Set 4
2004-2022
Set 4
2004-2022
There are three parts to this narrative. The first is an account of eight documents on democracy and religion. The second is a timeline of organizing activity that began roughly in 2004 and includes documents closely related directly to organizing and political movements. The third part is a look back at the span of 83 years of life from 1939 to 2022 covered to this point, and an essay on a vital part of the story that might seem to have been overlooked.
First Item
The Scholar of Religion and Jonathan Z. Smith’s ‘Iron Law.’” 2015
A final version of this article was published in 2019 with the title,“Locating the Study of Religion in a Theory of the Academy: The Unexamined Relationship Between Jonathan Z. Smith’s Two Careers.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 31 (2019) 309-346.
This article is copyrighted and is not therefore available in this archive. It is available from the publisher. Though not included in the archive, it is too important not to include in this autobiographical account.
I have included in this archive an earlier version of the article, entitled, “The Scholar of Religion and Jonathan Z. Smith’s ‘Iron Law’” written in 2015.
I ended the third set of writings with an article about Jonathan Z. Smith (JZS). I begin this set with a reference to two more articles about him. All three articles have in common the claim that Smith’s approach to “religion” is of vital public interest; more precisely it is of vital interest for democratic public attitudes towards religion. In the previous article the emphasis on the relationship between religion and democratic publics was explicit. In this 2019 article, the focus is on the responsibility of the university in particular, in a democracy, more specifically, the focus of the article from start to finish, is on Smith’s academy in a democracy. In it, I argue that Smith, in addition to his extensive contributions to the study of religion, makes a valuable contribution to the theory and responsible public exercise of cognitive power. This larger public concern is explicitly and repeatedly addressed in his writings on the academy in which he develops a theory of the academy that articulates the conditions essential to the responsible exercise of cognitive power. A further claim is that this theory constitutes the integrating standpoint of his study of religion. The failure to recognize the relationship between his theoretical writings on the academy and his study of religion, reflecting his two careers, has given rise to misunderstandings that have obscured the wider public significance of his entire oeuvre.
Furthermore, as will be clear when I turn to the fifth set of writings that follow, the first item addresses the same issue, viewed from the perspective of a Christian pastoral counselor and psychotherapist. The point is that “religion,” whatever we mean by that word, is a matter of urgent concern for a would-be democratic people. It’s threat to democracy has only grown more urgent. At the same time, I want to insist, the question of what matters most, what a people values most, what is reverenced, what is still evoked by the word “soul” and its care and well-being is vital to ourselves as a terrestrial human species.
In one way or another, all of the articles in this set reflect that attitude, some more directly than others. They appear in the following order in the archive:
Second Document
A Chaos Theory of Christian Origins 2006
This article draws on two books by the Canadian historian, Donald Akenson, whose significance for how to understand the origins of Christianity is, in my judgment, ground-breaking, though to date it has been almost completely ignored by biblical scholars. I refer the reader to my short article.
I consider Akenson’s other extensive historical work equally essential, but for very different reasons. Iin particular his most recent book, The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America’s Own Bible, published in 2023. This is the third in a trilogy that traces the history of one of the most influential modern interpretations of the Christian Scriptures in America today. It is an interpretation that was invented in the early 19h century. It became well-known to the public through the blockbuster “Left Behind Series” of novels that began appearing in 1995 and continued through 2007. It has appeared in multiple versions and in a film series, and is known by its adherents as “Dispensationalism. “America’s Bible,” in Akenson’s title, refers to The Schofield Bible, a version that comes complete with an extensive series of interpretive notes which explain how the Bible is to be interpreted from beginning to end.
Third Document
This is a review of Crazy for God,:How I Grew Up As One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back, by Frank Schaeffer, published in 2007. Frank Schaeffer is the son of Francis Schaeffer, a Presbyterian missionary to Switzerland, where he established a center in 1955 known as L’Abri. In the Sixties it became famous to students travelling in Europe. Ruth and I took the train to L’Abri twice during our first year in Germany.
I suggest that “Crazy for God is a story about growing up in a Christian Right subculture, with habits, rituals, language and beliefs that will strike many Americans as distinctive and as peculiar as exotic Philippine headhunters. It is the ultimate anthropological field report, told by an insider, of what it was like “being raised inside a miracle,” the “miracle” of L’Abri, his parents’ unusual and highly successful work as fundamentalist American missionaries stationed in Switzerland. He writes as an outsider but because he was born into the culture and grew up in it, he acts as his own native informant.”
I argue further that ““Faith” is the key term that defines fundamentalist culture, and one of the valuable features of Crazy for God is its demonstration of the complex and contradictory ways that faith saturates everything. It is a story of a faith-crazed subculture in which “faith” permeates everything, eating, sex, child-rearing, conversation, marriage, class, status. “My life,” says Schaeffer, “has been one of all-consuming faith – not my faith, but the faith of others that I seem to have caught like a disease and been almost obliterated by.” It is about faith not as a matter of beliefs only but as “gut-responses.” It is not about fundamentalism as unchanging creed but faith as living, moving, changing, relentlessly honest and therefore sordid, shocking, comic, wonderful, moving. “There is no way to write the absolute truth about my family,” says Schaeffer, “the only answer to ‘Who are you?’ is “When?’
Fourth through Seventh Documents
4th “A radical-democratic trickster and a fool for Christ in conversation, Bruce Woll. Review of Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian,”American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, Volume 30/2, May 2009.
5th The Liberal Jesus: A River of Traditions, Saint Paul and the Redeemer, October 16, 2011
6th Knowing the Self in Some Gnostic and Valentinian Writings,” A paper written for David Brakke, University of Chicago, 2012.
7th How to think about the Bible in the 21st Century – A Primer for the Nonconfessionally Curious
These four articles reflect the diverse religious topics, audiences, and formats I found myself writing for, a review for a journal of theology and philosophy; a talk to the local Episcopal Church my wife and I attended in Hyde Park, an academic paper I wrote for David Bakke at the University of Chicago, and the handout for a four part set of talks on biblical history which I gave in various forms to three Unitarian-Universalists societies during this period.
All of them in one way or another were, in my mind, intended to contribute to public understanding of the incredibly rich diversity of the public religious heritage of “the West.”
Eighth through Eleventh Documents
Student-led Salon on “Alternative Epistemologies” at the University of Chicago Divinity School
8th Religion as an Object of Study in the Academy, 2015
9th What Has Political Monotheism to do with Democracy, 2016
11th What is the role of Bruno Latour’s notion of “counter-religion” in his call to “face Gaia”? 2018.
These four presentations were given to a unique Salon on “Alternative Epistemologies,” organized by students of the University of Chicago Divinity School which were convened every term for several years. It was designed as a venue for students writing dissertations to present their question or topic and receive feedback from other students. In a few cases, visiting professors from other institutions were presenters. The Salon from the start was not limited to Divinity School students and welcomed even non-students such as myself. The discussions, which were attended by anywhere from a half-dozen to a couple of dozen were lively and invaluable.
The purpose of the Salon was inspired by the idea that “we are impoverished as human beings and scholars by our tendency to forget or devalue ways of knowing other than the cerebral. It took its name from the theory of Charles Mills, as articulated in his 1988 essay, entitled “Alternative Epistemologies.” We hope to provide a public space for conversations about other ways of knowing,’ as well as how discursive knowing and articulating might be enriched, expanded, deepened and illuminated by other ways of knowing. Alternative Epistemologies is also responding to what we consider to be an ethical imperative to listen to perspectives that have been historically underrepresented and shut out of the mainstream academic conversation. We believe that just as we do very well to honor the different modes of our knowing and ourselves, we must also honor the different voices in our culture and our world. We consider this to be integral to our wholeness as human beings and as scholars.”
I want to call special attention to presentation listed as the #9 above, “What Has Political Monotheism to do with Democracy” (2016). Two figures I cite in this talk have become central since then. Danielle Allen, already mentioned, is one. I have mentioned her above and say much more about her in the final set of writings. The other is Vincent Wimbush. Wimbush is an African-American biblical scholar whose subsequent writing and organizing demands to be better known.
The rest of this autobio shifts gears from a focus on writings to organizing, beginning with some canvassing activity for Kerry in 2004. I was hired in 2004 by Alternatives, Inc., a youth services organization in Uptown, as their tech support manager, working four days a week. This would be my last job before retiring in 2011.The shorter hours gave me time to get active politically when Obama ran for President in 2008. But it was not until Sanders announced in 2015 that things changed for me. What follows is a brief chronicle of the organizations I joined and became active with over the next few years.
In June 2016 the first national People’s Summit was held in Chicago, with over 3,000 people from all over the country. It was followed by a second summit, in 2017, with over 4,000 attendees. I attended both summits, and passed out fliers I had made, featuring Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics image from her book by of the same name, just published in February of 2017.to promote her visionary, planetary-scale model of economics for the 21st century.
I was also caught up in the campaign for a Green New Deal represented by Alexander Ocasio-Cortez’s —– I wrote a document, in response to David Brooks’s contemptuous dismissal of it, which I include as document # 12.
Document Thirteen
“Organizing for Democracy and Our Common Inheritance,” 2018
It cites one of the most important figures I learned about while involved with TPL, Gar Alperovitz, co-author with Lew Daly, of Just Desserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance (2008). Their book is about who deserves how much of the common heritage of humankind. Just Desserts suggests that Bill Gates built a fortune from software, but the enormous growth in power, productivity, and therefore his income actually came from the hardware it ran on, which doubled in power every two years. Almost free to him. It was the result of more than 150 years of development. It was a gift. “The incredibly inequitable distribution of wealth from that shared inheritance in modern society is abhorrent and illogical,” they conclude bluntly.
Document Fourteen
“Public Bank Training for Organizers,” 2019.
Citing Martin Luther King: “We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt,” I stated that the purpose of the training was to persuade organizers that they have the capacity to play an essential role in taking control of the people’s money by campaigning for public banking in their electoral and issues work.
Also in 2015, I stood on train platforms in the Logan Square neighborhood collecting signatures for a friend who was running for alderman. Through him, I met one of the dynamic lead organizers of The People’s Lobby (TPL), Marta Popadiak. I became active with TPL, inspired by Marta and their “People and Planet First Budget.” The one-page budget, heavily footnoted to identify the sources of the numbers, showed that Illinois and Chicago, notorious for chronic deficit budgets, had enough capital resources to balance their budgets if everyone, including the giant corporations in the state, paid their fair share. Two documents written for The People’s Lobby constitute documents # 13 and #14.
Document Fifteen
Freedom’s Trickster: Essay on Jedediah Purdy, A Tolerable Anarchy, 2015
I argued in this essay that Jedediah Purdy’s A Tolerable Anarchy (2009) goes a long way towards rescuing the word “freedom” from the abuse and misuse it is subjected to on all sides. In part, I suggest, this is because it recognizes that to understand America’s political culture of freedom requires doing epistemology at the same time that it is doing history. “Epistemology” used to be a word buried in the black hole of academic philosophy departments, but this year Time Magazine, in a cover article asking “Is Truth Dead?” declared, tongue in cheek I assume, that “Trump knows something about epistemology.”
The power of Purdy’s rich epistemology for imagining a political culture of freedom is, I propose, evidence that public epistemology is an urgent political issue. “Freedom” is the trickster word in the resonance echo chamber of our national media which feeds on either/or binary simplifications and in turn feeds political polarization. Purdy’s epistemology shatters this dangerous cardboard cutout epistemology with an epistemic universe where the both/and of paradox is commonplace because the embeddedness of epistemic practice in contexts is definitive.
This is a crucial document contributing to the theory of the fundamentalizing dynamic that. I argue, has become indispensable.
While active with TPL, I learned about The Public Banking Institute, founded by Ellen Brown in 2011, three years after the 2008 banking collapse, and still active. See the presentation held a few weeks ago, January 8, 2026. The video playlist is available at Public Bank of North Dakota NM Presentation – 1/8/26. In 2018 I began a campaign to educate the People’s Lobby organizers on public banking so they could begin lobbying for a public bank in Illinois and/or Chicago. That same year JB Pritzker became Governor of Illinois and launched a campaign for an Illinois Fair Tax bill. The People’s Lobby leaders threw their energies behind the Fair Tax campaign and did not have the resources to give to public banking.
Meanwhile, through a member of the People’s Lobby, I had learned about “monetary reform” and the American Monetary Institute. To find out more I attended a few sessions of their annual conference in September, 2018 where I met Steve Walsh, then Director of AMI. I became so interested that in December 2018 I flew to Cambridge, Mass to attend a conference at Harvard University, on “Money as a Medium of Democracy.” This conference was organized by the Harvard Law Professor, Christine Desan.Toggle Content
In 2021, after the COVID year of 2020, I got an email from Lucille Eckrich, founder of the American Alliance for Just Money (AFJM). She had learned of my involvement in public banking and recognized my name. We had met many years ago through the Urban Life Center when she had been on the staff.
Since as early as I can remember, I preferred being outdoors to being indoors. I went barefooted most of the time as a boy growing up in Eldoret. I played outdoors, pole-vaulted, built a tree-house, hitched up a rope to swing from, Tarzan-style, biked everywhere, climbed to the top of the tallest tree where we lived and gazed out at the horizon. I spent the first two summers back in the States when I was 15, working on the sweet-corn farm where we lived in South Jersey, crawling up and down the rows, in the dirt, with two other boys, pulling up suckers. I learned quickly not to go bare-footed after I stepped hard on a jagged piece of broken glass.
Ruth and I spent our honeymoon in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. The following summer we decided to take a camping trip to Boston and then to Acadia National Park in Maine, equipped with two sleeping bags, a flyleaf for a tent and a suitcase! In other words, we didn’t know what we were doing. Ruth had camped as a young girl with a Christian organization called Pioneer Girls and they had camped outdoors with no tent. We never got to Boston, though we did get as far as Cape Cod. We have spent the rest of our lives camping with our two kids and our family reunions with our extended families, have been spent where we could swim, hike, canoe, sail, and play tennis. Our most recent reunion of the Woll side of the family was spent on the North Carolina coast on Emerald Isle. There were over 60 of us, swimming, beach combing, and some of us jogging or walking every morning down the beach and back. My son, Arthur, found a way to go wing-foiling on the inter-coastal, shallow waters. And, of course, there was endless conversation and music, and good food.
In 1978 we drove to Arizona to see the West with my sister, Martha, and her family. They had invited us to see the Grand Canyon with them before they left Tucson to return to the East Coast. That was when the seed was planted that would eventually grow into a passion for geology. One memory stands out. We came over a rise after visiting Zion and Bryce National Parks when I noticed a row of perfectly shaped low pyramids ahead on the right side of the road. For a second I thought they must have been man-made but quickly realized they were natural formations. At that moment, I wanted to know how that had happened, along with all the two other astonishing canyons we had just visited and hiked in. Some days later, when we arrived at the rim of the Grand Canyon, it was about midnight. My brother-in-law, Alan Rice, and I, who had been driving, were the only ones awake. Alan and I got out and walked over to the rim in the moonlight and gazed down at the vast deep, falling away at our feet. “Geology” became forever associated in that moment with awe and wonder and a kind of love.
Eventually, I stumbled on a book called, The Map that Changed the World, published in 2001, which tells a dramatic – and controversial – story of William Smith and the first geological map of England. It led me to read the biographies of some of the founders of the discipline of geology, such as Sedgewick, and Roy Porter’s 2008 book The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660-1815. I will add four other books that have fed my appetite for the earth and its life. The first is The Geology of Britain: An Introduction, by Peter Toghill, published in 2000. Packed with charts, maps, color plates, it became an indispensable guide to our hikes. Simon Lam and David Sington, Earth Story: The Shaping of our World, 1998, is another such guide that takes in the whole living planet, one of several “Earth Stories” that have been told. David Attenborough’s Life on our Planet: My Witness Statement and A Vision for the Future, 2020, is one of this master’s most brilliant, entertaining, and heartfelt accounts. On a completely different note, I would call attention to Robert B. Laughlin’s A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. (2005). Laughlin was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. I heard him speak many years ago. I confess I found I could not follow him past the first several chapters, but they have remained to tantalize me, every time I remember to pick it up and read those first chapters.
Wallace Stegner deserves special mention as another figure who fed my appetite not only for the material make-up of the dirt and rocks, and soil under my feet but also for the history of the earth, “geohistory,” which is inseparable from the history of life. Wolf Willow: A History, A Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier, published in 1955 was my introduction to Stegner and his boyhood life. The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West, another Stegner book, contains the line that endeared him to me forever. His father took the family on a long holiday trip one year south. After hours of driving across the hot, dusty plains they came in sight of the mountains. After more hours climbing they finally stopped by a clear mountain stream where they climbed out and took a cool drink. At that moment, says Stegner, “I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again.
I don’t think its exaggeration to say that I gave my heart to him!
Later I read what I suggest is his most important book, Beyond the Hundreth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. (1953). In it Stegner told the story of the geologist and second director of what became the U.S. geological Survey, John Wesley Powell. Powell was also famous for his 1869 expedition down the Colorado river, including the first official U. S. sponsored passage through the Grand Canyon. Reading it back in Chicago after a family camping trip that took us to South Manitou Island in Upper Michigan, I recorded in my journal, for Wednesday, September 9, 1992, how I was feeling: “the sheer weight of miles of sand beach, stone, crashing lake surf, rain, driftwood, bluff, trees, tangled thick meadow growth, vivid colors of grasses and flowers in the wet rain on the Island.” I was also aware of “the sheer astounded delight at how Stegner’s biography of Powell is turning out. Astounded at the suspense, the interest, the breadth of interest and ideas and perspective coming through pages about government surveys, outcroppings of detail about land I know nothing about. Important, important, important. Themes – home-grown, soil-grown, cooperative visions, science, system.”
Sometime later I came across the writings of the famed scientist, Stephen J. Gould, writings on Darwin, paleontology, geology, “intelligence,” and baseball. I fell in love with his Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, published in 1989. I also discovered that his book The Mismeasure of Man, was not “just” a book about statistics, but an essential undermining of the claims of scientific racism based on the notion of “intelligence” and intelligence testing. In 1996 a second revised and expanded edition of Mismeasure of Man, was published. It included a critical response to the notoriously racist The Bell Curve, by Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray, published in 1996. Gould’s books and essays led to several ventures in “geological tourism,” undertaken on two vacation trips Ruth and I took to England in 2000 and 2008, as well as in the American West, whenever we went to visit Tucson where Ruth’s aunt lived in the winter. I also became interested in learning what I could about the geology of the Midwest. I discovered the existence of the mammoth Thornton Quarry, crossed by Interstate 80 south of Chicago. Ruth and I signed up for a tour of the Quarry and after several months our turn came to visit. A bus took a large group down into the quarry. One of the other visitors came armed with a sledgehammer. At one point the bus stopped, let us all out for about a half-hour to look for fossils. There were some very large specimens. The guy with the sledgehammer proceeded to break some of these up and let the others of us take some of them. One lesson I learned was that I needed a trained geologist as a guide to be able to recognize what I was seeing.
The next best thing was reading John McPhee’s exquisite series of books on geology, starting with Basin and Range (1980). The point of this story of the “outdoors” is that it prepared me for Bruno Latour’s love affair with the earth sciences, and the significance of Kate Raworth’s three-page Appendix on the sciences of planet earth which are the basis for her images. Latour cites John McPhee’s 1983 book, The Control of Nature.
So insistent was he on this point that he invoked the term “fundamentalism” to characterize the interpretations of Charles Darwin’s writings by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Gould wrote two articles The New York Review of Books. The first was bluntly titled, “Darwinian Fundamentalism.” It argued that “a movement of strict constructionism, a self-styled form of Darwinian fundamentalism, has risen to some prominence.”[1] “The uniting theme” has been called “Ultra-Darwinism.” Despite Darwin’s explicit assertion at the close of his Introduction to the first edition of the Origin, that “I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification,” the Ultra-Darwinists share a conviction that natural selection regulates everything of importance in evolution, and that adaptation emerges as a universal result and ultimate test of selection’s ubiquity.” The rest of the article is a detailed defense of Darwin’s own insistence that natural selection was not the exclusive means of modification. He also asks why Darwinian fundamentalism should be expressing itself so stridently today. “I am no psychologist,” he says, “but I suppose that the devotees of any superficially attractive cult must dig in when a general threat arises. … There is something immensely beguiling about strict adaptationism – the dream of an underpinning simplicity for an enormously complex and various world. If evolution were powered by a single force producing one kind of result, and if life’s long and messy history could therefore be explained by extending small and orderly increments of adaptation through the immensity of geological time, rather than an explanatory simplicity might descend upon evolution’s richness. Evolution then might become ‘algorithmic,’ a surefire logical procedure.”
The title of the second article, “Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism,” focused attention on evolution’s “richness,” “not reducible to one in place of “one overarching law,” “one true way.” He speaks of the “the ideological violence of fundamentalists, the “Ultra-Darwinists, or ‘true believers’” of their “dogmatism,” which that threatens to compromise the true complexity, subtlety (and beauty) of evolutionary theory and the explanation of life’s history.”
The first and most important reason I am calling attention to Gould’s work because of the important role it has played in my thinking about the history of the planet itself and its life. The very title of Wonderful Life reflected Gould’s pleasure in devoting his life to it and becoming, as he said, a “participant” in it and what I felt was a sense of gratitude.
The second reason is that in introducing the notion of “fundamentalism” to characterize the views of those he took issue with he has invoked a central theme of this archive. And he has done so, not with reference to a “religion,” in any conventional sense of that term, but rather, in a “secular” context. In other words, these are not discrete reasons. The contrast between the attitude of gratitude, on the one hand, and attitudes towards outsiders associated with fundamentalisms, religious or secular, towards those who don’t belong to the camp or group of believers, will likewise grow more and more weighty with significance in the next set of documents.
I don’t presume to be able to judge the merits of the scientific claims on either side of the controversies involving Gould. The point of this essay as a whole, and what I owe to Gould, among many others like John McPhee, is a sense of how vast, how grand, is this common heritage “we get to experience,” to borrow from Norman Lear’s memoir, Even This I Get to Experience.
[1] Stephen. Jay. Gould, “Darwinian Fundamentalism,” The New York Review of Books, June 12, 1997, See also “Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralsim,” New York Review of Books, June 26, 1997.
Merchants of Doubt
How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change (2010)
Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway followed up their book as the narrators of a brilliant documentary in 2014 by the same name. Wikipedia describes how the film traces the use of public relations tactics that were originally developed by the tobacco industry to protect their business from research indicating health risks from smoking. The most prominent of these tactics is the cultivation of scientists and others who successfully cast doubt on scientific results. Using a professional magician, the film explores the analogy between these tactics and the methods used by magicians to distract their audiences from observing how illusions are performed. For the tobacco industry, the tactics successfully delayed government regulation until long after the establishment of scientific consensus about the health risks from smoking. As its second example, the film describes how manufacturers of flame retardants worked to protect their sales after toxic effects of the retardants were reported in the scientific literature. The central concern of the film is the ongoing use of these tactics to forestall governmental action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in response to the risks of global climate change.[5]
Oreskes and Conway also wrote The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014), a sober science fiction account of the disaster unfolding today. Oreskes is an historian of science who wrote Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth, published in 2002.
Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence 2011
I must include Parenti along with Oreskes and Conway as another bearer of the grim news of the scale of planetary violence.
Before leaving this subject, I want to recall Gar Alperovitz, featured in one of the two training scripts I wrote for The People’s Lobby. It is Document number thirteen above. “Organizing for Democracy and Our Common Inheritance,” It is worth repeating what I said about the book co-authored by Alperovitz and Lew Daly, Just Desserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance (2008). Their book is about who deserves how much of the common heritage of humankind. Just Desserts suggests that Bill Gates built a fortune from software, but the enormous growth in power, productivity, and therefore his income actually came from the hardware it ran on, which doubled in power every two years. Almost free to him. It was the result of more than 150 years of development. It was a gift. “The incredibly inequitable distribution of wealth from that shared inheritance in modern society is abhorrent and illogical,” they conclude bluntly. Instead of gratitude, the super wealth class assume they are entitled.
In turning to the fifth set of writings, I want to go back to what I am tempted to say is the deepest sense of this essay; namely, it is when I am outdoors that I feel most in touch with my soul and its share in the life of the universe. I feel most deeply the horrifying, cold indifference felt by Mersault in the final scene of Camus’ The Stranger, when he is staring out of the bars of his cell at night. This theme, what is at stake in how we use the word “soul” today; that is to say, how we understand ourselves as peoples and persons, becomes more and more insistent and urgent as the fact and site of the conflict as a war. On that note I turn to the fifth set of writings. By the end of the fifth set; by today, 2026, in other words, the question of a philosophy of war, how to think about the nature of this conflict, as a war over the soul of the life of the planet specifically. Finally, the question of strategy becomes the lens for viewing Kate Raworth’s planetary vision spelled out in Doughnut Economics.