Popular writing about the Supreme Court focuses on the content of the complex rules that the Court fashions for deciding cases.  Conservatives criticize them for favoring the left, liberals for not doing so enough.  Far too few citizens notice the most conspicuous feature of the situation, which is not which way these intricately complex rules lean, but the sheer fact of their intricate complexity.

A few distinctions aid precision, but a thousand distinctions destroy precision.  Suppose, for example, the Court says that the constitutionality of a law depends on whether it correctly balances the interests of the plaintiffs against community standards, whether the burden on the plaintiffs is constitutionally significant, or whether the state interests advanced by the law are compelling.  As the late Justice Scalia remarked, interests, burdens, and standards of this sort are not mentioned in the Constitution, and needless to say, the document does not contain criteria for weighting significance or compellingness.  What then do these factors mean, and what is the correct way to balance or apply them?

Not even the members of the Court know the answer to that question.  Everything depends on their respective moods at the time each case is decided.  Not only does this inevitably politicize the Court, but it also encourages disputants to litigate everything, continually returning to the Court to see what they can get away with (or what they can keep other people from getting away with) this time around.

In this way, the law of the land comes to depend less and less on legislative judgment, and more and more on judicial whims.

Admittedly, legislatures encourage this sort of thing through imprecise legislation – which amounts to passing the buck.  But few had expected, when the Constitution was new, that it would be so easy for judges to magnify their importance.

It is commonly said that although devotion to a wicked cause is bad, at least it is good that the devotee is giving himself to “something greater than himself."

I have no interest in defending narcissism.  Closely examined, though, most of the things that are supposed to be greater than the self turn out to be either things less than the self, or else disguises for something about the self.

In the former category, for instance, some people feel small in the face of the Cosmos or the All, and so they worship that.  But although the totality of everything is bigger than the self, it is not greater.  In fact, it is less, for it does not even rise to the level of being a person.  Every single person in the created universe is a higher entity than the universe as a whole.  The mere agglomeration of life and death, animals and stars, harmonicas and pneumonia, pop concerts and yogurt smoothies, love, malice, lies, truths, pimples, illusions, and everything else is not the sort of thing that can love, know, or deliberate.  It doesn’t have hopes, aspirations, or disappointments.  It will never learn your name.  It can’t answer when you speak to it.  It’s not a who, but only a whopping big what.

As to the latter category, there are lots of examples.  How amazing that in adoration of our own reflections, we immolate not only others but ourselves.  The Nation may be merely a many-times-multiplied idol of myself; pleasure, an idol of my senses; fertility, of my animal powers; knowledge, of my intellectual powers; money, of my power; and power, of my will.  A friend has famously been called “another self,” but for this very reason, another person can also be an idol of the self.  Now any of these things may be good in themselves.  Some are very good; it is wonderful to have a friend.  But they are not good when turned into idols.

Needless to say, a good deal of what passes for the worship of God is really idolatry too.  Yet if only He is pursued properly, God may be the only thing truly greater than ourselves that we ever do worship.

One day in class, I commented to my students that scientists and other intellectuals fall into groupthink at least as readily as other people do, and I offered examples.

The hypothesis of continental drift is now generally accepted, but during the first half of the twentieth century, most geologists considered it ridiculous.  The natural historian David Attenborough tells a story of one of his college lecturers calling it “moonshine” and sneering at him just for asking about the idea.

Or take the hypothesis of global warming.  When I was young, I was taught that we are in danger of freezing in glaciers because the planet is cooling.  Now the young are taught with equal conviction that we are in danger of drowning in melted ice because the planet is warming.  Climatology is a notoriously inexact science, much more so than geology, and it is especially difficult to tell what is really going on with global temperatures because anyone expressing less than absolute certainty is squashed.

I suggested to my students that the great thing is not to follow the majority wherever it leads, but to follow the evidence wherever it leads.  Attacking those who present reasons to draw different conclusions is deadly.

Apparently the lesson didn’t take.  At the end of the same semester, one of the students wrote in his course survey that although I was a good teacher, he was giving me a poor teaching evaluation because I was a “climate denier.”

Justice is giving to each person what is due to him:  Whatever reward, punishment, or share in common benefits or burdens he deserves.  The only way to be just is to practice justice.  Proclaim all you like the justice of doing injustice in certain cases, but the most careful rules for justifying injustice can never make injustice just.

Today we deny this.  For example, we punish persons who have done no wrong, just because of wrongs done long ago by people who may not even have been their ancestors but happen to have had the same color of skin.  James did wrong, but James is dead, so let’s punish John, who looks like him.

“But John enjoys good fortune that he doesn’t deserve.”  Did John get his good fortune by doing wrong to someone else?  If he did, take it away!  But John doesn’t earn punishment merely by enjoying a blessing that Peter doesn’t.  Would it be just to punish me to compensate for the fact that I didn’t deserve so good a mother as I had?  If you insist on leveling, you will have to.  But that isn’t justice.  It’s malice.

Besides, once you begin rationalizing injustice, you can never stop.  If you talk yourself into committing injustice for one social goal – say, equality – then you can talk yourself into committing it for any social goal.  So long as you like the result more than you dislike the accusations of your conscience, you can do anything, to anyone, for any reason.

A Reader Asks:

Your website is called the Underground Thomist.  Are you really underground?

Reply:

Shhh!