This is easier for me to say since I have never been the father of a teenager, and there are those who curiously and inexplicably list this among the sacrifices a priest must make. A pastor, of a parish, though, is entrusted with the care of a flock as a father, and the Pope himself has a very large flock and is to them not a Holy King or Holy President, but a Holy Father. In the singular economy of the Church, a man may be a father to those older than himself and as old as himself, as well as to those younger. In the confessional, no one has to calculate one’s age in relation to the confessor before saying, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” And when the rod must be used, those who need to be tapped into moral consciousness may object at first, but on the Last Day they will be thankful if it saved them from going off a cliff.

So we have the maxim, “Spare the rod,  spoil the child.”  Those who quote the Bible without reading it, often assume that the line is scriptural, though it was coined by the seventeenth century Cavalier satirist Samuel Butler in his narrative poem, “Hudbibras” which mocks the Roundheads, Presbyterians and Puritans.  The line is perfectly consistent with the Book of Proverbs which speaks of ‘rod discipline’ six times, and the New Testament is in concord: “My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord or lose heart when reproved by him: for who the Lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every son he acknowledges” (Hebrew 12:5-6).

In the politicized diction of gender neutral translations, we would say sons and daughters:  “If you are without discipline, in which all have shared, you are not sons (and daughters) but bastards.” (Hebrews  12:8)

On occasion, our present pope has been required by the One whose Vicar he is, to wield the rod according the demands of his lofty office, and must take heroic virtue when it is not instinctive to his gentle nature. Had discipline been more evident in the practice of mercy in previous decades, the rod would be lighter now. Instead, a world of spoiled children, even among consecrated Religious,  rallies the perpetual adolescents in the media to support them in their crusade against reality.   The rod without the staff would certainly be a battle-axe, but the staff without the rod would be a weak crutch. St. Paul was not the father of a child, quite in radical departure from the rabbinical code in which he was reared, but he became a father of many churches, and as such seems to be speaking to himself when hewrites: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up with the training and instructions of the Lord.” (Ephesians 6:4)

The Good Shepherd says that “the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his sheep by name” (John 10:3). Like the father excommunicated from his son by the iPod, God Himself can be blocked out of our consciousness if we hear only our own voice, living in a “virtual reality” sustained by the imaginings of the ego. Jesus told Peter “Tend my lambs. . . Feed my sheep . . . Feed my sheep” (John 21: 15-17).  The sheep are those who hear God but need encouragement. The lambs are those who seem to have blocked out God, Who continues to call to them. Once they have been brought to consciousness, sometimes by the shock of crises in life, which can strike like a rod, then God leads them with His shepherd’s staff into green pastures and“restores my soul” (Psalm 23:3).

Spiritual mortification is our inner attempt at contacting God without the interference of disorderly passions. There will always be outward distractions when we pray, but there are also willful distractions rooted in self-absorption, that can only be overcome by discipline, and the spoiled soul has lost the art of such self-control.  Just to take a domestic example,  it is not unknown that someone will actually answer a cell phone during Mass. Unless God is on the other end, this is inverted prayer. The personality type that lets a machine interrupt worship  has excommunicated its self through the agency of self-uncontrol.

Now prayer is conversation with God, and it is often difficult for us because, by misuse of free will, we can “put Him on hold.” When we do not answer, God leaves us a recorded message through the words of the Scriptures, the pulse of the saints and the songs of Liturgy. The Latin word for deaf issurdus, and man does become an absurdity to his very self when he willfully listens only to himself.  Aquinas hymned “Sedauditu solo tuto creditur,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins translated: “How says trusty hearing? That shall be believed…” When the dying St. Stephen said he could see the Son seated at the right hand of the Father, the mob covered their ears in a simulation people listening to iPods.  But one of them listened.  Later on the Damascus road, he was dazzled by what Stephen had seen.  When St. Paul was converted, he said: “You also, who have heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and have believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit” (Ephesians1:13).

Cover Image Credit: www.fromi2us.com

That must have sounded like a very ambitious and exciting goal 30 years ago. But if, having seen pictures of African villagers and Indian slum-dwellers wielding cellphones, you have the strong impression that the digital divide was bridged a while back; if the possibilities of the internet seem to you to have gone about as far as sanity will permit; and if your dearest wish is to unplug your laptop and bury your smartphone in a deep drawer — the hedonic centres of your brain may not be lighting up at the idea that there is an unfinished communication agenda.

There is unfinished business there, of course, but mere talk has become cheap — literally; just think of Skyping people around the world, for nothing. The bottom has dropped out of the information market; there is just too darn much of it. Constant chatter about daily trivia has become exhausting. What people increasingly crave is the luxury of silence: quiet spaces in which to collect their thoughts, get in touch with their own being, figure out what it all means, and come up with something that is really worth sharing.

A few months ago US writer Pico Iyer reflected on this theme in an essay in the New York Times. He noted: the rise of “black-hole resorts” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms; writer friends who “pay good money” to buy software that disables their internet connections for up to eight hours at a time (I rely on my local telecom for that); and an Intel experiment whereby company workers were guaranteed four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning. Two of Iyer’s journalist friends “observe an ‘Internet Sabbath’ every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation.” If only…

In the quest for quiet, other ancient customs are being pressed into service. Although Eastern meditation, or awareness, techniques have been around in the West for a long time, they seem to have a new lease on life. An estimated 16 million Americans sustain a $6 billion yoga industry. And there is rising interest in “mindfulness” — basically, focusing on breathing to develop increased awareness of the present — as both a therapeutic and an educational tool. Actress Goldie Hawn, author of 10 Mindful Minutes: Giving Our Children–and Ourselves–the Social and Emotional Skills to Reduce Stress and Anxiety for Healthier, Happier Lives, is the poster girl for the movement, which is in part a response to the distractions that constantly divide our attention and make us strangers not only to ourselves but even to those we live and work with.

But there is a western tradition that we can draw on too, in order to achieve inner tranquillity and richer communication. A few years ago an art film about Carthusian monks living at the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps, and conversing with one another only once a week, was an unexpected hit in Europe and North America. Into Great Silence, all two-and-a-half hours of it, has no soundtrack other than the natural sounds of the monks at work and prayer, and of their environment.

German director Philip Groning has interpreted the appreciative response to his film as a commentary on the unhappiness that results from having to “design our own personality, design our own plan for life, achieve that plan for life, and then be happy on top of that.” He suggests that being so totally responsible for ourselves is a burden that is more than a human being can bear, but this is what happens when God is not sensed in the world. The monks, by contrast, have faith in God, “faith in the sense of trust, of completely trusting that they are like children in their mother’s arms. They feel like they are in the hands of God, and this is good.”

Perhaps it is that sense that subtly draws Pico Iyer periodically to a Benedictine monastery in the hills near Big Sur to live in the hermitage for a few days at a time. He says he doesn’t attend services when he is there and has never meditated, there or anywhere. “I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness…” He finds other people doing it too. OK, he is not looking for God, but why is the stillness around the monastery better than somewhere else — like in that quiet room with no TV at the expensive hotel up the road? Is it just the money?

In any case, silence and stillness are not enough for us. They might be for a little while, as an immediate escape from the din and demands of daily life. But they are means to an end rather than ends in themselves. In his Letter for World Communications Day Pope Benedict XVI shows how silence is meant to serve relationships — with God and others.

In silence, says Benedict, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves as well as express ourselves. But in silence we also allow the other person to speak; “space is created for mutual listening and deeper human relationships become possible.” We are not just stuck in our own words and ideas but can help “build an authentic body of shared knowledge.”

Much of our communication, the Pope continues, is driven by questions in search of answers. (The search engine has an almost godlike power to deliver the information we want.) But even amid the swirling tides of information on the internet many people find the ultimate questions of life confronting them: “Who am I? What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?” These point to the desire for truth that God has inscribed in human hearts and can, through a balance of dialogue and silent reflection, lead to him.

What happens then, one might add, is like, but even more unlike, what happens in Buddhist-style meditation or mindfulness, as a 1989 letter on the subject from the Vatican makes clear. The likeness would be in whatever serenity and therapeutic benefit is achieved. The difference lies in whom one encounters: for the Buddhist meditator, it is at best the depths of the self, which, he may believe, merges with an impersonal divine; for the one reaching out to the Christian God it is another person — divine and completely other, but the kind of personal being described by the film-maker Groning, into whose arms harried netizens can throw themselves and find not only peace but love.

Of course, the search for quiet and recollection does not necessarily take a religious turn. It can happen in a multitude of ways: a walk in the country, losing oneself in a good book or in a hobby such as wood-turning or embroidery, listening to music, or just sitting in a room by oneself. As somebody famous once said, “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.”

But to have the right effect times of quiet have to be regular, as regular as our exposure to noise and activity. As Goldie Hawn, along with most meditation gurus, says, “10 mindful minutes” a day. Where do the other contemplative activities fit in, though? Pico Iyer’s friends who observe the “Internet Sabbath” give us a clue.

Remember Sunday? The way it was before shopping and sport and catching up with household chores and blobbing out in front of TV took over? Now that’s a tradition worth reclaiming. If we could spend one day a week on the old mix of community (church), family (dinner), and individual pursuits we might begin to bridge those communication gaps that are far more threatening to our wellbeing than the digital divide.

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

In “The Bioethics Threat to Universal Human Rights” (Human Life Review, Winter/Spring 2011) Wesley Smith paints a sobering picture of where our modern world appears to be headed, as human beings increasingly are legally exploited for the “benefit” of others.¹ Unwanted infants are killed. Death is redefined so that the organs of the living can be legally removed, to be given to others. Children are conceived to be aborted, providing organs for adults in need of transplants. There is nothing fanciful about this picture, for behind each “vision” are bioethicists crafting arguments for these very practices—arguments that Smith contends will, if unchecked, undermine the basic principle of universal human rights. How we argue against them is therefore of paramount importance.

How do we argue that human beings are exceptional, and that all human life is worth protecting? For Smith, the argument is best engaged in secular terms, for two related reasons: “human exceptionalism does not require belief in a transcendent God” and to argue on religious terms “surrenders the field to human unexceptionalists.” The chief burden of Smith’s essay is that human exceptionalism not only can be, but ought to be, demonstrated from a secular perspective.

The following is a response, written principally for Christians, to Smith’s contention that effective public argument should be secular. I write as one who has a deep appreciation for Smith’s serious, persistent, and tough-minded work for many years in defense of the life of the vulnerable. But here I think he is wrong, and furthermore that his position actually works against the ends he is pursuing. In the end, a secular argument cannot do the heavy lifting that will be required to (re)establish that human beings are exceptional, that we do have inherent dignity and intrinsic worth, and that therefore human life should be honored and protected.

Human Exceptionalism, Morality, and Secular Thought

Smith’s central concern in his article is to ground human exceptionalism in secular terms. He justifies human exceptionalism chiefly in moral terms, giving examples of what makes us moral, mentioning rationality, creativity, abstract thinking, moral agency, and accountability. These characteristics, he argues, “arise from our natures and are possessed by all of us unless interfered with by immaturity, illness, or disability”² (emphasis original). He goes on to argue that “because our essential human natures do not change if we are injured or too young to fully express them, none of us should be denied equality.”

While Smith is surely right to plead for human equality, notice how he couches his argument. Having defined human exceptionalism by a list of characteristics, he then argues for human exceptionalism even when those characteristics are (for reasons of “immaturity, illness, or disability”) absent. Here Smith comes close to arguing in terms that he rightly rejects in others. Condemning “a distorted concept of personhood, in which that status is not viewed as intrinsic, but rather, must be earned by possessing minimal capacities, such as being self aware or able to value one’s own life,” Smith goes on to distinguish human beings from others based on the moral characteristics mentioned above. As Smith well knows, it is precisely when these characteristics are “interfered with by immaturity, illness, or disability” that many contemporary bioethicists deny human exceptionalism. But if Smith locates human dignity in moral capacity and character, how does he argue that humans are exceptional in the absence of those capacities that make us moral?

Smith answers this question in two ways: He asserts that our moral nature is intrinsic and also that we are members of the human moral community. Smith argues that a moral nature underlies its various expressions and sets humans apart. There is no reason to take issue in principle with either Smith’s assertion that our human nature is intrinsic or his logic that this nature remains even if some of its expressions are absent. It is difficult, however, to see why this should ultimately matter. A squirrel, a flower, and a chimpanzee all have natures that are intrinsic to them, even under circumstances that do not allow the characteristics of each to come forth fully. This raises the question of why human exceptionalism is more important than floral exceptionalism, or the exceptionalism of a squirrel, a question to which we will return later.

Smith further seeks to ground individual human exceptionalism by arguing that our moral natures are rooted in human community. Here Smith quotes philosopher Carl Cohen:

It is not individual persons who qualify (or are disqualified) from the possession of rights because of the presence or absence in them of some special capacity, thus resulting in the award of rights to some, but not to others. Rights are universally human; they arise in the human moral world, in a moral sphere. In the human world moral judgments are pervasive; it is the fact that all humans including infants and the senile are members of that moral community—not the fact that as individuals they have or do not have certain special capacities, or merits—that makes humans bearers of rights.³

Yes, but why? To be sure, I agree with Cohen’s point that we are members of a moral community, but fail to understand how it would compel a secular bioethicist who did not already agree with him. The crucial question goes unanswered: Why should specific individuals be considered members of the moral human community if they lack capacities that define that community? It is not enough simply to assert that all are part of the human community if they don’t have certain characteristics that make them human. As we will see below, history is rife with people who made the opposite argument—that some were sub-human due to a lack of certain characteristics—and who would not be convinced by a simple assertion that they are wrong.

Furthermore, why must Smith’s criteria for morality—including rationality, creativity, abstract thinking, moral agency, and accountability—be moral? What makes a creative being more important than one who is not? Is a being that thinks abstractly more valuable than a being that thinks concretely? On what grounds? Why would abstract thinking be intrinsically any more moral or important than the ability to fly? Arctic penguins go to astonishing lengths (literally) in treacherous conditions, some even giving their own lives, to ensure that their young survive—why are they not accorded moral status? Unless we can answer such questions, we are left with our own preferences. In secular discourse, the concept of morality can be no more fixed than a wax nose that can be manipulated and shaped by the one defining it. While one might not like the answer “thus saith the Lord,” it is hard to think that it is any less compelling than “because I say so.”

This raises an all-important point. How is Smith’s secular argument different from a religious argument? In the end, Smith argues that all human beings are exceptional. Why? Well, because we are. To simply say that our natures are intrinsic does not answer why we are special. To say that we are moral does not answer why we are particularly important. In the end, Smith’s argument is rooted in an a priori presupposition, indeed a metaphysical presupposition, which not all share and which cannot be proven. My point here is not that Smith is wrong, but only that he argues religiously. Metaphysics, by definition, deals with first principles, unproven presuppositions upon which an argument or a worldview is built. Logically speaking, God is a metaphysical presupposition. So is not-God. And, I would argue, so is the exceptionalism of mankind. Calling a perspective “secular” does not make it irreligious, it only alerts us that the metaphysical presupposition of the perspective excludes God.

Morality is always rooted in a vision of the greater good. If a certain act serves that greater good well, it is moral. If it does not, that act is immoral. The difficulty in our culture is that there is no consensus on what that greater good is, and therefore no consensus on the specific content and contours of morality. Whether one’s vision of that good is labeled religious or secular, in either case the true believer takes his vision of the good and seeks, to use a modern term, to impose it on others.

Evolution and Morality

This leads to a second difficulty in Smith’s line of thinking. Not only is a secular perspective as faith-based as a religious perspective, but a secular perspective cannot account for the morality that Smith argues makes human beings exceptional. For Smith, it matters not how we arrived at our moral status, only that we did arrive: “We, and only we, in the known physical universe, are hard-wired—whether through creation, intelligent design, or random evolution—to be moral beings.”

Smith gives three options that account for how we became moral beings: creation, intelligent design, or random evolution. How the moral nature of humanity derives from creation is clear—God, as a moral being, created mankind in his image. Intelligent design, as a scientific enterprise that does not claim to be able to identify the designer, nevertheless implicitly accounts for the moral nature of humanity in that man’s moral nature is part of the design, and therefore part of the designer’s purpose. Whatever differences may exist between one’s understanding of creation and intelligent design, neither has difficulty accounting for morality. How the moral nature of mankind can come from a random evolutionary process is another matter.

Scientific Difficulties of Moral Evolution

The difficulties random evolution has in accounting for morality are scientific, philosophical, and historical. To begin with, it has been notoriously difficult for evolutionary theory, as a scientific enterprise, to account for the moral character of humanity. Darwin, of course, sought to do so, citing our moral impulses as evidence of the benefit to a species of working together and looking out for one another. Yet, Darwin seems to have puzzled over how this worked, since the moral impulse to preserve the life of the weak actually worked to weaken the human race:

We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.⁴

Yet, in the very next paragraph, Darwin asserts that “if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”⁵ The conflict is apparent, for Darwin concedes that the moral impulse which allowed humanity to survive, and thereby to evolve to our present state, is the same impulse that will lead to our degeneration. The conflict inherent in accounting for morality from an evolutionary perspective is apparent.

A good example of the scientific difficulty can be seen in the work of Harvard scientist and professor Steven Pinker.⁶ In a piece explicitly addressing how natural selection can account for altruism, Pinker writes,

The body is the ultimate barrier to empathy. Your toothache simply does not hurt me the way it hurts you. But genes are not imprisoned in bodies; the same gene lives in the bodies of many family members at once. The dispersed copies of a gene call to one another by endowing bodies with emotions. Love, compassion, and empathy are invisible fibers that connect genes in different bodies. They are the closest we will ever come to feeling someone else’s toothache. When a parent wishes she could take the place of a child about to undergo surgery, it is not the species or the group or her body that wants her to have that most unselfish emotion; it is her selfish genes.⁷

Perhaps the inability to see in these words (or in his larger article) a crisp, understandable, and scientifically compelling description of moral evolution is my problem alone. Nevertheless, several questions arise. How would a particular gene “know” to safeguard the wellbeing of that same gene elsewhere? Would not a man endowed with an altruistic gene seek the welfare of all, rather than particularly those who carry that same gene? If so, how does that help the survival of that specificaltruistic gene? While it is readily granted that a particular gene is passed to others, genes areimprisoned in bodies, and can only survive if the organism itself, with its myriad of genes within and environmental challenges without, survives long enough to reproduce.⁸ That Pinker is compelled to describe the necessarily unintentional (evolutionary moral development) in language that is explicitly intentional (genes “calling” out to one another) is not only curious, but telling.⁹Furthermore, Pinker later credits evolution with the improvement of morality in our modern era. Never mind that the twentieth century was arguably the most brutal century in history, the fact that Pinker credits evolution with quite significant and noticeable improvement over a few short centuries is indeed strange to evolutionary thought, which normally insists upon millions of years for large-scale evolutionary change, not a number of generations that can be counted on two hands.

What would be scientifically compelling would be the discovery of a gene that makes us moral. Science has discovered much about genes, including genes that have very specific functions in any given organism. In fact, we know so much about genes and their specific functions that we can genetically modify plant, animal, and human genes, and reengineer them for specific, precise purposes. Despite the vast amount scientists have learned about genes, to my knowledge a gene that makes one moral, if it exists, is still unidentified. In the absence of this kind of hard, direct scientific evidence, Pinker’s defense of the evolutionary basis for morality sounds more like an article of faith than the sober assessment of evidence that demonstrates that evolution accounts for our moral nature.

Theoretical Difficulties of Moral Evolution

Another problem with asserting that our moral character can be explained in evolutionary terms is theoretical, for evolution can account for neither human exceptionalism nor morality. How can human beings be exceptional according to evolutionary theory that insists that humans are notexceptional, but rather one stage in a process that does not have us in mind? All manner of questions arise. When did humans become exceptional? At what point did the moral nature of human beings become recognizably moral? Will the beings that humans evolve into at some distant point be exceptional as well? On what basis? What if their “morality” looks different than ours? Might we deem it immoral? If the process by which morality evolved was a process that is, by definition, amoral, then why do we attach such importance to morality anyway?

The problem, however, gets worse. How does one define morality? According to the story of Darwinian evolution, the process by which we evolved was a process where the strong survive and the weaker pass away. The very process by which we came into our moral nature is a deeply immoral process, at least by many standards of morality. If we arrived at our moral nature precisely because the strong survived (again, through an undirected, unintended process which must by definition be amoral), how can “morality” be anything else than the ability and/or will to survive? Smith decries bioethicist Jacob Appel’s hope to create a market where women could be paid to conceive children who would subsequently be aborted to supply organs for transplant patients as a chilling example of where bioethics is leading us. Yet, from an evolutionary perspective, how is this immoral? Are we not who we are precisely because some have found a way to survive, even at the expense of others? Even if altruism could be established as a product of human evolution, morality moves in the realm ofought. It is one thing for evolution to describe human beings as they are, it is quite another to suggest that evolution prescribes how humans should be.

Historical Difficulties of Moral Evolution

The final problem of an evolutionary account for morality is historical.  Enough time has passed for us to be able to assess, at least in part, the impact of evolutionary thought on morality from a historical perspective. Perhaps the most notable example in recent American history is the debt that the eugenics movement owed to Darwinian thought. As John West has recently demonstrated, the eugenics movement, which led to the widespread practices of forced sterilization and abortion on demand, was largely promoted by scientists influenced by Darwinian evolution, who supported programs designed to discourage the reproduction of the unfit so that the human race would grow increasingly strong and able. West quotes Harvard biologist Edward East:

Nature eliminates the unfit and preserves the fit . . . Her fool-killing devices were highly efficient in the olden days before civilization came to thwart her. It is man, not Nature, who has caused all the trouble. He has put his whole soul to saving the unfit, and has timidly failed to do the other half of his duty by preventing them from perpetuating their traits.¹⁰

Notice how East’s line of thinking conforms to the process of natural selection. Further, and more important, notice how his understanding of natural selection informs his moral vision, as natural selection lays upon man the moral duty to prevent the unfit from having children. Traditional morality is turned upside down: A society seeking to protect the vulnerable causes trouble if it fails to carry out its corresponding duty to deprive those very people of the ability to bear children. This kind of thinking led to over 60,000 forced sterilizations in the United States in the 20th century.

Further along this road is Nazi Germany. While Smith is wise to insist elsewhere that we be careful about how we link some contemporary bioethical thought to Hitler, it is nonetheless well established that Hitler was deeply influenced by Darwinian thought. For example, consider Hitler’s words fromMein Kampf. Disparaging “the sheer craze to ‘save’ feeble and even diseased creatures at any cost,” Hitler writes that “vengeance will follow sooner or later” and the will of Nature will prevail:

A stronger race will oust that which has grown weak; for the vital urge, in its ultimate form, will burst asunder all the absurd chains of this so-called humane consideration for the individual and will replace it with the humanity of Nature, which wipes out what is weak in order to give place to the strong.¹¹

For Hitler, several factors converged: an understanding of human struggle that saw the conflict between species as conflict between races, a belief in the superiority of the so-called Aryan race and the attendant commitment to its preservation and promotion, and a thoroughgoing anti-Semitism. But notice the similarities between Hitler’s words and Darwin’s own. Describing how he believed evolutionary “gaps” widened over time, Darwin predicted that:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.¹²

For Darwin, one race exterminating another was part of the evolutionary process. The inherent racism apparent in such a position (Darwin here asserts the racial inferiority of the “negro” and the aboriginal Australian) clears the way for an evolutionary justification of the extermination of one race by another. To be clear, this does not mean that Darwinism inevitably leads to death camps, or that Darwin personally encouraged any such oppression of one race by another. Nevertheless, Darwin describes this process as inevitable, even natural. It is therefore very appropriate and historically responsible to acknowledge the influence of Darwinian ideas upon a Nazi ideology that led to the mass extermination of a people.

We can look at the historical impact of evolutionary thought from another direction. If, for the sake of argument, we dismiss any connections between eugenics, Hitler, and Darwinian social thought, we can still ask the following: Has any humanitarian movement been explicitly grounded in evolution? Here it is instructive to return to Pinker. In making his case for the evolution of human morality, Pinker lays down the following challenge:

Any understanding of human morality has to explain the moral progress that has taken place over the millennia. Customs that were common throughout history and prehistory—slavery, punishment by mutilation, execution by torture, genocide for convenience, endless blood feuds, the summary killing of strangers, rape as the spoils of war, infanticide as a form of birth control, and the legal ownership of women—have vanished from large parts of the world.¹³

There are two problems with Pinker’s assertion. First, it is far from clear that mankind has made any moral progress whatsoever. Pinker’s claimed indications of moral evolution in fact suggest that he is unaware of the devastating moral tragedy of the 20th century (which includes every crime he mentions above). In any event they do little to convince anyone with even a cursory knowledge of what is happening in the world that things are much better. Second, Pinker fails to give evidence for his assertion that evolution accounts for moral progress in specific instances. For instance, Pinker says slavery has been eradicated in large parts of the world. True enough, and we indeed should be profoundly thankful that African slavery in America no longer exists as it once did. However, I know no historian who argues that abolition is a sign of evolutionary progress. Most historians point not to natural selection, but to people like William Wilberforce, the English Member of Parliament who relentlessly fought for the abolition of the African slave trade, or Harriet Tubman, the former slave who helped hundreds of fellow American slaves to escape. Both of these, laboring at great personal cost, were explicitly and powerfully motivated by their Christian faith. In the end, Pinker’s assertion that evolution accounts for moral progress is simply that, an assertion. And his challenge of accounting for moral progress in specific instances (e.g., the African slave trade) is easily met.

Along these lines, Smith’s insistence that we must argue from a secular standpoint in matters of public policy fails to appreciate how public policy has been radically impacted by those with sturdy religious (usually Christian) commitments. Smith of course is aware of this, for he credits the beginnings of the modern bioethics movement to Christians: “The most prominent leaders of these efforts were inspirited by a robust Christian faith and a strong adherence to the sanctity/equality of human life.” This has also been true in other areas that deal with human exceptionalism. To return to slavery and its denial of human exceptionalism, the abolitionists had no difficulty whatsoever in appealing to God as the creator of all men, who were made in his image. The civil rights movement was likewise largely animated by Christian thought.

Arguing for Human Dignity in Public Discourse

It is certainly true that American society does not have the same generally uniform Christian worldview that it did 150 years ago, or even 50 years ago. We are indeed far more secular as a country than we were during the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement. As Smith suggests, to fail to recognize this shift in public thinking would be foolish. It does not follow, however, that recognizing the secularization of thought means that one must argue on secular ground to be most effective in public discourse. How then can Christians defend human dignity in the public arena without tying one hand behind their back? What might public argument look like in an increasingly secular culture? I want to make two suggestions.

First, we can ask questions. We might begin by asking questions of ourselves. For too many of us, our cultural instincts suggest that we must defend our Christian position (hence the popular term “defend the faith”). The underlying idea, real if often unarticulated, is that we live in a world of reasonable secular discourse, and therefore we hope that Christian thought can be viewed as reasonable as well. Yet on what grounds do we assume that secular reasoning is any more reasonable than Christian thought? Is an understanding of the world based on God less reasonable than an understanding of the world based upon not-God, or atheism? The assumption that Christian presuppositions must be defended has the unfortunate effect of placing the burden of proof on the Christian, a burden that Christians often too readily accept. And, as we all know, it is difficult to fight from one’s heels. Instead of acquiescing to the implicitly held notion that Christian ideas are based on faith, while secular ideas are based on rationality, we should make it clear that everyone reasons from faith, from presuppositions which cannot be proven but are held nonetheless. Such questions counter the defensive posture that many Christians reflexively take when confronted by rules of secular argument, and free us to think more clearly, creatively, and boldly.

We might also ask questions of those who deny human dignity, questions that we likewise should be prepared to answer ourselves: “What is your view of the good to which we should direct ourselves? From where do you get this vision of the good? Should public policy seek to realize this vision? In so arguing, aren’t you seeking to impose your system of beliefs upon others? On what grounds?” Such questions can push a secularist to acknowledge and articulate the presuppositions that inform his vision of the good, moving the argument into a realm where ideas can be exchanged and debated and fought for without being pigeonholed and then dismissed as “religious.” After all, we should not privilege an idea because it is secular, but rather because it is compelling.

For instance, we might ask Peter Singer, who has advocated for infanticide in certain circumstances because infants lack certain capacities, these questions: “If we allow a mother to kill her child at 3 months, can we kill him at 3 years? How about at 13 years? What problems will be solved and what positive good will be promoted if we embrace such killing?” We might ask Jacob Appel, whose vision of the future includes exploiting the organs of the vulnerable for the sake of the healthy, “What is your vision of a just society? Can this vision be realized in a world where some human beings are used for the benefit of others? In the end, how will it be decided who is used, and who benefits? The desires of the powerful? Majority vote? Those who can afford it?” Bioethicists should have answers to these questions, and the answers will be telling. And even if answers are not forthcoming, well-placed questions go a long way toward exposing such positions for what they really are. When we don’t ask pointed and specific questions, proposals like Appel’s can actually be spun to sound generous. After all, how can any caring person object to doing whatever we can to save sick people in need of liver transplants?

Second, and most important, we speak truth. I realize that such a statement violates both the canon of post-modern thought that sees truth claims as a power grab and the secular mindset that acknowledges truth only in the material. And of course not everyone will accept the truth. Truth is polarizing. People fall to one side or the other. But that may not be a bad thing. One of the problems with the pro-life movement today is that too many of us are caught in the middle. How else can we explain that roughly 50 percent of Americans in recent polls declare themselves to be pro-life, and yet we don’t see 50 percent of our country in a principled and intentional effort to ensure that life is legally protected? Could it be because Christians have not been sufficiently clear that mankind is made in the image of God, that loving God means loving His image (our neighbor—particularly the vulnerable). Would some of these be moved by the reflection that God will not forever tolerate the shedding of innocent blood, or the Christian community’s silence/lukewarm disapproval that is complicit in such bloodshed?

St. Paul provides a good example of presenting truth while engaging a non-Christian culture in Acts 17:15-34. Finding himself in Athens, a city full of philosophers and ideas, Paul went to both the synagogue and the marketplace to reason with the Athenian people—both Jewish and non-Jewish. The manner in which Paul argued is instructive, particularly as he engaged the Athenian philosophers. He referred to their own cultural and religious forms, citing their altar to an unknown god, and quoting their own poetry to make his case that God desires them to know Him. Paul did not reject everything in the thought of the Athenian philosophers. Actually, he showed a great deal of respect as he engaged their philosophy. But he engaged it critically, proclaiming what they did not know—that God created the heavens and the earth, and was calling for repentance; that God had appointed a man who will judge the world, a man whom God raised from the dead. As we might expect, Paul was mocked by some when he proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection. But look at the wider response: Although some mocked him, some wanted to hear more, and some believed (17:32-34). Paul accomplished this by perceptively engaging the culture to which he spoke, while not surrendering to their way of thinking. He offered something better.

A final argument: If Christians argue in a manner that suggests that God is irrelevant or optional, we tacitly participate in and contribute to the very atmosphere that has led to the increasing denial of human exceptionalism in our world. Coming from the Soviet Union’s massive denial of human exceptionalism, Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned that the denial of God and the attendant rise of materialism would lead to the destruction of freedom in the West.¹⁴ Solzhenitsyn had experienced firsthand the fulfillment of Dostoevsky’s prophetic warning that, in the absence of God and any future life, “nothing would be immoral any longer, everything would be permitted.” This is exactly where we are now. And we will not reverse the drift of our culture by continuing to travel the road that has led us here.

Thankfully, truth has a rich history of overcoming. But the truth that overcomes is not simply presented in argument. It is spoken in grace, and embodied in love. In the end, if we love God, we will love His image, and that includes our neighbor, even the neighbor who denies human dignity. This is what made the public argument of Martin Luther King so powerful. Insisting that the civil rights movement not return like for like, but that the oppressed love their oppressors, King explicitly sought to ground the movement in the vision of the Bible. Echoing John the Baptist, King called America to a vision of the greater good, a greater hope:

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope.

Much of what Smith writes is right, and we do well to heed his warning. Bioethics is not a hermetically sealed discipline. Universal human rights really are at stake. Knowing that ideas have consequences, Smith rightly calls for believers in human exceptionalism to argue as effectively as possible. But we cannot be effective by sidelining truth. God need not always be on our lips. The church argues well when she proclaims that man is exceptional because we are made in the image of God, and therefore to be protected. She also argues well when she proclaims that in Christ Jesus there is forgiveness for the sinner, for there are many who deny human exceptionalism, not because they have a well thought-out worldview, but because they feel guilty about their involvement in taking the life of another, and seek to conceal from themselves the seriousness of what they’ve done. The word of grace that the secular world can never speak may well open minds that would otherwise remain closed. The church’s effectiveness—her power—lies in her faithfulness to the truth. And this battle needs power. Is it an overstatement to believe, with Solzhenitsyn, that “one word of truth shall outweigh the whole world”? The impulse to argue in a secular fashion is understandable. Effectiveness is important. But for Christians to argue on secular terms as if God is irrelevant drains the church of her authority, and will ultimately render her ineffective. In the end, universal human rights proceed from God, and therefore are God’s concern. Protecting the vulnerable cannot be done effectively without reference to Him.

NOTES 

1.  Wesley J. Smith, “The Bioethics Threat to Universal Human Rights,” The Human Life Review37:1, 2 (Winter/Spring 2011): 63-72.
2.  Ibid., 68, emphasis original.
3.  Ibid.
4.  Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London: J. Murray, 1871), 168.
5.  Ibid.
6.  Thanks to Justin Arnold, friend and graduate student in Biology at Appalachian State University, for his insightful comments concerning Pinker’s thought.
7.  Steven Pinker, “Evolution and Ethics” in Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement, ed. John Brockman (New York: Vintage Books, 2006): 146.
8.  The priority of the gene in natural selection is challenged among evolutionary biologists. See, e.g., Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 89-92, where Gould critiques Richard Dawkins’ contention (to which Pinker is indebted) that the unit for selection is not the individual, but the gene.
9.  Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, 90, defends the language of intent as metaphorical shorthand.
10. Edward M. East, Heredity and Human Affairs (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), 311, quoted in John West, Darwin Day in America (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2007), 129.
11. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter IV (Gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt).
12. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871 edition, J. Murray, London), Part I, Chapter VI, p. 201. Schaaffhausen citation omitted.
13. Pinker, “Evolution and Ethics,” 148.
14. See Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address.

W. Ross Blackburn serves as the pastor of High Country Anglican Fellowship in Boone, North Carolina, and teaches Old and New Testament at Appalachian State University. He recently earned a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He and his wife have three children.

The conservative Buchanan cited Suicide of a Superpower as the occasion for his heave-ho by MSNBC. If this book actually did do him in, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised. It’s hard to imagine anybody agreeing with everything it says, and many will come away from it hopping mad. But matter for firing? Only in a setting where thinking unpopular thoughts is not allowed.

Buchanan is blunt on topics where others tread lightly or not at all. But bluntness is the only honest approach to his central theme: America’s ideologically-driven craze for diversity has gotten out of hand and is well on its way to doing us in. (In a book I haven’t read, Coming Apart, Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute makes a similar argument but, unlike Buchanan, deliberately omits race and immigration from his analysis.)

“Racially, culturally, ethnically, politically,Americais disintegrating,” Buchanan writes. Ever since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, Americans have been losing their shared sense of identity as a nation. “Out of one we have become many,” he says.

In tackling tough issues like race, immigration, and the wisdom of continuing international commitments left over from cold war days, Suicide of a Superpower says plenty to raise hackles. Even more annoying, the author bolsters what he says with facts and coherent arguments. That includes making the case that unchecked immigration presents a grave national problem whose ducking by Congress and the White House reflects the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of political Washington.

But has he got the story straight about Hispanics? Recently-arrived Latinos may be at the same early stage of assimilation that groups like the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians occupied a long time ago. Entry into an alien culture is bound to be a bumpy road—for the Spanish-speakers as it was for them. Give the Latinos time. The results could turn out more happily than Buchanan imagines.

The author, a Catholic, devotes a chapter to the Church, saying no institution in America has been more “ravaged” than it by cultural changes of the last half-century. Now, he says, Catholicism in the United States must “necessarily [be] an adversary culture” in order to survive. The assimilation of American Catholics has already gone disastrously far. Much farther, and American Catholicism will be finished as a viable cultural force.

That, however, underlines another problem—in the real world and also in this book.

Buchanan seeks a solution to disruptive diversity in the seamless assimilation of diverse groups into a unitary American culture. In other words: bring back the melting pot. Yet, as he’s well aware, American secular culture in its contemporary manifestation is far from being the basically healthy thing that it was back in melting pot days. On the contrary,  it’s degraded and destructive, as a few hours spent watching television or reading The New York Times should persuade any sensible person.

What to do? Diversity or assimilation? Or some yet-to-be discovered third way that combines elements of counter-culturalism and new evangelization? That’s worth another book. Maybe, without MSNBC on his hands, Buchanan will have time to write it.

The end of World War I brought with it the end of the Ottoman Empire and the contraction of Turkish sovereignty to Asia Minor and a strip of land on the European side of the Bosporus. That contraction relieved Turkey of the overextended position it had tried to maintain as an empire stretching from the Arabian Peninsula to the Balkans. In a practical sense, defeat solved the problem of Turkey’s strategic interests having come to outstrip its power. After World War I, Turkey realigned its interests to its power. Though the country was much smaller, it was also much less vulnerable than the Ottoman Empire had been.

The Russia Problem

At the same time, a single thread connected both periods: the fear of Russia. For its part, Russia suffered from a major strategic vulnerability. Each of its ports — St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, Murmansk and Odessa — was accessible only through straits controlled by potentially hostile powers. The British blocked the various Danish straits, the Japanese blocked access to Vladivostok and the Turks blocked access to the Mediterranean. Russian national policy had an ongoing focus of gaining control of the Bosporus both to prevent a blockade and to project power into the Mediterranean.

Therefore, the Russians had a particular interest in reshaping Turkish sovereignty. In World War I, the Ottomans aligned with the Germans, who were fighting the Russians. In the inter-war and World War II periods, when the Soviets were weak or distracted, Turkey remained neutral until February 1945, when it declared war on the Axis. After the war, when the Soviets were powerful and attempted covert operations to subvert both Turkey and Greece, the Turks became closely allied with the United States and joined NATO (despite their distance from the North Atlantic).

From 1945 until 1991 Turkey was locked into a relationship with the United States. The United States was pursuing a strategy of containing the Soviet Union on a line running from Norway to Pakistan. Turkey was a key element because of its control of the Bosporus, but also because a pro-Soviet Turkey would open the door to direct Soviet pressure on Iran, Iraq and Syria. A Soviet-allied or Soviet-influenced Turkey would have broken the center of the American containment system, changing the balance of power. Along with Germany, Turkey was the pivot point of U.S. and NATO strategy.

From a Turkish point of view, there was no other option. The Soviets had emerged from World War II in an extremely powerful position. Western Europe was a shambles, China had become communist and the surplus military capability of the Soviets, in spite of the massive damage they had endured in the war, outstripped the ability of nations on their periphery — including Turkey — to resist. Given the importance of the Bosporus and Asia Minor to the Soviets, Turkey was of fundamental interest. Unable to deal with the Soviets alone, Turkey thus moved into an extremely tight, mutually beneficial relationship with the United States.

During the Cold War, Turkey was a strategic imperative of the United States. It faced the Soviets to the north and two Soviet clients, Syria and Iraq, to the south. Israel drew Syria away from Turkey. But this strategic logic dissolved in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union. By then, the union had fragmented. Russian power withdrew from the southern Caucasus and Balkans and uprisings in the northern Caucasus tied the Russian military down. Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan gained independence. Ukraine also became independent, making the status of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea unclear. For the first time since the early years of the Soviet Union, Turkey was freed from its fear of Russia. The defining element of Turkish foreign policy was gone, and with it, Turkish dependence on the United States.

The Post-Soviet Shift

It took a while for the Turks and Americans to recognize the shift. Strategic relationships tend to stay in place, as much from inertia as intention, after the strategic environment that formed them disappears; it often takes a new strategic reality to disturb them. Thus, Turkey’s relationship with the United States remained intact for a time. Its ongoing attempts to enter the European Union continued. Its relationship with Israel remained intact even after the American rationale for sponsoring Turkish-Israeli strategic ties had diminished.

It is much easier to forge a strategic policy in the face of a clear threat than in the face of an undefined set of opportunities. For Turkey, opportunities were becoming increasingly prevalent, but defining how to take advantage of them posed a challenge. For Turkey, the key breakpoint with the past was 2003 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. From Turkey’s point of view, the invasion was unnecessary, threatened to empower Iran, and posed domestic political challenges. For the first time since World War II, the Turks not only refused to participate in an American initiative, they also prevented the Americans from using Turkish territory to launch the invasion.

Turkey had encountered a situation where its relationship with the United States proved more dangerous than the threat an alliance with the United States was meant to stave off. And this proved the turning point in post-Soviet Turkish foreign policy. Once Turkey decided not to collaborate with the United States — its core principle for decades — its foreign policy could never be the same. Defying the United States did not cause the sky to fall. In fact, as the war in Iraq proceeded, the Turks could view themselves as wiser than the Americans on this subject and the Americans had difficulty arguing back.

That left the Turks free to consider other relationships. One obvious option was joining with Europe, the leading powers of which also opposed the American invasion. That commonality, however, did not suffice to win Turkey EU membership. A host of reasons, from fear of massive Turkish immigration to Greek hostility, blocked Turkey’s membership bid. Membership in the European Union was not seen in terms of foreign policy alone; rather, for secularists it symbolized the idea of Turkey as a European country committed to European values. But the decision on membership was not Turkey’s to make. Ultimately, the European decision to essentially block Turkey’s membership left Turkey with a more dynamic economy than most of Europe and without liability for Greece’s debt.

The failure to integrate with Europe and the transformation of ties with the United States from an indispensible relationship to a negotiable (albeit desirable) one finally forced Turkey to create a post-Cold War strategy. That strategy grew out of three facts. First, Turkey faced no immediate existential threat, and even secondary threats were manageable. Second, Turkey was developing rapidly economically and had the most powerful military in its region. And third, Turkey was surrounded by increasingly unstable and dangerous neighbors. Iraq and Syria were both unstable. Iran was increasingly assertive, and a war between Iran and Israel and/or the United States remained a possibility. The Caucasus region was quiet, but the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and ongoing tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia were still significant factors. The Balkans had quieted down after the Kosovo war, but the region remained underdeveloped and potentially unstable. In the past year, North Africa became unstable, Russia became more assertive and the United States began appearing more distant and unpredictable.

Three processes define Turkey’s strategy. The first is its rise in relative power. In a region of destabilizing powers, Turkey’s relative strength is increasing, which provides Ankara with new options. The second is the possible dangers posed to Turkish interests by the destabilization, which draws Turkey outward, as Ankara seeks ways to manage the instability. The third is the reality that the United States is in the process of redefining its role in the region following the Iraq War and no longer is a stable, predictable force.

The Transitional Stage

Turkey is emerging as a great power. It has not yet become one for a host of reasons, including limited institutions for managing regional affairs, a political base that is not yet prepared to view Turkey as a major power or support regional interventions, and a region that is not yet prepared to view Turkey as a beneficial, stabilizing force. Many steps are required for any power to emerge as a dominant regional force. Turkey is only beginning to take those steps.

At present, Turkish strategy is in a transitional stage. It is no longer locked into its Cold War posture as simply part of an alliance system, nor has it built the foundation of a mature regional policy. It cannot control the region and it cannot simply ignore what is happening. The Syrian case is instructive. Syria is Turkey’s neighbor, and instability in Syria can affect Turkey. There is no international coalition prepared to take steps to stabilize Syria. Therefore Ankara has taken a stance in which it refrains from overt action, but keeps its options open should matters become intolerable to Turkey.

When we consider the Turkish periphery as a whole, we see this transitional foreign policy at work, whether in Iraq or in the Caucasus. With Iran, it avoids simply being part of the American coalition while refusing simply to champion the Iranian position. Turkey has not created a regional balance of power, as a mature regional power would. Rather, it has created a Turkish balance of power in the sense that Turkish power is balanced between subordination to the United States and autonomous assertiveness. This period of balancing for an emerging power is predictable; the United States went through a similar phase between 1900 and World War I.

Turkey obviously has two main domestic issues to address as it moves forward. We say “as it moves forward” because no nation ever solves all of its domestic problems before it assumes a greater international role. One is the ongoing tension between the secular and religious elements in its society. This is both a domestic tension and an occasional foreign policy issue, particularly in the context of radical Islamists, where every sign of Islamic religiosity can alarm non-Islamic powers and change their behavior toward Turkey. The other is the Kurdish problem in Turkey, as manifested by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group.

The first problem is endemic in most societies these days; it defines American politics as well. It is something nations live with. The PKK problem, however, is unique. The Kurdish issue intersects with regional issues. For example, the question of Iraq’s future involves the extent of autonomy enjoyed by Iraq’s Kurdish region, which could have an effect on Turkish Kurds. But the major problem for Turkey is that so long as the Kurdish issue persists, foreign powers opposed to Turkey’s rise will see the Kurds as a Turkish weakness and could see covert interventions into the Kurdish regions as an opportunity to undermine Turkish power.

Turkey is already wary of Syrian and Iranian efforts to constrain Turkey through Kurdish militancy. The more powerful Turkey gets, the more uncomfortable at least some in the region will become, and this actually increases Turkey’s vulnerability to outside intervention. Therefore Turkey must address the Kurdish issue, since regional unrest and separatism fueled by outside enemies could undermine Turkey’s power and reverse its current trend toward becoming a great power.

There is a paradox, which is that the more powerful a nation becomes, the more vulnerable it might be. The United States was undoubtedly safer between the Civil War and its intervention in World War I than any time since. So, too, Turkey was likely safer between 1991 and today than it will be when it becomes a great power. At the same time, it is unsafe to be simply a junior ally to a global power given to taking risks with other countries.

The idea of safety among nations in the long run is illusory. It doesn’t last. Turkey’s current strategy is to make it last as long as possible. This means allowing events around it to take their course on the reasonable assumption that at present, the outcome of these events doesn’t threaten Turkey as much as Turkish intervention would. But as we have said, this is a transitional policy. The instability to its south, the rise of an Iranian sphere of influence, a deepening of Russian influence in the Caucasus and the likelihood that at some point the United States might change its Middle East policy again and try to draw Turkey into its coalition — all of these argue against the transitional becoming permanent.

Turkey is interesting precisely because it is a place to study the transition of a minor country into a great power. Great powers are less interesting because their behavior is generally predictable. But managing a transition to power is enormously more difficult than exercising power. Transitional power is keeping your balance when the world around you is in chaos, and the ground beneath you keeps slipping away.

The stresses this places on a society and a government are enormous. It brings out every weakness and tests every strength. And for Turkey, it will be a while before the transition will lead to a stable platform of power.

A few weeks ago, in a remarkably unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the attempt of the present Administration in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran  Church and School v. EEOC to restrict religious freedom by interfering with the hiring of ministerial personnel. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Administration’s argument that the First Amendment does not guarantee the right of religious organization to choose its leaders, was an “extreme” infringement of the free exercise clause.

Undeterred, and menacingly on the cusp of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Department of Health and Human Services has issued an “interim final rule” which requires all private health plans, including those of  Catholic hospitals and schools, to include coverage of prescription contraceptives, female sterilization procedures, and abortion counseling.

For a while, various Catholic leaders had hoped that they might reach an understanding with the Administration, and some even felt more at peace with the president’s assurances. But “peace for our time” only lasts until Poland is invaded. Cardinal Mahony, whom no one would fault for intransigence, now says, “I cannot imagine a more direct and frontal attack on the freedom of conscience than this ruling today. This decision must be fought against with all the energies the Catholic Community can muster.” Cardinal-elect Dolan  said, “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences.”

When a writer for The National Catholic Reporter supports the Catholic Churchagainst the Obama administration,  one wonders if it might be the effect of solar radiation, but it has happened now.  And The Washington Post joined the ranks with an editorial saying that “requiring a religiously affiliated employer to spend its own money in a way that violates its religious principles does not make an adequate accommodation for those deeply held views.”  We have already seen the removal of hospitals from their Catholic associations.  The bishops seem united against government policy in their defense of principles as never before.  In St. Petersburg, Bishop Robert Lynch, not a man of conservative temperature,  speculated about the possibility of “civil disobedience” and Father John Jenkins of Notre Dame University, who gave an honorary degree to President Obama, has suddenly been awakened to the consequences of naiveté: as William McGurn pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, penalties mandated by the government’s Health and Human Services for non-compliance,  would cost Note Dame $10 million annually.

It would never had occurred to Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina to honor Mr. Obama, and a suit which it has filed in the District Court in Washington,D.C. over compulsory coverage of prescription contraceptives, could well be invoked to block the Health and Human Service’s aggression.  Its president, William Thierfelder, has made clear that he would sooner close the college than submit to a violation of the First Amendment.  Of course,  a question for the bishops as they take their place on solid rock, is how will they deal canonically with Catholic public officials who cooperate with evil, which is something worse than twisting the U.S. Constitution.  Vice President Biden said once with his customarily infelicitous use of English that he would “shove my rosary beads” down the throat of anyone who suggested that the Obama administration was hostile to the Church.  Mrs. Pelosi more recently complained that the Catholic bishops have “this conscience thing,” and the secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, boasts of her Catholicity while threatening the Church with civil penalties.

At the time of the last presidential election, some may have thought that I overstated things in finding parallels with the dystopian world described in Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World in 1907,  in which Julian Felsenburgh makes eugenics “a sacred duty.”  Felsenburgh was a previously unknown man from the American Midwest who suddenly appears with enormous financial backing to promote a One World government, something like the European Union metastasized.  In spite of no record of any sort of accomplishment, he cuts a swath through the populations of nations with a cold condescension, reading carefully crafted speeches that cause people to sob and faint.  He promotes himself as an arbiter of cultures, with himself as a universal president.  He proposes pacifism, pantheism and the eradication of poverty by distribution of wealth.  His chief obstacle is Christianity.  He employs the useful idiocy of treasonable clerics: those utopian idealists who had grown impatient with the religion they were ordained to serve.

Since our Lord did not humiliate the frightened apostles by saying “I told you so”when he rose from the dead, I shall not say “I told you so” to any who, just three years ago,  underestimated the plottings of social engineers whose audacity is only an audacity of hopelessness.  But in 1992, long before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger cited The Lord of the World in a lecture at the Catholic University of Milan, and invoked Felsenburgh, as an apocalyptic prototype who should be a warning against the consequences of materialistic humanism. He said of Felsenburgh: “The anti-Christ is represented as the great carrier of peace in a similar new world order.” He told you so.

So did another giant  of intellectual history,  the Blessed John Henry Newman. In Discussions and  Arguments on Various Subjects, Newman cited the prediction of an eighteenth-century Anglican bishop and scientist, Samuel Horsley of St. Asaph:

The Church of God on earth will be greatly reduced, as we may well imagine, in its apparent numbers, in the times of Antichrist, by the open desertion of the powers of the world. This desertion will begin in a professed indifference to any particular form of Christianity, under the pretense  of universal toleration; which toleration will proceed from no true spirit of charity and forbearance, but from a design to undermine Christianity, by multiplying and encouraging sectaries… For governments will pretend an indifference to all, and will give a protection in preference to none.

There’s some helpful thinking on this subject in a new book by an archbishop that I want to recommend. But before getting to that, let me do a little scene-setting.

Much of the debate about social issues, moral truth, and the like has focused so far in this election year on Rick Santorum and his run for the Republican presidential nomination. Think what you will about Santorum’s candidacy, he stirred up a hornets’ nest. A typical reaction from the secular left comes from a Washington Post columnist named Lisa Miller, who, in a state of extreme exasperation, delivered this wisdom:

“ ‘You can’t go home again,’ Thomas Wolfe said. Modernity is here, with all its progress and imperfections, and no matter how hard they pray, Santorum and his flock will never be able to turn back time.”

Leaving aside the appositeness of using the title of a novel published 72 years ago to argue that there’s no looking back, Ms. Miller has a point. It’s the point typically made by liberal pundits who wish to tell us their particular take on modernity is the only correct one—and if you don’t like it, lump it.

But there’s a different way of thinking. Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, gave it an ironic twist when he said, “Truth is like a threshing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of the way.” Note that bothersome word: truth.

The quote is the lead-in to A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America, a new e-book by Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia. (Published by Image Books, it’s available from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.) This is a feisty manifesto by an admired leader of the Church.

One of its surprises is the recovery of largely forgotten essay by Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., “The Construction of a Christian Culture,” based on lectures delivered in 1940. Father Murray is usually recalled as a kind of precursor of progressive Catholicism for his advocacy of religious liberty against Church conservatives. Here, though, he’s saying something very different: “American culture…is actually the quintessence of all that is decadent in the culture of the Western Christian world.”

“It’s most striking characteristic,” he writes, “is its profound materialism….It has gained a continent and lost its own soul.”

And this, Archbishop Chaput pointedly remarks, is the “American mainstream” of which all too many American Catholics have rushed to become part in the decades since John Courtney Murray wrote.

During this time, the dominant American culture has turned from secular to secularist, while efficiently secularizing its adherents, Catholics included. “Instead of Catholics converting the culture,” the archbishop laments, “the culture too often bleached out the apostolic zeal in Catholics while leaving the brand label intact.” Here’s the triumph of Ms. Miller’s “modernity …with all its progress and imperfections” that writers like her tell us to accept, no questions allowed.

Archbishop Chaput doesn’t buy it. And if American Catholics do buy it, he warns—as very many have—then Catholicism is finished as a significant cultural factor in the debate on moral values and much else.

Catholics have important choices to make about the future of the Church. A Heart on Fire can help us make them.

The basic issue in FCC v. Fox Television Stations and FCC v. ABC is the authority of the Federal Communications Commission to bar obscenity and nudity from broadcast television and to fine broadcasters who violate the ban. In a decision back in 1978, the Supreme Court upheld the FCC. Now the networks want to change that, and they have the support of decisions from the U.S. 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.

Note that what’s in question here is broadcast TV—the stuff you get without paying extra. Cable TV and the Internet aren’t involved. Those are places where anything goes, and no one proposes to do anything about that. To be sure, someone looking at broadcast television these days might reasonably ask whether FCC regulation made any significant difference there either, but the networks are paying lawyers good money anyway to argue regulation is an offense against the First and Fifth Amendments.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the two cases in early January. Its decision is expected soon.

Now, what about Cardinal Newman? In his famous 1875 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, perhaps the finest exposition of the Catholic view of conscience ever written, Newman contrasted authentic conscience (“the voice of God”) with a “counterfeit” version prevailing in his day. This he summed up as follows:

“When men advocate the rights of conscience, they in no sense mean the rights of the creator nor the duty to him, in thought and deed, of the creature; but the right of thinking, speaking, writing, and acting according to their judgment or their humor, without any thought of God at all….

“They do not even pretend to go by any moral rule, but they demand what they think is an Englishman’s prerogative: for each to be his own master in all things and to profess what he pleases, asking no one’s leave and accounting priest or preacher, speaker or writer unutterably impertinent who dares say a word against his going to perdition…in his own way.”

Substitute “American” for “Englishman” and you have a good account of the principle of radical libertarianism underlying virtually any attempt, however modest, to regulate virtually any form of expression in the United States today. The result, naturally, is the ongoing pollution of our shared social environment in its aesthetic, psychological, and moral dimensions—at enormous cost to us all.

The conventional libertarian argument in favor of absolutizing the right of expression is that, apart from a few isolated exceptions, nobody gets hurt by letting people express themselves. But that is simply untrue. “Men are qualified for civil liberty,” Edmund Burke pointed out, “in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites.” Libertarianism is the ideology of unchained appetite, and as such it erodes the foundation that underlies liberty’s responsible use.

Obviously the regulation of expression is something that must be done with extreme care to protect the very real claims of free expression. In other words, it’s a balancing act, in which society is always at risk of tipping too far in one direction or the other, toward libertarianism or repression as the case may be. I wish the Supreme Court well in its latest wrestling with this challenge. John Henry Newman would understand.      

The first disappointment is that Clark skips over the first thousand years of the Cvilisation he is celebrating by choosing to begin in the so-called Dark Ages. There is no mention of Homer and his timeless and peerless epics; no mention of Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripedes; no mention of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. For that matter, though perhaps less surprisingly, there’s no mention of the wisdom enshrined in the Old Testament. Like Greece, Rome is barely mentioned. The impression is that Clark has plucked his starting point from thin air, in which it floats without foundations. These great civilisations are parenthetical afterthoughts; they are the footnotes to Clark’s civilisation and not its foundations. Like Homer, Virgil is overlooked, as are Boethius and Augustine. Clark is not consoled by philosophy; he is confused by it. His discussion of Aquinas is so brief and vacuous that one would think that scholasticism had played no role in shaping civilisation. There is no discussion of the Church Fathers, rendering Clark’s civilisation fatherless, a bastard child of subjective aesthetics.

The series begins bizarrely on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, signifying that civilisation had all but been wiped out by the barbarians and that only a handful of Irish monks were keeping the flames of faith and civilisation alive. One would think that the Benedictines never existed, or that there was no pope in Rome. One would think that England had not been baptized in the late sixth century by the great St. Austin of Canterbury, who had been sent by the pope, St. Gregory the Great, or that the great English saint, St. Boniface, had not sallied forth to convert the Germans a century or so later.

Clark is in his element when waxing eloquently on art or architecture but seems to flail around like a man out of his depth when discussing music or literature. His treatment of Dante, for instance, is banal. He states that Dante’s use of the imagery of light is the aspect of his work which “we” like best, speaking on “our” behalf. “Speak for yourself!”, I snorted upon hearing this judgment of Dante on my behalf. The problem is that Clark’s woeful ignorance of Thomistic theology and philosophy makes Dante inaccessible to him. The problem is compounded because such ignorance is as applicable to mediaeval and early-Renaissance art as it is to mediaeval and Renaissance literature. Such art speaks to us through the power of theological symbolism. If we don’t know the theology, we will not see the symbolism. We will not understand the painting.

Clark’s ignorance of the unity of faith and reason inherent in the philosophy and theology of Christendom leaves him speechless, literally, when discussing the great Shakespeare. He simply selects three speeches from the Bard’s works (from Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth), suggesting that Shakespeare’s philosophy can be gleaned from the speeches themselves, the last of which is Macbeth’s famous assertion that “life … is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” . Clark concludes that Shakespeare was the first great writer for whom religion was unimportant, implying that Macbeth’s words represent the Bard’s own nihilism. Why, one wonders, should the words of a mad and desperate mass murderer, moments before he receives his just deserts, be a representation of the weltanschauung of the playwright?

The truth is that Clark is a decidedly modern man who sees history and civilisation through the superciliously defective lens of post-“enlightened”, i.e. disenchanted, culture. Although not quite Eliot’s “hollow man” or Waugh’s “Hooper”, his vision is sullied by the sundering of reason from faith and feeling. For all his love of the Renaissance, he is a child of the enlightenment and is the slave of that particularly pernicious zeitgeist.

Perhaps I’m being a little harsh on a man who at least loved the beauty of western civilization, even if he did not understand the goodness and truth that gave the beauty its form. It is significant, perhaps, that Clark was received into the Catholic Church on his death bed, fourteen years after his seminal television series was first broadcast. It is also difficult to dislike a man who fearlessly attacked Marxism, postmodernism and their “hippy” children in the late sixties, when these destructive and deconstructive forces were at their most powerful and pervasive. His comments on the subject of 1960s radical University students, in the penultimate episode of Civilisation, are priceless: “I can see them [the students] still through the University of the Sorbonne, impatient to change the world, vivid in hope, although what precisely they hope for, or believe in, I don’t know.” There is, however, a grim irony in the very criticism that he levels against his postmodern enemies. Clark is himself “vivid in hope, although what precisely he hopes for, or believes in, we don’t know”.

This essay was also published in the St. Austin Review  www.staustinreview.com

Joseph Pearce is writer in residence and associate professor of literature at Ave Maria University in Florida and co-editor of the Saint Austin Review (www.staustinreview.com). His biography of Roy Campbell, Unafraid of Virginia Woolf, is published by ISI Books. He is also the author of many books on Christian literary figures including Shakespeare, Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Oscar Wilde and Solzhenitsyn.

For weeks now I have been getting alerts from the Times on the subject of birth control. Over 40 of them have dropped into my box since December (thanks for that, NYT), the majority of them reporting or commenting on the now infamous White House decree that all insurance plans must fully cover birth control (including abortifacients) regardless of conscientious objection on the part of certain employers — chiefly, Catholic-affiliated hospitals, schools and other institutions.

Birth control, you must know, is one of the Gray Lady’s sacred cows – perhaps the most revered of them all. It is allowed to wander at will through the establishment, attended by acolytes from Planned Parenthood and the Guttmacher Institute, rudely bumping into such moderate columnists as David Brooks and Ross Douthat on its way to the friendly offices of Nicholas Kristoff, Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd and a seeming host of others. Ms Dowd, by the way, is one of those writers highly prized by the Times – a dissident (or is it ex-?) Catholic.

Which brings me to the proximate cause of this article: the full-page advertisement run by the Times in its March 9 issue (front section, page 10) and headed, “It’s Time To Consider Quitting the Catholic Church”. The ad, placed by a group called Freedom From Religion Foundation, takes the form of an open letter “to liberal and nominal Catholics” setting out reasons why they should exit the church “en Mass” (ha ha) for the sake of women’s reproductive freedom. It is decorated with a cartoon showing a big-mouthed bishop, a pill and a brassed-off woman.

The message is that those Catholics who don’t agree with their church about birth control (and, gosh, Guttmacher reckons that’s 98 per cent of the women) gay rights (including marriage), and embryonic stem-cell research — are propping up a benighted, ruthless, dishonest, anti-democratic institution when they should be fighting against it — by, for example, joining FFRF. “You are better than your church, so why stay?”

The text of the ad is a more succinct, and slightly more cautious, version of the original on the FFRF website, no doubt the result of judicious editing by the Times. The headline advises Catholics to “consider quitting” where the original just tells them to quit. A tasteless reference to a Catholic doctrine is omitted, and Thomas Paine is quoted in support of shucking off the church instead of Bertrand Russell (who probably means nothing to most Americans, even to Times readers) although the latter is quoted indirectly on the necessity of freeing oneself “from ideas uttered long ago by ignorant men, from blind obedience to an illusory religious authority”. A Times trademark appears in the addition of “overpopulation” to the miseries the church wants to inflict on the world.

What remains, however, is quite intemperate enough. It presses all the buttons of popular prejudice with references to “the Dark Ages”, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and — the Times’ own favourite issue — the sex abuse scandal, “involving preying priests, church complicity, collusion and coverup going all the way to the top”. The paper has never given up its goal of pinning responsibility on the Pope.

So it’s pretty nasty stuff, the sort of thing a respectable newspaper would not publish under its own aegis, although some columns in the Times have come near it. However, it sounds very like what the editors might have wanted to say, in which case the ad would have seemed the perfect solution. All care (from the legal department), no responsibility.

(The times would not, however, take the risk of publishing a copycat ad from the Stop Islamization of America group, even with the price tag of $39,000 dangling before it. At least, not yet, according to a letter from the paper quoted by Fox News. Afghanistan, you know…)

So the ad is nasty, yes, but also a rather desperate move on the part of folks who see that the Catholic Church has found its backbone over this issue and that all the huffing and puffing from the birth control establishment, all the Times editorials and columns, all the dissident Catholics paraded in front of the media, are not gaining them any ground. I just checked the FFRF website and I did not see it boasting any sign-ups from ex-Catholics over the past week, or a sudden surge in demand for “debaptism” certificates. In fact, their campaign could have just the opposite effect. People have all sorts of gripes against their mother — until someone else starts insulting her; then they remember whose child they are.

As for me, the New York Times was never my home, just a place to find out what was going down in Manhattan and the select postcodes of the north-eastern United States, so it would not be difficult to quit. I was never a true believer. Heck, I still only read within the free quota of articles — there’s no way I am going to subscribe.

It does seem a shame to give up on an institution that has lasted so long and served the public quite well at times — a bit like the Catholic Church. But then, by using their website I am boosting their hit rate and helping to prop up a business that seems bent on attacking the things I most value. Like those “nominal” and “liberal” Catholics whom the FFRF thinks still go to church.

So I’m thinking seriously about quitting. I might even find it a liberation — there are so many good things out there to read.

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.