Edward Feser's Blog, page 17

How to define “wokeness”

A common talking point among the woke is the claim that “woke” is just a term of abuse that has no clear meaning.  Whether many of them really believe this or are just obfuscating is not clear, but in any event it isn’t true.  I would suggest that what critics of wokeness have in mind is pretty obviously captured in the following definition: Wokeness is a paranoid delusional hyper-egalitarian mindset that tends to see oppression and injustice where they do not exist or greatly to exaggerate them where they do exist.

Examples would be: Characterizing as racist “microaggressions” behaviors that in fact are either perfectly innocuous or at worst just ordinary rudeness; condemning some economic outcome as a racist “inequity” despite there being no empirical evidence whatsoever that it is due to racism; condemning as “transphobic” recognition of the commonsense and scientific fact that sex is binary; condemning as “racist” the view that public policy should be color-blind and that racial discrimination is wrong whatever the race of the persons being discriminated against; condemning as “antigay” the view that it is not appropriate for grade schools to address matters of sexuality in the classroom without parental consent; and so on.

If you’re thinking “Wait, what’s wrong with any of that?,” you’re probably woke and should seek help, because these are deeply irrational attitudes.  My book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theoryexplains what is wrong with much that presents itself as “antiracist” but is in fact nothing of the kind.  (You will find much of the book useful even if you are not Catholic, because the argumentation is largely of a philosophical and social scientific nature rather than a theological nature.)

By characterizing wokeness as paranoid and delusional I am not flinging terms of abuse, but describing real psychological features of the woke attitude.  In their book The Coddling of the American Mind (which I say a bit about in my own book), Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt note that the frame of mind encouraged by woke ideas (Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, “Social Justice Warrior” rhetoric and the like) is very similar to a mindset that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy identifies as a major cause of psychological disorders. 

Features of this mindset include emotional reasoning, or letting our feelings determine how we interpret reality rather than letting reality determine whether our feelings are the appropriate ones; catastrophizing, or focusing obsessively on the imagined worst possible outcome rather than on what the evidence shows are more likely outcomes; overgeneralizing, or jumping to sweeping conclusions on the basis of one or a few incidents; dichotomous thinking, or seeing things in either-or terms when a more sober analysis would reveal more possibilities; mind reading, or jumping to conclusions about what other people are thinking; labeling, or slapping a simplistic description on some person or phenomenon that papers over its complexity; negative filteringand discounting positives, or looking only for confirming evidence for some pessimistic assumption while denying or downplaying confirming evidence that things are not in fact so bad; and blaming, or focusing on others as the sources of one’s negative feelings rather than taking responsibility for them oneself.

Obviously, the more thoroughly one is prone to these habits of thought, the more likely one is to see the world in excessively negative terms and to be miserable as a result.  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy thus aims to help patients identify these bad mental habits and to counteract them.  But “wokeness” positively encourages all of these cognitive distortions.  For example, it teaches emotional reasoning insofar as it pits personal “narratives” of oppression against the ideals of rationality and objectivity, and insofar as it makes the subjective reactions of offended people the measure of whether they are victims of “microaggressions.”  It encourages blaming by treating accusations about microaggressions and other grievances as if they can never reasonably be regarded as stemming from oversensitivity or paranoia on the part of the person offended.  It indulges in negative filtering and discounting positives insofar as it arbitrarily defines terms like “racism,” “sexism,” “transphobia,” “homophobia,” and the like so broadly that anything can be made to count as racist, sexist, transphobic, or homophobic, even what would historically have been regarded as paradigmatically egalitarian policies (such as color-blind or race-neutral policies, and opposition to all racial discrimination).  In the same way, it engages in labeling, by ignoring all the complex causes of disparities and the different motives behind various actions and policies, and simply slapping descriptions like “racist,” “sexist,” etc. on them.  It promotes dichotomous thinking insofar as it insists that one either agrees with woke ideas or ought to be dismissed as “racist,” “transphobic,” etc.  It exhibits catastrophizing in that it insists that anything short of implementing the most extreme of woke policy recommendations will leave us with an unjust society that has made little if any real progress.  It encourages mind reading by imputing “racism,” “bigotry,” “hate,” “implicit bias,” “white fragility,” and other such attitudes to all critics, even in the absence of any objective evidence for these attributions.  It overgeneralizesby treating any particular case of a real or perceived injustice as if it amounted to confirmation of the entire woke worldview.

In short, woke ideas positively encourage paranoid habits of mind which are analogous to those exhibited by people suffering from depression, anxiety, and other psychological disorders.  Looking at the world through woke lenses leads one to see oppression and injustice even where they do not exist, to feel strongly aggrieved at this imagined oppression and injustice, and then to treat the narrative of grievance that results as if it were confirming evidence of the reality of the imagined oppression and injustice. 

The psychological factors underlying wokeness account for two characteristics of the woke that are very familiar to anyone who has ever dealt with them, but might seem incongruous.  On the one hand, wokesters are extremely confident of their view of the world, thinking it so obviously correct that they cannot understand how anyone could possibly disagree with it.  Yet at the same time, they seem almost constitutionally incapable of calm and rational engagement with critics.  They invariably attack the critic rather than the claims and arguments the critic raises.  Imagine a person suffering from the paranoid delusion that everyone is out to get him.  Because he massively over-interprets other people’s behavior – reading malign motivations into the most innocuous remarks and actions – he thinks that the evidence that everyone is out to get him is overwhelming, even though in fact it is extremely slight at best.  But at the same time, precisely for that reason, he finds it impossible calmly and rationally to discuss the matter with anyone who disagrees with him.  “It’s so obvious!  If you can’t see it, you must be crazy!  In fact, you must be part of the conspiracy too!”  You might say that that such a paranoid delusional person thinks he’s become “woke” to the reality that everyone is out to get him, when in fact he’s lost in fantasy.  Think of Russell Crowe’s portrayal of John Nash in the movie A Beautiful Mind – seeing plots and conspirators everywhere, including even places where literally no one exists.

The difference between wokeness and other forms of delusional paranoia is that the wokester’s delusions and paranoia reflect what I referred to above as a hyper-egalitarian view of the world.  Notice that I am not saying that all forms of egalitarianism are bad.  On the contrary, as I argue in All One in Christ, because human beings of all races have the same nature, they have the same basic rights and dignity.  Hence it would, for example, be unjust for a government to protect the lives, liberties, and property rights of citizens of one race while not doing the same for citizens of other races.  This would be a clear case of an unjust inequity.

What I am calling hyper-egalitarian is the tendency to suspect all inequalities of being per se unjust – for example, to suppose that if 10% of the population of a country is of a certain race yet less than 10% of the stockbrokers in that country are of that race, this amounts to a “racist” inequity that cannot be given an innocent explanation and must somehow be eliminated by governmental policy.  (Think of Ibram X. Kendi’s famous remark: “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.”)  Again, imagine Russell Crowe’s performance in A Beautiful Mind, but suppose that instead of seeing hidden messages, Soviet plots, and fellow spies everywhere, he saw racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. everywhere and divided the world into the “bigots” who aimed to uphold this system of “intersectional” “oppression,” and the “allies” working together with him to subvert it.  The delusion seems frighteningly real, but in fact is held in place by circular reasoning and ad hominem attacks on anyone who tries to convince him otherwise.

To be sure, I am not saying that all wokesters are as insane as the Russell Crowe character.  Nor are all wokesters even as shrill as the stereotypical online Social Justice Warrior or Twitter mob.  Like other forms of delusional paranoia, wokeness comes in degrees.  But if you think that views like Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, etc. are so obviously correct that no decent and well-informed person could possibly object to them, and find it at least difficult calmly and rationally to engage with anyone who thinks otherwise, you are woke.  And precisely because you find it difficult calmly and rationally to entertain the possibility that you are wrong, your attitude is paradigmatically irrational. 

Further reading:

Countering disinformation about Critical Race Theory

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion”: Good, bad, or indifferent?

The Gnostic heresy’s political successors

Woke Ideology Is a Psychological Disorder

All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory

This month at First Things

My review of Thomas Ward’s superb new book Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus appears in the current issue of First Things.  I was recently interviewed by Mark Bauerlein for the First Things podcast about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory .

Naturalism versus Katz’s Platonism

Naturalism holds that there is nothing more to reality than the world of concrete entities causally related to one another within space and time.  Since this is the realm studied by the natural sciences (such as physics, chemistry, and biology), naturalism can also be characterized as the view that the subject matter of natural science is all that there is.  Naturalism thus denies the existence of God, of angelic intellects, of immaterial souls (whether conceived of along the lines of Descartes’ res cogitans or in some other way), and of Platonic Forms and other abstract objects. 

When people think about philosophical criticisms of naturalism, it seems they usually call to mind arguments for God’s existence or for mind-body dualism.  But it is possible to reject naturalism for reasons independent of those particular issues.  That would be the approach of those who argue for the reality of abstract objects, whether they be universals, numbers, propositions, or what have you.  Call this sort of view Platonism.  (Here I am using the term “Platonism” more or less the way contemporary analytic philosophers tend to use it, viz. to refer to belief in the existence of such abstract entities as distinct from a commitment to either theism or soul-body dualism.  In the history of Platonism there was, of course, a closer connection between these three views than one might guess from the contemporary usage.)

Platonism in this sense has had a number of illustrious defenders in modern analytic philosophy from the very beginning of its history.  Frege’s classic essay “The Thought” is a famous defense of an essentially Platonist view of propositions.  Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy defends something like a Platonist view of universals.  Popper’s “World 3” notion is in some respects similar to Plato’s realm of Forms.  Gödel was famously committed to mathematical Platonism.  When I was in graduate school, it was arguments of this kind, and especially those concerning propositions, that gradually broke the hold over me of the naturalism to which I had long been committed – and softened me up, as it were, for a reconsideration of theism and of the immateriality of the mind.

It was during that time that I first came across Jerrold Katz’s book The Metaphysics of Meaning, a critique of naturalism very much along these broadly Platonist lines.  I’d later discover that this book was part of a larger project that included other works like Language and Other Abstract Objects.  Katz’s work is analytic philosophy at its best – the rigorous argumentation characteristic of that tradition, but in the service of defending old-fashioned metaphysical positions that the tradition is often (if wrongly) thought to have undermined. 

It is not just Katz’s Platonist approach to criticizing naturalism that makes his work stand out, but also his distinctive way of arguing for Platonism.  Katz was a linguist as well as a philosopher, and it is considerations about language and logic, specifically (as opposed, say, to mathematics or general metaphysics) that drive his arguments for Platonism.  But his focus is not (as it was for Frege) on the idea that we cannot make sense of language without positing propositions as abstract objects, lying beyond language, that we access by way of language.  Rather, for Katz, a language and the sentences that can be formulated within it must themselves be understood as abstract objects.  It is this realm of abstract objects that is the subject matter of linguistics – just as, for the mathematical Platonist, numbers constitute a realm of abstract objects that are the subject matter of mathematics, and for the Platonist metaphysician, the Forms are the primary subject matter of philosophy.

Platonic realism is traditionally contrasted with nominalism and conceptualism.  Each of these three positions has variations relating to the subject matter about which one may or may not be a realist (universals, numbers, propositions, or whatever).  For example, consider the problem of universals.  The Platonic realist takes them to be abstract objects (the Forms) in a “third realm” distinct from either the world of particular material things or the world of the mind.  The nominalist holds that only particular things are real and that universals are mere fictions, artifacts of language that correspond to nothing outside language.  The conceptualist takes the purportedly middle ground position that universals exist, but are the sheer creations of the mind rather than mind-independent realities waiting to be discovered by us.  I say “purportedly” because it is difficult to spell conceptualism out in a way that doesn’t collapse into either nominalism or realism of some sort.  (I put to one side for the moment the other variations on realism, viz. Aristotelian realism and Scholastic realism.)

Where language itself is the subject matter, Katz characterizes the nominalist rival to his own position as the view that the focus of linguistics ought to be on the study of token utterances and scribblings – this particular utterance or writing out on paper of the sentence “The cat is on the mat,” that particular utterance or typing out of the sentence “The dog is on the log,” and so on.  Katz endorses Chomsky’s critique of this conception of linguistics.  But Chomsky’s own approach is not realist either in the relevant sense.  Linguistics is, for him, fundamentally about discovering the rules of Universal Grammar that are innate to the human mind.  For Katz, this amounts to a riff on conceptualism or psychologism.  It cannot do justice to the objectivity of linguistic facts.

But it is Wittgenstein and Quine whom Katz takes to have developed the main twentieth-century defenses of naturalism of the kind he has in his sights.  Wittgenstein’s “therapeutic” approach to philosophy aimed to cure us of the temptation to suppose that language is anything more than one further part of the natural history of human beings, alongside seeing, hearing, eating, walking, and so on.  Quine’s scientism sought to fold the study of language into the more general study of human behavior, understood naturalistically.  Much of The Metaphysics of Meaning is devoted to showing that neither thinker successfully made the case. 

Katz’s positive arguments appeal to features of language and logic that the methods to which naturalists confine themselves cannot account for.  For example, there is the necessity possessed by logical truths and analytic statements.  A sound logic and linguistics cannot plausibly deny such necessity.  But the psychological properties posited by a conceptualist theory like Chomsky’s can only ever be contingent in nature.  Hence there is a deep ontological mismatch between the logical and linguistic facts on the one hand and the facts to which such a naturalistic theory can appeal on the other.

Or consider that a language’s grammatical rules allow for the construction of an infinite number of possible sentence types, and that the recursiveness of the logical connectives (and, or, if-then, etc.) allow for an infinite number of possible compound propositions.  By contrast, actual human linguistic and logical performance has yielded only a finite (albeit very large) number of concrete sentence tokens. 

Now, a naturalistic theory that identified linguistic and logical facts with psychological-cum-neurological facts would have to extrapolate, from actual performance, what our psychological-cum-neurological capacities are.  And while actual performance could justify attributing to us capacities for linguistic and logical performance well beyond what has been observed, it could not justify the attribution to us of an infinite capacity.  Again, there is a mismatch between what the logician and linguist know to be true of logic and language, and what is true of psychological capacities construed naturalistically. 

The basic problem, as Katz sums it up, is that “linguistics and logic… trade in the abstract while naturalism insists that everything be concrete” (p. 280).  And again:

Sciences like linguistics and logic are about structures which are maximally abstract… [T]he best scientific theories in these disciplines cannot be brought under constraints interpreting them as theories of concrete objects like minds/brains.  In requiring that a theory of English or a theory of implication be a theory of a concrete psychological reality, conceptualism presents us with theories that do not describe the structure of English sentences or implication relations themselves, but describe, as it were, the shadows they cast on the walls of our mental/neural cave. (p. 281)

Linguistics and logic are in this respect like mathematics.  As is well known, it is quite hopeless to try to interpret mathematical truths as nothing more than descriptions of finite, contingent, concrete entities (collections of physical objects, or of symbols, or whatever).  Katz’s point is that the truths of logic and linguistics are no less infinite, necessary, and abstract, so that it is no less hopeless to try to reduce them to descriptions of finite, contingent, and concrete phenomena of some kind (such as psychological phenomena).

Katz’s reference to “shadows they cast on the walls of our mental/neural cave” is most apt.  The modern naturalist labors under the delusion that he is more rational and scientifically informed than the traditional metaphysician, but the reverse is true.  His position is in fact radically out of harmony with the deliverances of sciences like logic and linguistics (not to mention mathematics), and it is only ideology that prevents him from seeing this.  He is like a denizen of Plato’s cave, albeit it is the brain rather than shadows that his attention is fixated on, leaving him unable to see the sunlight of the higher truths of logic, linguistics, mathematics and the like.

There is much else in Katz’s discussion that merits attention – his differences from Frege, his critique and reformulation of Moore’s notion of the “naturalistic fallacy,” and so on.  But the primary value of his work lies in the salutary reminder it affords us of a fundamental and historically enormously influential (but in recent times strangely neglected) style of challenge to naturalism.

It may seem odd for an Aristotelian like me to commend the work of a Platonist like Katz.  But I don’t see Platonism as a hostile rival to Aristotelianism, as naturalism is.  Rather, I see the dispute between Platonism and Aristotelianism as a family squabble, a disagreement over details between thinkers united on the key moves in the war against the naturalist menace.  (Aristotelianism is in this way best seen as a member of a broader “Ur-Platonist” alliance, to borrow Lloyd Gerson’s phrase.)

Moreover, though my own settled version of realism is Aristotelian (or, more precisely, Aristotelian-Thomist) rather than Platonist, I have long thought that the best route to seeing the truth of realism is through Platonism.  Given the way our minds work, I suspect, it is initially easier to see the falsity of naturalism by way of contrast with the exaggerated anti-naturalism of Platonism (and then to bring Plato down to earth with Aristotle and St. Thomas).  That was my own trajectory, in any case, since it was the Platonism of Frege and other contemporary analytic philosophers that first broke the hold over me of naturalism, and opened the way to reaching, eventually, the sober Aristotelian-Thomistic middle ground.

Related reading:

Join the Ur-Platonist alliance!

Frege on objectivity

Frege on what mathematics isn’t

The metaphysical presuppositions of formal logic

Rucker’s Mindscape

What is mathematics about?

The access problem for mathematical Platonism

David Foster Wallace on abstraction

Review of Craig’s God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism

Five Proofs of the Existence of God, Chapter 3

Open thread combox

Here’s the latest open thread, by popular demand.  Actually, it was one guy, but I’ll bet there at least twice as many as that who are interested.  From quantum logic to Quantumania, MacArthur at Inchon to Thomas Pynchon, Muay Thai to Jamiroquai, everything’s on topic.  Just keep it civil and classy.  Earlier open threads archived here.

Catholicism, CRT, and the spirit of the age

Recently I was interviewed by the Catholic Herald’s Katherine Bennett about Critical Race Theory and the need for Catholics not to let themselves be intimidated by the progressive spirit of the age.  You can watch the interview at YouTube.

Pope Francis contra life imprisonment

The white supremacist Buffalo shooter who murdered ten people has been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.  According to scripture, natural law theory, and traditional Catholic moral theology alike, he is worthy of death.  It follows that this lesser penalty can hardly be unjust.  However, it seems that Pope Francis would disapprove of it.  For he has on many occasions condemned this sort of punishment as on a par with the death penalty, which he has also famously condemned.  I discussed this neglected but problematic aspect of the pope’s teaching in a Catholic World Report articleoriginally published in 2019, and he has since then made further statements along the same lines.  Current events make the topic worth revisiting.

The pope’s statements on the topic

I am aware of at least ten occasions on which Pope Francis has condemned life sentences.  Let’s review them in order.  In an address to the International Association of Penal Law on October 23, 2014, the pope said:

All Christians and men of good will are thus called today to fight not only for the abolition of the death penalty, whether legal or illegal, and in all its forms, but also in order to improve prison conditions, with respect for the human dignity of the people deprived of their freedom.  And I link this to life imprisonment.  Recently the life sentence was taken out of the Vatican’s Criminal Code.  A life sentence is just a death penalty in disguise.

In a March 20, 2015 letter to the president of the International Commission against the Death Penalty, Francis wrote:

Life imprisonment, as well as those sentences which, due to their duration, render it impossible for the condemned to plan a future in freedom, may be considered hidden death sentences, because with them the guilty party is not only deprived of his/her freedom, but insidiously deprived of hope.  But, even though the criminal justice system may appropriate the guilty parties’ time, it must never take away their hope.

In comments made to the press in September of 2015, the pope approvingly referred to calls to end life imprisonment, comparing the punishment to “dying every day” and a “hidden death penalty,” insofar as the prisoner is “without the hope of liberation.”

In a November 2016 interview, Pope Francis condemned capital punishment, saying that “if a penalty doesn’t have hope, it’s not a Christian penalty, it’s not human.”  For the same reason he went on to condemn life imprisonment as a “sort of hidden death penalty” insofar as it also deprives the prisoner of hope.

In remarks made to prison inmates in August of 2017, the pope called for their reintegration into society and said that a punishment without a “horizon of hope” amounts to “an instrument of torture.”

In his December 17, 2018 address to a delegation of the International Commission against the Death Penalty, Francis stated that “despite the gravity of the crime committed, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that the death penalty is always inadmissible because it offends the inviolability and dignity of the person.”  He then immediately went on to say:

Likewise, the Magisterium of the Church holds that life sentences, which take away the possibility of the moral and existential redemption of the person sentenced and in favour of the community, are a form of death penalty in disguise… God is a Father who always awaits the return of his son, who, aware he has made a mistake, asks forgiveness and begins a new life.  Thus, life cannot be taken from anyone, nor the hope of one’s redemption and reconciliation with the community.

In a September 2019 audience with penitentiary staff and prison chaplains, the pope said:

It is up to every society … to ensure that the penalty does not compromise the right to hope, that prospects for reconciliation and reintegration are guaranteed… Life imprisonment is not the solution to problems – I repeat: life imprisonment is not the solution to problems, but a problem to be solved… Never deprive one of the right to start over.

In remarks made to a meeting on prison ministry in November 2019, Pope Francis stated:

You cannot talk about paying a debt to society from a jail cell without windows… There is no humane punishment without a horizon.  No one can change their life if they don't see a horizon.  And so many times we are used to blocking the view of our inmates… Take this image of the windows and the horizon and ensure that in your countries the prisons always have a window and horizon; even a life sentence – which for me is questionable – even a life sentence would have to have a horizon.

In an in-flight press conference, also in November 2019, the pope said:

The sentence should always allow for reintegration.  A sentence without a “ray of hope” toward a horizon is inhuman.  Including life sentences.  One must think about how a person serving a life sentence can be reintegrated, inside or outside.  But the horizon is always necessary, the reintegration. You might say to me: but there are mentally ill detainees, due to illness, madness, genetically incurable, so to speak ... In this case, one must seek a way in which they can do things to make them feel like people.

Finally, and most significantly, in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis stated:

All Christians and people of good will are today called to work not only for the abolition of the death penalty, legal or illegal, in all its forms, but also to work for the improvement of prison conditions, out of respect for the human dignity of persons deprived of their freedom.  I would link this to life imprisonment… A life sentence is a secret death penalty.

As far as I know, that is the most recent public statement the pope has made about the issue.

Implications of the pope’s teaching

Let’s note several things about these remarks.  First, the pope claims that life sentences are morally on a par with the death penalty, and suggests that to oppose the latter requires opposing the former as well.  Second, he says that the way they are similar is that they both deprive the offender of “hope” and the possibility of “redemption,” and are both “inhuman” and contrary to the “dignity” of the person.  Third, he has raised this issue repeatedly and in formal addresses, and not merely in an off-the-cuff remark or two.  Fourth, he has invoked “the Magisterium of the Church” when speaking on this issue, rather than presenting it as a mere personal opinion.  Indeed, with Fratelli Tutti he has proposed this teaching at the level of an encyclical.

Fifth, and remarkably, the pope seems to object not only to life sentences, but to any sentences of an especially long duration.  For in his March 20, 2015 letter he criticizes “life imprisonment, as well as those sentences which, due to their duration, render it impossible for the condemned to plan a future in freedom” (emphasis added).  Pope Francis appears to be saying that it is wrong to inflict on any offender a sentence that is so long that it would prevent him from returning eventually to a normal life outside of prison.

Now, the implications of all this are quite remarkable, indeed shocking.  Consider, to take just one out of innumerable possible examples, a serial murderer like Dennis Rader, who styled himself the BTK killer (for “Bind, Torture, Kill”).  He is currently in prison for life for murdering ten people, including two children, in a manner as horrific as you might expect from his chosen nickname.  If Pope Francis is right, then it is wrong to have put Rader in prison for life.  Indeed, if Pope Francis is right, then Rader should not be in prison for any length of time that might prevent him from being able to “plan a future in freedom.”  Rader is 74 years old, so that would imply that Rader should be let out fairly soon so that he can plan how to live out the few years remaining to him.  And if the pope is right, the same thing is true of other aging serial killers.  Presumably the pope would put conditions on their release, such as realistic assurances that they are not likely to kill again.  But his words certainly entail that it would be wrong to deny at least the possibility of parole to any of them, no matter how heinous or numerous their crimes.

But even this doesn’t really capture the enormity of what Pope Francis is saying.  Consider the Nuremberg trials, at which many Nazi war criminals were sentenced to death or life imprisonment.  Pope Francis’s view would imply that all of these sentences were unjust!  Indeed, Pope Francis’s position seems to entail that, had Hitler survived the war, it would have been wrong to sentence him to more than about twenty years in prison!  For Hitler was in his fifties when he died, so that if he had been sentenced to more than that, he could not “plan a future in freedom” – as a greengrocer or crossing guard, perhaps.  Pope Francis’s views imply that the Nuremberg judges should have been at least open to the possibility of letting Hitler off with such a light sentence and letting him return to a normal life – despite being guilty of the Holocaust and of fomenting World War II!  Perhaps Pope Francis would shrink from these implications of his views.  One hopes so.  But they are the implications of his views.

Now, Mike Lewis, editor of the website Where Peter Is, has claimed that the pope’s statements on this subject have been distorted by his critics.  Lewis says that in the 2019 in-flight press conference quoted above, the pope indicates that “of course there are cases when releasing someone is impossible… because of the danger that they pose to society or themselves.”  This suffices to refute “the more hysterical criticism” by “papal detractors [who] made it sound like he wants serial killers set loose.”

But this completely misses the point.  So far as I know, no one is claiming that Pope Francis has said that we must release serial killers and the like even when they are known to remain dangerous.  They claim rather that the pope appears to think they ought to be released as long as they are not dangerous.  Not only does Lewis not deny this, he approvingly describes the implications of Francis’s views as follows:

Where a prisoner has clearly experienced a dramatic conversion or change of heart, demonstrated over time, and the risk of a return to former ways is deemed negligible – the merciful response is to give that person a second chance at life on the outside.

What the critics object to is precisely this.  The criticism is that, even when the very worst offenders are no longer dangerous, it would simply be a miscarriage of justice to release them, given the enormity of their crimes.  Suppose, for example, that the BTK killer or a Nazi war criminal “clearly experienced a dramatic conversion or change of heart” and could be known to pose no threat to anyone.  By the pope’s criteria, as Lewis himself interprets him, such an offender should be released from prison – regardless of how absurdly light his sentence would then be compared to the many lives he took, the trauma he caused the families of the victims, and the chaos he introduced into the social order.

Lewis also claims that the qualification that offenders who remain a threat should not be released “was always implicit” in Pope Francis’s teaching on life imprisonment.  But as anyone can see who reads the remarks from the pope I quoted above, that is clearly not true.  Out of ten occasions on which the pope has addressed this issue, there is only a single one – the November 2019 in-flight press conference – where he even comes close to qualifying his teaching in this way.  Moreover, the qualification is off-the-cuff and not clearly stated.  In every other case, including the formal context of an encyclical, the pope speaks in an extreme and peremptory way, not even acknowledging, much less answering, the obvious questions raised by his teaching on life imprisonment.  Lewis is correct that it is plausible to suppose that Francis would not want to release offenders who remain deadly threats.  But the fact that he has repeatedly failed clearly to make even this obvious qualification illustrates the persistent lack of nuance or caution in the pope’s statements on the subject.

Doctrinal and practical problems

This brings us to several serious problems with Pope Francis’s teaching on life imprisonment – the first being that, like other novel and controversial claims the pope has made, it is not presented clearly or systematically or in a manner that addresses the many grave doctrinal and practical difficulties it opens up. 

For example, if life imprisonment, and indeed even sentences so long that they would not allow an offender to plan for a return to society, are off the table, exactly what is the maximum sentence the pope would allow?  Should a mass murderer get the same maximum penalty as a one-time murderer or a recidivist bank robber?  Is there at least some minimum sentence that an offender ought to receive for the gravest crimes?  Or should parole be possible as long as repentance seems genuine, no matter how short the time served in prison?  How is the prospect of imprisonment supposed to deter the gravest crimes if the offender knows that he will not get even a life sentence for committing them (let alone the death penalty)?  How are police and prosecutors going to get the most stubborn offenders to cooperate with investigations if they are unable to threaten them with life imprisonment?  Is the pope saying that life imprisonment is intrinsically evil?  Or only that it is wrong under certain circumstances?  What level of certainty do we need to have about an offender’s repentance and likelihood to behave himself before letting him out again?  Is the burden of proof on the offender to prove that he should be let out – or rather (as the pope’s teaching seems to imply) is the burden of proof on governing authorities to prove that the offender should not be let out?  Again, the pope does not even acknowledge, much less answer, such (rather obvious) questions. 

A second problem is doctrinal.  The claim that it is wrong to inflict a penalty of life imprisonment, or even a very long imprisonment, conflicts with the traditional teaching of the Church that “legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense” (as the Catechism states).  For certain crimes are manifestly so grave that nothing short of life imprisonment would be proportionate to their gravity – for example, serial killing and genocide.  To say that not only the death penalty, but life imprisonment or even long imprisonments, must never be inflicted, would be to strip the principle of proportionality of all meaning.

A third problem is that the pope’s claim that long imprisonments deprive the offender of hope seems to presuppose a secular rather than Catholic understanding of hope.  In Catholic theology, hope is a theological virtue.  It has nothing to do with looking forward to pleasant circumstances in this life.  As St. Paul wrote, “if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (I Corinthians 15:19).  Rather, hope has to do with the desire for eternal life and trust in God to provide the graces needed to attain it.  Now, life imprisonment is in no way contrary to hope in this sense.  On the contrary, as the Catechism teaches, “when [punishment] is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation.”  And the possibility of expiation for sin is precisely a reason for hope.  Accepting the penalty of life imprisonment as one’s just deserts can mitigate the temporal punishment one would otherwise have to suffer in purgatory.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine how an offender like the BTK killer or a Nazi war criminal could plausibly be said to be repentant in the first place if he had the effrontery to request going back to a normal life outside of prison despite the enormity of the evil he inflicted.  You might say that, with the worst offenders, the very fact that they want to be released itself proves that they should not be released. 

As I have argued elsewhere, when one considers all the details of Pope Francis’s statements on capital punishment together with the consistent teaching of scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and all previous popes, the only plausible way to interpret his teaching is as a prudential judgment that is not binding on the faithful, rather than a doctrinal development with which they must agree.  This clearly applies a fortiori to his teaching on life imprisonment, which is even less clearly or systematically stated and even more out of harmony with the traditional doctrine of the Church.

In our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, Joe Bessette and I discuss in some detail the teaching of Pope Pius XII on the topic of crime and punishment (at pp. 128-34).  It was a theme he treated in a series of addresses, and to our knowledge, no other pope has come close to setting out Catholic doctrine on the matter at such length or in such a systematic way.  Now, Pius’s teaching is entirely in line with the Thomistic natural law approach to punishment that Bessette and I expound and defend in our book.  Pius emphasizes how retributive justice must always be factored in when considering what punishments to inflict, even if it is not the only consideration.  He rejects the idea that punishment should consider only what is conducive to rehabilitating the offender and deterring him from future offenses.  Rather, guilt for past offenses is enough to justify inflicting a penal harm on the offender, and this penalty ought to be proportionate to the offense.  Indeed, Pius says that this is the most important function of punishment.  He considers the suggestion that such a retributive aim reflects past historical circumstances and is no longer fitting in modern times – and he explicitly rejects such claims as incompatible with scripture and the traditional teaching of the Church.  While condemning excessively harsh punishments, he also warns that there is an opposite error of making punishments too lenient, and that making punishments proportionate to the offense is the key to avoiding both errors.  Unsurprisingly, in light of all this, Pius explicitly affirmed on several occasions the continuing legitimacy of inflicting capital punishment in the case of the most heinous crimes.  Obviously, it would follow logically that life imprisonment can be a justifiable punishment too.

Any Catholic who wants to think seriously about these issues should study Pope Pius’s teaching carefully.  Again, in our book, Joe Bessette and I discuss it in detail, providing many quotations from the relevant texts.  Now, it is very hard to see how the teaching of Pope Francis can be reconciled with that of Pope Pius XII, with respect either to their conclusions or the principles they appeal to in reaching those conclusions.  To be sure, as with Pope Francis, Pope Pius did not make any ex cathedra pronouncements on the subject.  However, in the case of Pope Pius, we have teaching that is set out in a very clear, detailed, and systematic way; that is perfectly consistent with scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, all prior popes, and the natural law theory that the Church has adopted as the core of her moral theology; and whose implications and applications to concrete circumstances are straightforward and unproblematic.  By contrast, with Pope Francis, we have teaching that is unsystematic and embodied in extreme and sweeping assertions rather than precise doctrinal formulations; that is novel and hard to reconcile with scripture and tradition; and which opens up many grave but unaddressed difficulties where practical application is concerned.

Given these considerations, together with the fact that Pope Francis’s teaching is most plausibly read as prudential and non-binding, it is hard to see how a Catholic could be obligated to agree with Francis over Pius where their teaching seems to conflict.  In any event, here as in other areas (such as Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried, and capital punishment), Pope Francis has muddied the doctrinal waters.  And in this case there are dire implications not only for the faithful’s trust in the Magisterium (which would be bad enough), but also for the social order more generally.  Like the successors of popes Honoriusand John XXII (who also generated doctrinal crises), the successors of Pope Francis will have their work cut out for them.

The Faith Once for All Delivered

Coming soon, the important new anthology The Faith Once for All Delivered: Doctrinal Authority in Catholic Theology , edited by Fr. Kevin Flannery.  Contributors include Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke (Foreword and Introduction), C. C. Pecknold, Christopher J. Malloy, Thomas Heinrich Stark, Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., John M. Rist, Edward Feser, Eduardo Echeverria, Kevin L. Flannery, SJ, Robert Dodaro, OSA, John Finnis, Guy Mansini, OSB, and Robert Cardinal Sarah (Afterword).  My essay for the volume is on the topic “Magisterium: The Teaching Authority of the Church.”

Talking about All One in Christ

The latest on my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory :  Recently I was interviewed for the EDIFY Podcast on the topic “The Truth about Critical Race Theory.”  You can listen to the interview here.  I was also interviewed about the book by Deal Hudson for the Church and Cultureradio show.  You can listen to the episode here.  Other reviews of and interviews about All One in Christ can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

An anonymous saint?

When we think of saints, we often associate them with mighty spiritual feats – dramatic martyrdoms, the production of works of great theological learning or spiritual insight, the founding of religious orders or vast charitable enterprises, and so on.  But saintliness, like the still small voice heard by Elijah, can manifest itself in subtler ways.  An illustration is provided by the life of Fr. Ed Dowling, SJ, the subject of Dawn Eden Goldstein’s fine new book Father Ed: The Story of Bill W.’s Spiritual Sponsor . 

The “Bill W.” of the subtitle is Bill Wilson, cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.).  Though not an alcoholic himself, Fr. Dowling was highly impressed by A.A.’s principles and success rate, and became a lifelong proponent of the movement and a close friend and advisor to Wilson.  Ministering to those struggling with alcoholism was of a piece with Dowling’s devotion to all those afflicted by mundane but intractable difficulties – marital unhappiness, depression and anxiety, drug addiction, and so on.  He helped found the Cana Conference movement to assist married couples, was involved with the Recovery organization’s efforts to help the mentally ill, and worked also with other such groups.  And in innumerable one-on-one relationships he personally helped suffering human beings – and brought them, where he could, into the sacramental life of the Church, where alone the most important source of healing can be found.

Suffering was something Dowling knew well.  Goldstein recounts the spiritual crisis the Jesuit priest went through in his early life, before becoming certain of his vocation.  And she provides a poignant account of the poor health and physical pain that afflicted him throughout his life.  Ankylosing spondylitis, a severe form of arthritis, calcified Dowling’s spine and one of his legs, to the extent that (as he liked to put it) it was as if he were gradually turning to stone.  But he doggedly embraced this suffering out of solidarity with others who suffer, and as God’s means of perfecting him.  Fr. Ed’s view was that “the shortest cut to humility is humiliations.”

Goldstein’s description of Dowling’s first meeting with Bill W. is especially moving.  Wilson was lying on his bed, at a low moment in his life, when the rumpled priest ambled up his stairway for a visit.  As they discussed A.A. and Wilson’s personal struggles, Bill later reported:

My spirits kept on rising, and presently I began to realize that this man radiated a grace that filled the room with a sense of presence.  I felt this with great intensity; it was a moving and mysterious experience.

But this was not the result of any shallow self-help happy talk on Fr. Ed’s part.  On the contrary, one of the remarkable aspects of their long discussion that evening is the emphasis the priest put on the divine call to patient endurance of dissatisfactions for the sake of a higher reward in the hereafter.  But he did so with such gentleness, kindness, and empathy that Bill took comfort and hope from it.  And it inaugurated a close friendship that lasted until Dowling’s death.

Dowling was struck by parallels he saw between A.A.’s Twelve Steps and St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises – especially after Bill told him that he had no knowledge of Ignatius, so that any similarity was coincidental.  In the years that followed, Bill would come to be attracted to the Catholic faith, receiving instruction not only from Fr. Ed, but also from Bishop Fulton Sheen.  Yet Wilson nevertheless stopped short of conversion.  The desire to keep A.A. free of an association in people’s minds with any particular religion might have been a factor.  Wilson seems also to have had difficulty with the requirement to submit to the mind of the Church on doctrinal matters.  In one letter to Dowling, he admits: “Maybe deep down I don’t want to be convinced – I just don’t know.”

Wilson was in any case also drawn to rivals to the Christian faith – Jungian therapy, spiritualism, even experimentation with LSD in the days when the drug hadn’t yet gained the notoriety it would later come to have.  Dowling tried gently but firmly to warn him away from such enthusiasms, with only limited success.  Goldstein’s account of the years-long back-and-forth between the two on the subject of Catholicism affords an interesting case study in the literature on conversion (or lack thereof).  As Goldstein writes, Dowling and Wilson himself seemed to agree that there was perhaps “an element of willfulness” in Wilson’s reluctance.

In any event, they maintained their friendship to the end.  And Wilson was just one of many who felt especially indebted to Fr. Ed for the help and spiritual guidance he provided.  Goldstein’s touching description of the humble priest’s funeral, and the sea of mourners who attended it, is a fitting conclusion to this excellent biography.

All the same, because it is a biography rather than a work of moral theology, it suggests, but without addressing, some tantalizing questions that seem worthy of future exploration (whether by Goldstein or someone else inspired by Dowling’s life and work).  For example, how would Dowling have applied his approach to dealing with people in thrall to addictions like those that predominate today?  Alcoholism continues to be a problem, of course.  But drug addiction has now spiraled well beyond anything Dowling had to encounter, and has taken on ever more destructive forms (as the meth and opioid epidemics illustrate). 

There is also pornography addiction, and a plethora of sexual vices which are no longer even recognized as such.  It is absolutely fundamental to the Twelve Steps approach endorsed by Fr. Dowling that one admits that one has a problem.  But stubbornly refusing to admit that one’s behavior is in any way problematic is characteristic of sexual sin today.  Fr. Ed also consistently emphasized the need to learn humility in the face of one’s struggles with sin.  But the emphasis today is instead on pride in what the Catholic faith teaches is sinful, and on indulgence in it rather than struggling against it.  The basic moral assumptions taken for granted in contemporary society are simply radically different from those that prevailed in Dowling’s day.  By no means does that make his approach any less necessary today.  But it does make its application more difficult.

Another area for possible exploration is the relationship between Fr. Dowling’s work and that of a contemporary of his, the moral theologian Fr. John C. Ford, SJ.  Ford is mentioned only a couple of times and in passing in Goldstein’s biography.  But Ford also knew Bill Wilson, admired A.A., and indeed at one point had struggled with a drinking problem himself and found A.A.’s approach useful.  Moreover, he wrote on the topics of alcoholism, and habitual sin in general, in a way that combined orthodox moral reasoning with psychological nuance and pastoral sensitivity.  It would be intriguing to bring his work to bear on the study of Fr. Dowling’s approach to dealing with people with problems.

But these remarks are not meant as criticisms of Goldstein’s book.  They are, again, rather in the nature of suggestions for further inquiry.  As it is, Father Ed is inspiring reading, and will do much good both for its readers and for the reputation of a holy priest who deserves to be more widely known.

Avicenna on non-contradiction

We’ve been talking about the law of non-contradiction (LNC), which says that the statements p and not-p cannot both be true.  (In symbolic notation: ~ (p • ~p) )  We briefly noted Aristotle’s view that skepticism about LNC cannot be made a coherent position.  Let’s now consider a famous remark on the subject by the Islamic philosopher Avicenna or Ibn Sina (c. 970-1037).  In The Metaphysics of the Healing, he says of such a skeptic:

As for the obstinate, he must be plunged into fire, since fire and non-fire are identical.  Let him be beaten, since suffering and not suffering are the same.  Let him be deprived of food and drink, since eating and drinking are identical to abstaining. (Quoted in the SEP article “Contradiction”)

Is this merely an expression of frustration with the skeptic?  Or is there an argument here?  Not quite either, I think.  The use of “must” and “since” indicates that Avicenna does suppose that inflicting such pain on the skeptic should convince him of the error of his ways even if nothing else does.  Hence there is more here than just a desire to punish the obstinate skeptic.  Avicenna seems to think the pain should correct him.  But it can’t be that Avicenna supposes that his remark amounts to a further argumentfor LNC.  That the defender of LNC holds that fire is not the same as non-fire, suffering not the same as not suffering, etc. is something the skeptic already knows.  These examples by themselves don’t add anything argumentation-wise to less harrowing examples that will no doubt already have been presented to the skeptic (e.g. that something can’t be both a cat and a non-cat, can’t both be a carrot and not be a carrot, and so on).

Obviously there is something about the unpleasant nature of the specific examples Avicenna uses that is supposed to be doing the work – and in particular, something about actually inflicting this unpleasantness on the skeptic that would do the work, rather than merely having him tranquilly contemplate the thesis that fire is not non-fire. 

What is going on, I suggest, is that Avicenna takes the defect in the skeptic to lie in the will, not in the intellect.  It is not that the skeptic’s intellect needs further argumentation in order for him to see that his position is mistaken.  All the necessary argumentation is already present; in particular, all a properly functioning intellect should need to know is that denying LNC is simply incoherent.  Rather, the skeptic is being willful – pretending, as it were, that there is really some serious doubt about LNC when in fact there is none.  And his will accomplishes this by not allowing the intellect to dwell on the incoherence, thereby facilitating its focusing instead on the fact that we can saythings like “Perhaps LNC is not true,” as if this expressed a real possibility rather than mere verbiage. 

Literally thrusting the skeptic into the fire, Avicenna is (I suggest) saying, would nullify the will’s distraction of the intellect, and force the intellect to see reality.  Under intense pain it could no longer maintain the pretense that the fire it feels might at that same moment and in the same sense be non-fire. 

Another way to put it is that what the skeptic needs is not rational argumentation, since his delusional position of its very nature makes him incapable, while he is entertaining it, of listening to reason.  Rather, what the skeptic needs is a kind of treatment or therapy – indeed, something like shock therapy to bring him back to reality and cease clinging to his foolish and merely verbal quibbles.