The most conspicuous feature of contemporary liberalism is intolerance and exclusion.  To show how inclusive they are, liberals demonize those who aren’t liberal -- because those are the sorts of people who demonize, you see.  To show how wrong it is to shut people up, they seek to make religious people shut up -- because we all know those are the kinds of people who want to shut people up.  The highbrow spokesman for this wish is the late John Rawls, who wrote that “in discussing constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice we are not to appeal to comprehensive religious and philosophical doctrines.”  Its pop culture spokesman is Sam Harris, who says human beings must choose between conversation and violence, and “faith is a conversation stopper.”

The interesting thing about this view of conversation is that it is accepted without conversation.  In fact, it functions – you guessed it -- as a conversation stopper.

Being a religious person, I think we should have a conversation about it.

Though both highbrow and lowbrow liberals want to ban the use of religious arguments in the public square, their reasons are different.  Harris claims that persons of faith aren’t reasonable.  They cannot give reasons for their views; they believe because they believe because they believe.  To put it another way, Harris thinks all religion is fideistic.  He writes like a burned-out fundamentalist who has lost his faith but still thinks faith and reason are opposites.

Except for liberals, I meet very few fideists.  The classical view of Christianity is that faith and reason are allies.  As John Paul II put it, they are like the two wings of a bird.  Rather than turning reason off, faith extends its possibilities.

Rawls – who knew better than Harris -- never claimed that religious people can give no reasons for their views.  His complaint was merely that other people may not accept these reasons:  Public discussions “are to rest on plain truths now widely accepted, or available to citizens generally.”  The argument seems to be that anyone who holds a view outside the mainstream has a duty to close his mouth.  Such a person shouldn’t even be allowed to try to convince anyone of its truth in the public square.

What are his followers afraid of?  If the efforts of religious people to persuade non-religious people really are doomed to futility, what is to be lost by letting them try?  One suspects that real liberal fear is that such efforts might not be doomed to futility after all, because liberalism has exhausted its own resources for rational persuasion and has nothing left but propaganda and force.

It was a Christian who wrote, “Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength.  Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

Objections Concerning Tautologies and Nazis

Even if one concedes that St. Thomas means what I say he means when he claims that we all know the moral basics, it might be argued that his claim is simply wrong.  Let us consider a few of the most likely objections.

Objection 1.  Perhaps in a manner of speaking everyone does “know” general moral principles such as “Don't murder,” but these principles are mere tautologies.  For example, “murder” means merely “wrongful killing,” so “Don’t murder” means merely “Killing is wrong when it is wrong to kill.”  All that we are really being told is that it is wrong to do what it is wrong to do.  Concerning when it is wrong to do it, there is not even an approximate agreement.[9].

I suggest that the premise is untrue:  There is an approximate agreement.  People of widely diverse cultures more or less agree that the prohibition of murder is about the avoidance of deliberately taking innocent human life.  This is the central tendency, to which the codes of particular cultures are better or worse approximations.  Probably not even the cannibal thinks it is all right to deliberately take innocent human life.  It is much more likely that he concedes the point but denies that the people in the other tribe are human (or perhaps that they are innocent).

The objector might now claim that I have merely substituted an elaborate tautology for a simple one.  He might say that “human” means merely “a being who is such that deliberately taking his life, when he is innocent, is wrong.”  Therefore, my so-called agreement means no more than “It is wrong to deliberately take the lives of innocent beings whose lives, when they are innocent, it is wrong to take.”   Yet this is not the case, for we also share implicit understandings about what counts as human.  If we did not, then it would be impossible to argue with cannibals that their moral codes are defective.  Yet experience shows that we can; various cannibal tribes have yielded to the persuasion of missionaries and other outsiders and given up their cannibalism.  Consider too, that unless the cannibal knows deep down that the people in the other tribe are human, it is difficult to explain why he performs rituals for the expiation of guilt before taking their lives.  Yet he does.

Objection 2.  If it were really true that everyone knows the general precepts of the moral law, then they would be more faithfully observed.  Consider the Holocaust.  Surely the Nazis did not know the wrong of deliberately taking innocent human life.

I would address the objector directly:  Haven’t you ever had the experience of doing something wrong even though you knew it was wrong?  The monstrosity of the Nazis is not that they didn’t know the wrong of deliberately taking innocent human life, but that they knew it and rationalized it anyway.  Nazi propaganda went to great lengths to depict Jews as bestial (not human) and criminal (not innocent).  And yet even the Nazis knew better.  Robert Jay Lifton reports on an interview with a former Wehrmacht neuropsychiatrist who had treated large numbers of death camp soldiers for psychological disorders.  Their symptoms were much like those of combat troops, but they were worse and lasted longer.  The men had the hardest time shooting women and children, especially children, and many of them had nightmares of punishment or retribution.[10]   In our own country we find similar symptoms among people who practice our own “final solution,” the abortion trade.

Notes

9.  See for instance the argument of Richard A. Posner, "The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory," Harvard Law Review, Vol. 111 (1998), pp. 1637-1709.

10.  Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 15.

Link to Part 6 of 14

Question:

I am a pastor in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the nature of marriage, particularly what constitutes a valid marriage according to natural law.  Since the recent ruling by the Supreme Court, I am confronted with the reality of having to understand what has actually happened as well as how best to respond.  One of the questions I would really like to understand is this: What is the nature of "marriage" as the state has defined it?

It seems to me that the state has rejected the actual substance of marriage by expressly denying that the complementary nature of a man and a woman are a necessary or defining part of what constitutes a valid marriage.  The substance of marriage is rejected and replaced with emotional verbiage.  If state "marriage" contracted before a Justice of the Peace constitutes something other than a marriage, this will have a profound effect on the church's relationship to it.  On the other hand, if the state still does have "marriage", how are we to explain clearly the distinction between a valid heterosexual marriage vs an invalid homosexual one, since the state uses the same word and definition for both?

Reply:

I agree that the federal government has repudiated the actual substance of marriage, so that to use the same word for both natural marriage and what the government calls marriage is now profoundly misleading.  How are we to explain this to people?  Perhaps something like this.

Marriage is a procreative partnership founded on the complementary, self-giving union of the procreative partners.   It is a natural institution, which means that its structure is determined by the way human persons must live in order to flourish – especially the fact that the child needs the continuous, dependable, loving care of both mom and dad.

Sacramental marriage is not something different from natural marriage, but natural marriage with a plus.  The “plus” is the supernatural grace of the sacrament.  But let’s leave that aside, because in this country the state has never claimed an interest in the sacrament.

Until last week, what the state called marriage was the recognition that a natural marriage existed.  The primary purpose of such recognition was to protect the resulting children by legally enforcing the duties of the mother and father to both their offspring and each other.

But what the state now means by marriage is a state-enforced convention for conferring social esteem on arbitrarily chosen adult sexual arrangements which need have nothing to do with procreation.  Although the state does not deny that children may be in the picture or that they still need protection, they have now been downgraded to a secondary consideration.  The fundamental consideration in this so-called marriage is the so-called right of the grown-ups in the picture to social approval.  What the change will do to family law is dreadful to contemplate.

I realize that this is a pretty small cup of water, but perhaps to parched tongues even a few drops of explanation will be welcome.

Mondays are reserved for questions from readers, especially students.

Question:

If people have been raised to consider bad behavior morally acceptable, how can they ever come to recognize that it isn’t?

Reply:

The premise of your question is that the only way people know what is right and wrong is that they have been told.  That’s what many psychologists think too.  They view conscience as an empty vessel filled up by parental teaching and other forms of socialization.  Your own experience will show you that conscience is more than that.  If knowledge of right and wrong came only from how you were raised, you could never recognize a moral error.  But haven’t you ever come to realize that something was morally wrong, even though nobody told you so?  Haven’t you ever had a change of heart?  Sure you have. 

Of course parental teaching does shape us, but we have, so to speak, a deep shape, which good teaching merely brings to the surface.  No conceivable parental teaching could wipe out the fundamental recognition that wrong is different than right.  No imaginable childhood socialization could pump the awareness of that difference into you if you couldn’t see it for yourself.  There isn’t any way to raise a child so that he will hold the judgment “I should be grateful to those who have done me the most hurt, and ungrateful to those who have done me the most good.”  Even if you don’t teach him the Golden Rule, at some level it will make sense to him that the rules of behavior should be the same for everyone.  He will know that he shouldn’t steal or murder.

By the way, I am not saying that everyone draws correct conclusions from first principles.  Often we don’t.  And I am not saying that everyone actually follows first principles.  Often we don’t do that either.  What I am saying is that everyone knows first principles.  Even our excuses for bad behavior make use of them; we try to convince ourselves that our lies weren’t really lies, that our betrayals weren’t really betrayals, or that our mistreatment of others fulfilled justice because “they had coming to them.”

Just because we do know first principles -- just because we do have deep conscience -- we have a fighting chance of correcting erroneous surface conscience.  Of course it helps to have virtuous friends who will call us to account, but if we didn’t have the knowledge of first principles, how could their words get through to us?  We wouldn’t grasp what they were talking about, would be?  But we can be reached after all; we can see that we are wrong; we can even have a change of heart.

As you probably know, Brian Williams, who was suspended from his prestigious NBC job earlier this year for lying about what happened when he was reporting in Iraq, has been reappointed as a special reports anchor for affiliate MSNBC.  The corporation refuses to comment on his salary, but according to some reports he will be pulling down close to $10 million a year.

Yes, that will teach him.

Some people think Williams’ rehabilitation shows that we are a forgiving nation.  I believe in forgiveness, but this isn’t about how forgiving we are.  It’s about how little we care about lying in positions of trust.

One may forgive the embezzler, but one does not trust him to work for the bank again.  One may forgive the burglar, but one does not give him the house keys.  One may forgive the rapist, but one does not let him date one’s daughter.