Edward Feser's Blog, page 28

From Socrates to Stock

Socrates is a model for all philosophers, not only because he pursued the truth through rational argumentation, but because he did so uncompromisingly, even at the cost of his life.  And he was executed, not by religious authorities and not by a dictator, but by democratic, egalitarian, purportedly tolerant Athens.  This would lead his student Plato to warn us, in the Republic, that the unruly passions spawned by egalitarianism are by no means the friends of reason and philosophy.  Woke politics and cancel culture provide the latest confirmation of this thesis.

Prof. Kathleen Stock has for some time now been under siege from the spiritual heirs of Socrates’ persecutors.  She is a feminist and no conservative, but she has dared through rational analysis and argumentation to defend the proposition that the difference between the sexes is objectively real rather than a mere social construct, most recently in her book Material Girls.  Until about twenty minutes ago no one would have thought this controversial, but for the cultural revolutionaries seeking to take over our institutions, it merits hemlock.  The fanatics are now trying to get her fired, though so far her university is standing by her.

A number of UK philosophers have signed a letter of solidarity with her university in its determination to uphold her academic freedom.  They have done so not because they all agree with her, but because they have not forgotten what philosophy is.  It makes demands on our wills as well as our intellects, and in particular requires courage no less than wisdom.  Prof. Stock has exhibited both, and for that she deserves the respect and support of all true philosophers, whether they share her views or not.

Covid-19 vaccination should not be mandatory

In a recent post, I argued that a Catholic can in good conscience take one of the Covid-19 vaccines, but also that such vaccination should not be mandatory.  In a follow-up post, I expanded on the first point.  Let’s now expand on the second.

Thomistic natural law theory and Catholic moral theology are not libertarian, but neither are they statist.  They acknowledge that we can have enforceable obligations to which we do not consent, but also insist that there are limits to what government can require of us, and qualifications even where it can require something of us.  In the case of vaccine mandates (whether we are talking about Covid-19 vaccines, polio vaccines, or whatever), they neither imply a blanket condemnation of such mandates nor a blanket approval of them.  There is nuance here that too many hotheads on both sides of the Catholic debate on this issue ignore.

In order to understand the ethics of vaccine mandates, it is useful to draw a comparison with the ethics of military conscription.  Both mandatory vaccination and military conscription involve a grave interference with individual liberty.  Both are nevertheless in principle allowable.  But the grave interference with liberty also entails serious qualifications.

Military conscription

What does the Church teach about military conscription?  On the one hand, there is a recognition of its legitimacy in principle, given the obligations we have as social animals who have a duty to defend our country.  Pope Pius XII taught:

If, therefore, a body representative of the people and a government – both having been chosen by free elections – in a moment of extreme danger decides, by legitimate instruments of internal and external policy, on defensive precautions, and carries out the plans which they consider necessary, it does not act immorally.  Therefore a Catholic citizen cannot invoke his own conscience in order to refuse to serve and fulfill those duties the law imposes.  (Christmas message of December 23, 1956)

Note that the principle here is that it can be legitimate in this case for the state to require something of the citizen even though it involves putting him at grave risk, and despite the fact that he might think his conscience justifies refusal. 

But does that entail that every citizen is obligated unquestioningly to take up arms in just any old war that a government claims is justified, and ought to be forced to do so?  Absolutely not.  For there are two further considerations which need to be taken account of.

First, the obligation to take up arms applies only in the case of a just war, and natural law theory and Catholic moral theology set out several criteria for a war’s being just: the war must be authorized by a legitimate authority; the cause must be just (for example, the aggression being responded to must be grave enough to be worth going to war over); the motivation must be just (for example, the publicly stated justification, even if reasonable considered by itself, must not be a cover for some hidden sinister motivation); the means of fighting must be just (for example, they must not bring about harms that are even worse than those that we hope to remedy through war); and there must be a reasonable hope of success.

Now, a private citizen does not have all the information required in order thoroughly to evaluate any particular war in light of all of these criteria.  In a reasonably just society, he therefore has to give some benefit of the doubt to the governing authorities.  All the same, he also does have a duty to make at least some investigation to determine whether a war really is just before going along with it.  And naturally, the more corrupt a given government is, the stronger are going to be the reasons for doubting the justice of a war that it undertakes.  There is, as Pius XII’s teaching makes clear, a presumption in favor of complying with the government’s requirements, but that presumption can be overridden.

That brings us to the second, related point, which is that although appeals to conscience do not by themselves suffice to excuse a citizen from military service, they nevertheless ought to be taken very seriously by the state.  As Vatican II teaches:

It seems right that laws make humane provisions for the case of those who for reasons of conscience refuse to bear arms, provided however, that they agree to serve the human community in some other way.  (Gaudium et Spes 79)

This basic principle here is this.  Though a person’s conscience can certainly be in error, at the same time one ought not to act in a way that is positively contrary to one’s conscience.  For one would in that case be doing something that one sincerely (even if wrongly) thought to be immoral, which would itself be immoral.  Suppose I sincerely thought that it would be gravely immoral to eat meat.  In fact it isn’t immoral, and so if I do eat meat, the eating of it is not itself wrong.  But violating my (mistaken) conscience would be wrong.  So, for that reason, I shouldn’t eat meat until I come to see the error of my opinion on this matter.

Of course, people abuse this principle all the time.  Catholics who want to get abortions like to pretend that they can justify themselves by appealing to conscience – as if the trip to the Planned Parenthood clinic was analogous to Thomas More’s refusing to swear allegiance to the king as supreme authority over the Church.  This is, of course, absurd, and not only because the arguments for the legitimacy of abortion are worthless.  To swear to recognize the king as supreme authority over the Church is to do something that is intrinsically evil.  Merely to refrain from getting an abortion is not to do something intrinsically evil, because it is not to doanything at all.  It is not a kind of action, but rather, again, a refraining from action.  Hence no one who is prevented from getting an abortion is being made to act against conscience in the relevant sense.

But suppose someone is forced to take up arms in a war he sincerely believes (rightly or wrongly) to be immoral.  Then he would in that case be made to act against his conscience, and in that sense be made to do something immoral (even if the war is not in fact wrong).  It is out of sensitivity to this problem that the Church allows for conscientious objection. 

Naturally, this raises problems of its own.  What if a very large number of people decided to opt out of fighting in a war that really was just and necessary?  That’s a good question, but one we can put to one side for present purposes.  Suffice it to say that even if there is a presumption in favor of the state’s having the authority to coerce citizens to take up arms in a just war, the state should nevertheless allow for exemptions, as far as it reasonably can, for citizens who demonstrate sincere and deep-seated moral reservations about the war, especially if they agree to some reasonable alternative public service.

Application to vaccine mandates

The application of these principles to the case of vaccine mandates is pretty clear.  A society might be threatened by a serious disease, just as it might be threatened by an armed aggressor.  We can have duties to help do what is necessary to repel the threat in the former case just as in the latter, even if this entails some risk to ourselves.  Hence, just as it is in principle legitimate for the state to require military conscription (despite the fact that this entails putting people’s lives at risk in defense of the country), so too can it be legitimate in principle for the state to require vaccination (even if this too involves some risk, insofar as vaccines – many vaccines, not just Covid-19 vaccines – can have occasional bad side effects for some people).  Hence, it will not do merely to appeal to a concern for individual liberty as an objection to vaccine mandates, as if that by itself settled the issue.

However, that is by no means the end of the story.  For there are, with vaccines as with war, two further considerations.  First, with vaccines as with war, the state has no right to impose on the citizens just any old obligation that it wants to.  A vaccine mandate, like a war, can be just or unjust.  As with a war, the state must determine that there is no realistic alternative way to deal with the threat it is trying to counter.  It must have the right motivation, rather than using the health considerations as a cover for some more sinister motivation.  There must be a reasonable chance that the mandate will successfully deal with the threat to public health.  There must be good grounds for thinking that the mandate won’t cause more harm than good.  And so on.  And as with war, if a citizen has well-founded reasons for thinking that the conditions on a just vaccination mandate are not met, he thereby has grounds for resisting it.

That brings us to the other point, which is that as with war, so too with vaccination mandates (and for the same reasons), the state ought to be generous with those whose consciences lead them to have serious reservations about vaccination, even if their consciences happen to be mistaken.  The state should as far as possible allow those having these reservations to contribute to dealing with the threat to public health in some other way (just as, as Vatican II teaches, those who refuse to take up arms should “agree to serve the human community in some other way”).  This is why, in its affirmation that the Covid-19 vaccines can be taken in good conscience, the Vatican also stated:

At the same time, practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary.  In any case, from the ethical point of view, the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one's own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good.  In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed.  Those who, however, for reasons of conscience, refuse vaccines produced with cell lines from aborted fetuses, must do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent.  In particular, they must avoid any risk to the health of those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons, and who are the most vulnerable.

End quote.  The applicability of the principles I’ve been setting out to the specific case of Covid-19 vaccines is, I think, also obvious.  As I said in my initial post, while I think some case could be made for a mandate, I don’t think it is a compelling case.  I don’t think state or federal governments have met the burden of proof.  I also said that there are reasonable grounds for preferring not to take the vaccines, and that it is also perfectly understandable that many citizens do not trust the judgment of public authorities.  Many such authorities today are committed to manifestly lunatic beliefs on other topics – that the police should be defunded, that the distinction between men and women is merely a social construct, and so on.  Many governments have earned the public’s distrust, and a wise statesman, knowing this, would strongly urge against heavy-handed actions that are guaranteed only to increase this distrust.

For such reasons, and also because of the general principle that the state ought as far as possible to avoid forcing people to act against their consciences, there should be no Covid-19 vaccine mandates, and where they do exist there should be generous exemptions for those who object to them in conscience.

In all things charity

Some readers of my two earlier posts on this subject have reacted in a predictably unhinged way.  One blogger insists that “one’s position on the vaxx is a litmus test,” and avers that I have now revealed “on which side [my] loyalties lie” and joined “the enemy” (!)  Another declares that I have “switched sides from that of God to anti-God” (!!)  They thereby illustrate my point that too many right-wingers have been led by the very real crisis we are facing to fly off the rails and land in the same paranoid fantasyland mentality that has overtaken the Left.  Or perhaps they simply demonstrate that they don’t know how to read.  For in my initial post, I explicitly criticized the mandates, explicitly acknowledged that there are reasonable concerns about the vaccines, explicitly said that public authorities have damaged their own credibility, and explicitly affirmed that those who put themselves at risk in resisting the mandates deserve our respect. 

But one can say all that and, with perfect consistency, alsohold that the Covid-19 vaccines are not connected with abortion in a way that would make it wrong to use them, and that those Catholics who decide to take the vaccine do not sin in doing so.  And that was the point I was making in those earlier posts.  Contrary to what some Catholic churchmen and writers have been saying over the last few months, opposition to abortion and fidelity to the Catholic faith do not oblige Catholics to “die on the hill” of Covid-19 vaccination.  These churchmen and writers have no business usurping the Church’s teaching authority and claiming otherwise.  But that by no means entails that there aren’t other reasons to object to vaccination mandates.

The bottom line is that whether to get a Covid-19 vaccine is, in the nature of the case, a prudential matter.  But fanatics on both sides want to turn it into something more than that.  One side says that as a Catholic, you must not get the vaccine – never mind what the Church says, what three popes have said, and what decades of orthodox Catholic moral theology has said.  The other side says that you must get the vaccine, even if this violates your conscience.  Both sides gravely offend against justice and charity.  Both sides muddy the waters and stir up passions when what the Church and the world need more than ever are clarity and sobriety.

Related posts:

Covid-19 vaccination is not the hill to die on

Covid-19 vaccines and Jeffrey Dahmer’s nail clippings

Covid-19 vaccines and Jeffrey Dahmer’s nail clippings

Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison almost thirty years ago.  Suppose that, before his body was removed from the crime scene, a prison guard had clipped off some of his fingernails as a ghoulish souvenir.  Suppose further that this guard dabbled in genetics and cloning as a hobby.  And suppose he somehow figured out a way to make exact copies of the fingernails, so that he could sell them on eBay to people interested in serial killer memorabilia.  Now suppose that almost thirty years later, you develop a novel nail clipper design.  You work up a prototype and test it – using one of the cloned Dahmer fingernails as your test material.  They work great, and you go on to manufacture and market the clippers.  Suppose they are so successful that all the other nail clipper manufacturers go out of business.  If people want to clip their nails, they need to buy your product.

If people buy these nail clippers, would they be doing something immoral?  Would they somehow be cooperating in the evil of murdering Dahmer?  Would they be contributing to a “culture of prison murder”?  Are your nail clippers now forever morally tainted by virtue of the fact that you first tested them on cloned Dahmer nail clippings?  Should you destroy your stock of clippers, burn the blueprints, and try to forget the design?  Are people morally obligated to walk around with long fingernails and toenails rather than buy your clippers, since they have no alternative products to buy? 

The example is, of course, ridiculous, but intentionally so.  For it allows us to consider some important moral principles without being influenced by the emotions generated by current moral and political controversies.  Dahmer is (unlike, say, an unborn child) about as unsympathetic a character as can be imagined.  But it was still gravely wrong to murder him.  True, if the state had executed him, that would not have been wrong, but the state has the moral right to do that.  Private individuals do not, and when they usurp the power of the state in this way, they are guilty of murder.  So, we must firmly oppose such vigilantism.

All the same, people would not be doing anything wrong if they bought your nail clippers.  For one thing, it would be ridiculous to suggest that doing so would entail “cooperating” with Dahmer’s murder.  The murder happened almost thirty years ago, and had nothing to do with your nail clippers.  People’s refusing to buy them would do nothing to prevent the murder, which is a fait accompli.  Nor does the contingent very remote connection with the murder magically generate some sort of intrinsic moral taint in the nail clippers.  Considered just by themselves, the nail clippers are morally neutral, and they do not somehow become less so just because of the way you happened to test them.

But suppose there came to be a widespread practice of using murdered serial killer fingernail clippings as a way to test products.  Would this raise moral questions?  It would.  But it would still not make it intrinsically evil to use the nail clippers.  On the one hand, we would want to make it very clear that we need to stop this practice of murdering serial killers in order to get their nail clippings to test products.  But that would not necessarily make it wrong to use your nail clippers, which are only contingently and distantly related to a murder that was not done for the purpose of testing products.  And since people need to cut their nails, there is a proportionate reason for using your clippers given that, in the scenario I have described, there are no alternatives on offer.

Now, this example is parallel to the way the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines (and many other vaccines, medicines, food products, etc.) were developed using cells descended from the cells of an unborn child aborted fifty years ago (as I discussed in my previous post on this subject).  Of course, the killing of an innocent child is worse than the killing of a person guilty of grave crimes.  But preventing Covid-19 and other serious illnesses is also more important than clipping one’s nails.  As with the Dahmer example, the murder occurred decades ago, was not done for the purposes of product testing, and is a fait accompli that would in no way be prevented by people refusing to use the product.  As with Dahmer’s nails, it is not the body parts of the victim that were used in the testing, but distant copies of those parts.  And as with the nail clippers, the vaccines are, considered just by themselves, morally neutral.  The contingent fact that they were tested in a certain way doesn’t somehow make them intrinsically morally problematic.  In both cases, the connection with the wrongdoing is very remote.

Again, Dahmer is an entirely unsympathetic character, and using copies of his fingernails to test nail clippers is a silly and unrealistic example.  But again, that is precisely the point.  Because the example generates no strong emotions and involves no real-world controversies, it is easy to see the moral principles involved and to consider them dispassionately.  Yes, there is a moral problem with the way the clippers were developed, and yes, in theory it could even be a significant problem under certain circumstances.  But the problem has nothing to do with there being anything intrinsicallyevil about the clippers, and the moral concerns are still outweighed by the proportionate good of allowing people to clip their nails (which, in the scenario in question, would not otherwise be possible).

Now, when you alter the example so that it involves instead an aborted baby and the Covid-19 vaccines, very strong emotions are generated.  But the relevant moral principles are the same.  Yes, because abortion is extremely wicked, the very remote and contingent connection the testing of the vaccines had to a particular abortion that occurred decades ago raises moral questions that would not otherwise exist.  But that does not make the vaccines intrinsically evil, and the moral concerns are outweighed by the proportionate good of protecting people from a serious disease (where, currently, there are no alternative vaccines available).  (That there is such a proportionate good would, of course, be irrelevant if the use of the vaccines were intrinsically evil – we’re not talking about consequentialism here.  But since it is not intrinsically evil, consideration of proportionate goods is legitimate.  This is just basic Catholic moral theology.)

It is, I submit, the emotions that abortion and Covid-19 generate, and not reason, that are driving many Catholics’ resistance to the Church’s instruction on the vaccines.  They think that in permitting the use of the vaccines, the Church is somehow selling out the pro-life cause, accommodating itself to secular opinion, or what have you.  This is completely ridiculous and unhinged.  In permitting Catholics to use such vaccines, the Church is simply reiterating a teaching that she has officially endorsed under two previous popes and that has been defended by orthodox Catholic moralists for decades.  She is taking account of nuances that exist in certain problem cases even where the topic of abortion is concerned (as she does in the case of ectopic pregnancy, where the Church allows theologians to hold the view that it can be permissible to remove the tube containing the unborn baby even if it is foreseen, but not intended, that the death of the baby will result).

The hotheads who now think they see cowardice or perfidy in Catholics who call attention to these nuances did not do so in years past, before the Covid-19 situation arose.  That is confirming evidence that they are letting emotion cloud their reason.  They are understandably worked up over the often dishonest and destructive way in which public authorities have dealt with the pandemic.  They are horrified at the insane and evil “woke” ideas and policies currently flooding our institutions.  They are rightly alarmed at the failure of the pope and many bishops clearly to uphold longstanding teaching on other issues.  They are worried about governmental overreach in dealing with the pandemic (in the form of draconian lockdowns, vaccine mandates, etc.).  They sense that the country and indeed the Western world in general are heading into a crisis.

They are right about all of that.  But it simply does not follow that the issue of whether to take the Covid-19 vaccines has any special connection with the anti-abortion cause, specifically.  It doesn’t.  This is a red herring.  It muddies the waters, causes division among good people who ought to be allies, and clouds reason when it is more imperative than ever that we keep our wits about us.

Related reading:

Covid-19 vaccination is not the hill to die on

Covid-19 vaccination is not the hill to die on

What should Catholics think about the Covid-19 vaccines and about vaccine mandates?  I keep getting asked about this, so a post devoted to the topic seems in order.  As I have said before, I think that the statement on these subjects issued last year by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) gets things exactly right.  The vaccines can be taken in good conscience, but authorities ought to keep them voluntary rather than making them mandatory.  (For those who are wondering, yes, I’ve been vaccinated, as have several other members of my family.) 

What about abortion?

Some Catholics mistakenly object to the vaccines on the grounds that they are connected to abortion.  Now, some uninformed people think that the vaccines actually contain fetal parts, or that they were manufactured using fetal parts.  That is not true.  What is true is that cells that are descended from cells taken from an unborn child aborted fifty years ago were used in testing but not in manufacturing the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (as they are used in testing all sorts of vaccines, food products, etc.).  (In the case of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, these descendent cells areused in manufacturing the vaccine.)

Naturally, it would be better if there were not even this very remote material connection to an abortion.  But the connection is merely material and very remote rather than formal or direct, and it is a longstanding and well-known principle of Catholic moral theology that an action can be justifiable in the case of a merely remote material connection to wrongdoing, if there is a proportional reason for taking that action.  In particular, it is a longstanding position among orthodox Catholic moral theologians that use of vaccines developed in the manner in question can, for this reason, be morally justifiable when there are no alternative vaccines available. 

This position was officially endorsed by the Church in connection with other vaccines having a remote connection to abortion, in a document prepared during the pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II and in another document issued under Pope Benedict XVI (cf. sec. 35). What the Church has done in the more recent document is simply to apply the preexisting principles set out in those earlier documents to the case of the Covid-19 vaccines.  There is no novel moral principle involved, and nothing special about the Covid-19 vaccines compared to the other vaccines the use of which the Church has permitted.

Some Catholics, understandably troubled by the sometimes imprecise and misleading remarks made by Pope Francis on other topics, seem to think that they cast doubt on the reliability of the CDF document on the Covid-19 vaccines.  But that is a red herring.  Again, the latest document merely reiterates and applies official Church teaching that was already in place under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and has long been defended by orthodox Catholic moral theologians.  Whatever one thinks of Pope Francis’s statements on other matters, they are completely irrelevant here.

Some Catholics would respond that the documents in question, including those associated with the two previous popes, are not infallible proclamations.  That is true, but also irrelevant.  If the Church officially determines that some action is morally permissible, then Catholics do not sin in carrying out that action, even if the decision is not infallible.  A theologian may have the right respectfully to present arguments in criticism of the decision if he thinks the Church ought to reconsider it, but he has no right to accuse fellow Catholics of sin if they decide to follow the Church’s pronouncement rather than his personal theological opinion. 

I don’t have anything to add to this particular issue beyond what many others have already said about it.  Readers interested in a detailed discussion of the rationale behind the Church’s position on the Covid-19 vaccines (including the question of the relative moral status of the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson vaccines) should read the Ethics and Public Policy Center statement on the issue signed by Ryan T. Anderson, Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, Maureen Condic, Fr. Kevin Flannery, Robert P. George, Carter Snead, Christopher Tollefsen, and Fr. Thomas Joseph White (who are well-known for their firm opposition to abortion). 

Those who think that the Covid-19 vaccines are somehow uniquely problematic from an anti-abortion point of view should read Fr. Matthew Schneider’s responses to that claim (hereand here).  Those who think that traditionalists ought to oppose the vaccines should read Prof. Roberto de Mattei’s articles on the subject (here, here, and here), and the comments of Fr. Richard Cipolla.  The Pillar has an especially detailed overview of the reasons for the moral justifiability of the vaccines and responses to objections to them.

This is in no way to deny that Catholics ought to oppose, and try to end, any medical research with even a very remote material connection to abortion.  On the contrary, the Vatican documents cited above emphasize this.  But similarly remote connections to abortion or other forms of wrongdoing (and in many cases closer, if still remote, connections) are entailed by countless other medicines, products, and services of various kinds that are licit and that the vaccine critics have not objected to.  (These include certain vaccines for rubella and chicken pox, Tylenol, Advil, aspirin, Benadryl, Maalox, various foods and cosmetics, and so on – all of which have been tested the same way the Covid-19 vaccines were – not to mention corporate donations to Planned Parenthood, immoral labor practices, etc.  See Fr. Schneider’s articles for more detailed discussion of these examples.)  Given how economically interconnected the world is, some remote connection to wrongdoing is unavoidable, and not something for which we are morally culpable (as orthodox Catholic moralists, and the Church, have long acknowledged, long before the Covid-19 situation).  There is nothing special about the Covid-19 vaccines in this regard, and thus no reason to be alarmed about them, specifically.

As the sources cited indicate, this is not a liberal vs. conservative issue, or even a conservative vs. traditionalist issue.  It is, again, simply an application of principles that were already widely accepted by conservative and traditionalist Catholics before Covid-19 or Pope Francis came on the scene.  Hence, Catholics who attempt to make a “pro-life” cause out of opposition to the Covid-19 vaccines do not, in my opinion, have any reasonable basis for doing so.  Though well-meaning, they are muddying the waters and taking precious time and energy away from dealing with the many genuine and very serious problems currently facing the world and the Church.

What about mandates?

None of that entails that a Catholic must take any of the vaccines.  In my opinion (and that of the CDF), there is no general moral obligation to do so (though a particular person’s special circumstances could generate such an obligation for him).  And as I say, I think the CDF is correct to hold that it is better that Covid-19 vaccination be kept voluntary rather than made mandatory, certainly as far as general government policy is concerned (though the military, schools, and the like may have their own special reasons for a mandate, as they do with other vaccines).  Unfortunately, some governments, like the California state government and now the Los Angeles city government, have moved to impose Covid-19 vaccination mandates.  How should a Catholic react to such policies?

The first thing to note is that a vaccine mandate, even if ill-advised in some cases, is not per se or intrinsically immoral.  Most Catholics acknowledge this in the case of other vaccines.  For example, few complain about the fact that schools have long required measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines as a condition for attendance.  Whether or not it is a good idea for a school, a government, a business corporation, or any other authority to impose some particular vaccine mandate is a matter of prudential judgment.  Hence, the Covid-19 vaccine mandates cannot reasonably be objected to simply on the grounds that they are mandates.  A reasonable objection would have to be based instead on the judgment that they involve a failure of prudence.

But how prudent or imprudent a policy is is a matter of degree.  A certain tax policy, for example, might be extremely wise, merely defensible, merely ill-advised, outright foolish, or extremely foolish.  The same thing can be true of a vaccine mandate.  In my opinion, Covid-19 vaccine mandates of the kind now in play in California are somewhere between ill-advised and foolish.  For one thing, I do not believe it has been shown that such mandates (as opposed to voluntary compliance) are necessaryin order effectively to deal with the virus.  That suffices to make them a bad idea, because imposing a vaccine mandate is a significant enough infringement on personal liberty that the authority imposing it faces a high burden of proof. 

For another thing, when citizens are highly polarized about some policy that has merely prudential considerations in its favor, that is itself a serious reason for a public authority not to impose it, especially if the skeptical part of the population is already distrustful of the authority and sees the policy (whether correctly or not) as a crisis of conscience.  This is just basic statesmanship.  When polarization and distrust are already very high, the aim should be to reduce them, and to try as far as possible to accommodate those who have reservations.  Heavy-handed policies like vaccine mandates will inevitably have the opposite effect. 

Are the reservations people have about the mandate reasonable ones?  Some are, and some are not.  On the one hand, some people have certainly said some very stupid things about the vaccines – that they amount to the “mark of the Beast” from Revelation, that they contain tracking devices, and other such idiocies.  Others have less bizarre but still unfounded medical concerns of one kind or another, due to rumors spread on social media.  (Here is a useful videoby Catholic physician Dr. Paul Carson on myths surrounding the vaccines.)

On the other hand, it is perfectly reasonable for someone who has already had Covid-19 and thus has natural immunity to wonder why it is imperative that he be vaccinated – as even Anthony Fauci has acknowledged.  It is perfectly reasonable for someone simply to prefer to wait as long as possible before taking some novel vaccine, just to be certain that there are no unforeseen bad side effects.  It is perfectly reasonable for those who are not particularly vulnerable to the virus (which is most people) to prefer not to get vaccinated, and to wonder why it is not sufficient that people who arevulnerable can get the vaccine if they want to. 

A response to this last point would be that the vaccines are not a magic bullet, and that they don’t guarantee that a person will not get the virus.  Rather, they make it less likely that one will get it, and less likely that one will get seriously ill if he does get it.  At the same time, though, if everyone got the vaccine, then the overall incidence of infection and serious illness would be greatly reduced.  In this indirect way, vaccinating those who are not at high risk from the virus contributes to protecting those who are at high risk from it.

That’s not an unreasonable argument.  Still, since there are legitimate concerns about possible (if rare) side effects, reasonable doubts about whether there is any point to vaccinating those who have already been infected, and significant social unrest over the issue, one must weigh benefits against costs.  It’s a judgment call, and since the burden of proof is on those who would impose burdens, the wiser decision in my view would be to refrain from imposing mandates, and instead encourage voluntary compliance while trying respectfully and patiently to address the concerns of the doubters.

It is also perfectly understandable that many citizens doubt the judgment of the governing authorities on this matter.  Many of these authorities have approached the pandemic in a nakedly politicized and cynical way – questioning the vaccines when Trump was in office, then encouraging them after Biden took office; condemning right-wing public protests as super-spreader events, then encouraging left-wing public protests (which were, into the bargain, often violent); insisting on masks for everyone else while personally not bothering with them; and so on.  Some of these public officials have also proven themselves foolish or malign in other respects – supporting pointless and destructive lockdowns, lunatic policies like defunding the police, and so on.  And there are among them many whose enthusiasm for vaccine mandates is of a piece with a general desire to increase the power of the state and a disdain for subsidiarity.  Then there is the fact that there is no better way to increase skepticism than to shout down and censor those who express it, rather than responding to their arguments in a calm and civil way.  As I have argued before, many of the authorities and experts who have shaped policy during the pandemic have themselves generated the resistance they complain about.

At the same time, it is possible to react foolishly to these very real and grave problems, and too many right-wingers and faithful Catholics have done so.  As Prof. de Mattei has lamented, some have let themselves become so rattled by the social, political, and ecclesiastical crises of recent years that they have fallen into subjectivist “narrative” thinking and crackpot conspiracy theorizing.  Some flirt with schism in a manner that echoes the rigorist heresies of the first centuries of the Church.  They insist on treating an extreme anti-vaccine position as a mark of true orthodoxy, regardless of what the Church herself has taught.  And some have worked themselves into such a lather over the vaccines during the last several months that, now that mandates are on the horizon, they have boxed themselves in psychologically.  They fear that to get vaccinated at this point would be on a par with offering a pinch of incense to an idol – and thus judge that they are obligated to give up their jobs, pull their children out of school, etc. rather than do so.

This is all melodramatic, theologically unsound, and self-destructive.  It is perfectly reasonable to object to the more draconian mandates and to work to get them reversed.  But they are a matter of bad public policy at worst, not a crisis of faith.  As with any bad public policy, those who put themselves at professional or financial risk in fighting it deserve our respect.  But it is wrong to pretend that such resistance is analogous to that of the martyrs of the Church, or a general moral obligation on Catholics as such.  The way our culture and politics are going, there will in future be no shortage of hills for Catholics to die on.  This is not one of them.

It’s the next thrilling open thread!

Please keep in mind, dear reader, that if you’re inclined to begin a comment with “This is off-topic, but…” then you shouldn’t post it.  Certainly I won’t approve it.  Wait for a post where it will be on-topic – such as this one, the latest, exciting open thread, where everything is on-topic.  From logic gates to interest rates, from CRT to CBD, from Charlemagne to House of Pain – the field is wide open.  Just keep it civil and keep it classy, as always.

Previous open threads can be found here.

The “first world problem” of evil

Suffering, atheists frequently assure us, is not what we would expect if God exists.  You might suppose, then, that where there is greater suffering, there will be fewer believers in God, and where there is less suffering there will be more believers in God.  But that appears to be the reverse of the truth.  As a friend pointed out to me recently, it is a remarkable fact that though life was, for most human beings for most of human history, much, much harder than it is for modern Westerners, they were also far more likely to be religious than modern Westerners are.  It is precisely as modern medicine, technology, and relative social and political stability have made life easier and greatly mitigated suffering that religious belief has declined. 

The atheist is likely to respond that suffering people are more likely to believe in God because they hope that he will rescue them from, or at least reward them for, their suffering.  But that doesn’t sit well with the atheist’s other claim, i.e. that if God exists we should expect him to be willing and able to eliminate suffering.  When human leaders show indifference or incompetence, does that tend to make people moreinclined to trust and hope in them?  Quite the opposite.  So, if people of earlier generations assumed, like the atheist does, that a good and omnipotent God would eliminate all suffering, wouldn’t the persistence of suffering have caused them to doubt God, rather than to believe more fervently?

The fact is that earlier generations did notsuppose that a good and omnipotent God would eliminate all suffering.  Indeed, the very idea is contrary to Christian doctrine, which teaches that much suffering is precisely what we should expect in human life.  The pervasiveness of suffering, if anything, actually confirms rather than falsifies Christianity.  And bafflement at suffering is more a consequence of modern unbelief than a cause of it.

To understand how this is so, consider the approach to these matters reflected in a book like Fr. Francis J. Remler’s Why Must I Suffer?  A Book of Light and Consolation.  First published almost a century ago, it is not a work of academic theology, but rather of down-to-earth spiritual guidance.  And despite what a modern reader might expect from its subtitle, it is the opposite of sentimental or touchy-feely – so much so that many today would no doubt find it insensitive.  Yet precisely for that reason it offers true light and consolation rather than the mawkish counterfeits of those who prefer to emote rather than to understand.  And it simply reflects what the Catholic faith has always taught about suffering, the forgetting of which misleads many today falsely to suppose that suffering somehow casts doubt on the existence of God.

Original sin

The first and most fundamental point Remler emphasizes is that suffering is the inevitable consequence of original sin.  Now, this is easily misunderstood.  The theologically uninformed often suppose that it means that God takes special action arbitrarily to inflict a punishment on us for something somebody else did – which, of course, sounds unjust or even crazy.  But that is not what it means.

Rather, the idea is this.  We are by nature rational animals, and that nature is, as far as it goes, good.  But it is severely limited.  Because we are flesh and blood, we are subject to all sorts of bodily harms – deprivation of food, water, and oxygen, broken bones, lacerations, infections, diseases, and so on.  Because the exercise of our rationality is dependent on bodily organs, we are also subject to various cognitive and moral disorders.  Limited information, excessive emotion, damage to sense organs, neural malfunction, and the like will lead us into various errors.  Excess or deficiency in our passions will also weaken the will in its capacity to opt for, and keep us attentive to, what the intellect tells us is good.  And so on.  Once these injuries and errors occur they are also bound to snowball and ramify, especially because we are also socialanimals.  We lead others into error and moral failure, so that societies no less than individuals become disordered in various ways.

For these reasons, human beings in their natural state inevitably depreciate, as it were, the moment they’re “driven off the lot.”  God could not have made us any different without making something that wasn’t us.  Having the limitations we have is simply a consequence of our very nature, part of the package of being a human being.  What God could do, though, would be to supplementour nature.  He could take special action to prevent us from falling into cognitive and moral error and otherwise suffering the damages we are prone to.  And he could also offer us a higherend than our nature by itself suits us for – the beatific vision, an intimate communion with him that vastly outstrips the knowledge of God that the exercise of our natural rational powers makes possible.

Because this special assistance and higher end are supernatural – that is to say, something above and beyond our nature – they are not in any sense owed to us.  We would still have been complete creations without them, albeit immeasurably inferior to what we would be with them.  To offer them to us is a matter of grace rather than justice.  God would have done us no wrong had he not offered them.

He did offer them to us, though, by way of offering them to our first parents, in a manner analogous to how a benefactor might offer to a father some good that would, if accepted, benefit his progeny.  Suppose a rich man decided out of kindness to offer you a valuable piece of real estate, or a million dollars to invest.  This would benefit not only you, but also all those who would come to inherit the land after it is developed, or reap the dividends of the invested money.  The rich benefactor doesn’t owe any of this to you or your descendants, and thus would have done no wrong to you or to them if he never made the offer.  Nor would he be doing any wrong to you or to them if he put conditions on the offer. 

Now, suppose that the rich man makes this conditional offer and that you refuse it, or refuse to abide by the conditions.  There is a sense in which you and your descendants have now suffered harm.  For you and they have now lost the opportunity for this benefit, and are in that sense in a worse off condition than you were before the offer was made.  But the rich man himself is in no way at fault for this harm.  Rather, youare at fault, and you and your progeny thus have no one to blame for your condition but you.

This is the sort of state we are in as a result of the failure of our first parents to fulfill the conditions God set on the supernatural gifts he offered them.  It is theirfault, not God’s, that we lost those gifts.  For us to suffer the effects of original sin is thus not a matter of God positively inflicting some harm on us, any more than the rich man in my scenario would be positively inflicting some harm on your progeny by refraining from giving you the million dollars.  It is instead a matter of our reaping the inevitable consequences of our first parents’ disobedience – which includes all the suffering our unaided nature is subject to, as well as the additional pain of knowing that it could have been avoided.

To be sure, it is also part of Christian teaching that God has, through Christ, restored the possibility of attaining the beatific vision, and provided the grace needed for repentance.  But that does not entail removing all the effects of original sin.  To do that would be like pretending it never happened, and would blind us to the severe limitations of our nature, to how very grave are the consequences of sin, and to how badly we need grace.  Grace does not smother nature but builds on it, and that entails removing only the worst effects of original sin.  The remainder of those effects are still with us – and thus, we cannot fail to suffer.

Actual sin

Then there is the fact that the sin of our first parents is very far from being the only source of suffering.  As Remler rightly emphasizes, there is also the circumstance that we all have ourselves committed many sins, and must inevitably face their consequences, which snowball and ramify no less than does the sin of our first parents.  If I am a liar, I may come to be distrusted by others, might lose friends as a result, and may encourage others to lie by my example.  If I am a drug abuser, I may come to be addicted, may lose my job as a result, and may lead others to use drugs.  If I am an adulterer, I may end up causing the breakup of my marriage and that of the person with whom I commit adultery, and will thereby harm any children involved.  And so on and on.  As millions upon millions of human beings commit these and many other sins, their effects inevitably multiply throughout the social order, so that the human race as a whole becomes miserable.

To be sure, here too God offers, through grace, the possibility of repentance and redemption.  But it is quite ridiculous to expect him to remove all the effects of actual sin, any more than he removes all the effects of original sin – to suppose, for example, that after I repent of lying, he should immediately restore my reputation by causing everyone to forget what I have done; that after I repent of abusing drugs, he should immediately remove all the craving for the drugs that I have habituated myself into feeling; that after I repent of adultery, he should immediately cause my spouse entirely to forgive and forget my infidelity; and so on.  Were he to do so, we would lose all understanding of the gravity of sin, and of our desperate need for grace.

Moreover, and as Remler discusses at length, we deserveto suffer for our sins.  And this leads us to a further reason why there must be suffering in human life, which is that it serves as a punishment for sin.  True, if we genuinely repent, God will preserve us from the eternal damnation we have merited.  But we are not entirely “off the hook.”  There is temporalpunishment that must be paid for every single sin we commit, and our debt gets very high over the course of a lifetime. 

But we can pay some of that debt every time we accept some particular bit of suffering that we did not cause ourselves.  Suppose, for example, that I am an adulterer but that my wife does forgive and forget.  I am very fortunate, but I nevertheless certainly deservethe anger and hostility she might have shown me.  Suppose also that I am unjustly accused of embezzling at work, and only after a long and painful investigation is my reputation restored.  Though I didn’t deserve that particular bit of suffering, I did deserve comparable suffering as a result of my adultery.  And if I accept the suffering in a penitential spirit, I can contribute to paying off my debt of temporal punishment.

Moreover, even when I am innocent of wrongdoing, I can emulate Christ by accepting undeserved suffering, in a penitential spirit, for the sake of others.  Suppose I am not an adulterer, but that I have a friend who is and whose marriage has been destroyed as a result.  Suppose he is very sorry for what he has done and is trying, with difficulty, to restore some order to his life.  If I undergo some undeserved suffering myself (as in the scenario involving an unjust accusation of embezzling) I might offer that suffering up to God for the sake of my friend, as Christ offered up his undeserved suffering for us.  By becoming, to that extent, Christ-like, I not only help my friend but contribute to the perfection of my own character.

In these ways, every instance of suffering we undergo, undeserved suffering included, can have a greater good drawn out of it, if only we let it.  That is by no means easy, but the graces to do so are also among those God offers us.

Suffering as punishment

Moreover, it is far preferable that we accept the miseries of this life in a penitential spirit than that we suffer those of the next – which includes those of Purgatory, let alone Hell.  This is another theme developed by Remler.  If you think things are bad now, just wait.  As Remler writes:

[T]he smallest measure of suffering in Purgatory is far more intense than the severest pains on earth.  The saints tell us that the intensity of the pain caused by the fire of Purgatory is the same as that which is caused by the fire of Hell.  The only difference is this: That the souls in Purgatory are consoled by the knowledge that their torment will end sooner or later, whereas the damned in Hell are tortured by despair at the knowledge that their punishment will last forever. (pp. 33-34)

At the same time, “the advantages of present sufferings over future ones are great beyond measure,” for “in this life you can accomplish vastly more in a few hours than you could in Purgatory perhaps in ever so many years,” provided that you accept suffering in a penitential spirit, out of sorrow for sin and love of God, and in union with Christ’s suffering on the Cross (p. 34).

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this connection between suffering and punishment for sin.  And from the Fall of Man to the Passion of the Christ to the Last Judgment, the theme of suffering as punishment absolutely permeates Christianity.  That is precisely why, though people in earlier eras of Western civilization suffered far more than we do, they were also more devout.  It was no mystery to them why God would allow suffering; on the contrary, they saw that suffering is precisely what we should expect and accept as punishment for human sinfulness.

But modern Western society is affluent and egalitarian, and for those reasons it is extremely uncomfortable with the idea of punishment.  For punishment is a matter of inflicting deserved suffering.  Because modern Western society is affluent, it is soft and cannot abide suffering.  And because it is egalitarian, it cannot abide the idea that some of the ways of living that people choose are bad, and thus deserving of suffering.  Thus does Christian teaching become incomprehensible to modern secularized Westerners.  They either reject it altogether, or they massively distort it by praising its notions of mercy and forgiveness while ignoring its complementary teaching about repentance and penance.

And thus is their bafflement at suffering more a consequencethan a cause of their apostasy.  It’s not that they don’t understand why God would allow suffering, and for that reason give up Christian teaching.  It’s that they have given up Christian teaching, and for that reason don’t understand why God would allow suffering.  You might say that the “problem of evil” as contemporary atheists understand it is, in that sense, a “first world problem.”  Of course, I don’t mean by that to imply that the suffering to which such atheists appeal when arguing against the existence of God is in any way trivial.  What I mean is that a “first world” mentality – that of the modern affluent, egalitarian, secularized Westerner – deeply informs their understanding of the significance of that suffering.

In fairness, though, it isn’t just atheists who exhibit this mentality.  It has deeply permeated the more liberal and moderate sectors of Christianity.  It is manifest, for example, in those who only ever preach about mercy and forgiveness, but never about the repentance and penance that are the necessary preconditions of mercy and forgiveness, and without which only damnation awaits; who deny or downplay the doctrine of Hell, and would rather reassure us that all or most are saved than warn us that some or even many are lost; who remain silent even about Purgatory, or who treat entry into it only as a relief rather than as something frightful and to be avoided if at all possible; who claim that capital punishment or even life imprisonment are per se contrary to human dignity; and so on.  All of this evinces deep discomfort with the very idea of punishment as deserved suffering. 

It thereby plays into the hands of the atheist, who can reasonably ask: “If making even the most wicked suffer for their sins is bad, then why would a good God allow any suffering at all?”  And it does grave damage to souls, ensuring that there will be vastly moresuffering rather than less.  For people who are constantly told about God’s mercy and never about the conditions he places on it are less likely to repent, or to do penance when they do repent.  Many will be damned who would have repented had they been warned; and many will suffer agony in Purgatory who would have avoided it had they been urged to adopt a more penitential spirit during this life.  Those who only ever talk of God’s mercy and never about damnation and penance are like a doctor who gently reassures those with lung cancer that many such patients survive, while never warning them to stop smoking nor prescribing chemotherapy or any other treatment. 

Yet it isn’t just theological liberals and moderates who have been infected.  As the madness and evil into which the secular world has sunk have permeated ever more deeply into the Church, even some very conservative Catholics have allowed themselves to be tempted to despair and to abandon her – as if Christ and the apostles had never warned of great persecutions, heresies, and apostasies to come, and as if the Church had not always acknowledged that even popes are sometimes capable of error and of causing great harm when not speaking ex cathedra.  Christ promises only that the Church will not be destroyed.  He does not deny that the human element of the Church will also suffer the effects of original and actual sin.

We would not be true sons of Holy Mother Church if we were not deeply pained by what is being done to her.  But is our pain greater than that of the martyrs who have over the centuries suffered unimaginable tortures and death at the hands of pagans, heretics, jihadists, and communists?  Is it greater than Christ’s suffering on the cross?  Has the softness we deplore in modern therapeutic Western society and “candy-ass” brands of Christianity not corrupted our own souls too?  Let us beware lest our zeal be the fair-weather kind of Peter, to whom Christ issued a stern reminder of the costs of true discipleship:

From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.  And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid, Lord!  This shall never happen to you.”  But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!  You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.”  Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.  For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:21-25)

Related reading:

The Thomistic dissolution of the logical problem of evil

Sterba on the problem of evil

Against candy-ass Christianity

Do not abandon your Mother

A reply to Dreher

Lao Tzu’s negative theology

Among the most interesting things about Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (fl. 6thcentury B.C.) is that he did not exist.  Or at least, that’s what some modern scholars tell us.  I’m skeptical about his non-existence myself, and so will refer to him in what follows as if he were a real person.  In any event, that existence and non-existence are both attributed to Lao Tzu is oddly appropriate given what his classic work Tao Te Ching says about the ultimate source of things: “All things in the world come from being.  And being comes from non-being” (II, 40, Wing-Tsit Chan translation).  What does this mean?

Even the casual reader of the Tao Te Chingquickly notices its love of paradoxical formulations.  But they have a serious purpose; indeed, Lao Tzu could not say quite what he wants to say without them.  But a little stage-setting is required in order to understand what is going on.

The central concept of the Tao Te Ching is, of course, that of the Tao.  Literally, this means the “Way,” and the notion of the Way as a moral path is central to ethics and political philosophy in the Chinese tradition.  But the Tao Te Ching raises the Tao to the level of a metaphysical principle as well.  The idea is that following the Tao conceived of as the moral path of the sage and the wise statesman has to do with mirroring the Tao conceived of as the metaphysical first principle or source of all other reality.  (The Tao Te Ching, like Plato’s Republic, is no less concerned with metaphysics than it is with ethics and political philosophy – and indeed, like Plato’s classic, takes its moral and political conclusions to follow from its metaphysics.  But in the present post I’ll be focusing only on the metaphysics.)

The Tao is “the origin of Heaven and Earth” and “the mother of all things” (I,1), and “all things depend on it for life” (I, 34).  It is “eternal” (I, 32) and possesses a “simplicity” (I, 32 and 37) that is prior to the “differentiation” we find in the world around us (I,32).  Lao Tzu writes:

Tao produced the One.  The One produced the two.  The two produced the three.  And the three produced the ten thousand things.  The ten thousand things carry the yin and embrace the yang, and through the blending of the material force (ch’i) they achieve harmony. (II, 42)

In another passage, the Tao seems to be identified with “the One”; and of Heaven, Earth, gods, lords, princes, and creatures, it is said that “it is the One that makes these what they are” (II, 39, Lau translation).  As if to summarize these themes, the Tao Te Chingsays:

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before heaven and earth.  Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change.  It operates everywhere and is free from danger.  It may be considered the mother of the universe.  I do not know its name; I call it Tao.  If forced to give it a name, I shall call it Great. (I, 25, Wing-Tsit Chan translation)

So far this sounds like a kind of theism, albeit the Taois commonly understood to be impersonal rather than a literal heavenly mother or father.  In particular, it is reminiscent of the Neo-Platonic theism that takes all differentiated and composite things to derive from an absolutely simple first cause, by way of emanation.  And since what we have here is a philosophical doctrine (even if it is not one for which detailed and rigorous explicit arguments are given) rather than a purported revelation, it amounts to a kind of natural theology.

However, we have not yet addressed the most striking aspect of this natural theology.  It is evident from the start, in the famous, haunting first lines of the Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be told of is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name” (I, 1).  Hence, as the passage goes on to say, the Tao is “nameless” as well as “named.”

There is paradox here, but no contradiction.  What Lao Tzu is telling us is that while of course the Taocan be named or spoken of in onesense – that’s the point of saying what we’ve so far heard him say, after all – what we are speaking about is something that ultimately cannot adequately be captured in language, because it is so radically unlike the temporary, changing, differentiated, dependent things of our experience.  In that sense it is nameless.  The best we can do is to suggest the ways in which it is not like the things of our experience – it is not temporary, not changing, not differentiated, not dependent, and so on.

In other words, the Tao Te Ching is in part an exercise in what has come to be referred to in the West as negative theology or apophatic theology.  The theme runs throughout the book.  We are told that the Tao is “empty” (I, 4) and “has no name” (I, 32).  It is the “Invisible,” the “Inaudible,” the “Elusive,” and “infinite and boundless, it cannot be given any name” (I, 14).  Though its “essence is very real,” it is “deep and obscure” (I, 21).  In the world of our experience, we find beauty and ugliness, good and evil, being and non-being, difficult and easy, long and short, high and low, front and back, and so on (I, 2); but, the implication seems to be, the Tao transcends all of these, and thus “the sage… spreads doctrines without words.”

This, I submit, explains the meaning of the remark cited above to the effect that “being comes from non-being.”  The Tao is not like any of the finite things of our experience – it is not merely one further item of furniture in the universe, not a being alongside all these other beings.  In that sense it is a kind of “non-being,” but this is not meant to imply that there is no such thing as the Tao.  After all, here Lao Tzu is affirming its existence and telling us much about it.

In an especially striking remark, he tells us that the Tao “seems to have existed before the Lord” (I, 4).  (Lau translates this as: “It images the forefather of God.”)  This is reminiscent of Paul Tillich’s notion of the “the God above God” – the idea that the God of classical theism transcends the excessively anthropomorphic conceptions of deity one finds not only among uneducated believers, but even among some theologians and philosophers. 

What exactly is the relationship between the Taoand the world?  What has been said so far might indicate that they are utterly distinct, as God and the world are taken to be in mainstream Western theism.  However, we are also told that the Tao “is to the world as the River and the Sea are to rivulets and streams” (I, 32, Lau translation).  This seems to imply a continuity between the Tao and the world, as rivers and seas are continuous with rivulets and streams.  Indeed, as Frederick Copleston notes in his book Religion and the One: Philosophies East and West, the Tao Te Ching says that the Tao“moves” by “turning back” (II, 40).  Copleston says that all of this “suggests that the One is the universe, which pursues a cyclic course, producing the Many in a process of self-transformation, absorbing them into itself, and then reproducing them once more” (p. 46).

How does this square with the idea that the Taois changeless, given that the world is changing?  Copleston proposes that we interpret the Tao Te Ching through the lens of the distinction drawn in later Chinese philosophy between substance and function.  The substance of the Tao, on this interpretation, is the Tao considered in itself, which is one, timeless, and unchanging.  The function of the Tao is the Tao considered in terms of its manifestation in the world of our experience, which is many, temporal, and changing.

This doesn’t quite imply pantheism, since there isn’t a complete collapse here of the distinction between Tao and world.  But the distinction is arguably sufficiently attenuated that we have a kind of panentheism.  I would propose that “apophatic panentheism” might be an apt label for Lao Tzu’s brand of natural theology.

Ioannidis on the politicization of science

Like other academics, I first became aware of John Ioannidis through his influential 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings are False.”  That essay was widely praised as a salutary reminder from one scientist to his fellows of the need for their field to be self-critical.  With the COVID-19 pandemic, Ioannidis would become far more widely known, this time for expressing skepticism about some of the scientific claims being made about the virus and the measures taken to deal with it.  His warnings were in the same spirit as that of his earlier work, and presented in the same measured and reasonable manner – but this time they were not so warmly received.  In a new essay at The Tablet, Ioannidis reflects on the damage that has been done to the norms of scientific research as politics has corrupted it during the pandemic.

The specific norms Ioannidis has in mind are, he says, “the Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.”  The reference is to an influential account of scientific method proposed by sociologist Robert Merton.  Science should be communal in the sense that research ought to be communicated to and shared with all scientists.  It should be universal in the sense of being judged by objective and impersonal criteria.  It should be disinterested in the sense that research should be pursued for its own sake rather than for the purpose of promoting some political agenda or personal aggrandizement.  It should be skeptical in the sense that scientists should make testable claims and welcome critical evaluations of their research.

Ioannidis notes several respects in which these norms have been violated over the last year and a half.  I want to call attention to two of his points in particular: the deleterious role that social media have played, and the damage that the politicization of science has done to science itself and to public health. 

The first is not entirely the fault of scientists.  Over the course of the pandemic, people of all political persuasions have confidently asserted that “the science” says this or says that, when in fact most of them have not read what scientists themselves have written and wouldn’t know where to find it if they wanted to.  Rather, what they know is what politicians and journalists have claimed about what “the science” says.  Worse, they know the simplified versions of what politicians and journalists have said that they find at Twitter, Facebook, and the like.  The doubly indirect nature of this knowledge of the scientific research already entails significant distortions.  Politicians and journalists of all stripes have biases, lack relevant expertise, etc. and this inevitably distorts their presentation of scientific findings.  And when their own presentations are reduced to sound bites by social media, there is bound to be further distortion. 

But it’s worse even than that.  For one thing, social media do not merely oversimplify complex issues.  They positively foster irrational habits of thought – snap judgments, snark and one-upmanship in place of dispassionate debate, groupthink, and so on.  And too many scientists active on social media have succumbed to these temptations, which erodes the Mertonian norm of disinterestedness.  Ioannidis writes:

Anonymous and pseudonymous abuse has a chilling effect; it is worse when the people doing the abusing are eponymous and respectable.  The only viable responses to bigotry and hypocrisy are kindness, civility, empathy, and dignity.  However, barring in-person communication, virtual living and social media in social isolation are poor conveyors of these virtues.

End quote.  Then there is the further distortion that follows from the political and financial interests that the owners of social media have in pushing certain scientific claims and censoring criticism of them.  As Ioannidis says:

Big Tech companies, which gained trillions of dollars in cumulative market value from the virtual transformation of human life during lockdown, developed powerful censorship machineries that skewed the information available to users on their platforms… Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health.  There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science – and science lost.

End quote.  We are constantly told to “follow the science,” but what we are given is not science itself but science as reflected in the funhouse mirror of contemporary media.  And everyone knows it.  The Big Tech companies and their allies in science who bemoan the skepticism that non-experts show toward pandemic-related scientific claims largely have themselves to blame for it. 

Regarding the damage that the politicization of science has done, Ioannidis says:

Politics had a deleterious influence on pandemic science.  Anything any apolitical scientist said or wrote could be weaponized for political agendas.  Tying public health interventions like masks and vaccines to a faction, political or otherwise, satisfies those devoted to that faction, but infuriates the opposing faction.  This process undermines the wider adoption required for such interventions to be effective.  Politics dressed up as public health not only injured science.  It also shot down participatory public health where people are empowered, rather than obligated and humiliated.

End quote.  The importance of these points cannot be overstated.  Genuine science must of its nature be coolly dispassionate, appeal to our reason, and eschew partisanship.  When you try to browbeat people into accepting some scientific claim, insult them for raising questions about it, loudly make a political statement out of adherence to it, etc., then you are inevitably only going to increasepeople’s doubts about its scientific status.  For if it really had the evidence and the best arguments on its side, what need would there be for the pressure tactics? 

Next to the enormous destruction caused by pointless lockdowns, the political factionalism Ioannidis refers to has been, in my view, the most depressing thing about the response to the virus.  Almost from the beginning, both sides have been reacting more to each other than to the facts.  Attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccines are the latest example.  On the Left, some of the same people who were skeptical of the vaccines when Trump was in office and working to fast-track them are now insisting that everyone take them and condemn all reservations about them as unscientific.  Some who indignantly claim to favor sovereignty over one’s body when abortion is in question now favor making the vaccines mandatory.  Some of them talk as if unvaccinated people who get sick or die are getting what they deserve, though they would never show such hatefulness toward people who become ill as a result of eating too much or risky sexual behavior. 

On the conservative side, some who had no problem with the vaccines when Trump was working to get them developed quickly now regard them as if they arose as part of a sinister left-wing plot.  The Catholic Church has long taught that the use of vaccines developed using cell lines originally derived from aborted fetuses can be justifiable under certain circumstances.  But some conservative Catholics, though they had no qualms about this teaching when it was promulgated under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, now claim that use of the COVID-19 vaccines necessarily conflicts with opposition to abortion – even though (as the CDF, the USCCB, and conservativeand traditionalistCatholic scholars have noted) the same reasoning that the Church endorsed under those earlier popes applies to the COVID-19 vaccines too.  (My own view is that of the CDF – that use of the vaccines can be justifiable, but that they also ought to be voluntary.  Catholic readers who suppose that the vaccines cannot be justified might want to read this, this, this, and this.)

Each side is, in my view, largely reacting in kneejerk fashion to the other.  This is no more rational or defensible when right-wingers do it than when left-wingers do.  However, it is the Left that dominates the commanding heights in academia, journalism, and popular culture.  When the left politicizes science, as it manifestly has done through the course of the pandemic, it has itself to blame for sparking a reaction and generating the skepticism about science that it decries.

Related reading:

Scientism: America’s State Religion

Dupré on the ideologizing of science

Grisez on balancing health against other considerations

Preventive war and quarantining the healthy

Lockdowns versus social justice

The rule of lawlessness

The experts have no one to blame but themselves

What “the science” is saying this week

The lockdown is no longer morally justifiable

The lockdown and appeals to authority

The burden of proof is on those who impose burdens

The lockdown’s loyal opposition

Some thoughts on the COVID-19 crisis

Make-believe matter

Materialism can at first blush seem to have a more commonsensical and empirical character than Cartesian dualism.  The latter asks you to believe in a res cogitans that is unobservable in principle.  The former – so it might appear – merely asks you to confine your belief to what you already know from everyday experience.  You pick up an apple and bite into it.  Its vibrant color, sweet taste and odor, feel of solidity, and the crunch it makes all make it seem as real as anything could be.  Anyone who says that all that exists are things like that might, whether or not you agree with him, at least seem to have the evidence of the senses in his corner. 

The trouble is that that is not what the materialist is saying.  The matter to which he would reduce everything is not the matter of common sense, not the hard earth of daily experience.  It is instead a highly abstract theoretical construct which – just like Descartes’ res cogitans – is not and indeed cannot be known directly via perception (nor, unlike the res cogitans, by introspection either).  Moreover, it is a conception the materialist has inherited from Cartesian dualism itself.  And it is that conception of matter, rather than the Cartesian’s commitment to a non-empirical res cogitans, that has made it so difficult for Cartesians and materialists alike to account for how conscious awareness relates to the physical world.

Longtime readers of this blog will recognize these themes.  They are also among the themes of philosopher William Barrett’s interesting 1986 book Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer.  Barrett writes:

Oddly enough, the trouble with the Cartesian dualism comes from the side of the body.  The body, as Descartes conceives it, is not such that it can accommodate the soul.  It cannot, so to speak, be penetrated by the soul; it can only remain in external contact with it.  This body is not the physical body, our physical body, as we know it in our daily intimacy with it.  It is the body of physics – that is, of the science of physics; a piece of matter, and particularly as Descartes conceived of matter.  But the body of physics is remote and unknown to us and is not the body we live in in our day-to-day existence.  The body we know is rarely sharply distinguishable from the soul: in our moods and feelings we are not often sure what part is physical and what not.  There is no sharp dividing line between.  The life of flesh and blood is particularly focused about the feelings and emotions.  So long as there is no adequate conception of the concrete or lived body, our theories of mind cannot deal adequately with the life of feeling. (pp. 19-20)

Let’s pause over the second half of this passage.  Consider the feelings and emotions people experience every day – the warmth in the throat that results from a swig of hot coffee, a twinge of pain in the knee or lower back, an itch from a rash that won’t go away, a pinch from tight clothing, the twinge of excitement that spikes in the chest upon being startled, the tightness and heaviness in the chest that can result from worry or depression, the uncomfortable fullness that results from having overeaten, the pressure of having too full a bladder or colon, the agitation of sexual arousal, anxiety, fear, or anger, and so on.  All of this is experienced as bodily.  It has the feel of knowing a particular bit of matter from the inside, as it were, from a place deep within the marrow and viscera.  If you were unacquainted with the way modern philosophers talk and one of them told you that these features of daily life were “mental” or “in the mind,” you would suppose that what he meant is that they were somehow unreal or imaginary, which sounds crazy.

But that they are in the mind rather than in the body is precisely what post-Cartesian philosophers, whether dualist or materialist, do say.  They take matter to be devoid of anything but primary qualities such as size, position in space, motion, and in general what can be given a purely mathematical characterization.  Anything else is treated as merely a projection of consciousness.  Hence the redness, sweetness, fragrance, and crunchy sound of the apple are taken to be nothing more than the qualia of our experience of the apple, and not to correspond to anything in the apple itself.  And in the same way, warmth, pain, itches, twinges, sensations of pressure, tightness, fullness, arousal, and the like are taken to exist only as the qualia of our conscious experience of the body, and to reflect nothing in the intrinsic nature of the body itself.  The matter of the apple and that of the body alike are taken to comprise nothing more than colorless, odorless, tasteless particles moving through space.  The purely mathematical description of matter afforded by particle physics exhausts their nature. 

Hence, on this view, introspection no more reveals to you the nature of the flesh than perception reveals to you the nature of the apple.  Apple and flesh alike are strictly unobservable.  What we perceive and introspect are really just the mind’s representations of the apple or the flesh, and not the real McCoy.  Physical theory, as interpreted through a mechanistic philosophy of nature, tells us their real nature. 

Now, Berkeley had a field day with this picture of matter and our knowledge of it.  Though he famously denied the reality of matter, the matter he denied was already a pretty ghostly thing anyway – matter stripped of all the concrete reality perception and common sense attribute to it, leaving only a desiccated mathematical husk.  And Berkeley’s point was in part that there is nothing left for the mathematical structure described by physics to be the structure of when all of those concrete features are abstracted away. 

We are accustomed to treating Berkeley’s philosophy as slightly (or more than slightly) mad, when the truth is that he was merely drawing out the implications of the mad conception of nature bequeathed to him by Descartes, Locke, and company.  As Barrett writes:

The real world of our common experience contains trees, grass, singing birds; houses and other people; chairs and tables; etc., etc.  In our daily life these are evidently and substantially there, and not at all “subjective” appearances of something else; and for Berkeley, too, they are evidently and substantially there.  It is Locke who would undermine their reality, and make it secondary to some underlying abstractions of physics.  And here Berkeley turns Locke’s own empiricist weapons back upon their originator.  (p. 39)

Specifically, Locke and company had appealed to the way that the appearances of color, sound, and the like are relative to the perceiver as a reason to judge them mere secondary rather than primary qualities of matter.  Our ideas of motion, position in space, etc. correspond to something really out there in mind-independent reality, but our ideas of color, sound, etc. do not.  Berkeley argued that the appeal to relativity can be deployed against all the so-called primary qualities as well.  And that includes what the Newtonians naively took to remain objectively out there after the mechanists were done with their desiccation of matter.  Here Barrett is worth quoting at length:

Here Berkeley introduces the principle of relativity in a bold and thoroughgoing form that was not to emerge again until Einstein in the twentieth century.

The motion or rest of material particles had been taken as absolute by Locke because there was the absolute space of Newton in which they moved or remained at rest.  And here Berkeley performs one of his most audacious acts of analysis, as he seeks to pull down one of the sacred pillars of the Newtonian world.  Space – the absolute space of Newton, container of all that is – is not given as a reality in and of itself.  It is built up as a high-level abstraction from our perceptions of touch and vision.  It is derived from experience; it is not the container of experience.  We invert the proper order by taking the abstraction as a concrete reality.

In sum, the whole world of matter, which Locke would make the substratum, or underlying reality, for the world of our common experience, is in fact a high-level intellectual construction.  It is a case of misplaced concreteness, as the philosopher A. N. Whitehead in our century has called it: the abstract concepts of physics are taken as ultimately concrete in place of the ordinary world of common experience.  Berkeley stands with this ordinary world, and he consistently reassures his ordinary reader that he is on his side against the materialism of sophisticated philosophers.  (p. 40)

The trouble, of course, is that Berkeley himself is not entirelythe friend of common sense, to say the least.  For he denies that tables, chairs, and the like continue to be there when no one perceives them, and that thesis is no part of common sense.  Like common sense, Berkeley holds that there is no real distinction between primary and secondary qualities.  But whereas common sense takes all of these qualities to be out there independent of the mind, Berkeley takes them all to be equally mind-dependent.  Like his philosophical predecessors, he buys into the basic move of the moderns, which is to relocate the qualities of physical objects into the mind.  It’s just that, unlike those predecessors, he relocates all of them there.  Hence even Berkeley is in fact insufficiently radical in his critique of his predecessors, precisely because he is insufficiently reactionary. 

Barrett makes the important point (at pp. 40-41) that the contemporary materialist’s obsession with the computer model of the mind in no way remedies the tendency of the modern conception of matter to collapse matter into mind.  For the notion of a computer is itself the notion of something essentially mind-dependent.  Nothing counts as hardware or software apart from an intelligence which has designed them to function as such.  (This is a theme that John Searle would go on to develop in detail a few years later, in argumentation that I have discussed and defended at length elsewhere.)

When I say that the moderns either partially or wholly move the qualities of physical objects into the mind, what I mean, to be more precise, is that they move them into the intellect (albeit the empiricists on the list, unlike Descartes, collapse the intellect and the imagination, but put that aside for present purposes).  That is why Descartes notoriously takes non-human animals to be insensate automata.  They lack rationality, hence they lack a res cogitans.  Thus, since for Descartes the only other kind of substance there is is res extensa, which is pure extension devoid of any consciousness, that is what animals must be. 

This too is contrary to the commonsense conception of matter.  Consider again what you experience in your own body, and experience precisely as bodily phenomena – sensations of warmth, flashes of pain, twinges of excitement, arousal, fear, and anger, and so on.  Common sense takes something like all this to exist in dogs, horses, bears, and other non-human animals, even though these creatures lack rationality and are entirely corporeal in nature.  For again, from the point of view of common sense, these features are bodily in nature, not mere representations in the intellect, so that other bodily but non-intellectual creatures are as capable of exhibiting them as we are.

Some contemporary philosophers, cognizant of the problems with the early modern mechanistic and mathematicized conception of matter, have reinserted into matter the qualities common sense attributes to it, but then fallaciously draw the conclusion that this entails panpsychism.  They are making a mistake similar to Berkeley’s, and like him they are insufficiently radical precisely because they are insufficiently reactionary, accepting as they do too much of the modern conception of matter they claim to be rejecting.  For like the early moderns, they take the qualities of ordinary physical objects to be partially or wholly mind-dependent, i.e. to be identified with the qualia of conscious experience.  Unlike the early moderns, they take these qualities to exist in physical objects themselves, and not just in our minds.  The result is that they conclude, absurdly, that there must be something analogous to conscious awareness even in rocks, dirt, tables, chairs, etc.  (The poor moderns.  They just can’t do anything right!)

Another part of the problem is that they implicitly buy into the modern reductionist idea that all matter is essentially of the same one type.  Hence if there really is consciousness in the matter that makes up non-human animal bodies, then (the fallacious implicit inference goes) there must be something like it too in rocks, dirt, tables, chairs, etc.

The sober, boring truth – enshrined in Aristotelian philosophy and common sense alike – is that some kinds of purely material substances (namely non-human animals) are conscious, and others (like rocks and dirt) are not.  The latter really do possess qualities like color as common sense conceives of it, but that does not entail panpsychism, because (contra Descartes, Berkeley, and company) those qualities are not entirely mind-dependent.  Not all matter is reducible to one, lowest-common-denominator type, and none of it is reducible to the purely mathematical description afforded by physics.  That description is merely an abstraction from concrete physical reality.  It captures part of that reality, to be sure, but not the whole of it. 

To think otherwise is somewhat like thinking that “the average person” of the statistician really exists, but that the various individual people we meet from day to day do not.  The reality is that those individuals do exist, and that the notion of “the average person,” while it captures important aspects of reality and is therefore useful for certain purposes, is a mere abstraction that does not correspond to any concrete entity.  And in the same way, the concrete physical objects of everyday experience also really do exist, whereas the mathematical description afforded by physics, despite its undeniable predictive and technological utility, does not capture the entirety of concrete reality.  To pretend otherwise is, we can agree with Berkeley, a kind of make-believe. 

Related posts:

Metaphysical taxidermy

Aristotle’s Revenge and naïve color realism

The particle collection that fancied itself a physicist

Materialism subverts itself

Concretizing the abstract

Chomsky on the mind-body problem

Nagel and his critics, Part VIII

Schrödinger, Democritus, and the paradox of materialism

Aquinas on humor and social life

In Summa Theologiae II-II.168.2-4, Aquinas discusses the essential role that play and humor have in human life.  They are necessary for the health of the individual, insofar as in their absence the mind becomes weary and tense.  And they are necessary for the health of social life, which would be similarly strained without the ability to laugh and play together.  The virtue of wittiness is the character trait that facilitates this human need.  Naturally, as in every other area of human life, we can sin by excess, as when we joke in an inappropriate manner or at an inappropriate time, or are in our general manner of life insufficiently serious about serious matters.  But we can also sin by deficiency, by being insufficiently pleasant and willing to engage in play with our fellows.  Aquinas writes:

Anything conflicting with reason in human action is vicious.  It is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by never showing himself agreeable to others or being a kill-joy or wet blanket on their enjoyment.  And so Seneca says, “Bear yourself with wit, lest you be regarded as sour or despised as dull.”  Now those who lack playfulness are sinful, those who never say anything to make you smile, or are grumpy with those who do.  (ST II-II.168.4, Gilby translation)

Addressing the question whether “comedians” or “play-actors” sin by excess by virtue of devoting themselves entirely to mirth, Aquinas answers in the negative:

As stated, play is necessary for the intercourse of human life.  Now whatever is useful to human intercourse may have a lawful employment ascribed to it.  Wherefore the occupation of play-actors, the object of which is to cheer the heart of man, is not unlawful in itself; nor are they in a state of sin provided that their playing be moderated, namely that they use no unlawful words or deeds in order to amuse, and that they do not introduce play into undue matters and seasons.   And although in human affairs, they have no other occupation in reference to other men, nevertheless in reference to themselves, and to God, they perform other actions both serious and virtuous, such as prayer and the moderation of their own passions and operations, while sometimes they give alms to the poor.  Wherefore those who maintain them in moderation do not sin but act justly, by rewarding them for their services. (ST II-II.168.3)

In light of such considerations, we can see that the current tendency toward the politicization of every aspect of social life, including even sports and entertainment, is evil.  And it would remain evil even if the political causes in question were themselves good (as, these days, they typically are not).  You cannot have the fellow-feeling required for a society to hold together without some area of life in which disputes are put on hold, tensions are eased, and common goods are enjoyed.  In American life, sports, popular culture, holidays, and the like have long performed that function, especially as the country has gotten more secular.  But as “wokeness” has extended its tentacles into even these areas of life, there is little if anything left to do the job. 

In the case of humor, this has manifested itself in the prevalence of “clapter” comedy, where the point is not to be funny and to get the audience to laugh, but rather to signal your purported political virtue and invite the audience to show theirs by applauding.  The result is not to mitigate social tensions but to exacerbate them.  Such “comedians” no longer function to smooth social interaction between people of different opinions, values, and backgrounds.  Rather, their purpose is to lead one faction in denigrating another.  It’s the “Two Minutes Hate” of Orwell’s 1984, but with strained chuckles rather than full-throated shrieks. 

This is inevitable given the nature of woke politics and its paranoid vision of human life.  When everything is interpreted as “oppression,” “micro-aggressions,” and the like, everything becomes deadly serious.  Even comedy is no laughing matter.  Envy is often said to be the only sin that gives the sinner no pleasure.  That envy is the deep root of wokeness is evidenced by, among other things, the fact that the woke are so humorless, angry, and miserable – that the wokester is, to borrow Aquinas’s words, “burdensome,” “grumpy,” a “kill-joy or wet blanket” on the enjoyments of the fellow members of his society.

“Clapter” “comedy” contrasts sharply with the essentially non-partisan approach of late night comics like Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, or even David Letterman in his earlier years.  That style of comedy is often mocked or dismissed today, but it performed the important social function of helping to soften tensions between citizens of diverse values and opinions and shore up a sense of common humanity and citizenship.  Not that Carson et al. saw matters in so highfalutin a way.  They just had the normal, healthy human being’s visceral understanding that not everything is political, and that their audiences were entitled at the end of a long day to relax and have a laugh rather than to be hectored.

However, it is important to emphasize that the point is not that all comedy ought to be non-political, and it is not an essentially “right-wing” point either.  Larry David (for example) is almost always funny, even when his targets are right-of-center.  The reason is that his aim is to be funny rather than to make some political statement, and when such political humor is done well even its targets can (if they have a sense of humor about themselves) appreciate it.  And right-wingers too are certainly capable of being humorless and of politicizing everything.  But it is wokeness rather than any right-wing pathology that is currently in the ascendency in comedy and other areas of mainstream entertainment, as Bill Maher, Joe Rogan, Jerry Seinfeld, and other non-right-wingers have lamented.

Related posts:

Thomas Aquinas, Henry Adams, Steve Martin

Meta-comedy

Is it funny because it’s true?

The comedy keeps coming

Risible animals

Pop culture roundup