FROM THE PRINT MAGAZINE:
This essay was originally published in New Polity Issue 2.3 (Summer 2021), though a light revision has been made for web publication. Order the full issue here.
abstract
Over the past year and a half, societies across the earth have altered nearly every aspect of their daily life in profound and probably often permanent ways to ward off disease. The need for immediate action, moreover, has carried us along without much reflection being engaged in.
We are now so far along in this process that it is possible to evaluate its motives and effects. And we need to: first of all so that we may come to grips with ourselves, and, second, so that we may be ready for the oft-predicted “next” pandemic.
Such evaluation, like all self-examination, requires delving to our roots. We will have to return to basic truths of what it means to be human, what morality is, what the existence of society rests on, and what government is for.
This article takes up the task, offering a diagnosis. A second essay, to be published in the future, will offer a prescription.
The New York Times, the intelligentsia’s oracle of acceptable opinion, has begun to question the narrative.
It has become permissible in its pages to raise suspicions about whether COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China; and pieces have been published arguing that a great many “public health interventions” of the past year have been unhelpful or even harmful.
All across the earth, our societies turned down the oh-so-long and straitened alley of pandemic response with scarcely any time for forethought, and—with the exception of endless number crunching—little time has been devoted to thought since. Uniformity has been the watchword, enforced both by elite or official channels and by the general moral pressure of not wanting to be judged a heartless menace to human life.
There is some real reason things have been like this, considering the need for concerted action. But at some point, thought must set in. The unexamined life (if I may sacrifice strict accuracy to a turn of phrase) is not worth saving: to be truly alive, we must weigh our choices and learn from them.
This is especially so since, while we may hope this current pandemic has nearly run its course, everyone seems to agree there will be another. I pick a few distinct headlines that are closest to hand: “The Next Pandemic Could Be Averted With AI, Apps, and Big Data,” “The Next Pandemic is Coming Sooner Than You Think,” “Diseases deadlier than COVID-19 are already in the making,” “The Next Pandemic is Already Here,” and (one that hasn’t aged so well), “The next pandemic is already coming, unless humans change how we interact with wildlife.” These sound less like predictions and more like declarations. If we do not evaluate the actions we have taken this time around, we will act no better when the specter rises in the future.
In this light, any sign of a shift by our gatekeepers must look hopeful. Is this the beginning of the reconsideration we’ve been waiting for? Will it result in a forthright reckoning of what was rightly done and what was not?
The answer, regrettably, is “no.”
The Problem We’ve Been Having
I will call only a single article as witness, for it captures everything in almost archetypal fashion.
On May 7 of this year, the Times published a protracted opinion piece by the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci called “Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid?,” arguing that, since the virus is spread perhaps predominantly by aerosols (as both the WHO and the CDC now shyly admit), a great proportion of policies and actions based on the theory of droplet spread—those such as closing outdoor events, putting up plastic barriers, disinfecting surfaces, hectoring about distance—were at best useless and at worst actually increased transmission. Further, she contends that scientists and major organizations, such as the WHO, have put unreasonable barriers in the way of acknowledging aerosol spread—and, even now that they’ve finally come around to acknowledging it, have admitted neither their previous error nor the magnitude of their change of mind.
I don’t exactly wish to criticize the article, for it is highly informative. And since it’s impossible to address a problem from every angle, there’s nothing wrong with sometimes concentrating on scientific aspects. Still, the article contains a characteristic flaw.
It presupposes wholly, so far as one can tell, that what we need most in the midst of the pandemic is better science: that the problem we face is a scientific problem simpliciter. If the public health organizations only had better scientific knowledge, they could pass that knowledge on to governments, governments could implement their “recommendations,” and we could be (more or less) saved.
This is a curious presupposition.
It becomes yet more curious when one hears the author’s own “recommendations”: more events moved outdoors; better indoor ventilation; and even more use of masks indoors, with more attention to their fit. One is led to wonder: if the virus is spread primarily by free-floating aerosol particles, how feasible is it to keep it in check? How quickly can we improve the ventilation of indoor spaces throughout the world? How possible is it to get practically the whole population of the earth to wear well-fitting masks anytime they’re indoors? “[A]erosols survive better in colder environments and lower relative humidity,” she relates—noting that this fits “the pattern of outbreaks around the world.” This, however, is precisely the problem. Many areas of the world are cold for much of the year—and these are precisely the places where people spend much of their time inside and where ventilation is necessarily poor. The situation is similar in the many places that are intemperately hot for much of the year (remember the increase in cases when Southerners started using air conditioning in the summer). Is her prescription, then, however scientifically incisive it may be, actually practicable?
Momentary reflection, even in the absence of any scientific study, would show that under any circumstances imaginable some amount of spread of a respiratory disease must be tolerated. We live in society, we live indoors, we breathe each other’s breath. Therefore the goal must be mitigation, not elimination.
No government has yet issued a decree that we should all hold our breath for two or three months (which would be the only effective method of elimination)—so at some level, everyone grasps this point. Still, it has been neglected in the general imagination. I live near a rash of bill-boards that confidently declare “COVID stops with you.” They put me in mind of the scene in The Matrix Reloaded where Neo raises a hand to, as it were, decline a hail of machine gun fire. Of course, the bullets obligingly slow to a rest midair, jingling to the floor once he waves them permission. Some similar semi-divine power would have to be mine, were I able to simply stop a disease spread by human respiration. Granted, the signs are meant rhetorically, and intend something like, “Taking precautions is your responsibility.” But overreaching rhetoric gives rise to overreaching action and opinion. Government regulations often seem to be aiming at elimination—and who has never encountered a person with the attitude that, if some people would just follow the regulations better, we could all get over this mess? We have not taken to heart even this most obvious point.
Anyway, if the goal must be mitigation, then the question inevitably arises: how much mitigation? For mitigation, unlike elimination, has degrees. Is the greatest possible mitigation the same thing as the most desirable mitigation? Not necessarily, for the greatest possible mitigation might cause other harms—and then one must find some means of weighing those harms against the benefits of mitigation. So two more questions necessarily arise: what other harms might mitigation cause?; and what would the criterion for comparison be? If any given level of mitigation leads to its share of, for example, death from other causes, or to a general lower quality of health, or to some long-term social harm (in any number of forms: such as increased poverty; impaired development of children; a lowered marriage rate; a higher divorce rate; rancorous social division; fear of human interaction; the permanent shift of many things from the real world into the “virtual”; the collapse of local business and the engorgement of corporations already enormous, in both the current and archaic senses of that word…), how can these disparate things be compared?
(It is worth noting that the basic question of degrees of mitigation, though it has necessarily been raised, has never been openly faced. At first we were told that we must slow the spread enough that hospitals would not be overwhelmed; then for a great while we were simply told to slow the spread—though it was not clear how slow we should make the spread, compared to what, and why that particular speed should be the one desired. These questions were never even asked. Nor, indeed, has it been clear why, if universal spread was inevitable, a slow spread was any better than a relatively fast one, granting that hospitals weren’t overwhelmed. We had our “green,” “yellow,” and “red” counties, yes—but did we ever know why?)
One thing is certain: science can have but a small role to play in the evaluation and decision. For by the time enough study has been accomplished so that the various factors can be quantified, any damage will already have been done. (Indeed, the damage done is what the studies would be measuring!) So the decision must be made on the a priori basis of what is most valuable in life, not on an empirical basis. The fundamental question must of necessity be, “If we were to sacrifice either this or that, which should it be?” Empiriometric study can only come along behind, offering, as an aid, a more detailed picture. There is also a yet deeper shortcoming of science in this relation: even once all the factors are quantified, one cannot simply decide which factor is most important by comparing the numbers. Simply counting up heterogeneous things does not make them comparable. Behind these considerations, one can find the key point: that is, there is no such thing as a merely scientific problem, since all scientific problems are embedded in human life. In the last analysis, every problem, no matter how greatly science may bear on it, is a human problem, and must be evaluated by human standards and settled by human means, using science only as an aid.
What, then, are these human standards? Whatever conduces to human life. And human life is not a matter of simply being alive, in a physical sense, but of what it means to be alive. That is, the question is: what allows people to be alive well and rightly? “What it means to be alive” is not merely a brute situation—of, e.g., living in common, breathing each other’s breath. If it were, we could make judgments only of possibility and impossibility, not of “living well” and “living rightly.” Rather, human life is something interiorly oriented toward a goal or end—called by the ancients a telos. So, “human life” means “human flourishing.” Therefore, the human standard—which is the same as the standard of moral right and wrong—is how well things serve the fulfilling of this telos.
The human telos is, according to the great tradition, a complex thing: many intermediate ends, all of them natural, ordered by their natures to one single final end that is held in common by all men. (For example, marriage is a natural end of the human being, which is ordered to the natural end of the growth of families, which are ordered to the communion that cities are, etc. And the peaceful interaction of the whole earth mirrors the perfection of God and embodies the love that leads to Him). Because of this complexity, it is impossible to chart out all the interrelations and relative values in such a way as to put us in a position to scholastically reason to the correct moral decision. To a degree, at least, such can be done, but it would take up vast volumes—and, in any event, such a proceeding would leave the whole enterprise open to byzantine disputes about whether this or that minute point was phrased with all due subtlety. So if we’re going to find a means of analysis, it will have to be something of a much more accessible sort. We’ll return to this question after making one other preliminary point.
The presupposition of the Times’ article becomes even more curious yet, when one reads the article’s account of the behavior of the World Health Organization. The author charges them as an institution (noting individuals within it who do not fit the pattern) with not seriously trying to discover the truth; with using a double standard for research, so that new hypotheses could scarcely be accepted as proven; and with being dishonest and ineffective in communicating its results when it actually does discover new things. These are clear signs of incompetence, dishonesty, love of power, and what the British would call being “unfit for purpose.” Despite all this, she closes the essay with a strange left turn, saying that the WHO’s major problems are “being hampered by chronic underfunding, lack of independence and attempts to turn it into a political football by big powers.” Thus hard does the myth of the noble scientist die: not even empirical evidence can extirpate it. Scientists are men like the rest of us—and, like the rest of us, are men either good or bad. So the question of humanity arises again. Science cannot even be done without that question being answered well, nor can science be communicated or made use of. For science, too, is a human enterprise, not an automatic mechanism—not a wind-up toy that trots along on its own inflexible impetus, clanging its cymbal of truth for the world to hear.
Human Maturity
So—anyhow—we have to begin rethinking our approach. If we cannot rethink it through detailed exploration of the human end, what is left to us? Let’s think about babies.
All of us begin as infants, immature in body and mind, without any particular excellence whatever: undeveloped. And yet, we are not tabulae rasae. We have a nature, and it is precisely in regard to our growth into this nature that we are called “undeveloped.” Acorns are undeveloped oak trees; and every baby is an undeveloped great man. By “great man,” of course, I don’t mean “fascinating, outsize epochal figure”—as though every infant were an incipient Winston Churchill. I refer to the culmination, the full development, of humanity: that which every human being can, and should, become. Someone becomes this by the blossoming of what, by being human, he has. Of course, as we all acknowledge, each child has his own specific gifts, his own peculiar personhood with its individual vocation; but nevertheless each child is equally human—and, since they are sharers in the same nature, maturity has the same features for all.
The key features of human maturity are what we call “virtues.” The idea is that man has certain capacities for action that are immediately directed toward the human end. “Virtue” is the name for the development of these capacities. The virtuous man exercises his capacities—that is, moves toward the human end—and does so well. I don’t think it’s necessary, here, to list the virtues or enter into their precise bearing—for that too would, in its way, embark us on an interminable project of elaborations, interrelations, and distinguishings. It is enough to sketch what human maturity means.
For us, living in a broken world as we do, virtue is most noticeably opposed not to undevelopment but to nature’s own opposite: nature’s dilapidation. That is, to sin, which erodes our nature into the states called “vices.” Nature is ever-striving, and no man can remain merely immature. He will either grow into what is good for him or he will become bent, diverting his powers down improper paths. We act to achieve things, always seeking an end: it is either our own end that we seek, or it isn’t, and in either case it embeds itself in us, for, in every act, we shape ourselves into things fit for it and focused on it. Our choices are “be more human” or “be more inhuman.”
It might seem that if nature seeks an end, it would achieve this end “by nature”—that is, spontaneously. It might seem that debasements would occur but rarely. So it is, after all, with other creatures. With human beings, however, such a proposition needs no disproof beyond brief observation. Why nature should fail so easily in only this one case is, to the natural mind, irremediably mysterious. But the fact remains: man is an exception to the general rule, and he does not achieve the fullness of his nature except by a hard upward struggle. In almost every sphere of his being, he is easy to dissuade; and he often falls away.
It is also essential to note that, according to the ancients, man has more spheres of his being than those that are given the name “virtue.” Speaking colloquially, one might list such things as taste, affection, or sentiment. Even though these things, unlike virtue, are not human goodness itself but merely “human goodness in one way,” it is not possible to look down on them. C. S. Lewis memorably summarized all these as being man’s “chest”: that which mediates between his “head” and his “belly,” by which, indeed, the head is made present to the belly.[1] Without these perfections, we are condemned to being “Men without Chests”—ungainly, unseemly, lacking in depth and resonance, and never quite able to connect our thought to the things of earth. It is worth quoting some of his discussion of the history of this doctrine:
Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the [built-up interior] affinity he bears to her.’[2]
The idea, both here and in strict virtue, is that all of man’s faculties must be formed by—built up in—the human end. It must come to dwell in us, as the measure of our minds and as the aim of affection. We must see and love the utmost that man can be. It is this, this alone, that fills us out and makes us solid, that gives us weight, savor, and substance. Our manifold end—family, the truth, our city, and on and on; and above all, God—takes up a more profound residence within us; we become more intensely oriented toward it. We become willing to give ourselves up for it, since we are already so given over to it. The perennial words of wisdom, such as dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,[3] become living things for us. And a great man is a truly interesting man, for the same reason that a great book is interesting: the ordered beauty of the entire world can be tasted in him. As the Latin phrase just quoted indicates, life itself can rightly be lost to achieve the end, since the very point of life is achieving the end. Life itself is ordered to something more than just being alive, and in going to that something life is fulfilled, even if it be extinguished in the act.
The only alternative to a man centered on the real order of the world is a man centered on himself, who has placed his end not outside but inside himself. This placement makes him no fuller; for there is nothing to be found within him. He is an emptiness. That which he seeks is nothing—or, since that is strictly impossible, the nearest approach to nothing. His “end” cannot fill him. Indeed, it breaks him down. For the “nearest approach to nothing” means that which constantly shifts, the evanescent and ephemeral: his appetites, which pull him now this way, now that, without either rest or satisfaction. Self-centeredness excludes self-possession, for the world is the stable thing and we are but its dependents; we, untethered from it, have nothing left to hold. Such a man is neither beautiful nor interesting, but bland—or rather vulgar: since the things that draw him are shiny enough to appeal, but without any nobility. Nevertheless, they—and he—are bland in the sense of lacking body or depth. He has no compass and no engine; his ship, indeed, lacks even a captain. Of course, nature can never be entirely destroyed, so men of this sort are never more than partial specimens of what I describe. Still, is not the archetype recognizable enough in its partakers?
These alternatives are what Karol Wojtyła once called “the upper limit that is man’s being-filled-up with humanity and the nether limit that is humanity’s devastation in man.”[4] This is the entire picture: the great man and his opposite. Somewhere in here stand we all.
Great Men Show Us How to Grow
Let us come back to our question: how can we determine what to do?
The most basic answer is this: the great man simply knows what to do. His internal attachment to the human end is so strong that he—to rejuvenate a cliché—“homes in” on the course of action in best accord with his nature, so strong that he cannot easily be misled down an inhuman path. (The traditional language calls these things “prudence” and “connatural judgment.”)
And this, indeed, is the only possible answer. Apart from being deeply good—which is to say, deeply human—there is no way at all to know what to do.[5] Even moral philosophy, just like science, is not an automatic truth-deliverer; it will be misdirected and mangled, whether knowingly or not, by any whose desires are debased. All who do evil are sophists, since they justify their desires, at least to themselves, that they may subvert their consciences. What surprise should it be, then, that they cannot sift out the subtle truth of things? Only the good can see what is good to do.
This leads, of course, to an ancient paradox: in the formation of full men, which precedes—knowing what is good, or doing what is good? But the answer is rather simple. One naturally knows what is right and wrong at a certain minimal level; and if one complies with this knowledge, one grows, becoming more able over time both to know and to do what is good. This most basic knowledge is natural in the sense of being automatic and inescapable. No healthy person over a certain age lacks it, for it occurs concomitantly with reason. If someone doesn’t know, in any given case, what is right to do, there are only two explanations: he has not yet grown enough to discern what is good in this case (either from not having enough experience or from not having lived up to his experiences), or he has debased himself to such an extent that he can no longer see what he should. Therefore, no cause exists for concern that the method that I (and the whole tradition) propose for deciding what’s right is unworkable or sealed off from inquiry. There is nothing elitist about the process of producing a great man. Nature itself supplies us what is necessary; we either turn from it or we don’t.
It is important to follow this thought a little further. We all share the same nature, and our nature is oriented toward certain ends: therefore, we all naturally know, to some degree, what the flourishing of our nature looks like. We cannot avoid knowing it. So universally acknowledged is this fact that even St. Augustine, the supposed progenitor of Calvin’s heresy of total depravity, wrote the words, “human nature is never so perverted in its degradation as to lose all feeling for what is honorable”: and this is why, he says, “decency and chastity ... excite[] the admiration of human nature all but universally.”[6] We all can recognize the great man. His greatness is no secret; it is not something we must be convinced of by long argument or induced to feel by hype and advocacy. The chords within us resonate to its note, having been tuned to it before we were born. Of course, many things can intervene to prevent this—our lack of acquaintance with a man’s actions; our knowledge of situational factors unknown to him (or vice versa: his knowledge of things unknown to us), so that certain of his chief decisions become inexplicable to us; our hatred of him for other causes, which obscures our sight; our own general evil character, which forbids us to acknowledge (perhaps even to ourselves) the greatness we perceive—but the point stands. We each, in our most profoundly interior impulse (no matter how we may warp or ravage it in practice), seek after the human end. This, at the central core of every individual, is the project that unites us all as a people. It is of this alone that it is most completely correct to say: “we are all in this together.”
This is the metaphysical foundation of leadership in society. The dynamism of our nature unites us; we naturally recognize those who are fulfilling it, and we naturally admire them. Men know who the great man is, because they admire and love him; what they are is sufficient to let them judge of him. Our undeveloped nature aims at its own maturity; it sees it, and seeks out those who have it, that they may help it grow. In difficult moments, we turn to them. We do this in regard to the problems of our own lives; and, in these, we usually seek only counsel or consolation, since our decisions themselves must remain our own. The whole idea of society, however, is that we must, also, all act together—and that, therefore, someone must make certain decisions for all of us. And who should it be but the wise and good man? This is the unanimous conclusion of human history.
So the fundamental prescription for our time is this: we do not need more and better science, we need more better men. Even if we need science, only good men will produce good science, and only good men will know what to do with it when they have it.
Expertise
We must turn our attention to another sort of human excellence, the sort that science is: expertise.
Expertise is a perfection of a human capacity either for knowing or for doing: specifically—and this is the key point—a perfection of a capacity that is not immediately directed toward the human end. A man may have an encyclopedic knowledge of English drama of the 17th century, but this does not make him wise. A man may be able to engineer a skyscraper, but this does not make him good. A wise man knows the human end and how to get there; a good man actually goes. An expert, as such, does neither, though he has some tools that may be capable of assisting.
We must clearly distinguish expertise even from taste and the other aforementioned non-virtue perfections of the person that nonetheless bear a close relationship to the human end. The difference, indeed, is clear enough. It is no matter for a regret if a man does not know the drama of 17th-century England inside out, but we should all think that there were something lacking in a man, precisely as a man, if he could not (prescinding from questions of the archaic language) appreciate Measure for Measure when presented with it. And these perfections are not a matter of a mere capacity for enjoyment or delighting, but of a capacity for appreciating in the literal sense: they involve evaluating things at their true level. That is, we would all think a man who didn’t deeply feel the weightiness and dimension of Crime and Punishment in comparison with, say, Avengers: Infinity War, or that of the cathedral of Notre Dame in comparison with Soviet bloc apartments, to be not merely missing out on a pleasure but to be hobbled, crippled. This is because he is unable to recognize the human when it is before him: he does not respond to what is his own.
Expertise is not a bad thing. It is, in fact, a human perfection—but it is not the human perfection, nor does it of itself contribute to it. It is essential to remember this. It can do no real good for humanity unless it is subordinated to humanity: unless it operates in line with what is human—which is no specialty. And it even does no good to the expert himself unless he is good by an entirely different standard.
We have known this since time immemorial. Even were it not obvious (and a case could be made that it is), it was taught us by the “father of those who know”: over two and a half thousand years ago, Aristotle distinguished between intellectual virtues, which make a man’s thought good, and moral virtues, which make a man good, and, moreover, cause him to use his intellectual virtues well, since, as perfections of the acting powers, the moral virtues alone—and this is their mark—not only allow for certain actions but actually give rise to action. An expert is able to say what is true in his field; an honest man does. A physician can kill, better than anyone else; being just restrains him. Expertise, whether pure knowledge or even know-how, does not make a man good, and it itself is not truly good, in the moral sense (that is, the fully human sense), unless the expert be good.
It is essential, too, to see clearly certain dangers that expertise presents.
Because it is not the upbuilding of human nature’s substance, it is not open to easy verification: unlike virtue, the average man cannot judge of it. The idea goes back to Plato that expertise can be verified in its results: does it accomplish what it says it will accomplish?[7] But even this is not so sure a test as one would hope—an expert can always rattle off arcane reasons why the promised results did not arrive, and those reasons themselves will not be easily susceptible to verification. Anyone who has ever taken his car to a mechanic knows this. Precisely because of his expertise, an expert can obfuscate until eternity. It is extremely difficult to corroborate whether expertise is real, and nearly impossible to know how far it really extends. And so suspicion of expertise is part of the common stock of man’s wisdom, enshrined in phrases both antique (“Who shall decide, when doctors disagree?”) and modern (“to blind with science”).
Also, because expertise is not founded on what is common to man, it has a tendency to separate men from each other. Men will inevitably be ranked (even in terms of virtue, a bad man is worse than a good man, and a great man better than a good) and thus in some way subordinate one to another; but they need not be subjugated to each other. They, after all, are sharers, to different degrees, in the same thing. An expert, however, can pull rank in a way a good man cannot: “I know things you know nothing of.” He can therefore ask for truly blind obedience, where the trust extended to him is not even founded on things the subjected person can verify. This tends to create a competition among experts that is impossible among good men: for the chief expert gets to tell all others that they are wrong—that is, not truly experts.
And it is necessary to see quite clearly that modern science is the most dangerous sort of expertise ever discovered.
On the one hand, modern science is a practical expertise unique among all others by not being directed (like, for example, architecture or generalship) to a single goal. Instead, it can at least imaginably achieve any and every goal: and this inclines to make its practitioners seem godlike—high priests who midwife the Future, our yet-unknown god. And this godlike aura makes it very easy to suppose that anything science can do, science should do. Popular wisdom has always grasped the existence of this temptation, even as the populace worshipped science. The 1950s and 60s, which looked up to science with childlike trust and outstretched hands, were nonetheless full of B-movies with mad-scientist villains. Any number could be named: but I’d like to cite the late entry Latitude Zero (1969), with Cesar Romero, who, too drunk with power to consider morality, crows, “I’m transferring the brain of a human being into the body of a lion!” (I quote from memory. He later stitches a condor’s wings to the lion.) More thoughtfully, in The Colossus of New York (1958), a scientist transfers the brain of a dead colleague into a robot shell so as to give him a second life, since he deems that the brilliant colleague had not yet run dry of inventions beneficial to humanity. When the scientist’s other colleagues object to the plan with moral horror, he manages to talk them down in the name of charity. The fact that this trope has been increasingly rendered into a joke—to the point where today it is practically impossible to invoke it seriously—detracts nothing from the insight. From the time of Frankenstein, if not even of Doctor Faustus, it has been an archetype that science tempts men to transgress the boundaries of nature. Science is a threat to our humanity in a way that, say, shipbuilding is not.
On the other hand, modern science is a speculative expertise (one seeking to know things and constantly making judgments about what they “really are”) unique among all others for two reasons: by not being concerned (like philately or geography) with only a particular realm of material reality but with all material things, and by learning about things not just by observing them but by manipulating them. This strongly inclines to the speculative conclusion that all material reality really is whatever we can make it do.[8] And this justifies the practical temptations—by simply erasing the category of “nature.”
If I may borrow a modern word: science is intrinsically tempted to be transhumanist.
Of course, expertise—even modern science—can be put at the service of the common good; it need not tyrannize our understanding and antagonize our nature. For this to happen, however, the temptations, which arise of themselves, must be overcome. And they cannot be overcome without being recognized.
Does our society recognize them?
Expertise & the Enlightened Mind
A page or so ago, I told only a partial truth. It is not the unanimous judgment of every civilization in history that the wise and good man should rule. I do not mean that some civilizations have lived differently. True, some have held to the divine right of kings or some such principle: but generally they have thought their distinctive method was the best way to ensure that the best ruled. Or else, if they did not think so, their own men of insight condemned their system—and it is not surprising that men, even en masse, should slip lower than the level of their own wisdom: we all do it when we sin. I mean, rather, that one civilization has dissented, has actually denied the proposition and set up another in its place. That civilization is our own.[9]
During the Enlightenment, we decided that democracy is the only just form of government—a position unknown throughout all preceding history. Today, if you ask the average American what the opposite of democracy is (a meaningless question), you will probably receive the confident response: “tyranny.” Now, no one should deny that men must be participants in the common life of society, acting from their own insight and upright desire, instead of being passive instruments managed by some mastermind. But this is not actually, at root, what the Enlightenment idea means—for those things could happen under a benevolent king, and, before the “divine right” of kings took hold, often did. The Enlightenment idea means, rather, that justice consists in giving each man, regardless of his goodness or badness and his insight or lack thereof, an equal share in swaying the whole society.
The ancient idea was that the great men who governed—whether they were kings, oligarchs, or democrats—were enabled by their maturity to guide and order the whole society in right paths: better paths, in fact, than less mature men were equipped to discern. This guidance encouraged the rest of the people to make a better contribution than their own insight and desire alone would allow, and it aided them in growing into yet greater insight and goodness. Such a ruler was able, in the ancient phrase, to be a “father of his people.” We tend to read this doctrine today as an objectionable paternalism, since we find it hard to believe that anyone might truly be beneficent—and find it almost impossible to even conceive that some man might be profoundly better than other men. But if a man actually can help others to grow up into their own fullness, to appropriate for themselves the greatness that is his and should be theirs (and if he does this while respecting his own limits), what else can one call such a thing but “fatherhood”?
Compared with this, the Enlightenment idea can be seen clearly. It is not concerned at all with finding the right path. It is content to say that whatever path people find should be considered right. Any criterion of “right” beyond the express will disappears.[10] That is, the “enlightened” answer to the perennial question of how we, as a society, can determine what we ought to do is not simply different, for the answer eliminates the question entirely, by eliminating any “ought” beyond desire itself—which is what had always been meant by morality. To say that justice means giving each man an equal share in governance is to say that justice consists in not distinguishing between justice and injustice. The meaning of justice has changed so much as to be unrecognizable. The value has been transvalued.
This bizarre doctrine derives from another characteristic Enlightenment idea: that man has no nature besides his choosing will and the needs of his body. Man has no ends. His whole goal is to stay alive so that he can do what he wants. On this view, the first aim of government is to preserve life (or, at any rate, the life of those humans who can choose) and the second is to maximize the choices possible within society. This means, of course, that ideas about human perfection—and even about right and wrong actions—can never be more than a “private” opinion. Were they to be given any efficacy in society at large, this would be violence: an impeding of someone’s ability to choose. And this restriction must exist forever: society will never be allowed to collectively adopt substantive views on human nature, no matter how many “individual” members of society may accept them, for that would be undemocratic.
Which is to say, “democracy”—for us, at least—denotes not merely a system of voting, a means used for allocating authority; it is, rather, the name for a theory about authority, a vision of right and wrong: an ideology that excludes virtue and the true human end as irrelevant—and therefore excludes the reality of God, who is the final human end.
This all has an unexpected consequence. If I cannot vote for a man so that he may lead us by his virtue (for that would be oppressive), on what basis may I vote for him?[11] To some extent, the answer is “the basis of his agreement with me.” But even this, taken literally, would be oppressive. If we have no shared nature, no fixed, shared goals, what, then, can I appeal to? Only expertise. The “moral” course of behavior becomes selecting the man who is best at “getting things done”—with the “proviso” that “things” means, per the “democratic” ends, “security and freedom.” (According to Enlightenment thought, this conclusion doesn’t depend on morality, since “enlightened self-interest” suffices: even morally base men—indeed, especially morally base men—desire to have security and unbounded freedom. But the prioritization of these ends is also held to be moral. Such a convergence signals a basic problem). Politicians become mere “policy experts”; and we have them debate not to see who seems more like a solid, substantial person but to see who has the best grasp on expert-approved opinion.[12] And the expertise we have in mind is always science: since science is the expertise that changes the world, that forms the future.
So democracy—in our modern sense—exists (at least in part) to serve science, since science increases physical security and, by giving the power to overcome nature, increases freedom. (Enlightenment “freedom” is transhumanist in essence; it is the luxury of making choices disconnected from ends, of being liberated from one’s nature.) It is not a historical accident that the scientific revolution and the democratic revolution occur beside each other: they are philosophically conjoined.
If you scratch it deeply enough, it becomes plain that the aim of democratic ideology is to establish utopia through the overcoming of (unacknowledged) human nature. (We are the last, best hope; we are the city on the hill.) No one deserves our worship except the men we are becoming. The “process” thinkers, such as Shaw, fools as they were and are, saw at least one point plainly: if God does not exist, the aim of all things is to create him. All things seek perfection, so if perfection does not exist already, it must be being produced. The only issue with this conclusion is that it cannot be accomplished in practice.
As we indicated before, transhumanism is implicit in science itself; and it can be overcome only by the whole practice and cultural understanding of science being circumscribed and informed by strong metaphysical, moral, and religious convictions. (These three dimensions are three ways of saying the same thing. Indeed, they must be, if the categories are to retain any purchase on the world). Unfortunately, as we have just seen, transhumanism is also implicit in our entire cultural way of conceiving society and politics. Nothing, that is, stands in its way.
One effect of this is that we are not even trying to produce great men.
We have replaced the ideal of the virtuous man—the wise, just, courageous, and self-controlled man—with that of the “expert”: whose greatness is measured by his knowledge alone, his specialized knowledge moreover, which is open to no easy test.
And this has political and social ramifications.
Instead of giving pride of place in our societies to great men—those who, out of what they are, can guide others to what is great and inspire them to reach it—we give it to “those in the know.” And considering that we don’t encourage growth in greatness, these, as like as not, are insipid vacuities. And the influence of such men over their fellows cannot but be destructive of what is best and most important in them.
“Moral”-ism: the Ghost that Haunts the Expert World
This consideration leads us to an odd conundrum.
For the modern expert pervasively claims—and to some degree appears—to be making moral decisions: to be acting on the basis of something outside of and valued more than his expertise. Nature persists, of course, and so people often do make genuine moral decisions. But it is not plausible that, in an expertise-worshipping age, a great many people have managed to prioritize the true good. Such prioritization requires social effort: as all personal experience shows, goodness that is not striven for soon dissipates.
This coincides with another curious thing: it is manifest that, frequently, experts are not truly looking for what the metrics of their field would uphold as best. What do I mean? A glaring, if minor, example is the 1,288 “public health professionals” and “community stakeholders” (whatever those may be) who signed an open letter stating that, despite that Black Lives Matter protests were “risky for COVID-19 transmission,” they were too “vital to the national public health” to condemn—even at a time when, across the country, businesses and even churches were shuttered. The letter outright says that “public health best practices” should be observed during the protests “to the extent possible.” Which of course means that, when impossible, they should be ignored: a standard totally contrary to that adopted in all other areas, where the regulations were placed first and the most essential activities of human life were permitted only when compatible with them. Even more brazenly, one of the letter’s recommended action items is “Prepare for an increased number of infections in the days following a protest.” (In a crescendo of contradiction, they observe that “This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders,” since those other protests explicitly “oppose public health interventions.”)[13] Another more serious example is that psychologists and doctors are not willing to observe that chastity and monogamy are more healthful than the alternatives; nor do we hear anything at all, ever, about the enormous medical harms of either homosexual behaviors or transgender surgeries and hormones. Instead, we have the State of California legally classifying women’s breasts as “abnormal body structure[s] caused by gender dysphoria,” so that insurance companies will be forced to pay for teenagers to have cosmetic mastectomies (when “recommended by a health care provider”).[14] (Nor is this some isolated case that cropped up only in crazy California. Fifty-five of the fifty-seven US insurance companies cover such surgeries, at least above the age of 18. And the American Society of Plastic Surgeons thinks this is too few, and that the requirements are too stringent.[15]) And which experts object? It would be tedious, as well as depressing, to multiply examples. The thing surrounds us on every side.
From this, it is plain that our society does not really have a tyranny of the “expert” as such. Expertise itself is not lording it over our humanity, since expertise itself is not being cleaved to by the experts. Yet there is still a tyranny—since it is not the genuine human good that the experts are cleaving to. So the picture is more complex than I have heretofore presented it.
These two puzzles are flipsides of a coin. That is: we, these days, quite often illegitimately deploy moral language to pass off something other than genuine human greatness as the end to which our actions must all be subordinate.
This dissimulation of ours is not a rhetorical tactic. It is, rather, the unavoidable result of a profound confusion. It springs instinctively from an error about what morality is. For what we generally, today, take to be morality is not real morality—not in the sense the word has immemorially borne. Rather, it is an ideology, an -ism. The usual term for it among philosophers is “moralism.” Morality, as I said much earlier, involves following the actual human dynamism, allowing oneself to participate in one’s own teleology. “Moralism” involves no genuine dynamism whatever:[16] it substitutes some ideological position about justice (etc.)—some pure invention of the mind—for the active human end that pulses within the soul and body. Such is its definition.[17] It obeys an invented universal rule instead of nature’s efforts to reach its end. It is unreal. Two characteristics follow from this: it thinks of morality as “following rules” instead of as “working toward fruition and avoiding deformity”; and it tries to conform nature itself to whatever the rule is.
Moralism deserves a somewhat lengthy discussion, since it is the alternative vision to the picture of human maturity that I’ve sketched; it must be thoroughly unmasked.
It must be said plainly that there are types of moralism other than the progressivism version that so noticeably surrounds us. For example, puritanism, too, is a moralism, since it reduces morality to a fundamentally unreasonable, non-natural thing: obedience to arbitrary divine edicts. There is also, unfortunately, a Catholic version, which thinks only in terms of the Ten Commandments or natural law (as written out, and therefore converted into too-generalized rules), instead of seeing law and its breaking as enfolded in a natural movement of love toward God.[18]
It is also important to note that the moral positions of a moralism need not be wrong, except by being too universalized. Many moralisms closely approach the genuine natural law, and all in some way appeal to it. The reason this is important is that moralisms and genuine morality can become entangled. Insofar as a moralism approaches the truth (or even resembles the truth), a person can be attracted to it by a genuine moral impulse—albeit one that gets derailed insofar as the impulse surrenders to the moralistic form. When a moralism approaches the truth, one need not necessarily surrender: probably many Puritans, had, as individuals, areas of morality where they were more subtle and realistic than their ideology—in those areas, they had real moral experiences, which merely blended in with their ideology. Of course, the fact that in that one place their ideology appeared to put roots into reality would make it more difficult for them to see that the rest of their ideology was an ideology.
With these provisos, it becomes possible to see that practically all people in the modern world, including most Christians (at least in the West, where my experience lies), have a moral understanding that is fundamentally moralistic in one way or another.[19] A vast swath of our “moral reasoning,” whether progressive or not, has an unreal or even fictitious character. (Though it is admixed, as I said, with much genuine moral insight—which is constantly subverted by its moralistic context, or at least dissuaded from developing its true character. We see this when, for example, even between well-intentioned people arguments about right and wrong—such as over whether “drag queen story hour” should be permitted—devolve into arguments about mere free speech.)
Because of this, a vast swath of our “moral reasoning” has an underlying unity, insofar as it is posited against nature. Different moralisms can maintain different and even contradictory propositions, but this is less significant than their union in unreality. In even the most “conservative” moralism, the key surrender has already taken place; to conquer and remake nature has been treated as good. Progressive moralism (though it has still not yet fully developed into itself) would seem to be the logical endpoint of moralism: a mirror of real morality, but without nature being acknowledged, so each type of virtue—when it can “survive” such a process at all—becomes a mere name detached from an end rooted in the living being. That is, love and compassion become sentimentality; the final end becomes “living your best life” (and chastity therefore does not “survive,” excluded entirely as a repressive misunderstanding); justice becomes an endless attempt at equalizing. One sees here quite plainly the profile of transhumanist “freedom.” Man can only do right or “be himself” once nature is gotten rid of. And this profile exists in its essentials in all moralisms.[20] This is the key point. All moralisms in one way or another agree that the exercise of charity, the highest of virtues, demands the subjugation of nature.[21] And all the most developed forms of moralism, at least, agree that the highest goals of charity are ensuring bare survival and “not interfering” with other people’s choices.
Even after having seen this, however, it may still seem that moralism is very like morality, in providing a sincerely-held overarching end to which all one’s acts are to be ordered, and to which all disciplines are subject. On this reading, someone entrapped by a moralism is genuinely trying to be a good person, so far as he understands it, and is simply entrapped by a mistake. With some of the lesser moralisms, this can be true. Even with the more complete moralisms, it can still be true in a way. But the reading nonetheless misses a key point. The more complete moralisms, especially, take things that are not only evil but also contrary to the first precepts of the natural law to be good. It is possible to behave as though such things are one’s final end—this, after all, is what mortal sin means. But how is it possible to pretend that they are part of man’s true final end, since Aquinas—speaking in line with the whole tradition—says the first precepts of the natural law are “the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge” (ST I-II, Q 94, A 4 resp.): since, that is, everyone without exception knows what is right and wrong in regard to certain acts?[22]
The only option is that people are not giving their real reasons for action, but are instead giving justifications for their actions—or, at least, for some reason or other, are wilfully suppressing their moral knowledge.
The plainest example of this phenomenon is the sort of it involved in our own wrongdoing. When we find ourselves wanting to do something we know to be wrong, we start rationalizing—spinning out reasons why, right now, it might not be so bad, really. We don’t believe these reasons; they’re simply something we use to distract our minds from the obvious truth. And when we go through with the action, we adopt them as our “motivation.” If we’re confronted about the act, we’ll often whip out these reasons. And we think we mean them—indeed, we have to think we mean them, for if we admitted these weren’t our real reasons, we’d have to face what our real reason was: our desire for an ugly, evil thing, which we wanted enough to lie to ourselves, to cause harm to ourselves (and generally to others), and to offend God. Until we are willing to repent, we will not allow ourselves to clearly know that we are lying about our motivation. (Experience indicates that this self-deception can, through repeated acts, accumulate to such a degree that we can’t uncover our own mendacity all at once—and must repent by degrees, detecting our dissimulation, now unknown even to ourselves, bit by bit: consigned to be an archeologist of our own sin). It is quite possible for these false reasons to be put forward as morality. One thinks of the dancer Isadora Duncan’s supposed propositioning of the eugenist Bernard Shaw: “We have a duty to posterity to have a child together: think what it would be, with my body and your brains!”[23] These sophistical justifications for our own evildoing are pervasive in the moral life—just as pervasive as our own evildoing is.[24] In these cases, we do not openly name that which we seek as our final end: we hide what we seek from ourselves and others.
Awareness of this sophistical self-deception, cover for and effect of evil, is quite ancient: the Bible’s wisdom literature speaks often of “the fool,” using this intellectual designation as a moral category. It regards a certain type of foolishness as caused by willful moral debasement. “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God,’ ” declares David (Ps 14:1); and St. Paul lays bare the process: “What can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them ... in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse” (Romans 1:19–20). So they are not ignorant; instead, they “suppress the truth”—the known truth, in themselves—“by their wickedness” (Rom 1:18). And “claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Rom 1:22).
Again, I don’t say that all moralism, even progressive moralism, is depravity this direct. Plainly, not everyone who professes one is using it to justify his own evil desires. Some are: some people’s alleged compassion or love of justice is obviously malevolence or resentment by another name. In a lesser way, it is likely that others profess the low progressive “standard” in order to, in general, alleviate a sense of their moral mediocrity, or to assuage their concerns about the moral condition of those they love. But even this, I think, is too hard a verdict to pass on everyone. A great many people seem more honest than this. It seems possible to say that they are suffering from a complex form of peer pressure: suppressing, and even coming to doubt, their certain knowledge because of an education (often formal, but always mainly by cultural osmosis) that provided them with pre-built sophistries to dismiss it, and because it helps them to fit in and be regarded as good. After all, it is natural, even virtuous, to hold that the mass of men are wiser than oneself and to defer to them. So people buy into progressive moralism by way of, in part, genuinely moral motivations. They then adopt its standard of good—which something in them knows to be evil—as their own rule for conduct. So in them it does function as something very like an imitation morality, though it still rests on a suppression of conscience (if, granted, a suppression of conscience by means of conscience: resulting in a “house divided”).
This hollowness of moralism, such that it does not give one’s real reason for action, has a strange effect. In the more developed moralisms, just as with Enlightenment democracy, the bad man and the “good” man wind up doing and advocating the exact same thing. The point is not just that the scale of values is inverted (the good man imitating the bad, instead of vice versa), but that both are doing evil, not only in effect but also (in some way) in motive. It would seem that in every sort of moralism, neither the bad or the “good” man is sincere about his motivation in a straightforward sense; neither is performing a genuine moral action, however much they pretend to be.
The genuine moral life, the life of actually seeking the human end on the basis of one’s knowledge, happens on the edges of moralism or in the cracks—once one enters the domain of moralism, one is either muffling and misrepresenting a genuine moral motion (at best), or groping around through a fog that hides the true character of moral action, or covertly seeking a false end (at worst). This is because—precisely insofar as it is moralism, that is, insofar as it is detached from the real demands of morality—it does not and cannot involve conviction. It is fake: it is not true reasoning (not even mistaken reasoning), not sincerely held, and utterly inadmissible for public purposes.
I would go so far as to assert that it seems to be a constitutive feature of the modern world[25] that practically no one is capable, at least in public, of giving their real reasons for action.[26] Of course, no one but the saint can consistently—or even in moments—give his realest reasons for action; at that level, the accusation would be banal. I mean instead that we have grown so detached from our natures, and so ensnared in sophistries of various sorts, that we rarely even get close to giving our real reasons; we give not insufficient descriptions but fake ones. And at some level, by the very nature of the case, we know this.[27]
In conclusion, we should say a few words about how moralism is developed, by way of contrast with the development of morality. Since moralism does not involve conviction, it cannot be spread and sustained in the same way genuine morality is. C. S. Lewis rightly says that a genuine moral education is “a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men.”[28] That is, it is an organic process, by which a living life transmits a living life. Too, the idea of humanity in his analogy is important: what is transmitted is one’s own substance, one’s (built up) nature, and is held as one’s own. One becomes more, becomes more oneself. He also indicates the key condition of insight, understanding: in a genuine moral education, one comes to see why the things one learns are so, and this coming to see is, in fact, the education. (With the proviso, of course, that human knowledge is often vague and implicit.) And one gains an ability, a capacity for action. He compares moral education to “grown birds” teaching “young birds” to fly. For this reason, it can be described as an “initiat[ion]”: an introduction to a higher realm of life and the ability that comes with it. Imparting moralism, on the other hand, can only be a matter of a “condition[ing].”[29] He very insightfully names its characteristic means as “propaganda.” The parallel between the words “propagation” and “propaganda” is not incidental: the intuitive folk wisdom that shapes language (and does so sometimes quite felicitously) grasped both the resemblance and the difference between the two things, and decided “propaganda” (used originally as a neutral word) should be pejorative, naming the diabolical aping of propagation.
Propaganda is the very language and lifeblood of moralism. Moralism, since it has no substance, can do no better than buzzwords and facile sloganeering—and these are the essence of propaganda. Propaganda, for its part, aims at producing a simulacrum of conviction (for it cannot truly persuade, and doesn’t try)—or at least at producing the effects of conviction. Thus, it needs continuous repetition, that it may shore up the fragility of this fake conviction, ever-threatened by the complexity of reality. And this “conviction”—since it apes genuine conviction—desires to be expressed; and so issues in a duty to sloganeer.[30] All this is more the case the more opposed a certain moralism is to the genuine moral truth. Those moralisms that are closer to the truth can have more of truth’s characteristics around the edges: more support by genuine moral motions and more authentic attempts at persuasion. However, even the most perverse moralism involves some appeal somewhere to real moral motions: it must, or it would have no foothold at all. Since nature is real, they are the ineliminable ground of plausibility. (Which does not necessitate that even these appeals, in all personal instances, are sincerely meant.) These appeals are normally the starting-point of the propaganda. “Be a good citizen.” “Help a brother out.” “Are you a hater?”
The contrast between the real thing and the fake in both conviction and self-possession, along with the fake’s ceaseless, centerless proselytizing, justify and explain Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s judgment on our world of seething propaganda: “Nowadays public opinion is not the sum of private opinions. On the contrary, private opinions are an echo of public opinion.”[31]
Where Am I Going with This?
Let us return to the thread.
Decisions about human life must be made on the basis of human life. It is great men who have, as it were, enough human life to be able to make (in the literal sense) great decisions. But today, so we hope, we are not led by great men, but by experts, who are generally—by the very nature of that disjunction—human vacuities. Yet, puzzlingly, throughout the pandemic our experts have claimed to be making moral decisions, not the inhuman, transhumanist decisions one would expect. They have constantly invoked moral standards and spoken of our duties in moral terms.
And here we come to the nub of the thing. Their central principles bear the unmistakable stamp of moralism, not human goodness.
Take this one: “One life lost is too many.” The unreality of this principle is apparent. The loss of even one life is matter for mourning; but it is not our responsibility to avert all death. It is not our responsibility because it is an impossibility. Obligation does not exist in regard to the impossible. One can suppose it does only if one is operating with an impractical “morality.” And any attempt to live out such a principle involves us in pretending to be God, as though power over all things is in our hands and we can recreate the world to exclude what we so choose—for that would be the only way for each and every death to be a thing we allowed. I might add that, beyond not being obligatory, it is not even laudable to try to avert deaths by any means conceivable: for one inevitably ends by doing wrong that someone may live. “One life lost is too many” is a sure recipe for sacrificing the soul to the body. Another indication of the unreality at the root of this sentiment is that it is unevenly applied. The number-one cause of death in the United States could be ended tomorrow, had we the societal desire. It is—of course—abortion. (And for what it is worth, the ever-reliable CDC doesn’t count it as a cause of death.)[32]
It might be objected that the sentiment isn’t meant literally. But the evidence suggests that it is. We have never been able to discover the category of “acceptable risk,” considering risk itself unacceptable. Websites for checking the weather forecast have running displays of one’s county’s death count, as though (invariably infinitesimal in comparison to the population) it were a thing to take into account before setting foot outside. And death tolls—sometimes even with each individual name!—are reported by the press with comparisons to preventable tragedies or acts of malice (e.g., Pearl Harbor, 9/11), as though if our leaders were only more competent they would have somehow assured that death from disease would never occur. So, if we don’t mean this idiocy literally, we’re putting up a mighty convincing pretense.
Or take: “We’re all in this together.” This, which sounds like reassurance, an encouraging attempt at consolation, is generally used as a subtle sort of browbeating. It ends up meaning something close to, “Do what I tell you, you selfish ghoul, if you don’t want everyone to die.” (That is, when it doesn’t just mean—in its usual TV-commercial context[33]—“Look how personal and caring our faceless corporation is.”) This slogan is also a clever way of covering over the suffering of enforced separation, without actually having to do anything to make such suffering more bearable: we’re all in this together, no matter what it looks or feels like, so stop hungering after human connection—you’ve already got all the togetherness you need. It is solidarity by incantation, a spell that hides the need for genuine solidarity.
At this point, I know, my formulations are beginning to seem extreme and unacceptable, perhaps even evil.
After all, aren’t we all in this together? There is such a thing as the common good; and as Christians, especially, we are called to solidarity. Too, shouldn’t we do our best to save human life? We have been given the “Gospel of life,” and have an “inescapable responsibility” to forge a “culture of life.”[34] In any case, the invective, certainly, is greatly out of place. Isn’t it wise—even right—to welcome our culture’s newfound concern for life: isn’t it a “sign of the times,” even a heaven-sent occasion of communal conversion away from the “culture of death”?
To this, I will say three things.
First, yes, we are all in this together. That is—we breathe each other’s air. We give each other in exchange the necessities of life. We are joined into a community through our communicating faces. This, we are all in together. It is simply madness to presume that we can each of us secede from society for months on end. Are we to abolish our bodies? We have been trying to be “all in this together” alone. The effort strains our nature just about to the breaking point. What do we live for (and by), if not each other? How, then, should we preserve our lives by leaving each other? Such makes sense at a smaller scale (if I am infectious and avoid my friends and family for a brief time), but when whole societies centrifugally disperse for a period of uncertain and pseudo-permanent duration, questions arise: such as who at all is being served by such a thing (for, certainly, everyone is suffering), and is reality being respected—or even being seen?
Second, there are limits to what we can and ought to do, even to accomplish the noblest goals. During the past year, (and here I limit myself to the United States, though the point is broader), to achieve the noble goal of saving human life, we have done a number of things that alter the shape and direction of our shared life: we have bloated the power of our already bloated-beyond-belief government; we have spent at least six trillion previously non-existent dollars (I’ve honestly lost count); we have engorged (necessarily nebulose, bodiless) online businesses, principally Amazon, at the expense of rooted things; we have irreparably destroyed truly local businesses across the country; we have virtualized many jobs and even fields, probably permanently. None of these actions are actually possible. They rest on the power to rewrite nature. They do not cultivate nature; they do violence to it. Like sex-change operations, they can appear possible only to someone who has pushed nature from his mind. We only think them possible because we’ve grown so drunk on our technocratic power that we can no longer discern human limits and the ends of nature. That is: they only look possible because we think we’re God.
(Of course, doctors do violence to the body to help it heal—so some steps outside the bounds of cultivation are permissible in times of emergency, when they aim at restoring a thing to natural, healthy function. On a social level, think, for example, of a country going into debt during time of war. But one must actually be capable of returning to normal function afterwards—and it is clear that we are not. It is not even clear we will ever be able to admit that the serious threat has passed. As everyone says, we have entered a “new normal”).
Indeed, these actions are worse than impossible. They involve ignoring man’s natural ends and replacing them with manufactured ones. Man is not and cannot become a virtualized, bodiless, placeless, indistinguishable mass. In acting as though he can, we have surrendered to the transhumanism of science, though most of us have done so unwittingly.
And: supplying man with a new end—this is the key point—is the essence of mortal sin. As such, these interventions are truly evil—not just “prudentially,” but really and absolutely. Attempting to save ourselves from death by rejecting human nature is equivalent to trying to gain temporal benefits by selling one’s soul to Satan. Which is to say: implicitly, it is selling one’s soul to Satan.
We ought to resist such destruction of human nature as we would resist the devil himself—for it is, in fact, he whom we resist. If such is what we must do to gain life, it is better that we die. This, too, is the teaching of St. John Paul the Great, for according to his teaching, the very essence of a “culture of life” is “living the law of the Lord faithfully and consistently”: and the Lord’s law is made known, in an elementary and unsurpassable way, in the ends of nature.[35] In vitro fertilization and human cloning “serve life”—but they are nonetheless evil for all that. Life has a character, an end-directedness, that must be preserved at all costs. And it is the only thing to which the phrase “at all costs” can be rightly applied, for the end is identical with morality. Life is not mere existence and bodily survival. Were it otherwise, it would be absurd to speak of “that truth in which life finds its full meaning”—which is what St. John Paul centrally proclaimed.[36]
Third, and most signally, we can look at the witness of the great men throughout history. (We must appeal to history instead of current events, because who would pretend that there are any great men governing us today—in the United States, in France, in Canada, in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Italy, in Australia, in China? Our society’s life-and-death decisions are being made, at best, by the sort of people who build multi-purpose rooms). What would they have done in a situation like ours?
The Judgment of Great Men AND of Nature
One might turn to St. Charles Borromeo, who, as a saint, is a “certified” great man: during the Bubonic plague, he governed a major archdiocese and even a city. Milan’s leaders, fearing the possibility of the plague’s outbreak, had preemptively forbidden processions and certain other religious acts. When he was given command of the government (the appointed leaders had fled the city), Borromeo reinstituted them. He distributed ashes, he personally visited the sick and dying, he was known to climb over piles of corpses to find any who had been abandoned prematurely. He exhorted his priests to prefer holiness to long life. At the same time, he took precautions: he ordered parishes to celebrate Mass outside; he held catechism classes in the streets; he appointed some priests to minister to the well and others to the sick; he encouraged use of medicine and reasonable means of prevention. But he redoubled prayer, even corporate prayer, and did not halt the ordinary activities of life. All this, during a plague that killed roughly a fifth of the city’s population in two years—and in other cities killed close to half.
Borromeo, of course, was a Christian and a saint. Some might think that his standard is too high or too “supernatural” to be asked of the average unbelieving modern man—that we must not expect more than “nature” can give. Let us, then, pick a pagan. Is it conceivable that, say, Plato would give the same advice as our experts?
The disagreement does not exist because the men of the past lacked our scientific knowledge and our standards of medicine: though, surely, the details of their approach would have changed if they had what we have, since different situations demand different actions. The disagreement exists because they all—the great men, pagan and Christian alike—had an entirely different “scale of values” than we today.
Let us hear from Marcus Aurelius, pagan emperor after the reign of Christ had begun. During his tenure on the throne, the empire was afflicted by the Antonine Plague, which killed about two thousand people a day in the city of Rome, and ravaged the entire empire, out to the provinces and Marcus’s army camps—and may eventually have killed him, too.
Here is the advice he gave himself in his personal journal:
It would be the part of a more accomplished man to leave the company of men without having tasted deceit, any kind of pretense, luxury, or pride; the second best is to breathe one’s last after acquiring a distaste for these things. Or have you chosen to keep company with vice, and does not even your experience of it persuade you to flee from this pestilence? For the corruption of the mind is much more of a pestilence than the miasma and decay in the air which surrounds us. The latter is a pestilence that attacks living creatures in their animal nature, whereas the former attacks human beings in their humanity.[37]
And again, perhaps even more to the point:
[I]f what you hold in fear is not that some day you will cease to live, but rather that you may never begin to live according to nature, you will be a man who is worthy of the universe that brought you to birth.[38]
Nor does this entail a callousness toward suffering. A statement recorded on his deathbed plainly shows compassion (albeit with a Stoic inflection): “Why is it you weep over me, and do not dwell much more greatly on the plague and the universal death?”[39]
So let us not fool ourselves—we are not handling this even so well as the pagans could.
Still, if this is not evidence enough, let’s follow out the emperor’s standard and look at some of the simpler ways we’ve failed to “live according to nature.” In the first place, we have failed to publicly, corporately supplicate God—as though there were nothing He could do. (Which makes sense, if all power over life and death is ours). Even the pagan Romans, whose rites were worship of the demons, redoubled their prayers in time of plague.[40] Along with this, we have quite obviously considered ourselves gods and masters of nature, any foreseeable expectations be damned, for we have tried to save lives by abolishing society. It is obvious, however, that a disease would have to be pretty unbelievably deadly to be more deadly than shutting down nearly all normal functions of society across the globe for a year and a half, while trying to treat human beings as creatures that can thrive (like caged hamsters) while engaging in only “essential” activities. Such a massive disruption of natural human function—one unparalleled, by the way, in all history—is certain to be wildly injurious and have massive unforeseen consequences.[41] It simply could not be otherwise.
Or we could list ways we have preferred survival over love, which is what life is for. There has been much talk about residents of nursing homes—what percentage of COVID deaths they constitute, whether the State of New York has been essentially killing them, etc. But we have never discussed the most fundamental question: if residents of nursing homes had been asked whether they would rather see their families, knowing that it might lead to their deaths, or live in isolation for ... how long?—a few weeks; a few months; a year; a year and a half; two years; we don’t know how long and, no, we won’t try to find out; we make no promises; hold tight, we’ll tell you the second it’s over—, can there be any doubt what they would have chosen? Or to put it differently, can there be any doubt what policy a good person would have put in place? But of course the choice was not offered them. Nor was a good man consulted.
Another way we have preferred survival to love is the scarcely credible cruelty of forcing toddlers to wear masks. Let us advert to science for an instant. There is formidable reason to think that COVID simply does not kill children—and even if it does, the rate is vanishingly minuscule.[42] And children up to age eleven or twelve basically don’t spread it, either.[43] And how long have we known this? Since the very start. The earliest studies indicated this.[44] So children are not being protected from COVID, nor are other people being protected from children. The practice is entirely useless—an exercise in cruelty unadulterated by any excuse. Nor, even if the data (at least on spread) were different, is any excuse possible. A real man would sooner die than scar a child’s soul with a lifelong disposition toward fear. And that is not even to raise the question of the developmental problems, both psychological and physical (immune response, etc.), that are a priori quite likely to arise from long-term mask use by and around children.
Yes, some people see mask-wearing as an act of charity, and thus see enforcing it upon their children as a training not in fear but in brotherly love; and some people simply don’t want to deal with the social disapproval their family might meet. Both of these positions—in addition to other profound problems (such as ignoring the science, or that it is uncharitable to on principle pamper other people’s morally perverse fears)—fail to grasp that children are society’s prime locus of the common good. Children in one sense are the common good of the family:[45] and so of society as well. It is natural for adults to make sacrifices for the sake of children; indeed, so inescapably natural that it is even spontaneous. It is perverse to ask the dynamic to work the other way round. This is distorted “charity” and distorted deference—so unnatural that it is practically impossible to understand.
Or we could simply list the stupidities we’ve committed, which would alone condemn us, for moral action must involve reasoning. Out of an embarrassment of riches, I will restrain myself (mostly) to two purely local examples.
In mid-2021, the State of Ohio mandated that large outdoor events, such as festivals, should be conducted according to this rule: “Individuals must avoid gathering in groups and attempt at all times to maintain social distancing. When gathered together, individuals should be in a group of no more than ten individuals that is separated from other groups by at least six feet.” Notice, first of all, that the rule supposes you will disobey it (“must avoid gathering,” but “when gathered”...). Notice also that it supposes that society is made up of individuals, instead of families—and certainly not of families with more than ten members. Notice, too, that the number ten has been plucked out of the air. Notice that by the time this edict was issued the general risk-less-ness of outdoor events was well-known. Take a moment to try to imagine the movements of these groups: if any part of each group must stay six feet from any other part of another group, when the groups mill about during a festival, each member would have to maintain some impressive awareness to avoid encroachment from passersby. How could one even tell, from a distance, whether one was looking at two groups of five or one group of ten that simply strayed apart a bit? The determination would be of great importance to one’s own maneuvers. One could rhapsodize on the idiocy of this passage for hours. It is necessary to ask: had the people who wrote this ever met a human being? One is indeed tempted to wonder whether they are human beings. Those who wrote, approved, and promulgated such nonsensical drivel—so opposed both to all possibility and all enforceability, not to mention all consistency with the rest of one’s necessary action in life—must be either fools or space aliens. Still, even faced with this stark alternative, it is hard to believe they could be such fools as that. Certainly, whatever manner of thing they be, they are unfit to govern. Indeed, someone who can insist that restaurant-goers “wear a mask between bites” (as Governor Newsom of California did, and as most US airlines do[47]) is not fit even to serve as dog-catcher. Why not muzzle the dog between bites?
In a similar vein, my local doctor’s office currently sports a sign on the door declaring, “Due to being a surgical area a mask is requried.”[48] The spelling and punctuation are the least worrisome elements. For there is, of course, as all men by now must know, no connection whatever between the risks of surgery and exposure to a respiratory disease. One cannot get COVID through epidermal incisions. The sign might as well say, “Because this is a hotel, only those with tattoos are permitted.” Yet all within have dutifully donned their masks. Such mindless conformity to meaningless rules is terrifying.
No, we are not a society of good men; no, we have not even attempted to live in accord with nature.
Retractationes (“Re-Treatments”)
I wish to be as fair as possible.
In an emergency, it is understandable to drop everything else to protect the thing immediately threatened; and practically no man, if indeed any, confronts an entirely unexpected moral quandary with perfect aplomb. We simply were going to see moral mistakes made, and living in the society we live in, they simply were going to be scientific-transhumanist mistakes, even on the part of relatively good men. Such are the “emergency powers” we see available to us.
And the common good is, by definition, that which we all pursue together. So it is right for a good man to doubt himself when all men disagree with him, or even to—within reason—subordinate his conscience to the needs of the common striving. And when we were all stuck inside for months hearing about the outside world only from the internet or from television news, it was impossible to tell whether all men really did disagree with us.
And of course, it’s not as though humanity is non-existent. To repeat St. Augustine, “human nature is never so perverted in its degradation as to lose all feeling for what is honorable.” These things were slipped past those of better sensibility only inch by inch. The emergency measures we’ve taken are possible for a short period, and “flattening the curve” so that ICUs wouldn’t be overwhelmed was a reasonable goal: so, we were told “Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread”—which, then, imperceptibly slid into “Fifteen Months to Stay Inside.” It seems likely that if our leaders had come out up front and announced that the lockdowns would last longer than a year, they would have stood a good chance of getting shot dead in their footsteps. But this they did not say. We were given horrific predictions and reasonable goals—for a time. (Now, the predictions are tame and the goals are unreasonable.) It is worth pointing out that St. Augustine follows the sentence above with this one: “That is why the malignity of these demons cannot fully succeed in its deception without sometimes, as we know from our Bible, ‘transforming itself into angels of light.’” I allege no conspiracy; the shift from reason to unreason was probably not premeditated; it arose from fear and cowardice and love of money and the politician’s and pressman’s unerring sense of a crisis going to waste. Yet the evil actions could not have been committed except (as it were) under cover of light.
Still, even if we qualify it in these ways, our inability to meaningfully mobilize has not been wholly happenstance, something that might have happened in any society. For many people (so many, I fear, it would be close to most) would not have found anything wrong with the announcement of a year-long lockdown, being motivated by fear or a misbegotten “charity” and lacking a real sense of the human end. And the witness of the past year shows that those who have, as the lockdown lengthened, found something to be wrong have largely been unwilling to hold their conclusions firmly and act on them—waiting, instead, for the mythical day when things will resolve themselves without courage being required. Further, some of those who have acted have been moralists themselves, of a libertarian stripe: whose “rules” have been stepped on. While others, who acted from genuine moral motions, have had their convictions co-opted by moralistic categories, such as an abstract “freedom of assembly.”
To those who still hear their consciences, the situation was so obviously unsustainable that it was hard to believe it could really be maintained that much longer—which for a while must have seemed like a good argument against precipitous disobedience. But it could. And it was. And it is. And all along the moralists have run constant interference, confusing the operation of the conscience in those who wished to use it. And we still do not act.
So even these retouches to my picture do not make it a rosy one. Such confusion, about such important things, sustained for so long, is itself a symptom of extraordinary social degradation—a degradation almost unexampled in history.
Our Profound Problem
Which brings us back to the central issue: we have lost our inner sense of human greatness. And this makes it impossible for us to pursue it in common.
We live in a deeply unpopular culture—that is, in a culture that is not “of the populus,” the people. For all our idolization of “democracy,” we have ground away all grasp of that which is common to man: his nature and his nature’s excellence. In doing so, we have destroyed the possibility of being a people. We have destroyed genuine fellow-feeling.
Among us, no man can be truly popular with his fellows, not at least for being (literally) a great fellow. Or if he can be, it can only occur in private, where nature can namelessly manifest itself. But when it comes time to appoint a man to handle a problem (and for us even governance is nothing but a problem to be solved), we turn to those who can really get things done, to “those in the know.” Among us, virtue no longer has a name. So even when it has a fame, no basis is left on which it can be spoken of aloud—and it can do nothing.[49]
Do we not all know this? In our usage, the “marketplace” itself is no longer where men meet each other, where the great men go to be heard by the crowd; now, it is only where men fight each other for material advantage. In accord with the capitalist “invisible hand,” which brings mutual prosperity out of competing self-interests, this fight for advantage is our idea of social communion. Even our vaunted “marketplace of ideas” is not an agora: it, following the capitalist metaphor, is something that prioritizes jockeying salesmanship over the community of truth; we’ll know what the truth is because everyone “buys it.”
In such a world, fellow-feeling has been demoted to mere sentiment. And since it does not rest on a shared nature, shared knowledge, and shared ends, it can exert no rational, justified sway on even our “private” action, much less our life in common. We hear today much talk of togetherness, of this (LGBT) “community” or of that (disabled) “community”; but moralism is never real fellow-feeling. We no longer recognize that which “we are all in together”; we have become, so far as we are concerned, “individuals.” We may help out other individuals, since it’s the “right” thing to do to help someone else achieve his dreams—but we have no shared dreams left. At least, we no longer see them.
So the solution to our degradation cannot be simply having a great man to lead us. Modern “individuals” would not respond to a great man. Imagine if someone in the government, at the beginning of the pandemic, had said, “This may be a bitter trial. It may be that many will die. But you must not be afraid. Every so often, earthquakes and hurricanes come, and we do what we can: but there always remains something we cannot do—and people will die. So it is now. This is a trial we must weather with courage and prayer and, where necessary, mourning. We will do what we can. I know you well. But we must not make believe that everything is in our power, abandoning our humanity in ceaseless scurrying after safety. And we must not flee from each other. We are joined together by nature’s need, and flight is impossible. If this virus is as bad as they say, and death must find us, let it find us loving and serving one another, and let our last sight be each other’s open faces.” He would have stood a better chance of getting shot dead in his footsteps—though some might have listened.
The determining weight of our society will always respond to appeals to nature and courage and spiritual hope with demands that real experts be brought in. Our society is unpopular not only because great men are not valued but because, more fundamentally, great men cannot be valued. The populus itself has become “individuals,” who have no sight—except the mute striving of nature—of what greatness is and have no conscious desire for greatness as it truly is. Our determining weight does not see it, does not want it, and therefore will not grow into it if asked.
So politics, in the classical sense, has become the next thing to impossible in our day. The common good cannot be sought in common. And this is so not just because men are evil—because, that is, many of us have given ourselves inhuman ends—since that has happened often before. It is so because men have grown blind and confused: we will not assent en masse to what is honorable.
However, there is not enough space left in this essay to present a prescription. So I must unfortunately end without striking the note of hope. For that, see, in the Fall 2021 issue (2.4), the follow-up essay : “Christ, ‘of Whose Fullness We Have All Received.’ ”
I am aware that Lewis’s idea is difficult to map onto Aristotle and Aquinas; much of what he includes in this term would be considered virtue by them. Still, it seems to me that his idea encompasses some things, such as literary taste, that certainly aren’t moral virtues and don’t seem to be even intellectual virtues—yet that nonetheless are indisputably part of human fullness. And in any case, his term is striking and aids enlightenment, and his general discussion is correct, even if lacking in precision; and for my argument complete precision is not necessary.
The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 26–27.
Chesterton is right to say that this sentence “means something untranslatable like everything that means anything”—and in particular to protest “that ‘dulcis’ is not the Latin for ‘sweet,’ ” which “is at once too strong and too weak a word,” having “been rendered hopelessly sticky by the accident of the word ‘sweets’ ” (“Some of Our Errors,” in The Thing [New York: Dodd, Mead, & Company, 1946], 190–91). If I had to hazard a translation, I should probably say, though it hardly pleases the ear, “To die for one’s homeland is a thing congenial and befitting.” I give this translation to note the implied logic: it can only be that it is congenial (dulce) because it is befitting (decoris), because, that is, it is a thing that belongs to the fullness of man. The bodily torments and unfulfilled dreams, etc., that undeniably go along with dying are in one way outweighed by the sense of living up to what is truly one’s own—and this makes the action, on balance and in a more profound sense, agreeable (dulce).
This means, of course, that Wilfrid Owen (in his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”) was right, too, for the action is dulce only when it is genuinely decoris. Needless death is not truly “for one’s homeland”; it is senseless. The thing may befit man in the abstract but not in the concrete.
So, one must be on one’s guard for manipulation even in the realm of man’s true end: it is easy to mislead men with the abstract truth, if they lack the personal resources to sense its concrete presence.
Karol Wojtyła, Promieniowanie ojcostwa [Radiation of Fatherhood], Act 1, section 2, in Poezje, Dramaty, Szkice – Tryptyk Rzymski (Kraków: Znak, 2004), 451. My translation. In Polish the word “man” [człowiek] in the sense of “human being” and the word “humanity” [człowieczeństwo] are more closely related than English can represent while retaining any poeticism.
I am not, of course, denying that practical reasoning is reasoning, nor that it depends on speculative grasp of the truth. My sole burden is that moral reasoning is never mere airy reasoning, despite that its contents can be represented that way. It is itself a moral process: done by men because they are men, and depending on, and disposing over, them as moral agents. Moral reasoning presupposes the concrete existence of man’s nature, his will, his appetites and affections, and it presupposes that they are acting and being allowed to act: man engages in moral reasoning because he is a being set in motion toward an end, and he engages in it well and rightly only insofar as he accepts this motion as his own and actively participates in it. Which is to say, practical reasoning is practical.
And it is worth saying, too, that actual people do not reason morally in the wholly explicit, developed way that philosophers represent it. Frequently, a man would be unable to give a philosophically airtight (or perhaps even cogent) argument why he rejects a certain evil behavior (say, bestiality): but nonetheless he finds it disgusting and dishonorable, and does so precisely because of the operation of his reason. Being human and not angelic, our intellection often remains implicit and vague, but that doesn’t make it any less firm or reliable.
City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003), 83. Bk. 2, ch. 26.
See, for example, Gorgias 514a–e.
Michael Hanby supplies a short but thorough explanation of this in his article “The Gospel of Creation and the Technocratic Paradigm: Reflections on a Central Teaching of Laudato Si’,” Communio 42.4 (Winter 2015): 724–747. A complete PDF of the article can be found on Communio’s website.
For what it is worth, this idea has been taught directly by a pope—in Laudato Si’ 106. The pope writes that “the scientific and experimental method” is “in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation.”
A much more adequate treatment of these ideas can be found in Michael Hanby, “The Birth of Liberal Order and the Death of God: A Reply to Robert Reilly’s America on Trial,” New Polity 2.1 (February 2021): 54–85. The article can also be found on New Polity’s website.
Objecting to the Enlightenment idea doesn’t involve me in being what’s called, these days, a “fascist”: one who wishes to force others to obey his own idiosyncratic sense of right and wrong. It is of course the case that societies should self-govern; it is of course generally unjust to force one’s own moral standards onto a society that does not share them. However, it is necessary that a society self-govern on the basis of its own genuinely moral standards. Authority flows from the conscience, which is God’s voice in us, speaking the eternal law in our dialect. Our actions carry authority only so far as they derive from our real conscience. Immoral standards are always unjust, no matter how great a part of a society agrees to them, because they require each person to ignore his own conscience—thus removing himself from the primordial source of law. Just like individuals, societies will grow over time in their grasp of the good if they persist in seeking it. Those who govern a society are products of a society, and thus their goodness—even as it in some measure exceeds the general level—will still reflect the society’s level and character. All growth is gradual, and all grasp of the good is “one’s own.” But justice cannot exist at all without trying to grasp the good.
Of course, the former was to some degree America’s founding idea: that one would vote not for representatives who agreed with you on every jot and tittle, but for representatives whom you trusted to make upright decisions. The will of the people should not govern, but the will of the people should decide whose wills should govern. This has plainly gone by the wayside. It got silently swallowed by the Enlightenment context in which it was embedded.
Though, as is well known, opinions differ on what expertise is. Some Americans lean to Adam Smith, some to Keynes. Alas: such is the fate of expertise. Still, we support the various experts because they’re experts, not because they agree with our thoughts (or so we say)—and certainly not because they’re morally and humanly great.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jyfn4Wd2i6bRi12ePghMHtX3ys1b7K1A/view
“Male chest reconstruction surgery (mastectomy and creation of a male chest) recommended by a health care provider for treating gender dysphoria in a patient transitioning from the female to male gender [legally] constitutes reconstructive [as opposed to cosmetic] surgery as defined in Insurance Code section 10123.88(c)(1)(B), as it creates a normal appearance, to the extent possible, as part of the treatment of gender dysphoria.... [I]n an individual diagnosed with gender dysphoria, who is born with female characteristics and identifies as male, the presence of a female chest is an abnormal body structure caused by gender dysphoria, which is a medically recognized condition within the meaning of Insurance Code section 10123.88” (California Department of Insurance, General Counsel Opinion Letter, December 30, 2020, on the subject “Permissibility of denial of coverage based solely on age for female-to-male chest reconstruction surgery as part of a treatment for gender dysphoria,” www.insurance.ca.gov/0250-insurers/0300-insurers/0200-bulletins/bulletin-notices-commiss-opinion/upload/Gender-dysphoria-male-chest-surgery-CDI-GC-opinion-letter-12-30-20.pdf). See also the accompanying press release from the California Department of Insurance, “Commissioner Lara takes proactive step to ensure transgender youth have access to gender-affirming medical care for gender dysphoria,” www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0100-press-releases/2020/release140-2020.cfm.
American Society of Plastic Surgeons press release, “Insurance Plans Vary in Coverage of Gender-Affirming ‘Top’ Surgery for Transgender Patients,” September 26, 2019, www.plasticsurgery.org/news/press-releases/insurance-plans-vary-in-coverage-of-gender-affirming-top-surgery-for-transgender-patients.
And it therefore cannot involve any real drama. On this, see D. L. Schindler, “On Trivializing the Lives of ‘Ordinary People’ in Liberal Societies,” Communio 44.2 (Spring 2017): 104–143.
This definition may seem unhelpful, since on first glance it could seem to also apply to the natural law. The natural law, as a thing to be obeyed, exists for man insofar as man is rational; so it must be a matter of thought—and man’s thought arises by means of abstraction. “The natural law” is not another name for the blind groping of instinct: it takes shape (at the general level) in known rules, however implicit. What is more, man’s individual ability to know the natural law is quite weak; he needs the help of other men to learn it well. Such learning and teaching happens, in large part, through the use of precepts, which are necessarily explicit. And it is of course possible that men may in good faith formulate precepts, especially about the finer points, that are in error.
None of that constitutes moralism. All this is compatible with morality being more than rules, something that cannot be wholly encompassed within rules. Moralism arises once the human end is forgotten; once nature itself is forgotten. When the rules lose their higher logic in the human end; when they are no longer rules for achieving flourishing; when, that is, obedience to “rules” (do this, don’t do that) simply becomes morality itself, moralism is born. Morality is fundamentally a question of practical reason: how is living done? Some of this can be captured in universal or universal-ish rules; much of it inescapably comes down to individual situation. (How do I, here, with these things, work toward the end?) Moralism, for its part, has no connection with life as a thing that can flourish or not flourish. It does not care. (It talks a lot about justice, equity, pleasing God, and such; but for it these are things that nature must be conformed to, not needs that nature is expressing.) It is simply a list of things to be accomplished or avoided. Practical reasoning does not enter into it. It is morality as non-practical (that is, as not rooted in and motivated by the person’s active teleology), and therefore, as not really reasoning, either (both since one of practical reasoning’s key premises—the active teleology—has been removed, and since it becomes a thing to be automatically applied).
This is not to say that it may not look a great deal like reasoning: the metastasizing of casuistry such that it eats up and replaces prudence is a hallmark of moralism. However, moralistic casuistry is not really reasoning, at least in one key sense: it is not reasoning about the thing in question (the actual, concrete, practical matter of the person), and thus is not reasonable.
The many works of the great Dominican Servais Pinckaers aimed to overcome this distortion of the Faith, which suppresses (or at least desiccates) the Beatitudes, the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the New Law written on the heart.
If this claim seems excessive (or even if it doesn’t), I invite you to read D. L. Schindler’s article “ ‘The Religious Sense’ and American Culture,” Communio 25.1 (Winter 1998): 679–695.
However, he seems to me to present the devastation that is the modern world too much as the result of some hairline crack that appeared in theology centuries ago; and this, I think, cannot be true. Somewhere it must be rooted in a moral flaw, which either justified itself by serious speculative error or necessarily implied such error. Our explanations may converge if one considers a heresy the fundamental root (insofar as there is one fundamental root!), since a heresy is always, first of all, a failure of humility and obedience. Masses of people may have been, after the fact, implicated in the error without much or any personal culpability: such has been the wages of sin from “the beginning.”
Some, such as puritanism, display it much less, however, since it appears as opposition (and not simply as over-generalization) in only one moral sphere (in the case of puritanism, sexual morality). The problem remains, though, that such moralisms have given up morality’s grounding in nature. So even if they are not transhumanist in all ways, they have no firm reason not to be. They have ceded the basic ground and entered a domain where transhumanism can sound reasonable.
Because of this, every moralism is in danger of sliding over time into progressive moralism. The continual iceberg-calving of religious traditions into progressivism shows this. Morality, when unmoored from reality, seems to slouch through a series of halfway houses on the way to the worship of transhumanist freedom.
Francis Bacon himself, when he kicked off the technocratic project in the Great Instauration (setting out to redefine knowledge as essentially know-how, eliminating contemplation and the need for virtue), wrote in the preface that knowledge must be for “the benefit and use of life” and “perfect[ed] and govern[ed] ... in charity.” He argues that if one proceeds in this way, his new knowledge-project can never go wrong, since “it was from lust of power that the angels fell, from lust of knowledge that man fell; but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man ever come in danger by it” (Spedding translation). He would be right, if the word “charity” retained its genuine content.
It has been rightly concluded that “the true temper of Baconian charity, of the Baconian scientist, evidently must combine the spirit of compassion with the spirit of domination,” mixing in, as well, “Promethean courage” (Laurence Berns, “Francis Bacon and the Conquest of Nature,” Interpretation 7.1 [1978]: 1–26, at 23; the reference to Prometheus alludes to ch. 26 of Bacon’s Of the Wisdom of the Ancients). The word “charity,” when all is done, simply authorizes his assault on nature.
Nothing substantial has altered from his day to ours.
For an explanation and defense of this controversial claim, see J. Budziszewski’s book What We Can’t Not Know (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 2003).
Shaw allegedly replied, “Yes, my dear. But what if it had my body and your brains?”
Fortunately for Duncan’s soul, if unfortunately for the history of humor, the story is apocryphal.
Failure to see this leads to a great deal of useless “dialogue” and misplaced apologetics. We too often suppose that those who advocate evil things are sincere in a straightforward sense. By the very nature of things, they almost never are. There is a limit to how wrong one can be and remain ignorant of it. (This is different than saying we should presume bad faith. Outright lying is different than suppressed lying.) The Soviets, for example, committed unbelievable, even unimaginable, atrocities with regularity—and yet probably scarcely a one of them would have admitted to doing evil. Their moralism of the workers’ utopia gave them cover, and their society’s acceptance of this moralism strengthened that cover. It would have been absurd to enter into an argument with practically any of the malefactors recounted in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago with the aim of proving that his principles were morally wrong: for he must’ve long known that, and long and ingeniously been ignoring it. The fool of the Bible cannot be educated, not without willingness to repent. At best, arguments may act to sting the conscience, by bringing forward the known truth that had been suppressed. This may indeed awake a desire for repentance, though it may instead stir up anger. (This would seem to be the meaning of the life-mission of Socrates: see Symposium 215e–216c, 221e–222a; Apology 29c–32e, 38c–39d. One may note what sort of success he had.)
The Nuremberg Trials, by the way, operated on this basis. Some people at the time criticized the trials for enforcing ex post facto laws on those who had never been subject to them. This was rightly ignored as a positivistic excuse. Those punished were punished for being sorry excuses for human beings—something that they knew, and something that the natural law, engraved on the heart of each, forbade them. There is nothing ex post facto about that law. And there is nothing unjust about enforcing unwritten laws when their obviously knowing and culpable violation gravely injures society.
Adopting, of course, D. L. Schindler’s distinction between “the liberal reading of modernity” and “the meaning of modernity more generally”: that is, between modernity as evil and modernity as genuine salvageable progress (“Trivializing,” 142, fn. 72).
And when the exposure of our real reasons seems inescapable, we avoid it by acting as though a particular evil action was in fact good because, in some imaginable circumstance, an act of a similar type could be good. It was not uncommon, over the past year, to hear people defend rioting and looting on the grounds that in some circumstances it is right for the poor to take food by force. They rarely bothered to argue that the circumstances actually obtained, or to investigate the actual situation and the actual motives of those involved.
Sophistry normally aims at justifying a chosen conclusion by any argument that seems to serve. This sort of sophistry differs in a bizarre way: it aims to justify a conclusion that only resembles the chosen conclusion—and then rests its case. Yet, despite its manifest failure to prove anything whatever, it is everywhere on cable news. I would guess that it’s a side-effect of moralism, since moralism never does take into account the full concreteness of the concrete action. So we talk as though we do not either have or need reasons: as though our particular reasons might as well as have been any reasons—all that matters is the “thing done,” whose essence allegedly remains the same in all conceivable cases. Of course, the “thing done” is taken in a physicalist way (e.g., taking “things” from other people), not in the Thomistic way where the “object” of an act is what rationality grasps (e.g., taking things from other people to which I have no just claim).
I suspect that this guilty knowledge, and not simply “polarization,” accounts for our constant accusations of bad faith. The problem increases as the modern world gets more thoroughly modern.
Abolition of Man, 33.
Abolition of Man, 32.
It is sometimes asked whether, say, certain celebrities or talking heads know how their lecturing, hectoring propaganda sits with the “ordinary American.” But need they care? If they have a “duty” to propagandize, how it is received is wholly beside the point.
This connection between propaganda and moralism is why the modern popes have so strongly condemned proselytism. “Proselytism”—firmly distinguished from evangelization—denotes a propagandistic, coercive approach to “spreading the word,” and so proselytism can be used only to convert someone to a moralistic form of Christianity. True evangelization is organic (which does not mean “silent”): proceeding from a genuine insight, one’s genuine circumstances, and the genuine needs of the other person or people. A moralistic form of Christianity is better than nothing, yes, but that doesn’t make it right. We Christians are trying to convert our own people (and our own selves!) out of moralism.
Escolios a un texto implícito (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1977), vol. 2, 446. Translation by Michael Gilleland, found here: https://applied.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/davila-Gilleland.pdf.
The CDC does report the number of abortions, but does so in a different category. (“Death” is a vague word, apparently, and tricky to know when to apply). Even then, their numbers are unreliable: they undercount by several hundred thousand. If one follows the Guttmacher Institute’s figures, abortion is well ahead of heart disease (the CDC’s top cause of death) by several hundred thousand per year. Even by the CDC’s deficient figures, the two causes generally run about even.
See Microsoft Sam, “Every Covid-19 Commercial is Exactly the Same,” YouTube, April 15, 2020, commercial montage, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM3J9jDoaTA. It is interesting that so many corporations knew exactly how to project morality even before masking had become common. The presence of the human face makes the commercials, in retrospect, seem shockingly human despite their deceitfulness. (It also makes them seem somehow violent—the Pavlovian conditioning, in defiance of all conscious disagreement with it, reads the uncovered face in this context as a self-evident aggression).
Pope St. John Paul the Great, Evangelium Vitae 28.
Evangelium Vitae 28; see also 42.
Evangelium Vitae 48.
Meditations, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 87. IX.2.
Meditations, trans. Robin Hard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 114. XII.1.
My translation. Quid de me fletis et non magis de pestilentia et communi morte cogitatis? (The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, ed. and trans. A. S. L. Farquharson, vol. 2 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968], 791).
It is worth noting that the persecutions of Christians under Marcus Aurelius—which were a lower-government phenomenon that Marcus did not order or oversee—were sparked because Christians refused to join in the emergency pagan-worship rituals, and thus came to be seen as responsible for the plague’s continuance. See Paul Keresztes, “Marcus Aurelius a Persecutor?,” Harvard Theological Review 61.3 (July 1968): 321–341. So apparently there does come a time when Christians should abandon the desire to be seen as helpful by society.
And there is statistical reason to suppose that our own actions have caused many of the deaths considered to be from the coronavirus—indeed, that they have caused more deaths than the virus: see Karl Dierenbach, “COVID is not a hoax, but the numbers are: A look at the first flu season with COVID,” Rational Ground, March 8, 2021,
https://rationalground.com/covid-is-not-a-hoax-but-the-numbers-are-a-look-at-the-first-flu-season-with-covid/. Do I know whether the analysis in this article is correct? Of course not. But even if it is grossly wrong, it demonstrates that one can do anything one likes with statistics. In that case, it would serve as one more reminder that it is best to stick to human measures in evaluating human crises. And the human measures already indicate that interventions the author objects to are unacceptable.
In any case, it should not be thought that our leaders hadn’t heard of the dangers of their actions. They had. They chose to ignore them—and not only to ignore them, but to silence any discussion of them, so that the evidence could never be completely presented to the public. They continue to do so. See, for example, the account given by John Tierney, “The Panic Pandemic,” City Journal (Summer 2021), www.city-journal.org/panic-pandemic.
As of September 1, 2021, the CDC gave a provisional count of 400 deaths in people 0–18 “involving coronavirus disease” since January 2020 (See “Provisional COVID-19 Deaths: Focus on Ages 0-18 Years,” National Center for Health Statistics, September 1, 2021, https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-on-Ages-0-18-Yea/nr4s-juj3.) Bizarrely, another CDC document issued a mere two days later said that “A total of eight in-hospital COVID-19–related deaths in persons aged 0–17 years occurred during August 2020–August 2021” (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, September 2, 2021, “Trends in COVID-19 Cases, Emergency Department Visits, and Hospital Admissions Among Children and Adolescents Aged 0–17 Years — United States, August 2020–August 2021,” www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7036e1-H.pdf). (I don’t think the 0–17/0–18 difference is the cause of the discrepancy, since other date sets don’t seem to bear that out, nor does it seem possible that either “in-hospital” or the timespan is a large enough loophole).
On why the CDC’s larger number—at least—isn’t reliable, see Mark Makary “The Flimsy Evidence Behind the CDC’s Push to Vaccinate Children,” Wall Street Journal, 7/19/2021, www.wsj.com/articles/cdc-covid-19-coronavirus-vaccine-side-effects-hospitalization-kids-11626706868.
The experience of Sweden—where schools stayed open and masks were not worn—also indicates that the CDC is wrong, for the pediatric death rate did not substantively change after COVID arrived, nor was a single child recorded as having died of COVID: see “Open Schools, Covid-19, and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden,” New England Journal of Medicine, www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2026670.
Of course, even if the CDC’s larger number is correct, there are 75 million people in that age group 0–18 in the USA: and 400 is roughly one-twentieth of one-hundredth of 1 percent of them—a statistically insignificant proportion.
See Alison Boast, Alasdair Munro, and Henry Goldstein, “An Evidence Summary of Paediatric COVID-19 Literature,” Don’t Forget the Bubbles, 2021, https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/evidence-summary-paediatric-covid-19-literature/.
Yet many people persist in denying it. The only possible justification they could have is that newer strains behave differently or at least seem to—but they, in fact, don’t. So clear is the evidence that even in Australia it can be admitted, and even in the newspaper of record: see Liam Mannix, “How does the Delta variant of COVID-19 affect children?,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 27, 2021, www.smh.com.au/national/how-does-the-delta-variant-of-covid-19-affect-children-20210826-p58m1i.html.
Marriage itself, as something held in common, is its own fundamental common good. But the union that is marriage is directed essentially toward procreation. So the fundamental common good is perfected in children: they are what it is principally for and fulfilled in.
Ohio Department of Health, “Director's Order for Social Distancing, Facial Coverings and Non-Congregating,” April 5, 2021: https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/OHOOD/2021/04/05/file_attachments/1744809/Director%27s%20Order%20for%20Social%20Distancing,%20Facial%20Coverings,%20and%20Non-Congregating%2004.05.21.pdf
Gary Leff, “How Long Can You Keep Your Mask Off While Eating And Drinking On A Plane?,” View from the Wing, March 10, 2021, https://viewfromthewing.com/how-long-can-you-keep-your-mask-off-while-eating-and-drinking-on-a-plane/. United Airlines goes so far as to assert that “Federal law requires you to immediately put your mask back on between bites and sips” (“What to Expect When You Fly,” accessed September 7, 2021, https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/what-to-expect.html: see the “Face covering questions” section of the FAQ), by which they mean the CDC’s “Requirement for Persons to Wear Masks While on Conveyances and at Transportation Hubs,” which stipulates that “the requirement to wear a mask shall not apply ... while eating, drinking, or taking medication, for brief periods” (effective date February 1, 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/pdf/Mask-Order-CDC_GMTF_01-29-21-p.pdf).
Meanwhile on the waiting room’s (entirely pointless) TV—in between snippets of medical advice (“If you have hepatitis C, it’s OK to have questions. Like, ‘Should I get treated for hepatitis C?’ ”) and news flashes on Germany’s psychic elephant (I make up none of this)—normally cuddly characters from Sesame Street humorlessly hector us to wear masks and millionaire celebrities let us know we’re all in this together.
Reasonableness and humanity have departed long since.
All this is the one and only valid objection, in our day, to “populism.” There is no longer any populus.
Of course, in our day, this is not actually what “populism” is used to mean. “Populism” has become a word for democracies doing “undemocratic” (i.e., “unenlightened”) things—and therefore, so far as it goes and in the abstract, the rise in populism is a positive sign. However, populism cannot truly subvert democratic ideology unless an actual populus exists. If one does not, populism will simply turn democracy into a tool (to some degree) for anti-Enlightenment oppression, instead of one for Enlightenment oppression. It will simply swap out transhumanist freedom for whatever inhumanity the mass happens to hanker for. This makes it a highly equivocal phenomenon: a sign only of unrest with despair and not a sign that brings hope.