Shantung Compound Essay Questions

1.     Early on in his time in the camp, Gilkey asked himself, “What’s so important anyway about the way a person looks at life?” “Isn’t this a typically intellectualist way of looking at our crises?” he wondered.  “The real issues of life,” he thought, “are surely material and political:  how we can eat and keep warm, be clothed and protected from the weather, and organize our common efforts.  These matters are resolved by practical experience and by techniques, not by this or that philosophy or religious faith….”  “It was not that I thought religion wrong,” says Gilkey; “I simply thought it irrelevant.”  Gradually, however, his view changed.  Why?  Explain in terms of his observations about:

a)     The depths of chronic human selfishness and moral blindness

b)    Man’s need for meaning and what brings Him the kind of true meaning needed to establish a strong community 

2.     Gilkey says that he had run into “a strange dilemma.”  Two things that apparently contradicted each other had become transparently clear from his experience.  First, he had learned that men need to be moral — that is, responsibly concerned with their neighbor’s welfare as well as their own if human community was to be at all possible.  Equally evident, however, was that men did not or even could not so overcome their own self-concern to be thus responsible to their neighbor.  A resolution of such a contradiction in existence could only take place in life, not merely in thought about it.  What was required instead?  Explain.

3.     Why did Gilkey reject the optimism presupposed by liberal progressivism and embrace instead belief in “original sin”?

4.     Gilkey writes that, “A realistic view of man tends to undermine the confidence a technological culture has in its own progress.  Since we all want to believe in something, our secularized culture has tended to adopt an idealistic view of man as innately rational and good, as able to handle himself and his own history with the relative ease with which he deals with nature.  [Should we expect him to make as much a mess of history as he has with nature?]  Consequently, the scientist rather than the politician, the knower rather than the moralist, has seemed to us to be the guarantor of security and peace, the harbinger of a better world.”  What he learned in the camp, however, says Gilkey, is that this vision is “a false dream.”  Why?

5.     Why, according to Gilkey, was the second, large shipment of parcels from the American Red Cross a “mixed blessing” for the camp?  What would have made it a blessing pure and simple?  What lesson might we derive from this story?

6.     When the second, larger shipment of parcels came from the American Red Cross, seven Americans wanted the Americans to get them all.  Gilkey and some others disagreed, so they went out to try to convince the bulk of their fellow Americans that they should share them equally.  Unfortunately, Gilkey did not get the responses he was hoping for.  “The talks were fascinating,” he writes, “although shattering to the remaining shreds of my old liberal optimism.”  Describe the responses of the following interlocutors:

a)     The cynical, “hard guy” Rickey Kolcheck

b)    The man who argued against sharing the parcels equally with everyone “on principle” — that is to say, based on a legal principle

c)     The man who argued based on “morality.”  Explain this man’s view of “morality.”  Consider how it is based on the common modern notion of freedom as personal, individual freedom. (Later in the semester, we will want to compare this man’s notion of becoming “good” with what Magda Trocmé says about being “good.”)

7.     “In the possession of material goods,” says Gilkey, “there is no such thing as satiety.”  Why not?  Gilkey does not mention this, but what would one need to have peace?

8.     According to Gilkey, “rarely does self-interest display itself frankly as selfishness.”  More often it hides.  How?  Explain why it hides.  How would this serve as a warning to us, especially in a class such as this one?

9.     Gilkey says that he learned in the camp that “idealistic intentions are not enough; nor is a man’s idealistic fervor the final yardstick of the quality of his character.”  Why are they not enough?  What should be the “final yardstick” of our actions?

10.  According to Gilkey, we commit most of our serious sins against our neighbor on the basis of what?

11.  Why, according to Gilkey, is it that “teaching high ideals to men will not in itself produce better men and women”?

12.  Gilkey says he learned that “men are neither so rational nor so moral as they like to think.”  Their minds and their ideals alike had all too often shown themselves to be what?  Explain.

13.  Gilkey rejects the notion that the problem arises due to our “lower instincts.”  Why?  How does this correspond to an insight St. Augustine had in struggle with the Manichean and neo-Platonic ideas about the origins of sin?

14.  “An idealistic law may state beautifully the abstract principles which should be operative for a perfect society,” says Gilkey.  But what is the problem?  What is needed instead?

15.  People in the camp had to struggle with the moral question:  “Is it right to steal?”  From whom did they think they were stealing?  From whom were they really stealing? What was the problem that arose in the camp from the attitude they took toward stealing?

16.  Did the freedom to steal make people better off?  Did it help communal relations in the camp?  Explain.

17.  What is Gilkey’s view of Locke’s notion of the “state of nature”?  Does he agree?  Why or why not?

18.  Gilkey’s friend Matt said one night:  “We make a great to-do about the force of public opinion, but when the chips are down, it’s a skittish and unreliable thing at best.”  Why?

19.  “Like most people,” writes Gilkey, “we thought that a legal and political problem such as ours [with stealing] called for an administrative solution.”  Why was this view mistaken?

20.  People in the camp were reticent to set up laws against stealing because many of them were also stealing.  What punishment would you have recommended for the crime of stealing in the camp if you were not stealing?  What punishment would you have recommended if you also had been stealing?  How about Mrs. Witherspoon, the woman who showed up late for the twice-a-day line-up, causing the whole group to remain an extra quarter of an hour:  what punishment would you have recommended for her?  What punishment would you recommend if you too had the tendency to show up late?

21.  Gilkey claims that “a democratic society can possess no stronger law than the moral character of the people within it will affirm and support.”  Do you agree or disagree?  How strong a law should we expect in the democratic society of the United States?  How strong a law would you prefer to see in the United States?

22.  Gilkey again mentions Locke and his “social contract” theory.  What is his criticism of it?  What view of political union does he hold instead?

23.  Gilkey believed skill was important, but something else was more important?  What was it and why was it more important?

24.  On p. 162, Gilkey notes that he ran into a “strange dilemma.”  “Two things that apparently contradicted each other had become transparently clear” to him because of his experience.  What were they?  What did he come to believe was the only resolution of this contradiction possible in life?

25.  According to Gilkey, besides personal integrity, the deepest spiritual problem an internment camp encounters is that of what?  How does this correspond to something Viktor Frankl said about life in Auschwitz?    How these statements at odds with what Timothy Clydesdale claims is common among emerging adults about their use of the “identity lockbox”?

26.  What, according to Gilkey, is the spiritual fuel that drives the human machine?  How does this correspond with something John Paul II said about human beings at the beginning of Fides et Ratio?

27.  For most average people, writes Gilkey, a sense of creative significance and strength of character both require what?  What happens when that context is missing?  What must people depend upon then?

28.  Gilkey says that his camp experience demonstrated that two things can safely be said about mankind.  What are they?  Why is it paradoxical that both are true?

29.  According to Gilkey, a man’s morality or immorality stems from what?  Explain.

30.  According to Gilkey, people’s centers of ultimate concern varied greatly.  Give some examples. What would happen if a person should lose his center of devotion and ultimate concern?

31.  Gilkey writes that, “The ethical issues of human community life are, therefore, the outward expression in action of deeper, more inward issues, we might say religious issues.”  Why?  Explain.

32.  Gilkey notes that the nineteenth century British writer Matthew Arnold had described religion as “morality tinged with emotion.”  Gilkey disagrees.  Why?  Explain.

33.  According to Gilkey, all men are “religious” in the sense that they have an ultimate concern.  Does Gilkey believe that all forms of religion equally creative or uncreative?  Explain. 

34.  Gilkey argues that a person’s “center of loyalty” must be “beyond themselves,” but also that this center of loyalty beyond themselves “cannot be a human creation, greater than the individual, but still finite, such as the family, the nation, tradition, race, or the church.”  Why not?  What is the only center that will allow a man to “forget his own welfare and for the first time look at his neighbor free from the gnawings of self-concern”?  How does this relate to what Gilkey calls “the man of real faith”?  What does “the Catholic world” call this “depth of self-surrender”?

35.  According to Gilkey, to live with courage, serenity, and a real love of life in the midst of uncertainty and suffering is a difficult task.  To be aware of our contingency, of the mortality of all we love and value, and yet to love life and act creatively in it, requires what?  Explain.

36.  For most humanists, living as they do in a stable culture, says Gilkey, the belief in the Providence of God seems antithetical to the belief in human creativity and freedom.  Why?

37.  According to Gilkey, our particular jobs of salesman, professor, or senator may prove useless in an internment camp or even in the next historical moment.  But what is “always with us”?  What provides the meaning of life on its deepest level?  How does this view correspond to something Viktor Frankl said about the challenge of life in a German concentration camp?

38.  Compare what Gilkey says about “Fate” with his view of what it means to live under divine providence.

39.  Gilkey says that one of the “strangest lessons that our unstable life-passage teaches is that the unwanted is often creative rather than destructive.”  What does he mean?

40.  Why, according to Gilkey, is it important to have a notion of the meaningfulness of history?

41.  Why does Gilkey believe that “only in God is there an ultimate loyalty that does not breed injustice and cruelty”?  Explain.