This week I'm participating in a St. Thomas faculty seminar titled, "Must Knowledge Be Secular?" The seminar is being led by Notre Dame history prof Brad Gregory, and Brad is using it to try out portions of his forthcoming book, Disentangling the West: The Reformation Era and the Makings of Modernity. The book should generate lots of conversations on MoJ and elsewhere. He's pushing back against many of the dominant historical narratives, including the story that science's eclipse of theology was an inevitable byproduct of the nature of scientific inquiry. Brad complicates the story -- e.g., arguing that the widespread and seemingly unresolvable disagreements about Christian doctrine during the Reformation era helped drive the trend toward the privatization of religion and the secularization of knowledge. In order to move beyond the doctrinal disputes, the conversation retreated to a plane of "natural" reason, becoming more and more disconnected from substantive Christian claims.
The history has opened up a range of questions within the seminar: When a historian is open to theology, is that openness aimed simply at a better understanding of the subject, or should the openness encompass the possibility that theological claims are actually true? What would it look like for universities (secular as well as Christian) to make space for theology (or more broadly, the transcendent)? And should a Catholic university do more than "make space" for theology? If so, what exactly should it look like? In any event, Brad's work reflects the extent to which many of our current debates are shaped by the historical narratives we embrace.
"Nietzsche, the child of a Lutheran pastor, radicalized this argument,
painting all of Christianity—indeed all of Western religion, going back
to Judaism—as a slave morality, the psychic revolt of the lower orders
against their betters. Before there was religion or even morality, there
was the sense and sensibility of the master class. The master looked
upon his body—its strength and beauty, its demonstrated excellence and
reserves of power—and saw and said that it was good. As an afterthought
he looked upon the slave, and saw and said that it was bad. The slave
never looked upon himself: he was consumed by envy of and resentment
toward his master. Too weak to act upon his rage and take revenge, he
launched a quiet but lethal revolt of the mind. He called all the
master's attributes—power, indifference to suffering, thoughtless
cruelty—evil. He spoke of his own attributes—meekness, humility,
forbearance—as good. He devised a religion that made selfishness and
self-concern a sin, and compassion and concern for others the path to
salvation. He envisioned a universal brotherhood of believers, equal
before God, and damned the master's order of unevenly distributed
excellence. The modern residue of that slave revolt, Nietzsche makes
clear, is found not in Christianity, or even religion, but in the
nineteenth-century movements for democracy and socialism:
Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply
into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the "equality of souls
before God." This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of
equal rights: mankind was first taught to stammer the proposition of
equality in a religious context, and only later was it made into
morality: no wonder that man ended by taking it seriously, taking it
practically!—that is to say, politically, democratically,
socialistically.
When [Ayn] Rand inveighs against Christianity as the forebear of socialism,
when she rails against altruism and sacrifice as inversions of the true
hierarchy of values, she is cultivating the strain within conservatism
that sees religion as not a remedy to but a helpmate of the left. And
when she looks, however ineptly, to Aristotle for an alternative
morality, she is recapitulating Nietzsche's journey back to antiquity,
where he hoped to find a master-class morality untainted by the
egalitarian values of the lower orders.
Though Rand's antireligious defense of capitalism might seem out of
place in today's political firmament, we would do well to recall the
recent revival of interest in her books. More than 800,000 copies of her
novels were sold in 2008 alone; as Burns rightly notes, "Rand is a more
active presence in American culture now than she was during her
lifetime." Indeed, Rand is regularly cited as a formative influence upon
an entire new generation of Republican leaders; Burns calls her "the
ultimate gateway drug to life on the right." Whether or not she is
invoked by name, Rand's presence is palpable in the concern, heard
increasingly on the right, that there is something sinister afoot in the
institutions and teachings of Christianity.
I beg you, look for the words "social justice" or "economic justice"
on your church website. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social
justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising
people to leave their church? Yes.
That was Glenn Beck on his March 2 radio show, taking a stand
against, well, pretty much every church in the Christian faith:
Catholic, Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist—even his very own Church of
Latter-day Saints."
As I was recently paging through my copy of Heinrich Rommen’s The Natural Law, I came across this passage of his:
When little or no respect any longer exists for any authority; when marriage generally ceases to be differentiated from concubinage and promiscuity; when the honor of one’s fellow citizen is no longer respected and oaths no longer have force, then the possibility of social living, of order in human affairs, vanishes together.
Although his thoughts were penned in 1935 when he and his family were still living in Germany where he had been a guest of the state police, they ought to provide us with insight about many of the issues we tackle here at the Mirror of Justice seventy-five years later.
Some time ago my sister, Angela, sent me her essay "At Any Cost: Heroic Measures to Save Lives." Although written after the Haiti earthquate and well before Peter Singer's recent op-ed titled "Should This Be the Last Generation?," I think it offers a powerful response to his essay.
All work stops.A small tapping sound is heard beneath the rubble; signs of life.Everyone on the rescue team increases their determination and will go to any length to find the survivor.I have watched the tremendous humanitarian efforts of not only trained professional rescuers, but film crews, family members, and every day individuals as well.They are all trying to save as many lives as possible following the devastating earthquake in Haiti.The images on television are heartbreaking; children, already born into difficult circumstances, now facing unimaginable hardships, many without parents, shelter, and even limbs.But they are alive and the world rejoices.
I cannot help but wonder, how many more are left under the rubble still alive?They may be buried so deep, that any signs of life cannot be heard.Their movements and sounds go unnoticed.There is no doubt; every rescuer present would risk their very lives to save them, if they could only hear their cries.No matter how difficult the circumstances the children and other survivors will face, everyone agrees, life is worth saving.
In spite of the magnitude of the disaster, I cannot help but be filled with hope for our world.Nations are at war, global recession is wreaking havoc, and crime is on the rise, while job opportunities are falling.Still, the global community has heard the cry for help and responded to the humanitarian call.The world has sent a message from Haiti as a testament to life itself.Everyone has joined forces around one of the poorest nations in the world to literally lift it from the rubble and preserve life.
If the world will rally for Haiti, will it not also finally join forces and rally on behalf of all the unborn whose lives are in danger?These children are moving, tapping, living.Although we cannot hear their cries, we know they are there.With today’s technology, we do not have to rely on microphones buried deep within the Earth to detect life, we can see their humanity.Although not everyone will agree that life begins at conception, there is clearly life forming activity from the very start.The life forming is human.If we followed the example of rescue workers in Haiti, we would proceed on the assumption that what we are detecting is alive. Rescuers are not absolutely certain that they will find someone breathing when they finally make their way through the rubble.If there is even the slightest chance that someone is left alive, they give their absolute effort.Should we not proceed as well, erring on the side of caution, not waiting until everyone is convinced that a human embryo is human life?If there were even the slightest chance that a life could be spared, wouldn’t all of us want to give our absolute effort?
Precious time is passing and lives are being lost.It is time to put political positions aside, join forces, and as a global community, collectively work to preserve life.Just like many of the children we have seen on the news laying in parks next to the ruins, these unborn children may be “unwanted,” they could be born into “devastating” circumstances, many could even be deformed or facing other unimaginable health issues.They have a chance at life though.The world has spoken in Haiti.Life, no matter how devastating the circumstances, is worth saving.What of these unborn lives?Will we not go to heroic measures to save them?Their tapping will go on long after the Earth finally settles in Haiti.Let’s not let their sounds go unheard.
Ronald Dworkin has a book
forthcoming later this year, Justice for
Hedgehogs, but there is already a symposium in the Boston University Law
Review discussing it with a response by Dworkin. I have always been attracted
to the main lines of Dworkin’s philosophy of law and repelled by his account of
liberalism. Indeed, I got interested in political theory because of how much I
disagreed with him. In general, I despise his liberalism becauseit is designed for hedgehogs. In my view, social reality is
too complicated and values conflict in too many contexts to hope or expect that
a theory with a few small premises could lead us to good results across a wide
variety of cases, but that is exactly Dworkin’s objective. I think the notion
that the state should be neutral about the good life to be simplistic. I think
that the deductions of hedgehog theory are forced. I think they obscure the
tragic choices inevitably made in decisionmaking. I went on a partial rant in
this vein at the Colloquium on Philosophy and the Social Sciences in Prague and
one of the presenters, Frank Michelman, who has read the book (and written
about it in an interesting essay) said, “Steve, you are not going to like this
book.”
I have read many of the essays in the symposium. I
particularly like two of them so far (in addition to Frank Michelman’s). Martha
Minow and Joe Singer have a wonderful essay stressing the existence of
tragic choices that are suppressed by Dworkin’s analysis and why the
acknowledgement of such choices is more true and humane that that put forward
by Dworkin. Robin West also has a very nice essay which opposes the neutrality
about the good life idea and argues that the idea of rights as trumps can
obscure the tragic choices made. She
also makes the interesting point that with all our theorizing about what
legislators must not do; we have
undertheorized the question of what they should be morally (and perhaps legally) obligated to do.
These
essays and the other essays in the symposium are available here
Last week, while many of us were distracted by the oil belching forth
from the gulf floor and the president’s ham-handed attempts to
demonstrate that he was sufficiently engaged and enraged, Gallup
released a stunning, and little noticed, report
on Americans’ evolving views of homosexuality. Allow me to
enlighten:
1. For the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and
lesbian relations” as morally acceptable has crossed the 50 percent
mark. (You have to love the fact that they still use the word
“relations.” So quaint.)
2. Also for the first time, the percentage of men who hold that view is
greater than the percentage of women who do.
3. This new alignment is being led by a dramatic change in attitudes
among younger men, but older men’s perceptions also have eclipsed older
women’s. While women’s views have stayed about the same over the past
four years, the percentage of men ages 18 to 49 who perceived these
“relations” as morally acceptable rose by 48 percent, and among men over
50, it rose by 26 percent.
I warned you: stunning.
There is no way to know for sure what’s driving such a radical change in
men’s views on this issue because Gallup didn’t ask, but that doesn’t
mean that we can’t speculate. To help me do so, I called Dr. Michael
Kimmel, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York
at Stony Brook and the author or editor of more than 20 books on men
and masculinity, and Professor Ritch
Savin-Williams, the chairman of human development at Cornell
University and the author of seven books, most of which deal with
adolescent development and same-sex attraction.
Many good answers to questions that properly arise in the face of the dilemma -- which I regard to be false -- of judges either *making it up* or *looking it up* can be found in Jeff Powell's Constitutional Conscience: The Moral Dimension of Judicial Decision (The University of Chicago Press, 2008). The question animating the book is of a piece with the one Michael Perry and Rick Garnett have just been pursuing here (or not quite pursuing, pending something Michael Perry mentioned in Brooklyn): When is it a good idea, all things considered, for a judge to lie about what he or she is up to in reaching/justifying a decision? Powell's claim is that virtues -- faith, integrity, candor, and humility -- should guide constitutional interpretation, because they (virtues) are among the ends we as individuals and as a people should be seeking and living (including by engaging in constitutionalism at all). I share Powell's judgment that the people who endow the governing authority with power have the right (because they have the duty) to expect of it/them virtuous conduct of office, which includes honoring the terms of the delegation of office they have received. If they should come to understand that they cannot perform under that delegation without doing (serious) wrong, then they must not perform under it, unless of course one believes one can do a (proportional) wrong to achieve a "right." Proportionalism, though, as a species of moral theory, is last season, not to mention vicious.
