Just days after the presidential election, the press reported a change the Texas Board of Education made in a high school text. When speaking of marriage, the textbook would now speak of marriage not as a union of partners but as a union of man and woman. Not a startling definition in light of the common tradition of humanity stretching far back beyond the pages of Genesis. Yet what is disconcerting is the remark reported of a board member who refused to endorse the change. She labeled the change "political agenda." She argued that the whim of some individuals should not dictate our actions. Without realizing the depth of her observation, she enunciated a profound truth while, at the same time, lobbying to perpetuate the very ideology she was condemning. She was right. The whim of any individual or groups of individuals can never be the measure of a society's morality. There are standards and values that transcend individual preferences. She was wrong because she was actually arguing to replace a solid centuries-tested understanding of marriage with the preference of some activists.
Our recent election has become the lightning rod for discussions of serious issues. The media has been flooding us with information and debates on the place moral issues are now playing in American politics. Major Election Day exit polls ranked moral values as an issue voters took seriously. Some have taken the same exit polls and are arguing that the polls themselves were flawed in the way they presented the issues. The discussion is touching a neuralgic point in our conversation with each other.
At the same time that our newspapers were reporting the Texas textbook incident, Rome newspapers were reporting the signing of the first constitution of the European Union. Notwithstanding the Pope's repeated pleading, the new document deliberately left out any reference to the Christian values that have shaped Europe's history from the beginning. An Italian politician quipped, "America has shown itself more religious and more attentive to values than Europe." Clearly the issue of moral and religious values mantles both sides of the Atlantic. How we resolve the issue will determine our common destiny.
The issue we face is complex. One commentator asked the question of whose philosophical understanding of right and wrong has the right to shape our future. Can two people holding two contrary views be right? Who determines whether abortion, embryonic stem cell research and human cloning are right or wrong? Is it just by vote? Who determines whether marriage is between a man and a woman? A popular poll?
Underlying all the articles, speeches, analysis and polls, there is a far deeper issue that has plagued our country for the last 40 years. In a recent Supreme Court decision (Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania vs. Casey), one of the judges said, "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." Such autonomy is the seed of destruction for a moral society. It flows from the idea that there is no objective moral order. Every one is autonomous. Each individual is free to create his or her own moral values. This theory first discussed in the arcane halls of academe in the 60's has quietly slipped into people's thinking. And now it waves its scepter in politics and everyday life. Yet, if every individual is autonomous in defining his or her meaning, then eventually moral values evaporate into personal preferences and each individual becomes a magisterium unto himself. Once there is a loss of a source for values beyond the individual, then every individual must have the right to choose as he or she sees fit. Is this not the error we face behind the arguments that disguise the horrendous sin of abortion with the whitewashed slogan of "the right to choose?"
One of the greatest gifts the Creator has given to every person is freedom. Sirach, an experienced and well-learned scholar living in 2nd century Jerusalem before Christ, advised his students, "The Lord himself made man in the beginning and then left him free to make his decisions" (Sirach 15: 14). From the Age of the Enlightenment, some have called free the individual who is totally self-sufficient and whose finality is his own satisfaction with the goods of this world. But this is not freedom. It is license. Unbridled satisfaction of one's desires actually enslaves an individual and prevents him from achieving his true end that lies far beyond the pleasures of this world. Each day creation falls fresh from the hands of the Creator. From the tiniest grain of sand beneath our feet to the sun blazing our path along the way, there is an overarching order. There is a providence that guides and governs the created universe. By wresting from the universe her secrets, we come to share in God's providence for His world. When we recognize and respect the law of gravity, we are free to construct buildings that stand and do not crumble. When we uncover and respect nature's laws, we are free to plant and turn deserts into gardens. From the first moment of conception to the last moment of natural death, there is a truth about the human person that comes from God. Each person is someone created by God, endowed with inalienable rights and an eternal destiny. When we reverence that truth, we are free to eradicate slavery, racism and war and to live in peace.
There is a hubris in today's world to endow every individual with the right to determine what is good and what is evil for himself. There is a tendency in today's culture to separate freedom from law. But authentic freedom is ordered to law. True moral values and truth transcend the individual. We are made to find our fulfillment in God who is all good. And it is only in relation to His goodness that manifests itself in the wise order of creation and in the truth of the human person that our values are moral and our choices truly free. As John Paul II has stated, "Man's genuine moral autonomy in no way means the rejection but rather the acceptance of the moral law&" (Veritatis Splendor, 41). Thomas Aquinas put it this way, "In the case of products of human manufacture, each product is considered right and good when it conforms to a standard. So also each human act is considered right and virtuous when it conforms to the standard of divine love." In a word, when a human act conforms to God who is love and to His wise ordering of all creation, it is morally good. There is indeed a standard for truth and moral activity. And it is this standard alone that offers us the hope of living in peace with each other.
November 9, 2004
Misunderstands the basic concepts of truth, liberty, and law. Yes, present culture includes a widespread heresy that also confuses them, but this piece fails to lay out the contrary position as it actually is, and to explain how our free society is designed to function.
Whose moral views determine the law? Answer - the people's. They are free, they are not in tutelege, they do not require moral orders from moral superiors. They do not acknowledge the existence of moral superiors. That is what it means that they are free.
Whose moral views determine the truth? Answer - no one's. Truth is not determined but determining. Truth is not a present possession, certainly not an exclusive one. It is the object of a continual, self questioning and critical, search. It is the tribunal within the individual conscience before which individual men question their own understandings of right and wrong. And it is the subject of free invitations, from those who think they have found out something about it, to other free individuals, who can take or leave it as their conscience dictates.
The missing minor is that the law and truth have nothing necessary to do with one another. Something does not become true because it is proclaimed as law. Nor does the presumption that something is true, but an individual or any group of them, however large, entail any requirement that law comply with that understanding of truth.
Liberty is not the ability to make something true by declaring it to be so - as the relativist heretics think. But it is also not tutelege to moral superiors proclaiming the moral truth to people and requiring it of them as a duty, punishing them for failure to fufill it. Liberty is the right to be wrong. It is not any magical ability to know truth or to proclaim it. It is the legal power to follow a course that is wrong, that is not in accord with the truth, that is in error.
If a monarch possessed absolute moral truth, he might require it of all other men, and punish any deviation from the strict moral truth. They would then be his subjects, absolutely, under his tutelege. But the founders of modern liberty proclaimed, that to judge mankind at discretion and without a rule, in this manner, is a perogative of God alone, and for any man or group of men to usurp it for themselves, is both tyranny and impiety.
Men are free to err, under truth. They take the consequences. They can't change the truth. But they also don't have to listen when you proclaim it to them. They can if they like or if their conscience demands it of them, or if they want to be good and agree that such and so is good.
But there is another misunderstanding abroad in the land, that confuses this absence of tutelege, with absence of law, or illegitimacy of law. Quite to the contrary, the people as a whole have full legislative power within themselves. They cannot make the least thing right, that isn't naturally so. But they can make something the law. That is what their political freedom means. They are their own masters, in matters of law.
The constant supposition that fails to see the essential distinction, is that truth is compulsory. Truth is not compulsory. It is an invitation, to free men. You can't require truth of people, without oppression. (For one thing, you don't have it, whatever you tell yourself). You can offer it to them, so far as you have been given light to see it. They then decide, collectively, in their united political capacity, what to do with all of the advice about the moral truth, they have received from all quarters.
Their decision makes nothing right or wrong, but it does make something the law. And you obey that law, or you fight them. Fight literally - they have full power to enforce their ideas of law. Men are ruled by their collective understanding, they are not unruled. Being ruled does not extend inward to perceptions of the truth. A man can obey a law he knows is wrong, because it is the law.
Indeed, this is the natural state of things, throughout most of human history, because error is the common state of the overwhelming majority of mankind. Which is precisely why truth cannot be required of men, without oppression. In the meantime, an honest man attempts to persuade his fellows, to change any law he sees as wrong. That is giving his testimony, as to the moral truth. But it is completely up to those he offers it to, whether to translate his suggestion into changes in law, or not.
Men err with their freedom. That is fully expected. It is their existence, their lives, their souls. Their souls are the stakes in their choices of right and wrong, in legislating no less than in personal actions. Nobody can take on the burden of those choices for them.
What is the heresy abroad in the world today, that has distorted all of this and deliberately misunderstood it? It is moral relativism, and political cynicism. Which believe there is no moral truth, only myth, particular moral dispensations made up out of whole cloth and legislated for whole civilizations, not merely as positive law, but as culture wide beliefs.
Fundamentally, this position is based on the assessment that Christianity was false but believed for millenia, an assessment looked on with envy, which modern cultural myth makers and legislators wish to emulate for themselves. It is the desire to put man back into tutelege, not to any past understanding of moral truth, but to a modern consciously created myth, put forth for political purposes. The Party, the state, the enlightened, all right thinking people, shall proclaim doctrine to the rest, a new clergy holding themselves morally superior to the rest of mankind, rightful legislators to them. Without being constrained by any idea of objective truth, in what they choose to proclaim as "moral". That is the heresy.
It is spread by cynicism, by teaching that there is no right or wrong but only politically effective proclamations of it, or that there is only legislation, not also truth. It debunks claims to truth, and invites its acolytes to do some proclaiming themselves, for calculated political effect. It believes the fundamental category of human life is not truth or law, but rhetoric. That all that is at stake in any of this, is who rules. And believes that the best answer to that question is "me" or "us". It isn't interested in right and wrong, but in ours and theirs. (Thus e.g. "identity politics", and soon after the tendency to excuse any crime committed by "one's own", while condemning any virtue in "the enemy").
The article understands that the idea of moral truth is essential, but thinks it is in contradiction to liberty, and falsely conflates liberty with the relativist heresy. It thinks man belongs in tutelege, and that the writer and those like him are in full possession of the moral truth that holds mankind in that tutelege. Not so. Yes, a free people are free to err morally. So are all self proclaimed possessors of the moral truth, who arrogate to themselves a perogative that belongs to nothing mortal. And this is true even within the doctrine the writer thinks he is upholding. We are not left in bondage, but freed, to sink or swim as our own consciences manage to direct. The standard before which we succeed or fail is indeed transcendent. But our actions under it are free, and extend to the legislative power.
Who decides what moral truth we live under? There is only morality, all men live under it, decision has nothing to do with it. Who decides what law we live under? We do, in our collective political capacity, and deviations from what we declare as law, are rebellion, and we have full power to deal with them. As individuals, we have such access to moral truth as we can manage, and offer our testimony about it to each other. For each other's sake, and to improve the law.
When someone or some group usurps our collective legislative powers, they are attempting to reduce us to tutelege again, and we do not stand for it. If they are right on the substance they can proclaim it to us and persuade us. But we make our law. We do not recognize a superior among men, in our collective legislative capacity.
