Gene C. Fant Jr.'s Blog, page 4

Banning Circumcision in Scandinavia

A serious campaign is underway in Scandinavia to ban the non-therapeutic circumcision of boys. A Danish doctors’ association says that, unless medically indicated, circumcision is a kind of child abuse. A Swedish medical association recommends setting the minimum age for the procedure at 12 and requiring the boy’s consent. Last September, the Nordic Ombudsmen for Children issued a joint statement declaring non-therapeutic circumcision of boys a violation of international human rights law. Although for now no country seems ready to outlaw the practice, surveys suggest large numbers of Scandinavians would favor a ban.

To put it mildly, a ban on the non-therapeutic circumcision of boys would cause some hardship for Jews and Muslims. At the very least, parents who wished to have their sons circumcised for religious purposes would need to have the circumcisions performed outside their countries—assuming a ban on circumcisions would not also prohibit parents from transporting children for such purposes. Most likely, a ban would simply cause Jews and Muslims to leave Scandinavia in large numbers. In fact, opponents of the ban allege that is its goal.

I doubt that religious bigotry, as such, has much to with it—though anti-Muslim sentiment, at least, is on the rise in Scandinavia, as in much of Europe. Rather, what we’re seeing is a clash of values between a secular worldview that has little patience for traditional religious expression, and the followers of the traditional religions themselves. To put it bluntly, the secular human rights community finds it increasingly difficult to take seriously the arguments traditional religion puts forward, especially when sex is somehow involved.

Here’s an example. Last week, The Copenhagen Post ran an op-ed by Morten Frisch, a doctor and sex researcher who favors a ban. Circumcision, Frisch writes, is problematic not only because it violates a boy’s bodily integrity when he is too young to consent. (Actually, any medical treatment would present that problem). What’s really bad is that circumcision decreases sexual pleasure later in life. “To most Europeans,” Frisch writes, “circumcision is an ethically problematic ritual that is intrinsically harmful to children: every child has the right to protection of his or her bodily integrity and the right to explore and enjoy his or her undiminished sexual capacity later in life.”

What about the fact that Judaism and Islam have required male circumcision for millennia? Isn’t that a factor to consider? You might think that practices that have lasted thousands of years come with some presumption of validity, even if you disagree with them. Millions of people across time have thought such practices important, even sacred. Frisch summarily dismisses these concerns. “Religious arguments,” he writes, “must never trump the protection of children’s basic human rights. To cut off functional, healthy parts of other people’s bodies without their explicit and well-informed consent can never be anybody’s right–religious or otherwise.”

Now, I don’t know whether exploring one’s undiminished sexual capacity really qualifies as an international human right nowadays; I don’t follow the literature too closely. And this is the first I’ve heard that male circumcision leads to to a decrease in sexual pleasure later in life (I’m not speaking of female circumcision). But let’s assume what Frisch says is correct. The fact that he so impatiently dismisses any hardship a ban would cause traditional religious communities is striking. There is, it seems, simply nothing to be said for traditional practices that violate contemporary norms in this context; the sooner we get rid of them, the better. Frisch’s essay, like the proposed ban itself, is another indication that the clash between religious tradition and secularism is heating up, and that secularism is in little mood to compromise.

First Links — 1.30.14

Aquinas the Dramatist

Daniel McInerny, Aleteia

When I Was Young at Yale

Mark Edmundson, Chronicle of Higher Education

A Modesty Proposal

Mark Hemingway, Weekly Standard

In Defense of Atonement Theology

Christopher P. Momany, Christian Century

What a Progressive Used to Be
Anthony Esolen, Public Discourse

Culture and Disenchantment

The
quest to find a unifying principle for the new forms of republicanism that sprouted in the wake of the French and American revolutions preoccupied the nineteenth century.
One proposal was for democracies to look to
culture as an organizing center for a common life, because culture concerned at
its root the cultivation of self and society as twin projects that could not be
severed. Any government by the people must concern itself with the formation of the people.

This idea lies behind Matthew Arnold’s assertion that the
origin of culture resided in a love of
perfection. Culture is not so much about possessing something as it is about
becoming something, a harmonious expansion of human capacities that moves
toward human flourishing. This is why for Arnold the love of perfection endemic to humanity is simultaneously a call to
a social life without which the pursuit of such perfection becomes impossible.
It is in the dances, the rituals, and the artistry of common human life that humans
find a connection to the natural harmonies of creation and explore its beauties
and terrors.

Given Arnold’s way of relating culture to perfection one can
immediately see religion’s contribution since religion too concerns itself with the pursuit of perfection. T. S. Eliot sought to reformulate
Arnold’s understanding of the relationship of religion and culture by suggesting
that the culture of a people is an incarnation of its religion. Even though
Christopher Dawson dissented from the close identification of culture and
religion, he agreed with Eliot’s desire to preserve the transmission of
culture through its primary elements: family, region, and religion. Each of
these elements reinforce subsidiarity and become the basis for viewing culture
as an organic relation among the various orders of society. The purpose of government was to maintain this organic relationship by securing the goods necessary for its growth.

What both Eliot and Dawson resisted was culture as a planned
and thus mechanized reality. This is ultimately what Dawson saw as the essence
of what he called the “bourgeois mentality” to which he opposed the man or woman of desire. He
thought that the advocates of a planned society as well as those of the liberal
ideal of an individual culture tended to sacrifice family, region, and religion as stabilizing forces that ensure human flourishing. Dawson called this “the impersonal tyranny of a
mechanized order.” For Dawson, the mechanization of society and the creation of a
technopoly through the “expert” will inevitably destroy spiritual freedom in
the name of equality of relation.

Eliot and Dawson provide an insight into how disenchantment
attempts to redirect the fundamental human love
of perfection by disavowing the creative ecstasy so central to the deepest
human impulses. At the popular level, disenchantment is resisted by the various spiritualities. The turn toward spirituality and even a semblance of
organized religion by some atheists like Alain
de Botton is an implicit recognition of the deeply spiritual nature of humanity and the need for a
corporate life within which to pursue this spiritual side. 

And here we find the essence of disenchantment and its connection to mechanization. Disenchantment
does not refer to a removal of the fundamental human impulse toward perfection,
including the spiritual perfection of the human person. Indeed, the forces of disenchantment cannot remove something so basic to human existence. Rather disenchantment is the result
of an effort to organize the pursuit of perfection along technocratic lines, which invariably destroys particularity in favor of homogeneity. This kind of rationalization crushes local life from which creative ecstasy bubbles up in a myriad different forms through a dynamic relationship in, with, and through family, region, and religion. Jürgen
Habermas sought to critique scientism as one force behind this turn. For
Habermas, scientism refers to a belief that science no longer constitutes “one form of possible knowledge, but rather
must identify knowledge with science.” Culture needs an enchanted world without
which the various forms of knowledge become lost and, just as importantly, the
nature of knowing ceases to be a revelatory encounter with the other.

Part of me wonders if the evolution in the “doctrine” of the
separation of church and state at the judicial level stems from a new view of
religion as hindering the pursuit of perfection rather than facilitating it. Of
course, at the same time the modern nation state continues to recognize that
when one removes mediating institutions like religious organizations something
must take their place. Absent the internal regulations of character formed and sustained through
connections to family, region, and religion, one must assert the privilege of
the state as the creator and arbiter of culture and the formation of the
citizenry. This may be why public education has become the battleground of the
culture wars and also the basic impulse behind home schooling.

We might end with a note on Alexis de Tocqueville’s
distinction between equality and freedom, which one also finds in Arnold,
Eliot, and Dawson. Modern democracies must not aim for an equality of social relations, but the conditions within which human freedom may be
cultivated in ways commensurate with the perfection of the human person and
thus human society. To do so is to recognize the need for culture to shape people as it bubbles up through its three elements of family, region, and religion. Governments that seek to build a society of complete social equality will invariably attempt to create culture and thereby actually destroy it through rationalization. Some may be mystified at decisions to
stay at home in order to fulfill one’s parental obligations or to return to
rural communities with their stabilized rhythms or to enter monasteries in part
because they do not see the connection between these activities, human
freedom, and human cultivation. They do not understand that these expressions of family, region, and religion actually promote freedom by unleashing the creative ecstasy necessary to the formation of self and society. From these roots culture springs forth and only an enchanted world inhabited by great lovers who passionately pursue perfection can sustain it.

Natural Law in the Fever Swamp

Anthony Murray, educated at a Jesuit law school at a time when I would have thought that that still meant something, worries at great length that—gasp—some Supreme Court justices might actually believe in natural law. To him, this would run the risk of introducing religious considerations into cases—all those involving the contraceptive mandate—where he thinks they don’t belong. 

He seems to be some sort of legal positivist influenced by Oliver Wendell Holmes, as he frequently cites that tart-tongued justice as if his word should be the last:

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes emphasized the danger of invoking divine morality when he wrote, in a 1917 opinion, “The law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky.” He elaborated a year later, in a Harvard Law Review article titled “Natural Law.” Holmes noted we all have impulses that convince us, as individuals, of what is and is not true. He called those impulses a system of “Can’t Helps”: We can’t help believing them because, to us,they seem so true. “Men to a great extent believe what they want to,” Holmes wrote, “although I see in that no basis for a philosophy that tells us what we should want to want.”

Addressing the subject of “jurists who believe in natural law,” Holmes wrote that they “seem to me to be in that naïve state of mind that accepts what has been familiar and accepted by them and their neighbors as something that must be accepted by all men everywhere.” But he argued that this notion—“our truth is cosmic truth”—was entirely unfounded. Among all of our wishes, Holmes pointed out, the desire to live probably ranks the highest. But does that fundamental urge give us a right to life? No, said Holmes: “The right to life is sacrificed without a scruple not only in war, but whenever the interest of society, that is, of the predominant power in the community, is thought to demand it.” At that point, he wrote, “the sanctity disappears.”

Like Thomas Jefferson, who famously called for a “wall of separation between church and state,” Holmes believed that personal beliefs had no place in judicial decisions.  

In other words, natural law is mere subjectivity, as is all religious belief. The only possible authority for judges is that of the majority, embodied in law. To be sure, he never inquires into what justifies the authority of the majority. Why should citizens or judges obey laws? In so doing, are we doing anything other than bowing to the superior force of the majority? Does their might make them right? Perhaps he would affirm this, though I don’t know how many of “the people” would follow him abandoning all recourse to justice outside the will of the majority.

What’s more, he clearly doesn’t really understand natural law, which he ties too closely to religion. Had he actually read St. Thomas, or any scrupulous commentator (not including Oliver Wendell Holmes), he would have understood that, according to Thomas (not to mention virtually every other proponent of natural law of whom I am aware), natural law depends upon reason, not faith, indeed upon a reason that all human beings, regardless of creed, are said to share.

Properly understood, then, Murray is afraid that some Supreme Court justices would have a high regard for reason, a reason that would give them a deep and abiding concern with justice and a respect for the rule of law, not to mention the role of legitimate majorities in settling questions that are matters of prudence.

I have seen no evidence that either Justice Scalia or Justice Thomas has actually invoked extraconstitutional considerations in his decisions. Murray misconstrues the evidence he adduces. The instance he cites from Thomas is a plausible interpretation of the First Amendment, not an invocation either of religion or of natural law. And the quotations from Scalia are simply affirmations of the religious legitimacy of government, much like that the Apostle Paul offers in his letter to the Romans.

First Links — 1.29.14

What Needs to Change for East-West Unity?

Adam A. J. DeVille, Catholic World Report

Job’s Past, Present, and Future

Davis Hankins, Marginalia

The Roots of Individualism in the Middle Ages
David Abulafia, Financial Times

The Republican Party Has Taken a Big Step Forward

Danny Vinik, Business Insider

Entrepreneurs of the Spirit

D. G. Myers, A Commonplace Blog

Ontology vs. Phenomenology in the Gay Christian Debate

During the debate over Galileo, some theologians appealed to verses of Scripture to “prove” that Galileo’s sun-centered model of the solar system could not be correct. For example, Psalm 93:1 says, “the world is established; it shall never be moved.” Along with 1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 96:10, and Psalm 104:5, this was taken to show that Galileo’s claim that the earth moved around the sun was contrary to the teaching of the Scriptures. Ecclesiastes 1:5, which says, “The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises,” was interpreted to show that the sun does move. Taken together, these were thought by some to provide a conclusive biblical refutation of Galileo’s heliocentric arguments.

The problem with this kind of interpretation is that these interpreters were mistaking phenomenological language, which describes appearances, with ontological language, which tells us about things as they really are. The sun does appear to rise and set, but this is caused by the earth’s rotation, and not by the motion of the sun. The earth appears fixed and immovable, but in fact, it rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun.

One of the most persistent mistakes made by critics of the crop of celibate gay Christian writers that came together around the blog Spiritual Friendship is the assumption that when we use any language that they don’t like (most commonly, though not limited to, the word “gay”) to describe our experiences, we are using that language to make ontological claims.

My primary interest is not in an abstract philosophical discussion. I am primarily interested in engaging gay and lesbian Christians in a conversation about what it means for us to love and obey Jesus Christ. In an interview published in America Magazine last summer, Pope Francis said:

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: “Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?” We must always consider the person. Here we enter into the mystery of the human being. In life, God accompanies persons, and we must accompany them, starting from their situation. It is necessary to accompany them with mercy. When that happens, the Holy Spirit inspires the priest to say the right thing.

I am interested in entering into the mystery of the human being, which is ultimately an ontological question. But the point of entry is not ontology: it is phenomenology. To meet the person where they are is to begin with the phenomena of their life, and to strive to engage them in such a way as to enable them to see that their own phenomenal experience can, if they listen closely, reveal the truth of the Catholic vision of the human person. (For examples of this approach, see What Does “Sexual Orientation” Orient? or My Alternative Lifestyle.)

If someone else wants to begin with ontology, I have no objection to that. That, too, can be a fruitful inquiry. But if they not only begin with ontology themselves, but insist on misinterpreting my phenomenal approach in ontological terms, then they have ceased to inquire fruitfully and become obstacles to a legitimate and fruitful line of inquiry.

If I say, “I’m gay and celibate” in a writing aimed at engaging gay people with the claims of the Gospel, I’m not elevating my sexual orientation to the most fundamental aspect of my personality. I am using the same language that the Pope uses when he talks about reaching out to gay people, and using it for the same motive that he uses it: to engage with them, starting from their situation.

For centuries, the Church’s credibility as an institution that seeks truth has been called into question due to the error of theologians who mistook phenomenological language in Scripture for ontological language. Today, those who are too quick to find ontological claims in the phenomenological explorations celibate gay Christians should take more care to understand the kind of claim they are dealing with before they rush to condemn it.

Is President Obama Reinventing Civil Religion?

She means it as a compliment. At OnFaith, author Diana Butler Bass writes that President Barack Obama is reinventing American civil religion for the spiritual-but-not-religious age. It is “obvious,” she writes, “that the God of Obama’s public speech is not the God of previous presidents.” He has “moved beyond specifically biblical images and language toward a broader set of spiritual themes to speak to for a diverse American future.”

To illustrate, Bass offers the president’s use of the term “journey” in his second inaugural address. Journey, she explains, “is not only a biblical image”:

It is a central theme to many faiths: the Buddhist seeking enlightenment; a Native American on a vision quest; a Muslim embarked on the Hajj; a Jew hoping for “next year in Jerusalem” at Passover; a Catholic visiting a shrine; a Protestant tracing the footsteps of Martin Luther; a Wiccan making a way to Stonehenge; a humanist celebrating Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. We are a nation of spiritual migrants and immigrants, a restless sort of people, on innumerable sojourns paying homage to our saints and heroes, always searching out new meaning in the universe we inhabit. . . .

President Obama proposed … a journey toward a deep realization of community, prosperity, mutual care, stewardship of the Earth, peacemaking, and human rights. These six ideals form an American creed, the fundamental aspects of the democratic project. Each one of these could be interpreted as Christian or Jewish (as they have traditionally been) or could be much more widely understood through other religious perspectives. The address ended with a call to action: Serve the poor, have hope in the future, renew your hearts. Make new the nation’s ancient covenant of justice and equality in this uncertain world. Create a new American future.

Bass writes that future historians may well see President Obama’s redefinition of our civil religion–what she calls his “innovative form of pluralistic post-religious civil discourse”–as one of his “greatest achievements.” I assume she’s not being ironic.

It’s easy to chuckle at Bass’s earnest enthusiasm, but she may be onto something. America is now, and will for the foreseeable future remain, an overwhelmingly Christian nation. That’s just demography. The percentage of Americans who adhere to non-Christian religions, although growing, remains very small. But, since around 1990, there has been a large increase in people who claim no religious identity at all–the so-called “Nones.” By some accounts, Nones now make up about 20% of the general population and about 30% of young Americans. These are dramatic numbers, indeed.

The sort of all-inclusive, vaguely spiritual language Bass cites seems crafted to appeal to Nones. Surveys show that Nones don’t object to spirituality as such. Rather, they object to organized religions, especially organized religions that make exclusive truth claims. So the president’s language may reflect a recognition of a new force in American politics. If the evangelical imagery of George W. Bush was, as critics complained, a kind of dog whistle to call out his base, perhaps the New Age imagery of Barack Obama is a kind of dog whistle to call out his. It seems to be working. According to Bass, in the 2012 election, Nones overwhelmingly voted for Barack Obama.

The Anti-Catholic Ghost in the Spiritual Gifts Debate

Whether John MacArthur wanted it or not, his Strange Fire conference has re-ignited the long-standing debate about the miraculous within Protestantism.
With its penchant to classify everything, contemporary Evangelicalism has
labeled this debate as being between cessationists and continuationists. There
is a tendency to treat the issue as though it were simply a matter of how one
reads Scripture, but to do so is to fail to see the ghosts of the past that
continue to haunt such discussions. 

I have recently read claims that the Protestant tradition has held in the main that the extraordinary
gifts of the Spirit listed in 1 Corinthians have ceased. Despite the fact that
such a historical claim over steps the numerous debates about the nature of
miracles and the miraculous in Britain during the Early Modern era, it also
fails to grapple with the ghosts of anti-Catholicism that fueled this claim for
centuries. One of the primary reasons why many Protestant writers rejected the
continuation of the miraculous was because acceptance suggested that God was
still at work in the church during the Middle Ages.

One need go back no further than B. B. Warfied’s 1918 work Counterfeit Miracles to find an example.
Warfield happily noted that the claims to a multitude of miracles in every age
of the church is distinctly Catholic. In response, he takes what he considers
to be a standard Protestant defense, which is to claim that all miracle
stories after the first 150 or so years of Christianity are the result of an
infusion of “Heathenism” into the church. These miracle stories are really the
result of a new kind of literature that emerged within Christian circles, which
Warfield calls Christian romances and finds their archetype in the apocryphal
Acts of the apostles from the late second and third centuries. Most of the book
is then taken up with the task of explaining miracle stories either on the basis
of natural phenomena when he feels such stories have some purchase on actual
history or on the basis of literary inventions when they do not.

As Warfield’s work makes clear, claims about “most
Protestants” holding the view that the gifts of the Spirit are no longer available
feeds into a long-standing polemic against Catholicism, which, in turn, cuts out a central
thread running through the history of Christianity. This also relates to how one
understands the nature of Christian tradition and whether tradition is
primarily a confessional or doctrinal entity or encompasses Christian life and
culture as a whole. If miracles have ceased, then what does that say about the
miracle of the Eucharist? The Protestant polemic against miracles sought to
splice tradition in ways that did not always sit well.

Of course, most Protestants who are cessationists will
quickly assert that God can still heal the infirm through the normal course of
divine providence. I tend to think of this response as akin to what John Cotton
reportedly said when Anne Hutchinson was queried as to whether she expected to
be delivered from her trial: “If she doth expect a deliverance in the way of
Providence, I cannot deny it. . . . If it be by way of miracle, then I would
suspect it.”

Evangelicals will no doubt continue to debate in good
conscience the continuation of the charismatic gifts in the history of
Christianity. Such debates are healthy to Evangelicalism. As part of this
debate, however, they should exorcise once and for all the ghost of anti-Catholicism
that lurks behind certain interpretations of the history of Christianity. It is hard not
to find this ghost still haunting statements that seem to dismiss so many
claims to the miraculous in the Patristic and Medieval periods. I might also
add that these polemics did little to support an enchanted view of the world
and most likely facilitated a movement in the opposite direction. 

Paul’s Powerpoint to the Corinthians

I have long been struck by the beauty of Paul’s prose in chapter 13 expressing Christianity in terms of Platonism centuries before Augustine. Of course I have the advantage of speaking English fluently and so being able to understand and be moved by this gem from the King James:

Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

But what about people who do not speak English? Over the last two hundred years the Scriptures have been translated into hundreds of tongues and indeed missionaries and evangelists are often at the forefront of linguistics so that the inspired word of God may be brought even to remote communities of a few hundred speakers. And yet a linguistic community numbering in the tens of millions right here amongst us cannot read, or more accurately, watch, the Scriptures.

1 Corinthians 13, translated into Terrible Powerpoint

I speak of course of speakers of Terrible Powerpoint (or as linguists usually abbreviate it, “TP”). This dialect is notable for its use of bullet points,
objet trouve clip art, and gratuitously intrusive animation. Speakers are commonly found in business, academia, government, and the officer corps of the military. While some TP speakers are bilingual in English, many of them see complete paragraphs as only so much babble. It is so that these TP speakers might be saved that I have translated Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians into their native tongue.

Fortunately, Paul’s use of lists, metaphors, and multi-faceted contrasts renders well into TP. Indeed, Paul’s rhetorical style adapts so well to TP that I think it’s fair to say that if the Roman empire had laptops and LCD projectors, the purple might have taken up the cross a good hundred years before Constantine. As Matthew Schmitz rejoiced on seeing the presentation, “Finally the Scripture can be heard in the meeting rooms of the world in the language of their native people. Every tongue shall confess, and now he is confessed in a new tongue.”

Watch all of 1 Corinthians translated into Terrible Powerpoint:

Wandering in Desert Wastes

Kevin Williamson’s cover story in the new
National Review, “The End of Sex in an Age of Pornography,” is well worth your time, if you can stomach it. Williamson attends a major trade conference of the pornography industry in Las Vegas, and helps us see the deeper social significance of what happens there. This kind of journalism is all too rare, and becoming rarer, regardless of topic; on this particular topic it is even more sorely needed, and even more scarce.

Williamson never crosses the line into being too graphic (at least not in my opinion; such matters are subjective) but he does not mince words and he lets you know what is happening. Readers who struggle with temptation in this area—okay, readers who struggle with temptation in this area more than all of us do—might be well advised not to read the piece. But those who want to be active in the confrontation with pornography will benefit enormously from it. I know there are other aspects of this issue; the social science on pornography’s impact and that sort of thing. But our only real weapon against pornography, ultimately, is to help people see what pornography is in its essence. We cannot do that by speaking in decorous scientific jargon about abstractions.

To take only one example: Williamson is not the first person to point out that pornography is slowly but surely displacing actual sex—large numbers of people seem to be more interested in fantasies of control and degradation that aren’t limited by the real world than in actual intercourse, which requires the presence and cooperation of a consenting human being and thus does not provide the illusion of being a god. But it is one thing to make this observation in general, and another to behold (through Williamson’s eyes) the spectacle of large numbers of men lining up literally across a city block in order to pay large sums of money to spend a day
looking at their favorite pornographic performers, when just a short drive away they could be spending less money to have actual sex with actual women, with no line to wait in and no violation of the law.

And then, after sojourning in the bleak wasteland, Williamson has dinner with some friends who live in Las Vegas. In the midst of all the misery, this paragraph made me so happy I could have smiled for a week:

The little borough of Vegas, Baby is practically hermetically sealed. It is surrounded by the city of Las Vegas, wherein dwell hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who go about their business only vaguely aware, if they are aware at all, of the specific day-to-day operations of the industries at the core of the city’s economy. The two municipalities are formally coincidental, but they are two very different places. I have dinner with some old friends who are the very picture of a happy, healthy family, the sort of enviable people who make it look easy even though it almost certainly isn’t. He is a respected man in his field, she a full-time wife and mother, the two of them steady and cheerful hands on the tillers of the lives of their two engaging and energetic children, practically a Mozart duet of wavering encouragement and gentle discipline. They hold hands around the dinner table and say grace with no sense of self-consciousness. They live in Las Vegas but they have, as you might imagine, a complicated relationship with the borough of Vegas, Baby, plotting out routes to social activities that do not necessitate driving their little ones past 40-foot billboards advertising the annual porn convention.

“The sort of enviable people who make it look easy even though it almost certainly isn’t.” That is, in the end, our doomsday weapon against pornography.

Unfortunately, Williamson doesn’t see this. At the end of the piece, he suddenly turns fatalistic. Pornography is here to stay, nothing can counteract it. The intersection of digital technology and the unchanging facts of human biology ensure it; no laws against pornography can be effective, nor would the legion of men who lose the Darwinian competition for desirable mates permit the enactment of such laws.

So it would be—technology and biology would be our unalterable masters—if human beings were just bodies. But human beings are not just bodies, they are souls and bodies, and the life of Vegas, Baby cannot sustain a civilization. In the long run—which is what counts to those of us who reject the Keynesian understanding of what it is to be human—civilizations are sustained by, and only by, “the sort of enviable people who make it look easy even though it almost certainly isn’t.”

I believe Williamson is familiar with
Herb Stein’s Iron Law. It does not apply only to the balance of trade.