This just in.  Hindu comic books (did you know there were Hindu comic books?) are changing traditional Hindu iconography.  The new trend is to make gods look like Western action heroes.

In the meantime, Western comic books, as well as movies and certain science fiction genres, are accelerating their trend of making action heroes into gods.  Think Lucy.  Think Captain America.

One effect of all this is to further the paganizing of the culture by inspiring worship of the creature (bulging muscles or breasts, superpowers, and all that) instead of the Creator.

Another is to further the ideology of transhumanism:  An even more radical worship of the creature, in which man seeks to be the Creator.  We will recreate ourselves, you see.

Don’t laugh.  A lot of scientists are on the “human enhancement” bandwagon.  Eugenics, which took a black eye from the Nazis, is back again.  If any of the fantasies of recreation come to pass, the result won’t look like Utopia, but like the Hindu caste system, this time with “gene rich” and “gene poor” humans.  We can’t truly recreate ourselves, but we can ruin ourselves.

It won’t take godless corporations or the State to make it happen (although they are already in the act).  All it will require is competition among parents for designer babies.

“‘In a little square garden of yellow roses, beside the sea,’ said Auberon Quin, "there was a Nonconformist minister who had never been to Wimbledon.  His family did not understand his sorrow or the strange look in his eyes.  But one day they repented their neglect, for they heard that a body had been found on the shore, battered, but wearing patent leather boots.  As it happened, it turned out not to be the minister at all.  But in the dead man's pocket there was a return ticket to Maidstone.’

“There was a short pause as Quin and his friends Barker and Lambert went swinging on through the slushy grass of Kensington Gardens.  Then Auberon resumed.  ‘That story,’ he said reverently, ‘is the test of humor.’”

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Checks and balances delay the advent of certain political wrongs, but eventually the ball can't be kicked down the road any further.

The Founder, James Madison, mocked rules written down with pen and ink, of the form "Executives may only execute the law, not make it," as "parchment barriers" because bad men would ignore them.  He thought checks and balances more realistic because ambitious men in each branch would be kept from doing the things the other branches were supposed to do by equally ambitious men in those other branches, who were in competition with them.

The problem with this argument is that checks and balances are not self-enforcing; rules of the form "executives may exercise only certain checks, not others" are still parchment barriers.

I think Madison realized this, otherwise he would not have emphasized in his remarks at the Virginia ratifying convention that no republic can get along without virtue.  Apparently, then, he mocked the former kind of rule not because the willingness to follow it required virtue, but because (at least in his judgment) the willingness to follow it to required less virtue than the willingness to follow the latter kind of rule.  To put it another way, he did not judge the latter kind of rule to be self-enforcing.  He only judged it to be more nearly self-enforcing than the former kind.

Unfortunately, he didn’t explain under what circumstances this judgment might be true.  I say “unfortunately,” because the willingness to follow the former kind of rule is disappearing.  The members of the branches exercise checks they shouldn’t; for example the president circumvents legislation he doesn’t like by that form of sheer decree called the executive order.  They also fail to exercise checks they should; for example the legislature routinely allows the judicial branch to legislate from the bench, especially in matters it considers too hot to handle.

I certainly don’t disparage political activism on behalf of constitutional integrity.  Trying to keep the operating system of the republic working properly is a good work.  But in the long run, the effort is futile unless the culture itself can be renovated, because ultimately its proper operation depends on some residuum of virtue.

What makes renovation of the culture so difficult is that the law itself now does so much to habituate citizens to venality – which is a story for another day.  But with God anything is possible.

Professor:

Isn't the very existence of positive law and its enforcement by the state an admission that natural law is either not universal or not efficacious?

Reply:

A law is a rule and measure for human acts, not a force that compels them to act that way.  Human beings cannot blot out the knowledge of the universal precepts of natural law, but they can certainly disobey them, just as they can disobey the laws of the state itself.

I might add two points.  First, though human beings can disobey the natural law, they cannot disobey it with impunity.  There are always natural consequences.  There are even natural consequences for trying to evade the natural consequences.  The birth control pill was supposed to make it possible to prevent pregnancies out of wedlock without practicing chastity, but its consequence has been a change in behavior and attitudes so radical that the rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies has soared.

Second, in the fallen condition of human nature, we are confronted with not one but two universals.  Not only is moral knowledge universal, but the determination to play tricks on moral knowledge is universal, too.  A law is written on the heart of man, but it is everywhere entangled with the evasions and subterfuges of men.  Even so that law endures; and even so it is seen to endure.

Query:

I have read some of what you have written about natural moral law.  In one of your books, you mention the moral superiority of monogamy to polygamy.  You write that although it is not part of the “core” of the natural law – the things we “can’t not know” -- it is true and demonstrable by reason.  Could you write a few sentences of explanation?

My family believes it is selfish and prideful of me to want to be married to one man exclusively, and that I should accept the way that God designed the man.  They also say God did not condemn polygamy, and that the Bible does not teach monogamy.

But the thought that I would not be enough for my husband, or that my entire individual personhood would not be adequate for the male nature, seems incredibly painful to me.  It seems deeply integral to my womanhood that I should be “fit for him.”

Reply:

My dear, your attitude is entirely right, and you should not be ashamed.  According to the classical natural law tradition, marriage serves two great natural goods.  One is procreation, the other is the unity of the procreative partners.   The problem with polygamy is that it seriously damages both of them –- and that is only the beginning of the difficulties it brings about.

Polygamy is bad for children because it attenuates the bond between father and child and turns the children of different wives into rivals for his affection.  It is bad for poor men because by producing a shortage of marriageable females, it causes hardship among males who do not belong to the privileged strata.  It is bad for rich men because it encourages the form of sexual selfishness in which they satisfy the fallen desire for mere variety in place of the creational design of mutual, complete, and exclusive union.  It is bad for women because it turns them into social inferiors, increases their vulnerability, and kindles jealousy among different wives of the same man.

Finally, polygamy undermines spousal intimacy.  The marital union is a mutual and complete gift of self between the husband and wife, and a husband cannot give himself completely to more than one wife.  At best he gives some of himself to one, and some of himself to another.  That is not the same thing at all.

Of course the thought that you might not be enough for your husband is painful to you.  Polygamy cannot satisfy a woman’s heart; it cannot even really satisfy a man’s heart.  Aren't love poems all over the world addressed from the Lover to the Beloved?  A lyric “to my darlings, Mary, Ellen, Susan, Penelope, Martha, Hortense, and Gwen” would be recognized everywhere as farce.  You were made to give yourself completely to a husband who gives himself completely to you.  He was made in turn to give himself completely to you.

If a woman refuses to be reduced to a tool of a man’s desire for sexual variety, it is not she who is proud and selfish for refusing it, but he who is proud and selfish for demanding it.  The desire for many women is not an expression of how God created the man, but an expression of how the creational design has been disordered by the Fall.

Besides natural law, you mention Scripture.  As St. Paul wrote in Ephesians 5, a Christian husband must lay himself down for his wife as Christ laid himself down for the Church.  He did not mean that a man should say to a succession of women, “lay down.”

In Old Testament days, polygamy was tolerated for a time.  Yet even in those days, Scripture warned against it.  We read in Deuteronomy 17:14-17, for example, “When you come to the land which the Lord your God gives you, and you possess it and dwell in it, and then say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are round about me'; you may indeed set as king over you him whom the Lord your God will choose.  One from among your brethren you shall set as king over you; you may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother.  Only he must not multiply horses for himself, or cause the people to return to Egypt in order to multiply horses, since the Lord has said to you, ‘You shall never return that way again.’ And he shall not multiply wives for himself, lest his heart turn away; nor shall he greatly multiply for himself silver and gold.

Notice that the passage regards the multiplication of wives as a form of greed, like multiplying silver and gold.  Notice too that the multiplication of wives did turn the hearts of the kings from God, as in the case of Solomon, who despite his celebrated wisdom was led by his many wives to give reverence to their many false gods.

Christ said, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’?  So they are no longer two but one.”  (Matthew 19:4-6, RSV.)

This is the reason why so deep in your womanhood you want to give yourself to one man alone, who gives himself to you alone.  I hope I have encouraged you to hold out and not give in.