Good afternoon, everyone.  I’ve just posted links to two new essays of mine to the Articles page.

“How Happiness Studies Lets Us Down,” which appeared yesterday in the online edition of First Things.

”Why Is There Something and Not Rather Nothing? Hey, Whatever,” which appeared yesterday in the Cambridge blog Fifteen Eighty Four.

Coming up in Monday’s post:  “Triumphalism.”  Keep your eyes peeled.

An interesting article by my friend Michael Cook, editor of the fine Australian journal Mercator, suggests that “Sooner or Later, Babies Will Be Too Precious to Abort.”  Using U.N. statistics, he points out that abortion is not only the leading cause of mortality worldwide, but outnumbers all the other causes combined.  Asking “Is this just a debating point?”, he answers “No, it’s the reason why abortion will eventually be banned everywhere in the world.”  Birth rates are dropping so rapidly all over the world that “Sooner or later, people will compare the decline in population to the number of abortions and conclude that this makes no sense at all.”

That may well be true.  I fervently hope that it is.  But I can see other possibilities.  Support for abortion is a facet of a whole cluster of disordered attitudes toward sex, marriage, love, fertility, natural law, and the preciousness of human life in general.  Demographic collapse may make it easier to challenge these attitudes – that is the hope.  But it won’t make these attitudes disappear by itself.  In fact, unless we do challenge them, they will condition our very response to demographic collapse, so that we become more disordered still.

Consider.  To our rulers, the most alarming thing about the decline in the birth rate is that populations age:  There are too few young people to pay for the care of all the old ones.  So, yes, the people who make the laws may call for having more little ones, but instead -- or in addition -- they may call for having fewer old ones.  Those who are now gung-ho for aborting the unwanted young might become determined to euthanize the unwanted aged.

Other people, who agree that we need more babies but don’t want to have any themselves, will ask, “Why do we need parents to have babies?”  Already, IVF separates the conception of the child from the loving embrace of his mother and father, so why not go further?  O brave new world!  We can manufacture sperm and eggs from ordinary cells, and gestate babies in womb tanks.  How many do you need?  Thirty million?  Fifty?  Eighty?  Coming right up.

Biologists are already investigating such possibilities.  If you talk with young people, you will find that a good many take for granted that this is our future.  Fatalistically, they assume that anything that can be done, will be done. 

Well, here is something that can be done!  Let us recover our awe for the preciousness of life.  Let us restore our lost reverence for its natural order.  Let us look forward to getting married and becoming moms and dads.

Gender ideology has caused enormous confusion in the courts of many countries.  Several years ago, I was invited to give a lecture on the topic at a Polish scientific conference.  If you would like to read the talk, titled “Transsexualism as Transhumanism,” you can find the English version here and the Polish version here, or you can just go to the Articles page.

The conference was “Adjudications of Courts in Cases Relating the Sexual and Gender Minority vs. Human Good.”  The sponsor was The Institute of Justice in Warsaw.  All of the conference papers have been published in a book, edited by Przemysław Ostojski and Mark Regnerus, which I recommend to anyone who wants to dig in:  Contemporary Problems of Protection of Marriage and Identity of the Person in the Light of American and European Case Law: An Interdisciplinary Approach.

Sometimes I collect and log thoughts I don’t want to discuss at full length.  So you may consider today’s post a sheaf of promissory notes.

Loving One’s Enemies.  After the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, the victorious Allies embarked on the Marshall Plan to help their former enemies rebuild their economies and institutions.  I have sometimes wondered a victorious Israel might be able to accomplish something like that in Gaza.  Of course such a plan could work only if Hamas were entirely uprooted and eradicated, for if permitted a hand in rebuilding, those currently in power in Gaza would rebuild nothing but the capacity for more terror.  Unfortunately, it now looks as though Israel will not be permitted to finish the job, so my speculations are probably moot.  A Marshall Plan for Gaza might have been impossible anyway, for it is much easier for the people of a territory to accept help from those who merely put an end to their campaign of extermination, as happened in Europe, than to accept it from the very people they had tried unsuccessfully to exterminate.  But one may dream.

The Administrative State.  I carelessly remarked to someone the other day that the administrative state is out of control.  What made the remark fatuous is that the administrative state is designed to be out of control -- to be as autonomous, as free from checks and balances, as anything in government can be.  Elected officials pass by like rain showers; bureaucrats endure like glaciers.  Laws are highly visible; regulations are too numerous to keep track of.  Theoretically, legislators can override administrative decisions; in reality, they like having someone else to take the heat for them.  Voters mutter against big government; but the agencies generate their own constituencies, which are much more highly focused and committed.  So of course the administrative state is out of control.  What else should anyone have expected?  That it will one day collapse is a certainty.  Whether it can be cut down to size before that happens is a much harder question.

The Limits of Law.  All law is premised consciously or unconsciously on moral judgments.  Yet as Prohibition taught us, or should have taught us, law cannot punish every sin or suppress every vice, and attempting the impossible may make matters worse.  Sometimes, when I make such observations, people draw the strange conclusion that even certain forms of murder should be legal.  No, allowing people to kill the very young, the very sick, and the very weak isn’t like allowing people to drink more than is good for them.  If we refuse even to protect innocent life, we may as well give up having any laws at all.  In the case of abortion, a sounder deduction from the fact that law cannot punish every sin would be that only the practitioners of this grisly trade should be punished, not their dreadfully misguided clients.  Leave the women to the judgment and mercy of God.  As pro-lifers have always maintained.

A Strange but Common Combination.  Not long ago a young woman lambasted me for defending the Israeli effort to eradicate Hamas, declaring that I was championing murder.  She insisted that all humans are naturally loving and peaceful – and yet at the same time, defended the rape and murder spree of the terrorists themselves, not to mention their other attacks and atrocities over the years.  Am I alone in finding it difficult to reconcile these two views?  She said I am a poor excuse for a Christian.  No doubt I am.  But I don’t think that’s why.

Ears Too Pure to Hear Unwokeness.  There is nothing surprising in the fact that people don’t like hearing views with which they disagree.  The surprising thing is how difficult some folk find it to hear such views at all, even when their ears seem undamaged.  For example, if I remark that men tend to be more aggressive and women to be more nurturing, I can expect to be told that I consider women inferior.  No.  In some ways they are superior.  But I refuse to judge women by the standards of men – and to do that, I think, really is to consider them inferior.

You aren’t indoctrinating me enough.  Over the years, the distribution of my teaching evaluations has always been bipolar.  I receive both strong praise and strong criticism, and not a lot in between.  That hasn’t changed, and in most ways, neither has my teaching.  What’s new is the character of some of the complaints.  They used to focus on things like my grading, my assignments, or my lecture style.  In recent years, though, I have sometimes been told that I’m a poor teacher because I’ve expressed skepticism about one or another conventional progressive dogma.  One student, who didn’t even take my course, complained to my dean because he had hunted down my blog and didn’t like it.

Parasitism.  Deism is parasitic on Christianity.  When people in a Christian culture lose their faith, they become Deists.  But as Christianity loses cultural influence, people do not become Deists; they repaganize.  That is, they no longer merely deny biblical faith -- they reject the natural law, place other gods in God’s place, and deny their need for His grace.  It may seem strange that it is even possible to deny something like the natural law.  Isn’t it a human universal?  Yes, but our fallen condition produces two universals, not one.  One is the law written on the heart, which is ultimately impossible to erase.  The other is the desire to erase it, which is equally inexorable, for we are at war with ourselves.  The best of the old pagan philosophers clearly recognized the first universal, but they were only dimly conscious of the second.  They seemed to think that the problem was merely that some people aren’t virtuous enough.

A young man in one of my classes ingenuously suggested that the educated and well-off are more virtuous than the poor.  I wasn’t surprised that he held such a complacent view, but only that he so readily gave voice it.  Among well-off people, this sort of thinking is no less common than it ever was, but nowadays it is impolitic to let it show.

Such views have a history.  Most political thinkers in most times and places have believed good character more prevalent among the well-off.  They may have disagreed about which is more to be admired, the rich or the middle class, but they agreed in their suspicion of poor and working folk.

Aristotle thought generosity required wealth, because the poor have nothing to be generous with.  The Romans depended on men of wealth and good family, because they had leisure to attend to the affairs of the community.  Thomas Jefferson located the mainstay of the republic in sturdy yeoman farmers, who had enough property for independence of spirit, but not enough to oppress those who had less.   Alexander Hamilton was more impressed by “gentlemen of business,” who couldn’t be pushed around and had experience in getting things done.  From time to time I hear people say that tycoons are more to be trusted than working people, because they are too rich to be bribed.

Not all of this is mistaken.  Certainly there are differences among classes and social groups, and there really are advantages to experience and education.  But there is far, far less to these complacencies than meets the eye.  The comfortable are not less prone to vice than poor and working people, but prone to different vices.

A man from the slums is more likely to rob a convenience store.  But a man from a gated community is more likely to embezzle.

A mother on the dole is more likely to commit welfare fraud.  But a bank examiner is more likely to defraud the bank.

A poor man’s sense of humor is more likely to be crude.  But a rich man’s is more likely to be arrogant.

An uneducated bully is more likely to twist an arm.  But an educated bully is more likely to twist the law.

As to bribery, it isn’t through indifference to the chance of gain that one becomes a tycoon in the first place.

And as to generosity, I will never forget the poor woman who invited me and my wife to sit down and share her cake.