Interviews
In Search of a Place: An Interview with Bill McClay
The Center for Christian Thought sits down with Bill McClay to discuss the importance of place in American life, as well as intellectual virtue.
Have you ever wondered where you belong? Those kinds of questions go a long way towards shaping who we are and how we see ourselves. It all comes down to the importance of place. Today, the Center for Christian Thought shares an interview with historian and intellectual Bill McClay, who holds the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. McClay discusses the relevance of place in American life.
Evan: At the University of OK, you hold an endowed chair in “the history of liberty.” Tell us a little bit about what that means.
Prof. McClay: Liberty is not an obvious, self‑explanatory concept. What does it mean to be free? What deeper question is there in human life than what does it mean to be a free person?
What does it mean to give yourself freely to a cause, to another person in marriage, and to whatever things you freely affiliate yourself with, including your religious faith? What does it mean to freely come to the knowledge and worship of God?
All these things are bound up in what we mean by liberty and the meaning of liberty has changed, has developed. Over time it has evolved, devolved, metastasized, you name it. That’s what I take to be the scope of the chair, to think in all these ways about what it means to be free.
This has actually been a concern of my scholarship from the beginning. My first book was called “The Masterless,” and so I’ve always had this interest in the tension between freedom and authority.
The way in which freedom and authority are things that enable one another, that ideally constitute a form of authority, is productive of freedom, enhances, enables freedom, but that freedom involves the ability to endorse authority without coercion. Our greatest form of authority is authority that requires no coercion or use of force to assert its power.
Evan: You’ve written a book on the importance of “place” in American life. Do you have an early memory for which place is especially significant?
Prof. McClay: My earliest memory is ‑‑ I can’t say how old I was but I think I was maybe about two or three years old ‑‑ I was walking. As I was crossing the street in Cincinnati ‑‑ a city I’ve never lived in, but we were visiting because my father was being considered for a job there ‑‑ walking across a busy street holding my big sister’s hand.
That’s my earliest memory. In another early memory, I think, we crossed the street and went into a little store and we bought one of these little bitty books.
It was my first book that I knew to be my own. It had been plucked off the tree where books grew for me alone. It was not the first book I’d ever seen, but it was the first book that I knew that I and no one else owned. That was, obviously, full of portent. The other part, though, which is much more vivid, I don’t know why I would remember that, but I can see why I would remember the book.
Evan: How do you define intellectual virtue?
Prof. McClay: Well, I see some of the things that you’re talking about like charity, even open‑mindedness, as shading over to being more moral virtues than intellectual virtues. When I think of intellectual virtues, I think of analytic power and things that fall into the orbit of logic, rational prowess.
I think of when J. Robert Oppenheimer was this great scientist involved in the development of the atomic bomb was asked what motivated the research of the scientists who were frenetically trying to perfect the weapons.
He said that, “Well, the problem was just so technically sweet.” You become obsessed with the solving the problem and once you solve the problem then you think about what the consequences will be, what you’ll do with it.
That’s one way of thinking about it, intellectual virtue run amok. That without the countervailing force of other kinds of virtues and constraints reigning it in or directing it. Now you could say, “Well, that intellectual virtue rightly understood includes those things. Rightly understood, intellectual virtue does not confuse reasonableness with rationalism.”
In the Greek sense, a virt˘ aretÈ is an excellence. We use the word in a way that it has a moral implication. To say that somebody who has intellectual virtues can be a cold blooded killer doesn’t quite compute for us because we think the word virtue implies, “Somebody who has virtue wouldn’t do that sort of thing.”
Partly I don’t want to get hung up on the strictly semantic issue, but I do think that, if we think in terms of intellectual excellences, that people can be, intellectually speaking, all dressed up with nowhere to go if they possess intellectual virtues and nothing else. I recognize that I’m defining intellectual virtue in a way that others might not want to.
Evan: Is this the particular nature of embodying our intellectual virtues in a real context, in a real life context where there are some normative aspect of it?
Prof. McClay: I think one way to get at this is to talk about the role of language. Language is ultimately at the ground of our common life. Nobody has a language all by themselves. Even J. R. R. Tolkien didn’t develop the idea of languages out of his own. He modeled his fictional languages on real languages. Seriously, nobody can invent a religion. Nobody can invent a language. These are things that come to us socially as in our capacity as social beings.
They’re given to us. We’re sort of born into them. To imagine ourselves without them is like imagining ourselves living without air. It might be theoretically and imaginarily possible, but not really. We’re in the air from the beginning, once we come out of the womb.
In language, the use of language, which is imperative and indispensable for the development of our intellectual life, involves interaction with others, involves communicating with others, involves dialoging, or discussing, or conversing with others. It involves the sharpening of one another, iron sharpen sharpens iron. We do this with words, not through iron.
There’s a way in which even the most arrogant expert of intellectual virtue is being arrogant in front of other people using tools that he got from other people. There’s some way in which…A great deal of sin is a forgetting. A forgetting of the origins of things.
The most wonderful definition of sin I’ve ever heard is from C. S. Lewis, of course. It’s, “Sin is like the scent of the flower thinking it can reject the flower.” Of course, there’s no scent without the flower. The scent imagines itself to be superior to the flower. To be having existence, prior to, or apart from the flower.
It’s that loss of the sense of the origins of things, of the grounding of things, of how they’re rooted, that forgetting that’s often associated with sin. I think language already involves us in a common world.
If we’re thinking rightly ‑‑ and maybe this is in the aspect of a real intellectual virtue, inducing humility ‑‑ we should understand that we don’t engage in discourse in order to humiliate or otherwise bury the opponent. In some way our engagement with them ought to be to a mutual benefit or at least respectful of them as persons, not as simply enemies to be vanquished.
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Evan: Is it worth distinguishing between moral virtues and intellectual virtues?
Prof. McClay: It would be interesting to ask the question ‑‑ Why distinguish them at all? Is every moral virtue ultimately an intellectual virtue? See what I’m saying? Because, in a certain way, you could say that that’s so. That charity comes out of an intellectual recognition that, or can come out of that.
It can also be something to which we’re, in some way, habituated or that springs emotionally from sources that we can’t even identify. I’m not sure it’s a virtue then.
I can see how you could argue that charity comes out of a theological recognition of our relationship to God and of our indebtedness to God for forgiving us and knowing that we must be forgiving if we are to be forgiven, that that is an imperative that’s placed before us. That can be an intellectual virtue.
I really want people to understand that intellectually, but not everybody can. What’s beautiful about Christianity is that it can be pitched in a variety of levels and still be the same thing. Those of us who are intellectuals don’t necessarily have a corner on the market.
There’re many, many stories of even Thomas Aquinas and other great intellectuals of the church saying, “You know, all that I’ve learned is there’s so much straw,” and, “Lean not on your own understanding.”
It’s crucial that we have places like Biola University and the Torrey Honors Institute where Christian minds are being developed.
So many Christians are afraid of this. Parents are afraid, and say, “My daughter is going to go off to this place and lose her faith. They’re going to have her reading Paul Tillich, and the next thing you know it’s off the bridge.” I don’t make fun of that. I’ve been a parent, and I have all those worries.
I had worked through them, all those worries, as anybody does, but there are things you can’t do for your children which they have to do for themselves. That’s the hard lesson every parent has to learn.
You want people to know their Greek and Latin cold. You want them to have read all the great secular philosophers and know their arguments backwards and forwards, up and down.
You want to be able to beat the infidels at their own game. You want to be good, just like a football player who is a Christian wants to be not only superior in his devotional life, but superior on the field. But, the thing that makes us different in that we contextualize this. The meaning of all the virtues, I think, is the fact that, ultimately, we are broken creatures who can find integrity and meaning ultimately only in Christ. That recognition of our brokenness and our utter dependence redefines everything.
It doesn’t mean the virtues are out. But, if you come back to them with a different attitude than the ancient had, than the classical pagan, than, say, Aristotle had…as wonderful as Aristotle is, and is essential to us as he is, he didn’t get the whole picture, just as Dante in “The Divine Comedy.”
He goes part of the way with Virgil as his guide, and at a certain point Virgil drops off because he can’t go any further.
Evan You’ve written on the importance of Christians having a master, of being under someone else’s authority. How do you apply that to the pursuit of intellectual virtue? How would you characterize, specifically, what it is to be a good Christian thinker?
Prof. McClay: There are a lot of different ways of being a good Christian thinker. This is a great question, because all of us who work in the academy have to ask that question at some point.
“What does my being a chemistry professor have to do with my faith? Is there some way that I can teach chemistry more Christianly?” In my field of history, there is the possibility of approaching the field from a strictly Christian perspective, but most of us don’t do that.
We don’t subordinate our professional interests to our faith for a variety of reasons, and I think almost all of them very good reasons. I think that in the spirit of you do what you do to the glory of God, and understand yourself as in service to Him in some way, one practical thing is that I think we should be very serious about ourselves as teachers, as opposed to researchers.
The real problem of a Christian life is not the theological breakthroughs that we somehow haven’t made. That’s not really the problem. Seriously, the problem is much more a matter of an existential problem. We do the things that we know we should not do and we don’t do the things we know we should do. This was pretty well formulated 2,000 years ago.
The solution was pretty well formulated 2,000 years ago, even though knowing Christ is always an elusive thing to define for people in different times and places. I think the disposition that you have towards your work will show. It will manifest in the way that you teach, in the attitudes that you have toward your students.
You plant seeds. A lot of times, that’s all you can so in this life, and very rarely you may get to reap somebody else’s planted seeds and feel really good about yourself for that until you realize, “Hey, I had very little to do with this. In fact, I just happened to be here when the moment came.”
You need to see what you’re doing as a calling. There may not be any particular techniques that enable one to be a Christian plumber as opposed to just a regular, old, garden variety plumber, but to see it as a calling, to see what you do as a calling, that’s something that’s open to every one of us, whether we’re Christian thinkers or plumbers.
Plumbers, at least, can you help accomplish something. I don’t know that I can help anybody with anything. I don’t consider myself superior to a plumber, but I have a different calling. I want to be careful here that the description of the church as an organism that Paul so beautifully lays out is a kind of way of understanding calling within a larger social structure.
I’m not sure that that metaphor is meant to apply to society more generally. I think it may be just simply for the church. Still, there’s some role that we have respect to everybody around us, to our neighbor. Jesus doesn’t say, “Love your Christian neighbor.” It’s just your neighbor, and your neighbor is the person next door, not someone in the Sudetenland or some faraway place.
It’s something you can do something about. Your neighbor is always something you can do something about, not something that you can wring your hands about because it’s just too big to address.
Jesus doesn’t say, “Love your Christian neighbor.” It’s just your neighbor, and your neighbor is the person next door, not someone in the Sudetenland or some faraway place.
Evan: This is a good place to jump in to your recent work on place. You just said that your neighbor is someone who is near to you, who is a part of your local environment. Wendell Berry famously said that “somewhere is better than anywhere.” If that’s true, why is it true?
Prof. McClay: From a Christian point of view, it’s true because we live in a world in which the word became flesh and dwelt among us and that God clearly manifested Himself in His fullness in the particularity of a particular person in time and place. I think there’s an affirmation of our corporeality that Christianity’s the most this‑world affirming of all the great religions. I would say even more so than Judaism. Let’s say Judeo‑Christian tradition. Even at the end of time, there’s the resurrection of the body. We affirm bodies, spiritual body, whatever that means, but it’s a body.
To be embodied means to be here and not everywhere. It’s to be somewhere, not anywhere. There’s this kind of way in which particularity is affirmed universalisticly in the Christian faith. It’s just amazing and hard to get your head around, but it does something beautiful.
I want to give you an example that I think is illustrative here, too. This is actually stolen from my friend, Michael Cromarty, who’s known and beloved by many people here at Biola.
He describes speaking. I think he was, maybe, at Covenant College or some Christian school and he gave this very inspiring talk. In the Q&A, one of the students in the audience says, “I’m just so fired up by what you say. I really want to go out and do something important.
“I really want to make a difference. It’s such a big world and there’s so much hurt in it and pain and need and so many people who…” on and on and just very passionate. He said, “How do I discern where God is leading me? What should I do? Where should I begin?” Mike said, “Well, you could begin by getting people to clean up the floor of your dormitory.”
It was just like a massive rush of air coming out of the balloon. He was making a very wonderful point and wonderfully well, which is that, generally, when God puts something on your heart, He puts it within arm’s length. I’m not saying people say, “I’ve been called to go to Africa,” but they’re not in any doubt.
But, a lot of times, people who say, “Oh, show me a sign, Lord. I just want to make a difference.” It’s like there’s some starving person in front of them, and, meanwhile, they’re saying, “Show me a sign, Lord, show me a sign.”
There’s something right in front of them, literally or figuratively. More often figuratively. Some suffering family member. Some neighbor. Somebody who isn’t particularly important maybe. You read about this sort of thing in “Time Magazine.”
It’s something where they have it in their power to do something that will make a difference in this small ‑‑ maybe unnoticed by any of us, but noticed by the noticer who matters ‑‑ some way that they can make a difference.
Again, this goes back to place and particularity. We’re called to operate in a particular context. The whole notion of global citizenship is one of the most pernicious ideas out there. I think one of the ways it’s pernicious is that it draws our attention away from the particular ways that we have within our power to do something in small ways.
None of us get to do much more than small things, but in small ways we can make the world a better place. Instead, we fall in love with these big, ballsy abstractions that generally involve us giving money to some 501(c)(3) corporation that will use 70 percent of it to support their people on K Street in Washington. Whereas, if I help this poor guy that’s lying on the floor in front of me while I’m asking the Lord for a sign, I just do it.
Alexis de Tocqueville has a wonderful treatment in his book, Democracy in America. He says abstractions play a particularly strong role in democracy, because the changes of political currents are such that a politician never knows when he’s going to need to backtrack on his commitments. He has a good sentence, which I don’t remember exactly. Something like this: an abstraction is like a box with a false bottom. You can slip meanings in and out of it through the false bottom unnoticed so that a word like democracy, can mean different things.
It’s interesting. The President himself, just yesterday, gave a press conference in which he said, “Well, the people voted and I heard them. I also heard the two‑thirds of the electorate that did not vote.” I’d love to know how he heard that. ] It’s an interesting way that he took the election, the voting process, which is for us the talismanic emblem of democracy, the vote and he turned it on its head. He said, “Well, you know, yeah. There was this election that kind of went against me and my party but, at least my party, not really against me.
“Nobody’s really against me, but went against my party, but it wasn’t really a very democratic election because two‑thirds of the people didn’t vote.” He’s still an exponent of democracy, but he’s using democracy in a very different sense than he would have had he won. I’m picking on him because he’s current, but I could’ve picked on any number of people. It does cross party lines, absolutely.
We use big words. We use big concepts in public discourse. This is partly, I think, too, because to rally the public to something you have to use some big concept that is going to provide a motivator. I’ll give an example.
I’m going to spread my partisan opprobrium more widely here. Back in the Reagan administration, We had a very sustained involvement in Central America, in El Salvador, in Nicaragua that rightly or wrongly were seen as products of Cuban and, ultimately, Soviet military adventurism and, therefore, were seen as part of the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.
It seemed clear to me at the time that the only real argument for the United States being involved in these settings was the self‑interest of the United States, but it also seemed to be clear that you could not make that argument in public. Not because it wasn’t a respectable argument, because you never used these kinds of argument to motivate a democracy.
Woodrow Wilson got the United States in World War I not because it was in the interest of the United States that the allied powers triumphed over the central powers, but because we had to make the world safe for democracy.
The fact that Wilson sort of believed it doesn’t make it any different. It’s one of the, I think, persistent difficulties of American foreign policy, is that we actually find ourselves unable to do things nakedly out of self‑interest. This is actually one of the things that the world resents about us, is that we don’t ever just do things because this is in our interest, it’s always got to be because some big word.
I think Tocqueville is right. I think this is a characteristic of democracy. It’s a pathology of democracy. In other words, it’s not incidental to it. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
It’s something we have to work around and find a way that the use of big words ‑‑ and inequality is, of course, one of the biggest of big words ‑‑ isn’t used as a sort of blunderbuss.
To use big words, big concepts, is a blunderbuss, is a way to beat over the head of your opponent and delegitimize your opponent. That’s deeply corrosive. For example, “You are a bigot. You cannot possibly hold the position that you hold without being a bigot and, therefore, I don’t have to listen to you. I don’t have to respect you. Your position can only be the position of a bigot.” That’s it. That’s the end of rational discourse.
It closes the door. Actually, we should be willing to reason with bigots.. I think tolerance is something we’ve lost the sense of. Tolerance often does mean holding your nose. To be tolerant doesn’t mean, “Oh, everything’s fine. I accept everything. I’m like Walt Whitman. Everything that’s out there, from the least amoeba to the morning star, it’s all fine and all mine.” No, what it really means is you don’t kill people, and you don’t persecute people. You don’t slander them or marginally wound them because they hold views that are otherwise repugnant to you. We’ve lost this, we really have.
Evan: Do you think there’s something inside of us that yearns for that?
Prof. McClay: No, I don’t think there’s something inside of us that wants that…I think we hate tolerance. Tolerance forces us to. It has to. You’re going against what you believe when you tolerate. When we talk about somebody who is getting over a gastrointestinal infection that you say, “Well, can they tolerate the solid foods?”
That just means they can have some without going into some sort of catatonic seizure. I think it’s difficult. We have this notion of civility. We’re all just around the table sipping tea together, and laughing at one another’s jokes, and appreciating diversity and how wonderful it is.
I think there’s a much more rough‑and‑ready notion of civility. It is that you don’t start shouting things, particularly calling people names, which is an act of violence, really, in that social context. It’s failing to treat a person as a person. You’re objectifying them, and you’re saying this is something to be defeated.
I think most demonstrations are less than fully civil in that respect because they’re not conducive to discussion. They really amount to making a proclamation and making that proclamation stand.
It’s that blunderbuss. What we’ve lost is an ability to believe that reason and reason deliberation can be efficacious. Of course, we’ve never been that way perfectly, and only in radical imperfection of different degrees. We could certainly do better than we’re doing now. I think everyone knows that.
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