Some weeks ago I heard a wise man make the point that the “rehabilitation of natural ends” is essential to restoring appreciation for natural law. Upon reflection, it is clear that he's absolutely right.
The idea of natural ends assumes that things have built-in purposes. To put it technically, natural ends reflect an intrinsic teleology at work in the world. Our fulfillment depends on respecting the purposes to which relationships, behavior, and everything else are naturally oriented.
While that may sound obvious to some, for many people it's anything but. Natural ends, as the wise man put it, were largely “deleted” from Western secular thought several centuries ago by thinkers like Descartes, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, reacting against the legacy of the great Scholastics like Thomas Aquinas.
But people do trifle with the reality of things at their own risk. In the absence of natural ends, we are left with the arbitrariness of subjective purposes — the outcomes we happen to want.
This mode of thought is deeply ingrained in American culture. Take that icon of 19th century American letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In “Self-Reliance,” an essay published in 1841, Emerson writes, “Trust thyself….No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.” Emerson doesn't mean the human nature he shares with everybody else. He means his private subjectivity, as what follows makes clear. “Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.”
Fourteen years later, in Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman translated this individualistic creed into self-regarding verse. A poem called “Walt Whitman” begins, “I celebrate myself” and later adds: “I dote on myself — there is that lot of me, and all so luscious.”
In the United States today doting on the so-luscious self is not confined to self-indulgent versifiers like Whitman. Supreme Court justices also seem to consider it an excellent thing to do. Pardon me for quoting something I've quoted here before, but in a 1992 abortion case called Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter subjected an unsuspecting world to this bit of airy subjectivism: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and the mystery of human life.”
And at the heart of being a Supreme Court justice, one might add, is the right to indulge oneself in the writing of egregious nonsense.
Ideas, as Richard Weaver reminded us, do indeed have consequences. The consequences of a bad idea like this one include such other bad ideas as same-sex marriage, the right to kill the unborn, and similar horrors of the day, all of them routinely rationalized in the name of individual freedom of choice. At their root, as the wise man pointed out, is Western culture's disastrous loss of appreciation for the intrinsic, natural ends of things.
The ultimate consequence of this state of affairs is deeply disturbing. “Wherever man makes himself the only master of the world and of himself,” Pope Benedict XVI remarked at the start of last month's world Synod of Bishops in Rome, “justice cannot exist. Only the freedom of power and interests can dominate there.”
That is how matters stand today. Bring back natural ends, I say.
Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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