Vulcan's Mercy

HUMAN DIGNITY

No credible system of ethics exists without accounting for why we must not defame, defile, and destroy each other.  That account starts with the dignity each and every one of us possesses.  Today Fr. Neuhaus of First Things puts forth a fine definition of human dignity:

In this view, the dignity of the human person means at least this: A human being is a person possessed of a dignity we are obliged to respect at every point of development, debilitation, or decline by virtue of being created in the image and likeness of God. Endowed with the spiritual principle of the soul, and—however healthy or impaired—with reason, and with free will, the destiny of the person who acts in accord with moral conscience in obedience to the truth is nothing less than eternal union with God. This is the dignity of the human person that is to be respected, defended, and indeed revered.

Amen.

Unfortunately, this eludes so many of us in this nominalistic age of ours in which we have discarded the hard-won knowledge of human essence, thus purpose, and so have let Will triumph over the Word written on all of our hearts.

DEVOLUTION

Rummaging through old pictures of the halcyon days of my youth, I found a couple of photos that illustrate a cautionary tale.  Below are the before and after shots of a cold warrior who didn't get a job after mustering out of the service.  (And no, it's not yours truly.  He is taking the "after" picture, because he did get a job after battling the Red Menace and so could afford a camera.)

 

DOMESTIC LIFE

First thing this morning ...

The wife: "Did it rain last night?"

Me: "Yes."

The wife: "Are you sure?"

Me: "Yes."

The wife: "It doesn't look like it rained."

Me: "Look at the sidewalk and the driveway.  They're still wet."

The wife: "How do you know they're wet from rain?"

Me: "Starting at a quarter-to-four this morning about a half-inch of rain fell over the next hour or so."

The wife: "I don't think it rained last night."

Translation: "Be sure to water the lawn this weekend instead of goofing around."

THE MONSTER'S HIRELING

Last week Judith Regan of ReganBooks, a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers, defended her decision to publish O.J. Simpson's book If I Did It, an account of his brutal murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, under the gimmick that it is only a hypothetical account of how it would have happened if he had done it.  Regan said that we all should be glad that she got Simpson to finally confess to the murders.

Well, sure, a confession from Simpson would be good.  However, he doesn't do that in If I Did It.  Indeed, the conceit of the book is that he didn't do it.  Granted, no one is falling for this ruse, but then no one but the willfully ignorant has doubted Simpson's guilt.  So Regan's publication of If I Did It does not advance the truth at all.  And even if Regan successfully persuades a lot of people to suspend disbelief and accept this book as a genuine confession from Simpson, it is morally void as it is unaccompanied by his repentance.

So this whole venture is nothing but a money grab.  The monster Simpson will have profited from his evil deeds, and so will his hirelings Regan and the other bottom-feeders in the media who are promoting his piece of garbage.

THE INAUTHENTICITY OF AUTHENTICITY

In the preceding article I wrote how people who pledge themselves to a standard of conduct are commonly and erroneously derided as hypocrites when they, being all too human, inevitably fail to meet that standard.  This misconception of hypocrisy not only drains it of meaning as a gratuitous entailment of any wrongdoing by people who are otherwise striving to live decently, but perverts the charge of hypocrisy into an assault upon the very idea of moral standards.  This is because hypocrisy has been deformed from a vice against integrity into a vice against authenticity, the cardinal virtue of our postmodern culture.  So let’s examine this virtue of authenticity and the antinomian creed behind it.

The postmodern man is antinomian, regarding no beliefs, principles, or standards as privileged over any others.  The idea of objective standards of morality is offensive to him, for he knows that all such standards are in fact nothing more than arbitrary social constructs designed to empower one person over another.  Hence, to illustrate one example, the postmodern phenomenon of feminism, an ideology dedicated to breaking the patriarchal chains of custom and tradition that enslave women to men.  That some of those customs and traditions may embody generations of accumulated wisdom about the complementarity of the sexes for the betterment of both is absurd to the feminists and their postmodern cohorts.

In this and many other ways, the postmodernists deny the universality of human nature and the human condition.  They deny the commonality of our form, our purpose, and our experience of the world around us.  For them there are no standards of conduct, decency, or morality applicable to all of us.  The only truth is the self, which can be true only to itself.  Therefore, out of this antinomianism arises the virtue of authenticity, the praiseworthiness of the self in pursuit of its true self.  The postmodern man enters this world in Rousseauvian splendor -- as his pure self.  However, he is soon polluted by a Eurocentric culture and the self becomes more and more encrusted with its grime.  But the corruption is not so deep that the postmodernist cannot become enlightened and cut himself loose of the arbitrary conventions of society that have repressed his expression of his true self.  He grasps the virtue of authenticity and begins his pursuit of the only truth he can know:  His true, pure, and unencumbered self.

So, what exactly is this authentic self that the mores of society, that of Western civilization in particular, have repressed?  Strip the postmodern ideologies of their rationalizations, and at bottom is the quest to unleash our carnal and visceral impulses without suffering any consequences from acting upon them.  Thus, feminists demand an unlimited abortion license so that women, like men, can sever sex from bearing children.  Gays demand the facsimile of marriage so that homosexual relationships are not just tolerated by society but given the stamp of approval.  Libertines demand the approbation of gratifying appetite as the highest good.  Civil libertarians demand absolutism not only in freedom of speech but also of conduct so that no form of expression, however vulgar, obscene, or profane endures any restraint.  Welfare statists demand the transfer of wealth from the productive to the unproductive so that no manner of living, however dysfunctional, is stymied by a lack of means to sustain it.  Multiculturalists demand no adverse judgment of street thugs, illegal aliens, and Gitmo detainees whose lawlessness is justified by our alleged oppression of them.  And we have yielded to the demands of the postmodernists.  We have done so, because we have uncritically accepted their claim that the authentic self is the true self.

But is that so?  No.  If it were, we would have to come to grips with the fact that a human being is a very ugly thing.  After all, we have loosed the postmodernists from our allegedly arbitrary conventions of social intercourse and let them indulge their carnal and visceral impulses for a generation now.  We have even joined them to a greater or lesser extent.  Yet, in all this celebration of authenticity, where is the beauty that the pursuit of the truth, therefore the good, should have discovered?  Nowhere, because there is none to be found by reducing ourselves to our “authentic” selves.  Strip us of our garments of rationality, decency, and morality, our garbs of civilization, we are grotesque creatures, mere beasts, clever enough to know how to indulge our appetites and impulses but lacking in the will to free ourselves from them.

The postmodernist virtue of authenticity is a falsehood.  That is because the so-called authentic self in not the true self.  A human being is more than his raw urges.  Even though he is born into this world as a clever beast ruled by his appetites and impulses, he possesses the reason that enables him to learn of the good that can come of refusing to gratify his urges today in order to work towards a desire that can only be satisfied tomorrow – and the will to do just that.  What he learns is the moral code requisite to creation.  By conforming to the objective standards of morality necessary to repress his raw urges and then direct himself to engage in the work of creation does a person become more than a clever beast.  Only as a creator can a person become fully human.  And it is this human self, once achieved, that is the true self.

Therefore, the human self does not exist except as a moral being.  It is that moral being, who chooses to repress the appetites and impulses of the “authentic” self that at best distract him from the work of creation and at worst lead him to destruction, that constitutes the complete self and so the true self.  An example of this is Mel Gibson and his recent drunk driving arrest.  Obviously intoxicated, he hurled anti-Semitic slurs at the police officers detaining him.  Many made the argument that in doing so Gibson revealed his true self as a bigot, for in vino veritas.  No doubt that in his drunken state, Gibson did reveal something true about himself.  He has some ugly ideas.  Yet, it is also true that when he is in full possession of his faculties, he represses this ugliness embedded in his “authentic” self and conducts himself honorably in regard to Jews.  Because a person’s will is a key component of his self, how he exercises that will is a better indicator of his true self than when he has lost control to his impulses.  It is a person’s moral standards that determine how he will exercise his will, and so only by taking account of a person as moral being can we understand his true self.

The authentic self, the clever beast shorn of its civilization, as the true self is a postmodern canard.  It is an inauthentic caricature of human nature.  By enshrining it as the only truth, it isolates a person by denying his commonality with his fellow man.  By giving rein to his appetites and impulses, he is enslaved by them.  By invalidating all objective standards of morality, he loses the only means to emancipate himself.  Thus, the postmodern virtue of authenticity is a black hole for the human soul.

THE RESCUE OF HYPOCRISY

I like words to be useful, so I've been long wary of the reduction of hypocrisy into meaninglessness by charging as a hypocrite everyone who fails to adhere to a moral standard he advocates.  That charge has the effect of making hypocrisy a wrong collateral to every instance of wrongdoing by a person who professes that the good life is a morally decent life.  Because no one is perfect, then by definition that charge makes every morally decent person a hypocrite.  If so, then hypocrisy becomes a muddy word blurring any useful distinctions, except perversely for the postmodern antinomians who despise all moral standards except their cardinal virtue of authenticity against which hypocrisy denotes the gravest vice.

Indeed, the widespread misuse of the word hypocrisy in general discourse these days is part and parcel of our unreflective, though probably not deeply held, acceptance of the antinomian's virtue of authenticity.  A common example of this is the disdain for etiquette as a masquerade that represses a person's true feelings.  After more than three decades recording the folly of the let-it-all-hang-out hippie culture, it still surprises me how many parents refuse to teach their children to say "thank you" unless the little monsters genuinely feel grateful for what they have received.  This, of course, misses the point of etiquette.  It is a set of manners precisely designed to give our actions the form of courtesy to others whether or not we feel courteous, because we are supposed to value benevolence to others more than giving rein to the impulses of our "authentic" selves.  Yet, too many of us dispense with the standards of etiquette as the hypocritical sin of repressing authenticity.

So, maybe I should make a stronger statement about our present common usage of hypocrisy.  It goes beyond misuse to abuse of the word, because so many of us have bought into the virtue of authenticity.  No doubt most of us haven't staked too much on this false virtue, because the realities of social intercourse do not let us forego the acknowledgment of moral standards entirely.  Nevertheless, the abuse of the word hypocrisy in praise of authenticity, however faint, remains a perversion that obfuscates moral knowledge and impedes acting in accord with it.  That is why we need to rescue hypocrisy.

To this end, Robert Miller has written a fine essay in "First Things" last Friday about the fall of evangelical pastor Ted Haggard from his pulpit.  He fights the good fight to rescue the word hypocrisy from its abuse as a sword against norms of decency to return it to its proper function as a shield in defense of those norms.  Miller does more than revitalize the word in terms of the old chestnut, "Hypocrisy is the praise that vice pays virtue."  He effectively demonstrates the gravity of the true hypocrite's sin by illustrating how it is not automatically entailed in every wrong a person does against the standards he voices but instead is a willful and scandalous lie mocking morality.  Read Miller's essay to understand how Haggard is not hypocrite.  Then consider how, ironically, those who gleefully charge him with hypocrisy are themselves guilty of it -- in the rescued sense of the word.

THE GREAT DIVORCE (WITH APOLOGIES TO C.S. LEWIS)

Many serious people have been amazed by the rapid disintegration of the legal foundation for the institution of marriage with the recent furor over homosexual unions and the coming one over polygamous unions.  They shouldn't be.

[Note that I don't qualify the word "marriage" as "traditional" or in some other manner to define it only as a union between a man and a woman for the simple reason that doing so is redundant.  Whatever the merits of passing statutes that allow any group of individuals to establish a household, nothing but the monogamous bond of a man and a woman is a marriage.  Calling lead gold doesn't make it so, however much we may wish it.  So I won't dignify the abuse of the word marriage by hemming it in with qualifiers.]

However, that legal foundation was cracked four decades ago with the advent of no-fault divorce.  But why should any change in the law have altered, for example, a Catholic's concept of and commitment to the sacrament of marriage?  Government statutes have no bearing upon what a Catholic knows to be marriage.  But plainly it has for many Catholics and even more so for others.  This unfortunate dimunition of marriage, even by those who should know better, is product of trusting the government to protect the institution.

By letting the government be the primary guarantor of the sanctity of marriage, we let it become the definer of marriage.  Thus, we surrendered marriage to the tender mercies of the state and blinded ourselves to the plain fact that we are still free to commit ourselves to true marriage, that unbreakable vessel of eros which no mere statute can affect.  We don't need and have never needed the government to protect marriage, if we can muster the integrity to honor marriage without the compulsion of the law.  Yet, we have increasingly relied upon the crutch of government to give heft to marriage, and by doing so, we are now baffled as to how to retain the sanctity of marriage as government renders it meaningless.

Therefore, maybe it's time we consider divorcing marriage from the government.  After all, from a Catholic perspective, the laws in the U.S. never embraced the Catholic concept of marriage.  They were always somewhat minimalist in that regard, and I doubt that many Catholics would want the government to ban divorce and birth control to conform to Catholic teaching on the matter.  I certainly have no desire to impose with the force of law my beliefs about the commitments that marriage entails upon others.   So why should it matter to any Catholic, or any person who embraces marriage as a fundamental institution of society, what the government calls marriage?

The fact is, the government's involvement in marriage is a modern phenomenon.  Before the Protestant Reformation, the Church determined what constituted a marriage.  In the seventeenth century Protestant states began registering and then licensing marriages in lieu of the Church.  Then the laws multiplied from there until the government alone could dictate -- legally -- what constituted a marriage.  Now, over the past half century, the government has retreated from its protection of marriage while retaining its power to dictate what it is.

Well, so what?  None of that stops any of us from entering into the sacrament of lifelong marriage (through the Church or otherwise).  Indeed, by doing so we liberate marriage from the government by making our autonomous moral commitment to it.  Short of tyranny, the government is powerless to prevent this liberation of the institution from its destructive grip.  It can define marriage into meaningless, yet each and every one of us remains free to vest marriage with all the meaning our hearts and minds can and should put into it.

Now think about that.  Socially the sanctity of marriage would be resurgent.  True marriage protected only by our private commitments to it and the judgment of our peers would be far stronger than any backbone the law could give to it.  The debased forms of it sanctioned by the government would whither away in the demand for the real thing.  And the good news is that each of us can have that real thing right now if we want it.  We just have to stop caring about what the government says marriage is and start caring about what we know it is.

[Note:  Thanks to Eve Tushnet of EveTushnet.com and David Delaney of Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex whose recent writings on sex, marriage, and Karol Wojtyla's "Theology of the Body" provoked my thoughts on the unalterable ontology of marriage and how the state can never destroy true marriage.]

FORGIVENESS

When we utter the Lord’s Prayer we loose from our lips a daunting proposition:  “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  Perhaps proposition is not the best word for this.  We are not trying to make a bargain with God.  The second half of this petition is not our “quid” for His “quo” of the first half.  We can trust God to give us His grace unconditionally.  Therefore, the forgiveness we commit to extending to others is an acknowledgment of what we must do to make His grace effective.

But how do we forgive those as God forgives us?  Proposition or not, this is a daunting task.  Right?  I’ll go further and say that it is an impossible task if Christian forgiveness is equated to mercy, as it commonly is.  This is not because we are incapable of mercy.  We can be merciful, but not always.  Because of our fallen nature, we will often be too petty to be so.  However, even if we overcome our pettiness, mercy can offend our sense of justice.  And it should when mercy is inappropriate.

How is that so?  When I am merciful I excuse the one who has wronged me from the consequences of his trespass.  In other words, I release him of my temporal claims upon him.  Mercy is appropriate if I have truly forgiven the wrongdoer, he is remorseful, and holding him to restitution for his wrongdoing would only impede his redemption.  In the absence of any of these conditions, mercy would not only be inappropriate, but unjust.  The fact is, often a malefactor will right himself only by suffering the consequences of his trespass.  Indeed, this is the only Christian rationale for capital punishment.  For some evil-doers, nothing short of imminent prospect of execution will focus the mind upon the truth.

This brings us back to what is forgiveness.  What is the proper Christian concept of forgiveness that makes possible the petition “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”?  Let’s go to the Oxford English Dictionary which defines forgive as “to give up, cease to harbor (resentment, wrath)”.  Precisely.  When I forgive, I give up the foulness which corrupts my judgment.  By cleansing myself of resentment, I approximate the perfection of God and so possess the clarity of mind to do justice to my malefactor.  I do not let his trespass against me poison my soul, which if unchecked by forgiveness can metastasize the venality of resentment into the vice of wrath.

With forgiveness I bleed from me the venom of wrath.  Without it the desire for vengeance will harden my heart against hope and charity – i.e., the hope that my malefactor is redeemable and the charity to do justice by him to that end.  That justice may be mercy.  More likely, it will mean accepting his restitution, his temporal punishment, for the wrong he has done.  It is in this way we can emulate God and forgive those who trespass against us.

NOODLING ON GOD, POSTSCRIPT

Greg Perkins thought I "egregiously" misrepresented the argument he put forth in his debut article on the Noodle Food website.  (See here for his article, my response, and the exchange that followed.)  Unless I'm exceptionally thick (and I have been on more than one occasion), I don't see how I did.  So I'm not taking down my response to Greg.  However, in light of the number of views my response has received, it is only fair that I post his objection here.

NOODLING ON GOD

This afternoon I ran across this essay by Greg Perkins on Diana Hsieh's Noodle Food website.  Greg argued that a religious foundation for morality is a God-of-the-gaps fallacy, because the ethical life is scientifically reducible to objective values needed for a person's existence.  He furthered argued that Ayn Rand showed us exactly how this is so, thus closing the last gap we theists have desperately tried to squeeze God into.

There are a number of problems with Greg's argument.  The first is his premise:  >>Morality is objectively valuable to humans because our existence literally depends on it.<<  That's not exactly true.  A person can survive amorally by living like an animal and seizing whatever opportunity there is for food, water, shelter, comfort, and pleasure.  Let's call that the non-human mode of existence.  Worse, a person can live by destroying the lives and livelihood of others to accumulate whatever he desires.  Let's call that the anti-human mode of existence.

Of course, a person could choose to live as human being who thrives by acts of creation not merely to survive but to live a sacred life of beauty.  It is this human mode of existence that necessitates morality.  Diligent students of Rand's philosophy, Objectivism, wouldn't put it that way, but they would agree with its essence.  When Rand wrote that the standard of value for morality is life, she meant more than survival.  She meant life qua man -- that is, life as a human being, not as a clever beast or a destroyer.

So, in fact, both followers of the Judeo-Christian tradition and Objectivists agree not only does morality have an objective foundation, evidence of which is in human nature (as opposed to our baser biological nature as an animal, which in our fallen state can lead us to depravity), they largely agree upon what the foundation is.   Therefore, the second problem with Greg's argument is this strawman:  >>Someone avoiding murdering simply because he is committed to following the commandment that "thou shalt not kill" is not so much against murder as for obeying God; he would likewise obey if he instead thought God wanted him to kill (consider terrorist suicide bombers, or the case of Abraham and Isaac).<<

No doubt many people keep their nose clean to avoid punishment by the authorities.  However, it isn't prudence that restrains a reflective theist (my shorthand here for a Jew or a Christian) from violating God's commandment against murder.  It is his knowledge that a human life is not his to take.  That life is God's creation and God's alone to dispense with.  If a theist is to strive for the epitome of his existence -- his telos -- he will emulate that most perfect being, God, and live as a creator and not as a destroyer.

The Objectivist also knows that the life of another person is not his to take.  But, unlike the theist, all he has is Rand's principle of self-interest to restrain him from murder.  Yet it is not clear how self-interest does this, except maybe prudence -- and that's a weak reed.  All prudence proscribes is the commission of a particular murder, not murder in general.  Because it is within a person's capacity to choose the non-human or the anti-human mode of existence, rather than the human one, self-interest alone offers no guidance as to which self a person should choose and therefore what interests will attach to that choice.

God vested us with a transcendent purpose to be what nothing else in His creation can be:  Creators in our own right.  Because each and every one of us is ensouled with this telos, we can objectively know that the only self we should choose to be is our human self.  Therefore, we can objectively know what conduct is moral and what is not.  We can objectively know why God's commandments are true and why we want to follow them if we want to live a fully human life.  Without God, Nietzsche showed us how ambitious men would be seduced to live as destroyers and how they would reduce the meek to beasts.  Rand's ethic of self-interest, despite her earnest efforts to the contrary, offers no compelling guidance as to why this should not be so.

At best Rand correctly described what the moral life entails, but not why we should choose it.  That's the third problem with Greg's argument:  >>In approaching morality like scientists, we don't reject "traditional values" out of hand, nor do we follow tradition blindly. Instead, we use this bounty of material to identify and refine principles of human action that support our lives.<<  Sure, that can work to identify the values, virtues, and vices of life as a human being.  The evidence of an objective morality can be found in human nature.  But this Objectivist approach only tells us what the principles of the human mode of existence are, not why any of us should make that choice.

BATMEN REUNION

Kudos to my old pal Erik Nilsen for organizing a reunion for all the reprobates, like me, who served in the 6988th Electronic Security Squadron.   Since late last year Erik has tracked down about five hundred of us.  The shindig is scheduled for the end of June at Jude's Ferry, a pub near the airbase in England our unit was located at.  Click here for details.

It's been twenty years since many of us served at the '88th, which was an Air Force intelligence unit.  Most of us were linguists who collected military radio signals leaked out into the ether by the Red Menace.  I was there for three years during the mid-Eighties at the climax of the Cold War.  Erik and I went through Russian language training together and shipped out to the '88th as our first field assignment along with five other buddies of ours.  We were the "Magnificent Seven" rushed in as newbie replacements for a slug of experienced operators who were rotating out of the unit after serving during the Solidarity uprising in Poland.

In fact, we were the vangaurd of a host of wet-behind-the-ears linguists sent to the unit to meet the demand for intelligence collection as Reagan sensed Soviet weakness in the wake of the Solidarity crisis and upped the stakes against them by commissioning the installation of Pershing missiles in Europe.  The crush for field instruction of so many new airmen was so great that both Erik and I were upgraded to trainers before we even finished our own training.  In light of all the medals we new guys received and the outstanding unit award for the '88th during our watch, I don't think we did too bad of a job.  But then we enjoyed the leadership of some the best men in the Electronic Security Command.

Our primary job was to fly along the coast of the old Soviet Union and collect radio signals from its air force, army, and naval units.  I usually manned the "fighters" station on the RC-135, the military version of the Boeing 707 (pictured to the left).  That meant keeping track of Soviet fighters as they scrambled to intercept us and then pretend to shoot us down.  Some of those planes were older than I was, and the Air Force still flies them in special circumstances.  It was an exciting mission, and a serious one.  Indeed, we were among the few Air Force personnel to wear the "combat crew" badge, because our sorties against the Soviets were, in effect, wartime missions.

We got the nickname "Batmen" because of the design of our unit patch (pictured above).  It represented the necessarily cryptic nature of our mission that during the long decades of the Cold War entailed the unsung deaths of some of our comrades, even those downed by enemy fire.  The golden rays behind the bat commemorated some of those who had fallen during the early days of our unit.  Fortunately, I never encountered any serious threat of harm.  By the time I was flying against the Red Menace, the Soviets had criminally degenerated to taking on only civilian airliners like the ill-fated KAL Flight 007.  Little wonder Ronald Reagan sized them up as the Evil Empire.

I was born the year the Berlin Wall went up.  I never thought it would fall so early in my lifetime.  I'm glad I played my (very) small role in bringing that about.  Volunteering to fight the evil of the Soviet Union remains one of my proudest achievements.  I turned down slots to study physics at MIT and law at the University of Michigan to do so, and I have never regretted it. I thank my old friend Erik for providing me the opportunity to remember what shouldn't be forgotten.