How to Be Happy in Life

There are many different ways of life, of course, and each person has to choose the way that fits his or her personality and intuitions about what life is all about and how to be happy. There is the way of the adventurer. The way of the businessman. The way of the scholar or priest. There is the way of the artist or mystic. There is even Gurdjieff’s Way of the Sly Man, the secret mystic who lives like an ordinary business man. But because I studied Aristotle at a young age, I’ve always been persuaded that, when considering how to “structure” your life, you should consider how best to use whatever God-given talents you’ve been given. In his Nicomachian Ethics (1095a15–22), Aristotle said that happiness (eudaimonia) comes from the full exercise of your powers… from using your gifts… and I’ve always thought that is true. And that is why, for me personally, one of the dominant themes of my life has always been what I call balance – the attempt to arrange your life, in so far as its possible, so that you have some balance in life and are able to use as many abilities as possible. Perhaps this is actually the Way of the Dilettante but I prefer to think of it as the Way of the Renaissance. In other words, I wanted a life in which I could marry, raise a family, think, create, study, make money, travel, play sports, stay in shape, play music, read books, and, in general pursue my interests and passions. I tried to make choices, as life went on in its haphazard way, that created conditions in which this multi-faceted, balanced life would be possible.

For example, I knew early on that I wanted to be my own boss – both because I would probably make more money with my own businesses but also because it meant I would have more free time, the ability to travel, the ability to see my children growing up, and so on. As a result, I never really pursued any sort of corporate job or career. This has its disadvantages, of course. We’ve always had to pay for our own health insurance and medical costs, for example – and to this day marvel when friends complain about their $30 “co-pays” and rising insurance costs. We paid for each of our children’s deliveries, about $5,000 each, almost literally in cash. We’ve also had to create our own Defined Benefit Pension Plan with its myriad federal regulations, its mandatory reporting requirementss, its frequent demands for cash, and what I like to call the “adult supervision” of a professional pension fund administrator – a delightful woman, the “dragon lady,” who is an Orthodox Jew and who does her best to keep us out of trouble with the Feds.

But overall, being self-employed, in my opinion, gives you many more opportunities for the “full exercise of your powers” and be happy than working in a nine-to-five corporate job. I am revisiting all these issues afresh because, as I write these words, my eldest son is plotting his own career trajectory in the corporate world of high finance – and I marvel both at his ambitious determination and at the assumptions that underlying his plotting. It is so utterly alien to my own way of life – trying to fashion a career in a corporate setting – that I am only now appreciating the stubborn but quite deliberate choices that went into our way of life.

Another part of living a balanced life is making money – not a lot of money, perhaps, but enough to provide a safe and comfortable home, in a quiet and secure neighborhood, and so that you can afford such luxuries as sports teams, music and language lessons, health care, good schools and so on. If you want to marry and raise children – which, for most people, is the most realistic path to becoming a decent human being and whatever enlightenment is granted us on this earth — a minimum amount of money is a requirement. The practical upshot of this, for me, was that I didn’t want to choose businesses or jobs that would make me too poor. I’ve never really been all that materialistic (as anyone who sees the old truck I drive or my clothes would confirm) but I do like to travel, buy books, study Aikido and philosophy in my spare time, and provide educational opportunities for my children. This meant that my wife and I had to figure out how to make money – and thus becoming a starving artist wasn’t a choice I was prepared to make. I admire artists for their single-minded dedication to their art… and I actually would encourage anyone with serious talented to pursue art or music as a career choice… but you still have to earn a living, artist or no.

When young people call me up, as some do, and ask me if they should become writers, I always say the same thing: Absolutely! It’s the best way of life in the world! My only caveat is that, to be happy, most people will want to marry and have children, to exercise all of their powers – not just their artistic ones – and that you therefore have to balance your artistic pursuits with the need to make money and provide a comfortable home. You want to enjoy your body and stay in shape. Play tennis or softball. Go to yoga classes. This is self-evident to many people but not to all, especially not to all of my children. When you are young and idealistic, you want to give yourself over to a great artistic passion or project – to spend years working on plays that never get produced, or a great novel, or painting, or a rock band. In your early twenties, that’s what you should do – test out your abilities and explore different ways of making a living. But if you want to have a happy life, you need to know that you have to balance the desire for creative pursuits with the need to make a decent living – not to “sell out” but in order that you can “exercise your full powers,” so you’re able to become a full human being.

Again, I am only thinking about these issues because I have so many children. But I really do believe balance in life is essential, perhaps even a key to happiness – even if you decide that your talents lie in science, or engineering, or medicine. For example, my eldest daughter is thinking about becoming a doctor. My wife likes this idea because her sister is a doctor and she likes the economic security that being a doctor can provide to women, especially in an increasingly competitive global economy. I think that’s great, of course, and will do everything I can to help my daughter through medical school, if she decides to pursue that course. My only caution to her would be to strive for balance – to think about how to balance the demands of a medical career with the needs and expectations of family life, her musical talents, her passion for swimming and athletics. Medicine is a fairly demanding and monomaniacal profession… but I know it’s possible to build a balanced life as a doctor, as my younger brother and my sister-in-law have proven. But it takes effort and deliberate choices.

Studying Philosphy at the Catholic University of Leuven

The Absurdity of Analytic Philosophy

Anyone who has struggled with the arcane texts of contemporary analytic philosophers will appreciate this delightful cartoon on YouTube.

Today’s Golden Age of Philosophy

Few people know this, but our age is an amazing time for people who love philosophy.

When I was in college 30 years ago, philosophy was strictly an academic exercise and there were few resources available for people, like me, who view philosophy more as a way of life or avocation than as a job.

Today, however, all that has changed.

There are three or four excellent “magazines” about philosophy – such as Philosophy Now and The Philospher’s Magazine – that are filled with funny, off-beat, irreverent articles about philosophical topics. A number of top-rate publishing houses, mostly in the UK, such as Routledge and Blackwell Publishing, produce books aimed at a general philosophical readership.

There are philosophy radio programs such as Philosophy Talk… coffee houses… salons… adult education classes… and literally hundreds of websites for the interested reader. There are even philosophy comic books, such as LogiComix about the life of British logician Bertrand Russell. It’s simply amazing. It’s a golden age of philosophy, I think.

The irony, however, is that there is still no solid consensus on what, precisely, philosophy actually is. In its historical and etymological sense, philosophy is literally “love (philia) of wisdom (Sophia),” and that is always how I have looked upon it. Philosophy, for me, is the attempt to reflect upon experience in order to understand more about life and how we are to live. My aims, like those of Socrates, are primarily practical: I want to understand the world and myself to live better.

Today, there are three, perhaps four major “schools” or approaches to philosophy, each with their own journals, intellectual heroes and methodologies. It is one of the scandals of contemporary philosophy that these schools are somewhat incommensurable, meaning they are so different in their approaches and ideals they are almost incapable of speaking to one another. It’s as though organic chemistry and 17th century French literature are forced to share the same offices and pretend they are the same discipline (I exaggerate but you get the point).

The first approach may be called, for lack of a better word, Traditional Philosophy: this is the approach now largely taught only in Catholic universities. It is primarily historical in orientation, a “history of philosophy” style in which students study the thought of, say, the ancient Greeks, and Descartes, the British empiricists, Kant, Hegel and so on. There is very little attempt to think through how the thought of these philosophical greats can be reconciled. The idea appears to be that by working through all of these great thinkers, eventually the student will come to his or her own philosophical conclusions — although there is really no fixed “method” or approach given for doing so. I always think of this as the University of Chicago or Great Books approach. A variation of this approach is Catholic philosophy, including various schools of Thomism (such as the Transcendental Thomism of Merechal, Karl Rahner and, my guru, Bernard J.F. Lonergan)

The second major approach to philosophy today is what is known as Continental Philosophy. This is the philosophy that is most commonly taught in Europe and, again, in some Catholic universities in the U.S. In practice, it means primarily the philosophical systems of phenomenology, existentialism, so-called “critical theory” and their postmodern descendants. When I was in college, this is what I studied (in addition to traditional philosophy). We read the classic texts of phenomenology as well as such trendy philosophers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Edith Stein and others. Today, those names have largely been replaced by those of postmodern French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard. While classical Husserlian phenomenology does attempt to “solve” major philosophical problems and actually be a descriptive science, in practice students of Continental Philosophy, like their Traditional Philosophy counterparts, spend much of their time studying the works of individual thinkers and writing papers on aspects of their thought. (There is a greater interest in Continental Philosophy in social and political questions, however.)

The third and allegedly dominant approach to philosophy today is Analytic Philosophy. This is the philosophy most commonly taught in the UK and in major U.S. universities. Built upon the infrastructure of British empiricists such as David Hume, Analytic Philosophy appeared in the early 20th century through the work of such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. When I was in college, I found Analytic Philosophy to be mostly unintelligible gibberish. The emphasis on symbolic logic and the solving of trivial intellectual “puzzles” was, to me, an absurd waste of time.

In the past few years, however, I’ve been reading more about Analytic Philosophy and I am now much more impressed. Analytic Philosophy has matured over the past few decades and is now more of a philosophical “style” than it is a collection of doctrines. The style is more like that of my hero, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, in that Analytic Philosophy is much more interested in actually solving philosophical problems than it is in clarifying the thought of past philosophers. Thus, Analytic Philosophy is characterized by a thematic, rather than a “history of philosophy,” approach. It uses or creates a specialized technical vocabulary to elucidate the various “options” available in any given philosophical issue… marshals the evidence in favor or against those options… and then attempts to actually “settle” the issue. It’s actually quite refreshing.

The only problem with Analytic Philosophy from the perspective of a traditional philosopher or “lover of wisdom” is that it’s still focused primarily on trivial problems or mere puzzles (perhaps because those are the easiest ones to “solve”). Academic analytic philosophy is often little more than “chloroform in print,” boring to the point of dispatching its readers into a catatonic stupor. The cure for this tedium has been, over the past several years, the appearance of those popular philosophy journals and publishing houses I mentioned earlier. Precisely because they are aiming at a wider audience, the popular philosophy authors have to turn their attention to the Big Issues that interest real people – and thus are forced by the market to abandon the tedium beloved by academics and use their philosophical skills to address topics people actually care about. An example of how wonderful this can be is a book I am reading right now, Michael Sandel’s magisterial Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? It’s clear, concise, lays open the various options available on contentious issues, concerns serious subjects (what is justice?) and doesn’t resort to pretentious displays of symbolic logic to make its points.

These days, I mostly read good Catholic philosophy (such as can be found in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly or Method: A Journal of Lonergan Studies) and “popular” analytic books such as Justice or those produced by Routledge.  I still can’t read academic analytic philosophy journals.  I tried subscribing to Faith and Philosophy, the (mostly analytic) journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, but found it deadly dull and exhibiting the worst aspects of analytic pretentiousness.  Here’s a sample, taken from John Turri’s essay, “Practical and Epistemic Justification in Alston’s Perceiving God” (July 2008, p. 290):

“Alston’s thesis is that putative perceptions of God often justify beliefs about God.  A subject S has a putative perception of God when S has an experience e in which it seems to S that God appears to S as P.  If, based on e, S forms the “M-belief” that God is P, then S has a justified belief that God is P.  An M-belief is a belief that God is P, which is based on a putative perception of God.  (I will often substitute ‘q’ for the proposition that God is P.)

I dunno. My reaction to writing like that is the same as George Will’s: Just because life is absurd that doesn’t mean philosophy should be as well.

I don’t mean to pick on John Turri, whom I am sure is a great guy and a lot smarter than I am. But this sort of stuff is meant solely for professional philosophers in universities… and is largely what turns people off to philosophy as an academic discipline.  If Socrates had spoken like that, they probably would have forced him to drink hemlock much earlier and philosophy would never have gotten off the ground.

The Debunking of Wicca

In the 1990s, a new generation of young, less ideologically-driven, often female anthropologists and scholars made it their business to investigate prehistoric European religious cultures and, when they did, they made an astonishing discovery: the religion of the Great Goddess was all made up out of whole cloth.

“The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly new religion, a 1950s concoction influenced by such things as Masonic ritual and a late-nineteenth-century fascination with the esoteric and the occult, and that various assumptions informing the Wiccan view of history are deeply flawed,” wrote Charlotte Allen in The Atlantic. “Furthermore, scholars generally agree that there is no indication, either archaeological or in the written record, that any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypal goddess…”

In fact, according to Phillip G. Davis, professor of religion at the University of Prince Edward Island and author of The Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality, much of what passes for “feminist spirituality” today is largely the creation of just one man (not one woman), an eccentric British bureaucrat named Gerald B. Gardner (1884-1964).

An avid Rosicrucian and occasional nudist, Gardner claimed to have learned the “Old Religion” from an ancient “coven” near his home in Highcliffe, Dorset, but Davis and other scholars who examined his unpublished papers now conclude that no such group ever existed. Rather, Gardner synthesized the Romantic musings of such 19th and early 20th century cranks as Charles G. Leland (author of Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches), Margaret Murray (author of Witch-Cult in Western Europe), Robert Graves (author of The White Goddess) and the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley.

What’s more, when women scholars began searching the records and relics of ancient societies for the peaceful religion of the “Great Goddess,” they discovered (to their dismay) that ancient pagans were a far cry from the feminist encounter groups they encountered at Harvard Divinity School, lighting incense to “the Divine Sophia.”

“Searching for female images of the Divine, [religious feminists] inevitably turned to ancient pagan goddesses such as Isis of Egypt and Ishtar of Babylonia, and, in the process, adopted the romantic notion that the societies that worshipped them held women, sexuality, and nature in high regard,” writes Judith Antonelli, a religiously observant Jew and feminist author in Boston. “There’s just one problem: The fairy tale isn’t accurate. It whitewashes the male supremacy and militarism of ancient paganism, falsely attributing the origin of these phenomena to ‘the Hebrews.’ In the new goddess myth, Egypt and Babylonia are portrayed as benevolent, peaceful, and matriarchal societies, despite the fact that sexual abuse and exploitation, ritual castration, phallus worship, and even human sacrifice were all integral aspects of their religious traditions. Do women who are enchanted by Isis, for instance, know that worship of her involved the annual drowning of a young virgin girl in the Nile to assure a plentiful harvest? Do devotees of Ishtar realize that many of her priestesses were simply temple slaves who were branded with a star (Ishtar’s symbol) just like the animals that were dedicated to her?”

Actually, it gets worse.

Mainstream anthropologists now concede that there is no historical or archaeological evidence whatsoever that a true matriarchal society – one in which political power lay primarily in the hands of women – ever existed anywhere on earth, even among goddess-worshiping pagans.

There have been matrilineal societies, of course – such as traditional Judaism, ironically enough – in which children are identified primarily from the mother’s line. But even in matrilineal societies such as traditional Judaism, males have dominated.

In fact, it was only after Christianity was introduced in Western Europe – with its egalitarian ethos and pervasive cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary – that women first gained the respect and dignity which, Christian theologians insisted, God ordained from the beginning of creation.

“One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for patriarchal society, to which nothing good is ever attributed,” writes the iconoclastic feminist scholar and lesbian intellectual Camille Paglia in her now-classic text, Sexual Personae. “But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small minded about men and freely acknowledge the treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture… we could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machines to eyeglasses, antibiotics and disposable diapers… If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”

Sentiments such as these are, of course, heresy among today’s aging gender feminists for whom “patriarchy” is the original, if not the only, sin.

It is certainly debatable whether testosterone-driven male “obsessiveness” was a necessary stage in the development of human civilization, but what is not debatable is that the status of women significantly improved (and almost exclusively in western Europe) as Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. The reason for this was the example set by both the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

The Rights of Women in the Ancient World

The truth that many contemporary feminists don’t want to face is that, with a few rare exceptions, women never had anything close to equal rights with men throughout the long history of the ancient world.

The evidence for prehistory is mixed. Certainly, small tribal groups may well have exhibited a more easy-going familiarity between the sexes and consequent quasi-equality. Then again, there is also evidence that some prehistoric societies were, like gorilla societies, brutally patriarchal, dominated by the strongest (alpha) males who simply took what they wanted – food, women, the best cave — with nary a please nor thank you.

Once we arrive in the period when records were kept, however, the status of women was definitely more limited.

In the Homeric epics, there are numerous powerful female figures – the goddesses and characters such as Circe and even the long-suffering, eternally chaste Penelope. But in Greek society itself, women had few if any rights. In the famous democracies of classical Greece, women had no vote. They could not sue in law courts. They couldn’t own property. They were rarely seen in public. As in ancient Japan, the Greeks expected their wives to be seen and not heard… although they did appreciate the company of prostitutes (hetaira) and concubines (pallakai) who appear to have had some influence.

As we saw in another essay, male children were more highly valued throughout the ancient world than female children who were frequently killed through the widespread practice of infanticide – a grim sociological reality that gender feminist, through their grim advocacy of abortion-on-demand, have unintentionally brought back. Strangely enough, ancient Egypt — with its powerful queens — seems to have granted women more equality. Late Egyptian marriage contracts give women more rights.
In Rome, women had more rights than in ancient Greece, including the right to divorce; but very little political power. There were no female Roman senators or emperors. Not until the legalization of Christianity in Byzantium did true empresses appear — Irene (A.D. 752-803), Zoe (978-1050) and, of course, the formidable Theodora (984-1056). (The wife of Augustus, Livia Drusilla, functioned as “co-empress” in a sense and was an adviser to her son, Tiberius, but was not a true emperor.)

Women in the Hebrew Bible

Women were generally treated better in ancient Israel and in early Judaism than in most pagan societies but patriarchy still reigned supreme. There are passages in the Hebrew Bible in which women are portrayed as seductresses (Delilah in Judges 16, Pharaoh’s wife Potiphar in Genesis 39), or as inherently untrustworthy.

Many feminists insist that the story of Adam and Eve places most of the blame on Eve… even though it’s clear from the text, and from their mutual punishment, that the blame lies on both equally. Part of the punishment for disobeying God is that the man will “rule” or “dominate” his wife – although this also makes clear that such male domination was not what God willed in the beginning but is a consequence of sin. Certainly, the Mosaic Law contains many provisions that strike modern people as unjust and discriminatory against women… such as the provision that a bride (but not a groom) discovered not to be a virgin be stoned to death (Deut. 22: 13-21)… the fact that men (but not women) were allowed to have multiple spouses… the rule that property be passed on to male heirs but not to female ones (Numbers 27: 8-11)… the provision that an oath by a man is legally binding but not that of a woman if it is contradicted by her father or husband (Numbers 30)… and so on.

On the other hand, however, there are many passages in the Hebrew Bible that emphasize the fundamental equality of women with men – as well as their ingenuity, compassion and courage.

In the Hebrew Bible, women routinely outsmart the men and take the initiative. You have to be a singularly ideological feminist not to see the humor and pathos in the story of Abraham and his beautiful, powerful, rich and determined wife Sarah. She is a woman of such beauty that, when Abraham and she flee to Egypt, Abraham tells the Egyptians that she is his sister, not his wife, because he fears the Egyptians will simply kill him and take her for themselves – and indeed, Sarah attracts the attention of none other than the Pharaoh himself. Yet Sarah remains childless into her old age – and so she, and not Abraham, proposes that her tired old husband Abraham sleep with the young Egyptian servant-girl Hagar (the first recorded act of surrogate motherhood) so Abraham will have an heir and all their property not be deeded to their bondservant. Inevitably, the nubile Hagar begins to act haughtily towards her old mistress – and Sarah is not a happy woman. “You are responsible for this outrage!” the Bible records Sarah screaming at Abraham. “I myself gave my maid to your embrace; but ever since she became aware of her pregnancy, she has been looking on me with disdain. May the Lord decide between you and me!”

Hardly a docile wife.

Finally, when Abraham informs his wife that God will perform a miracle and that she will conceive a son after menopause, she laughs – a bit at her old husband’s expense. Sarah says, “Now that I am so withered and my husband is so old, am I still to have pleasure (edna)?”

The Nature of Existence

For a beach philosophizer like myself, it doesn’t get much better than “The Nature of Existence,” the quirky little documentary on the Meaning of Life that is opening this weekend. Filmmaker Roger Nygard wrote down the 85 toughest questions he could think of about the meaning of life — and then set out with a camera crew to ask them of such luminaries as Indian holy man Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (The Art of Living), professional atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), 24th generation Chinese Taoist Master Zhang Chengda, Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind (co-discoverer of string theory), wrestler Rob Adonis (founder of Ultimate Christian Wrestling), confrontational evangelist Brother Jed Smock, novelist Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game), director Irvin Kershner (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back), Stonehenge Druids Rollo Maughfling & King Arthur Pendragon and many more. The result is his interesting little film:

The Nature of Existence – Original Trailer from Roger Nygard on Vimeo.

Elena Kagan and the Perils of Legal Positivism

It goes without saying that Supreme Court nominee (soon to be justice) Elena Kagan is a charming, intelligent, well-spoken woman who, unlike most politicians, gives every impression of being a genuine “moderate” in her views, someone who understands the complexities involved in great social issues and who is willing to acknowledge that people of good will could disagree with her.

Yet there was one point in the confirmation hearings today that revealed an ideological seed that, I fear, will grow into something quite disturbing during the 30 years or more she will be seated on the bench.  And that is her apparent agnosticism towards the existence of unalienable natural or human rights.

Questioned by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., about whether she believed in “unalienable rights,” such as those referenced in the Declaration of Independence, Kagan replied quite firmly that she did not.

“You should not want me to act in any way on the basis of such a belief” in people’s rights outside the Constitution and laws, Kagan said. “I think you should want me to act on the basis of law.”

This exchange reveals that Kagan is, as many liberals today are, a believer in what is known as legal positivism. Legal positivism was a highly influential theory of jurisprudence throughout the first half of the twentieth century. But the horrors of World War II and Communist and Nazi totalitarianism made many law professors rethink whether it is a good idea to teach the doctrine that what is legal is whatever the State says is legal.

After all, Adolf Hitler was democratically elected by the people of Germany. The summary executions and brutalities of the Communist regimes were “legal” in the sense that the State authorized and approved them.

Much of what has gone wrong in the western law, over the last 150 years — from the approval of slavery in the Dred Scott decision to the legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade — stems from this fundamental, anti-Christian belief that basic human rights do not really exist, that the State may grant, or take away, whatever rights and “privileges” it deems necessary.

In contrast to the “new” theories of rights advocated by Hobbes, Bentham and others, the classic Judaeo-Christian view (expressed most succinctly in natural law theory) has always been that governmental elites must answer to a higher law than mere human legislation.

When governments repeatedly transgress these fundamental human rights, it is the right of the people, as Jefferson put it in the Declaration of the Independence, “to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.”

Governments that fail to respect the “unalienable rights” endowed by God are tyrannies and, therefore, illegitimate.

Once again, these ideas stem, not from atheistic philosophers, but from Christian theologians reflecting upon the truths found in the Bible.

The notion of a Divine Law above mere human law was expressed clearly by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica, ratified by John Calvin in his Institutes, and summarized succinctly by Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), one of the chief sources used by Jefferson (and all the Colonists) in crafting the new American government.

According to Blackstone, civil law is given, not to create rights, but to protect already pre-existing natural rights.

The primary object of law, he says, is to maintain and regulate those “absolute rights of individuals … such as would belong to man in a state of nature, and which every man is entitled to enjoy, whether in society or out of society.”

“Those rights then which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as are life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolable. On the contrary, no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture.”

This great tradition of classical natural right — which extended from the biblical prophets and the teaching of Christ through the medieval scholastics and Protestant divines up to the U.S. Declaration of Independence—was challenged directly by what is sometimes called “political atheism.”

A long string of anti-Christian thinkers—first Machiavelli, then Thomas Hobbes, and finally Jeremy Bentham and John Austin—rejected the notion of human rights as nothing more than, as Bentham put it, “anarchical fallacies.”

The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) advocated a strong totalitarian government (the “leviathan”) as the only way to save human beings from themselves. Famously describing human life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Hobbes insisted that the reality of human interaction was that of “war of every one against everyone.”

From this, he says, it follows that “nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place [in the state of nature] (Leviathan, 13.13)

The only hope for a modicum of peace and civilization, Hobbes thought, was for individuals to surrender irrevocably their natural rights to a totalitarian state (such as an absolute monarch). Fear of the “leviathan” would force selfish and violent men to maintain order and limit their crimes. For this reason, Hobbes rejected the Christian notion that individuals could ever disobey immoral laws or criticize the State in any way.

Nevertheless, Hobbes accepted the classic notion, developed in the early Middle Ages, that government derives its powers from the “consent of the governed.” This “social contract” idea did influence the American Founders. But for Hobbes, the “consent,” once made by a majority, is irrevocable and cannot be changed or transferred without the permission of the original sovereign.

It sometimes happens that a sovereign puts to death an innocent man, he says, but, in essence, this is simply the price people must pay for having a government. “Nothing the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on what pretense soever, can properly be called an injustice or injury, because every subject is author of every act the sovereign does,” he says. For this reason, “tyranny” is merely an empty word for a monarchy that someone dislikes … just as “oligarchy” is merely a word used for an aristocracy that someone dislikes.

Needless to say, the American Founders didn’t accept Hobbes’s notion of absolute, unquestioning obedience to the State. Rather, they worked out an entirely new theory of government that combined the best of both the classic Christian theory of natural rights and the notion, drawn from the early Middle Ages, that the legitimacy of a government was the result of the “consent of the governed.” But unlike Hobbes, the Founders believed that, when a government violated a people’s natural rights “endowed by their Creator,” then it was the “duty” of the people to “alter or abolish it” and to “institute new government.”

Not surprisingly, not everyone took to this new theory of government. Totalitarians throughout history, whether monarchists or communists, dislike the idea that the power of government can be constrained in any way.

The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who witnessed the American Revolution, rejected entirely the notion of natural rights and the entire natural law tradition. His enemies were both Sir William Blackstone and John Locke. The idea of natural rights, he said, “is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense upon stilts.” The founder of the movement called “legal positivism,” which is still influential today, Bentham believed that the only rights that truly exist are rights created by the civil government. If the government hasn’t granted the right, he said, it’s not a right but a wish. Whereas Aquinas and other Christian thinkers insisted that a civil law that violated the law of God is not a true law and can be justly disobeyed, Bentham and legal positivists insist that this is not the case. According to John Austin, another influential founder of legal positivism, morality and law have nothing to do with one another. The validity of a law lies only in that it is proclaimed by a sovereign. The influence of Thomas Hobbes is evident throughout legal positivism. The power of the state is virtually limitless.

This is the disturbing philosophical pedigree, if you will, to Elena Kagan’s off-hand remark that she doesn’t recognize any natural rights “not found in the Constitution or in law.” In other words, if the State doesn’t say it’s wrong… it isn’t wrong. If the State says it’s okay to do something, it’s okay.

After the horrors of the Nazi era, we know that isn’t true. Elena Kagan knows it, too. And that’s why, as nice as she is, what she said is so disturbing to anyone who believes in human rights.

Cowboy Constitutionalism

Jacob Weisberg wrote a thoughtful piece on the various factions on the Right. It was published in the dying Newsweek blog:

The GOP Looks West

Here’s my favorite paragraph:

The GOP’s new Western tone harks back to Goldwater’s disastrous but transformational presidential campaign of 1964. Goldwater didn’t care about religion—he was a Jewish Episcopalian who once said that Jerry Falwell deserved a kick in the nuts. He wasn’t focused on racial politics; there weren’t many black people in Arizona then. What mattered to him was limiting government and preserving liberty. To Goldwater, political freedom was inseparable from economic freedom, a view distilled in his most famous phrase: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

It was great analysis until the end… when Weisberg predictably proclaimed that what America needs is “a conservatism that hasn’t been in evidence lately—a version that’s not Western, Southern, or Eastern, but instead tolerant, moderate, and mainstream.”

In other words, a “conservatism” that is anything but conservative… sort of Country Club Republicanism that most Americans don’t want and which consistently loses.

Bernard Lonergan a Closet Kantian?

One of my favorite Catholic blogs, Lex Christianorum, had an interesting post on my philosophical guru, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, yesterday.  Lonergan is accusing of being… the horror!… a Kantian in disguise.  Of course, this comes as no surprise to anyone who knows Lonergan or his work.  It’s the standard slam against almost all of the so-called Transcendental Thomists (Marechal, Rahner, Coreth) and is somewhat justified.  Nevertheless, I find Lonergan to be the best philosophical synthesis between classical Thomism and the new statistical methods of modern science — far better, in my view, than the work of Jacques Maritain.  Here is just one of Lex Christianorum’s digs. The post is discussing the work of a new book, By Nature Equal: The Anatomy of a Western Insight by John E. Coons & Patrick M. Brennan.

Their [Coons' and Brennan's] radical reinterpretation of the tradition is not of their own breeding, but comes from their devotion to the theological method of Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984), whose system must be viewed with suspicion as it led him to dissent the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception as contained in Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, implying that somewhere, somehow Lonergan got it badly wrong. Lonergan despaired of any ability of the human mind to comprehend objective being or objective good (as traditionally understood as the correspondence of the mind to the external reality, veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus). So he escaped like any good Kantian would from the effort. He withdrew, much like a tortoise into its shell, or perhaps better, imploded, sort of like gravity and light into a black hole, into a subjective objectivity, or objective subjectivity, clearly confusing both dimensions of reality. The objective retracts into or collapses into the subjective, and, in all but name, objectivity becomes subjectivity.

This is tremendously unfair to Lonergan, I think. Funny, but unfair. Lonergan’s great insight was that objective knowledge is not, as we imagine, “taking a look” at the “really real,” but is the fruit of the act of judgment. Human knowing is a grasp of the virtually unconditioned, a judgment of fact that something is or is not so.

Debating Atheism, Part 1

A week ago, I was scrambling to get my daughters off to a major swim meet at six o’clock in the morning, when I got a strange email: I was being invited to come to the Philosopical Society at University College Cork, Ireland, and participate in a debate about “whether this house would” reject atheism. The debate would be in mid-March, just a few weeks away.

I was flabbergasted!  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why they had invited me, of all people. I have no qualifications as a philosopher (my B.A. in philosophy, as impressive as it is, doesn’t quite cut it). I haven’t written a book about atheism. My only academic work has been in Biblical studies, and even that is pretty popular.

Of course, my wife’s first reaction, upon reading the email, was to say, “Well, plainly they must be desperate…”

But I was tempted. The university was offering to pay all my expenses… plane ticket and beer money… and I’ve always wanted to see both Cork and its rather famous university. What’s more, the “Philosoph,” as the UCC Philosphical Society is known, has had quite a few famous speakers and debaters address it, including most Irish politicians and even the prime minister.

However, in the end, sanity prevailed. The debate was right about the same time that I am taking my whole extended family on a 10-day trip to Rome. If I accepted, I would think about nothing else for three weeks and would get nothing done.  It was just too much. I reluctantly declined.

Alas, that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about what I would have said. Why should “this house” reject atheism? Here are a few ideas off the top of my head:

1. That This House Would Reject Atheism because atheism is, by its very nature, irrational, and universities should not encourage more irrationality than they already do. Logically speaking, atheism is what is known as a “universal negation” — such as “there are no gods” or “there are no purple toads” — that is impossible to prove empirically. (That’s one of the few things I remember from the Introduction to Logic class I took in college.) Therefore, precisely because atheism is illogical, an assertion of empirical fact without empirical evidence, it should be rejected as the official doctrine of any university regardless of its religious orientation.

2. That This House Would Reject Atheism because atheism, unlike agnosticism or theism, promotes the closing of the human mind rather than the opening up of it. Atheism asserts dogmatically that the case for God is not “unproven” but CLOSED — Science has “settled it,” rather like climate change — and this closed-mindedness represents the very antithesis of the scientific spirit that universities are supposed to inculcate in the young and foolish.

3. That This House Would Reject Atheism because atheism, in its most popular contemporary forms — as represented by such authors as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett — offers primarily insults, not arguments. The so-called “new atheist” writers merely belittle the vast majority of mankind as intellectually dim-witted compared to, well, themselves. “Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma,” said Sam Harris in The End of Faith, which is the closest he actually gets to mounting a philosophical argument of any kind. Phillip Roth once said “Roman Catholicism would insult the intelligence of a gorilla” just as Clarence Darrow, the famous scourge of creationism, noted that he “doesn’t believe in God for the same reason I don’t believe in Mother Goose.” Danniel Dennett famously proposed that atheists call themselves “brights” to contrast themselves with the “dims” who believe in God. Universities should not promote an ideology that merely insults or belittles the vast majority of human beings on the planet.

4. That This House Would Reject Atheism because atheism has, historically and more ominously, been an force for intellectual intolerance and, at times, political oppression. The atheism of the French Revolution led inexorably to the guillotine… just as the atheism of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot led to concentration camps and genocide. The New Atheists, like Sam Harris and Dawkins, while not as murderous as their intellectual forebears, nevertheless display the same authoritarian streak. “I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance — born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God — is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss,” Harris writes (The End of Faith, p. 15). Universities should not embrace any ideology that asserts human beings should NOT be free to believe whatever he wishes about God.

5. That This House Would Reject Atheism because atheism’s version of empiricism represent a crabbed, discredited 19th century “scientism” that rejects out of hand virtually every intellectual endeavor not conducted with lab equipment. In philosophical terms, atheism adopts a positivistic epistemology that is intellectually indefensible (if it can’t be quantified or measure with instruments, it doesn’t exist or isn’t worth thinking about). Universities in the 21st century should not revert to philosophical doctrines that the vast majority of actual scientists, philosophers and university professors no longer accept.

6. That House Would Reject Atheism because atheism’s principal argument — that order and complexity in the universe can be better explained as the result of chance than intelligence — merely asserts what it must prove. Anyone who has studied Richard Dawkins’s writings knows this. Dawkins’s primary argument is that the overwhelming fact of order, complexity and design in the universe is merely an ILLUSION that can be explained as the result of random events. However, he does not then explain them. Instead, all Dawkins does is show that the theory of evolution offers a plausible account of how biological change could occur through random forces — and then merely asserts that a similar mechanism must exist for the physical universe (what he terms a “crane”), even though he concedes none is known. It is just as logically plausible that order and complexity in the universe are the result of intelligence as it is that they are the result of a yet-to-be-determined random mechanism. Universities should not be promoting as established fact what is, instead, merely hypotheses.

7. That This House Would Reject atheism because atheism’s secondary argument, that an appeal to an intelligent creator involves circular reasoning, is logically fallacious. This secondary argument is the closest Dawkins comes to an actual philosophical argument (Hitchens and Harris don’t even bother with philosophy: they merely throw insults and glib one-liners). Dawkins claims that, while postulating the existence of an intelligent creator does make at least a little intellectual sense, given the existence of so much interlocking complexity in the universe, nevertheless such a hypothesis is intellectually indefensible because it merely begs the question, “Well, then who created God?” But in fact it does no such thing: If I find a baby on my doorstep, and I assert that SOMEONE must have put him there, the fact that I cannot explain who put that someone in a position to put the baby there does not justify me asserting that NO ONE put the baby there… the baby must have appeared randomly out of nowhere.

8. That This House Would Reject Atheism because atheist, at its very root, involves a fundamental rejection of an empirical, even metaphysical fact that all intelligent human beings (except atheists) accept: that nothing happens without a cause. To accept atheism is to believe that things happen without purpose, certainly, but also without any cause whatsoever: The universe “just is,” as Dawkins puts it. While this is logically possible, it contradicts the overwhelming evidence of our own eyes and even of all scientific inquiry: Virtually everything we know about DOES have a cause. Science was born precisely because the Christian belief in divine “laws” gave early modern scientists the stamina to search for underlying causes they were certain MUST exist. Had western Europe embraced atheism, as the Chinese embraced the mysterious Tao, science as we know it would never have been born.  Universities should recognize the role that religious belief has played in the intellectual development of mankind… rather than merely belittling it as atheism does.

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