NBC has suspended nightly news chief anchor and managing editor Brian Williams for six months without pay for falsifying what happened when he was reporting in Iraq.  Does the punishment fit the offense?

Well, there may be more punishment.  NBC is still investigating other alleged fictions by Williams.  But NBC concedes that at least he lied repeatedly about his experience in Iraq.  That is enough to settle the question of proper punishment.  It doesn’t matter what other fabrications may turn up.

Offenses can be wrong for reasons either internal or external to the enterprise.  Historian Quinn is arrested for drunken driving; historian Smith is caught intentionally falsifying the historical record.  Quinn’s offense discredits his character, but Smith’s discredits the very enterprise of historiography.  Lying about history may not be the worse offense; after all, drunk driving can kill.  But it is a worse historical offense – the worst that a historian can commit against his vocation.  Perhaps Quinn shouldn’t be fired.  Smith has to be.

Plainly, Williams’ offense is more like Smith’s than like Quinn’s.  It demonstrates contempt for the very principle of honest news reporting.  It is not the sort of thing for which you “lead someone to the exit door,” as one pundit put it.  It is the sort of thing for which you hoist him by his suspenders and kick him out of it.

NBC’s failure to recognize this fact suggests that the management of the organization is confused about the virtues essential to its calling.  If so, then there is no reason to think that the fabulist Williams is an isolated case.

The natural law is not just a philosophical theory; it expresses the common sense of plain people everywhere.  This being the case, one would expect it to shine with particular brightness today, for the modern age is supposed to be the age of the common man.  This is a myth.  The modern age is not the age of the common man; it is the age of the expert.

The dominion of experts is understandable in specialized fields like computers and open heart surgery, but we make it the rule in every department of life.  No one understands law but the lawyer, no one understands policy but the bureaucrat, no one understands ethics (supposedly) but the ethicist.  There are no wise men any more, but only therapists.  When all of life is dissolved into specialized fields, something is wrong.

Why has this happened?  How has it come about that the common man has lost his place in the "age of the common man"?  Perhaps the chief reason is philosophical.

Modern thought is much more elitist than ancient thought, though it talks a less elitist line.  In both eras the great philosophers recognized that some men have greater understanding than others.  The difference is that in ancient thought the ideal is the man of wisdom, whereas in modern thought the ideal is the man of expertise.  Aristotle belonged to the old school.  Though he pursued wisdom, he began all of his ethical reflections by considering what ordinary people think in all times and places.  Even on those occasions when he considered the opinions of sages, they were the men whom ordinary people themselves recognized as sages.

Of course to begin with common sense is not the same as to end there.  Indeed, in particular times and places the common sense of plain people can be corrupted.  Even so, the wisdom of the philosopher lay mainly in his grasp of the deep presuppositions and remote implications of our universal common sense, not in something completely alien to it; what he tried to understand is what the common sense is getting at.  Even when he offered corrections to common opinion, they were based on considerations that common opinion accepted; the correction was from within.  The ideal was that when the philosopher had finished his work, the common man would say "Yes, that is what I wanted to say, but I didn't know how."  This is also the deepest goal of medieval reflections on the Natural Law, and it is biblical too.  There is, to be sure, a direct divine revelation which we cannot do without.  And yet as St. Paul said, a law is written even on the hearts of the gentiles, however it may be suppressed.

By contrast, in the modern period the thread connecting the highest thoughts of the philosopher with the plain sense of the common man is stretched so thin that it finally breaks.  The ancients thought common folk knew something, even if only in a general and confused sort of way.  But in an incredible passion of hubris, Descartes thought that in the strict sense the common folk have no knowledge whatsoever, and that before himself, all philosophers have been in the same boat.  The reason for this, he says, is that true knowledge is something certain, and no one before him has had certainty about anything; what they had was not knowledge, but merely opinion.  To attain certainty, he proposes that all opinion be passed through a sort of certification engine of his own devising.  The engine he devised was systematic doubt.  Whatever can be doubted, should be doubted; no starting point should be accepted unless it literally cannot be doubted.  This was the point of his celebrated line, "I think, therefore I am."  In his own existence, he believed that he had finally found something that could survive his own intellectual meat grinder, for he could not doubt his own existence; if he was thinking, he existed!  Starting there, he believed he could find other certainties.

Alas, his certification engine didn't work.  I can doubt that there is thought; I can doubt that thinking requires a thinker; I can doubt anything whatsoever.  So if certainty requires something that literally cannot be doubted, then the certification engine devised by Descartes has failed.

But even though his engine failed, his precedent stood.  What the modern era decided that it had learned from Descartes is simply this:  Nothing counts as real knowledge until certified by experts who have passed it through a certification engine -- be they lawyers, bioethicists, educational psychologists, or government bureaucrats.  Which certification engine the experts use (and there are many) is no longer considered particularly important.  What counts is that there is a certification engine, which no one but the experts understands.

Some theoretical differences are unbridgeable.  For example, what specialists call the incommensurability thesis is either true or false (I think it is false).  Yet considering that a war for the moral sense of Western Civilization is going on, you would think Thomists and other natural law thinkers would work harder to find common ground.  To this end, I suggest:

That one can believe natural law is knowable by reason, without denying that it presupposes eternal law and is deepened by revelation.

Conversely, that one can accept the deeply Christian character of Thomist thought, without denying its claim to be philosophy.

That one can find merit in Intelligent Design arguments, without holding a “mechanistic” view or denying final causality.

Conversely, that one can consider the traditional metaphysical proofs for God’s existence stronger and more fundamental than ID arguments, without denying the merit of ID arguments so far as they go.

That one can say that the New Natural Law theory is not what Thomas Aquinas had in mind, without intending insult to the NNL thinkers.

Conversely, that one can find the NNL theory’s analysis of one-flesh unity suggestive in certain ways, without thinking that it contains the whole truth, turning one’s back on natural teleology, or turning into an NNL theorist.

That one can believe natural purposes are “in” things, without holding a “crude biologism” which denies that they indwell our minds as natural meanings.

Conversely, that one can believe that such meanings naturally pattern human consciousness, without becoming “subjectivists” who are trapped in their own minds.

Finally, that one can acknowledge St. Thomas’s deep debt to Aristotle, without denying his equal debt to St. Augustine.

Next question:  How do we explain things like this without using ten-dollar words?

Monday, as always, is for letters from students.  You would think my letters would all be about things like natural law.  Directly, no.  Indirectly ....

Question:

I am 18 years old, a sophomore in college, and engaged to be married.  My fiancé and I have agreed to get married one semester before I finish my bachelor's degree (one year, eight months from now) but I have a feeling we won't be able to wait that long.  I know St. Paul’s saying “It is better to marry than to burn,” but we know that we are still not ready for marriage.  We feel that by the time our wedding date comes around, we will be ready spiritually, emotionally, physically and financially.  We both know it is not God's time yet, but we are very anxious to be together.  We've already been together for one year 11 months, and we've been engaged for 10 months.  We've prayed and we've fasted and we've asked for advice but every day that goes by seems to be more and more difficult to get through.  I start to ask myself whether God really wants us to wait that long or if He rather us marry sooner so that we will not fall into temptation.  How will we be sure when it is God's time?  Do you have some advice for our situation?

Reply:

Thanks for writing.  Now brace yourself, because I some questions for you.

The first:  If you're sure you aren't mature enough to marry, then what makes you think you're mature enough to get engaged?  Turning it around: If you're sure that you’re mature enough to get engaged, then what makes you think you're not mature enough for marriage too?

The second:  The usual reason people have difficulty avoiding sexual intercourse is that they've already crossed too many other lines.  If you want to avoid having sex, you have to re-cross those lines in the other direction — you have to go back.  This means a real change in behavior:  Avoid everything that arouses you.  Yes, that includes drawn-out kissing sessions; you have to stop thinking of sexual arousal as recreation.

The third:  Being alone together is one of the most arousing things there is, so spend as little time as possible by yourselves (read that as zero).  Instead, spend your couple-time with other people around; for example, restaurant yes, apartment no.  If you back off from aloneness now, then it will be wonderful to be alone on your wedding night — but don't imagine that you can have bedroom privacy without the rest of the bedroom experience.  Capiche?

One more thing.  I’ve been assuming that when you write “We've already been together for one year 11 months,” you mean you’ve been dating for that long.  But if you mean you’ve been living together for that long, you are not being realistic.  The situation is intrinsically unchaste.  Praying for chastity while living together is like jumping off a cliff yet begging God not to let you fall.  Living together yet trying to abstain from intercourse is like igniting the engines yet telling the rocket “Don’t blast off.”  You aren’t made that way, my dear.  Nobody is.  If you’re serious about purity, live apart.

“There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion:  ‘The religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach.’  It is false; it is the opposite of the fact.  The religions of the earth do not differ greatly in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach.”

-- G.K. Chesterton, Othodoxy