A good high school graduation present

To “live like an animal” isn’t really to live like an animal, but only to live as a human badly.  For although we too have animal powers, we do not, we cannot, experience our animal powers as animals do -- nor would it be good for us if we could.  For us, every impulse is mediated and modified by mind; the notion of a “raw feel” is a dissipated fantasy.

Ideally, the mind acquires wisdom; ideally, the lower powers acquire discipline.  Then, rather than champing at the bit, they are taken into partnership with reason.  Like salt dissolved in water, they remain themselves, and yet they are drawn out of themselves -- held in solution by a flood of rational meaning.  Animals feed; we share meals.  Animals mate; we marry.  Animals flock; we practice friendship.

Tomorrow:  Déjà Vu, Part 1 of 2

Some people dispute the classification of man as a rational creature because we abuse our rational powers.  What they overlook is that when we have bad reasons, even then we have reasons; when we obstinately choose to rationalize the unreasonable, even then we engage in reasoning.  Such is our paradoxical dignity, even in the way that we sin. We are but little lower than the angels, some of whom fell, as did we.

Tomorrow:  Living Like an Animal

To say that animals have natural inclinations is not to say that animals never behave inappropriately, as when one male animal attempts to mount another.  Rather it means that the creational design provides a standard for considering the behavior unfitting.  In such a case, what nature provides to draw males and females together has misfired.  The fact that the creature may become habituated to such behavior leaves this judgment untouched; even things that are bad for us can become “second nature.”

It is easy to see how misfires can happen among subrational animals.  During breeding season, the territorial defense response of the male stickleback fish is triggered by the sight of red, because competing male sticklebacks have red bellies.  But the male stickleback attacks anything red, not just other fish, because it is incapable of understanding its ends.

Among human beings, the etiology of misfires is much more complex because we have rational souls.  Even though we are capable of grasping our ends, we may misunderstand them -- sometimes willfully.

Tomorrow:  Paradoxical Dignity

Not even natural inclinations are always fully operating.  For example, the mind of a sleeping man has the deep dispositional structure that normally enables him to consider the dependence of conclusions on premises, but because he is asleep, he cannot use it.  In the same way, the mind of a small child has the deep dispositional structure that will one day enable him to grasp the general principles of the natural law, but because he has not yet reached the age of reason, he cannot correctly put them into action.

Yet isn’t it interesting that something is there even so?  Even the smallest child knows that the force of “That’s not fair!” is greater than the force of “But I want!”  He cannot reliably discern what is fair and unfair – but he grasps that there is a difference.  No animal grasps that.  We don’t have a tape measure long enough to measure the chasm between the silliest child and the wisest chimp.

Tomorrow:  Misfires

Mondays are for questions from students.  This student hails from my own institution, the University of Texas.

Question:

Although the Declaration of Independence proclaims “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” American political thought seems to have severed its connections with those ideas.  How did the American tradition understand God, and how did that understanding justify natural rights?

Answer:

To say that we have natural rights is to say that we have certain rights because of the kind of being that we are.  What kind is that?  A human being is a person, an individual reality of a rational nature, “the most perfect thing in all nature.”  He can never be a mere part of something else, in the way that your arm is a mere part of your body.  That’s why, even though a human being can be subject to authority, he cannot simply be owned by the state, to be used as the state desires.  Not even God views us as mere tools, for though we were created by and for His love, and we owe Him our utter loyalty and obedience, the Creator made man in His image.

Fortunately, the American Founders were influenced by this robust tradition.  Unfortunately, they were also confused by various early modern thinkers who thought they were raising the stature of natural rights, but subtly distorted them.  Not even the best of them, the English thinker John Locke, realized that a man is a more excellent thing than a tool.  He argued that the reason you have rights against me is merely that you are God’s tool, not mine.  Take a close look at his Second Treatise of Government, Chapter 2, Section 6, and you will see what I mean.

This view – affirming natural rights, yet for confused and insufficient reasons -- was like a lovely, fresh red apple with a worm in it.  The apple can’t remain as it is; if you don’t do anything about the worm, it decays.  That is what has been happening, for the people of our day are deeply mixed up about rights.  At one extreme are legal positivists, who think that there aren’t any natural rights – that government creates rights and can take them away again.  At the other extreme are people who think that the autonomous self is utterly sovereign -- that anyone who wants something badly enough has a transcendent right to it, and the government has a duty to back him up.  Oddest of all, some people try to occupy both extremes at once.

The classical view that rights depend on the kind of being that we are could bring order to this chaos, but is widely rejected.  For example, the supporters of abortion -- whether they realize it or not – are logically committed to the view that either not all human beings are persons, or else personhood is a matter of degree.  Either way, we are headed for a caste system in which some people have greater rights than others and may privately decree death for them.  Infants.  The old.  The infirm.

The only way to save the apple is to get rid of the worm, and that, I think, is the task for our day.

Tomorrow:  Child and Chimp