For new readers:

Introduction to the blog (2013)

I would rather write about what sexuality is meant to be than about what can go wrong with it.  But it isn’t always possible to make resolutions of one’s preferences.  Sometimes one has to pause to blow away the smoke, or no one can see anything at all.

Perhaps this is one of those times.  Important questions about law and disordered sexuality are about to come before the Supreme Court.  Not coincidentally, editorialists and bloggers are getting into the act.  An item in one of the New York newspaper blogs even asserts the paradoxical opinion that properly understood, natural law supports unnatural sexual acts.

Reduced to a near-syllogism, the argument runs like this:

1.  Some homosexual writers say homosexual behavior fulfills them.

2.  Therefore homosexual behavior fulfills them.

3.  Natural law supports fulfillment.

4.  Therefore natural law supports homosexual behavior.

Some people who suffer same-sex attractions disagree with what the activists say in their name, but let us not turn this into a you-say, I-say brawl.  The greater problem is that fulfillment is not whatever someone says it is.

Some heterosexual men claim infidelity fulfills them; some even say bringing a third person into the bedroom deepens their intimacy with their wives.  Would the author agree with them too?

Like everything else about us, genuine fulfillment has a pattern, one we defy at our peril.  This pattern is embedded in our nature, in the kind of being that humans are.  Yet the author -- a philosopher who ought to know better -- has nothing to say about our nature. 

Let us leave his essay aside.  Beginning tomorrow I will offer a few reflections about the broader topic.

This seven-part series is adapted from my chapter in a book to be published by Ignatius Press.

Mondays are reserved for letters from students and other young people – some scholars, some not -- and I say again, since people keep asking me, that the letters are all real.

Question:

I am a Witch and I follow the Wiccan path.  It always amazes me when I read sites like yours.  You Christians pretend that your religion is correct.  You show your intolerance for others by attacking other religions.  You cannot conceive that people would be happy without your Jesus.  You feel that unless people convert to your religion they are quite unhappy.  Happiness is only what people make it to be not how some religion dictates.  Spiritually Blind?  I think not.  That is just your perception from your twisted views.  And now that I have said that, I will tell you a little about myself.  I used to be a Christian.  I was a good Christian.  I went to Sunday school and everything.  But emptiness is what I felt.  Deep dark emptiness.  I could not even understand "Why?"  I am now a Witch.  I enjoy it very much.  I am no longer sad or lonely.  I have a clear purpose and I am free.  Please write back.

Reply:

I appreciate your letter, but I think you misunderstand what Christianity is about.  You see, your words are all about how much happier you are now than you used to be.  I take your former unhappiness seriously, and I'm sorry that you never got to the bottom of it.  However, Christians worship Christ because we believe He is the Way, the Life, and the Truth, not because He always makes us happy in this life.  It is certainly possible to delight in what is false and to sorrow in what is true; that is why false religions exist.

The other issue in your dispatch is condemnation.  I think this is a red herring.  If you really believed it were wrong to condemn another person's religion, you wouldn't have written a letter in condemnation of mine.  God is always to be praised; that which leads us away from God is always to be rejected; and the human beings whom God has made are always to be loved, as I, in His name, love you.

Thomas Aquinas remarks that devotion is spurred mainly by considering God's goodness.  Directly, such consideration causes joy because the remembrance of God is so delightful, but it also causes sorrow because we do not yet enjoy God fully.

But devotion is also spurred by considering our own failings, and now the picture reverses.  Directly, such consideration causes sorrow because the remembrance of sin is so dreadful, but it also causes joy because we hope for God’s assistance.

St. Thomas concludes, “It is accordingly evident that the first and direct effect of devotion is joy, while the secondary and accidental effect is that ‘sorrow which is according to God.’”

-- Summa Theologiae, II-II, Q. 82, Art. 4

Tomorrow:  Emptiness in Christ?

In short, no.  It hopes for self-government; it does not require it.

By giving this answer I’m siding with the classical tradition against some of the early modern revisionists.

John Locke – the revisionist who most strongly influenced our own revolutionaries – thought that the consent of the majority was required by the logic of social contract.  Once a group of people have entered into civil society, “it is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority: or else it is impossible it should act or continue one body, one community, which the consent of every individual that united into it, agreed that it should; and so every one is bound by that consent to be concluded by the majority.”

Even for Locke, that means less than one might think.  He believed that if one nation entered into an unjust war against another, those responsible for the aggression would forfeit their natural rights, so that they could be ruled without their consent.

The classical tradition certainly recognized the importance of consent.  Ideally, it held, a government is a blend of monarchy (insofar as it has executive unity), aristocracy (insofar as the wisest heads assist in government), and democracy (insofar as these wise ones are selected both by the people, and from the people).

But although the tradition regards consent as deeply important – for human beings were not meant to be ruled as slaves -- it did not regard it as an absolute, because people may sink so low that they lose the moral capacity to govern reasonably.  For example, the people may give their suffrage to whoever promises them the biggest bribes – a thing, by the way, which takes many forms besides the open sale of votes.

Such a people should lose the privilege of choosing their own magistrates – unless the alternative is even worse.  Which it may be.  Unfortunately, in such cases the citizens are usually beyond caring.  “Apathy” is not the cause of this attitude, but merely a name for it.  The root cause is the cardinal vice of sloth – an insufficient love of the good, in this case the common good.

To put it another way, though freedom in the sense of self-government is a precious thing, a worthy aspiration, and a dreadful thing to lose, it is not a natural right.  It comes with a price, which is virtue.

Tomorrow:  Sorrow According to God

For new readers:

Introduction to the blog (2013)

A loyal dog displays something that looks like shame at its master’s reprimand.  Its ears droop, and its tail seeks the shelter of its legs.  Is this conscience?  No.  The dog is merely signaling submission.  Conscience is a privilege of rational beings, an echo of moral law.  And mark this amazing fact:  Even though it is my conscience that commands me to act and accuses me when I do wrong, it seems to speak to me with an authority greater than my own.  It presents itself not just as a medley of attractions and aversions which I happen to have, but as an interior witness to moral truth, to a law that directs me and by which I am measured and judged, to a standard that I did not make up.

It may seem that all this is error or delusion:  That conscience could not be the interior witness that it seems to be.

One group of deniers simply asserts that conscience is merely a social construct, meaning a set of desires and aversions we happen to have decided together that we will have.  We’ve agreed to feel bad about stealing; tomorrow we may agree to feel good about it.

Another group of deniers claims that conscience is a set of desires and aversions pumped in from the outside, an internal emotional residue of lessons taught to us when we were growing up.  I don’t feel good about lying, but if only mother had taught me to lie, then perhaps I would feel good about it.

A third group of deniers says that what we call conscience is simply instinct -- a subset of the desires and aversions common to high-order mammals.  Guppies eat their young, primates don’t; but if primates had endured some of the same evolutionary events that guppies have, then primates would probably find it pleasant too.

Although such views have the prestige of being called “objective” and “scientific,” they are really just materialist prejudices.  Science and objectivity ought to mean following the evidence where it leads, and the evidence points elsewhere.  Take the sort of denial that calls conscience a social construct:  It doesn’t explain our sense that conscience has authority over us; it merely ignores it.  Conscience speaks with a different voice than constructs.  We can put on and take off our clothing styles, our architectural fashions, and even our religions and forms of government, but we cannot put on and take off our conscience.

I dislike child sacrifice, but if you were to suggest that I might someday come to like rolling infants into heated furnaces to placate the powers of fertility, I would be profoundly disturbed.  Why?  Because it would be wrong.  The content of a social construct is whatever we construct – it is all up to us.  But the whole idea of conscience is that it binds us whether we like it or not, and amazingly, we think that it should.  If we could make it up and change it to suit ourselves, then it wouldn't be conscience.  Even when we change our minds about some detailed point of right and wrong, we do so in consideration of deeper principles about which our minds cannot change.

The second sort of denial, which calls conscience a residue of upbringing, has a grain of truth because conscience is influenced by how we were taught.  But conscience is more than that; in fact it may command us to go against our childhood teaching.  Besides, the only way to teach anyone anything is to build on something already there.  “Don’t pull your sister’s hair,” mother says to Johnnie, “You know better than that.”  The whole force of her rebuke is that at some level he does know better.

You might say, “That only shows that at some point along the line mother must have taught Johnnie the golden rule.”  She may have; but how could she?  The only reason the child can understand such a teaching is that he can see for himself that he shouldn’t treat others as he wouldn’t want to be treated by them.

Finally, the evidence is against the third sort of denial, which calls conscience an evolved set of instincts.  For purposes of argument, let us suppose that instincts themselves really may evolve.  If you want to talk about kin selection as an explanation for why mammals help out their close relatives, go ahead.  But tell me:  Why should evolution have given me instincts, but then given me another thing that passes judgment on these instincts and can even override them?  Wouldn’t a mind which had resulted from pure natural selection instead merely find me ways to satisfy my strongest instincts?

Besides, if conscience really is just instinct, then why do we feel a need to dress it up as something else?  Evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright says “It’s amazing that a process as amoral and crassly pragmatic as natural selection could design a mental organ that makes us feel as if we're in touch with higher truths.  Truly a shameless ploy.”  Philosopher Michael Ruse and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson write that “our belief in morality is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends.... ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate (so that human genes survive).... making us think that there is an objective higher code to which we are all subject.”  The premise of such arguments is that by thinking that we perceive meaning in our lives, we will be more strongly motivated to do the things which enable us to live long enough to pass on our genes – including, of course, the genes that make us look for this meaning.

These poor fellows are reasoning in a circle.  The perception of meaning would strengthen the motive to do those things only if we possessed a preexisting need to perceive meaning – only if we lost interest in living if we didn’t perceive it.  Now I ask you:  What adaptive value could there possibly be in a need to perceive a meaning that isn’t there?  Rather than first producing animals who lose their will to live unless they see what isn’t there, then making them think they do see what isn’t there, why didn’t natural selection produce animals who have a will to live without seeing what isn’t there?  A reasonable person, not blinded by materialism, concludes that we seek meaning not because it helps smuggle our genes into our descendants, but because there is meaning – and we are made with a view to finding it.

Tomorrow:  Does Natural Law Require Democracy?