Ley

Preguntas que se formulan:

— ¿Es la ley moral algo meramente externo, o también está en el interior de cada persona?

— ¿Todas las normas tienen el mismo valor? ¿O hay algunas subordinadas a otras? ¿Y unas perfectas, que no admiten excepciones, mientras que otras son imperfectas y sí las admiten? ¿Tiene igual valor el "no matarás" y el "no cruzar un semáforo en rojo"? ¿Valora bien el "no matarás", o debe más bien entenderse de otra manera que sí resulta inmutable, sin excepción?

— ¿El que una ley suponga una generalización implica que sea impersonal? ¿Hay algo de común en todas, absolutamente todas, las personas? ¿Qué diferencia hay entre una ley física y una norma dictada a personas?

— ¿Una ley supone una coacción por venir "de fuera"? ¿Se cumple sólo como imposición, o puede haber otros motivos más elevados? ¿Puede la propia conciencia asumir la ley como buena?

— ¿Es la ley dictada por la razón o por la mera voluntad? ¿Tiene que ser racional? ¿Un dictado arbitrario de quien tiene el poder puede considerarse como ley? ¿Hacen bien en este caso los padres despachando a su hijo con frases hechas cuando pide razones?

— ¿Es cierto que la conciencia decide lo que en cada caso está bien o mal, o más bien interpreta? ¿Qué diferencia hay entre ambos términos? ¿Con arreglo a qué debe juzgar la conciencia? ¿Si sólo juzga con arreglo a sí misma, no resultaría entonces arbitraria?

— ¿Es la tranquilidad o intranquilidad de la conciencia lo que infaliblemente indica qué está bien y qué está mal?

— ¿Es cierto que en este caso para actuar en conciencia es necesario dejar de estar sometido a unas reglas? ¿Es así siempre?

— ¿Cómo valoras la situación expuesta?

Vid. Catecismo de la Iglesia Católica, nn. 1776-1794, 1950-1974.

Reason and Pop Atheism

From First things

By Edward T. Oakes, S.J.

Monday, January 22nd 2007, 10:56 AM

The publishing world, it seems, is just as prone to the fickleness of trends and fashions as is, well, the fashion industry. A few years ago, a whole spate of books came out on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, most of them flogging (surely not by coincidence) the same dead horse of papal perfidy. More recently, several books arguing for atheism have cropped up on the bestseller lists. I’ve looked at a few, and none of them struck me as even trying to get beyond that old dorm-room chestnut: “If God made the universe, who made God?” Gosh, thanks for bringing that up, Professor Bright. I had never really thought of that before—and now, horribile dictu, I’ve lost my faith!

Needless to say, our recent atheists, without exception, have to drag Darwin into the business. But—also without exception—they end up taking the implications of Darwinian biology so far that their arguments become self-consuming. I am thinking especially of the notion that cultural ideas are only “memes,” that is, self-replicating trends that catch on and take over a culture the way viruses do in the human body. One favorite example would be teenagers who wear baseball caps backwards: An impish adolescent somewhere gets the idea to wear his cap backwards, and soon every boy in the land is following suit.

The next step then is to claim that religion, too, is a meme, and a mighty destructive one at that, the Ebola virus of human civilization. The trouble is, if all ideas are but memes, then so is natural selection, whose cultural influence has its own bloody history to account for. On that, I recommend the reader get a hold of Richard Weikart’s From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, which carefully traces Darwin’s influence on a host of prominent intellectuals in Germany from 1860 to 1939, a genealogy of “memetic contagion” that made Nazi ideology so plausible to so many. (For a fuller review of this truly brilliant book, see my article “Darwin’s Graveyards” in the December 2006 issue of Books & Culture.”)

Tedious and self-consuming as these arguments are, their popularity—if one is to judge by the bestseller lists—did get me to thinking about atheism as a cultural phenomenon. As I always ask my class when I teach contemporary theology: If God exists, why are there atheists? Or rather, and to put more strongly: Since God exists, what makes atheism conceptually possible?

I let my students crack their noggins on that question for a while to prepare them to take up one of the texts in the course, The Discovery of God by the renowned French Jesuit Henri de Lubac, which deals directly with this issue of atheism as made possible by God.

Part of the problem is psychological: even the most knock-down arguments in mathematics fade in the brain after a while, like sand castles on the beach. For example, I would never presume to raise objections against Euclid’s plane geometry, but I’d be hard pressed to reproduce what I learned in sophomore high-school geometry after all these years.

But the problem goes much deeper than the vagaries of human memory. St. Anselm thought he had his own knock-down argument for the existence of God, which later went by the name of the Ontological Argument (which Thomas Aquinas held to be invalid). But however much Anselm was convinced of the argument, he never went so far as to place moral blame on those who rejected it, because for him there was a deeper reality behind the phenomenon of atheism. As he said in the Proslogion (the best translation is here):

Why this, O Lord, why this? Is the eye darkened by its own weakness, or blinded by your light?—Without doubt it is darkened in itself and blinded by you, obscured by its own littleness and overwhelmed by your immensity, contracted by its own narrowness and overcome by your greatness.

As I presume most people reading this site know, the First Vatican Council declared de fide that the existence of God can be proved by reason. At first glance, this seems paradoxical. For if God can be proved through rational demonstration, one would expect the council to adduce this marvelous proof and let it be judged on its own merits. And because of de Lubac’s critique of the “manual Thomism” of the Roman universities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (which placed heavy emphasis on rational proofs for God’s existence), one might also think that de Lubac would dismiss the sterile rationalism that some theologians claim lurks behind Vatican I.

But that is not his position at all. De Lubac quite openly asserts that “behind the apparent variations, the skeleton of the proof always remains the same. The proof is solid and eternal, as hard as steel. It is something more than one of reason’s inventions: it is reason itself.”

What happens then is that, once this proof is formulated in words, the learned make adaptations and modifications as they encounter objections. But these modifications are for de Lubac in no way part of the incontrovertible proof that he holds to be the common patrimony of mankind: the use of reason itself. Hence de Lubac’s confident conclusion:

All the objections brought against the various proofs for the existence of God are in vain; criticism can never invalidate them, for it can never get its teeth into the principle common to them all. On the contrary, that principle emerges more clearly as the elements with which the proofs are constructed are rearranged. . . . It forms part of the substance of the mind. It is not a path which the mind can be discouraged from pursuing to the end, or one from which it can turn away, afraid of having taken the wrong road. Path and mind are merged together. The mind itself is a moving path (de Lubac’s emphasis).

At first glance, de Lubac might seem to be elevating the place of reason here to such a height that he ends up conceding reason’s right to judge the things of God—the very procedure he found so objectionable in Descartes and Kant. That, however, is not his intent, which is why he so stresses the dynamism of reason. Augustine defined sin as “the heart turned in on itself,” the corollary of which for de Lubac would be: The Enlightenment (at least in its French and German versions) is reason turned in on itself.

What has always struck readers of the Continental Rationalists from Descartes to Kant is how all these Rationalists divide reason from desire (usually called by them, tellingly, the passions, meaning feelings that overwhelm us rather than longings that express our inmost nature). De Lubac, on the contrary, sees reason and desire as parts of the same whole, subsumed under the wider image of “heart,” encompassing them both. And because desire is inherently outward in its aim, thereby testifying to a deficiency in the self, the same holds true of reason. Precisely because we never start off in possession of the truth, we must go out in search of it, always desiring it on the way. And that dynamism aims, however unawares, at God. This is why Thomas Aquinas can say in De Veritate: “All knowing beings implicitly know God in everything they know.”

In other words, what all proofs are really reaching for is this common fund of inchoate awareness of the necessity of God already present whenever reason exercises its rational faculties. In one of his many footnotes, de Lubac quotes Maurice Blondel, who makes just this point: Proofs for the existence of God, Blondel says, “are not so much an invention as an inventory, not so much a revelation as an elucidation, a purification and a justification of the fundamental beliefs of humanity.”

That said, de Lubac refuses to countenance faulty reasoning just because an invalid argument is aiming for the same conclusion as do valid proofs. Believers’ faith might well be strong enough to slough off bad arguments for God’s existence, but that should be no excuse for sloth in reasoning: “Where belief in God is concerned, I cannot rest content with a doubtful argument, and an inconclusive proof is as repugnant to my moral sense as it is offensive to my intelligence.” And further: “Even in the most essential matters a sinner may reason better than a saint.” Rigor in reasoning is no sin; rightly realized, it testifies to faith’s underlying rationality.

But even in cases where, say, a Thomas Aquinas trumps a David Hume in the field of argument, the believer feels vaguely dissatisfied:

Why is it that the mind which has found God still retains, or constantly reverts to, the feeling of not having found him? … The temptation is to succumb to this scandal and to despair in proportion as one has formerly thought to have found him: a temptation to deny the light because the veil becomes opaque once again…. The temptation in this case is to underestimate the obstacles, to imagine that serenity is easily acquired, and to confuse the faint clarity of being with the divine light.

Just think what would happen, de Lubac asks, if rational proofs really did lead to certainty: Then we would mistake the proof for God; and, in the manner of the French “enlightened” philosophes, we would in effect end up building a temple, not to God, but to reason. But that is the very definition of reason’s sin, turning inward. We would then make reason the object of our worship, rather than God. (In the midst of the maelstrom of the French Revolution, some Jacobins actually built a “Temple to Reason.”)

But when we turn to God via our rational faculties, we simultaneously recognize both the underlying rationality of our faith in God and yet also reason’s insufficiency to grant us what we really long for: light itself in a dark world. That light, however, only comes from God, not reason. We are pilgrims, and reason is our viaticum —but it is only viaticum. The nourishment this food for the journey provides is salubrious (when the reasoning is correct), but it is not life itself, only the provisions for life, which only God can provide.

Edward T. Oakes, S.J., teaches theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake.

Family Matters

By John Haldane

Philosophy 81(2006) 581-594 Cambridge University Press

Here's an abstract of the cientific article:
"Governments and international bodies continue to praise the family for its service to the good of individuals and of society. Among its important contributions are the rearing of children and the care of the elderly. So far as the former is concerned, however, the family is subject to increasing criticism and suggestions are made for further state intervention, particularly in the area of education. In response to this challenge I consider the natural operation of the family in relation to the development of children, and examine the implications of this for the role of the state in promoting, protecting or interfering with family life. Relating this to the issue of autonomy I argue that the sort of liberalism that lies behind the increasing criticism of parental authority is unable to find a place for the common good of family because of its commitment to neutrality between life-shaping values. I conclude that the best advice that philosophers might offer to policy makers is to make it possible for families to flourish in the ways they themselves recognise to be best."

How a teacher’s gender affects boys and girls

For a complete report on this question click here.

On Our Honor

From CERC
On Our Honor CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS

James Bowman and Christina Hoff Sommers discuss his new book.

Christina Hoff Sommers

James Bowman

In Honor: A History James Bowman, resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, traces the changing fortunes of the concept of honor. He contrasts primitive honor cultures — those of criminals, jihadists, and backward societies — with the high honor culture of the West — best exemplified by the Victorian gentleman. We live, he says, in a “post-honor” society that is deeply uncomfortable with the notion of honor — in any of its forms. For almost a century, idealists, pacifists, feminists and sundry others have warred against it. They view it as a relic of the Middle Ages — elitist, undemocratic, irrational, and dangerous. Bowman concedes that it can be all these things. But he also shows the honor ideal, in its higher post-Enlightenment expressions, is indispensable to our personal and social well-being — perhaps even our national survival. The case he makes here is compelling and rousing. Bowman's is a necessary book. He talks about Honor in an interview American Enterprise Institute resident scholar (and author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys) Christina Hoff Sommers.

Christina Hoff Sommers: You show that the Western concept of honor has lost much force and is becoming obsolete. Can you tell us what you think is the most serious consequence of this ongoing diminishment?

James Bowman: The most serious? That would have to be in the corresponding diminishment of our will to live as a society and a culture. Honor is among other things an assertion of collective identity. We are this and we are not that. We are American and not Islamicist. When we are attacked, it is a counter-assertion by someone else that he is that and not this. He is Islamicist and not American. Honor is the name that used to be given to the will to assert the one identity over the other. If you attack me because I am American, honor dictates that I must counterattack and defeat you because you are Islamicist — since you have shown me that being an Islamicist means being an enemy of America. But nowadays we find something disreputable about this kind of assertion and counter-assertion of identity. It is fundamentally at odds with the multiculturalist orthodoxy of the last 30 years. What we ought to have learned from the terror attacks of September 11^th and subsequent events is that multiculturalism has sapped our will to fight back and thus to survive. If American patriotism has to be expressed at the expense of non-Americans, even non-Americans who want to kill us simply for being Americans, we are ashamed to express it.

Sommers: In your book, you mention an unusual recent addition to London’s Trafalgar Square. The Square, designed in 1844 as a tribute to Admiral Horatio Nelson for his victory at Trafalgar against Napoleon, includes a number of statues commemorating British war heroes. But last September, the commission in charge arranged for a large marble sculpture of a naked, armless, pregnant woman to be placed in the square. It is entitled “Alison Lapper Pregnant.” Alison Lapper is a British single mother who was born without arms and with underdeveloped legs. Ms. Lapper hailed the sculpture as a tribute to “femininity, disability and motherhood.” The Mayor of London said that Lapper had to struggle to overcome “much greater difficulties” than the men celebrated in the square. What does this addition to Trafalgar Square tell us about the fate of the Western honor culture?

Bowman: When an honor culture breaks down, honor itself doesn’t simply cease to exist. Rather it is transmuted into other forms, though forms which are mostly useless in terms of their survival value. One such alternative to traditional honor culture is to be found in the exaltation of victimhood. The statue of “Alison Lapper Pregnant” placed among British war heroes is a good illustration of how the cult of the victim consciously seeks to supplant more traditional ideas of honor. Several people pointed out at the time that Admiral Nelson lost an arm, and an eye, and was eventually killed in the service of his country, but he was honored not because of what he had suffered but because of what he had achieved, which was the defeat of the Napoleonic navy and the establishment of British maritime supremacy for a century afterwards. The enshrinement of an image of Lapper in the same precincts is a deliberate statement of the contrary principle that it is victimhood alone which is worthy of honor. Lapper herself made the point when she compared herself favorably to Nelson by saying, “At least I didn’t get here by slaying people.” No, indeed! But national greatness and autonomy, which are invariably the products of slaying people, are correspondingly devalued and denigrated. Once again, the decline of traditional honor proceeds pari passu with the loss of national identity and finally even the will to survive as an identifiable people distinct from those who would destroy that identity.

Sommers: You describe a shocking case in a Pakistani village where, in 2002, a young woman was raped by members of a tribal council to “avenge their tribal honor.” In what respect does the Western post-Enlightenment concept of honor differ from the concept of honor we find in this village?

Western ideas of honor underwent a process of evolution that, for some reason, never happened in Islamic — or, indeed, any other — honor cultures. I believe we owe the difference to Christianity.

Bowman: Western ideas of honor underwent a process of evolution that, for some reason, never happened in Islamic — or, indeed, any other — honor cultures. I believe we owe the difference to Christianity. Christianity was anti-honor in a way that Islam never was. Radical ideas about loving your enemies and doing good to them that insult you could never easily co-exist with any honor culture hitherto known to man. As a result, the two things — the Christian religion and the honor culture — existed separately and side by side for centuries, but not without exerting some influence on each other. When the aristocratic honor culture finally died out in the 18^th century, honor was reinvented partly by integrating it, for the first time, with Christian principles. One of the most striking things about the old Western honor culture, when we compare it to the ones to be found elsewhere in the world, was the status it gave to women. Nowhere else do we see the exaltation of women — sometimes described as putting them on a pedestal — that was characteristic of chivalry in the West.

All honor cultures make women’s honor — by which is meant their chastity or fidelity — the property of their male family members, for it is up to fathers, brothers or husbands to protect it, and to challenge other men who threaten it. The process is all bound up with status, of course, but we see this in a particularly virulent form in a primitive and tribal honor culture like the one in Pakistan. The woman “sentenced to be raped” had done nothing wrong, but apparently her younger brother had been molested by some men belonging to a higher caste family. When he refused to keep quiet about it, he was charged, almost certainly falsely, by the other family with having done something to compromise the honor of one of their women, so his sister had to be raped in revenge. It was their way of reasserting the family’s superior status and wiping out the stain on their honor of the boy’s accusation. It all makes a weird kind of sense in that culture in a way that it never would have done in the West, certainly not when chivalry towards women still had a good name among us.

Sommers: You recognize that the Western honor culture is inherently unstable. Not only is it subject to constant attack from within, but it requires an uneasy accommodation between Enlightenment ideals of equality and democracy with medieval ideals of chivalry and elitism. Can this marriage be saved?

Bowman: I’m rather pessimistic about this. The various anti-honor orthodoxies of our time are too powerful. But we have to take some encouragement from the fact that the trick, or something like it, was done once before. When Edmund Burke responded to the French revolution — even before its worst excesses — by announcing that “the age of chivalry is dead,” he didn’t know that, even as he wrote, the age of chivalry was being re-imagined in a form that seemed and for a while actually was compatible with ideals of freedom, democracy and equality. The heroes of this re-imagining were the European romantics inspired, first, by the American Founding Fathers and then by Sir Walter Scott, and it produced what I call the Victorian accommodation between traditional honor and those new ideas of human progress. The reasons for the breakdown of this wonderful synthesis are many and complex, but it is not entirely clear that the breakdown was inevitable. The problem is, can honor be re-re-imagined without simply turning back the clock, which is always a fool’s errand? It’s possible, but I don’t see a great imaginer, in the mold of Scott, on the horizon.

Compared with a nutritious diet of real heroism, the artificial excitement generated by the comic-book super-hero is like a sugary snack and kills off the appetite for the genuine article. Super-heroes are our culture’s apology for not having real heroes anymore.

Sommers: It occurred to me as I was reading your book that we have deprived a generation of children — especially boys — of stories about male valor and honor. You mention, for example, Major H. F. Fane-Hervey, a World War Two British tank commander whose rescue of some of his men from a burning tank was so heroic, enemy soldiers who were watching broke out in applause. Today, in the post-honor classroom, students are far more likely to read stories about men learning to cry. Do you have any ideas on how we can educate young people about honor?

Bowman: Do you know what I think is the chief culprit in depriving us of honor models? It’s another thing that the romantics tried to teach us about, namely fantasy. What kids read in the classroom is only the tip of the iceberg. It’s what they want to read, or to watch, when they’re free to do as they like that matters much more. And they don’t like to read or watch stories of real heroism anymore. I believe this is because their imaginations have been corrupted by fantasy, which assumed its present state of cultural dominance concurrently, but not coincidentally, with the decline of the honor culture. Compared with a nutritious diet of real heroism, the artificial excitement generated by the comic-book super-hero is like a sugary snack and kills off the appetite for the genuine article. Super-heroes are our culture’s apology for not having real heroes anymore. Heroes are okay only so long as they are acknowledged fakes, like Michael Jackson prancing around in a field marshal’s uniform.

Let me give you another example. The story of Major Fane-Hervey was culled from the obituary pages of the London papers, especially the Daily Telegraph and the Times, which are almost the only places you can read stories of real heroism now without digging around in libraries and archives. American papers rarely run obituaries of soldiers, except for medal-of-honor winners, solely on account of things they did 60-plus years ago, but the British ones still do. One I particularly liked recently was of Captain Kingsmill Bates, who was electrical officer on the battleship Duke of York as it pursued the German battle cruiser, Scharnhorst, in the icy waters of the North Sea in December, 1943. When a near miss by a shell from the Scharnhorst knocked out the ship’s radar — which in the dark and low-visibility of a force 8 gale was the only means by which the Duke of York could aim her guns — Bates climbed a mast to right the radar antenna and re-start the gyro-stabilizer and so helped to enable the British to sink the Scharnhorst a few hours later.

For this he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and was widely portrayed as a hero in the popular media — then much more strongly interested in heroes than they are now, needless to say. But, as the Telegraph tells it, because the workings of radar were still a mystery to most people, “Bates was exasperated after the war by the way he was regularly depicted as ‘Barehands Bates,’ holding live electrical wires together, in comics and on the backs of cereal packets.” What so you suppose happened to those comics and cereal packets a few years later? They were colonized by Superman, Batman, Spiderman and the rest, whose greatest super-feat was to drive reality quite out of the childish imagination. Obviously, the super-heroes made the exploits of the likes of “Barehands Bates” look pretty unimpressive by comparison — though that will continue to be true only so long as we allow the popular culture to go on teaching kids and, now, grown-ups as well that reality itself is unimpressive and indeed unnecessary.

Sommers: Is it a case of cherchez la feministe if we want to know who has done the most damage to the reputation of honor?

Bowman: I don’t know. There are so many candidates for that honor! But I do believe that feminists present by far the biggest obstacle to any revival of honor. That’s not because they’re wrong but because they’re right. As a culture we have come to accept the injustice of treating women as less than fully human — for that was the implication of their being denied full political and legal equality with men — as even the most enlightened honor culture of the past used to do. It is no longer conceivable — short, that is, of our surrender to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban — that we could ever go back to regarding women as second-class citizens, confined to the private sphere of home and family, while men (officially anyway) run the world. But modern feminism, having helped to kill the honor culture, wants to keep hammering more nails into its coffin by all kinds of things that have nothing to do with equity and justice — particularly by its collaboration with the self-esteem movement, about which you and Sally Satel have written so well in One Nation Under Therapy. Not only would a revived culture of honor have to put a stop to all that, it would also have to persuade women that there is still a way for them to allow men to be men — honorable men — and to accept their own status as equal to but different from them. I can’t see feminism standing still for that! So far, it has remained adamant not for equality but for virtual identity of the sexes. Perhaps that, too, is fantasy’s doing!

Honor: A History

“What an engaging book James Bowman has written, and what a daunting command he has of his material. Ranging across psychology, popular culture, military history, the arts, and politics, Honor is a tapestry of the 20th century that uses a neglected thread-the evolution of the complicated bundle of values that goes into the concept of honor-to explain how our culture got where it is today. Honor gives that rarest of gifts: a new, powerful way of thinking about a familiar history” — Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground “James Bowman has written a profound and important book, at once fascinating and alarming, on the changing fortunes of the idea of ‘honor’ in America and the West. Faced with the energy and the implacable hatred of the barbaric version of honor in radical Islam, our long-term survival may well depend on the reinvention of a form of honor suitable to free and democratic societies.” — Robert Bork, author of The Tempting of America “You will gain a new insight on the first page of this book, and on the last, and there are fireworks all the way through, again and again. A real education, on a subtle topic — on a topic of unheard-of, silent, horizon-shifting importance, like the shifting of the earth deep below the surface.” — Michael Novak, author of On Two Wings

Sommers: Your book brilliantly documents a relentless and ongoing campaign to disparage and discredit the Victorian honor tradition. Well-known novelists, poets, philosophers, and political radicals — starting after the First World War and continuing to this day — have been nearly united in their aversion for the nineteenth century British gentleman and all he stood for. Yet, even today, to call someone honorable or to tell a man he is a gentleman is a high compliment. Could it be that the honor ideal is so powerful and enduring that it will be weakened, but never fully vanquished, by those who try to disparage it? Can we be hopeful about a resurgence of an honor culture?

Bowman: In my book, I distinguish between what I call “reflexive” and cultural honor. Reflexive honor is the quasi-instinctual urge to stand up for ourselves when we are attacked or insulted. Every child still knows what it means to lose face, to become contemptible, in the eyes of his fellows, though he may never have heard of the word “honor.” The honor culture, when we had one, was able to work with this raw material by teaching that it was not only a willingness to assert oneself against others that was honorable but also such qualities as standing by one’s friends, telling the truth and being respectful towards women. All of those things we still value, sometimes in spite of ourselves, which is why it’s still a compliment to call a man a gentleman, but we have been taught by a dominant, liberalizing ideology of almost a century’s standing that the whole package, as it were, is obscurely scandalous. To claim gentlemanly status for oneself would be, if anyone dared to do it anymore, not only an insult to the ladies (which would be ungentlemanly) but an assertion of moral superiority to others of a kind which we now find intolerable.

How we untangle that cultural snarl, I can’t tell you. It may be too late for the gentleman except as a very remote ideal, as the Grail knights were to the gentlemen themselves back when there were gentlemen. Where honor may have its best chance of making a comeback is in international relations. Hobbes said that, in spite of civilization, princes remained in a state of nature with respect to each other, and that is still largely true. It means that the basic honor culture — though in the West it is as ashamed of itself as the personal one is — still obtains among nations. I think it’s why so many people continued to support the war in Iraq in spite of the failure to find any Weapons of Mass Destruction. They understood that the WMDs were never the main reason for going to war, only the most acceptable one rhetorically in a climate as hostile to honor as ours.

In fact, I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine honor coming out into the open and saying on national TV something like this. “This war has not been undertaken primarily to protect ourselves from attack by chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons nor to establish democracy in the Middle East. These things may be desirable and may even be accomplishable, but the main reason we go to war is because someone’s got to pay a price for insulting Uncle Sam. And who better to pay it than a tyrant and a murderer like Saddam Hussein? For if Uncle Sam does not exact that price, he will be continually and ever more grievously insulted from here on out, and many more Americans are sure to die than will die in the demonstration of American strength and resolve.” The media and the academic Left would of course become instantly hysterical at this, or anything approaching it, but ordinary people might just understand it in sufficient numbers to demand that they bring back the word “honor” to describe this strange but strangely compelling new idea.

Sommers: Jim, Thank you.

To read the introduction to Honor: A History click here.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Christina Hoff Sommers. "On Our Honor." National Review (May 30, 2006).

This article is reprinted with permission from National Review. To subscribe to the National Review write P.O. Box 668, Mount Morris, Ill 61054-0668 or phone 815-734-1232.

THE AUTHOR

James Bowman is or has been: movie critic, The American Spectator (1990 to date); American editor, The Times Literary Supplement of London (1991 to date); media critic, The New Criterion (1993 to date); Washington correspondent, The Spectator of London (1989-1991); teacher of English and Head of General Studies, Portsmouth Grammar School, Portsmouth, England (1980-1989). Mr. Bowman received his M.A. and A.B.D. degrees from Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, England. He is currently a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Visit his website here. Order Honor: A History here.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance, and Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life.

Copyright © 2006 National Review

Darwinian Fairytales

By James Franklin
Tuesday, 24 October 2006
An Australian philosopher ruthlessly dissects the logic of Darwin and his followers.

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In public debates over evolution, people often lose sight of the foundational principles of its most popular explanation, Darwinism. One who did not was the Australian philosopher David Stove, whose book Darwinian Fairytales is reviewed below by his literary executor, James Franklin. This gem of ruthless logic and rapier wit was originally published in 1995 and, inexplicably, went out of print. For a while it languished on the internet in an electronic version, until it was reprinted earlier this year in the United States.

* * * * *

Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution By David Stove
320 pp Encounter Books ISBN 1594031401 2006

The evolution versus intelligent design controversy is a strange one, in that positions are taken on a scientific question on religious and philosophical grounds. And not just on one side. Most defenders of intelligent design would prefer it to be proved that Darwin’s theory of evolution cannot account for the complexity of living things, in order to give room for divine creation to fill the gap. On the other side of the debate, Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and other leading pro-Darwinian books, writes "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually-fulfilled atheist". He has a strong philosophical need for the science to deliver a certain answer too.

The question of the evidence for Darwinism is not easy, contrary to popular belief. The evidence that present organisms descended from primitive forms over very long periods of time ("evolution" strictly so called) is indeed very strong. It is not so easy to prove conclusively Darwin’s theory of the causes of evolution. The sole (or almost sole) cause of evolution, Darwin says, is natural selection (the "survival of the fittest") acting on random small changes in genetic material.

In the nature of the theory, it is rather distant from any observations, as long-term evolution is not directly observable – it requires subtle arguments like extrapolation from varieties to species and genera, excuses for gaps in the fossil record, argument about whether "irreducibly" complex structures could have evolved bit by bit, and calculation as to whether something as complex as humans could have evolved by a random search process in the time available. A complex theory with such a distant relation to evidence needs attention from an expert not so much in biology as in logic, and one without a philosophical axe to grind.

David Stove fits the bill. An (atheist) Australian philosopher (1927-1994), he was known for his defence of the rationality of inductive reasoning and his logic-based criticism of the philosophy of science of Popper and Kuhn. Shortly before his death he completed the manuscript of Darwinian Fairytales, an attack on modern evolutionary theory from a different direction from the proponents of intelligent design. He has two main criticisms. The first is that Darwinian theory is so logically flabby it can "explain" anything by subtly changing the terms of the debate. He writes of the standard account of altruism:

Any discussion of altruism with an inclusive fitness theorist is, in fact, exactly like dealing with a pair of balloons connected by a tube, one balloon being the belief that kin altruism is an illusion, the other being the belief that kin altruism is caused by shared genes. If a critic puts pressure on the illusion balloon -- perhaps by ridiculing the selfish theory of human nature -- air is forced into the causal balloon. There is then an increased production of earnest causal explanations of why we love our children, why hymenopteran workers look after their sisters, etc., etc. Then, if the critic puts pressure on the causal balloon -- perhaps about the weakness of sibling altruism compared with parental, or the absence of sibling altruism in bacteria -- then the illusion balloon is forced to expand. There will now be an increased production of cynical scurrilities about parents manipulating their babies for their own advantage, …

His other criticism is that the Darwinian theory requires it make statements about all species that we all know are false of the human species. For example qualities injurious to a species are supposed to be "rigidly destroyed", whereas we know abortion, celibacy, and many other traits are common in humans.

Science is an excellently rational enterprise, perhaps the best in the business. But it has never been very good at admitting its problems. It would not hurt evolutionary theory to admit that critics like Stove and the intelligent design theorists have identified serious problems. It would be better to work on answers than trying to shoot the messengers.

James Franklin is an associate professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney.

Further reading

David Stove, `So you think you are a Darwinian?’. Royal Institute of Philosophy website.
James Franklin, `Stove’s anti-Darwinism’. Royal Institute of Philosophy website.

Roger Kimball's Introduction to the new edition.

source: Mercatornet

When I use a word

George Rutler

Lewis Carroll anticipated the word games that demagogues play when he had Humpty Dumpty say, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” There are a lot of Humpty Dumptys around in our time, turning words inside out to turn the moral order upside down. They call vice “liberation” and infanticide “health care.” A few years ago, a major chain of bookshops listed a book on how to commit suicide under the category “Self-Improvement.”

George Orwell updated Lewis Carroll in his brooding book 1984. By now “Orwellian” has become a neologism for Humpty Dumpty talk. In a famous essay called “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell wrote: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Foolish thoughts can also be criminal and destructive. Recently the press reported the death of a retired Massachusetts congressman who, despite having been censured for perverse and predatory sexual offences with a youth, was re-elected to office and given major leadership offices. One senator called him “a role model.” The New York Times and the Boston Globe obituaries said that he was survived by his husband. His husband. The syntax reminded us that we are a couple of decades past 1984 and language rot is now a received style. It is not just Humpty Dumpty silliness: It is a deliberate attempt to alter reality by altering the language which describes reality.

Orwell optimistically thought that the decay is reversible, but “to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.” By definition, however, regeneration is not the desire of the degenerate. The clarity of thought urged, for instance, by Pope Benedict is considered scandalous. The historian Toynbee said that civilizations die, not by invasion, but by suicide. Under the guise of sophistication, the moral lights of culture begin to dim when wordplay is considered an amusing game and not a sinister plot.

Gazing upon the ruins of Timgad in North Africa, a city founded as Thamugas by the emperor Trajan in 100 a.d., and destroyed by the Vandals after it had lost its cultural balance, Hilaire Belloc wrote: “We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.