Just for fun, on this First Friday of Advent, why not compare the thoughtful, sensitive, and insightful comments of a genuinely intelligent man on the nature of God's interaction with us, here at PBS's This I Believe, with the stupid, ignorant, and puerile stream-of-consciousness of this moron, also at PBS's This I Believe.
Ironically, Penn Jillette is the professional magician, but it is John Fountain who has the real magic in his life.
Friday, December 02, 2005
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Our Calling
Here is one amazing story about a woman whose son was murdered by racist bigots yet she says
The Times went on to remark
For some reason, as I read this story I was reminded of the books in the "Left Behind" series by Tim LaHaye. I haven't actually read any of these books all the way through, but I have browsed them rather extensively while passing time in bookstores sipping at lattes, and I have read several reviews of them, including one in the Times Literary Supplement of all places. What struck me about them is the violence directed at the alleged enemy of the believer. It is very much a series about retribution, with unbelievers getting their heads blown off and Lord knows what all. When I lived in North Carolina I had a friend who often talked about Our Lord's return in this way--he used to say that he couldn't wait for Christ's Second Coming, because then all the sinners would really get theirs. I guess he was pretty confident of where he stood in Our Lord's sight, as I suppose Tim LaHaye must feel. But it is striking that, when thinking of Our Lord's return what they feel first is not the joy of the Beatific Vision but the bloodlust of revenge against the unrepentant. That is not a view of the proper Christian mindset that I share.
Mrs. Walker's attitude is a model that it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to live up to, since we are all too human. But if she can do it, if she has done it, that establishes that it can be done, and that becomes our benchmark. And yes, Mark Shea is right: only the grace of God can empower us to overcome our innate, biological drive to seek revenge. But God has offered his grace to us all. The word "grace" comes from the Latin gratis, free--all we have to do is want it enough to abandon our very selves to God's will, and it is ours.
We don't have any excuse for acting otherwise.
Do I forgive them? At the point of death Jesus said, ‘I forgive them because they do not know what they do’. I have got to forgive them. I still forgive them.As Mark Shea said, "Mercy, the most scandalous demand of the gospel is also the most breath-takingly beautiful and supernatural. The power to do what this woman did can only come from God".
It will be difficult but we have no choice but to live on for Anthony. Each of us will take a piece of him and will carry on his life.
The Times went on to remark
The contrast between the 18-year-old victim, a devout Christian, committed student and talented basketball player who wanted to become a lawyer, and his white racist killers could not have been more stark.We certainly live in debauched times. It is tempting to want to exact revenge on such thugs, to pay out to them the lex talionis. But that would be to lower ourselves to a level that is, in some sense, lower than the level that they have lowered themselves to. They acted out of ignorance, fear, and loathing. To execute them would be to act in cold blood, with malice aforethought that is unbecoming of the Christian. Mrs. Walker is a paradigm for us all.
For some reason, as I read this story I was reminded of the books in the "Left Behind" series by Tim LaHaye. I haven't actually read any of these books all the way through, but I have browsed them rather extensively while passing time in bookstores sipping at lattes, and I have read several reviews of them, including one in the Times Literary Supplement of all places. What struck me about them is the violence directed at the alleged enemy of the believer. It is very much a series about retribution, with unbelievers getting their heads blown off and Lord knows what all. When I lived in North Carolina I had a friend who often talked about Our Lord's return in this way--he used to say that he couldn't wait for Christ's Second Coming, because then all the sinners would really get theirs. I guess he was pretty confident of where he stood in Our Lord's sight, as I suppose Tim LaHaye must feel. But it is striking that, when thinking of Our Lord's return what they feel first is not the joy of the Beatific Vision but the bloodlust of revenge against the unrepentant. That is not a view of the proper Christian mindset that I share.
Mrs. Walker's attitude is a model that it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to live up to, since we are all too human. But if she can do it, if she has done it, that establishes that it can be done, and that becomes our benchmark. And yes, Mark Shea is right: only the grace of God can empower us to overcome our innate, biological drive to seek revenge. But God has offered his grace to us all. The word "grace" comes from the Latin gratis, free--all we have to do is want it enough to abandon our very selves to God's will, and it is ours.
We don't have any excuse for acting otherwise.
Means and Ends
One reason why the recent Vatican document regarding homosexual priests has been so poorly received among some circles of Westerners is the fact that, as a culture, we no longer recognize the causal structure of the world that the Church has so carefully illuminated for us over the centuries.
What do I mean by "causal structure of the world"? The answer is fairly complicated, but it explains exactly why the Church's position (a) makes a great deal of sense and (b) will probably not be accepted by folks outside the Tradition any time soon. In this post I want to do two things. First, I want to explain the philosophical foundation of the Church's understanding of what I'm calling the "causal structure of the world." This aspect of the post will be largely historical and--I'm afraid for some--rather boring. Second, I want to show how this philosophical foundation upholds the Church's teaching not only on homosexuality, but on a great many other things--indeed, most things--and what aspects of this foundation are rejected by contemporary Western culture. This part of the post will be theoretical rather than historical, but it will probably still be plenty boring.
1. The Causal Structure of the World
The idea that the world is causally structured actually antedates the Christian church--it can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle. Take any given entity, X, and ask the question, "What is it that makes X the kind of thing it is?" Aristotle said that we can answer that question in four different but inextricably connected ways.
Let's use a concrete example to help illustrate how these ways constitute a kind of "causal structure." Let our candidate entity, X, be a hammer. The first thing to notice about a hammer is that it must be made out of the right stuff, the right sort of material. A solid chocolate hammer might be delicious, but it will be useless for hammering in nails, which is what people ordinarily want hammers for. What is needed is a nice solid material for the head, and something suitable for the handle. Steel and wood are nice candidates.
So if you had two items before you, one made of chocolate, the other made of steel and wood, and both shaped like a hammer, you would be right to say that only one of them is a hammer. And so one answer to the question "What causes the one to be a hammer but not the other?" is to say "The one that is a hammer is made of the right sort of material". This way of answering the question is an appeal to what is called the material cause of the entity.
But suppose you had two items before you, both of which are made out of steel and wood. One of them, let's say, was made by a toolsmith, the other is just a random pile of material that fell together on the toolsmith's floor by accident. We have a tendency to say that things like hammers are the byproduct of some "intelligent design"--that is what makes them "tools" rather than just random collections of stuff. So we have an intuition that the thing made by the toolsmith is the real hammer, that is, it really is a hammer; but the other thing is just a curiosity of some sort that may or may not look like a hammer, depending on how the pieces fell together (if we are tempted to call it a "hammer" because it really looks like one, we should say instead that it is only a hammer "homonymously"--in technical philosophical jargon homonyms are things that have a name in common [in this case "hammer"] but that are really two different kinds of things). So again, if asked "What is it that causes the one thing to really be a hammer, but not the other?" we may answer "The thing that really is a hammer was not a byproduct of chance, it was made by the right sort of hammer-maker." This is an appeal to what is called the efficient cause (here "efficient" comes from the Latin efficere, to make).
Now in the case of things like hammers, we find that form tends to follow function, that is, the shape of the thing can affect how well it is able to do what it was designed to do. So a hammer has to have a certain sort of shape if it is to be efficient at hammering in nails. You don't want a hammer shaped like, say, a coat hanger, which also might be made out of steel and wood. A screwdriver also might be made out of steel and wood, but if you were to open your tool box and see two items next to each other, one of them looking like what we call a hammer, the other looking like what we call a screwdriver, you would still know that they are not the same kind of thing even if they were made out of the same materials. You would know this because of their different shapes. If someone were to ask you how you knew that one of them was a hammer and the other not, you could answer "Because the one has the form of a hammer, the other doesn't." To answer in this way is to appeal to what is called the formal cause.
In a certain sense a hammer is also caused to be what it is--a hammer--by the fact that it is used to hammer in nails. A "hammer" made out of chocolate is not just made out of the wrong sort of material to really be a hammer--it is also not able to do what it is that hammers ordinarily do: hammer in nails. All tools have functions of this sort: a screwdriver is for driving in screws and taking them out, pliers are for gripping with great strength, a ruler is for measuring and drawing lines, etc. This is not to say that you couldn't use these tools for other sorts of things. I suppose a hammer could also be used as a paperweight, or to threaten an intruder in your house--but it seems rather obvious that what a hammer is "really for" is hammering in nails--at least that's what it was designed to do, and that is what most hammers are used for most of the time. So again, if one were asked "What causes this to be a hammer rather than something else?" one could simply ask "The fact that it is used to hammer in nails." To answer in this way is to appeal to what is called the final cause (here "final" is from the Latin finalis, pertaining to an end or goal). I'm reminded of the fact that one "artist" once put a urinal in a museum and called it "art". If someone were to actually urinate in it, he would be arrested. This is because the thing is no longer a "urinal"--it now has a different final cause than a urinal, so it is no longer really a urinal. Or something like that. I guess.
Anyway, these are the four different sorts of causal accounts that Aristotle thought could be given for any kind of entity (well, entities that he thought of as genuine entities, anyway--he didn't really think that things like hammers count as entities--but we don't need to go into that here). They can also be applied to things other than intelligently designed artefacts: they can be applied to living organisms, like human beings. Let our entity, X, now be a human being. What are the four causes of this thing being a human being rather than some other kind of being?
The material cause of a human being is the right sort of flesh, blood, bone, etc. that human beings are made of. You cannot make a real human being out of, say, marshmallow. A robot is not a real human being, even a very realist looking robot like Commander Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation", because such things are not made out of the right materials. Now, chimps and other mammals have flesh, blood, bone, etc. that is very similar to ours, but that is not the right sort of matter either, as we will see more clearly in a moment. For now it is enough to note that if you were to take a sample of chimp flesh or bone and clone it, you would grow another chimp, not a human being.
The efficient cause of a human being is, strictly speaking, the genetic lineage, but we may say more simply that it is constituted by the parents of the human being in question. Frankenstein's monster would not count as a real human because he does not have the right sort of efficient cause.
The formal cause of a human being is not as simple to describe as the formal cause of a hammer, but to see what it is recall that form follows function: the formal and final causes are always very closely related, conceptually. What is it about human life, in general, that distinguishes us from all other forms of life? That is a question that the present cultural orthodoxy regards as absurd. We are bombarded, in our culture, with arguments and reasons intended to show us that we don't really differ from other forms of life at all, or at least not in any non-arbitrary way, that we are in fact just insignificant organisms amidst hundreds of thousands of other organisms. Our genome is 94% identical with a chimp genome, our strength is nothing compared to a tiger, our voices nothing compared to the sounds of birds, our intelligenc no different from a dolphin's, etc. etc. But of course nobody in their right mind would take this kind of crap to prove anything either philosophically or scientifically interesting about the relation between human beings and other living things. Everyone knows the difference between a human being and chimp, even if chimps have genomes very much like ours. If you were to try to mate with a chimp, then as close as his/her genome is to yours, you still would not be able to breed, and there is a reason for that: human beings are one kind of thing, chimps are another. The difference between chimps and humans is not an arbitrary, socially-constructed artefact of human categorizing, it is a biological fact. And this is true across the board.
One way of looking at how this biological difference can be conceptualized is to think in terms of how it is that human beings live their lives, as contrasted with the way that other creatures live theirs. In general it seems safe to say that we do, in fact, share many behavioral traits with other animals. Plenty of animals build homes for themselves; produce vocalizations to communicate after a fashion, either with their own kind or with other animals; reproduce sexually; use tools to obtain food or to scratch themselves or what have you; and some of them even reason, after a fashion, about how best to survive in their environment. No other animal, however, is capable of the sort of highly-symbolic, infintely recursive, theoretical speculation that human beings are capable of. No other species has discovered the Pythagorean Theorem or the Categorical Imperative. So if one were to ask, what sort of behavior is characteristic of strictly human life, what activity distinguishes a human being from other kinds of beings, what sort of capacity to act causes one thing to be a human being and not another, the answer would be: "The capacity for theoretical reasoning of this kind." That is the final cause of a human being.
And that final cause helps us to see that the formal cause is whatever it is about human structure that makes that kind of activity possible. For Aristotle (and, of course, for Christians) it was the human soul. If you don't like soul talk, you can think of it as something else, if you like: the human genome, the human brain, the species itself even. But that is what the formal cause of a human being would be: whatever it is that makes this particular collection of faculties and capacities able to engage in theoretical reasoning.
So the end, for humans, our "purpose", as it were, is a certain form of rational activity. That does not mean that all human beings are always capable of the same level of rational activity. Some are capable of great rational activity, others seem fully irrational. But that doesn't make any difference to whether something is a human being, any more than the fact that one man can lift more weight at the gym would make him more human than a weaker man. The point is that the species itself, as such, has the capacity for this kind of activity, and the fact that certain individual instantiations of the species do not actually engage in that activity under certain circumstances is irrelevant.
2. Final Causation (The Natural Law) vs. Materialist Utilitarianism
This way of looking at entities in the world is thoroughly foreign to the modern scientific worldview, which is fully materialistic in its orientation. That is, all explanations, causal or otherwise, are reducible to accounts of matter and its properties. For such folks as these, there simply isn't any such thing as a "formal cause" or a "final cause", and the efficient cause of an entity is arbitrary and unimportant. In particular, the final cause has come in for particular ire, because it smacks of "purpose", and we all know that only benighted morons believe that there is such a thing as purpose in nature.
That is, of course, a benighted and moronic view of what is meant by a final cause, but no matter, the damage is already done. Materialists want only materialistic explanations, so no talk of "ends" can be permitted (except, of course, in the case of artefacts, where the "purpose" of the thing, socially constructed though it is, is still intelligible).
But for Christians, who still maintain the Thomistic view of causation that derives ultimately from Aristotle, all things--especially human beings--have final causes, and we appeal to it as normative in some sense. That is, a normal human being is, by definition, a human being in which the four causes are as they tend to be for the most part in nature. Straying form this norm is sometimes described as "against nature", though that is meant to convey not actual strife, but merely difference from the norm established through natural causes.
The phrase "against nature" is rarely heard these days, because few like its connotations. But Christians, at least, are familiar with the phrase "objectively disordered", and that is the phrase that gives rise to a significant amount of distress in the case of the teaching on homosexuality. Homosexual desires are said to be "objectively disordered" because they represent a tendency to act contrary to the causal structure that is in place in the case of human beings. The Christian (as opposed to Aristotelian) final cause of humankind is to love God, that is, to strive to will what God wills, to the extent that we are capable of doing so (and Our Lady shows that it is possible for mere human beings to will precisely what God wills in the case of any given thing that is within our capacity to will). To will what God wills would include, presumably, the order of nature as it was put into place by God. In that order of nature, sexual relations have a single purpose with a double aspect. The purpose is reproduction, and the two aspects are biological: sexual pleasure is a motivation, and the marital bond a Sacramental sign that this activity is a part of the divinely established order of nature. To engage in sexual activity that is not consistent with this picture is said to be different from the order of nature as God has established it--it cannot result in offspring--and this is what is meant in calling it "objectively disordered". It is outside the proper order of things with respect to the ends (objectives) that it can be directed towards.
Homosexuals believe that they can have "committed, permanent" bonds of love. And that may, in fact, be the case. And there is nothing disordered about any two people loving each other deeply, exclusively, and for a long time, as long as that relationship is a friendship. The worry is that such folks will believe that the relationship that exists between them can be anything other than a friendship. The "final cause" of the relationship betweem folks of the same sex can at best be only imperfectly ordered, since however much love there is betweem them there cannot be any procreation, an essential element in marriage (again, this is not to say that any particular marriage must produce children, any more than that any particular human being must be fully rational--the requirement is only that the relationship be capable in principle of procreation).
But we live in debauched times, in which the satisfaction of biological drives takes the place of any notion of final causality. Should folks who reject the notion of final causality be ordained to the priesthood? It is hard to see why the should be, but of course they may feel "called" to the priesthood. Of course, there are some women who also feel "called", and if one accepts final causality, then one may always wonder whether such "calls" are really calls or just things that appear to be calls in some respect or other. But that is another matter. In the case of the priesthood, we must again think in terms of the Church's understanding of the causal structure of the world. The priesthood is ordered towards certain ends, one of which is the modelling of Christ himself, who wills only what the Father wills. Since the Father wills the natural order that he has put into place, anyone who wills something other than that (such as a desire for sexual relations with members of one's own sex) does not will what the Father wills. There are plenty of examples of men who have been able to overcome whatever biological drives they may have that have been contrary to what the Father wills, and the present document allows for the ordination of such men. But for those for whom it is still a struggle it seems quite salutary to regard their calling as only homonymously a calling, at least until such time as they can show otherwise.
The recent Vatican document reflects a long and venerable tradition of looking at the causal structure of the world in a certain way, a way that is orthogonal to the way that our contemporary, materialistic culture looks at it, and that is rather discouraging, since more and more young men are being formed primarily by the materialistic culture around them rather than the culture of holiness and life of the Church.
What do I mean by "causal structure of the world"? The answer is fairly complicated, but it explains exactly why the Church's position (a) makes a great deal of sense and (b) will probably not be accepted by folks outside the Tradition any time soon. In this post I want to do two things. First, I want to explain the philosophical foundation of the Church's understanding of what I'm calling the "causal structure of the world." This aspect of the post will be largely historical and--I'm afraid for some--rather boring. Second, I want to show how this philosophical foundation upholds the Church's teaching not only on homosexuality, but on a great many other things--indeed, most things--and what aspects of this foundation are rejected by contemporary Western culture. This part of the post will be theoretical rather than historical, but it will probably still be plenty boring.
1. The Causal Structure of the World
The idea that the world is causally structured actually antedates the Christian church--it can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle. Take any given entity, X, and ask the question, "What is it that makes X the kind of thing it is?" Aristotle said that we can answer that question in four different but inextricably connected ways.
Let's use a concrete example to help illustrate how these ways constitute a kind of "causal structure." Let our candidate entity, X, be a hammer. The first thing to notice about a hammer is that it must be made out of the right stuff, the right sort of material. A solid chocolate hammer might be delicious, but it will be useless for hammering in nails, which is what people ordinarily want hammers for. What is needed is a nice solid material for the head, and something suitable for the handle. Steel and wood are nice candidates.
So if you had two items before you, one made of chocolate, the other made of steel and wood, and both shaped like a hammer, you would be right to say that only one of them is a hammer. And so one answer to the question "What causes the one to be a hammer but not the other?" is to say "The one that is a hammer is made of the right sort of material". This way of answering the question is an appeal to what is called the material cause of the entity.
But suppose you had two items before you, both of which are made out of steel and wood. One of them, let's say, was made by a toolsmith, the other is just a random pile of material that fell together on the toolsmith's floor by accident. We have a tendency to say that things like hammers are the byproduct of some "intelligent design"--that is what makes them "tools" rather than just random collections of stuff. So we have an intuition that the thing made by the toolsmith is the real hammer, that is, it really is a hammer; but the other thing is just a curiosity of some sort that may or may not look like a hammer, depending on how the pieces fell together (if we are tempted to call it a "hammer" because it really looks like one, we should say instead that it is only a hammer "homonymously"--in technical philosophical jargon homonyms are things that have a name in common [in this case "hammer"] but that are really two different kinds of things). So again, if asked "What is it that causes the one thing to really be a hammer, but not the other?" we may answer "The thing that really is a hammer was not a byproduct of chance, it was made by the right sort of hammer-maker." This is an appeal to what is called the efficient cause (here "efficient" comes from the Latin efficere, to make).
Now in the case of things like hammers, we find that form tends to follow function, that is, the shape of the thing can affect how well it is able to do what it was designed to do. So a hammer has to have a certain sort of shape if it is to be efficient at hammering in nails. You don't want a hammer shaped like, say, a coat hanger, which also might be made out of steel and wood. A screwdriver also might be made out of steel and wood, but if you were to open your tool box and see two items next to each other, one of them looking like what we call a hammer, the other looking like what we call a screwdriver, you would still know that they are not the same kind of thing even if they were made out of the same materials. You would know this because of their different shapes. If someone were to ask you how you knew that one of them was a hammer and the other not, you could answer "Because the one has the form of a hammer, the other doesn't." To answer in this way is to appeal to what is called the formal cause.
In a certain sense a hammer is also caused to be what it is--a hammer--by the fact that it is used to hammer in nails. A "hammer" made out of chocolate is not just made out of the wrong sort of material to really be a hammer--it is also not able to do what it is that hammers ordinarily do: hammer in nails. All tools have functions of this sort: a screwdriver is for driving in screws and taking them out, pliers are for gripping with great strength, a ruler is for measuring and drawing lines, etc. This is not to say that you couldn't use these tools for other sorts of things. I suppose a hammer could also be used as a paperweight, or to threaten an intruder in your house--but it seems rather obvious that what a hammer is "really for" is hammering in nails--at least that's what it was designed to do, and that is what most hammers are used for most of the time. So again, if one were asked "What causes this to be a hammer rather than something else?" one could simply ask "The fact that it is used to hammer in nails." To answer in this way is to appeal to what is called the final cause (here "final" is from the Latin finalis, pertaining to an end or goal). I'm reminded of the fact that one "artist" once put a urinal in a museum and called it "art". If someone were to actually urinate in it, he would be arrested. This is because the thing is no longer a "urinal"--it now has a different final cause than a urinal, so it is no longer really a urinal. Or something like that. I guess.
Anyway, these are the four different sorts of causal accounts that Aristotle thought could be given for any kind of entity (well, entities that he thought of as genuine entities, anyway--he didn't really think that things like hammers count as entities--but we don't need to go into that here). They can also be applied to things other than intelligently designed artefacts: they can be applied to living organisms, like human beings. Let our entity, X, now be a human being. What are the four causes of this thing being a human being rather than some other kind of being?
The material cause of a human being is the right sort of flesh, blood, bone, etc. that human beings are made of. You cannot make a real human being out of, say, marshmallow. A robot is not a real human being, even a very realist looking robot like Commander Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation", because such things are not made out of the right materials. Now, chimps and other mammals have flesh, blood, bone, etc. that is very similar to ours, but that is not the right sort of matter either, as we will see more clearly in a moment. For now it is enough to note that if you were to take a sample of chimp flesh or bone and clone it, you would grow another chimp, not a human being.
The efficient cause of a human being is, strictly speaking, the genetic lineage, but we may say more simply that it is constituted by the parents of the human being in question. Frankenstein's monster would not count as a real human because he does not have the right sort of efficient cause.
The formal cause of a human being is not as simple to describe as the formal cause of a hammer, but to see what it is recall that form follows function: the formal and final causes are always very closely related, conceptually. What is it about human life, in general, that distinguishes us from all other forms of life? That is a question that the present cultural orthodoxy regards as absurd. We are bombarded, in our culture, with arguments and reasons intended to show us that we don't really differ from other forms of life at all, or at least not in any non-arbitrary way, that we are in fact just insignificant organisms amidst hundreds of thousands of other organisms. Our genome is 94% identical with a chimp genome, our strength is nothing compared to a tiger, our voices nothing compared to the sounds of birds, our intelligenc no different from a dolphin's, etc. etc. But of course nobody in their right mind would take this kind of crap to prove anything either philosophically or scientifically interesting about the relation between human beings and other living things. Everyone knows the difference between a human being and chimp, even if chimps have genomes very much like ours. If you were to try to mate with a chimp, then as close as his/her genome is to yours, you still would not be able to breed, and there is a reason for that: human beings are one kind of thing, chimps are another. The difference between chimps and humans is not an arbitrary, socially-constructed artefact of human categorizing, it is a biological fact. And this is true across the board.
One way of looking at how this biological difference can be conceptualized is to think in terms of how it is that human beings live their lives, as contrasted with the way that other creatures live theirs. In general it seems safe to say that we do, in fact, share many behavioral traits with other animals. Plenty of animals build homes for themselves; produce vocalizations to communicate after a fashion, either with their own kind or with other animals; reproduce sexually; use tools to obtain food or to scratch themselves or what have you; and some of them even reason, after a fashion, about how best to survive in their environment. No other animal, however, is capable of the sort of highly-symbolic, infintely recursive, theoretical speculation that human beings are capable of. No other species has discovered the Pythagorean Theorem or the Categorical Imperative. So if one were to ask, what sort of behavior is characteristic of strictly human life, what activity distinguishes a human being from other kinds of beings, what sort of capacity to act causes one thing to be a human being and not another, the answer would be: "The capacity for theoretical reasoning of this kind." That is the final cause of a human being.
And that final cause helps us to see that the formal cause is whatever it is about human structure that makes that kind of activity possible. For Aristotle (and, of course, for Christians) it was the human soul. If you don't like soul talk, you can think of it as something else, if you like: the human genome, the human brain, the species itself even. But that is what the formal cause of a human being would be: whatever it is that makes this particular collection of faculties and capacities able to engage in theoretical reasoning.
So the end, for humans, our "purpose", as it were, is a certain form of rational activity. That does not mean that all human beings are always capable of the same level of rational activity. Some are capable of great rational activity, others seem fully irrational. But that doesn't make any difference to whether something is a human being, any more than the fact that one man can lift more weight at the gym would make him more human than a weaker man. The point is that the species itself, as such, has the capacity for this kind of activity, and the fact that certain individual instantiations of the species do not actually engage in that activity under certain circumstances is irrelevant.
2. Final Causation (The Natural Law) vs. Materialist Utilitarianism
This way of looking at entities in the world is thoroughly foreign to the modern scientific worldview, which is fully materialistic in its orientation. That is, all explanations, causal or otherwise, are reducible to accounts of matter and its properties. For such folks as these, there simply isn't any such thing as a "formal cause" or a "final cause", and the efficient cause of an entity is arbitrary and unimportant. In particular, the final cause has come in for particular ire, because it smacks of "purpose", and we all know that only benighted morons believe that there is such a thing as purpose in nature.
That is, of course, a benighted and moronic view of what is meant by a final cause, but no matter, the damage is already done. Materialists want only materialistic explanations, so no talk of "ends" can be permitted (except, of course, in the case of artefacts, where the "purpose" of the thing, socially constructed though it is, is still intelligible).
But for Christians, who still maintain the Thomistic view of causation that derives ultimately from Aristotle, all things--especially human beings--have final causes, and we appeal to it as normative in some sense. That is, a normal human being is, by definition, a human being in which the four causes are as they tend to be for the most part in nature. Straying form this norm is sometimes described as "against nature", though that is meant to convey not actual strife, but merely difference from the norm established through natural causes.
The phrase "against nature" is rarely heard these days, because few like its connotations. But Christians, at least, are familiar with the phrase "objectively disordered", and that is the phrase that gives rise to a significant amount of distress in the case of the teaching on homosexuality. Homosexual desires are said to be "objectively disordered" because they represent a tendency to act contrary to the causal structure that is in place in the case of human beings. The Christian (as opposed to Aristotelian) final cause of humankind is to love God, that is, to strive to will what God wills, to the extent that we are capable of doing so (and Our Lady shows that it is possible for mere human beings to will precisely what God wills in the case of any given thing that is within our capacity to will). To will what God wills would include, presumably, the order of nature as it was put into place by God. In that order of nature, sexual relations have a single purpose with a double aspect. The purpose is reproduction, and the two aspects are biological: sexual pleasure is a motivation, and the marital bond a Sacramental sign that this activity is a part of the divinely established order of nature. To engage in sexual activity that is not consistent with this picture is said to be different from the order of nature as God has established it--it cannot result in offspring--and this is what is meant in calling it "objectively disordered". It is outside the proper order of things with respect to the ends (objectives) that it can be directed towards.
Homosexuals believe that they can have "committed, permanent" bonds of love. And that may, in fact, be the case. And there is nothing disordered about any two people loving each other deeply, exclusively, and for a long time, as long as that relationship is a friendship. The worry is that such folks will believe that the relationship that exists between them can be anything other than a friendship. The "final cause" of the relationship betweem folks of the same sex can at best be only imperfectly ordered, since however much love there is betweem them there cannot be any procreation, an essential element in marriage (again, this is not to say that any particular marriage must produce children, any more than that any particular human being must be fully rational--the requirement is only that the relationship be capable in principle of procreation).
But we live in debauched times, in which the satisfaction of biological drives takes the place of any notion of final causality. Should folks who reject the notion of final causality be ordained to the priesthood? It is hard to see why the should be, but of course they may feel "called" to the priesthood. Of course, there are some women who also feel "called", and if one accepts final causality, then one may always wonder whether such "calls" are really calls or just things that appear to be calls in some respect or other. But that is another matter. In the case of the priesthood, we must again think in terms of the Church's understanding of the causal structure of the world. The priesthood is ordered towards certain ends, one of which is the modelling of Christ himself, who wills only what the Father wills. Since the Father wills the natural order that he has put into place, anyone who wills something other than that (such as a desire for sexual relations with members of one's own sex) does not will what the Father wills. There are plenty of examples of men who have been able to overcome whatever biological drives they may have that have been contrary to what the Father wills, and the present document allows for the ordination of such men. But for those for whom it is still a struggle it seems quite salutary to regard their calling as only homonymously a calling, at least until such time as they can show otherwise.
The recent Vatican document reflects a long and venerable tradition of looking at the causal structure of the world in a certain way, a way that is orthogonal to the way that our contemporary, materialistic culture looks at it, and that is rather discouraging, since more and more young men are being formed primarily by the materialistic culture around them rather than the culture of holiness and life of the Church.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
To Everything There is a Season
In my line of work one tends to make a lot of use of a certain device known in the trade as a "thought experiment". I suspect that the popularity of this device among some philosophers is due to a kind of science envy, but I suppose there's no use in speculating about motives. In general I tend to think that "thought experiments" are a waste of time, telling us nothing of any importance and only very rarely having any philosophical interest. However, sometimes they can shed a little light on our values, and in that sense they can, in very rare instances, be intriguing.
There's one in particular that comes up in discussions of ethical theory that I've been thinking about for a while. It's a very old and very simple one. We're to imagine a man hurrying to a job interview in his very best--and only--business suit. The job is such that he simply will not get it if he is either late for his interview or not neatly dressed, and he desperately wants the job, because the one he has now is neither personally fulfilling to him nor financially rewarding, though he is able to survive with it. On his way to the interview he is hurrying through a public square that is empty except for one other person: a two-year old toddler is playing by himself next to a public fountain. As the man hurries by he looks around for the toddler's parents, but there is literally no one else to be seen anywhere. He watches as the toddler climbs into the fountain and then proceeds to fall face-down in the water. It becomes clear that the child is drowning, but the man is still far enough away from his interview that there is no way that he can help the child without both ruining his only suit and making himself late for the interview.
This thought experiment is supposed to trigger an intuition, namely, the intuition that if the man does nothing to help the child then his values are skewed--he has put a certain level of material satisfaction above the life of another human being. In fact, some people would say that if the man does nothing to help the child then he will be morally responsible if that child should happen to drown. Others argue that (a) it's not his child, (b) the child isn't dead yet, and (c) the man can't be morally responsible for an act that he did not initiate himself. The purpose of the thought experiment (to the extent that thought experiments can be said to have purposes), I guess, is to get people who subscribe to these different views to start arguing with each other in front of the rest of the class so the teacher can sit back and get paid for doing nothing.
My own intuitions about this case track rather closely with the former set of considerations. We often hold people responsible for undesireable things that happen due to neglect of one kind or another, and that is what this case appears to be. The man, in failing to help a person who clearly needs help, neglects his duty by failing to help when he can. That the child is not his is not relevant, since the same duty would exist if the person drowning were an unrelated adult. The argument that he will lose his chance at the job is specious, since the story as we have it gives us no reason to believe that he needs that job more than the child needs his life, or that the man will have no other chances at job security, while a dead child has no more chances at living.
To make this position stick, though, one needs more than a naked intuition. In particular, one needs an argument to show that there is a moral responsibility to help others who cannot help themselves. Such arguments do exist, but they are not without difficulties of one sort or another. Here is one that has fewer difficulties than most.
1. All human beings are morally equal
This is not as obvious as some people think it is, but it is more obvious than some others think it is. Think about what it means to say something like "X is a human being." If you want to make the claim that some object, X, is a human being, you need to have some idea of what it means to be a human being, that is, you need to have something in mind that will establish something as a human being rather than as something else. Everybody has some such set of necessary and sufficient conditions, whether they think they do or not. Unless you believe that there is some such set of necessary and sufficient conditions, you are committed to saying that there is no real difference between a human being and, say, a fire hydrant. There are philosophers out there who commit themselves to such things, but they aren't worth taking seriously. They mostly work at places like Princeton.
For the purposes of this argument, it doesn't actually matter what you take the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a human being are. You might agree with Aristotle that a human being is a "rational animal"; or you might think that all human beings share a certain genetic lineage; or you might think that being a human being means never having to say you're sorry. Whatever condition you stipulate, however, will be definitive: either X meets the criteria or it does not. If it does, then it is a human being; if it does not, then it is not a human being. This means that there is no such thing as an entity that is more human or less human than another similar entity. There are no "degrees" of humanity.
The upshot of this is that there is no rationally compelling reason to treat one human being differently than another on the grounds of their status as human beings. Obviously we sometimes treat different human beings differently on other grounds: we put criminals in jail, for example, but not innocent persons, we make children live at home until they reach a certain age even if they might prefer to run away, and we do not necessarily take the rantings of a madman at face value. But these differences, real though they are, do not make human beings fundamentally different kinds of things. A criminal human being is still fully human, as is a child or a madman.
This is important because the essence of morality is the giving and assessing of reasons for acting one way rather than another relative to other human beings. We do not bother to give reasons when our actions do not affect another person: I don't need to justify my preference for Bach over INXS, nor do I expect such justifications from others. We may not approve of another person's preference for Dewar's over The Macallan, but we cannot reasonably demand that they justify their preference on pain of compelling them to act otherwise. We only demand reasons when the failure to give an adequate reason will result in punishment.
Nor can we demand a reason if we apply different standards of reasoning to different persons. It would be impossible for one person to give a justification to another if the one person subscribed to different standards of rationality than the other. Moral reasoning requires that the same logical standards apply to everyone involved. (For this reason, Aristotle's necessary and sufficient conditions on being a human being are rather attractive.)
So we cannot treat one human being differently than another unless we can give reasons that are rationally compelling. To act otherwise would be, in a sense, to act irrationally, since there is no rationally compelling reason to treat any one person different from any other in the absence of a justification.
2. Anyone may vindicate a moral right, whether his own or those of another
So it is because all human beings are the same kind of thing that it is necessary to give some reason for treating one differently than another, and that reason had better be a good one. That is, it had better be a reason that would justify treating you exactly the way you are proposing treating the other guy. If you want to put someone into jail because he stole your money, you had better be prepared to acquiesce in going to jail yourself if you steal someone else's money. If you want to hold another human being as a slave, then you had better admit that you would not mind being held as a slave yourself. If you cannot make that admission, then you have no reason to hold anyone else as a slave. As it happens, nobody can make such an admission. If you actually want to be a "slave", all that means is that you are not really a slave at all, but some sort of weird "volunteer" servant. If you do not want to be held as a slave, then you have no excuse for holding anyone else as a slave against their will either, since they do not differ from you in any way that is relevant to the question of being held as a slave.
If you want to kill somebody, you had better be prepared to let others kill you when the same conditions are present. Now, who on earth would ever be prepared to let themselves be killed for any reason? If someone were trying to kill me, I would protect myself. And most people would be prepared to let me. I would be justified in protecting my life, because the madman has no reason to take my life. But what if I could not protect myself? Suppose I am locked in a room with a madman and an ex-army ranger. The madman is intent on killing me, and doesn't even notice the ex-ranger. The madman, let's say, has a knife, and keeps coming at me. He gets in a few jabs and manages to cripple me in such a way that I am lying helpless on the floor. Now the madman is going to finish me off, and there's nothing I can do to stop him. But he's a puny little guy, and the ex-ranger could easily disarm him and tie him up with his shirt. Would the ex-ranger be justified in protecting me in this way? Would it be morally right for him to restrain the madman and prevent him from killing me? It is difficult to imagine what could possibly be morally wrong in his doing such a thing.
So, if I have a right, say, to protect my life, then surely another person would be justified in protecting that right for me when I am unable to vindicate my own rights for some reason.
But suppose we return to the drowning child scenario. Sure, the man on his way to the job interview would be justified if he did save that child--the question was not about that. The question was, would he be acting unjustly if he failed to protect the child. Would the ex-ranger be acting unjustly if he failed to come to my help?
3. We have a duty to vindicate the rights of those who cannot vindicate their own rights
The most controversial part of the argument is also the most important. My justification in vindicating the right of another lies in the importance of that right being vindicated: if I act to vindicate a right merely because it pleases me to do so, then my act is not rationally motivated--it is not prompted by the process of giving a rational justification grounded in the equality of the person qua human being. If, however, I act because it seems the reasonable thing to do, if I act because my reason tells me that it is what I must do because I would want another to do the same for me were the roles reversed, then my act of vindication is no longer merely a case of the satisfaction of some arbitrary desire that I happen to have at that moment. But if I can apply reason to this situation to show that it is right to vindicate this right here and now, the same reasons would show that it is always right to act in that way. And if it is always right to act in that way because the logic of morality justifies acting in that way, then it would be wrong to fail to act in that way.
So if I am hurrying to a job interview and I see someone drowning, if I have good reason to believe that the person will die unless I help him, and if I also have good reason to believe that I will not be risking my own life in helping him, then I not only am permitted to help him, I have a moral obligation to help him.
Thomas Merton, famously, recounted the story of the Dutch resistance to the Nazi oppression. It was a non-violent resistance in which many lives, arguably, were saved. But opponents of Mertin cannot help but wonder whether the pacifist resistance would have had any long term effect for the good in the absence of military resistance. That is, you can resist peacefully for just so long in the face of an aggressor like that: in the end, the mercilessness of the enemy will overwhelm you. Passivity did not save the Jews, and it is probably a fluke that the Dutch were able to save as many as they did. If the Allies had chosen to continue resisting the Nazis with words only, one wonders what we would think of them today, in light of what we now know was going on in the camps. Would we still admire them, knowing that they stood idly by while millions were murdered? If we have a duty to protect innocent life, we may also have a duty to use compelling force, if compelling force is the only means available to us for bringing an end to the injustice. But this is controversial, since it is not always obvious when force is required and when it isn't.
We tend to think of the Allied military response to Nazi aggression as justified. If we hear accounts of resistance attacks on Nazi installations, we feel that they, too, were justified. If someone were to try to liberate a concentration camp by violent means, we might very well think that they were justified. We tend not to think that people who blow up abortion clinics are justified, however, so we may not always apply our principles in a consistent way. But that we must have principles, and that we must apply them consistently, is quite clear.
The war in Iraq, like the war in Vietnam, has proven to be a challenge to our principles. Are situations like these cases where we have a duty to vindicate the rights of those who cannot act to vindicate their own rights? If so, is military action our only means of giving aid? If so, what criteria do we apply to measure our success in such endeavors?
There's one in particular that comes up in discussions of ethical theory that I've been thinking about for a while. It's a very old and very simple one. We're to imagine a man hurrying to a job interview in his very best--and only--business suit. The job is such that he simply will not get it if he is either late for his interview or not neatly dressed, and he desperately wants the job, because the one he has now is neither personally fulfilling to him nor financially rewarding, though he is able to survive with it. On his way to the interview he is hurrying through a public square that is empty except for one other person: a two-year old toddler is playing by himself next to a public fountain. As the man hurries by he looks around for the toddler's parents, but there is literally no one else to be seen anywhere. He watches as the toddler climbs into the fountain and then proceeds to fall face-down in the water. It becomes clear that the child is drowning, but the man is still far enough away from his interview that there is no way that he can help the child without both ruining his only suit and making himself late for the interview.
This thought experiment is supposed to trigger an intuition, namely, the intuition that if the man does nothing to help the child then his values are skewed--he has put a certain level of material satisfaction above the life of another human being. In fact, some people would say that if the man does nothing to help the child then he will be morally responsible if that child should happen to drown. Others argue that (a) it's not his child, (b) the child isn't dead yet, and (c) the man can't be morally responsible for an act that he did not initiate himself. The purpose of the thought experiment (to the extent that thought experiments can be said to have purposes), I guess, is to get people who subscribe to these different views to start arguing with each other in front of the rest of the class so the teacher can sit back and get paid for doing nothing.
My own intuitions about this case track rather closely with the former set of considerations. We often hold people responsible for undesireable things that happen due to neglect of one kind or another, and that is what this case appears to be. The man, in failing to help a person who clearly needs help, neglects his duty by failing to help when he can. That the child is not his is not relevant, since the same duty would exist if the person drowning were an unrelated adult. The argument that he will lose his chance at the job is specious, since the story as we have it gives us no reason to believe that he needs that job more than the child needs his life, or that the man will have no other chances at job security, while a dead child has no more chances at living.
To make this position stick, though, one needs more than a naked intuition. In particular, one needs an argument to show that there is a moral responsibility to help others who cannot help themselves. Such arguments do exist, but they are not without difficulties of one sort or another. Here is one that has fewer difficulties than most.
1. All human beings are morally equal
This is not as obvious as some people think it is, but it is more obvious than some others think it is. Think about what it means to say something like "X is a human being." If you want to make the claim that some object, X, is a human being, you need to have some idea of what it means to be a human being, that is, you need to have something in mind that will establish something as a human being rather than as something else. Everybody has some such set of necessary and sufficient conditions, whether they think they do or not. Unless you believe that there is some such set of necessary and sufficient conditions, you are committed to saying that there is no real difference between a human being and, say, a fire hydrant. There are philosophers out there who commit themselves to such things, but they aren't worth taking seriously. They mostly work at places like Princeton.
For the purposes of this argument, it doesn't actually matter what you take the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a human being are. You might agree with Aristotle that a human being is a "rational animal"; or you might think that all human beings share a certain genetic lineage; or you might think that being a human being means never having to say you're sorry. Whatever condition you stipulate, however, will be definitive: either X meets the criteria or it does not. If it does, then it is a human being; if it does not, then it is not a human being. This means that there is no such thing as an entity that is more human or less human than another similar entity. There are no "degrees" of humanity.
The upshot of this is that there is no rationally compelling reason to treat one human being differently than another on the grounds of their status as human beings. Obviously we sometimes treat different human beings differently on other grounds: we put criminals in jail, for example, but not innocent persons, we make children live at home until they reach a certain age even if they might prefer to run away, and we do not necessarily take the rantings of a madman at face value. But these differences, real though they are, do not make human beings fundamentally different kinds of things. A criminal human being is still fully human, as is a child or a madman.
This is important because the essence of morality is the giving and assessing of reasons for acting one way rather than another relative to other human beings. We do not bother to give reasons when our actions do not affect another person: I don't need to justify my preference for Bach over INXS, nor do I expect such justifications from others. We may not approve of another person's preference for Dewar's over The Macallan, but we cannot reasonably demand that they justify their preference on pain of compelling them to act otherwise. We only demand reasons when the failure to give an adequate reason will result in punishment.
Nor can we demand a reason if we apply different standards of reasoning to different persons. It would be impossible for one person to give a justification to another if the one person subscribed to different standards of rationality than the other. Moral reasoning requires that the same logical standards apply to everyone involved. (For this reason, Aristotle's necessary and sufficient conditions on being a human being are rather attractive.)
So we cannot treat one human being differently than another unless we can give reasons that are rationally compelling. To act otherwise would be, in a sense, to act irrationally, since there is no rationally compelling reason to treat any one person different from any other in the absence of a justification.
2. Anyone may vindicate a moral right, whether his own or those of another
So it is because all human beings are the same kind of thing that it is necessary to give some reason for treating one differently than another, and that reason had better be a good one. That is, it had better be a reason that would justify treating you exactly the way you are proposing treating the other guy. If you want to put someone into jail because he stole your money, you had better be prepared to acquiesce in going to jail yourself if you steal someone else's money. If you want to hold another human being as a slave, then you had better admit that you would not mind being held as a slave yourself. If you cannot make that admission, then you have no reason to hold anyone else as a slave. As it happens, nobody can make such an admission. If you actually want to be a "slave", all that means is that you are not really a slave at all, but some sort of weird "volunteer" servant. If you do not want to be held as a slave, then you have no excuse for holding anyone else as a slave against their will either, since they do not differ from you in any way that is relevant to the question of being held as a slave.
If you want to kill somebody, you had better be prepared to let others kill you when the same conditions are present. Now, who on earth would ever be prepared to let themselves be killed for any reason? If someone were trying to kill me, I would protect myself. And most people would be prepared to let me. I would be justified in protecting my life, because the madman has no reason to take my life. But what if I could not protect myself? Suppose I am locked in a room with a madman and an ex-army ranger. The madman is intent on killing me, and doesn't even notice the ex-ranger. The madman, let's say, has a knife, and keeps coming at me. He gets in a few jabs and manages to cripple me in such a way that I am lying helpless on the floor. Now the madman is going to finish me off, and there's nothing I can do to stop him. But he's a puny little guy, and the ex-ranger could easily disarm him and tie him up with his shirt. Would the ex-ranger be justified in protecting me in this way? Would it be morally right for him to restrain the madman and prevent him from killing me? It is difficult to imagine what could possibly be morally wrong in his doing such a thing.
So, if I have a right, say, to protect my life, then surely another person would be justified in protecting that right for me when I am unable to vindicate my own rights for some reason.
But suppose we return to the drowning child scenario. Sure, the man on his way to the job interview would be justified if he did save that child--the question was not about that. The question was, would he be acting unjustly if he failed to protect the child. Would the ex-ranger be acting unjustly if he failed to come to my help?
3. We have a duty to vindicate the rights of those who cannot vindicate their own rights
The most controversial part of the argument is also the most important. My justification in vindicating the right of another lies in the importance of that right being vindicated: if I act to vindicate a right merely because it pleases me to do so, then my act is not rationally motivated--it is not prompted by the process of giving a rational justification grounded in the equality of the person qua human being. If, however, I act because it seems the reasonable thing to do, if I act because my reason tells me that it is what I must do because I would want another to do the same for me were the roles reversed, then my act of vindication is no longer merely a case of the satisfaction of some arbitrary desire that I happen to have at that moment. But if I can apply reason to this situation to show that it is right to vindicate this right here and now, the same reasons would show that it is always right to act in that way. And if it is always right to act in that way because the logic of morality justifies acting in that way, then it would be wrong to fail to act in that way.
So if I am hurrying to a job interview and I see someone drowning, if I have good reason to believe that the person will die unless I help him, and if I also have good reason to believe that I will not be risking my own life in helping him, then I not only am permitted to help him, I have a moral obligation to help him.
Thomas Merton, famously, recounted the story of the Dutch resistance to the Nazi oppression. It was a non-violent resistance in which many lives, arguably, were saved. But opponents of Mertin cannot help but wonder whether the pacifist resistance would have had any long term effect for the good in the absence of military resistance. That is, you can resist peacefully for just so long in the face of an aggressor like that: in the end, the mercilessness of the enemy will overwhelm you. Passivity did not save the Jews, and it is probably a fluke that the Dutch were able to save as many as they did. If the Allies had chosen to continue resisting the Nazis with words only, one wonders what we would think of them today, in light of what we now know was going on in the camps. Would we still admire them, knowing that they stood idly by while millions were murdered? If we have a duty to protect innocent life, we may also have a duty to use compelling force, if compelling force is the only means available to us for bringing an end to the injustice. But this is controversial, since it is not always obvious when force is required and when it isn't.
We tend to think of the Allied military response to Nazi aggression as justified. If we hear accounts of resistance attacks on Nazi installations, we feel that they, too, were justified. If someone were to try to liberate a concentration camp by violent means, we might very well think that they were justified. We tend not to think that people who blow up abortion clinics are justified, however, so we may not always apply our principles in a consistent way. But that we must have principles, and that we must apply them consistently, is quite clear.
The war in Iraq, like the war in Vietnam, has proven to be a challenge to our principles. Are situations like these cases where we have a duty to vindicate the rights of those who cannot act to vindicate their own rights? If so, is military action our only means of giving aid? If so, what criteria do we apply to measure our success in such endeavors?
Dante and Darwin
There's a very good post at Darwin Catholic about Charles Krauthammer's recent remarks regarding the use of torture in extreme cases. Darwin makes some very interesting comparisons to the theology of Purgatory as found in Dante, and he draws a rock-solid conclusion about the morality of torture under any circumstances. Anything that is morally wrong is always morally wrong, and torture is morally wrong. That's the general principle of the moral realist, but Darwin adds the principle of the Roman Catholic: our positive law ought to reflect the moral (natural) law.
Indulge Me
Pope Benedict XVI has announced a plenary indulgence "under the usual conditions" for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception next Thursday. This item may not get much news coverage, since we live in debauched times that regard such things as indulgences as relics from the middle ages better to be forgotten than practiced. That's too bad, because folks who look at the world in that way are needlessly separating themselves from a worldview that is literally more salutary than the one they cherish so much. It is very difficult to live life as a true disciple of Christ who obeys Saint Paul's command to "pray without ceasing", but why pass up opportunities to approach more closely to such a life by incorporating a whole new attitude towards our relationship to the world into our day to day experience? Go to Confession; receive Holy Communion; pray with Christ's Vicar: these are the "usual conditions". Then go out and live your life as though you were going to meet these conditions every day.
Monday, November 28, 2005
I'm Positive
I have a wonderful little book--not so very little actually: it weighs in at 1387 pages--that is remarkable not so much because of what is written in it but because of the witness it gives to a moribund worldview of a bygone era: the historical positivism of the 1950s and 1960s. The book is Volume 6 of the UNESCO-sponsored History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development, the first volume of which, Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization, appeared in 1963. Volume 6, which appeared in 1966, was subtitled The Twentieth Century.
There are a couple of things to notice about this. First, there is the rather obvious hubris of trying to publish any kind of history of the twentieth century before it is even two thirds finished. By the editors' own admission, most of the work for Volume 6 was actually done before 1955. Since we're in the Advent season now, and my children are reminding me once again how difficult it is for those of us born in the 20th century to postpone our gratification, I find this desire to get the history of the 20th century out quam celerrime more than a little close to home. The assumption appears to be that, whatever it was about the 20th century that made it unqiue, that gave it its character, was well established by mid-century, and unlikely to be displaced by any upstart events of the waning years on the downhill side of the century. Looking back over the last 40 years of my life, however, I cannot help but think that the last third of the 20th century had very little in common, culturally or scientifically, with the first two thirds. There is, indeed, a place for a book such as this, but it ought to be titled something like A Provincial and Myopic View of the Significance of the First Half of the Twentieth Century. Now, before people start complaining about what a ridiculously pedantic title that is, remember that the thing was sponsored by UNESCO. I think I'm being rather charitable.
The second thing worth noticing is the apparent assumption that people who are literally in medias res are somehow going to rise above it all and write about the cultural and scientific development of their own era in a way that is not wholly useless. Albert Speer wrote a very interesting account of the Third Reich, but I would not go to that volume for anything like a compelling account of the significance of the history of that regime. Volume 6 of the History of Mankind was "planned and executed from an international viewpoint", it proclaims, and that, I take it, is supposed to be one of its virtues. But in fact such a claim only reflects the sad political reality of the day: you couldn't say anything politically interesting without Soviet kiss-asses objecting on ideological grounds. The chapters on economics and history are interlarded with footnotes from Soviet "experts" who challenge much of what is being said in the main text. In some passages written by Soviets there are a few tepid challenges from Western scholars, but by and large the politicization of the volume is a one-way street.
The book is filled with grandiose-sounding slogans, with section titles such as "Man's Relation to his Past and Future", Dissemination of Nutritional Knowledge", "Extension of Education as a Mass Process". But let's cut to the chase: of course one wants to know what these brainiacs had to say about culture and religion, science and society, and--of course--one is not to be disappointed if one is expecting to find a typical 1960s mishmash of popular psychology, positivism about "man's progress", and communistic economic ideas governing the whole analysis. In particular, there is a very Bill Moyers-ish dismissal of all religion as a mere cultural construct with no real relation to reality--for that one must turn to science, since after all it is science that is really god to these people. The Catholic Church and--of all things--philosophical Thomism! are singled out as the cultural bad-boys of the century, since they toe the line of their respective "orthodoxies" (in this book the word "orthodoxy" is like the word "vice"). For these movements, "rigorous formal logic" was the determining faculty by which we come to know the world. But what of that other "orthodoxy", Islam? You may be surprised to learn that
Some parts of this volume are fascinating to read--in some sections it does contain rather interesting compilations of data. But as a genuine assessment of the "cultural and scientific development" of the century--well, it's hard to take it very seriously. Culturally much has happened since 1966, such as the fall of western communism, the ascendancy of the Catholic Church, the globalization of the economy, explosive change in music and art, both classical and popular, and in the scientific domain one need mention only a few things such as space exploration, medicine, computer technology, before one begins to see that this volume was hopelessly outdated even before the century it purports to give a history of was finished.
There are a couple of things to notice about this. First, there is the rather obvious hubris of trying to publish any kind of history of the twentieth century before it is even two thirds finished. By the editors' own admission, most of the work for Volume 6 was actually done before 1955. Since we're in the Advent season now, and my children are reminding me once again how difficult it is for those of us born in the 20th century to postpone our gratification, I find this desire to get the history of the 20th century out quam celerrime more than a little close to home. The assumption appears to be that, whatever it was about the 20th century that made it unqiue, that gave it its character, was well established by mid-century, and unlikely to be displaced by any upstart events of the waning years on the downhill side of the century. Looking back over the last 40 years of my life, however, I cannot help but think that the last third of the 20th century had very little in common, culturally or scientifically, with the first two thirds. There is, indeed, a place for a book such as this, but it ought to be titled something like A Provincial and Myopic View of the Significance of the First Half of the Twentieth Century. Now, before people start complaining about what a ridiculously pedantic title that is, remember that the thing was sponsored by UNESCO. I think I'm being rather charitable.
The second thing worth noticing is the apparent assumption that people who are literally in medias res are somehow going to rise above it all and write about the cultural and scientific development of their own era in a way that is not wholly useless. Albert Speer wrote a very interesting account of the Third Reich, but I would not go to that volume for anything like a compelling account of the significance of the history of that regime. Volume 6 of the History of Mankind was "planned and executed from an international viewpoint", it proclaims, and that, I take it, is supposed to be one of its virtues. But in fact such a claim only reflects the sad political reality of the day: you couldn't say anything politically interesting without Soviet kiss-asses objecting on ideological grounds. The chapters on economics and history are interlarded with footnotes from Soviet "experts" who challenge much of what is being said in the main text. In some passages written by Soviets there are a few tepid challenges from Western scholars, but by and large the politicization of the volume is a one-way street.
The book is filled with grandiose-sounding slogans, with section titles such as "Man's Relation to his Past and Future", Dissemination of Nutritional Knowledge", "Extension of Education as a Mass Process". But let's cut to the chase: of course one wants to know what these brainiacs had to say about culture and religion, science and society, and--of course--one is not to be disappointed if one is expecting to find a typical 1960s mishmash of popular psychology, positivism about "man's progress", and communistic economic ideas governing the whole analysis. In particular, there is a very Bill Moyers-ish dismissal of all religion as a mere cultural construct with no real relation to reality--for that one must turn to science, since after all it is science that is really god to these people. The Catholic Church and--of all things--philosophical Thomism! are singled out as the cultural bad-boys of the century, since they toe the line of their respective "orthodoxies" (in this book the word "orthodoxy" is like the word "vice"). For these movements, "rigorous formal logic" was the determining faculty by which we come to know the world. But what of that other "orthodoxy", Islam? You may be surprised to learn that
Most of the interaction between eastern and western thought was onesided, the impact of ideas originating in the West upon the thought of the East.That's right, the "impact" in the other direction didn't come until the first year of the next century. But I'm interrupting...
The development in the West of the non-rational philosophies during these years, however, began to provide a possible bridge to the philosophical thought of the East which had always stressed the use of non-rational faculties to penetrate to the essence of reality...through the middle of the century, however, the gap remained wide as far as any real penetration of eastern though into the West was concerned. It was indeed a rare westerner who was prepared to submit himself to the discipline which easterners associated with the sort of insight, self-penetration and wisdom which was part of their tradition and which the westerner, too, could only hope to experience from within.Wow, there's a lot of penetrating going on in there. Notice how the problem of inter-"penetration" is laid at the feet of the lazy westerner, who doesn't have it in him to penetrate himself the way the easterner does. There seems to be some distinction being drawn here between the "rational" faculties and the "non-rational" ones, but as usual with this kind of 1960s garbage there's no explanation (or empirical evicence) regarding what this distinction might amount to and how it is actually worked out in any real theories of either east or west. In short, this is just banal speculation on the part of someone who's read too much Hesse.
Some parts of this volume are fascinating to read--in some sections it does contain rather interesting compilations of data. But as a genuine assessment of the "cultural and scientific development" of the century--well, it's hard to take it very seriously. Culturally much has happened since 1966, such as the fall of western communism, the ascendancy of the Catholic Church, the globalization of the economy, explosive change in music and art, both classical and popular, and in the scientific domain one need mention only a few things such as space exploration, medicine, computer technology, before one begins to see that this volume was hopelessly outdated even before the century it purports to give a history of was finished.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Simon Says
When I was in graduate school I was fortunate to be able to study under Simon Blackburn while he was still the Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has since returned to Cambridge, where he continues to hold forth in his witty and sagacious way on matters of Truth and Morality, not only in his teaching but in a series of popular books on, well, Truth and Morality.
In a recent contribution to the Times Literary Supplement (available online here) of 30 September 2005, Blackburn does a fine job of highlighting the merits of a recent selection of essays by the late G. E. M. Anscombe. For those who are not philosophy wonks, Anscombe was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, perhaps of even more interest to readers of this forum, a very dedicated Roman Catholic. She was also, as all sides agree, something of a genius. Many Catholic moral philosophers do a pretty good job of hiding the fact that they're Catholic--it's one of the many symptoms of the debauched times in which we live--but Anscombe argued forcefully for many of the moral tenets of the Catholic faith, including the absolute prohibition on euthanasia, abortion, and contraception. She defended, in other words, a version of moral realism that was quite congenial to the Magisterium's view of normativity in the world.
Simon Blackburn, by contrast, describes himself (not in this particular essay, but in plenty of other places) as a Humean, though not as an out-and-out moral relativist. The trouble is, the only difference between his moral philosophy and moral relativism is the stridency with which he asserts the correctness of his views. Humeans are, by and large, both skeptics and empiricist materialists as well as rather truculent, so none of this should come as a surprise. One does not want so much to fault him as to pity him, but that is another matter.
It is rather interesting to note, however, the pomposity with which he dismisses the sort of morality defended by Anscombe. He begins by criticizing her view, which he characterizes as "Dostoevskian," that
The difficulty with the analysis comes only when one wants to know why he would treat a morally offensive colleague in this way. For the Humean the only reason is because the behavior is repulsive to some particular point of view, not because there is anything wrong with it in itself. What makes it repulsive to Simon Blackburn, however, may not strike another as quite so deserving of such opprobrium. In short, by ignoring the fundamental belief behind Anscombe's moral theory--the existence of final causes--Blackburn misses the whole motivation for being moral in her system.
This is why his appeal to Plato is so perplexing. I suppose he must have in mind places like the Gorgias or Book I of the Republic--places where Plato argues that just living is its own reward, there is no "divine command" that makes something morally right or wrong. But Plato would not have agreed that the mere fact that Simon Blackburn finds bribery offensive is a sufficient condition on its actually being offensive, no matter how deeply Simon Blackburn believes it, or what he threatens to do about it. Maybe it isn't Plato himself whom Blackburn has in mind. Callicles, in the Gorgias, would have been quite happy to agree that what a particular individual regards as morally offensive is morally offensive, even though he would have drawn a very different inference about the moral licitness of bribery. I'm sure Callicles would have agreed with Blackburn about just who are the ones who are most likely to have the best views about morality, too, since Callicles seems to have held a rather Nietzschean view about, well, Sophists.
But for Plato himself, moral normativity lies in the notion of an objective human good, something that does not differ from person to person and, more importantly, something about which it is possible to be mistaken, that is, you can fail to know that something is really the right thing for you to do, even though you are very sincere in your belief that it is not. Now, this is not necessarily inconsistent with Simon's argument, at least so far. But if we were to turn the tables things would be somewhat different. If we were to ask, "What about you, Simon? What if you were the one contemplating taking the bribe? What reasoned argument would prevent you from doing so?" He would not have at his disposal recourse to an answer like "I know that I cannot morally do such a thing, because doing so is contrary to the human good, thus making it wrong per se, a violation of my place in the rational order of things." If he claims that he does have recourse to that answer--if he does, in fact, endorse the realist notion of an objective human good--he has not revealed in any of his writings just what he thinks that objective good is. If he denies that there is such a thing, he begs the question against Anscombe and the realists.
In particular, since he seems horrified and offended by the idea that human life itself might have an objective value and the concommitant idea that certain things, such as the needless taking of human life, might be categorically prohibited, he begs the question against the Catholic Church's understanding of what the objective human good is. Some folks--Simon Blackburn among them--misunderstand what it means to say that if God is dead anything is permitted. The misunderstanding appears to stem from the mistaken belief that it is nothing more than fear of God, fear of retribution, that keeps the believer from doing wrong things, and that if only God (or our virus-like belief in such a being) weren't there we could do anything we like "and get away with it". That is a very banal understanding of what a moral realist like Plato--or Anscombe--is arguing for. The idea is rather that all things, including human beings, have a natural end, and normativity is defined in terms of what that natural end actually is, not what we might (perhaps mistakenly) believe or wish it to be. It is this end that gives us a compelling reason to act one way rather than another. We do not act out of fear of God, but out of love for God. Without God, we may love whatever we like, and that is why, without God, anything is permitted.
The only "reason" that Blackburn offers for refraining from bribery is the fact that he, and others like him, will scorn the folks who take bribes. Well, unless depth of feeling and sincerity can persuade, that argument fails to persuade. One can rightly ask, "Why should I care whether I offend Simon Blackburn?" If the answer is really nothing more than "Because I will humiliate you in front of others, wreck your career, and in general make your life miserable"--well, that is just an ugly might-makes-right sort of argument and, ironically, differs in no way at all from what Blackburn himself appears to think is the point of having God be the source of normativity!
For the Catholic, unlike Plato, the objective human good is God himself, and our love for God is a manifestation of our innate desire to seek our final cause, our natural end. If, like Simon Blackburn, you simply don't believe that any such natural end exists, there's not much anybody can do about that. But to merely assert, without argument, that there simply is no such natural end of man, is surely no better than to assert that there is. And it is clearly worse to not only assert without argument, but to childishly ridicule one's opposition when argument fails. Perhaps he thinks he is only emulating the brilliant Ms. Anscombe, who was rather famous for the well-placed barb, but Blackburn scoffs at the whole idea of final causation in his essay, comparing it to Michael Frayn's parody (the "natural end of travel" is to move forward, so all looking backwards, including the use of rear-view mirrors in cars, is immoral). When I knew Simon Blackburn he was not quite so, well, full of himself, at least not most of the time. He was always very kind to me, even though his open scorn for all conservatives is something that he proudly parades in the press. Perhaps he is enough of a moralist, of sorts, to recognize the possibility that there may be a difference between when it is appropriate to merely think that someone is a scumbag and when it is appropriate to tell them to their face that they are one. It is more than likely, though, that the explanation for his treatment of me was nothing more sophisticated than his ignorance of my politics, thus proving Plato right once again--it is possible to be mistaken about what the "right" thing to do is, since if he had known my politics he surely would have treated me differently. His ignorance was my bliss.
The title of Blackburn's essay, by the way, is "Simply wrong", which I suppose is intended as a sly response to what he perceives as Anscombe's "absolutism" about ethics. I'm sure the irony was unintentional, but it is rather delicious.
In a recent contribution to the Times Literary Supplement (available online here) of 30 September 2005, Blackburn does a fine job of highlighting the merits of a recent selection of essays by the late G. E. M. Anscombe. For those who are not philosophy wonks, Anscombe was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, perhaps of even more interest to readers of this forum, a very dedicated Roman Catholic. She was also, as all sides agree, something of a genius. Many Catholic moral philosophers do a pretty good job of hiding the fact that they're Catholic--it's one of the many symptoms of the debauched times in which we live--but Anscombe argued forcefully for many of the moral tenets of the Catholic faith, including the absolute prohibition on euthanasia, abortion, and contraception. She defended, in other words, a version of moral realism that was quite congenial to the Magisterium's view of normativity in the world.
Simon Blackburn, by contrast, describes himself (not in this particular essay, but in plenty of other places) as a Humean, though not as an out-and-out moral relativist. The trouble is, the only difference between his moral philosophy and moral relativism is the stridency with which he asserts the correctness of his views. Humeans are, by and large, both skeptics and empiricist materialists as well as rather truculent, so none of this should come as a surprise. One does not want so much to fault him as to pity him, but that is another matter.
It is rather interesting to note, however, the pomposity with which he dismisses the sort of morality defended by Anscombe. He begins by criticizing her view, which he characterizes as "Dostoevskian," that
if God is dead everything is permitted: "where one does not think there is a judge or a law, the notion of a verdict may retain its psychological effect, but not its meaning".His own verdict, however, is that this is just a load of hooey, and in fact has been proven to be hooey by none other than Plato.
Suppose you are a colleague, and I find you taking bribes in order to fiddle exam results and am shocked and horrified as a result. I believe you have failed in your duty, that you have betrayed your obligations to the university and to your students. Is this "merely" psychological, and am I using words with "merely" talismanic force? Well, just try me. Suppose I break off relations with you, or make the matter public, or invoke sanctions, strip you of your rank or drum you out of your job. Suppose, in addition, I look askance at anybody who fails to share my outrage, and strenuously try to change their minds. Am I supposed to say, po-faced and even while I do these things or worse, "By the way, I do not say that what you did was morally wrong. That's a concept I cannot deploy"? This is poppycock: what I do shows in spades that this is exactly how I regard you and your doings.Well, that's just great: you can claim to be as realist as you like just so long as you are enough of a popinjay to use words like "poppycock" in a sentence.
The difficulty with the analysis comes only when one wants to know why he would treat a morally offensive colleague in this way. For the Humean the only reason is because the behavior is repulsive to some particular point of view, not because there is anything wrong with it in itself. What makes it repulsive to Simon Blackburn, however, may not strike another as quite so deserving of such opprobrium. In short, by ignoring the fundamental belief behind Anscombe's moral theory--the existence of final causes--Blackburn misses the whole motivation for being moral in her system.
This is why his appeal to Plato is so perplexing. I suppose he must have in mind places like the Gorgias or Book I of the Republic--places where Plato argues that just living is its own reward, there is no "divine command" that makes something morally right or wrong. But Plato would not have agreed that the mere fact that Simon Blackburn finds bribery offensive is a sufficient condition on its actually being offensive, no matter how deeply Simon Blackburn believes it, or what he threatens to do about it. Maybe it isn't Plato himself whom Blackburn has in mind. Callicles, in the Gorgias, would have been quite happy to agree that what a particular individual regards as morally offensive is morally offensive, even though he would have drawn a very different inference about the moral licitness of bribery. I'm sure Callicles would have agreed with Blackburn about just who are the ones who are most likely to have the best views about morality, too, since Callicles seems to have held a rather Nietzschean view about, well, Sophists.
But for Plato himself, moral normativity lies in the notion of an objective human good, something that does not differ from person to person and, more importantly, something about which it is possible to be mistaken, that is, you can fail to know that something is really the right thing for you to do, even though you are very sincere in your belief that it is not. Now, this is not necessarily inconsistent with Simon's argument, at least so far. But if we were to turn the tables things would be somewhat different. If we were to ask, "What about you, Simon? What if you were the one contemplating taking the bribe? What reasoned argument would prevent you from doing so?" He would not have at his disposal recourse to an answer like "I know that I cannot morally do such a thing, because doing so is contrary to the human good, thus making it wrong per se, a violation of my place in the rational order of things." If he claims that he does have recourse to that answer--if he does, in fact, endorse the realist notion of an objective human good--he has not revealed in any of his writings just what he thinks that objective good is. If he denies that there is such a thing, he begs the question against Anscombe and the realists.
In particular, since he seems horrified and offended by the idea that human life itself might have an objective value and the concommitant idea that certain things, such as the needless taking of human life, might be categorically prohibited, he begs the question against the Catholic Church's understanding of what the objective human good is. Some folks--Simon Blackburn among them--misunderstand what it means to say that if God is dead anything is permitted. The misunderstanding appears to stem from the mistaken belief that it is nothing more than fear of God, fear of retribution, that keeps the believer from doing wrong things, and that if only God (or our virus-like belief in such a being) weren't there we could do anything we like "and get away with it". That is a very banal understanding of what a moral realist like Plato--or Anscombe--is arguing for. The idea is rather that all things, including human beings, have a natural end, and normativity is defined in terms of what that natural end actually is, not what we might (perhaps mistakenly) believe or wish it to be. It is this end that gives us a compelling reason to act one way rather than another. We do not act out of fear of God, but out of love for God. Without God, we may love whatever we like, and that is why, without God, anything is permitted.
The only "reason" that Blackburn offers for refraining from bribery is the fact that he, and others like him, will scorn the folks who take bribes. Well, unless depth of feeling and sincerity can persuade, that argument fails to persuade. One can rightly ask, "Why should I care whether I offend Simon Blackburn?" If the answer is really nothing more than "Because I will humiliate you in front of others, wreck your career, and in general make your life miserable"--well, that is just an ugly might-makes-right sort of argument and, ironically, differs in no way at all from what Blackburn himself appears to think is the point of having God be the source of normativity!
For the Catholic, unlike Plato, the objective human good is God himself, and our love for God is a manifestation of our innate desire to seek our final cause, our natural end. If, like Simon Blackburn, you simply don't believe that any such natural end exists, there's not much anybody can do about that. But to merely assert, without argument, that there simply is no such natural end of man, is surely no better than to assert that there is. And it is clearly worse to not only assert without argument, but to childishly ridicule one's opposition when argument fails. Perhaps he thinks he is only emulating the brilliant Ms. Anscombe, who was rather famous for the well-placed barb, but Blackburn scoffs at the whole idea of final causation in his essay, comparing it to Michael Frayn's parody (the "natural end of travel" is to move forward, so all looking backwards, including the use of rear-view mirrors in cars, is immoral). When I knew Simon Blackburn he was not quite so, well, full of himself, at least not most of the time. He was always very kind to me, even though his open scorn for all conservatives is something that he proudly parades in the press. Perhaps he is enough of a moralist, of sorts, to recognize the possibility that there may be a difference between when it is appropriate to merely think that someone is a scumbag and when it is appropriate to tell them to their face that they are one. It is more than likely, though, that the explanation for his treatment of me was nothing more sophisticated than his ignorance of my politics, thus proving Plato right once again--it is possible to be mistaken about what the "right" thing to do is, since if he had known my politics he surely would have treated me differently. His ignorance was my bliss.
The title of Blackburn's essay, by the way, is "Simply wrong", which I suppose is intended as a sly response to what he perceives as Anscombe's "absolutism" about ethics. I'm sure the irony was unintentional, but it is rather delicious.
Walmart Apologizes
Well, that was easy. You may now return to eating fried liver. I wish I could say that I'll see you there.
Kids These Days
I actually was not particularly surprised to read this report at CNS of religiosity among Catholic teens. In particular, I found this remark hauntingly clowse to home:
The real problem is that there are some folks who just don't understand that they are required, by Canon Law, to get a religious education for their children. Catholic parents are required to send their children to a Catholic school if there is one available to them and, failing that, they are required to obtain religious education from the Church. Homeschooling is allowed only with the permission of the bishop and in compliance with diocesan standards. If parents themselves don't understand the duties and obligations that come with membership in the Church, then it is hardly surprising to find that the children haven't cultivated very impressive religious values either.
One reason why some parents may not fully understand the duties and obligations that come with being Catholic may be that some parents do not understand what it even means for themselves to be a Catholic. There are some folks who call themselves Catholic principally because that was what they were raised to do, but who do not have very deep committments to the teachings of the faith itself, assuming that they even know what the teachings are beyond some vague princples like "Attend Mass if it's not too inconvenient." I don't know how many such folk there are in the Church, but I do know that there are some, and I suspect that it will be the children of these kinds of people who will have the least interest in getting involved in religious activities.
I sometimes wonder about my own level of committment to religious principles, and I consider myself a pretty religious guy. I worry constantly that my inner attitude is not what it ought to be, that my prayer life is not enough in the spirit of "Thy will be done." These are, in my opinon, important worries to have because they seem to me to reflect "where I'm at" spiritually, so to speak. So when I run into people who think that the Real Presence is not a teaching that needs to be taken all that seriously (certainly not literally!), then I know that I am in the presence of someone who needs to rethink his/her committment to the whole notion of participation in a religious institution. I sometimes think that what is needed is a body of believers whose attitude is more like the attitude that must have been present in the early Church, when committment to the Church's principles was actually something dangerous. It is relatively easy to make such committments today, and indeed in some contexts doing so may bring with it certain kinds of rewards in the form of social acceptance or even status.
Sadly, I'm not all that sure what I would do if I found myself in context where my religious committments were literally dangerous. But at least I'm sad about that. I fear there may be some folks to whom it never even occurs to be grateful that things are otherwise. Until we take these things more seriously--much more seriously--we can't expect our children to take them very seriously either.
Forty percent of Catholic teens said they had never attended any parish-based religious education, compared to 19 percent of mainline Protestants, 13 percent of conservative Protestants and 12 percent of black Protestants.My parish does not have a Catholic school, so we provide our own religious education through a parish program that serves both Athens parishes. Attendance is not too bad among those who sign up for it, but not everyone who is supposed to be getting Catholic education is signing up for it. True, it does cost money, but we have scholarships for those who can't afford to pay: nobody in either parish has any excuse for not signing up.
The real problem is that there are some folks who just don't understand that they are required, by Canon Law, to get a religious education for their children. Catholic parents are required to send their children to a Catholic school if there is one available to them and, failing that, they are required to obtain religious education from the Church. Homeschooling is allowed only with the permission of the bishop and in compliance with diocesan standards. If parents themselves don't understand the duties and obligations that come with membership in the Church, then it is hardly surprising to find that the children haven't cultivated very impressive religious values either.
One reason why some parents may not fully understand the duties and obligations that come with being Catholic may be that some parents do not understand what it even means for themselves to be a Catholic. There are some folks who call themselves Catholic principally because that was what they were raised to do, but who do not have very deep committments to the teachings of the faith itself, assuming that they even know what the teachings are beyond some vague princples like "Attend Mass if it's not too inconvenient." I don't know how many such folk there are in the Church, but I do know that there are some, and I suspect that it will be the children of these kinds of people who will have the least interest in getting involved in religious activities.
I sometimes wonder about my own level of committment to religious principles, and I consider myself a pretty religious guy. I worry constantly that my inner attitude is not what it ought to be, that my prayer life is not enough in the spirit of "Thy will be done." These are, in my opinon, important worries to have because they seem to me to reflect "where I'm at" spiritually, so to speak. So when I run into people who think that the Real Presence is not a teaching that needs to be taken all that seriously (certainly not literally!), then I know that I am in the presence of someone who needs to rethink his/her committment to the whole notion of participation in a religious institution. I sometimes think that what is needed is a body of believers whose attitude is more like the attitude that must have been present in the early Church, when committment to the Church's principles was actually something dangerous. It is relatively easy to make such committments today, and indeed in some contexts doing so may bring with it certain kinds of rewards in the form of social acceptance or even status.
Sadly, I'm not all that sure what I would do if I found myself in context where my religious committments were literally dangerous. But at least I'm sad about that. I fear there may be some folks to whom it never even occurs to be grateful that things are otherwise. Until we take these things more seriously--much more seriously--we can't expect our children to take them very seriously either.
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