(Paul C. Vitz is Professor of Psychology/Senior Scholar at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences and Professor of Psychology Emeritus at New York University. He is our guest blogger for the month of August, and this is his fourth post).

 Cambridge/Amherst Seminar: This 15- minute talk was given on Oct. 30, 2006 at Harvard University to a group of about 60 faculty members from Boston area universities, mostly from Harvard. It was also given on Oct. 31 at Amherst College to about 45 faculty members from Amherst area colleges. In each case it was a dinner address and was preceded by a 15-minute talk by Prof. Harry Lewis the former Dean of Harvard College. His address summarized the thesis of his book, Excellence Without A Soul: How A Great University Forgot Education (2006) and focused on moral errors in the conduct of major publicly known representatives of Harvard University, errors that exemplified a serious loss of moral vision.

 Before taking up the topic of the soulless modern university, and the need for rediscovery of moral leadership, I want to place the topic in a general cultural context.

    I believe there is reasonable evidence and consensus that we are coming to an end of the so-called modern period.   It is a commonplace to describe our present situation as post-modern.  This term, post-modern, in spite of its ambiguities refers to a kind of late modern period in which many of the traditional underpinnings and assumptions of modernity have been very seriously criticized or deconstructed.  In recent decades I see three major modern ideals that now show clear signs of completion and exhaustion.  The first is secularism.  In my graduate student day’s secularism was riding high.  Religion was seen as a thing of the past, which would soon finish withering and disappear, to be replaced by the modern, rational humanistic secular world.  Many psychologists and other social scientists interpreted their disciplines as part of this emerging secular triumph.  For Christianity, Harvey Cox’s Secular City (1965) is a good representative of this confident assumption.  It is now roughly forty years later and much of that secular confidence has evaporated. This has happened in part because of the remarkable and unexpected growth of religion in America and in much of the world. Indeed in the United States Evangelical Protestantism was beginning to emerge at the very moment when Harvey Cox was writing his book.  Since then in the United States we have seen a resurgence of Orthodox and Hasidic Judaism to the extent that today the future of Judaism is generally understood to be the future of its orthodox expressions.  There are now clear signs of a broad based grass roots revival of traditional Catholicism in the United States, a revival largely unobserved by the media. And, of course, Islam has shown much growth in many places.  There are still other examples of this religious growth ranging from Hinduism to Mormonism to Buddhism to New Age spirituality but I think the point is clear, religion has revived very strongly. One sign of this is the extent to which religion for better and worse is part of the headlines dealing with current events. 

       Ironically, post-modern critics of modernity by attacking the very concept of an objective knowledge that aimed to provide a widely accepted humanistic ethics have undermined much of the previous secular confidence. And, of course, no new generally accepted rational humanistic ethics has arisen. Instead we have postmodern support for a personally relative morality of anything goes plus the claim that any proposed objective basis for a moral norm is simply the disguised expression of a desire for power.  Furthermore, a disappointment with and wide- ranging criticism of science among post-modern and other critics has also eroded the belief in the possibility of a stable, generally acceptable secular society. Some of these critiques have focused on technology with its negative environmental impact; others have identified the agendas or goals of science as being set by the government and corporate sponsors of science. For many of quite different political persuasions science is not seen as an independent and honest moral discipline but as a kind of hired man for those who fund it.

    A second major modern ideal or emphasis of the modern period that is dying is socialism as broadly defined. By socialism I mean not only the growth of socialist programs within governments around the world, but also the general belief in the government’s capacity to assure the material and well-being of its citizens.  This modern assumption is losing much of its confidence and even its appeal. Throughout the world, socialist governments, which means for all practical purposes all of the modern states in the western world, and Japan, are aware of a looming crisis with respect to their social obligations.  People are no longer convinced that governments will have the money to pay for their huge social programs. Many governments, especially in Europe and Japan, recognize that there will not be an adequate work force to sustain their economy because of population declines that promise to become severe in the future.  In short, socialism is an idea that has largely been completed and generates very little idealistic enthusiasm among the young who today are often likely to see themselves as victims of their parent’s socialist systems. 

   The third major characteristic of modernism that is also beginning to show it’s age is what might be called “sexualism”. By this I mean the sexual revolution with its continued push toward more and more varied and extreme sexual expression.  This general attitude is familiar to all and is presently found in pressures for same sex marriage and now increasingly a return to polygamy or poly-amorous relationships as they are called in progressive circles. (The media seem to be using the term plural marriage.) Many kinds of high tech manipulation in the creation of children are another example of sexualism.  But this sexual revolution, as it is often called, is now rather old hat to many of our young people.  And the first serious criticisms of this way of life even in the university world have begun to appear even among former feminists.  The idea that your youthful days will be wonderful if you can hook up sexually with anyone you happen to feel attracted to after a few beers is far from convincing, especially for young women who often pay a heavier price for such pseudo-bonding.  One could interpret the whole preoccupation with date rape as an indirect expression of female college students’ despair over the present relation between the sexes.  Although sexual modernism and post-modernism seem firmly in place in our society, I would not be surprised to see emerge in future decades a counter-revolution expressed by intelligent and idealistic young people, a reaction tied to religious commitments.  In any case, sexualism as a new exciting personal and social idea has certainly lost its novelty and through the problems it causes has begun to create a serious re-evaluation. Thus, sexualism along with socialism and secularism is becoming a completed or exhausted movement.  One can say that all three of these modern ideals with their associated sources of meaning and values are, if you will, ” so last century.” And idealistic young people are especially uneasy with these tired modern ideas.

   A final important context for our seminar topic is the growth of Islam and the present conflict between Islam and the West.  One does not have to agree completely with Samuel Huntington’s (1996) thesis about a clash of civilizations, but it is probably safe to say that for many years in the future, and possibly for the rest of this century, a conflict between Islam and the West and in some respects explicitly between Islam and Christianity is going to be with us. If the challenge of Islam has a long-term future then I suggest that one of the effects of this challenge will be the increasing growth of religion in the West. Let me note my rationale for this hypothesis.  In the previous century the United States faced both internally and externally, the challenge of socialism and communism.  The most dramatic example obviously was the conflict with the Soviet Union, but the challenge existed long before communism took over in Russia.  One profound effect of our competition with socialism and communism was the extent to which we took on socialist characteristics ourselves. We developed many essentially “socialist” government programs.  In Europe Socialist political parties became commonplace. That is, one of the major consequences of this great struggle was that we became like our enemy because we had to respond to their legitimate criticisms of us. Likewise, the Islamic critique of the godless, commercialized and sexualized West has great validity and resonates with millions of Westerners; to the extent that Islamic criticism and pressure continue in the decades ahead, we will have to shore up our own religious and moral response, and a Western godless and self indulgent society will seem increasingly weak and indefensible.

     Now, one important consequence of this modern and even postmodern completion is what I believe is a widespread quietly developing interest in a new, positive approach to many previously neglected or rejected questions and topics. Indeed, the revival of religion is one major example of this new mentality. After all religion was reliably rejected by modern and postmodern thinkers.  For want of a better term I have referred to this possible new and emerging cultural period as “transmodern“. By transmodern I mean a transformation and transcendence of the modern and postmodern worldview. Thus, transmodern is not a rejection of modernism but a transforming of it in the service of transcendent ideas. By transcendent I include both religious and spiritual interpretations, as well as idealist and high ethical concerns.  I believe important early expressions of such a mentality are already present in many of the arts, in philosophy and in religion. (Some examples are the philosophy and theology of the previous and the present pope; the recent writings of the novelist Tom Wolfe such as his essay “I am sorry but your soul just died”; Harvard’s Prof. Harvey Mansfield and many, many others.). However, I wish to focus on a transmodern phenomenon that has recently emerged in psychology. The so-called “positive psychology” pioneered primarily by Prof. Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania is an example of an idealistic new psychology that is based on the virtues. This psychology of the virtues proposed and developed by a prominent secular psychologist has quickly established itself as an important new field of both empirical and theoretical psychology. Its importance lies in its emphasis on ideals of the good or flourishing life and on its placing of purpose or teleology back at the center of psychology, especially of academic, research psychology. In addition the psychology of the virtues has begun to reestablish important connections between psychology and philosophy that had long been neglected.  This focus on the virtues is -one might say- psychology’s rediscovery of the wheel, of what had long been known. However, in view of psychology’s influential role in American society and because the empirical method is likely to find new ways in which the virtues can be learned and applied, I anticipate that this new virtues psychology will have serious cultural importance. Already, the psychology of forgiveness has received wide attention in the media and elsewhere. Psychologists focusing on the study of such virtues as love, gratitude, justice, honesty and courage are likely to have their work generate significant public interest as well.

   The decline of modernism, specifically of secularism, socialism and sexualism, the rise of the Islamic challenge to the West, the growth of religion and more recently the interest in virtue, provide large cultural contexts for why I believe religion and in particular God must return to and be part of our elite universities if they wish to remain relevant in the coming century.  However, for most of our elite universities and in particular for Harvard there is a historical and institutional reason why God should come back.  The problem of the absence of a soul is really the problem of the absence of God.  The idea that Harvard has turned its back on God would have been considered impossible by the founders of the college over three hundred years ago.  Harvard was founded and in many respects formed as a Christian seminary or college.  Over the centuries Harvard like most of our elite universities first neglected, then forgot and now has rejected God. This I suggest is no longer acceptable. Thus the first reason for bringing back God is that any institution that turns its back on its founding principals, on its founding charism as we say in Catholic circles, is in danger of cutting off its basic life principle and motivation for future growth. The convincing lament of soul-less ness so well described by Dean Lewis can be understood, at least in part, as a consequence of Harvard’s rejection of its founding principles and heritage. A second important reason for re-introducing God is the basic commitment to intellectual and moral truth that characterizes any genuine university.   The impressive number of important contemporary intellectuals who believe in God is something that the modern university has closed its eyes to.  Serious theists are rarely encouraged, much less honored, at our premier universities. Atheism or at least an active skepticism is the standard operating position in our academies.  Nevertheless for many years now increasing numbers of intelligent believers have come onto the intellectual scene. Much of the recovery of a theistic mentality has happened outside of our universities where, of course, so much of the country’s intellectual life has been happening in the last few decades- in think tanks and private institutes.

    Let me almost conclude by suggesting that a university that is looking for a soul should sponsor a series of talks given by prominent intellectuals who believe in God.  This series of lectures would not focus on argument and dialectic. Instead, the talks would present examples of accomplished intellectuals and scholars whose belief in God has been important for their intellectual work and also for their personal and moral integrity. It should not be feared that such speakers Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or other would attempt though argument to impose their views.  Instead, this kind of lecture series would be a small step in the right direction for any university or college that understands that it has lost its vision in today’s world of nihilistic relativism.

    This proposed lecture series, which could be called Plan A, however, might seem too unsuited even too radical for the present university scene, too politically loaded for professors or administrators to feel comfortable in such a sponsorship. In addition, the need for a new moral vision is so immediate that a positive treatment of God however stimulating might be too abstract or removed from such a more pressing need. So, I propose a Plan B or fallback position for those wanting some constructive but more concrete response to the moral vacuum on campus. Let me suggest a different series of lectures by academics and intellectuals focused on the recovery of the great virtue tradition – a tradition with a long Western heritage but also one found in all the world’s major civilizations. A good lead speaker might be Prof. Seligman but there are many fine philosophers, theologians, psychologists and cultural commentators who would be appropriate. I believe none of us would be surprised if college students’ gave an enthusiastic response to intelligent new treatments of the topic of the virtues rediscovered. For many students are hungry not only for some kind of moral vision, but also for evidence that their university is aware of their need and has something positive and exciting to satisfy it.