Question:

I think your point that socialists can be just as materialistic as capitalists is well-taken. However, I’m not so sure the main appeal of Bernie to the young is free tuition (at least not free tuition for them). Most of the young non-religious people I know -- mostly artists of some kind -- support Bernie, and most of them are already out of college.

They are already leftists, they are already ignorant of economics, and they support Bernie rather than Hilary because they sense authenticity in him -- he actually believes what he is saying, unlike anyone else in the race.

Reply:

You’re trying to understand why confirmed young leftists might support Senator Sanders over Senator Clinton, and I’m sure your reasoning is correct.  But I’m trying trying to understand why unformed young people might be attracted to his leftism in the first place.

They do want someone “authentic.”  But although it is difficult to believe in the authenticity of someone as indictable as Senator Clinton, I don’t think it true that nobody else in either party believes what he is saying.

On the other hand, it is easy to believe in the authenticity of someone who enthusiastically promotes one’s own self-interest.  And to feel good about it too.

Coming Monday:  Is it all materialism, or is there something else too?

Around the same time as the incident I told about in yesterday’s post, the contraceptive mandate came up in another class.  I mentioned how strange it seemed to me personally to call artificial contraception, sterilization, and the provision of abortion-inducing drugs “health care,” because pregnancy is not a disease.

A young man responded that pregnancy is a disease.

“Do you mean that pregnancy itself is pathological,” I asked, “or do you mean only that although pregnancy is a natural condition, complications may arise during the course of it?”

He vigorously denied that the distinction was valid.  Pregnancy is associated with certain health risks, therefore it is a disease.  Although some of the other students were shocked, others agreed with him.  Still others seemed troubled and confused.

Since I had encountered this view in the writings of abortionists, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I hadn’t fully realized how common it had become.  It was as though a plague vector had escaped from a containment facility and was spreading through the population.

It happened several years ago, but I guess anecdotes on the increasing split in the culture are never out of date.  I was guest-lecturing about political theology and St. Augustine’s City of God in a colleague’s graduate seminar.  Discussion ranged widely, and among the things that came up was the federal mandate requiring that employers who provide insurance plans include coverage for artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs, even if they are morally opposed to doing so.

Someone suggested that the motivation for the mandate couldn’t be financial, because a month’s supply of birth-control pills costs doesn’t cost much anyway.  “That’s not true!” protested one young woman angrily.  “My birth control pills cost more than my cable bill!”

Irrespective of the cost of her pills, I was taken aback.  She could afford cable, yet she pled poverty, so that others would pay for her privilege of sleeping with anyone at any time -- and she was indignant that the others might not want to.

Question:

In The Line Through the Heart you remind your readers that “A truly adequate theory of the natural law will not always be turning into metatheory of the natural law, a theory about theories.  It will resist that tendency.”

But you also comment about why that tendency is so pervasive.  We quarrel about natural law not because it isn’t obvious, but because we don’t like it.  Instead of trying to understand how we are made, we waste time pretending that we aren’t really made that way.

What I think you’ve just described is an apologetics problem, and I face it all the time.  I struggle with how to reply and interact with those for whom conversation seems to so quickly turn into the game that someone has called "Everything you can do I can do meta."  Pick a meta -- any meta. 

Could you suggest questions I could use to suggest to my friends that one's epistemology ought to be the handmaiden of what we know, instead of a way to deny what we know?

Reply:

You may have in mind a conversation about the natural law itself, and in another post I’ve given an example of that sort of thing.  But I think you have in mind something different – the Peter Rabbit game in which you ask a concrete moral question about, say, abortion, marriage, or euthanasia, and instead of answering it, and your friend, casting you in the role of Mr. McGregor, hides under the flower pot of metaquestions:  “How do we know whether anything is right?”  “Who is to say what the nature of anything is?”

Don’t misunderstand me:  Such questions are important.  But the proper place of such questions is to help find things out, not to run away from finding them out -- to become wise, rather than exercise our cleverness.

First, then, here’s how not to respond when someone hides in the flower pot.  Don’t open a discussion of how epistemology ought to be the handmaiden of what we know.  You’re right – it should be -- but you’re playing the other fellow’s game.  He retreated from questions to metaquestions, and you’ve responded by retreating from metaquestions to meta-metaquestions.  The obvious move for him now is to pose a meta-meta-metaquestion.  “You say P is the handmaiden of Q, but how are we to decide the priority of one inquiry to another?”  You see?  You are trapped in an infinite regress.

So when your friend tries to jump into the flower pot, don’t follow him.  Instead, grab his ankle and pull him back out to the original question.  He will either allow himself to be pulled back, or he won’t.  If he does allow himself to be pulled back, then you discuss the question.  If he doesn’t, then he forfeits -- and you have to make that clear.  For example:

You:  “So are you saying that taking the lives of unborn babies is morally right?”

Him:  “Ah, but that is the question, isn’t it?  What is a baby?”

You:  “Are you saying that since you don’t know what babies are, killing them should be allowed?”

Him:  “Who am I to say what should be allowed?  Who is anyone to say what a baby is?”

You:  “Have you noticed that you aren’t answering my questions?”

Him:  “I am trying to point out that many, many other questions would have to be answered before I could answer your question.”

You:  “I propose that while we are engaging in that interminable inquiry, we let the babies live.  Do you agree?”

Him:  “That raises an interesting quandary about the epistemological requirements of practical decision.”

You:  “Let’s suspend our discussion of the abortion question until some time when you are actually willing to answer it.  In the meantime, you have my own answer:  Let them live.”

Slightly revised; thanks to alert readers

Question:

For what it's worth, even as a Protestant, I have found the fruit of your defense of the natural law invaluable.  Here is my question.  If we consider marriage merely as a natural reality, prescinding from its sacramental aspects, would two amorous teenagers in the backseat of a Cadillac promising to "love each other forever" create a marriage in God's eyes?  It seems to me that there must be certain conditions for a valid marital promise to be made, and these include things that the state requires for the recognition of a marriage, like witnesses and legally binding statements.

Reply:

Thank you.  You’re right – there is no marriage here.  Let's sort this out.

First a distinction between the castle and the gate that we enter it by:  Matrimony is the status of being married, a status which carries with it certain rights and duties that cannot be changed by the will of the parties; if they do not acknowledge them, then although they are in some sort of relationship, they are not in the status of matrimony.  Marriage is the act of entering that status.

Now, a distinction about matrimony itself.  There is only one species of marriage, but natural matrimony may also be civil or sacramental.

Natural matrimony is a complete partnership of life between a man and women, directed by its very nature toward both their own good and the procreation and care of their children.  Notice that if the man and woman do not intend a procreative partnership, they are not married; they are merely in a sexual relationship.  There are various other conditions too, both negative and positive; for example one cannot marry one’s sister.  The act by which natural matrimony is entered is an irrevocable covenant, a free and mutual promise to accept each other for life as husband and wife.

Civil matrimony is – or ought to be -- natural matrimony which has been recognized by the state so that doubts about the existence of the marriage are removed, the rights and duties of the parties can be enforced, and the vulnerable – especially the wife and children – can be more easily protected.  Hence the state requires that the covenant must be publicly registered subject to the requirements of civil law.  Canon law does something similar when it requires that for the man and woman to be married in the Church, their consent must be given before witnesses and an authorized minister.  The travesty of civil marriage today is that the state claims that there is a marriage when by nature there isn’t one, and that there isn’t when by nature there is.  That’s what happens when we put in office tyrants who deny natural law.

Sacramental matrimony is natural matrimony which has been supernaturally lifted by the special grace of which it is the outward sign.  Even apart from this grace, marriage is in principle indissoluble, but the sacrament makes it even more so, because whether or not they make use of it, the man and woman receive the grace to be bound with the love that binds Christ with the Church.  Among the baptized, every valid marriage is a sacramental marriage.

Now back to those teenagers.  A few minutes of passion in the back seat do not make them married.  By your description -- “we will love each other forever” – what they probably think they are promising is that they will always have amorous feelings.  Not only is that far short of the marital promise – for there is nothing here about joining in a complete partnership of life in the hope of children – but in fact, it isn’t a promise at all.

Why isn’t it a promise at all?  Because no one can promise the impossible.  Promising to have the same feelings forever is like promising to live forever.  When the man and woman promise to love each other in the wedding vow, they aren’t promising to have the same feelings forever, but to persist in the commitment of their wills, each to the true good of the other.  Feelings waver.  Love endures.