Universalism and the demise of Western Civilization

The November 20 Radio Derb has a couple of interesting reflections on the demise of Western Civilization. Derb contrasts the anger he felt over the attacks of 9/11 with his relatively emotionless response to the Paris attacks and suggests that, in Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross's stages of grief, he has moved from anger to acceptance with regard to the end of our civilization.

If we couldn't muster the clarity of mind to comprehend properly the menace that Muslims pose to our society after 9/11 and the attacks that have followed, we never will. All we can come up with are idiotic invade the world/invite the world solutions that are based on false universalism: if the Muslim world just had good democratic governments, if we just would quit offending them by supporting Israel/imposing Christianity/supporting tyrants/stealing their oil/etc./etc., then they would be stop hating us and become good modern, western citizens, separating Church and state, contributing to the GDP, etc.

Liberal universalism is like a kind of mental illness that has anosognosia as a symptom--it frames our experience in a way that we are unable to see it. We think the only solution can be more universalism, more multiculturalism, putting our perspective in perspective, understanding the other, etc. We can't see that this universalism is false. And, as long as it isn't shared by the other, it doesn't matter how much we think we understand him. We never will, unless we see that our universalism is as inescapably peculiar as his fundamentalism: that it is not truly universal, but is the peculiar characteristic of our people. It can only exist among those who share in its premises, and not everyone does. Those outside it are threats to it. And if we fail to recognize that, we open ourselves to be destroyed by them.

This is why universalism is a heresy. Christianity is universalistic in the limited sense that anyone can join the club. You don't have to belong to a certain tribe, speak a particular language. To some extent, it is even culturally pluralistic. But, to belong, you have to join the club and there are certain, minimal rules, that are not culturally dependent.

The heresy of universalism says that everyone is already a member of the club, whether they want to belong or not, whether they follow the rules or not. Liberal modernity is essentially an extension this Christian heresy. It started out by reducing the minimum to eliminate the specifics of Christian creed, then it moved to eliminate the specifics of Christian morality, now it eliminates all requirements. It literally thinks that it encompasses everyone. But this is a delusion.

This heresy is being disproven by events. Universalism is, in fact, a weird peculiarity of Europeans--especially northwestern Europeans (cf. JayMan). No one else believes it--they probably don't even think that we believe it, and so they are quite happy to exploit our blinding insanity to destroy our civilization. While we try to understand them--i.e. figure out how, despite their protestations, they are actually just the same as us--they are hard at work figuring out how to exploit and even destroy us.

If we say that victims deserve help and laws to protect them, they will claim to be victims. If we say that the non-Christians suffer from bias, they will yell "discrimination." If we say we must atone for our historical wrongs, they amp up their complaints about them. If we say that equality demands it, they will call for equality. But they are just exploiting our language--a peculiar feature of our culture--to grab what they want. They have no interest in preserving our universalistic culture. They are interested in preservation of themselves and their people. They are not interested in equality--not for us, anyway. If they were in power, they would not reciprocate.

What has become apparent over the last 15 years is that our disease is terminal. We are incapable of doing what is necessary to fight off the foe. We are not even capable of recognizing our foe. We are fat. We are effeminate. We are weak. We are old. (Derb brought up the "mouse utopia" experiment of John B. Calhoun.)

This doesn't just apply to the Muslims. It applies just as well to the racial grievance mongers within higher education. Like the Muslims, they have little or no interest in sharing in our supposedly universalistic culture. They have no interest in the cultural basis of the institutions we've built--they want the wealth and power that those institutions possess and produce.

They see our "reason" and "free speech" as white male constructs that exist for the benefit of white males. And, they're actually right, to a degree. The open culture of liberal modernity is, in fact, even more of a white male thing than Christianity. But its universalism has degenerated together with liberal Christianity. It has put aside the necessity of conversion. And so it has opened itself to exploitation and destruction by the barbarian who enters the gates and claims the benefits of citizenship, but rejects the duties that once went with it.

I don't know what the solution is. It doesn't seem like it has to necessarily be perpetual war, but surely some realism about whom we let into our countries--who is and who is not likely to assimilate (and have children who will assimilate)--would be the starting point. In any case, a realistic assessment of the real and perhaps irreducible differences between peoples seems like a better basis for peace than the illusion of universalism.

Muslims can have their own countries and live as they please within them--even if this necessitates excluding outsiders who interfere with their way of life. But certainly we ought to enjoy the same rights.

Racists and anti-racists now agree ...

Racists and anti-racists now seem to agree that freedom and reason are peculiar to white males and exist primarily for their benefit. They just disagree on whether that makes them good or bad things.

Science and reform

I stated that conservative Catholics only accept revision of Church teaching when it emerges from within the tradition and higher up in the hierarchy of truths. I think, in practice at least, there is an exception to this: conservative Catholics will accept revision to Church teaching based on clearly demonstrated scientific or historical facts.

For instance, I don't really know that the biblical creation account was ever taught definitively and formally as being literally true, but I'm pretty sure that it was more or less taken for granted that it was so until clear evidence emerged to the contrary. Similarly, with medieval geocentric cosmology. Likewise, I think that at least some of the conclusions of modern critical biblical scholarship (e.g. regarding authorship of the biblical books) are in this category. And, at least in this case, there were preliminary negative responses to these ideas from the Vatican--though nothing ex cathedra. While it's true that that these new facts were able to be assimilated because there was not clear, definitive teaching to the contrary and openings could be found within the tradition, it remains the case that what was assimilated was new information from outside the tradition.

Perhaps, then, what differentiates liberals from conservatives within the Church, to some extent at least, is that certain developments in modern society and thinking that conservatives view as errors to be rejected or resisted are held by liberals to be in this category of clearly demonstrated empirical truths--so the felt needs of the day are new "facts" that traditional teachings have to be weighed against. For example, the difficult situation of civilly divorced and remarried people is a new (or newly recognized) fact that in some way relativizes the authority of the anathemas of Trent. Likewise, modern psychology gives us new facts that force us to adjust traditional understandings of sin and culpability.

Things at this level involve conceptual errors about the meaning of moral truth and too slavish following of modern expert opinion claimed in the name of science and complete servility to the modern political order ... but it can still be seen as a difference in degree rather than in kind from the sort of development that a conservative would view as possible. In other words, not necessarily heresy.

However, many liberals tend to accept modern "facts" that work at a meta level to negate the tradition as a whole: so they also say that the facts of comparative cultural anthropology undermine any attempt to posit a universal, idea of unchanging human nature, making the teaching of universal moral truths impossible in principle; the facts of modern historical research force us to reject the naive idea that the tradition is continuous and binding; and the facts of post-modern Cultural Marxism force us to subject the entire narrative to critique in the name of the oppressed and marginalized.

This, surely, is the synthesis of all heresies.

Own your heresy

Ross Douthat's (in)famous tweet encouraged those who find themselves advocating positions that the Church has consistently rejected to "own" their heresy.

As he has explained, not all liberals are heretics, and not all liberal Catholic ideas are heresy, but a significant element of Catholic liberals seem to think that pretty much everything (aside from the Creed and maybe some clearly infallible core of later councils and papal teaching) is up for grabs. And this is clearly heresy.

While John Paul II and Benedict XVI worked vigorously against this heresy, for whatever reason--most likely fear of making division within the Church worse--they didn't name it as heresy.

But what heresy is it? Is it just modernism redux? It it even a single heresy? Many of have claimed (plausibly) that "modernism" doesn't really describe an actual heresy or coherent school of thought. And, when you look at the condemnations from Pius IX and Pius X, it does seem to be kind of grab-bag of modern ideas or attempts to modernize the Church.

And, of course, the heresy that goes under the name of liberalism is similar. There's not one identifiable, consistent error or line of reasoning that defines it. It is rather--like modernism--defined by its desire to fully reconcile the Church to the times, and it's pretty much willing to throw any line of reasoning at that project that will stick.

So, in a sense, whatever common thread--however thin--joined together the ideas that got condemned as "modernism" in the nineteenth century, it could be argued that contemporary liberal Catholicism (in its more radical forms, at least), shares that thread, even if its particular claims and ideas aren't identical with those of the nineteenth century modernists.

As both traditionalists and liberals like to point out, at least some of the ideas once condemned as modernism seemed to have been adopted by Vatican II (and, actually, to some extent, before that). Traditionalists point this out to condemn the council and the popes since John XXIII as modernist heretics. Liberals point this out in order to claim that the Church changed her mind about modernism.

There's obviously some truth in this. There was, at least, a moderate appropriation of certain ideas that were once condemned with modernism, such as historical-critical study of the Scriptures, and acceptance of democratic forms of civic government and religious freedom. Likewise, the idea of aggiornamento is an acceptance that the Church--to some degree at least--can and should be reconciled to the modern world.

Still, the official line and intent of the Council and the popes has not been an embrace of modernism, but a kind of moderate and flexible response to modernity that seeks to distinguish what is essential, internal, and unchangeable and from what is non-essential, external, and changeable. An adaptation of approach, but not a wholesale reevaluation of Catholic teaching or practice.

I'm sympathetic to a traditionalist critique that views that approach to be naive and, in some ways, wrongheaded. At least when it comes to actual human beings rather than intellectual abstractions, there is no "mere" external that you can modify without affecting in some way the internal. The reform of the liturgy has, in fact, changed the faith, despite the benign intentions of Paul VI. (I won't speak of whether the intentions of the liturgical reformers were benign.)

Even so, it remains that the Church did not accept the core premise or project of modernism. While the Church did acknowledge that there is a hierarchy of truth--with essential and more certain things at the center and less essential and certain things at the peripheries--it has, to this point, maintained that the standard of truth and reform comes from within that hierarchy--not from the world.

And this, perhaps, is the key distinction between genuine reform and adaptation to the times and heresy of modernism/liberalism. The latter believes that the modern world is to be set up as judge over the faith and not vice versa.

An asymmetrical debate

Watching the debate between Douthat and the liberal theologians has been rather instructive. Conservatives are interested in demonstrating from Church tradition that their position is correct and obligatory. Liberals just don't seem to be interested in engaging this argument. For them, the general facts that the Church has changed in the past and that theology and history are complex are apparently adequate for putting aside just about any argument from tradition. They want a certain result, and if there are specific discontinuities with the tradition, they are happy to let the professional theologians paper over them.

Intelligent and educated conservative Catholics like Douthat are quite aware that the Church has changed, that doctrine has developed, and that history doesn't lend itself to an easy argument for a broad understanding of the infallibility of the Church. For liberals, this historical consciousness has resulted in a kind of demythologizing of the tradition of the Church (or, at least, of all but its very core) and of any arguments made from it. Arguments from tradition were used in the past to claim that the Church never innovates, but simply reiterates what has been handed down, but this can be demonstrated to be false, so these arguments can no longer be made in earnest. At best, they are a form of discourse for governing how the Church changes to meet changing times. But they do not determine the result. The result is determined by the needs of day. For historically aware conservatives (i.e., not "fundamentalists"), though, this demythologization has not occurred (or has not proceeded to the same extent). They still see fundamental continuity in the development of doctrine as a whole and not just in the very core of Church teaching. Thus, they still make arguments from tradition in earnest.

Unlike the liberal, what they seek primarily in such arguments is not the "best" solution as determined by the needs of the day, but the best expression of faithfulness to the tradition. If there is innovation, it needs to be continuous with the tradition and come out of it--a clarification or synthesis that takes better account of the data of tradition. (This is how non-traditionalist conservatives view Vatican II.)

Liberals seem to be content with showing that a proposed innovation meets the felt needs of the day and does not contradict a clearly infallible teaching of the Church. It is not that conservatives view all magisterial statements as infallible, but they put the burden of proof on the innovators and that they regard the tradition as always authoritative, even if not infallible. This means that, if past magisterial statements are to be revised, they should be revised from within the tradition and from higher in the "hierarchy of truths," not just based on the perceived needs of the day.

The radicalized papacy

The papacy is credited by conservative Catholics as the rock that has kept the Church steady and faithful in the winds of historical change and heresy. If it instead becomes an obvious, visible, instrument for the destruction of Catholic tradition, conservative Catholics will be forced to revise that assessment. They will either be forced (to some degree at least) into the position of Catholic traditionalists, who already view the modern papacy this way because of the changes of Vatican II, or they will flee to Eastern Orthodoxy, which views the modern papacy as the fruit of centuries of papal error.

While the former is a smaller bridge to cross, there's a certain absurdity to anti-papal traditionalism, that will make Orthodoxy seem more consistent (and stable and attractive) to many. I would expect especially that the waves of converts from Protestantism that were once attracted by the apparent permanence of Catholicism and the strength of the papacy, having found that their trust has been harshly betrayed, will move on to Orthodoxy. (And, for those Protestants who are now looking for a more historical form of Christianity, Orthodoxy is going to start to look more attractive and viable in comparison to Rome.)

One wonders too about the bishops with traditionalist leanings appointed by Benedict XVI. Will they hang in there, providing some cover for traditionalists? (Will some of them even defect to Orthodoxy, perhaps having an overly expansive notion of papal infallibility popped by reality?) Because the papacy has attained complete control over the appointment of bishops, Catholic traditionalism could find itself increasingly forced into institutional estrangement from the papacy and the creation of a counter-hierarchy, and conservative Catholic who formerly stayed within the mainstream Vatican II fold may find themselves fleeing to traditionalism just to take advantage of those institutions to avoid increasing and seemingly terminal liberalism within the mainstream Church. (Eastern Catholic Churches may also serve as a refuge, as they already for many Latins looking for formal liturgy and traditional teaching and practice.)

Maybe things won't get this dark, and there are enough good bishops to keep things from going off the rails too quickly, but if Francis gets to work promoting liberal bishops and stacking the college of cardinals, it's hard to see a way to correct the direction of the hierarchy from within.

The vitality of liberal Catholicism

I wrote the two previous posts before listening to Ross Douthat's excellent lecture on the Crisis of Conservative Catholicism.

He makes a good case against naive hope in the "biological solution," based on the assumed sterility of liberal Catholicism. Liberal Catholicism has well-established institutions and a large constituency among involved, mass-going Catholics. The movement to reconcile the Church to modernity has been around for a while and is likely to continue to appeal to large numbers of Catholics for the foreseeable future.

The truth is that the Church is enormous and, at least as measured by adherence to Humanae Vitae, which is the main instrument driving the biological solution, conservative Catholicism is actually negligible--practically a rounding error. We're large enough to make an impact on the priesthood, because priests come from a small number of the most devout families, we're still almost non-existent among laity. I don't think we yet have the critical mass to reverse the trend toward increasing liberalism among Catholics driven by the dying off of Catholics formed before the Council.

Conservative Catholicism: long-term trends

The bigger question for Conservative Catholicism is whether the long-term trends still favor us. The mood of conservative Catholicism was prematurely triumphalistic at the election of Benedict XVI. We thought that John Paul II had transformed the college of cardinals enough that the election of a liberal pope was now impossible--and things would only get better there. Obviously, we were wrong about that. But there are other factors underlying that mood that may or may not remain true:

The sterility and bankruptcy of liberal Catholicism. This certainly remains true. Liberal Catholicism produces few children, most of whom slide into atheism and none of whom enter the priesthood.

The vitality of conservative Catholicism. Not sure about this one. Conservative Catholicism has a demonstrated ability to produce some enthusiastic laypeople and a few priestly vocations. These enthusiastic laypeople have larger families and make great efforts to pass the faith onto their children. It seems like there is enough vitality for this movement to at least perpetuate itself. But it placed a lot of hope in the papacy and, in recent years a least, in possibility that things were soon going to get better in the local dioceses and parishes, so that we would no longer be outsiders and weirdos in the local Church. That first hope is likely gone, and we're likely to see a slow down or reversal of the second hope. Depending on how far Francis takes things, I think we'll see increased attrition as some people throw in the towel and go Orthodox, full-on traditionalist, or give up on Christianity.

Younger priests. The only real hope (without papal power appointing friendly bishops) that conservative Catholicism (at least in the U.S.) has of actually going beyond self-perpetuation to transformation of the Church is in younger, orthodox, priestly vocations. We'll see how that trend perseveres in the face of this situation. I think with the episcopate in doubt again, we're likely to see that trend of orthodox seminarians slow down or stall, as you will need to either be flexible in your convictions or prepared for the possibility long-haul resistance under another generation of liberal bishops. Likewise, conservative parents will be more hesitant to send their sons to seminary for the diocesan priesthood if they don't trust the bishop or the seminary (especially if there are fears of a resurgence of homosexuality among the clergy and in the seminaries).

Still, we have an upcoming generation of clergy that are, as a group, far more conservative than the previous generation. Even if we have systematic discrimination in favor of the most liberal and malleable among them, that trend is going to have an effect on the pool of candidates for the episcopate and on the life of the average parish. (As Ross Douthat noted, Pope Francis was forced to look to Spokane, WA, to find a "poor man's Joseph Bernardin" for Chicago.) That should at least keep the liberal tide somewhat in check (a liberal bishop can only do so much if a significant portion of his clergy are against him). Maybe, in the long run, it can reverse it. If there's hope anywhere in the near future (assuming the papacy is lost for while), it's there.

The death of old liberal churches and rise of young conservative churches. I'm not sure about this one. The African church is definitely conservative in a lot of ways and will be a force keeping things in check. The Latin American church, on the other hand, seems to be a mix of conservatives and radicals, and it is larger and influential. I think it is hard to say what Africa is going to be like in a generation. My experience with African clergy in the U.S. hasn't been all that encouraging on this score. Maybe it is because most of the ones in the U.S. studied here and/or stick around because they prefer the liberalism (and first-world lifestyle) of the U.S., but they haven't seemed particularly conservative to me.

The sterility of liberal Catholicism means that it's only power is to destroy. It does not even have the power to perpetuate itself. Conservative Catholicism at least has that. So, the question is really whether liberal Catholicism has enough power to completely destroy conservative Catholicism. If it does not, then the long-term trends still favor the conservatives.

Prospects for conservative Catholicism

Cause for hope: vitality of conservative Catholicism, seen especially in young clergy that emerge from it
Cause for despair: continued (and probably expanded) liberal dominance of the hierarchy

The question is whether the cause of despair will kill the cause of hope. Conservative Catholics have resisted pressure from priests and bishops for years, but (except for traditionalist groups) have been able to appeal to the support of the papacy. The loss of papal support is demoralizing and will give new encouragement to liberal priests and bishops who are inclined toward intolerance. We'll see what happens. Some (especially clergy) will just embrace liberalism as the new order--these may even become the worst persecutors of resistance as they turn on former friends, who cannot go along in good conscience. Some will be pushed in the direction of traditionalist groups, who have already built structures (intellectual and institutional) for outright resistance. Some, disillusioned entirely with the papacy, will defect to Orthodoxy or conservative Protestantism. Some will lose their faith.

Most, I think, will find a way to more or less soldier on as they do currently, either performing mental gymnastics to claim no contradiction between their theology and take on Vatican II and the direction of the papacy, or keeping mum about it, or becoming more comfortable with frank criticism of the papacy in light of the tradition as a whole, while still remaining within the mainstream body of the Church--so, a kind of Vatican II traditionalism, that accepts the magisterium of Vatican II and the recent popes as part of the tradition, but without the mottramist tendencies that are view the pope as unable to do wrong.

At least in the U.S., the conservative movement has already developed its own structures for handing on the faith outside the reach of clergy of dubious orthodoxy: home schooling, publishing houses and periodicals, a few colleges. These things aren't going away and their interest in self-preservation will direct them to maintain a tenable position of resistance that continues to appeal to the conservative and the orthodox while not going too far outside or against the institutions controlled by the hierarchy. We developed these institutions because we the official and mainstream institutions were corrupted by liberalism, ineffectual at teaching and spreading the faith, and closed to us. In the last few years, we had finally succeeded in making some inroads into those institutions and reversing some of the damage. We're likely to see much of that progress reversed.

What we do not really have are our own parishes and clergy. Yes, there are parishes with a reputation for orthodoxy, but unless they are staffed by conservative religious orders, a bishop can squash these instantly with a change of personnel. (And, a bishop can kick an order out of a diocesan parish, too, though that's much more transparent and burdensome given the shortage of priests, so it's less likely.) Traditionalist groups, centered on preserving the liturgy against the attempts by the hierarchy to suppress it, are further along in this area. This is likely to drive more conservative Catholics into Latin-mass communities, which cannot be so easily co-opted or compromised by unfriendly bishops.

Like I said, I think we'll see some reversal in our ability to make inroads into official institutions, but we're strong enough at this point that I think few bishops are going to make too many sudden or dramatic moves to squash us. We no longer will be able to appeal to the papacy, but the internet now brings these things to the public forum, so bishops will be aware that they are courting a firestorm of nasty, public criticism if move against conservative groups.

Synod on the Family

The Synod on the Family did not end disastrously, but as others have pointed out, we are by no means out of the woods, and, given the signals that Pope Francis has been sending about his own thoughts on the matter and the people he has been promoting, until at least the end of his pontificate, things are likely going to continue getting worse before they get better.

While the final document doesn't outright break with tradition or teach heresy, it makes some incoherent noise about conscience that will be exploited by those who wish to do so (certainly many priests and bishops, likely Pope Francis) to give the divorced and remarried (and other sexual sinners) permission to decide on their own whether or not they are eating and drinking condemnation upon themselves. In practice, this has already been happening on the ground on sexual issues since the 1960s. It was even endorsed by some bishops in their responses to Humanae Vitae. However, this erroneous idea of conscience has, to this point, been resisted by Rome. We'll see how much further Pope Francis wants to push things in the post-synodal apostolic exhortation. My guess (my hope) is that, seeing that Cardinal Burke and many others are already very much on to the deliberate ambiguities in the synodal document, he will realize that he can't push it much further without provoking outright dissent and rejection. The ambiguities will remain ambiguities--we'll have the semblance of peace where the heretics and the orthodox can appeal to the same document, reading it differently.

The orthodox will continue their teaching and resistance, reading the documents in (a somewhat forced) continuity with John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who firmly rejected this false notion of conscience, in hopes that a future pope will set things back right. We'll see though. If Pope Francis has adequate time to change the composition of the college of cardinals so that we are guaranteed another pope like him or worse, then things are going to start looking very, very dark. Conservative Catholics are going to have to start planning for the long-haul to preserve orthodoxy with or without the support of the hierarchy.

The permanence of the revolution and the transience of the permanent things

To be a conservative is to question the revolution and assert the permanence of the permanent things, but--to all appearances, at least--today it seems like the only thing permanent is the revolution. No matter how many elections we win, no matter how many judges we appoint, no matter how many times the revolution falls on its face, acts like a tyrant, or eats its own, it progresses on inexorably. It is slowed, but almost never stopped, and never reversed. It as if the center of gravity resides with the left, so that (as O'Sullivan's law has it), any organization that is not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing.

It is particularly disheartening to see this operating in the Church. After a quarter century of John Paul II, the election of Ratzinger of all people as his successor, it seemed like we might finally put liberal Catholicism to bed. It had shown itself to be completely played out, sterile, self-hating, aesthetically and intellectually bankrupt, a dead end. Everything vital and new in the Church was clearly conservative. But then Benedict retires, a new guy comes in, he abandons the careful rhetoric of his predecessors for a casual style that generates left-friendly sound bytes and appears to do just about everything he can to reopen the left's pet causes that his predecessors put the lid on for years, and it's as if the last two papacies didn't happen. Despite 30 years of episcopal appointments, papal documents, a new catechism, a massive dying-off of liberal orders and institutions, the center of gravity is with the left--and, in fact, as moved leftward, so we're talking about being welcoming to gays and transgenders instead of just the boring old remarried mom with kids.

Now, it looks to me like the center of gravity among the bishops is still toward tradition and they're going to shut down the move to the left in this case, and, I don't think Pope Francis is actually a consistent or radical liberal. But still, at least to all appearances, the revolution is relentless and is playing the long game, while those standing up for what is ostensibly immutable feel as though there is no room for error--even when we're talking about bishops overwhelmingly chosen by conservative popes in a Church that stakes its very claim to authority on the immutability of its teachings.

It is a marvel. The confidence that the Catholic once had that the Church was unchanging is now felt by the progressive who is confident that progress is an inevitable law of the universe. Like it or not, the progressive shapes the dominant narrative of our society, and we are to some extent captive to it, even if we consciously reject it.

"Conscience"

At some point, conscience changed from the thing that accuses to the thing that lets you off the hook.

"Conscience" is invoked as an excuse for Catholics who find the Church's teaching on sexuality difficult and don't want to follow it--as if what distinguishes these people is a particularly sensitive conscience. "Celibacy, periodic abstinence, or having tons of kids is OK for the weak, and I really want to stop fornicating/contracepting/buggering my boyfriend like the Church asks, but my conscience just won't allow it!"

Yes, conscience can sometimes tell you to disobey the Church, but that's not what's operating here in 999 out of 1,000 cases. What's actually going on is that following the Church's teaching is hard--sometimes really hard--for a lot of people, and maybe for most people at least at certain periods in their life. So, a lot of folks just aren't going to be able to cut it, possibly for long periods of their lives. Failing to follow the Church's teaching has a lot more to do with "doing whatever you want" and "doing what society tell you is good" than with "following my conscience."

Struggling to live up to the Church's teaching is normal, and we should be understanding, merciful, etc., but there's no need to drag in this false idea of conscience to explain this or motivate our mercy and understanding. Doing so flatters people for being average and removes the possibility of an actual conscience that tells you to do things that are hard.

Moreover, it's an insult to those of us who actually seek to form their consciences according to the Church. Implying that, those who conform themselves to the Church's teaching, going against the grain of society at large, often at great personal sacrifice, do so out of some dullness or lack of moral creativity or inability to think for themselves.

Is psychology complete bunk?

There's an article in First Things by a psychiatrist arguing that transgendered people are the way they are because they got stuck in some stage of psychological development and that they need psychotherapy to cure them.

I agree with the author's argument that people who think they're a different sex from what they obviously are by genetics and anatomy clearly suffer from a kind of mental illness--and that it is political correctness that keeps us from recognizing this, not science or logic. However, these kinds of explanations don't sound plausible to me--whether they're applied to this or any other kind of mental or emotional problem. The whole idea of the unconscious mind as something which is, on the one hand, outside of consciousness and free will, and thus operates according to laws that are discoverable by science but not obviously having to do with material bodies, seems unlikely. At best, you're dealing with a very rough proxy for underlying material events, so that the further you get away from "x happened to this part of your brain, so that's why you suffer from y," the shakier ground you are on for showing the kind of clear, reproducible, causation, which could lead to any kind of effective treatment.

It could just be that we're so far away from bridging the gap between the physical brain and the conscious mind and human behavior and that these realities are so complex that postulating "laws" about them at this point is like predicting and controlling the weather--but with only the knowledge and instrumentation of 200 years ago. (And, if human beings are truly possessed of free will, then, even if we figured that out, at some level, their behavior is ultimately only predictable and subject to laws on a broad statistical level.)

In any case, it seems to me that such claims of causation of mental aberrations don't even rise to that level. They're easily refuted by counter-examples. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're complete bunk, but it may mean that they have more in common with the philosophical or religious psychology employed in the tradition of spiritual direction than they have to do with modern medicine.

Stupid laws for stupid things

I was looking at a website dedicated to banning bottled water. My first thought was the standard conservative/libertarian, "What is it with these crusading would-be despots, who feel the need to micromanage my groceries at gunpoint?!"

A more considered reaction though is that I don't actually disagree in principle with their objections to bottled water. I don't really know that the environmental impact is actually significant, but there is something wasteful about paying money for water in a bottle. We used to get by just fine with tap water and drinking fountains--in fact, I recall making fun of idiot rich people who paid for fancy bottled water supposedly from the French Alps. But now the wonder of capitalism found/created the need for it among the masses. That's what capitalism does--incite and manipulate our appetites to create needs. The whole system is set up to wear down our self-control so that we can have constant economic growth. The only effective brake on it is the law, so the natural response of a certain segment of people who want to do something about our gross slavery to stupid appetites to resort to the force of law.

I'm not trying to justify petty laws like this, but it seems like they might be a natural or necessary result of the unleashing of appetite that capitalism is engaged in. Laws against single-serving bottled water just weren't necessary 30 years ago because it more-or-less didn't exist. But someone invented it and sold it to the public, and now the genie is out of the bottle (so to speak). If one were to grant that the harm is significant enough to be of public concern (which is dubious), then--well--we'd need a stupid law to deal with stupid water bottles.

I don't think the harm of bottled water, on its own, is that significant--at least in this country where we have efficient garbage collection systems, and most people are conscientious about using them. But you could argue that it's harmful as a part of the broader unleashing of thoughtless appetite and abandonment of thrift and self-denial.

This may ultimately just be a restatement of Chesterton's observation that "When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws."

Extra ecclesiam nulla salus?

There has been a decided shift toward optimism in regards to the salvation outside the Church in recent years, but I think this actually runs counter to the developments of twentieth-century Catholic theology--at least, the thread that has been most completely absorbed into Church teaching through Vatican II, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

That development has been in the direction of more explicit Christocentrism and toward approaches which remove the arbitrariness in the associations between Christ, his Church, the sacraments, Christian morality, and salvation.

Thus, salvation is not just an arbitrary reward for a good life, carried out with the help of the Church and the sacraments. But (in a sense) salvation is life in Christ--it is life as member of Christ's Body, which is his Church, which is constituted by the sacraments.

This actually makes salvation of the unbaptized (or even non-Catholic Christians) harder to explain than explanations that focus primarily on forgiveness of sins. It is easy to imagine forgiveness of sins occurring outside the normal sacramental economy--even within the sacramental economy, there are various ways that sin is forgiven. But when salvation is seen as being not ultimately distinct from the Christian life--that is, following Christ, living a sacramental life in the Church--then salvation for people who are evidently not living that life is much harder to explain. What would such a salvation even mean?

I guess you fall back on the fact that basically anything good that anyone does is ultimately due to grace. So, whatever is good in anyone's life must be attributed to grace at some level . Thus, grace is available in some form to all, and all have the ability to accept or reject that grace. And, to the extent they accept that grace they actually are living in Christ. Still, you can't take that very far without again reducing the requirements placed on Christians to arbitrariness. If salvation is life in Christ and we have a decent idea what life in Christ looks like, then--while we can certainly withhold judgment on any individual, since judgment belongs to God alone--at least on the face of it, things don't look good for most of humanity--which would be in accord with what Jesus said about the narrow gate.

That doesn't mean we can't hope that the truth is otherwise, but that hope seems to have slid into optimism, which is certainly not warranted--either by scripture or the majority of the tradition and common sense of the Church through the centuries. While the Church heavily qualifies "extra ecclesiam nulla salus" these days, I suspect that, for the most part, when our ancestors said that, they more or less meant it--even if they might admit some exceptions.

I expect that the sense in the Church will eventually shift back toward the historical consensus--though perhaps not quite to the pessimism of some eras. It's possible that the current attitude is an over-correction for a distorted pessimism, and we'll find the reasonable mean, which allows for God's grace to work in unexpected ways, but sees the direness of the evident neglect of the ordinary means which he has publicly revealed.

The current optimism seems to go hand-in-hand with the optimistic cooperation with "men of good will" that comes from John XXIII and Vatican II. It's hard to see this being sustained as the "men of good will" increasingly turn on the Church.

WW[GT]

I don't want this blog to be exclusively about World War G/T, but it's what's on my mind right now. Specifically, I'm trying to think through how this might work out in the long run, given that gay/straight inequality--like other social inequalities--is likely due, at least in part, from facts about humanity that aren't going to go away.

I think there are two purposes to thinking this through:

1. I'd like to see more realism and humility in the face of human nature on the part of the left. Your ideals don't match human reality any more than any other religion's morality, and rigid enforcement of them will be just as inhumane as the worst puritanism.

2. I'm hoping to find some realistic optimism for traditionalism. Yes, things are rapidly changing due to societal and technological shifts, but some things about humanity don't change--or at least, they don't change that fast. At least some aspects of traditional ideas about sex and sexuality seem universal enough to be in this category. Thus, if what the left is pushing is insane and unworkable, it won't ultimately work--either we'll figure out a workaround that most people will muddle through, or there will be a backlash and an adjustment of our political order and self-understanding ... or the whole thing will collapse. Hopefully it won't come to the latter.

The persistence of pathologies of the gay community, cont.

The gay community appears to suffer from other pathologies as well, that are at least not evidently related to lack of male-female balance. High rates of mental illness, suicide, violence, etc. Again, the presumption is that the cause of these things is the societal rejection that gays face.

However, the same thing that leads me to believe that gays (at least the males) are "born that way" makes me think that the other psychological problems associated with homosexuality are likewise inborn. The truth is that a frightening amount of what think of as our personalities, dispositions, mental problems etc., are strongly influenced by genetic and other biological factors. If homosexuality has a biological cause (as seems very likely for men at least) and it is consistently correlated with other psychological or behavioral abnormalities, it seems quite likely that, whichever way the causality might run, these also have related biological roots.

If this is the case, then the pathologies of the gay community aren't going to go away. Like the persistence of the pathologies of the black community, this is bad news for society as a whole--as reality persistently refuses to live up to the ideology of equality, we get growing resentment on the part of the minority and endless guilt trips for the majority, leading either to craven worship of the minority for the true believers and dark cynicism for the skeptics.

Most folks will muddle through, repeating the official line that there are no significant differences between groups, but, in practice, keeping their distance from the problems they continue perceive in the minority group.

Gay integration, cont.: social pathologies of the gay community

In addition to the inherent structures of a human society geared to heterosexual mating and reproduction, the social pathologies of the gay community pose another obstacle to the liberal dream of a society where sexual orientation makes no difference.

Right-thinking people tell us that these pathologies are all or mostly due to oppression by straights and, thus, that they will evaporate as soon as that oppression ceases, but--taking a lesson from the experience with blacks--this seems unlikely.

Certain social pathologies arise directly from the unbalanced nature of homosexual sexuality. Male and female human sexuality evolved together in a complementary fashion. This complementarity is lacking in homosexual relationships. Yes, there are variations between individuals which mean that any given couple, homosexual or heterosexual, can be more or less complementary in various ways, but the differences between male and female sexuality are quite significant when groups are taken as a whole and individual variations cancel each other out. This means that, taken as a whole, different patterns will be seen in male-female, male-male, and female-female sexuality.

The most obvious manifestation of this is the hyper-promiscuity of a significant portion of the gay male population. We can get a glimpse of what sexuality tailored purely to male tastes looks like from straight male porn: endless random couplings that get right to the point and leave no attachments. Of course, this is a fantasy world, based on the absurd premise that females have the same libido as males, but gay men actually inhabit (or can choose to inhabit) a sexual reality that at least approximates this. Being gay does not make you a sex maniac, but male sexuality unbalanced by female sexuality tends toward sex mania, with the attendant venereal diseases. A significant number of gay men have an astronomical number of sexual partners, and the HIV infection rate remains high despite the fact that everyone knows what causes it and how to prevent it.

Not being a woman, I don't know how this unbalance is likely to work out among lesbians, but there are bound to be problems there as well. Lesbians are obviously more likely to form lasting relationships than gay men, but I recall a study showing that lesbian relationships were still significantly less stable than heterosexual relationships. So, it does not seem to be the case that more monogamous inclinations of human females relative to males leads hyper-monogamy in female-female relationships, but that there is something out-of-balance in female sexuality as well.

Perhaps opening marriage to homosexuals will, over time, change homosexual culture to be oriented toward monogamy like heterosexual culture. Gay boys will grow up dreaming of meeting Mr. Right and settling down. There's probably some truth in this. Some gay folks (mostly lesbians), will desire the settled life of marriage (and even children), and this will become a goal for some from early on, and the gay sexual market will be modified accordingly.

However, the disappearance of marriage among the lower classes makes me think that monogamy is a fragile thing that arises and flourishes only under certain circumstances. It is not "natural" in the sense that, when obstacles are removed, it just emerges as the default. Rather, monogamy is an arrangement that arose specifically around the yin and yang of male and female and is specifically oriented toward rearing offspring. Everything else (including--to some degree--old straight people getting married), is an imitation of the "real thing"--something of a tragedy or a joke. Other kinds of couples can be cute, endearing, edifying in their devotion to each other, etc., but they are not engaged in the work of family. Yes, gays can adopt or lesbians can be inseminated like farm animals, but this presupposes the weak modern ideal of family as a mere launching pad for individuals bound for the corporate/state machine. There is no essential connection of blood that ties all the individuals together and little reason for it to remain permanent.

Gays: prospects for integration

The civil rights movement started with bright prospects: Eliminate Jim Crow, and the barriers between white and black will fade away. Of course, that didn’t happen. Lower class blacks suffer from social pathologies that everyone is anxious to distance themselves (and, more importantly, their children) from. Jim Crow was (among other things) a blunt instrument for accomplishing this. The North had more subtle ways of doing it--excluding blacks from certain neighborhoods, etc. We've gotten rid of those and condemn them as racist, but we have our own ways of doing the same thing. For instance, white people--including good-thinking liberals--are anxious to move to neighborhoods with "good schools"--which effectively means "majority white and asian". Of course, there are middle class blacks, who integrate more or less successfully with the white middle class (and also must insulate themselves from lower class blacks), but the hopes of the civil rights movement have met with hard realities: no one has a solution for the social pathologies of lower class blacks, and no one really believes (when you look at revealed preferences) the official dogma that these pathologies are primarily in the eye of the beholder.

As we all know, gays are the new blacks, and the gay rights movement is the new civil rights movement. So, the question arises: what are the realistic prospects for "gay integration"?

As with blacks, we are informed that negative impressions of gays are merely prejudice--gays and straights are the same. If they're not, it's because of straight prejudice. Remove the prejudice, give gays their rights, and they'll be just like straights (except where they're better than straights!).

There are reasons to think this argument is more plausible for gays than it has proven to be for blacks. Strictly speaking, gays have never been forcibly segregated, so we're talking more about social acceptance rather than integration. The persistent differences between whites and blacks seem to arise in large part from genetic differences that come from breeding separately for thousands of years--most prominently, the mean IQ of the two populations is different. Gays are not a distinct genetic population like this, with a broad set of differences from the rest of the population that show up as statistically significant against the noise of individual variations when whole populations are considered. It seems somewhat more plausible to say that gays are just like straights, except that they are attracted to their own sex.

On the other hand, the limitations that civil rights and feminism have met up against despite legal changes and relentless propaganda should make us skeptical of the ability of the gay rights movement to fully normalize homosexuality. Like differences between blacks and whites, and men and women, the societal disapproval of homosexuality is not some peculiar quirk of our culture, but manifests itself across many (most? all?) cultures in some form or another.

Even if there's not some direct reason for this (e.g. disapproval of homosexuality somehow directly increases genetic fitness), there are basic logical reasons why "gay" will never become a compliment--namely, sexual differentiation works.

The vast majority of men like being masculine and prefer women who are feminine. The vast majority of women like being feminine and prefer men who are masculine. As much as we might protest "Not that there's anything wrong with that!", when it comes to revealed preferences, we like sexual differentiation in our mates, our associates and our children. Maybe propaganda will be able to wear down some of the felt revulsion at androgyny (at least, among some women). It has certainly already limited public expression of that revulsion, but, again, when it comes to whom we choose to associate and mate with, women prefer clearly masculine men and men prefer clearly feminine women--and, as there are obvious evolutionary reasons for this as masculinity and femininity largely boil down to signals of biological fitness, it's unlikely that this will go away, even if the boundaries and specific cultural manifestations of masculinity and femininity are modified over time.

Sexual differentiation is too basic to the structure of society and life as most people actually prefer to live it for the public breakdown of this differentiation demanded by LGBT ideology (and now being enshrined in law) to ultimately succeed. If the law will no longer allow outright discrimination against those who violate the boundaries demanded by this differentiation, people will find other means to carry on normal life. To the extent that we have free association, we can associate with people who value similar things. When parents move to neighborhoods full of people who "value education," or when white people more generally move to whitopias like Portland to be around a "vibrant arts scene" or "sustainable lifestyle," they are, in fact, selecting to be around people like them, which--in practice--means mostly whites, and, implicitly, they are expressing preference for and approval of ways of life that are most characteristic of whites in our society. In the same way, sexually normal straight people naturally gravitate to other sexually normal straight people--both for selecting mates and for friendship, and they express preference for and approval for masculinity in men and femininity in women.

This inherently limits the social acceptability of homosexuality.

Pop lesbianism is just porn

When attractive female pop singers sing songs about exploring lesbianism, they get to pretend that they're fighting for social justice for gays, but they're actually just tapping into the market for porn involving two chicks that a lot of straight guys like. Somehow, I don't foresee the Indigo Girls or K.D. Lang successfully getting in on this trend.

(And, if they're influencing impressionable girls to experiment in this way, they're just opening them up to the same kind of exploitation.)

The totalitarian logic of capitalism

Liberal totalitarianism is not limited to left-liberalism. Capitalism works by a similar logic, supplanting custom and culture by creating "needs" that can be exploited for profit.

In both cases, it works because there actually is a real perceived benefit (at least for someone) and the good that's lost is usually lest tangible. The benefit is usually individual; the loss is usually communal. I am freed from dependance on or judgment by others so that I can do more of what I want, but without any need binding us together and without shared expectations of behavior, there's less to bring us together.

The clown

In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they become still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose that the world will be destroyed--amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is a joke. (Kierkegaard, Either/Or I 15)

I recently saw some street-corner preachers, holding signs warning people about hell. A few people engaged with them, others just took pictures or laughed. They were clowns.

But really the position of those of us with a more sophisticated Christianity trying to warn the world that Soylent Green is people isn't that different. We're like the clown not only because we appear absurd--warning of doom in the richest society in history--but because, like the clown, our role in the story has been assigned to us and it precludes our warnings being taken seriously. The story is that we're progressing out of the oppression of Christianity. When the Christian warns people where this is going, he may actually be lucky to be brushed off as a clown. The story doesn't have him wearing clown suit, but a Hitler costume. When we tries to speak out, he just ends up reinforcing the story of victimhood that necessitates the further advancement of the cultural left. Is Hitler saying that Planned Parenthood is bad? That just proves that we need to redouble our efforts against Hitler.

I'm not really sure how we get out of the clown suit, much less the Hitler costume.

All speech is hate speech

Words invoke concepts or things, which, to be meaningful, indicate this and not that. So, by they're nature, they exclude.

Somewhere, somehow, your exclusion is oppressing someone.

Stop the hate.

Stop speech.

In silence, there is equality.

(Also, no gestures, writing, thinking, moving, being more or less beautiful or ugly, short or tall, skinny or fat.)

At a gay wedding ...

... do they have a father-son dance?

Ross Douthat speaks truth to power

Here.

May God bless him and protect him from his enemies.

More sci-fi analogies

Soylent Green is an imperfect analogy--at least as long as our human-flesh-powered prosperity machine keeps humming. What we've got is a sort of combination of A Brave New World and Soylent Green. Life is pleasant in every respect to the point that moral argument against it is difficult--do you not like happiness? There is something deeply unhuman about it, but it is nearly impossible to see or articulate from within that life.

Of course, introducing a secret dark side makes the book less interesting as a moral puzzle, but (at least if you believe in Original Sin) makes it more realistic. These things always have a dark side.

H.G. Wells' Time Machine is another suggestive analogy. We Eloi have a pleasant life. Nothing to complain about. Oh, but we're basically cattle being fattened for slaughter. The difference is that the human race isn't divided (yet?) into Eloi and Morlocks. With apologies to Solzhenitsyn, the line separating Eloi and Morlock cuts through our own hearts.

There are probably more analogies. Cannibalism was once a go to symbol for horror and barbarism--possibility in our future due to the degeneration of Christian society (Soylent Green, Time Machine, Heart of Darkness). Now, it's less and less of a symbol and closer to reality.

All we need now are some sexual degenerates (like Armin "Der Metzgermeister" Meiwes) claiming cannibalism (consensual, of course) is a human right. Then we can frame opposition to cannibalism as anti-science and anti-gay.

Soylent Green is people

So, Planned Parenthood, a respectable organization in our society, funded by governments, beloved by everyone with the right opinions, harvests flesh from the unborn children it kills for scientific research so we can have medical advances that will give us a better life.

In short, we're living the plot of Soylent Green.

But Soylent Green isn't the shocking secret ingredient in the cure for our starvation in a post-apocalyptic wasteland; it's a ho-hum part of the economic and technological machine extending our comfort in the most prosperous society in history.

The resulting situation for us would-be Charlton Hestons is eloquently described by Brandon McGinley at First Things. It seems like madness to say that our culture is morally rotten when our life is so pleasant. Rod Dreher expands on this. It's not just the barbarism of Planned Parenthood itself but the lack of reaction to that barbarism from our popular culture that exemplifies the moral insanity of our culture. We no longer have the means to condemn cannibalism. Cannibalism is "gross", but so is surgery. Our disgust instinct has no rational basis. It is simply an obstacle to be overcome so that we're free to manipulate the meat world for the satisfaction of our desired.

(Heck, even in the moral theology class I took in a Catholic college, the professor--an exponent of the standard "liberal" Catholic consequentialism--couldn't condemn anthropophagy, at least in cultures where it was a sign of respect for the dead rather than humiliation of an enemy. Maybe some day the Church will be enlightened enough to embrace ritualized cannibalism as part of an inculturated liturgy!)

When we can't agree on cannibalism--when we can't agree on the harvesting the bodies of our young for medical research--where do we start?

As MacIntyre has accurately described it, the Enlightenment project to base morality on a universal, rational basis is a failure--and, worse than that, it has destroyed what it tried to replace: the shared moral life based in practice of the virtues that is a necessary precondition for any kind of meaningful moral discourse. At this point, it is nothing more than a kind of zombie virus which only serves to infest and consume what remains of meaningful moral communities by providing arguments that allow individuals to opportunistically reject particular traditional moral strictures as oppressive.

When meaningful dialogue is impossible, the only possible response (aside from violence) is a kind of prophetic rebuke.

But if that witness is to be carried on, if a meaningful moral life is to be carried on, then what is most imperative is building of communities that are resistant to the virus.

Must we harden our hearts? An analogy

I wonder if a useful analogy to those of us who, as Christians, are bound to love the marginalized that cultural liberalism seeks to help, but cannot get on board with cultural program of left liberalism would be the situation of those who sympathized with the plight of the poor in the late nineteenth century but refused to become socials or communists (esp. the Church). I suspect they were similarly denounced as heartless (and, in fact, in some places, it's still the case that anyone who doesn't get on board with radicalism is denounced as being anti-poor.)

The analogy may fail (in the case of the Church, at least) because the nineteenth century poor were seen as victims of capitalism, and the Church vigorously denounced the capitalism behind that development as much, if not more, than socialism.

But maybe the analogy does work--or it would if we could more clearly frame the isolation of the marginalized as a symptom of the broader breakdown of society--families (nuclear and extended), communities, etc.--and, within the Church, the celibate vocation. In other words, gay marriage is a radical solution like socialism that we must reject, but it arises because our society is atomized and has subverted the meaning of family and sexuality. The solution isn't more individualism and false liberation, but a return to a thicker, religious, society that doesn't make sexual fulfillment the highest good and companionate marriage the only permanent relationship.

Of course, it was easier to triangulate against capitalism and socialism because the Church was seen more a regressive obstacle--the opiate of the masses--rather than the source of oppression itself. In the case of gays at least, the Church is seen as the prime oppressor, and the left doesn't really identify social atomization as the enemy. (Or it equates society with the state, so when it opposes individualism, what it advocates is a larger, more invasive state rather than a thick society where people are directly responsible for their neighbors.)

So, not a perfect analogy. In the end, the Church's rejection of radicalism was vindicated when communism invariably led to oppression, starvation and mass murder. Communism openly advocated violent revolution from the beginning, so it's an exaggeration to compare the cultural left to it in that regard--whatever totalitarian tendencies it may have, it's not advocating violence. (Of course, being in control of the state, which has further consolidated its monopoly on violence in the last century, they don't really have to.)

The totalitarian logic of liberalism

Step One: Identify a shared common-sense understanding that guides social relations (E.g., "Human beings are born male or female as determined by their genetics and anatomy.")
 
Step Two: Identify a minority group that falls outside that understanding. (E.g., "There's a handful of people that don’t identify as the same sex as their anatomy would indicate.")
 
Step Three: Destroy the shared common understand by characterizing it as mere bigotry--causing grievous harm to the affected minority and having no positive social value in itself. (E.g., "Assuming that everyone belongs to one sex or another as determined by their genetics and anatomy is just cis-normativity. It hurts the transgendered and distorts social reality.")
 
Step Four: Propose an expansion of managerial liberalism as the only way of keeping social peace in the absence of the shared common-sense understanding. (E.g., "Sexual identification is now determined by each individual for him or herself--children included. Programs, policies and protections must be put in place in all institutions and inculcated into everyone to ensure that self-identification is always respected. No one who accepts the common-sense understanding as meaningful can be entrusted with any kind of authority.")
 
Repeat.

Referring to north as "up" and south as "down" is probably racist.

Must we harden our hearts?

I am not sure if my cynicism is more a cause of my conservatism or a defense mechanism I've developed to withstand the sentimentalism employed by liberalism to shame its opponents, but it runs deep.

As a Christian, I think this is a spiritual problem. The universalism and concern for the poor and marginalized that characterize left liberalism are features it inherited from Christianity. The conservative Christian would say that liberalism exaggerates and distorts these features, having taken them out of context, but he cannot deny they are a part of his religion, too. Thus, he must both maintain enough objectivity to critique liberalism's claim to be the only morally upright response to the poor and marginalized, yet not actually let his heart be hardened against them.

It is not easy to do--particularly when you generally agree with liberals that the thing they're campaigning against is bad, and you don't have your own easy alternative solutions on hand. So, for instance, I agree that the modern market is creating great disparities in wealth and power and that this a problem for society. I largely agree that racial and sexual minorities often have it rough (though I don't entirely agree with them about the causes of this). And I don't really buy the official conservative rationalizations or solutions for these problems. Getting the government out of the way so that personal liberty and market economics can work their magic won't solve much of anything. The result is that my politics are largely negative--engaged in bursting the moral pretensions of the left, but without offering much of substance to replace it.

I would like to think that, fundamentally, this view of the world is not so much cynical as it is tragic. There are certain evils that cannot be eradicated from the human heart or human society because what is good and what is wicked in man are so tightly involved in each other that we cannot stamp out what is wicked without also crushing what is best in man. The wheat and the tares cannot be sorted out until the end.

So, I view the lot of the poor and the marginalized as, in some ways, built into the structure of reality, and I oppose efforts to alleviate their suffering that deny reality because these can only end by constructing an order that is fundamentally inhuman and insane. This means, sometimes, we have to say, "no". We do have duties to the poor and marginalized. Our hearts should be open to them, but their claims (or the claims of those who advocate on their behalf) cannot be unlimited. They have to evaluated critically and weighed against the claims of other goods.

In theory, that is not the same as indifference. In practice, it is hard to keep it distinct. This is particularly so in the face of the unending onslaught of guilt trips emanating from the moralistic zealots who speak on their behalf. Saying "no" in the face of a guilt trip takes some spine and maybe even a certain kind of callousness--or whatever it is that parents develop to avoid being manipulated by their children.

In parents, this callousness is (usually) countered and kept in check by a deeper natural sympathy--in fact, the callousness is usually in service to the deeper love. Most of us don't have that kind of natural sympathy for the poor and marginalized--so saying "no" without slipping into indifference (or worse) is a moral challenge.

Gender is complicated

"Gender is complicated" isn't argument. Yes, gender is complicated. (Though, 99% of the time, it's not, really.) So what? Why should the conscious subject's sense of its gender be more relevant than chromosomes or sex organs or the sex that society assigns it? We're social beings, and society "assigns" us roles and tells us how to act all the time.

If society has no right to tell Caitlyn that she's a man, then society has no right to tell me that Bruce is a woman.

Back to the office, mom! Motherhood is socialist.

Fred Schwarz at NRO reports that European laws and customs discourage employment of mothers. I guess  this is supposed to be bad because it's Europe and "socialist", while America is good for being ruthlessly capitalist and putting moms right to work.

Granted, the damper that generous maternal leave puts on employment of mothers and expectant mothers may be an unintended consequence of policies with good feminist intentions and ignorance of how people actually make hiring decisions. Nonetheless, it seems like this isn't an uncommon European phenomenon--laws that are "socialist" in theory but, in effect, actually preserve social customs and economic ways of life that American capitalism has long since torn to shreds.

Europe is killing itself by other means, of course, so probably neither approach is ultimately sustainable, but it's a commentary on the stupidity of our politics that a conservative site agrees with feminists that stigmas that encourage mothers to be parents instead of wage slaves are bad things.

Is sex magic?

Contemporary arguments about sexual morality generally assume utilitarianism (or consequentialism) and nominalism. Consequentialism holds that the morality of an act is purely determined by the goodness or badness of its consequences; utilitarianism further specifies that this is to be evaluated in terms of net pleasure/suffering brought to society as a whole. Nominalism says that there are no universals. Universals are just convenient fictions of language allowing us to name groups of similar things, but there is no actual nature or essence shared by things named by the same universal. Thus, arguments about the meaning of "male", "female", and "marriage" have no meaning from which we can derive moral conclusions. There are only individual things which we classify as "male, "female", or "marriage" for convenience.

This combination has been used as a sledgehammer against traditional definitions of marriage and prohibitions against homosexual acts. Arguments that marriage or the conjugal act are different "kinds" of things, with inherent purposes are met with scoffing and reductio ad absurdum arguments: "If marriage is about procreation, why do we let infertile couples marry?"

This is just one instance of the broader movement to demystify sex. Sex has no essence, no nature, no meaning or purpose beyond the subjective meaning and purpose attributed to it by the participants. Sex is not magic. In itself, sex can't be distinguished morally from other kinds of physical activity, and different sex acts cannot have different moral meanings apart from the moral meaning attributed to them by the participants. So, for instance, there can be no inherent difference between the act upon which the continuation of the species depends and "an unnatural act of the Oscar Wilde type". To say otherwise is to be superstitious and bigoted.

The problem is that this proves too much. (And here comes my reductio ad absurdum.)

We're already seeing in some boundary-pushing publications that this approach to sexual morality can't really make a coherent argument against bestiality. Provided that no physical harm is done to the beast, the only arguments to be made would be that it is somehow "unnatural" or that it debases the human participant. But these all rely on bigoted essentialism. If the participant doesn't find it debasing, then it isn't debasing. (Maybe an animal rights advocate would make an argument based on consent, but this just shows that the idea of attributing rights to animals is absurd.)

Similarly with (consensual) incest. Again, arguments that it confuses relationships in a way that is "unnatural" depend on essentialism--taking seriously kinds of relationships and sex as a particular kind of act, regardless of how that act or those relationships are viewed by the participants. People will bring out arguments about the genetic risks of inbreeding, but this can no longer determine the question. For one thing, procreation can be easily avoided, and genetic screening and abortion could be used as a backup. Anyway, arguments about gay sex and parenting have already determined that such risks of general social harm don't count for much against individual desires. For example, the social cost of the AIDS epidemic and its causal connection to male homosexual buggery is about as clear as it gets, but any suggestion that take measures to limit this activity is denounced as bigoted. Arguments based on psychology can be similarly put aside--if there are no essential kinds of relationships and acts, there can be no clear cause and effect in psychology--or at least, nothing clear enough to rule out relationships and acts that are consensual and otherwise appear "healthy".

Ultimately, it is hard for me to see even how liberals can consistently uphold the age of consent and strictures against pedophilia, if they consistently evaluate sexual morals by this withering standard. Society has bunkered these strictures in the language and logic of consent, which makes them less vulnerable to the reductionist logic. Within liberalism, consent is the one remaining absolute when it comes to sex, and kids can't offer meaningful sexual consent to adults. Still though, this only makes sense if you presume that sex is magic--different in kind from other kinds of acts. Children can consent to giving handshakes and high fives and playing board games, can't they? So what sets sex apart? Or, for that matter, what sets sex between teenagers apart from sex between a teenager and an adult? If minors can't give consent to adults, how can they do so to each other? Ultimately, our arguments still rely on the belief that sex is something different in kind from other acts, and the age of consent protects the innocence of minors from being violated, even though, we've otherwise discarded the concepts of "innocence" and "violation". The backup argument would be claims of psychological harm, but, again, is the causal link strong enough to be proven definitively and distinguished from the harm caused by social stigma? Homosexuals and transgendered folks have all kinds of psychological problems, but if you argue that these are related to their sexual proclivities rather than caused by social stigma, you are a bigot.

I'm not arguing in favor of these disgusting acts, nor am I saying that the advocates of the acceptability of gay sex are actually advocating these things. I am only arguing that the rightful disgust we feel at these acts only makes sense within a thicker moral framework for sex than the reductionism that is brought out against traditional arguments against homosexuality. That reductionism is being used selectively and inconsistently. When applied consistently, it cuts at the logical foundations of sexual limits that most liberals still hold to.

Despite what we say when we want to justify certain acts, we still implicitly treat sex as if it were magic and inherently meaningful prior to the intentions of the participants. We still believe in innocence (in some form) and understand that some kinds of sex can violate it. We're only dismissive of those ideas when it suits us for the purpose of justifying our own actions or those of a sympathetic minority.

Natural revulsion, cont.

How do we distinguish the "objective" view that a surgeon has of human flesh from that of the hangman?

Are robots the officially recognized aggrieved minority of the future?

Hilarious.

Snowballing madness

This week at Mass we sang a hymn written a by liberal nun twenty-five years ago. It has a verse about men and women, made in God's image, equally contributing to the Church.

Twenty-five years ago that was good because it sounded like feminism taking a shot at patriarchy

Today, it's suspect because when you put it that way it sounds like you're saying the human race can be meaningfully classified (and maybe even paired) as "men" and "women". Only reactionaries talk that way these days. It's exclusive and mean-spirited.

Surely this snowballing madness must consume itself? But how long?

Overcoming natural revulsion

Rod Dreher comments on the metaphysical commonalities in Planned Parenthood's harvesting of fetal tissue from the aborted unborn and the celebration of Bruce Jenner's "triumph" over biological reality. Man's triumph over nature must extend to triumph over (what was once called) human nature. We are beyond that. All that counts now are the arbitrary desires of conscious subjects. There is no external standard for evaluating those desires--certainly no standards arising from the biological nature of the human person.

Eliminating such standards requires overcoming our instinctual revulsion toward things that are disgusting, ugly and shameful, and this is another common element to the justification of Planned Parenthood's fetal organ harvesting and the normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism.

In an earlier article, Dreher links to Amanda Marcotte, arguing that, well, of course harvesting organs from the unborn human beings we're killing is "gross". But lots of things are "gross"--childbirth, abortion itself, etc. and we don't let "grossness" stop us from defending those things. People who work in medicine (driven by scientific objectivity) have inured themselves to these instincts in ways that might shock us sometimes, but "gross" has no rational meaning.

It is the same, we are told, with any instinctual revulsion toward homosexual sex acts or the falsified or mutilated bodies of the transgendered. It seems reasonable to me that, with the evolution of distinct orifices for reproduction and defecation, humans and other mammals would naturally come equipped with instincts directing us toward their proper use and that such instincts--while not absolutely determining the moral question in themselves--might meaningfully point us toward some sense of what it means to use our bodies properly.

But this is all swept away and condemned as prejudice. If a man wants to show his love to another man by accepting his reproductive organs into his rectum, then this is truly love, and my instinctual revulsion is just prejudice--hatred. If a man wants to express his true inner self by presenting himself as woman or even mutilating his body to remove his male reproductive organs and create a wound that mimics female reproductive organs, then this is true self-expression, and my instinctual revulsion is just prejudice--hatred.

Such instincts must be subverted if all desires are to be considered equal, if the triumph of subjective desire over human nature is to be complete, and we're hard at work subverting them--from popular entertainment which gets a laugh or a reaction through "gross out" elements that undermine modesty to pornography which twists the sexual desires of young men toward progressively more deviant sex acts.

Absent some kind of reaction, we're headed toward transhumanism and That Hideous Strength.

Ryan Anderson: keep fighting (nicely)

Ryan Anderson thinks that traditionalists can keep from being pushed out of civic life as bigots if we continue to engage civilly on behalf of marriage, thinking that the slow progress (or at least, holding pattern), we've achieved with regard to abortion by means of moral arguments and social science can be recreated.

He's right that this is a necessary part of the tactic of keeping from being pushed out of the public square entirely, though, absent major changes in trajectory it's hard to see it actually succeeding in reversing this thing (but maybe delusional optimism is a necessary component of staying engaged).

It's hard for me to imagine we'll really have much success in keeping the left from dismissing us as bigots. They're already doing so, and as they run the government, the education system, the communications system and the corporations, it's hard to see how that won't be the official view that people have to at least outwardly conform to. It might enough, however, to keep us from getting pushed out of the GOP and the "right-wing noise machine", which are key components in keeping before the public the fact that there are still two sides to be heard on this issue.

So, this strategy has its place. I don't think, however, that it's enough. We cannot keep pretending that the entire system is not already rigged against us; that the logic of liberalism that leads to gay marriage doesn't run deeper than we'd like to admit, and that engaging in battle on the terms set by classical liberalism, while the progressive liberals are bound by no such terms is a fool's battle. While there's something honorable in originalist principles that motivate Justice Scalia to say that he doesn't care how marriage is defined, that is, frankly, an insane statement. The constitutionalism of classical liberalism presupposes a sane society that doesn't do things like redefine marriage for political purposes. When society does that (even if it did so according to the rules of the originalist game), the game is over.

I don't know if we win by escalating the battle. There may not actually be much hope of winning, but at this point we are only fighting for the terms of our surrender. Constitutionalist principles and being nice aren't enough for this. Only power is enough. If playing by the rules and being civil serve the ends of access to power necessary for preserving our rights, then let's use them. But let's not forego other means available to us.

I'm not advocating violence (though I think we should be ready to take up arms to defend our family, property and churches if they come for them), but it seems like a certain form a fearless lawlesness is needed to stand up to tyrants and make their unjust laws unenforceable. We need to stop being cowed by PC or laws or social conventions that don't actually serve our communities or what's left of the common good. In public engagement, we need to top feeding the victim industry with apologies, stop avoiding uncomfortable topics for the sake of preserving coalitions. (For instance, we're not going to win the marriage debate while pretending that what we're saying has no bearing on the morality of gay sex.)

This might mean a division of labor--fearless extremists and trolls creating room on the right for the mainstream guys to carve out more respectable opinions: basically, using any and all means to break the conformist orthodoxy that the left is trying to smother the country with by making people aware that there is still a significant community of dissenters and we're not going anywhere.

Note: I'm personally preoccupied with political questions, but it's important to remember that we can't confuse means with ends. I'm mostly on the same page as Rod Dreher here. The purpose has to be, first of all, preservation of our way of life and extension primarily through personal evangelization. The political theory, coalition and strategy serves the shared way of life and not vice versa. If we're failing at actually living it out and passing it on to our children, the fight is completely purposeless and hypocritical. The fearless lawlessness and realization that things like constitutionalism are losing games are part of recognizing that the classical American political order that conservatives think they are defending no longer exists and is no longer possible given the disagreement over the proper meaning and end of human life. That regime has become something else and while advocates of the old order are still present in some parts of it and are still capable of exercising some good, it is fundamentally devoted to a way of life that is inimical to our own. It is a machine built by and for leftists and we look silly when we try to pretend we can operate and use it profitably for our own ends.

More pessimism

On the other hand, Rod Dreher is decidedly more pessimistic about the ability of the Church to resist in any meaningful way when Christians will take their cues from the predominant culture against the clear teaching of Scripture and the Church. He uses the fact that Southern Christians saw no contradiction between slavery or segregation and the Bible as an example of culture triumphing over clear Christian teaching.

I don't know if the analogy completely holds. The Bible can obviously be invoked against the way blacks were frequently treated in the South, but the case against slavery or segregation per se (as opposed to what a Christian defender of them might term abuses) aren't quite so clear. The Bible is pretty clear about the ultimate unity of the human family and that unity in Christ trumps the division between slave and free, and from these you can make a strong case against the compatibility of slavery (especially race-based chattel slavery) and racial segregation with Christianity, but it's not really that straightforward. Brotherhood in Christ clearly relativizes distinctions of class and race, but the idea that it requires the abolition of their social manifestation is actually a recent idea that would probably seem revolutionary to most Christians of the past.

In contrast, it's pretty hard to get around the Bible's condemnation of gay sex. (In fact, even if we're right about the incompatibility of slavery and racial segregation with Christianity, the fact that we think that it's completely obvious, when clearly many Christians have not found it so, is a good demonstration of the dominance of the surrounding culture over us that Dreher is talking about. For our culture, racism is the worst thing, so obviously Christianity clearly condemns it.)

That doesn't mean he's not right about culture trumping Christian teaching anyway, but a closer analogy would probably be the compatibility of feminism with New Testament teaching on the submission of women. In practice, most people wiggle their way around that by contextualizing it. Not that most people actively accept such arguments to dismiss the Biblical teaching on male and female roles--but they mostly just ignore them in practice and if they run into something dismissing it, they accept it as fitting how they already live and think. It's not too hard to imagine the similar pro-gay-sex arguments gaining traction in the same way--though, even here, the Biblical teachings on male-female relations seem to either be so specific (cover your hair) that they seem obviously culture-specific, or broad enough (submission of woman-as-Church, self-giving love of man-as-Christ) to allow a fair amount of cultural specification.

Also, I think about the persistence of creationism. It's hard to think of something more uncool in our culture, but lots and lots of people still believe in a six-day creation--even though it means derision from opinion makers and even though (I think) not that many churches actually teach it or push it that hard. (Maybe I'm wrong about that. But I would bet that there are a lot of creationists in churches that don't actually teach it. For some reason, it's always news when the Catholic position on evolution gets restated.) Of course, creationism vs. evolutionism doesn't have the same day-to-day implications as marriage, and while creationists are dismissed as rubes, they aren't condemned as bigots.

I don't know. I basically agree that things don't look good for hard, popular resistance to gay rights, and this probably even holds for resistance to its enforcement against the Church. But maybe I have more hopes for at least the persistence of the kind of quiet obstinance we see with creationism--even if it's mostly ineffective politically.

But how doomed are we?

I am not optimistic that this is just another Roe v. Wade or that we’ve reached Peak Leftism. The real question is whether the left is correct (at least on a political level) that we are the equivalent of the last defenders of Jim Crow. Are we the last gasp of a dying moral system that, in a generation, will be universally derided?

I’m not familiar enough with the civil rights debate to speak with certainty, but my general impression is that we do not need to be that pessimistic.

Realistically, I don’t think we’re going to be rolling back the Supreme Court decision, and it will remain the case that certain opinions will not be able to be given voice in public and will risk your job in some circles. Nonetheless, while we may not be there yet, I do think support for expanding gay rights will top out at some point—hopefully sooner rather than later, and that the sources of societal opposition aren’t going to be washed away or reduced to a tiny corner of the internet. We are still going to have a significant number of people who believe that—at least in their personal opinion—gay sex is a sin rather than a matter of pride, and marriage is between a man and a woman.

The major factor here is the Church. The civil rights movement was, in a lot of ways, explicitly Christian, and it had the support (or least, no significant opposition) from the entirety of mainstream Christianity--including conservative Southern denominations.

 The Church is on the other side of this one. Is it winning over minds? Not really. Is it losing influence over society as a whole and over its own adherents? Yes. But it’s still there, and, outside of true-believing leftists and their institutions, it’s not (yet) being treated with opprobrium. And it’s mostly standing firm. Aside from the liberal Protestants, who were already completely coopted by secular humanism and a few flaky evangelical personalities, the Church is out there teaching (at least officially) the truth about human sexuality.

Similarly, the right hasn’t really caved. This is where Michael New is correct about the significance of social conservatism as a political movement. Its role at this point—at least for the time being—is probably not an offensive attempt to roll back what the courts have done, but to defend the rights of dissenters and keep social conservatism within the Overton Window.

The big question here is whether or when the Republican Party will officially sell us out. I’m not entirely pessimistic on this score. The GOP is lost without social conservatives. The idea that “socially liberal, economically conservative” is the way of the future has been thrown around forever, but it doesn’t actually work, and I think the GOP mostly knows this. The same folks who want gay rights are good-thinking people who also want an intrusive federal government to save the environment, protect the poor, and … protect gay rights! The idea that the cultural part of liberalism is “libertarian” only makes sense in the alternative reality of Libertarians. Sexual revolution = more broken families = more welfare (and more votes for Democrats). The GOP knows that ditching social conservatives means political death. While all we will get out of them is lip service and (hopefully) judicial appointments that will at least slow things down, that’s not nothing. Lip service helps keep the Overton Window from collapsing. Judicial appointments will be important for protecting the rights of dissenters and slowing down the next project of the left.


Of course, the GOP may be doomed, but this has little to do with the unpopularity of social conservatism per se and more to do with immigration and the actual decline of marriage, which is the decline of the traditional American middle class way of life that (at least in theory) the GOP represents in a way that distinguishes it from the pure technocracy of the Democrats. (And, of course, this decline isn't entirely unrelated to immigration.)

That decline is the larger issue behind all this. The question, when we talk about “peak left” or “peak gay”, is how long this can go on. I'm not holding my breath waiting for a reaction from the silent majority (because, unlike 1973, it's not a majority any more), but how much longer can the welfare state grow and grow to take the place of natural ties? How much longer can the native population maintain below-replacement birth rates without major social upheaval? It just doesn’t seem sustainable. If social conservatives are right, then, it’s not sustainable.

Of course, things can still get a lot worse, but the hope would be that the run-in with reality (and, one hopes, a signficant portion of the population that remains recalcitrant) will weaken the ability of the state to enforce its ridiculous dogmas.

Peak Left?

Kevin Williamson thinks that the increasing insanity and intolerance of dissent of the left are signs that we have reached Peak Leftism.

I hope so, but I’m not so sure. They seem to me to be signs that the left is just finally consolidating its victories. What we’re seeing is their total control of the educational system, the communications system, corporations and the state manifesting itself in ever greater displays of raw power—enacting insanity, marginalizing the sane.

One can hope that this will provoke a backlash, but it’s hard to imagine where it would come from and how it would be effective when, as one commenter said, “The Left doesn't need to persuade you. They have your children, and you will be gone soon enough.”

Maybe something new will come up and surprise us all, but right now, the right looks … old. The left doesn't have any new ideas, but they're emboldened because they think they can win consistently without any compromise with the right.

Perhaps this is a symptom of the rise of the internet and social media, which have deprived a generation of the ability to think deeply and independently. They only feel, and they do so with an eye on the mob that’s watching them. You would think they would be kicking against the constraints of PC, but I'm not seeing it. (But I'm almost certainly not looking in the right places.)

I don’t know. The hope would be that the left will, at some point, cross a bridge too far and, make normal people become hostile, or at the very least, cynical about the latest cause for justice and equality. But if insisting that Bruce Jenner is actually a woman isn’t a bridge too far, I don’t know what is.

It may be that reality will only reassert itself when we burn through the advantages of our wealth and technology. Women on submarines and societal accolades for sexual misfits are luxuries you can only afford when you’re not facing real scarcity or an enemy who is a real threat.