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God willing, the new evangelization will happen, but let us not imagine that this time will be like the first time. The old evangelization proclaimed the Good News among pagan, pre-Christian peoples to whom it came as something new. Nothing like that had been done before. But nothing like our task has been done before either.

Re-evangelizing is not evangelizing as though for the first time again; the very fact of past proclamation makes re-proclamation different. For we proclaim the Gospel to a neo-pagan, post-Christian people to whom it does not come as new. The old world had not yet felt the caress of grace; our world, once brushed, now flinches from its touch.

Is re-evangelization completely and radically different from evangelization? No. The same Christ knocks at the door of the same human heart, though a heart with a different history. Is it more difficult? In some ways. Easier? In some ways. But different.

Here is one great difference: The pagan made excuses for transgressing the moral law. By contrast, the neo-pagan pretends, when it suits him, that there is no morality, or perhaps that each of us has a morality of his own. Since they had the Law and the Prophets, it comes as no surprise that the Jews took morality for granted. But to a great degree, and despite their sordid transgressions, so did the pagans.

Not that skepticism was unknown among them: “What is truth?” Pilate asked, not waiting for the answer. Yet consider all the pagan errors to which St. Paul alludes in his epistles: Was relativism one of them? No. He could omit it then; he could not have omitted it today.

Related to that first great difference is another. The pagan wanted to be forgiven, but he did not know how to find absolution. To him the Gospel came as a message of release. But the neo-pagan does not want to hear that he needs to be forgiven, and so to him the Gospel comes as a message of guilt.

This inversion seems incredible, because the neo-pagan certainly feels the weight of his sins. But he thinks the way to have peace is not to have the weight lifted, but to learn not to take it seriously. Hearing Christ’s promise of forgiveness, he thinks “All those guilty Christians!” Having chosen to view the freest people as the most burdened, he naturally views the most burdened as the freest. “Everyone has done things he regrets. Everyone lies. Get over it!”

The pagan was raised differently. He was brought up in the ways and the atmosphere of paganism, and in order to be converted, he had to be removed from both. By contrast, though the neo-pagan has probably also been taught pagan ways, he may have been brought up in an atmosphere of Christian sentiment. Consequently he regards the Gospel not as the story of true God become man, but as a sentimental fable for children. Even Christian sentiments are difficult to take seriously apart from the actual life of grace.

Then too, the pagan was likely to be exposed to the Gospel either all at once or not at all. The neo-pagan has been exposed to just enough spores to develop an allergic reaction. Perhaps he was baptized as a child, but never seriously taught the faith. Perhaps his parents became angry with the Church and stopped taking him.

The pagan suffered the burden of a pagan childhood, but he was spared the burden of an interrupted Christian childhood. Whereas he had never been immersed in the waters of faith, all too often the neo-pagan has been dipped in them, but then pulled out.

Not only was the pagan devoid of nostalgia for a Christian past, he was also unencumbered by the anger of guilt for rejecting it. The neo-pagan is susceptible to both the nostalgia and the anger, and he may even feel both at once.

I once met an atheist with a chip on his shoulder who boasted of the “fun” he had “ruining all the Catholic kids” at the Catholic college where he had taught. Yet after a few glasses of wine he said that he was “very religious,” and that he had recently joined a church choir from sheer love for the great old hymns. At turns, he was nostalgic for something good he had left behind, and belligerent because he had no good reason for having left it.

If neutralism is impossible, then bias is inevitable.  So what am I saying?  Should laws and rules and policies embrace bias?  Is bias good? 

Bias is in the nature of a rule, but some biases are appropriate and others are not.  The rules of baseball are biased toward skill, and that is appropriate because skillful competition is what baseball is about; the rules of education are biased toward knowledge, and that is appropriate because the extension of knowledge is what education is about.

Mind you, rules can and should be fair.  For example, we shouldn’t discriminate against a skillful player because of the color of his skin.  But that is not the same as having no bias; the rules give the advantage to the exercise of skill.

What about the kinds of rules called laws?  Surely they should have no bias, shouldn't they?  Certainly not.  They should be biased toward the common good, along with its corollaries, justice and the greatest possible protection of conscience.  Lady Justice wears a blindfold not because she has no criterion of judgment, but because she is blind toward all other criteria.  She doesn’t use her eyes because she is using her scales.

If we admit that rules cannot be neutral, then aren't we authorizing the tyranny of some religion, or coalition of religions, over others?  We are certainly conceding the inevitability of religious influence, even of unequal religious influence, on public policy.  But shall we protest this inequality?  Why?  What sane person would suppose that, say, Satanism, Voodoo, or Thuggee should have the same influence, say, as the classical theist religions, such as Christianity or Judaism?

But whether the influence of a religion will be irenic or tyrannical depends on the nature of that religion -- on just what supreme and unconditional commitment it proposes, and how it understands it.  Take the early Christian writers, who gave distinctively Christian reasons for respecting non-Christian conscience.

"God does not want unwilling worship, nor does He require a forced repentance," says St. Hilary of Poitiers; "human salvation is procured not by force but by persuasion and gentleness," says Isidore; "no one is detained by us against his will," says Lactantius, "for he is unserviceable to God who is destitute of faith and devotedness .... nothing is so much a matter of free-will as [the virtue of true] religion, in which, if the mind of the worshipper is disinclined to it, [the virtue of true] religion is at once taken away, and ceases to exist."

This is what I call the classical theory of toleration.  It grounds toleration – in this case, religious toleration, but the same is true in every sphere of toleration – not on an incoherency, but on a paradox.  Unlike liberalism, which tries to ground toleration on an impossible suspension of judgment about the good and the true, it grounds it precisely in making judgments about the good and the true.

For example, God really does desire only willing worship.  Faith really cannot be coerced.  True religion really is destroyed by compulsion.  For just these reasons, some bad and false things must be tolerated.  We may pass laws against some things that people do because of their beliefs – that is another sphere in which one must decide what to tolerate and what not to -- but we will not pass laws against the holding of certain beliefs.

For those of us who have been brought up to believe in the liberal rather than in the classical theory of toleration, in the incoherency rather than in the paradox, this is terrifying.  We thought toleration was something that got us off the hook of making judgments.  Now it seems that it hangs us on it.

But I think that is simply how it is.  We have to get over our unreasonable fear of sound judgment.  One must know something, at least, about the good and true in order to know whether to tolerate any bad and false things at all.  Does God really desire only willing worship?  Is faith really impossible to coerce?  Is true religion really destroyed by compulsion?

One must know still more about the good and the true in order to know which bad and false things to tolerate, and which not to.  The more detailed the decisions become, the more one must know.

Toleration turns out to depend not on suspension of judgment, but on judgment.  The ancients were right after all.  We must become wise.

Toleration is a virtue.  But it is a puzzling one, because the whole point of it lies in putting up with some things that are immoral, offensive, erroneous, in poor taste, or in some other sense bad.

In the end the various rationales for toleration boil down to just two.  The classical rationale grounds toleration on a paradox.  The liberal rationale grounds it on an incoherency.  One can live with paradoxes; they merely take some getting used to.  But incoherency is intolerable.  Let’s start there.

We owe the liberal theory, the incoherent one, to early modern thinkers who were wearied by wars of religion and ready to grasp at straws, and to contemporary thinkers who think it is unnecessary to choose among competing views of how to live.  On their view, the reason we put up with some bad and false things is that we suspend judgment about what is good and true.  We don’t have to know what is good to make good laws.

And there is the incoherency.  Liberalism tries to get something from nothing.  If we really suspended judgment about the good, then it would be hard to see what is good about toleration itself.  In fact, we wouldn’t even grasp it means to practice toleration, because we couldn’t locate the mean.  We would have no basis for drawing the line between bad things we should tolerate and bad things we shouldn’t. 

Along with the incoherence comes something even worse.  If neutrality is impossible, then no matter how it preens itself on the illusion, liberalism will never really be neutral.  It will enforce its own biases, sparing itself the necessity of having to defend them by pretending that they aren’t biases at all.

Some of the results are almost comical.  In matters of religious liberty, for example, liberalism follows rules concerning religions which admit that they are religions, which it does not follow concerning religions which deny that they are religions.  Does this claim seem implausible?  Then consider contemporary Establishment Clause jurisprudence. 

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, governmental action must be thoroughly neutral, not only among different religions, but even between religion and irreligion (which isn’t what the Clause really says, but never mind).  In order to promote this so-called neutrality, the Court imposes a three-pronged test.  (1) The law must have a "secular" legislative purpose.  (2) It must not have the principal or primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting "religion."  (3)  It must not foster an excessive government entanglement with "religion."

Yet because the Court denies that so-called secular systems of life and belief are religions, the way the three-pronged test actually plays out is like this:  (1) A statute may not be motivated by concerns originating in the Jewish or Christian systems of life and belief, but it may be motivated by concerns arising in, say, the Queer Nation system of life and belief.  (2) It must not have the principal or primary effect of advancing things that Jews and Christians believe, but it may have the principal and primary effect of advancing things that, say, Marxists believe.  (3) It must not foster an excessive involvement with the institutions of Church or Synagogue, but it may foster any degree of involvement whatsoever with the institutions of, say, Planned Parenthood.

To put the problem another way, liberalism discriminates against transparency and honesty.  My second grade public school teacher, who probably read the Bible, led us at lunch in giving thanks for our food.  My fifth grade public school teacher, who probably read Jeremy Bentham, taught us in civics class to believe in the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number, which at that age, God forgive me, sounded plausible.  These two pieties, biblical and utilitarian, were equally reflective of supreme commitments; they merely reflected different ones, and each one excluded the other.

To mention but a single point of difference, utilitarian morality denies that there is such a thing as an intrinsically evil act, holding that the end justifies the means; but biblical morality insists that there is such a thing as an intrinsically evil act, proclaiming that we must not do evil so that good will result.   Yet what do liberals say?  That the second grade teacher's piety is "religious" and has no place in the classroom, while the fifth grade teacher's piety is "non-religious" or "secular" and may stay. 

If neutrality is impossible, then bias is inevitable.  So what am I saying?  Should laws and rules and policies embrace bias?  Is bias good?  Stay tuned; all will be answered next time.

When I was young, barbarian that I was, I used to think that although some intellects are smarter and some not so smart, at bottom there is only one kind of mind – my kind, of course.  The first shock to that cocky misconception was marriage.  The second was raising children.  My wife and daughters think beautifully, but they think differently.

My wife, for example, is extremely perceptive, beats the pants off me in games of strategy, and is the most penetrating and accurate judge of character and motive I have ever met.  But with a few striking exceptions -- such as trigonometry and number puzzles, where she is a blur, and mystery stories, where she always knows whodunnit and can account for all the clues – it is all intuition.  That means I haven’t the faintest idea how she is reaching her conclusions.  Nor can she usually tell me, because she doesn’t know either.

In the first few years of marriage, this drove me crazy.  Unfamiliar with intuition, poorly exercised in it, I thought there must be some hidden algorithm.  I judged character, for example, by testing my observations against hypotheses.  My wife found this most amusing, especially because my conclusions were almost always wrong.  After many years, a little bit of her intuition rubbed off on me, but two things about that process were equally astonishing.  First, I still didn’t really know how it worked.  Second, I didn’t know how it had rubbed off on me. 

One of the things philosophers do is provide arguments to test, ground, clarify, elevate, and connect the dots of intuitive knowledge or would-be knowledge.  This is a helpful thing to do, but it doesn’t show that argument is the way the knowledge was attained in the first place.  Moreover, for some of the things we know, no argument ever could be given, because they are first principles.  You can “motivate” or elicit them, but you cannot prove them, because they are the things by which other things are proven.  They are either known in themselves, or not at all.

So the intuitive mind is one kind of mind.  More likely it is eight or nine of them, because there are different kinds of intuition.  What other kinds are there? 

One of my former students is a ruminator.  He grinds up ideas in his crop, taking his time to chew the cud, until finally he can do something with them.  He speaks slowly, he writes slowly, he formulates questions slowly.  But what comes out of the process is quite remarkable.  Does the metaphor of a ruminator give the impression that this brilliant fellow is not very smart?  Then change the metaphor.  Think instead of the millstones of the gods, and how they turn:  Slowly, slowly, but very fine.

Another of my students is a leaper, or at least one kind of leaper.  He asks questions scarcely anyone else would think to ask; he takes soaring jumps from scattered hints, which could hardly be called premises, to speculative possibilities, which could hardly be called conclusions.  To find out what is on the other side of the mountain, the ruminator has to climb it, step by tiring step, but the leaper just knows what he will find.  Not that he knows it clearly or entirely; he has only flashes and visions.  Not that he is always right; sometimes what he just knows turns out to be dreadfully wrong.  But his guesses are right often enough to make it worth watching whenever he does make one of his death-defying springs. 

I myself am a teacher, or at least one kind of teacher.  This took me some years to find out, because I thought teaching was what I did, not what I am.  Please understand that I am not claiming to be a good teacher, but only explaining how my mind works.  I find it almost impossible to hear a lecturer explain something, for instance, without thinking “How would I explain it?”  I once feared that this character trait was a moral flaw.  How could I be so arrogant as to think I could explain everything better?  But I am not so arrogant as to think that I can.  I have merely discovered that asking how I would explain something is my way of learning it.

Even now this seems backwards.  In order to explain something correctly, wouldn’t one have to understand it already?  But that is not how it works for me.  If I cannot see how to explain it, I have difficulty learning it at all.  Teaching is therefore as much for me as it is for my students.  Sometimes my students apologize for what they consider stupid questions.  If only they understood what a gift such questions are!  They are so much more difficult to answer than smart ones -- consequently I learn so much more from trying to answer them. 

There are too many kinds of minds to list.  These few must do for all.  One crucial lesson is that in order to teach someone well, you must recognize what kind of mind he has.  A ruminator learns differently than a leaper, a leaper learns differently than a teacher, and so on.  Another is that each of these different kinds of minds balances and depends on all the others.  They are involved in one another, or they ought to be.  So marvelous!

These lessons came late to me.  If I had learned them younger, I might have been a better teacher now.  But it is better to have learned them late than not to have learned them, so I am glad.

A peculiar feature of our intellectual culture is that we don’t believe anything until we can describe it in a language which looks like physics.  The reason the social sciences have not advanced as far as physics is that they are trying to be the same sort of thing.

You won’t think much of the proposition “Justice is giving each person what is due to him” if your model is the proposition “Applied force is the product of mass and acceleration.”  As a chemist friend once asked me when we were talking about politics and justice, “Where are your variables?”

The irony is that there really is a variable in “Justice is giving each person what is due to him”:  The variable is what is due.  But it is not a physical quantity, there is no instrument to measure it but mind and conscience, and although there are principles to rely upon, they don’t work like algorithms.  You can’t use them unless you get them.

So in discipline after discipline, we ignore most of the classical traditions of inquiry and set out to reinvent the wheel.  Since we have strange conceptions of wheels, we have strange conceptions of progress.  “Behold, the triangular wheel.  See how much better it is than the square wheel, because it eliminates one bump.”

Take intelligence.  Psychologists are gradually beginning to recognize that intellect isn’t the sort of thing that can be described by the old-fashioned intelligence quotient, because it isn’t a single ability; now they are coming to view it as a set of different abilities.  To put it another way, if they spoke of an intelligence quotient at all, it would have be a vector:  Instead of saying “Your level of intelligence is 120,” they would say something like “Your levels of intelligence are 95, 150, 80, 120, and 155,” with 95 indicating your arithmetic intelligence, 150 indicating your spatial intelligence, 80 indicating what they oddly call your emotional intelligence, and so on.

Well, this is an advance, of sorts.  It is quite true that intelligence is not a single ability.  But viewing it instead as a set of abilities is like switching from square wheels to triangular:  It only eliminates one bump.  Rather than thinking of abilities, we should be thinking of dispositions which supervene upon abilities.  In the classical tradition -- for which the distinction between abilities and dispositions was fundamental -- these dispositions were called moral and intellectual virtues.

For example, what our own psychologists seem to be trying to get at with the clumsy new term “emotional intelligence” is what the classical tradition called the moral virtues, for example courage, frankness, temperance, justice, and generosity.  These are dispositions -- “habits of the heart” – to make choices in a particular way, according to a mean relative to us, determined by a rational principle recognized by persons of practical wisdom.

To see the difference between abilities on the one hand and dispositions or habits on the other, consider courage.  True, a certain ability is required for me to be courageous:  It must be possible to repress fear and to stir up confidence.  That sounds simple.  But it is not enough that the horse be broken; the rider must know how to ride.  I must learn to choose in just the right way, with neither too much fear nor too much confidence, just as the circumstances demand, and the habit of doing so must be settled in my bones.  How do I determine what the right way is?  By practical wisdom, which is also a virtue – not a moral but an intellectual virtue.  These two kinds of virtue interact.

What I am suggesting is that intelligence is not so much about abilities as about character – about moral and intellectual personality – about “habits of the heart” which supervene on abilities, for better or for worse.

Perhaps you think this is going too far.  I can imagine someone objecting, “What you’ve been saying is all well and good when applied to so-called emotional intelligence.  Perhaps that sort of thing really is about dispositions; moral virtues I can buy.  But surely the other facets of intelligence are mere abilities.  To be smart in a certain sort of way is nothing more than to be able to perform a certain kind of mental operation.  It isn’t about personality.”

I think it is about personality.  And I would go farther:  Just as there are many virtues, there are many kinds of intelligent minds.  I am not falling into relativism.  Just as the tuning of each kind of musical instrument depends on the same principles of harmony, so the tuning of each kind of mind depends on the same principles of virtue.  But just as different musical instruments are adapted for different parts in a symphony, so are different minds.  Some are flutes, some are cymbals, some are cellos, some are trumpets, some are harps.

In the next post I hope to say something about the kinds of minds one encounters as a teacher -- and what to do with them.