Mark Lilla on Science, Religion, and Modernity.

August 23, 2010 at 12:44 P.M. "Errors" inserted in this text which was left in peace for a while. I hope to have made all necessary corrections for now.

July 30, 2007 at 10:41 A.M. I am unable to print items from Critique. "Errors" will be inserted repeatedly in this essay. I will make the same corrections, also repeatedly. You are witnessing power's need to eliminate dissent -- or even truth -- when it becomes an obstacle to controlling others. This is the opposite of the spirit of democracy or the rule of law. It is also the opposite of intelligence. Porter Goss? I am blocking:

http://view.atdmt.com/MSN/iview/msnnkhac00172,

http://view.com/NYC/iview/brstmcpc01800, (City Council?)

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/N4225.Trlgy/B198514 (Times)

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/N3880.sd2527.38880/... (SD?)

http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N3016.msn.comSd25

On August 1, 2007 at 3:41 P.M. I am blocking:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N950.NPR/B239818 (NPR)

http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90 (NJ)

Articles borrowed from my sites or links have appeared in a number of scholarly sites lately. I cannot say what the motive for this "kindness" may be. I have not been consulted about these appropriations. I hope that some day I will be able to use my printer again and that I will not have to deal with hackers looking over my shoulder or seeking to destroy my writings. I hope to live in a society that respects privacy and freedom of speech, even for those who are not tenured or allowed to write for elite publications, nor contributors to one or both of America's political parties. The first chapter of a novel and memoir was so damaged at my home computer that I was forced to delete it. I will write it by hand, then I will retype it on to a new computer file. Eventually, I will find a way to publish that work.


Mark Lilla, "The Cost of Utopia," in The New York Times, Sunday, July 29, 2007, Book Review, at p. 15. A review of Lesley Chamberlain, Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia (London: Rookey, 2007), $35.00.
Mark Lilla, "Wolves and Lambs," in The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (NYRB, 2007), p. 31.
Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London: Pelican, 1979), "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (p. 22.) and "German Romanticism in Petersburg and Moscow" (p. 136.)
Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Vintage, 1992), p.1. ("The Pursuit of the Ideal").
Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Volume 7 (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 15-50, 121-157.
Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (New York & london: Routledge, 1993), pp. 30-42, 55-87.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, "The Political and the Divine," in The New York Times, Book Review, September 16, 2007, at p. 9.
Juan Galis-Menendez, "Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Interpretation," in Applied Epistemology, http://www.appliedepistemologytoday.com/shop.php?= (reissue or link to my essay on Kant in the Philosophy section at Critique. I hope without editorial additions.)

I never authorized the use of my essay, but it has been reprinted (or linked) and my goal is to have the work read, as I wrote it, by as many people as possible. Unfortunately, at this time, one of my books cannot be downloaded. I am struggling to make it more widely available. The true number of visitors to this blog or readers of my books is not known by me. I am obstructed in my efforts to access my own books on-line. Despite paying for the full ISBN service and distribution, one of my books is not being sent to on-line book sellers. The ISBN number may be a fake. I will continue to struggle. ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")

Sundays are great for reading the Times, seeing old movies, spending hours with loved-ones and thinking, just thinking. I find that, rather than meditating while sitting on a rock or smoking a pipe at my gentlemen's club, I do some of my best philosophical meditation at the busy laundromat in my neighborhood. Kids screaming, women chatting about their sex lives in Spanish because they assume that I do not understand what they're saying -- since I am obviously a "Gringo" -- all provide soothing background music for the contemplation of lofty things. The things that women say to one another when they believe there are no men around who understand their words would knock your socks off! -- unless you're a woman, of course.

For those who came in late, there is much talk these days about "The Clash of Civilizations," to which others respond with discussions of the "Clash Within Civilizations"; there is talk of "Science and Religion" and of the conflict between civilizations devoted to archaic religions (bad) and others committed to the scientific world view (good). These opinions may be defended at a very sophisticated level or at a not-so-sophisticated level. The people I usually deal with on-line are at the not-so-sophisticated end of the spectrum.

People who attend Smith College and Harvard Law School are annoyed at all of the second-guessing of their wisdom by the lower orders. Intellectual fashionistas of all genders are ready to advise candidates (Democrats, naturally) about the correct stance on all matters before lunch. (Susan Faludi explained: "9/11 was about silencing women!")

This avoidance technique will allow successful candidates to pass on this wisdom -- like kidney stones -- and accompanying instructions to unenlightened nations, filled with annoying brown people located in dangerous parts of the world. Things never really work out as planned, for some reason, so there is much puzzled discussion in American academia of global "irrationality." David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest should be required reading for American politicians.

My intelligence and annoying habit of independent thinking are shared by persons in different parts of the world making life difficult for self-styled Masters of the Universe residing on the Upper West-Side of Manhattan. Why will we not simply allow others to "instruct" us concerning these matters -- about which they know nothing -- since they have clearly attended Brown University and Yale Law School besides having our welfare at heart? Who knows? Stubborn, I guess.

I have just spent hours fighting obstacles to write at my msn group. If only I will accept "conventional wisdom" (whatever that is), I am sure that I would experience fewer problems with hackers. Power desires the collapse of human autonomy not for some ulterior purpose, but for the sake of wielding power and the jolt of supriority over others. It is a sick sadist's joy in "controlling" fellow human beings that seems to motivate my self-styled "superiors" in Trenton.

I am what torturers call a "difficult subject." Most philosophers are annoyingly independent and strangely smart. These qualities are more unacceptable in some persons than in others. My unwillingness to legitimate the crimes committed against me means that I am in "denial." Why can't we move on? These were the words of many defendants at Nuremberg.

Professor Lilla's review is well-written and engaging, marred by an unfortunate subtitle for which he must not be blamed. "In rejecting the Enlightenment for a HAZY German Idealism, 19th-century Russian thinkers did their country no favors." By seeing the issue in such terms the controversy is predetermined and (more importantly) misunderstood: Why is German idealism "hazy"? Why should we be thrilled about the separation of church and state? What kind of separation of religion and politics is good and why? Does Israel, for example, "separate" religion and politics? Would it make sense for Israel to do such a thing? What kind of separation does make sense?

I wonder whether the person responsible for this subtitle -- one of the geniuses who writes for the Times -- is aware of exactly how "hazy" linguistic philosophy or pragmatism looks to other people? Clearly not. How can we speak of the Enlightenment apart from German thought, especially in the form of the greatest Enlightenment thinker, Immanuel Kant? Whose Enlightenment are we discussing? How is it possible for Mr. Lilla to suggest that "we" (smart people) in the West are beyond religion whereas unenlightened "others" are shrouded in darkness, when most people in the world -- including the Western world -- continue to express religious affiliations? Who's "we"? Consider the arrogance in the following statement from the point of view of any religious person:

"We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, [Do women have minds?] stirring up messianic passions that can leave societies in ruin. [Stalin's Soviet Union was atheistic.] We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, [Why should they do that in a non-Enlightenment society?] that political theology died in 16th century Europe. [Have you read the newspaper, Mark?] We were wrong. [You said it.] It's we [who's we?] who are the fragile exception."

Mark Lilla, "The Great Separation," in The New York Times Magazine, August 19, 2007, at p. 28.

This paragraph alone was enough for me to pass on the rest of the article, despite having read several of Professor Lilla's essays. I wonder whether Mr. Lilla is censored at his computer when he writes? I doubt it. Get the self-congratulatory flavor (a new "error" -- not found in my earlier print version of this essay -- has just been corrected) and notice the smug tone of this paragraph by Professor Lilla:

"Time and again we must remind ourselves that we are living an experiment, that we are the exceptions."

Aren't we just wonderful? Makes your toes curl up with pleasure, doesn't it?

"We have little reason to expect other civilizations [the brown people in funny clothes, Mark?] to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a unique theological-political crisis within Christendom."

Book Review, September 16, 2007, at p. 9 (Goldstein quoting Lilla).

In other words, around the seventeenth century, there were some bloody wars when everybody got the shit kicked out of them in Europe. Suddenly, there was a philosophical illumination: "Hey, I'm John Locke and I'm into tolerance now. You believe what you want. I'll believe what I want. We'll be 'for' liberty, then we'll get into the slave trade, so we can make money. Whatta-ya say?"

Notice that what is intellectually possible in the world is determined (or should have been) for Professor Lilla only by what happened in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. China's 5,000 year civilization does not matter to world religious/scientific thinking, neither does Islam, India, Africa or Latin America. After reading the first paragraph of Mr. Lilla's recent article in the New York Times Magazine, I knew that there was no need (for me) to read the rest of his essay or anything else by this author at any future time. Life is short:

"The twilight of the idols has been postponed. For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. [Another "error" just corrected.] War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity -- these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the west are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong."

This is a catalogue of contemporary trendy assumptions compatible with political correctness and philosophical-historical blunders, in my opinion. Also, I'm sorry Professor Lilla, but your self-love and cultural blindness are a little hard to take. By the way, inserting errors in this essay will not help Mr. Lilla's argument. For example, why assume that political problems are ever really distinguishable from religious controversies? Or that, say, Communism (whatever else it was) could not also be called a "religion"? Psychoanalysis? Scientism? Are those ideologies? Or religions? Psychoanalysis and scientism are a little of both -- religion and ideology -- with a sprinkling of bullshit on top.

Why determine "world" political themes and possibilities or understandings on the basis of one contested reading of modernity in Western consciousness? Why isn't your scientism, Professor Lilla, exactly the "dogmatic purity" and "fanaticism" that you complain of and also "religious"? Societies may be ruined by the denial of spiritual realities and needs, by denials of recognition and respect to believers or the opposite. People are good at ruining and building societies for any reason or no reason. ("Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power.")

If I were a Muslim, I would be deeply offended by this essay, suggesting that "we" are either secularists, pragmatists, or "we" are fools. Maybe I should be insulted even as a non-Muslim. (Another "error" detected and corrected.) Why should cultures "separate" religious questions from political ones? Where is such a separation written in the stars? Is this not merely assuming one particular resolution concerning the boundaries between spiritual and secular concerns, private and public, fact and value which is the result of a troubled history in a narrow part of the world seeking to overcome the legacy of religious wars -- an overcoming that is achievable in other ways, by other cultures -- while presuming to govern other people in the world through cultural hegemony? Isn't this division of religion and politics itself highly political? In fact, such a division may also be religious.

"What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding," Edward Said writes, "is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that 'we' might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar."

"Preface," in Orientalism (New York: Vintage 1979), p. xviii, with Afterword dated 1994.

I say this as a supporter of the First Amendment who wants a neutral public square in America, without telling other people what is "rational" or "modern." Don't help or hurt religion. Don't assume that religion means only one of the traditional faiths.

The Islamic world would say to Professor Lilla that these Western solutions are unworkable in societies that do not recognize a bifurcation between secular and religious realms, but rather see co-extensive domains, religious and secular, with overlapping areas of concern that are equally important and real. Professor Lilla is mistaken to think that fanaticism could ever be dead. His essay may be an example of fanatical scientism.

Lesley Chamberlain's book entitled Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia (London: Rookery Press, 2007), is finally available in the United States. I will read it because I am very interested in the subject. I'll also weep bitter tears for the 35 clams that it will cost me to own this opus. Anyway, all of this allows me to get into into some heavy political and philosophical stuff. I also enjoyed a lecture by Professor Martha Nussbaum on c-span 1 or 2, or 3, maybe C-span 3 and 1/2, I'm not sure, focusing on political developments in India, right before a fascinating lecture on Mongolian stamp collectors and their busy sex lives.

Do you find it difficult to keep up with all of the t.v. channels that suddenly exist? I do. I think this may be a distressing sign of age. I was unable to identify the "WAM!" channel on my cable service. No doubt there is a "GEEWIZ!!" channel. Maybe all of them are gee wiz channels, as a friend likes to say.

Back to Russia's nineteenth century philosophical challenge. Surprisingly, Charles Taylor's work in Continental thought is not mentioned by these philosophical grandmasters, neither is the theoretical difficulty faced by Russian intellectuals, then and now. Regrettably, an important analogy to current difficulties between Islam and the West is not fully explored. (I haven't read Tom Stoppard's "Coast of Utopia," but I will.)

Russia faced, we are told, the impasse of choosing between Western Enlightenment, "modern" science and philosophy, as opposed to commitment to Russian culture and especially religious bonds, love and community. The fear of excessive rationalization and science's cold inhumanity was tempered by a desire for progress. Everybody wants "progress." Not everyone is attracted to the English-American model of society as legally mediated interactions between persons, then among persons and the State. The red copy is for me, the blue is for you. This comes as a shock to many American graduate students and others, who should know better. American community always transcends political forms and is better found in culture. This is something that visitors to the U.S. fail to get. Professor Lilla explains from on high -- somewhere near the celestial throne in Morningside Heights -- exactly what we should think about all this:

"What the 19th-century Russian intellectuals found in, and partly projected onto, Germany was a romantic alternative to the supposedly cold, heartless logic of Descartes and his progeny. They were especially drawn to F.W. J. Schelling, whose philosophy of nature, a hash of intuition and metaphysical speculation, was closer to theosophy than to modern science."

I disagree about the dismissal of Schelling. See Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (New York & London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 30-42, 55-87.

"(Lots about 'life,' nothing about the pancreas.) Schelling's doctrines proved to be infinitely adaptable and unfalsifiable, and thus served as useful defenses against French and English rationalism. Like Napoleon's troops, the modern ideas of Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Hume were turned back at the gates of Moscow and beat a slow retreat through the snow."

Notice the assumption made by Professor Lilla concerning what is modern. Man cannot live without a pancreas, Professor Lilla, but he lives in order to do more than observe his pancreas working away all day. All that a person is cannot be reduced to biological functions which are certainly essential to mental survival. Presumably, according to this review, Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel are not "modern." Neither are Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Lenin, or Pasternak.

I wonder whether Professor Lilla can even imagine the insults and stupidity, torture and censorship used against someone like me, in many places in America, by people spouting opinions derived from reviews such as his, confident that there is nothing more to say on the subject. Some of us have our writings defaced by hackers all the time. Mostly because they can not refute our arguments. Empiricism and scientific method define the modern for this Anglo-American theory or interpretation of philosophical history. This view, if accepted, makes much modern political and military history incomprehensible. Modernity is more complex and more riddled with contradictory elements -- like Russia and all of us -- than such a summary will allow. Professor Lilla grudgingly admits: "Hostility to the modern Enlightenment is itself a modern phenomenon, though it usually has archaic roots."

What is the anti-modern Enlightenment? Isn't modernity coextensive with Enlightenment, according to some theorists? What on earth does the good professor mean by the "modern Enlightenment"? Is there a European Elightenment that is not modern?

I bet Professor Lilla is not accustomed to having people suggest that he may be mistaken about something or that he is anything less than modern. There is no single "central" strand of modernity associated with science and the disenchantment resulting from Gallileo, Darwin and Freud to which unenlightened millions react with hostility and "backward-looking" grasping at tribal or "mythical" traditions, which will be swept away by scientific thinking, eventually -- as Jonathan Miller suggests at the conclusion of his recent PBS series discussing reason and religion. (A new "error" was inserted in this essay since my last review of it.) This view is itself "mythical." However, I cannot say whether it has "archaic" roots.

We "archaic" types resent being lectured by anyone concerning what is the appropriate view of modern history or truth. We also resent tampering with and destruction of our writings as well as censorship from persons who call themselves "liberals." (A new "error" was discovered in this last sentence, inserted by New Jersey's legal whores.)

This resentment and independence of opinion is appropriate since these are contested and open-ended matters that are seen in one way among a tiny group of dominant American intellectuals and very differently elsewhere. (I have just corrected another "error" inserted in this last sentence.) Destroying my writings is no answer to these points. Hurting me, even more than I have been hurt, is no answer to these arguments. ("What is it like to be tortured?") You want to discuss "silencing," Susan Faludi? I can lecture on that subject.

Torturing Muslim men will not make us safer nor will it demonstrate our intellectual superiority to those benighted millions who presume to worship and believe, to reason and create differently than we do. I insist on my freedom. Millions in the Islamic world, who are potential allies, are turned into enemies by the denial of dignity and respect to them or their faith and opinions by well-meaning "intellectuals" like Mark Lilla and his government counterparts. The controversy over the creation of a mosque at or near ground zero is absurd, Constitutionally, besides feeding into the perception in the world that America's war is not against terrorism (Luis Posada Carriles is protected by the C.I.A.), but a holy inquisition against Islam.

Jihad, for example, can be spiritual struggle or a form of moral discipline having nothing to do with military weapons. For Islam, I am a Jihadist. Millions of persons who are Muslims and fellow Americans, also intellectuals -- including scientists -- are members of a culture that does not see a conflict between religion and politics in these stark analytical terms. All of those people are not stupid or no longer Americans. They have adopted different philosophical views which are just as rational and true, even objectively true as Mr. Lilla's platitudes -- views which should be seen to supplement the perspective of Mr. Lilla in our collective quest for a more total and truthful perspective on these matters.

There is no single American perspective on these philosophical issues because -- not in spite of -- the First Amendment, which is violated by my would-be censors on a daily basis. As I write this sentence, after more than twenty years of violations of my rights by N.J. people who do not seem to get it, I am forced to post and revise my work against efforts to destroy it and me. The experience of such violations of one's humanity -- by people uttering banalities worthy of fortune cookies and concealing a vicious will to power -- must compare with what is endured in the streets of nations lectured by the U.S. on human rights. We fire robot bombs into villages to (possibly) kill one person, then we explain "ethics" to other people. For me, this is idiotic and hypocritical.

We speak of human rights to others as pilots -- with computer game-like zeal -- fire missiles at unarmed bystanders and witnesses in Iraqui streets, dissidents (like me) are censored at home, harassed, have their lives destroyed and are subjected to forms of conditioning intended to wipe all out all domestic opposition to a doubtful consensus. Any more sabotage of this essay? My life has indeed become symbolic of American hubris and ideological blindness.

For New Jersey criminals in judicial robes to refer to the same Constitution, whose provisions they ignore as they defecate on the Bill of Rights, is a joke. The neutrality we desire in the public square guaranteed by our Constitution allows each of us to resolve these questions of faith and reason for ourselves, saying nothing about how other societies must resolve these issues. This is not to adopt a skeptical view of truth or any such nonsense.

The yearning for the benefits yielded by science and technology has always been mixed everywhere with legitimate and very rational-- also modern -- concerns about the price of so-called progress in terms of alienation, conflict, depersonalization, displacement and loss of beauty and meaning resulting from an excessive reliance on the scientific world view or collapse into the destructive ideology of scientism. See the works of Professor Charles Taylor and Leszek Kolakowski's "Why Do We Need Kant?," in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990), p. 44; and also Tariq Ali, "Bush in Babylon," in Speaking of Empire and Resistance (New York: The New Press, 2005), at p. 58: "When the empire behaves in this way, all the while claiming to act in the interest of democracy and freedom, I tend to doubt it."

The "empire" is not only military power, but a trivializing of ideas -- ideas found in the Islamic world and everywhere else, ideas and values focusing on the dignity of the human person as well as the moral limits on scientific inquiry that should provide a place of meeting for all of us. This is not to deny that all human societies may be criticized for human rights failures. Nationalism is also poorly understood in this review since the question should not be, say, "What is Russian truth?" but "What is truly Russian?"

How can science be done "here," wherever this may be, while preserving cultural values that are the reason why persons do science in the first place? For example, the values of community, love, compassion and preserving the aesthetic and unifying elements in religions? "Here" might be the Islamic world, Latin America, Africa, China or Cuba, Russia. There is also a dissenting tradition in America, after all, a tradition celebrating human values which is respectful of religion. Science is certainly a great intellectual adventure. However, we must remember:

"... sooner or later the exhilirating breakthroughs enfuel the engines of Juggernaut. No glory for the technician's boldness without the attendant blame. For knowledge is power. And power is politics -- somebody's politics -- as it turns out, anybody's politics who pays the way. A tragic perversion of noble intentions? To a degree. But at Los Alamos on August 5, 1945, there were physicists who rushed to order champagne dinners when news came that the thing had worked. 'Worked!' The original sin to which science was born: hubris -- at last become pandemic. 'We have now,' the head of a promiment think-tank announces, 'or know how to acquire the technical capability to do very nearly anything we want ... if not now or in five years or ten years, then certainly in 25 or in 50 or in 100.' ..."

"And ye shall be as gods. ..."

Theodore Roszak, Sources (New York: Harper-Collophon, 1972), p. xvi.

Has science become the latest religion of the West? This might be a good future topic. The "bottom line" is that Professor Lilla's conclusion is unacceptable to many of us:

"At its best, Chamberlain's account sheds light on the complex cultural reaction set off when modern Western ideas wash up on the shores of cultures simultaneously ashamed of their social and scientific backwardness and convinced of their moral superiority." (emphasis added)

There are cultures more "ashamed" -- and horrified -- at what is done by nations believing themselves scientifically and technologically "superior" to others, atrocities like Mi Lai and Abu Ghraib or (perhaps) Hiroshima.

What is "shameful" is the failure to recognize the shame in such actions, whatever government is responsible for them. Needless to say, these more "modern" nations see themselves as entitled to "instruct" the lesser breeds, to explain how people should live, and what are the right value choices for them to make. No country is without sin. No interpretation of a phenomenon as complex as "modernity" will be shoved down my throat nor can it be imposed on intelligent people anywhere, much less everywhere. Censoring and further harming me will not alter the truth in these statements. You cannot torture opinions out of (or into) people.

Many of us have experienced the arrogance of wealthy and politically powerful persons in America, who are not always intellectually impressive, like Professor Lilla. Sometimes they are quite stupid and their world views are hand-me-down drivel. ("Sybil R. Moses and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Is New Jersey Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz unethical or only incompetent?")

Many nations have experienced colonialism or the status of a chess piece in a superpower tournament, rarely enjoying the experience. No one wants to be or see themselves as "chess pieces" in a game played by others. I also know what that is like, the feeling of being reduced to a plaything for others. None of us should accept slavery or the torture of unchosen "conditioning for our own good." I will always resist such torture. These are things very distant from Professor Lilla's world. They are seemingly beyond his comprehension. Dennis Overbye? (Dennis Robinson?)

Manohla Dargis, you cannot force your opinions on people who reject them as absurd or unwarranted, through computer crime or other forms of cruelty. ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!")

There is a countertendency within modernity (notice, again, Professor Lilla's assumptions concerning what are "modern Western ideas") that appreciates the complexity and nuances involved in judgments concerning what is rational or modern, humane or proper in the light of our scientific learning, while refusing to abandon fundamental human concerns with meaning, beauty or love.

I fear that this more nuanced and emotionally rich position is often underappreciated in the West, even by some of our political and intellectual "leaders," as we humble little people wash and fold clothes on Sunday afternoons, allowing these great minds to think on our behalf. Our intellectual leaders have always done such a good job of thinking and acting for us, like in Iraq and Afghanistan today.