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Let's move to your own background—what has prepared you to take this role?

To give a quick answer: I suffer from a late-onset, probably lethal, rabbinic gene which has gradually expressed itself, and it has taken me over. I think a number of things count. I'm a first-generation American raised in a Yiddish-speaking, proudly Jewish but secular home, with no religious rearing whatsoever. There were socialist leanings, and strong moral teachings. My parents were both immigrants, neither of them schooled. But the moral questions and the question of how to live righteously and nobly and well and with dignity were the questions of their home. I don't just mean that you were exhorted to be good, but that there were dinner conversations about "What do you think of so-and-so's behavior?" One was somehow encouraged to pay attention to conduct and to character. As to the integrity of both of my parents—I can't shine their shoes. There was a remarkable moral example, and a kind of explicit moral conversation.

At the University of Chicago, I realized that there were real questions, whereas previously I only had answers. Although I was headed for biology, I was introduced to some of the questionable philosophical assumptions that are at the foundations of modern science—to which we mostly just don't pay any attention, because we see science as progressive, and more is better and truer.

I was headed for a career in academic medicine. Then in 1965 my wife and I went to Mississippi to do civil rights work. I came back with this question: Why was there more honor and dignity and things that I admired in these ignorant black farmers in Mississippi with whom we lived than in my well-educated, privileged fellow graduate students at Harvard University? I had been taught that education, opportunity, and privilege would banish poverty and superstition, and enable human beings to flower morally into the kinds of creatures that only the stinginess of nature and their ignorance prevented them from being. If that was true, why this discrepancy between these very smart people who were around me, many of whom you would not want your sister to marry, and these very fine, simple, uneducated men and women?

I really had questions, because if a kind of simple Enlightenment progressivist view of morals on a purely secular foundation was correct, this couldn't be right. And if what I believed was wrong, what was in its place? That began a series of readings. A friend gave me Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences to read, and I read Aristotle's Ethics and Physics with him. He also gave me C. S. Lewis's Abolition of Man to read, and Huxley's Brave New World. And I was off. On the side of science, there were certain assumptions about nature, and human nature, that set the metaphysical questions aside so that we can get on with the power to predict and control events. On the other side, there were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.

I also learned gradually that what I thought had been the socialism of my home was, in fact, a terrestrialized version of prophetic Judaism. It was the Prophets without the Law. This was true of that whole generation. Many of these people who fell for Marxism did so out of a longing for justice, and belief that one didn't have to wait for the messianic age, one could build it here and now. Especially when our children were born, I realized that one shouldn't live as a parasite on a tradition that one knew nothing about. So I joined a synagogue, I began to do some studying of the Torah. I don't regard myself as a good enough Jew by a long shot, either in terms of learning or practice. But I've come to treasure the biblical strand of our Western tradition more than the strand that flows from Athens.

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June 10 2002, Vol. 46, No. 7