An Angry Professor

The other day a student at another university related an interesting tale to me.  According to his ethics professor, anything goes between consenting adults.  The student remarked during office hours that by this standard, voluntary incest, voluntary cannibalism, and voluntary bestiality would all be okay.  The professor agreed.  “What’s the harm?” he asked.  He wasn’t playing devil’s advocate; this was really his view.

That’s not what makes the story interesting.  Such is the state of our intellectual culture that opinions like this are not at all unusual.  What makes the story interesting is what came next.  When my young friend politely suggested that incest, cannibalism, and bestiality are immoral, indecent, and disgusting, and that consent doesn’t make them okay, the professor – who is rather shy in lecture, he says -- became enraged and aggressive.  The conversation, apparently, went on for some time, and went steadily downhill.  The professor became angrier and angrier.  “What’s the harm?” he kept asking.  In a gibe against the young man’s Catholic faith, he sneered “You have already lost – you have already lost.”

“I have never seen anything like it,” my young friend told me.  “It was almost as if he had found out that I had raped his wife during his anniversary, and I was confessing it to him.”

He adds that he is drained and demoralized by the conversation and needs to talk about it, but he hesitates to do so.  “I feel bad about speaking about it, not because I feel as though as though I did something wrong, but because I'm not sure that I can share this darkness with others.  How do you begin a conversation with a friend by telling him that your professor thinks that marrying your mother and eating people's flesh is morally permissible?”

Despite having spent much of my career criticizing such views, I too find them difficult to talk about, and most people find it difficult to hear about them.  Morally undamaged people find such topics creepy, with good reason.  Natural modesty makes them want to cover their ears.  The shame of it is that such reticence allows people who hold these creepy views to have their way in our schools, courts, and other opinion-forming institutions.

Where does one begin?  At any number of points.  For instance, we can talk about the sheer incoherence of the professor’s opinion.  His persistent question “Where’s the harm?” suggests that nothing is ever morally wrong unless it causes harm.  But isn’t it a little strange to suggest that eating a person doesn’t harm him?  The function of the professor’s ancillary principle, mutual consent, seems to be to reclassify being eaten as a special kind of harm, which doesn’t count as harmful.  John Stuart Mill, the pioneer of this way of thinking, had all sorts of devices for reclassifying harms as non-harms.  By his lights, the corruption of mores which safeguard human flourishing is not harm; seduction to evil is not harm; insult is not harm; conduct by which a person destroys his abilities to fulfill his obligations to others is not harm; and the risk of harm, distributed in such a way that we do not know on whom the sword will fall, is not harm either.

From a rational point of view, making such points is very good.  In a situation like the young man’s conversation with his professor, it is useless.  People don’t become enraged because they want to reason with you, but because they don’t want to reason with you.

Why don’t they want to reason with you?

Maybe because they have something on their conscience.  They have done something wrong, they don’t want to admit to themselves that it is wrong, and they are acutely uncomfortable when their rationalizations are called into question. Their rage is a “tell,” like the little tics and gestures most people make when they are lying.  It signals that at some level, even they know that the views they are trying to defend are indefensible.

This is only to be expected.  Thomas Aquinas points out that the foundational moral principles are “the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge.”  This little grenade of a proposition means that the moral basics are not only right for everyone, but in some sense known to everyone.  It follows that although anyone may make an innocent mistake about the remote implications of a first principle, if someone contradicts the first principle itself, his mistake isn’t innocent.  He is lying to himself.

I suggest that the hypothesis of moral self-deception explains a lot of things which the hypothesis of innocent error cannot.  We don't get angry just because people disagree with us.  The reason the professor is so angry is that he is trying to hide from avenging conscience, and someone is calling out to it, “Look!  Here he is!  Come and get him!”

How can one talk with self-deceived people?  Should one confront them?  That’s what my young friend wondered:  “I am starting to think that a valid response to some arguments is a good old fashioned ‘bulls—t.’”  This suggestion was half-right and half-wrong.  “Bulls—t” may be a valid response to certain kinds of opinion, because it cannot be rational to deny first principles.  However, it is rarely a persuasive response, because confrontation usually makes people more belligerent, not less.  And I don’t just mean professors.

Next week:  Leaving professors aside, can conscience be dredged?  Can suppressed moral knowledge be brought back to the surface?  Can anything be done, conversationally speaking, to help people recognize their own moral self-deceptions?

To follow the sequels to this post,

use the chronological list

Secularism and its Children

A number of modern political thinkers have held that the citizens could be made more docile and governable by depriving religious faith of its public significance – by putting the God question on the same level as purely personal preferences like whether to drive a Ford, a Honda, or a bicycle.  Trying to bring this about might be viewed as one of the great projects of the secular liberal state.

Several years ago, a scholar from another institution visited my own university to speak about the project.  I was a little disappointed in the talk, because although what he really wanted to know was whether the project had played out as the modern thinkers had expected, he spent most of his time on what the early modern thinkers had meant.  He was an interesting man, and I was sure his reflections would have been interesting if he had allowed himself to discuss them.

The most absorbing part of his talk came near the beginning, when he told anecdotes about his students at a nominally Christian university.  Though not himself a person of faith, he was amazed by their apparent religious indifference.  They found it difficult to understand why the God question ever would have disturbed the body politic.  I am reminded of some freshmen a colleague and I tried to teach several years ago.  When we assigned them classic pagan and Christian readings on things like the purpose of life and the meaning of happiness, one of them protested, “Why do we have to read these writers?  Their questions are not my questions.”  I wondered what his questions were.  After the visiting scholar’s talk, one of the social scientists in the audience revealed a similar blind spot, asking “Why should any of this interest us?  As scholars, we’re interested in reason, not faith.”  Most of my colleagues view faith and reason as opposites; that wasn’t surprising.  But I was surprised that he didn’t find religious faith interesting even as an empirical phenomenon that might have influence on politics.

Frankly, though, I don’t believe in all of this supposed indifference.  My own experience as a teacher suggests that apparent religious indifference results not from the destruction of godward longing but from its suppression.  We have become used to the Freudian notion that if we suppress the so-called id, it doesn’t go away but only goes underground, where it works in unexpected ways.  Displaced libido -- that’s nothing.  Want to see some really powerful unanticipated consequences?  Try suppressing the impulse to know the truth about God.  You can’t pull it out like a tooth; you can only push it down, and it always pushes back.  Strong motives are required, because the God question is at the root of the rational mind.  One must work not to think about it.  Denied all its normal modes of expression, it seeks abnormal ones.

What strikes me most forcefully about contemporary public life is not so much its irreligious character as its increasingly religious character – a religiosity which tends to pass unrecognized because it isn’t Christian, although it sometimes borrows language and ornament from Christianity.  In recent history, the most obvious examples come from recent Democratic presidential campaigns.  Barack Obama was presented more as a candidate for Messiah than as a candidate for political office; Bill Clinton, before him, had gone so far as to call his political program the New Covenant.  But the phenomenon is much wider than election campaigns, and it is increasingly divorced from even the outward trappings of Christianity.  For some people, atheism itself is a kind of religion.  Or consider the most devoted environmental extremists, who are so far along in Gaia worship that they invoke Her by name.  Or the transhumanists, who want Man himself to become God.  What, haven’t heard of transhumanism?  You will.

And so it is that the project of rendering the citizens more docile and governable by depriving religious faith of its public significance has been transformed.  So called secularism, in which religious faith seems to lose its potency, is turning out to be but the first stage of a process in which religious faith comes flowing back, strangely and disturbingly transformed.  The public square is not being cleansed of religion; it is being repaganized.  And the pagans were very religious.

Praeambula amicitiae cum natura

Does natural law presupposes faith?  Those who reject natural law often say it does.  “It’s a Christian thing,” they say.  “You only believe in it because you’re Christian.”

No.  The foundational principles of natural law, for example that good is to be done and pursued, that evil is to be avoided, and that we must never do evil so that good will result – and the easier corollaries, for example that we should honor our parents and that we should never deliberately take innocent human life -- are not only right for everyone but at some level known to everyone.  As St. Paul says, they are written on the heart.  Even atheists know them.  In this sense, natural law is common ground for all human beings.  So it shouldn’t surprise us that under one name or another, the idea keeps coming up among Christians, Jews, Muslims, Confucians, and all sorts of people, though of course some of these traditions have more resources for discussing natural law than others do.

Yet the fact that natural law is a common ground doesn’t mean that everyone is standing on it.  I might know something but not realize that I know it.  I might know it, but violate it.  I might know it, but carve out self-serving exceptions for myself.  I might know it, but fail to work out its implications.  Or I might know it, but deny that I know it -- I tell myself that I don’t know what I really do know.

Friends of natural law sometimes overlook these difficulties.  Opponents of natural law sometimes try to cash in on them.  “You say some truths are evident in themselves?  Well, they aren’t evident to me.  Like when you say we shouldn’t do evil for the sake of good.  What I say is, sometimes we have to do evil to keep something worse from happening.”

For all these reasons, the common ground is a slippery common ground, hard to stand on, wet with the dew of our evasions.

This gives us a reason to revisit the question of whether natural law presupposes faith.  In principle, no, because we don’t require faith to know its foundational principles.  But in practice, sometimes yes, because we might require faith to bring ourselves to admit that we know them.  If I deny God, then the law is still written on my heart, but I may deny that it is law, claiming for example that it’s just a primate inhibition.  If I deny the possibility of divine forgiveness, then my conscience stills speaks to me, but I may refuse to listen, claiming for example that it’s just a neurotic hangup.  For that matter, I may not even want to be forgiven, because I would have to change.  I may prefer my vice to the possibility of innocence and freedom.  So I avert my eyes from the inscription on my heart; I try to rub it out; failing that, I cover it up with a shroud of rationalizations.

The upshot is that although the ancient writers were right to say that the natural knowledge of the reality of God and of His law is a praeambulus fidei, a preamble to faith, the relationship works in the other direction too.  For many of us, faith may be a praeambula amicitiae cum natura, a preamble to friendship with our natural knowledge.