Monday, February 16, A.D. 2009

The Incomprehensibility of Abortion

Last week, the National Right to Life Committee sent out a mailing concerning Florida abortionist Pierre Renelique, which is now online—“Further Reflections on Abortionist Pierre Renelique.” Renelique recently lost his medical license because of Sycloria Williams’ disturbing story. Williams went to Renelique’s abortion clinic to “terminate her pregnancy,” but her termination came in the form of delivery rather than abortion. Nonetheless, after delivery, one of the clinic’s owners, Belkis Gonzales, took the newborn and placed her in a plastic biohazard bag. Then, the child was thrown out in the garbage. The police found the baby’s corpse in a cardboard box the following week.

What surprises me about the case is the supposed media shock and outrage. Had the “termination” occurred with scissors and forceps an hour before birth, then these ever so concerned citizens would only have argued about supporting a woman’s reproductive rights. Various press reports even quote N.O.W. chapter leaders who feign concern. Abortion rights supporters somehow muster up the gall to state that our society cannot treat babies like trash. Yet, tossing bodily remains in the garbage is the standard procedure for disposing each murdered fetus. Dead babies are mere medical waste for the abortion industry.

I wonder if the abortion establishment finds such cases upsetting simply because they draw attention to the horrible truth that society attempts to ignore. Botched abortion procedures are p.r. headaches; the story of Williams’ daughter is bad for business.

However, we cannot attribute such motivations to Williams herself. In the N.R.L.C. story, we read this bizarre passage:

Yesterday’s story dealt with the Florida Board of Medicine decision last Friday to revoke the license of abortionist Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique. The board upheld the Department of Health allegations that he falsified medical records, inappropriately delegated tasks to unlicensed personnel and committed malpractice. Ms. Williams had “planned to have an abortion but instead gave birth to a baby,” according to CNN.

Williams has sued Renelique, the clinic and its staff , seeking damages. She alleges in her suit that “she witnessed the murder of her daughter” and said she “sustained severe emotional distress, shock and psychic trauma which have resulted in discernible bodily injury.”

Imagine a philanderer who calls the cops to arrest a whore with whom he has just conducted business, citing how her activity harms society and family life.

Evil truly is unintelligible.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, February 16, Anno Domini 2009
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Friday, February 6, A.D. 2009

Reagan’s Birthday

Ninety-eight years ago, Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in the small town of Tampico, Illinois. After a career in Hollywood, he would become the governor of California and then the fortieth president of the United States of America. Scholars and partisans will continue to argue about his legacy, but that is not the purpose of this post. I wish to celebrate the man whom I, not having a grandfather myself, identified as the grandfatherly figure in my life. Perhaps it was his photograph on the wall at the front of my elementary school class, or perhaps it was seeing him on television and hearing his comforting voice that resounded with humility and strength that made me think of him so. Having right wing parents probably helped, too. I have noted how objectionable I find the cultic euphoria over Barack Obama, though I somewhat understand the emotional power of a governing figurehead due to my own experience growing up under the steady watch of President Reagan.

I was fortunate to be in Washington when Reagan died. I visited the Capitol to see his body lie in state under the dome; I walked around the casket around six o’clock in the morning when the rotunda was full but silent. Americans might be republicans, but we rather casually exhibit our regal impulses. In the Capitol and in the memorial events throughout the city, it felt as though our beloved and aged king had died. I confess that I teared up; in some childish but nonetheless sincere way, I felt as if the uniformed soldiers standing guard around the casket were honoring our departed paterfamilias rather than a mere politician. He was a very special man.

In honor of the President’s birthday, I am linking various videos. The first set is of President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals (unfortunately in sound only). It still shocks me that an American president would or could make such arguments.

Here is an excerpt of Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech at the Republican Convention during the Goldwater campaign.

Here is the famous “age issue” moment in the Reagan - Mondale debate.

You may listen to President Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech in Berlin.

Lastly, here is President Reagan’s farewell address.

Ronald Reagan, memory eternal!

Posted by Joseph on Friday, February 6, Anno Domini 2009
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Wednesday, February 4, A.D. 2009

Kantian Denaturing

One of the things my good and wise friend Andrew taught me was the destructive influence of Kantian critical philosophy on societies where it gains a large following. Let me qualify the following criticism of Kant by noting that he is a fearsome intellectual opponent. While I hold Nietzsche to be the wisest of the modern philosophers because he more honestly and more perspicaciously understood the logical force of modernity’s self-destructive tendencies, I think that Kant is the Enlightenment’s greatest defender. No proponent of modern philosophy gave stronger or more insightful arguments than the professor from Königsberg. I find Kant difficult and at times frustrating, but his work remains, literally, awesome. Kant has immensely contributed to philosophy. Nonetheless, with fear and trembling, I dare to question Kant’s ideas not only as inadequate but also as corrosive.

My chief annoyance with Kant’s system concerns his epistemology. Though Kant excels Hume by far, he still renounces the mind’s ability to transcend what he sees as the limitations of reason. Kant magnificently proves the shortcomings of Hume’s skepticism, but he lays an intellectual trap for Western thought in proposing his limitations on reason. Kant’s antinomies claim to show that human reason cannot resolve certain metaphysical problems, at least without resorting to metaphysical distinctions that render the world unintelligible in itself. Hence, human reason cannot be trusted as an accurate guide once one passes a certain threshold of metaphysical questioning. While Kant’s arguments superficially appear as an admission of intellectual modesty, they are bold claims that state that Kant’s reasoning exhausts the capability of human reason to tackle these conundrums. When I find that my reasoning on a particular issue is inconclusive, my default conclusion is that I do not know enough about the issue or that my reasoning is inadequate. In short, I conclude that I am ignorant and that I have not thought long or well enough. With the antinomies, by contrast, Kant purports to show that all that can be done has been done in his speculative reasoning.

All partisans of subjectivity after Kant employ similar—though inferior—arguments in touting the (selective) ignorance of man. What strikes me as insupportable about such a position is that it claims a transcendent knowledge of the limitations of human reason while simultaneously holding that such knowledge is an impermissible result of the transcendent temptation. In other words, to consider the limitations of reason is necessarily to transcend such limits. Kant argues that his system achieves the first but denies—for his philosophy and for any other—the second. Kantians presuppose a divine perspective in order to chastise ambitious reasoning, though such a divine perspective is contradictorily audacious.

I suspect that the other problems in Kant’s philosophy result from this epistemological issue. For Kant holds that we cannot know things in themselves. We cannot reason from noumenal knowledge. We are largely stuck inside the boundaries of our phenomenological experience. Thus, we cannot know the nature of things through reason; we can only know reason through reason. As such, Kant’s philosophical approaches to ethics, politics, and aesthetics are ingenious but inadequate attempts to treat justly their intended objects. For they must avoid the natural, and ignoring nature is a disastrous approach to constructing systems that must answer to nature. Denatured political theory, if enacted, necessarily becomes ruinous politics.

Therefore, I accuse Kantian philosophy not only of failing to portray the world accurately but also of having a deleterious effect on society, You may wonder how this applies to the contemporary world. Well, consider my letter to Lawrence Auster in response to his post, “You’ve got to be carefully taught—to commit racial suicide.” If you are not familiar with Auster’s View from the Right web site, he is chiefly interested in the cultural and ethnic survival of the West. He argues that the Leftist drift of modern society has effectively emasculated Western society through multiculturalism, universalism, and the undermining of traditional social values and behavior. I share many of his concerns and views, though I suspect that I have more toleration of and appreciation for the wayward ways against which he rails. Auster’s post shows his reaction to the movie, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Auster believes that the Left, through popular culture, instills in people an unnatural love for and trust of the alien. That popular culture does this is undeniable. I disagree with Auster, though, that the current myth makers do so due to a subversive racial agenda. Instead, I think that they simply reflect post-Kantian cultural values:

I wonder if the tendency in the West to promote unnatural reactions is largely due to Kant’s influence. For Kant, natural inclination and self-interest pollute rational endeavors, from morality to aesthetics. For example, we are unable to know if a woman who saves her baby in a fire has done a moral deed; for she necessarily acts through interest. To know whether her action is moral, she must work against her natural inclination. Hence, to be truly rational, we need to transcend inclination and self-interest. Acting against one’s natural impulses for the sake of some abstract principle is one of the highest, noblest actions available to man, for a Kantian.

I do not wish to insult Kant; he was a brilliant and profound thinker. Yet, I suspect that his followers in the West have adopted this position as a form of “noblesse oblige.” I know that you do not think highly of Sailer’s status theory, but I believe that he is onto something in the Western psyche. When the culture no longer holds up as an ideal the ascetic form of greatness (saintliness) or the heroic form of greatness (classical virtue in the magnanimous gentleman), it must find another model for the best life. The post-Kantian version is the life of enlightened man, where people bask in their own high-minded self-righteousness, defined and determined as that which goes against their natural interests. Multiculturalism, anti-racism, and religious relativism can be seen as species of this so-called enlightenment. It is an evolution, of sorts, of Christian charity, though mixed with a peculiar form of group-self-hatred coupled with individual-self-adulation. I believe that the social aspect of this sort of rejection of natural inclination is what Sailer analyzes in his status theory.

Your Grinch example belongs to this world view. To be enlightened, you must question and reject your natural inclinations. The Who girl who loves the Grinch is just such an enlightened being; she looks past the external and past the standards of the world to see the beauty inside the Grinch. Nietzsche considers Kant a bastardization of Christianity. The American cultural Left, with its insistence on valuing each person and making room at the table for everyone, is an heir, of sorts, to the Gospel. Good intentions, though, will not protect you from the evil for which your inclinations serve as warnings and defense. The Left only got the last part of the message in, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”

Auster replied that something much simpler is at work—our contemporarily prized value of non-discrimination. I responded so:

You suggest that a commitment to non-discrimination is at work. That is certainly true, with non-discrimination being an unwillingness to prefer one’s own to the other. Yet, it is not strong enough, I think, to explain the Left or our Kantian culture. Non-discrimination is a state of neutrality, while the enlightened man of the Left celebrates the other as other, pursues the other’s interests to the detriment of himself, and consciously works against his own natural inclination.

I believe that Nietzsche is correct to see modern morality as a decaying remnant of Christianity, as I have written elsewhere on this site and most recently in “Christianity’s Odd Place in the World.” The moral Left—[spasm of coughs and throat clearings]—consists of a Christianity robbed of all understanding of the world. Kant gives such folks intellectual respectability—and he is so much more dangerous for it. Again to invoke Nietzsche, to be dangerous is not the same as to be false. However, I believe several features of Kantian philosophy to be harmful because they are false—that is, they are destructive because they misunderstand the world and therefore misadvise human beings as to their beliefs and conduct.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, February 4, Anno Domini 2009
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Tuesday, January 27, A.D. 2009

The Human Person Yada Yada Yada

In my “Christianity’s Odd Place in the World” entry last week, I commented upon Metropolitan Jonah’s talk at vespers that centered upon a discussion of the human person. Indeed, the metropolitan’s pastoral message for the Sanctity of Human Life Sunday and address at the March for Life used similar language.

Being Jesuit educated and having swum in Roman Catholic intellectual waters for some time, I am very familiar with the language of “the human person.” You can smell its traces everywhere—from university mission statements to Orthodox hierarchs’ homilies. I suppose that the features of such talk originates in Personalism, taught by French thinkers such as Emmanuel Mounier and Gabriel Marcel and made globally popular by Pope John Paul II. Such language has entered Orthodoxy through the French-Russian Orthodox axis, epitomized by L’Institut Saint-Serge in Paris. Metropolitan Jonah’s remarks have their geneaology in that post-war cross-pollination that figures so prominently in the Orthodox Church in America.

I do not know how to assess all of this talk on “the human person.” I do not detect anything wrong or heretical in such teachings, but the novelty of the language troubles me. To my knowledge, one cannot find such a fixation on the human person per se before the twentieth century. I grant that Christianity has always been the religion of love, where God wants all to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth. We Orthodox Christians call Jesus Christ philanthropos—the lover of mankind. Moreover, all political and ethical thought obviously involves the human person. The ancient Greeks concerned themselves with the order of the soul. Christians some centuries later pondered the appropriate hierarchy of goods and loves, the disorder of which leads to lust and to all the trials of a fallen world. Early modern philosophers debated how best to deal with divergent wills in a human community. In all of these ages, the fundamental issues involved the question of man. Yet, one does not find therein an emphasis on each man’s being a man.

As I listened to the metropolitan’s talk at vespers, I wondered if the prophets and thinkers of our age were simply addressing the pressing problem of our time. For philosophy and theology are always largely reactive. Each age has its own set of necessary questions, and it is up to the minds of that age to provide the answers. Perhaps, with the advent of totalitarianism, mass culture, new technology, and the dehumanizing understanding of man in economics, biology, history, and art, what we have now is a veritable crisis of seeing man’s humanity. During the last two centuries, reductionist views of human beings with man as appetite, man as an economic being, man as the result of irrational chance, and man as will have become the air that we noetically breathe. Yet, to some extent, wasn’t it always so? Couldn’t we justly include Protagoras or Hobbes with Feuerbach, Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche? Maybe the difference in the contemporary world is the widespread ascendancy of such reductionism in all domains of human life.

Andrew suggested that the recent genesis of Personalism may have to do with modernity’s obsession with individualism. If such is true, it would be highly ironic, as those who worry about the human person endlessly trouble themselves with the ills of individualism. Could it be that they are philosophical parricides?

Posted by Joseph on Tuesday, January 27, Anno Domini 2009
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Thursday, January 15, A.D. 2009

Chesley B. Sullenberger, III

If you have not yet heard about the amazing airplane incident today in New York, allow me to introduce you to an American hero—Chelsea “Sully” Sullenberger. United States Air Force Academy graduate, United States Air Force fighter pilot, veteran pilot for US Airways since A.D. 1980, founder and C.E.O. of his own company, a visiting professor at U.C. Berkeley, and a member and consultant for several aviation and safety organizations and task forces, Mr. Sullenberger has an extraordinarily accomplished record. You can visit his company’s website, Safety Reliability Methods, Inc., where you can see his impressive curriculum vitae.

The city of New York and the whole nation celebrate today this man, who reminds us what a real hero is. If you wish to express your admiration, you can e-mail him at the address available on his C.V. I wrote the following short note to Mr. Sullenberger: “Thank you for saving people’s lives today and for showing a nation what character, a cool head, and solid training can do. You are a hero and a role model. The U.S.A.F., the Academy, U.S. Airways, and your family must be very proud.” Indeed, they are. Frankly, I am surprised that U.S. Airways has such pilots in its fleet. Given my rather unpleasant experiences with their luggage crews and flight delays and cancellations, I did not have a good impression of the company. Mr. Sullenberger alters my views a bit. I hope that they throw him a big party; he is the best p.r. that the company has had in some time.

You can read about the pilot’s admirable actions at the following: N.B.C. New York’s “Miracle on the Hudson,” Michelle Malkin’s “Flight 1549 pilot: God bless Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger!” and “Plane down: U.S. Airways disaster miracle in Hudson River; Update: All survived? Passenger: ‘Everyone prayed,’” the Times’ “Veteran pilot Chesley B. ‘Sully’ Sullenberger III a hero after splashdown saved every life on board,” WCBS New York’s “All Safe after Jet Ditches in NYC Hudson River,” and the Smoking Gun’s “The Hero of Flight 1549.”

Let us also not forget the valiant efforts of the flight crew, the rescue teams, and the passengers. It is a fine day when a disaster becomes an opportunity for heroism, competence, and success. Kudos to everyone involved!

Posted by Joseph on Thursday, January 15, Anno Domini 2009
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Friday, January 9, A.D. 2009

Richard John Neuhaus

Roman Catholic priest, thinker, writer, speaker, and editor and founder of First Things journal Richard John Neuhaus died yesterday. In his honor, First Things reposted his essay “Born Toward Dying” that you may wish to read. It is a mix between near-death autobiography and a somewhat Christian version of the Phaedo. I was fortunate enough to have met him once after a talk that he gave at the John Paul II Cultural Center a few years ago. May his memory be eternal!

I commented upon the passing of Neuhaus in a letter to a friend yesterday in which I marvelled at the lights in the darkness of our inane times. We should be ceaselessly grateful for such luminaries:

When I consider how unworthy our era is of any blessings, it is humbling to think of how many shimmers of truth and sanity have manifested in the world during the past century. Considering just mainly English and French speakers, the list is impressive—to name just a small sample: Gilson, Lewis, Maritain, de Lubac, Popovich, Elliot, Orwell, Chesterton, Danielou, Voegelin, Lossky, Aron, Berry, Kirk, Anscombe, Tolkien, Plantinga, MacIntyre, Strauss, Findlay, F. O’Connor, von Balthasar, Bozell, Schmeeman—not to mention several hierarchs, including the present and preceding Roman pontiffs. Anyway, it is probable that the culture and population at large are the worst that they have ever been in the history of civilization. Never before have so many believed in so much that was so wrong. Nonetheless, it is also possible that we have not had the same level of insightful and wise thinking and discourse in the West, on the part of a growing minority, since the Renaissance. Several centuries of diseased modern ideas have given us both sets of facts. Perhaps, there is hope for the West.

Whenever you get caught up in a fit of desperation, wondering where are our Cappadocians, our Ciceros, and our Thomas Mores today, just consider those names and the thousands like them who have maintained nous in an anoetic age.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, January 9, Anno Domini 2009
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Tuesday, December 2, A.D. 2008

Being Good for Goodness’ Sake

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine asked me if I identified the Good in Plato’s dialogues with God, and I do so identify the Good with God. The question was timely because on the previous evening, on the way back from the airport after Thanksgiving break, I had boarded the Metro where I saw an advertisement in the train that read “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.” Here is a news story about it.

Anyway, I started thinking about the old argument of whether one can be an atheist and moral at the same time. Of course, this is possible, given that moral action is more about upbringing than clear thinking. In the Abolition of Man, Lewis writes a memorable line about this, “I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.”

However, is it possible to be an atheist and be moral—and be able to give an account of being moral that would hold up to one’s own rational requirements? In other words, can a moral atheist rationally justify his morality? Certainly, an atheist can be moral, but we could attribute his moral training to something extrinsic to (and perhaps even undermined by) his atheism.

This brings me to Plato’s Good. I wonder if it is possible to have a sense of the Good without involving God or, in the broadest sense, the divine.

To some extent, Plato’s successor, Aristotle, attempts to explain ethics without transcending the human order, though even he admits that the highest human life is one that contemplates things greater than man. Aristotle’s argument is built upon a condition—that man naturally wishes to be happy. The “ought” of his ethical system is built on that condition. If one wishes to be happy, one needs to live virtuously to attain that goal. For virtue is the only firm foundation for the good life. For a supportive argument readily accessible to everyone, Aristotle notes that everyone desires friendship as a element in human happiness, but only virtuous agents truly have real friendship.

The self-interested aspect of Aristotle’s “virtue ethics” where a person cultivates virtue in order to be happy is what upsets our only serious latter day ethicist, Kant. Kant considers this striving after happiness extraneous to or even undermining of morality in that it makes morality a conditional good. For virtue is sought only for the sake of something else—namely, happiness. By contrast, Kant considers morality a matter of duty—something absolute, independent of our happiness or non-happiness—independent of our nature altogether, save the purest rational part of us.

What always bothers me about Kant is his insistence that an agent must see all rational agents as equal to himself. This is precisely what selfishness won’t allow, and I am not sure that reason has a case against the darker side of our souls. Kant’s basic argument is that in making any choice, we affirm the value of choice as such—the will as such. Hence, we must respect the free choice—the will—as exercised by any rational agent lest we contradict ourselves. For how can we affirm the value of will here and not there?

However, why can’t I simply value my will? I do not know why my exercise of the will necessitates my respect for your exercise of the will. From this grounding, Kant builds his entire ethical system, but I do not see its necessity given his stingy metaphysics. For a Kantian, what exactly is the universalizable act of willing? What metaphysical status can it have?

I believe that the Platonic Good, as well as the Christian God, supplies the absolute demand on moral action that Kant demands of ethics, but it does so by embracing rather than casting out man’s natural desire for fulfillment and happiness. With the Good, morality is a matter of happiness (fulfillment in that which is our natural end) and duty (we owe our very being to it and are nothing without it). We are to be good. Why? We have a natural end to be good, and when we act against it, we are miserable . . . like a fish out of water. Yet, even if we nihilistically and demonically will to be miserable, we still ought to be good since we owe such behavior to the source of our being. This, of course, involves the idea of justice—of owing and making good on one’s debts.

The Good, justice, virtue—the nominalist hates the invocation of all these forms. Yet, the Platonic response is that they distinguish ideas that we have—ideas indispensable to making our world intelligible. Whenever we attempt to reduce such to other things (e.g. evolved patterns of behavior that aid group survival), we lose sight of the realities for which we are trying to give an account. For example, let’s say that we deny that there is anything “really real” about justice and that we make it simply a code of behavior that assists in the group’s survival. Members of the group realize that it is in their self-interest (to survive, at least) for the group to survive. Hence, XYZ are important rules to follow to accomplish that task. That makes sense. Yet, does it really present a necessity to a member of the group to act just when he is the one to be sacrificed for the good of the group? For moral action to hold in such a situation, there has to be something that transcends worldly self-interest. Virtue, Platonically speaking, is self-transcending. We are to be virtuous—good—and such is its own reward because it is a higher form of being. It is the metaphysical default of beings to seek their perfection by returning and conforming to their source. That such does not always happen is the confusing and unintelligible phenomenon—that nasty problem of evil.

If your world is only the animal life, what sense is there in justice? Therein, I simply restate Ivan Karamazov’s famous words that without God, everything is permitted. We have nihilism and the consequent attempts to escape its soul crushing clutches by establishing values in a valueless existence, for which Nietzsche pleads. Where there is no good and evil, Nietzsche demands that we make our own way and create our own values. Yet, is the will strong, or irrational, enough to impress itself by creating values that it will simultaneously obey? Without any permanent or higher reference point, according to what standards will the will legislate its new morality? According to whim? Yet, whim changes by the moment. Moreover, is a will in one moment obliged to follow its moral code from the previous moment? Such an obligation has no basis beyond the passing fancy of the will in the moment. The consequence of the Nietzschean system is that human beings, reduced to animal life, cannot rise above it. We only have beasts following their unintelligible appetites. Were we to allow for the goodness of nature, we could find some solace in the goodness of appetitive drives. Nihilism denies us even that.

As the atheist advertisement states, we are to be good for goodness’ sake. Yet, why should we care about goodness for its own sake unless it has a claim on our love by its very nature? Does it make sense to talk about such goodness—goodness that would be entitled to such a claim on our love—without its being divine?

Posted by Joseph on Tuesday, December 2, Anno Domini 2008
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Tuesday, November 18, A.D. 2008

Thrasymachean Knots

On Amused Cynic’s page, the author voices some of my concerns about the new administration and mentions a line that has become a motif in conservative complaints—that the opposition uses our own civility against us . . . The idea goes thus: If only we were not constrained by our respect for the rule of law, by our standards of fair play and decency, by our habitual noblesse oblige in dealing with the opposition, all while they ignore such constraints—then we would be victorious.

But at what cost? As I wrote on the Amused Cynic’s page, would you really want to be part of the MoveOn crowd, even with power? Honor and integrity count for some consolation in defeat.

Manipulative and unprincipled agents always use the civility of good people against them. Thrasymachus in The Republic makes the case well that nice guys finish last. He is correct, if we look at worldly success—the attainment of temporal power—as the measure of a man. Plato’s argument, and the necessary argument of all ethics, is that some goods are more important than the fleeting goods that the many value. Wealth, power, security, good fortune—they are all undeniable goods that we desire. However, they are tricky possessions, and having them might paradoxically make you less of a human being if you do not have firm support. Such support comes from virtue, and the possession of virtue is always a good. It is unqualifiedly beneficial. No one can take it from you, and it is more intrinsically you than any external good. If you had to choose between wealth and virtue, you should choose virtue. It may lead to wealth, as well, but wealth without virtue will not lead to virtue, and it will not bring the happiness for which wealth is supposedly useful in attaining. Thus spake the wise from Socrates to Boethius to Thomas . . .

However, I wonder if this purest Socratic call to follow the Good demands that we neglect our responsibilities. Even if you wish to preach the gospel of self-sacrifice, without power—without the ability to exercise our will—we are unable to fulfill our duties to those in our care. Maybe this is why Socrates tried to dissuade his young friends from a life in politics—like Buddha, Socrates realized that worldly responsibilities often compromise the stringent demands of moral rectitude. We enlightened moderns may snicker when we read that Christian emperors like Constantine waited until their twilight days to get baptized, but they may manifest an uncomfortable truth—the demands of morality and the demands of life often contradict.

It is a rare talent to be both decent and ruthlessly effective. When one starts to justify departures from principle with success rates, one has already begun to lose one’s moral compass. Our choices can transform us into that which we previously hated—all while aiming for something good. Consequentialism is a foolish ethical theory, but there is a greater psychological danger to the end’s justifying the means. For in getting our fingers dirty, we might find that the stains sink in and won’t wash off. We can become habituated in evil even as we do unseemly actions with an aim for the good.

Yet, we do not live in a perfect world, and when the lives of others hang in the balance, should our moral rectitude excuse our negligence in doing what is necessary to protect our fellow human beings? Does morality ever become a personal luxury, the cost of which is the blood and treasure of the innocent? If the good of the city falls to my individual choice, why isn’t it permissible—or even obligatory—to consider the probable consequences of my choice? The utilitarians may be ethically confused, but they tap into a common sense awareness that strict ethical theory fails to grasp.

So, where do we find the balance? How can we maintain our moral sense and yet do what needs to be done to fulfill our duties in a fallen world? This is what every leader, and everyone with responsibility, must face. It truly is applied ethics.

I think that Plato and Aristotle always provide superior guidance. Contemporary historians of ideas sometimes criticize the medievalist tendency to defer to authority, but well-chosen authorities provide able captains in navigating dangerous waters. Plato and Aristotle deserve to be auctores more than anyone outside the prophetic and apostolic tradition, and I am wont to consider them divinely inspired themselves. Anyway, both Plato and Aristotle hold up the virtuous man as an ideal for ethical action rather than defining ethical formulae. Throughout the dialogues, Plato centers his ethical discussions on the ideal man, Socrates. Socrates incarnates in his own life the Good which we must seek. In various passages, Plato also stresses how the ethical life is an imitation of the Good—the virtuous man models his soul on the order of the heavens, and the virtuous soul seeks to follow in the course of the highest things. Aristotle fleshes out ethics in analysing practical reason and in formulating the logic of moral choices. Still, if one were to ask Aristotle what would the correct action be in a given situation, he would reply that it is that which the virtuous man would do. Both Greeks posit the ideal marker of true virtue . . . Plato, in the forms of the virtues, and Aristotle, as instantiated in the truly virtuous man.

If the wise Greeks are correct, then we would expect that the truly virtuous man—the one who knows wisdom, justice, courage, and prudence—would be able to unravel our Thrasymachean knot. The truly virtuous would know if and when the standard rules of ethics could be abrogated, and he would act accordingly. Critics of the Greek way might hiss that we have gotten nowhere with such an answer. As we are not truly virtuous, knowing that the truly virtuous person would choose correctly is somewhat of a tautology; it does not help us. Nonetheless, the Greek scheme does show how important the cultivation of virtue is—as Aristotle says, practical wisdom is for action, not for theory. We learn ethics for the sake of acting well. No amount of ethical argumentation, case hypothesizing, and casuistry will get us closer to right action without the fundamental steps of character formation. If a murderer in pursuit of his intended victim ever came to the door of a truly virtuous innkeeper into whose building the chased man fled, such an innkeeper would surely do what should be done, even as Kant and Mill disagree about morality.

We should thus look to our own character and try, with every choice that we make, to align our habits with right reason and to imitate ever more the virtuous man. In the meantime, I’ll not judge the man who perhaps errs in cases too difficult for us imperfect in practical wisdom.

Posted by Joseph on Tuesday, November 18, Anno Domini 2008
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Tuesday, November 11, A.D. 2008

Ninetieth Anniversay of Armistice Day

Ninety years ago, the horrifying and disastrous First World War came to an end. Prophets and philosophers in the West knew that the modern industrial age was not the utopian world for which progressive men hoped, but the “Great War” showed everyone the frightful possibilities of man’s new power, arrogance, and forgetfulness of past wisdom. Our collective memory of the war fades, but flickers remain in commemorations of Armistice Day, Remembrance Day, and, here in the United States, Veterans Day, when we remember all those who served in the armed forces.

The seeds to the First World War go back to Adam, of course, and the war itself lies at a particularly dark nexus in world history. For the war set in motion the apocalyptic nightmare of the twentieth century wherein monarchies were overthrown, aristocracies and ancient traditions were repudiated, cities were destroyed, empires crumbled, totalitarianism began its dreadful march, theomachy was unleashed, and the West chose death over life in its greed for world domination. The fallout of the damned war continues to plague us . . . as the last embers of Western civilization currently fade into history. If only Europe’s leaders ninety-four years ago could have foreseen what they have wrought—Europe weeping for her children, because they are not.

War is hell, but it strangely allows us to see some of the best aspects of human nature. There is nothing nobler or more iconic of God than self-sacrificial love, and war provides ample opportunities for such heroic actions.

Greater love hath no man than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends.

This aspect of war as a challenge for greatness supplies the opinion of war’s glory. What justifies man’s existence—that greatness in certain human beings—flourishes in adversity, but slothful and lazy men become perversely ugly in times of comfort and peace. Hobbes and Nietzsche are correct when they praise war for its positive effects on human beings; suffering often prunes human beings into better specimens. As Aristotle noted millennia ago, war provides the ultimate test for human excellence, wherein men learn of their own and of their fellows’ virtue, where valor, courage, and self-sacrifice remind human beings that perhaps they do deserve to survive and that they have the power to do so. Not just soldiers but the civilian population grows in its worth if it survives a struggle nobly. A seiged city that comes through conflict victorious and without shame is a better city for the pain and suffering that it overcame. Nietzsche noted well that man learns through pain.

Yet, consider the demonic cost of such spiritual growth—a generation lost and more marred. Some survivors are better with their scars, but others are broken and many are dead. It would be somewhat comforting to think that only the weak and the cowardly die in war—that war acts in some Darwinian manner to cull the herd of its less desirable stock. Yet, this is not so . . . artillery rains down upon the best and the bravest as upon the wicked and the cowardly. I think of Rhett Butler’s response to Scarlett in Gone with the Wind: “I’m angry. Waste always makes me angry, and that’s what all this is, sheer waste,” or Sherman’s “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.” So many lost—and so many young, promising ones lost, often the kind of people that you want to constitute a society—who perished before their time. Or so it seems to the ones who remain. The glory of virtue is its own reward; a moment worth a lifetime is for the one who conquers his lesser self and shines forth in noble acts; the songs sung of the dead and heroic deeds recounted for generations may gain a certain type of immortality for the valiant—these are considerable goods, but they do not fall to the grieving families except as bittersweet consolation in pride. How many widows of the men in Arlington would rather have their husbands back alive and victorious rather than dead and heroically commemorated. The Spartan women may have said to their husbands to return with their shields or on them, but I suspect that even the most Spartan wife’s heart hoped for the former.

So, this is quite an irony of human existence—war makes us better and worse. I suppose that the ideal situation would be where a society cultivates the virtues that the dangers of war make necessary for human affairs but then never actually has to use them. Of course, human beings come to ignore the perceived needless, and reminders have to come from time to time for our own good. Regardless, I do not think that war itself is avoidable, given the wickedness, vulnerability, misunderstanding, and greed of men. Sometimes, violence must answer violence. Nonetheless, even given its salubrious effects, war is always tragic—good men die fighting and innocent civilians always suffer collateral damage. Not least among their sufferings is their beloved dead who never make it home.

For a bleak depiction of World War I, I recommend the Australian film Gallipoli. If you have never seen it, do not watch this closing scene but borrow the whole movie:

What a lot that we have made for ourselves, both to our shame and to our credit.

Memory eternal to the dead of war! It is meet and right to honor them, to miss them, and to be grateful for their sacrifice.

Posted by Joseph on Tuesday, November 11, Anno Domini 2008
Anthropology • Ethics • Politics • (1) Comments • Permalink

Sunday, October 19, A.D. 2008

Ignorance and Vice

For all my thinking years. the problem of evil has captivated my attention more than any other knotty issue. I have explored it somewhat more metaphysically in other posts, but on a simpler level, I wonder what really leads people to false opinions and immoral behavior. Does one of these unpleasant sets cause the other, and, if so, which leads to which?

When I was an undergraduate, a fine young Jesuit scholar told me once his rather controversial opinion on the matter. He believed that most people persist in error to justify their immorality. I did not accept his argument as I did not wish to diminish intellectual controversies to the level of psychoanalysis, but I have considered it many times in the years since. There may be truth to it. Obviously, human matters are complex, and the soul’s calculus in decision making undoubtedly has many non-rational and non-moral influences. Depending on one’s character, barely conscious or subconscious self-rationalization might skew one’s allegiance among the claims of competing beliefs. It is not flattering to think that some form of selfish cost and benefit analysis might be at work with matters of theology, morality, and metaphysics, but it might be accurate.

Another professor of mine is fond of characterizing human beings as agents of truth. It may be just as honest to say that we are self-justifying manipulators of ideas.

Posted by Joseph on Sunday, October 19, Anno Domini 2008
Ethics • (0) Comments • Permalink