Well, "Gooey" is One Word For It

Just the other day I was recommending Dr. Mike Liccione's Sacramentum Vitae for the fascinating essays on offer there regarding the ordinary and universal Magisterium. Since I check in there regularly to see if there's any more of the same on offer, I get to blame him for directing me to the stomach-churning essay by Mark Morford of the San Francisco Gate, in which we are treated to the sort of analysis one ordinarily expects to find in the Onion, not major newspaper outlets. Just to whet your appetite a little, check this out:

Here's where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

And, no: he's not kidding. He's. Completely. Serious. Dude. The whole essay is just like that. Don't try to read it after a heavy meal.

I would say that at least part of Morford's problem is that he is just a kid. At the bottom of the essay there's a picture of him, and he looks like he's about 22 years old, if that. Which would explain why he would say things like this with a straight face:

Are you rolling your eyes and scoffing? Fine by me. But you gotta wonder, why has, say, the JFK legacy lasted so long, is so vital to our national identity? Yes, the assassination canonized his legend. The Kennedy family is our version of royalty. But there's something more. Those attuned to energies beyond the literal meanings of things, these people say JFK wasn't assassinated for any typical reason you can name. It's because he was just this kind of high-vibration being, a peacemaker, at odds with the war machine, the CIA, the dark side. And it killed him.

Of course, he's too young to really know anything at all about Kennedy, or Martin Luther King Jr., for that matter: he's just regurgitating what he's been spoon-fed by all the right media outlets and has adopted as his own because, well, it's what he would like to believe. People of his ilk are bound to lionize Obama because they hate George Bush so much. But he gives the rest of us something to smile about.

On Infallibility

Dr. Mike Liccione of Sacramentum Vitae has a great essay on the infallibility of the ordinary and universal magisterium. I highly recommend it: he argues, first of all, that there really is such a thing as the infallibility of the ordinary and universal magisterium and, second, that the normative criteria for determining which teachings of the ordinary and universal magisterium are "clear enough in magisterial documents themselves to be authoritatively extended to particular teachings." At the end of the essay there is promissory note for another essay that will examine the status of the licitness of ordaining women and the use of artificial contraception vis-a-vis these considerations.

I won't say much more about Mike's essay here because that might tempt some readers to rest content with the Readers' Digest version on offer here, when in fact the essay ought to be read in its entirety, as I suspect will also be the case with its sequel.

Skip a Bit, Brother...

The new English translation of the Roman Missal has been slowly wending its way through the vetting process at the Vatican now for several years. One argument in favor of the older, simpler translations (which I have discussed before) has been that English is just plain fundamentally different from Latin in its modes of expression. Where Latin waxes pleonastic, it is more natural for English to simplify. So a sonorous Latin phrase like "Omnipotens sempiterne Deus" gets turned into the mere vocative "God", or on some occasions, "Mighty God". I don't think that the ICEL translations have been uniformly as banal as this example, but they come fairly close to a certain aurea mediocritas that has generated legions of critics, at least in this country.

Is it really true that simpler, plainer style is the norm in English? I'm not so sure. Although it tends to be rather common nowadays, the plain style is not something that motivated many of those who first translated Latin liturgical texts into English. In his magisterial English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (by far his greatest scholarly work, if you want the opinion of someone whose only knowledge of the subject matter comes from reading the work in question), C. S. Lewis explained in loving detail the various ways in which a desire for stylistic English (as opposed to merely colloquial) drove some of the work (p. 218):

Thus in vota humilium (third in Lent) English forces us to have a noun with humilium so that we get 'thy humble servants'. It then seems to the translator's ear that vota also should have a satellite, and, selecting (for he is an Englishman) one that alliterates, he writes down 'the hearty desires of thy humble servants', where the medieval translator would probably have been content with 'vowes of us humble'. In addition to such rhythmical motives I suspect the influence of a feeling, and, I believe, a just feeling, that the resonant Latin words carry more not only to the ear but also to the heart and imagination than their short English equivalents, so that 'faithfully to fill' is not an excessive allowance for ad implenda nor 'in the midst of so many and great dangers' for in tantis periculis.

I am particularly struck by the phrase "It then seems to the translator's ear...". I wonder how much banality in the ICEL translations could have been avoided by paying more heed to "the translator's ear"? Did the ICEL translators even have ears? Sometimes it seems not. Lewis was a master of translation, of course, and quite possibly the members of the ICEL committee entrusted with the task of translating the liturgical texts were principally trained in matters of theology, as opposed to Lewis's background of classical philology, philosophy, and English literature. One suspects, rather sadly, that even if Lewis had lived long enough to help out with the ICEL translations (and had been willing to, and had been able to, etc. etc.) he would not have been invited to do so. While that is merely a suspicion, it appears to be supported by the actual outcome of the project, given that Lewis was not the only person on the planet with his qualifications and talents.

I'm not at all sure that the ICEL is entirely to blame for the present unpleasantness, however. It takes two to tango, as they say, and the numbers of people who read and take delight in the same sorts of literature that transported Jacksie Lewis and his friends at the turn of the last century are rapidly dwindling. I won't pretend to be a snob in this regard: when I was 14 years old, I was reading Lewis's stories for children; when Lewis was 14 years old, he was reading Homer. In Greek. By the time I was 17 years old, I had read some more Lewis, all of Tolkien (several times) and, for some reason, Thucydides (in English), but by that same age Lewis had been offered a scholarship at Oxford University after having passed an entrance examination that I could never pass in a million years, even now. So I am in no position to lecture my cohort about their reading habits. Our technological age has favored the capacity for quick adaptation to electronic marvels rather than the slow, meticulous scholarship that made Lewis the genius that he was. It's not that we are no longer capable of such genius, it's that we no longer have the patience for it. As I said, I read Tolkien in my teens, and I loved what I read so much that I had read and re-read The Lord of the Rings nine times before I graduated from college. Arguably I should have been branching out a little, but even so: I cannot get my own son to read through the thing even one time. I have tried everything: I got him a very nice, deluxe edition of the thing, which has been gathering dust in his room. I tried reading it aloud to him on our cold, snowy winter evenings, along with servings of hot chocolate and beautiful, atmospheric music; I got a recorded books version that we both listened to together; I got the deluxe version of the DVD of Peter Jackson's movie interpretation and promised him that he could watch the whole thing if he would only read the book first. All to no avail: he still has not gotten any farther than the first third of The Two Towers. And yet he will sit for hour upon hour trying to "finish" Grand Theft Auto IV.

He is typical of a certain sort of adolescent boy. I have no illusions about that: some kids just don't like that kind of stuff, and no amount of immersion therapy is going to change that. I haven't figured out yet what he does like, but reading books is just not on his list. (A little sad, since in a house containing two classicists and a philosopher, there are literally thousands of really good books in the offing, all for free. It's like a fucking lending library in here, but never mind.) The same is true for most of his friends, as it happens. Much the same, I suppose, is probably true in the culture at large. I'm sure there are plenty of kids who do go in for a little more culture than most, but I fear, based not only on my experience with my son and his friends, but on my experience with the average undergraduate student, that the days when Lewis and his ilk formed the dominant culture are long gone, if they were ever really here in a dominant form. There will always be exceptions to the situation I am lamenting. I have a friend that I went to graduate school with who was, in some ways, remarkably like C. S. Lewis: he had a very good, classical education as a young boy, he grew up learning how to play the harpsichord and I don't know how many other musical instruments; he appears to have been as well educated as Lewis upon entering college, and he remains a remarkably able and productive scholar in classics. But in the 30 years I have been in the business, he's the only person I have met like that from my own cohort. And what one sees of the intelligentsia in the mass media these days is only discouraging. Just have a look at what passes for thoughtful, intelligent discourse among the self-styled "Brights", and you will have cause to weep; but much the same can be said for popular "apologetics"--there are no Lewises out there defending the faith today, only Bakkers.

Lewis was an amazing man, a man whose view of reality was animated by a love of myth and whose capacity to see the truth was galvanized by a herculean imagination. Many intellectuals these days are basically variations on the Mr. Spock theme: they are able to excel in this or that technical discipline, but the lack that spark of creative intelligence and imagination that enabled Lewis to see the whole world as it really is. He was a complete man, and his was a complete intellect, in a way that is rare to find these days. The delight that he took in English literature was a manifestation of his fascination for the word as sacramental representation of the truth. That's why he delighted so in poetry, and why he lamented what he saw as the degradation of poetic achievement in modernism.

Few of us, apparently, delight in the sheer poetry of language in the way Lewis did, or we would be far more vocal than we are about the banalization of our liturgy, where the sacramentality of language is more paramount than anywhere else. We have become like Brother Maynard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who, when the monk played by Michael Palin is reading from the Book of Armaments, urges him to "Skip a bit, brother", when the reading becomes rather more detailed than time would appear to permit. We seem to like our liturgies streamlined rather than drawn out, simple rather than complex, and, above all, something that does not demand too much of us. When we remember why we attend Mass in the first place, we will perhaps begin to recapture something of our own sense of excitement and pleasure in the participation in a feast of words, and start praying for more Lewises in the ICEL.

And no, C. S. Lewis would never, in a bazillion years, have used the word "fucking" in an essay. The times, they are a-changin', baby!

A Place for Evolutionary Theory in Theology?

The question seems not only absurd, but also to work against the position I have staked out in this blog over many months. On the view I have defended, Evolutionary Theory (ET) is a theory whose application is restricted to a particular domain, namely, the domain of the material and the empirically verifiable; theology is not so restricted, and so the utility of ET to theology seems to be very low, if not zero.

There's certainly no need to convince the working evolutionary biologist of such a possible utility: what the working biologist has to say about theology, qua biologist, is irrelevant--indeed, meaningless. Nor is there any particularly compelling reason to convince the orthodox (small "o") theologian of such a possible utility, because the orthodox theologian already knows that materialist, empirical theories have nothing to say about, and no ramifications related to, theology. This is why, in fact, no orthodox theologian is worried about the question whether Christianity is compatible with ET, for he already knows that they are as compatible with each other as Euclidian geometry, qua geometry, is compatible with musical composition, qua musical composition: the disciplines do not impinge on each other in any way.

So what possible utility could ET have for theology, and to whom are we addressing this argument? ET is a theory about certain forms of material beings and how they relate to each other as individuals and in populations situated in certain environments. It is one of the most robustly confirmed scientific theories in history and serves, if anything does, as a paradigm case of the importance of human reasoning in understanding human nature as such. But all scientists and philosophers of science know that it is open to revision: if and when new empirical evidence should prove to be incompatible with the theory as it stands, the theory will be revised appropriately. This is not a threatening fact to the scientist or the philosopher of science, it is further proof of the value of scientific investigation and, hence, a motivation to keep doing scientific research. (In this regard it is somewhat strange that writers like Richard Dawkins write about ET as "an established fact". Established facts, whatever else they may be, are not open to revision, otherwise they would not be established facts. No scientific theory is "an established fact" in the sense of not being open to revision, though it is, of course, quite true to say that ET is well confirmed. It would be a mistake, however, to conflate the notions of confirmation and facticity.)

That scientific research is a hallmark of the human mind and an expression of the human essential nature is one reason to think that ET has some value to theology, since it is a fact that is not merely consistent with but appears to follow from what theology claims about human nature; but it is not something that is unique to ET. Any robustly confirmed scientific theory can claim an equal utility for theology. ET, however, has a unique value that is not shared by any other scientific theory. ET is essentially a theory about change, and more specifically it is a theory about change that is due to variation. Where there is no variation, evolution by means of natural selection cannot take place (drift would still be possible, of course, but that would be true even if ET were false). A necessary precondition on variation is, of course, difference. Indeed, variation is arguably just another term for difference. Without getting overly Parmenidean about it, we may also say, somewhat loosely, that difference is a kind of opposition: a property p is said to be different from any property that is ~p and, according to the Law of Concontradiction, ~(p & ~p). This is an ontological as well as a logical claim: just as the two propositions, p and ~p, cannot be true at the same time and in the same respect, the state of affairs cannot be in two orthogonal states at the same time and in the same respect (according to ET; according to quantum mechanics this may not be the case; whether the consistency of ET with quantum mechanics is more of a problem for ET than for QM is a question for another context, but it certainly underscores what I said earlier about the revisability of scientific theories).

The fallen world in which we live is, from a theological point of view, above all a world of oppositions: opposition to God, opposition to one another, even, in a sense, opposition to ourselves (I want to resist sin, but because of weakness sometimes I cannot). To move from sin to grace is to make a change that is, in a certain extended sense, adaptive. Sin is, by definition, a willful turning away from God; by God's grace we are given the capacity to turn back to him, and doing so is as salutary as adapting to the environment in which we live. Every time I turn away from God, every time I sin, I die a little (sometimes, completely), but through Reconciliation I am given another "generation", as it were, another seed to plant in the environment in which I live to nurture and train to grow towards God rather than away from him. If I learn anything from my sin and reconciliation, it is rather like an adaptive change in a genome that did not survive in a previous setting. Without opposition, without variation, none of this would be possible ("O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, that gained for us such a Redeemer"). Life before the fall was, in a certain sense, a static sort of life in the sense that Adam and Eve had not yet sinned, there was not yet any opposition to God, to each other, or within themselves; in the eschaton life will again be static: as the Talking Heads once said, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens". All will be one at that time, and the Sacraments, including Reconciliation, will pass away. Only here, in this world, are the Sacraments necessary and good, and although ET does not explain anything about our relations to God or one another (since it is not a theological but a materialist explanatory account aimed not at theological truth but empirical truth), nevertheless by its very truth it illustrates something deeply true and important about the very fabric of being itself as we experience it. It is, in short, a sacramentally sound description of the way things are in addition to being empirically verifiable.

In my opinion, this will be true of any robustly verifiable scientific theory, precisely because every such theory, if accurately representing they way things are to any significant degree, will be consistent with the theological truths about how things are. But ET seems to play a special role in this illustrative sense, since it paints a very vivid picture of what "survival of the fittest" means when translated into "survival of the most grace-filled". By the way in which natural processes play themselves out at the level of merely material beings, we see writ large the far more important way in which our spiritual survival is tied to adapting our own wills to the will of God by means of a sequence of generations of reconciliation. That God would use perceptual evidence--evidence at the materialist, empirical level--to communicate to us this great truth is not in the least alien to our theology, since the core of our faith was made known to us empirically, by means of the life of Our Lord and the eyewitnesses who have made known to us the facts and meaning of that life.

So my claim here is aimed principally at those who fear that ET represents some sort of a threat to Christian truth, or that it raises difficulties for Christian theology. Far from doing that, it is fully consistent with that theology and, indeed, serves to illustrate certain very important aspects of it. I have argued elsewhere that it even serves quite well as an answer to the so-called "problem of evil", since it makes suffering, death, and dying all perfectly natural processes that are in fact valuable elements of any evolutionary story of the origins and development of life, just as, theologically, suffering and death are turned by God into ways of growing closer to him and experiencing first hand what it means to abandon oneself to him. This is a message that will be of no interest to the biologist qua biologist (though it may interest the biologist who happens to be a Christian), and no news to the theologian. Perhaps it will be of service to nobody in particular. In fact, I hope that is the case, if what it means is that everybody already knew it to be true. But for those who were still worried about ET, it may perhaps serve as some sort of palliative.

Choosing Among Evils

Doug Kmiec had a rather unpleasant experience at Mass last Sunday, when he was refused Holy Communion on the grounds of his open and unapologetic endorsement of Senator Barack Obama for President. The decision to deny Kmiec Holy Communion, to judge from the media accounts of the event, was made unilaterally by the priest celebrating the Mass. Archbishop Roger Mahoney, that icon of Catholic orthodoxy and strict discipline, condemned the move, as did two different canon lawyers interviewed by National Public Radio for a story on the event that aired this evening on All Things Considered. According to an opinion piece he published at catholic.org last May, Kmiec's excuse for his endorsement was "To some of my fellow Catholics, Senator Obama's answers on abortion make him categorically unacceptable. I understand that view, respect it, but find it prudentially the second-best answer in 2008".

This is a debate that has come up before, and it raises some interesting issues. Let's take Kmiec, who has sometimes described himself as a conservative, at his word when he claims to be against abortion himself. What, then, does it mean to say that he thinks that Obama is nevertheless "the second-best answer in 2008"? The answer, it turns out, is rather incredible. In spite of his views about abortion, which Kmiec himself does a very good job of showing to be both facile and banal, Obama nevertheless seems to Kmiec to offer a greater opportunity for limiting abortion than does the Republican party, which makes opposition to abortion a part of its official platform. Thus, as usual, an allegedly pro-life argument is made for abandoning pro-life legislation in favor of a different sort of "pro-life" legislation:

Commit us toward a course of environmental stewardship that will not be dependent upon fossil fuel

•Focus tax and health policy reform in favor of the average working family and the poor

•Reaffirm an American foreign policy respectful of international standard

•And end an unjust, preemptive war – another obvious life issue -- that deprives families of some of our most self-sacrificing yet often least advantaged young men and women and drains our economy in a 3 trillion dollar fashion, crippling our practical ability to be the force for human good that Americans want their country to be

These things, you see, are more consistent with that whole "seamless garment" thing that faithful Catholics are supposed to care about. In short, the sophistry tells us, as long we the overall good of pro-lifeyness is moved forward, then it's OK to fall down on one or two of the more finial pro-life positions. Basically it's just an old-fashioned liberal excuse for not caring as much about abortion as about the other favorite issues of the left.

Typically, arguments like this also tend to paint a picture of more serious opponents of abortion as "single issue" voters, who unreasonably make abortion a kind of on-off switch with regard to the acceptability of a given political candidate. Kmiec doesn't go quite this far, though he cannot resist saying that an Obama candidacy will

•Transcend the politics of division – so well illustrated on any given day by the unfortunately base tactics of the Clinton or McCain campaigns (see the recent GOP ad in North Carolina once again dredging up Reverend Wright)

It's hard to imagine saying this with a straight face about a man who says, almost every time he speaks, that a McCain presidency will really just be a third term George Bush presidency, but perhaps Kmiec has never heard of guilt by association.

Well, until now, anyway. He knows about it now because his association with Obama has cost him his chance to receive Holy Communion, at least on one occasion. The canon lawyers interviewed by NPR stressed the formal elements of the process whereby excommunication is made a matter of public knowledge, ad did Mahoney, and nobody addressed the question of the latae sententiae nature of certain kinds of excommunication (of course). Mahoney, to his credit, did not complain (that I heard, anyway), when Kmiec arrogated to himself the task of deciding whether or not he was still in Communion with the Church and criticized the priest who refused him Communion in very inappropriate terms. Whether or not the priest acted in accordance with canon law (or even common decency), it is clear that the question of whether or not a particular person has excommunicated himself by his own actions is something for the local ordinary to decide, not the person in question.

In situations such as this I always find myself wondering, What are the limits of this person's commitments? Imagine, for example, a slightly different candidate than Obama. Make this candidate identical to Obama in every respect, political and otherwise, except three. First, let this other candidate by fully opposed to abortion in just the same way that Kmiec is (or claims to be). Second, let this other candidate be white rather than black. Third, let this other candidate be a vicious racist. What would the Kmiecs of the world make of such a candidate? I suspect that nobody of Kmiec's ilk would stomach such a candidate, no matter what this Other Candidate's views happened to be about global warming, health care for the poor, or the war in Iraq. Now, it has often been alleged--and I think that it's true--that no president is going to have anything like a significant impact on abortion policy in this country. Even the Supreme Court seems to have very little, if any, impact on said policy (indeed, in the few instances in which one might have thought that a more conservative court would have been an advantage in this area, the impact of the Supreme Court has been, if anything, negative). The same, of course, is true with regard to public policy regarding race relations. So a racist president, though a disgusting spectacle, would not bring about anything like the virtual apartheid from which we escaped in the 1960s. Those days are, in a word, gone. (Now, those of you who happen to find unrealistic thought experiments rather distasteful--and I'm with you on that, as long as it's somebody else's thought experiment we're talking about--substitute for "vicious racist" something like "benign but vocal racist", or whatever it takes to help you imagine such a person actually getting elected these days). In spite of the fact that such a person could have no meaningful impact on racial legislation, nobody like Kmiec would ever vote for him. Nor would I, or, indeed, any sane person.

What's the difference between espousing racist views, and espousing views like Obama's regarding abortion? There are two ways to conceive of the difference. One is a nominal difference, the other a real difference. According to the nominalist, abortion is called wrong because some people think of it as the killing of a human being. Others may not think of it in those terms and, according to the nominalist, such people do not call abortion the killing of a human being. For them, indeed, it is not the killing of a human being or, if it is, it is not a significant killing of a human being. For the nominalist, then, the "wrongness" of abortion, such as it is, amounts to nothing more than a conventionalist judgment about the acceptability of a certain practice to a certain group. There is no compelling need to consider such judgments other than to acknowledge that they exist and to "respect" them, as legitimate, if wrong-headed, views. According to most of these very same people, however, the judgment that one race is superior to another is not such a judgment because it is not only wrong-headed, it is also unreasonable, it is not a legitimate judgment at all and must not be tolerated. (There are some nominalists who think the same about the judgment that abortion is the unjustifiable killing of a human being, but I will pass over such persons in silence, as they appear to be confined to Canada for the nonce.)

The realist view says that abortion takes the life of a human being, and that any taking of the life of a human being has to be justified in some way. Usually we think of such justifications as involving things like self-defense, or defense of the common good, or some other situation in which there is a grave threat that must be answered with deadly force. It is difficult to imagine what sort of grave threat a fetus could present along these lines, though one does sometimes hear of those who think that abortion may be justified to save the life of the mother, but for the most part those who defend abortion rights don't really understand the need for justification in these terms. According to the defender of abortion rights, the only justification that's needed is to point out that the fetus is in the body of another person, and that other person, that is, the mother of the fetus, has absolute autonomy over her own body, even to the extent of taking the life of the fetus, just so long as said fetus is an invader in her body. For the realist, however, the need to justify the taking of a human life goes beyond arguments grounded in personal autonomy, since we would not ordinarily excuse the killing of, say, a three year old child on the grounds that having to care for it was an infringement on the autonomy of its parents. It is rather curious, when you come to think of it, that some of the people who favor abortion rights also oppose capital punishment, and in some such cases the reason for opposing capital punishment is expressed as a rejection of the idea that the taking of human life can be justified. For such people, I imagine, the real obstacle to understanding the realist view of abortion is quite simply the fact that they just don't believe that the fetus is anything important. It is not autonomous itself, and autonomy seems to be the main thing. It does not look like a human being, indeed, when it is a mere conceptum consisting of a single cell it seems almost absurd to say that it is a human being. Perhaps it is human in some adjectival sense, as, say, the hairs on my head are "human" hairs, but who on earth would say that it is a human in a noun kind of way, as in "human being"? It is, of course, far easier to support abortion rights if you just do not think that fetuses are anything like human "beings", if you think that they are not "persons" and, hence, don't actually have any rights or duties.

Herein, I think, lies the difference between the Kmiecs of the world, and those Catholics for whom life issues are more coherently understood. If there was a man running for president who knew full well that there were whole populations of "real people" being intentionally killed--let's say, for example, that there is some backwards county in northwestern Idaho where they are rounding up blacks and shooting them--if there were such a man running for president who said that he thought such activities ought to have the support of the law, then I imagine that even Doug Kmiec would say that he couldn't find it in his heart to vote for him. And yet that is exactly what Barack Obama, and others who support abortion rights, do say, though they do not say it knowingly. Of course Barack Obama does not believe that abortion is the moral equivalent of racial genocide, because of course he would fully oppose it if he did view it that way. So Barack Obama at least has the excuse of ignorance; what is Doug Kmiec's excuse, if he really believes what he says he believes about abortion? Can it be any more obvious that he does not believe what he says he believes about abortion? He does not think what the Catholic Church thinks, at any rate, that is, he does not think that human lives equal in value to his own are being intentionally taken every day, or he would be far more outraged than he is at the moral sloppiness of the Barack Obamas of the world who fail to understand what it is they are defending, just as any rational person would be outraged at a racist who defended himself by saying that he just doesn't think other races are equal to his own. I'm sure that Barack Obama is a nice man who is very sincere and who really wants to do good things, but even if I found his other ideas politically acceptable, I could no more vote for a person who favors abortion rights than I could vote for a person who is openly and viciously racist. Such a person is morally crippled and does not have a healthy understanding of the foundations of morality. Such a person, no matter how "nice" they may appear, no matter how well intentioned, cannot be trusted to make sound policy decisions.

If I were a priest, I would not withhold Holy Communion from anyone unless my Bishop instructed me to, but in the case of someone like Kmiec I might be tempted to do it, just because of the guy's hubris in thinking himself fit to make moral pronouncements about issues he clearly doesn't fully understand. Unlike Obama, who is rather famously not Catholic, Kmiec pretends to be not only Catholic but pro-life. And he's not a complete idiot: he's a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University and at Catholic University of America. His argument, which is nothing more than "choose the least of the evils", is bogus. In his radio interview today he averred as to how "not voting" for one of the candidates on offer is actually a greater sin than voting for a pro-abortion candidate, but what a crock of shit that is--it amazes me that an educated person would even think once, let alone twice, about taking a statement like that seriously, let alone actually endorsing it as one's own, considered view. Since when is refusing to vote for candidates whose views are repugnant the moral equivalent of refusing to take part in a democratic process? If I go into a voting booth and write in "Mickey Mouse" because my other choices are complete losers, am I sinning by "not voting"? If I register as a Democrat so that I can vote in the primaries for the candidate I think most likely to lose the general election, am I somehow subverting democracy and "not voting" in an honest way? Or what ought I to do when it's not just a matter of picking some jerk to be the dog catcher, but picking a monster to be president? Well, gee, all of the candidates on the ballot this year just happen to be members of the Nazi Party, but I have to vote for one of them, it would be a sin not to vote for any of them, so I guess I'll just pick the least objectionable Nazi in the bunch. Please. No wonder people complain about CUA; I don't know what the story is at Pepperdine, but this is the sort or thing that gives professional ethics a bad name, at least among reasonable people. I don't know about Doug Kmiec, but I would not vote for a Nazi even if all of the slots on the ballot were filled with Nazis. I would sooner go into the voting booth and write in "Doug Kmiec" than vote for a Nazi. I suspect Doug Kmiec would too, but after today it's difficult to tell for sure.

WTF??!!

Christopher Gillibrand of Catholic Church Conservation has posted a video of a Call to Action "liturgy" that, if you can keep from laughing, will make you cry.

Olivia Judson Takes a Position!

That was the lede (or part of it anyway) at the NYT website today for an essay by biologist and science writer Olivia Judson. Since it will disappear soon, here's the whole lede for reference purposes:

Olivia Judson takes a position on a proposal in Britain that would permit the merging of the DNA of two different species.

This lede is linked to her essay, called Enter, the Cybrids.

The essay is a relatively harmless account of the very harmful legislation that has been percolating in Britain of late. In particular, we're talking about legislation that will, among other things, move the terminus post quem for legal abortions from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, allow the creation of "savior siblings" (children created in vitro for the purposes of tissue harvesting), and permit experimental work involving the creation of "cybrids" for medical research. A "cybrid" is a human-animal hybrid created by replacing the DNA in the egg cell of some non-human animal with real live human DNA (interspecies somatic cell nuclear transfer, a kind of cloning). The legislation is "harmful" for two distinct but related reasons. First, it makes abortion more readily available by allowing abortions to be carried out earlier. Empirical evidence shows that the willingness to procure an abortion is inversely proportional to the length of gestation. Second, it allows the use of human subjects in medical experimentation without the granting of consent by the subjects of the experimentation. Since the "subjects" in this case are just "clumps of cells" (as the proponents of such experiments like to call them, just as the Nazis called Jews a "viral infection of the German Volk"), they cannot give consent, so presumably their parents, or some suitable surrogate (perhaps a Big Brother), will give the consent for them, and all will be hunky dory in scienceland, where anything and everything is permitted in the name of progress.

In addressing her concerns about the possible moral worries raised by this sort of research, Judson write:

I think a tiny clump of cells in a dish does not have equal standing with a person. Moreover, if that tiny clump of cells can potentially lead to treatments that improve peoples’ lives, it seems to me that the sanctity of human life is better respected by following that potential, not preventing it.

Well, if Olivia Judson says that "a tiny clump of cells in a dish does not have equal standing with a person", I guess that settles things. No need to offer anything like an argument that would give the rest of us some sort of compelling reason to think that she is right. No need to offer anything like an account of what a "person" is and what the precise line of demarcation is between a "person" and "a tiny clump of cells in a dish". In short, Olivia Judson has adopted an ontology of her own, and thanks to that convenient ontology, any possible moral qualms about this research simply vanish! What could be more congenial?

I'll tell you what: adopting, in addition to said ontology, a moral framework that goes along with it: utilitarianism. Even if that "clump of cells" had any kind of moral standing, "if that tiny clump of cells can potentially lead to treatments that improve peoples’ lives, it seems to me that the sanctity of human life is better respected by following that potential, not preventing it." In short, if the payoff is great enough, you can do pretty much whatever you like.

One has to respect her reason for maintaining this position: "it seems to me." What could be more persuasive than that? It seems true to Olivia Judson. Wow, that's a real deal closer. It might "seem" differently to her if someone decided that their own interests were best served by harvesting her organs prior to her own natural demise, but she probably thinks of herself as a "person" and protected against that kind of thing by her "rights". The philosophical chutzpah is palpable.

In her peroration, Judson pulls out what, for her, would appear to be all the rhetorical stops:

When, a couple of years ago, I first imagined putting a nucleus from one animal into the egg of another, I found the idea unsettling. But that was because I was imagining something different: I had in mind the growing of animals, not the creation and swift destruction of a clump of cells. I worried that animals produced this way might not be normal. But then I learned more about the procedure and how it is done. Also, in the course of making a television program about biotechnology, I visited laboratories working with stem cells, and I was impressed by what we have already managed to achieve.

Now my discomfort has gone away. It’s been replaced by wonder. We’ve already learned a great deal about the ultimate construction of life as a result of the experiments done so far. But more than that, the fact that it’s possible at all to put one creature’s DNA into another creature’s cell and have the two work together at all is amazing — and another sign of the common evolutionary heritage of ourselves and the other beings on the planet.

The strategy here is to try to set the minds of her simplistic readers at ease. I am a scientist, and believe me, I was worried too, just like all you little people--but now I'm not worried anymore! Don't you see? It's all really quite beautiful once you open your minds and use your imagination (try not to think about Spongebob Squarepants as you read that bit).

If only the rest of us could make television programs, I'm sure all of our discomfort would go away, too. No need to engage in any argumentation, offer any reasons, or think more deeply about the moral foundations of our views. All we really need to do is carefully craft a world view in which the conclusion that we want to get falls naturally out of our self-serving presuppositions and ontological attitudes.

Come on, everybody! Just take a position! Don't bother to argue for it! Just assert it, and all of your worries will go away!

Time to Get Crackin'!

I've obviously become something of a pussy cat lately--how else to explain this:




Hmm. I wonder how the phrase "pussy cat" gets counted?

Moral Imperatives

Kant, famously, argued that we have a duty to help those who are unable to help themselves whenever they are in a situation in which we ourselves, mutatis mutandis, would have a reasonable hope of being helped by others. Hadley Arkes, the redoubtable Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions at Amherst College, developed this idea at some length in his excellent book, First Things: An Inquiry into the First Principles of Morals and Justice (Princeton, 1986). On Arkes's account, there is a moral duty to vindicate the rights of others when they are unable to vindicate their rights themselves. This is an idea that is congenial to Catholic moral theory, which holds that, at the very least, it is never wrong to vindicate the rights of others, whether or not they are able to vindicate their rights for themselves. The question whether it is in fact a duty to vindicate the rights of others whenever they are unable to vindicate their rights for themselves is a rather more complicated question, but it seems to me that there are certain rather prime examples of times when it has seemed at least reasonable to think that there is such a duty (putting a stop to the Nazi genocide, for example, or bringing about the end of slavery, seem like such cases, though one may dispute the means by which the particular duty was carried out).

I mention all of this because I listened with great interest this morning to Sunday London Times correspondent Simon Jenkins argue that there is a moral duty to "intervene" in Myanmar, given the obstreperous refusal of the government of that country to do the right thing with regards to allowing foreign aid into the country (he has an article on this topic at the Huffington Post posted on Monday). He noted, with some reason, I thought, that although there were interventions in Kosovo and Iraq that went ahead without the approval or backing of the United Nations, the debate over whether the Iraq intervention had been justified/worth it was obscuring the need to intervene for humanitarian reasons in Myanmar. He's not talking about an intervention of the same sort that was made in either Kosovo or Iraq, however. He's claiming only that there are military resources ready and waiting off the coast of Myanmar that are prepared to deliver humanitarian aid into regions where the Myanmar authorities aren't even bothering to show up, and so there is no excuse not to take the relief supplies into these areas. And it seems to me that he has a very good point.

Ideally, of course, the Chinese, who seem to be rather more chummy with the idiots in charge of the ruling junta in Myanmar, would be the ones to look to for this sort of intervention, but they, famously, don't like to "intervene", even when it's the right thing to do, and, of course, they have problems of their own right now (apparently the Chinese military were sent into areas hit by the earthquake without even basic supplies such as masks and rubber gloves, which were supplied by citizens on site). Since the cool thing to do right now is snub the United States, perhaps somebody else could be found to volunteer for this job, but one way or another it is a job that has got to be done.

Single Issue?

DarwinCatholic has an excellent post up about what would be involved in supporting a candidate who is pro-choice in today's electoral mix.

However, it seems to me that in discussing the upcoming election, several Catholics in public and intellectual life (Kmiec very much among them) have attempted to make the case that one should support Obama not despite his stand on abortion, but rather because an Obama administration will be able to make progress towards a more truly pro-life society in a way that recent Republican administrations have not been able to. I disagree with people who take the former position, though I can certainly respect them, but I take serious objection to those who take the latter, and this post is intended to address them.

There follows a remarkably clear-sighted analysis of what it is these people are really saying, and why it is morally banal. Highly recommended reading.

Finally

Archbishop Joseph Naumann has done the right thing. According to a story at Catholic.org he has instructed Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas to stop presenting herself for Communion, because she has scandalized the faithful in her support of abortion. She is, it seems, latae sententiae excommunicate. This is good news for the real Catholics out there, who have been wondering when somebody in a position of authority was going to stand up for those of us who are powerless to prevent our secular leaders from making a mockery of our religious beliefs. It's bad enough when the pagans do it, but when people who claim to be Catholics do it as a matter of "principle", evidently regarding positive legal principles as higher than moral and religious ones, then things have really gotten out of hand.

There are some who hold the (mistaken) view that religious scruples should play no part in the formation of public policy. As laughably naive (not to mention banal) as this view is, there is nevertheless a solution for those who hold it. They may take a lesson from their buddies who put bumper stickers on their cars that read "Against abortion? Don't have one!" and adopt the position of "Don't think religious views have any place in politics? Then get out of politics!" Sebelius's duty is quite clear. If she seriously believes that she has no right to defend the human lives she claims to govern, then she should either stop receiving Communion, or resign her position as governor of Kansas. I predict she will do neither, thus forcing Archbishop Naumann to take further pastoral action on her behalf.

Those of us who have been waiting for this day, however, have some small cause for celebration.