Dr. James Billington:  
Well, thank you all for coming today and it's a great pleasure to celebrate this occasion, which we're -- we will be recording for the archives, including your questions afterwards with our distinguished speaker.  Dr. William F. May is the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair occupant in American History and Ethics.  It's a wonderful topic.  We've had some really very wonderful and provocative thinkers, and we have never had one more experienced in dealing with these topics than we have in Bill May. 

And we want to especially welcome Cary Maguire, the benefactor of this Chair.  He made it possible.  He's traveled from Texas to be here.  So, Cary, we thank you very much for not only for -- for creating this Chair, but for being here for this important occasion. 

Dr. May is recognized, I think very widely, as one of America's leading scholars and teachers in the field of ethics, medical ethics, all kinds of ethics.  I always get nervous when people say someone is an ethicist and that sort of implies that -- but there's nothing that more deeply concerns people and is sometimes harder to discuss in the public arena than this very fundamental question.  So it's wonderful to have this Chair, and we have been awfully fortunate to have Bill May. 

He's written extensively, lectured internationally on ethical issues in religion, politics, business and professions.  His lecture title couldn't be a better illustration of what I'd like to think is that we're trying to do with the Chairs we have here, is to give tentative answers to important questions rather than just definitive answers to trivial ones, which occupies --  
 
[laughter] 
 
-- an awful lot of our cerebral talent in this country.  Not entirely widely, but it's wonderful to have people who try to put things together rather than just take them apart. 

His lecture title certainly covers a big topic.  It's called "Containing Runaway Fear in Foreign Policy: Recovering Our National Identity."  He can do that in the short space of one hour, we'll have justified our existence around here.  He's going to explore the moral and religious apprehensions embedded in American politics, especially our foreign policy during the last 70 years as the country has dealt anxiously with successive concerns, threats, global tyranny, anarchy and so forth.  He's identified the two basic, sometimes contending, social goods of justice and order and the pair of social evils of tyranny and anarchy that surfaced in the ancient narratives and in debates over the U.S. Constitution and in current efforts to shape American foreign policy. 

Incidentally, in the course of this year to come, we are going to be unveiling a really mega exhibit, a quite extraordinary exhibit called "Inventing the United States."  We're going to put on exhibit approximately all of the documents that are resident here in the more than just about a half century between the Albany Convention, the first time the states came together for a common purpose in 1754, and then ended with the transition of the first contested elected President being succeeded by another elected -- contestant elected President, 1800 when Jefferson succeeded Adams in a very bitter but in a way path breaking election.  And we'll also be reconstituting Jefferson's Library.  All of this will be interconnected with our expanding, still expanding Web site of primary documents of American history and culture. 

So there couldn't be a more important subject than what's being posed today by someone who knows about the founding documents but who has written extensively, taught excellently.  He's been a Fellow of the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life at the University of Virginia.  In 1985 he joined Southern Methodist University where he became the Cary M. Maguire Professor of Ethics and founded and directed the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility.  In 1993 he served on the Ethical Foundation Subgroup for the Clinton Task Force on National Healthcare Reform.  From 2002 to 2004, served as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.  In 2000, his alma mater, Yale University Divinity School recognized him with an award for distinction in scholarship and theological education.  He has taught at Smith College, where he twice served as Chair of the Department of Religion, Indiana University, where he founded and chaired the Department of Religious Studies, and the Georgetown University Kennedy Institute of Ethics.  Former President of the American Academy of Religion, Founding Fellow of the Hastings Center where he co-chaired its research group on death and dying. 

It really is a very special pleasure to welcome him here, and I will turn the microphone over to someone eminently qualified to speak on this very important topic, Dr. William May.   
 
[applause] 

Dr. William May:
Thank you, Dr. Billington, taking time in your busy schedule to be here this afternoon, for your gracious introduction, and for the invitation, especially, to spend three savored months at the Library of Congress.  My thanks go as well to Dr. Carolyn Brown and her staff colleagues, Mary Lou Reker, JoAnne Kitching, Robert Saladini, and my research intern, Greg Miller, for their many kindnesses in the course of my privileged stay here.  And I'm particularly indebted to Cary and Ann Maguire, public citizens of Dallas who I have reason to know have made a difference in higher education there and whose gift to the Library of Congress allowed Dr. Billington to appoint holders of the Maguire Chair in American History and Ethics, of which I am honored to be the fifth. 

Now, my topic is too contemporary and contentious for me to please everyone.  I hope simply to respect the time you have given me this afternoon with words that carry the conversation forward on issues that vex.  This cautionary tale is about the religious apprehensions embedded in American politics, especially in our foreign policy over the last 60 years as the country has dealt anxiously with the successive threats of global tyranny and anarchy. 

I'm a Christian theologian, not a political theorist.  Why would I venture on this topic in this city of rulers and consultants to rulers and op-ed critics of rulers?  Well, Machiavelli gives encouragement here.  In his preface to The Prince, he asked -- [break in audio] -- when he was not himself a Prince working directly in the forest.  And he compared himself to a landscape painter who views the terrain from the advantage of a distance that might throw governance in a fresh light.  The scriptures of Israel, although some 2,500 years distant from the current scene, throw light on a world beset by the twin threats of tyranny and anarchy.  Samuel I warns against the fundamental social evil of injustice or tyranny.  The people hanker for a king, but the prophet warns that a king will rule arbitrarily and unjustly.  And the Book of Judges flags the opposite social evil of anarchy.  "In those days there was no king in Israel, every man did what was right in his own eyes."  

In one way or another, every society struggles with the twin social evils of tyranny or injustice and anarchy.  And these evils pair with two basic and sometimes contending social goods, justice and order.  Every society needs some measure of order to stave off chaos, and it hopes for rulers who will exercise their ordering power justly and fairly.  Not surprisingly, the founder of the United States wrestled with the balance between these two social goods and evils.  [Break in audio] -- the tyrant, King George.  However, no less urgently they later sought to thwart the anarchy that would befall a newly independent nation should each colony simply do what it deemed right in its own eyes.  

So they devised a Constitution that would contain runaway fear.  They recognized that an unbounded fear of tyranny would let a society slide into anarchy, hence the need for an energetic and effective federal government.  However, a runaway fear of anarchy might produce tyranny, hence the need for a government with built-in checks and balances on the exercise of its power.  Building a just and well-ordered society is no easy task, either then or now.  In striking a balance, wise leaders recognize both social goods.  Sometimes radicals on the right and the left differ from centrists in that they rashly organize themselves solely around the good they prize and against the evil they fear.

Now after World War II, the leading political anxiety in the West focused on the evil of global tyranny.  Americans on the political right -- but not only on the right -- believed that a totalitarian state, the Soviet Empire, placed the United States and other nations in harm's way.  In its extreme form, this anxiety intensified and inspired an arms race against an evil deemed absolute.  The Soviets mirrored this anxiety in reverse, as they maneuvered against the military and economic colossus of the West.  Religiously put, a dualist vision drove extremists East and West in matters of public policy.

The ancient Manichean dualists reduced all distinctions in the universe to the cosmic struggle between two rival powers, the Kingdom of God pitted against the Kingdom of Satan, Good vs. Evil, Light against Darkness, Spirit opposed to Matter.  Modern dualists have embedded this cosmic struggle in the arena of politics or cultural or racial conflict.  After World War II, dualists identified the forces of righteousness with the capitalist West and the legions of Satan with the communist East.  The communists returned the favor by reversing the players in the mythology.  The Soviets would usher in a new Jerusalem by vanquishing Western economic imperialism.

In their appeal to portions of the electorate, those who hold to this dualist vision in America have invoked the language of biblical monotheism, Good vs. Evil, God vs. Satan.  However, dualism and monotheism differ.  Monotheism affirms God to be one, not two.  Evil is real, but not ultimate.  Dualists tend to act as if the devil is co-equal to God.  Further, by separating humans into two organized warring camps of the righteous and the unrighteous, dualists dismiss the Paulean warning that "All falls short of the glory of God."  They are metaphysical separatists.  They abhor especially the confusion, commingling, and tainting of Good with Evil.  They prefer the clarity of military contest to political compromise.

Now the containment of tyranny.  In the end, the United States, under President Truman, dealt with the threat of the Soviets not by acting on the script from the political right, but by following irregularly the more moderate policy of deterrence and containment, and the rebuilding of Europe proposed by George F. Kennan and colleagues.  Kennan argued for the diplomatic and military containment of the expansionist tendencies of America's former ally.  Containment required recognizing the evil of tyranny for what it is, but at the same time putting it in the lower case.  It excluded both appeasing and seeking supremacy over the Soviets.  

Less noticed, Kennan's policy of containing the Soviets required first and foremost that the United States contain itself and its own insecurities.  The United States should not view Russia through the distortions of fear as though our enemy were indelibly powerful and evil.  An anxious overreaction to Soviet tyranny would be morally self-deforming, he argued, as it transmogrified the American republic into a hypertensive empire, and would also be prudentially self-defeating as it drained American resources needed for long-term competition and as it aroused animosities against us elsewhere.  Kennan publicly confessed, "We see," and I quote him, "as if through a glass darkly."  This cognitive humility freed him to imagine the possibility of Russia's own later internal changes.  "One shouldn't automatically assume that Russia will remain inalterably what it is."  

Kennan's hope, moreover, rested on something more substantial than the vague feeling that maybe something better will turn up later.  He believed that an overextended imperial Russia could not sustain itself indeterminately into the future.  However, he also believed that long-term competition required that America remain firmly and patiently what it is, a republic.  And I quote, "The most important influence that the United States can bring to bear upon internal developments in Russia will continue to be the influence of example, the influence of what it is, and not only what it is to others, but what it is to itself."  Containment depended upon self-containment.  It called for a brace of continuing virtues: firmness, patience, self-confidence and hope. 

Forty years later Kennan's message of patience and hope seemed vindicated in the dramatic events of 1989.  However, the story didn't end in a triumph of hope.  A second and differing wave of anxiety overran the major players in the later stages of the Cold War and dampened any disposition to celebrate unalloyed hope. 

Anarchy now, on the current scene.  The Soviets experienced first and most traumatically a shift in their anxieties towards anarchy.  Although Glasnost and Perestroika opened up the Soviet empire to the outside world, the society quickly spun out of control as client states and regions broke off from the empire.  The meltdown at Chernobyl wasted on entire region and symbolized the plight of a society that had lost the ability to contain explosive powers within.

At length, a similar but subtler shift in political anxieties appeared in the West.  The invasion of Kuwait threatened the stability of a world order that depended upon both oil and the territorial integrity of nation states, and a rash of troubles broke out in the '90s. Failed nations became a category in political thought.  Cumulatively, the disintegration of the Balkans, the implosions in Africa, the flair-ups between the Arabs and Israelis, and most spectacularly, on a clear blue telegenic day called 9/11, the symbols of prevailing power for the United States, the commanding heights as it were, fell to the ground, Ground Zero.  And thereafter, a second religious vision supplied a different narrative account of the political scene.  Not order versus malevolent order, but order versus chaos, the political term for which is anarchy. 

From the 1990s and forward, we have been moving from the basic story line of Manichean and dualism to a narrative that traces back to dualist scriptures older than the Book of Genesis.  The Babylonian creation myth gives an account of a cosmic struggle between two rival gods, but this time not order versus malevolent order, but order against chaos.  Marduk, a kind of sheriff deity, the enforcer of law and order, battles against Tiamat, a formless monster, issuing from turbulent waters, the symbol of primordial chaos.  Marduk slays Tiamat and fashions the world out of Tiamat's dismembered body and human kind out of the blood of Tiamat's son who contrived the uprising against order.  Thus the world that we know and the creatures we are participate at one and the same time in order and chaos. 

But to complicate the picture, Marduk has a taste for violence.  He not only slays but dismembers Tiamat's body.  He's given to a somewhat enthusiastic overkill.  Quoting, "There lie hidden in the dark depths of his soul both violence and wildness."  The myth reminds us that a society threatened with disruption and chaos may suspend its more peaceful pursuits and restraints and rally around its police and militia for the sake of law and order.  It may even tolerate an outcropping of lawlessness in its law enforcers, permitting them a kind of frenzy and ecstasy, if you will, in protecting the compound of the law.  One tribe, traditional tribe, referred to its lawless defenders as the king's knives.  Thus, the contest doesn't offer perfectly pure conflict of opposites.  While at first glance the struggle seems a clear-cut battle between rival symbols, Marduk vs. Tiamat, law and order vs. chaos, the dragon's tail may show beneath the sheriff's uniform. 

Terrorism and the dread of anarchy.  Disarray in distant places didn't seize the United States with anxiety as much as that singularly violent event on our own shores September 11th.  The terrorists aimed at the supreme symbols of the New World Order, as the first President Bush defined the future after the breakup of the Soviet Union.  The World Trade Center symbolized and claimed by name an economic ascendancy over the world located in New York City.  But when the terrorists struck the second target, the Pentagon, they attacked directly and symbolically the core of the West's account of the origin and justification for the state.  From the 17th Century forward, the West has traced the origins of the state not to a supreme good, God, or the sacrifice of a founding hero, but to the protection the state provides against a supreme evil, the evils of theft, invasion and violent death.  

We give to the state a monopoly over the power of death, authorizing its police and military powers, and in exchange, the government assures us that, well, when we go to sleep, we'll not be robbed or murdered in the night.  That's the political deal.  People fear death.  And so they enter into a contract conveying to the state the awesome power to kill in order that they may not be killed.  However, the terrorist event proclaims on television that the state cannot protect you against a violent death.  The terrorist breaks the state's monopoly over violence, not simply by his readiness to kill, but by his willingness to die.  With his body wrapped in explosives, he stands outside of ordinary fear, and therefore the power of the state.  He is an ecstatic in the literal sense of that word.  Meanwhile, those who still fear death have lost their protector.

Decades ago, when the Irish conflict erupted in the bombing of various pubs in London, a Member of Parliament said, "From now on, every man his own magistrate.  Scotland Yard cannot protect you."  

In their choice of means, the commercial airplane, terrorists also denied to Americans the comfort that they were safe at a distance.  Anybody can be on an airplane.  There's no longer any security in obscurity or anonymity.  Television, moreover, guarantees that the event caught on camera will annihilate distance and reverberate liturgically over and over again in the country. 

Still, terrorist attacks don't seem to fit into the sequential world of political means and ends.  Why do they do it?  What do they hope to accomplish by a propaganda of deed?  Their actions seem only to galvanize hatred and fear.  In the past, critics tended to interpret terrorist movements simply as a type of political strategy and found them wanting.  They were counter-productive and self-destructive; hence, irrational.  As John Hume, a Bogside Catholic Member of Parliament once put it, "The Provos bombed themselves to the conference table and then they bombed themselves away again."  So interpreted, terrorist action breaks up into what Hannah Arrand [spelled phonetically] called the irrational.  The connection between means and ends and between agent, victim and intended social consequence so attenuate that the action juts out as a surd.  It becomes a politically impenetrable end in itself.

Now, in response, any government seeking to stop terrorism also seems to slide beyond reachable goals into the irrational and counter-productive.  Its actions lose connection to the causal nexus of means and ends.  By discharging a boundless resentment, it yields an immediate satisfaction, but no future.  And of course, critics warned that in attacking Iraq, the U.S. risked becoming the source of destabilizing power in the Middle East and also conflicted in its own internal life.  There, with Al-Qaeda, an increasingly marginalized movement managed to expose the preeminent power on earth in its relative powerlessness.  America's exercise of power seemed self-defeating. 

The conception and exercise of power.  Despite everything, the United States wields preeminent power in the world today, both hard power and soft.  The moralist Albert Camus wryly distinguished the two kinds of power by observing that power includes not only the force of a tornado but sap in the tree.  The violence of shock and awe is one thing, the surge of organic growth another. 

Recently and less vividly, Joseph Nye argued that the hard power of sticks and carrots, military and economic, does not of itself let a country such as the United States sustain its influence or command.  The country depends also upon its soft power, which often operates indirectly.  The respect of others for its laws and its law-abidingness.  The attractiveness of its educational and cultural institutions.  Its support for international institutions and enduring alliances.  And for better and for worse, a worldwide addictiveness of its technologies and the penetration of its mass media.  In a world in which no monopoly on the use of force can provide a nation with total security, not even the United States, how should the country conceive its exercise of power in relationship to others?  First over others, first apart from others, or first among equals?

Before the national election of 2000, the neoconservatives strongly backed the doctrine of first over others.  I think especially of William Crystal and Robert Kaplan's anthology on the subject.  They argued that the United States as a sole superpower, occupying a "position unmatched since Rome," should not act like "a reluctant sheriff."  It should be ready to project power and "conceive of itself as a European power, an Asian power, a Middle Eastern power, and of course, a Western Hemispherean power."  Thereby, the United States would fulfill its role in sustaining a benevolent global hegemony in the world that has already been transformed economically "in America's image." 

The administration acted on this doctrine of first over others, especially in response to 9/11.  The government's defense policy called for a military prowess, exceeding that of all other nations combined.  It replaced the stricter standard of a preemptive war, justified only in the case of an imminent threat, with the looser standard of a preventive war, justified in the grounds of a more vaguely defined gathering threat.  It rejected the constraints of the Kyoto Treaty, it exempted the U.S. from the jurisdiction of a world criminal court, and it passed off some provisions, as we know, of the Geneva Convention on the abusive treatment of prisoners and torture as quaint and obsolete.  And it appeared before the U.N. in the run up to the war, which seemed rather reluctantly and tactically, and it dismissed the warnings of its long-time partners in those alliances as offering the council of old Europe. 

In reaction to its policies, based upon first over others, both the administration, but also many of its critics, have worried that the nation may be tempted to resort to an isolationist withdrawal from the world and embrace a policy of first apart from others.  In effect, the United States would attempt to repeat on a global scale a strategy that has appealed to some of the privileged within the country, the security of being a gated community.  But such a path is no longer available strategically to a country that has undercut, through its transportation, economic and communication systems, to say nothing of its addiction to oil, its capacity to survive alone.  The path of isolationism is also dubious morally, and neither repairs the damages we may have wrought by American hegemony, nor discharges the responsibilities that fall upon a nation of ranking power. 

The third self-conception, first among equals.  We recognize America's current preeminent power as a fact of life, but attempt to lead rather than to dominate or withdraw from the world.  It's not within the scope of this lecture to explore the important particulars of this kind of leadership in foreign policy.  I'm concerned here simply to explore how our anxious responses to the external threats of terrorism and tyranny have stirred internal struggles over our national identity.  The question of our identity is far from a settled issue.  Are we a republic or an empire?  Does the President operate within a system of checks and balances, or do the exigencies of our current plight demand a vastly expanded Presidential role?  What view of the citizen, imperial or civic, underlies these debates? 

Since recent leaders have used some of the familiar language of monotheism to appeal to parts of the electorate in shoring up support for their understanding of the nation's mission, I will offer comments on these issues only as Christian thought bears on them.  Now, let it be conceded immediately that neither the Christian churches nor the scriptures to which they appeal offer a series of directives for foreign policy or an embossed blueprint for the design of a government.  A fixed Christian set of directives would leave too little room for good faith differences among Christians on principles and their relative weight, and also too little room for subsequent criticism of a particular design and its imperfect realization.  It might also imply that policies were not shareable across a broad range of beliefs, secular and religious.  Monotheists need not always feel obliged to forge distinctive policies or directives on any and all issues to prove God's uniqueness as the nation goes about the awesome business of wielding power for the common good. 

That said, monotheistic belief, I think, calls for a foreign policy at once humbler but also more confident than the religious outlook that has shaped American decisions in recent years.  Although no theologian, Zbigniew Brzezinski touches on the larger scheme of things; there are no immortal nations or empires.  "America's global dominance in the course of time will fade."  That fact should be religiously bearable on the grounds that God, not America, is the beginning and end of all things.  However, this powerful but mortal country and its institutions can also leave a legacy in the course of its continuance under wise leadership.  Wisdom, however, requires keeping the country's fears and anxieties under control lest it distort its fundamental identity as a nation. 

Biblical realism addresses the issue of fear and anxiety.  Monotheism affirms that the evils of both injustice and chaos are real but not ultimate.  We misinterpret and undervalue our lives, our politics, and much else when we split the world asunder into two gods, whether order vs. malevolent order or order vs. chaos.  Dualists of either sort tend to be religiously grim, and therefore in their apprehensiveness reach for total control and power.  A foreign policy of runaway fear drives for absolute security, which in turn justifies the unilateral presumption to empire.  Meanwhile, imperialists in their isolation are prey to the fear that every challenge, every limit undercuts their control.  Thus, their security spreads unabated.  Presumption and anxiety feed one another and politics tends to starve. 

In this atmosphere, Vice President Cheney reportedly argued that a possible threat at the very low threshold of just one percent might justify the nation's strongest response to protect itself and its preponderate power.  I give a quote here; it is not a direct quote from him, but reported in Suscan's [spelled phonetically] book about the encounter between him and the head of the CIA.  He said purportedly, "If there is a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.  It's not about our analysis or finding a preponderance of evidence; it's about our response."  Cheney's doctrine justified, it seemed to me, a policy based on a possibility, not a perceived reality.  As the world's only superpower, America should concentrate on creating a new reality through its response, was the view proposed.  It need not be tethered to the rayal [spelled phonetically] politique of Old Europe, obliged to consider all factors, influences and consequences of action. 

Now, a footnote here on the illusions of empire.  In an aphorism reminiscent to the theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger once observed, "History is the best antidote to illusions of omnipotence and omniscience." 

The earlier Cold War realists, in my judgment, suffered primarily from the illusion of omniscience.  Nixon and Kissinger in their worst moments prided themselves in being experts in how the world works.  Kissinger warned, "We should not destroy what is possible by forcing events beyond what the circumstances will allow."  In effect, statecraft triumphs through craftiness. 

In contrast, the neoconservatives have suffered from the illusion of omnipotence.  They believed that the United States had the power to create the circumstances in Iraq and elsewhere, to which other nations would have to adjust.  The United States held in its hands the power of shock and awe, which would change the realities to which others must yield.  We did not need to know the religious and cultural intricacies of the world we were replacing.  The buzzword was "transformative leadership."  In a sense, history didn't matter.  Democracy would follow swiftly upon overthrowing the tyrant, and the whole world, Iraq not excepted, thirsted for freedom. 

Classical conservative thinkers, as early as Edmund Burke on forward, have countered history does matter.  Democracy has to be grown, not simply imposed.  As it takes hold, it resembles less the tornado than sap in the tree. 

Now, the question of recovering our national identity by containing the ambition to empire.  Ian Shapiro, the Yale political scientist, has borrowed from George Kennan and proposed containment as a third way between supremacy and appeasement in dealing with terrorism.  "The idea behind containment is to refuse to be bullied while at the same time declining to become a bully."  Now, critics of containment have objected that terrorists change the nature of the game for the nation state.  Restraint will no longer work.  The political irrationality of terrorism demolishes the traditional diplomatic ploys of restraining bullies with disincentives and incentives.  How can you contain or deter terrorists with the prospect of their deaths when they have already handed themselves over to martyrdom? 

Shapiro responds to this challenge by distinguishing between three groups: the attackers, their leaders, and the leaders of enabling states.  Although the attackers, whom I described as ecstatics, may not be eliminable and all of their attacks deterrable, they are containable.  Terrorists do not simply attack alone.  Even if individual terrorists operate on a plane indifferent to death, their leaders and enabling institutions and states will be susceptible, he argues, to incentives and disincentives for the sake of the survival of their cause or their community. 

Well, what are the long-term prospects for containment today?  An argument can be made that the prospects are at least as good for a favorable outcome today as George Kennan could reasonably hope for in the earlier contest with the Soviets.  Admittedly, terrorists draw on some passages in the Koran to justify their cause.  However, the sacred scriptures and traditions of Islam, in their diversity, give as much or more ground for hope in the emergence of moderating influence in Islam than the writings of Marx, Lennon and Stalin justified Kennan's hope for changes in the Soviets and worldwide communism.  Firm containment, however, requires some discipline so as not to give advantage to the hawks in Islam by gratuitous chest thumping. 

Now, I leave aside here a second issue of maintaining checks and balances in the exercise of Presidential power, a debate that in part traces all the way back to Madison and Hamilton, and turn to the less explored third issue of limiting the imperial self and cultivating the civic self.  An air of unreality has haunted our present administration.  It sounded the alarm on a world historical struggle against terrorists and tyrants, yet it has not called for sacrifices from all Americans in the struggle.  It rejected tax hikes to pay for the war, it dismissed the very idea of a draft, thus relying on those with the humblest of resources to fight it, and it advised the rest of the nation to go shopping. 

In another era, W.H. Auden dealt with similar ironies in behavior when he warned of "the snarl of the abyss that always lies just underneath our jolly picnic on the heath of the agreeable."  In its policies, the administration has scrupulously deferred to an imperial understanding of the self, calling for no serious limitations on our way of life.  A deep irony abounds in American history.  Liberals, radicals, and conservatives, for different reasons in each case in the last century, have inveighed against imperialistic and oppressive institutions, but they have not recognized that beneath imperialistic institutions often lies an equally imperial concept of the self. 

The literary critic Quinton Anderson in his study of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman defined the imperial self as a self that accepts no limitation upon itself at the hands of others.  It resents intrusions from the public realm.  It does not invest itself in growing strong, nurturing and self-restraining institutions.  For the latter task, a society must cultivate the civic self.  The civic self, as opposed to the imperial self, understands and accepts itself as limited and amplified by others. 

A society wholly driven by imperial self-interest would tear itself to pieces, no matter how ingenious its constitutional safety mechanisms of checks and balances, if it didn't also cultivate the civic self.  The civic self engages in the difficult art of acting in concert with others for the common good, and that's why the leaders of the Revolutionary and Constitutional periods recognize the importance of public virtue in a citizenry.  "No phrase except liberty was invoked more often by the revolutionaries than 'the public good.'"  Public virtue implies some readiness to sacrifice self-interest to the common good.  

Such sacrifices for the common good are important both in the arena of politics and in the setting of what Edmund Burke once called the little platoons amongst us.  Sociologists have dubbed them less elegantly those intermediate institutions, neither the government nor the solitary individual, upon which the health and vigor of our common life depends.  When they do their work well, such intermediate institutions, including professional societies, neighborhood associations, religious congregations and the like, are not merely interest groups pursuing their own private interests, but also publics within the public at large.  The deliberateness with which they act should serve as a brake on the intemperate wants of the imperial self and on the ill-considered projects of an imperial government.  But also, the habits of sacrifice they engender should help sustain those national policies that call for expenditures on behalf of just causes. 

Religious congregations, to the degree that they are publics within the public at large and not merely interest groups, are engaged in cultivating the civic self.  Rabbis, priests, ministers and imams lead groups of people of all stripes and purposes and cross-purposes.  Such leaders, in marrying and burying Democrats as well as Republicans, hawks as well as doves, and in drawing together people who may be recalcitrant and at odds, are engaged in building up indirectly the soil in which democratic institutions flourish. 

Finally, taking to heart monotheism in dealing with dualists.  In the foregoing, I have not called the dualist movement currently influential in our politics the "Christian right."  Strictly speaking, its adherents, whether denominationally affiliated or not, urge upon the country not Christianity, but a different religion: dualism, not monotheism.  St. Augustine was the founding theologian in the West who recognized what was at stake here.  In his great treatise on the dualism of his time, he didn't locate the Manicheans on a spectrum of Christian left, center and right as though he were describing simply different colorations of the same thing.  The metaphor of a spectrum, which the modern media regularly imply when they refer to a Christian left, center and right, assumes a single beam of light which refracts into different colors.  The dualists, Augustine recognized, threw a different beam of light altogether, not simply an alternative shade of Christian monotheism.  They were not a Christian right.  They were something different, and they were mistaken. 

However, Augustine made a second equally important point.  He recognized the lure of dualism in us all.  He himself spent nine years as a hearer among the Manicheans, attracted at first to the instant clarity they offered in the struggle of Good and Evil.  He finally rejected dualism.  However, taking to heart his monotheism, he also rejected a dualist view of dualists.  He declared that "to heal heretics is better than to destroy them."  God's will is "that they should be amended rather than destroyed, and in every case we must believe that the designed effect is the healing of men and not their ruin."  

St. Augustine recognized that if you want to address the destructive power of dualism at the deepest level, then you had better contain the lure of dualism in your own soul as you deal with them.  That cautionary tale has reappeared in the testing events covered in this lecture.  Israel needed a king to firm itself up against the threat of tyrants from without and defend off anarchy from within, but it also needed to contain its own runaway fears so as not to install within its own life the arbitrary powers it feared. 

The founders of the United States recognized the need for a stronger executive in legislative authority to overcome the weakness of the former colonies in dealing with overseas tyrants.  But they built checks and balances into the Constitution and they encouraged the cultivation of the civic self so as to bequeath a society more spaciously conceived than a nation obsessed with its security alone.  And that imperfect republic, eventually grown powerful, has undergone two successive waves of anxiety across the last 60 years, but it must not let an uncontained fear reconfigure it into shapes it professes to detest. 

Most tellingly of all, however, Augustine offers a warning to monotheists on the current scene.  Monotheists will succumb to their own spiritual temptation if they simply slam the door shut on the dualists and create a reflexive dualism of their own, identifying the bad guys with their current opponents and the good guys with the dwindling band of monotheists in the mainline churches.  Believers in God as the alpha and omega, oh God, a more hopeful, open and confident politics than that, as they persist in working with all sorts and conditions of men and women, irregular libertarians and would be imperialists, dualists and secularists and religionists of every stripe to build spacious, humane, inhabitable institutions in the rough terrain of modern politics.  A rough terrain indeed, but whoever promised that pursuing the common good would be easy?  

Thank you.   
 
[applause]
 
I will be pleased to take questions.  
 
Male Speaker:  
Over here?  Does not the United States need oil for pharmaceuticals and plastics, so that our effort to get oil wherever is not really an addiction?  

Dr. William May:  
A factor of need for pharmaceuticals and the problem of our addiction to privacy in the automobile is quite another thing.  And there's, of course, a great deal that we have to do to attempt to address the addiction.  I live in Charlottesville.  I brought a car up with me here.  I discovered I use it very seldom because there's a wonderful metro system here.  Of course, the American city, by and large, was built after the automobile instead of before the automobile.  It's very hard to reverse commitments that have been built over a hundred years.  I don't mean to underestimate the problem.  

Yes, we certainly need oil.  I found Kevin Phillips's point important.  The three successive empires that he identified -- the Dutch, the British, and American -- each depended upon a basic energy source and ours has certainly been oil.  And it's been useful for an awful lot more than the automobile, as you have pointed out.  
 
Male Speaker:  
I think you made a powerful statement, but let me ask, why don't you go further than just the pursuit of the common good, and understand that when Brzezinski says that inevitably America as a great power will decline, inevitably.  After all, Rome declined every -- all of the great [unintelligible].  Why do we have to accept that?  Those nations never had a leader who said that the government of the people shall not perish from the earth.  They never had a slogan that we are here to make the union greater.  I mean, the whole idea is to keep improving.  

They never had the examples that were set by the men who stormed the shores of Normandy.  And while we are awed by terrorists and suicide bombers, don't we understand that the majority of the men who went ashore at Normandy or Iwo Jima, they understood that they might die, that they were martyrs, and that this nation has done some things in the pursuit of a mission -- the missionary zeal of the nation?  We were there in Normandy not necessarily to defend our immediate shores, but in pursuit of freedom for the whole world, to stop the scourge of Nazism destroying the world.  And we were there in Japan against fanatics.  We talked about the Kamikazes and all the kind of fanatical actions of the Japanese military, but they were overcome by men who had a greater zeal than they had, which meant they were martyrs whether they use the language or not.  

So we are a nation that has a history that we should build on in terms of -- our mission is not merely to take care of the practical problems of guaranteeing that we have oil and that our prosperity is not threatened and that we are economically competitive, but we also feel that in order for us to develop a more perfect union, in order for us to realize the things that we want to realize for our posterity, there must be a mission.  We have acted as if we had a mission.  I mean, Truman's Marshall Plan was as much as important as the invasion of Normandy.  And I was in Pakistan a few years ago and I said, only if we acted with a Marshall Plan similar to Truman's would be had for Pakistan, we could secure that 50 percent of the population is very pro-American, right down the middle.  Well, we didn't do that, so they may be slipping in the other direction.  

We can defeat Islamic extremism.  We have defeated things greater than that.  But I think we have to understand there was a zeal, there is a zeal that has been present in the pursuit of the American dream, not just for America but to understand the broader implications of having to go beyond convenience and sometime even into martyrdom.  While we don't call it martyrdom, if necessary we can do that. 
 
Dr. William May:  
Well, you stated much more eloquently than I did in the paper, but that's why at the risk of keeping you much, much too long, there was that section on the civic self at the end.  Because the problem of the internalization of identity is crucial.  And part of that sense of what the civic self is, as distinct from an imperial self, is a self that recognizes that it lives in the midst of limitations, and limitations which it is willing to assume.  

The art of acting in concert with others for the common good is the way I define the civic self.  And public virtue, which was the second most-often invoked term at the time of the American Constitution, after liberty -- why after liberty?  Because if all you had is liberty alone, things would fall apart in this country.  For this country to endure it not only had to win the war but to maintain the kind of republic that it was becoming.  And public virtue requires some readiness to sacrifice for the common good.  And it was de Tocqueville who once said of the United States, maybe not a lot of Joan of Arcs and heroes on the grand scale, but a nation of small sacrifices.  And I guess that's why some of us find it strange that we have not seen the force, the claim of sacrifice upon us in the case of just causes.  But the justice of the cause is another issue.  Yes, sir. 

Jim Davis:  
Hello, sir, my name is Jim Davis.  I'm with a student group from Central Texas College and I have a question regarding your references to soft power in your lecture.  Do you believe that through the use of soft power we can change the minds of the radicals in the Middle East and elsewhere, given the overwhelming opposition to the existence of Israel and the U.S. presence in the Middle East to protect our national interests?  And can you give a few examples of that soft power?

William May:  
The distinction made between hard and soft power, neither by Joseph Nye nor myself in borrowing on it, was made in order to dismiss the significance of hard power.  And the policy of containment had two sides to it.  It did require containing Russia, in the case of Kennan, but it also required self-containment.  And that summarized for him, it seemed to me, this whole concern that be careful that we remain a republic.  As you Congressmen have so eloquently talked about, the question of our enduring future, whether we live or die is not entirely in our hands across the thousands of years, but there is a question of faithfulness to the legacy that we would leave should we not survive.  

And I wrote my undergraduate thesis, a grandiose idea of an undergraduate thesis on Toynbee's study of history.  And of course, Toynbee said in the long run civilizations die not through murder but through taking their life at their own hands.  And I take that to mean for us not the letting loose of what is called hard power, but knowing how to contain it so that we remain firmly what we are as a nation.  Firmness not only in relationship to the opponents, but discipline in our own carriage and bearing.  That's the legacy that I think Brzezinski was talking about.  Yes, sir. 
 
Male Speaker:   
I think a very interesting lecture.  I was especially taken by the dualism in the sense that you were touching on, developing between the imperial self in essence on the one side and the civic self on the other side.  And thinking about American history and the myths of American history, you know, America has a mythical view of itself in the world and its role in the world.  You know, a country who stands up there, kind of a God-given country with a God-given task for the rest of the world.  And for us who come from different parts of the world -- I happen to come from the Caribbean; I grew up and was educated in the Netherlands -- it's this kind of very, very deeply embedded, nearly socialized imperial self that I see as so potentially dangerous for the United States at a time when it's undergoing such tremendous changes socially, economically and politically, and also having to deal with the fact that its power is clearly waning.  

You talked about Brzezinski -- in his book, I think what you call it -- A Second Chance or The Second -- I think it was The Second Chance, was the name of the book, right?  In which he talks about that this imperial self was going to run -- I thought especially the last 20, 30 pages of that book is really a very brilliant type of thing in which he talked about internationally the growing sense of self-dignity but also self-agency.  The growing sense internationally of other people feeling that they also have a right to their own sense of [unintelligible], their own interests being taken into consideration.  

And I was wondering, is there not the danger that as these crises, economical, social, ideological, psychological crises that are now taking place in the United States that has developed, if this sense of this self-containment doesn't break down -- I mean, you call for the self-containment constantly in your lecture obviously, because I suppose you, to a certain extent, sense there might be a crisis in this, this politics of self-containment or this sense of self-containment.  And I was wondering how do you see this playing out in the future?  How do you see this working itself out?  Is there not a great danger that as the country runs in more crises, that maybe the imperial self continually takes over and continue to go over, this one percent idea, taking over from this other part. 
 
Dr. William May:  
Well, it's a very -- I'm not going to try to repeat the question because the question is about the imperial self.  It's a constant struggle in life.  If you think of the shipboard covenants that people entered into before they came to this country in the setting of Protestant Puritans, and they agreed and they used the image of a body to understand themselves, members of a body, which of course comes out of scripture, and then they got here.  Now, here's a group that understands the self is limited.  

You see, those Puritans understood that as they entered into a covenant.  It means you're going to be limited in your relationship to others as you brave things together.  And then, of course, they get over here and lo and behold, there are the Native Americans.  And lo and behold, on other ships come Baptists, and you ship them off to Rhode Island.  And then the worst thing of all, there are your kids who aren't even born yet.  It's a constant trauma of immigrants coming into the country that even when America has entered into this sense of compact and covenant, there's the constant problem of hemorrhaging of the universe that has been built up.

And back in the '60s, the generation gap.  Well, it was as though it was discovered in the '60s.  There's always been a gap between the generations, and education is an attempt to open up, and when you open up, you hand over into the hands of others, and when you do that kind of releasing into the hands of others, there's an element of uncertainty as to how you're going to be received and taken over.  The word tradition is not simply inculcating; it's also handing over into the hands of others.  

And so when you ask about future, it seems to me the struggle between what I call the imperial self and the civic self is a constant struggle, and I have no tealeaves into the future as to how each generation will handle this problem of the trauma of the stranger.  But I tell you, America has in some ways a lot more experience in dealing with the trauma of the stranger than so many European countries that are now going through it.  We're going through it in the immigration problem today.  How it's going to turn out, I don't know.  But I see it in those terms.  

Yes. 
 
Female Speaker:  
We'll take one or two more questions. 
 
Dr. William May:  
That's fine.  Absolutely. 
 
Female Speaker:  
Maybe collect all the questions and then respond.  So if people want to ask a question, listen to all of them. 
 
William May:  
If they're -- it's a little hard from up here.  There's a hand up here.  Yes?  Yes, ma'am. 
 
Female Speaker:  
Thank you.  Basically I'm a European.  I don't really have a question.  The point is, your lecture has been so excellent.  I couldn't agree more as a European, and I think the best of European politicians in continental Europe would just agree with you, because while we have this kind of political tradition that we share -- and I'm an expert in the American political autobiography of the early republic, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Monroe -- and what you have said is perfect for what Europe wants.  All that we want are perfect trans-Atlantic relations in this kind of spirit that is the history of American politics, and what America is all about.  And that's, I think, to achieve the public good, even trans-Atlantic public good in the U.S. and Europe.  It's not that it is impossible.  I think this is a necessity in the future and I think it might be easy to achieve it in the next decade.  Thank you.  
 
Dr. William May:  
Thank you.  The common good -- oh, yes, sir.  Yes, sir. 
 
Male Speaker:  
Yes.  I was curious how you reacted to the Christian denominational response to, I guess, particularly the buildup in the start of Iraq war.  It seemed like the Roman Catholic Church, National Council of Churches had outspoken opposition.  Southern Baptist Convention was strongly supporting the President, maybe seemed to be the only major denomination doing that.  I'm wondering how you see that in light of just war theory, biblical interpretation, you know, religious tradition.  
 
Dr. William May:  
The question was asked about just war.  The question over here related -- comment related to the question of the common good.  To invoke the common good is not the end of a discussion.  It's simply the beginning of the discussion, because there are huge debates as to what constitutes the common good.  There are the base fundamental goods related to survival, but there's the higher goods related to human flourishing.  There's a question of human being and the question of human well being.  And this institution is more related to the question of well being, the books, the library, the scholarship and the rest, the so-called higher goods.  And there's a huge contest over these issues, so that's only the beginning of parliamentary debate once you invoke the idea of the common good. 

And your question, sir, was -- 
 
Male Speaker:  
Yeah, particularly how you saw the role that the Christian denominations in particular were playing -- 
 
Dr. William May:  
Yes.  Well, I'm a Protestant and so it's very hard, as you know, to generalize, and it's also kind of hard to generalize to say -- I remember one Episcopal clergyman telling me that there's one politics on one side of the alter rail and there's another politics on the other side of the alter rail.  So there's different politics and leaders and laypeople in these communities.  It seems to me, the debate over these issues in foreign policy has been dominated by the assumption that Christianity is simply the Christian right.  And that is not correct.  But on the other hand, it's very, very hard to have a voice in the agora, the public space, because it's much easier for television to deal in terms of melodramatic alternatives.  And so centrists' voices have some real difficulties of finding a place.  

Now, I don't mean to whine about that, because in fact, there are occasions in which there is space to speak, and I think my own tradition has -- which happens to be Presbyterian, hasn't done the best of jobs of dealing with this issue.  But nevertheless, there are an awful lot of clergy out there who are marrying Democrats and Republicans, getting them to work together in one way or another.  So, an awful lot of the contributions that religious groups can make to public life are indirect rather than direct, contributions to public culture rather than simply policy resolutions. 

I have been warned that we need to stop.
 
Female Speaker:  
Yeah, I think we need to stop, yeah.  Let me ask you to please express your appreciation.   
 
[applause] 

And I also ask that you join us for a reception and continued informal conversation.  Thank you very much.   
 
[applause]