Epilogue

Only in God

Langdon Gilkey grew up in the most enlightened, educated environment possible. Born in 1919, he went to elementary school at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, a progressive educational institution founded by John Dewey. Gilkey’s father was on the faculty of the University of Chicago, as were the parents of half of the school’s students. In 1939 he graduated from Harvard magna cum laude with a degree in philosophy. The next year he went to teach English at a university in China. When the Japanese overran the region where he was teaching, he was put under house arrest with other Westerners and finally sent to an internment compound in Shandong Province. Gilkey survived his experience and wrote about it years later in the book Shantung Compound.¹

Fragile Existence

A wall with electrified barbed wire surrounded the compound, along with guard towers filled with machine gun–armed soldiers.² It was about the size of a large city block, about two and a half acres, yet contained two thousand people. His personal living space consisted of a bed with eighteen inches on either side and three feet at its foot in which to keep all his possessions. “In that little world, 9 feet by 54 inches, each single person had to keep intact all his possessions and at the same time somehow to maintain his own personal being.”³ Food was extremely scarce and sanitation was poor. There were only twenty or so toilets—none of them flush—for two thousand persons, and so the lines were perpetual.⁴ The ordinary symbols of status—money, family pedigree, and education—did nothing to change one’s status or living space or influence in the compound. No one could accrue or protect any privacy. Most of all, the prisoners’ very lives were always in doubt under the constant “harangues” from their captors and the guns trained on them.

Like most bright, educated young adults, Gilkey had a “view of life,” a set of beliefs about human meaning, nature, and purpose. He began his time in the compound with “the confident humanism so characteristic of liberal academic circles.”⁵ He described that as consisting of two basic parts. First, he believed in the “rationality and goodness” of human beings, who had the ingenuity to solve basic human problems.⁶ Second, he saw religion as “merely a matter of personal taste, of temperament, essential only if someone wants it” and useless to achieving the broad concerns of the human race. He believed “secularity, with its techniques, its courage, and its idealism is quite able to create a full human life without religion.”⁷ “‘Why,’ I asked myself, ‘add religious frills to the ethical commitments . . . to the moral absolutes of peace in the world and justice in society?’” These moral commitments, he thought, did not need religious “frills” for support. In fact, religious belief distracted people from what was really important.⁸

Gilkey’s first couple of months in the compound seemed to confirm his “secular humanism.” When two thousand strangers suddenly found themselves thrown together, they began to organize themselves, discovering what every person was trained to do vocationally and putting everyone to work. The challenges of food preparation, sanitation, health care all were met with ingenuity. The actors and musicians created a stage and put on arts events. Also, people learned new skills. “Those who had never seen a mason’s trowel built clever brick stoves in their rooms . . . that not only heated the room, but baked a modest cake.” All of this confirmed his belief that “the capacity of [human beings] to develop the technical aspects of civilization—know-how—is limitless. I knew I would never again despair of man’s ability to progress in both knowledge and practical techniques.”⁹ He felt that human ingenuity in dealing with the problems of human life was “unlimited,” whereas the metaphysical issues that religion and philosophy “pretended to deal with” were “irrelevant.”¹⁰

Human Nature

But the rest of Gilkey’s account reveals how thoroughly his “secularity” was dismantled by his unusually up-close two-year confrontation with fundamental human nature. People began to steal coal and food, and no amount of public shaming could stop it. Fights broke out over space and distribution of goods, and those with marginally more of these things fiercely defended them rather than sharing. Crisis after crisis occurred “that involved not a breakdown in techniques, but a breakdown in character.” The trouble with his “humanism” was “not its confidence in science and technology . . . [but] its naïve and unrealistic faith in the rationality and goodness of the men who wielded these instruments.”¹¹ What he discovered was that all human beings were intensely self-interested and selfish but found the most ingenious ways to cloak those motives in moral and rational language. He called this “the essential intractability of the human animal,” and it not only was a problem for the people from the lower or less educated classes but characterized the missionaries and priests in their midst as well.¹²

He realized that this created a great crisis for their “microcivilization.” “These moral breakdowns were so serious that they threatened the very existence of our community.” In particular, very few people seemed regularly capable of self-sacrifice, but that was what was required. “I began to see that without moral health, a community is as helpless and lost as it is without material supplies.”¹³

One of the most instructive incidents came early in his time as the elected head of the Housing Committee. Eleven single men living in a small room discovered that there were nine single men living in an identical-sized space. They went to Gilkey asking that one of them be allowed to move into the other residential room, so that there would be ten living in each one. Gilkey was pleased. “Here at last was a perfectly clear-cut case. Surely the injustice in this situation was, if it ever was in life, clear and distinct. . . . Anyone who could . . . count and measure could see the inequity involved.” He assumed that “the average man, when faced with a clear case of injustice . . . will at least agree to rectify that injustice even if he himself suffers from the rectification.” And surely, he reasoned further, we are all in a common difficulty here, like persons on a raft at sea. So he assumed that the nine residents of block 49 would agree with him to accept a new resident, if not enthusiastically.

On the contrary, they did not. “Sure we’re sorry for those chaps over there,” said one, “but what has that got to do with us? We’re plenty crowded here as it is, and their worries are their tough luck.” Gilkey passionately argued against what he called “the sheer irrationality of nine men in one room and eleven in the other when both were the same size.” It seemed only rational to share fairly, and, he argued, to do so was ultimately in their self-interest, because this way they could count on fair treatment if they were in a position to need it. Gilkey, of course, was speaking and later writing before John Rawls’s influential books that argued almost in the identical way. There was no need to appeal to anything but rationality and self-interest to establish a peaceful and just order.

The men of block 49 heard Gilkey’s excellent logic, and one replied, “That may be, friend. But let me tell you a thing or two. Fair or not fair, if you put one of them in here, we are merely heaving him out again. And if you come back here about this, we are heaving you out too.”¹⁴ Several others tried to take a more moderate tone, but they were just as adamant against the move. They tried to engage Gilkey’s argument, finding ways to explain why they were not being impractical, unreasonable, or unjust.

As Gilkey went home, defeated, a thought struck him. “I almost laughed aloud when a queer thought struck me: Why should a man wish to be reasonable or moral if he thereby lost precious space?” What obliged a person to be rational? If you argue that to be rational is simply to be in your best interests, well, you are appealing to no higher value than selfishness. So why shouldn’t the person act selfishly? Rationality and logic, then, were insufficient to bring human beings to agreement and to move them to action that promoted the social good. Something else was needed.

True Virtue

Gilkey came home that night confused, shaken, and losing faith in humanity’s “basic goodness.” “Self-interest seemed almost omnipotent next to the weak claims of logic and fair play.” As the months went by, he constantly faced this same self-centered “intractability,” namely, that “the fundamental bent of the total self in all of us was inward, toward our own welfare. And so immersed [are] we in it that we hardly are able to see this in ourselves, much less extricate ourselves from our dilemma.”¹⁵ People never could admit to themselves or others what they were doing. They always found “afterward . . . rational and moral reasons for what they had already determined to do.”¹⁶ The most moral and religious people, like everyone else, “found it incredibly difficult, not to say impossible, to will the good; that is, to be objective . . . generous and fair. . . . Some power within seemed to drive us to promote our own interests against those of our neighbors. . . . Though quite free to will whatever we wanted to do in a given situation, we were not free to love others, because the will did not really want to.”¹⁷

The Shandong compound had stripped away the masks of politeness. “The thin polish of easy morality” had worn off. In more comfortable settings, people can feign the virtues of justice, compassion, and integrity. But in the compound, to be truly “fair and rational . . . just and generous . . . required the sacrifice of some precious good,” and that did not come naturally to anyone. Shandong showed that true virtue is extremely costly and goes deeply against the grain of human nature. Gilkey had been taught in Chicago and at Harvard by teachers who believed that when the chips were down, and humans were revealed as they “really are,” they would be good to one another. He now saw that “nothing could be so totally in error.”¹⁸ If the social order was to improve or even to survive, people had to be capable of virtue. But in their natural state they were not. In the compound Gilkey found true virtue to be “rare indeed.”¹⁹

Gilkey discovered a number of ideas for which we have been contending in his book. He saw that Western secularity was not just the absence of belief but a new set of beliefs. Those beliefs included the goodness and rationality of human beings and especially the sufficiency of unaided human reason to guide us toward the goals of peace and justice. This worldview, these beliefs, could not stand up to the reality of human nature and human life under less-than-ideal circumstances.

He saw that rationality alone could not give people a basis for moral obligation. Why should people make sacrifices for others, especially if they could not see how it benefited them? Not only that, Gilkey saw an intractable inclination to selfishness and cruelty in the human heart that simple appeals to moral ideals could neither dislodge nor even enable people to see in themselves. This led Gilkey to a radical reversal in thinking.

It was a rare person indeed in our camp whose mind could rise beyond that involvement of the self in crucial issues to view them dispassionately. Rational behavior in communal action is primarily a moral and not an intellectual achievement, possible only to a person morally capable of self-sacrifice. In a real sense, I came to believe, moral selflessness is a prerequisite for the life of reason—not its consequence, as so many philosophers contend.²⁰

In short, if we are going to live rationally and use our minds well, we need new hearts. We need something that draws us out of our desperate search for self-fulfillment, affirmation, and value and makes us capable of loving other beings, not for our sake but for theirs. Gilkey came to believe that only faith in God could do all this.

[Human beings] need God because their precarious and contingent lives can find final significance only in His almighty and eternal purposes, and because their fragmentary selves must find their ultimate center only in His transcendent love. If the meaning of men’s lives is centered solely in their own achievements, these too are vulnerable to the twists and turns of history, and their lives will always teeter on the abyss of pointlessness and inertia. And if men’s ultimate loyalty is centered in themselves, then the effect of their lives on others around them will be destructive of that community on which we all depend. Only in God is there an ultimate loyalty that does not breed injustice and cruelty, and a meaning from which nothing on heaven and earth can separate us.²¹

My wife, Kathy, and I originally discovered Shantung Compound because we understood that it contained an account of Eric Liddell (called by the pseudonym “Eric Ridley” in the book), the former Olympic star and missionary to China whose story is told in the movie Chariots of Fire. Liddell was a prisoner in the compound and died during his internment. Gilkey candidly describes how the other missionaries and clergy in the camp were fully as selfish and ungenerous as others, and in many cases more so, because they often accompanied their behavior with sanctimony. But Liddell was different. Gilkey makes a startling statement about him: “It is rare indeed when a person has the good fortune to meet a saint, but he came as close to it as anyone I have ever known.”²² Liddell was especially concerned to minister to the teenagers of the camp. He cooked for them and supervised recreation for them and poured himself out for them. More than anyone else there he was overflowing with humor, love of life, sacrificial kindness for others, and inward peace. When he died suddenly of a brain tumor, the entire camp was stunned.

Liddell was a committed Presbyterian missionary who believed in Christ and that his salvation was accomplished by God’s sheer and free grace. Gilkey wisely points out that “religion” all by itself does not necessarily produce the changed heart capable of moral selflessness. Often religion can make our self-centeredness worse, especially if it leads us to pride in our moral accomplishments. In Liddell we had a picture of what a human being could be if he was both humbled yet profoundly affirmed and filled with the knowledge of God’s unconditional love through undeserved grace. Gilkey, quoting Reinhold Niebuhr, says:

Religion is not the place where the problem of man’s egotism is automatically solved. Rather, it is there that the ultimate battle between human pride and God’s grace takes place. Insofar as human pride may win the battle, religion can and does become one of the instruments of human sin. But insofar as there the self does meet God and so can surrender to something beyond its own self-interest, religion may provide the one possibility for a much needed and very rare release from our common self-concern.²³