I N S I G H T Vol.I, No.1 1994.04.04 Table of Contents ======================================================= 1. Hello, Dalai Lama, -- talking about sex 2. Speaking in Tongues, -- erotic talkings 3. The Art of Dreaming 4. The "Civics", Hope of the Townships 5. Brave New Biocracy: Health Care From Womb To Tomb 6. Profit And The Patent On Life, Molecular Biology New Challenges 7. A Pluralist Path In The Arab World,--interview with King Hussein 8. A Civilization That Denies Death (by a Nobel Laureate) 9. Europe Turns Left: Greece takes the Lead 10. Outside Looking In: Nonnatives and American Indian Literature 11. Back to Nature,--Reviews in American History 12. Theological Ethics, Moral Philosophy, And Public Moral Discourse 13. Broken Promises: Hong Kong Faces 1997,--What Ôs Democracy? 14. E-Mail Privacy,-- How safe is your email? 15. Diving into the Internet: Gopher 16. "No One Runs the Place"--money in the higher education ====================================================== Magazine: OUT Issue: Feb/Mar, 1994 Title: Hello, Dalai Author: Scott Hunt Scott Hunt takes to the Himalayan foothills and chats with the Buddhist leader about sex, AIDS, and the fate of the world. Buddhist Scott Hunt is writing a book on the Nobel Peace Prize laureates. He has contributed to The Advocate and Christopher Street. TENZIN GYATSO REFERS TO HIMSELF as "a simple Buddhist monk -- no more, no less." But millions of people around the world know him as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, a living Buddha and the 14th incarnate spiritual and temporal ruler of Tibet. Most people who meet this 58-year-old man in a maroon robe, tinted glasses, and brown Oxfords expect a supernatural encounter. Indeed, many tell stories of being rendered speechless in his presence. Some say that they were floating; others had visions of his previous incarnations. Although I personally had no supernatural experiences in his company during my private audience last August at the Dalai Lama's home in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, I did find it impossible to see him as an ordinary man. His benevolence is remarkable by any standard. Even for the Chinese, who have killed more than 1.2 million of his people, forced sterilization or abortions on thousands of women, plundered the country's cultural treasures and natural resources, and destroyed 6,254 of Tibet's monastaries, he says, "I have no hatred." When the Chinese Communists invaded Tibet in 1950, the Dalai Lama was only 15 years old. Faced with this crisis, the country granted His Holiness absolute power over the government. He immediately sought help from Great Britain, India, and the United States to expel the foreign invaders, but the international community failed to respond. Despite meeting with Chairman Mao and an honorary position in the government, the Dalai Lama was powerless to stop the atrocities. In 1959 the man who was often called the Precious Protector of Tibet secretly and unhappily slipped through the rugged Himalayan mountain passes into exile in northern India. From there he has continued his gentle campaign to liberate his country, and in 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent opposition to Chinese oppression. The Chinese, who have called the Dalai Lama "a social parasite" and "red-handed butcher," denounced the award as "ludicrous." THE GREAT 14TH DALAI LAMA was born in a cow shed in the village of Takster in the northeastern Tibetan province of Amdo, beginning life as a typical farm boy. But in 1937, at age two, his life was forever changed when a search party of monks was led to his house by visions and auspicious signs. In accordance with Tibetan tradition the young boy was given an array of tests that confirmed that he was the reincarnation of the Holder of the White Lotus. At age four, Tenzin Gyatso was taken to the Potala Palace in Lhasa, seated on the Lion Throne, and proclaimed the Dalai Lama (meaning "ocean of wisdom"). Having left the isolated kingdom that inspired the myth of Shangri-la, the Buddhist leader now travels extensively, giving lectures on Universal Responsibility and teaching Buddhism to eager Westerners, including Richard Gere, Harrison Ford, Allen Ginsberg, Loni Anderson, Philip Glass, and John Cleese. His high profile invites comparison to another well-known Holiness, the Pope. The Dalai Lama himself has noted the similarities between Catholic and Buddhist monastic orders, particularly their strict vows of sexual conduct, and between the ritual traditions of the two religions. The Dalai Lama, however, is clearly much more receptive to change and more tolerant of differences than is his Catholic counterpart. On the issue of birth control, for example, he declared in our interview, "A further increase in population is out of the question. In order to save a better future and our fight for precious life, our conclusion must be that we have to take birth control measures." He spoke in a rich baritone voice, leaning back regally in a simple chair in his receiving room. "If some religious tradition is against birth control, we have to study and find ways to get past these. . . . I have already shared this thought with my Catholic brothers and sisters." The Dalai Lama is also more liberal on issues of sexuality. "Using one's hand is not harming on others, and if you have no vow, then it is simply for temporary satisfaction," he said. This principle apparently applies equally to homosexuality, a topic that caused noticeable discomfort for the translator and the assistant who sat in small chairs on the side of the room. At first the Dalai Lama seemed to say that homosexuality was prohibited by traditions proscribing sexual misconduct. "Blow, here," he said in broken English, pointing first to his mouth and then to his groin, "is wrong." After giving the issue more thought, however, he arrived at an answer that modified his initial response: "If someone comes to me and asks whether it is OK or not, I will first ask if you have some religious vows to uphold. Then my next question is, What is your companion's opinion? If you both agree" -- he laughed heartily -- "then I think I would say, if two males or two females voluntarily agree to have mutual satisfaction without further implication of harming others, then it is OK." This may seem a surprising statement for one of the world's foremost religious leaders. But in Buddhist teaching, the Dalai Lama pointed out, "individual rights means we have the individual right to engage in any action that gives satisfaction, provided it does not harm others. We cannot say on the basis of individual rights that it is OK to steal from someone or to kill someone. Why? These also give individual satisfaction, but this is not sufficient, because it creates harm on others. Any action or activities that do not create a problem for others, and even for the temporary satisfaction of the individual if it does not create suffering in others, then that kind of action is all right." Far from the Christian concept that the Bible is unquestionable, Buddhists are encouraged to debate the dharma (Buddha's teachings). "If someone introduces someone better than Buddha, then you may accept another one," the Dalai Lama said matter-of-factly. "From a Buddhist tradition that is the most correct position. In the beginning your attitude toward Buddha should be somewhat skeptical and questioning, not accepting. And then if you have a questioning attitude, that attitude will automatically lead to more investigation. . . . That is the democracy of Buddhism." Unlike religions that can compel their numbers to abide by doctrine through the threat of expulsion, the Dalai Lama noted that Buddhist belief in individual freedom also means "it is not dependent upon someone else's power whether to accept you as a Buddhist. No one can expel you. It is not an organization. If a person accepts Buddha . . . that person is automatically Buddhist, so long as the faith is there, even if he kills someone." Buddhist respect for the individual also leads to respect for other religious faiths. "Sectarianism I think is not good," the Dalai Lama declared. "Buddha, as one person, himself created contradictions. It seems almost that we have to ask Buddha, `Which is real teaching?'" He laughed. "Anyway, Buddha was quite clever. . . . The purpose of his teaching was to help each person, and he respected each individual's right. So now this creates new perspective toward other religions like Christianity. In the past, millions of people have gained from that teaching, so the right of millions of people must be respected. We must accept the potential of different religions. To me Buddhism is best, but this does not mean that it is best for everybody. That is clear." In fact, according to the Dalai Lama, religion itself will not be suitable for everyone. The important thing, he declares, is to treat other people with simple kindness. THESE SENTIMENTS HAVE MADE the Dalai Lama popular in the West, where people are increasingly reluctant to follow Judeo- Christian religions but still seek some form of spiritual practice. Moreover, the Dalai Lama put into words what many Westerners have begun to realize: The insatiable material appetite of the West has led to widespread inhumanity and environmental destruction. "Basically, I believe that the material lifestyles of Western society have developed problems," he said politely but firmly. "The whole lifestyle of the society -- of producing and consuming and the concept of promoting a higher level of living standard -- must change. It looks like you are going in a vicious circle and no one knows how to break out of that circle." Part of the problem, he noted, is the "tremendous gap" between the wealth of the industrial nations of the Northern Hemisphere and the poverty of the less-developed nations in the South: "Because of the gap with richer nations there will be a refugee and immigration problem with political consequences. If the living standard of the South improves to a similar standard that the North has already achieved, nature's resources will be inadequate. So the richer nations have to sacrifice something. This is not based just on morals but on our own long-term existence." With characteristic honesty, he added, "Where to start, I don't know. It is much easier to see the problem than to find the answer! But if people recognize the tremendous negative consequences of their present lifestyle through use of their intelligence, they will realize that they must change the present economic system." Equally difficult to solve is the AIDS epidemic, and on my mention of the disease a sense of sorrow overcame the Dalai Lama's face. To answer, he relied on his knowledge of Tibetan medicine, which is legendary in Northern India for curing terminal illnesses. According to Tibetan medicine, the causes of disease may be divided into two types, long-term and immediate. The long-term causes are anger, desire, and mental darkness that create an imbalance in the body's constituents. Immediate causes are such things as diet, use of the sense organs, sleep, and daily conduct. "To Tibetan physicians," said the Dalai Lama, "AIDS is really something new, and the immediate cause is negative: sexual liberty. That is the way one receives the disease. Tibetan medical experts say that the present use of more chemicals, air pollution, and contaminants on vegetables is another part of the immediate cause." Like most diseases, he added, "such a major illness or major negative event also has a karmic cause, no doubt. But," he said frankly, "I think AIDS also has a positive aspect. It has helped to promote some kind of self- discipline." With this statement, the Dalai Lama's assistant imposed discipline on His Holiness' schedule and asked us to end the interview. The Dalai Lama took my hands in his and bowed his head close to mine. As I left the room, returning into the hot, thin Himalayan air, I heard his vibrant laughter one last time. I turned to see his face in a brilliant smile. In spite of my many memories of despair, with so many reasons to be angry, I had a newfound hope that the world just might begin to listen to this simple Buddhist monk. Magazine: Yellow Silk Issue: Issue #45 Title: Speaking in Tongues Author: Carson Reed SPEAKING IN TONGUES by Carson Reed I remember, the preacher said: "let them be joined together forever in the Holy Spirit," and I kind of wrinkled my brow because God is easy and Jesus is easy but the Holy Spirit thing was always way beyond me, and I wasn't really sure that what I had in mind was a menage a trois with some supposedly benevolent essence, and in my poor agnostic head I imagined the two of us suspended in the spiritual plasma of the Holy Ghost for eternity, like watermelon pickles. But when we headed out of the old adobe church that day so far as I could tell it was still just the two of us, just you and me, light-headed as teenagers in the summer in the evening in the park, our vows an exotic narcotic wrapped in plastic and shoved down deep in our socks. And I remember we didn't even make love that night, but consummated our marriage in the deep sweet of sleep. In the morning there were tiny roses of blood on the bed and I knew that my dreams had ferried across the occult water of sleep and with a broad flat sword had broken through the soft dense flesh of your maidenhead to dance with you to the beat of feral drums. And when the morning had come, sure enough, there was the Holy Spirit, less like a poltergeist and more like a cat, perched on a comforter on the old steamer trunk at the end of the bed. "Go ahead," the Holy spirit dared me. "Touch her." and I touched you and the walls shuddered like an old miner's shack teetering into the San Andreas fault. "Holy shit," I said, thinking this could be dangerous, and then I realized that I had blasphemed and I was afraid and embarrassed. "It's okay," the Holy Spirit told me. "You go right ahead. Don't worry. Nothing can harm you." So I kissed your ear, and Aretha Franklin began to sing. And I pulled off your T-shirt and the bed danced a samba across the floor. And you said "That's cool," and I said "you try it" and you kissed me on the lips and instantaneously the bedroom walls shattered, covering us in gypsum dust and little puffs of pink insulation and bright shards of glass. I cupped your breast in my hand and bit at your nipple and the trees moaned with pleasure and all the neighborhood children gathered around us in the rubble and danced in a ring, their little hands holding each other gingerly like hamsters. I touched your belly and Gideon appeared, his trumpet blasting a Hallelujah into the quivering sky. Then you pulled hard at my back and fire roared down from the sky like napalm, sucking the air from my lungs and smoldering in jellied splotches on the soles of my feet. I stroked your side and buck naked laughing seraphim appeared fluttering all around me, randomly shooting morphine-dipped arrows into my butt. Light stuck to your naked body like a fresh cut haystack after a rain. You looked just like a desert sunrise and you tasted just like file gumbo and you smelled just like the spray from the breakers at Patrick's Point. Puppies played under your skin and some unseen hand snaked a length of hairy twine up from my tail bone and out through the center of my skull, harmlessly pulling out bits of unused brain tissue that stuck to my hair like marshmallows. And when I pulled your thighs apart the sky opened and God himself came thundering down wearing a pork pie hat with a press pass stuck in it, taking a seat at the announcer's desk of some celestial sky box, surrounded on every side by bleachers full of rowdy drunken angels. "Don't mind Me," He said into the microphone. And then He filled us so full of the Holy Spirit that It oozed out of us and we slipped and slid across each other, the Holy Spirit sticky in our mouths, the Holy Spirit leaking liquid blue light from our fingertips, the Holy Spirit trickling down our foreheads and stinging into our eyes, the Holy Spirit pouring from our armpits and off our legs and our shoulders and from between your legs and making a Holy mess on the bed. We were speaking in tongues. We were rolling holy rolling in the sheets, our tongues were driven mad with Pentecostal ecstasy, our tongues were epileptic, our tongues were frothing, our tongues were crying, our tongues were screaming, our tongues were babbling holy nonsense, our tongues were repentant of every sin, our tongues praised God, our tongues were baptized, our tongues were washed with the Blood of the Lamb and our tongues were born again. And again. And as our tongues gave witness to the power of the Holy Spirit, I heard the strange words rise up into heaven and rattle the very cage of the universe, building, like an argument, shattered, like the Tower of Babel, resurrected, like Jesus, emerging from the dark cave of our souls. And then it was night again, and the Holy Spirit settled down on us like a feather comforter, a soft weight that pulled us close in the night, down toward the dark beat of drums around a fire in the forest along a turgid river of sleep. And as I drifted slowly down from the headwaters of the Holy Spirit, I remembered what the preacher said: "Let them be joined together forever in the Holy Spirit," and I pulled you closer and murmured from my tired, tired tongue, "oh, baby, amen." [This story will appear in Issue 45 of YELLOW SILK :Journal of Erotic Arts, due out in Spring of 1994. This entire contents is fully protected by copyright c. 1993.] Magazine: Yoga Journal Issue: March/April 1994 #115 Title: The Art of Dreaming Author: Richard Leviton Does a dream consist of ransom nerve impulses, symbolic messages from the unconscious, or actual excursions into nonmaterial realms? Controversial dream theorists like Carlos Casteneda and Fred Alan Wolf are challenging our understanding of dream reality. In the man's dream, a fish jumps out of a pond and twitches at his feet. Like a colorful bird, it flies to a tree branch, where it turns into a point of light resembling a firefly. The man follows this strange firefly through a dark tunnel until he is spewed out against a gigantic, cavernous sponge. The firefly pushes him into an opening in the sponge, which resembles a huge beehive filled with innumerable tunnels that seem alive, conscious, and sizzling with energy. The man knows he's dreaming as he struggles to make sense of a scene that seems straight out of a science fiction movie. Then a voice speaks to him. "Choose a tunnel and you can live in it," the voice instructs. "Each one of them will teach you something different. The ancient sorcerers learned everything they knew about dreaming by staying here among us. You are inside an inorganic being. When the man awakens from his dream, he still remembers the "impressive clarity of the voice within the spongy tunnel. He doesn't write it off in the morning as a fantastic apparition spun by his dreaming brain, as most of us would; nor does he set out to interpret its symbolic message according to some psychological theory. As far as he's concerned, the sponge world is real, he has actually entered the sentient tunnel, and he plans to revisit this place soon. He knows that his experience wasn't merely a dream. Were the dreamer anyone other than Carlos Castaneda, we might dismiss his views with skepticism or disbelief. But for the past 26 years, this intrepid and elusive anthropologist has been filing reports -- his nine bestselling books -- about his alleged trips to other realms through the door of dreaming. In his most recent work, The Art of Dreaming, Castaneda summarizes the teachings and techniques of his late mentor, the Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus, who initiated him into the mysteries and revelations of dreaming over a 13-year apprenticeship. In Don Juan's tradition -- an arcane branch of shamanism he calls "sorcery dreaming is the key to human freedom. It's the secret to understanding -- even molding reality because it reveals nothing less than the nature of perception, the mechanics of how we construct a coherent world from sensory data. As Castaneda learns, "dreaming liberates perception, enlarging the scope of what can be perceived." Put differently, dreaming is a heightened mode of perceiving worlds other than our familiar physical one. We can transform dreaming into a door to other worlds by changing the way we perceive, shifting our perceptual focus, and developing new psychic capabilities through a set of practices Castaneda calls "the art of dreaming. To many, Castaneda's techniques will seem either too preposterous to take seriously or too dauntingly exotic to attempt. For most Western scientists, dreams are curious but random psychoneurological events of marginal relevance to a person's waking life; for most psychotherapists, they are mental configurations with potential therapeutic value, provided we find the clues to decoding their symbolic messages. In either model, dreams happen in our minds, not in some objective external reality. Castaneda directly challenges this fundamental assumption. If even a little of what he claims is true, it could profoundly alter our general attitudes about the origin, meaning, and importance of dreams. At the very least, Castaneda's accounts raise provocative questions about the nature of dream reality. Does a dream symbolically dramatize psychic contents pertinent only to the individual dreamer, or does a dream depict our adventures in a transpersonal, nonmaterial realm? Is dream reality produced "inside" our heads, or does it actually take place "out there"? We assume that our daytime experiences are real and our dreams are fictional -- but what if our dreams are equally real, or even more real than our waking experiences? Might the world itself, as many spiritual philosophies have argued, be simply a big dream, and we the characters within it? Our answers will have direct implications for how we interpret our dreams. If a dream is nothing more than a metaphorical drama scripted by our unconscious, our standard notions of interpretation may be adequate. But if what we remember in the morning is a fragment of a shamanic journey into another world, then these methods may lead us considerably astray. While he may be far afield in his unorthodox claims about the nature of dream reality, Castaneda is not alone in his call for a new theory of dreaming. For the last decade, Stanford University dream researcher Stephen LaBerge has been scientifically documenting the art of lucid dreaming, which involves becoming conscious in one's dreams in order to purposefully mold the dream experience. For centuries, Tibetan lamas have taught their students the ancient practice of "dream yoga," a method for using dream lucidity to develop daytime mindfulness and eventual spiritual awakening. And most recently, quantum physicist Fred Alan Wolf has proposed a new theory of dreaming that links the psyche with quantum physics. All of these views take us deeper into the mysteries of dream reality. THROUGH THE GATES OF DREAMING In The Art of Dreaming, Castaneda presents the most cogent summary to date of his understanding of dreams. While his explanations are no doubt beyond the experience of most of his readers and cannot be corroborated without highly developed clairvoyant powers, his model, despite its strangeness, seems internally consistent and makes reasonable sense of the data, which is what any working hypothesis must do. Our physical human body is surrounded by the "energy body," a luminous cocoon of light that resembles an egg, Castaneda says. The egg contains a round spot of intense brightness (the size of a tennis ball) about two feet behind our right shoulder blade; it is here in the "assemblage point," not the brain, that our perception of the world is assembled. The world at this level of perception is composed of millions of incandescent energy filaments emanating from all the objects and creatures in reality. The filaments all pass through the egg, but only a tiny percentage of them pass directly through the assemblage point; the objects and creatures that correspond to these few filaments are the only ones we actually perceive. The assemblage point is like the band on a radio dial. While we could tune into any of the stations, the dial can only be set for one station at a time; after a while, we forget that other stations are available. According to Castaneda, social conditioning and the habits of consensual reality freeze our assemblage point on one setting alone; we then take this setting to be all of objective reality. Once the setting is fixed, we automatically assemble perceptions of our world from the same small bundle of filaments, shortchanging ourselves of literally worlds of experience. But for intrepid souls like Don Juan and Castaneda, rationality is a perceptual prison: The world doesn't have to be only one way, they say. Dreaming can be asophisticated practice in which the assemblage point is shifted at will from its habitual position, enabling us to perceive other realities. Dream reality suddenly becomes a geography of numerous unexplored realms, each as real as so-called waking life. Through discipline and training, it is possible "to cultivate and perform a systematic displacement of the assemblage point" by passing through what Castaneda calls "the four gates of dreaming." These gates are central to Castaneda's teaching about dream reality, and he devotes most of The Art of Dreaming to an exposition of the techniques associated with them, enlivened by an ample share of his dream adventures. In the first gate you gain access to your energy body, or the luminous egg; to gain the necessary concentration and focus, Castaneda learned to become aware of himself falling asleep and to sustain his sight on a single dream object, such as his hand. To pass through the second gate of dreaming you must be able to change dreams at will in an orderly manner, as if waking up from one dream into another. In the third gate you see yourself sleeping while you operate in your energy body; you begin to overlap dream reality with the waking state, you can move your energy body on your own through the waking world, and you can see the energy essences of everything you encounter. After passing through the fourth gate, you can travel in your energy body to specific places, even if they exist only in the minds of others, such as their dreams -- an astonishing experience Castaneda describes at the end of his book. The key to mastering the gates of dreaming is energy. Castaneda himself spent many years freeing up vast stores of personal energy through a technique called recapitulation. Make a thorough chronological list of everyone you have ever interacted with and everything that happened in each relationship, Don Juan told him; this process will liberate all the energy still tied up in these old relational patterns. Most people can't exercise volition in their dreams because "their lives are filled to capacity with loaded emotions like memories, hopes, and fears" -- hence they have no extra energy available for the art of dreaming. Though exhausting in itself, recapitulation liberates the vast stores of energy necessary for this work. Recapitulation is especially important because it gives "sorcerers" enough energy to slip past the Eagle without allowing it to consume their awareness. In the Yaqui tradition, the ultimate nature of reality is expressed metaphorically as a giant eagle. All the luminous filaments, and thus all of consciousness, emanate from this great bird. The Eagle lends all living creatures awareness, but when they die, it recollects it. "There is no objective world, only a universe of energy fields which seers call the Eagle's emanations," says Castaneda. Dream interpretation is only possible or meaningful after you understand the strange cosmology that informs this Yaqui view. Seers in Don Juan's lineage determined that there are 48 band-widths of the Eagle's emanations comprising Earth, only eight of which produce sentient beings. Of these, one band belongs to the human realm, while seven belong to the "inorganic beings," who have awareness but no organic life. From this perspective, the meaning of Castaneda's dream about the spongy tunnel is straightforward: He visited the band-width of the inorganic beings by shifting his assemblage point. The jumping fish/firefly was actually a "scout" or emissary from the inorganic beings sent purposefully to lure Castaneda into their domain. WESTERN PARADIGMS OF DREAMING Castaneda's radical propositions about the objectivity of dream reality occupy the fringes of possibility for most of us. Ever since Sigmund Freud published his epochal Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, most Westerners who pay any attention to their dreams have sought only symbolic, personal meaning. The dominant assumption in dream research and practice in this century has been that dreams are mental experiences scripted in a strange code requiring skillful interpretation. In Freud's view, dreams were disguised expressions of repressed wishes, conflicts, and impulses arising from the personal unconscious mind. For C.G. Jung, dreams represented the "small hidden door in the psyche" to the collective unconscious of humanity and its transpersonal, archetypal wisdom. While for Freud the dream content concealed dark secrets, for Jung dream symbology openly pointed to psychic gold, to an oracular unconscious that seeks to instruct the waking ego through its visual images and scenarios drawn from a universal symbolic language. Although Freud and Jung both established the dream as a legitimate subject for scientific and psychotherapeutic study, it wasn't until the early 1950s that Western scientists began to explain the physiology of dreaming. That was when researchers at the University of Chicago discovered that dreaming primarily occurs during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, cyclical periods during the sleeping state in which the eyes move rapidly as if following an interior scene. If we sleep between six and nine hours in one night, we are likely to have four to six REM periods (rapid bursts of eye movements accompanied by dreaming) arising every 90 minutes and occupying about 25 percent of our sleeping time. REM periods last longer and are clustered closer together as the night progresses, which means we dream most prolifically close to dawn. The first REM period lasts about 10 minutes, but REMs closer to dawn may go on for 40 to 60 minutes. If you sleep seven hours, 50 percent of your REM dreaming time happens in the last two hours. Since the discovery of the REM/dreaming connection, scientists have elaborated their neurophysiological model of dreaming. During REM sleep, they say, the brain stem sends neural signals to the visual cortex, the brain's visual processing center. This information led J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley of Harvard Medical School to propose their "activation-synthesis" model of dreaming in the late 1970s. In this theory, dreaming results when the cerebral cortex tries to make sense of electrical nonsense produced by a random bombardment of neural stimulation from the brain stem. During REM sleep, the brain stem releases bursts of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that turns on the sleeping brain. "Once so activated, the mind/brain synthesizes or constructs a unified conscious experience (the dream) by comparing the internally generated signals to perceptions, actions, and emotions in its memory bank, Hobson explains. Dreaming is basically a secondary feature of what is primarily an automatic neurobiological process; as such, dreams are inherently meaningless and chemically driven, says Hobson. They're the product of the brain synthesizing likely dream plots, making "the best of a bad job" to produce reasonably coherent dream imagery from random neurological noise and biochemical activation. The general trend toward neurophysiological models of dreaming continued with a novel theory put forward by DNA researchers Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison. In 1983, they proposed that we dream in order to forget, to erase overloaded circuits in the "neuronal net" of the brain. During the day, the neocortex is overloaded with sensory information; to protect the integrity of our memory function, superfluous data must be regularly erased from the system in a process of reverse learning, otherwise known as dreaming. We dream to eliminate "undesirable modes of interaction in networks of cells that will otherwise generate fantasy, obsession, and hallucination which clog our memory capacity. According to Crick and Mitchison, remembering a dream indicates a failure of the neocortex to erase the superfluous information. Despite such scientific theories, many contemporary psychologists continue to value dreams for their therapeutic value. Whether our dreams originate from random neurochemical events in the brain stem or from a shift of an assemblage point in the vast band of the Eagle's emanations is of no concern to Gayle Delaney, Ph.D., noted dream researcher and author of three popular books, Living Your Dreams, Breakthrough Dreaming, and her most recent, Sexual Dreams. It's unimportant -- and probably impossible -- to know where dreams come from, Delaney states; what is of greater value is to help dreamers discover the "problem-solving, insight-promoting, and creative functions" of their dreams free from any theoretical indoctrination, psychosexual theory, or complex metapsychology, Jung and Freud included. Our dreams result from a kind of psychic CAT scan of the "dynamics, origin, function, and results of the dreamer's attitudes and feelings," she explains. What Delaney does is to facilitate the dreamer's ability to observe resemblances between the dream scenario and waking life, thereby helping the dreamer get the practical point, or "punchline," of the dream. According to Delaney, the dreaming mind speaks in a private language using personally meaningful metaphors in aid of our psychological development and integrity. Once we understand how to act as our own dream consultants, our dream images can turn into "powerful allies in helping us break out of limiting patterns of belief and behavior, Delaney says. "The dreamer's own descriptions and associations must be elicited and held as the most relevant and important clues to the meaning of the dream if the interpretation is to be accurate, specific, and meaningful to the individual. THE LUCID DREAMER Whatever the cause or purpose of its activities, the dreaming brain is almost inexhaustibly creative, generating complete worlds and endless dramatic scripts for our nocturnal entertainment. If we're creating these fantastic scenarios, can we change them at will? Yes, says Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D., a pioneer in lucid dream research at Stanford University, author of Lucid Dreaming and Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, and editor of NightLight, the newsletter of his Lucidity Institute in Palo Alto, California. Back in the late 1970s, LaBerge dramatically demonstrated that it is possible to be fully conscious -- lucid -- in our dreams. Indeed, we can take deliberate, purposeful, self-aware action within the dream, even send a physical message (a prearranged eye-movement signal) back from the dreamworld to scientists monitoring us in a dream lab. Since 1977, when he began to dream lucidly, LaBerge has become one of the field's leading "oneironauts" (dream travelers) and respected scientific researchers, having conducted considerable dream lab research while logging several thousand lucid dreams of his own. Being awake in your dreams and aware that you're dreaming has practical advantages, says LaBerge. During a nightmare, you can recognize the dream characters as mind projections and change them at will, transforming attacking tigers into purring kittens. Dream lucidity gives you the power to manipulate the script in progress, enabling you to choose how to respond to the dream events rather than unconsciously reacting to them. "With lucidity comes an astonishing, exhilarating feeling of freedom," writes LaBerge, "the knowledge that you can do anything, unbound by any laws of physics or society." Other benefits include unparalleled adventure, creative inspiration, enhanced abilities -- in short, "the opportunity to experience anything imaginable. In one lucid dream, LaBerge was driving a sportscar down a lovely country road when he spotted an attractive female hitchhiker. "Of course, I could pick her up and have asexual dream encounter," he reflected. "But I've had that dream before, so how about something new?" He resolved to experience "the highest" instead. Once he announced his intention, his car sprouted wings, transporting him up through the clouds into a "mystical realm, a vast emptiness that was full of love, an unbounded space that somehow felt like home." Spontaneously he began to sing with "ecstatic inspiration," amazed with the exceptional range and quality of his dream voice, as if he were embracing the entire cosmos through its resonance. "Upon awakening from this remarkable lucid dream, I reflected that it had been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life, of profound significance. This dream gave me a vastly expanded sense of identity. Lucid dreaming is a wholly natural state of consciousness, says LaBerge, and it's potentially available to all of us with a little training. In the 1980s he developed a reliable technique for inducing the lucid dream state called "mnemonic induction of lucid dreams" (MILD). In this approach, you tell yourself with strong conviction: "Next time I'm dreaming, I want to remember to recognize I'm dreaming." Eventually you remember this resolve while you're dreaming and awaken into lucidity. Another approach is to fall asleep consciously, with vigilance. As you drift off to sleep, count silently to yourself: "One, I'm dreaming; two, I'm dreaming; three, I'm dreaming," and so forth, until you're asleep and dreaming and, with some luck, aware of it. A complementary technique is a cognitive query called "reality testing." During the daytime, periodically ask yourself: "Am I dreaming?" Critically examine all the aspects of your situation, your thoughts, the external scenery, and look for anomalies, oddities, and inconsistencies that might indicate that you're dreaming. Question the foundations of your perceived reality and your assumption that this is waking life; then, if you're convinced you're awake, imagine how things would be different if you were dreaming. LaBerge gives a lot of credence to what he calls "the fantastic realm of lucid dreaming." But where exactly does this realm exist? In the dreamer's mind, says LaBerge. The lucid dreamer recognizes that the experience is entirely mental, that all the dream characters are nothing more than images, that even his bodily sense of self in the dream is a mental self-representation of his actual physical body. "The dream ego is not the dreamer; rather than dreaming, it is being dreamed. The actual creator of the dream is not a part of the dream at all -- being, in fact, the sleeping self." A dream is a mind- generated model of the world that needn't have any accurate correspondences with the physical world. There's no evidence for the existence of the objective dream world that Castaneda postulates, says LaBerge. "This idea would require extraordinary proof and evidence because it contradicts all our experiences. The lasting value of lucid dreaming, says LaBerge, is that it can heighten our waking capacity for mindfulness. It can inspire us to start treating our waking experiences in the physical world as if they might be lucid dreams, too; and this attitude may spark us into greater self-awareness. "When you attain lucidity in a dream," says La Berge, "you realize that what you had only a moment before taken for the reality of waking life is actually a dream, an all-encompassing reality created wholly within your own mind. Similarly, in waking life we may come to suspect that the conditions of reality we experience are dreamlike, mind-spun, and inherently unreal. In a perhaps unsettling way, this insight puts us on the threshold of a challenging notion: Might not this waking reality we experience now be a dream? How can we prove that it's not? Acknowledging this conundrum, Tibetan Buddhists have used lucid dreaming and specific dream yoga practices for many centuries, LaBerge points out, "to help them attain realization of the illusory nature of experience. TIBETAN DREAM YOGA In 1984, Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, a well-known Tibetan Buddhist teacher now working in the West, made a pilgrimage to Tolu Monastery and the cave of Maratika in northern Nepal. In the seventh century, two renowned Tibetan spiritual adepts named Padmasambhava and his consort Mandarava had attained immortality here through rigorous practice in what became known thereafter as the Cave of Long Life. During the nights he was at Tolu, Norbu Rinpoche had a series of extraordinarily vivid dreams. In these dreams, he received instruction from spiritual beings, including one called Ekajati, a principal guardian of the Dzogchen tradition, considered to be a direct emanation of Samantabhadra, the feminine aspect of primordial wisdom. Ekajati directed Norbu Rinpoche through a series of contemplative states, demonstrated certain rites and objects of initiation, and revealed a secret text about longevity practices for him to write down. Tibetans use the term milam terma to describe such a hidden Dharma text that exists only in the minds of spiritual beings. The direct transmission of a milam terma across time and space is given only to a teacher of high accomplishment capable of entering that rarefied mind-space in which the milam terma exists. For Norbu Rinpoche, the gateway was lucid dreaming. In 1990, while leading a Dzogchen meditation retreat in Massachusetts, Norbu Rinpoche experienced another unusual series of dream transmissions. This time a female dream figure, whom he understood to be a dakini (literally, "sky dancer," a special class of feminine wisdom-bearers and initiators who exist only in the spiritual world), taught him a complex series of dances involving intricate steps for 36 dancers to be performed with a special song that deepened the meditation state. Norbu Rinpoche's students now enjoy the benefits of both of his dream transmissions -- the longevity practices and the dance ritual -- appreciating them as aspects of the alleged "84 million teachings of Dzogchen" administered by the lineage's supreme guardian, Ekajati. To many, these stories may seem as fantastic as Castaneda's dream of spongy tunnels and an awareness-devouring eagle. Not so for Tibetan Buddhists, who view the receiving of terma as typical of what can happen in the milam bardo, or dream reality. The milam bardo is the second of six "intermediate states" (bardos) in the continuum of consciousness, which includes ordinary waking, meditation, dying, after-death, and rebirth states. The now famous spiritual text Bardo Thodrol, better known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, instructs students in how to maintain lucid awareness in their passage through all six bardos. To develop and maintain that lucidity, Tibetans developed "dream yoga," which Namkhai Norbu outlines in Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light. We have to distinguish between two different categories of dreams, says Norbu Rinpoche. Most common are dreams "appearing from karmic traces," which are related to mental tensions of the individual, personal entanglements in matters of body, speech, and energy, even residual memories from earlier lives. Dreams of karmic traces are related to events "that touched the person deeply and left traces of the tension, fear, or other strong emotion." Tibetan physicians find these dreams especially useful as a source of diagnostic clues in cases of mental or physical illness. The second class are "dreams appearing from clarity of mind." This category spans the range from lucid dreams to profound encounters like Norbu Rinpoche's reception of the longevity terma. "In Dzogchen teaching, the practice of dream work and the development of lucidity are not fundamental," Rinpoche explains. "It is a secondary practice that can arise spontaneously or automatically from doing the principal practice" -- the cultivation of "natural light." Natural light -- which is developed through visualizations, breathing practices, and mental affirmations -- is a state of pure awareness that precedes all thinking and visual representation, including dreams. As "the full presence of wisdom before we return to the workings of mind," this natural light is experienced fleetingly every night as we fall asleep and every morning as we awaken. Although it is not essential, attaining lucidity in dreams is excellent practice for the after-death bardo in which apparitions, hallucinations, and other mind-generated phantoms ("peaceful and wrathful deities") will rise up before us. This particular bardo is an exceptionally vivid and intense version of the nightly dream experience; the only safe way through it and out, say the Tibetans, is to be lucid. "In a real sense, all the visions that we see in our lifetime are like a big dream," Norbu Rinpoche explains. "The dream condition is unreal. When we discover this for ourselves within the dream, the immense power of this realization can eliminate obstacles related to conditioned vision. For this reason, the dream yoga is very important for liberating us from habits. IN SEARCH OF THE BIG DREAMER If life is a dream, who is the dreamer? That is precisely the question Fred Alan Wolf, articulate explicator of quantum physics' relationship to consciousness, sets out to answer in his new book, The Dreaming Universe. For Wolf, the "dreaming universe" is a metaphor for how all of reality manifests: It's dreamed into existence. As a quantum physicist, Wolf sees the world as a field of probabilities, not certainties. According to quantum physics, subatomic particles can't be definitively located in space; they only occupy probable, estimated locations. When and where a particle actually manifests depends in part on when and where the observer looks for it. Until an observer sees an electron, for example, the electron occupies an infinite number of possible positions simultaneously. Once the electron is observed, all of those possibilities collapse into a single reality. In the quantum model of the universe, we don't just watch reality unfold -- we help create it. In other words, we dream it up. Most of us tacitly assume that dreaming is a completely different activity from our waking perception of the world. We think that, while asleep, we walk through a magical door, experience a bizarre fantasy world, then return through that door to solid reality. But according to Wolf, quantum physics supports the view of Tibetan dream yogis that "we are dreaming all the time." Our nighttime dreams are merely "the place where the quantum reality becomes especially transparent, where the mix of mind and matter is revealed. Dreams help us understand our relationship with the "implicate order," a term coined by quantum physicist David Bohm to suggest the primal, unbroken whole of existence, the source of all possibilities, where the particles exist before they are observed. "In terms of the implicate order, one may say that everything is enfolded into everything else, Bohm writes. Time, space, matter, energy, mind, the universe -- all possible states exist simultaneously, enfolded together, with the potential for literally anything to happen. Both the objective "out there" world (waking reality) and the subjective "in here" world (dream reality) are manifestations of the implicate order. As we come to see how we create our dream reality, we can also see that so-called physical reality is just another opportunity for us to learn the mechanics of creation, to see how our mind creates our world. In our dreams, we contact the vast, formless realm of the implicate order, which our limited mind expresses in a series of snapshot images sequentially arranged into a reasonably coherent narrative. As we become aware of this process, we begin to see that we do the same thing while we are awake. The seemingly solid world "out there" is actually created from the implicate order by our process of observation. To a child, Wolf explains, the implicate order is the heavenly abode, the place we go when we die and come from when we're born. To somebody having a near-death experience, it is the light at the end of the tunnel. In Hindu mythology, the implicate order is expressed by the image of Vishnu as the ultimate dreamer, floating on the cosmic milky ocean, dreaming the world into existence. According to Fred Wolf, the implicate order is the Big Dreamer, whose dream is the universe. Through our dream life, Wolf says, we can climb a ladder of ever-greater states of self-awareness until we reach the point of identifying not with the contents of the dream, but with the Big Dreamer, who is the source of awareness itself. In other words, our awareness ultimately fuses with that of the unified field of pure cosmic consciousness. As Wolf puts it, "Then your I is no longer your mundane little self but the I of the Big Dreamer who is dreaming the whole universe." The art of dreaming indicates that we are much larger than we ever imagined possible. SLIPPING PAST THE EAGLE? One day Carlos Castaneda and Don Juan sat on a mountain ledge overlooking the exquisite flatlands of central Mexico. As Castaneda surveyed the prairie, he saw filaments of vibrating light radiating from everything. "At first it was like the explosion of an infinite number of short fibers, then the fibers became long threadlike strands of luminosity bundled together into beams of vibrating light that reached infinity." Each filament was separate, yet somehow all of them were bundled together. "You are seeing the Eagle's emanations and the force that keeps them apart and bundles them together," Don Juan told him. Those fibers exude awareness and make consciousness possible, he added, but one day the Eagle will collect them all again. The Eagle owns the conscious awareness of all living creatures, humans included, and it is always devouring awareness as food; upon their death, the awareness of all beings floats up to the Eagle's beak "like a ceaseless swarm of fireflies. The Eagle devours the awareness of all beings -- except, that is, the "sorcerers," those intrepid human souls who refuse to be consumed and devote their lives to preventing it. The goal of Castaneda's training, and ultimately of his art of dreaming, is to slip past the Eagle without being consumed, keeping all his awareness intact. According to Wolf, however, Castaneda's Eagle is just another metaphor for the Big Dreamer -- with whom we learn to identify through the art of dreaming. "You're not going to get away with it, Carlos; the Eagle is always watching you because you are the Eagle," Wolf admonishes. Slipping past the Eagle is slipping past your Self, past a great opportunity to realize your true nature. "Carlos is just an image of the Eagle trying to trick itself into thinking it's not the Eagle," adds Wolf. In the final analysis, then, is Castaneda's account of a talking spongy tunnel and an Eagle that devours awareness just a dream? Is his exotic terrain merely a subjective dream reality? "It's real for him, the experiencer -- that's all we're able to say," comments Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., who has met Castaneda, knows Wolf and LaBerge, and has studied Tibetan dream yoga. Krippner's credentials for making an assessment here are formidable: He's editor of the book Dreamtime and Dreamwork, president of the Association for the Study of Dreams, psychology professor at San Francisco's Saybrook Institute, and fellow of numerous prestigious psychological organizations. Castaneda's work is entertaining, describes his experiences accurately, and could be scientifically investigated, Krippner grants. But that doesn't mean he writes about an objective, mappable reality. "Nothing can be objectively mapped," Krippner insists. "I see a multiplicity of subjective truths and realities. I don't know what objective reality is. Nobody has ever been able to convince me that such an entity exists. I think all realities are subjective, but some are shared by more people than others. That's why I prefer the word `experience' to `reality. In the end, perhaps, dreams are only as real as we perceive them to be. For Castaneda, they are a means to shift our assemblage point so we can enter the realm of the inorganic beings and other alternative realities. For lucid dreamer Stephen LaBerge, they are an opportunity to live out our wildest fantasies by starring in vivid dramas of our own creation. For Tibetan dream yogis, they're a way of rehearsing for the after-death experience. And for Fred Alan Wolf, they're a chance to make the quantum leap into the implicate order. One thing is clear -- we all dream. Whether we choose to slip past the Eagle, merge with the Big Dreamer, look for meaningful personal symbolism, or merely sleep the night away is entirely up to us.\312* Richard Leviton is a senior writer for Yoga Journal. RESOURCES Association for the Study of Dreams, P.O. Box 1600, Vienna, VA 22183; (703) 281 3639 The Lucidity Institute, 2555 Park Blvd., Ste. 2, Palo Alto, CA 94309; (415) 321 9969. Dream Network Journal, P.O. Box 1026, Moab, UT 84532, (801) 259-5936. A quarterly publication. $18/year. Magazine: The Times Literary Supplement Issue: April 1st 1994 Title: The "Civics", Hope of the Townships Author: Mzwanele Mayekiso Extract from Mzwanele Mayekiso's article THE "CIVICS", HOPE OF THE TOWNSHIPS You always remember your first sight of Alexandra township, it is so striking. Visitors to Johannesburg's nearest black ghetto expect to see many high-rise buildings, after being told that 350,000 people live in this small area of 1.6 square kilometres. Instead, you are immediately surprised as you enter "Alex", dodging cows, goats, chickens, mangy dogs that no owner would claim, all roaming the streets, scavenging in litter-pits for food. But you quickly conclude that this is not, by any means, a rural scene, as shack huts of plywood, cardboard and zinc roofing stretch before your eyes like a muddy sea, occasionally punctuated by old 1920s-era brick houses. Alex is unlike any other urban area in the world. No South African township is so well-developed politically nor so densely populated, so devastated by unemployment and economic despair and socially tense. We were known as the "Dark City" because of the lack of electricity until a few years ago. Raw sewage runs in the streets, where children pick up disease, and acquire a sense of profound social deprivation. Mothers and daughters are overworked - and molested as a matter of course. Just two kilometres to the west lies Sandton, Johannesburg's richest suburb. Sandton ratepayers and town councillors have done their best to ignore our plight. Yet from Alex, we can see the Sandton City office-shopping complex towering in the distance, and we are enraged at the conspicuous consumption which the cleaners and garage attendants report to our residents. Gazing directly over our heads, meanwhile, are three huge and ominious buildings at the top of a hillside, dominating the Alex skyline: single-sex migrant labour hostels. We residents know that on bad days, walking past two of them is an invitation to snipers aligned to the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). The third is a women's hostel more sympathetic to the African National Congress and the residents' organization. On two separate occasions in 1991 and 1992, more than a hundred of our townsfold were massacred by IFP sorties throughout the "Beirut" neighbourhood of densely packed shacks, where streets still remain eerily deserted today. Political "unrest" can explode at any moment here - usually in the form of gang raids against residents by proto-fascist hostel-dwellers, rebuffed by our self-defence units, which are in turn subject to periodic police harassment. Though this civil war among the oppressed people is a phenomenon not seen in the Johannesburg area before 1990, it appears that we will have to suffer it for some time now, thanks to the refusal of Gatsha Buthelezi to test the IFP's popularity in the elections. Residents are expecting the worst in the run-up to the April 26-28 election. They understand the meaning of "low intensity conflict". Magazine: New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ) Issue: Winter 1994, Vol. 11, No. 1 Title: Brave New Biocracy: Health Care From Womb To Tomb Author: IVAN ILLICH The philosopher and theologically trained historian Ivan Illich published his seminal and highly controversial study of health care, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, in 1976. In his first major essay on this subject in the nearly 20 years since Medical Nemesis Illich argues here that the modern social construction of "a life" into an abstract, disembodied and dis-integrated entity -- a "fetish" -- prepares the way for depersonalized manipulation and management of our existence from womb to tomb. Going beyond his argument in 1976 that the medical establishment itself had become a threat to health through doctor-induced suffering, Illich here renounces as an "indecent demand" the very idea of "responsibility" for one's health in a sickening environment. Instead, he takes a radical leap and calls for the only "decent" alternative: hygienic autonomy from any system of health care. LIFE IS NOT SACRED BREMEN GERMANY -- Physicians in the Hippocratic tradition were pledged to restore the balance -- or "health" -- of their patient's constitution but forbidden to use their skills to deal with death. They had to accept nature's power to dissolve the healing contract between the patient and his physician. When the Hippocratic signs indicated to the physician that the patient had entered into agony, the "atrium between life and death," he had to withdraw from what was now a deathbed. Both quickening -- coming alive in the womb -- and agony -- the personal struggle to die -- defined the extreme boundaries between which a subject of medical care could be conceived. In our world, these boundaries have been obliterated. By the early 20th century, the physician came to be perceived as society's appointed tutor of any person who, having been placed in a patient role, lost his own competence. Physicians are taught today to consider themselves responsible for lives from the moment the egg is fertilized through the time of organ harvest. They have become the socially responsible professional manager not of a patient, but of a life from sperm to worm. Physicians have become the bureaucrats of the brave new biocracy that rules from womb to tomb. In societies confused by the technological prowess that enables us to transgress all traditional boundaries of coming to life and dying, the new discipline of bio-ethics has emerged to mediate between pop-science and law. It has sought to create the semblance of a moral discourse that roots personhood in the "scientific ability" of bioethicists to determine who is a person and who is not through qualitative evaluation of the fetish, "a life. What I fear is that the abstract, secular notion of "a life" will be sacralized, thereby making it possible that this spectral entity will progressively replace the notion of a "person" in which the humanism of Western individualism is anchored. "A life" is amenable to management, to improvement and to evaluation in a way which is unthinkable when we speak of "a person." The transmogrification of a person into "a life" is a lethal operation, as dangerous as reaching out for the tree of life in the time of Adam and Eve. The churches -- one of the most important agencies for defining moral issues in public life -- bear a particular responsibility as a lost civilization turns to them for guidance on such issues as abortion, euthanasia, organ transplants, embryo cloning and eugenics. "A life " is the most powerful idol the church has had to face in the course of its history. More than the ideology of empire or feudal order, more than nationalism or progress, more than gnosticism or Enlightenment, the acceptance of "life" as a God-given reality lends itself to a new corruption of the Christian faith. The Christian West has given birth to a radically other kind of human condition unlike anything before it. Only within the matrix which Jacques Ellul calls the "technological system" has this new type of human condition come to full fruition. A new role opens for mythmaking, moralizing, legitimating institutions, a role which cannot quite be understood in terms of old religions, but which some churches rush in to fill. The new technological society is singularly incapable of generating myths to which people can form deep and rich attachments. Yet, for its rudimentary maintenance it needs agencies which create and legitimate fetishes to which epistemic sentimentality can attach itself. We seem to need a Linus blanket, some prestigious fetish that we can drag around to feel like defenders of sacred values. "Life" has become this blanket; it has come to constitute an essential referent in current ecological, medical, legal, political and ethical discourse. Consistently, those who use it forget that the notion has a history. It is a Western notion, ultimately the result of a perversion of the Christian message. When the Lord announced to Martha "I am Life," he did not say "I am a Life." He says "I am Life" tout court. This Life has its historical roots in the revelation that one human person, Jesus, is also God. This one Life is the substance of Martha's faith. In the Christian tradition, we hope to receive this Life as a gift; and we hope to share it. We know that this Life was given to us on the Cross and we cannot seek it except on the via crucis. This Life is gratuitous, beyond and above having been born and living. But, as Augustine and Luther constantly stress, it is a gift without which being alive would be dust. Life in the Christian tradition is personal to the point of being one person, both revealed and promised in John 19. It is something profoundly other than the life which appears as substantive in all the headlines about abortion or euthanasia in American newspapers. At first sight, the two have nothing in common. On the one side, the Bible says: Emmanuel, God-man, Incarnation. On the other, the term is used to impute substance to a process for which the physician assumes responsibility, which technologies prolong and atomic armaments protect; a substance which has standing in court, can be wrongfully given, and about whose destruction without due process or beyond the needs of national defense or industrial growth the so-called pro-life organizations are incensed. However, at closer inspection, life as a property, as a value, a national resource, a right, is a Western notion which shares its Christian ancestry with other key verities defining secular society. The notion of a human life as a distinct entity which can be professionally and legally protected has been torturously constructed through a legal-medical-religious-scientific discourse whose roots go far back into theology. The emotional and conceptual connotations of life in Hindu, Buddhist or Islamic traditions are utterly distinct from those evident in the current debate on this subject in Western democracies. In the United States, the politicized pro-life movements are sponsored mainly by Christian denominations. It is for this reason that it is mainly up to the churches to de-mystify "life." The Christian churches now face an ugly temptation: to cooperate in the social creation of a fetish which, in a theological perspective, is the perversion of revealed Life into an idol. THE HISTORY OF LIFE Biblical scholars are well aware of the limited correspondence between the Hebrew word for blood, dam, for breath, ruah, and the Greek term we would render as soul, namely, psyche. Neither comes anywhere near the meaning of the substantive, life. The concept of life does not exist in Greco-Roman antiquity: bios means the course of a destiny and zoe something close to the brilliance of aliveness. In Hebrew, the concept is utterly theo-centric, an implication of God's breath. Life as a substantive notion appears two thousand years later, along with the science that purports to study it. The term biology was coined early in the 19th century by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. He was reacting to the baroque progress in botany and zoology which tended to reduce these two disciplines to the status of mere classification. By inventing a new term, he also named a new field of study, "the science of life. Lamarck's genius confronted the tradition of distinct vegetable and animal ensoulment, along with the consequent division of nature into three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable and animal. He postulated the existence of life that distinguishes living beings from inorganic matter not by visible structure but by organization. Since Lamarck, biology searches for the "stimulating cause of organization" and its localization in tissue cells, protoplasm, the genetic code or morphogenetic fields. "What is life?" is, therefore, not a perennial question, but the pop-science counterfoil to scientific research reports on a mixed bag of phenomena such as reproduction, physiology, heredity, organization, evolution and, more recently, feedback and morphogenesis. Life appears during the Napoleonic wars as a postulate which is meant to lead the new biologists beyond the competing descriptive studies of mechanists, vitalists and materialists. Then, as morphological, physiological and genetic studies became more precise toward the middle of the 19th century, life and its evolution become the hazy and unintended by-products reflecting in ordinary discourse an increasingly abstract and formal kind of scientific terminology. THE DEATH OF NATURE -- A thread which runs back to Anaxagoras (500-428 bc) links a number of otherwise profoundly distinct philosophical systems: the theme of nature's aliveness. This idea of nature's sensitive responsiveness found its constant expression well into the 16th century in animistic and idealistic, gnostic and hylomorphic versions. In these variations, nature is experienced as the matrix from which all things are born. In the long period between Augustine and Scotus this birthing power of nature was rooted in the world's being contingent on the incessant creative will of God. By the 13th century, and especially in the Franciscan school of theology, the world's being is seen as contingent not merely on God's creation, but also on the graceful sharing of his own being, his life. Whatever is brought from possibility (de potentia) into the necessity of its own existence thrives by its miraculous sharing of God's own intimacy, for which there is no better word than -- His life. With the scientific revolution, contingency-rooted thought fades and a mechanistic model comes to dominate perception. Caroline Merchant argues that the resulting "death of nature" has been the most far-reaching event in changing men's vision and perception of the universe. But it also raised the nagging question: How to explain the existence of living forms in a dead cosmos? The notion of substantive life thus appears not as a direct answer to this question, but as a kind of mindless shibboleth to fill a void. LIFE AS PROPERTY -- The ideology of possessive individualism progressively affected the way life could be talked about as a property. Since the 19th century, the legal construction of society increasingly reflects a new philosophical radicalism in the perception of the self. The result is a break with the ethics which had informed western history since Greek antiquity, clearly expressed by the shift of concern from the good to values. Society is now organized on the utilitarian assumption that man is born needy, and needed values are by definition scarce. It becomes axiomatic that the possession of life is then interpreted as the supreme value. Homo economicus becomes the referent for ethical reflection. Living is equated with a struggle for survival or, more radically, with a competition for life. For over a century now it has become customary to speak about the "conservation of life" as the ultimate motive of human action and social organization. Today, some bioethicists go even further. While up to now the law implied that a person was alive, they demand that we recognize that...there is a deep difference between having a life and merely (sic!) being alive. The proven ability to exercise this act of possession or appropriation is turned into the criterion for personhood and for the existence of a legal subject. During this same period, homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age. LIFE AS ECOLOGY -- Ecology can mean the study of correlations between living forms and their habitat. The term is also and increasingly used for a philosophical way of correlating all knowable phenomena. It then signifies thinking in terms of a cybernetic system which, in real time, is both model and reality: A process which observes and defines, regulates and sustains itself. Within this style of thinking, life comes to be equated with the system: It is the abstract fetish that both overshadows and simultaneously constitutes it. Epistemic sentimentality has its roots in this conceptual collapse of the borderline between cosmic process and substance, and the mythical embodiment of both in the fetish of life. Being conceived as a system, the cosmos is imagined in analogy to an entity which can be rationally analyzed and managed. Simultaneously, this very same abstract mechanism is romantically identified with life and spoken about in hushed tones as something mysterious, polymorphic, weak, demanding tender protection. In a new kind of reading, Genesis now tells how Adam and Eve were entrusted with life and the further improvement of its quality. This new Adam is potter and nurse of the Golem, his artificial creation. In the sickening manufactured environment we have made for ourselves, health in the Hippocratic tradition has become an impossibility; balance has become hope-less. The hope once symbolized in the mystery of the unborn has been corrupted; now there is only the legal entity of the fetus monitored on the sonogram. Agony, too, has been corrupted by the medicalization of death. Dignity will not be found in the universal health care now demanded, but in hygienic autonomy and in a newfound art of suffering and dying. In modern sickness I see the occasion for this discovery. A HISTORY OF HEALTH The concept of health in European modernity represents a break with the Galenic-Hippocratic tradition familiar to the historian. For Greek philosophers, "healthy" was a concept for harmonious mingling, balanced order, a rational interplay of the basic elements. He was healthy who integrated himself into the harmony of the totality of his world according to the time and place he had come into the world. For Plato, health was a somatic virtue, and spiritual health, too, a virtue. In "healthy human understanding," the German language -- despite critiques by Kant, Hamann, Hegel and Nietzsche -- preserved something of this cosmotropic qualification. But since the 17th century, the attempt to master nature displaced the ideal of the health of a people. This inversion gives the a-cosmic health created in this way the appearance of being engineerable. Under this hypothesis of engineerability, "health as possession" has gained acceptance since the last quarter of the 18th century. In the course of the 19th century, it became common sense to speak of "my body" and "my health. In the American Declaration of Independence, the right to happiness is affirmed. The right to health materialized in a parallel way. In the same way as this happiness, modern-day health is the fruit of possessive individualism. There could have been no more brutal and, at the same time, more convincing way to legitimize a society based on self-serving greed. In a similarly parallel way, the concept of responsibility of the individual gained acceptance in formally democratic societies. Responsibility then took on the semblance of ethical power over ever more distant regions of society and ever more specialized forms of "happiness-bringing" service deliveries. In the 19th and early 20th century, then, health and responsibility were still believable ideals. Today they are elements of a lost past to which there is no return. Health and responsibility are normative concepts which no longer give any direction. When I try to structure my life according to such irrecoverable ideals, they become harmful -- I make myself sick. HEALTH IS A PLASTIC WORD -- Health and responsibility have been made largely impossible from a technical point of view. This was not clear to me when I wrote Medical Nemesis, and perhaps was not yet the case at that time. In hindsight, it was a mistake to understand health as the quality of "survival," and as the "intensity of coping behavior. Adaptation to the misanthropic genetic, climatic, chemical and cultural consequences of growth is now described as health. Neither the Galenic-Hippocratic representations of balance, nor the Enlightenment utopia of a right to "health and happiness," nor any Vedic or Chinese concepts of well-being, have anything to do with survival in a technical system. "Health" as function, process, mode of communication; health as an orienting behavior which requires management -- these belong with those post-industrial conjuring formulas which suggestively connote much, but denote nothing that can be grasped. And as soon as health is addressed, it has already turned into a sense-destroying pathogen, a member of a word family which Uwe Poerksen calls plastic words, word husks which one can wave around, making oneself important, but which can say or do nothing. The situation is similar with responsibility, although to demonstrate this is much more difficult. In a world which worships an ontology of systems, ethical responsibility is reduced to a legitimizing formality. The poisoning of the world is not the result of an irresponsible decision, but rather of our individual presence, as when traveling by airplane or commuting on the freeway, in an unjustifiable web of interconnections. It would be politically naive, after health and responsibility have been made technically impossible, to somehow resurrect them through inclusion into a personal project; some kind of resistance is demanded. Instead of brutal self-enforcement maxims, the new health requires the smooth integration of my immune system into a socioeconomic world system. Being asked for responsibility is, when seen more clearly, a demand for the destruction of sense and self. And this proposed self-assignment to a system stands in stark contrast to suicide. It demands self-extinction in a world hostile to death. Precisely because I favor those renunciations which an a-mortal society would label suicide, I must publicly expose the idealization of "healthy" self-integration. To demand that our children feel well in the world which we leave them is an insult to their dignity. Then to impose on them responsibility for their own health is to add baseness to the insult. INDECENT DEMANDS -- In many respects, biological, demographic and medical research of the last decade, focusing on health, showed that medical achievements only contributed in an insignificant way to the medically defined level of health in the population. Secondly, studies have found that even preventive medicine is of secondary importance in this respect. Further, we now see that a majority of these medical achievements are deceptive misnomers, actually prolonging the suffering of madmen, cripples, old fools and monsters. Therefore, I find it reprehensible that the self-appointed health experts now emerge as caring monitors who, with their slogans, put the responsibility of suffering onto the sick themselves. In the last 15 years, propaganda in favor of hypochondria has certainly led to a reduction in smoking and butter consumption among the rich and to an increase in their jogging. But throughout the world, propaganda for medically defined health coincided with an increase in misery for the many. In India, Banerji has demonstrated how the importation of Western thought undermined the hygienic customs of the majority and solidified advancement of elites. Twenty years ago, Hakin Mohamed Said, the leader of the Pakistan Unani, spoke about medical sickening through the imposition of a Western concept of health. What concerned him was the corruption of the praxis of traditional Galenic physicians, not by Western pharmacopeia so much as by a Western concept of health which sees death as the enemy. This hostility to death -- which is to be internalized along with personal responsibility for health -- is why I regard the slogan of "my body, my health" as indecent. LIFE AS BLASPHEMY -- In recent times, as I discussed earlier, the representation of the substantive concept, "life," has prominently emerged. The physician was required to take responsibility for life. Around 1979, the quality of life was suddenly before us. Biomedicine discovered its competence over "life. Studying the history of well-being, the history of health, it is obvious that with the arrival of life and its quality -- which was also called health -- the thread which linked that which is called health today with health in the past was broken. Health has become a scale on which one measures an immune system's fitness for living. The reduction of a person to an immune system corresponds to the deceptive reduction of creation to a global system, Lovelock's Gaia. And in this perspective, responsibility ends up being understood as the self-steering of an immune system. As much as I would like to rescue for future use the word "responsible" -- a word that, as a philosophical concept, only appeared around 1920 -- to characterize my actions and omissions, I cannot do it. And this is true, not primarily because as by a Western concept of health which sees death as the enemy. This hostility to death -- which is to be internalized along with personal responsibility for health -- is why I regard the slogan of "my body, my health" as indecent. LIFE AS BLASPHEMY -- In recent times, as I discussed earlier, the representation of the substantive concept, "life," has prominently emerged. The physician was required to take responsibility for life. Around 1979, the quality of life was suddenly before us. Biomedicine discovered its competence over "life. Studying the history of well-being, the history of health, it is obvious that with the arrival of life and its quality -- which was also called health -- the thread which linked that which is called health today with health in the past was broken. Health has become a scale on which one measures an immune system's fitness for living. The reduction of a person to an immune system corresponds to the deceptive reduction of creation to a global system, Lovelock's Gaia. And in this perspective, responsibility ends up being understood as the self-steering of an immune system. As much as I would like to rescue for future use the word "responsible" -- a word that, as a philosophical concept, only appeared around 1920 -- to characterize my actions and omissions, I cannot do it. And this is true, not primarily because through this slogan for self-regulation of one's own "quality of life" sense is extinguished, management transfigured as beneficial, and politics reduced to feedback, but because God is thus blasphemed. I ask you to pay careful attention to my form of expression. I am a Christian, but when I speak here about blaspheming God, I want to be understood as an historian, not as a theologian. I have outlined my thinking. Longing for that which health and responsibility might have been in the recently arrived modernity I leave to romantics and drop-outs. I consider it a perversion to use the names of high-sounding illusions which cannot fit in the world of computer and media for the internalization and embodiment of systems and information theory. Only if one understands the history of health and life in their historical interconnection is there a basis for the passion with which I call for the renunciation of "life." I completely agree with T.S. Eliot: Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. The concept of a life which can be reduced to a survival phase of the immune system is not only a caricature, not only an idol, but a blasphemy. And seen in this light, desire for responsibility for the quality of this life is not only stupid or impertinent, it is a sin. THE ILLUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY I can imagine no complex of controls capable of saving us from the flood of poisons, radiations, goods and services which sicken humans and animals more than ever before. What sickens us today is something altogether new. What determines the epoch since Kristallnacht is the growing matter-of-fact acceptance of a bottomless evil which Hitler and Stalin did not reach, but which today is the theme for elevated discussions on the atom, the gene, poison, health, and growth. These are evils and crimes which render us speechless. Unlike death, pestilence, and devils, these evils are without meaning. They belong to a non-human order. They force us into impotence, helplessness, and powerlessness. We can suffer such evil, we can be broken by it, but we cannot make sense of it, cannot direct it. There is no way out of this world. I live in a manufactured reality ever further removed from creation. And I know today what that signifies, what horror threatens each of us. A few decades ago, I did not yet know it. At that time, it seemed possible that I could share responsibility for the remaking of this manufactured world. Today, I finally know what powerlessness is. I know that "responsibility" is an illusion. In such a world, "being healthy" is reduced to a combination of the enjoyment of techniques, protection of the environment, and adaptation to the consequences of techniques, all three of which are, inevitably, privileges. In order to live today, I must decisively renounce health and responsibility. Renounce, I say, not ignore or become resigned. I do not use the word to denote indifference. What I mean is that I must accept powerlessness, mourn that which is gone and renounce the irrecoverable. Renunciation can free one from the powerlessness which robs me of my awareness, of my sense. But renunciation is not a familiar concept today. We no longer have a word for courageous, disciplined, self-critical renunciation accomplished in community -- but that is what I am talking about. I will call it askesis. I would have preferred another word, for askesis today brings to mind Flaubert and Saint Antony in the desert -- turning away from wine, women and fragrance. But the renunciation of which I speak has very little to do with this. The epoch in which we live is abstract and disembodied. The certainties on which it rests are largely sense-less. And their worldwide acceptance gives them a semblance of independence from history and culture. What I want to call epistemological askesis opens the path toward renouncing those axiomatic certainties on which the contemporary world view rests. I speak of convivial and critically practiced discipline. The so-called values of health and responsibility belong to these certainties. Examined in depth, one sees them as deeply sickening, disorienting phenomena. That is why I regard a call to take responsibility for my health as senseless, misleading, indecent, and, in a very particular way, blasphemous. HYGIENIC AUTONOMY: A MANIFESTO Many persons are confused today about something called "health." Experts prate knowingly about "health care systems." Some persons believe that without access to sophisticated and expensive treatments, people will be sick. Everyone worries about increasing costs. One even hears talk of a "health care crisis." I would like to say something about these matters. First, I believe it necessary to assert the truth of the human condition: I suffer pain; I am afflicted with certain impairments; I will certainly die. Some undergo greater pain, some more debilitating disorders, but we all equally face death. Looking around me, I see that we -- as people in other times and places -- have a great capacity to care for one another, especially in the moments of birthing, accidents and dying. Unless unbalanced by historical novelties, our households, in close cooperation with their surrounding communities, have been wonderfully hospitable, that is, generally adequate to care for the real needs of living, celebrating and dying. In opposition to this experience, some of us today have come to believe that we desperately need packages, commodities, all under the label of "health," all designed and delivered by a system of professionalized services. Some try to convince us that an infant is born, not only helpless -- needing the loving care of household -- but also sick, requiring specialized treatment by self-certified experts. Others believe that adults routinely require various drugs and interventions in order to become old, while the dying need medical treatment. Many have forgotten -- or are no longer able to enjoy -- those common-sense ways of living that contribute to one's well-being and ability to recover from illness. Many have allowed themselves to become dependent on a self-aggrandizing technological myth, against which they nevertheless complain, because of the impersonal ways in which it impoverishes many while enriching a few. Sadly, I recognize that many of us are infected with a strange illusion: a person has a "right " to something called health care. Thus, one states a claim to receive the latest assortment of technological therapies, based on some professional's diagnosis, to enable one to survive longer in a situation which is often ugly, injurious, depressing or just boring. I believe it is time to state clearly that specific situations and circumstances are "sickening," rather than that people themselves are sick. The symptoms which modern medicine attempts to treat often have little to do with the condition of our bodies; they are, rather, signals pointing to the disorders and presumptions of modern ways of working, playing and living. Nevertheless, many of us are mesmerized by the glitter of high-tech "solutions, " we pathetically believe in"fix-it" drugs, we mistakenly think all pain is an evil to be suppressed, we seek to postpone death at almost any cost. I appeal to the actual experience of people, to the sensibleness of the ordinary person, in direct opposition to professional diagnosis and judgement. I appeal to people's memories, in opposition to the illusions of progress. Let us look at the conditions of our households and communities, not at the quality of "health care" delivery; health is not a deliverable commodity and care does not come out of a system. I demand certain liberties for those who would celebrate living rather than preserve "life": -- the liberty to declare myself sick; -- the liberty to refuse any and all medical treatment at any time; -- the liberty to take any drug or treatment of my own choosing; -- the liberty to be treated by the person of my choice, that is, by anyone in the community who feels called to the practice of healing, whether that person be an acupuncturist, a homeopathic physician, a neurosurgeon, an astrologer, a witch doctor or someone else; -- the liberty to die without diagnosis. I do not believe that countries need a national "health" policy, something given to their citizens. Rather, the latter need the courageous virtue to face certain truths: -- we will never eliminate pain; -- we will not cure all disorders; -- we will certainly die. Therefore, as sensible creatures, we must face the fact that the pursuit of health may be a sickening disorder. There are no scientific, technological solutions. There is the daily task of accepting the fragility and contingency of the human situation. There are reasonable limits which must be placed on conventional "health" care. We urgently need to define anew what duties belong to us as persons, what pertains to our communities, what we relinquish to the state. Yes, we suffer pain, we become ill, we die. But we also hope, laugh, celebrate; we know the joy of caring for one another; often we are healed and we recover by many means. We do not have to pursue the path of the flattening out of human experience. I invite all to shift their gaze, their thoughts, from worrying about health care to cultivating the art of living. And, today, with equal importance, to the art of suffering, the art of dying. Magazine: New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ) Issue: Winter 1994, Vol. 11, No. 1 Title: Profit And The Patent On Life Author: JACQUES ATTALI The founding president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the chief aide of French President Francois Mitterrand during the 1980s, Jacques Attali is one of Europe's most provocative intellects. He has written widely on subjects ranging from music to time. His most recent book in English is Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming Century (1991). PARIS -- The first human clone was created in July 1993 when its scientific fathers, Jerry Hall and Robert Stillman of George Washington University, managed to separate two cells, technically known as cleavage cells or blastomeres, that derived from the duplication of a cell originally fertilized in vitro. They then succeeded in isolating these cells in artificial membranes and causing them to divide again up to 32 times into the minimum number of specialized cells required for an embryo to be reimplanted in a womb and grow. This announcement exploded like a bombshell in the scientific community. By applying the findings of this experiment, it would be possible to produce several identical embryos -- copies of a single human being deriving from artificial fertilization -- and reimplant them in various surrogate mothers, thereby creating a theoretically unlimited number of clones. The success of the American scientists did not, however, come about by chance. It was the outcome of a competitive race between rival teams who were surely not unaware that the ability to clone human cells heralds the opening-up of a huge potential for economic development, and perhaps even offers in the future a radical solution for cutting the rising costs that have caused a crisis in health care throughout the West. But genetic cloning at the same time raises new ethical and economic problems that parliaments throughout the world cannot yet bring themselves to look in the eye, as though spellbound by the very prospect of the immense and unprecedented choices confronting them. A PATENT ON LIFE -- It has been known for some 15 years that it would one day be possible to use genetic discoveries for therapeutic purposes, but few expected the kind of advances we have already seen until the middle of the next century. First, the vegetal and animal cell was used as a locus for the artificial reproduction of human genes. In 1973, an initial gene transfer from one bacterium to another provided a means of creating artificial genes in a plant. In 1979 an historic judgment by the U.S. Court of Appeal for Patents and Trademarks authorized for the first time the patenting of artificially produced living beings -- in this case a new single-cell colony of bacteria -- because the courts considered it to be an item of living matter that depended for its existence on human intervention. The ruling was confirmed a year later by the U.S. Supreme Court. From that time on, a company could obtain property rights not only on its gene production, but also on any individual of the same species produced by any other company. In 1982, the first insulin produced by this method was put on the market. Even though this insulin was no less expensive than natural insulin, it marked the beginning of a huge industry known as genetic engineering. Since then, the gene market has grown to almost six billion dollars in the U.S. and it has offered an opportunity for vast future profits. In June 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court went even further and decided that an artificially produced multicellular organism could be patented. At the present time, 90 drugs produced by genetic engineering are patented and marketed; 140 others are being tested in hospitals throughout the world. For example, EPO, a human protein facilitating blood formation, is being produced artificially to help alleviate the need for excessive numbers of blood transfusions to patients through dialysis. By the 1980s it was also thought that by decoding the various components of an individual's gene structure it might be possible to diagnose not just the sex but an entire set of characteristic parameters that could be compared with a "normal" state in order to detect the presence of an hereditary disease or of a predisposition to an indirectly hereditary disease. Over six thousand hereditary diseases have already been listed and one day the genetic trace of each will be able to be identified. In what some worry is the onset of "genetic cleansing," Orthodox Jews in New York and Israel screen couples that date or are preparing for marriage for hereditary diseases like Tay-Sachs or cystic fibrosis as well as lesser diseases like Gaucher that causes enlargement of the spleen. In a program called Dor Yeshorim, or "the generation of the righteous," those tested are given an ID number that will help determine compatibility with potential mates and are counseled on whether they should marry or even date. In this vein, efforts have been started all over the world to systematically decode DNA in segments, using increasingly sophisticated techniques. The methods developed in France by Professor Daniel Cohen and by the American Craig Venter from the National Institutes of Health have substantially lowered the cost of this decoding, which is now going ahead at top speed. Cohen has already physically mapped 33,000 DNA fragments that contain the entire genome, or blueprint for construction of a human being. The University of Osaka has decoded more than 20,000 gene fragments. The British Medical Research Council has decoded more than one thousand. For the time being, no one is able to understand their meaning -- that is, define the function performed in an individual's identity by each DNA sequence. But the hope that this meaning will some day be discovered is opening up a vast field for medical investigation in search of preventive gene therapy. Even more recently, it was discovered that genes could also be transplanted to repair genetic defects. This was done for the first time in September 1990, for the treatment of a very rare hereditary disease, ADA deficiency. An American doctor, French Anderson, managed to rectify the deficient gene and to reimplant it in the cell. Backed by a leading laboratory, Anderson immediately marketed his innovation. Many other diseases will be able to be treated in this way. In particular, thought is currently being given to the application of gene therapy to certain cancers, or even one day to AIDS. The financial implications of such research can easily be imagined. PRIVATE DNA -- The vast market potential for genetic products has led the corporate laboratories and scientists that create them to assume their ownership and property rights. As was the case earlier with plants and animals, American scientists took steps to appropriate hundreds of genes as soon as it was authorized by the Supreme Court. For example, the gene coding for alpha-interferon, an important component of the immune system, was appropriated by BIOGEN. EPO (erythropoeietine), which helps the formation of blood cells, was appropriated by AMGEN. Similarly, the logic of the market would suggest that the decoding of DNA is likely to go hand in hand with the patenting of DNA sequences. The pharmaceutical company of Smith-Kline-Beecham appropriated Venter's research findings in the manner of those companies that take out mining permits in areas where they hope one day to find some unspecified mineral. Patent applications have been filed in Great Britain for 1,000 DNA fragments and for 6,122 fragments in the United States. In the U.S., the question of patentability of these fragments is still pending. France, which is well ahead in its research, refuses to patent its discoveries, regarding genes and DNA fragments as part of the heritage of humanity. The research being conducted by Professor Cohen is not then the subject of any profit-making activity. This is the one exception anywhere in the world. Like oil companies, gene decoding companies are an attractive proposition to financiers and investors. In 1993 they raised more than two billion dollars on the American market, a third more than the year before. It seems that nearly every scientist in the field is setting up his own company or joining a private laboratory. FROM HOSPITALS TO GENE FACTORIES -- Although the scientific advances in genetic manipulation have begun to have economic consequences, they have not as yet transformed the medical industry. This will cease to be true in the future. First, gene diagnosis will develop further and the risks of hereditary diseases will be diagnosed without any traumatizing intrusion. Following the example of the Orthodox Jewish program, one day people will carry in their pockets a genetic identity card containing information about their specific weaknesses, telling them what they are allowed to do, eat or drink from birth and who they can marry or date; or more likely, what they are allowed to do if they want to be reimbursed by their health insurance company or public health program. This will be followed by gene therapy. In somatic cells, that is to say, cells with a specialized function, a defective gene will be replaced by a normal one. One may also imagine clones produced from a colony being used as a gene pool. These would be made available in the event of unsuccessful implantation, or as material for gene diagnoses and experiments for the benefit of the developed embryo. Yet again, the colony could be used as a gene bank, or even to develop an organ bank for the benefit of one's twin. Eventually, if we take this idea to its furthest limit, each individual would be able to build up collections of himself, stay in good health, receive transplants of organs taken from his own clones, keep alive or perpetuate himself in identical form by becoming his own son, or by being the matrix of chimeras produced from himself and other embryos. Man will then consume himself as he consumes objects, through gene cannibalism. He will live several lives, attaining a kind of genetic eternity. Lastly, through gene control, defective genes will be modified by hereditary means, that is to say, at conception, in somatic cells. A series of clearly identified risks could thus be eliminated from a family line for good. Society for its part may wish subsequently to produce individuals with particular characteristics, for example a life-span and physical aptitudes keyed to the needs of the labor market or to aesthetic requirements. The consequences of these revolutions for the practice of medicine are considerable. They will inexorably lead to a smaller role for hospitals and surgery and a greater role for industry. The history of capitalism has been to transform a service, through the application of technique, into a commodity that can be mass produced. In this sense, medical intervention will be hyperindustrialized and produced in a form that can be purchased and utilized by the average consumer without the need of a mediating professional. Doctors will thus be shunted toward prevention, detection and patient support. The monitoring of the maintenance of a "normal" state will be their key roles. Other questions remain uncertain. How will these genetic drugs be administered? What will they cost? What will their consequences be for people's life span and the length of their human maintenance contracts? Each of these mutations in health care will have considerable economic consequences. They will become a source of profit and, ultimately, reduce the costs of medical care by radically lowering the labor costs of the medical profession. They will enable medical services to be hyperindustrialized and made far less expensive just as the present health care systems in the West are about to collapse under the weight of their unsustainable costs. The overall competitiveness of those countries where this becomes the general trend will be very greatly increased because they will escape the cost burdens of overloaded health care systems. In addition, new questions will arise in connection with commerce and international trade. How will we deal with the pirating of copyrighted clones? Will royalties be charged on the use of an organ developed from copyrighted clones? Should genetic products be allowed to circulate freely and be marketed without restriction? Should protection and subsidies be outlawed? Should national ethnic and ethical standards be established? And in this case will it be possible to resist the temptation of turning them into marketable goods? Will the Shinto resistance to organ transplants in Japan be considered a structural impediment to market access by American human organ exporters? These are momentous questions which are bound to be on the agenda for the next round of the GATT talks. We must get ready for them. THE SANCTUARY OF THE PERSON -- The ethical consequences of these changes are also gigantic. If we assume the right to interfere with cleavage cells, to manipulate cells that have just been fertilized, we shall in fact be authorizing irreversible genetic modifications that will be passed down to our heirs. What is more, all the diversified cells would carry the mutation, causing the individual who has been modified in this way to become a potential source of specific genes, perhaps unbeknownst to him. In line with current judicial practice, a variety of the human species could be patented which would be sturdier or longer lasting so its genetic identity could be appropriated, theoretically, for eternity. True, this is not going to happen tomorrow. But if we are not to have our hands forced by scientists and businessmen, we must start thinking about how to control it now. So far, legislation has not yet been passed in these areas, but the time is coming when parliaments will have to take up the many questions applied science has placed urgently before us. What is to be done about the anonymity of sperm donations, the protection of organ transplants, filiation, supernumerary embryos, prenatal diagnosis, gene tests and the removal of organs from corpses? Should France continue to be the exception and not allow DNA sequences to be patented, thus no doubt depriving itself in the long run of a huge source of revenue on the world market when others will be patenting French discoveries? If there is the slightest flaw in the system of worldwide control, it could render the idea of control completely meaningless. A "gene haven" would be more dangerous for humanity than all the tax havens combined. It will then be necessary to think about drawing up an international convention declaring everything which may have irreversible consequences for the species to be genetically inviolable. It is therefore becoming essential to declare the human being, the person, as a sanctuary. The right to create must go hand in hand with duties and responsibilities. We must set limits on ourselves and refuse to produce human beings as commodities that can be used as a source of pro\336t. We must refuse to attempt to "improve" the species by placing barriers before knowledge sought for this purpose and its economic uses. Some elements of life, such as cleavage cells, should become inviolable through the tacit agreement of the principal laboratories. Other elements of life must be manipulated with only the greatest deliberation, care and sense of gravity. This issue of where to draw the boundaries of the person, of what is specific to humanity, will be the central issue in the next century. Democracy, which sings the praises of reversibility and trades in ephemera, does not readily accept the idea of a restrictive sanctuary. For the champions of democracy, all areas must be automatically open, accessible and amenable to change. We must hold fast against this view. In effect, we need to give future generations, and those who came before, the right to vote. In an era when we can reach into a gene pool that evolved over millennia and change it forever, democracy as we know it will have to be organized without frontiers in space or in time. The race has begun between the Market and the Law. So far, the Market is winning, against man. Magazine: New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ) Issue: Winter 1994, Vol. 11, No. 1 Title: A Pluralist Path In The Arab World Author: HUSSEIN IBN TALAL One of the most influential Arab leaders in the Middle East, King Hussein is the leading proponent of democratization in the Arab world. King Hussein sat down recently in the patio of the Hashemite palace in Amman to talk with NPQ editor Nathan Gardels about Islam and democracy in the Arab world. NPQ -- Now that the external foil of the "Zionist enemy" is being removed by the PLO-Israeli peace process, won't the Arab states be deprived of their reason for national unity and be forced to look inward? There is no longer any excuse for autocratic rulers not to open up their societies. KING HUSSEIN -- I hope this will happen. There is no doubt that the rug will be pulled from under the feet of many a leader in the region who used the confrontation with Israel to aspire to or justify his own power. Time and again that has been the root cause of instability in the region. I have been saying for a long time that this region should emulate the European model of integration, since there is so much complementarity. If relations can be based on mutual respect, we can move away from confrontation. Our Palestinian brethren insist at this point that they want a confederation with Jordan. I insist we do nothing except work from the grass roots upward. And that requires an opening up of Arab society so that any coming together is something that is natural, normal and meaningful. This same logic would apply to a broader integration of the region. We have seen so many efforts at unity, but they have all failed because they weren't built from the grass roots upward. Now, with the PLO settling their affairs with Israel, we may for the first time have this opportunity. True unity can happen only when there is pluralism and freedom of expression so that we can deal with each other on a people-to-people basis. Then the relationships mean something and are not based on the whims or moods of unaccountable leaders. To crown this hope of peace based on new democratic possibilities in the Arab world, I, as a Muslim, a Hashemite, an Arab and as a person who seeks to satisfy my conscience, have called for talks to achieve an accord on the Holy Places in Jerusalem which removes all sovereign claims except for those of Almighty God. All followers of the three great monotheistic religions -- Muslims, Jews and Christians -- should enjoy worshiping side by side, as God meant it to be. If that happens, then the ripples will go not only to our immediate region, but affect the world as well. The Holy Places of Jerusalem should be moved out of the orbit of the attempts of any to impose sovereignty over them. That alone belongs to Almighty God. The rights of all should be equally recognized. A dialogue should produce the kind of meeting of the followers of the three monotheistic religions aimed at forging a peace, which has not been our fortune for far too long. The Holy City should be separated from any temporal sovereignty, which I hope will also represent the coming together of the Palestinians and Israelis on this question. NPQ -- The Christian theologian Hans Kung has written that, "The three Abrahamic religions need a religious symbol, a common holy place as a great sign that they all three worship the one God of Abraham and therefore have something in common that overcomes all divisions and enmity. "The fact is that there already is a sanctuary of the God of Abraham, the Dome of the Rock. It is a unique holy place on the old temple site in Jerusalem. According to the Jewish and Muslim tradition, the Dome of the Rock commemorates not only the blinding of Abraham's son, Isaac, but also the creation of Adam, and will be the scene of world judgment. "Is it so utterly absurd to believe that Jews, Muslims and Christians could pray to the one God of Abraham at this holy place? In this way, the Dome of the Rock would be a Dome of Reconciliation? Is Kung's proposal in the realm of what you have in mind? HUSSEIN -- Jerusalem can be this site of reconciliation. The details will have to be worked out and I cannot embrace any specific proposal. But the overall spirit expressed here is what I have in mind. NPQ -- Presumably, the parliament that was elected in Jordan November 8 will have to approve any peace treaty between Jordan and lsrael. Yet, the leader of the Islamic Action Front, Dr. Ishaq Al Farhan, has called the PLO-Israeli accord the first step toward a "Middle East region" dominated by Israel, a "Trojan horse" for Jordan and the "Arab world. Will the Islamic Action Front try to block a peace treaty through their representation in parliament? HUSSEIN -- I think that, regardless of any other factor, Jordanians, when they assume their responsibilities, are very pragmatic. I hope they will act more responsibly in the times ahead. I am utterly committed to the cause of lasting peace that will change the situation in this region entirely. This country comprises Muslims as well as many Christians, and they are all represented in the parliament as a result of the November 8 election. You can see in the vote, which weakened the Islamists, that Jordanians have not let themselves down, let the Palestinians down, or let me down. NPQ -- You are in the odd situation of being a monarch who is the leading proponent of democracy in the Arab world. What is behind this new democratic model you are promoting in Jordan? HUSSEIN -- My belief in my people is firm. My duty to them is to enable them to partake in shaping their future. Our democratization is not new. We have been trying to do it but have not been able to continue in a normal way for many years. In 1956 we held free elections. But then people in Jordan, including myself, believed in Arab unity. Many did not believe that this country had anything distinct to offer. So, political pluralism did not really exist except insofar as parties were extensions of those elsewhere in the Arab world. The nation-building began after that and went through very difficult times -- the 1967 war and beyond. The resumption of elections was only possible after we disengaged with the West Bank in 1988, which enabled the PLO to accept (United Nations Resolutions) 242 and 338, and for all the developments now resulting in self-rule to occur. We couldn't have elections before that, with half of what was legally Jordanian jurisdiction under occupation. So, at the first opportunity, in 1989, we took the first step of holding general elections and developed a National Charter through a Royal Commission, with representatives of all schools of political thought in this country. A new constitution was formulated and our path toward genuine pluralism was charted. Now, there is no turning back. The charter defines our system of government as a parliamentary, hereditary monarchy where government decisions are subject to the approval of a freely elected parliament. While affirming that Islam is the religion of the state and Islamic law is the principal source of legislation, the charter guarantees tolerance and the right of citizens to hold varying opinions. It guarantees the right of political participation of all citizens and upholds the supremacy of the rule of law by rejecting violence as a means of effecting change. Jordanian men and women are equal under the law, and discrimination is forbidden on the basis of differences in race, language or religion. NPQ -- What is most interesting about Jordan's emergent political opening over the past few years is your experience with Islamic militants. At one point a couple of years back, 40 percent of the parliament and five ministers were from the Muslim Brotherhood. Once seen as a threat, in the November election they were seen as just another alternative among many. HUSSEIN -- When popular movements are put to the test of government, people become aware of their limitations. And free people always tend toward pragmatism. NPQ -- So the Islamic Action Front of Jordan today is competing for election against scores of other groups and individuals with the slogan "Islam is the Solution." Meanwhile, Islamists are being executed weekly in Algeria and Egypt. Isn't democratic inclusion a better way to cope with the threat of militant Islam than repression? HUSSEIN -- Let me say this without reference to any other Arab state in particular: We are determined to make an example of something that can work, of something that the world can look at which reveals the true possibilities of Islamic society and deflects from the image presented by intolerant extremists, or perceived in ignorance by those who know little of Islamic faith and tradition. In the short and long term, stability has to be augmented by people sharing and shaping their future through democratic institutions; by people exercising their rights and seeking their hopes through direct involvement in political life. I hope that Jordan will be an example of something that works, including for those who have given themselves the name of the Islamic Front because, after all, the country is Muslim as well as Christian. We are all one family equal under the law. NPQ -- So bringing people into the process breeds moderation; keeping them out through repression breeds extremism? HUSSEIN -- That ought to be obvious. There was a time when we were almost alone in this entire region, misunderstood and under tremendous pressure following the disaster of the Gulf War and the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. I think, without our journey toward democracy and without the people forging the policies of this country, we wouldn't have survived. This is the kind of strength that is inherent in democratization. There is no substitute for it. Individual rulers come and go. Only institutions founded in the will of the people live on. That is what I hope will be my legacy to the future generations of this troubled region. NPQ -- Of course, there is no guarantee that more democracy in the Arab world, as demonstrated by Jordanian public attitudes about the United States and the coalition states during the Gulf War, will mean a more pro-Western attitude. Wouldn't it be a mistake for the West to assume so? HUSSEIN -- What democracy means is that people are free to determine their own sovereign decisions. Now let me be very clear about Jordan's position during the Gulf War. We were never in favor of Saddam Hussein and did not support Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait. Jordan was worried, like every single Arab state, about fragmentation. We were worried about the human and material losses. Jordan was not against the U.S., but we were against the destruction of the Iraqi people made to suffer dearly for the policies of their leaders. We tried to resolve the problem in an Arab context and failed. I was pained during that war when we were told by Americans that "you are either with us or against us," because our friendship with the Americans is built on the principles and ideals on which that nation was founded and which we, in our own way in this moment, are embracing. During the Cold War, Jordan was the only voice in this region standing up against the tide of communism that otherwise might have reached all the way to Africa. NPQ -- You have stood with the West, but will a democratic public? HUSSEIN -- I am sure. Magazine: New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ) Issue: Winter 1994, Vol. 11, No. 1 Title: A Civilization That Denies Death Author: OCTAVIO PAZ The Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1990. MEXICO CITY -- How we die tells us who we are. Death defines life. It is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living. The life of each one of us -- the whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes that is our existence -- finds in death not meaning or explanation, but an end. Our deaths illuminate our lives. If our deaths lack meaning, our lives also lacked it. Each of us dies the death he is looking for, the death he has made for himself. A Christian death or a dog's death are ways of dying that reflect ways of living. Death in our time does not have any significance that transcends it or that refers to other values as it did, for example, in ancient Mexico. The opposition between life and death was not so absolute then. Life extended into death, and vice-versa. Death was not the natural end of life but one phase of an infinite cycle. Life, death and resurrection were stages of a cosmic process that repeated itself continuously. Life had no higher function than to flow into death. Death in today's consumer civilization is rarely anything more than the inevitable conclusion of a natural process. In a world of fact, death is but one more fact. But since it is such a disagreeable fact, contrary to all our concepts, the still regnant philosophy of progress pretends to make death disappear, like a magician palming a coin. Everything in our consumer society functions as if death did not exist. Nobody takes it into account, it is suppressed everywhere: in political pronouncements, commercial advertising, TV sit-coms and popular customs. These thoughts first came to me years ago when reflecting in my book Labyrinth of Solitude on Mexico's Day of the Dead Fiesta. They are even truer today. Not only has consumerist materialism sought to suppress death in its one-dimensional focus on the present; it now seems possessed by the Promethean desire to "cure" death with technology. This seems to me the ultimate fixation on achieving "paradise now," a vulgar version of hedonism quite unlike the hedonism of Epicurus who lived sensually, but in full knowledge and acceptance of the limits of life. At the same time, this has been the age of mass death. In this century of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Bosnia nobody thinks about his own death, as the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke asked us to, because nobody lives a personal life. Death, like the person, disappears in our mass consumer rush to happiness even as it looms so darkly as a collective reality in unspeakable holocausts. LIKE THE ANGELS -- Fear makes us turn our backs on death, and by refusing to contemplate it we shut ourselves off from life which is a totality that includes it. At the beginning of his eighth Duino Elegy, Rilke says that the "creature," in his condition of animal innocence, "beholds the open." This is so unlike ourselves who never look toward the absolute. The "open" is where contraries are reconciled, where light and shadow are fused. This conception restores death's original meaning: Death and life are opposites that complement each other. Both are halves of a sphere that we, mired in one dimension of time and space, can only glimpse. In the prenatal world, life and death are merged; in ours, opposed; in the world beyond, reunited again, not in the animal innocence that precedes sin and the knowledge of sin, but as in innocence regained. Man, if he detaches himself from immediacy, can transcend the temporal opposition separating these spheres and perceive them as a superior whole. He must open himself out to death if he wishes to open himself out to life. Then he will be, as Rilke says, "like the angels. In his poem Muerte sin Fin (Death Without End) Jose Gorostiza speaks to us from his prison of appearances -- for him trees and thoughts, stones and emotions, days and nights and twilights are all simply metaphors, mere colored ribbons. The breath which shapes these appearances and gives matter its form, he warns, is the same breath that corrodes and withers and defeats it. The poet reminds us that a civilization that denies death ends by denying life. Magazine: New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ) Issue: Winter 1994, Vol. 11, No. 1 Title: Europe Turns Left Author: ANDREAS PAPANDREOU Achieving a stunning comeback when his Pan Hellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) won a landslide victory at the polls on October 10, Andreas Papandreou was elected prime minister of Greece. He had been prime minister of Greece from 1981 to 1987. Since January, Papandreou has also taken the helm of European leadership as Greece assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union. During the interview with NPQ editor Nathan Gardels on October 14 at Papandreou's spacious, modern home in the Athens suburb of Ekali, the 74-year-old prime minister appeared vigorous throughout nearly two hours of discussion. His wife Dimitra -- who has stirred controversy because she was appointed chief of the prime minister's personal staff -- visited the room from time to time to check on the progress of the interview. NPQ -- The late Willy Brandt predicted that once post-Cold War Europe -- east and west -- had tasted too much of the free market and social insecurity, it would once again tilt left. In the former East, Poland has been the first to move back toward the left. In the West, you campaigned vigorously against privatization, austerity and layoffs in Greece and were rewarded with a landslide return to power. Are we witnessing a turn of the trend in Europe back toward the left, and, in your view, why? ANDREAS PAPANDREOU -- Willy Brandt was correct, I think, in his basic interpretation of how events would unfold. And Greece is the first clear socialist victory in Europe in these times. But it may be premature to say that this period has already arrived. The return of PASOK in Greece, rather, is a precursor. It represents something that is only budding and which must be nurtured with care if it is going to bloom. There are a lot of expectations. Obviously we have made commitments for measures which will guarantee let us no longer say the welfare state, but "social sensitivity" in our policies. At the same time, this new start will collapse unless we manage to increase our productivity so that we can compete in the fierce new global economy that is upon us. Competitiveness is the key new dimension of socialism in the 1990s. One of the reasons socialism receded in Europe, and in Greece, was that we did not understand that if Europe could not compete in world markets we would not be able to achieve any of our social objectives. Only the rapid rise of productivity can protect wages and salaries in a competitive environment. In this new world it is the only way to protect our standard of living; it is the only way to create the wealth from which we can finance policies of "social sensitivity." What is impressive here in Greece is that the working class has understood this message. In the campaign I pledged nothing I cannot deliver. Greeks know they have to work hard to earn their way in the world. My only commitment is to hold the line -- to ensure that real wages do not fall due to inflation. Of course, what is happening in the east of Europe is not the same as in the west, but there is a commonality in that we all now belong to the same planetary market and to that extent share the same challenges. Since the 1980s, when the trend of "neo-liberalism" gained momentum, we have experienced a very rapid globalization of the market. Economic frontiers have been falling all over the world. If GATT is successful, the trend will be further accelerated. As a consequence economic competition is worldwide. The result has been quite harsh for those societies that have grown accustomed to a system of mass production that assured jobs and paid for the welfare state. The arsenals of the new global battle are labor-displacing technologies; the troops are the legions of low-wage workers in places like East Asia. What globalization of the market has thus meant is a transfer of poverty from East to West. Not only has technology replaced jobs in Europe and America, but the West's mass production system has been replicated in Asia and now competes for our consumers. There is no escaping the fact that Spain's 22 percent unemployment rate is linked to Asia's rising standard of living. One of the key goals of any European firm trying to survive while competing with the low wages of Asia is to lower labor costs. That means not only cutting salaries or laying off workers, but also trying to shed the costs, either as taxes or benefits, of pensions, medical care, housing and education for employees. Clearly, frenetic competition on a world scale has undercut social policies and the protection of the less advantaged at a time when more and more of the formerly advantaged are joining their ranks. This is the reason for the renewing appeal of parties of the left. The problem we, like everyone, must face is that productivity increases are based on new technologies that are labor displacing. Rising productivity can thus go hand in hand with a swelling army of the unemployed -- not the old cyclical unemployment that came with recession and went away with a return to growth, but structural unemployment that endures. NPQ -- You also sounded very pro-European integration themes in your campaign. Can you meet your social objectives and still meet the strict convergence criteria -- cutting the budget deficit and inflation -- laid down by the Maastricht Treaty? In other words, can Greece only be as left as the EC allows? PAPANDREOU -- Yes, it does limit us on the social side. I support Maastricht. Greece voted for it. We want a united Europe. But we have reservations. The goals of Maastricht are all financial. They are stability-oriented banking criteria -- debt, inflation and deficits being the major culprits that must be locked up in order to formally converge toward unity. We in PASOK had the view from the start that the problem with the Maastricht Treaty is that it did not set targets that are also related to employment, to the social dimension of Europe or to sufficient fiscal policies to shore up the weaker parts of Europe. Such mechanisms do not exist in the Maastricht Treaty. Of course the Delors II package provides some compensation for the weaker parts of Europe to make the adjustment easier. But that is not enough. To make adjustment possible means not just meeting formal targets, but also advancing socially. The road toward unity ought to have targets that seek to reduce unemployment just as there are targets to reduce inflation. Clearly, without targets for a social Europe based on a strategy of growth, Europe is going to face socially explosive forces -- xenophobia and ultra-right threats to democracy. Who are we kidding to think that unity is going to somehow arrive in Europe if we do not find a way to cope with a 22 percent unemployment rate as we see in Spain? NPQ -- Greece has the highest inflation rate in Europe. How will you reduce it? PAPANDREOU -- Greece is afflicted by cost-push, not demand-pull, inflation. There is hardly any consumer demand. And the government has been the chief culprit because of the high rates it charges for telephones, water, electricity, gasoline. The whole policy of the previous government has been to increase revenues by charging higher utility rates -- in effect indirect taxes. So the government has been pushing inflation. We can stop the push. The privatization of the phone company which the previous government had planned would have resulted in nothing other than the transfer of monopoly from the state to some large company that would have charged whatever it wanted. NPQ -- In your first days of government, you moved to stop the privatization of Greek telecommunications. Wouldn't the proceeds from that sale have helped to pay down the budget deficit? PAPANDREOU -- We chose to reverse privatization, not because of some blind ideological spot. We did it because we need some levers to be able to guide this economy out of the doldrums. Already, as we discussed, being in the EC limits our ability to address national economic affairs. But we are not going to extremes. The phone company will be allowed to float shares in the market -- 20, 25 or 30 percent -- if it needs investment funds. What we don't believe in at all is turning over the phone company to the private sector at a ridiculously cheap price. Our phone company was going to be sold by the previous government for a sum equal to the projected profits of the company in two years! That is not policy. That is nonsense. NPQ -- What are your goals as president of the EC? PAPANDREOU -- I will have three priorities. First, building a social Europe. We cannot just be throwing people out of a job with total indifference with what happens to them tomorrow. Second, equally important and perhaps a precondition of the first, is to raise productivity and instill a mentality of competitiveness in the world economy. Believe it or not, Germany, the giant, has had a drop of two percent in its productivity. If this happens to Germany, and then to all of Europe, then Europe will have a very tough time. Third, I will press for a foreign policy that has some cohesion and leads to the pacification of the Balkans. NPQ -- The Serbs have now effectively won on the battlefield in Bosnia. In this event, Sali Berisha, the president of Albania, has warned that the Serbs will thus be freed to turn south in the quest for a Greater Serbia and try to "cleanse" Kosovo of its ethnically Albanian Muslims. Do you think there is truth to this view? PAPANDREOU -- There is truth here only to this extent: There are political and military groups in Serbia that have a "drive south" mentality. But (Serbian President) Slobodan Milosevic and those around him -- let us call it Belgrade -- fully understand that a drive south will mean war. Not war merely between Albania and Serbia, but a Balkan war with the intervention of great powers. So, Belgrade would have to lose its orientation entirely if it were to drive south. What I am afraid of is that war could happen as a result of provocation from the Muslim side within Kosovo who might want to free themselves from Serbia. Or from some big power NPQ -- What big power? Germany? PAPANDREOU -- They have played a role up to now. Yugoslavia should never have been broken up as it was because they pressed for the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia in December 1991. That is very clear. Now, though, I'm not sure that the Europeans responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia want this wound to continue to bleed. Let us not forget that if war breaks out in Kosovo, the Muslim presence in Europe will be much bigger. If Muslims and Serbs fight in Kosovo, there is no doubt that the Muslim forces will come to aid their brothers. We will then have transferred to the ground of Europe the kind of conflict we have not seen here in centuries. To put it frankly, Belgrade does not have a design to drive south. If they did they would be terribly foolish. And as far I can see, Belgrade is not foolish. It is very important that Berisha also gets the message from the European countries and the United States -- which by the way has taken an admirably prudent stand in the Balkans -- to avoid war. Berisha must not be allowed to believe that if he becomes embroiled in a confrontation with Serbia that he will have the support of some big power. Greece now, under my government, will be taking every possible measure for a peaceful mission in the Balkans. Our foreign minister will visit them all, country by country. We have good contacts with the leadership of all these countries. And since no one is afraid of Greece as an imperial power, our word is taken seriously and we can play a mediating role. NPQ -- Will you seek to remove the sanctions against Serbia? PAPANDREOU -- Look, Serbia has been conducting itself in a way -- talking about the present moment -- which would justify the withdrawal of sanctions. The basic orientation of Belgrade now, in October of 1993, is peace. At the same time there is a concern that Serbia is getting more than its share of a deal in Bosnia. As long as Serbia gets more than its share, it will be difficult in practice to remove sanctions. NPQ -- Now that you are in power, what is your position on Skopje, or "Macedonia"? PAPANDREOU -- It is very difficult to convey the logic of the Greek government to someone who is not part of the scene. Our main problem is the name. I have to tell you that for decades -- 60 years -- there has been a very strong, well-financed lobby, especially in Canada and Australia, whose aim is to create a "Greater Macedonia," a new state that would include northern Greece. That there is such thinking, that funds are expended in this direction, is a fact. In order to be able to build this state, there must be a name. Skopje wants the name "Macedonia." This is the source of the negative stand toward recognition of such a state under the name of "Macedonia" on the part of the Greek people, irrespective of party affiliation. We have no expansionist tendencies or interests. Greece wants stable frontiers. We will defend our own, but we won't touch anyone. That is the fundamental position of this government. Militarily speaking, we constitute no threat to Skopje. And they do not pose a military threat to us. But it is not possible to legally recognize Skopje de jure with the name "Macedonia" or any derivative of it. We are committed and unyielding on this point, and the nation is literally united around it. What does non-recognition mean? It doesn't mean, for instance, that traffic or commerce cannot go through. It does not mean sanctions, unless of course there are provocations by Skopje. In the past, for example, they have stopped truckloads of oil on the way to Greece. If they do this now, then we can always make it a little tougher. But this depends on their behavior. We keep this card. Many countries have recognized Skopje as "Macedonia" because the previous (Greek) government wobbled, with the prime minister and foreign minister telling different stories. This we will not do. Let me repeat, we are not threatening anyone, least of all little Skopje. Our stance is not aggressive. But we will not yield on the name. NPQ -- You have noted that one result of the breakup of Yugoslavia has been the revival of the old ties of the Christian Orthodox alliance -- Athens, Sofia, Belgrade, Bucharest and perhaps even Moscow. Will issues of war and peace in the Balkans depend less on post-World War II institutions like NATO and the EC in the future, and more on the deeper historical foundations of the region? PAPANDREOU -- Of course, NATO's new role has not yet been defined so we don't know what effect it will have. There is also the effort led by the French for a new European military alliance. But that is in the future. Now, the Balkan wars, I do believe, have brought to the surface the resonance of Orthodox ties. And, of course, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union has brought Orthodox religion back to the daily lives of the Russian people. It is true that this is a bond. It was dormant, but with the developments in the Balkans it is taking on some real substance. In a very fluid world, people are seeking identity and security. People are looking for roots and connections to defend themselves against the unknown. And there are many unknowns in Europe today. Prime Minister Edouard Balladur of France, for instance, has proposed a conference that would re-examine treaties and frontiers. So, you see, when a statesman of his magnitude puts such an idea as this before the European Community, then we must be concerned about what changes are being designed for us. Under such circumstances, we look for points of commonality with those who share our roots. I would not go so far as to say that the institutional ties of post-war Europe are today already less strong than the Orthodox ties being revived. But how that holds depends on where the Europe we have known since world War II goes in the future. NPQ -- You are remembered by the U.S. as a fire-breathing anti-American who was always threatening to throw U.S.bases out of Greece. What is your view of the U.S. now, after the Cold War? PAPANDREOU -- First of all, let me remind you that my last government was the first to have an agreement with the U.S. on bases in Greece. Before that they were here informally. America today is not just a superpower, it is the superpower. It is anyone's privilege to comment on that fact, but it is a reality. The Americans go on and make their planetary strategy and countries like Greece can have little influence on it. Problems that have arisen between Greece and America in the past have, of course, been due to the famous triangle of Washington-Ankara-Athens, not with America otherwise. The problem, as we all know, is that Greece is in the same security alliance as Turkey -- NATO. Yet that alliance does not protect us from the only country that threatens us -- Turkey. This friction reflects on the U.S. because it must choose to support one or the other in this conflict. Greece wants the closest possible relations with the U.S. The cautious and prudent stand of the Americans in the Balkans has shown they are concerned with stability. This goes very well with us. We especially look forward to playing as constructive a role as we can with America in the Balkans since stability of borders is our common aim. Magazine: American Quarterly Issue: March 1994 Title: Outside Looking In: Nonnatives and American Indian Literature Author: Robin Riley Fast TEACHING AMERICAN STUDIES Outside Looking In: Nonnatives and American Indian Literature ROBIN RILEY FAST Emerson College As a nonnative teaching a course on Native-American literature to classes (so far) made up of nonnative students, I have become acutely aware of the tension between two imperatives that, while they undoubtedly shape how we read in many contexts, take on special meanings here due to the emotional and historical baggage we bring to the study of Native-American cultures and literatures. One is the reader's impulse to read in relation to his or her own needs and experiences; the other is the desire to study the literature, in my students' phrase, "as literature," to see how it is constructed, how it works, and what it is on its own terms, apart from nonnative readers' concerns. To some students, this means a basically formalistic approach; to others, and to me, it means considering not only a work's structures and their effects but its various social, political, historical, cultural, even geographical contexts. Thus the potential for tension multiplies. Most of my students perceive these tensions early on and to some degree find them a troubling and unexpected element of the class. (Unexpected, I think, because few, if any, have taken a class in which they encountered with such intensity cultures so thoroughly new to them and a situation in which their often eager attraction and curiosity are matched by their great discomfort in the face of history.) Their perceptions of this "conflict of interests" have come through as requests for more (or less) background information on Native-American cultures, as objections to fellow students' "inability to overcome cultural bias" (or to others' "imposition" of "political correctness"), as a preference for more discussion of literary technique and value (or for less emphasis on "technique" and more attention to "what these writers are actually saying"1. Of course, any class, lecture, or assignment can present very different realities to different students. What strikes me is the constancy of the issues that evoke such requests, objections, and preferences in the course on Native American literature. I found myself voicing my own struggle to give each its due when I declared (to family and colleagues, not students), "Native Lit isn't just about consciousness raising for white kids!" It is not centrally about the nonnative reader. We risk remaking it in our own images and falsifying it if we concentrate too intently on what it says to us or on our questions about it. But, of course depending on the particular example at hand--- Silko's Ceremony and Momaday's House Made of Dawn come to mind---it acquires, or it has inherent in it, that "consciousness raising" function as well, given language, who the majority of American readers are, and the realities of publishing and bookselling, to say nothing of history.2 Who we are matters, I realized more acutely than ever when I first began to think about my own responses to Native-American literature and then to teach it and listen to my students. I grew up in the Southeast Alaska, in small towns with significant Native (mostly Tlingit) populations, in the 1950s and 1960s---a time when Alaskans became increasingly aware, with all Americans, of the oppression of African Americans.3 Most nonnatives, I think, remained complacent about, or oblivious to, the unequal treatment of Alaskan Natives. My parents had cordial, even friendly personal relationships with Indians, but for me those relationships did not translate into more than either a very general or a very individualized awareness of native peoples' lives. I took for granted that families volunteering to accommodate out-of-town students during basketball tournaments or music festivals would be asked, on a form distributed by my high school, whether they objected to hosting native students, even while I took for granted that the only right answer was "no." Though I chatted with some of the native girls in my class, we were not close friends. I was aware of the prejudices of others but not of the limits of my own interests and knowledge. Nothing in the school system, and very little in the community at large, made me aware of those limits or challenged them---I had no inkling that there was a rich, ongoing, local native culture worthy of my respect and attention. When my high school offered a class on Alaska native crafts, I lumped it with home economics and shop and dismissed it as not academic and therefore not serious. (I wonder whether I would have been capable of recognizing a class on Alaska native literature as serious.) Nonetheless, I left home, and, influenced by my parents' liberal politics and my 1960s and 1970s education in civil rights, the antiwar movement, and feminism, I came to a general awareness of Native American history relatively easily. But my awareness of Indian cultures came much more slowly. As an undergraduate and graduate student, I studied the canonical works of English and American literature. Emily Dickinson is as close to the margins as I got, and it is in part thanks to my Dickinson-inspired interest in women writers that, through reading Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Leslie Silko, and Wendy Rose, I woke up to contemporary Native American culture and began to wonder about its roots and contexts.4 Only as I tried to answer the questions these poets made me ask did I begin to realize how much I had missed as I grew up. Reading a special issue of the Alaska Quarterly Review devoted to Alaska Native writers, storytellers and orators, I found not only family names I had heard in Juneau and Haines but also the name of a boyin my class who was the present caretaker of a particular ceremonial headdress. Remembering my shock on reading that, I know that, for me, learning and teaching about Native- American literature and culture is, among many other things, a way of recovering the ability to acknowledge something that existed beside me as I grew up but that I could not see. (Of course, I could not have seen it literally- --stories were not told, ceremonies were not performed, in the streets. But I did not know that I was not seeing. Even when I worked in the Alaska State Museum for two summers, the artifacts were simply artifacts to me. I knew, superficially, about traditional indigenous material cultures---Aleut baskets and seagut parkas, Tlingit bentwood boxes and spruce root hats, Eskimo sealing stools, scrapers, and harpoons---but I had no real conception that such things were integral to the ongoing, multidimensional lives of the peoples who made them.) By describing my background here, I mean to suggest some of the ways in which I am not a disinterested teacher of Native-American literature. If I have said more than seems necessary, I suppose it reflects my need to remind myself of my own multiple interests as I try to enable students to become aware of their motives and agendas and both to use and to move beyond them. I teach at a private, specialized, four-year college in Boston. My students, seniors and graduate students, have so far been European Americans, mostly from the eastern United States. Most have been majoring in either creative or professional writing (my college has no literature major), the rest in performing arts or some communications specialty. They take the class to fulfill a general education requirement in "U.S. Multiculturalism," out of curiosity and desire, or both. Most have had no previous academic exposure to Native-American history or culture, and many are not aware of ever having seen living Indians. Still, they bring with them a host of images and accompanying emotions, ranging from romantic nostalgia to guilt, along with curiosity, energy, and the writer's ardent belief that literature counts. In the course, they encounter a number of traditional and contemporary genres, represented by works from various North American Indian cultures. Through supplemental readings, lectures, a visit to a local ethnological museum, and films, I try to make them aware of such aspects of traditional Native-American cultures as the sense of relationship to land and place, myth as sacred history, and the interconnection of all beings and some of the concrete ways in which different indigenous groups' practices reflect these concepts. The oral nature of traditional literatures and the implications and possibilities associated with oral continuity and performance also come in for considerable discussion. (From the beginning, too, I stress the fact that many contemporary American Indians continue to participate in traditional cultures.) The aim here is to give the students contexts, which in turn provide a kind of continuity; as we move from oral narratives to modern poetry, or from "as-told-to" autobiographies to fiction, students recognize images and motifs, patterns and structures, and continuity or variation in values across time and genres. Of course, the connections are not smooth or constant, or always easy. Students are learning both the possibilities and, as they become aware of tribal variations or historical change, the limitations of generalization. I realize that by restricting the course to a region, a cultural group, or a genre, I might make generalizing easier and safer, as well as allowing for greater depth and specialization.5 But the habit of generalizing about Indians is one of the handicaps students bring to the class, and I want to make it problematical for them while I help them realize how, with care, they can learn by generalizing. Beyond this, as I periodically question my decision not to make the course more specialized, I remind myself that the students' mixed academic backgrounds, different interests, and lack of previous coursework mean that they lack a common basis for specialization; equally importantly, by offering a wide range of materials, I want to give each student the opportunity to discover an area, a genre, a writer, that she or he can feel passionate about and may continue to study independently in the light of the contexts the course will have provided. One thing many of my students have apparently not brought to the study of Native-American literature is religious experience. Some indicate that they have grown up without any religious affiliation or practice; others might identify themselves "culturally" as Jews; quite a number come from Catholic backgrounds; but few of those who speak up on this issue (which almost always elicits animated discussion) will acknowledge personal religious belief or spiritual experience of any sort or have more than superficial knowledge of "their" culture's religious traditions. Those who have had a religious education are often skeptical or actively rebellious. It is not surprising, then, that religion is one of the fields on which the two imperatives---to question, explore, and express the self and to meet and examine the literature and its cultural contexts- --are thrown most clearly into relief. The spiritual nature of much traditional and contemporary Native American literature guarantees that the question of how to respond will be ongoing. For example, references in myth, folklore, and autobiography to visions and ceremonial re-creations of mythic events, evoke questions like "how could they believe that?" Contemporary works like Momaday's "The Man Made of Words" and Silko's Ceremony, which demonstrate that belief in vision and in the efficacy of language are not limited to the ancient and "primitive," may reignite and complicate and questions.6 Because of my students' limited religious experience, referring to the doctrine of transubstantiation, for example, or to the Passover Seder's power of re-creation through ritual recollection may only be helpful in a limited way or to a few; intellectually, they might recognize parallels, but they still can not imagine believing. (A few may want to rest with the familiar, manageable "explanation" that Indians having visions were probably "just doing drugs.") A text which helps some students make the imaginative leap is Beck and Walters's The Sacred: Ways of Knowing Sources of Life, which explains and illustrates aspects of native-American spiritual experience using both myth and modern accounts by people from diverse American-Indian cultures.7 Still, I find myself urging students to "suspend disbelief" while reminding the creative writers and performers of their convictions about the power of language and hope that, with continued exposure, their responses will evolve away from perplexed or dismissive disbelief. It helps to bear in mind that for many of the students the questions are so compelling, and they are so driven to express their own feelings and experiences, because they are engaged, perhaps to their surprise, in understanding their own lives.8 If the students have not brought religious knowledge to the class, they have brought other expectations that may equally threaten to overwhelm discussions of the literature. Many come with a strong tendency to romanticize native- American peoples and cultures and an eager, unexamined readiness to identify with them. Influenced, sometimes, by "New Age" books, music and attitudes and recognizing the kind of genuine spiritual experience they feel they have missed and seem to expect will come easily, some students are inclined to respond rhapsodically to almost any assignment---they move only with difficulty (and sometimes evident resistance) beyond "everything I read makes me love Native-American culture more."9 Their ability to see the idealized Indians they want to see becomes a barrier that must be broken down if they are to begin truly to pay attention to the literature and the peoples who created it. As James Kincaid has observed, "we h ave little to hope for, any of us, if those in the dominant culture cannot get past sympathizing so fully and understanding so readily. . . . those other Americans who outnumber Indians by 200 to 1 can smother any threatening difference with empathetic awareness."10 A discussion of Black Elk Speaks, in the context not only of Lakota history and culture but also of John G. Neihardt's creative editing of Black Elk's story and the associated controversy, can provide a valuable opportunity for students to recognize and respond to a sympathetic nonnative's idealistic inventions (or, in Neihardt's word, "transformation") of native-American experience. It can also help them see how Neihardt's idealizing is linked to the "vanishing race" stereotype. Initially, anyway, students can discuss Neihardt without having to scrutinize directly their own perhaps similar assumptions; once the talk turns to the question of Neihardt's audience's expectations, the students recognize that we are all somehow implicated. I have found that Black Elk Speaks and this discussion become touchstones for some students; their references to it, throughout the course, reveal that they continue to work on the issues the book and its editing raise---particularly those of stereotyping and cultural appropriation. Interestingly, while the book and its history frustrated or angered many students in my most recent course (as they had previous students), by the end of the term, when my final questionnaire asked them whether I should continue to assign it, the response was overwhelmingly in favor.11 This idealizing impulse often, though not always, accompanies an almost automatic, but still painful, sense of guilt over the history of Indian-"white" relations. (Students may both insist that guilt is an inevitable, necessary response and resist it as not realistic---they did not personally displace anyone, they say, or their forebears arrived in American too recently for complicity.) Once they begin to study, their inclinations to romanticize and/or to feel guilty lead to perplexity and difficulty. I find myself facing delicate and urgent imperatives as I work to maintain their interest and receptivity while helping them through the difficult transitions that more complex knowledge demands. Above all, and most consistently, students are shocked and disappointed when they find themselves taken aback by or critical of behaviors, beliefs, or attitudes described or expressed in their readings. Their uneasiness when they read about the Sun Dance, the practice of slavery among various Northwest Coast peoples, or the sexual habits of Coyote, for example, disrupts their readiness to embrace native-American literature and must seem, for those who have been most idealistically eager, to undermine their whole basis for interest in Indian cultures and peoples. Most recently, students were distressed by the arrow maker's seemingly unprovoked killing of an enemy, defined as such by his not understanding the Kiowa language, in the story Momaday tells in "The Man Made of Words" and The Way to Rainy Mountain.12 (One of the things that is revealed by the strength of students' reactions to these unexpected disillusionments is how much some have invested in the idea of American Indians as completely pacific and egalitarian---living up to ideals we profess, as we rarely do ourselves.) At the same time, more gradually, some begin to recognize that their feelings of guilt may be reflexive responses. Reading works on varied subjects hastens this recognition, I think, for it makes the consistency of the response suspect. These students become more thoughtfully aware of their own reactions as they realize the need for a more complex response to history and literature. I have found that I can, to some extent, lessen the students' shock by anticipating these confusions and difficulties and by addressing the underlying issues from the beginning of the course. (I would add that in right situation, shock might be salutory.) Each time I have taught the course, I have increased the assignments of "non-literary" background readings, especially, but not only, at the beginning of the term.13 At the outset, they serve both to give students new information and to alert them to the depth and complexity of some of the differences they are going to encounter. Some students may at first be impatient with such assignments, either because the assignments are more difficult than the students expected or because they are eager to get to the literature. However, I have found that students come to recognize the value of the background readings as they are able to draw on them to deepen their responses to myth, poetry, and fiction. Beyond assigning and discussing informational articles, though, I need to work on three general issues to enable my students to revise their expectations and assumptions so that they will be more truly open to learning about American Indian cultures and history and more freely and knowledgeably capable of reading the literatures. These issues involve stereotypes, dealing with difference and familiarity, and guilt. Addressing these areas can help lessen the students' needs to work through their own individual histories and beliefs in class and, as a consequence, make it easier to shift the emphasis toward more sustained and serious encounters with the literature. For dealing with each of these needs, I have found it extremely useful to have students keep journals, in which they can raise questions or try out ideas and to which I can respond, regularly in writing and sometimes in class. First and easiest (because it can be addressed directly and explicitly, as well as gradually, through exposure), I need to destroy stereotypes. Fortunately, my students have not been burdened by the "demonic savage" stereotype, but most have brought with them its opposite, the "noble savage," and many expect that "the Indian point of view" is inherently tragic or at least always serious, if not mystical, and lacking in humor. Thus, though some may appreciate the very contemporary political wit of Vizenor's "Reservation Cafe: The Origins of American Indian Instant Coffee," they may be reluctant to acknowledge the lighthearted humor in a work like Nora Dauenhauer's "How to Make Good Baked Salmon from the River," for they assume that they latter's back-and-forth movement between traditional and contemporary ways implies, primarily, nostalgic regret.14 (Students may also be mystified or put off by the inclusiveness of Vizenor's needling and surprised that he seems to direct some of his barbs at "tribal" behavior. I point out alternatives to the stereotypes as they appear in the readings and identify the stereotypes and their implications as they surface in students' comments. Just learning about the history of the "noble savage" is enough to make many students want to reconsider their preconceptions. I make clear that the basis for questioning the stereotypes is ultimately our recognition of human complexity and try to show this in part by drawing attention to differences within native- American cultures and communities: different versions of a story, for example, or different degrees of traditional observance. (It is important, however, to avoid simply creating an opposite image, not of totality but of fragmentation.) Louise Edrich's Love Medicine and Mountain Wolf Woman, edited by Nancy O. Lurie, have worked particularly well to illustrate diversity within a culture, family, or individual. (Pairing Mountain Wolf Woman with The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian, the life story of Montain Wolf Woman's brother, edited by Paul Radin, could also further this aim.)15 Ironically, students' experience of and wariness about stereotypes have led some to identify distinctions based on gender, in myth and in accounts of traditional life, with the kinds of gender-role prescriptions that feminism has taught us to resist. Similarly, some question Silko's depiction of Betonie's grandmother, the Night Swan, and especially Ts'eh (all in Ceremony) as being too close for comfort to Western European culture's relegating of women to nature. Ultimately, such misgivings are not absolutely answerable, and students should realize that. Still, I can remind them of the imperatives of subsistence cultures; the variety of roles (some quite powerful) filled by women in different native-American cultures; and the likelihood that women's (or men's) association with nature will have different connotations in cultures that acknowledge spiritual and familial relationships to nature than in cultures that view it as radically other and fear or despise it. As students become disillusioned by the destruction of their rosy idealizations, I need to help them turn their disappointment into acceptance of the more demanding humanness of American-Indian cultures and peoples and recognition of cultural and historical contexts as sources of behavior and belief. Gerald Haslam's story "Hawk's Flight: An American Fable" very clearly and startlingly demonstrates the influences of culture on expectations and judgments. The fact that it is not a perfect story (one of my students pointed out that Haslam himself is not innocent of stereotyping) actually makes for very interesting and productive discussion. Carter Revard's "Report to the Nation: Claiming Europe" and Louise Erdrich's "Captivity" also draw attention to the power of presuppositions by subverting them.16 Second, at the same time that students must be freed to disagree, dislike, or criticize (which follows from recognizing Native-American peoples and cultures as human, in stead of perfect and unquestionable), I need to work to preserve and encourage an atmosphere of respect for native values and integrity and for cultural differences. I do not want the students' process of disappointment, rediscovery, and recognition to result in the conclusion that "they're just like us," with all of the attendant impulses to appropriate and subsume "their" differences. For some of my students, the "melting pot" has already been discredited; reminding them of the implications of this kind of appropriation can help them reconsider. As students encounter, in the literature, reactions and situations that seem familiar, I encourage them to define the familiarity as precisely as they can and especially to search for the sources of seemingly similar behaviors in the relevant culture. In this respect, Tayo's belief (in Ceremony) that his prayer and curse have caused the drought can become the impetus for a searching and clarifying discussion. After a session in which students, while commenting on other aspects of the novel, implied that this belief showed Tayo to be "paranoid," confused, "understandably" feeling guilty about his uncle's death---all reactions they could imagine having---or simply wrong, I asked them to consider, for the next meeting, whether Tayo might really bear some responsibility for the drought. The next day, one student eloquently and persuasively reminded his peers of some of the cultural reasons for Tayo's belief in his own guilt---most particularly the beliefs in the interconnectedness of all being and the efficacy of words---both of which are evoked repeatedly in the novel, as well as Tayo's prior experience of connection between his words and the coming of the rain. As the discussion proceeded, students began to realize that what had seemed explicable in their terms actually had very different sources and that if Tayo is mistaken in taking all the responsibility (and consequent guilt) upon himself, it is not, again, for the reason they initially assumed, the "obvious impossibility" of one man's words' causing a drought. Most difficult of all the imperatives I face as I try to enable students to work productively through their uneasiness and perplexity is the need to deal constructively with guilt. It is especially difficult because it is most clearly an emotional issue; the reasons for European-American guilt are real, yet the students have little tangible, personal reason for feeling as guilty as some of them do. What I want is to redefine the appropriate, useful response to past and present wrongs, not as guilt but as responsibility--- responsibility to know about the past and responsibility in the present and for the future. Such responsibility, I think, can be intellectually, emotionally, and socially/politically productive; guilt, as far as I can tell in my students' cases, cannot. I do not mean to belittle the ways in which European Americans have benefited from the displacements and oppressions of native-American peoples. I have told students how studying American- Indian history has brought me uncomfortably to face my own family history as I put my grandfather's written reminiscences about settling on "recently opened" Flathead reservation land in Montana together with the account in Olson and Wilson's Native Americans in the Twentieth Century of the governmentally sponsored encroachments (under the allotment policy) on just that land, at just that time, by white farmers and ranchers like my grandfather--- an account rendered painful by the simple citing of statistics measuring the diminishing acreage available to the Indians.17 But I try to convey to my students that I, personally, must be able to move beyond feeling guilty for my grandfather (whom I loved, and whose life and actions I cannot simply, angrily, reject or deny) or, on the basis of his life, for myself. I want my students, rather than feeling put upon by guilt for things that "weren't their fault," to realize that perhaps in some way their forebears were involved, that there may be some such connection for them too, but that that need not be the end of the story.18 Because the issues are so complex and so personal, this is, as I have said, one of the most difficult aspects for me of teaching Native-American Literature. I fear that my discussion of the problem may almost have replicated it; after all, I have been addressing how to deal seriously with students' preconceptions and needs, without allowing them to overwhelm discussion, in order to facilitate a fuller and more respectful engagement with the literature. Teachers can hope to accomplish this, I believe, if we make a commitment to dealing with the literature on its own terms and encourage our students to share that commitment. Michael Dorris, Jarold Ramsey, and Galen Buller have all written of the importance of teaching native-American literatures in their "ethnohistorical" contexts.19 For nonnatives particularly, I think, this means working to recognize those terms, acknowledging that they will vary with the literature's contexts, and expanding our studies beyond literature to history and other aspects of culture. (Some students may initially be skeptical of this project, just as some at first resist considering myth and other oral lore as literature.) It means, too, taking seriously Jack Forbes's insistence that Native American literature has agendas other than addressing the needs and questions of nonnative readers, even if we consider his definition and criteria too exclusionary.20 It means taking seriously, too, Paula Gunn Allen's misgivings about the publication, analysis, and "direct" teaching, in literature classes, of "sacred materials," by which she means "any material that is drawn from ritual and myth."21 The problem of finding a just basis for interpretation and analysis becomes compelling---and worrisome---to students as soon as they confront translated mythological texts or begin to recognize cultural differences within Native America. The need to see the literature in terms of its contexts makes them aware of another difficulty, the fact of our often necessarily incomplete knowledge--- necessarily incomplete, sometimes, because of the absence of explanations and contexts for material collected by outsiders, often through many layers of interpretation, and from peoples whose cultures may since have disappeared. But necessarily incomplete, also, because, as Allen argues, we may not be entitled to, or granted, full knowledge of sacred rites, stories, and beliefs. As an example, I might tell students about a Native American woman in a writing class I taught years ago: writing of her community's reestablishment of the sweat bath, she was willing to describe some aspects of the ritual in general terms but decided that she could not provide any information that would allow outsiders to locate the lodge or intrude upon the ritual. I remind them too, of Beck's and Walters's observation that many American Indians consider an element of mystery essential and seeking after complete understanding inappropriate.22 But I also realize that this kind of limitation can become a virtue, particularly with regard to modern literary works, as it makes us attend not only to an individual text's ethnic grounding but also to the individual writer's imaginative accomplishment, which is likely to respond to nonnative influences as well (thus the critical balance Ramsey advocates). And so, like Allen, I may steer discussion toward other aspects of structure and meaning in the work at hand. My aim---finally, as I address all of these needs, questions, and difficulties---is not to dissolve the conflicts or the opposing impulses, emphases, and values, or to resolve them too easily but to enable students to recognize them and to advance their own understandings of the cultures and the literatures. Native-American literature is not an easy class for me or my students. I promise them on the first day that they are going to work harder than they expect and in different ways than in their previous literature classes. We all have to learn to work on unfamiliar ground, sometimes with discomfort and often in uncertainty. That my students have generally been willing to make the effort of working under these circumstances bodes well, I think, for their growth beyond stereotyped expectations and purely personal needs to complex engagement with the literature and cultures they study. NOTES 1. I adopt the term "conflict of interests" from Jarold Ramsey, who uses it in a slightly different context to indicate that the issues involved "can be resolved . . . through some sort of integration" and "balance." See "The Teacher of Modern American Indian Writing as Ethnographer and Critic," College English 42 (1979): 163. 2. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York, 1977); N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York, 1968). Silko's novel will be cited parenthetically henceforth. 3. The indigenous peoples of Alaska refer to themselves as Natives or Alaska Natives, as well as by more culture- specific names. 4. Representative texts are Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses (New York, 1983); Linda Hogan, Seeing through the Sun (Amherst, Mass., 1985); Wendy Rose, Lost Copper (Banning, Calif., 1980) and The Halfbreed Chronicles and Other Poems (Los Angeles, 1985); Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (New York, 1981). 5. I am aware, too, of Michael Dorris's argument against "Native American Literature" as a category for study and his objection to the superficial treatment and stereotyping invited by an approach that tries to be all-encompassing. I can only say that I share his concern, and do not aim to "cover" it all; I try, as I indicate in this essay, to work against the lure of the superficial. See Michael Dorris, "Native American Literature in an Ethnohistorical Context," College English 41 (1979): 147--62. 6. Also, for a few students who have studied contemporary theory, Momaday's essay and others highlight contrasts between poststructuralist linguistics and Native conceptions of language. 7. Peggy Beck and Anna Walters, with Nia Francisco, The Sacred:Ways of Knowledge, Sources of Life (Tsaile, Ariz., 1990). 8. Linda Hogan comments in an interview that many of her non-Indian students are desperately searching for spirits, for their own souls, . . . longing for something they believe existed in earlier times or in tribal culture. What they want is their own life. Their own love for the earth, but when they speak their own words about it, they don't believe them, so they look to Indians, forgetting that enlightenment can't be found in a weekend workshop, forgetting that most Indian people are living the crisis of American life. See Laura Coltelli, ed., Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak (Lincoln, Neb., 1990), 75. 9. These students have something in common with those Paula Gunn Allen refers to as "wanna be's," who enter her classes "voraciously interested in the exotic aspects of Indian ways." See Paula Gunn Allen, "Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony," American Indian Quarterly 14 (1990): 382. 10. James Kincaid, "Who Gets to Tell Their Stories?" New York Times Book Review! Sunday, 3 May 1992, 1 and 24. 11. John G. Neihardt, ed. Black Elk Speaks. 1932 (Lincoln, Neb. 1979). For a history of Black Elk Speaks, with a detailed examination of Neihardt's role, see Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather, Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (Lincoln, Neb., 1984). 12. N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 1969). 13. Beck and Walters's The Sacred is a wonderful resource; also very useful is D. M. Drooling and Paul Jordan-Smith, eds., I Become Part of It: Sacred Dimensions in Native American Life (San Francisco, 1989). The first chapter of Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans Willard Trask. (New York, 1968) is a good companion to Beck and Walters's first chapter, especially for the more sophisticated students. 14. For Dauenhauer, see Duane Niatum, ed. Harper's Anthology of Twentieth-Century Native-American Poetry (San Francisco, 1988), 20--23; for Vizenor, see Simon J. Ortiz, ed., Earth Power Coming (Tsaile, Ariz., 1983), 31- -36. 15. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, (New York, 1984): Nancy O. Lurie, ed. Mountain Wolf Woman, Sister of Crashire Thunder: The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1961); Paul Radin, ed., The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian, 1920 (New York, 1963). 16. For Haslam and Revard, see Ortiz, ed. Earth Power Coming, 145--49 and 166--81, respectively; for Erdrich, see Niatum, ed. Harper's Anthology, 340--42. 17. James S. Olson and Raymond Wilson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, Ill., 1984). 18. See Margery Mazie, et. al., "To Deconstruct Race, Deconstruct Whiteness," American Quarterly 45 (June, 1993); 291. Mazie et. al., deal with the issue of guilt in a class on "Racialism and Inter-racialism in American Culture and Thought": "Many in the class struggled to avoid the seductiveness of guilt, a no-action, feel-good response . . . that avoided responsibility for change." This is the same struggle in which non-native students of Native American culture and history must often engage. 19. For Dorris, this necessity precludes the general survey approach to Native American literature. Ramsey discusses the need for a balance between the scholarly approach, which emphasizes contemporary literature's rootedness in tradition at the expense of the writer's individuality and imagination, and the "chaste critic's" approach (165), which either ignores ethnicity or avoids taking it seriously by resorting to gushing generalizations. Describing his goal of a criticism that is "as diversified and as culturally and artistically knowing" as contemporary Indian literature itself, Ramsey names the ideal to which I want my students to be able to aspire. Buller, whose students have been "predominantly Indian," identifies "five critical areas" in which American Indian literature differs from American literature. Recognition of these differences, he implies, requires attention to the Indian literature's contexts, and enables readers "to make distinctions between American Indian literature and literature written in America by Indian authors." Buller here is addressing another issue that arises in my classes, as I imagine it inevitably does in any class that deals with contemporary works: how to define Native American writers and texts. For Dorris, see note 5; for Ramsey, see note 1. See also Galen Buller, "New Interpretations of Native American Literature: A Survival Technique," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 4 (1980): 175. 20. Forbes states, for example, that "Native American literature must consist in works produced by persons of Native identity and/or culture for primary dissemination to other persons of Native identity and/or culture." Although he acknowledges that "of necessity, native writers producing novels have to write them in such a way that they will be attracted [sic] to an English-language audience which is primarily non-Indian," his discussion seems to call into question the status of such works as Ceremony and House Made of Dawn as Native American literature. See Jack Forbes, "Colonialism and Native American Literature: Analysis," Wicazo sa Review 3 (1987): 19, 22. 21. See Allen, "Special Problems," 379. How to respond to Allen's warning against using such materials is made ambiguous by the fact that there is evidently some divergence of opinions on this matter among contemporary Native writers and that Allen herself, in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston, 1986), apparently took a rather different position. (See, for example, pages 223--44, "Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale.") Her acceptance of using the materials other than "directly"---which seems to be what she does when she gives "a few generalized lectures on native spiritual systems" and avoids "discussing any particular detail" ("Special Problems," 385)---does leave the teacher a way of locating the literature in its contexts. Interestingly to me, Allen and I share the recognition that our students are likely to be disappointed in the course of studying Native literature, though we define their disappointment differently, and thus differ, too, on the prospects for transforming that disappointment. 22. For example, Beck and Walters state that "Native American sacred ways limit the amount of explaining a person can do. In this way they guide a person's behavior toward the world and its natural laws" (4). With regard to education they tell us that "in order that knowledge did not get separated from experience, wisdom from divinity, the elders stressed listening and waiting, not asking why" (48). Robin Riley Fast is an associate professor of American literature at Emerson College. She is currently working on the Native-American prescence in the poetry of Mary Oliver. *With the exception of one who defined himsef as 1/8 Native American and was in the process of exploring what that might mean but whose upbringing had apparently been wholly within Euro-American culture. Magazine: Reviews in American History Issue: May 1994 Title: Back to Nature Author: Reviewd by Richard White BACK TO NATURE Reviewed by Richard White Donald Worster. The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. x + 255 pp. Notes and index. $25.00. Donald Worster's Wealth of Nature is an eclectic collection of essays written over the last several years. They are revealing and worth reading precisely because they are such a mixed lot. Less tightly woven than Worster's monographs, they allow readers to glimpse an important set of ideas and assumptions that inform the body of Worster's work but are often obscured from view in Dust Bowl or Rivers of Empire. Dust Bowl and Rivers of Empire have made Worster a major American historian. In both books Worster's gaze is fixed on capitalism and arid lands, although he defines neither narrowly. Capitalism for Worster is not just an economic arrangement, it is a culture, a particular take on the world. The culture of capitalism demands a relentless transformation of nature; capitalism commodifies nature at a social and environmental cost that the planet cannot indefinitely endure. The arid lands of the West are always a vividly particular place, but they also come to stand for nature itself. The relationship of capitalism to nature is Worster's great theme, and it is one that he touches on repeatedly here, giving it a new twist in the last, title essay of this book. But there is little sense in reading a book of essays simply to encounter in a condensed form what the author has treated expansively elsewhere; this book offers more. The very diversity of topics and audiences Worster addresses gradually draws the reader's attention to ideas which, while not usually occupying center stage in any of the essays, make at least cameo appearances in many of them. Indeed, they draw attention because they are so ubiquitous. Reading these essays, repeatedly encountering these ideas, reminded me of being a Gentile in Salt Lake City. After a while you noticed certain people simply because they seemed to show up in all the same places you did. These ideas, lingering on the margins, are like that. Don Worster is not happy with life on the margins, and in these essays he is creating a disturbance at the edge of the party. It is like someone heckling Orin Hatch on Pioneer Day. Worster wants his concerns treated seriously, and he is an unusually eloquent heckler. And here the Utah analogy breaks down, for dissent in Utah is usually as bland and silly as its targets and far more accommodating. Worster crafts sentences as finely and precisely as any historian writing today. He sharpens them into weapons, and this makes him a formidable a polemicist. When he attacks, his targets bleed. He is not afraid of taking unfashionable stands, and he is not accommodating. The ideas of most interest in these essays are not currently in historical fashion. First of all, Worster contends there has been no nature in most American histories. The "blooming, buzzing, howling world of nature that surrounds us" (p. 63) doesn't make its way into history books. Worster does not mean that before the rise of environmental history there were no intellectual histories of nature, no studies of perception or representation. He means that there was no sense in these histories that dirt, earthworms, rocks, mountains, buffalo, and cattle had any intimate connection or involvement with human life. "There was no nature in their history---no sense of the presence and influence of the land on past human experience, no soil, no countryside, no smell of fungus, no sound of spring peepers trilling from the marsh at dusk" (p. vii). Second, Worster's demand that nature be included is not just a desire that we return to a focus on material life. Worster wants an "antimaterialistic materialism" (p. ix). Nature has a transcendent meaning for Worster. Several of these essays are about soil and water, but in looking at soil and water Donald Worster is searching for a better, indeed an ideal, human relation to the world. He is interested in talking about the purpose and meaning of human life and society and is convinced that meaning is inseparable from nature. Third, and finally, Worster seeks in nature, through his "antimaterialistic materialism," an order, which once discovered, can provide the model for our own actions. The last three essays in this book---on modern ecology, on the roots of modern environmentalism, and the title essay on "The Wealth of Nature"---are about order. These ideas underlie most of Worster's work, but they are most clearly seen here. Material life, transcendent meaning, and natural order are not exactly the reigning concerns of American historians these days. And, indeed, as Worster himself points out, they are hardly ideas accepted by all environmental historians. I am an environmental historian with a longstanding admiration for Donald Worster's work, but it struck me in reading these essays how critical I am of the work of many of the figures Worster admires in this book: Walter Prescott Webb and Karl Wittfogel, Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Berry. There seems to be no canon for environmental historians. Perhaps the most basic of the ideas that inform this book is Worster's attack on the elimination of nature from most academic history. Quoting Worster gives some sense of his style and passion. He complains of a division of academic labor that gives "water cycles, deforestation, animal populations, soil nutrient gains and losses" (p. 19) to science while history gets "tariffs, diplomatic negotiation, union-management conflict, race and gender" (p. 20). It is a balkanization that has done "enormous damage" not only "to our intellectual and moral life" but to "planet Earth" (pp. 19--20). His goal is to adopt a wider focus. "The reorganization of nature, not merely of society, is what we must uncover" (p. 57). Such assertions currently tend to get caricatured as misanthropic and elitist, as being callously disdainful of human struggles for a better life, as valuing trees or insects or owls more than human beings. This sense of traitors in our midst in humanity's struggle with nature has brought together a rather odd coalition to condemn those who have shown insufficient enthusiasm for individual enterprise or material progress and too much concern for environmental costs. Rush Limbaugh, Alston Chase, and some urban historians may or may not agree on much else, but they all know that such a stress on nature puts humanity and its achievements under siege and demands swift denunciation. But Worster, in calling for the inclusion of nature in history, is not calling for the exclusion of humans. In looking at the reorganization of nature, he is most definitely concerned with the reorganization of society. In calling attention to the exploitation of nature he is not defending the exploitation of human beings. Indeed, he has tried in much of his work to argue that the two are intimately connected. Where things do get a little trickier is in what the marriage of natural science and history might involve and what is the nature of the "Nature" they reveal. It is a little surprising to read the author of Nature's Economy talking about people stepping outside of culture and saying that "science can help historians see beyond the framework of culture, help us appreciate the role of those autonomous material forces, processes, and beings that we call nature" (p. 24). But the Donald Worster of Nature's Economy is still also present in these essays as when he argues that "All of ecology's models of nature derive at last from culture" (p. 68). In these essays Worster is not, I think, abandoning a cultural analysis of science, but he is rejecting the kind of radical subjectivity in which all that exists are competing representations of the world, and one representation is ultimately as good as another. But since such discussions of science are often more tangential than central in these essays, the particular statements Worster offers often tend to be polemical and stand as obiter dictums. His own best work and instincts point, however, toward a more sophisticated formulation, such a formulation, apparent, for example, in the work of Katherine Hayles. Hayles analyzes science as a cultural activity but at the same time takes seriously its ability to negate some representations in favor of others. Science does represent the natural world and the representation is cultural, but its generalizations still hold across time and culture.1 For Worster, in any case, the importance of maintaining Nature as a collection of "autonomous material forces" is itself primarily a cultural issue. Only an autonomous nature can be a clear source of moral order and provide the grounding for his anti-materialist materialism. This desire for an autonomous nature explains Worster's hostility toward analyses which argue for substantial Indian impact on the western hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans. He wants an "undomesticated" continent, "wild or nearly wild" (p. 5), as the setting for his larger story. A nature always already compromised by human activities cannot be the pristine source of moral authority that Worster needs. And for Donald Worster nature's moral authority exists because material nature teaches larger lessons which transcend materialism. The primary lesson is one of balance, and balance is the source of the larger order Worster finds in the natural world. "The world of nature constitutes a pattern of order which we are bound to respect and care for, perhaps even risk our lives to save" (p. 173). Such ideas of a received order and balance are, as Worster admits "profoundly conservative" (p. 75). Indeed, he thinks the idea of such an order may be integral to the human mind. Scientifically, it is an order Worster found in Clementian ecology and, also, in the ecology of Eugene Odum. The abandonment of such older formulations of ecology by modern scientists has disturbed Worster, and it has led to his most probing writings about ecology since Nature's Economy. In "The Ecology of Order and Chaos" Worster, often brilliantly, returns to a cultural analysis of a science that threatens his own deeply held beliefs. It is in this discussion of ecology, here and in another essay---"Restoring a Natural Order," that one of the paradoxes of Worster's own thought emerges. On the one hand, Worster wants a merger of science and history. He wants a naturalization of history. He, himself, began his career with a cultural analysis of scientific thought about nature, and his own analysis of modern ecology is primarily a historical critique that seeks to locate scientific ideas about nature within a shifting culture. But on the other hand, what Worster doesn't want is historicizing within science itself. He attributes the skepticism scientists display toward natural order to "the radical historicizing that has been going on in the science of ecology" (pp. 175- -76). Although you might think that their mutual fascination with a constantly changing and contingent past is precisely what would make cooperation between ecologists and historians so fruitful, it is the shift of ecology toward contingency and history that alarms Donald Worster. The taint that Donald Worster, the historian, finds in science is history. History brings to science precisely the relativism that Worster wants nature to transcend. Historicizing, he explains, in a revealing passage "can be a dangerous habit of thought, leaving people bewildered and uncertain to the point of paralysis, demolishing all the cherished myths of tradition but leaving nothing in their place. Now that it has become so thoroughly embued [sic] with historical consciousness, ecology runs the risk of total relativism" (p. 176). A historicized nature, far from providing a model of order, might only present us with a shifting kaleidoscope of landscapes, each contingent, each as "natural" as the other. And so Worster shifts his hopes for maintaining a natural order from science to a larger "aesthetic apprehension" that will allow us to see the whole instead of the pieces (p. 181). This aesthetic apprehension Worster seems to indicate is "primal" and seemingly safe from the historicizing that has corrupted ecology (p. 182). Donald Worster himself is hardly a conservative but what is striking in this book is how the pursuit of his own premises to their logical ends has led to a somewhat uneasy accommodation with a set of very conservative ideas: order, tradition, particularly religious traditions, and an acceptance of limits. Indeed he defines an acceptance of limits---"limits to population, limits to technology, and limits to appetite and greed"---as being at the heart of an uncompromising environmentalism (p. 143). Sometimes in these essays I found myself thinking of him, particularly in his attacks on progress, as an environmental Christopher Lasch. Like Lasch, Worster is a critical and engaged scholar who has taken a series of positions that are hard to characterize in simple political terms. They could be either radical or conservative or, more likely, an idiosyncratic mix. Ultimately, the goal of "material simplicity and spiritual richness" (p. 143) that informs Worster's study of nature and society is antithetical to American conservatism. Worster's hostility toward capitalism (even in the guise of sustainable development), economic individualism, and elitism remain unchanged. His commitment in these essays to a Protestant moral activism and, an "egalitarian individualism," which he sees at the root of environmentalism, is deep. Both are tools for radically changing society rather than preserving a status quo. Indeed, Worster is ready to throw out the "progressive, secular, and materialist philosophy" on which Western Civilization has rested for the last three hundred years. It is, he thinks, "deeply flawed and ultimately destructive to ourselves and the whole fabric of life on the planet" (p. 143). Worster is, in short, a complicated thinker who has, depending on your point of view, a gift or a weakness for making eloquently simple statements. It is only when many of these statements are grouped together, as in these essays, that the full spectrum of Donald Worster's thought, with all its interesting premises and paradoxes, with all its implications for both society and history, becomes exposed to view. Richard White teaches in the history department at the University of Washington. He is currently at work on a book of essays about labor, energy, and the environment on the Columbia River. 1. N. Katherine Hayles, "Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theatre of Representation," New Orleans Review 18 (Spring 1991): 76--85, and "Introduction: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science," in Hayles, ed., Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (1991), pp. 1--33. Magazine: Kennedy Institute of Ethics Issue: March 1994 Title: Theological Ethics, Moral Philosophy, And Public Moral Discourse Author: Albert R. Jonsen This article is based on the annual Andr_ E. Hellegers Lecture at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. THEOLOGICAL ETHICS, MORAL PHILOSOPHY, AND PUBLIC MORAL DISCOURSE* Albert R. Jonsen ABSTRACT. The advent and growth of bioethics in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s precipitated an era of public moral discourse, that is, the deliberate attempt to analyze and formulate moral argument for use in public policy. The language for rational discussion of moral matters evolved from the parent disciplines of moral philosophy and theological ethics, as well as from the idioms of a secular, pluralistic world that was searching for policy answers to difficult bioethical questions. This article explores the basis and content of the unique contributions of both theological and philosophical ethics to the development of public moral discourse. In July 1964, Joseph Fuchs, a renowned Catholic moral theologian and a professor at the Gregorian University in Rome, was among the guest faculty of an ethics course I was teaching at the Summer School of the University of San Francisco. Walking across campus one morning, Father Fuchs hailed me and told me that he had, on the previous day, received a phone call inviting him to join several other leading theologians in a meeting with Senator Ted Kennedy and Robert Kennedy at Hyannisport. Robert Kennedy was running for the New York Senate, and the Kennedy family and their political advisors wished to discuss the position that a Catholic politician should take on abortion. Father Fuchs then astonished me by saying that since he knew nothing of American politics, he wanted me to accompany him. If I would agree, he would accept the invitation on the condition that I come as his companion. I agreed and they agreed. Two days later, the distinguished German theologian and the American novice travelled to Cape Cod to join Catholic theologians Robert Drinan, then Dean of Boston College Law School; Richard McCormick; Charles Curran; and a bishop whose name I do not recall; as well as Andre Hellegers, an obstetrician and a fetal physiologist, who was to be the technical advisor. We spent two days discussing the Catholic doctrine on abortion and the American political scene. Those conversations marked an extraordinary moment in the acrimonious, and now violent, debate over these issues. As best I can recall, the dominant influence on the discussion was the thinking of an American theologian who was not present, John Courtney Murray. Father Murray's views about the relationship between Catholic doctrine and a democratic, pluralistic society had put him in trouble with the Vatican, but appealed powerfully to many of Catholic intellectuals who lived in the democratic, pluralistic United States. He championed the thesis, then unfamiliar to many Catholic theologians, that even committed believers in a dogmatic faith could participate in the democratic dialogue of a secular society. Even moral evils in the social and political order might be tolerated, he asserted, if this was necessary for the preservation of social peace, although given a comprehensive assessment of the social situation, toleration must be the lesser evil. Murray believed this to have been the long teaching of the scholastic theologians and supported it by a citation from Pope Pius XII: The duty of repressing religious and moral error cannot be an ultimate norm of action. It must be subordinated to higher and more general norms which in some circumstances permit, and even perhaps make it appear the better course of action, that error should not be impeded in order to promote a greater good. (Murray 1960, pp. 61-62) Our colloquium at Hyannisport, as I recall it, was influenced by this position and reached the conclusion that Catholic politicians in a democratic polity might advocate legal restriction on abortion, but in so doing might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances, if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order. This position, which, of course, is much more nuanced than I have stated, seemed to have informed the politics of the Kennedys. I recall this event, at which I was more an awed listener than a participant, not to introduce a discussion of the tortured issue of abortion and public policy, but to initiate some reflections on the contribution that the disciplines of ethics, both theological and philosophical, make to public moral discourse, a contribution that has been notable in bioethics. Father Murray championed a view that dialogue about moral matters should and must be fostered in a democratic policy, even between believers and secularists. In his profound writings about the public consensus, he stated "the act whereby the...consensus is formulated is not the act of inquiry into the facts...it is an act of judgment, an exercise in moral affirmation or denial" (Murray 1953, p. 119). The Hyannisport gathering predated the beginnings of bioethics and even predated what I wish to call public moral discourse. Yet, in embryonic form--if I might be pardoned the metaphor--it anticipated the growth of the bioethics movement and the influence it has had on public policy about ethical issues, for it asked how those holding a clear moral belief could translate that belief into policy within a pluralistic, secular society. Certainly, from time immemorial, people have discussed ethical problems. They do so with intimates, with counsellors and confessors, with casual acquaintances at cocktail parties and in bars. They comment casually, debate vigorously, and shout vociferously about racism, war, sex, cheating and lying, punishment, and pornography. This perpetual conversation is, for the most part, informal and unorganized. We never learn to talk ethics the way we learn to do arithmetic; even the more formal sorts of ethics discussion--e.g., in sermons or seminars-- have a random air about them. This form of discourse, I call popular moral discourse. By public moral discourse, I mean the effort to give shape and order to popular moral discourse by establishing a forum for the discussion, by attempting to impose some method on it, and by aiming at conclusions that can be used in public policy. While popular moral discourse echoes through human history, public moral discourse is rather rare. Occasionally, political bodies, such as Parliaments and Congresses, have engaged in it and educational and religious institutions may encourage it, but the deliberate attempt to analyze and formulate moral argument for policy purposes is, I think, a relatively modern activity. The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, established in 1972, was the first example in the United States of what I am calling public moral discourse. A public body was explicitly charged to formulate recommendations for Federal regulations that would "protect the rights and welfare of human subjects of research sponsored by the Federal government" (P.L. 93-348). The charge included a mandate "to determine the ethical and moral principles governing research with human subjects" (P.L. 93-348). There had been a few earlier examples of government bodies charged with examining an explicitly moral issue, such as President Nixon's ill-fated Pornography Commission, but there had been no explicit attempt to bring formal ethical analysis to bear on the problem. The National Commission had two members who were academically trained in ethics, both of them from theological rather than philosophical ethics. It immediately hired a well known moral philosopher, Stephen Toulmin, as a consultant and, after his departure, brought on Tom Beauchamp. It relied on the scholarship of many theologians and philosophers, who wrote papers on special topics, testified, and criticized drafts of policies. The popular moral discourse about the abuse of human subjects of research was transformed into public moral discourse. The Commission, which sat from 1974 to 1978, was followed by the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and in Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which carried on similar ethical discourse and relied heavily on the advice of ethicists. Many other similar bodies have come into being, with greater or less success. At present, legislation is pending to reinstate the Ethics Advisory Board at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and calls are heard for the establishment of a new Presidential Commission. It is curious that these efforts at public moral discourse have dealt exclusively with matters of medicine and medical science. While it is conceivable that environmental or racial or commercial moral problems could be dealt with in a similar way, they have not been. It is also curious that an academic field, bioethics, has developed around these questions, while no similar field has come into being in other disciplines, such as law, education, or business. True, many are concerned about ethics in these areas and many write and teach about it, but there is no discernable academic field, as there is in biomedicine. Nevertheless, a vigorous academic activity has grown up over the last two decades that goes by the general name, "bioethics." The academicians who participate in it come mostly from philosophy and theology, though lawyers, physicians, and social scientists also contribute. It is unquestionably a hybrid discipline, if it may be considered a discipline at all. Yet, despite its uncertain academic credentials, its practitioners have contributed to public moral discourse in ways that neither academic philosophy in its speculative mode nor moral theology in its denominational mode have done. Why has bioethics, as an amalgam of philosophy and theology, been able to make its voice heard in public moral discourse? My answer calls me back to the origins of bioethics and the state of both moral philosophy and theological ethics at the end of the 1960s. I see in those disciplines, at that point in their history, a plausible explanation of their role in the public moral discourse over the ethics of medicine, health care, and the life sciences. In the late 1960s, bioethical questions began to be asked in a public way. The debates over selection for the scarce medical resource of dialysis, the disclosure of arguments over research with human subjects, and the efforts to reformulate the definition of death, which was required to deal with organ transplantation, were in the news. The visions of modifying human behavior by drugs and surgery and even human nature by genetic manipulation were, if not on the news pages, certainly in the Sunday supplements. These developments raised ethical questions, but it was not clear exactly what the disciplines of moral theology and moral philosophy had to do with understanding or resolving them. I recall my own puzzlement in 1971 when I was invited to serve on the Artificial Heart Assessment Panel of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a precursor of the National Commission. I not only knew nothing about artificial hearts; I had no idea how my training as a philosopher and theologian might contribute to the recommendations of the Panel. Some nascent ideas about informed consent and fairness in the selection of subjects were in the air and I could exploit them, but the role of formal philosophical analysis was beyond me. I was astonished when another member of the panel, Clark Havighurst, a law professor, suggested that John Rawls's newly published book, A Theory of Justice (1971), could be used as a method for analysis. I had not read Rawls, but did so immediately and found my puzzlement deepening. I could not imagine how the "original position," the "veil of ignorance," and "the difference principle" could shed much light on whether the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should pursue artificial heart research. Today, after Norman Daniels's (1985) superb reworking of Rawlsian theory for health care ethics, I might be more competent at seeing the connection. However, the cloud of unknowing slowly began to clear. As some of us were invited into public moral discourse by appointment and consultancy, and others invited themselves by offering cogent commentary and critique, we began to think and talk in an a pidgin language, formed partly from the words and thoughts of our parent disciplines and partly from the idioms of a secular, pluralistic world that was searching for policy answers rather than speculative opinion or dogmatic deliverances. Quite fortuitously, the parent disciplines of moral philosophy and theological ethics had reached a point in their respective intellectual histories that provided the resources for the new language of communication. Each of the disciplines lent a quite different element, but together they made possible a lingua franca for rational discussion about moral matters in the public forum of a pluralistic society. First, theological ethics has long been an essential part of the reflection of the Christian churches on their life, belief, and practice. (I shall discuss only the Christian churches, having too much respect for Judaic, Islamic, and the Oriental religions to write of what I know so little.) In the 1950s and 1960s, Catholic and Protestant ethics, which had been intensely denominational, splintering the common message of the Gospel into multiple ecclesiastical and sectarian interpretations, emerged from a long dogmatic and denominational slumber. Richard and Reinhardt Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Helmut Thielike, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Emil Brunner shook the Protestant tradition out of homiletic simplicity; Bernard Haering, Gerard Gilleman, Philip Delhaye, and Franz Bockle challenged the comfortable clarity of Catholic natural law morality. Within both traditions, there was an urgency to recover scriptural inspiration, to reconnect with theological doctrine, and, above all, to discover a moral message that spoke prophetically to the world as well as redemptively to the conscience. Those of us who read theological ethics in that time of ferment were excited by the vitality of ideas and by the honesty of self-criticism. It is impossible to capture in brief compass the variety and vitality of those ideas, represented by many authors in distinct theological idioms and learned by diverse students. Still, I wish to lift out one central theme, heard in different tones and accents throughout the literature, that, in my view, prepared the theological ethicists of that era to enter public moral discourse. The theme that arose was the constant invocation of polarities: God-world, grace-sin, nature-grace, judgment- redemption, and love-justice. These polarities were familiar to Christian theology--with Augustine's "Two Cities" and Luther's "Law-Gospel" being among the most influential examples--and many of the theological ethicists of the 1950s and 1960s found in them a forceful methodology for eliciting the dynamic tensions involved in moral judgment. Because these polarities structure the salvific message of Hebrew and Christian scripture, I call them "kerygmatic polarities." Unquestionably, each theologian selected the terms of polarity that suited his tradition or personal penchant, but the popularity of this style left its impression on me and, I assume, on many others in the same milieu. It is possible, I suggest, to divest this stylistic and methodological device of its theological garb and use it as an instrument to open the complexities of moral discourse. The kerygmatic polarities can be secularized. If pushed for ultimate justification of such a view, the theological origins would probably emerge, but even without these faith and intellectual foundations, the habit of approaching moral problems as complex human situations that incorporate polarities in tension is very serviceable. It is particularly serviceable for the nascent issues of bioethics, for these almost always are created by scientific advances that both bring benefit and cause harm. The first set of questions that engaged the attention of theological and philosophical ethicists arose from "the new biology," a term that usually referred to the rapid transformation of genetics from a statistical to a biological science with the attendant implications for control over the evolution of the human species and worries about eugenics. These issues, which theologians such as James Gustafson and Karl Rahner, as well as philosophers such as Hans Jonas and Martin Golding, noted, were ripe for polaristic analysis: they were promising yet perilous, creative yet risky, and liberating yet an invitation to tyranny. The questions about human experimentation were fraught with similar polarities, as were most of the scientific and medical advances, such as transplantation and life support, that gave rise to moral concerns about the prolongation of life. These issues were often described as dilemmas--questions to which either answer is equally right and wrong--and their ambiguity stressed. However, the ethicist must attempt to redefine dilemmas and to relieve ambiguity wherever possible, and the method of polarities opened the way. An essay by James Gustafson, published in 1970, reflected on the new biology in just this fashion, raising a series of contrasting propositions and attempting to find a middle ground in which the tension of the contrasts was preserved, while a possible resolution was presented. He wrote: Our contrasting propositions follow: a) The rights of individuals are sacred and primary, and therefore under no circumstances, are they to be violated in favor of benefits to others...b) Anticipated consequences judged in terms of the 'good' that will be achieved or the 'evil' that will be avoided ought to determine policy and action, regardless of the restrictions on individual rights that this might require. c) Propositions a and b are both one sided. Decisions require considerations both of individual rights and of benefits to others. Thus, one of the two can be the base line and the other can function as the principle which justifies restriction on, or the exceptions to, the base line. (Gustafson 1976 [1970], p. 266) He then commented, "...it is important to keep the polarity between them more clearly in mind for the practical benefit of forcing a sharp awareness of the seriousness and complexity of the issues" (Gustafson 1976 [1970], p. 269). Almost subconsciously, I used this approach from the time I became engaged in public moral discourse. I believe that a review of the writings of other theologically trained ethicists also would reveal the influence of this methodology on their analyses of bioethical questions. It is my hypothesis that the classical theological polarities, stripped of their theological idioms, equipped the theological ethicists for public and secular moral discourse. They came armed with an analytic approach that was not dogmatic, but was suited to the nature of the moral questions under scrutiny. Other aspects of the theological ethics of that era, such as interest in "the normatively human" and the acceptance of the "worldly," namely, human science, history, and experience were also important and deserve further examination. As theological ethics was finding its new voice, moral philosophy also was seeking a new way. The great systematic ethics that moved majestically from Spinoza to Kant to Hegel and to Sidgwick had been under heavy attack by the logical positivists in the 1920s and early 1930s. The linguistic philosophers eliminated normative ethics and replaced it with metaethics in the 1930s and 1940s and then, in the corrosive manner of analytic thought, revealed the inanity of ethical naturalism and non-naturalism alike. Metaethics was as far from moral commitment and ethical concern as was metaphysics. Although metaethics was still lingering in the philosophical air in the 1960s, a new interest in normative ethics had appeared among those philosophers who realized that one of the traditional functions of moral philosophy--reflection on the motives and consequences of diverse human acts--had to be revived. In the effort to do this, philosophers such as Henry David Aiken, Richard Brandt, Kurt Baier, Roderick Firth, William Frankena, and Paul Taylor began to fashion an approach to ethical analysis that relied on two human characteristics that were long cherished by philosophers in the Western tradition, namely, rationality and autonomy. These are unquestionably deep and complex notions, wrangled over by philosophers for many centuries. Still, the normative ethicists hammered them into shapes that would make it possible, they thought, to render reasonable judgments about moral choices. Among the most discussed of these approaches was the concept of the "ideal observer." Borrowing from 18th century philosophers David Hume and Frances Hutcheson, Roderick Firth (1952) sketched out the ideal epistemic conditions for moral judgment. The ideal observer thesis proposed that the assertion "x is right" means "if anyone were, in respect to x and y (two moral options), fully informed and vividly imaginative, impartial, in a calm frame of mind and otherwise normal, he (or she) would approve x." While Firth's formulation itself was much debated, the ideal of a person, who could view the options impartially and with full information about their consequences, worked its way into the new normative moral philosophy. Richard Brandt (1959) proposed a version of the ideal observer that he called, "qualified attitude," and today, Rawls's "reflective equilibrium" bears marks of this description of epistemic conditions for choice (Rawls 1971, p. 183f.) In addition, moral philosophers, concerned about the rational justification for moral choices in a theory of choice, were also concerned about showing how moral choices were logically connected with whatever theoretical basis was selected. David Gauthier, Stephen Toulmin, and R. M. Hare, all quite different in orientation, explained how reasons were to be joined with assertions through logical connections. In reaction to the common view that ethical statements were little more that expressions of feeling, logical consistency became an important feature of ethical reasoning. Thus, students reading moral philosophy in the 1960s learned from metaethics that moral terms could be evacuated of all meaning and moral reasoning deconstructed; but they learned from the reborn normative ethics that in reality, as distinguished from metareality, the conditions for rational moral argument could be laid out in various ways, all of them marked in some way by the dominant characteristics of rationality, impartiality and information. The moral philosophers who trained in the 1960s and early 1970s and entered bioethics-- Daniel Callahan, Danner Clouser, Tristram Engelhardt, Ruth Macklin, and Arthur Caplan--were certainly familiar with these ideas, even as they were conscious of their complexity and diversity at the hands of various philosophers. I am not claiming that any of these philosophical bioethicists adhered to the specific doctrines of "ideal observer" or "qualified attitude," but rather that they were shaped by the underlying themes of rationality and autonomy. They were able to bring to public moral discourse an approach that was not doctrinaire and that had the virtue of lifting the heated topics of debate to a realm of cooler, more objective discourse. Moral philosophers and theological ethicists converged on the new questions and moved into the public forum of moral discourse that surrounded them. I propose that, due to the development of their respective disciplines, each brought just the right components, which, when blended, made for successful public moral discourse. The theologians saw the issues in the light of polarities, that is, advances in biomedical science were, at the same time, examples of human progress and creativity as well as temptations to hybris and destruction. Analysis must proceed by a dialectic that reveals both poles. The philosophers brought a commitment to rational discourse that requires impartial examination of the various moral assertions that are offered to justify or criticize biomedical advances and prospects. Clear and consistent reasoning must be offered for positions espoused. Together, although without collusion or even conscious plan, they took up the various questions posed by public moral discourse and, divesting themselves of the pure languages of their native disciplines, forged a common mode of communication, blending the critical commitment of theological ethics with the philosophers' concern about conditions of rationality. In so doing, they were able to cooperate and to contribute both commitment and rationality to public moral discourse. They began to do in practice what John Courtney Murray proposed in theory, initiate and sustain a dialogue in which representatives of diverse commitments speak rationally with each other for the commonweal. REFERENCES Brandt, Richard. 1959. Ethical Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Daniels, Norman. 1985. Just Health Care. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Firth, Roderick. 1952. Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 12: 317- 45. Gustafson, James M. 1976 [1970]. Basic Issues in Biomedical Science. In Theology and Christian Ethics, pp. 245-71. Philadelphia: United Church Press. Originally published in Soundings 53: 151-80, 1970. Murray, John Courtney. 1960. We Hold These Truths. New York: Sheed and Ward. (Quotation of Pope Pius XII: Allocution to Italian Jurists, 6 December 1953. Acta Apostolica Sedes 45: 794-802, p. 799.) Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Magazine: Journal of Democracy Issue: April 1994 Title: Broken Promises: Hong Kong Faces 1997 Authors: Martin C.M. Lee & Tom Boasberg BROKEN PROMISES: HONG KONG FACES 1997 Martin C.M. Lee & Tom Boasberg Martin C.M. Lee is chairman of the United Democrats of Hong Kong and a member of Hong Kong's Legislative Council. A Queen's Counsel and former chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association, he received the most votes of any candidate in Hong Kong's first democratic elections in 1991. Tom Boasberg, a recent graduate of Stanford Law School, served as Mr. Lee's senior assistant from 1990 to 1992. During a century and a half of British colonial rule, the people of Hong Kong have been denied the experience of democratic government. At the same time, however, this bustling port city has established itself as the freest place in AsiaQnot only for trade and commerce, but also with respect to such personal and civil liberties as the right to a fair trial and freedom of the press. The people of Hong Kong are determined to expand their rights to include that of democratic self-government, for they fear that without democratic elections they may lose the rule of law and human rights guarantees that they have long enjoyed and so highly cherish. In three short years, sovereignty over the six million inhabitants of Hong Kong will be transferred from Britain to the People's Republic of China (PRC), and neither China nor Britain is honoring their joint promise that Hong Kong could look forward to exercising full autonomy over its own internal affairs. If this promise remains unfulfilled, then the light of freedom and hope that Hong Kong represents for China's 1.1 billion people may well be extinguished. In 1984, the governments of the People's Republic of China and Great Britain signed the Joint Declaration on the Future of Hong Kong, in which Britain pledged to transfer sovereignty over the Crown Colony of Hong Kong to the PRC on 1 July 1997. In the Joint Declaration, China promised that Hong Kong would retain its capitalist economy for at least 50 years after 1997, and that the people of Hong Kong would be allowed to govern themselves in all matters except defense and foreign affairs, which would be the responsibility of the central government in Beijing. Deng Xiaoping encapsulated the PRC's declared intentions in a trio of four-Chinese-character phrases: Beijing's policy toward Hong Kong would be grounded on the principle of Rone country, two systems,S meaning that RHong Kong people will rule Hong KongS with Ra high degree of autonomy.S For its part, Britain promised that it would use the 13-year transition period between the 1984 Joint Declaration and the 1997 transfer of sovereignty to transform its unelected colonial administration into a government democratically elected by the people of Hong Kong. Ten years after the Joint Declaration, however, and only three years before the handover, it has become clear that neither Britain nor China is going to honor the promises that each made in the Joint Declaration. Almost before the ink was dry on the treaty, the PRC Government began to backpedal from its promises of self-rule for Hong Kong. The Beijing-drafted Hong Kong Basic Law, which is to serve as the territory's post-1997 constitution, reneges on the Joint Declaration's promise of democratic elections and ensures that Beijing will be able to exercise authoritarian control over Hong Kong. As 1997 draws closer, the communist regime's threats and meddling grow stronger by the day. In order both to appease the PRC and to maintain control over Hong Kong during the twilight of its colonial rule, Britain has disavowed its own transition responsibility of developing democratic institutions in the colony. It has promised Beijing that it will allow for no more than a third of the colony's 60-seat legislature (known formally as the Legislative Council, or Legco) to be democratically elected before 1997, and executive power remains firmly in the hands of the British governor appointed from London. While Hong Kong's latest governor, former Conservative party chairman Chris Patten, has angered Beijing by proposing some modest last-minute democratic reforms, the fury probably has more to do with Patten's rhetoric and style than with the actual content of his limited proposals. It is imperative that Britain use the final years of its rule to respond at last to Hong Kong's need for genuinely democratic institutions. China, likewise, must be persuaded to amend its authoritarian Basic Law and allow Hong Kong the autonomy promised in the 1984 treaty. If the PRC attempts, as it is now threatening, to impose its dictatorial rule on Hong Kong, there will likely be serious conflict between the communist government and the well-educated, cosmopolitan, and heretofore free people of Hong Kong. The Joint Declaration Hong Kong's three partsQHong Kong Island itself, the Kowloon Peninsula, and the New Territories (the area between Kowloon and Mainland China that constitutes approximately 90 percent of the colony's total land mass of just over a thousand square kilometers)Qwere acquired by Britain through three separate nineteenth-century treaties forced on China's Qing emperors. While Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded in perpetuity to Britain in 1842 and 1860 [--- Unable To Translate Graphic ---] respectively, the decaying Qing Dynasty in 1898 granted Britain only a 99-year lease over the New Territories. It is this lease that expires in 1997. Although the communist leaders who founded the PRC in 1949 never recognized the legitimacy of these three Runequal treaties,S neither did they seek to force Britain out of Hong Kong. From 1949 to his death in 1976, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chairman Mao Zedong's position on Hong Kong was simply that the PRC would take back Hong Kong Rwhen the time is ripe.S The usefulness of Hong Kong as a source of foreign currency and a window on the world apparently outweighed the insult that the British colony's existence presented to the CCP's nationalist and socialist principles. In September 1982, Britain's then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made her first visit to Beijing to raise the question of Hong Kong's future with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Fresh from Britain's victory over Argentina in the Falklands War, Thatcher adopted an aggressively nationalistic pose, stressing Britain's sovereign treaty rights to rule Hong Kong rather than the rights of the people of the territory. In two years of difficult Sino- British negotiations that followed the Thatcher visit, Britain offered to recognize the PRC's formal sovereignty over Hong Kong in exchange for continued British administration of the colony after 1997. China refused, insisting that Hong Kong was part of Chinese national territory that Britain must return. In two years of talks, no representatives of Hong Kong's six million people were ever consulted or allowed to play any part; all discussions took place in secret between British and PRC diplomats. In September 1984, Britain and China initialed the Joint Declaration, in which Britain agreed to transfer sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997 and China made detailed promises as to how it would implement its stated policy of Rone country, two systems.S Despite its obligations under the UN Charter and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Britain refused Hong Kong the right to determine its own fate. The people of Hong Kong never had a chance to vote on or amend the provisions of the Joint Declaration. It was presented as a Rdone dealS made by the outgoing and incoming sovereign powers. Nevertheless, the detail and substance of the Joint Declaration exceeded Hong Kong's expectations. The Joint Declaration proclaims that after 1997 Hong Kong will become a Special Administrative Region of the PRC, and that it Rwill enjoy a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defense affairs, which are the responsibilities of the Central People's Government.S The Declaration promises Hong Kong wide-ranging economic autonomy, avowing that the territory can keep its capitalist economy, remain a free port, retain its own currency, participate in multilateral organizations such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), have independent finances, and remain free from any taxes from Beijing. On the whole, therefore, the treaty makes clear the importance that China places upon Hong Kong's remaining the capitalist engine that has done so much to help drive China's remarkable post-1979 economic growth. While the political and legal autonomy granted to the territory under the Joint Declaration is not quite so extensive, the treaty's provisions do establish the system under which RHong Kong people will rule Hong Kong.S According to the Joint Declaration, the Legislative Council, which in 1984 was entirely appointed by the colonial government, is to be fully elected by 1997. The chief executive (the post-1997 governor) is to be selected Ron the basis of the results of elections or consultations held locally.S Although this clause leaves Beijing able to refuse to allow elections for the chief executive in favor of a controlled RconsultationS process, the treaty at least requires that the legislature be fully elected and that executive authorities Rabide by the lawS and Rbe accountable to the legislature.S Equally important, the territory is to continue to be governed under its existing common-law system, and the Rlaws currently in force in Hong Kong will remain basically unchanged.S As the treaty stipulates: RRights and freedoms, including those of the person, of speech, of press, of assembly, of association, of travel, of movement, of correspondence, of strike, of choice of occupation, of academic research, and of religious belief will be ensured by law.S In order to guarantee that these freedoms do not share the fate of the similar list of promised freedoms enumerated in the PRC's Constitution, the Joint Declaration provides that Hong Kong's courts shall continue to be independent of the government. Although the Chinese government was not prepared to allow appeals from Hong Kong courts to the Privy Council in London to continue after July 1997, it did agree to Hong Kong's establishment of its own Court of Final Appeal. This new court is to have the power of final judgment over Hong Kong law; to bolster its independence from the government, it is allowed to invite distinguished foreign judges from other common-law countries to sit on its benches. Perhaps the greatest flaw of the Joint Declaration is that it gives to China's National People's Congress (NPC), and not to the people of Hong Kong, the task of embodying the treaty's provisions in a RBasic LawS that will serve as the territory's post- 1997 constitution. Although it may have been somewhat naive to expect the communist regime to fulfill its promises, the great detail of the Joint Declaration and its status as a binding international treaty nonetheless created high hopes among the people of Hong Kong. The last decade, however, has demonstrated just how unfounded such hopes really were. Democratization versus RConvergenceS After the signing of the Joint Declaration in September 1984, Britain was faced with the responsibility of reforming its colonial government along democratic lines. In particular, the British had to transform the wholly appointed Legco into a wholly elected one by 1997. As Richard Luce, Minister of State with Special Responsibility for Hong Kong, pledged to the House of Commons on 4 December 1984, during the ratification debate on the Joint Declaration: RWe all fully accept that we should build up a firmly based democratic administration in Hong Kong in the years between now and 1997.S While Britain's original intentions may have been good, it soon retreated in the face of China's vociferous objections and the colonial government's own reluctance to share political power with local Hong Kong representatives. Further pressure against democratization emanated from members of the colony's business elite, who traditionally had been appointed to the colonial Legco and feared the prospect of open democratic competition. In 1985, therefore, Britain contented itself with introducing indirect elections to Legco through extremely limited constituencies such as business and financial groups and professional associations. Britain labeled these rotten boroughsQmost of which had less than a thousand votersQas Rfunctional constituencies.S Their introduction was only a slight improvement over the colonial appointment system. Within months after the introduction of these indirect elections, Britain's new special minister for Hong Kong, Timothy Renton, was summoned to Beijing. He returned to Hong Kong in January 1986 announcing that thenceforth Britain's primary transition responsibility would be not building democratic institutions but rather achieving RconvergenceS with Beijing's plans for Hong Kong after 1997. Convergence was necessary, Renton argued, to achieve a Rsmooth transitionS in 1997. This passive and shortsighted notion has remained the touchstone of British policy ever since. Its inevitable result has been to allow Beijing to dictate pre-1997 policy for Hong Kong, for any failure by the colonial government to confine its reforms within the limits set down by Beijing would damage the paramount goal of convergence in 1997. In 1988, therefore, after the colonial government conducted a sham public review to determine whether to introduce democratic elections to Legco, colonial officials chose to defer to China's objections to democratic reform. Though numerous independent surveys showed a strong majority of Hong Kong citizens favoring democratic elections, the colonial rulers declared that opinion in Hong Kong was too RdividedS to permit such democratic elections before 1991Qmore than halfway through the 13-year transition period! Meanwhile, in Beijing, the NPC was drafting the Hong Kong Basic Law. In order to give the appearance of Hong Kong participation, the NPC gave 23 places on its 59-member drafting committee to representatives from Hong KongQafter making sure that most of these were longtime pro-Beijing loyalists. As the drafting process proceeded, it soon became apparent that Beijing had no intention of living up to the Joint Declaration's promises of political and judicial autonomy. Most striking was Beijing's contention that the promise of RelectionsS to Legco did not in any way imply open and direct balloting. Rather, communist leaders argued that RindirectS elections were more desirable and pointed approvingly to the easily controllable Rfunctional constituenciesS that the British had introduced in 1985. As the drafting process neared its close, the PRC and Hong Kong alike were profoundly shaken by the Chinese democracy movement that captured the world's attention in the spring of 1989. Inspired by the courageous example of the students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, over a million of Hong Kong's people poured into the colony's narrow streets on two successive Sundays in late May to support the students' call for democracy in China. After this call was stifled by the brutal Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 4, a great wave of anger and fear toward the government that would rule them in eight years' time swept over the colony's residents. The massacre in Beijing and the ensuing repression throughout the Mainland greatly strengthened Hong Kong's desire for a democratic political system capable of safeguarding human rights. Even Legco, which still lacked any democratically elected members, began arguing for democratic reforms that Beijing and London had already rejected. The Council unanimously agreed that Britain should allow for at least half of Legco to be democratically elected before 1997, and called on China to provide that the entire Legco membership and the chief executive be democratically elected by 2003. Both Britain and China, however, turned a deaf ear to such pleas. Hong Kong's reaction to Tiananmen raised for Britain the disturbing possibility that a democratically elected legislature in the colony would object heatedly to the terms of the 1997 handover. For Britain to be seen remanding an unwilling Hong Kong into the hands of a communist dictatorship with a known lack of regard for its treaty commitments under the Joint Declaration would be a foreign relations disaster. It became imperative, therefore, for Britain to ensure itself the cover afforded by a majority of yes-men in the colony's legislature. In Beijing, the resurgence of hard-liners following Tiananmen only stiffened the regime's opposition to democratic reforms in a territory where a million people had so recently come out to demand that the CCP give up its grip on China. Unbeknown to people in Hong Kong, Britain and China began secretly to collude for the purpose of formulating a response to the colony's call for democratic reforms. In February 1990, the two governments reached a secret deal not fully disclosed until almost three years later: Britain agreed to allow no more than a third of the Legco to be democratically elected before 1997, and also promised to raise no objections to the inclusion in the soon-to-be-completed Basic Law of severe restrictions on the democratization of the territory after 1997. In April, the NPC finally promulgated the Basic Law. As widely expected in Hong Kong, the NPC had designed an authoritarian system with power concentrated in the hands of a Beijing- appointed chief executive subject to few checks or balances from the legislative or judicial branches. In a strong display of dissatisfaction with this projected constitution, Hong Kong's Legco moved on 4 April 1990Qthe date of the Basic Law's promulgationQto call on Beijing to amend many of its central provisions. The Basic Law As Hong Kong's future constitution, the Basic Law will go into effect at the moment of turnover on 1 July 1997. It is the hope of Hong Kong that the Chinese government will agree to amend this severely flawed document before then, yet the PRC's leaders have repeatedly stated that amendments are impossibleQ indeed even illegalQbefore 1997. Most troubling is the degree to which the Basic Law departs from the Joint Declaration. In order to understand what China plans for Hong Kong after 1997Qand to see how greatly this differs from what was promised in 1984Q one need only briefly examine some core provisions of the Basic Law. A) Election of the Legislature: Despite the Joint Declaration's promise that the Hong Kong legislature Rshall be constituted by elections,S only a third of the legislators chosen in 1997 are to be democratically elected. The rest are to be selected via Rfunctional constituenciesS and an undefined RElection Committee,S which presumably will be under Beijing's control. While the Basic Law provides for marginal increases in the number of democratically elected legislators in future years, there is no promise that more than half the legislature will ever be democratically elected. The PRC government seems intent on controlling a legislative majority through its supporters in the territory. B) Appointment of the Chief Executive: The chief executive, who will possess many of the same wide-ranging powers as the current colonial governor, will not be democratically elected, but rather will be selected by a Beijing- controlled RElection CommitteeS similar to the one that will select members for the legislature. Appointed by the central government in Beijing, the chief executive also will be removable only by Beijing. C) Accountability of the Chief Executive: While the Joint Declaration provides that executive authorities up to and including the chief executive Rshall be accountable to the legislature,S the Basic Law gives Legco no power to pass a vote of no confidence in the chief executive, even as it arms the chief executive with the power unilaterally to dissolve the legislature should it fail to pass an RimportantS bill. Just as significantly, the chief executive has the power to block the introduction of any bill by a legislator if the chief executive deems the bill in question to be Rrelating to government policiesSQa potentially all- encompassing prohibition. D) Restrictions on the Judiciary: Although the Joint Declaration promises that Hong Kong courts will have the Rpower of final adjudication,S the power of interpretation over the Basic LawQthe territory's own constitutionQultimately rests not with Hong Kong courts but with the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress. This severely limits the ability of the courts to ensure governmental compliance with the Basic Law, thus calling into question the viability of the rule of law in Hong Kong. It also means that the final arbiter of the constitutional rights of the people of Hong Kong will be the communist legislature in Beijing. Beijing furthermore has reserved to itself the power to declare null and void any Hong Kong law (whether passed before or after 1997) that it deems to be in conflict with the Basic Law, a power that it has already stated it will use to repeal Hong Kong's Bill of Rights. Finally, Beijing, with London's blessing, has reinterpreted the power given under the Joint Declaration to Hong Kong's post-1997 Final Court of Appeal to Rinvite judges from other common-law jurisdictions to sit on the Court.S Under the new interpretation, the Court will be able to invite one foreign judge at most. The 1991 Elections Slightly more than a year after the promulgation of the Basic Law, in September 1991, the people of Hong Kong were finally given the opportunity to elect 18 of the 60 members of the Legislative Council democratically. The election turned into a contest between advocates of democracy (viewed with hostility by Beijing and London) and those who favored good relations with Beijing above democratic reform. The democrats' campaign theme was very clear: Hong Kong must proceed with democratic reforms before 1997 even though such reforms might alienate Beijing and be dismantled in 1997. The democrats' chief opponents, most of whom had the backing of pro-Beijing groups and business associations, opposed further reforms and placed their emphasis on good relations with China and a smooth transition in 1997. Despite the funding edge enjoyed by the pro-Beijing and business-backed candidates, the democrats swept the election. Of the 18 seats, democrats captured 17, with the United Democrats of Hong Kong winning 12. Not only was the margin of seats won overwhelming, but within individual constituencies leading democrats outpolled their rivals by margins of over 2 to 1. Governor David Wilson, one of the main architects of Britain's policy of appeasement toward China, was surprised by these results, but waited only days to appoint 17 antireform representatives to Legco as a counterweight to the elected democrats. These appointees almost immediately formed a coalition with the business representatives chosen through the functional constituencies to build an antireform majority within Legco. Equally important, the British government decided to break with longstanding practice in cases of decolonization and refused to name any local democrats to the colony's Executive Council (Exco), which serves officially as the governor's cabinet and in practice makes decisions by majority vote that he is bound to follow. As the British prepared to pull out of other former colonies (such as Ghana, Malaysia, and Kenya), they had always appointed leading winners of the first democratic legislative elections to the Executive CouncilQboth to lend legitimacy to the sunset regime and to prepare locally elected leaders for the task of governing. In Hong Kong's case, however, China's strong objections to the appointment of democrats, along with Governor Wilson's lack of enthusiasm for sharing power with elected leaders vigorously opposed to his appeasement policy, led to a British refusal to name any democrats to Exco and allow for the start of self-government. The Arrival of Governor Patten Soon after the Tory victory in Britain's April 1992 general election, Prime Minister John Major named his close personal friend and former Conservative party chairman Chris Patten as Wilson's replacement. Patten, who had failed to hold onto his own parliamentary seat in the elections, represented a departure from the pattern set by his predecessors. He was not a Mandarin Chinese-speaking diplomat whose career had been built by promoting smooth Sino-British relations, but rather a consummate politician who at the time of his appointment had practically no experience in Hong Kong or Chinese affairs. When Patten arrived in Hong Kong in July 1992, he found a colony that had changed vastly in the ten years since Britain had initiated negotiations with China over its future. The PRC's own successful experiments with economic reform had spurred a tremendous business boom in Hong Kong during the 1980s, and by 1993 the colony's per capita GDP exceeded that of Britain itself. Though business had suffered a brief downturn following the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, China had rebounded to emerge as the world's fastest-growing economy by 1992. As the principal source of China's foreign investment capital and the port through which it ships most of its exports, Hong Kong has reaped great dividends from China's growth. As Hong Kong investors poured their money into the Mainland, and as Hong Kong manufacturing companies moved their operations into neighboring Guangdong Province to take advantage of low land and labor costs, the economic border between Hong Kong and the Mainland began to fade; economists now speak of the flourishing Pearl River Delta as a single economic unit. While business confidence in the colony was at an all-time high at the time of Patten's arrival, the same could not be said for political confidence. Dissatisfaction with Britain's policy of appeasement and fear of Communist China's plans for 1997 and beyond led many in Hong Kong to demand that the new governor reverse his predecessors' policy of seeking to squelch democratic reforms. Shortly after Patten took office, all 18 democratically elected members of Legco, in a rare unanimous action, signed a letter calling on him to resist Beijing's pressure and allow at least half of Legco to be democratically elected before 1997. Simultaneously, polls showed Hong Kong residents saying yes by a 7-to-1 margin when asked if the new governor should introduce democratic reforms even at the expense of antagonizing the PRC. The feeling in Hong Kong could be summarized simply: if we whose own futures are at stake are willing to stand up to Beijing, why should Britain be so unwilling? Faced with these pressures in Hong Kong and increasingly aware of the international criticism of Britain's appeasement of Beijing, Governor Patten decided on a course of limited democratic reform. By agreeing to Beijing's demands on the most important subjects but still making substantive reforms, Patten hoped that he might square the circle and satisfy both the gerontocrats in Beijing and Hong Kong's young middle class. He began by bowing to Beijing on the two most important issues of democratic reform. In October 1992, in his first Policy Address to Legco, Patten announced that despite the unanimous wish of Legco's democratically elected members, Britain would not allow more than a third of Legco to be democratically elected before 1997. Nor, he added, would he appoint any democratically elected representatives to the Executive Council. With these two strokes, he denied Hong Kong the opportunity for any meaningful degree of democratic self-government before 1997, just as China wished. To compensate, Patten hoped to enlarge the numbers of electors represented in the indirect-election constituencies of Legco. According to the Basic Law, in 1997, only 20 of Legco's 60 members are to be democratically elected; 30 are to be chosen through the functional constituencies, and the remaining 10 are to be picked by the nebulous RElection Committee.S In their secret deal of 1990, Britain and China had agreed that if the 1995 Legco elections (the last under British sovereignty) followed these proportions, then China would allow this Legco to continue in office for its full four-year term ending in 1999. This was known as the Rthrough-trainS arrangement, from the term for the Hong Kong-Guangzhou express rail service. Patten's proposals centered on broadening the extraordinarily narrow franchise in the rotten boroughs of the functional constituencies and defining the rules for the yet-to-be-established Election Committee. Patten planned nine new functional constituencies (making a total of 30) to be elected through the suffrage of Hong Kong's 2.7 million working adults. His decision to preserve the 21 existing functional constituencies represented a major concession to Beijing and Hong Kong business interests. Second, he proposed that Hong Kong's Election Committee, which would choose ten Legco members in 1995, be composed of local district representatives who themselves would be democratically elected. Under Patten's plan, then, 39 of Legco's 60 seats (the 20 directly elected, the 9 new functional constituencies, and the 10 filled by the Election Committee) would be open to widespread suffrage. Given the democrats' overwhelming success in the 1991 Legco elections, it was a real possibility that they could capture more than 30 of these seats in 1995, giving them a thin legislative majority and creating a nightmare scenario for Beijing. Beijing reacted furiously to Patten's proposals, and the PRC media made him the object of an almost comically vitriolic propaganda barrage. Patten's extremely limited reforms became the focus of a major international dispute between Britain and China. China's rage stemmed from several sources. First, Beijing's leaders bitterly resented Patten's direct and unsparing verbal style. Second, Beijing was not prepared to countenance the possibility that Hong Kong democrats might gain a majority in Legco. Third, and most important, after a decade in which Britain's colonial leaders had bowed to Beijing's every wish and solved all problems secretly through Sino-British diplomatic channels, Patten was attempting to chart a new course and proposing to allow Hong Kong's Legislative Council to make its own decision on the issue of democratic reform. Secret Negotiations After six months of shrill invective, Beijing switched tactics and agreed to enter into negotiations with Britain over the Patten proposals. The communist leaders hoped either to make Patten back down or to stall him long enough to kill the reforms. To respond to this ploy, Patten in April 1993 announced that the decision on the reforms was no longer going to be for Hong Kong's Legislative Council to make. Rather, he committed Britain to private talks with Beijing aimed at forging a compromise between the sovereign powers. These negotiations would be handled by Britain's ambassador to the PRC. The need for secrecy, Patten stated, meant that Britain would not inform the Hong Kong public or even the Legislative Council about the course of the negotiations that would determine their future. In falling back upon the discredited practice of secret Sino-British dealings, Patten failed to understand the strategy of China's leaders. For almost eight months, PRC negotiators stonewalled in round after round of secret Sino-British talks in Beijing. The Chinese rejected out of hand Patten's proposals to broaden the franchise in the functional constituencies or the Election Committee. In addition, the PRC leaders insisted on retaining the right to prevent Legco members deemed by the Chinese to be RunpatrioticS (i.e., not under Beijing's direct control) from keeping their seats after the 1997 handover. The communist regime, in other words, was determined to throw the Hong Kong democrats off the trans-1997 Rthrough trainS in midpassage. Britain, not surprisingly, found China's position unacceptable: if the British were expected to shape the 1995 Legco elections to guarantee a pro-Beijing majority, then China could at least allow the minority of democrats elected to retain their seats. What the Rthrough-trainS approach gives Britain, after all, is an excuse to retreat from its promises of pre-1997 democracy for Hong Kong. Despite the Hong Kong democrats' insistence that Britain's priority should be the establishment of democracy before 1997, Britain has long made the self-serving argument that it is Rbetter for Hong KongS to sacrifice the RlesserS goal of pre-1997 democracy in order to achieve the RgreaterS goal of convergence and a smooth transition in 1997. Yet with China declaring its refusal to accept the Rthrough-trainS approach, Britain can no longer justify its failure to hold democratic elections now. As of this writing Patten has finally agreed to introduce his proposals to LegcoQnearly 18 months after his initial promise that this would be a matter entirely for Legco to decide. Patten's latest plan, however, appears to be to introduce his proposals and then to allow or even tacitly encourage the current pro-Beijing majority of Legco to gut them by making amendments palatable to Beijing. Such a reliance on Britain's own colonial appointees would be extraordinarily cynical. It is clear that at least 17 of the 18 democratically elected members of Legco support the reform proposals. Indeed, the democratically elected representatives believe that Mr. Patten's plans are far too limited, and intend to offer amendments to make at least 30 Legco seats democratically elected by 1995. Patten still retains enough influence over several appointed Legco members to obtain their support for his original proposals (indeed, Legco passed resolutions supporting the reforms on three separate occasions in late 1992). Now, however, he appears content to let the colonial appointees amend the heart out of the reforms. He would then be able to tell the world that Britain had done its part by introducing the reforms, and to lay the blame for their failure squarely on the timidity of Hong Kong's own Legislative Council. Listening to the People of Hong Kong The great irony of Patten's policies is that, while he deserves credit for attempting to broaden the franchise even slightly, the means that he has used tend to undermine Britain's most important duty of decolonizationQnamely, establishing the institutions that will allow Hong Kong to realize its promised autonomy. Patten's most damaging mistake has been his decision to shut Hong Kong's democrats completely out of the Executive Council. Rather than increasing the authority and democratic composition of Exco in preparation for 1997, Patten has taken ever more personal and direct control over Hong Kong's executive branch. The result is that, as 1997 approaches and the people of the territory are supposed to be learning how to manage their own affairs, their decisions are being made for them by an Englishman who will definitely leave in three years' time. Those who will stay behind have no part in policy making. Consequently, the policy decisions of the Hong Kong government are increasingly viewed by the territory's citizens as Patten's personal decisions, made with Britain's interests rather than Hong Kong's interests in mind. Under the Joint Declaration, reforms to Hong Kong's electoral laws are entirely internal matters for Hong Kong to decide; they have nothing to do with the defense and foreign affairs that are to be managed by the sovereign governments. Yet after initially promising to allow the Hong Kong Legislative Council to decide on the reforms for itself, Patten erred grievously by reneging and opening up more secret Sino-British negotiations closed to the people of Hong Kong. By allowing the political-reform debate to be transformed into a diplomatic conflict between Britain and China, Patten has taken the whole fight out of Hong Kong's hands. Faced with the impossible choice of supporting either their old colonial or new communist sovereign, the people of the territory view the dispute with increasing skepticism and have little confidence that either Britain or China will act in their interest. At a time when it is crucial that Hong Kong learn how to govern itself and to negotiate for itself with Beijing, the British have stymied any such development. Within Hong Kong, all major decisions are made by the British colonial governor with little or no input from Hong Kong's elected representatives. In all matters relating to their post-1997 future, the people of Hong Kong are allowed to play no part; everything is handled in secret between British and Chinese diplomats. Sadly, the Joint Declaration's promise that Hong Kong citizens would be allowed to manage their own affairs has never seemed more empty. With only three years to go before the 1997 handover, Britain must immediately abandon its failed policy. It has already wasted ten years in unavailing attempts to appease China's opposition to political reform. In the 1991 elections, the people of Hong Kong clearly revealed their belief that genuine democratic reforms must be undertaken before 1997, even atJthe expense of upsetting PRC leaders. The importance of Hong Kong's economy to China's economic reforms (along with the huge sums invested in the territory by Mainland enterprises and individuals) has given Hong Kong confidence that it can stand up for itself; one indication of the territory's growing self-assurance is that in the year and a half since Patten made his proposals, the Hong Kong stock market has more than doubled in value. Britain must respond to the aspirations of the people of Hong Kong and fulfill the promises it made when it decided in 1984 to hand the territory's six million people over to China. Patten must appoint democratically elected local leaders to the Executive Council, and he must let such a locally constituted government stand up for itself and deal with Beijing. Hong Kong's affairs must be decided by the people of the territory, not by British and Chinese diplomats meeting behind closed doors 1,400 miles away. Equally important, Patten must also accept Hong Kong's demand for genuine democratic elections to Legco, for only then can Legco represent the people of the territory and hold accountable the Beijing-appointed post-1997 chief executive. Given the common view of Hong Kong's democratically elected representatives, Patten must not back away from reforms under the tired old rubric of RHong Kong's desire for a smooth transition.S Hence, he must not let the spring of 1994 go by without ensuring that at least his modest reforms become reality. Patten himself has said that he knows he will be judged on the degree to which he implements the Joint Declaration. If he fails to establish constitutional institutions whereby Hong Kong people will truly rule Hong Kong with a high degree of autonomy, he will be adjudged to have failed in his duty to Hong Kong. The best scenario would be if Beijing were to agree to accept those institutions and allow them to continue after 1997 on the Rthrough-trainS arrangement. It is quite unlikely, however, that PRC leaders will reach such an agreement with Chris Patten in the near future. The worst scenario would be for Patten, in blind pursuit of Rconvergence,S to reach an agreement with Beijing that would preclude the establishment of democratic political arrangements. Such a Rcompromise,S advocated by many British businessman and by many of the Sinologists in Britain's Foreign Office, would only ensure that Hong Kong would have no democracy either before or after 1997. It would be far better for Britain, if it cannot obtain China's assent even to modest democratic reforms, to follow Hong Kong opinion anyway and implement such reforms before 1997. Then at least the hope would remain that circumstances could change by 1997, and that Beijing might become reluctant to make its first act of sovereignty the summary ejection of all members of Hong Kong's elected institutions. At present, Beijing's policy toward Hong Kong remains in the hands of aging communists who, in the power vacuum created by Deng Xiaoping's failing health, are reluctant to do anything more than rely on hard-line dogma. Beijing's leaders must be persuaded that authoritarian tactics and lack of respect for Hong Kong's pluralism will only backfire and lead to conflict and instability in the territory. Deng Xiaoping's original pledge of Rone country, two systemsS still holds promise for Hong Kong, where the great majority of the people take pride in their Chinese nationality but are equally devoted to protecting their personal and economic freedoms. Yet this policy needs to be implemented: Hong Kong must be allowed to practice its own separate economic and political systems. China must agree to amend the territory's post-1997 constitution. The Basic Law is undemocratic, unacceptable to the people of Hong Kong, and unable to preserve the rule of law in the territory. The demise of the rule of law will gravely threaten Hong Kong's status as an international financial center where all investors and financial institutions heretofore have been confident of fair and equal treatment in local courts. China must listen to the people of Hong Kong: we understand our own society best and are in the best position to draft a constitutional framework that will allow for our continued success. If China continues to refuse to honor the Joint Declaration's provisions for political and legal autonomy, then the people of Hong Kong will not enjoy Rone country, two systemsS and the right to manage their own affairs with a Rhigh degree of autonomy.S Rather, Hong Kong will run the risk that it could soon become little different from China's Special Economic ZonesQwith capitalist economics and communist politics. Such a result would be a tragedy not only for the people of Hong Kong but for the cause of democracy throughout the entire Pacific Rim. Magazine: EDUCOM REVIEW Issue: Mar-Apr 1994 Title: E-Mail Privacy Authors: Jackie Shieh and Rhea A-L Ballard Electronic mail (e-mail) has become a common communication tool within companies and institutions today. Its popularity has soared in recent years due to use by individuals at home and at work. It is the use of e- mail in the workplace that has given rise to a number of issues that have not been adequately addressed by law. Surveys have shown that a good percentage of federal and private organizations monitor their employees' communication activities. This article examines the relationship between e-mail and employee privacy rights. Part One summarizes current litigation involving the privacy issue. Part Two is divided into two sections: Section A examines the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, and Section B examines proposed bill H.R. 1900--the Privacy for Consumers and Workers Act. Part Three proposes some suggestions concerning employee e-mail privacy that can be used to avoid possible undesirable litigation. Part One The following cases represent only a fraction of the suits currently filed in the courts. Both cases profile the topic of employee e-mail privacy. Alana Shoars v. Epson America, Inc. (1990). Alana Shoars worked as an e- mail coordinator at Epson America, Inc. Shoars was instructed to monitor Epson employees' e-mail transmissions. The company placed a tap on the e-mail gateway where the mainframe computer interfaced with the outside MCI Mail Communication Service. Employees were using company equipment on company premises as well as company phone lines. When Shoars objected to Epson's monitoring of employees' electronic transmissions, she was fired. Shoars filed a class action suit against Epson America, Inc., in Los Angeles Superior Court in 1990. She alleged that Epson had violated California Penal Code S 631 when it invaded its employees' right of privacy and wrongfully terminated her. Symantec Corp. v. Borland International, Inc. (1992). Eugene Wang was executive vice president of Borland International, Inc. Two days after Wang resigned from Borland to join Symantec, Borland reviewed his e-mail files and discovered "sensitive information" concerning Borland and Symantec. In September 1992, Borland brought suit in Santa Cruz County Superior Court against Wang and Gordon Burbanks, CEO of Symantec. The privacy issue was expected to be the focus of the case. However, Symantec argued that the e-mail messages consisted of business information that contained stolen trade secrets. Thus, the focus of the case shifted from the privacy issue to the actual contents of e-mail. Symantec argued that the transmission between Wang and Burbanks constituted a criminal offense under California Penal Code S 499c. The court will have to determine whether Borland's search of Wang's MCI Mail mailbox violated Wang's rights under federal and state laws designed to protect the privacy of electronic communications. Part Two Section A: Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The general issue of e-mail privacy, excluding employee e-mail, was addressed by Congress eight years ago. In 1986, Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to respond to the inadequacies it had found in the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act (wiretap law). The wiretap law prevents unauthorized listening to telephone conversations or communications that can be either overheard by the human ear or sent via common carrier. Electronic communications that are digitized and carried by private telephone networks (like MCI or Sprint) are not covered by the wiretap law. Thus, prior to the wiretap law, electronic communications that were not transported by common carrier or heard by the human ear could be subject to unauthorized disclosure or surveillance. In response to this problem, Congress passed the ECPA to amend the wiretap law. Under ECPA, it is unlawful for a person or entity furnishing electronic communication service to the public to knowingly disclose to a third party the contents of a communication that is in electronic storage, carried, or maintained by the service. Section B: Privacy for Consumers and Workers Act. The Shoars and Symantec cases indicate that e-mail users have become increasingly aware that ECPA does not adequately cover employees who transmit electronic communications. ECPA applies only to persons or entities providing service to the public and not to employers who electronically monitor or disclose electronic communications transmitted by their employees. On April 28, 1993, Rep. Pat Williams introduced H.R. 1900--the Privacy for Consumers and Workers Act (PCWA)--to ensure employees some of the same protections guaranteed by ECPA. PCWA addresses from two perspectives the issue of employer monitoring of employees: electronic monitoring and telephone call accounting. In addressing the issue of electronic monitoring, PCWA can be analyzed in five parts: permitted monitoring, notice of monitoring, prohibited monitoring, data obtained from monitoring, and penalties. Permitted monitoring. Generally, PCWA does not apply to law enforcement agencies, which are lawfully permitted to monitor for criminal investigations. Nor does it apply to employers who monitor based on court order, who monitor in connection with the investigation of a workers' compensation claim who are registered under the Commodity Exchange Act or Securities Exchange Act, who are a gaming facility or involved in gaming, who are a financial institution, or who monitor employees with significant financial responsibility that involves the use of independent judgment. However, monitoring is permitted for the types of employers whom PCWA does cover, but only in specific situations. Employers can periodically monitor new employees who have been employed for less than sixty days or employees who have worked for the employer for less than five years if monitored while part of a group of employees. Notice of monitoring. Employers who monitor their employees must notify the employees of when and how they are being monitored, of what type of personal data (data) will be collected, and of how the data will be used. The notice must be posted in a conspicuous place. In addition, during the first personal interview, employers must notify prospective employees that employees are monitored. Notice is not required when the employer has a reasonable suspicion that an employee is engaged in unlawful activity or willful gross misconduct that adversely affects the employer's (or the employer's employees') interests. Prohibited monitoring. An employer cannot monitor employees who are engaged in their First Amendment rights or who have five years' or more employment with the company unless the employer has a reasonable suspicion that the employee is engaged in unlawful conduct in accordance with Section 5 of PCWA. Data obtained from monitoring. An employer must give an employee a reasonable opportunity to review all data obtained from monitoring. However, the employer does not have to provide a reasonable opportunity to review if the employer reasonably suspects the employee is engaged in unlawful conduct in accordance with Section 5 of PCWA. An employee can review data after monitoring, if review is limited to specific data that the employer believes are relevant to the employee's work. An employer can also access data controlled by an employee if (1) the employer has an immediate business need and the employee is not available, (2) the data are alphanumeric, (3) the data shall not be used for performance evaluation or discipline, and (4) the employer tells the employee within a reasonable time that the data were accessed. The employer cannot disclose to any person other than the employee the data obtained by monitoring unless (1) the employee has given prior written consent, (2) the information is given to other company officers or employees who have a legitimate need for the information to perform their duties, (3) the employer is carrying out a court order, (4) the data are given to a law enforcement agency for investigation purpose, or (5) the employee is a public official and the information is being publicly disclosed because it has a direct impact on public health and safety. Penalties. An employee must commence an action within three years of knowing of the employer's unlawful monitoring or of a time when the employee could reasonably be expected to know of the unlawful conduct. If an employee either learns of such activity and institutes proceedings, or testifies about a violation of PCWA, or discloses information relevant to PCWA, the employer cannot discharge, discipline, or discriminate against the employee. Employers who are found guilty of violating PCWA are civilly liable for not more than $10,000 per violation. Part Three The public is generally familiar with the legally protected privacy of mail delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. Many people believe the same protections are extended to e-mail, but that is not the case. All data transferred on networked e-mail systems, local area networks, mainframes, and microcomputer e-mail systems are accessible. Although a majority of such communication activities require a password for access, a network manager can virtually retrieve every aspect of the networked computing environment without the user's approval or knowledge. Some networks even allow the network administrator (manager) to change passwords, read, delete, or alter any messages on the server. Thus there is a need to develop policies that will protect e-mail privacy without discouraging the use of e-mail. In the formulation of an e-mail policy, a good source to use is Access to and Use and Disclosure of Electronic Mail on Company Computer Systems: A Tool Kit for Formulating Your Company's Policy. The kit explains various issues to be considered when a policy is in formulation: privacy rights of employees, employer's need to protect security and company resources, rights of third-party access to files, who should participate, what assets should be considered in the formulation of a workplace privacy policy, and a range of other related issues. The kit recommends that the policy be formulated by a working group of company personnel who represent different interests and levels of responsibilities. The group should consider company needs, employees' reasonable expectations, the rights of outsiders, and other complex interests. If that type of policy is drafted and H.R. 1900 becomes law, then a better working environment for both employees and employers will result. Endnotes Johnson, David R., and John Podesta. Access to and Use and Disclosure of Electronic Mail on Company Computer Systems: A Tool Kit for Formulating Your Company's Policy. Arlington, Va.: Electronic Mail Association, 1991. Podesta, John, and Michael Sher. Protecting Electronic Messaging: A Guide to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. Arlington, Va.: Electronic Mail Association, 1990. Jackie Shieh is Catalog Librarian and Assistant Professor at Georgia State University Law Library. Rhea A-L Ballard is Public Services Librarian and Assistant Professor at Georgia State University Law Library. Magazine: Internet World Issue: March/April 1994 Title: Diving into the Internet Author: Joel Snyder Diving into the Internet The Trouble with Gopher by Joel Snyder Ever hear the expression "Better late than never?" When people say that to me, I have an answer: "who says?" I'm a believer in doing things right. When it's time to help fix a half-done job, that bothers me. So when I started to explore the convoluted and confusing world of Gopherspace, I got both excited and upset. Gopher, for those of you who have been living in a cave for the past two years, is the brainchild of a group of support folks at the University of Minnesota. Their original design goals were modest: replace the cumbersome anonymous-ftp system for information retrieval with something that was friendly, understandable, and usable. Build a campus-wide information system (CWIS) to help distribute information. That's the exciting part. At the University of Minnesota, Gopher was an incredible success. People could actually find information about things that mattered to them. More importantly, they could find information without knowing anything about the conventions of the Internet, Unix, or any other esoteric bit of computer arcana. That's the exciting part. Plunged into Total Anarchy Gopher's ideas aren't new. CompuServe, the grand dame of information services, has had a menu-oriented view of its online world for a decade. And the most powerful concept of Gopher -- its ability to jump from one Gopher server to another without showing the user any seams in the web of information resources -- has been part of CompuServe from the beginning. What's lacking in Gopherspace is something that CompuServe has: an information architect -- someone who's responsible for making sure that it all makes sense; that there are overall indices; that users can jump into the system with some hope that they'll find resources waiting to be discovered; that the user isn't plunged into total anarchy. Unfortunately, that's what Gopherspace is today. Anybody can install and advertise a Gopher. And, you'll discover, lots of geniuses and morons have. Can we blame the good folks at Minnesota for that? For making Gopher too easy to install and use? For making it so simple to link the Gophers of the world together? I don't think so. Think of the Gopher pioneers as true research scientists. The results of the Minnesota Gopher team are something that can be used or abused. Gopher is a tool. Using tools like Gopher to build information systems takes practice. Right now, there are a lot of amateurs running Gopher servers. That's a problem. Look at the typical new Internet user, someone who got lured into it and uses one of the dozen new "Internet User Guides" as a bible. These aren't computer folks. They're confused. How to find anything in the million-plus nodes of the network? Suddenly, they find Gopher. There it is -- a menu-oriented interface to the Internet, finally. While drowning in a sea of information and resources, Gopher offers an anchor. Try and take Gopher away from a new user, and you'll see how important any anchor, even a bad one, is. Gopherspace isn't organized; it's assembled. Gopher is a true client-server application. The software you run when you type "gopher" (or click on the Gopher icon, for you GUI folks) doesn't have any data. It points at a server, one of hundreds, maybe thousands, on the Internet. You may have to pick one out yourself, or your system administrator may have selected one for you as a default. The Wild World of Gopherspace The top-level menu at that first server forms your window on the Internet. If the maintainer of the server you pointed your client at has been diligent and thoughtful, you may have a well-designed view of some small chunk of the Internet. Or, you may be pointing at an archive that was up-to-date when it was created, but hasn't been maintained since. Most likely, however, you'll find yourself pointing at a server that holds a small repository of local information and a menu item pointing at "All Gophers in the World." That menu item is one place where your server ends and another begins. And it's the most common way for someone to link his or her Gopher server into the wild world of Gopherspace. Certain Gophers specialize in collecting pointers to a particular kind of information, such as legal information or religion. How can you find the Gopher maintained by someone with your same interests? Good luck. "All Gophers in the World" is helpfully organized by the physical location of the server: states, countries, and continents. That's the same as sorting books in a library by the publisher. And just as useful. Some Gopher enthusiasts have jumped in to fight the inevitable entropic disintegration that the second law of thermodynamics predicts. David Riggins, for example, has created a Gopher server list organized by subject. His "Gopher Jewels" list is available via Gopher to cwis.usc.edu (or anonymous ftp to usc.edu or ftp.einet.net). Other Gopher server operators (Gopher masters) have made similar efforts. At the University of Saskatchewan, gopher.usask.ca is a collection of well-organized pointers to the world of Gopher space. The University of Saskatchewan is also the home of Hytelnet, the world's most ambitious (and complete!) collection of telnetable Internet resources. If you like Gopher, you should also get a copy of Hytelnet. At Rice University, Prentiss Riddle tries to keep on top of things with a Gopher that merges directories from other Gophers. Sort of a Gopher of Gophers of Gophers, all kept at riceinfo.rice.edu. You could also turn to Veronica and Jughead, tools that let you do a full-text search of some popular Gopher server menus. The Sublime Part of Gopherspace These fine examples are counterbalanced by the truly sublime part of Gopher space. Check out the legislative information system at Gopher.cc.utah.edu, where last year's legislation is organized by bill number or full-text search, and nothing in between. And don't miss the Salt Lake City Police Department's daily reports: ROctober 17, 1993, 10 p.m. Officers were dispatched to the 7-11 after reported gang members had threatened the clerk claiming to have a gun. Or slip on over to The Management Archive at chimera.sph.emn. edu (don't these Minnesota people talk to each other?), which is advertised as Ran innovative idea with considerable potential to improve the flow of ideas, knowledge, and substantive learning between researchers and practitioners and across the management academy.S It will be awhile before The Management Archive achieves its potential. I don't mean to be the grouch of the Internet. The Minnesota Gopher implementers have given us a great product. Lots of information organizers out there are trying to make sense of the world of the Internet. They're shooting at a fast-moving target. Keep that in mind as you navigate in Gopherspace. Magazine: Financial World Magazine Issue: March 15, 1994 Title: "No One Runs the Place" Author: Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene "No One Runs the Place" The sorry mismanagementof America's colleges anduniversities by Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene What do you think of this company? It is the recognized national leader in many of its markets and employs hundreds of the nation's best minds. It has more potential customers than it knows what to do with. What's more, it has about $3 billion in income-earning investments and a Aaa bond rating from Moody's. Now the bad news: This same institution was forced by escalating costs to more than double its prices over the last 10 years. Its services are now more expensive than most of its competitors' and it offers deep discounts to many clients. There's been recent turnover in its top jobs, and it has had operating deficits in excess of $40 million over three years. Professional estimates of deferred maintenance on its plant and equipment several years ago exceeded $500 million (though corporate officials won'tor can'tconfirm that figure). You're not rushing to the phone to pick up a few hundred shares of this nifty outfit, are you? But you'd probably love for your son or daughter to be a customer there. Truth is, it's not a company we're talking aboutit's Yale University. And if the ivy on Yale's walls is turning abit brown around the edges, it's really a symptom of root rot in the way the nation's colleges and universities are managed. Fiscal problems are more common than copies of Homer's Odyssey. Cornell University's statutory colleges, funded by the state of New York, have $100 million of deferred maintenance, according to Moody's. Despite the fact that it has 11,000 fewer students this year than last, the California State University system is using $13 million more in revenues to educate them, according to the California Higher Education Policy Center. Washington University in St. Louis was forced to drop its School of Dentistry due to tight economics. Standard & Poor's currently reports a negative outlook on the debt rating for such well-known institutions as Tulane and Vanderbilt. You can't blame colleges and universities for not charging enough. Typical tuition increases have finally slowed, but at 6% to 10% they still greatly exceed inflation. Over the last decade, the cost to attend public or private institutions doubled. The average student now pays $11,025 for tuition at a four-year private institution, according to the College Board, a national nonprofit research organization. Add in another $4,793 for room and board and you get a grand total of $15,818. Since many families can't afford this kind of money, much of the additional tuition money goes out the same door it came in, as financial aid. Smith College, for example, raised its tuition from $6,800 in 1982 to $15,650 in 1992. During the same period, however, financial aid as a percentage of tuition went up from 23% to 39%. Gershon Vincow, vice chancellor for academic affairs at Syracuse University, put the matter bluntly in a recent annual report to the faculty: "After more than a decade of annually raising tuition 2% to 4% above increases in CPI . . . independent higher education is now experiencing price resistance. Fewer students and families are willing or able to pay our full price." Of course, unlike primary and secondary education in the U.S., the country's universities are international models. In 1993 there were 483,000 foreign students in the U.S., up 4.5% from the previous year. Americans win more than six out of 10 of all the Nobel prizes for chemistry, physics and medicine, thanks largely to the country's outstanding research universities. But no defender of the university system claims that increased tuition has actually made the education offered any better than it was 10, 20 or 30 years ago. And even if you wanted to make such an argument, you'd have a tough time proving your point. Few measures of actual quality of education exist (see page 50). Only a handful of institutions make any effort to compare the skills of entering students to those who graduate. As a result, many parents hand over their tuition money to buy reputationnot education. "In a largely middle class culture, in which there is not great wealth being transferred from generation to generation, the way amiddle class family transfers wealth is by securing an educational credential," says Robert Zemsky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education there. "Parents want to believe that if they send their child to [Harvard, Yale or Princeton], that will give their child a leg up in the economic race." So without any evidence that quality is improving, how can it be that the nation's 3,600 colleges and universities are charging so much more and yet are under such financial stress? Perhaps the most significant problem has been the freewheeling way universities have spent money for decades. One way or another, the problems focus on payroll. Between 60% and 80% of most universities' budgets go out as paychecks to teachers, administrators and other employees. Zemsky: "If you are going to save money at a college or university, you have to get your staff smaller. That's the flip side of being labor-intensive." Through the 1970s and early 1980s, administrative costs soared. One study indicated that administrative staffs grew an average of 60% between 1975 and 1985. Was that warranted by growth in universities generally? No. Over the same period, faculty increased by an average of less than 6%. Meanwhile, on the faculty side, tales of professors teaching only one or two courses a semester have led some institutions to try to crack down. The problem is that the path to promotions and tenure in many institutions is not tied to teaching, but to research and publishing in often obscure journals. William F. Massy, director of the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research, calls this process the "academic ratchet." "No longer do faculty members devote the majority of their time to teaching and related activities. The primary focus of faculty effort increasingly is research, scholarship and other professional activity." This might not be so bad, financially, if research projects actually generated income. But they don't. The federal government is no longer reimbursing universities for research overhead as much as it once did. So the $10.2 billion in research money that goes from the federal government to universities doesn't bring much cash down to university bottom lines. "All of the large research universities Iknow about, with one or two exceptions, are under financial strain," says Cornelius Pings, president of the Association of American Universities. "Any large university that's taking money from the federal government to do research in volume is losing money on it." At least the biggest research institutions in the country gain goodwill from research. Their reputations are enhanced by the discoveries faculty members make. But the emphasis on research extends to hundreds of other educational institutions as well. For them, it can be terribly expensive to support faculty members who are not working in a university's profit centerthe classroom. The University of Louisville, for example, figures it will save about $210,000 a year in part-time lecturers and supplemental payments in its college of arts and sciences by requiring professors to devote 60% of their time to teaching. That amounts to about three courses a semester. In Indiana, a fierce public debate has raged over the time spent by professors in the classroom. Clyde Ingle, Commissioner for Higher Education there, says he has been hooted and jeered by faculty members for using the word "productivity" in an academic context. Ingle's commission is now setting up a system of productivity measures for each state-supported campussuch as teaching loads, degree completion rates and student passing rates for licensure and certification examsthat will be submitted to the legislature with each higher education budget. Well, at least the big athletics programs at these universities make money, right? Wrong. A winning football team may well help attract tuition-paying students or alumni donations. But fewer than 100 of the 300 big-time sports colleges and universities make any money directly from their athletic programs, according to the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. And those are the best-known programs. The vast majority of other schools lose money; annual deficits range from $230,000 to $685,000, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association. A strong economy and huge tuition increases may have obscured these pressures during the 1980s. But the recession brought them into clear focus. Meanwhile, the population of traditional college students has been declining. In 1980 there were 30 million people between the ages of 18 and 24 in the U.S. In 1990 that number had dropped to 26.8 million. Although the number of high school graduates is expected to increase over the next decade, student demographics are changing as well. Many colleges and universities are still geared up to educate 18-to-22-year-olds fresh out of high school. But about half of the enrollees in the nation's institutions of higher learning no longer fit that mold. "Students are older. They go summers. They take weekend courses. They spread their learning out over five or six years, tied to professional development," says Peter Smith, former Republican congressman from Vermont and dean of the school of education at George Washington University. "The institutions that are still trying to attract students to come full-time for four years are having a difficult time, and their costs are going up." At the same time, increases in federal grants to students lagged substantially behind inflation through the 1980sputting enormous pressure on colleges and universities to provide their own financial aid. You might think the public universities would benefit from the pressures on the private institutions. But you'd be wrong. In the last several years, they have been reeling from the first cutbacks in state aid in over a generation. In April 1993, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that 20 states had made mid-year cuts in higher education budgets. The biggest cut9.8% in Montanaresulted in an 18% increase in tuition at Montana State University. "Over five years we lost 40% of our budget," says Sherry Penney, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. "At five o'clock on a Friday night, the state pulled money out of our computer account. On Monday morning we came in and money we thought we had was gone." The wolf is so close to the door for many universities that paw prints are on the welcome mat. Is the management of the country's $160 billion higher education industry up to the task of downsizing quickly and effectively? There's no simple answer, but overwhelmingly, the nation's colleges and universities do not get high grades for management. In fact, it appears that many aren't even taking the class. Rather than dealing with their structural problems, many colleges and universities are trying to pick up declining revenues by turning to their marketing departments. Advertisements for some universities can make Club Med sound boring. Bryant College, a "moderately difficult" school with 3,875 undergraduates, according to Peterson's college guide, recently published an ad in a national magazine that boasted the following six benefits to incoming students: "Over 90% of Bryant students participate in sports." "Studying is fun on our beautiful 375-acre wooded campus." "You'll know why Rhode Island is called the Ocean State." "Bryant is ideally located for weekend fun." "There are over 60 clubs to join." "Bryant students have easy access to many cultural and sporting events." Sometimes the invasion of the body snatchers goes beyond hoopla and enters the realm of the unethical. "One college was sending letters of acceptance to kids who hadn't even applied," says Frank Burtnett, executive director of the National Assocation of College Admission Counselors. "Another told students that it wasn't going to offer a financial aid package until they had gotten their best offer from other schools. Then, the college claimed, it would better that offer. Yet another college wrote to all the kids it had admitted who didn't go there. It wrote to them around Thanksgiving and said, 'How are you doing? You happy there? Remember, we still want you.'" Another trendchecking to see if potential students need financial aid before they are acceptedis particularly troublesome to those who worry about equity in education. A small but growing number of institutions, including Brown University, Smith College and, most recently, Oberlin College in Ohio, now consider the ability of marginal candidates to pay full tuition before admitting them. In doing so, they argue that they are taking back control of financial aid, a large and unpredictable item in their budgets that can easily cause significant strains. Cornell, for instance, continues to offer need-blind admissions. But it had to make mid-year budget reductions last year because of "an overrun in the undergraduate financial aid budget," according to the university's annual report. Are even the nation's most competitive schools, like Brown, Smith and Cornell, tottering on the brink? Of course not. "There's a glass ceiling in higher education," says Zemsky. "There are fewer than 100 institutions above that glass ceiling" with surplus applicant pools and well-stocked endowments. Large endowments with solid income streams give a university the luxury to withstand pressures on their income statements, of course. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Rice and others all have endowments of well over $1 billion (see table). But even these schools know they are destined for trouble if they ignore current problems. As the former president of the University of Chicago once observed, "The university's characteristic state may be summarized by the words of the lady who said, 'I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something.'" Fortunately, leaders in higher education have come up with a number of sensible steps that colleges and universities can take to assure their continued viability. Some of the outstanding efforts are outlined on pages 46-52. No. 1 on the list, for most institutions, is bringing efficiency to administration. Few universities have purchasing or payroll systems that come up to private-sector standards. Most can afford to cut back on layers of staff that duplicate functions or could be replaced by computers (see page 51). But that's the relatively easy part. Here are a few more difficult steps that stand out as particularly sensible: Focusing on teaching. "A number of institutions, both public and private, including regional campuses of the University of Wisconsin system, Syracuse University and others, are rewriting their criteria for tenure promotion," says Clara Lovett, director of the Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards of the American Association for Higher Education. "They are making it clear that faculty members who excel in undergraduate teaching can move ahead at the rate of the competent researcher." Refining the mission. For generations, schools tried to be all things to all people, adding tons of irrelevant electives. But under economic stress, universities must concentrate on those things they can do well, or risk doing nothing at all. Take Oregon's Portland State University. "They had a 40% cutback in state funds," says Russell Edgerton, president of the American Association for Higher Education. "So they had to say to themselves, we just can't have a cafeteria curriculum any more." Explains Judith Ramaley, Portland State's president: "We lost one school and 19 to 20 degree programs. And we lost about 150 faculty and staff positions. But what's left is stronger than what was here before. In fact, our continuation rate from freshman to sophomore year went up from 50% to 70% over the last two years." Paying attention to the bottom line. Universities are no different than most other not-for-profit organizations: The idea of genuinely tying expenses to revenues is foreign. "In 1989 the university ran a $1 million deficit, which it didn't discover until after the end of the year," says James Griesemer, vice chancellor for business and financial affairs at the University of Denver. "All of the departments had lived within their budgets. But revenues were down, and there was no way that the system could have connected revenues with expenses." The University of Denver has now established a businesslike system. "We linked revenues with expenses and then set up a gainsharing mechanism. Departments keep 50% of any revenues generated over budget and they keep 100% of savings over budget. This provides tremendous motivation to the departments to come up with reasonable revenue estimates. Unfortunately, too many universities wait far too long to take such steps. "Most institutions wait for the storm to blow over. They defer maintenance. They don't paint. They don't replace faculty who leave by way of retirement," says Portland State's Ramaley. "That may work for a round or two, but the storm isn't going to go away." In the late 1980s the Association of Physical Plant Administrators pegged the capital renewal and replacement needs of colleges and universities at $60 billion, with about a third of those repairs or renovations identified as "urgent." That study has not been replicated since then, but it's more than likely that the problem of deferred maintenance is only getting worse. It's not hard to understand why. Cutting the maintenance budget to avoid painful staff cuts is a time-honored practice even outside the groves of academe. Take the situation at Yale University. The faculty reacted in horror several years ago when a committee that was set up to deal with budget problems recommended dramatic staff cutbacks, on the academic as well as the administrative side. The long-term plan included the elimination of the linguistics department, a paring-down of sociology and a reorganization of engineering. A mighty battle ensued. When the dust cleared, the targeted cuts on the faculty side were gone, replaced with a much more modest plan to eliminate positions through attritiona good way to avoid making hard choices. The new strategy to restore financial balance relied more heavily on administrative cuts. The redesign and streamlining of management systems is promising, but cuts also included reductions in facility staff: the people who maintain and clean the buildings. Yale stripped its maintenance budget from a proposed $50 million to $30 million. Meanwhile, the university has embarked on a campaign to raise $500 million to restore its physical plant. But raising huge sums for routine repairs is trickydonors want their names immortalized on buildings, not plumbing systems. The battle between administration and faculty at Yale is typical of the dynamic in universities. Faculty members everywhere worry that a devotion to finances will jeopardize quality. "Bottom-line thinking is not appropriate to every endeavor in life," says a professor at a private northeastern university who does not want to be named. "If you're spending your time in warfarecontinually worrying that your department is going to be removedyou're not spending your time in creative thinking." Of course, without any solid measurements of quality, it's impossible to see exactly what impact individual cuts might have. Meawhile, economic realities mandate that some changes must take place. Will quality suffer in some instances? No question about it. But avoiding making the hard decisionsdeferring maintenance, eating into endowment money or simply cutting across the boardguarantees a negative outcome. The vast California public higher education system, educating some 1.8 million students, has been burying its head in the sand. "We have the IBM syndrome," says Pat Callan, director of the California Higher Education Policy Center. "We've been cited as the world model for how to do large-scale higher education, just like IBM was the model for the industrial-era corporation. But your very success becomes an impediment. It becomes hard to recognize when the time has come to make changes and not just stick to the old way." The University of California system has offered substantial golden parachutes to encourage professors to retire. "They made the offer to anyone with the prerequisite number of years, so they ended up creating a kind of random process of dealing with academic figures," says Callan. "Often, the people who leave are the ones you most want to keep." Ironically, in some instances, the system has actually hired back some of their retired professors as part-timers, effectively paying them twice: once through the pension plan and again on the payroll. Of course, universities are at a huge management disadvantage. What corporation offers an employment-for-life job track to a healthy proportion of its employees, as universities do with their tenure system? Some 63% of full-time faculty members are tenured, according to the American Association of University Professors. The end of legal mandatory retirement this year means that tenured profs can hang on until they die, if they wish. What corporation consults with employees on every change that might affect the way it is organized? Universities are obligated by the system of faculty governance to do so. The similarities to the problems in health care are unmistakable. Just as doctors in voluntary hospitals thwart their administrators, faculty members can do a great deal to short-circuit administrative efforts they don't like. "You have a lot of hard-working presidents and provosts fighting a culture in which the faculty are still kind of autonomous folks with a sense of their own courses," says Edgerton. "And there are elements of that system one ought never try to change. It's partly the reason why there's so much that's good in American universities." So what can be done to shrink payrolls without hurting quality? Edgerton: "Somehow the faculty have to take responsibility, collectively, for prioritizing, looking at faculty efforts and the impact of the department as a whole." That sounds great, but as Edgerton admits, "You need a crisis to mobilize faculty for a change like this." Clearly, the solution is for university administrations, backed strongly by their boards, to put it to faculty members forthrightly: Either you work with us toward making the most sensible cuts from both an academic and financial point of view or we'll do it for you (see page 52.) Unfortunately, the knee-jerk reaction of some faculty members is to work to protect their own turf zealously, even to the detriment of the university or the students in the long run. "Often it's the politically weakest rather than the educationally weakest units of a university that are dropped," says Edgerton. "When a system like the California State system starts shrinking, the part-time faculty go first. They're the people who are teaching the basic writing courses that are essential for graduation. But no president or dean or department chair can cut out senior tenured faculty before cutting out part-time faculty." Add all the forces together and it would appear that the university in the U.S. is headed downhill. And it's doubtless true that a number of institutions are going to fold, merge or simply lose stature over the next couple of decades. But it's equally true that hard times will separate the better managed from the rest of the pack. The open question is, which of the universities have the leadership to truly manage? Years ago, James Conant, then president of Harvard, tried to explain the management of higher education to a business student. "I would like the faculty to think they run the place," he said. "The faculty would like the overseers, the trustees, to think they run the place. And the trustees would like to think I run the place.