Three vices may be observed concerning difficult things:  Making them too easy, making them unnecessarily obscure -- and making them both at once.

Things that really are easy should be easily presented.  However, those who are in a hurry, or who do not want to think much, want everything to be easy, and so they turn to oversimplifications.  In the appendix to his 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, E.D. Hirsch listed 5,000 things which he said educated people ought to be able to should be converse about.  I don’t think it was the poor man’s intention – he criticized rote learning -- but the book inspired a movement to cram the 5,000 names and ideas down the throats of schoolchildren as though they would then be well-educated.

Things that really are obscure should be presented in a way which acknowledges their difficulty.  However, those who are proud of their knowledge and accomplishments puff themselves up by making the arcana of their disciplines seem more difficult than they have to be.  Often they use deliberately obscure language either to disguise what they mean, or to make it seem as though they are saying something when they are saying nothing.  They are simultaneously contemptuous and envious of those who do write clearly.

You would think these two vices would be mutually exclusive, but a peculiarity of our own intellectual culture is the development of ways to obfuscate and to oversimplify all at the same time.  A prime example is the application of quantitative techniques such as cost-benefit analysis to matters to which they are not applicable.  Methods like this baffle and impress the uninitiated because they take a long time to learn.  However, they enable the adepts to reach spurious conclusions about all sorts of things without having to do any real thinking.

Conversion

If conversations like those I reported last time are part of the teaching of philosophy, why shouldn’t they be part of philosophy?  Socrates, the ancestor of all philosophers, thought they were.  If we strip out the dialogue from his dialogues, boiling away the spiritual combat and leaving only a dusty residue of syllogisms, then we miss much of their point.  Figuring out what their point is requires a philosophical analysis of something we might have preferred not to consider a philosophical problem at all.  We find this to be true of some of the conversations in the New Testament as well, such as the dialogue between Christ and the woman at the well in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John.  On the surface it seems like a series of non sequiturs, but really it is a duel of feints, thrusts, and ripostes.

Such conversations are likely to be full of paradoxes.  For example, getting through to the denier will sometimes require a great deal more than presenting a sound argument to him.  But on the other hand, sometimes it may require presenting less.  The mere tender of arguments to someone who is determined to remain self-deceived is more likely to provoke him to cleverness than to stir him to wisdom.  Just because he is still talking, we may think we are getting somewhere, but he is merely generating objections for their own sake.  For him, the conversation is not so much a means of attaining truth as a sophisticated means of avoiding it.

One thing this suggests is that what might be called the purely professional way of doing philosophy is a mistake.  By the professional way, I mean the attitude which separates the intellectual from the moral virtues, which separates what I am doing from what kind of person I am.  Philosophy is only accidentally a profession.  It is essentially a vocation.  Characteristic of any vocation is that in order to pursue it I must do more than acquire a certain set of abilities; I must try to become a certain kind of person.  If I do not practice the moral virtues, then I acquire an interest in justifying myself without being just.  This is a disincentive to discovering the truth.  So I must either try to be a better man, or stop pretending that I want to know the truth.

The hypothesis of moral denial also underscores the importance to both sides -- both deniers and anti-deniers -- of reaching the young first.  Virtue has a reason for reaching them first because if they develop vicious dispositions, they will probably become deniers themselves.  But vice has a reason for reaching them first because it cannot have them thinking straight.  For the denier has an interest in converting others into deniers.  If he allowed the new generation to think straight, they might join his unmaskers.  His troubled conscience therefore defends itself against exposure by surrounding itself with a ring of recruits.

And what of my own conscience?  It is one thing to have such a conversation with a self-deceived student.  It is harder to have it with a self-deceived colleague.  More difficult still is to have it with a self-deceived public, where one must carry it out in sound bites.  The most difficult thing of all -- ah, that it were not -- is to have such a conversation with myself.

To know truth, I must be converted into truth.  I think this is what Socrates had in mind.  But alas, I resist.

Link to the beginning of this 14-part series

This letter is a follow-up from the doctoral student who wrote last Monday.  I’ve paraphrased a little just for brevity.

Question:

Thanks for your response -- that helped.  Let me ask one of my remaining questions.

You’ve stressed that although the Ten Commandments are a good summary of natural law, they are the kind of summary in which the part stands for the whole -- each commandment stands for a whole category of rights and wrongs.  For example, although they mention only the worst kind of lying, bearing false witness, this is a placeholder for lying in general, and although they mention only the worst kind of sexual impurity, adultery, this is a placeholder for sexual impurity in general. 

Here is my question:  Is there anything in natural law that doesn’t fall under one of these ten categories?  Or would you say that natural law includes exactly the ten kinds of thing that the Decalogue addresses, albeit in a more capacious way?

Reply:

I would say the latter.  To put it another way, the Ten Commandments are a complete summary of natural duty.

There is a slight complication here, because these Ten have traditionally been enumerated in two different ways.  If we enumerate them the way Thomas Aquinas did, then the first three commandments put man in proper order in his relations to God.  Fidelity, owed God in deeds, is represented by the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me.”  Reverence, owed Him in words, is represented by the second, “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.”  And service, owed Him in thoughts, is represented by the third, “Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

The rest of the commandments put man in proper order in his relations with his neighbors, who live with him under God.  First come particular duties, the payment of debts:  These are represented by the fourth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother.”   Next come general duties, that is, the duties to refrain from harming others by deed, word, or thought.  But these need to be subdivided.

The broadest category is the prohibition of harm by deed.  Harm by deed concerning another’s existence is represented by the fifth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”; concerning the propagation of offspring, by the sixth commandment, “Neither shall you commit adultery”; and concerning another’s possessions, by the seventh commandment, “Neither shall you steal.”

The next category is prohibition of harm by word, represented by the eighth commandment, “Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbor.”

Finally comes the prohibition of harm by thought, whether through the lust of the flesh, represented by the ninth commandment, “Neither shall you covet your neighbor’s wife,” or through the lust of the eyes, represented by the tenth commandment, “and you shall not desire your neighbor’s house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”

It seems that the natural law covers these same ten categories – fidelity, reverence, and service to God; and to our neighbors, the payment of debts, avoiding harm by deeds concerning life, procreation, and property, avoiding harm by word, and avoiding harm by though through the lust of either the flesh or the eyes.  I discuss these at greater length in my online Companion to the Commentary, which is the free online supplement to my Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law.

I can’t think of anything that the ten categories overlook.  However, we must take care not to construe them too narrowly.  For example, someone might say that the wrong of transhumanism – of trying to change human nature, say by rewiring our brains, or by blending the genomes of humans and animals -- doesn’t fall under any of the ten categories.  But I would say it falls clearly under the duty of reverence in deeds to God, the Creator.

Why do you write so much about sexuality?  Do you have an obsessive mind?

I write about sexuality because I can’t think of anything more fundamental to the ordering of society than the ordering of the family.  If you don’t understand what sexuality has to do with the ordering of the family, there’s the problem.

You also write a lot about abortion.  Isn’t it just one issue among many?

Do the numbers:  That is like saying that one four Stalinist reigns of terror, five Holocausts, forty-one Hiroshimas, or seventy-six American civil wars would be just one issue among many.  The fact that we can view it that way shows how blunt and coarsened our perceptions have become.  Abortion is the great moral issue of our century.

Why do you write about “transhumanism”?  Most people haven’t even heard of it.

No, but they will.  As abortion is the great moral issue of the century now passing, what it is to be human will be the great moral issue of the next.  The fog comes on little cat feet.  When you hear people talk about “human enhancement” and “controlling human evolution,” watch out.

And God -- why do you write so much about Him?  Can’t we be good without God?

How has that been working?

Be serious.

I am being serious.  You don’t suppose the experiment has been successful, do you?

But why can’t we?

We cannot be good without God, first, because He Himself is our highest good, and we were made to be in friendship with Him; second, because even the lower goods end in spume and vexation unless we seek Him first; and third, because our thoughts, desires, and passions are still in disorder because of the first time we tried to do without Him.

Why do you write so much about coercion of conscience?  Isn’t this the land of the free?

It used to be.  The problem may be stated simply.  People who uphold a faith that views man as the image of God, and conscience as His gift, have a reason to respect people who deny what they believe (even if, historically, they sometimes haven’t).  But people who hold a secular creed that regards man as a hastily made-over ape, and conscience as an obstacle to their political programs, have no reason at all to respect people who deny what they believe.  The view that religion should be suppressed by the government is already becoming respectable in academic and other totalitarian circles.

Why do you write so much about boring things like how we are losing our republic?

Because it bores people that we are losing our republic.

What?

Think about it.

Why do you write so much against liberalism?  Doesn’t that make you seem partisan?

I can’t help that.  Conservatism, of course, may be good or bad; it depends on what you are trying to conserve.  But liberalism in our day has become evil.  Where once it may have meant responsible liberty, now it means irresponsible coercion.  Where once it may have meant helping the poor, now it means destroying their families and making them permanent clients of the state.  Though even now it claims to speak for plain people, in fact it holds plain people in contempt.

What Is to Be Done?

If Thomas Aquinas is in thinking that the most general moral principles are the same for all as to knowledge, then whenever one does deny them, he knows better.  This fact makes it crucial to distinguish between honest objections and smokescreens.  Honest objections are brought by persons who are in real perplexity and want to get out of it; smokescreens by persons who are in fictitious perplexity, and in whom the essential ordering of the human being toward knowing the truth is at war with the accidental motive not to know it.

The hypothesis that those who deny general moral principles are self-deceived makes many people who take philosophy seriously deeply uncomfortable, for it seems to them to spell an end to philosophy.  After all, even if the statement “You are self-deceived” is true, it does not refute the proposition, “There are no true moral universals.”  So what do you do with someone who is in denial?  And how do you make sure that you yourself are not in denial?  It sounds like a problem not for a philosopher but for a psychological therapist.   Unfortunately, therapists are even more helpless here than the rest of us.  In the first place, a therapist can treat a person only if the person recognizes that he has a problem and submits himself for treatment.  The persons we are talking about don’t; no one says “Help me, doctor, I’m a selective relativist.”

Curiously, such persons often do say “Help me, doctor, my life has no meaning,” but although they complain of meaningless in general, when it comes to meaningless in morals they are more likely to boast than to complain.  Besides, the theories of psychological therapy prevalent in our day tend to be just as deeply immersed in non-judgmentalism and the rejection of moral universals as the rest of the culture is, if not even more.  So I think the ball is in our court.

If it is really true that the obstacles that prevent intelligent persons from recognizing true moral universals lie not mainly in the realm of the intellect, but mainly in the realm of the will, how can such persons be reached?  Perhaps by a mode of conversation that addresses not just their intellects but also their wills; say, by conversational moves that somehow help them to become aware that they are, in fact, in denial.  But does that kind of conversation even belong to philosophy?

It certainly belongs to the teaching of philosophy.  A student said to me once, “Morality is all relative anyway.  How do we even know that murder is wrong?”  Once upon a time I would have tried to convince him that murder is wrong, but one cannot convince someone of something he already knows.  So I asked, “Are you at this moment in real doubt about murder being wrong for everyone?"  After a long pause, he said "No, I guess I’m not.”  I replied, “Then you aren’t really perplexed about whether morality is relative after all; you only thought you were.  Can you suggest something you are perplexed about?"

On another occasion, I remarked to a student, “Did you realize that you’ve just taken an incoherent position?  You say truth can’t be known, all the while supposing that you know it can’t.”  “I guess I am being incoherent,” he replied.  After thinking for a moment, he added, “But that’s all right, because the universe is incoherent, and I don't need to have meaning in my life.”  I thought he knew better than that.  So I said, “I don't believe you.  You know as well as I do that the longing for meaning and coherency is deep-set in every mind.  So the real question is this:  What it is that is so important to you that you are willing to give up even meaning and coherency to have it?"

Link to Part 14 of 14