A Case Where President George W. Bush Is More Articulate than President Obama (and especially President Clinton)

"A Study in Contrasts

The differences between President Bush’s 2007 “Executive Order Expanding Approved Stem Cell Lines” and President Obama’s executive order overturning it are striking especially given the popular mischaracterization of both. Despite its demonization as a right-wing Christian rejection of modern science—if not of modernity as a whole—the language of Bush’s order manages to acknowledge the serious and profound ethical dilemmas that surround embryonic stem cell research and to clearly articulate both the scientific and moral principles that ground its conclusions. Thus, the order recognizes the great promise of biomedical innovation but also its potential conflict with “human life and human dignity,” making it “critical to establish moral and ethical boundaries to allow the Nation to move forward vigorously with medical research.” In fact, the entire document is a model of transparent political argument meant to broker some measure of civic compromise without sacrificing either clarity or conviction regarding moral principle. It even draws attention to the unique difficulties that present themselves to the federal government as a democratic body representing a constituency with diverse moral worldviews and therefore having a “duty to exercise responsible stewardship of taxpayer funds.”

In fact, the entire order is premised upon two forcefully stated moral principles and two empirically defensible definitions. President Bush objects to embryonic stem cell research on two grounds: first, that “the destruction of nascent life for research violates the principle that no life should be used as a mere means for achieving the medical benefit of another,” and second, that “human embryos and fetuses, as living members of the human species, are not raw materials to be exploited or commodities to be bought and sold.” One could argue that the former principle is characteristically Kantian and the latter Christian, but Bush also marshals scientific support for the classifications his moral principles rest upon. He provides a clear and scientifically defensible definition of the term “human embryo” and explains in plain prose what counts as “subjecting to harm a human embryo.” One can certainly take philosophical issue with the substance of the argument, but there can be no doubt that an articulate argument is proffered, that it carefully balances the benefits of science against its moral risks, and that the argument is premised upon scientifically defensible categorizations of human life. President Obama’s executive order never attempts to reject the interpretation of human life offered in the Bush order it overturns, assuming instead that its celebration of science is evidence enough of its scientific superiority.

Furthermore, President Bush’s order is a legitimately political one in two important ways. First, it resigns itself to an irresolvable contest of interests instead of attempting a merely cosmetic harmony through demagoguery. The position espoused in his executive order is meant to be a respectful and equitable compromise between opposed constituencies, and it recognizes the real limitations placed upon the federal government as an arbiter of a moral dispute between such profoundly divergent convictions. Secondly, a democratic and representative deference to a split in the will of the people doesn’t necessarily justify the abdication of any and all moral principle or require a comprehensive moral skepticism; Bush’s political compromise regarding the federal funding of stem cell research still draws an unequivocal moral line in the sand—there are certain kinds of research he won’t prohibit but refuses to assist, and then some (human cloning, for example) he simply will not countenance. The great virtue of Bush’s 2007 executive order is that it is appropriately political without being merely political; he captures the need for compromise but also eludes the danger of brokering merely an amoral compromise. It is correct to say, then, that Bush’s approach is Christian but not in the sense usually (and malignantly) understood—it is Christian in the sense that it espouses some universal moral truths, like the unique dignity of each human life, but also accepts that such recognition does not undercut the need for prudence in applying these truths to the theater of real political experience. In other words, it is Thomistic in a way philosophically consonant with the principles of the American founding and the tradition those principles subsequently birthed.

President Obama’s executive order, by way of contrast, makes no mention of any controversy at all but rather prefers to tout the “broad agreement in the scientific community that the research should be supported by federal funds,” ignoring the more pressing question of whether this is essentially a question of scientific expertise in the first place. He does note that his order removes “barriers to responsible scientific research,” thereby indicating a distinction between that and the irresponsible variety; however, there is no attempt to address what counts as either. Obama never articulates any moral principle other than the absolute sovereignty of scientific activity. He makes it unambiguously clear in his memorandum on scientific integrity that the real issue is that the “public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions.” Obama fails not only to identify a genuine moral predicament worth mentioning but also any real participatory role for the public to exercise its consent. As he sees it, the public’s job is to accept passively the wisdom of technocratic experts.

In his remarks delivered to the press, President Obama does discuss the moral “concerns” of many “thoughtful and decent people” and the corresponding need to maintain the kind of “difficult and delicate balance” such concerns warrant. Yet despite the directive to “respect their point of view,” he marginalizes such dissent by claiming that the “majority of Americans...have come to a consensus” and that the “proper course has become clear”—a polite way of saying that these “thoughtful” dissenters are simply wrong and nearly everyone knows it. In fact, Obama implies less than subtly that the time for “discussion, debate, and reflection” has really passed and that there is nothing left but “a false choice between sound science and moral values.” For those who still cling to their now fully discredited religious reservations, Obama assures them that he offers this dismissal of their views as a “person of faith” himself. Likewise, for those who still insist there is any moral uncertainty, he comforts them with the simplistic platitude that the only relevant moral imperative is our “work to ease human suffering.” Obama’s rhetorical gestures towards the opposition are transparently perfunctory: he is so insistent on avoiding any political compromise whatsoever that he actually neglects even to mention that the research progress encouraged by his predecessor may have made it possible to sidestep the moral controversy. While much of President Bush’s 2007 order was devoted to the exciting discoveries being made for “less morally problematic alternatives” to embryos as a source of stem cells, Obama fails to mention these alternatives, or to mention that his new executive order also revokes Bush’s encouragement for exploring them, opting instead to support “promising research of all kinds,” problematic and otherwise.

In contrast to his predecessor’s circumspect effort to strike the right balance between scientific progress and political restraint, President Obama attempts to render them mutually exclusive: he wants scientists to operate free of the “manipulation and coercion” that are constitutive of any “political agenda.” To ensure that “scientific data is never distorted” and that “scientific decisions are based on facts, not ideology,” Obama effectively denies that there are any political judgments that cannot be settled by scientific investigation. For Obama, “responsibly conducted science” means science unobstructed by political intrusion, free even from the democratic will of the people. Science trumps politics entirely, or, to be more precise, simply absorbs it; any reference to values or interests that cannot be legitimated by scientific analysis is branded as ideology, whether or not supported by popular consent. Obama goes as far as to suggest that the political aggrandizement of America as a nation is inseparable from its stewardship of technological innovation. He not only wants to “advance the cause of science in America” but also hopes for “America to lead the world in the discoveries it may one day yield.” To update John Winthrop’s famous line, we shall be as a laboratory upon a hill."

-from Ivan Kenneally's excellent article "Technocracy and Populism" in New Atlantis Spring 2009

After "Constantianism" Supposedly Established, St. Ambrose Excommunicates Caesar

Sometimes our formulations are too easy. When Protestants do history I think we should be especially on guard because, let's face it, our propensity is to slough off the effort from a long tradition of neglect of history between Augustine and Luther, or beyond. For instance, in the case of the charge that since Constantine the church has succumbed to "Constantinianism" and "doing ethics for Caesar" has to be mitigated if not thrown out when actual intricacies of history are look at seriously. Take for instance the following case which occurred almost 90 years after Constantine has become emperor:

"When, in the year 390, Saint Ambrose excommunicated the Christian Theodosius for his massacre in Thessalonika, he was holding Caesar accountable to the ethics of the Church". A more correct view seems to be the following:

"The history of the relations between the church and the state in the Middle Ages is a history of a long dispute waged with wavering fortune on either side. Extravagant claims on one side called forth equally extravagant claims on the other. The Eraastianism of post-Reformation settlements was the answer to earlier imperiousness on the other side" (p. 34, American Babylon, 2009, Richard John Neuhaus).

Dorothy Sayers and Christian Economics

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/06/dorothy-sayers-and-economic-so


“...Sayers would have agreed that the housing meltdown was, at base, a moral failure. The belief that it was not merely reasonable, but virtuous, to want that which you could not afford would have struck her as preposterous as well as sinful...Moreover, Sayers would have identified envy as the sin at the heart of left-wing critiques of capitalism. "If avarice is the sin of the Haves against the Have-Nots," Sayers reminded her audience, "Envy is the sin of the Have-Nots against the Haves," and therefore "can always find support among those who are just and generous-minded." We are as familiar as Sayers with these plausible plaints, but Sayers recognized in envy a deeper and more subtle evil, in which the spirit of vindictiveness masquerades as righteous indignation. ”

“...Her address to the Council Sayers entitled "The Other Six Deadly Sins," in which she berated the churches’ concentration on lust. Sayers took avarice and held it to the light, with results that must have been unpleasant to the more reflective audience members. "The Church says covetousness is a deadly sin—but does she really think so? Is she ready to found welfare societies to deal with financial immorality as she does with sexual immorality," Sayers mused, rhetorically asking "does the Church arrange services, with bright congregational singing, for total abstainers from usury?"

Christ's Face a "Very Present Pledge of Salvation"

“...we lack nothing for an abundance of all good things and for assurance of salvation so long as the Lord is our God. And rightly so! For if his face, the moment that it has shone forth, is a very present pledge of salvation, how can he manifest himself to a man as his God without also opening to him the treasures of His salvation? He is our God on this condition: that he dwell among us, as he has testified through Moses [Lev. 26:11]. But one cannot obtain such a presence of him without, at the same time, possessing life. “ -John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II, CH. X, Section 8.

Here is another surprising (for me) little meadow opening up in Calvin's prose, a familiar theme, one that should be familiar I think to every Christian: the face of Christ. It is hard for me to imagine a person truly looking into Christ's face in comprehension and yet thinking there might be others of equal value. I am forced by love to think of their minds as darkened.

The present intimacy with Christ cannot really be sectioned off. But I think there is a place for contemplation of the future and of the past within this present intimacy. The past in seeking to allow God to shape your life into a story worth telling, the future in memento mori, etc. both to clear up one's judgment and thereby clear up the capacity to see Christ.

Calvin's reflection from Scripture on the Christ's face as the very present pledge of salvation is hymned in a beautiful poem by John Donne, one of the peaks of the English language:

A HYMN TO GOD THE FATHER.
by John Donne

I.
WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
    Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
    And do run still, though still I do deplore?
        When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
                    For I have more.
II.
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
    Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
    A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
        When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
                    For I have more.
III.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
    My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
    Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore ;
        And having done that, Thou hast done ;
                    I fear no more.

Contemplation in God of Neighbor

“We ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love; here there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God, not in themselves. When we turn aside from such contemplation, it is no wonder we become entangled in many errors. Therefore, if we rightly direct our love, we must first turn our eyes not to man, the sight of whom would more often engender hate than love, but to God, who bids us extend to all men the love we bear to him, that this may be an unchanging principle: whatever the character of the man, we must love him because we love God.” -John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II, CH. VIII, Section 55.

[A succinct formulation of a basic teaching of Christianity...The contemplation of all in God. “In a single feeling of love” - an inner disposition we learn from continual remembrance and communion. ..."the sight of whom would more often engender hate than love" sounds something of a misanthropic note. Perhaps I would feel more the same if for instance a close friend of my youth was burned at the stake for espousing views deemed heretical (as was Calvin's friend). Regardless if we commiserate with the starkness of Calvin's formulation and the hard sentiment, he rightly points the way to love the wellspring of love, that same one as natural human love, but deepened, clarified and revealed.

True Courage: Advancing Toward the Horror Knowing

“Fortitude presumes to a certain extent that a man is afraid of evil; its essence does not consist in knowing no fear but rather in not allowing himself to be compelled by fear into evil or to fail to accomplish the good. Anyone who ventures into some danger, even for the sake of the good, without realizing how dangerous it is, or out of an impulsive optimism ('Nothing is going to happen to me'), or with a well-founded confidence in his own power and capacity for struggle does not yet have the virtue of fortitude. The possibility of being courageous in the true sense comes about only when all those apparent or genuine elements of security fail, that is, when the natural man fears for himself; indeed, not when he fears for himself out of baseless anxiety, but rather when, on the basis of clear perception of the true state of matters, he cannot do otherwise- as it were, with good reason- but fear for himself. Whoever in such a situation of unqualified seriousness, in the face of which any miles gloriosus (glorious soldier) falls mute and every heroic gesture becomes crippled, nonetheless advances toward the horror and does not allow himself to be prevented from doing the good, specifically for the sake of the good and thus finally for the sake of God, not out of ambition or out of fear of being taken for a coward: that person is truly courageous.” -Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, pgs. 26-27.

Tasting Truth As It Is

"A wiseman is one to whom things taste as they are". A saying from the Middle Ages. I pause here to steal a moment of free form reflection. Implied in the statement is an oughtness to taste. What is rejected is the kind of rejection of judgment of taste by some forms of utilitarianism such as that of Sedgwick.

What this and all my subsequent reflections must not be is a perishing into mere words, a kind of low mental rearranging of words, outside of the purview of life. Modern vogue ways of knowing seem largely to adopt an Enlightement division of knowledge and action and, as Hamann noted of Mendelssohn, tend to cut them into two dead halves. That is a splitting of prudence right down the middle in the name of knowledge.

I think implied in the quote is a view of wisdom which encompasses the soul and emotions. Right emotions in the face of things. But all this is rather convicting (and probably hard to follow). One can talk about virtue but actually trieing to live virtuously is, to one bent, monstrous. Beyond sorting through the facts and getting to controlling principles there is a deeper place in which virtue has its roots. It is that deeper face that provides the context for the virtuous principles. Otherwise, the abstract principles are just deadly. The touch of the Spirit of God provides the context out of which order may arise.

Mere Knowledge of Scripture

“'Bible Religion' is both the recognized title and the best description of the English religion. It consists not in rites or in creeds, but mainly in having the Bible read in Church, in the family, in private. Now I am far indeed from undervaluing that mere knowledge of Scripture which is imparted to the population thus promiscuously. At least in England, it has to a certain point made up for great and grievous losses in its Christianity. The reiteration again and again, in fixed course in the public service, of the words of inspired teachers under both covenants, and that in grave majestic English, has in matter of fact been to our people a vast benefit. It has attuned their minds to religious thoughts; it has given them a high moral standard; it has served them in associating religion with compositions which, evenly humanly considered, are among the most sublime and beautiful ever written; especially, it has impressed upon them the series of Divine Providence, in behalf of man for his creation to his end, and, above all, the words, deeds, and sacred sufferings of Him in whom all the Providences of God centre.”

-John Henry Newman, The Grammar of Assent, Bk. 56-57.

[In 1 Timothy 4:13, Paul instructs Timothy regarding the main tasks as a pastor he is to perform win Paul's absence: “Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching.” I have been thinking lately that these three things are still vital signs of a church's health.

Paul follows up: “Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.” 'Diligence in these matters' includes the three things he mentioned above, it seems. The quote from Newman stirs cultural memory of a time which is now largely past, but in which the “mere knowledge of Scripture” through “the Bible read in Church, in the family, in private” was a marked sign of Christianity in England. I know there are considerations and questions that deserve attention regarding what this meant in Paul's day. It might be suggested that as far as such public Scripture reading, it was called for by the high rates of illiteracy of the time. There is certainly a place for discussion about the formats that modern shapes of living call for in advancing this “mere knowledge of Scripture”, but a bottom line for a healthy church is that Christians should know and be taught to know the Scripture. Paul even ties up these labors of Timothy with salvation for him and his hearers.

Sometimes the classical liberal notion of the equality of religions is held forth in the old adage that the different religions are like a bunch of blind men in a room with an elephant who have never seen an elephant and who latch onto just part of the elephant and think it is the whole and dispute with each other that the dimensions of their part of the elephant are the correct one. The problem with this analogy, which is meant to suggest the folly of adhering to any one religion, is that it presupposes a bird's eye view, a superior vantage point. In order to see the folly of the blind men you have to presume to see the elephant whole (or the Brahmin spirit, or the Oversoul or whatever you call it). Rather than exposing the pride and folly of the religions it turns out to conceal a presumed superiority which may turn out to be the most acidic pride of all. And this vantage point becomes the effective religion, rather than any one of the religions.

Contrast then with the kind of devotion Paul is speaking of here. He does not speak of Christianity as merely a culturally positive local place to plant yourself, one which is interchangeable with other faiths. He does not harbor a sense that it is bigoted and a fallacy to presume that Christianity has some special corner on the truth, some X marks the spot. Rather he says that these things mean salvation. Not fashion and fancy but life and death.

Josef Pieper on Distraction and Its Cure

“The 'concupiscence of the eyes' reaches its utmost destructive and extirpative power at the point where it has constructed for itself a world in its own image and likeness, where it has surrounded itself with the restlessness of a ceaseless film of meaningless objects for show and with a literally deafening noise of nothing more than impressions and sensations that roar in an uninterrupted chase around every window of the senses. Behind their papery facade of ostentation lies absolute nothingness, a 'world' of at most one day constructs that often become insipid after just one-quarter of an hour and are thrown out like a newspaper that has been read or a magazine that has been paged through; a world which, before the revealing gaze of a sound spirit uninfected by its contagion, shows itself to be like a metropolitan entertainment district in the harsh clarity of a winter morning: barren, bleak, and ghostly to the point of pushing one to despair.

Still, the destructive element of this disorder, born out of and shaped by illness, is found in the fact that this disorder obstructs the original power of man to perceive reality, that it renders a person unable not only to attain his own self but also to attain reality and truth.

If, therefore, a fraudulent world of this kind threatens to overrun and conceal the world of reality, then the cultivation of the natural desire to see assumes the character of a measure of self-preservation and self-defense. And then studiositas (diligence) means especially this: that a person resists the nearly inescapable temptation to indiscipline with all the power of self-protection, that he radically closes off the inner space of his life against the pressingly unruly pseudoreality of empty sights and sounds-in order that, through and only through this asceticism of perception, he might safeguard or recoup that which truly constitutes man's living existence: to perceive the reality of God and of creation and to shape himself and the world by the truth that discloses itself only in silence.”

-Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, Ignatius Press (1991), Trans. By Paul C. Duggan, p. 40-41.

The Soloist- On Putting Connection with the Person First, Above and Beyond the Limits of Science

"Making a diagnosis isn't as important as making a connection...He tells me the challenge for doctors, mental health workers and advocates is to treat the person and not the disease."

-Insights on helping those with mental disorders from Mark Ragins as conveyed by Steve Lopez in The Soloist, p. 57. (Mark Ragins is the author of a book called A Road to Recovery which unfortunately is not available in any bookstores or on Amazon.com, at least not the big chain stores I checked at. )

From "Against Readings" by Mark Edmunson

"...The desire to turn the art of reading into a science is part of what draws the profession [Academic literary criticism] to the application of sterile concepts...Criticism is getting into skeptical dialogue with the text. Mounting a conventional academic reading- applying an alternative set of terms- means closing off the dialogue before it has a chance to begin."

-Mark Edmundson, "Against Readings"

What's Wrong With Modern Education?

"...For a long time I puzzled over this image of the well-educated person, especially because so many of the men and women I teach with are actually strongly motivated by a love of truth. Slowly, however, I have come to realize that we tend to teach as much in response to our fears as our hopes. There are, perhaps, two main and very different intellectual fears. The first is a fear of opportunities squandered, of truths unnecessarily missed. The second is a fear of deception, of falsehoods wrongly cherished.

It is crushingly obvious that the present dictatorship of relativism is profoundly motivated by the second fear. Aside from the natural sciences, we give students little more than training in critique. Loyal to our critical principles, we can barely squeak out the slenderest of affirmations. Fearful of living in dreams and falling under the sway of ideologies, we have committed ourselves to disenchantment.

I find myself recalling one of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. He urges us to remember that love is just sexual intercourse: “it is the friction of member and a convulsive expulsion of mere mucus.” We are to apply this method of critical thinking to all aspects of our lives in order to free ourselves from fanciful notions. “Where things make an impression which is very plausible,” he advises, “uncover their nakedness, see into their cheapness, strip off the profession on which they vaunt themselves.” The goal is simple: Humanize yourself by disabusing yourself of illusions.

No philosophy or faith worth its salt endorses a witting love of illusions. It’s the truth we want, not fantasies. Yet, there is something desperate and loveless in the triumph of suspicion. Love falls. As the urgent, searching bridge in the Song of Songs reminds us, love risks the dangers of deception and betrayal. We cannot fall into the embrace of truth by way of cool, dispassionate critique. If we fear that truth will elude us, then we must search and seek with reckless desire..."

-R.R. Reno, "Teaching in the Twenty-First Century"

Murder in the Name of Economics

..Consider the following example. Lawrence Summers—currently the head of President Obama’s National Economic Council—for a time served as Chief Economist of the World Bank. While in that position he sent an internal memo to a colleague arguing that the World Bank should encourage poor countries to sell space for western pollution. “A given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” The Economist got hold of the memo and, while acknowledging that the language was “crass,” went on to admit that “on the economics his points are hard to answer” (37). If “economic logic” leads to the obvious conclusion that it is good for developing countries voluntarily to assume the “health-impairing” toxic waste of developed countries, then perhaps there is something wrong with economic logic. Could it be that it is blind to important facets of reality?..."

-from "The Dismal Science vs. Community", by Mark T. Mitchell

A Response to President Obama's Order for Embryonic Stem Cell Research

On a basic level it is obvious and beyond dispute that embryos are developing human life. If you compare their features to the developing embryos of another species they are not that species but the human species. And you have to engage in a kind of special treatment of language to say that they are not life. This generally means opting for a non-biological signs of life criteria, criteria which tend to be a lot more subjective, such as “personhood” and “consciousness”. When it comes to this, there is a debate. Some like Peter Singer will acknowledge the obvious, that fetuses are human, but then he will argue that this does not mean that we should not kill them and he and others go into debate about the permissibility and ethical calculations in this regard. That debate needs to be carried out, but the Obama position is that there is no viable debate. It is the enforcement of one view on the public. And he does it by advancing lines that belie distorted or unjust assumptions. Robert George: “The announcement was classic Obama: advancing radical policies while seeming calm and moderate, and preaching the gospel of civility while accusing those who disagree with the policies of being "divisive" and even "politicizing science." “ If I were embracing Darwinian race theory and assuming not only that blacks were lower on the biological hierarchy but that they were actually a threat to the health and well-being of my biological race, but must be tolerated for the sake of compassion, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century I would not lack a majority among scientists (not a conspiracy then but a twisted culture). Although my stance could find support from the likes of Ernst Haeckel, and though it seemed profitable to give care to the moral hygiene of people, so that I would agree with Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr. that we don’t need any more degenerates and therefore we should sterilize “the morally degenerate”, wouldn’t it be not only wrong, in the sense of an intellectual error, to hold these views, but morally wrong? The way President Obama frames it, the question of whether scientists should experiment on human embryos is a question best left to the scientists. It is not a moral but a scientific question. This is not science but the indiscriminate idolatry of science. Let me ask you why we think so highly of science in our society? Isn’t it because of a proven track record of being able to produce knowledge and material gains? But aren’t these the result of a dogged pursuit of truth in investigation of material causality? Isn’t the honor we give science properly given in so far as the science is a pursuit of the truth? Doesn’t science derive its due honor from truth? Isn’t truth above science, and science properly the servant of truth? Here is an NIH scientist on truth and embryonic stem cells: “In the summer before the 2004 Presidential election, Ron McKay, from the National Institutes of Health, admitted that he and his fellow scientists had generally failed to correct the media’s false reports about the promise of stem cells- but that was all right, he told the Washington Post, since ordinary people ‘need a fairy tale.’ They require, he said, ‘a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.’” http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6380 What would become of science if scientists as a whole adopted this attitude toward truth and asked in their representation of the truth of the material world (which of course scientists sometimes do) what does it matter if it’s true as long as it is beneficial? (I wonder if the science community as well as the press fell prey to what became the Hwang fiasco largely because of this sort of susceptibility to the benefit of fairy tales and useful myths.) To my ears this is a subtle or not so subtle betrayal of what is good about science and suggests more a care for the veneer and the politics and how to use science for one’s limited view. It is a focus on what we think the truth ought to be, rather than a focus on the truth.
Melody Barnes, the President ’s domestic policy advisor, wrote a column extolling the President ’s executive order and she takes up the same lines I find so onerous in President Obama’s speech, establishing it is a line the administration is choosing to follow. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/12/ED6516CTN2.DTL ):
She writes: “The order will allow responsible researchers to conduct potentially life-saving work that could benefit millions of Americans who suffer from debilitating diseases. Just as importantly, the President 's executive order closes the book on an era that put politics first and science a distant second.
[The claim is directed primarily at President Bush’s embryonic stem cell policy, of course, and the claim is that the reservation he showed toward experimentation on live human embryos was politics before science. (I consider you might think that using the term “live human embryos” weights the argument but I think you have to given reasons why that should be bracketed).]
“Under the Bush administration's restrictions, the National Institutes of Health was allowed to fund human embryonic stem cell research on cell lines created before Aug. 9, 2001 and was prohibited from conducting research on cell lines created after that date. The August date was arbitrary, a function of the political calendar, and without any basis in science…. Instead, we will embrace the potential stem cell research offers, ensure this research is conducted responsibly and rely on scientists - not politicians - as we work to cure disease and ensure more Americans live longer, healthier, happier lives… The president's order lifts this restriction. From this time forward, decisions about federal funding of stem cell research will be based on scientific principles. In the Obama administration, the scientific community will be empowered, but not unaccountable. Scientists who wish to conduct stem cell research must do so in a responsible manner and the president Obama will not allow scientists to leave our shared values at the laboratory door. But unlike the past eight years, political ideology will no longer trump sound science. “
[Here she is taking the same line one can see in Obama’s speech (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/us/politics/09text-obama.html ). They both attempt to relegate the question of whether we should experiment on human embryos to science, but that is not properly a question that science can answer. She does refer to “our shared values” and says that experimentation on embryos should be done responsibly but this ignores or dodges the moral question of whether research on embryonic stem cells should be done at all (in the actual situation of current science and not in some abstraction). Ascribing to science moral questions suggests a superficiality to the professed honoring of science because rather than honoring and valuing the actual work that science does, it focuses on the veneer. The gains from science are allowed to induce a gold rush mentality in the bystander and as result they become enamored, not with science itself, but with the veneer, with the power and prestige that adheres to it. Consequently, rather than really knowing it and cherishing it, they idolize it and ascribe to it powers beyond its purview. And our whole society becomes accustomed to this so that we don’t bat an eye when we are told that we should relegate our moral decision-making to science technocrats and Mustapha Mond.
Writing in 2008, Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen observed the current tendency for conflation in this area which can be seem all over the press as well as in Obama’s speech:“It is critical to engage seriously with embryo ethics today. For it is not uncommon to hear embryo researchers and their supporters claim that only science should have a say in what science does, and that ethics, and religion, and politics have no business in the concerns of science. Such sentiments should sound familiar to anyone who has listened to proponents of such research defend the freedoms and even the imperatives of scientific research.” from Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. ]
It seems to me that much of the argument for embryonic stem cell research and much of the policy is guided by indiscriminate acceptance of what have becomes currently unquestioned commonplaces. The argument proceeds from assuming that IVF and abortion are not morally problematic. Here is one author, Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in The New Yorker arguing along this lines: “Stem cells for research are drawn from blastocysts—embryos that are a few days old, consist of several dozen cells, and are smaller by far than the pinhead on which theology’s angels dance. Infertility clinics create and freeze such embryos in the thousands every year, and the vast majority—more than ninety per cent—are never implanted in a woman’s womb. Whether these excess blastocysts are simply discarded, as the opponents of stem-cell research would apparently prefer, or whether a few hundred of them become the basis for a biomedical alchemy that could benefit millions, the amount of actual human suffering entailed would be the same: zero.” He raises two main points in that paragraph, as I see it, but I am focusing right now on the first. The argument goes that because IVF clinics produce embryos in the thousands every year they should be used and not wasted. But is it right and was it ever right to assist fertility by a method producing embryos which would be destroyed? A lot of the arguments I here are basically going with what has become commonplace, the moral landscape such as it is, not questioning its moral validity on its own merits. When IVF clinics were first coming into existence advocates such as Ellen Goodman dismissed the possibility of what has become the norm. In 1980 she wrote: “A fear of many protesting the opening of this clinic is that doctors will fertilize a myriad of eggs and discard the ‘extras’ and the abnormal, as if they were no more meaningful than a dish of caviar. But this fear seems largely unwarranted.” Years later, faced with the new norm, she simply changed her mind. This illustrates the slippery slope down which the respect for life has gone. Obama’s refusal to support protections for infants who escaped the womb during an abortion seems to me a new stage in the slippery slope, but not the last. As for the point that the embryos feel no pain, pain is hardly the mark of a person’s worth. If it were conceived to be possibly to the health advantage of someone or to a group of persons if a man were to be suddenly annihilated before he would even have a chance to blink, say with a nuclear laced shell or something like that, so that he had no chance to feel pain or awareness of his fate, the sacrifice of another for one’s own good would still be a lessening of the greatest good of the survivors, the good which encompasses more than physical well being. Also, those who follow this line of reason seem inevitably to end up sanctioning the pain and death of more developed human beings as well. People don’t want to fight any more about abortion. They are willing to yield truth for harmony with the social norm of the day and yield to its trajectory, whatever way it is going.
I would like to talk further about the view of science. Instead of understanding science as the investigation of material causality, definitions such as its being “methodological naturalism” or “methodological atheism” betray a desire to convert science into a total worldview. C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man focuses in on this aspect of modernity which postmodernity has inherited, the inability to think with clarity and articulateness about the moral, the inability to acknowledge the moral and the sublime without occlusions. This is illustrated by attempts to subsume questions of morality under science which is incapable of answering those questions. The President and Melody Barnes’ statements provide good examples of this conflation. As philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, the moral sources are occulted. They are necessarily occluded and covered over because they are supposed to fit within science, or science mythologized (my words, not his) and close inspection of science reveals the contradiction. Nevertheless, moral language is still used, often with stridency, but its connection with a truth and reality in which science is suppose to be the one, true, supreme authority providing all the answers cannot bare inspection and demands occulting.
This has consequences. It is not enough to say you don’t believe an embryo is a human. I think Peter Singer recognizes the kind of nihilistic abyss suggested for morals by the assumption that science encompasses all. Since he holds the assumption, instead of arguing that unborn babies are not human, he begins to elaborate arguments for periods of say 28 days after birth for parents to decide whether to keep or kill the infants. Science can provide no rationale for valuing humans.
What science actually tells us is that embryos are human:“…Moore and Persaud write that the initial totipotent cell that is the result of fertilization ‘marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual (italics added).’ William Larsen writes that male and female sex cells ‘unite at fertilization to initiate the embryonic development of a new individual.’ Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Muller state that ‘a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte (italics added).’
All these embryologists and developmental biologists, who are collectively responsible for the standard textbooks in their fields, agree in marking fertilization… as the beginning of a human individual.” (from Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, by Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen).
What science tells you is that the embryo is a living human. What it doesn’t tell you is the worth of the human. Social norms through history have divided the worth of humans into different categories of value. For instance, the Dred-Scott decision in the US created the legal fiction “that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants-- whether or not they were slaves—were not legal persons and could never be citizens of the United States” (from Wikipedia entry for Dred Scott v. Sandford). Another example of such a division of peoples worth is the caste system in India, which falls hardest on the ‘untouchables’. These are unjust doctrines and legal fictions that issue in injustices. The Gospel is different because “in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Gentile, slave nor freeman, but all are one in Christ Jesus”. It is different because Jesus would not bruise a broken reed. It is different because Jesus identified with the discarded and the least and taught his followers to do the same.
Adult stem cells have more demonstrated potential than embryonic stem cells already, and both have been experimented on for some time now throughout the world. One entirely avoids the moral problem of experimenting on the human and commodifying the contents of women’s bodies, especially poor women, and procedures that pose danger to those women. It also makes the point of the bodies possible rejection of the embryos moot because adult stem cells come from the same person. Nevertheless, it is not as if the playing field is now leveled between ESC and Adult Stem Cell Research. President Obama rescinded the Presidential order encouraging research into alternatives to embryonic stem cell research. I find the logic in Wesley Smith’s statement regarding this (from the article I cited above) convincing: (from http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/263fnapt.asp) “The big news in biotechnology in 2007-08--proving the wisdom of the Bush policy--was the development of a technique known as "cell reprogramming," in which ordinary human skin and other cells are transformed into "induced pluripotent stem cells" (IPSC). This achievement and subsequent advances in research were deemed so impressive and important that the journal Science named the development of the IPSC as the scientific "breakthrough of the year" for 2008.
As criticism of Obama's betrayal of alternative sources has slowly bubbled up in cyberspace, some have claimed that he "had" to rescind the order because it contained a clause describing embryos as human life. Here is the offending text from the Bush 2007 executive order: Section 2 (d) human embryos and fetuses, as living members of the human species, are not raw materials to be exploited or commodities to be bought and sold;But that clause is not only accurate biology--human embryos and fetuses are not Martian, after all--but also reflects federal law. Besides, if telling the biological truth in an executive order so seared the delicate Obama sensibility, he could have reissued the alternatives-funding order omitting the biological facts about nascent human life--and then publicized it as an example of a bridge across the cultural divide that he has promised to erect.
I can think of only two reasons for this unwarranted revocation: vindictiveness against all things "Bush" or considered by the left to be "pro-life"; or a desire to get the public to view unborn human life as morally akin to a crop ripe for the harvest so as to open the door to funding destructive embryo and human cloning research--actions advocated, not coincidentally, by the New York Times in the immediate wake of Obama's stem-cell executive order. Wait, there's a third potential reason: both of the above.
President Obama's silent revocation of alternative-methods funding as a special project of the federal government betrayed the concerted attempts made over the last eight years to find a common way forward in one of the most ethically contentious areas of biotechnological research. So much for bridging the country's cultural and political divides. So much for transparency in governance. So much for taking the politics out of science.”
[Ultimately Obama injected a lot more politics and ideology into the issue than he claimed or thought, it appears, and that he believes it makes it all the worse.]

Immanentizing Evil to Religion and Creating a Secondary Ideology Against the Venom

One thing I keep thinking about is the kind of constellation of thought that keeps cropping up out there that suggests that religion is the root of all evil and that people need to be proactive and ruthless in rooting it out of the human psyche. On the one hand I see this lining up with the description of self-deception T.S. Eliot aptly and wryly gave. How convenient, he muses in one passage, to find all evil embodied in another group. There is nothing like it to put a spring in your step. But it is self-deceptive and Christians should not partake of it. But when faced with others bigotry, when they begin to regard what you stand for as the embodiment of evil, there is a temptation to counter with the same. And who knows what group started the cycle. Against the blind venom of ideological rigidity, one is tempted to form a “secondary ideology”, a defensive and despising militancy. But this is the great test of the Christian faith. Will we love our enemies as Christ loved us when we were His enemies (and as He does when we act like His enemies)? (Some seem to think the test is whether we hate ourselves for the sake of our enemies until well, Christ gets the shaft, and we rage with the nations against the Son of God).

Cardinal Newman Resists the Fracture of the University

It is interesting to me to learn that John Henry Cardinal Newman during his first years as a fellow at Oriel in Oxford was initially greatly influenced by the friendly guidance of two Seniors, one of whom would later become archly opposed to him for his stance that teachers ought, at the then ostensibly Christian Oxford university, to not merely teach but also watch over the religious life of their pupils.

“It was the powerful minds of two friendly seniors that really shaped him, in these first Oriel years, Richard Whately and Edward Hawkins. And the Oriel ‘spirit of moderation and comprehension’, wrought very powerfully, in these years to lessen that morbid sensibility and irritability of mind’, in religious matters, against which, as a characteristic weakness of his early manhood, his father had once gravely warned him.”

Several years later, in 1828, Hawkins would become Provost of Oriel in 1828 and Newman and he would come into head on collision.

“The subject of the dispute was the contention of Newman and his fellow tutors that their duties were not merely to teach but to watch over the religious life of their pupils.”

As Provost, Hawkins responded to Newman’s disagreement by ceasing to assign him any more students after 1830. Newman reflected later that had he not been deprived of his tutorship, the Tract movement (the Oxford theological movement which among other things would influence the birth of Alcoholics Anonymous) would never, humanly speaking, have occurred. The hardship was the necessary precursor to a fruitful movement.

What I find especially interesting is the point of dispute between Hawkins and Newman, a point of dispute that one might say is also between the modern university and Newman’s idea of the university. The neat, arbitrary, paralyzing and neutering divisions of modernity which cut the cords between knowledge, morality and beauty were eschewed by Newman who insisted on the synthesis even to the point of being censured and persecuted.

It may be necessary to mention that Newman at this time had been from 1822-1833 Vice-principal of a small college, the acting pastor of St. Clement’s parish in Oxford, one of the four Public Tutors in his college, and as a dean, he had “played a prominent part in taming a rowdy, hard-drinking set of undergraduates and in restoring long-relaxed college discipline.” There is more, but the point I drew from it is that he was a preacher and a spiritual man who could not and would not divorce the spiritual from the intellectual. Indeed, as he points out in his book The Idea of the University, the original idea of the university was to be versed in multiple fields of knowledge that were all ultimately unified. Modern man on the other hand lives with fracture and tends to hallow it as normal, inured to even a longing for the unified whole, and impaired in his thinking by his complacent divisions.

Last there is this note about this formative time in Newman’s life: And of all the varied forces that worked on him in the ten years since he went to Oriel, none had effected him so powerfully, by 1833, as the systematic study of these early Christian writers, Greek and Latin, whom we call the Fathers. ‘In the long Vacation of 1828 I set about to read them chronologically.”

* Quotes taken from an introduction to the Apologia Pro Vita Sua by Philip Hughes in an Image Book copy (1956), pgs. 16-18.

Golgotha Undiscerned: Philosophy's Fatality

"In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all too familiar sight- three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, 'It's disgusting the way the mob enjoys such things. Why can't the authorities execute criminals humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?' Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the nature of the true, the good and the beautiful." -W.H. Auden, 'Meditation on Good Friday' in A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (Faber, 1971), qtd. in Richard Harries' Art and the Beauty of God: A Christian Understanding, (Continuum, 1993).

Sertillanges on Virtuous Intellect

“The Virtues of a Catholic Intellectual”, Chp. 2 of Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life

As I listened to chapter 2 of Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life, I experienced a mixture of reactions. At times he roused, at times, my conscience smarted under his well aimed exhortations; at times he seemed quaint or naïve, and, when I perceived the overall unity and integrity of his vision that emerged in the chapter as a whole, I was at times moved to pause in admiration. His understanding of the interconnectedness of things impresses me as an exalted and deep grasp or reality and essential to his ability to rouse and challenge. The central and unifying vision to this chapter and to the book as a whole is the contextualization of “the intellectual life” within a whole life devoted to God. Tolstoy once wrote to the effect: “Before I am a writer, I am a man”. There must be this sense of the whole, this attentiveness to each aspect of our lives in their interconnected-ness, so that the parts can be mutually fortifying, rather than devalued and detracted from by disorder in any area. “Life is a unity”, Sertillanges insists. He discusses the connection of the virtues to the intellect, but he also discusses its connection of the body (and the body of course is connected to the virtues as well). He also counsels the Golden Mean: the right behavior and soundest course is often between two extremes. And he urges, in harmony with Scripture, that we test ourselves in order to work from a sound estimation of our capacities, neither too great, nor too low. As the Apostle Paul writes:

“If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. Each one should test his own actions. Then he can take pride in himself, without comparing himself to somebody else, for each one should carry his own load” (Galatians 6:3-5).

Many times my response to these exhortations by Sertillanges is perhaps an especially American response: “How?”- also characteristically accompanied by an impatience to “get ‘er done.” But the answer called for is a response that includes infinite dimensions. It is a call to eternal worship.

“The true springs up in the same soil as the good: their roots communicate” (p. 19). Sertillanges’ sense of the unity of truth, goodness and beauty has him captive, but he seems to overstate his argument on page 18 to the point of seeming quaint and naïve:

“Would there not be something repellent in seeing a great discovery being made by an unprincipled rascal? The unspoiled instinct of a simple man would be grievously hurt by it.”

Haven’t many great discoveries and many great works been made by singularly unprincipled rascals? In a book disturbing for its project as well as its content, the historian Paul Johnson enumerates very unprincipled sins of many leading intellectuals in the Western tradition, providing a few examples from world history of memorable intellects possessed by very badly behave men and women. But Sertillanges mitigates his statement, though not entirely, it seems, on page 19, by remarking that truth visits those who love her, and that the man of genius at work is already virtuous but that it would “suffice for his holiness if he were more completely his true self.” There remains something noble, something lovely to be reflected on in the work of a genius, even if much of their life is sinful. I can agree with Sertillanges on this and also agree with him in believing that wholeness and abundant life is not in an opposition of the intellect’s life, however, brilliant, to the virtues and the care of the body, or a negation of these, but that there is an essential unity God designed us for and God is redeeming us to, and that we should rise to with all our might, knowing Christ.
Sertillanges makes his point about the unity of the intellect and the virtues eloquently on page 22:

“But stupidity apart, what enemies do you fear? What about sloth, the grave of the best gifts? What of sensuality, which makes the body weak and lethargic, befogs memory? Of pride, which sometimes dazzles and sometimes darkens, which so drives us in the direction of our own opinion that the universal sense may escape us? Of envy, which obstinately refuses to acknowledge some light other than our own? Of irritation, which repels criticism and comes to grief on the rock of error?”

Remove the vice, he says, and the gift can reach its full measure. I think he is right. Profligate geniuses are not as sound as saintly geniuses. I prefer Newman to Lucretius, but can profit from both.
Coupled with the theme of the unity of our lives before God is the counseling of the Golden Mean: “To the virtue of studiousness, two vices are opposed: negligence on the one hand, vain curiosity on the other” (p. 25). I prize this aspect of Sertillanges’ counsel, which recurs throughout the book, and think it gives distinctive depth to his treatment of the books’ subject. An essential part of pursuing study as a spiritual discipline and as part of a life of devotion to God is not studying when you have another duty that you should be doing. To be errant in your duties as a man or woman in order to study is to cheapen your study and turn it into dilettantism.
Finally, he counsels a “sound body in a sound mind”. (Incidentally, Bin Laden and Al Qaeda also counseled this: “Salim bal fi salim jism”, but that only shows that sound advice can sometimes appear in extremely distorted lives). “Exercise every day.” Neglect of the body and its health detracts from the whole.
As a parting note, in pondering the unity of the intellectual life, the virtues, and the body, and of learning to in some manner live life as a whole with some sense of the whole, I am posed with a challenging question: how do we live our lives as a whole? And especially in a culture where more and more it seems our fragmentation is codified in our in the shape of our lives. Some of Picasso’s paintings of distorted faces of people comes to mind as illustrations of peculiarly modern form of this distortion. I also think of a debate in neuroscience about our nature and of Aristotle’s point that it makes more sense to say “I do this”, or “I do that” than to say “My soul does this”. There is a place for this (I think of the Magnificat). But from being useful, this can become codified and a numbness to a sense of the whole can set in. In neuroscience, culminating a trend throughout the medical profession and in our society in general, materialists urge that saying our brain did something is the same as saying that we did it. This expresses itself in a turn to mood altering drugs as a cure for every aspect of behavior on massively irresponsible levels in the medical profession. And this understanding, or rather failure of understanding of ourselves as a whole is also where sources of self-discipline are being eroded. But it is not easy to identify the solution. Still it occurs to me that the way to all embracing wholeness is exactly as Jesus said and made possible: we lose ourselves in a life of worship of God, the Truth.

David Alexander
9/30/2008

Pyrrhonism, of Which Civilization Can Die

Pyrrhonism: 1. the doctrine taught by Pyrrho (c. 360-c. 270 B.C.), a Greek Skeptic, that all knowledge, including the testimony of the senses, is uncertain 2. Extreme skepticism.

“But one of the features of development, whether we are taking the religious or the cultural point of view, is the appearance of skepticism- by which, of course, I do not mean infidelity or destructiveness (still less the unbelief which is due to mental sloth) but the habit of examining evidence and of the capacity for delayed decision. Scepticism is a highly civilized trait, though, when it declines into pyrrhonism, it is one of which civilization can die. Where skepticism is strength, pyrrhonism is weakness: for we need not only the strength to defer a decision, but the strength to make one.” –T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, (1940), p. 102.

[Something I wrote previously reflecting on a book by Sertillanges appies here. When Eliot talks about Pyrrhonism he seems to me to be alluding to a defining weakness of Postmodernity, the failure of judgment.]

Sertillanges has deep insight into the act of judgment. A passage I found particularly resonant is toward the end of the preface where he describes the proper approach to knowing a thing aright. In the whole of his description I can see lesser halves, distorted approaches to knowledge, which his wholeness on the subject avoids. “To be long multiple is the condition of being richly one,“ he writes. “Unity at the starting point is a mere void.” That is a saying I plan to remember. It seems to me that much of the ideologies of modernity are unities that are “mere voids” but that postmodernism seems definable by a weakness of being only multiple, and not aiming and finally believing in the richly one. Postmodernism, as successor, justifies its excesses against the excesses of the preceding ideologies. “It is a great secret to know how to give radiance to an idea by means of its twilight background. It is a further secret to preserve its power of convergence in spite of this radiating quality.” The strength of postmodernism lies in its attunement to the first secret, perhaps, but it becomes a weakness, a sickness unto death, if it does not learn the second secret.

Neither Liberalism Nor Conservatism, O Christians!

“But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative, or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things; liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of permanent things.”

–T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, (1940), p. 76 .
(from a reprint of a broadcast talk, delivered in February 1937 in a series on ‘Church, Community and State’).