Ultimate and Penultimate Currencies

Note: I started writing this in January 2010, and apparently put it away for some time. The basic theorem is an idea that has stayed with me and that I think on not infrequently. I actually thought I had published it here already. Oops.

In reading Cardinal Ratzinger's Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life on the evolution through salvation history of the notion of our reward from our Creator, a point that I've been mulling for some time struck me powerfully. As everyone knows and as is well attested in the pages of Sacred Scripture, the earlier conception of our reward was long life and worldly prosperity. Many are the Patriarchs given their farewell encomium by cataloging the preternatural number of their years before their passing, their great worldly wealth, and their long and lasting memory in their many descendants.

The Single Penultimate Currency Theorem

As I mentioned in my previous post, our concern for ourselves, our well being centers primarily on our bodily existence. All other wealth (jobs, money, possessions, children; even to some extent honor or reputation and education) is wealth to the extent that it succors our bodily existence. Hence, all good boils down to a single "currency"—our lives.

Yet it is also apparent to those who take the time to reflect on life and its meaning, that this life is not everything. The most evident manifestation of this truth is that this life ends. What payment does one receive at the end of life? It is all the same. And when one is dead, how does a happy memory profit the deceased? He is clearly beyond caring. And to top it off, this condition last far longer than one's life.

People can use whatever evil means they can to acquire the wealth that enhances and preserves life. But is a dishonest life truly worth living? People with integrity, who are truly worthy of respect, will say "no." But what good can we cite that would be worth living and dying without the goods of this life as long as one keeps one's honesty? One doesn't have to name it to recognize it must exist if justice is to prevail and goodness and happiness go together (NB: for many ancient philosophers, virtue was its own reward, so it needn't be eternal life). So, there must be another currency, one that is more ultimate than our corporeal existence.

Life is a currency, but it is thus only the penultimate currency.

Two Antepenultimate Currencies

But there are more immediate currencies (goods that humans work for) that become evident when we reflect on the sterotypical differences between what motivates men and women. Men tend to work for outward recognition, things like status, honor, and money. Women tend to work for love and personal connection. It's almost as if the “masculine” world of “achievement” and the caregiving world were two independent economies. (I think this is the reason caregiving is so poorly remunerated: the true currency here is not money.)

They aren’t truly independent of course. In truth these two economies are interlocking, two sides of support for human existence. Traditionally the masculine economy is seen as bigger and more important: naively it seems to provide the context for the caring economy, but really the two provide the context for each other. It’s been the Christian genius to reveal how the caring economy is in many fundamental ways more important; it is closer to the ultimate currency (according to Christian lights), without being identical to it of course.

Justice and gratitude

A friend recently reposted on Facebook a tweet that made the very worthy point that people who build accomodations for the handicapped in churches shouldn't expect effusive thanks from the people they've helped, since the act was a simply the duty of justice. It's a great point! But it made me reflect more deeply on the tension between justice and gratitude.

Justice of course is mandated by God. We need to treat our brothers and sisters justly. But gratitude is also mandated by God, and in fact is arguably the central Christian virtue. We need to give thanks, not only for what is granted us gratuitously, but also for what we receive that is simply our due.

These days everyone has rights. But (to vastly simplify) back in the day, all the rights belonged to one man (typically male), a monarch, or a small set of people, an aristocracy. Everyone else served them and received at their will. Whereas most people had to express gratitude for everything, the rulers got whatever they wanted, as their right, and thus had no need to express gratitude. The latter had no need to build the virtue of gratitude. So a small subset of people were designated with a tendency to lack a key virtue necessary for salvation, but the bulk of the population was given to exercise this virtue often.

These days of course, everyone is equal: we have all been elevated to the level of the rich rulers of the past. But our wealth is not primarily in money or real estate, but in rights. We all have equal rights, and thus we all equally are handicapped in the virtue of gratitude. Modernity has damned us by giving us nothing to hope for.

And Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mt 19:23-24)

So while there can be no argument that everyone should have justice, it is also clear why we moderns have such difficulty with Christian faith.

The Long-overdue Death of Embryonic Stem Cell Hype

The Hype over Embryonic Stem Cell Research Dies Not with a Bang but a Whimper

Science and scientists are subject to hype just like everyone else.

The Courage of Caitlyn

Although Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner's big coming out is buried under several layers of news-cycle by now, I don't think a post on his situation is out of place, seeing as he continues to keep himself in the public eye with a new "reality" television series.

The still quite-dominant liberal media persists in calling this very public "sex" change "courageous." But one has to wonder: on what basis? Is it because Jenner is going against public opinion? Surely that can't be it, when elite opinion is all lauding him! How can he be courageous for going against the dominant opinion when that dominant opinion is praising him for being courageous?

I say it is rather that Jenner is going against a higher authority: nature, his own created nature. Like the ancient gnostics: his is battling the wrath of the creator god to find the creation-transcending god: in the modern case, his own "sexual identity."

Hyposexuality

Really, Caitlyn Jenner is the victim of a much larger cultural problem: the misunderstanding of sex. The word sex has the same root as "section," the idea being that mankind is divided into two great sections, female and male. Only in the 20th century did the word take on the meaning of sexual intercourse, and from properly sexual intercourse, it was only a small leap to interactions in which only one of the organs involved was a sexual organ, that is to say, endowed with the proper procreative function. These days it's really a flattened sexuality that's people are celebrating: not a real sexuality at all, but only the firing of a bunch of treasured sensory neurons.

That's why I think a more accurate category for transexuals, homosexuals, and many other sexual deviants is hyposexual.

Darwinism and Amoralism

I went to a thought-provoking talk excellently presented by Professor Kenneth Miller, the Brown-University cell biologist who testified in the Dover trial on teaching intelligent design in public schools. As you may know, he's a Roman Catholic Christian, and the title of his talk was "Darwin, God and Design: Is There Room for God in the Evolutionary Process?".

The answer to the question, in short, was No: God is transcendent, so it's wrong to think of God as requiring "space" (literal or figurative) in his creation. A great point that definitely needs to be made, but one that doesn't do complete justice to our Creator, I'm afraid. God is primarily transcendent, of course, but he's also immanent: the saying goes that he's closer to each of us than we are to ourselves, so it would seem he could act within us. Plus, there's plenty of "room" for divine action in the "randomness" of the mutation that Darwinism says provides the novelty for the natural selection mill. Randomness in modern science basically means, "We don't know." And this room is not a gap, as in "God in the gaps," because even if one came up with a story to describe the particular mechanical interactions that caused what mutations occurred (the kinds of causes modern science in fact uses to explain), it could not in principle eliminate all meta-stories about an intelligent agent coordinating and arranging apparently natural secondary causes (mechanical and otherwise) for a larger goal.¹ Every scientific theory will always have boundary conditions but none will ever be able to fix those of the wild, wide world.

Be that as it may, that's not the main subject of this post. Mainly I wanted to discuss the problem of morality in the Darwinian account of nature. Dr. Miller admitted (1) that there is a continuity between apes and men in the fossil record and (2) that we can see in the human genome that we are still evolving. Primarily because of (1), it would seem that it's not clear to which creatures the natural moral laws applies. As Dr. Miller himself put it, if we came across a tribe of Australopithecus afarensis in some remote jungle, whether we should treat them as human or merely as a respected non-human relative is not clear.

Primarily because of (2) it would seem that the natural moral law is not fixed. If human nature is not fixed, then shouldn't the natural moral law that grows from that nature also be unfixed? If humans don't breed true, who's to say a human couple's offspring is necessarily human?

David Stove (an atheist), in his incisive, often funny, critique of human evolution, Darwinian Fairy Tales, wonders what natural selection can even mean with regard to man in light of the fact that the term was coined from "artificial selection," the process by which humans breed better non-human animals. (Is the way we humans pick our mates natural or artificial?) If evolution is a blind process, then why can't human beings lend an intelligent guiding hand? Why not engage in eugenics?

Discussion

With regard to randomness, I've written in the past. A further point to be made is that Darwinism, child of the mechanical philosophy and its biological consummation, explains using only extrinsic causes. What's so often missed is the interiority of fully natural causation. Why couldn't the evolution of organisms be determined from within (intrinsically), by the natures of the organisms themselves, instead of by an abstract Nature? This sort of immanent intelligence would also show as "randomness."³

With regard to man, it first needs to be noted that the timeline of human descent relies on very little actual hard evidence: the fossils would fit in the back of a pickup truck.² Archaeologists see a continuity of evolution, but based only on bones and some DNA. We don't have the living creatures to see. We see even in dogs vast differences in appearance within one species. We can also observe (say, between placental predatory cats and their marsupial analogues), similarities of form between two utterly different species. The bones are not the creature, nor is the DNA. DNA is simply a library of blueprints for all the proteins the body can possibly produce and of possible regulations for producing them; these possibilities only come to life when in the context of the proteins that limit the possibilities and actualize the cell, which is why proteomics is the big field these days. People talk about our sharing 96% of our DNA with chimpanzees. Yet beer is close to 100% water and manifestly not the same thing as water—try claiming to the judge in your DWI case that the beer you drank was the same as water.

The only thing that could truly delineate between man and his non-human ancestors is an examination of the full creatures, especially their behavior. Questions like, "Do they have language?", "What is their conception of time?", "Can they conceptualize the natures of things?", "Can they understand right and wrong?" have to be among the tests for humanity.⁴

Still, Darwinism admits of devolution as well as evolution (or rather abolishes species altogether). So while it is clear that demanding that each individual (esp. newborns, the ill, the handicapped) have such characteristics is unreasonable, it is not clear how one can preserve the humanity of everyone we regard as human without the assumption that species (or at least humans) breed true. More to come on scientific reasons this assumption might not be a mere assumption...

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Notes

1. One questioner astutely asked Dr. Miller how his view was theistic not merely deistic. It must be admitted that there is a large gap between what Dr. Miller admitted as miracles (amounting to 'inexplicable' goodness in human action) and an event manifestly supernatural, like the Resurrection.

2. Cf. the October 18 NPR story "New Fossil May Trim Branches of Human Evolution" in which fossils of a mere five individuals are apparently upsetting established notions of the field. Also cf. reconstruction of a fossil tooth in Tom Weller's hilarious Science Made Stupid. (WARNING: This may be the funniest book of all time.)

3. As in Physics II.8.199b26-29:

"It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating. Art does not deliberate. If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would produce the same results by nature."

Aquinas comments:

"Hence it is clear that nature is nothing but a certain kind of art, i.e., the divine art, impressed upon things, by which these things are moved to a determinate end. It is as if the shipbuilder were able to give to timbers that by which they would move themselves to take the form of the ship" (Commentary on the Physics, no. 268).

4. But also, "Are they physiologically suited to such activities?" Swift's talking horses are clearly absurd horses for their supposed ability to carry things with their limbs. Cf. Erwin W. Straus, 'The Upright Posture', in Phenomenological Psychology, (London: Tavistock, 1966) 141.

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David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution (Encounter Books, 2013), 232.

Modesty Is Simply Thoughtfulness

Huffington Post is promoting a story about Mark Frauenfelder's daughter being told by a TSA agent to cover up. According to Frauenfelder, the agent said,

"You're only 15, cover yourself!"

The latter link includes the single public photo of how she was dressed. Of course it was unprofessional of the agent to remark on anything personal. But except for that, it's about time someone says something to young women who dress revealingly. Even in that one photo in which she's "covered up," it's clear that the leggings don't leave much of the shape of the girl's lower half to the imagination. We also might suspect that the photo is not exactly what the agent saw: it's clear that the top is the kind that tends to ride up revealing the navel, and we can't see (Deo gratias) how revealing the top might be close-up despite its apparent thickness here. So we shouldn't rush to judge the remark based on a single photo.

Of course, the subsequent reaction is typical of our times: that the agent's remark was creepy, that it's up to a woman how she dresses, that they want to force women to wear burkhas, etc.

A while ago, a friend posted a story about women protesting rape and sexual harassment. Any civilized person has to agree wholeheartedly: men are fully responsible for their actions and need to control themselves, regardless of the context. But then the photo showed the women dressed scantily, immodestly. Clearly these women weren't getting a deeper point.

People these days forget that we dress not only for ourselves, but also for others, to ease our common life together: we dress decently to make others comfortable. Men are naturally attracted to women's bodies; more visibility means more attraction. That this was something that could only be controlled with effort used to be a fact widely understood. It's just in the nature of men and women, how we're put together. (In fact we owe our continued existence as a species to this aspect of our nature.)

In saner days women dressed modestly to make life easier for men. But no more. I think our modern attitude comes from two ideas that stand in tension with each other:

1. We think of ourselves as entirely rational, autonomous agents, transcending the gross corporeal world.
2. We identify ourselves with our inclinations and desires (and fail to acknowledge that we can resist our desires, and that some should be resisted).

From these two sides of Enlightenment mind-body dualism, we conclude by divinizing our desires and choices, placing them above doubt or question. Women tend to think that there's nothing wrong with using their sexuality to manipulate men; that they can dress however they wish, the rest of the world be damned. Men tend to think that satisfying their base desires is necessarily good; that getting what we 'want' is victory, the rest of the world be damned. Clearly the actions of men here, being direct violations of another person, are more condemnable, but both selfish tendencies, unchecked, add up to a war between the sexes and the splintering of society. But peace won't come from answering power with power, but from answering power with peace.

The irony is that Mark Frauenfelder presents himself (as do his supporters) as socially conscious. In actuality, by failing to teach his daughter about the social implications of dress, he is contributing to the impoverishment of community. In a world so individualistic that it's off-limits to comment on another's dress, if the parents don't teach their children about such things, who will?

Biggest Barrier to Women in Science: Women

There it is. The New York Times has discovered it AGAIN! Bias against women in science. Here's the nub of the study that PROVES it:

All of the professors received the same one-page summary, which portrayed the applicant as promising but not stellar. But in half of the descriptions, the mythical applicant was named John and in half the applicant was named Jennifer.

About 30 percent of the professors, 127 in all, responded. (They were asked not to discuss the study with colleagues, limiting the chance that they would compare notes and realize its purpose.)

On a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 being highest, professors gave John an average score of 4 for competence and Jennifer 3.3. John was also seen more favorably as someone they might hire for their laboratories or would be willing to mentor.

The average starting salary offered to Jennifer was $26,508. To John it was $30,328.

The bias had no relation to the professors’ age, sex, teaching field or tenure status. “There’s not even a hint of a difference there,” said Corinne Moss-Racusin, a postdoctoral social psychology researcher who was the lead author of the paper.

"The bias had no relation to the professors’ age, sex, teaching field or tenure status"! The article highlighted this fact:

Female professors were just as biased against women students as their male colleagues, and biology professors just as biased as physics professors — even though more than half of biology majors are women, whereas men far outnumber women in physics.

But why would women, whom one would expect to be more aware of the bias against them and take mental counter-measures, have the same bias as men?

I suspect the answer is that the "bias" matches their experience. (Some "biases" represent actual information. The bias we should be rooting out is the bias against reality.¹)

There are plenty of possible explanations for why this might be so. For example, it could be that women have a higher propensity to leave the so-called professional ("real") world for family², so the most notable scientists are men.

It could also be that women of a given level of proficiency in science show it to a much higher degree than men of the same level—in other words, that men are less articulate or expressive than women. But then that would be a bias against men.

But further, why do we automatically assume that women and men have the same aptitudes in everything, and are in fact virtually identical except perhaps physically? Has it yet been demonstrated that men and women in general have equal skill at science or communication? There's nothing to say that men aren't in fact more or less skilled than women.³ Perhaps the ridiculous assumption that sex is simply an accidental "add-on" is the reason the mother of twins might be asked whether her daughter and son are identical twins.

We already know that the supposed applications in the experiment were not identical in one way significant to the reviewers: the apparent sex of the applicant. Why should we automatically assume that the sex of the applicant is not an important piece of information? Such an assumption would seem to represent a decided prejudice.

But that leaves an important question: why should prejudice justify the institutionalization of discrimination?

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Notes

1. But in our postmodern age, we're told that there is no truth and truth claims are reflections of power differentials. Of course this idea means this article and the study it's based on are simply part of a raw exercise of power... as is the idea itself.

2. Making a home and raising a family are supposed to be insignificant. Perhaps this explains why the U.S. fertility rate has fallen below replacement level. Apparently matters of (national) life and death are insignificant.

3. Lest I needlessly raise the hackles of roaming thought-policepersons, I should point out an important but often-overlooked paradox. Just because the majority of mumbley peg players are male, doesn't mean that the majority of males play mumbley peg. Similarly, if all terrorists in a certain place are Muslim, it doesn't follow that all Muslims there are terrorists. Nor would a disproportionate number of Blacks among criminals mean that most Blacks are anything but law-abiding citizens.

Ideally we would judge every person on his own individual merits. But given our limited information about a given individual, we inevitably group people among others with the same apparent characteristics. It would seem that such prejudice is inevitable among created intellects.

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Kenneth Chang, "Bias Persists for Women of Science, a Study Finds," New York Times (September 24, 2012).

Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, John F. Dovidio, Victoria L. Brescoll, Mark J. Graham, and Jo Handelsman, "Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Arc of Modernity

James Barham has a great post on "Can We Teach Virtue?". It got me to thinking about how we got into such a mess that we can't even teach schoolkids that there is truth (or even just pretend that there is, for their sake—but that's another subject altogether).

Here's a skeletal outline of the arc of modernity:

1. In the late Renaissance and Enlightenment, we reasoned that we can't agree on religious truth (cf. wars of religion), but (modern) science is true (our savior!).
2. In the 19th and (especially) the 20th centuries, we discovered that science doesn't give us access to truth.
3. Therefore, we conclude, nothing is true.

The reasoning is obviously full of holes, primarily the opening premise that since religion is a source of discord, the only alternative is experimental science. What a straw man!

Then, since casual conversation avoids the subjects of politics and religion, it's a wonder parties can ever support conversation. Can people from different backgrounds agree about nothing but "science"? On the contrary, there are broad swaths of agreement on basic human issues (like how to raise children). It's just that some people are unable to provide reasonable ground for why they think what they do. Even more we all agree on our common human experience (as described, for example, in Mike Augros's excellent talk "A ‘Bigger’ Physics"). By setting up the false opposition of "science vs. religion," we've excluded a broad swath of rock-solid objective experience from which we can reason to sure conclusions.

A parallel description:

1. Man¹ can only know through experiment, that is, active intervention—baldly asserted in a raw exercise of power by people like Francis Bacon, but implicit even in Descartes's assertion of dualism.
2. From this stance, man can only see that part of the world that can receive his actions, so the world must be purely passive and lack all inherent activities (and directedness²).
3. The only activity man can see is his own, so man must be the source of all activity.
4. Therefore man is God, so God is dead.³

Again, the reasoning is full of holes. While the Baconian assertion that "knowledge is power" has a monomaniacal consistency, it is far from an axiom (as traditionally understood: immediately evident and requiring no proof)—that is, unless one's basic outlook starts with power as preeminent and primary.

In reality, we are creatures: we act, but we are also acted upon. We are sources of activity, but we are also bodies (with which our souls are intimately connected). To deny the latter obvious truth is the path to madness. In truth, we originate in love and are born in weakness. The net effect of denying our createdness is to shield our desires from rational examination—divine motivations are beyond scrutiny. One's identity becomes identified above all with an impenetrable "I want."

Fundamentally, there are two paths in life:

• Power, and
• Love.

Only one of these can be primary in each life. The Path of Power leads a person to close in on himself and to elevate his own desires above all; ultimately it leads to solipsism and loneliness.

The Path of Love requires self-giving and surrender to the world as it is and to others, but opens the heart to the rest of reality and to communion.⁴

It used to be that only the monarch and the aristocracy were subject to the trap of power. Scientific modernity and its technology have democratized power, making it possible for each of us to regard himself as a little god. This position is untenable in the long run; the question is: how big a crisis⁵ will it take to shake us from our delusion?

How long until our society can return to its only lasting foundation in truth, love?

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Notes

1. I hate having to explain my use of this word. "Man" is a collective and a singular at once; we are collectively man, and at the same time each one of us is man, regardless of our sex (not our gender—we are not parts of speech). The alternatives do not capture this meaning. See Tony Esolen's "What Is Man?", Touchstone 25:1 (Jan/Feb 2012), 15-17.

2. "Directedness" is a rudimentary form of "teleology," but the the later word carries too much undue baggage. (See my post "Four Levels of Teleology.") When Aristotle, for example, talks about "for the sake of which" in his natural/biological works, he means primarily directedness.

3. No matter what one believes about the existence of God, it should be extremely clear to all that man is not God. (Cf. James Barham's "Two Kinds of Atheists", The Best Schools Blog, December 7, 2011.) At least it's immediately clear with regard to others; it's clear with regard to one's self if one is self-reflective or if one allows all men to share a common nature. (From here we get into the nominalist origin of the modern crisis.)

4. Clearly I'm talking about agape (self-giving love, i.e., charity) and not eros (desire-love) here. The latter is not self-sufficient.

5. Idolization of desire seems to be a contributing cause of the current debt crisis. Another cause is the dishonesty of a currency whose value is decreed by fiat and that undermines trust by making every contract a lie.

The Inhumanity of Teilhard de Chardin

Once upon a time, among comments on Albert Camus's The Plague, Thomas Merton wrote a trenchant critique of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin¹:

The current apologetic reply to Camus’ dismissal of Catholicism goes something like this: Camus was exposed to Augustine when he was not ready for him. He paid too much attention to Pascal and to “sick” Christianity like that of Kierkegaard. And of course he was not favorably impressed by the French Catholic collaborationists and their jeremiads over sin and punishment at the time of the Nazi occupation. But it would have been a different story if Camus had been able to read Teilhard de Chardin.

Is it that easy? To begin with, let us state the question more exactly. It would be impossible to say whether or not Camus, under this or that set of “favorable circumstances,” would ever have become “a believer.” Such surmises are usually nonsense. The problem with Camus was that he simply could not find Christians with whom he was able completely to identify himself on every level. The closest he got was with some of the French priests in the resistance, and evidently that was not close enough.

What would Camus have liked about Teilhard?

Obviously, first of all, he would have been happy with Teilhard’s com­plete acceptance of nature and of material creation, Teilhard came as close to developing a Christian mystique of matter as anyone has ever done; and Camus, in some of his essays, extols the material, the phe­nomenal, the sensible, the experience of the fleeting moment, in quasi-mystical language.

A study of Teilhard’s writings and especially of his own spiritual de­velopment shows us to what extent he rebelled against the mentality we have seen in Paneloux: the self-righteous, censorious repudiation of a beautiful world created by God’s love. Writing from the trenches in World War I. Teilhard confessed, in a letter to a friend, that even in the midst of war he was meditating and keeping notes on the “real prob­lem of my interior life”—“the problem of reconciling a passionate and legitimate love of all that is greatest on earth, and the unique quest of the Kingdom of Heaven.” He explicitly rejects any concept of the world as “only an opportunity to acquire merit.” Rather he sees it as a good creation, coming from the hand of God and given us “to be built up and embellished.”

[215] It is of course typical of the spirituality of Paneloux to regard the created world merely as something to be manipulated in order to amass an abstract capital of merit. Paneloux is a spiritual profiteer, and his kind of Christianity is a reflection of the social establishment, with which it exists in a symbiotic unity. Of such Christianity, Teilhard says it makes one less than a man and a traitor to the human race. Those who observe it from the outside are repelled and “blame my religion for it” That is precisely what Camus does in his portrait of Paneloux. Teilhard’s criti­cism of this false supernaturalism is that in trying to divert man’s capacity to love and turn it aside from concrete human reality to the purely abstract and spiritual, it deadens and distorts man. “The capacity to love cannot with impunity be dissociated from its object: if you try, mis­takenly, to cut off our affectivity from love of the universe, are you not in danger of destroying it?” This is what has happened to Paneloux: a good, sincere, strong-willed man, with a strong tendency to intellectualize, he has fallen a victim to an abstract and inhuman spirituality. His power of love has atrophied. His affectivity has been channeled into will-to-power and rigid authoritarianism. When he tries to recover the warmth of love, he ends in a self-immolation which is part heroism and part algebra, an irrefutable conclusion to an argument which no one is able to understand.

Teilhard, on the contrary, wants to transform and divinize the human passions themselves. “I shall put the intoxication of pagan pantheism to Christian use, by recognizing the creative and formative action of God in every caress and every blow … I would like to be able to love Christ passionately ... in the very act of loving the universe.” And he asks: “Is there communion with God through the Earth, the Earth becoming like a great Host in which God would be contained for us?”

Camus’ basic sympathy for the element of Greek theoria in Mediter­ranean culture would incline him to accept this “Christian gnosis” up to a point. He could identify with the “passionate love,” if not with the theological elaboration. Teilhard also completely and totally accepts man; and the God of Teilhard is not simply a remote judge and creator, but a God who seeks to complete his epiphany in the world of man by bring­ing all humanity to convergence and unity in himself, in the Incar­nation. The Incarnation for Teilhard is, then, not just an expedient to take care of sin and bring the kind of “grace” that Paneloux was happy about. The Incarnation is ultimately the full revelation of God, not just in man but in the “hominization” of the entire material world.

Camus would have heartily agreed with Teilhard’s love of man and [216] with his aspiration toward human unity. But it is rather doubtful whether he would have been able to accept the evolutionary and historical scheme of Teilhardian soteriology. To be precise, it is likely that Camus would have had a certain amount of trouble with the systematic progress of the world toward “hominization” and “christification” by virtue of laws im­manent in matter and in history.

The point cannot be adequately discussed here, but anyone who wants to investigate it further had better read Camus’ book on Revolt (L’Homme révolté), which he wrote after The Plague and which he thought out at the same time as The Plague. This study of revolt, which precipitated the break between Camus and the Marxists (especially with Sartre), is a severe critique of Hegelian and post-Hegelian doctrines which seek the salvation and progress of man in the “laws of history.”

Camus was suspicious of the way in which totalitarians of both the left and the right consistently appealed to evolution to justify their hope of inevitable progress toward a new era of the superman. In particular, he protested vigorously against their tendency to sacrifice man as he is now, in the present, for man as he is supposed to be, according to the doctrine of race or party, at some indefinite time in the future. In Camus’ eyes, this too easily justified the sadism and opportunism of people who are always prepared to align themselves on the side of the executioners against the victims.. In other words, a certain superficial type of eschato­logical hopefulness, based on evolution, made it easy to ignore the ex­termination camps, the pogroms, the genocide, the napalm, the H-bombs that so conveniently favored the survival of the fittest, got rid of those who no longer had a right to exist, and prepared the way for the epiphany of superman.

At this point, it must be admitted that one of the most serious criti­cisms of Teilhard bears precisely on this point: an optimism which tends to look at existential evil and suffering through the small end of the telescope. It is unfortunately true that Teilhard, like many other Chris­tians, regarded the dead and wounded of Hiroshima with a certain equanimity as inevitable by-products of scientific and evolutionary prog­ress. He was much more impressed with the magnificent scientific achievement of the atomic physicists than he was with the consequences of dropping the bomb. It must be added immediately that the physicists themselves did not all see things exactly as he did. The concern of a Niels Bohr and his dogged struggle to prevent the atomic arms race put Bohr with Rieux and Tarrou in the category of “Sisyphean” heroes that are entirely congenial to Camus. After the Bikini test, Teilhard exclaimed that the new bombs “show a humanity which is at peace both internally [217] and externally.” And he added beatifically, “they announce the coming of the spirit on earth.” (L’Avenir de l’homme)

No matter how much we may respect the integrity and the nobility of this dedicated Jesuit, we have to admit here that at least in one respect he resembles his confrere Paneloux. True, they are at opposite extremes of optimism and pessimism; but they do concur in attaching more im­portance to an abstract idea, a mystique, a system, than to man in his existential and fallible reality here and now. This is precisely what Camus considers to be the great temptation. Lured by an ideology or a mystique, one goes over to the side of the executioners, while arguing that in so doing one is promoting the cause of life.

There is no question whatever that Teilhard believes in the “new man,” the homo progressivus, the new evolutionary leap that is now being taken (he thinks) beyond homo sapiens. Science certainly gives us a basis for hope in this development, and perhaps Camus needed to have more hope in the future of man than he actually seems to have had. Perhaps Camus was too inclined to doubt and hesitate. Perhaps his “modesty” tended too much to desperation. Perhaps there was much he could have learned from Teilhard. But it is not likely that he would purely and simply have agreed with Teilhard’s statement in Peking, in 1945, that the vic­torious armies of Mao Tse-tung represented “the humanity of tomorrow” and “the generating forces and the elements of planetization,” while the bourgeois European world represented nothing but the garbage (le déchet) of history. No doubt there may be good reason to think that a “new humanity” will arise out of the emerging Third World. Let us hope that it will. But Camus would not be so naïve as to identify this “new humanity” with a particular brand of Marxism, or to pin his hopes on a party which announced its own glorious future as a dogma of faith.

Both Camus and Teilhard firmly took their stand on what they con­sidered to be the side of life. Both saw humanity confronted with a final choice, a “grand option,” between the “spirit of force” and the “spirit of love,” between “division” and “convergence.” Man’s destiny is in his own hands, and everything depends on whether he chooses life and creativity or death and destruction. Teilhard’s scientific mystique and long-range view, extending over millennia, naturally did not delay overlong to worry about the death of a few thousands here and there. Camus could still pause and have scruples over the murder of an innocent child. He refused to justify that death in the name of God. He also refused to justify it by an appeal to history, to evolution, to science, to politics, or to the glorious future of the new man.

In short, Teilhard de Chardin's devotion to the powerful generalities of modernity blinded him to the plight of particular men living in the world.

Note

1. Thanks to Patrick Henry Reardon, whose mention of this analysis in the last issue of Touchstone alerted me to its existence.

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Thomas Merton, "The Plague of Camus: A Commentary and Introduction," The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New Directions Publishing, 1985), 214-217.

Patrick Henry Reardon, "A Many-Storied Monastic: A Critical Memoir of Thomas Merton at Gethsemani Abbey," Touchstone (September/Octobober 2011), 50-57.

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Note: These past couple months I've been completely occupied with an important project; it will take another few months to see it through to the end.

Abortion and the War against Nature

I went down to DC for the March for Life last week. Trip preparations before and catching up with work afterward have taken up much of my time these past couple weeks.

Just ran across this excellent piece by former atheist Jennifer Fulwiler reflecting on her former pro-abortion views, specifically on the source of the anger that energized them.

My peers and I were taught not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. We absorbed through cultural osmosis the idea that every normal person will have sex at some point in his or her life, and that the sexual act, by default, has no significance outside the relationship between the two people involved. In this worldview, when unexpected pregnancies came up, it was seen as a sort of betrayal by the woman's body [emphasis added]. My friends and I lamented the awful position every woman was in: Unexpected pregnancies were like lightning strikes, and when one of these unpredictable events did occur, there were no good options for dealing with them. Abortion wasn't ideal -- even we acknowledged that it was a violating procedure that was hard on a woman's body -- but what choice did anyone have? To not have the option of terminating surprise pregnancies when they came up out of nowhere would mean being a slave to one's biology.

Betrayal? But pregnancy is a woman's body working properly! So our cultural situation sets women at war with their own biology, their own selves. This conflict comes out most pointedly when Ms Fulwiler considers the disparity between our society's "two critical lists":

In every society, there are two critical lists: acceptable conditions for having a baby, and acceptable conditions for having sex. From time immemorial, the one thing that almost every society had in common is that their two lists matched up. It was only with the widespread acceptance of contraception in the middle of the 20th century, creating an upheaval in the public psyche in which sex and babies no longer went hand-in-hand, that the two lists began to diverge. And now, in 21st-century America, they look something like this:

Conditions under which it is acceptable to have sex:

• If you're in a stable relationship
• If you feel emotionally ready
• If you're free of sexually transmitted diseases
• If you have access to contraception

Conditions under which it is acceptable to have a baby:

• If you can afford it
• If you've finished your education
• If you feel emotionally ready to parent a child
• If your partner would make a good parent
• If you're ready for all the lifestyle changes that would be involved with parenthood

As long as those two lists do not match, we will live in a culture where abortion is common and where women are at war with their own bodies.

She makes a great metaphor for the precarious position in which our erroneous culture places women:

In fact, I started to see the catastrophic mistake our society had made when we started believing that the life-giving potential of the sexual act could be safely forgotten about as long as people use contraception. It would be like saying that guns could be used as toys as long as long as there are blanks in the chamber. Teaching people to use something with tremendous power nonchalantly, as a casual plaything, had set women up for disaster.

Bullet-blocking devices may be more representative of the actual situation. In any event, the imagery of an abortionist inserting devices into the most sacred natural place, the womb, could not be any more explicitly mechanical, unnatural. (Biochemical interventions may be more visually subtle, but are no less invasive.) How could we be more blind!

As many have observed already, radical feminism is far from being pro-woman. The war on women is underwritten by our scientific culture that conceives the human relationship to nature (and by extension, all relationships) as being primarily about power and domination (yes, that's where Marxism comes from). It's not for nothing that one of early, more frank writings of one of the fathers of this "scientific" culture, Francis Bacon, is called, "The Masculine Birth of Time." Bacon writes,

My intention is to impart to you, not the figments of my own brain, nor the shadows thrown by words, nor a mixture of religion and science, nor a few commonplace observations or notorious experiments tricked out to make a composition as fanciful as a stage-play. No; I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.

That our culture is anti-woman is a commonplace of political correctness. That abortion (along with contraception) is the main weapon of the culture's war against women is PC anathema, but nonetheless the truth.¹

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Notes

1. Capra's 1990 film Mindwalk has an excellent exposition of the mechanism of science and the ascent of the masculine at the expense of the feminine. But notice the schizophrenia of the unmerited dig at Phyllis Schlafly (at about 40 minutes), who fought to maintain whatever is left of unique feminine privileges in American society through her opposition to the so-called Equal Rights Amendment. Several years ago, I contacted Schlafly about the quotation attributed to her and she denied she had written that "God's greatest gift to mankind is the atom bomb." It seems that for the makers of Mindwalk in this case, a political grudge takes precedence over intellectual consistency—or even integrity.

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Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964), 61.

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Note:I've started to restore the pictures to the blog, starting with the Pan's Labyrinth review. I'll continue on, beginning with the more significant graphics I've used. If you'd like me to get to one in particular, please request with a comment to that post—the system copies all comments to me via e-mail.

Institutional Roots of Scientific Dishonesty

I recently wrote about about how dishonesty is a matter of course in modern (Baconian) science (and here) with regard to the British climate memo scandal. Yesterday I ran across a post of penetrating insight on how such dishonesty can fester and what can be done about it:

Truthfulness in science should be an iron law
by Bruce Charlton, Editor-in-chief, Medical Hypotheses

The article fills in details of how the apparently altruistic motivation of Baconian science, as I put it, "easily slides from 'benefit mankind' to 'benefit my scientific career' or 'benefit a political program.'" I recommend reading the whole thing. In case you're in a rush, the post starts with a summary abstract, but for a bit more of the substance, below are a few of the best excerpts. I've added a comment in brackets.

Scientists are usually too careful and clever to risk telling outright lies, but instead they push the envelope of exaggeration, selectivity and distortion as far as possible. And tolerance for this kind of untruthfulness has greatly increased over recent years. So it is now routine for scientists deliberately to ‘hype’ the significance of their status and performance, and ‘spin’ the importance of their research.

Furthermore, it is entirely normal and unremarkable for scientists to spend their entire professional life doing work they know in their hearts to be trivial or bogus – preferring that which promotes their career over that which has the best chance of advancing science. Indeed, such misapplication of effort is positively encouraged in many places, including some of what were the very best places, because careerism is a more reliable route to high productivity than real science – and because senior scientists in the best places are expert at hyping mundane research to create a misleading impression of revolutionary importance.

...

So, in a bureaucratic context where cautious dishonesty is rewarded, strict truthfulness is taboo and will cause trouble for colleagues, for teams, for institutions – there may be a serious risk that funding is removed, status damaged, or worse. When everyone else is exaggerating their achievement then any precisely accurate person will, de facto, be judged as even worse than their already modest claims. In this kind of situation, individual truthfulness may be interpreted as an irresponsible indulgence.

Clearly then, even in the absence of the sort of direct coercion which prevails in many un-free societies, scientists may be subjected to such pressure that they are more-or-less forced to be dishonest; and this situation can (in decent people) lead to feelings of regret, or to shame and remorse. Unfortunately, regret and shame may not lead to remorse but instead to rationalization, to the elaborate construction of excuses, and eventually a denial of dishonesty.

...

Peer usage was the traditional process of scientific evaluation during the Golden Age of science (extending up to about the mid-1960s). Peer usage means that the validity of science is judged retrospectively by whether or not it has been used by peers, i.e. whether ideas or facts turned-out to be useful in further science done by researchers in the same field. For example, a piece of research might be evaluated by its validity in predicting future observations or as a basis for making effective interventions. Peer usage is distinctive to science, probably almost definitive of science.

Peer review, by contrast, means that science is judged by the opinion of other scientists in the same field. Peer review is not distinctive to science, but is found in all academic subjects and in many formal bureaucracies. When peer usage was replaced by peer review, then all the major scientific evaluation processes – their measurement metrics, their rewards and their sanctions - were brought under the direct control of senior scientists whose opinions thereby became the ultimate arbiter of validity. By making its validity a mere matter of professional opinion, the crucial link between science and the natural world was broken, and the door opened to unrestrained error as well as to corruption.

...

Overall, senior scientists have set a bad example of untruthfulness and self-seeking in their own behaviour, and they have also tended to administer science in such a way as to reward hype and careful-dishonesty, and punish modesty and strict truth-telling. And although some senior scientists have laudably refused to compromise their honesty, they have done this largely by quietly ‘opting out’, and not much by using their power and influence to create and advertise alternative processes and systems in which honest scientists might work.

The corruption of science has been (mostly unintentionally) amplified by the replacement of ‘peer usage’ with peer review as the major mechanism of scientific evaluation. Peer review (of ever greater complexity) has been applied everywhere: to job appointments and promotions, to scientific publications and conferences, to ethical review and funding, to prizes and awards. And peer review processes are set-up and dominated by senior scientists.

Peer usage was the traditional process of scientific evaluation during the Golden Age of science (extending up to about the mid-1960s). Peer usage means that the validity of science is judged retrospectively by whether or not it has been used by peers, i.e. whether ideas or facts turned-out to be useful in further science done by researchers in the same field. For example, a piece of research might be evaluated by its validity in predicting future observations or as a basis for making effective interventions. Peer usage is distinctive to science, probably almost definitive of science.

[Government funding of science skyrocketed after the War. With more funding, more scientists and more scientific papers; more publications meant a prospective filtering process was needed. Also: more funding alloys love of truth with other motivations. LG]

Peer review, by contrast, means that science is judged by the opinion of other scientists in the same field. Peer review is not distinctive to science, but is found in all academic subjects and in many formal bureaucracies. When peer usage was replaced by peer review, then all the major scientific evaluation processes – their measurement metrics, their rewards and their sanctions - were brought under the direct control of senior scientists whose opinions thereby became the ultimate arbiter of validity. By making its validity a mere matter of professional opinion, the crucial link between science and the natural world was broken, and the door opened to unrestrained error as well as to corruption.

...

Honest individuals are clearly necessary for an honest system of science – they are the basis of all that is good in science. However, honest individuals do not necessarily create an honest system. Individual honesty is not sufficient but needs to be supported by new social structures. Scientific truth cannot, over the long stretch, be a product of solitary activity. A solitary truth-seeker who is unsupported either by tradition or community will degenerate into mere eccentricity, eventually to be intimidated and crushed by the organized power of untruthfulness.

...

A Great Awakening to truth in science

The best hope of saving science from a progressive descent into complete Zombiedom seems to be a moral Great Awakening: an ethical revolution focused on re-establishing the primary purpose of science: the pursuit of truth.

In using the phrase, I am thinking of something akin to the periodic evangelical Great Awakenings which have swept the USA throughout its history, and have (arguably) served periodically to roll-back the advance of societal corruption, and generate improved ethical behaviour.

Such an Awakening would necessarily begin with individual commitment, but to have any impact it would need to progress rapidly to institutional forms. In effect there would need to be a ‘Church’ of truth; or, rather, many such Churches – especially in the different scientific fields or invisible colleges of active scholars and researchers.

I use the word ‘Church’ because nothing less morally-potent than a Church would suffice to overcome the many immediate incentives for seeking status, power, wealth and security. Nothing less powerfully-motivating could, I feel, nurture and sustain the requisite individual commitment. If truth-pursuing groups were not actually religiously-based (and, given the high proportion of atheists in science, this is probable), then such groups would need to be sustained by secular ethical systems of at least equal strength to religion, equally devoted to transcendental ideals, equally capable of eliciting courage, self-sacrifice and adherence to principle.

...

Much of Charlton's post reminded me of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's essay "Live Not By Lies." Solzhenitsyn's writing was characteristically Slavic in its directness, but equally it needs to be recalled that his living witness to the truth in suffering gave him such razor-sharp insight. In any event I think the pointed resolutions he recommends at the end of his essay could inspire similar (New Years?) resolutions for scientific honesty.

There you have it: there is no substitute for the value of transcendental truth. Only by placing this truth above all other goods is it possible to maintain scientific integrity, which after all ought to be about truth. Somehow there need to be institutional 'incarnations' of this principle (appropriately enough for today's Feast of the Epiphany).

In recommending further reading, Dr. Charlton unfortunately did not link the articles. For your convenience, here are the links:

‘‘Peer usage versus peer review’ (BMJ 2007; 335:451)

‘Zombie science’ (Medical Hypotheses 2008; 71:327–329)

‘The vital role of transcendental truth in science’ (Medical Hypotheses 2009; 72:373–376)

‘Are you an honest academic?’ (Oxford Magazine 2009; 287:8–10)

 

As I hinted in my comment, I am skeptical of how practicable it would be to return to peer usage. However I am eager to read more of Dr. Charlton's thoughts on the matter. He is clearly a man who has pondered these issues!

(h/t The Joy of Curmudgeonry for pointing out the blog)

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Bruce G. Charlton, Truthfulness in science should be an iron law Medical Hypotheses 73 (2009), 633-635.

Thanksgiving

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

—Cicero, "Pro Plancio," XXXIII.

Live, Online Bioethics Debate

I thought you might be interested in participating in this debate taking place this week at The Economist.

Sex on the Brain

Work's been keeping me from writing anything here, though I have been thinking of things to write. I thought you might be interested in a couple interesting articles on sex I've run across.

The first is about a study that exposed men to sexually suggestive stimuli and then measured their impatience.

“It seems that sexual appetite causes a greater urgency to consume anything rewarding,” the authors suggest. Thus, the activation of sexual desire appears to spill over into other brain systems involved in reward-seeking behaviors, even the cognitive desire for money.

“After they touched a bra, men are more likely to be content with a smaller immediate monetary reward,” writes Bram Van den Bergh, one of the study’s authors. “Prior exposure to sexy stimuli may influence the choice between chocolate cake or fruit for dessert.”

Rather unsurprisingly, all of men's appetites are primed by related mechanisms, which bears out the traditional wisdom that exercising the virtue of continence in one area, say food, builds that virtue in others, say sex. Of course, this relation is why advertisers use sex to sell products not even remotely related to sex. It also helps explain why our sex-soaked society finds it so difficult to make decisions requiring a delay in gratification.

The second revealed some surprising results about the sexual arousal patterns of women. The study found that whereas men are aroused by images solely of the sex to which they are attracted (e.g., heterosexual men by images of women), women are aroused by images of both sexes (e.g., heterosexual women are aroused by images of women as well as images of men).

One important detail to note is the questionable methodology of the study

To rule out the possibility that the differences between men's and women's genital sexual arousal patterns might be due to the different ways that genital arousal is measured in men and women, the Northwestern researchers identified a subset of subjects: postoperative transsexuals who began life as men but had surgery to construct artificial vaginas.

In a sense, those transsexuals have the brains of men but the genitals of women. Their psychological and genital arousal patterns matched those of men -- those who like men were more aroused by male stimuli and those who like women were more aroused by the female stimuli -- even though their genital arousal was measured in the same way women's was.

It may be that I'm just poorly informed about the basis of "sex-change" operations, but this methodology assumes without warrant that these operations truly give their subjects "the genitals of women." The assumption would seem to be an instance of assuming a human construct is equivalent to nature (or that nature is but a construct).

And yet despite the flawed methodology, the study is suggestive (and not merely in a lurid way). For one thing it seems to reflect the greater plasticity of female sexuality elsewhere observed. Take as an example Caitlyn Flanagan's restrospective on young women at college:

The other thing that the girls tended to do was to fall head over heels in love with one another. The 1907 Barnard yearbook observed that crushes were “an epidemic peculiar to college girls,” marked by “a lump in the throat, a feeling of heat in the face and an inability to speak.” While romantic friendships between women were an accepted aspect of life in the 19th century, Peril’s reporting on the nature of those relationships is eye-opening. An 1898 advice book called What a Young Woman Ought to Know describes the irritating behavior of girls who imposed their ardor on the world:

They go about with their arms around each other, they loll against each other, and sit with clasped hands by the hour. They fondle and kiss until beholders are fairly nauseated.

In 1928, one besotted “smasher” at a Texas college formalized her feelings in a yearbook entry: “Roommate, darling, how I love you.”

These women in that innocent age weren't actual lesbians, or even manifestations of the LUG (lesbian until graduation) phenomenon that wasn't unusual during my tenure at Columbia, and for that fact better examples of the relative plasticity of female sexuality than the latter.

Another suggested insight is the objectivity beauty of the the female form. One needn't go so far as to call it an eternal form, but there's something about it that goes beyond mere conditioning or habituation (a friend once claimed—I think wrongly—that if our mothers were green spheres, we'd grow up to be attracted to green spheres). I've heard that even the great apes readily recognize human females as female, whereas we humans have trouble distinguishing ape females from males (though perhaps the latter is only a sign of human insensibility). The question this raises is whether the attraction to the (human) female form is merely "hardwired" into primates' neural circuitry or has deeper roots, perhaps as deep as the very materiality of our existence.

Certainly angels are examples of intelligent creatures who aren't sexual beings, but also examples of intelligent creatures without bodies at all. But we might ask: in what manner and to what extent is (attraction to) the female form necessary to a species of embodied intelligent beings?

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Bram Van den Bergh, Siegfried DeWitte, and Luk Warlop, "Bikinis Instigate Generalized Impatience in Intertemporal Choice" (2007).

Meredith L. Chivers, Gerulf Rieger, Elizabeth Latty, J. Michael Bailey, "A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal," Psychological Science 15: 11 (November 2004), 736-744.

Caitlin Flanagan, "The Age of Innocence," Atlantic Monthly (April 2007).

Pinker's Confusion

Steven Pinker's screed against of the President's Council on Bioethics will be officially published by The New Republic on May 28 (h/t Holopupenko).¹ He writes of the Council's recent document Human Dignity and Bioethics,

This collection of essays is the culmination of a long effort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity.

Whatever that is. The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it. (emphasis added)

Pinker charges that dignity is a vague notion. Perhaps. As vague a notion as “dignity” might be, he seems to have little notion what improvement in life means: to know how to improve life requires a clear notion of the ends or goods that life is supposed to achieve. As we'll see, Pinker can offer little more than "autonomy" as an end of human life.

So it should come as no surprise that Pinker is hopelessly confused about bioethics. Newsflash: the accent belongs on "ethics" not on "bio." "Bio" is a modifier and "ethics" the subject. This is why, as important as scientific data is to its deliberations, it is more important that Council members to have ethical training than that they have scientific training. Science provides the raw material for bioethical discussions (which needs to be parsed scientifically), but the actually thinking in these discussions is unavoidably ethical (that is, extra-scientific).²

Pinker upholds "autonomy" as the true basis of bioethics:

The bioethicist Ruth Macklin, who had been fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to squelch research and therapy, threw down the gauntlet in a 2003 editorial, "Dignity Is a Useless Concept." Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy--the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another. This is why informed consent serves as the bedrock of ethical research and practice, and it clearly rules out the kinds of abuses that led to the birth of bioethics in the first place, such as Mengele's sadistic pseudoexperiments in Nazi Germany and the withholding of treatment to indigent black patients in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, "dignity" adds nothing. (emphasis added)

Newsflash: not all humans have the same capacities "to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose." And even if they did all have the same capacities in these departments, it is much less than clear that they would have the same capacity to articulate themselves and defend their interests. Perhaps he and Macklin are thinking that all humans are adults, but even here, it is still less than clear that the postulated equality holds.

The egalitarian paradigm of "autonomy" appears to work well in the central bright spot of human life, but breaks down on its shadowy borders. Humans both at the beginning and at the end of life cannot reason and choose independently. People in the center of their adulthood struck by illness also lose these capacities.

Of course, Pinker can salvage "autonomy" (restoring its bedrock edges) by maintaining that people lacking these capacities are unworthy of protection. In that case, equal capacity is intended not so much as a description of human beings as much as a re-definition of which lives are "human" and thus worthy of life and legal protection.

But if one is going to monkey around with the definition of "human," it's rather difficult to find a principle that allows one a substantial disagreement with Nazi bioethics: wasn't the Nazi's modus operandi simply to redefine what human lives were worthy of life? These days of so many addictions, it is especially easy to get an individual autonomously to surrender his autonomy. Having "willingly" surrendered his autonomy, such an individual could be easily enough recategorized as non-human and disposed of at will. But then the whole notion of the individual is a legal fiction. "No man is an island," so why should we expect individualism to provide ethical "bedrock"?³

Of course, it would be much easier to take Pinker seriously if he weren’t so manifestly anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish. But then his bigotry is of a piece with his dislike of the ethical dimension of bioethics. As Walker Percy writes, modern man tries to hold two opposing views in his head: the materialist "scientific" view of himself as a mere organism, and the (remnants of the Judeo-Christian) notion of himself as possessing a sacred worth. The latter of course is the basis of our system of government and rights: our worth and our rights are not based on some ability we have, but on the fact that we are "created human." (Not that the reasoning behind these notions of rights strictly depends on any sort of revealed truth: Aristotle's ethical system without Divine revelation substantially agrees.)

Pinker is perfectly consistent in railing against Jewish and Christian thought. But now we have to wonder: does he really have a substantial disagreement with Mengele? Or does he simply part ways with Mengele's inability to avoid being "caught" by a more powerful authority?

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Notes

1. Doubtless Pinker is smarting from his drubbing at the hands of Kass in last year's Commentary. The exchange is in response to Kass's original April 2007 article.

2. Come to think of it, Pinker's misunderstanding of "bioethics," his elision of "ethics," casts into a different light the word's coinage. Was it an attempt by "scientific" biology to usurp the prerogatives of ethics, an attempt to sever or mute its connection with the tradition of ethics? From my understanding, it seems that the people who devised the term were more on Pinker's side of the discussion than on Kass's.

3. Neuhaus had some valuable thoughts on human dignity, which I quoted here.

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Steven Pinker, "The Stupidity of Dignity: Conservative bioethics' latest, most dangerous ploy," The New Republic (May 28, 2008). [The histrionic tone evident in "latest, most dangerous" approaches self-parody.]