Environmentalism and Religion

Freeman Dyson's recent book review concludes with some insightful thoughts:

All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

He's correct that environmentalism is a religion, as it binds people to set of beliefs, and these beliefs are not necessarily based on publicly available reason. I have recently been thinking about extreme environmentalists' condemnation of human life itself as "luxurious living". As Dostoevsky observed, if God is dead, everything is permissible; there are no limits to what man should do. Thus it makes sense that since not everything is permissible, in lieu of the old God, we need a new god, a new standard by which to condemn what is evidently disordered.

Dyson is also right that the debate should not be arbitrarily shut down, as he elsewhere in the article notes that the PC-faction has in Britain; there is still a lot of uncertainty in the science of "climate change." ("Global warming" is passé; it's an open secret that the globe's surface temperature hasn't warmed for a decade now.)

I just by chance ran across another discovery that should effect the "climate change" discussion. UMass Amherst scientists have established that bacteria can metabolize minerals containing carbon and reintroduce it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

According to Petsch, the bottom line is that the release of organic material from sedimentary rocks contributes approximately 2 percent of the carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere each year. While this may seem like a small amount, it is another piece of the puzzle that can be used when determining how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades.

Just goes to show that the science of "climate change" is anything but settled and that discussion should continue.

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Freeman Dyson, "The Question of Global Warming," The New York Review of Books 55:10 (June 12, 2008). h/t Touchstone (July/August 2008)

Steven Petsch, "New Piece of Climate Change Puzzle Found In Ancient Sedimentary Rocks by UMass Amherst Researchers" Press Release, July 23, 2008.

Four Levels of Teleology

The existence of teleology (from telos, Greek for end or purpose) is a controversial issue in the study of nature. The Scientific Revolution succeeded in rendering the notion disreputable, largely by ridiculing its abuses and ignoring its strengths.

A big obstacle for moderns to believe in natural purpose is the flattening of language that's occurred since the so-called Enlightenment. Words nowadays mean only one thing (or at least that's the popular perception) and have lost much of their flexibility. Gone are analogous senses of words. Mariano Artigas, in The Mind of the Universe, goes a long distance to rehabilitating teleology for the modern mind by helpfully distinguishing four senses or levels. Each higher level presupposes all the lower levels and adds something new. Figure 4.2 (p. 126) summarizes what he explains at greater length in the text:

1. END of a PROCESS
   "The End" of a film, of a journey, of an exam.
   Final stages of any process
2. GOAL of a TENDENCY
   Attractive or repulsive physical forces
   Multiple tendencies of living beings
3. VALUE for a SUBJECT
   Something good or bad for the subject who acts
4. PURPOSE of a PLAN
   There are known aims and designs

The text:

On the first level, teleology refers to the "end" of a "process." Sometimes we can distinguish particular stages in a process and consider the conclusion of any one of them as an end. We can speak about ends in a spatial sense, but when we talk about teleology we are primarily interested in the ends of processes that develop in time. This meaning of "end" is at the same time something real and completely neutral from a philosophical point of view. However, it is a necessary component of the remaining three levels.

The second level contains a stronger finalist meaning, as it refers to the "goal" of a "tendency." This meaning presupposes the first and adds something, the existence of a tendency toward a determined end. This is no longer a neutral issue from the scientific or philosophical points of view, and it poses two problems: how we can determine the existence of tendencies and how we can explain them.

On the third level a new qualification is introduced: we say that particular ends have a "value" for some "subject." Here, "value" means something is convenient or inconvenient, good or bad, for a particular subject or kind of subject. Discussions about teleology sooner or later refer to values.

These three levels exist in both natural and human activity. But on the fourth level there is a new kind of teleology that belongs only to the purposeful activity of intelligent beings: to reach a "purpose" as a consequence of a "plan." This is the level on which we can properly speak of purposeful actions and of design.

Intelligent purposeful action is teleological because, by its very nature, it is directed toward something that can be considered to be the end of the action. This end is a goal, as far as it is reached as the result of a tendency, and is also a value, because otherwise the subject would not desire it. Natural activities are not so clearly teleological because it may be difficult to determine whether they are directed toward determinate goals, and because it may be even more difficult to determine whether these goals, if they exist, can be considered real values.

The problem of natural teleology has a double aspect: first to determine whether natural tendencies toward goals that can be considered values exist, and then, if these goals exist, to determine whether they require the existence of some intelligent plan that governs the activity of nature.

But to return to teleology in nature, a paper by John Keck, the director of the Institute for the Study of Nature, recently published in The Thomist discusses the natural teleologies in the laws of physics. The introduction observes that physics necessarily deals with teleology (on Artigas's level 2): "In book 2 of the Physics, Aristotle establishes that nature's obvious regularities—its tendency to act in particular ways (which itself maintains the good of the cosmic order)—reveal an ordering to specific ends. That things happen 'always or for the most part' indicates finality or purpose." The paper continues,

The only alternative to purpose is chance and, although chance events often obtain, the natural world is inherently teleological. Scientific laws, modern and ancient, physical, chemical, and biological, capture nature's regularities and im-plicitly testify to teleology. That baking soda and vinegar react expansively, and that confetti is normally attracted to the static electric charge on a balloon show the order and purpose of nature. Far from being opposed to modern science, teleology is its conditio sine qua non. (532-3)

The rest of the paper is devoted to observing how the ends of physics processes constitute values (Artigas's level 3). The main focus is on establishing how gravity and entropy constitute constitute natural motions toward the ends of spatial unity and disunity.

Gravity is the kind of motion that Aristotle describes in book 8 of the Physics as "bring[ing] to actuality the proper activities that [material bodies] potentially possess." It is a natural motion—a natural motion toward physical or spatial unity, a surrender of the masses' separate existences to a greater participation in the transcendental perfection of unity. The more matter they contain, the more they are already united in sharing a sympathy of being, and the more strongly (i.e., with greater force) they are drawn together still. (543)

That the end of entropy is disunity is indisputable in the sense of level-2 teleology, but the conclusion seems forced with regard to level 3: to what extent can disunity be considered a good? Instead I think that Dr. Keck would be better to observe that matter as such need not tend toward a good, because matter, insofar as it is matter, has no perfections (I speak of matter in the Aristotelian sense here). Matter is closely allied with the notion of the infinite (both are privations of form or limit), so it would make sense that matter as such would tend "toward" boundlessness (cf. Physics III.7.207b35-208a4). Other than that complaint, I can find nothing to disagree with.

The paper also also mentions that "On the level of individual charges, the action of electro-magnetic forces tends toward the natural end of (electrical) charge neutrality" (542).

That physical matter (mass-energy) has ends constitutes a continuity with the living world. Once life is constituted (however that happens), the preservation of the organismic configuration of matter becomes a value for the organism. As Hans Jonas writes,

[L]iving things are creatures of need. Only living things have needs and act on needs. Need is based both on the necessity for the continuous self-renewal of the organism by the metabolic process, and on the organism's elemental urge thus precariously to continue itself. This basic self-concern of all life, in which necessity and will are bound together, manifests itself on the level of animality as appetite, fear, and all the rest of the emotions. The pang of hunger, the passion of the chase, the fury of combat, the anguish of flight, the lure of love—these, and not the data transmitted by the receptors, imbue objects with the character of goals, negative or positive, and make behavior purposive. the mere element of effort lifts bodily activity out of the class of mechanical performance, and the fact that movement requires effort means that an animal will move only under the incentive of an interest.

... The organism has to keep going, because to be going is its very existence—which is revocable—and, threatened with extinction, it is concerned in existing. There is no analogue in the machine to the instinct of self-preservation—only to the latter's antithesis, the final entropy of death. (126)

As a matter of fact, every part of an organism is united in the effort to survive, and I think it's safe to say that this unity of effort is what defines their unity of form.

But the question of how to move from level 3 to level 4, that is, how to go from animal life to rational life, remains to be seen. Jonas points to the human capacity for image making, which is closely related to the sense of sight.

Some sort of disengagement from the causality of the encounter [with the sensible object] provides the neutral freedom for letting the "other" appear for itself. (The organization of our senses assures this disengagement in advance.) In that appearance the affective basis ("stimulation," "irritation") is canceled, its record neutralized....

Vision, of all senses, most conspicuously realizes in its normal performance this double feat of "abstraction": setting off the self-contained object from the affective condition of sensing, and upholding its identity and unity across the whole range of its possible transformations of appearance, each of which is already an integrated simultaneous manifold. (168-9)

Sight and the image-making capacity share in disengagement from their object. At last month's ISN Summer Conference, Lenny Moss gave an outstanding keynote address that showed how the concept of detachment permeates nature from human beings down to the lowliest bits of matter. Detachment is "is a measure of the relative independence of an entity from a larger milieu—its ability to resist the forces of thermal or other kinds of winds." As entities ascend the hierarchy of being, they become more detached from their environment. With mounting being and detachment, an entity acquires the ability to carry a history. "To have a history requires the ability of an entity to buffer itself against random perturbations, or perhaps even to set its own agenda as to how it will receive and respond to stimuli from without." (It's not hard to see how Moss's scheme allows for free will.)

Similarly, notice that each of Artigas's levels of teleology is at a greater remove from the subject of the telos. The end of a process is simply part of the process. The goal of a tendency is a future part of regular process. A value for a subject is hypothetical or possible future part of a process. The purpose of a plan is possible future part of an intelligent subject's activity.

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Mariano Artigas, The Mind of the Universe, (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000), 126-127.

John W. Keck, "The Natural Motion of Matter in Newtonian and Post-Newtonian Physics," The Thomist 71 (October 2007), 529-54. [The URL works at present, but may change soon.]

Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001/1966).

Lenny Moss, "Detachment, Genomics and the Nature of Being Human," ISN Summer Conference 2008 (June 13, 2008). [published proceedings planned]

Graying and Dying

Just a short note to point out a couple of interesting articles on the graying and dying of our population. First, Boston Globe op-ed by Jeff Jacoby on the coming population bust.

Human fertility has been dropping for years and is now below replacement levels - the minimum required to prevent depopulation - in scores of countries, including China, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Turkey, and all of Europe. The world's population is still rising, largely because of longer life spans - more people live to old age than in the past. But with far fewer children being born today, there will be far fewer adults bearing children tomorrow. In some countries, the collapse has already begun. Russia, for example, is now losing 700,000 people a year.

Even in the United States, where birth rates are still (barely) at replacement level, there are hints of the dislocations to come: In Pittsburgh, reports The New York Times, deaths now outnumber births and hospitals are closing obstetrics wards or converting them to acute care for the elderly. Pittsburgh's public school enrollment was 70,000 in the 1980s. It is 30,000 today - and falling.

By mid-century, according to one UN estimate, there will be 248 million fewer children than there are now. To a culture that has been endlessly hectored about the dangers of overpopulation, that might sound like welcome news. It isn't. No society gains when it loses its most precious resource, and no resource is more valuable than the human mind. The coming demographic winter will chill us all.

Second, NPR's Here and Now had a program a couple weeks ago on Andrew Blechman's Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias. Sounds like the older generation is partying down, without regard for the decreasing number of young people to support their benefits.

Jeff Jacoby's follow-up op-ed underscores the dire economic effects of an aging population:

Far from boosting the economy, an aging population depresses it. As workers are taxed more heavily to support surging numbers of elders, they respond by working less, which leads to stagnation, which reduces economic opportunity still further. "Imagine that all your taxes went for nothing but Social Security and Medicare," says Longman in "Demographic Winter," a new documentary about the coming population decline, "and you still didn't have health care as a young person."

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).

Phillip Johnson, Put Down that Kool-Aid!

There are a couple especially noteworthy articles in the May Touchstone. First L.P. Fairfield writes a review of a book on panentheism (not to be confused with pantheism).

"Panentheism" means "God in everything" and conversely, "everything in God." Unlike pure pantheism, it does not merely identify God one-for-one with the sum total of everything in the cosmos. But unlike biblical Christianity, it does not separate God and the universe either.

Well that's one common strain of understanding of the word, but there is also a Christian understanding of it. The Wikipedia article on the subject matches with the understanding of the subject imparted to me by some good theologians:

The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches have a doctrine called panentheism to describe the relationship between the Uncreated (God, who is omnipotent, eternal, and constant) and His creation that bears surface similarities with the panentheism described above but maintains a critical distinction.

Most specifically, these Churches teach that God is not the "watchmaker God" of the Western European Enlightenment. Likewise, they teach that God is not the "stage magician God" who only shows up when performing miracles. Instead, the teaching of both these Churches is that God is not merely necessary to have created the universe, but that His active presence is necessary in some way for every bit of creation, from smallest to greatest, to continue to exist at all.

I wish I could do better than an inadequately sourced Wikipedia article, but I'm not an academic theologian by any means. Whatever the definition of the word, suffice it to say that when I talk about panentheism, I do not intend the new-agey meaning described in the review, but the understanding of the Orthodox and Oriental Christian Churches that I've just reviewed for you.

The second article I'd like to mention is surprisingly related. Phillip E. Johnson disputes the "God-in-the-gaps" argument against Intelligent Design (ID) theory:

[The] point [of theistic evolutionists who warn intelligent design theorists against committing what they call the “God of the gaps” fallacy] is that it is futile to rely on “gaps” that the theory of evolution has not yet explained as places where divine acts might be necessary, because those gaps will inevitably be filled as science progresses. Eventually, God will be squeezed out of these spaces, with consequent embarrassment to the cause of religion.

That may be the reason some or even most theistic opponents of ID theory give for their opposition, but there is a more subtle danger. What ID proponents fall into is giving the idea that God can only work in the same mode as natural causes. In reality God's ways of operating far transcend natural causes, including human ways. Whereas humans make new things by pushing around matter that already exists, God creates, that is, He brings something from nothing. The fact that there is a natural order at all is His work. Human making relies on a pre-existing order, but God is responsible for the entire order that pervades his creations, including the possibility of generating further order. As Thomas Aquinas wrote:

Nature is nothing but the plan of some art, namely a divine one, put into things themselves, by which those things move towards a concrete end: as if the man who builds up a ship could give to the pieces of wood that they could move by themselves to produce the form of the ship. (Commentary on Physics II.8, lecture 14, no. 268; h/t Mariano Artigas)

So my objection to ID is not that it exposes religion to embarrassment, but that its proponents leave unchallenged a materialist premise that implicitly denigrates God and overlooks the most obvious evidence of His action.

Of course, this isn't necessarily so. Johnson and other ID proponents could very easily add to their writings something like this caveat: "Of course, even if ID were proven wrong, that wouldn't disprove God's action in creation, because the very order of nature presupposed by science manifests God's action. This order is evident to every man without the mediation of special scientific techniques."

But they don't write that. They insist on giving "scientific" materialists home-field advantage. They answer the atheist charge that God can't exist because he doesn't make (the way humans do) by shouting, "Oh, yes He does!" They leave unchallenged the atheist premise that creating is just like making, and in doing so, they leave their readers to tacitly accept that faulty premise.

In a sense it's like boys arguing about whose father is smarter. One boy asserts, "If your father's smarter than mine, he'll beat him right now in checkers." The second boy, instead of resting secure that his father is a Nobel laureate, instead responds, "My father will too beat your father!" Maybe the second boy's father doesn't think playing, let alone training, in checkers is worthwhile, or maybe he's simply got something better to do at the moment. God's action on nature is farther beyond human action than a Nobel laureate is beyond the neighborhood checkers champion.

It is sad that Johnson and many good people who fight for belief in God get so caught up in the dispute with atheists that they imbibe (or at least allow others to imbibe) the subtle and deadly materialist premises of their interlocutors.

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L. P. Fairfield, "Review of Unreasonable Force Panentheism: The Other God Of the Philosophers—From Plato to the Present by John W. Cooper," Touchstone (May 2008), 33-34.

Phillip E. Johnson, "Science Futures," Touchstone (May 2008), 9-10.

Physics for Realists

Looks like Anthony Rizzi's new book is out. You can order your copy for just shy of $100 plus shipping at the IAP Store.

This first of its kind in 300 years textbook will enlighten you and your students. For advanced high school students and college freshmen.

"Physics for Realists is a landmark textbook that uses our common sense to discover and clarify modern physical theory. The resulting pedagogical approach makes physics more accessible and its beauty more evident. This book will revolutionize our understanding of physics and the way it is taught." -Murray Daw, Bowen Prof. of Physics

This textbook presents the fundamentals of Newtonian Mechanics to the college undergraduate or the advanced high school student in a way that taps the student's common sense. Starting with things we see directly, it leads the student to a deep understanding of the best in modern theory. Each chapter builds on the previous one in a simple way to the crescendo of special relativity, drawing the student at each step into the excitement of physics. This profound unity of principle is complemented by a unity of practice through the challenge of a manned mission to Mars by AD 2030, which is the current commitment of the US.

Real world problems and examples salt the text, helping the student to ground his thinking and see the importance of physics to everyday life. It is the hope of the IAP that this approach will make the rigorous, scientific content at once engaging and challenging to both those interested in careers in the hard sciences and also those not traditionally attracted to mathematics and the hard sciences. (Prerequisite: Calculus) (The book will begin shipping May 20, 2008.) [I've cleaned up some of the formatting here for readability.]

(That the advertisement fails to mention that Dr. Daw helped Dr. Rizzi with the textbook, and is hardly a disinterested evaluator, is a bit disingenuous. But then I guess one gets endorsements where one can find them.)

Not having seen the published text, I myself should refrain from saying anything substantive about it. But I will express my fervent hope that Dr. Rizzi has made the effort to weave final causality into substance of the text. As you may know, final causality is in fact the heart of Aristotelian natural philosophy, and what is so desperately missing from modern science. Integral purpose is the way that Aristotle's conception of nature is far superior to that of modern science.

If you'd like to hear Dr. Rizzi himself speak on his new book, he'll be appearing on EWTN LIVE with Fr. Pacwa on May 28th at 8:00pm ET. I wish Dr. Rizzi the best with his new book.

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.]