Question:

I’m a law student.  I also have some background in theology.  Though I haven't studied natural law before, I’ve been reading On the Meaning of Sex and have enjoyed it (I haven't quite finished it yet).  You talk in the book about the natural procreative and unitive purposes of the sexual powers, and that brings me to a problem I’ve had in conversation.

I was wondering how to talk with people who argue that the nature of our bodies, the difference of the sexes, and the reason why we have sexual powers in the first place don’t matter.  Their main argument is that most things can have a multitude of uses.  “What’s ‘natural’ anyway?  We do ‘unnatural’ things all the time, like using mouths for kissing instead of eating!  Any part of the body can be used for almost anything.  So what’s the problem?”

Such arguments frustrate me because they seem to be mostly about warping definitions.

Reply:

I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the book.  I see why it seems to you that your friends are warping definitions, because they seem to have fallen for the non sequitur that since words are just names, we may call anything whatever we want.  But I can think of several other reasons for the conversational problem you describe.  Here are a few of them.

The first problem is that your friends are attacking straw men.  No natural law thinker in history has ever suggested that the mouth is made only for eating and that any other use of it is unnatural; go ahead and kiss your wife.  Rather the argument is that any use of our natural powers which undermines, degrades, and dishonors the purposes of our natural powers is inappropriate.  So if you get angry, don’t bite her.

The next problem is that your friends can’t see any difference between objective purposes of their natural powers and their own subjective purposes in using them.  But this distinction shouldn’t be difficult either.  I might use my respiratory powers for the purpose of sniffing glue, but the inbuilt purpose of the power is to oxygenate my blood.

Third, they don’t understand the relationship of the ‘fitting’ – they deny that anything could be naturally fitting or unfitting, appropriate or inappropriate, to anything else.  Again, this should be easy.  Surely there would be something disordered if Grandma encouraged her Thanksgiving guests to eat until they were bursting, purge, then return to the table for the pleasure of another four courses.  Surely there would be something wrong with us if we didn’t get it.  Yet wouldn’t this also be a “use of the mouth”?

The final problem is that when the disordered ways in which we live give us something that we want -- perhaps pleasure, perhaps the approval of our friends -- we resist recognizing even what should be obvious.  To justify ourselves to our consciences, we do violence to our grasp on reality.  I mentioned that the points I made above should be difficult to us -- yet they become difficult for us because we work so hard to make them that way.

One can correct the first, second, and third problems by argument, because they lie in the intellect.  But one cannot correct the fourth problem that way, because it lies not in the intellect but in the will.  Moreover, the fourth problem causes us to resist the correction of the other three.  So I have several suggestions for you.

Focus on the good and the beautiful.  We more readily recognize the bad from the good than the good from the bad; we more easily identify the ugly through the vision of the beautiful than the beautiful through the nightmare of the ugly.  Despite all they may do to destroy the loveliness of truthful order in their lives, your friends do long for it.  It is impossible not to.

Learn to distinguish when it is useful to speak with someone and when it isn’t.   Some people ask questions to find out the answers; others ask questions to avoid them.  Some people engage in conversation to explore what may be true; others engage in it to be clever.  Talking with people who are in the wrong state of mind to gain by conversation may do more harm than good.

Try to stay in relationship with misguided friends.  In the lives of each of us, there come times when our evasions and rationalizations begin to wobble, when slivers of light pierce through to our eyes despite all the shrouds we use to shut them out.  These are the times conversation can accomplish the most good.

And pray for them.  I don’t think it is possible to love truth without loving the persons who resist it.

One of the classical arguments for the existence of God is the Argument from the Governance of the World, which works like this.  The universe is not a hectic, buzzing confusion in which nothing makes sense and nothing hangs together.  On the contrary, we see that things have purposes, and they nearly always act in such a way as to bring these purposes about.  For example, hearts exist for the purpose of pumping blood, and they nearly always do pump it.  But such things as hearts cannot direct themselves according to their purposes, because they have no intelligence. Therefore, however long it may have taken to do so, some being with intelligence must have arranged the purposeful order that we see in nature, and we call this being God.

One of the main objections to the Argument from the Governance of the World is the supposed discovery that purposeful order can arise spontaneously, without any need for directive intelligence.  In each field of study, this claim takes a different form.  One mechanism of spontaneous order is proposed for markets, another for the origin of biological processes, another for the flocking of birds, yet another for the crystallization of molecules.

But a distinction is needed.  If the hypothesis of spontaneous order means that contingent forms of order – forms of order that might not have been – can come to pass without continuous, interfering micromanagement, it is certainly true.  But if it means that such order can come to pass without prior order, that it can be altogether spontaneous, then it is certainly false.

To see this, consider what happens if I toss nine three-inch-square blocks into a nine-inch-square box, then jostle the box.  The blocks will spontaneously arrange themselves into a symmetrical three-by-three block grid.  But they will do so only because they are just the right number, shape, and size to fit, a set of features unlikely to arise by chance.

In general, the more elaborate the spontaneous order, the more prior contrivance is necessarily to make it come to pass “on its own.”  Evidently the maxim that you can’t get something from nothing applies not only to the matter and energy embodied in an arrangement, but to the order embodied in it too.

Now if each instance of contingent order does require prior order, then we must ask whether the prior order is also contingent.  If it is, then we must ask whether its prior order is also contingent.  To avoid an infinite regression of forms of order, we must assume a First Principle of Order, the existence of which is not contingent .  So we still come back to God.

As I read it, the explosive Vanity Fair article on what sexual hookup apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Happn have done to dating has two messages, not one.

1.  Sexual practices are becoming more meaningless than ever, even in the view of the participants.

2.  We had better get used to it, because this is how things will be from now on.

One would think these two messages are inconsistent.  Because men and women can’t live without meaning, things can’t go on like this.  The only question is whether cultural change will come through change of heart, or through conquest by some other culture.

But the sexperts the author quotes don’t see it that way:  “‘We are in uncharted territory’ ... says Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. ‘There have been two major transitions’ in heterosexual mating ‘in the last four million years,’ he says. ‘The first was around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled,’ leading to the establishment of marriage as a cultural contract.  ‘And the second major transition is with the rise of the Internet.’”

Never mind that we have no evidence whatsoever that true human beings have ever lived without marriage.  Focus instead on that blather about evolution.  In order to find it convincing, you have to believe two things at once:

1.  Because nothing endures forever, the sexual wisdom of the past is not valid any more.

2.  Because they are next stage in evolution, the bizarre customs which have arisen during the last fifteen minutes of human history will endure forever.

“There's no use trying," said Alice.  “One can't believe impossible things.”  “I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen.
 

Mondays are for questions from young people.  In this case I can only give the answer.  You may apply your imagination to what the question was like.

Reply

Let me tell you what I think may be happening.  I think you’re right that your laziness in college isn’t a “compensation for working too hard in high school” – but I don’t think you have lost your perfectionism.  It seems to me that your obsession with being perfect is still in business, and that’s why you’ve been so lazy in college.

Perfectionists want to be perfect at whatever they turn their hands too, but they are willing to turn their hands only to what they can do perfectly.  So when they can’t be perfect, they give up.  That seems to be just what you’ve been doing, not just in schoolwork but in other matters too.  You aren’t satisfied with being the best you can.  You insist on being best, or you quit.

In high school you worked hard, because there you could be best.  Since you couldn’t be best in college, you withdrew from the competition.  Judging from your letter, the same thing has happened in your relationships.  Just because your first serious friendship with a young man wasn’t perfect, you’ve simply withdrawn from friendships with the opposite sex.

It would be a shame to find yourself someday giving up on marriage because no marriage is perfect, or on your children because no children are perfect, or on life because no life is perfect.  So I hope you won’t give up on getting over your perfectionism too.  You can do it.

Now don’t be a perfectionist about getting over perfectionism; that will take time, and progress will come little by little.  But don’t be discouraged.  God will help; counselors have a lot of experience with this problem; as you ask, I will certainly pray for you; and now that they know about you from reading this, a lot of other people will be praying for you too.

“Some today argue that respect for freedom of the individual makes it wrong to seek truth, including the truth about what is good.  In some circles to speak of truth is seen as controversial or divisive, and consequently best kept in the private sphere.  And in truth’s place -- or better said its absence -- an idea has spread which, in giving value to everything indiscriminately, claims to assure freedom and to liberate conscience.  This we call relativism. …

“Dear friends, truth is not an imposition. Nor is it simply a set of rules.  It is a discovery of the One who never fails us; the One whom we can always trust.  In seeking truth we come to live by belief because ultimately truth is a person: Jesus Christ.  That is why authentic freedom is not an opting out.  It is an opting in; nothing less than letting go of self and allowing oneself to be drawn into Christ’s very being for others.”

-- Benedict XVI, 2008