Archbishop Charles J. Chaput on defending human dignity
Here’s my first point. We remember Bonhoeffer, Solzhenitsyn, and other men and women like them because of their moral witness. But the whole idea of “moral witness” comes from the assumption that good and evil are real, and that certain basic truths about humanity don’t change. These truths are knowable and worth defending. One of these truths is the notion of man’s special dignity as a creature of reason and will. Man is part of nature, but also distinct from it.
The philosopher Hans Jonas said that three things have distinguished human life from other animal experience since early prehistory: the tool, the image, and the grave. The tool imposes man’s knowledge and will onto nature. The image—man’s paintings and other art—projects his imagination. It implies a sense of beauty and memory, and a desire to express them. But the greatest difference between humans and other animals is the grave. Only man buries his dead. Only man knows his own mortality. And knowing that he will die, only man can ask where he came from, what his life means, and what comes after it.
November 8th, 2011 | 12:01 pm
Do you really need the first and the third in that list? Wouldn’t the second, something “fundamental and unchangeable about human nature”, be enough to make rights more than whims and preferences?
November 8th, 2011 | 12:03 pm
Great piece by Archbishop Chaput (as usual). His reference to Solzhenitsyn’s speech at Harvard brough back many memories, including the ferocious media coverage that followed his remarks. The Boston Globe was especially put off by Solzhenitsyn’s speech, living up to the latter’s observation that “hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”
November 8th, 2011 | 1:08 pm
Hi, Ray,
Yes. We do. If humanity is the product of a mindless, purposeless process from which we quite accidentally evolved, there is nothing “fundamental and unchangeable about human nature.” It is always evolving into something else.
Eugenics is the dangerous and ridiculous idea that mere mortals should manage that evolutionary process, so it is no longer mindless, guiding it such that humanity is eventually made in the image of the sociopathic buffoons who have appointed themselves managers of that process. Hitler and Margaret Sanger were such people.
Either it is possible to improve on humanity being made in the image of God or it isn’t. Either God knows what He is doing and doesn’t need any help, or the atheists are right and humanity is the result of a process that has been managed mindlessly for far too long and mere mortals need to start managing it according to their own idea of what humanity ought to be. That is a frightening thought considering the disastrous results of the attempts that have already been made to do that.
November 8th, 2011 | 2:34 pm
Wait – the fact that humanity might become something else someday doesn’t mean that there isn’t a human nature now! Perhaps one day the class ‘human’ will not be instantiated anywhere. That doesn’t mean there isn’t such a ‘form’, to use the Platonic term, that is instantiated today.
(I rather suspect the fact that humans ‘make their own niche’ implies they’ll be like the shark or the coelocanth or the alligator or the cockroach, and be stable over millions of years anyway. But that’s not necessary for there to be an actual ‘human nature’.)
Non sequitur. One of the (many) reasons eugenics is wrong is that it assumes that it’s possible to identify genes that are bad, and eliminate them. Genetics is more complicated than that, and traits that are ‘bad’ in one circumstance can be literally life-saving in others. For example, a person with two copies of the sickle-cell gene will suffer from sickle-cell anemia and die young. But a person with only one copy does not suffer such ill effects and has a significantly increased resistance to malaria. In a region where malaria is endemic, the risk of having babies die from sickle-cell anemia is offset by the improved chances of other babies surviving malaria. Cystic Fibrosis is another recessive trait where only one copy of a mutated gene apparently affords some protection from Typhoid and perhaps Tuberculosis. A further example is RH-negative blood; there is some evidence that, while RH-negative women are at increased risk of miscarriage, they have an easier time getting pregnant.
(Perhaps the stereotype of the artist susceptible to drug abuse has a basis in fact, and by working to eliminate alcoholism we would devastate the art world?)
This leads into another evolutionary argument against such eugenic practices. Diversity in a population is a very good thing. It helps a population cope with all kinds of threats – disasters, disease, variations in environment, and more. If a trait really is “bad”, it will be eliminated in due course without – even in spite of – our intervention.
November 8th, 2011 | 3:33 pm
Hi, Ray,
I am glad you see the absurdity in eugenics. Not everyone does.
You believe it is a “fact that humanity might become something else someday.” You also assert that “something ‘fundamental and unchangeable about human nature’” is “enough to make rights more than whims and preferences.” Is human nature unchangeable or is it only a temporary state of affairs?
Actually, the point, I think, is that either humanity is something loftier and set apart from the rest of creation, the only beings able to ponder it and ask what it all might mean, or it is just another one of those curious, accidental assemblages of matter and energy which we refer to as “living.” “Accidental” is the key word here. If humanity is the result of a mindless accident, not the result of a purposeful decision by a being capable of creating the Universe and us, then its dignity and value are only a matter opinion — and the opinions of the powerful regarding the less powerful are the one’s that will be operative. If humanity is a purposeful creation then its dignity and value are whatever God has assigned them, regardless of what any of us, powerful or not, might think.
It can’t be both ways. One view leads inexorably to one kind of government with no intrinsic limits to its authority, and the other leads to government with limited authority, limited by the inalienable rights of humanity which it cannot infringe upon, and which are not bestowed upon humanity by the government; its job is to protect them, not to bestow or withdraw them.
It never ceases to amaze me that so many people do not seem to realize that the foundational principles of our government have been replaced by concepts radically opposed to those original principles.
November 8th, 2011 | 5:43 pm
harry –
Individuals don’t evolve. Populations do.
Perhaps my great-to-the-nth grandchildren won’t be human as we understand it today. Maybe.
That doesn’t mean I am not human today. That doesn’t mean my kids aren’t human today. Especially considering:
Wait, why are those the only options? Why can’t our origin be ‘accidental’ in the sense you’re striving to convey, and yet we are nevertheless “able to ponder it and ask what it all might mean”? (And by that definition, I’m pretty sure not only that all my descendants will be human, I wouldn’t be shocked if other beings arise at or reach that level as well.)
Why is God’s putative valuation ‘definitive’? An artist is free to put whatever value they like on their creations. Critics, patrons, audiences, and others don’t have to agree on that value. “Value” is inherently relative to the one doing the valuing.
A woodworker might trade you a chair for some of the corn you grew. Who came out better on the deal? You both did – you both have more value (by your personal estimates) than before. (Or else why did you trade at all?) Differential valuing is what makes economics possible. But think – if there’s some kind of ‘objective value’, then at least one of you is wrong. Either the chair was worth ‘objectively’ more than the corn, in which case you cheated the carpenter – or else the corn was ‘objectively’ worth more than the chair, in which case the carpenter cheated you. (Or else they are ‘objectively’ equal, in which case you’re both wrong about having more value than you did before.)
Now, you object that this means the “dignity and value [of life] are only a matter opinion”. However, if there’s such a thing as ‘human nature’, then from a human perspective it’s possible to have at least some common human values… not unlike the way that, from the perspective of a chess player, a queen is a very valuable chess piece.
Protecting the lives of others, communally, protects our own and that of our loved ones.
November 8th, 2011 | 7:54 pm
That is precisely the problem. Nobody in their right mind wants the government doing the “valuing” of human life. We want the government to assume all human life has great value and that its job is not to place a value on various human lives but to protect all human life and the intrinsic, inherent rights of every human life. That is not a strange, new idea. It is the one our government was founded upon.
November 8th, 2011 | 8:34 pm
harry –
And why do we want that?
November 9th, 2011 | 2:58 am
As Pascal says,
“Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, of whom some are butchered each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men.”
That is where all philosophy begins.
November 9th, 2011 | 6:55 am
BTW, harry, I didn’t see where you actually answered my question. You said it would be bad if God’s valuation wasn’t considered definitive, sure. But just because something might have bad consequences doesn’t make it false.
November 12th, 2011 | 2:58 am
Either God knows what He is doing and doesn’t need any help, or the atheists are right and humanity is the result of a process that has been managed mindlessly for far too long and mere mortals need to start managing it according to their own idea of what humanity ought to be.
This is not true.
One look at how humanity has failed utterly in every central planning experiment they’ve ever tried ought to be enough to make the case for the idea that letting cultural elites control what humanity becomes is a bad idea, whether there is a God or not.
The reason is simple, to anyone who really understands science (evolution, complexity, chaos, game theory, etc). We need checks and balances. They are what keep us from lurching off into unstable and dangerous excesses.
To borrow a metaphor: humanity has been seeing itself as being like a body since the invention of literature. (For all that we currently fetishize the notion that each of us is individual and independent, the truth is that we are all interconnected, and that independence is in fact deeply connected to the sense of alienation that is currently reaching crisis point. But I digress.) The cultural elites see themselves as like a brain, but the problem is, they’re not content to be merely a brain. They think they’re smart enough to be the whole body. They are too smart to need or want to listen to those dumb lymph nodes in flyover country.
But the thing is, a brain that can’t process feedback from the rest of the body is not a better brain, it’s a sick brain. These people are not smarter, they’re just cancerous.
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