A recent newsletter of the American Maritain Association reminds us of the split personality of France, a country long noted for devotion to both Bastille Day and the feast day of Joan of Arc.  The mid-century Thomist, Jacques Maritain, hoped that his country’s Christian aspirations might be harmonized with its avowed dedication to liberty.  That was a tall order, because French faith had too often been united with the cause of reaction, and the notion of liberty with the cause of violent, anti-Christian revolution.

Good point.  Let us add that our country long enjoyed an advantage France did not have, because our founders were harmonizers from the beginning.  Faith and reason, ancients and moderns, were all drawn into the struggle for self-government.  Christian republicans and moderate admirers of the Enlightenment made common cause.  For a while it seemed to work.

But there was no real synthesis, only a colloidal suspension.  Eventually the elements settled out, like milk and cream.  Although from its first centuries the Church has united faith and reason, the young republic’s most influential religious movements tended to hold intellect in suspicion.  Although American proponents of natural rights were the beneficiaries of a rich and ancient tradition, they were ungrateful ones, adopting “made simple” versions of natural law theory that ultimately came to seem unbelievable.  Now, having thrown away faith, those who formerly styled themselves defenders of reason can no longer bring themselves to believe in reason either.  Abandoning God, they have even lost man.

So the European crisis of culture is our crisis too.  “American exceptionalism” means simply that here it has taken longer to come to a head.  Could there have been a real cultural synthesis?  Yes -- and there still could be, for faith and reason really are allies, and our past mistakes are not an irresistible fate.  But can it be achieved in the way we have previously gone about it?  That road is closed.

This reader hails from down under.  Although it’s student letter day, I’m not certain that she is a student -- but I do think students will enjoy her question.

Question:

I have been listening to your online lectures about Natural Law and conscience, and a question, or an objection, has come to mind.  Sociologists have pinpointed three types of worldview cultures: innocence/guilt-based (Christians, Jews), fear-based (pagans, some tribal cultures) and honor/shame-based (other tribal cultures, Islam, the ancient Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad, etc).

You say that everyone has a conscience that points to Natural Law, e.g. not to harm others, but this is only true with innocence/guilt cultures, not honor-based ones.  Honor-based warriors do not feel guilt if they kill someone: they are only concerned with honor.  So appeals to Natural Law would not be universal.  What are your thoughts on this, please?

Reply:

Thank you for your question.  Natural law thinkers use the word “conscience” for moral knowledge.  The sociologists who distinguish among guilt cultures, fear cultures, and shame cultures are using the term “conscience” for moral feelings.  What we know expresses itself in what we feel, but knowledge and feelings are not the same thing.

The claim of natural law thinkers is that people of all cultures know the moral basics:  Honor your parents, do not murder, be faithful to your spouse, and so forth.  Whether people of all cultures feel the same way when they act in violation of the moral basics is another question.  (Even in what you are calling a guilt culture, persons who have guilty knowledge don’t always have guilty feelings -- though I think they do show other signs of guilty knowledge.)

Since natural law thinkers are speaking of knowledge, and the sociologists to whom you refer are speaking of feelings, the sociologists are not actually refuting the claim of the natural law thinkers; they are talking about something else.  Does this help?

If you’d like to know more about how guilty knowledge works, you can find a more complete discussion in my book What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide .

“In my experience, university-educated people believe that staying within the protocols of consent and good intentions absolves a person of moral responsibility for any suffering they might inflict in their personal lives.  ‘Who have you hurt without meaning to?’ is a hard question for anyone to answer honestly, but decadence makes it harder.”

-- Helen Andrews, First Things

In several previous posts, here and here, I’ve suggested that Liberalism is an “upstairs” morality, an ideology of the cultural elites.  Since the old view of Liberalism as the voice of the little man dies hard, we should consider the economic elites too.  What we find is that those who identify themselves as Liberals are consistently much more likely than other Americans to belong to the wealthiest income group.

As always, there are wrinkles.  For example, according to a 2004 study by the Pew Research Center, “business conservatives” are also mostly wealthy, while the “faith and family left” tend to be relatively poor.  But the group Pew calls business conservatives turn out to be socially liberal, while the group it calls the faith and family left turn out to be socially conservative.

So although it would be misleading to say that economic Liberalism is the preferred ideology of the wealthy, social Liberalism is.

Governments must often base policy on information from scientific experts.  In order to protect the environment, for example, one must know what is happening to it.  Is the global atmosphere actually warming?  If so, is such warming a cyclical event or a long-term trend?  Is it influenced by human activity, and can anything be done about it?  In the meantime, whatever may be happening to the climate of the earth, the climate of debate passes through swings of its own; we tend to forget that a scant two generations ago, the great concern among scientists was global cooling.

Although the Church speaks with authority about morals and doctrine, she knows she has no special competence in science.  In the popular view, she is antiscientific.  On the contrary, all too often Church officials jump on the latest scientific bandwagon just because the scientists whom she consults have jumped onboard already.  At various times she has been assured by penologists that prisons rehabilitate, by psychologists that sexual abusers who have undergone therapy can be safely returned to active ministry, by biologists that the hypothesis of natural selection explains macroevolution, by political scientists that simple transfer of wealth to the governments of poor nations will make poor nations richer, and by economists that forgiveness of debt on a huge scale would not cause moral hazard.  Each of these matters is at least open to question, but the Church too quickly accepts the confident pledges of her expert advisors that they are beyond debate.

A case in point:  The Church goes beyond calling for the protection of the environment.  It takes planetary warming so much for granted as to cite it as one of the reasons for dialogue with the members of other religions.  As a statement of the International Theological Commission on the search for universal ethics incautiously declares, “The good of the species appears as one of the fundamental aspirations present in the person.  We are particularly conscious of it in our time, when certain perspectives such as global warming revive our sense of responsibility for the planet as well as for the human species in particular.”

This particular endorsement of the global warming scenario – there have been many -- was composed before the explosion of the “Climategate” scandal at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, England, in which the content of leaked email messages gave strong reason to believe that researchers at the CRU had colluded to manipulate data, interfere with the peer review process, and punish outside scientists who dissented from their conclusions.  Though official investigators drew milder conclusions, even they criticized the University for a “culture of withholding information.”

In the meantime it has become clear that the vaunted “consensus” of the scientific community concerning the warming of the planet is more like a powerful but contested opinion.  What actually happened at the CRU may take years to sort out, but the event is a salutary reminder that communities of experts are much like little polities, with their own gatekeepers, their own ways of withholding and distributing resources, their own publicity machines, their own ways of policing consensus, and their own ways of punishing dissent.  This is especially true in fields like climatology, where the data are messy, the modelling methods highly sensitive to minute changes in assumptions, emotions run high, and the distinction between scientific theory and political ideology is easily blurred.

Scientists themselves -- except when they hold minority opinions -- are often remarkably oblivious to the possibility of bias and groupthink, viewing their disciplines as immune to the foibles of the world, perfectly in harmony with the ideal of rational inquiry.   Members of the Church would do well to remember that just as there are fads, prejudices, and irrational convictions in the nonscientific world, so there are in science.