Why Atheists Can Have No Moral Absolutes

"No God, No Good:  Atheism's Futile Quest for Morality, and the Unconscionable Practice of Stolen Concepts"

         One often hears atheists assert that the moral virtues are those virtues without which we humans beings cannot, and do not, flourish because they are rooted in human nature.  One also sometimes hears atheists assert that moral virtues are those virtues that enjoy a consensus that spans culture, country, and century, something like the Tao described at the end of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.  That moral values described or derived in either of these two ways are not truly moral values, much less moral absolutes, is the burden of this brief essay.

         First, atheist values determined either by human flourishing or by human nature are not truly right or wrong, not properly moral absolutes; they are pragmatism or utilitarianism masquerading as good and coöpting the language of virtue and of “oughtness,” to which they have no philosophical or (especially) theological claim.

         As the following analysis will demonstrate, one must not contend that human nature and human flourishing yield moral absolutes, properly so-called, because such a theory fails to account for (1) the origin of human nature, (2) changes in human nature, and (3) the selection of “flourishing” as a category of moral discernment.  I shall leave aside the vexed philosophical question of whether or not human nature itself actually exists as an entity in its own right and has objectively knowable and universal characteristics, or if it is merely a philosopher’s fiction without any extra-mental reality.  I simply note in passing that the atheistic theory of morality here under review assumes an answer to this difficult philosophical question that, if mistaken, devastates the atheist theory of morality by erasing its metaphysical basis.

         (1) If, as atheists insist, human nature arose as the chance result of a mindless evolutionary process, a process behind which exists no divine mind and no divine plan, then moral absolutes disappear.  That is, if human nature is the result of evolutionary accident (time, plus matter, plus chance), and if right and wrong arise solely from human nature, then right and wrong are accidents, not moral absolutes.  Biological chance, evolutionary accident, cannot serve as the philosophically proper foundation for right and wrong; it is their undoing.  If human nature and human mind are the unintentional outcome of the chance collocation of atoms and of the mindless and unpredictable meanderings of natural selection (in other words, if the human mind is a mere epiphenomenon contorting and disporting itself for a short while upon the face of physical matter), then we have no convincing reason -- and no metaphysical justification -- for trusting them as indicators of moral goodness; nor have we any real or enduring right and wrong.      

         (2) Had the evolutionary process been different, or had the primordial soup been mixed from a different recipe, so to speak, or stirred at a different temperature, human nature, if it existed at all, might have been noticeably altered, along with the allegedly moral values atheist theory insists arise from it.  Evolution might well have yielded a quite different array of species than it has, and humans might not be the most intelligent species and they might flourish in ways radically different from those that now obtain.  That is, one can easily imagine a set of markedly different biological conditions, a set of conditions that demonstrated the physiological supremacy of a non-human species, one that flourished after the fashion, say, of an intelligent cockroach.  Cockroach-style flourishing would then become the measure of virtue, and not that means of flourishing that we humans sometimes now employ.  In other words, the moral absolutes yielded by the atheist system of thought (biological might makes moral right) are neither truly moral nor truly absolute.   They are simply that set of actions that the biological winners perceive to tend most effectively toward the pleasure and prosperity of their own species, which is, to put it bluntly, simply species bigotry parading as morality.

         To make the point in a different direction, precisely why the actions that conduce to the flourishing of the most intelligent and biologically innovative survivors of natural selection, whatever those survivors happened to be like, should be called morality is not clear and has not been (indeed cannot be) metaphysically justified or properly established.  In other words, what is here propounded by the atheists is not true morality.  It is an intellectual misfire that bases morality on the philosophically injudicious assumption that somehow biological might makes moral right, or that merely by succeeding biologically a species gets to use itself as the measure of good and evil.  This is not a system of moral absolutes; it is a system of biological relativism.  It is selfishness masquerading as the basis for right and wrong.  

         That those actions which conduce to the flourishing of the most biologically innovative survivors of natural selection should be called "moral" merely confuses with right and wrong those actions that seem to the atheists of that species to permit that species to flourish at one particular point in its evolution.  If in the atheistic worldview species evolve, then the species whose flourishing they appoint as the arbiter of morality was sufficiently different in its earlier stages of development from what it is now, and will be likely be sufficiently different in its later stages of development, that those means by which it now flourishes might be significantly different both from what they once were and might eventually become.  We simply do not know.  But whatever those unknown facts were in the past and will be in the future, the atheist must endorse them as moral, however grotesque and wicked they might actually be.  If so, what are now called right and wrong in the atheist view are not moral absolutes, but simply that set of actions perceived to be most efficient at the moment.  What set of actions will be so perceived in the distant future is still an open question, a question that might receive a starkly different answer then than either it now does or previously did, but which the atheist system of thought must nevertheless consider morally correct and universally binding if it is to employ the language of moral absolutes.  In short, to our previous charges of species bigotry and biological relativism we now must add time relativism and moral contradiction -- but not moral absolutes.  The new atheists cannot find metaphysical grounding for their claims to morality.  They cannot talk about how religion ruins everything because the word "ruins" implies a morality not metaphysically available in the atheist worldview.  They can say they do not like what religion does, and that they prefer something else.  But they can raise no truly moral objection.

         To take it a step further, not only does the doctrine of evolution entail the notion that the human species and human nature are essentially mutable, but this natural mutability is amplified by the very startling, and very real, prospect of the species itself orchestrating and accelerating its own evolution and alteration by means of its scientific experimentation and acumen.  Like the natural mutability that precedes it, this self-orchestrated mutability is the death knell of any and all moral absolutes supposedly rooted in human nature.  When we do acquire the power to modify the nature of the race -- and some speculate that our ability to do so is soon to be gotten -- will what we produce still be truly and fully human?  Will right and wrong then be rooted in human nature as it was or in human nature as it is in whatever it is we shall have made of it?  Assuming that the alteration in human nature is accomplished only one person at a time rather than in the entire race all at once, and assuming therefore that two (or more) sorts of persons with a defendable claim to human nature exist simultaneously, which version of human nature supersedes the other and is to be considered the fountain from which all right and wrong arise?  Will those who possess the older human nature be subject to a system of right and wrong that arises from a newer nature not entirely their own?  What if our experiments do not always succeed?  That is, what if the treatment does not always "take;" what if it yields occasionally idiosyncratic results that produce far more than merely two varieties of human nature?  Which variety is normative?  Shall we fall into the logical contradiction of having a number of competing sets of moral absolutes, each with different content?  The answer to these and other questions are still unknown to us.  In the wake of their ignorance, the atheists are flying by faith.  Though the answer to such puzzling questions might be difficult, or even impossible, to identify, and though the answers to such questions might raise insurmountable difficulties for those who advocate this inadequate atheistic system of moral absolutes, the answers given to those questions make no difference at all to my purpose because any answer given them exposes the metaphysical foundation of the atheistic ethical system as shifting sand, not moral bedrock.  Nothing transitory can yield moral absolutes. 

         Furthermore, if humans did not exist at all (and under the direction of a mindless evolutionary process they easily might not), and if right and wrong arise from human nature, then right and wrong would not exist (regardless of whether we considered right and wrong as either moral absolutes or as the biological relativism that emerges from biological success).  In other words, because the atheist theory of ethics ties morality to human nature, the fate of human nature is the fate of morality.  That fate, if the second law of thermodynamics is correct, is oblivion.  The material world is winding down to something like an amorphous, motionless mass of dead matter at a low temperature, incapable of sustaining life.  Along with the demise of the physical universe go all the atheist's alleged moral absolutes, the true name of which we now see is “nihilism.”  In this system, morality, like everything else, comes precisely to nothing.  When human beings cease to exist sometime in the future, as any worldview that leaves out God must assert, right and wrong cease to exist at that same moment.  In short, what is intended by the atheists to be the foundation of morality is really its death warrant.  

         (3) Why flourishing (and not something else) should be the measure of morality cannot be proven, cannot be metaphysically rooted or justified.  To select flourishing as the measure of moral discernment, or to define flourishing as one thing and not another, is merely to elevate both one's own personal preference for flourishing and one's own definition of flourishing (whatever it happened to be) to the level of a moral absolute, which they neither are nor ever could be.  One might just as easily have selected private pleasure at the expense of another's pain as the measure of moral conduct, as might someone like the Marquis de Sade.  One might even prefer death to life, as do virtually all suicides.  That happiness or prosperity, and not death, is the proper content of flourishing cannot be established upon a merely evolutionary basis, except that an atheist simply assert a preference (pragmatic or otherwise) for the one and not the other.  Again, whatever else such private preferences might be, they are not moral absolutes.

         The un-Godded worldview does not, and cannot, yield moral oughtness. It yields only competing sets of preferences to which some atheists unjustifiably try to attach the language of oughtness. Other more astute atheists refuse to make that mistake. On that point those more astute and consistent atheists deserve full credit because they understand that no atheistic explanation of morality has the metaphysical rootedness necessary for moral absolutes. Their worldview precludes it. They know that when other more inconsistent atheists want to hold onto atheism and to avail themselves of the language of oughtness, they fall afoul of what atheist Ayn Rand called the error of stolen concepts: They employ ideas and categories to which their system has no metaphysical access.  Atheists who invoke morality are idea thieves.

         Put differently, it makes all the difference in the world whether we say mind came from matter or matter came from mind. Because ideas have consequences, if you choose the former, you cut yourself off from the consequences that attach solely to the latter. One of those lost consequences is the metaphysical rootedness necessary for moral absolutes, that is, for a morality that rises above the level of mere preference.

         Finally, as much as I value the work of C. S. Lewis, in general, and his The Abolition of Man, in particular, I would be misusing his book were I to argue from it that, because there appears to be substantial agreement among the peoples of the world about the rules of right and wrong, therefore these rules of right and wrong are moral absolutes.  Consensus, regardless of how extensive or how enduring it might be, is no sure measure of morality.  All too often the majority has consented, either explicitly or implicitly, to colossal evil.  Atheist governments have made it happen time and again.  Morality is not determined by nose count (or by power).  "Majority" is no synonym for "morality."

         In a word, if there is no God, there is no good.

The Chronicle of an Undeception

The Chronicle of an Undeception    

            "The central myth of the sixties was that [its] wretched excess was really a serious quest for new values."

                                                                                                George Will

 

I.  The Tragic Vision of Life

            I confess to believing at one time or another nearly all the pervasive and persistent fantasies of the sixties.  In the words of Joni Mitchell's anthem for the Woodstock nation, I thought all I had to do was "get back to the land to set my soul free."  I thought that flowers had power, that love could be free, and that the system was to blame.  By 1968, I had the whole world figured out.  I knew the cause of every evil -- America -- and I knew the solution to every problem -- freedom and tolerance.

            If truth be told, of course, I knew nothing, at least nothing worth knowing.  I knew how to posture, but not how to stand.  I knew how to protest, but not how to protect.  I knew how to work up an impressive case of moral outrage, but I didn't know morality.  I knew about peace, but I didn't know enough to fight for it.  I knew about self-indulgence, self-preservation, self-esteem, and self-expression, but I didn't know about self-sacrifice and self-control. 

            Worse still, I didn't even know myself.  I didn't know what Socrates knew about me -- that I entered this world in a state of total and seamless ignorance, and that my ignorance could never be breached as long I remained blissfully unaware of it.  I didn't know what St. Augustine knew about me -- that the well of my soul was poisoned, and that whatever was down in the well would come up in the bucket.  St. Augustine also knew this about my soul:  No matter how hard it tried, no matter where it looked, it could never find its rest anywhere but in God.  I didn't know what Edmund Burke knew about me -- that no government could fix what ailed me, either by the things it did or by the things it did not.  The most any state could do was to help protect me from myself and from others.  Most importantly, however, I didn't know that I was Everyman.  When I learned that, I stopped being a liberal.     

            Like almost all dissidents of my generation, I was a protestor without a plan and a visionary without a vision.  I had not yet learned that you see only what you are able to see, and I was able to see only the egalitarian, relativistic, self-gratifying, superstitions of the secular, wayward, left.  Please do not think that this was simply a case of prelapsarian innocence.  It was not.  It was ignorance and it was evil, although I would have denied it at the time. 

            Only slowly did I come to understand that my fellow dissidents and I had taken for ourselves the easiest and least productive of all tasks, that of denigrator.  And only slowly did I come to understand that to destroy is easy, that to build is hard, and that to preserve is hardest of all. 

            But it was worse even than that, because my fellow dissidents and I were blind to the most obvious truths, especially to what Russell Kirk and others have called the tragic vision of life -- the profound realization that evil is not something “out there,” it is something “in here.”  The tragic vision of life arises from the fact that we are flawed -- deeply, desperately, tragically flawed -- and we cannot be trusted.  We are broken at the heart; our defect is life wide and soul deep.  Though we are capable of reason, because of our selfish passions and our moral weaknesses we are rarely reasonable.  We ourselves are what is chiefly wrong with the world.  We are this planet’s most malignant and enduring ailment.  We have our dignity, to be sure, but we have our horror as well.  I can tell you this:  I did not wake up until I met the enemy face to face.  I met him in the mirror.  We all do. 

            I had to learn to stare squarely into that face in the mirror, into the face of hard, fallen reality, and not to flinch.  I did not, in fact I could not, comprehend the tragic vision of life until I learned that the problem of the human heart is at the heart of the human problem.  Once I examined with care and honesty the habits of my own heart and those of my dissident friends, I learned that C. S. Lewis was right:  to be one of the sons of Adam or the daughters of Eve is both glory enough to raise the head of the lowest beggar and shame enough to lower the head of the highest king.  I am a human being.  That is my wealth; that is my poverty. 

            Before that undeception, I was like all other cultural and political liberals.  I had fallen prey to what Jeane Kirkpatrick identified as the error of misplaced malleability.  I thought that human institutions could be reshaped at will to fit the plans already existing inside my head.  It cannot be done.  Human institutions arise from human action; human action arises from human nature; and human nature is notoriously intractable.  Apart from the grace of God, human nature cannot be fixed, no matter how badly it needs fixing.  I finally learned that my deepest need was not more freedom.  I needed the grace and guidance of God.  Until I understood that, I remained shamelessly superficial.

            I had to put my insipid and airy romanticism where it belonged, on the burgeoning junk pile of the fatally flawed and conclusively overthrown fantasies to which the human mind seems continually to give rise.  Not romanticism but religion, not Byron but the Bible, not poetry but Paul, not Voltaire but virtue, not trends but tradition, not idealism but ideas, not genius but grace, not freedom but faith could cure me.  I had to exchange Wordsworth for the Word and revolution for repentance.  Thus, while some of the things I valued were useful and good, they were not properly fundamental.  I had to put first things first.

            The tragic vision of life humbled me.  From it I learned that it was not my prerogative to invent wisdom and virtue.  That had already been done.  My responsibility was to listen to the One who invented them and to those whom He taught.  Wisdom and virtue, I had to learn, were not born with my generation, or with Rousseau's, or Matthew Arnold's, or even Eugene McCarthy's.  I had to learn in the last half of the twentieth century what was already old news even in the days of Jeremiah, the ancient prophet, who wrote,             

                        Stand at the crossroads, and look,

                        and ask for the ancient paths,

                        where the good way lies;

                        and walk in it, and find rest for your souls (Jer. 6: 16).

Wisdom is found by walking the "ancient paths."  Those "ancient paths" led through the wilderness, through the sea, even through the valley of the shadow of death, and not through Berkeley, not Columbia, not the Village, not Watts, not Haight-Ashbury, not Altamont, and not Woodstock. 

            The tragic vision of life also taught me that order is the most fundamental of all political and social needs.  Because it is, I learned that the police are not pigs.  They never were, and are not now, an occupying army intent upon destroying my freedom.  Quite the opposite; imperfect as they sometimes are, the police are the guardians of freedom and the paid protectors of life and property.  In the line of duty, some of them even died for me, and for you.  The tragic vision of life taught me that you cannot reject authority -- whether civil, familial, cultural or divine -- and yet live in an orderly world.  When you “off the pigs,” (of whatever sort) you give birth to an outlaw culture, not to freedom.  To live outside the rules, to live outside authority, to live without the wisdom of the ages and of God, is to court slavery and death.  Enforceable law and law enforcement are requirements of the first rank.  Because human nature is what it is, without great volumes of enforceable law, freedom is impossible.  As Dean Clarence Manion observed in the very last line he wrote before his death in 1979, “a society that is not held together by its teaching and observance of the laws of Almighty God is unfit for human habitation and doomed to destroy itself.”  

            When is freedom not enough?  Every time truth and righteousness are at stake.  In a fallen world, that is almost always.  Freedom must be exercised according to the dictates of truth and virtue, never the other way round.  Freedom must be limited by the demands of justice, love and revelation.  The most important consideration regarding any action is not “Is it free?” but “Is it good?”  When I learned that, I stopped being a libertarian.  Freedom, furthermore, is an incomplete concept.  Whenever someone insists upon freedom, you must ask "Freedom to do what?"  You must ask that question because freedom, like tyranny, has its unintended and unforeseen consequences, some of which are colossally vile.  In passing, I name but one -- abortion. 

            From the tragic vision of life I learned that you have to do what is right whether it suits you or not.  In the sixties, we hardly did anything that did not suit us.  I also learned that the enemy is not the CIA, not the FBI, and not the GOP; it's the NEA, NOW, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, DNC, WCC and NPR, indeed the entire grab bag of alphabetized, leftist, subverters of culture, of tradition, and of revelation.  I learned that those who deprive themselves of the wisdom of western tradition are no more free than a baby left alone by its parents to do as it pleases.  I learned that politics is not about equality, but justice; that personal action is not about freedom, but righteousness; and that sex is not about pleasure, but love and privilege and posterity. 

            Those things and more I learned from the tragic vision of life.  I commend them to you.  They taught me that in many ways the sixties were twisted and misshapen.

            The sixties are over, and it's a good thing.  The sixties were a bad idea, if for no other reason than because the sixties had no ideas, only selfish desires hiding behind the shallow slogans and freelance nihilism emblazoned on psychedelic bumper stickers, slogans like “I dissent, therefore I am.”  The only things about which we were intellectually modest in the sixties were the claims of objective truth.  We seemed unable to wrap our minds around even the most obvious ideas.  We seemed unable to realize, for example, that you cannot raise your consciousness until you have one.  The sixties were perhaps the most unconscious decade in centuries.  It was a time of suffocating intellectual mediocrity, from which our nation has not yet recovered. 

II.  Sixties Redivivus  

            I can imagine a student reading these remarks and wondering, "This all might be well and good, but what does it have to do with me?  I wasn't even alive in the sixties."

            My answer is simply this:  While the sixties are over, they are not dead, not by a long shot.  They live, indeed they thrive, not only in the White House juvenocracy (which is tragic enough), but in the faculty lounges and endowed chairs of nearly every college and university in the United States.  Tenured faculty members everywhere have traded their tie-dyed T-shirts and their bell bottom jeans for a cap and gown, if not a cap and bells.  Those faculty members are the entrenched purveyors of an unexamined and indefensible hand-me-down Marxism, and of what Allan Bloom called nihilism with a happy ending.  They have become paid agents of the very colleges and universities they once tried to burn to the ground, and not because they gave up on the dreams of the sixties.  What they failed to do as protesters they have succeeded in doing as professors.  Quite possibly they have done it to you, because the entire teaching profession, from the pre-kindergarten level to the post-graduate, has become a political captive of the cultural left.  Like roving street gangs prowling the halls of academe, power hungry bands of leftist professors everywhere have instigated countless institutional turf wars, most of which they won.  They succeeded in burying the accumulated wisdom of the ages in the name of learning; in overthrowing academic freedom in the name of tolerance; in stifling debate in the name of openness; in exalting egalitarianism above all other ideas in the name of equality; and in segregating and tribalizing the university, the nation, and the culture by gender, by age, by religion, by race, and by sexual preference, all in the name of unity.  The schools and colleges that hire and then tenure them commit academic treason.  I simply remind you that any intellectual community that is unwilling or unable to identify its enemies cannot defend itself.  David Horowitz was exactly right:  Those who cherish free institutions, and the culture of wisdom and virtue that sustains them, must stand up boldly against the barbarians already inside the gates.

            Because the sixties live, this decade has become irrational, ignorant, and morally illiterate.  If the sixties were majestically self-indulgent, this decade is perhaps the most self-congratulatory decade our nation has ever seen, and not because we have succeeded where all other generations have failed, but in spite of the fact that we have failed where all other American generations have succeeded -- in learning to learn, in learning to work, in learning to listen, and in learning to worship.  This is a decade determined to ignore, if not belittle and malign, beauty, truth and goodness, three things most moderns foolishly believe are in the eye of the beholder.  Our decade is the sworn enemy of revelation and of righteousness.  If the threefold mantra of the sixties was "tune in, turn on and drop out," that of today is comprised of that earlier mantra’s four silly children, four sentences that no thinking man ever permits himself or herself to utter in the face of a moral challenge, sentences like: "Everything is relative," “There is no right or wrong," "There are no absolutes," and “Who's to say?" 

            If you cannot now figure out why belief in those four sentences is the death of learning and of virtue, then perhaps for that very reason you can understand why I spend nearly all my time and energy as a professor and as a writer defending the ancient liturgy of the enlightened mind -- that right and wrong are matters of fact, not matters of feeling; that without God there is no good; that justice is not equality; that new is not necessarily better; and that relativism, secularism, and pragmatism are not the friends of truth and goodness.  The denizens of modernity probably do not realize and probably do not care that they are the befuddled and bedeviled lackeys of designer truth, of made-to-order reality, and of ad hoc morals making.  If you follow them, you walk into the night without a light and into the woods without a compass.  I want to tell you as plainly as I can that their vision of academic tolerance lacks intellectual virtue.   It dilutes the high cultural inheritance of the past with the petty and insupportable leftisms of the present.

            A moment ago, I imagined a student that might be wondering about the relevance of my semi-autobiographical musings.  I also can imagine someone thinking that all I’ve done since the sixties is simply to change sides in the culture war that rages around us.  To think so, however, is to assume that flower power and Christianity are morally equivalent and that hippies rank equally with saints, two false assumptions that, if you make them, show just how much a child of the sixties you really are.  

            I have often wondered why today feels like a sixties renaissance.  I discovered the answer to that question in a college cafeteria and in conversations with some of my students’ parents. 

            First, the parents:  I have often noticed my students saying and thinking the same sorts of things their parents say and think when I speak with them.  Such things happen because the acorn seldom falls far from the oak tree.  That fact is more than a little significant because the parents of today’s college students were probably the young men and women of the sixties.  Many of the responses my students learned to give to life are responses they learned from their parents.  More often than not, those responses are the stock responses of the sixties.  In one way, of course, that is good; I want my students to learn all the truth they can from their parents.  But insofar as my students’ responses mimic the responses of the sixties, they too must learn the lessons I had to learn.  They must come to understand, with all the clarity and courage they can muster, the truth of the tragic vision of life:  We are, every one of us, morally defective, ethically twisted, and spiritually broken.  If my students fail to come to that realization and to act upon it, both they and their world shall suffer. 

            Second, the cafeteria:  I often notice my students echoing some of the things they hear their teachers say.  When talking with students in the cafeteria, for example, I sometimes have the eerie feeling that I’m not in the cafeteria at all; I’m in a faculty meeting.  I say so because I frequently hear the clear and unmistakable intonations of my colleagues’ voices, but coming from other people.  Sometimes I even hear my own voice.  Again, that’s good; I want college students to learn all the truth they can from their professors.  But here’s the rub:  Like me, many of their teachers were children of the sixties; and like me, many of those professors have made only an incomplete break with the mistakes of that era.  From their other professors and from me, my students have gotten many of their ideas.  Like my students themselves, their ideas have parents.  Worldviews and attitudes, just like the people who have them, show marked family resemblances.  For that very reason, I often want to ask my students this question:  From where do you imagine your rampant relativism and your not-very-carefully-hidden contempt for authority arise?  In most cases, when I consider asking such a question, I already know the answer -- from the sixties and from the people (like me) who reached their emotional and intellectual maturity at that time.

III.  Undeception Redivivus? 

            Here’s my point:  If you believe in the sixties, or if you believe in today, you believe a lie.  As I did, you need an undeception.  In order to get it, you need to go back well beyond the sixties, back to a wisdom that is older than time.  You need to go back to God and to the wisdom that spoke this universe into existence.  You need to go back to the God who made you and redeemed you.  Real answers are found nowhere else.

            It should not surprise you when I tell you that, if you do what I suggest, you shall meet energetic and determined opposition, sometimes even from those who call themselves the friends of God and of tradition.  As Socrates observed long centuries ago, most men do not take kindly to the preacher of moral reform, to the pursuer of the good.  There is no telling, he said in the Gorgias, what might happen to such a man.  But do not let that stop you.  Do it anyway.  Do it because you need it; do it because it is right; and do it because it ought to be done.  Your task will be difficult.  It's always easy to be a modernist; it's always easy to go with the spirit of the age.  But in the face of the world's downward slide you must be vigilant, strong, perceptive, and courageous.  The world needs people like that, people unafraid to turn around and walk back into the light.  Our world needs people like that more now than perhaps it ever has because everywhere you look the adversary culture of the sixties has become the dominant culture of today. 

            Our cultural patrimony is being embezzled from under our very noses.  If you think of yourself as a Christian, or as a conservative, or as both, the view from here is haunting:  We don’t own the public square; we don’t own the media; we don’t own the arts; we don’t own the sciences; we don’t own the arena; we don’t own the marketplace; we don’t own the academy; we don’t own anything.  We don't even own the Church.  It’s all owned by the sixties.

            Therefore, if, as I did, you find yourself an unwilling or unwitting child of the sixties, I invite you, I exhort you, to turn with an open mind and an open heart to the prophets and apostles in Scripture and to the great poets and sages outside Scripture.  They are your only liberation from modernist thralldom and from slavery to your own fallen desires.  (Did you know that you can be a slave to your own will?)  Put yourself on a quest for eternal truth, and never give up until you find Him.  

            While you are on this quest, you must always remember that most of the powers that be are of no help to you.  Those who loved the sixties own today.  The left still hates America, and it still hates what made America possible:  faith in God, the sacredness and inviolability of the family and of life, individual responsibility, local and limited government, and traditional morality.  The leftists of today are the enemies of heartland values.  They want you to keep quiet.  They want you to sit meekly in the corner of the room, hands folded and mouth shut.  They want you to be nice.  They want the friends of beauty, truth, and goodness to speak only when spoken to and, when they do speak, to speak only those things that offend no one.  That they have offended you seems not to matter.  They want you to stick to the script.  They want you to keep your views to yourself and to act as if your views were not true, indeed as if there were no truth.  That's what political correctness -- Or should I say political cleansing? -- is all about. 

            Consider it for just a moment:  What kind of man or woman would you be if you let yourself be controlled by the empty criticisms of the rootless left, and what kind of world would you be creating for those who came after you if you neglected to restore realism to human thought and turned your back on the only thing that can make you content even in dungeons, even in slums, even in the face of death?

            My desire for you is that you throw off the vestiges of leftist cultural subversion, that you make yourself a devotee and guardian of the wisdom of the ages, that you become the sworn enemy of nonsense in all its forms, and, most importantly, that you become the faithful and ardent friend of God.  Then, and only then, can you be free. 

            What has been given you as a heritage you must now accept as your quest.  If you wish to be wise, you must learn to learn from your ancestors.  You must learn to make peace with the wisdom of the ages and with those who gave it, regardless of their sex, their race, or their ethnic background. You must do so because wisdom and truth are not gender based, race based, or nation based. They are thought based, and thinking is very hard work.  Knowledge is not parochial.  It is not the private property of any race, any gender, any era, or any ethnic group.  It belongs to those determined to get it, to those who seek it resolutely and who will not be denied, no matter how difficult the circumstances arrayed against them.

            In that light, I invite you today to make one of the most important choices of your entire life:  Which will you have, truth or rest? 

            You cannot have both.  

           

The Pro-Abortion Contradictions: They Endorse What They Oppose; They Oppose What They Endorse

         Pro-abortion arguments are fraught with contradictions.  For example:  (1) Abortion defenders often say that it’s wrong to force morality on others.  (2) They also say that abortion is a woman’s issue and that men have no proper say in it.  Men ought to stay away.

         If so, then the pro-abortion folks need to oppose Roe v. Wade because it transgresses the very principles the abortion lobby says it upholds.

         (1) Before Roe V. Wade was decided in 1973, abortion was illegal in 45 states and was severely restricted in two others.  Opposition to it was formal, legal, and almost universal.  Yet, despite the near universal rejection of the practice, the Supreme Court imposed its morality on the entire nation.  If imposing morality on others is wrong in principle, as the pro-abortion lobby insists, then the Supreme Court decision was wrong because it imposed its morality upon an entire nation.  But that imposition of morality is never opposed by the pro-choicers, which tells you that they are either cheaters or liars.  They say they oppose imposing morality in principle, but they don’t, not if their morality is being imposed.  They only reject imposing morality when someone else’s morality is in view.

         (2) If, as a matter of principle, men have no proper say in abortion, as the pro-abortionists insist, then they ought to oppose Roe v. Wade because it was decided entirely by men, a mere nine men who imposed their morality upon the whole nation.  If men have no proper say in the issue, as the pro-choice defenders insist, then the Supreme Court decision doubly transgresses pro-abortion principles:  It imposes morality and it was decided by men.  But that double transgression of principle means nothing at all to those who endorse abortion.  As long as men impose the same morality the pro-abortion faction holds, men can say, do, or impose whatever they wish.  It’s only when men argue against abortion that they must be excluded.

         In other words, it’s not really about imposing morality on others, and it’s not really about excluding men from the issue.  It’s not really about the pro-choice lobby’s alleged principles.  It’s really about vacuous self-contradiction.  It’s about cognitive dissonance on the grandest scale.

         But then whoever accused the pro-abortion cadre of logical consistency?  Certainly not I. 

Natural Law, Unnatural Law, and Unnatural Lawyers

         Before you start pontificating about natural law and its alleged lessons, you’d better consider all the ways that nature is now unnatural.  You’d better know the difference between nature as created and nature as cursed.  You must understand the difference between what nature is now and what nature ought to be, once was, and will be again.

         All any natural law advocate has ever seen is unnatural or sub-natural nature.  Further, the natural lawyers need to understand that they themselves are unnatural, that they universally are fallen, wicked, sinful, and rebellious.  They are unnatural and wicked creatures reasoning on the basis of unnatural nature in order to tell us about real natural law, as if, despite all their incapacities and habitual immoralities, natural lawyers were objective, disinterested, and reliable on the point.

         I’m not convinced.

         The natural law crowd does not know and therefore cannot articulate the difference between natural nature and unnatural nature, whether in themselves or in the world at large.  Those differences are perhaps unimaginable.  Those differences are something akin to the difference between ancient Eden and the Arabian desert.  Such differences are depicted in the eschatological image of the lion lying down with the lamb.   Shockingly, and to us quite unnaturally, the lamb will not be inside the lion when it happens.  That future version of nature and our contemporary version of it seem to operate quite differently.   The details of that difference we do not know.  Natural lawyers have never seen nature not under a curse, nature unburdened.  They have never seen themselves not under that debilitating and burdensome curse.  Apart from God telling them, they cannot know and do not know what real lessons real nature might teach, if any, and how those lessons differ from those supposedly taught now by a cursed nature and by the unnatural lawyers who fancy themselves able to speak for it.

         When unnatural lawyers explain the “laws” of unnatural nature, they do so in a tendentious and highly selective manner.  They do not tell you for your instruction and imitation that nature is vicious, that it is “red in tooth and claw,” that its law is normally to kill in order to live.  They do not tell you that nature is doomed, that it is winding down to a cold, motionless, amorphous mass at a low temperature, that in the end all stories reduce to precisely nothing.  That is, they do not tell you that natural law is murderous and nihilistic.  Rather, they want to use nature to teach the things that they want it to teach, not what it actually does teach, if it teaches anything all.

         In nature as it is, the law is either to kill or be killed, even though the natural lawyers will not teach you to live in that brutal fashion, and would be appalled if you seriously undertook to do so.

         Indeed, even if living things in nature escape being killed, they still die.  In other words, selfish predation and both individual and cosmic nihilism are the order of the day, even if the unnatural lawyers don’t recommend that you live accordingly.  Unnatural lawyers publicly trumpet natural law while ignoring or rejecting much of it.  They often alter it to fit their own agenda.  With regard to the real laws of contemporary nature, they are what they despise others being with regard to positive law:  They are legal and judicial activists.  They push their own truncated agenda onto the law and subjugate the agenda of nature’s current constitution to it.  The so-called natural law advocates are unnatural, indeed anti-natural, if by “natural” we mean “nature as it ought to be and used to be,” and not “nature as it is.”

         If unnatural nature as it now is “teaches” anything, it “teaches” serial marriage and abandonment, not simply monogamy.  It “teaches” us to devour our young, not just to nurture them.

         If you want to know real right and real wrong -- and you should -- then you need to go to God’s Word, not to the current workings of a cursed and therefore unnatural natural order or to the self-aggrandizing and twisted mental gymnastics of unnatural lawyers.    

Who Pays?

(1) If someone cannot pay for a service, then someone else -- not government -- has to pay for it.  Government does not pay for anything.  It uses the power of coercion to force some other citizen(s) to foot the bill.  The only money government has or can get is money it takes from citizens.

         (2) Health care is not a right because health care is a service provided by others.  We have no right to their work.  That is, we have no right to force others to do work for us.  If we could compel the work of others at our will, they would be slaves.  Your doctor is not your slave.  Neither is your grocer, your plumber, or your auto body repairman.  If you want health care, you must be willing to pay for it, just like you must be willing to pay for it if you want a muffler, a television, a computer, a cell phone, or groceries.  Those things all come at a price.  Someone must pay that price.  The only real question is, "Who ought to pay for it?"

         (3) Without exception, every public policy hurts someone.  If you decide to hurt someone by law or by policy, you'd better have a remarkably good moral and political reason.  Frankly, there just aren't any good reasons of that sort because to discriminate by law against the successful is an evil.  You must not target others by law because of their bank account any more than you ought to target others for their skin color or their gender.  Evil is evil regardless of your intentions. Good intentions don’t mend the matter at all.

         (4) If you want government involved in this issue at all, it should be involved only as a way to prompt or promote voluntary charity.  By that I mean that government should give tax breaks to those who voluntarily decide to assist the less fortunate in their time of need, whether that need be for health care, groceries, housing, etc.  The generosity of the American people is legendary.  Government, therefore, should be creating incentives that set that charity loose to do well the things for which government is shockingly ill-suited, things like charity.  

The Constitution v. Roberts

         I often disagree with Justice Ginsburg, but not because I think her qualifications inadequate.  They are not.  My disagreements are not about her background but about her legal reasoning and the conclusions to which it leads.  My disagreements are not about her but her work. 

         The same holds true with my disagreement with Chief Justice Roberts.  His qualifications are stellar.  His legal reasoning is not.  His credentials are impressive.  Everyone agrees.  About his ruling on health care legislation, they do not, not even those who ruled with him, like Justice Ginsburg.

         I find the Chief’s recent reasoning eccentric, even shocking.  I am shocked because I do not recall anything in his legal background that made me anticipate his decision or its alleged justification.   Perhaps such a personal precedent exists and I have missed it.  I miss things every day.  But if his previous work contains such a precedent, then it seems no one noticed it.  No one expected him to rule as he did or for the reasons he expressed.  At least I have found no Court-watcher’s prediction in that direction.

         I am aghast to see Chief Justice Roberts assert that the role of the court is to find ways to make a law constitutional.  I do not recall him advocating this view.  If he did, then I would not, if the privilege were mine, vote for his appointment.  The burden of making a law constitutional belongs solely to the legislature that drafted, debated, and passed it, not the courts.  The courts decide if the legislature succeeded in that task or not.  The courts do not take it upon themselves to do what the lawmakers failed to do.

         In order to do what he says is the court's duty, namely to find a way to make the law constitutional, Roberts had either to sever the individual mandate from the rest of the bill or else alter the fundamental nature of the mandate from "penalty" to "tax.”  He opted for “tax.”  Even Ginsburg, who was on the winning side with Roberts, formally dissented from his calling this a tax.  She and I rarely agree.  Here we do.  Indeed, Roberts’ reasoning is so eccentric that it actually drove Ginsburg into the Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Kennedy camp against him – a judicial rarity.

         As I see it, the deliberative history of a law is indispensable to assessing its nature, content, purpose, and constitutionality properly.  If, in their debate, the legislators expressly rejected classifying the individual mandate as a tax, and if the legislators insist that calling it a tax means they will not vote for the bill, then the Court must assess the law on those expressly argued and formally articulated grounds.  Instead, the Court, through Roberts, morphed this law into something it is not.  On that point, Scalia was right:  Roberts re-wrote the law from the bench in order to find some way to make it constitutional.

         Nothing in Roberts’ confirmation hearings made me think he would or could do such a thing, much less declare it his solemn duty.   He seems to me to have betrayed his own jurisprudential principles and his own sworn testimony in his confirmation hearings in order to reach this decision, as if stare decisisincluded invoking Benedict Arnold.

         Roberts manipulated the law in order to treat it as a tax.  He then held that the taxing power of Congress is broad enough to rest this newly altered law upon it.  By doing so, he ignored the President and the Congress, who argued strenuously that the individual mandate was not a tax.  Both said explicitly that Congress did not impose a tax; it imposed a penalty for failure to comply with a regulatory mandate.  If the individual mandate is a tax, and if the Supreme Court, not the House, made it a tax, then we stand in transgression of Article I, Section 7.  Further, if it is a tax, then I conclude that the Anti-Injunction Act prevents the Court even from hearing the case, much less deciding it.

         If that is what happened, and if, as some speculate, Roberts’ motive was to prevent the Court from appearing politicized or from having its legitimacy undermined in the eyes of some, he has accomplished the opposite.  If that is what happened and why, then he should resign, period.  He swore to uphold the Constitution, not to prevent folks from thinking his court was or was not political.

         For the second time in a week, the Chief Justice has failed to uphold the Constitution.  The federal government’s constitutional obligation to enforce border security was the victim earlier.

Legislating Morality (part 4)

Morally sound law helps us to distinguish right from wrong, innocence from guilt, and justice from injustice.  But if the law from which we learn is not rooted in true morality, what we learn is misshapen, misguided, and misleading, because law always teaches.   In such cases it teaches error.  Put differently, ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad ones.  The bad ideas encoded in supposedly morals-free law are corrosive of virtue, of duty, of civility, and of human fulfillment.  One of the disastrous effects of allegedly morals-free legislation is that it tends to produce deep and widespread doubt in persons across the culture about what is right and what is wrong, which leaves only a resort to power as a way out of our moral dilemmas.  In a moral vacuum, power and doubt rule all.   Doubt makes us unsure of ourselves and of our beliefs; power makes those who have it despotic over those who do not.  Without morality in law, we know less well and less surely what is right, and if we are ignorant about what is right and wrong, we can raise no compelling argument against evil, or even know it when we see it.  Our ignorance makes it so.

         Government and governing involve questions of value, questions about what is good, and what is good for us, as well as what is evil and what will do us harm.  To instruct us regarding the good, to lead us toward it and to protect us from evil -- whether our own or someone else’s -- are all part of the function of law.  But those who wish to exile virtue from the legal code, who wish to banish virtue from law and to render legislation a morality-free zone set these important and valuable functions of law at nought.  Were those persons to succeed, both we and they would suffer incalculable harm, having had one of our most useful moral educators quite shut down, censored as it were.  They would stop the moral voice of law, and in so doing would silence one of our most valuable instructors of civic virtue, thereby destroying one of our most effective guides to prudent social behavior and to the blessings that attend it.

         All cultures are rooted in, and are expressions of, deeply held values.  Cultures are the historical outworking of those values, the historical human consequences of those values, values that sometimes lead to compassion, beauty, war, deprivation, heroism, or degeneration. Law is a function of culture -- all cultures have law-- which means that law is a function of values, of morality.  Law without values is cultural suicide, which is what those who wish to separate the one from the other are going to produce, whether they wish to do so or not.      

     In our age of increasingly complex moral problems, where technological advances outstrip our moral growth and understanding, we must do our level best to cultivate the wisest persons, the noblest motives, and the highest actions of which we are capable.  To do so, we must make far better use of the law as tutor, as moral ennobler.  We must remind ourselves repeatedly that the best habitat in which to raise ennobled citizens is a well-ordered society, one in which law is rooted in morality.  We must not forget that law is an expression of, and a shaper of, the conscience of a nation.  Consequently, the near-sighted and misguided movement to separate law from morality is as dangerous as it is impossible.  Both for our nation and for us as individuals, our character is our future.  Morality is destiny.

     And what morality ought that to be?  Simply put:  God’s.

     The laws of God, his commandments, are the righteous code of freedom, the rules that define and preserve both political freedom and its taproot, spiritual freedom.  God’s laws are not merely the suppression of fallen human impulse.  They are the honor code of liberation.  They are the way authentically free persons conduct their business with Him and with one another:  Now that you are free, here is how you ought to live.

God Himself declared as much to the ancient Israelites when, before He gave them His law, He reminded them that He was the very One who brought them out of slavery and bondage in Egypt (Exodus 20: 2).  Now that they were a free people, here’s the way a free people ought to act; here’s the way they ought to conduct their affairs.  If they were to be, and to remain, both morally and politically free, they must not lie (Exod. 20: 16); they must find ways of gaining rest for themselves and others (vv. 8-11); they must respect their elders, thereby acknowledging the debt they have to their ancestors and those who made the world they inherited (v. 12); they must respect and preserve private property (v. 15); they must respect human life and refrain from all murder  (v. 13); they must not serve any false gods, for there is one God and one God only (vv. 2-7); and they must keep themselves free from envy, lust and inordinate desires, which themselves are bondage and indicate moral slavery (v. 17).

In other words, the freedom God gave them came with responsibilities, and these laws articulate the responsibilities.  Freedom, to be preserved, comes with obligations.  These laws are the preservatives and the obligations.

Freedom, furthermore, must be extended to others, and these laws are how to extend it to those who are foreigners and who live among you.  As God never tired to remind the Israelites, they too were foreigners in other lands, and they knew first hand how bitter and crushing that experience could be (Exod. 22: 21, 23:9; Deut 5:5, 10: 19).  Imposing that crushing bitterness on others is not the way freed and righteous persons ought to live.

And if the ancient Jews found this freedom and its obligations beyond their reach, as the unregenerate always do, then the law would do something else for them:  It would lead them to The Great Liberator Himself (Gal. 3: 24), Who would set them free in soul, a liberation from which all other freedoms spring, and which helps to keep freed persons on the right side of the line that divides liberty from licentiousness.