http://catholica.pontifications.net/?p=1112



The Revenge of Conscience

J. Buziszewski


Things are getting worse very quickly now.

http://catholica.pontifications.net/?p=1112



The Revenge of Conscience

J. Buziszewski


Things are getting worse very quickly now. The list of what we are
required to approve is growing ever longer.

Things are getting worse very quickly now. The list of what we are
required to approve is growing ever longer. Consider just the domain of
sexual practice. First we were to approve sex before marriage, then
without marriage, now against marriage. First with one, then with a
series, now with a crowd. First with the other sex, then with the same.
First between adults, then between children, then between adults and
children. The last item has not been added yet, but will be soon: you
can tell from the change in language, just as you can tell the approach
of winter from the change in the color of leaves. As any sin passes
through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its
name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague
tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation
"intergenerational intimacy": that's euphemism. A good-hearted
editor tried to talk me out of using the term "sodomy": that's
avoidance. My students don't know the word "fornication" at all:
that's forgetfulness. <et-frigging-cetera>

http://catholica.pontifications.net/?p=1112



The Revenge of Conscience

J. Buziszewski


Things are getting worse very quickly now. The list of what we are
required to approve is growing ever longer. Consider just the domain of
sexual practice. First we were to approve sex before marriage, then
without marriage, now against marriage. First with one, then with a
series, now with a crowd. First with the other sex, then with the same.
First between adults, then between children, then between adults and
children. The last item has not been added yet, but will be soon: you
can tell from the change in language, just as you can tell the approach
of winter from the change in the color of leaves. As any sin passes
through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its
name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague
tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation
"intergenerational intimacy": that's euphemism. A good-hearted
editor tried to talk me out of using the term "sodomy": that's
avoidance. My students don't know the word "fornication" at all:
that's forgetfulness.

The pattern is repeated in the house of death. First we were to approve
of killing unborn babies, then babies in process of birth; next came
newborns with physical defects, now newborns in perfect health.
Nobel-prize laureate James Watson proposes that parents of newborns be
granted a grace period during which they may have their babies killed,
and in 1994 a committee of the American Medical Association proposed
harvesting organs from some sick babies even before they die. First we
were to approve of suicide, then to approve of assisting it. Now we are
to approve of a requirement to assist it, for, as Ernest van den Haag
has argued, it is "unwarranted" for doctors not to kill patients
who seek death. First we were to approve of killing the sick and
unconscious, then of killing the conscious and consenting. Now we are
to approve of killing the conscious and protesting, for in the United
States, doctors starved and dehydrated stroke patient Marjorie Nighbert
to death despite her pleading "I'm hungry," "I'm thirsty,"
"Please feed me," and "I want food." Such cases are only to be
expected when food and water are now often classified as optional
treatments rather than humane care; we have not long to go before
joining the Netherlands, where involuntary euthanasia is common. Dutch
physician and author Bert Keizer has described his response when a
nursing home resident choked on her food: he shot her full of morphine
and waited for her to die. Such a deed by a doctor in the land that
resisted the Nazis.

Why do things get worse so fast? Of course we have names for the
process, like "collapse," "decay," and "slippery slope." By
conjuring images-a stricken house, a gangrenous limb, a sliding
talus-they make us feel we understand. Now, I am no enemy to
word-pictures, but a civilization is not really a house, a limb, or a
heap of rocks; it cannot literally fall in, rot, or skid out from
underfoot. Images can only illustrate an explanation; they cannot
substitute for one. So why do things get worse so fast? It would be
well to know, in case the process can be arrested.

The usual explanation is that conscience is weakened by neglect. Once a
wrong is done, the next wrong comes more easily. On this view
conscience is mainly a restraint, a resistance, a passive barrier. It
doesn't so much drive us on as hold us back, and when persistently
attacked, the restraining wall gets thinner and thinner and finally
disappears. Often this explanation is combined with another: that
conscience comes from culture, that it is built up in us from outside.
In this view the heart is malleable. We don't clearly know what is
right and wrong, and when our teachers change the lessons, our
consciences change their contents. What once we deemed wrong, we deem
right; what once we deemed right, we deem wrong.

There is something to these explanations, but neither can account for
the sheer dynamism of wickedness-for the fact that we aren't gently
wafted into the abyss but violently propel ourselves into it. Nor, as I
will show, can either one account for the peculiar quality of our
present moral confusion.

I suggest a different explanation. Conscience is not a passive barrier
but an active force; though it can hold us back, it can also drive us
on. Moreover, conscience comes not from without but from within: though
culture can trim the fringes, the core cannot be changed. The reason
things get worse so fast must somehow lie not in the weakness of
conscience but in its strength, not in its shapelessness but in its
shape[....]

We've seen that although conscience works in everyone, it doesn't
restrain everyone. In all of us some of the time, in some of us all of
the time, its fearsome energy merely "multiplies transgressions."
Bent backwards by denial, it is more likely to catalyze moral collapse
than hold it back.

But conscience is not the only expression of the natural law in human
nature. Thomas Aquinas defined law as a form of discipline that compels
through fear of punishment. In the case of human law, punishment means
suffering the civil consequences of violation; in the case of natural
law it means suffering the natural consequences of violation. If I cut
myself, I bleed. If I get drunk, I have a hangover. If I sleep with
many women, I lose the power to care for anyone, and sow pregnancies,
pain, and suspicion.

Unfortunately, the disciplinary effect of natural consequences is
diminished in at least two ways. These two diminishers are the main
reason why the discipline takes so long, so that the best that can be
hoped for in most cultures is a pendulum swing between moral laxity and
moral strictness.

The first diminisher is a simple time lag: not every consequence of
violating the natural law strikes immediately. Some results make
themselves felt only after several generations, and by that time people
are so deeply sunk in denial that even more pain is necessary to bring
them to their senses. A good example of a long-term consequence is the
increase of venereal disease. When I was a boy we all knew about
syphilis and gonorrhea, but because of penicillin they were supposed to
be on the way out. Today the two horrors are becoming
antibiotic-resistant, and AIDS, herpes, chlamydia, genital warts, human
papilloma virus, and more than a dozen other sexually transmitted
diseases, most of them formerly rare, are ravaging the population.
Other long-term consequences of violating the laws of sex are poverty,
because single women have no one to help them raise their children;
crime, because boys grow into adolescence without a father's
influence; and child abuse, because although spouses tend to greet
babies with joy, live-ins tend to greet them with jealousy and
resentment. Each generation is less able to maintain families than the
one before. Truly the iniquities of the fathers-and mothers-are
visited upon the children and the children's children to the third
and fourth generation.

The second diminisher comes from us: "Dreaming of systems so perfect
that no one will need to be good," we exert our ingenuity to escape
from the natural consequences of breaking the natural law. Not all
social practices have this effect. For instance, threatening drunk
drivers with legal penalties supplements the discipline of natural
consequences rather than undermining it. Nor is the effect always
intended. We don't devise social insurance programs in order to
encourage improvidence, though they do have this result. It isn't
even always wrong. It would be abominable to refuse treatment to a
lifelong smoker with emphysema, even though he may have been buoyed in
his habit by the confidence that the doctors would save him. But to act
with the purpose of compensating for immorality is always wrong, as
when we set up secondary school clinics to dispense pills and condoms
to teenagers.

Here is an axiom: We cannot alter human nature, physical, emotional, or
spiritual. A corollary is that no matter how cleverly devised, our
contrivances never do succeed in canceling out the natural consequences
of breaking the natural law. At best they delay them, and for several
reasons they can even make them worse. In the first place they alter
incentives: People with ready access to pills and condoms see less
reason to be abstinent. In the second place they encourage wishful
thinking: Most people grossly exaggerate their effectiveness in
preventing disease and pregnancy and completely ignore the risks. In
the third place they reverse the force of example: Before long the
practice of abstinence erodes even among people who don't take
precautions. Finally they transform thought: Members of the
contraceptive culture think liberty from the natural consequences of
their decisions is somehow owed to them.

There comes a time when even the law shares their view. In Planned
Parenthood v. Casey, which reauthorized the private use of lethal
violence against life in the womb, the Supreme Court admitted that its
original abortion ruling might have been wrong, but upheld it anyway.
As it explained, "For two decades of economic and social
developments, people have organized their intimate relationships and
made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in
society in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that
contraception should fail. . . . An entire generation has come of age
free to assume [this] concept of liberty." To put the thought more
simply, what we did has separated sex from responsibility for resulting
life for so long that to change the rules on people now would be
unfair.

Naught avails; our efforts to thwart the law of natural consequences
merely make the penalty more crushing when it comes. The only question
is whether our culture will be able to survive the return stroke of the
piston.

To survive what is bearing down on us, we must learn four hard lessons:
to acknowledge the natural law as a true and universal morality; to be
on guard against our own attempts to overwrite it with new laws that
are really rationalizations for wrong; to fear the natural consequences
of its violation, recognizing their inexorability; and to forbear from
all further attempts to compensate for immorality, returning on the
path that brought us to this place.

Unfortunately, the condition of human beings since before recorded
history is that we don't want to learn hard lessons. We would rather
remain in denial. What power can break through such a barrier?

The only Power that ever has. Thomas Aquinas writes that when a nation
suffers tyranny, those who enthroned the tyrant may first try to remove
him, then call upon the emperor for help. When these human means fail,
they should consider their sins and pray. We are now so thoroughly
under the tyranny of our vices that it would be difficult for us to
recognize an external tyrant at all. By our own hands we enthroned
them: our strength no longer suffices for their removal: they have
suspended the senate of right reason and the assembly of the virtues:
the emperor, our will, is held hostage: and it is time to pray.

Nothing new can be written on the heart, but nothing needs to be; all
we need is the grace of God to see what is already there. We don't
want to read the letters, because they burn; but they do burn, so at
last we must read them. This is why the nation can repent. This is why
the plague can be arrested. This is why the culture of death can be
redeemed. "For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before
thee . . . a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not
despise."

http://catholica.pontifications.net/?p=1112



The Revenge of Conscience

J. Buziszewski


Things are getting worse very quickly now. The list of what we are
required to approve is growing ever longer. Consider just the domain of
sexual practice. First we were to approve sex before marriage, then
without marriage, now against marriage. First with one, then with a
series, now with a crowd. First with the other sex, then with the same.
First between adults, then between children, then between adults and
children. The last item has not been added yet, but will be soon: you
can tell from the change in language, just as you can tell the approach
of winter from the change in the color of leaves. As any sin passes
through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its
name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague
tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation
"intergenerational intimacy": that's euphemism. A good-hearted
editor tried to talk me out of using the term "sodomy": that's
avoidance. My students don't know the word "fornication" at all:
that's forgetfulness.

The pattern is repeated in the house of death. First we were to approve
of killing unborn babies, then babies in process of birth; next came
newborns with physical defects, now newborns in perfect health.
Nobel-prize laureate James Watson proposes that parents of newborns be
granted a grace period during which they may have their babies killed,
and in 1994 a committee of the American Medical Association proposed
harvesting organs from some sick babies even before they die. First we
were to approve of suicide, then to approve of assisting it. Now we are
to approve of a requirement to assist it, for, as Ernest van den Haag
has argued, it is "unwarranted" for doctors not to kill patients
who seek death. First we were to approve of killing the sick and
unconscious, then of killing the conscious and consenting. Now we are
to approve of killing the conscious and protesting, for in the United
States, doctors starved and dehydrated stroke patient Marjorie Nighbert
to death despite her pleading "I'm hungry," "I'm thirsty,"
"Please feed me," and "I want food." Such cases are only to be
expected when food and water are now often classified as optional
treatments rather than humane care; we have not long to go before
joining the Netherlands, where involuntary euthanasia is common. Dutch
physician and author Bert Keizer has described his response when a
nursing home resident choked on her food: he shot her full of morphine
and waited for her to die. Such a deed by a doctor in the land that
resisted the Nazis.

Why do things get worse so fast? Of course we have names for the
process, like "collapse," "decay," and "slippery slope." By
conjuring images-a stricken house, a gangrenous limb, a sliding
talus-they make us feel we understand. Now, I am no enemy to
word-pictures, but a civilization is not really a house, a limb, or a
heap of rocks; it cannot literally fall in, rot, or skid out from
underfoot. Images can only illustrate an explanation; they cannot
substitute for one. So why do things get worse so fast? It would be
well to know, in case the process can be arrested.

The usual explanation is that conscience is weakened by neglect. Once a
wrong is done, the next wrong comes more easily. On this view
conscience is mainly a restraint, a resistance, a passive barrier. It
doesn't so much drive us on as hold us back, and when persistently
attacked, the restraining wall gets thinner and thinner and finally
disappears. Often this explanation is combined with another: that
conscience comes from culture, that it is built up in us from outside.
In this view the heart is malleable. We don't clearly know what is
right and wrong, and when our teachers change the lessons, our
consciences change their contents. What once we deemed wrong, we deem
right; what once we deemed right, we deem wrong.

There is something to these explanations, but neither can account for
the sheer dynamism of wickedness-for the fact that we aren't gently
wafted into the abyss but violently propel ourselves into it. Nor, as I
will show, can either one account for the peculiar quality of our
present moral confusion.

I suggest a different explanation. Conscience is not a passive barrier
but an active force; though it can hold us back, it can also drive us
on. Moreover, conscience comes not from without but from within: though
culture can trim the fringes, the core cannot be changed. The reason
things get worse so fast must somehow lie not in the weakness of
conscience but in its strength, not in its shapelessness but in its
shape[....]

We've seen that although conscience works in everyone, it doesn't
restrain everyone. In all of us some of the time, in some of us all of
the time, its fearsome energy merely "multiplies transgressions."
Bent backwards by denial, it is more likely to catalyze moral collapse
than hold it back.

But conscience is not the only expression of the natural law in human
nature. Thomas Aquinas defined law as a form of discipline that compels
through fear of punishment. In the case of human law, punishment means
suffering the civil consequences of violation; in the case of natural
law it means suffering the natural consequences of violation. If I cut
myself, I bleed. If I get drunk, I have a hangover. If I sleep with
many women, I lose the power to care for anyone, and sow pregnancies,
pain, and suspicion.

Unfortunately, the disciplinary effect of natural consequences is
diminished in at least two ways. These two diminishers are the main
reason why the discipline takes so long, so that the best that can be
hoped for in most cultures is a pendulum swing between moral laxity and
moral strictness.

The first diminisher is a simple time lag: not every consequence of
violating the natural law strikes immediately. Some results make
themselves felt only after several generations, and by that time people
are so deeply sunk in denial that even more pain is necessary to bring
them to their senses. A good example of a long-term consequence is the
increase of venereal disease. When I was a boy we all knew about
syphilis and gonorrhea, but because of penicillin they were supposed to
be on the way out. Today the two horrors are becoming
antibiotic-resistant, and AIDS, herpes, chlamydia, genital warts, human
papilloma virus, and more than a dozen other sexually transmitted
diseases, most of them formerly rare, are ravaging the population.
Other long-term consequences of violating the laws of sex are poverty,
because single women have no one to help them raise their children;
crime, because boys grow into adolescence without a father's
influence; and child abuse, because although spouses tend to greet
babies with joy, live-ins tend to greet them with jealousy and
resentment. Each generation is less able to maintain families than the
one before. Truly the iniquities of the fathers-and mothers-are
visited upon the children and the children's children to the third
and fourth generation.

The second diminisher comes from us: "Dreaming of systems so perfect
that no one will need to be good," we exert our ingenuity to escape
from the natural consequences of breaking the natural law. Not all
social practices have this effect. For instance, threatening drunk
drivers with legal penalties supplements the discipline of natural
consequences rather than undermining it. Nor is the effect always
intended. We don't devise social insurance programs in order to
encourage improvidence, though they do have this result. It isn't
even always wrong. It would be abominable to refuse treatment to a
lifelong smoker with emphysema, even though he may have been buoyed in
his habit by the confidence that the doctors would save him. But to act
with the purpose of compensating for immorality is always wrong, as
when we set up secondary school clinics to dispense pills and condoms
to teenagers.

Here is an axiom: We cannot alter human nature, physical, emotional, or
spiritual. A corollary is that no matter how cleverly devised, our
contrivances never do succeed in canceling out the natural consequences
of breaking the natural law. At best they delay them, and for several
reasons they can even make them worse. In the first place they alter
incentives: People with ready access to pills and condoms see less
reason to be abstinent. In the second place they encourage wishful
thinking: Most people grossly exaggerate their effectiveness in
preventing disease and pregnancy and completely ignore the risks. In
the third place they reverse the force of example: Before long the
practice of abstinence erodes even among people who don't take
precautions. Finally they transform thought: Members of the
contraceptive culture think liberty from the natural consequences of
their decisions is somehow owed to them.

There comes a time when even the law shares their view. In Planned
Parenthood v. Casey, which reauthorized the private use of lethal
violence against life in the womb, the Supreme Court admitted that its
original abortion ruling might have been wrong, but upheld it anyway.
As it explained, "For two decades of economic and social
developments, people have organized their intimate relationships and
made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in
society in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that
contraception should fail. . . . An entire generation has come of age
free to assume [this] concept of liberty." To put the thought more
simply, what we did has separated sex from responsibility for resulting
life for so long that to change the rules on people now would be
unfair.

Naught avails; our efforts to thwart the law of natural consequences
merely make the penalty more crushing when it comes. The only question
is whether our culture will be able to survive the return stroke of the
piston.

To survive what is bearing down on us, we must learn four hard lessons:
to acknowledge the natural law as a true and universal morality; to be
on guard against our own attempts to overwrite it with new laws that
are really rationalizations for wrong; to fear the natural consequences
of its violation, recognizing their inexorability; and to forbear from
all further attempts to compensate for immorality, returning on the
path that brought us to this place.

Unfortunately, the condition of human beings since before recorded
history is that we don't want to learn hard lessons. We would rather
remain in denial. What power can break through such a barrier?

The only Power that ever has. Thomas Aquinas writes that when a nation
suffers tyranny, those who enthroned the tyrant may first try to remove
him, then call upon the emperor for help. When these human means fail,
they should consider their sins and pray. We are now so thoroughly
under the tyranny of our vices that it would be difficult for us to
recognize an external tyrant at all. By our own hands we enthroned
them: our strength no longer suffices for their removal: they have
suspended the senate of right reason and the assembly of the virtues:
the emperor, our will, is held hostage: and it is time to pray.

Nothing new can be written on the heart, but nothing needs to be; all
we need is the grace of God to see what is already there. We don't
want to read the letters, because they burn; but they do burn, so at
last we must read them. This is why the nation can repent. This is why
the plague can be arrested. This is why the culture of death can be
redeemed. "For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before
thee . . . a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not
despise."



J. Buziszewski is Associate Professor of Government and Philosophy at
the University of Texas and author of Written on the Heart: The Case
for Natural Law (InterVarsity). An earlier version of this article was
published in William D. Gairdner, ed., After Liberalism (Stoddart).