Common Problems, Uncommon Grounds- A Matter of Trust 2

In my previous post, I wrote about some possible issues that religious believers, most especially conservative Christians, might have to overcome in coming together with non-believers to work for common goals.  The most pressing issue I considered seemed to be the simple matter of trust.  Believers, to put it in a nutshell, don't trust non-believers.  This seems to be a function of how religiosity developed in human societies and over time became a sort of marker of trustworthiness.  Non-believers, by not showing the common signs of religiosity, are perceived as inherently untrustworthy.  Distrust may also be connected to a discomfort among believers with the way atheists draw conclusions.  Studies suggest that, for instance, the hearts and minds of Christians can be moved by prayer leaders who are seen to arrive at conclusions by a combination of prayer and reason rather than by reason alone.  I concluded with the suggestion that these issues may also lay near the heart of atheist distrust for believers, too.

It is hard to conclude otherwise when one considers the leading figures in atheist circles.  People like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens, whose works form the cornerstone of the so-called "New Atheism," never seem to waste an opportunity to heap scorn upon believers.  Their message is simple: religion is a "delusion;" it represents an existential threat to humanity, and even moderate religion is harmful because it enables extremism; it is an atavism that may have served a useful purpose but needs to be shaken off; it is a human artifact that "poisons everything."  Religion is such a blight that they can find no accommodation with it. Mankind must embrace reason if it is to survive and if "spirituality" is to be continued, it must be one shorn of mythology and based (at least as Harris sees it) in the discoveries of neuroscience.

Of course this ignores that in our everyday interactions while we address or attack religion (which, like science, is a constructed category encompassing a range of human activity), our actual targets turn out to be religious believers, which is to say human beings.  Small wonder, then, that having found themselves reduced to a set of beliefs, some believers might have a hard time cooperating with non-believers.  They must imagine their putative partners mocking them behind their backs, especially when they read blanket attacks on their faith that fail to differentiate moderate, essentially secularized, believers, and extremists, polemics that label their closely-held beliefs delusion.  In their shoes, I would find it ironic that the same people who criticize my belief as a weird sort of groupthink that requires doctrinal purity would insist on a similar type of purity of thought as a requirement for respect.  That many launching such attacks are scientists may also contribute to a perception that science is, or leads to, atheism, hindering cooperation on issues such as climate change that are bound so intimately to science.

If, as I suggested in the first post on this, religious believers are going to have to make mental adjustments to work with non-believers, then it is clear non-believers will have to make similar adjustments to their attitudes.  Detente is required, at least while we are attempting to work together.  The joint purposes we share are not advanced by either the religious or non-religious engaging in apologetics in an attempt to convert one another.  To this end, I would like to revive an idea proposed by the late Stephen Jay Gould in the pages of Natural History, the idea that religious and scientific thought address different areas.  Gould called this idea "non-overlapping magisteria," or NOMA.  NOMA suggests that science is not competent to address the "moral truths" of religion and religion is not competent to address "factual conclusions" of science.

Gould's idea was met with almost immediate and complete disdain from non-believers.  Leaders of the "New Atheism" have either rejected it, or found it seriously limited.  They suggest that if NOMA is embraced by religious leaders, it is tacit admission that there is no evidence for God.  As for themselves, they are confident that moral questions can be answered without recourse to religion, and see no advantage to yielding that territory to it.  Yet, as I have suggested previously, the source of moral behavior is less important than the behavior itself.  If we, as non-believers, and they, as believers, can set aside for the purposes of working together our sources of moral authority, it seems NOMA can provide solid neutral territory for working together.

This would surely yield great dividends. Christians and other believers, with the help of leaders of their communities, could embrace the science needed to face looming problems such as anthropogenic global warming, which is where this project began, for NOMA ensures the faithful that God and science are compatible (see the works of Kenneth Miller, Michael Dowd and John Haugh, for example, not to mention Galileo and Newton).  Non-believers could recognize that faith, or at least its objects, lie beyond the realm of the measurable and that it is possible to believe in God (or god) and embrace reason.  Both sides can derive moral force from whatever sources they chose. 

The point is not to turn theists into atheists, or even for one side to stop proselytizing another in all situations, but to recognize that when confronting common threats, the question of god (or God) is largely irrelevant.  We atheists need to recognize this, perhaps more than theists do, because our numbers are insufficient to the tasks confronting us.  While arguing over the existence of the deity or deities can be entertaining, and indeed raise questions of genuine import, alienating potential allies in important struggles makes all the rhetoric employed no more than whistling past the graveyard.

Common Problems, Uncommon Grounds- A Matter of Trust 1

As part of an ongoing project to write an article for the online journal Theoecology I have been engaged in thinking about reasons (beyond the obvious ones) that atheists and Christians, especially conservative Christians, might be having trouble connecting with on another to work on environmental issues, especially anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  In an earlier post I noted that polling information shows broad-based agreement on both the existence of global warming as a phenomenon, though there were differences among religious group on whether it is man-made, and on the value of action to protect the environment in general.  I also suggested factors such as the shortened time horizon implied by end-times eschatology, a generalized sense that the threat of AGW is to others elsewhere, and that accepting AGW may compromise beliefs in a just world.  All of these will be addressed in the final article.

However, just as I was, I thought, finishing the article, this link appeared on my Twitter feed.  The article it led to talked about social science research that had been done by psychology professors at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon, on whether theist prejudice against atheists was based on a lack of trust.  This would be different, say, from prejudice against gays, which other work has found to be based in disgust.  It also presupposes that when in-groups and out-groups collide, the prejudice against the out-group will be based on the nature of the threat they pose.

Religious belief, they claim (and it is a claim that should be familiar to regular readers or who has spent more than ten minutes talking to me about the topic) arose as a tool of social cohesion.  Like David Sloan Wilson, whose Darwin's Cathedral is a must-read on this subject, Gervais, Shariff and Norenzayan argue that religious belief was, essentially, a way to unload the responsibility (and energy cost) of motioning public morals and doling out punishment to a supernatural being.  This has been so effective, that recent psychological studies show that the mere suggestion of divine watchfulness has been enough to increase honesty in personal transactions.

Over time, as human communities grew, the mixing of strangers required extension of trust.  Religiosity, Gervais, and his co-writers suggest, was a potential shortcut in this.  Outward signs of religious faith were a signal that a person could be trusted, helpful in an environment where everyone could not know everyone else.  Because of this atheists are problematic.  They do not make the outward signs that the religious do, leading religious believers to distrust them.  This idea was borne out in their experiments.  Self-identified religious participants expressed varying levels of distrust for atheists, with this prejudice being strongest among the most religious.  In a subsequent paper, two of the authors found that this distrust could be mitigated by reminders of secular authority.  Governments, they contend, have assumed the monitoring and punishment duties of gods, and it would seem that reminders of this bring home to believers that they and atheists both are liable to judgment from the same authority.

So one of the problems inherent in this meeting of the minds between religious believers and non-believers, on any topic is going to be this trust issue.  Among those identifying themselves as extremely religious, such as conservative Christians, this distrust will be at its worst.  Among more liberal denominations this seems less likely to be an issue, as such denominations tend to be more secularized. Another potential problem is discomfort with the way atheists come, or are perceived to have come, to their determinations, which is to say by the application of reason.  An interesting study of attempts by evangelical leaders to rally the faithful on environmental issues, especially AGW, suggests that even the most conservative religious believers can be brought around by leaders within their faith tradition and more specifically by leaders who are seen to have arrived at conclusions not simply through reason, but also by prayer.  Epistemology, the means of reaching the understanding, is as important as the understanding itself.

Therefore, in engaging with believers, especially conservative Christians, atheists face two challenges.  The first is overcoming problems of trust.  The second is that religious believers will be less likely to accept their views because of the process involved.  A potential third is, of course, the attitudes of atheists themselves towards the religious.  It is not far-fetched to suggest that distrust and epistemological problems may lie near the root of this as well, something I will explore further.

The Unraveling American Orthodoxy- Talk delivered to the Ethical Humanist Society of the Triangle

This is the full text of a talk I delivered today to the Ethical Humanist Society of the Triangle in Chapel Hill, NC.  It builds on themes and language I have begun to develop in earlier blog posts.  I hope to continue fleshing out these ideas as I go forward, but the main shape of the argument can be seen here.

On June 25, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, the United States Supreme Court held that the portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required all or parts of 15 states to submit changes in voting laws to the Justice Department—so-called "preclearance"—could not be enforced.  In the majority opinion, signed on to by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, the objection was raised that the formula used to determine which areas needed preclearance was inadequate.  They failed, according to the majority, to take into account demographic and voter registration changes in the 48 years since the original act was passed.  Within hours, led by Texas, states whose attempts to implement measures such as voter ID, restricted early voting hours, purges of the voting rolls, etc., but had been prevented by the preclearance requirement, began pushing to do so.  A few days after the ruling, eleven of the fifteen states affected had started such a push.  This is part of a larger, nationwide push to implement new voting regulations.  Advocates for these measures see them as a hedge against what most experts say is non-existent voter fraud; critics have noted that these measures tend to raise barriers to minority participation, the very problem the Voting Rights Act was implemented to fix. 

A day later, the court handed down decisions in two cases related to same-sex marriage.  In the case of United States v. Windsor, a court majority consisting of justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan ruled that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which stated that the federal government would not recognize same-sex marriages, was an unconstitutional violation of equal protection.  In the case of Hollinsgworth v. Perry, an odd combination of justices Roberts, Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan essentially confirmed a California decision overturning Proposition 8, which banned gay marriages in the state.  By invalidating the case on the technical grounds that plaintiffs had no standing to contest the ruling, they paved the way for same-sex marriages to resume in California.  

Over the last couple of weeks, the abortion issue has come to the forefront.  In Texas, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and, as you might have noted, here in North Carolina, Republican-led assemblies have rushed to implement new restrictions, perhaps as a push to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.  

How are we to make sense of these developments?  Why are they happening at this historical moment?  On the one hand, the same-sex marriage rulings can be seen as a blow for personal freedoms.  On the other, there seems little doubt that the efforts in statehouses to change voting rules and increase abortion restrictions serve to limit individual freedoms.  One of the standard narratives is that these represent some sort of  backlash stemming from the election of the nation's first African-American president.  Voting rights, abortion rights and same-sex marriage are near and dear to the president and to Democrats, after all, and whatever he is for Republicans must be against.  Yet while most of the proponents of the rollback on voting and abortion rights are Republicans and while Republicans are certainly the inheritors of the racist Democratic coalition that broke up in part because of the push for civil rights that included the Voting Rights Act, this seems insufficient.

For one thing, moves to restrict abortion and to tighten voting regulations have a history that pre-dates the current administration.  Certainly in the case of abortion, in places the push to restrict access to the procedure immediately post-dates the Roe v. Wade.  And states targeted under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have long tried to skirt the act's provision, attempting to follow the law's letter while ignoring its spirit, a push that has intensified in the last ten years, especially in the south as more southern states were dominated by the Republican party.  But these voices have never been sufficient to do much damage until now.  

Same-sex marriage, for its part, has always been at a legal disability and it has been suggested more than once that the push for their recognition is the next stage in the struggle to extend the promise of America to all of her citizens.  It's advance seems something of an anomaly, since its opponents are the same crowd working on abortion and voting restrictions.  

I would like to suggest, however, that the DOMA and Prop 8 decisions are, in fact, not anomalies.  Rather, they confirm the pattern that includes the erosion of basic liberties for certain groups of citizens, especially women and racial minorities.  For this reason, while we should praise the signal these decisions send that there is no constitutional impediment to marriage equality, we should be careful to follow this victory with concerted action to make sure this equality extends to all citizens, not only to those in the affected states.  Because what these rulings actually seem to do, at least until further legal action, is return the decision over who can marry whom to the states.  This handover of authority on matters of basic civil liberties to state governments  is part of the process that is also leading to erosions in women's and minorities' rights.

What we are witnessing, I contend, is the unraveling of what I will call the American orthodoxy.  This orthodoxy is one that was established in stages from the aftermath of the Civil War through the middle of the 1970s.  At its core was an extension, albeit imperfect and uneven, of the promise inherent in America's founding documents, to those whom it had previously been construed to exclude.  It began to be attacked in the late 1970s by an alliance of Republican politicians and adherents to a certain brand of Protestant ideology.  Following the conclusion of the Cold War, it truly began to unravel.

Though I contend that the orthodoxy that is unraveling began to form in the aftermath of the Civil War, its roots are well-known and stretch back to the founding moments of the nation.  The first definitive statement is the famous section in the Declaration of Independence that has been called the "American creed."

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.  That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.  

There is danger in these words, which can be used by individuals as a weapon against the common good.  But there is also promise in them, a promise of equality for all citizens, indeed of all men and women.  This is the first component of the American orthodoxy.

When the Revolution was over and the business of war became the business of governing, of setting up institutions to secure the rights that were ours, further adjustment was needed.  Our first attempt at self-governance, the Articles of Confederation, was inadequate to the task of governing the new nation, as it left too much power to the individual states.   So, important figures from the republic met in Philadelphia in 1787 to change the Articles, but instead scrapped them in favor of a charter they drafted in secret, the Constitution, which was adopted in 1789.  From the start, the Framers set lofty goals:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

   

While the Declaration set the goals of government as promoting rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," the Preamble to the Constitution spelled out what that promise entailed.  Challenged by the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation, subject to pressures that might have torn the new country apart, the delegates in Philadelphia refined the American orthodoxy to include the kind of actions the new government would need to take in pursuit of this goal.

The great challenge of American history has been the effort to extend the promises inherent in these passages to all.  Voting rights, perhaps the greatest marker of full participation as a citizen, provide us with the best marker for how much progress has been made.  For the first half of the nineteenth century, we can see the franchise, originally the province of elite white men, as it gradually extended to…other white men. More broad-minded sorts advocated for reforms that would make women equal partners in society, and others still advocated for ending the practice of slavery and bringing African-Americans into the American family, but these were largely voices in the wilderness, voices that, especially on the issue of emancipation, became stronger in the middle of the century.

Then another crisis that threatened the existence of the Republic erupted in April, 1861 when the United States, now split in two, went to war with itself.  Though the causes of the war are much-debated, there is little doubt in my mind that the central issue was the southern fear that with the election of Lincoln, slavery would be abolished.  Some of the ordinances of secession directly mention or allude to the practice and several provisions of the Confederate constitution deal with it as well.  Even if it was not the proximate cause of the war, by the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, it was clear that on one level the war was being fought for the freedom of African Americans.  Though both sides used the language of the Declaration in their writings, it is Lincoln who is generally credited with restoring the document to American consciousness.  Most notably, of course, there is the opening "Four score and seven years ago," to the Gettysburg address.  But the end of that speech needs to be considered as well: 

that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The war, in Lincoln's mind, had become about reaffirming the core values of the new nation and insuring their continuance.  Part of this was the push at the end of his life, when the outcome of the war and the emancipation of the slaves was certain, to bring African-Americans into the civil life of America.  This push culminated in the Reconstruction amendments, which at least for the duration of Reconstruction, provided African Americans in the south entry into political life.

This, I would suggest, is the true beginning of the American orthodoxy, which holds that the promise implicit in our founding documents should be extended to all citizens.  It was born of the crisis of the Revolution and re-forged in the crisis of the Civil War.  For following the Civil War, for a little more than a century, we see an expansion of liberties for those who were excluded from full citizenship prior to the Civil War.  Expansion was uneven, of course, and I would be remiss not to mention the tragedy of Jim Crow, the racism of acts to exclude Asian immigrants, the treatment of native Americans, and the very slow progression to suffrage for women.  Indeed, the circumstances of progress and regress are a central part of this argument.

Permit me, then, to jump ahead.  Conceding that the political gains for African-Americans, especially in the South, were ephemeral, we need to look at the circumstances in which such gains were made.  Emancipation came about as a result of the existential threat of the Civil War, and the Reconstruction amendments that theoretically guaranteed equality were a result of that.  Why a decay in the years following Reconstruction?  Simply put, there was no pressure to maintain the gains.  In the years that followed Reconstruction, there were few voices clamoring for African American equality, for women's suffrage, because of a sense among the powerful that things were good.  Though women would first be allowed to vote in the Wyoming territory in 1869, it was not until 1920 that they would gain the national vote.  And, of course, it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that a real civil rights push for African Americans took hold, culminating in the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of the Johnson administration.  

I would like to suggest that these gains were similar to the initial gains made by African Americans during and immediately after the Civil War.  Women gained the right to vote, after decades of agitation, at least in part because of their contributions on the home front during the First World War.  African Americans gained greater civil rights in part because of their service in the Second World War and Korea, by which time fighting units had been desegregated, and in part because the denial of such rights was a propaganda weapon that the Soviets could use during the Cold War.  In other words, when the United States was faced with dire threats, more and more people who had been previously excluded from the ranks of "We the people," were called into service and, ultimately, brought into the ranks of full citizens.

This action, extension and refining of our core tenets, is why I have chosen the term "American orthodoxy," so I will take the opportunity to offer an apology of sorts for the term.  This is an apology in the sense of an explanation, such as defenders of religion engage in when testifying to the truth of their faith.  Apology is doubly appropriate since orthodoxy is itself a term most often applied to religion.  My usage will be more…catholic. Orthodoxy ultimately derives from the Greek orthodoxos, meaning "proper belief."    It is generally paired with heterodoxy, or a "different belief."  Someone who has chosen heterodoxy, is a heretic, from the Greek for making a choice.

Orthodoxy need not be limited simply to matters of religion.  Indeed, we often hear this language used for matters of politics, science, etc.  In order to be orthodox, a belief need only be widely accepted and, more importantly, advanced by entities with the power to produce content that confirms the orthodox belief and to punish dissenters.  Orthodoxy is not, however, fixed and immutable.  It is constantly challenged by heterodox ideas, generally from within.  At each step along the way, orthodoxy is changed by its encounter with heterodoxy, as its ideas and arguments are forced to become sharper and better-defined.

Heterodox ideas, on the other hand, tend to appear when the power that maintains orthodoxy, be it governmental authority or social utility, is weak.  Tenuous gains by African Americans immediately after the Civil War faded because the only force capable of imposing American orthodoxy, the federal government—more specifically, the occupying Union armies—fled the scene.   It was, again, only when there was a significant outside threat that there was enough momentum to bring women, then later African Americans, on board.  Of course, this is not to say that there was no dissent in the interim.  But as long as there was no looming menace that favored women and African Americans becoming full members of the American family, their protests could be ignored and suppressed as heretical.  On the other hand whenever there was a perceived need for unity, expansion of rights, the mark of inclusion, would be favored.  

There are deep drivers at work here.  A factor we haven't mentioned in this discussion, for instance, is urbanization.  Throughout the late 19th century, the United States underwent a massive migration from the countryside into the cities.  A result of this migration has been a shift in mores, which in rural life most likely encouraged obedience to authority and group cohesion (think of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind and the values he claims political conservatives are more attuned to than political liberals), to those more concerned with fairness and equity as people from different places and diverse religious backgrounds mixed.  Anything that tends to build barriers would tend to be de-emphasized.  This is a breakdown of what we might loosely call tribal values in favor of more cosmopolitan ones; it may be the substrate on which the edifice of rights we have discussed were later built.  If so, then we can explain the extension of rights as a literal extension of "we the people," as a way of increasing membership in the tribe when confronted by a larger tribe.

It also goes a long way towards explaining why the American orthodoxy is unraveling at this historical moment.  At the beginning, I suggested that this unraveling began in the 1970s by the groups that joined to form the Reagan coalition.  This movement was born of discontent with the civil rights advances of the 1960s, of anti-communists and of religious conservatives.  The orthodoxy that saw, among other things, the imposition of the Voting Rights Act on the South and the Roe decision in 1973, began to be challenged with increasing effectiveness.  This could happen because after more than half a century of living under dire threat, the United States entered a period culminating with the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and its emergence, at least briefly, as the sole superpower.  This moment seems to have started with the policy of détente, which eased superpower tensions under President Nixon, an easing that survived President Reagan's attempts to revive the full-blown Cold War.

Absent an existential threat, tribal identities—white, Protestant, conservative, what-have-you—could once again be asserted over the more cosmopolitan values that had created the American orthodoxy.  National power, power that was exerted in creating this orthodoxy and that was needed in the crises of the 20th century, began to give way once again to state power, itself more susceptible to manipulation in favor of tribal values.  This is clearly evident in the movements in Republican-led statehouses to clamp down on abortion, to raise new barriers to voting, and even in the short-lived attempt in the North Carolina General Assembly to make local establishments of religion legal—secularism, too, was a component of the American orthodoxy.   

Only, it seems, in the face of an existential threat can the emergent tribal values be laid aside in favor of a more cosmopolitan outlook.  Witness, for instance, the groundswell of unity in the weeks following the September 11, 2001 attacks, a unity that quickly faded when the shape of the threat became clear and when President Bush and Republicans began using the attacks as a bludgeon against dissent.  Finally, it is no coincidence that this process accelerated following the election of President Obama.  Overtly racist or not, there certainly seems to be a sense in some quarters that the president is "not one of us," a sense evident in accusations that the president was born in Kenya, or is a crypto-Muslim. 

What is to be done?  President Reagan once said , "I occasionally think how quickly our differences, worldwide, would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world."  He seems to have instinctively understood that small differences disappear when confronted with a larger threat.  While that would almost certainly work, or aggressive moves by a rising power like China might ease our internal tensions, the former seems at best unlikely and the latter certainly undesirable.  

One concomitant of the emergence of tribal values is the emergence of tribal religion, what we might call a heterodoxy to the inclusiveness of the American orthodoxy.  It's no coincidence that most of the movers in both the pushback against abortion rights and the implementation of new voting measures are evangelical Protestants.  Their values tend to be rooted as much in the legalism of the Old Testament as in the dispensation of the New.  There is an emphasis placed on rules, rules which it should be noted were originally written by Hebrews for Hebrews, which is to say to protect members of the in-group against pollution from without and within (again we see the usefulness of Haidt's model in The Righteous Mind).  On top of this is what seems in some groups a genuine push to redeem society, but according to the rules of the given sect.  The study of nature, and of the evolution of groups, tells us that those groups with a high level of cohesiveness tend to out-compete less cohesive groups, so there is genuine cause for concern.

What is needed, then, is something capable of drawing diverse people together, and of providing them with a high degree of cohesion.  We need institutions that encourage the cosmopolitan values that have served us well and which could again.  While the groups currently unraveling the American orthodoxy are numerous, I cannot imagine that they outnumber those who would rather not see it undone.  Who are in these groups?  Catholics (mostly, though abortion can be problematic), non-believers of various stripes, Jews, African Americans (except occasionally on gay rights and environmental issues).  Mainline Protestants might be convinced, as they are not quite so rigidly partisan as Evangelical Protestants tend to be.  Anyone who values secular society—by which I mean a society and government that is officially neutral on matters of religion—the only true guarantor of religious freedom.  Humanists, who recognize the dangers inherent in devaluing people in the here and now.  People who have an expansive view of "we the people," one that includes those who have historically been marginalized, and one that extends beyond confessional borders.  In other words, the same people who saw to it that the American orthodoxy came into existence in the first place.

Failure to act, to restore this promise, is unacceptable.  In the contest between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, both sides are generally convinced they are in the right.  And, in the final analysis, one is, if only by virtue of victory.  It is up to us to decide which it will be.