“Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.”
- Archimedes (280-211 BC)
I waited patiently for the LORD;
he turned to me and heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock
and gave me a firm place to stand.
Blessed is the man
who makes the LORD his trust,
who does not look to the proud,
to those who turn aside to false gods.
- Psalm 40: 1-2,4 (NIV)
…everyone operates out of a basic worldview…
[and] all worldviews involve ideological and
philosophical assumptions — including the
secularist worldview. There is no neutrality.
- Dr. Albert Mohler, Friday, April 25, 2008
Mohler’s most recent blog post (see link above) takes a few paragraphs to get going but, as I’ve come to appreciate from him, it winds to a conclusion absolutely vast in its implications, yet based on a principle that’s as sound and as simple as the quote I have excerpted above, namely:
Those who wish to separate religious views, and the people who hold them, from legitimacy in the sphere of public debate are, in fact, imposing their own, whether they know it or not. They can claim no special, objective vantage or privilege and it is pernicious that they should be allowed to do so.
Thus the oft-forgotten emphasis in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting government from preventing the free exercise of religion (double negative; parse carefully!) has metasticized into a movement that wants to scrub from politics, law, government and public policy all traces of traditional religion, in favor of their own: a religion of anti-religion.
More later. Off to church…
[Four hours later, with a big pasta lunch and a handful of dark chocolate on board, all brain circuits firing...]
One irony is that they (the seculo-moralists) operate, wittingly or not, within a framework of religion-like precepts at least as dogmatic as any they attribute to traditional religion but without root in anything other than the average of public opinion at any particular moment. I.e., ‘grounded’ in nothing other than a great big ‘raft’ of public opinion that’s become un-anchored from anything eternally true.
I’m a student, professional practitioner, and huge fan of ‘wisdom of crowds’ phenomena a la James Surowiecki’s book of the same name, but only for their apparent prescience on many factual questions. They aren’t terribly good at providing cannot deliver any meaningful guidance on moral ones, as I learned a few years ago, up-close-and-personal as a member of a particularly liberal Protestant denomination that sought democracy in everything… and divine, authoritative wisdom in very little. (Question for the day: If Moses had taken a vote in the desert, would the Jews ever have reached the promised land? Answer: Yes. Because God is God and He would have found a way regardless… however, under that scenario, the only one who would have made it would have been Moses himself.)
The SeMos (seculo-moralists) derive their power not from any deep-rooted principle, text, or systematic time-tested theology, but only from an instinctive impulse towards democracy in everything — an idea virtually unchallenged in the West in the 21st century. Paradoxically, they also draw power from our hunger to have someone tell us what to do, i.e., our all-too-human attraction to tyrants, both petty and otherwise. I can think of no better example of this toxic contradiction than the UN, where the averaging of world opinion has led to the demise of moral clarity and the elevation of those without any morals at all.
Dr. Mohler, in his Friday blog piece, takes issue with an article by Mary Warnock in the current issues of The New Statesman. Who is she and why should we care? Mohler writes:
Mary Warnock, formally known as Baroness Warnock of Weeke, is one of the most influential figures in the field of biomedical ethics and ethical philosophy. She emerged in the international limelight in 1984 when she headed the committee that brought the so-called “Warnock Report” that legalized IVF procedures in Great Britain.
OK so far. Fair-minded people could conceivably come down on either side of IVF — a biomedical advance that seldom brings people into the streets with placards and megaphones [pun intended]. At least in principle — at least nominally — IVF is an advance that promotes life. I personally know of several couples who, after much struggle and angst, have gone this route. It is not mine to say that their children are not amazing gifts, treasured to a degree that those of us who have not had to can even imagine. (As a bumper sticker I saw yesterday said: “Children are gifts from God”. The parents of IVF children know this viscerally).
In practice however, and despite such positive outcomes, IVF raises a host of ethical conundrums, not least of them embryonic ‘culling’ (in vitro and/or in utero; hmm… can you think of a word that rhymes with ‘culling’?) the status of frozen embryos (especially in divorce cases) and the displacement of massive resources, energy and money that might otherwise go towards adopting and caring for kids without parents, already walking around. As I said: reasonable people, both religious and non-religious can and do come down on either side on this one.
I make that digression only to point out that IVF is one of the least controversial of Baroness Warnock’s pronouncements. Yet it still is a great example of how one’s world view (or, I would submit, one’s view of the world, whether there is anything beyond it, and if so what that ’stuff’ is and how we can know it, aka one’s cosmological/eternal view, or lack thereof) inevitably informs how one views something like this. I ask you to hold onto that word ‘inevitably’ as you read the rest of this.
Dr. Mohler continues:
In recent years, Baroness Warnock has become a major proponent of a secularized vision of ethics — ranging across the field of ethical concerns. Baroness Warnock wants to make certain that religious and theological objections are not allowed to impede what she sees as scientific and medical advances.
And here, with the word ‘advances’, begins the problem. It is the same problem longtime readers know I have with the word ‘progressive’ as well. Advancing… towards what? Progressing… towards what? A statement about movement (e.g., for “change”) says nothing about direction, velocity or destination. It may bore and/or irritate some to go into semantics here, but without them we might just as well grunt and hit one another with sticks. Contrary to what the deconstructionists would have us believe, language is all we’ve got and it is sufficient (when properly used) to convey meaning, albeit with difficulty. (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” — John 1:1)
The word ‘advances’ (e.g., in medical technology) seems self-evident in the main, just as might a reference to ‘advances’ in auto safety (something on my mind after purchasing a 1969 Karmann Ghia for my wife for our 20th anniversary and discovering that it had only lap belts and no shoulder straps.) It is not the main that’s a problem. It is the margins. The areas in which one person’s ‘advance’ is another’s setback and vice versa. Biomedical ethics are rife with them, even as we can almost all agree on thousands of utterly non-controversial ones (antibiotics come right to mind).
Here is Baroness Warnock herself:
Society is not a religious organisation like a church. Laws must as far as possible be made in the interests, far wider than matters of faith, of all members of society, whether or not they hold any religious views. As legislators, MPs and governments must consider the consequences of the measures before them, how they will probably affect society and whether they will do more good than harm. It is the role of legislators to be consequentialists. They must not ask, “What does my religion teach about this measure?” but “Will society benefit from it in the empirical world?”
To our pluralist-indoctrinated ears, this seems reasonable at first glance — a high-brow version of Rodney King’s famous “Can’t we all just get along?” But I urge you to look closer. And think. Here is what I see, and it goes beyond what Dr. Mohler chose to treat in his first-rate critique:
To ask whether ’society will benefit’ from (fill in the blank) is to ask how one would know — again, at the margins — what is and is not a benefit and over what span of time. That is, it begs the question of what socio-moral framework ought to prevail in assessing benefits.
For example, if one takes a very long term but earthly view of ‘consequentialism’ (her word, slightly morphed) e.g., the coalescence of a culture able to persist over millennia, one has very few examples from which to choose historically; the most prominent by far being the the Judeo-Christian, aka biblical one.
(Oh irony of ironies.)
If one goes further, taking an eternal view, i.e., one in which there is a living moral force and reality no less true than that of gravity, that our souls persist after death one way or the other, and that the world is just a transit station and not our real home, then one’s answers to biomedical ethics questions in the first decade of the 21st century will be very different indeed from if one’s view of ‘consequences’ is framed only in terms of decades, e.g., whether my parents will benefit from therapies derived from human embryos.
In other words, Baroness Warnock’s framing leaves open the most fundamental question of all: one’s view of life, the universe and everything. It is not an idle question, and it is not one for which it is possible to adopt the simplistic notion of dividing religion from everything else. (A notion no more plausible than the widely prevailing but anti-common-sense notion that one’s personal and public lives can and or should be entirely separate.)
In essence, Baroness Warnock is asking us to accept the word ‘benefit’ as patently obvious to everyone and therefore not open for discussion. (Reminds me of a certain Tennessee ex-Senator’s approach to climate science… but we’re not gonna go there today.) That tacit request to accept the notion of benefit as non-controversial is patently absurd in light of what she (correctly) observes (and which Dr. Moher notes) earlier in her article, namely, that moral consensus no longer exists — at least in Britain. Small wonder. We’re next. Baroness Warnock writes:
…the comfortable assumption of coincidence between moral beliefs and the criminal law is no longer justifiable. Though much of the law remains squarely in accord with what society believes to be right, we are more conscious than ever before of sometimes irreconcilable differences. As private individuals, we may be content to advocate a practice of tolerance, a kind of moral relativism, but in public life, in legislation and the enforcement of law, there is no room for relativism. Society survives only if it is subject to the rule of law, and the law must be unequivocal, and must be seen to apply to everyone alike.
To which Dr. Mohler responds:
Put into plain language, Warnock believes that society is now so divided over basic moral questions that no moral consensus now exists. Thus, the law must choose sides and “must be unequivocal.” In other words, one side wins a total policy victory.
Where does all of this leave us? (Besides with a blog post that might make Tolstoy shudder.) Just here — I hope: With a Toto-like pulling-back of the curtain of secular righteousness covering up an argument that pretends to far more power and authority than it actually deserves.
Seculo-moralists would like to draw a line around all ideas and mores they deem ‘religious’ (or at least religious and outside of their instinctive comfort zone) and thus preemptively constrain the influence of those ideas in society at large.
In so doing (and here is the problem) they tacitly grant themselves the authority to define what should go into that dis-empowered box of views (i.e., those that stem from traditional religion) and what should go into another box we might call ‘diluted for seculo-pluralist consumption’. At its best, one might call this the averaging of morality. At its worst — as I am asserting — it leads not to averaging but to tyranny.
Rather than accepting the messy, pluralist stalemate Baroness Warnock observes, she seeks, in the name of unspecified ‘advance’, to tilt the socio-political playing field in such a way that (to quote Orwell) “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. It is the same impulse that argues for ends justifying means. We know where that leads, and its ugly.
What is unacceptable is that, in so doing, the ‘SeMos’ seek to deal themselves the trump card that would empower them to define what guideposts you and I may use in the public sphere in arguing for what is and is not ‘progress’, what is and is not an ‘advance’, what is and is not right, what is and is not true. In short, they seek to constrain the political and social power of anyone who does not buy in to their secular world view. They are tyrants by any other name.
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End note relative to the picture at the top of this post: Was I the only one unaware that 2008 is the ‘Year of the Frog’? And is it too kitschy to mention (as I learned in an e-mail late last week) that F.R.O.G. stands for ‘Forever Rely On God’? Have a blessed week everyone!
