a world we want to live in—and what price we pay for living in a world where each moment is so closely tracked.

We don’t have good ways for weighing the goods and bads involved here. Challenged as to exactly why we object to having, say, our supermarket purchases monitored by computerized checkout systems, we may complain that such tracking threatens our privacy. But most of us don’t really consider the detail of what we’re buying such a private matter that we’re inclined to shield our choices from others at the checkout counter. One’s reaction here is not so much that the information on our purchases should never be public—but that it’s collected automatically, systematically, and “unobtrusively”, by institutions who are using it in ways we cannot necessarily anticipate.

Defenders of ever-emerging new forms of monitoring often point out that the data being collected have always been publicly available—and that use of these data has long been expected of the competent authorities. Regarding the tracking of elementary school pupils, they might assert that the whereabouts of students during the school day should hardly be considered “private information” from school staff. Teachers and others have always been expected to monitor that whereabouts—in the interest of pupils’ own well-being.

And yet, there comes a point at which more relentless accomplishment of long-standing aims finally lands us in a qualitatively different world. That world would be one where major institutions can reach down into every personal moment, to enforce any interest or obligation.

Nobody really wants to live in a world like that. Yet we find it hard to draw the line as to which incremental step toward further surveillance is too much. If pupils should expect to be tracked in their movements during the school day, what about a system that would monitor the movements of each of us for the benefit of the police, the IRS, or the Department of Homeland Security? All day, every day?

On a sticky June morning in the D.C. area, I drove my daughter to a triathlon at a Navy base some two hours south of our home. The event (three-quarter-mile swim, six-mile bike ride, and three-mile run) drew a lot of military athletes, but there were also civilians interested in the same exhilaration of hard physical activity. As I helped my daughter unload her bike, I found myself gawking at the sculpted bodies that surrounded me, especially those of the men: V-shaped torsos and six-pack fronts, well-developed biceps, broad, muscular shoulders, thickened necks, well-defined pectorals, thighs pumped and strong like stallions’ legs. For the most part, I found them beautiful. I had become used to the sight during my time at the Naval Academy, and as one sitting squarely in middle age, I found the well-kneaded, non-saggy bodies even more attractive. Still, I knew most of these fit bodies were the product not just of youth or nature but of vigilant labor- hours of biking, swimming, or running logged each week. For some, additional hours had been spent at the gym in weight training.

Many participants had woken up at 3 a.m. or earlier to arrive for the 7 a.m. start time- some did regularly as part of the weekend triathlon circuit. But despite the hour, people were cheery and chatty, even the most serious-looking athletes. Among them were two USNA triathlon team members, who meticulously greased their bodies with a product called Glide so that they could slide into their full-length wet suits easily and slither out of them the moment they hit the shore and dashed for their bikes.

Side by side with this spirit of camaraderie was a subtle but unmistakable combat element. It came not just from the military types who flocked to this navy base and whose bodies have long been thought of as “war machines”- equipment that is part of the armor and weaponry of the military mission, bodies that are a public investment. It also emerged in the logos on equipment that civilians brought with them: racing bike tires emblazoned with the words “Speed Weaponry,” a T-shirt that featured a bodybuilder in combat fatigues and the caption “Take No Prisoners,” another T-shirt with a lighthearted revision of an Army recruiting slogan: “Be All You Never Were.” The scene confirmed something quite noticeable these days- that the fitness of the classic warrior has become a model for many Americans who have no military experience and little appetite for it.

The phenomenon has become conspicuous in the tony gyms and fitness programs that have mushroomed throughout the American landscape. In my neighborhood alone one finds the Fitness Corps, the Sergeant’s Program, Basic Training, and the Fitness Force. They are our local boot camps. In these programs, well-heeled men and woman pay good money to subject themselves to self-fashioned drill sergeants who specialize in just the sort of abuse that real military drill sergeants are now under pressure to abandon. Indeed, at 5 a.m. in my neighborhood, fitness sergeants are kicking the saggy butts of middle-aged folks who willingly accept the abuse. One winter my husband became a self-appointed victim. He would wake up before sunrise to endure the boot camp he’d managed to escape during the Vietnam years. One morning he lagged in his warm-up run around the park. The drill sergeant didn’t fail to notice and instantly ordered him to pay for his sloth by doing twenty push-ups on the frosty ground. As if this weren’t enough of an indignity, the sergeant then barked out: “Presser, you little piece of shit, do them like you mean them, or else you’ll do twenty more.” It is not just men who subscribe to civilian boot camp. Women too flock to fitness corps, to be all they can be and everything they weren’t. One women’s workout group in our neighborhood has a four-D slogan: “Drill, discipline, dedication, dignity.” At a local 8K charity race I ran (my only competitive race in some twenty-five years of running), it was just those fitness drill sergeants- many of whom, I am sure, are former military men and women- who goaded the runners on from the sidelines to run harder and faster than we thought possible: “Push it out, push it out,” they yelled, and “Make it happen!” “Hey, ho, hey, ho!” they chanted in military cadence. If Jane Fonda’s best-selling 1983 workout video first launched the fitness craze, military-minded trainers are keeping it alive and well.

Still, the American fascination with the military image, even if primarily the body image portion of it, s something not to be taken for granted. Before the events of 9/11 and the widespread mobilization of permanent and reserve troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, many argued that there was a growing gap between the military and civilian worlds. Indeed, in 1997 Tom Ricks, a Pentagon correspondent, argued in his book Making the Corps that this gap is widening as the result of a number of factors: the end of the draft in the early 1970s and the institution of an all-volunteer army with lengthened periods of enlistment, a swelling in non-middle-class recruits at the bottom end of the chain of command matched with a growing professionalization within the officer class at the top, and a new partisan conservatism among officers that no longer reflects the partisan divisions in the general public. Add to this the diminishing number of ROTC units on campuses, the dwindling number of congressmen who have served in the military, and the military’s own prolonged “Vietnam hangover” (its sense of civilian betrayal during that war), and one gets a fairly vivid picture of weakened links between those who wear uniforms and those who don’t. Ricks’s own experience comes from covering Marine boot camp at Parris Island. After eleven weeks of deprivation and drill, recruits were not simply alientated as they returned to their largely working-class communities but disgusted a the corpulence and unkempt lives they had left behind.

It is not just Marine recruits who harbor these views. Increasingly, many civilians do, and some of it is self-directed. Indeed, for those tired of pleats of adipose tissue, modified boot camp seems to offer an attractive tonic. In a country of extremes, it is the antidote to Homer Simpson’s gluttony and lassitude.

This renewed interest in hard control of the body may sound Stoic in spirit, especially in terms of its emphasis on self-toughening through severe training and drill. Epictetus, in particular, routinely employs athletic metaphors to capture the dedication and discipline needed for Stoic training: We are to be like the “invincible athlete” who continues to prove himself even after “he has been victorious in the first encounter,” even if it is “burning hot,” even if there are naysayers who try to bring him down. No one can be “an Olympic victor…without sweat.” “Remember that god, like a wrestling master, has matched you with a rough young man.” But training and discipline, whether physical or mental, are on thing; attachment to the body is another. And Epictetus himself will argue, in Stoic fashion, that while we have a duty to care for the body, ultimately our bodies should be regarded as indifferents, not as intrinsic elements of our good.

This can be difficult advice to swallow. We non-Stoics tend to view ourselves as embodied and our identity as a function of our bodily existence. We may overexaggerate that identity and become obsessive in our care and cultivation of the body, but a healthy sens e of self does not leave the body behind. Soldiers who return from war with bodies maimed and disfigured lose more than just a physical part of themselves. They sacrifice a fundamental part of what shapes their sense of self and good living- easy mobility, full and independent use of arms and hands, sightedness and hearing, and in many cases a fitness for competitive physical adventure and risk that made the military attractive to them in the first place. They may also have to live with the fact that they inflicted comparable losses on others. The bitter irony of war is that the fittest risk becoming the most disabled. As we shall see, cutting-edge technology has transformed the lot of veterans, with many more surviving the sort of severe injuries that would have killed them in past wars. Even so, they still must adjust to a new kind of life, lived with a new kind of vulnerability and set of compensatory skills.

In a sense, the Stoics address fragility of just this sort. We are vulnerable to disease and disability, whether through war, sickness, or old age. We need lessons for preparing for this- indeed, hard training and drill- if we are not to be totally undone by life’s tragedies…How might Stoic consolations help a soldier face the gruesome casualties of war?…[there] is striking paradox about which there has been a stunning silence: a warrior’s body is in many ways a public investment, and yet the sacrifices he or she makes are harrowingly private. Can Stoic doctrines help in facing those losses?

Email 3 and 4

Philip Jenkins with answers by Miranda Hassett.

Philip Jenkins: On your point about how I am read, I have remarked a few times in the past few years that I am a professor not a prophet! But, conservatives were dead right to take two things from my work, namely the demographic shift, and the tilt towards orthodoxy among many global South churches. If they found that message from me and credited me with that knowledge, well and good, and equally if they found hope and comfort. However, I would say again that the demographic shift is critical news (and definitely good news) for all shades of Christians, not just traditionalists.

One use of my book interested me: Israeli newspapers reviewed Next Christendom to make the point that Christian numbers were surging so far ahead of Jews that it was time for Jews to begin proselytizing again! While that was not the point I was trying to make, I’m delighted to see that my work stimulated discussion, and got people thinking about these future developments.

Well, let me ask you a couple of questions, which you can address as briefly or as lengthily as you choose.

As you read our respective books, what do you think I got wrong, or perhaps emphasized wrongly? Had you been in my shoes writing Next Christendom, how might you have taken my argument, and presented it in what you would might think is a fairer or more balanced way?

I ask this because, as you are probably aware, the Chronicle of Higher Ed presented our books as very much in conflict, and quoted you as saying that adopting Jenkins’s view “casts the alliances between conservatives in this country and Global South Anglicans as … a massive historical trajectory that is inevitable and happening beyond any kind of individual agency or design.” I respect the comment, but I’m not sure that I really framed things this way.

Miranda Hassett: The Next Christendom did something very important by bringing broad attention to an undeniable demographic trend, and one that churches, as well as politicians, need to reckon with. I appreciate the book, and learned a great deal from it. I think my approach to the same subject matter would have differed simply because I am a cultural anthropologist, and I share my discipline’s bias towards the particular. For example, I am never quite comfortable with using the words “conservative” or “traditional” to describe Christianity in the global South, and I tried to avoid doing so in my own work. I find the terms too easy for the reader to invest with his or her preconceptions. In my experience, the range of moral, doctrinal, social, and cultural positions shared by most Ugandan Anglicans do not map at all neatly onto American (or European?) conservative/liberal distinctions. Reading The Next Christendom, I longed for more specific pictures of what Southern conservatisms look like, in all their variety. I expect I will find that when I finally have time to read The New Faces of Christianity!

Philip Jenkins: On a related matter, you cite Ian Douglas’s suggestion that what we are really seeing is more of a global Pentecost than a clash of ecclesiastical civilizations (I do like that phrase, and I should patent it!). What do you think about his idea? What signs do you see of that coming out of the present Anglican crisis?

Miranda Hassett: If I may, I’ll begin answering this with a bit of personal reflection. I would never have gone to Uganda, and never spent time with Ugandan Anglicans, if research into these church conflicts hadn’t led me there. And I feel that I was deeply enriched by those experiences, conversations, and relationships. I’m wary of a lot of the pat language people use to talk about what they get out of relationships with Southern Christians, (as I discuss in chapter 6 of my book). It’s not that Ugandan Anglicans have a pure or simple faith, or a faith honed by poverty or suffering. It’s just that their lives and faith are so different from mine – and yet, in important and surprising ways, the same. Discovering those differences and similarities in conversation, in relationships, was a Pentecost experience for me, an experience of seeing that the Church is much bigger than my church.

Douglas’s “global Pentecost” image appeals to me as a way of voicing the hope that many others might have such experiences – and especially that we in the privileged Northern churches might open our eyes and broaden our worldview. And I do see some signs that this is happening. I remain concerned that some Northern liberal and moderate Episcopalians feel that the current crisis shows they have nothing in common with Anglicans in the global South. But others have been spurred to become more thoughtful about those relationships, to educate themselves about the wider Communion, and to re-invest in transnational relationships. So I think the greater global awareness that’s arisen in the past few years carries opportunities as well as challenges for Northern and Southern Anglicans of all stripes.

Philip Jenkins: As things look presently, do you believe the Anglican Communion can avert a global schism? If not, what effects would that split have?

Miranda Hassett: I find it very difficult to prognosticate! There are too many unknowns – it’s become quite a complex system. It will be very interesting to see which bishops decide put on their episcopal frocks and attend Lambeth 2008.

Email 5

Philip Jenkins

I like your comments about how you had a “Pentecost” experience by seeing other ways of living and believing. I’ve been delighted and moved to see US congregations in recent years try to form links with global South churches, as they have learned so much from these encounters.

There is a (rather) funny story about how I got interested in all of this. Like much else I write, I would blame it on an argument with the New York Times, and specifically to the article by Paul Lewis “As Nations Shed Roles, Is Medieval the Future?” NYT, January 2, 1999. Basically, this argued that the nation state was in decline, and we would have to get used to a “medieval” world in which some ideology yet to be defined would serve the same unifying transnational role that “Christendom” did in the Middle Ages. This being the ultra-secular NYT, the ideology he contemplated was “environmentalism with a New Age twist”. I looked at the figures, and suggested instead that the future Christendom might be, well, Christendom - hence the title of my book. Another big influence at the time was the collection of essays in Andrew Wingate, Kevin Ward, Carrie Pemberton, and Wilson Sitshebo, eds., Anglicanism: A Global Communion, (New York: Church Publishing 1998).

You should also know that I was blessed with a pre-1970 British secondary education in history, which still maintained a now unfashionable emphasis on matters imperial. Think what you like of the politics, but that gave me a solid background in African and Asian history that modern curricula do not include - VERY useful for the following study.

As to the future: the fundamental issue in Anglican debates remains homosexuality, not because of the intrinsic importance of that issue, but because of the broader questions raised about ecclesiastical authority, scriptural and traditional. Given that, I really do not see any obvious compromise to be found between ordaining and NOT ordaining openly gay clergy. Given that, I fail to see how the different sections of the Communion can remain together over the next few years, I suppose I see a schism as inevitable. One point that interests me now is how similar events might develop in other denominations. Just today, the NY Times (again!) published an interesting report by Neela Banerjee (”Lutherans Urge Restraint in Disciplining Gay Ministers” NY Times, August 17, 2007). Briefly, the gay issue may be set to surge again in the Lutheran church, and I know the Methodists are looking nervously at Episcopal precedents. So how far might this spread?

In case you aren’t familiar with these authors here is a quick bio to orient you.

Miranda Hassett is the author of Anglican Communion in Crisis (Princeton University Press), which looks at how a new alliance between conservative American Episcopalians and African Anglicans is transforming conflicts within the Anglican church. The book is based on wide research, interviews with key participants and observers, and months Hassett spent in a southern U.S. parish of the Episcopal Church of Rwanda and in Anglican communities in Uganda.

Philip Jenkins, an OUPblog regular, is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University and the author of The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South and God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis. His books offer a historically grounded appraisal of the future of Christianity in a rapidly changing world.

Email 1

Miranda Hassett writing to Philip Jenkins.

You position your work as serious, secular, religio-socio geopolitical scholarship, and rightly so. What I find interesting is the way your work has been taken up by a wide range of American evangelical Christians as support for their moral and theological worldview. This really jumped out at me when I was looking at the Amazon reviews of The New Faces Of Christianity - a very high proportion of the reviewers seemed to be evangelical Christians who found hope and inspiration in the book’s message about Christianity in the global South. It seems that you are almost a cult figure in certain evangelical circles! As you observe, none of this is perhaps surprising, but it still seems to me that it’s an interesting situation for you to be in. I suppose what I’m really hoping for are your reflections, as a scholar of Christianity, on being viewed in such a prophetic light by certain constituencies of your readership.

Email 2

Jenkins in response Hassett.

I appreciate the chance to discuss Miranda Hassett’s excellent book, which comments at some length on my own work, especially The Next Christendom. I view her book very highly for its research and for the quality of her writing, although I think she oversimplifies my argument somewhat. Anyway, we can explore that point in this discussion.

As to your question, I was quite impressed by how my work was actually taken up by a variety of groups across the political/ecclesiastical spectrum, not just conservatives (and by no means only Episcopalians). I was even invited to speak at the National Cathedral by Washington’s bishop John Chane, who nobody has ever accused of being a conservative! I hope I do not misrepresent him when I say that neither he is an evangelical.

What these different groups usually wanted to discuss was the fundamental demographic shift in the composition of global Christianity, which frankly does not seem to be a controversial point. The change has happened and will continue to happen. Barring some kind of global catastrophe or mass religious persecution, it seems unarguable that by 2030 or so, a large percentage of the world’s Christians will be in the Global South – Africa, Asia, Latin America – and many other Christians residing in the Global North will have “Southern” roots. I am thinking for instance of Latino immigrants in North America, or Africans in Europe. We are just beginning to understand the implications of this change, above all the vast imbalance between where the numbers are in world Christianity, and where the power and resources lie.

That point is however distinct from the other issue of religious conservatism, which is a concept that demands definition. Some readers might have understood me to say that global South churches were “conservative” in the precise American or European sense, and that statement would be half-correct. What I said, and what I would repeat here, is that many such churches do have a strongly traditional approach to issues of sexual morality, especially in critical areas like homosexuality, and on issues of scriptural authority and orthodoxy. That is especially true of some churches of the Anglican Communion. Having said that, the same churches are anything but conservative on economic issues, social justice matters, and (often) questions of women’s roles. (I discuss these distinctions much more fully in my 2006 book The New Faces of Christianity.)

Just why that conservatism exists on some issues is an interesting question. For a great many African or Asian Christians (by no means all), faith is a relatively new presence, and that novelty has an impact on how people believe. I am thinking here of Weber’s church-sect typology: new religious bodies made up chiefly of adult converts tend to act very differently from older-established churches into which people are born, and that difference will often survive for a generation or two. When we also take into account the strong sense of identification that many African and Asian Christians have for the world of the Bible, that tends to translate into a greater respect for scriptural authority.

So to give a short answer: conservative Episcopalians would be absolutely right to read me as saying that a massive demographic shift was in progress within the Anglican Communion, and that many of the most rapidly expanding churches hold conservative views on questions close to their hearts. They would be wrong if they thought I said that global South churches were uniform in their opinions, or that they followed any kind of strict across-the-board ideological conservatism.