I DON'T know what it
is about the hurly-burly of Christmas that makes me so reflective.
Certainly the arrival of God's son should be reason enough, but for
me it's the much-derided tinsel trappings -- the fragments of Bing
Crosby's voice, the astonishment of a house outlined in an explosion
of color, a cyber-house of light scratched into the leafless night
-- that send me a little unexpected stab of causeless joy, that lead
me to ponder first causes.
So perhaps it's not so unnatural that, after a mad dash of
last-minute shopping (a dozen CDs, a cookbook and enough Power
Rangers to defend two galaxies, thanks for asking), I found myself
in the bookstore cafe, pondering "why natural law is staging a
comeback."
That's the subtitle of an illuminating essay in The Weekly
Standard by the mysteriously named "J." Budziszewski about
the resurgence of objective moral truth.
As "J." puts it, "There are some moral truths ... a normal human
is unable not to know." In the last two years, no less than 26 books
with the word "Natural Law" in the title have been published. Of
course, before you can have a renaissance, there must first have
been a senescence. In this century, moral truth came under attack
from philosophers who pointed out that, try however hard you might,
you can't huff and puff an "is" into an "ought."
Faced with these intellectual difficulties, and even more with
the desire to have sex as they will, the intellectually powerful
among us have agreed to talk as if moral truth does not exist. It
turns out this is impossible for any sane human being, which may be
the biggest reason why moral truth is making a comeback. The same
people who say in one breath, "There is no moral truth," want very
much to say in the next that, therefore, "It's wrong to impose your
morality on other people." Voila! A new "ought" conjured up
mysteriously from an "is."
Nietzsche was perhaps one of the few thinkers who consistently
followed the absence of truth to where it logically leads: If moral
truth isn't objective, you may impose your morality on as
many people as you can. And Nietzsche ended up kissing a
horse.
Most of sin is a kind of induced irrationality; an attempt to
have our cake and eat it too, like the alcoholic who makes himself
believe he can have sobriety and one last scotch as well. Who in
their right mind would really prefer momentary lust to true love,
for example, or the escape hatch of a lie to the joy of knowing you
are trustworthy?
The learned new books offer complicated argument to overcome our
contemporary reluctance to see morality as either true or false.
This curious reticence reached its zenith in the 1992 Planned
Parenthood vs. Casey decision, where the Supreme Court, losing faith
in "self-evident" truths, asserted a newfangled "right to define
one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of
the mystery of human life."
How many lies do you have to tell yourself before such a claim
can even seem plausible? The right to a personally defined moral
code is based on an adolescent fantasy of who we really are.
Increasingly, it seems to me, the fountainhead of morality is
gratitude: recognizing the simple truth of what we did not make
ourselves. Our life is a gift of others living and dead, who have
created the world we enjoy, and which we will pass on either
enlarged or diminished. We were loved into loving, smiled into
smiling, begotten into the mystery of being.
Which, in my own meandering way, takes me not so very far, after
all, from the babe in the manger whose 2,000th birthday we celebrate
this year.
E-mail: GallagherIAV@Yahoo.com
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