What Is Community and How Is It Changing in North Dakota? by David Danbom

When the folks at the North Dakota Humanities Council asked me to write on this question I figured the first thing I needed to do was to research the word “community” a little bit.

So I typed in “community” on Google and was informed that there were “approximately” 1,130,000,000 entries. That’s a lot of entries, even for a college professor with time on his hands, so I went over to the NDSU library to see whether I could find a more manageable data set.

Typing in “community” on the subject line of the NDSU Library brought up 5522 entries. That quite a bit more manageable than 1.1 billion and change, but it’s still a pretty big number and – keep in mind – we’re hardly the Library of Congress. But at least I could get a sense of what “community” means from these 5500+ entries.

Turns out it means a lot of different stuff. As I expected, community refers to places, as in the work entitled A Community Study of Mandan, North Dakota. Nor was I surprised to see community defined in terms of emotional bonds among people, as in the book In Search of Community: Encounter Groups and Social Change.

But the word community is also regularly applied to large social groupings, as in the “European community” or the “community of man.” And it is frequently applied to professional groupings, such as the “legal community” or the “medical community.” Interestingly, it is frequently applied to professions but almost never to jobs. There seems to be no “plumbing community” or “truck-driving community.”

We also see the word community attached to institutions, organizations, or even inclinations. Hence, we speak of a “Catholic community” or the “volunteer community” or an “NDSU community.”

Reading through these many applications I was reminded of a book by Daniel Boorstin called The Americans: The Democratic Experience. Boorstin saw communities everywhere, in the television shows people watched, the organizations they joined, and the products they consumed. As one who wrote about “I Love Lucy” and “Frigidaire” communities, Boorstin would undoubtedly nod approvingly at mention of “Face Book” and “My Space” communities today.

Complicating matters further is the fact that the word community goes beyond even this infinite variety of human groupings in its application to ecological or biological niches or species, as in Ecology and Natural History of Desert Lizards: Analysis of the Ecological Niche and Community Structure. Now, if you were to stick the lizards together with the lawyers, this use of “community” might make more sense.

Well, it should be pretty clear that my search for help turned out to be more confusing than enlightening. I found myself thinking of the words of Justice Brennan of the United States Supreme Court, who said that he couldn’t define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. With apologies to Brennan, I’m not going to attach a rigid definition to community, but I think I know it when I see it, and I expect most of you do, too.

I expect that when most of us think about “community” we think about it through some combination of the first two ways I mentioned – as a physical place inhabited by people bound together emotionally. This is fairly close to the definition of community provided by Ferdinand Töennies, the German sociologist of the nineteenth century who was one of the first people to study the issue systematically. Töennies defined communities as relatively restricted spaces shared by people with close family, kin, friendship and neighborhood ties. In Töennies’ communities human bonds were personal and emotional rather than contractural, and human affairs were governed by moral responsibility and personal obligation rather than law. Töennies contrasted community with society. Societies were made up of diverse, unrelated and unconnected people, often divided along class or ethnic lines. People in societies had few mutual ties and consequently felt few mutual obligations. Thus, they were governed not by moral imperatives, but by law backed by compulsion and force. I would imagine Töennies’ understanding of society sounds rather harsh and alien to us. But his conception of community probably resonates with us, because it sounds a lot like what we have had – and what we still have – in North Dakota.

Early European Americans in North Dakota had to make farms and towns and lives, but when you think about it, you realize that their communities came pretty much ready made. Take a look some time at Bill Sherman’s wonderful ethnic atlas of North Dakota – Prairie Mosaic. When you look at Sherman’s big picture, you see a remarkably heterogenous state. But when you break it down to the township or sub-township level you see communities of remarkable – even stunning – homogeneity. That isn’t accidental. That’s how the railroads and the land companies and the settlers themselves settled the state. So we have Bohemian Germans over here and Volga Germans over there. Norwegians in this township and Swedes in that. Poles on this side of the river and Icelanders on the other.

It was a good way to settle the land. It was easier to sell to a group and easier to attract individuals when a bunch of folks like them were already there. And when they came from the same village or even the same family, as they frequently did, they had a ready-made community. People already cared about each other and were ready to lend each other a hand. And when you’re among friends and relatives who depend on you and on whom you depend, you tend to be a sticker and a survivor. It’s easier for you to make a go of it in a difficult environment.

People who spoke the same language – literally and figuratively – quickly created institutions that buttressed their strong sense of community. They founded ethnic churches with services in their native languages. They built schools in which the language of instruction was supposed to be English but frequently was not. They created new organizations – such as the Sons of Norway – to reinforce and elaborate their community ties and their connections to home. And they recreated the Old World in the New, transferring customs, traditions, celebrations, foodways – you name it – from the Russian Steppes and the Scandinavian valleys to the vast and forbidding Great Plains.

One is tempted to call these “island communities,” after historian Robert Wiebe’s phrase coined a generation ago, but they were never isolated in the sense of Indians deep in the Amazon rain forest or throwbacks in isolated Appalachian hollows. North Dakota communities participated in a national commercial and political culture. Children went off to school or to the service or to work for a while in Fargo or Minneapolis or Seattle. And automobiles and radios exposed local communities to the world beyond the locality.

But, in the context of modern American society, these communities were relatively isolated. They were rural, agriculturally oriented communities, and were not particularly dynamic. People moved out, because agriculture simply couldn’t support all of the children farmers produced, but few people moved in, and those who did were usually friends or relatives of the folks who were already there.

The relatively static nature of so many North Dakota communities was not a bad thing. We tend to privilege “progress” in the United States and assume it is good, but that’s not necessarily so. There is much to be said for places that don’t change very much when they are comfortable, caring, and sustaining. It is the nature of these communities – and their relatively unchanging character – that makes modern people who grew up in them so nostalgic about them.

North Dakota communities provided a comforting and sustaining environment to many of the people living in them, but not all. Communities set standards and had expectations. Those who met them enjoyed a warm and pleasant life. Those who did not – who were “different” to use that judgmental word so popular in our state – found communities stifling and oppressive rather than supportive and caring. They are the folks who left and who do not attend the centennials and all-school reunions that draw so many old residents back.

The fact is that community means defining who we are, but also who we aren’t. It’s about including some people and excluding others, and some of those who are excluded live there. This is where the fences come in.

Now, defining people out as well as in is not a practice confined to North Dakota. I think it is probably a component of human nature generally, and perhaps of the nature of other species as well. We all tend to divide humanity into “us” and the “other.” What we are defines implicitly – and sometimes explicitly – what we are not.

In part because our communities are so tight and change so little we in North Dakota have a good understanding of us and them – of defining of who we are not by who we are. We are Catholic, not Lutheran; white not black or Latino or Indian; Norwegian, not German or Irish; West River, not Imperial Cass. Plug in what you want. We all have a good sense of who we are and who we are not; of who is on our side of the fence and who is on the other side.

Us and them sounds negative, but it isn’t necessarily. We need to know who us is to have a sense of identity and uniqueness and a feeling of belonging, and defining them as them doesn’t usually do anybody any tangible harm.

But the us-and-them thinking that we see in our communities and that represents the fences with which we are so familiar can actually harm us and foreclose a better future for our children and our grandchildren. We need to ask whether the fences our ancestors built a century a more ago are appropriate in a dynamic and rapidly changing society, or whether they limit North Dakota’s ability to move forward to a brighter future.

We all know that the most compelling and enduring issue in our state is demographic. We are the only state in the Union whose population is smaller today than it was in 1930. We obsess about this issue. We are excited when the Census Data Center shows an uptick in the birthrate or a slight population increase. Conversely, even a slight population decline sends us into a funk.

We view the demographic decline as our number one problem, and what is the solution we regularly suggest? Keeping young North Dakotans here and/or inducing former North Dakotans to return. Now, there are good reasons for conceiving this solution first. People who live here or who have lived here know that we are not at the end of the earth and they know that it is possible to survive the winter. We don’t have to sell them in the way we have to sell outlanders.

But there’s something more to this, isn’t there? Present and former North Dakotans are part of us. They have been inside the fence, so we know that, not only will they be comfortable with us, we will be comfortable with them.

There’s another way to address our demographic problem. We could encourage immigration to the state by people who have never been North Dakotans. We have great communities and an attractive lifestyle. Why not urge others to come and share it with us?

For about thirty years after statehood we had a Department of Immigration and we had lots of immigrants. In 1910 seventy percent of North Dakotans were either immigrants – mostly from Europe or Canada – or the children of immigrants, a figure which led the nation.

In the 2003, 2005, and 2007 legislative sessions a bill was introduced to revive the state immigration department, which would now target people in other states rather than other countries. It was defeated every time. In 2005 a senator summed up the opposition during floor debate when he concluded, “immigrants cause problems.” What a fine fence-builder he is!

But, to give him his due, we need to recognize that this xenophobic fence-builder is right in a sense. Outsiders do challenge us. Bosnians and Somalis in Fargo stress the capacities of the schools. It is sometimes difficult to communicate with Latinos in Grafton and Drayton. Roughnecks from Texas and Oklahoma bring practices and dialects and churches to which Williston and Dickinson are not accustomed. But all of these folks also enrich us, economically and culturally. They shake us up and stir the pot. They shock us out of our lethargy and comfortable self-satisfaction. But I believe – and I think the census figures bear me out – that they represent a large part of the future of the state.

I believe that the challenge for North Dakota in the future is not going to involve the wholesale tearing down of the fences that have helped us maintain strong and sustaining communities, but in putting more gates in our fences and opening them more widely. We need to bring more of those who are outside the fence in and we need to make them more comfortable when they are inside.

I don’t think this needs to involve a sea-change or a major disruption in our lives, but it will require a little different way of thinking. In recent years we have undergone an ethnic revival movement. NDSU houses a “Center for Heritage Renewal” whose purpose is to serve “heritage communities.” I have not doubts that this center has done much good work on behalf of our “heritage communities” and that those entities appreciate it and what it does. But what I really wish someone would create is a “Center for North Dakota Renewal.” That center wouldn’t define community in terms of eating lutefisk, or speaking German, or making kuchen, or telling Norwegian jokes. It wouldn’t focus on who is in and, by implication, who is out. It would define community in a larger and broader and more emotionally inclusive sense that we have tended to define it. It would talk about community in terms of sustenance for families, neighbors who genuinely care for one another, pride of place, tolerance, and, to paraphrase Martine Luther King, Jr., judgment of others on the basis of their characters rather than their “heritage communities.”
We have the fences, and they don’t need to be built stronger and higher. What we need to do now is to open the gates and invite those who can be North Dakota’s future in.

David B. Danbom is a historian, author, columnist, and professor of agricultural history at North Dakota State University. Danbom spent nine years on the Fargo Historic Preservation Commission.

What Are Free Markets For? Or, what should we think about before we think about voting? by Jack Russell Weinstein

In the midst of a long and unpredictable election season, American voters find themselves asking very difficult questions: How is the country to be unified in the face of deeply felt political difference? What is the role of religion in political governance? How freely should we trade with other countries? How important is the economy to national well being? What is the ideal education policy?

These are not new questions, nor do they have easy answers, but voters, when examining their own commitments, tend to make two types of mistakes. The first assumes that these questions are simply matters of opinion and can be addressed without considering the history of public policy; the second is supposing that a person can answer any one of them without addressing the others – that political commitments are singular and unrelated to one another. These two central difficulties relate to what I shall call the problem of expertise versus equality, and the problem of policy connectedness. The problem of expertise versus equality asks to what extent an uninformed electorate is more or less effective than an informed one. It requires that we wonder whether voting is a matter of opinion or knowledge, and, if it’s the former, whether all beliefs are of equal worth. The problem of policy connectedness acknowledges that any given policy necessitates support from other laws and practices, and asks to what extent changes in policy or practice necessitate other changes across the legislative board.

1. Expertise versus equality.

Prioritizing expertise has a long history. Plato argued that democracy was rule by the ignorant and that a society is only just when it is governed by the intellectual elite. Aristotle argued that some people were leaders by their very nature. Augustine postulated that the only just society was the one created by Christians who rejected their own self-interest, and Thomas Aquinas argued for adherence to a “natural law,” asserting that justice is only found when human rules are in alignment with those set forth by the divine. Martin Luther King, Jr. made this exact argument in A Letter from Birmingham Jail.

These variations on Plato’s priority of expertise presume an irregular access to knowledge. They assume that governance should privilege the knowledgeable and reject any claims to equality. In contrast, philosophers of the modern era –from the sixteenth century onward – reversed this, emphasizing individualism instead. Hobbes, Locke, and others showed that equal political participation was the “right” of every individual, and that government was only legitimate when it represented the will of the people. In these theories, expertise became a managerial skill essential for governors but not the people who consented to be ruled.

Equality here presumes the detachment of governance from state religion and intellectual authority. After centuries of religious wars, modern philosophers concluded that the only way towards peace and justice was through “toleration,” a pluralism that included different interests as well as beliefs. They argued that citizens should be able to pursue their own goals in their own way, and that each person must be permitted to have a say even if, in the end, the majority chose to do otherwise. Equality of belief – religious belief, in particular – became the hinge of liberal democracy.

These were, and are, imperfect solutions. First, participation was quite limited. Women, slaves, and those without land were usually excluded from the process. Second, the majority is not always right. Just because lots of people agree on something doesn’t mean it’s the best thing to do. We need only think of slavery or the binding of women’s feet to prove this.

What is most relevant for us is that that these approaches were all built upon the glorification of self-interest. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the widespread acceptance that acting out of “self love,” was neither inherently vicious nor to be discouraged. Previously, subordinating one’s needs to the community had been all-encompassing; private interest was considered selfish and vicious. The modern political philosophers changed this.

This shift towards the acceptance of self-interest was economic as well as moral. Mandeville wrote that vices drive commerce, and that being virtuous materially benefited nobody. Shaftesbury argued that one’s real self-interest was always in alignment with the community, and that if it appeared otherwise the agent was mistaken about what was in his or her own interest in the first place. Adam Ferguson wrote that one must always, “distinguish the selfishness of the parent when he takes care of his child, from the selfishness when he only takes care of himself.” To put it simply, while modern political theorists recognized that self-interest was essential to political motivation, they disagreed vehemently about what they meant by the term in the first place.

Let’s stop and consider how all of this relates to the current election. When I ask about expertise, I am not asking which candidate is most qualified for the presidency (even though it is perfectly legitimate to do so). Instead, I am asking what makes a voter qualified to choose a president. Is it that citizenship comes with certain rights and duties and as such, all people are qualified just because they are American? This is the constitutional answer, but philosophically, one can suggest that just because someone has the right to vote doesn’t mean that one should. An uninformed voter who knows none of the candidates, who randomly selects buttons based on an arbitrary standard, may have the right to vote, but we would all be justified in asking whether he or she ought to exercise it.

As always, it gets complicated. The position that only some people should vote has, in the United States, at least, lead to literacy and property voting requirements such that have been used to disenfranchise vast numbers of people unfairly. (Compare the Jim Crow laws to certain recent African elections in which ballots contained pictures of candidates because many of the voters couldn’t read.) Such tests would violate the equality principle of democracy, so we must shift the burden from government testing to self-awareness. Taking away the state’s role in excluding others allows citizens to decide their level or participation for themselves. Perhaps the question of expertise becomes more palatable to our contemporary sensibility when posed like this: how must people prepare in order to vote well?

My students often justify their lack of voting by saying that they aren’t informed enough to feel comfortable participating in the process. This self-selection is both laudable and disheartening. If they feel too ignorant to influence the vote then perhaps they are right to withdraw from the process. But this too is unsettling because their choice to be unrepresented still results in a lack of representation. Their voices are still silenced, even if they were quieted voluntarily. The obvious response (and my response) is to challenge students by citing their civic duty: “It is good that you are self aware enough to recognize your ignorance. Now, go learn something and then exercise your rights in the ballot box.” This would be the best of both worlds. It invokes personal responsibility while increasing expertise and equality at the same time. (It also reminds me of the old joke about the coed who bats her eyes at a professor, telling him suggestively that she will do anything to pass his class. His response: “study.”)

However, even before we face the specific questions of who/what to vote for and why, we must ask about the method of choice. Should we, as Locke suggests, vote based on what we think is best for ourselves independent of anyone else, or should we, as Jean Jacques Rousseau postulates, vote based on what we regard as best for the community as a whole, understanding that as a member of the community, we will likely benefit from the result? Our position on this debate helps us focus our positions on welfare, economics, the draft, education policy, individual rights, and a whole host of other thorny issues. Those who vote for their own best interest do not vote for welfare if they are well-off, nor do they vote for affirmative action if they are not discriminated against. In contrast, those who do ask whether welfare or affirmative action improve the community despite their good fortune usually vote independent of their personal circumstances.

Locke’s position is built upon a commitment to expertise. As Adam Smith writes, every person is “by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care.” In other words, each person knows his or her own needs better than anyone else and should therefore vote based on that knowledge. Self-interest is the motivation for self-knowledge. It contrast, Rousseau’s position emphasizes equality. He argues that those in the voting booth should not distinguish between their needs and others, or, again, as Smith writes, “the most vulgar education teaches us to act, upon all important occasions, with some sort of impartiality between ourselves and others.” When it comes to public policy, it is hard to justify prioritizing one specific person’s needs over another’s.

I use Smith to illustrate both approaches because it is my contention that his reconciliation of these complex issues helps us reconsider our options for the current election, especially because of his fervent embrace of the free market. However, I aim to show that once we look at his commercial structures in terms of equality, expertise, and policy connectedness, we get a very different picture of market-influenced politics than is usually put forth.

2. The (limited) purpose of the free market.

Smith is most famous for being the founder of modern economic thought. Published in 1776, his groundbreaking treatise An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations changed the world as much as any other book in history. Its greatest achievement was to systematize the elements of the modern free market economy. These include, among other things, commercial transactions, government obligation, personal motivation, and social and political unity. It operated on the assumption that self-interest tended to guide commercial exchange, famously suggesting that, “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

The Wealth of Nations is close to 800 pages; its size is a monument to policy connectedness. Smith could not simply put forth a market model. He also had to describe the government that oversaw it, the manufacturing practices that cultivated it, the social structures that prepared its agents, and the history that contextualized it. These concerns grow out of one basic postulate: what makes a nation wealthy is not the value of the currency within its borders, but the value of the labor of its citizens.

In Smith’s time, mercantilists believed that the more money a country had the wealthier it was. On the face of it, this makes sense. We think of ourselves as wealthy if we have a large balance in our savings account or substantial equity in our house. But this approach misses the point: most prosperity comes from the potential to create more wealth, not the ability to revel in what we have. Unless we are lucky enough to inherit a substantial sum and live off of interest (which is also future income), what we earn comes from the labor we will do over a lifetime. Thus, when we want to ask whether we are wealthy, we must first ask about our future earnings and the expected duration of our employment.

For Smith, what is true of individuals is true of countries as well. The more potential for meaningful labor among its citizens, the more wealthy and stable a country will be. Obviously, we can’t tell the future. Disaster can strike at any time; floods, tornadoes, or war can destroy infrastructure. But all else being equal, Smith’s presumption seems to hold. With labor comes wealth.

Smith argues that the more a country trades, the more labor opportunities there will be. Therefore, rather than hold the mercantilist position to limit trade and keep currency within established borders, Smith argues for free trade, increasing market size, maximizing potential sales, and, in turn, creating more manufacturing opportunities, which then creates more and higher paying jobs. This increases the wealth of workers and the nation.

This debate should sound familiar. Its contemporary version lies at the core of disagreements about NAFTA and protectionism. If one were to argue that the provisions of NAFTA are faulty, then that may not violate Smith’s perspective. One need only rewrite the treaty to better its terms. However, if one were to reject the trade agreement based on protectionist principles alone – that protecting American manufacturing jobs is the most important thing anyone can do for the economy and that so called “out sourcing” is crippling the American worker – then one is violating the principles set forth by The Wealth of Nations. For Smith, limiting the market does more damage than allowing it to expand globally. From his point of view, it is better to lose some jobs in order to gain many more.

While it may not be evident at first glance, the market principle is actually a means to negotiate expertise and equality. The former, expertise, comes in the form of specialization. Given the division of labor, workers develop refined skills that increase efficiency; the more expert a worker is at a task, the more profitable the result. Modern work arrangements increase expertise which, Smith argues, also increases innovation and therefore efficiency is increased even more. The problem here, as we will see, is that this expertise is only a narrow form of knowledge, and it needs to be expanded. I shall return to this point shortly.

The division of labor also leads to equality since each component of the manufacturing process requires people to work together. When one worker fails, the whole project falls apart. The community coheres around the manufacturing process. But this, too, is a narrow form of equality and does not assist matters outside of the manufacturing process. So, the next question is how to expand the immediate effects of the market to the larger community. The standard answer to this is to expand the market itself, to “privatize” government, education, security, and other such matters. But as we shall see, this is in opposition to what Smith argued for. Privatization misses the boat when it comes to policy connectedness. Smith recognized that in order to make free trade work, the state and the community must provide a great deal of support: support for the worker, for the consumer, for the community, and for the state.

For example, Smith was very aware that repetitive specialized labor could destroy a worker’s ability to think creatively, to become educated, and to make good judgments. The mind numbing process of doing the same thing minute after minute, day in and day out, if that is all the person has, can destroy someone’s intellectual and creative lives. Smith was also aware that the economic need that forced people into undesirable jobs can also do terrible things to their families and to lower the self-worth of the worker, trapping everyone into an unsuitable and dead-end lifestyle. Even though he never anticipated the industrial revolution, Smith explicitly addressed what Marx would call the “alienation” of commercial work. He described the workers’ conditions bluntly and sought to make their lives better.

For Smith, it is the duty of the whole country to care for its workers, to attend to the poor, and to make sure that the conditions of the worst off are improved. He writes:

Servants, laborers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.

One of the great purposes of The Wealth of Nations, especially combined with Smith’s earlier book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was to describe what Smith named “universal opulence,” the circumstance in which all individuals in a given society have what they need in order to thrive. Smith argued that everyone ought to have access to basic necessities and be able to use them to educate themselves and choose their own ways of life – self-interest at work, yet again. In this context, economic and political life contribute to personal, familial, religious, and political fulfillment. The worker, no matter where he or she works, or what needs to be done, must have access to society, to share sentiments, experiences, beliefs, and moral values with others.

Here we begin to see the reconciliation between expertise and equality: the development of a minimal standard. Market economies and modern democracies presuppose some form of difference. There are going to be richer and poorer, those more and less powerful, and those more or less informed. Nevertheless, it is possible to seek a society in which all individuals are at least as wealthy as they need to be, and at least as powerful and educated as well. The contemporary philosopher John Rawls made much of this. He argued that these minimal standards worked fine as long as one didn’t define need in terms of envy. We may not have as much as our neighbor, but as long as we have what we personally need to thrive, than the moral obligation of society and community is fulfilled. Defining those minimal standards is an ongoing and controversial process, but it is the shift to minimal standards and away from total equality that is relevant for our discussion. Minimal standards balance self- and community interest.

Therefore, in the midst of an economic discussion, we find ourselves engaged in a moral one. Smith uses the term “equity” meaning a combination of fairness and justice. He references a citizenry that is “flourishing” and “happy,” and while his requirement that everyone should be “tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged” is a lesser goal than one where everyone is always comfortable all the time, it is still subordinate to the main (and quite revolutionary) claim that no commercial system is to be considered successful if anyone is left out.

Smith argues for free markets because he thinks they will make everyone better off. But he also recognizes that people are only better off when they are treated as people, not just economic agents, and when the society caters to their needs, not just their desires. Despite the minimal nature of his standards, Smith’s values are not narrow. In addition to food, clothing, and lodging, happiness, and fulfillment, he also references social and religious companionship, equity, justice, education, art, an accurate sense of self, and a whole host of other concerns that space precludes discussing. He argues, in fact, that people, in their hearts, seek not simply to be praised but praiseworthy; that people wish to be good and virtuous, deserving the esteem of others, and that those isolated folks who end up never feeling attended to by society are destined for unhappiness. His language is moral and (at times) religious, and it presumes a holistic human experience, not just one dominated by commerce.

To elaborate, let us consider what Smith means by religious fulfillment. For Smith, religion is a necessary part of the human experience. People assume – whether rightly or wrongly, we don’t know – that the rules of morality are designed by God, and this added incentive encourages them to act properly even when no one is watching. Religion also provides a sense of community for those who feel alone. For example, Smith writes about the isolation felt by those who move from rural to urban areas where there is no longer a close-knit group of people to watch over and urge this person to be moderate in his or her actions. The state therefore has an interest in cultivating some religion because it makes the citizenry more moral and more ordered.

Religion is also a matter of conscience, and like others before him, Smith is explicit that the government cannot prescribe religious beliefs for its citizens. Thus, while the state promotes religion in general, it rejects endorsing any particular denomination or sect. Politicians must refrain from endorsing or espousing one religion over another. Smith has an eloquent and prescient passage in The Wealth of Nations describing the corruption of government that comes along with privileging one denomination over another. The state must walk a fine line, then, between cultivating the opportunity for religious fulfillment and the freedom of religious choice. Smith wants a condition in which citizens have a sense of unified community, of social network, of worth and their own goodness, and a clear sense of duty stemming from moral rules. A Smithian would therefore look at the current election and seek the candidate who best encourages freedom for all religions while being detached from the religious process.

This separation is necessary because, as Smith observes, religion can be destructive as well as constructive. According to The Wealth of Nations, the more extremist adherents wrongly believe that their religious obligations are more important than their political ones; they therefore seek to change and even overthrow the government in the name of their god or their religion. Smith therefore advocates for not only religious freedom, but public worship and festivals. The more sects there are in any society, he argues, the more stable society is. The more public religions are, the less outlandish their claims will be. In terms of religion, then, the more pluralistic the community is, the more unified it will be because the more people will rely on the political character of society to define its commonality.

It should be obvious, yet again, how these issues dominate the current presidential election. The role of religion in government is a central fissure in political debate, the place of God in endorsing moral rules and the importance of denominational community are all very much center stage right now. Smith weighed in over two hundred years ago on all of these matters, and he linked them to the question of free trade. What connected them? Smith’s answer is education.

Recall that for Smith, the greatest danger from mind-numbing work is the destruction of the intellect. This is a problem because an unexercised mind prevents moral judgment. It inhibits individuals from entering into the perspective of others and stifles their ability to moderate their own behavior or cultivate temperance in others. It also interferes with the ability to become happy, the ability to make judgments about one’s family, and cheapens the overall human experience. Smith argues, then, that the sovereign – the old-fashioned word for legitimate governmental authority – must help establish schools for the poor. He recommends mandatory study in philosophy, science, math, reading, writing, and arts education since these subjects help cultivate good moral and political judgments while quelling superstition. He supports general education for children and some form of religious education for adults. Learning is a lifelong process for Smith, and the state is responsible for helping make it available to all.

For Smith, the sovereign has three duties: protect the society from invasion, protect citizens from one other, and maintain public works and institutions that are too expensive or result in too little profit to be maintained by individuals or small groups. These includes roads, utilities, and as we have seen, educational institutions, among other things. In essence, Smith is acknowledging that the government must fill in the gaps. It must supply those things that the market cannot. This tripartite prescription is the origin of Smith’s so-called “limited government,” and certainly compared to many theories, Smith’s account is minimal. However, as we have already seen, the role of government in public works and institutions is quite large and the more any society needs to supplement the market, the larger government will be. The size of government, then, is contextual, based on needs of the time, not based on some independent standard of “small” and “large.”

Thus, although we find ourselves in the midst of policy connectedness, we now know that the criteria that connect one policy to another are expertise and equality. The sovereign must provide those mechanisms unavailable through the market that raises people’s expertise to the minimal standards and makes sure that they are all minimally equal. These standards of expertise are reached, in part, though public education, limited involvement of religion, and the refinement of job-related skills. The standard of equality is achieved through universal opulence, military protection, and the mechanisms of justice.

3. What the market is for.

We can now answer the question posed by the title of this essay: what was the purpose of the free market? For Smith, the purpose of the market was to raise the standard of living for all people in any given society. It solved the problem of expertise by recognizing that economically, self-interested transactions could work together to improve economic circumstance. It solved the problem of equality by increasing market power, creating job opportunities, and bettering general well-being. And, it reconciled the two by accepting the role of the government in making all of this happen. The market served as a bridge and standard to determine what was needed from the sovereign to raise quality of life to an acceptable level.

We see Smith’s policy connectedness by asking familiar questions: what must the government provide for the market to work? What kind of education is necessary for consumers to make good judgments about their economic activities, their personal relationships, and their political duties? What kind of state intervention is necessary to minimize the fractious power of religion and separate legislative process from theological bias? It is true that the market increases wealth so that people and government have the means to finance that which the market doesn’t provide, but the market can only do this when these support mechanisms are, in fact, provided. Or so Smith argued.

I shall conclude by recalling the two mistakes voters tend to make: believing that political judgment is just a matter of opinion independent of the history of public policy and ignoring policy connectedness. I have shown why these are mistakes, that the history of political thought helps add clarity to our own opinions and that one position intimately relates to many others. Here Smith and I agree. If we are to favor free markets, we must also favor strong public education. If we are to emphasize social unity, we must cultivate freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. If we are to tie these all together, we must recognize that the market only increases general well-being when the government plays a strong role in supplementing the economic sphere.

And what of the other question, what must people do to prepare to vote? Voters must understand the connectedness of their positions. They must seek the candidate who understands the systematic nature of public policy. Single issue voters are missing the boat, not because strong commitments are not politically viable, but because one is more likely to achieve a goal by voting for a connected vision rather than a single policy. Above all else, and despite the fact that all individuals have (and should have) the right to vote, American voters must educate ourselves. We must recommit to understanding the political process, to looking behind the rhetoric, and to grasping how the system works even before we choose between candidates. Then, we must ask about policies, not campaigns; democratic values, not pandering; and we must force the candidates to answer a very fundamental question: what social supports are necessary to make the most of your economic policy and what are you doing to realize them?

This is a lot to ask of a voter. It is overwhelming and demanding. Who has the time to do this? Who has the time or resources to investigate these issues and study the complexity of the American system in such detail? These are understandable retorts but sadly, we do not have the luxury to hide behind inconvenience. We must find the time because if we don’t, democracy fails. We must find the time because if we don’t, our leaders fracture our government, divide our society, and chip away at our well being. We must find the time because, if we don’t, our leaders will talk circles around us and persuade us to choose a mirage and not what is best for us all.
Of course, there is another option. We can always return to Plato’s vision. We can always abdicate our own participation and return the responsibilities of governing to an intellectual elite – to someone other than us. But when we do that, we give up our political freedom and we lose the ability to determine our own goals, our own religions, and our own self-interest. In a time of crisis and uncertainty, this seems an awful lot to throw away.

Jack Russell Weinstein is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Dakota. He does research on the intersection of the history of philosophy and contemporary political theory. His main interests include theories of diversity and justice, with special attention to education and the role of emotion in moral judgment. He seeks to create a general theory of human understanding in the midst of difference that internalizes respect above and beyond a minimalist conception of human or political rights.

Professor Weinstein received his Ph.D. from Boston University, has authored two books, several edited collections and journal symposia, and over two dozen articles and reviews. He has contributed work for lay audiences to newspapers, magazines, and public radio. He was also a 2005 NDHC Remele Fellow and the recipient of the 2007 UND Foundation/McDermott Award for Individual Excellence in Teaching.

He can be reached at: jack.weinstein@und.nodak.edu

More of his writing can be found at: http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/weinstei/

Why Is Religion Violent?

Writing about religion is a tricky business. That is where the dictum arises: never discuss religion or politics in polite company. Politeness can degenerate into heated discussion and, from there, sometimes into violence. Is it not ironic that the religious dimension of all our lives should, on the one hand inspire peace between individuals and nations through altruism, forgiveness, and harmony, and on the other hand, some of the planet’s most sickening crimes and horrendous wars have arisen from conflicts embedded in religious issues? The evil side of that irony is what concerns us here.

Many are puzzled by the religious aspect of violence. Consider the place we give to religion in our society. We divide our public and private lives into various compartments such as economics, politics, medical arts, sociology, psychology, and justice. Religion tends to be placed among these as merely another department of human activity. Religion, then, becomes singled out, or reified, as a catalyst for violence. Free thinkers, for example, desire to eliminate religion because they view it as only a prelude to violence. They point to the crusades, the inquisition, the Thirty Years War, the witch trials, and Waco, Texas, as prime examples of the destruction that arises from superstition and dogmatics. For that reason, they wish to separate religion, at the very least, from power, primarily the power of the state.

But is religion merely one compartment among others? To think this is to make a fundamental mistake about the nature of religion; it is what we academics call a category mistake. Religion is not one section of human endeavor; rather it is the presupposition that underlies them all. At the most basic is that every individual and every society is built on values, concerns, hopes and expectations, providing meaning and direction to all that is done. Across the face of the earth there are numerous cultures each built on an orchestration of values and concerns. There we have it: the root of the word “culture” is “cult.” What the cult provides is a window to the sacred which each culture regards as the ultimate and itself as superior to all.

Perhaps the most basic statement of how the ultimate works to build society is found in Paul Tillich’s study, The Dynamics of Faith. He holds that faith is what concerns one ultimately; everyone has an ultimate concern. The shape of the ultimate concern is formed partly through individual longing and partly through the upbringing and influence of a culture. By means of myths, rituals, teachings, calendars of holy days, sacred times and spaces, symbols are created which in turn create reality or a sense of plausibility. As a culture shapes the lives of its youngsters it forms a milieu wherein the young inherit a world difficult to imagine otherwise. A friend of mine, a Roman Catholic priest, said, “Give us a child for the first five years of his or her life and s/he will be ours forever.” I find it hard to imagine that the same cannot be said about any significant religious culture around the world. Thus, one might say that religion does not describe the world (as fundamentalists might contend), rather religion creates a world.
From this point, it is not so difficult to understand how violence enters the picture. In the encounter of one culture with another the members of each sense that much is at stake.

Conflicts arise out of the fear that, if the values of a foreign culture penetrate our society, significant changes are certain to follow. Parents fear that their children may grow up to embrace different values that those that are dear to them and to their ancestors. Our kids might end up living in a different world because the basic work of religion is world construction. If this should become the case, the parents’ world is thereby called into question because it is not sufficiently potent to prevent that from happening. When faced with such a prospect the temptation to resort to violence is often attractive. The encounter of sacred with sacred usually does not favor the ignorant or the semiliterate and is often difficult even for those learned in their own tradition. Indeed, as we say in Religion 100, “he who knows only one religion knows none.”

Much discussed today is Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996). He begins with the often-mentioned theme of the shrunken globe where many cultures are immediately present to one another through internet, public media, business, and travel. He defines a culture as a combination of religion and language. In the twentieth century up to 1979 the global conflicts were ideological involving Nazism and Communism. From 1979 onward into the twenty-first century, Huntington tells us, the global conflicts will involve culture against culture. The year 1979 marks the time of Iranian Revolution which was based entirely on religious issues.

A political scientist from Harvard, Huntington has done studies on cultural violence. He counted incidents of violence along cultural fault lines where 500 or more people are killed. The borders around Islamic societies where they divide Islam from non-Islamic cultures, he states, are three times more violent that anywhere else in the world. And the future holds more. When one considers the events of 9/11 it is increasingly clear that borders may be an antiquated concept since America has no border with any Islamic society yet has felt the sting of religious violence. Religious conflict and violence, however, are not confined to foreign lands; they are close to home also.

Religion and Conflict on the Great Plains

In Their Father’s God Ole Rölvaag tells the story of how two families in late-nineteenth-century South Dakota were victims of religious conflict. While this novel leads up to the door of physical violence, it does not cross the threshold, but that does not make the story any brighter. The struggle is between Norwegian Lutherans and Roman Catholic Irish. Much of what we have already said about the basis of conflict is present in this story. Even though his story is fictional, we know that Rolvaag’s material came from his in-laws who lived north of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and from many interviews he made about that time, the 1890s. A Lutheran, Rolvaag learned much about the Irish form of Roman Catholicism and, surprisingly, does not take sides.
The Catholic, Susie, and Lutheran, Peder, become romantically and sexually involved and inevitably have to get married. From the very first, problems begin to arise because of misunderstandings of each other’s backgrounds. Things certainly are not helped by their families’ suspicions of each other. “While love is blind, marriage is an eye-opener,” it is said.
They were married by her priest and soon thereafter the tension builds as Peder’s mother fears that her son will become a Catholic. To do so would mean turning his back on all that is sacred. Viewed through Norwegian eyes the Irish world is a collection of mysterious symbols. Its ecclesiastical language is Latin, its priest wears a cassock, there are blessings for various occasions, and there are rosaries and crucifixes. Viewed through Irish eyes the Norwegian world is cold and dreary. They do not appreciate a good drink, they don’t dance, they are so individualistic they break into sects, they read the Bible and think they know all about religion, and their hymns are mournful, even cadaverous.

Much of the fear from both sides revolves around the new baby. Bad enough that he is red-headed like an Irishman, but his father fears that he will be raised in superstition. (The word “superstition” in Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is defined as “someone else’s religion.” Such a definition is quite close to what we find in Rolvaag’s story.) The child’s grandmother is so fearful of the Catholic culture that she and a friend, alone one day, secretly baptize him in the Lutheran faith. Only on her deathbed does she reveal this act to Susie who is horrified by it despite the fact that she too has had her son privately baptized by the priest.

Much of what transpires between these two worlds is transacted through symbolism. The home of the Irish appears as messy and unkempt. To the Norwegians it is not a healthy abode and is the symbol of a faith that is cluttered with many objects and rituals that are not understood and may be misunderstood. The Norwegian home is uncluttered and spotless as though it was not the place where real life is lived. One can think that guilt is dispelled by relentless cleaning but it always seems to creep back in. Susie is never comfortable or quite herself in her mother-in-law’s house; it never becomes a home because her home is where her father and brother live. There the priest is welcome, not where her husband and his mother live.

Throughout this story fear, superstition, anger, heated argument, and humiliation surface on almost every page. The final scene involves her rosary. After an explosive argument Peder, in an iconoclastic outburst, snatches her rosary from the nightstand and grinds it to pieces under his heel. After that she leaves for home and there the story ends. In his mind Peder has killed an idol, and, presumably, his marriage along with it.

In the late 1920s when Rölvaag wrote this novel, these events were more common than today after the ecumenical movement has dispelled much of the ignorance of each other’s tradition and the fear that accompanied that ignorance. But it remains an allegory of what barriers exist between even Christian traditions with their various histories. We are to be thankful that the Protestant and Catholic differences have not, in America, risen to the levels of those in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

The Great Plains, however, have not been free of religious violence. Here the theme is apocalyptic violence and it, unlike the symbolic violence in Rölvaag, has left many torn bodies in its wake.

For example, just twenty-five years ago the state of North Dakota was the scene of a shootout that reverberated around the nation. This, of course, was the gunfight in Medina, which ended in the deaths of two U.S. marshals at the hands of Gordon Kahl and his cohorts. In the popular press, the event was mostly about tax-dodging, but the underlying script was apocalypticism. Apocalyptic is a term often used, but to be accurate, it must include specific salient features, briefly described below.

It begins in the heavens with a war between Satan and God where Satan attacks the abode of God. On his side Satan enlists the demons and, on earth, the wicked. God commands the angels and, on earth, the saints. As this cosmic battle unfolds, the earthly consequences are “wars and rumors of war,” earthquakes, social dislocations, such as depressions and persecutions or plagues. As these evils expand God finally puts a stop to it, which is the ultimate battle of Armageddon. When the saints, who are commanded to fight the holy war, are killed they become martyrs. A martyr does not lie in the grave, as everyone else, but his soul goes immediately to heaven. Apocalypticism also includes the themes of numerology (secret numbers), conspiracy, and the evils of human government (such as Rome being identified as the Whore of Babylon).

What makes apocalyptic such a devastating script for violence is that a warrior is either on the side of God or Satan, there is no in-between. Thus when a wicked person is killed it is not a tragedy or a murder, but a cleansing; it is done as an honor to God. In Revelation, Jesus is depicted as saying, “I would that you are either hot or cold, but if you are lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth.” It should be noted that the controlling theme of this religious style is warfare. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam---the religions arising out of the Middle East---all have parts devoted to apocalyptic.

Given this sketch of the apocalyptic imagination, it is likely that the police are correct when they testify that Gordon Kahl shot first. When he was blocked on the road out of Medina, this script would also prompt him to believe that evil government men were out to destroy him. Several days later the Fargo Forum received a letter from Kahl (his wife verified the handwriting) explaining the events in apocalyptic terms supported by a number of quotations from the book of Revelation.

Apocalyptic religions provide security and assurance of divine order to those who have come to see the world as dangerous and chaotic. Ironically, the sense of power provided by apocalyptic simultaneously creates an overwhelming sense of fear. The system expects evil from the outside; if it does not have an available enemy, it is necessary to construct one. This was the plan of David Koresh in Waco in 1993: he promised his followers that they would have enemies sent from Satan. Koresh collected an impressive cache of weapons, some of them military grade. When a UPS delivery addressed to the compound accidentally spilled a shipment of hand grenades, the federal authorities knew that it was time for action. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raided the compound, thereby proving that the enemies, promised in the Book of Revelation, were at the door. Four agents were killed outright; it is not known how many of Koresh’s followers died, but the situation degenerated into a fifty-day standoff. It is likely that the followers touched off the fire that killed Koresh and most of his company. Scholars knowledgeable in the writings of Revelation say they expected that outcome because it states in Revelation 8:5, “Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire form the altar and threw it on the earth….” Koresh had been constructing a theology based on the seven seals and this was the last of the seven. This was his version of an apocalyptic holy war.

The apocalyptic imagination leaps from context to context. Two years to the day of the tragic fire in Waco, Timothy McVeigh engineered the greatest act of terrorism perpetrated by an American against this nation in blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh based his violent act not on the book of Revelation directly, but on a 1978 novel by a former Nazi and white supremacist, William Luther Pierce, under the pseudonym, Andrew MacDonald. The book, The Turner Diaries, contains all the key elements of apocalyptic: martyrdom, holy war, conspiracy, and Armageddon. In it, the United States government is the victim of a Jewish conspiracy and is out to destroy the godly patriots who are claimed to be the real Christians. McVeigh was thoroughly convinced that such was the case; The Turner Diaries became in effect his bible. The monstrous blast in Oklahoma City, which killed more than 160 people, including both government workers and children, has its prototype in an episode in the Diaries. In the novel, a truck loaded with ammonium nitrate, common fertilizer, mixed with fuel oil (becoming an explosive commonly used on farms to excavate stock ponds) is driven into the basement of the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., killing 700 people. McVeigh vowed holy revenge against the government and chose April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the Waco fire as the date. In apocalyptic, anniversaries have religious significance in that they “make present” the original day of the original event.

Militant Islam

After 9/11 many Americans expressed genuine perplexity asking, “Why do they hate us?” That is the wrong question; rather, it should be, “Why do they fear us?” For centuries the Islamic civilization existed apart from contact with the larger world and was and is governed by Sharia, the law derived from the Qur’an. From the very beginning Islamic forces conquered territory after territory to place the world under their law. Outward from Mecca in the early seventh century, Islam spread northeast into Persia, north to Asia Minor, and west along the Mediterranean coast, up through Spain into the region of today’s France. All of this was accomplished in one century. At the battle of Tours in 732, Islamic aggression came to an end in Europe. Unlike the founder of Christianity, Muhammad was a military commander, and ruler as well as a prophet, who is said to have received the dictation of Allah which comprises the Qur’an.
Until the nineteenth century, Islam was able to concentrate its energies to developing itself without any interference from the west with the egregious exception of the Crusades. Because Europe was turned in on itself from the seventh to the eleventh centuries, mainly as a consequence of a feudal society, it was unable immediately to oppose Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries. From 1095 until after 1200 A.D., crusade after crusade was launched, all ending in failure of various degrees. In the Middle Ages, Islam had been the host to universities that superseded those in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries involving the study of science, medicine, law, literature, and architecture. With justification, Muslims looked down on other cultures regarding them as barbarian and ignorant of the Sharia. After the Protestant Reformation, Europe began to narrow the gap between the Middle East and the West, however, and by the 1800s had surpassed the Islamic lands in these areas of study including the addition of military technology and science. When Islamists saw that the tables had turned dramatically, it was too late to overtake the West.

In the 1950s we saw the first major reaction to the intrusion of the West into Islamic lands; it was the Islamic Brotherhood called into existence by Sayyid Qutb to summon Islam back to its roots. As he saw it, Islam was being attacked by the outside forces of communism, materialism, or democracy. Qutb even spent time in California and Colorado as a student and came face to face with the cultural forces he was certain would dissolve Islamic culture in a sea of sex and sensationalism. A generation later the Ayatollah Khomeini had similar fears about what the Shah would do to the Iranian soul with the help of America, the “Great Satan.” It is often said that if Islam had undergone an experience like the Christian Reformation it would have been more able to digest these rapid cultural changes. Since such was not the case, this meant war; it meant Jihad because it was feared that the world intended to obliterate Islam culturally, religiously, economically, and militarily.

Because of its military beginnings and also because of it apocalyptic tradition, war has held a central place in Islamic thought. Most Western people know about jihad, but not much about it. Muslims make the distinction between the greater and the lesser jihad. The greater jihad is actually the struggle for selfhood by combating the evil part of one’s soul, removing impediments to following Allah’s will or standing in the way to surrender (“Islam” means surrender.) On the other hand, the lesser jihad involves actual warfare in defense of Islam and Islamic territories.

Those brought up in a Christian culture find it strange that a religion should place war and conquest in such a central place particularly when Islam comes from the same milieu as Judaism and Christianity. The syllogism goes thus: Christianity is a religion; Christianity focuses on love and peace; Islam is a religion, therefore, Islam is primarily about peace. Contemporary Christians find it hard to believe that the church could ever have been involved with the bloody spectacle of the Crusades and, therefore, speak about them apologetically.

It is informative to see the similarities between Christian apocalyptic religious violence and militant Islam. They both focus on enemies from the outside, have a theology of martyrdom, hold a view of holy war, and see their opponents as worthy only of “cleansing.” Death has an appeal for both: apocalyptic versions of Christianity look beyond this world to the world to come after death, and Islam finds martyrdom a virtue to be rewarded by reaching heaven instantly to be greeted by seventy virgins and wine that does not intoxicate, and there is more than one can drink.

There are differences: Christianity exists within the boundaries of various nation-states. For Islam there is the concept of the umma, the mystical brotherhood of every Muslim. National borders are not real for these Muslims since they believe them to be merely manmade; eventually the whole globe will come under rule of the Sharia. Those who resist that rule are enemies of Islam and are worthy of death. For them, there are two divisions of humanity, the Dar-al-Islam (the house of Islam, under the Sharia) and the Dar-al-Harb (the world not under the Sharia, the house of war, and the abode of the enemies of Islam.) For militant Islamists the subjection of the Dar-al-Harb is the duty of jihad, incumbent on every Islamic able-bodied male.
Grim stuff, if one finds oneself as the object of jihad. The question arises, though, as to how many Muslims living in the Middle East concur with this violent scenario; where are the moderates, those who might not take this teaching in its literal sense? Nobody knows, for sociologists have not had the opportunity to practice their trade in these Islamic societies. We can be sure there are some, but if the Wahhabi sect had its way, there would be no moderates. If one were to be vocal about ecumenical ideas, his life would be in danger.

Academics debate whether Islam is doing its natural thing by waging war on the West, or whether it has been “hijacked” by militants. Maybe future historians will decide for one side or the other, but it is not presently clear which of the two sides is the case. Nevertheless, this much can be said – one would, for example, not consider hijacking Hinduism because there is no tradition of warfare in it. Whether Islam was hijacked may be irrelevant simply because the militants saw in the Qur’an a number of verses that counsel warfare against the enemies of Islam.

When the questions of violence in the Middle East arise, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is usually the first to receive attention. There is a debate over that situation: on the one side many contend that all Islamic violence would disappear if that problem were to be solved, usually to the disadvantage of Israel. On the other, there is a mass of evidence that suggests the Palestinian issue is a symptom of a much deeper complex of issues which we have outlined above. For Osama Bin Laden, Israel was not nearly as often the complaint as was the situation of American troops based on the soil of Muhammad’s home territory, even though the government of Saudi Arabia invited American troops there in the 1991 Gulf War. Apocalyptic Islam is constantly conscious about territories that are or have been under the Sharia at any time in history. In addition to losing their homes and businesses, it is certain that the issue of territoriality plays a role in how Palestinians understand their relationship to Israel.
President Bush often speaks of the war on terrorism, but that is not how militant Islam would characterize it. We should listen carefully to what the militants say because they are quite serious: they are engaged in holy war, every bit as important as the crusades. They understand the present world situation as a war on Islam, a war that they do not intend to lose no matter how long it takes to be victorious. They really do believe that Allah commands it and will eventually bring them victory. If Huntington is correct, violence in the future is inevitable because the clashes in the twenty-first century are not between ideologies but come instead from religions at war with each other.


John Helgeland is a professor of history at NDSU. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago. He currently serves on the NDSU Bush Ethics Committee. John also has received the Blue Key Distinguished Educator Award.

Why North Dakota? by Michael Lopez

I’ve been stopped in elevators, on sidewalks, in grocery stores, by friends and family alike, with the question: Why North Dakota? Or, more appropriately: “Why would you (or, by implication, anyone else) choose to live in North Dakota?” And before I’ve even had a chance to respond to their question, the second one is inevitably forthcoming: “Is North Dakota even a place?” I’m sometimes tempted to respond: “is Sacramento even a place?” (Or San Francisco, or Oakland, or wherever I happen to be.) Because my first inclination is to ask them, “What do you think constitutes a place?” Perhaps more importantly, I’m tempted to ask them, “Did you choose your place?”

It was not, in retrospect, very surprising on my part to move from the warm climates of Northern California, specifically the San Francisco Bay Area, and my college alma mater’s town, Davis. I sometimes think that, at least for me, a move to Los Angeles, or San Diego, would have been viewed with real surprise by my friends and family as an unusual variation. What I mean to say here is that for me, the way my psychology is oriented, and what I am interested in, is not to be found in Los Angeles, or (though I’ve spent considerably less time in it) New York, or Washington, D.C.

I think it was a novelist – though I can’t remember which one – who said that those places aren’t really places, because you’re never really there (As Gertrude Stein meant it in that there-there sense); it’s more that you’re simply passing through. You may stay there for forty or fifty years, but the place is so large, so rapidly moving, with so many incoming and exiting passengers, that you’re just occupying a space, but never a place. It’s not simply the largeness of a city that precludes place; I think you can find place cities, but those, with their electrifying movement, their caffeinated jolts of frantic energy, suggest to my conscious and unconscious that I’m constantly moving – I’m never at rest. The time for reflection isn’t today (or tomorrow), because there’s too much to be done; too much to see; movies, plays, shows, lectures, enough for a lifetime. Home is about peace, and rest.

Don’t get me wrong about this either: home can be anything but peace, or rest. Especially if something is wrong: a loved one is sick, the bills can’t be paid; external and internal forces beyond our individual power to control can subvert that peace, but in the end, home is always a place where you find yourself again. It resists, from its center on out, the forces of chaos; it calms you, brings you back into its comforting sense of familiarity, and never ceases to surprise me with the newness I discover in things I thought I knew.

I’ve driven certain stretches of highway for over ten years, and am still amazed at the new things I see and discover. I’m not talking about little flowers by the roadside, or a hidden brook – I’m speaking about houses, buildings, mountains, that I could never consciously recall in conversation to another. They still have the power to take my breath away: that recognition that within so much that is familiar, there’s so much I don’t know. I do know it takes a lifetime to learn it, and more importantly, a lifetime to shape my life around it. My momentary existence on a plod of earth, the continent North America, the webs of family and ancestral ties that long ago determined the shape of my bones, the texture of my lips, color of my hair and eyes, and future, that remains to be lived.

So North Dakota was partly because of my past. My great-great grandparents immigrated from their native Norway (they were farmers, and the family homestead is still in Telemark), through the famous pathway of Ellis Island, to North Dakota. The state was a great place for immigrants, especially those used to cold climates. And, the railroads made it easy by securing vast tracts of land from the U.S. Government, and through encouraging the settlement of towns close to the rail lines. Casselton, where they ultimately ended up, was in the early 1900’s a major center for freight movement through the state. They lived there until the outbreak of the Second World War, whereupon it was decided by my great-grandfather (I would have liked to have known him then. He was, by photographic and personal accounts, a handsome, debonair, intellectual, and all around cool fellow), that the family would move to California, to take part in the work of the Kaiser Shipyards.

That might have been the end of this story. After all, when I was born in 1982, they had lived in their California house for over forty years (they never moved out of it), all of their children resided in the state, as did every other immediate family member. My own family was established in its businesses and trades; my schooling was secured by nature of district alignment; health facilities were (and remain), some of the best in the country; and the terrain, those geographic areas I’ve been fortunate to call “home,” are some of the most beautiful you will encounter in the world. There is nothing like being close to the ocean for a Norwegian (that ancient blood still moves through my veins), and the ghostly echoes of waves still comforts me when I am most alone. I even attended an elementary school directly adjacent (our fence was about 15 feet away) to the bay itself.

At this point I’m usually stopped in my response to most people’s question on why the move, the radical shift North – but I ask them to hold, because it’s important to understand what has been my home for over twenty years. And, because, I want them to understand that the directions our lives take, whatever choices we make, are bound in an universe (which no one can fully envision) – all that blackness held together by so many particles of light, and motion; families of substance that go back to the beginnings of time – of past, the past of our ancients who traveled from the only places they knew, in a search of being for some epic impulse within them; the more immediate past of our migrant ancestors finding their ways to this young country; and the most immediate past of those relatives who welcomed us into this world, into our first light; our home is already chosen for us.

It could have been anywhere: Australia, Japan, Iowa, or Nevada, but it was San Francisco, California. And in the end, it was only a place. The webs of being were already crafted and formed, the lines of transit between bloodlines and people, established; our fates are bound to those who came before us, and our choice is to accept the open door to adventure, to fate, that they offer.

The answer then, if there is one, or at least the closest that one individual journeying through life, attempting to continue the infinite thread that connects one living being to the family of humanity can give, is my family. My father, mother, and great grandfather, whose life lessons – ones they don’t even know they gave – came in the form of stories; of places they had been, of things they had done; of memories that were woven so tightly into their conscious (and unconscious) being, that it influenced everything they had ever done.

The stories of North Dakota rank, as some of the most deeply affecting of my childhood. I spent a large amount of time with my great-grandfather, and was never so amazed as when his eyes would go off into some distant memory – of which I could play no role, except as receptor for the images he described – of North Dakota. The place he left in his early 20’s, and which seemed as close to him as though he had never left, as though every childhood friend, sour adult, sexy schoolmistress, (secretly) alcoholic husband, and dour spinster, were still there; still living in the same houses they had occupied since the beginning of time – his time, which is as real as anyone or anything gets.

Those streets of North Dakota never changed for him. I remember when I was in high school, when Grand Forks was devastated by a flood, that for that day (and the week, or two after), the television was always on, always on the news channel, as he watched those electronic images with a reflection so deep that not even a serious student of Kant, or Hegel, could achieve that sense of oneness with the idea, or act. He told me, with something that bordered on the joy of a schoolchild, and the concern of a North Dakotan, that Grand Forks had been flooded; as though he was there, back again, a part of something he had left fifty years earlier. A vicarious involvement in a part of a place that took him into its web of existence, as though he had never left; never ceased to live in Casselton; never stopped being in North Dakota. And, he never did.
His stories filled much of the time we spent together, and of course they weren’t always about North Dakota. Often they were about wonderful parties he went to in the hills of Berkeley, in the Sixties; about organizing labor on the waterfront, as a longshoreman, with the great Harry Bridges, and on. They were the stories of a single man who lived a fully-lived life, and they were never boring – even to an eleven year old. The stories about North Dakota though, were always the ones that took on a different clarity; they caused Berkeley, San Francisco, and the town he had lived in for half a century, to fade away. They became little more than a glimmer, a passing stop on a long journey that began, and ultimately ended in, North Dakota.

Those stories that he told me, that he honored me with in a sacred tradition that goes back to cave paintings, aren’t remarkable. I mean that in the sense that he wasn’t the Norwegian Scott Amundson, who traversed Antarctica, braving severe temperatures – though growing up in the 1920’s and 30’s in North Dakota could certainly be read as that – while exploring vast territories, as yet unknown. His stories were about everyday events – kids running around, soaping up windows on Halloween; getting a milk cow onto the third story of their High School building – they were stories about husbands who secretly drank, and hid their empty bottles of vanilla in old tool sheds; ultra-religious women who objected to everything, and attractive aunts, who had they not been aunts might have taught my young grandfather more than he could have bargained for. Stories about kissing young girls born in Breckenridge, Minnesota; being sick with scarlet fever, more than once, and a host of other diseases, that he told with a distant tear in his eye – as though he had been happier facing death, in that cold terrain, up North. (Sickness, and kissing, seemed to have less of a pleasure in California, than in that far-away distance sense; a mixture of nostalgia, and a life altered beyond one’s ability to comprehend where it went.)

There were stories about the people who filled this town of Casselton: its two doctors, the good one who took care of the poor, and who charged nominal fees that they could afford; and the bad doctor, who took much better care of the rich. My great-grandfather had the unfortunate circumstance, during one of his bouts of sickness unto death, of dealing with the wealthy one – whose name escapes me. While treating my grandfather, this doctor had to go out of town to attend a gathering, and when my grandfather’s mother asked him: “What more can I do?” his only response was, “To pray.”

My grandfather’s mother being dissatisfied with this response – she was one of those sturdy Nordic mothers, who could switch fluently between Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (something that their great-great grandchildren, and I struggle with; we’ve lost something of that maneuverable tongue, that speaks with ease to our neighbors), and who refused to take matters like death, which were always so close at hand it seems, lying down – and so she went to speak with Dr. Reedy, the good doctor. He asked her what medicine had been prescribed, and I remember my grandfather belaboring to me that it was measured in “horse units” (though I may have misremembered it), and when my grandfather’s mother told him, he shouted “My God, he’s killing him!” Dr. Reedy tripled the medication that the other doctor had prescribed, and when he returned from his conference and found my grandfather sitting up in bed eating ice cream, his face – much to my grandfather’s relish – dropped to the floor. My grandfather also told me that Dr. Reedy eventually committed suicide, and he could never quite understand why – he had always served the vulnerable, the truly needy of Casselton. I’m not sure I can answer that question, but it strikes me that it’s not altogether surprising that of the two doctors, his name is the only one I can recall.

Even my grandfather’s fondness for restaurants with booths and curtains (he used to point out the old hooks for the curtains at older restaurants we’d go to), where he remembered these stories with such acuity and narrative clarity, that I’m struck at how real his memories seem to me, though he’s been dead nearly ten years. He liked those curtained booths, for making out with pretty young girls.

One of his most distinctive memories of North Dakota was of a beautiful, young, Irish girl; very Catholic, though as my atheistic, liberal, grandfather told me, “Still I would’ve converted for her, and we’d ‘ave had ten children.” I don’t quite remember how he met her, or where, only that she had gone to a teachers college in Jamestown, and had landed a job teaching primary school in Fargo. It makes sense if they had met there, my grandfather worked in Fargo for Sears, Roebuck – a job that always loomed as his finest. However they met, it was love at first sight: he would begin to describe her fiery red hair, and how they would go to restaurants and spend “hours,” as he put it, “just staring at each other.” Unfortunately, my grandfather was also very much married, and would soon have a child on the way to complement the affairs. And so, as is so often the case, this young woman wrote my grandfather a letter, which was found by my grandmother – and after that, there were no more letters. This affair was never consummated – it was never about that. It was about the passion that burns inside every individual who lets himself live, to find another person that he can love in such a way as no other. It’s our choices that often redirect those ambitions – in my grandfather’s case, getting my grandmother (who he met on a blind date, arranged by his friends) pregnant.

He didn’t regret marrying my grandmother, or having children. After all, he would tell me, “I would never have gotten you.” I know he meant that, and that I was the son he never had (he only had daughters), and so he intended that I should carry on the ambitions of living, as he had done for most of his life. And yet, it’s not without tears in my own eyes that I remember his mind being transported far away from the Pacific Ocean, away from me, from his family, from the very car he was driving – we often talked about his past while in the car – back to a place that then, at fifteen or sixteen, I simply could not understand.

North Dakota.

“Okay, Grandpa, what is this North Dakota?”

“There’s nothing like it, Michael,” he would say, “We used to have so much fun, and then there was…”

And eventually her name would come up, that woman who he never had, and at that physical moment in his life, never would, and whom I could never meet. And yet, I did meet her, time and again in that car with my grandfather; she was resurrected from the depths of his memories, which at eighty retained such detail that I’m sometimes ashamed to admit I can’t even remember some of the momentous moments of my life in such vivid imagery. Always the backdrop for this was North Dakota, with its endless stretch of characters for there – in Casselton, Fargo, everywhere – were characters.

An author once said that “New York has only eight or nine characters,” and the rest are just “copies.” Copies of copies of copies, that are slowly diluted, like in California. We are too far away from each other here, though we sometimes sit right next to each other on the train or bus, idling in traffic to go to points we think we know, to be characters any longer. Our towns long ago lost that ability to support characters as a town, as a community.

Every memory my grandfather spoke retained the vibrancy of pure air: as though when he spoke of this place so distant (and it is 2,000 miles from San Francisco), the only thing I could even begin to compare it with is camping out with friends on the tops of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where you’re confronted with billions of stars, that you’d never know existed, if you lived your life in the city, if you lived in that image of what is. When he spoke of his love for that young woman, of icy winters, long underwear, and outhouses; of being an upwardly mobile buyer for Federated Department stores; of food, and lefse, dancing, music, and town gatherings – I was drinking in pure air. It jolted my stifled mind, long since used to the clouded exhaust of so much, to realize I had so little of that purity, of characters, of those things that really mattered: love, community, fun, adventure, and the clarity that only forty below brings.

Even so, after my grandfather died, I remained in California. This is, after all, my first home, the place I felt I knew best, and I was able to attend one of its renowned universities. It was not until I was close to graduating that I realized I had better figure out what to do with my life, and so after a night of heavy drinking and thinking, I decided that graduate school seemed, at that point, the place to direct myself to. I wasn’t quite ready to relinquish the academic world yet, though it had disappointed me as an undergraduate with its petty vices, and war of words on every miniscule topic one can imagine. North Dakota was one of many places I applied, and it accepted me. At twenty-one I was given full support, and a teaching position – and without a second thought, I left California, and moved there. I have never regretted that choice.

What I discovered there was not my grandfather’s North Dakota; it exists, in parts, and there are still people there who remember him. I was even able to take my sister to visit a woman who grew up with my grandfather (she still lives in Casselton), and my sister’s eyes filled with tears as she listened to this woman tell the stories I knew so well, and for her to understand and see, that our beginning began far away from the coastal territories we know so well. But those stories that were my grandfather’s are not my own, they are his, and will forever be; what they did for me was to show me that my way is not so lonely or alone, as so many young people my age believe; it lit up corridors and halls throughout a place that felt, from the first, as though I had returned home.

I knew no one, understood none of the rituals or institutions that were the state, but never felt lost, or outside of what I had never lived. Everywhere I drove, everything I saw, seemed as it should be, in the right place, doing what it ought to be doing. Though, and this is especially true late at night, as I drive on the major interstate highway that runs from Bismarck, Casselton, Fargo, to Minneapolis, and as I pass Casselton, I always howl the loudest howl I can muster, in honor of one who brought me here. There would be no North Dakota without my family; everything would have been strange and foreign. I could have, over time, grown accustomed to it – but it would never have been the strange peace, as when I lived through my first winter, of standing at the edge of town staring off into the infinite whiteness and feeling as though I had only come home.

Our lives are decided for us long before we’re even conceived, let alone physically delivered into the arms of life. I don’t mean to say that we have no freedom to choose, or that we can’t make our lives what they are – we do that everyday. I have done that, made choices, tried to understand who and what I am, and where I’m going, but my stories know too well now that look my grandfather had when he resurrected memories; my heart now feels the icy cold of a North Dakota winter, and sometimes (though, not always; it can get very cold there) longs to be in it; to drink coffee, and drive on highways unclouded by the frantic mentalities of speed, and schedule, lost in my own recollections of what it means to live, to take time to think of everyone around me, of the characters I have encountered, and who are waiting to be born.

My grandfather’s stories, as I have said, did not force me down this path, and he did not mean for them to be a rigid structure for living my life. Rather, as is the case with true stories, he meant for them to be an inheritance of himself, of his lifetime of knowledge on everything that was good, right, and just, on the themes that have been the foundations of meaning for the human race: love, beauty, and hope, and to find, as he once had, a place of home where those could be felt in their true magnitude.

Until I lived in North Dakota it was always an image, a thought, an idea – a place that, sure, yeah, existed, but not really. Having lived there, and having understood my grandfather’s stories as I have made my own, I understand now why California was, for him, a station, where he could tend to all of the things that life gives an individual in a lifetime. And, I like to think, he tended them well. So well, in fact, that whenever anyone asks me, “Why North Dakota?” I only give them a smile of deep feeling, and unconsciously I feel a part of my mind shoot off into the depths of memory, and though I can’t see myself, I feel my eyes taking on the look of my grandfather, as I glance off into the distant sky that forms the horizon, and the outlet of the bay to the Pacific Ocean that unfolds before me, and in my chest, and with the hint of a sigh, I reply, with a sense of complete peace and knowing, “Where else?”




Michael Lopez is a graduate student at the University of North Dakota, in the department of English. Originally from San Francisco, CA, Michael earned A.B. in English Literature and Political Theory from the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on the writings of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and William Shakespeare. In addition to his work in North Dakota, Michael has held fellowships and residencies with the Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf college, and the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, at the University of Copenhagen, in Denmark. Although much of his work is focused on British literature and philosophy, he has a serious interest in American literature, and recently presented (Summer, 2006) at the Hemingway Foundation’s conference in Andalusia, Spain, on the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and one of Hemingway’s later novels, Across the River and Into the Trees.