First Things RSS Feed - Michael W. Hannon

Against Obsessive Sexuality

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 00:00:00 -0400

For the March issue of First Things , I wrote an essay called “ Against Heterosexuality .” In brief, my argument was that the concept of sexual orientation is not historically inevitable, not empirically accurate, and not morally useful. The heterosexual-homosexual dichotomy is counterproductive to encouraging the virtue of chastity, so we Christians should do our best to eliminate “gay” and “straight”—especially “straight,” actually—from the way we think and talk about sex, always with prudence directing us as to the particulars. There is an apologetics benefit to this general approach, since a generation from now, our culture will almost certainly have abandoned the bizarre psychosexual determinism of this outdated framework anyway.

Continue Reading »

“Hey Kid”

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 14:43:00 -0400

Do First Things readers care that the American Theatre Wing’s 2014 Tony Awards are happening this weekend? Most probably don’t, and that’s probably okay.

Continue Reading »

The How I Met Your Mother finale was an April Fools joke

Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Remember how, towards the end of the Wayne’s World movies, Wayne and Garth would do ridiculous endings in the style of various other films, just before they’d get to the real final scene? The Thelma and Louise ending, the Scooby Doo ending, etc.? Well that’s exactly the trick that How I Met Your Mother pulled Monday night in its (alleged) series finale. They opted for the Friends ending.

Continue Reading »

Against Heterosexuality

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0500

Alasdair MacIntyre once quipped that “facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention.” Something similar can be said about sexual orientation: Heterosexuals, like typewriters and urinals (also, obviously, for gentlemen), were an invention of the 1860s. Contrary to our cultural preconceptions and the lies of what has come to be called “orientation essentialism,” “straight” and “gay” are not ageless absolutes. Sexual orientation is a conceptual scheme with a history, and a dark one at that. It is a history that began far more recently than most people know, and it is one that will likely end much sooner than most people think.

Continue Reading »

Some Millennial Frustration with America’s New Evangelization

Fri, 07 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

I have an awkward confession to make. When I hear American Catholics cheerlead the New Evangelization, I’m sorry to say, I become very skeptical very quickly. As they unpack their bold vision for evangelical reform, I start feeling a lot like Mugatu, who, in an exasperated breakdown at the end of the 2001 film Zoolander , famously exclaimed, “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

Continue Reading »

Sexual Disorientation: The Trouble with Talking about “Gayness”

Thu, 10 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0400

In the wake of Pope Francis’ virally circulated airplane interview, orthodox Catholic writers from every corner of the blogosphere have united in defense of our Holy Father, against the bizarre and ignorant statements of the popular media. Whether attacking the Times et al. for skewing the story to advance their own agenda, or complimenting the pope for using an unsuspecting press to help him broadcast Gospel truths, almost all such authors have agreed in insisting that there was nothing contrary to doctrine in the matter of our pontiff’s remarks. On this point, I certainly agree as well. “Judge not” is hardly foreign to Christianity.

Continue Reading »

The Dominic Option

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 14:10:19 -0400

Continue Reading »

What Is Water Polo?: And Its Surprising Relevance for Marriage

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:01:00 -0500

Back in high school, I played a sport that most people have encountered, if at all, only in the Olympics. It is an athletic game both exhilarating and exhausting, and while I would probably drown if I tried to play it again now, still I count my adolescent water polo career among my life’s greatest blessings. The lessons I learned in the pool might turn out to be particularly relevant today, and in a surprising fashion. For understanding water polo can, I contend, help us to understand a far more important human institution: marriage.

Continue Reading »

Occupy and the Injustices of Inequality

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:01:00 -0400

Many conservatives have objected to the Occupy Movement’s focus on inequality by pointing to its refusal to offer an overarching analysis or slate of policies. This objection is, of course, hardly original to the movement’s conservative detractors. Indeed, even its most outspoken supporters have often lamented that Occupy lacks a coherent position and a decisive direction. Yet despite these and other obvious problems with the Occupy Movement, we should not be too quick to dismiss its criticisms of our contemporary economic circumstances.

We ought to ask of economics the same question of that we ask with regards to any other moral issue: how it fosters or frustrates human flourishing. So what then are we to make of our present economic system, one marked by”among other things”large inequalities of wealth? The answer, we believe, is that such inequality is both a symptom and a cause of great social harms. And whatever else may be true of it, the Occupy Movement gestures towards these serious problems in our present economy.

Today, some”but by no means all”on the right often imagine that contemporary inequalities of wealth result from the operation of some idealized conception of “capitalism” and the “free market.” The truth, however, is that America’s actual economy often is not very free at all. Since its earliest days and to an ever-increasing extent, our economy has been the marriage of big business and big government. For while the state has, through the widespread adoption of Keynesian policies, stabilized the economy from otherwise disastrous crises, it has also, more perniciously, systematically privileged employers over workers and large corporations over small businesses.

Consider the following examples. Patent and copyright laws, which inhibit entry into the market by competitors, contribute to unnaturally large accumulations of wealth on the part of patent or copyright holders. Moreover, transportation costs for big corporations are largely subsidized by the state. Our highway system, for instance, maintained through taxation, eliminates otherwise prohibitively large shipping costs for national and multinational corporations. Finally, corporate “personhood” combined with limited liabilities gives corporations advantages over small-scale businesses and encourages reckless economic behavior.

Wealth has become concentrated in the hands of the few (“the one percent”, if you will) at the expense of the many”at the expense, that is, of widespread economic freedom. For while our economy may have brought material welfare for some, it has, in Pope Leo XIII’s words, “laid a yoke almost of slavery on the unnumbered masses of non-owning workers.”

Great disparities in wealth are also great disparities in power. The vast degree of wealth in the hands of big business allows big business to take power to itself”not only regulatory capture and access to credit, but also purely economic influence and control over the market. This creates a lopsided power structure in which large corporations and their CEOs are able to accumulate more wealth and perpetuate inequality. And such inequalities negatively impact society in two broad ways.

First, power inequality harms civic friendship. As Aristotle writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, “if there is a great interval in respect of virtue or vice or wealth or anything else between the parties . . . . then they are no longer friends, and do not even expect to be so.” Aquinas too wrote that one way of noting the quality of friendships is to see how much friends have in common with one another, higher friendships necessarily involving those who have greater commonality.

Charles Murray’s research in Coming Apart supports the views of Aristotle and Aquinas. Here Murray points out that the vast material inequalities between the upper and lower classes have created vast cultural divisions too, one of the consequences of which is that friendship across classes has become less common. By severing the bonds of social solidarity, inequality stratifies society into income-classes that either come into conflict or remain hermetically sealed off from each other.

Inequality also leads to negative consequences in our physical, psychological, and social flourishing. In The Impact of Inequality , for instance, Richard Wilkinson provides extensive sociological evidence that increasing inequality in societies is linked to lower levels of trust among citizens, greater homicide rates, more discrimination against women and ethnic minorities, higher rates of anxiety and depression, shorter life expectancies, poorer access to healthcare and legal remedies for wrongs, and so on. Not only civic friendship, then, but also our basic personal wellbeing is at stake here. Behold the fruits of inequality, and judge accordingly.

These indeed are good reasons to be concerned with the inequality generated in America by the marriage of big business and big government. And while it may not offer a clear or effective remedy to these problems, the Occupy Movement ought to at least be commended for noting the existence of these injustices and attempting a social response. To accept that these problems are problems, of course, need not commit us to a socially liberal ethic; we can just as well realize their perversity by that line of economic thought running from Aristotle to Aquinas to Pope Leo XIII.

Michael W. Hannon studied philosophy, religion, and medieval studies at Columbia. David J. Pederson studies philosophy at Princeton. Peter A. Blair studies philosophy and government at Dartmouth.

RESOURCES

David Mills, Occupy Wallstreet’s Empy Anger

Edward Skidelsky, The Emancipation of Avarice

Continue Reading »

Love God and Do What You Will: Avoiding Over-Devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Discernment

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:01:00 -0500

In so many Christian contexts today, it is almost impossible to avoid hearing about the importance of discerning one’s “personal vocation.” This label, apparently, is meant to denote the specific calling God gives to each individual, through which each is to live out his own particular call to holiness. Yet this language reflects only a half-truth. We are indeed meant to follow the will of God in all that we do. But such popular talk of one’s “calling” also betrays a crucial misunderstanding of discernment, a cardinal error that is entirely foreign to the great tradition of the Church.

The confusion is rooted in the oft-overlooked sin of presumption. For when a Christian goes to prayer with the expectation that God will reveal to him a personalized plan for his life, he presumes that God will make him the recipient of a miraculous private revelation. Now, our Christian history has seen numerous instances of his doing exactly that, particularly with some of the Church’s most venerable mystic saints. But God is under no constraints to act in this way, and far be it for me to deem myself worthy to receive so extraordinary a message from Our Lord.

But if a Christian is not to presume that God will supernaturally reveal his “personal vocation” to him, how then is he to know God’s will for his life? I would contend that, if he has been going to church on a weekly basis and has received at least average catechesis along the way, he probably already does know his will for his life. God summarizes it succinctly in the Ten Commandments, and even more succinctly in Matthew 22: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind”, and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That, further informed by the ordinances of the Church, is all the instruction we need to achieve our fulfillment and arrive at salvation.

In a recent documentary on Eastern Christian monasticism , NYU’s Norris Chumley asked a monk in the Ukraine if God speaks to him in prayer. “He does not speak to me,” the monk answered, “because he has already said everything, through the Gospel and through the works of the Holy Fathers, of the saints.” Such a response might sound borderline blasphemous to contemporary Christians. And yet, this answer reflects perfectly the consensus of the Church over the past 2,000 years. In general, it seems that God provides the graces people need to serve him in whatever station of life they occupy.

So God does not tell each of us exactly what to do all the time. In fact, he does not necessarily even tell us what to do with regards to major life choices, including choices between religious and secular life. He gifts us with any number of good and virtuous options, and then leaves the decision to us. As a mantra classically attributed to St. Augustine puts it, “Love God and do what you will.”

This attitude obviously flies in the face of most of today’s popular literature on vocation, wherein “discerners” are told to look within themselves to see if their desires indicate that God has singled them out to live a religious life. So, in addition to the prideful presumption lurking within that common strategy, this typical modern message about discernment also sows a dangerous confusion about the nature of a religious vocation.

The religious life is a higher calling, not an esoteric, separate one. Just as giving an extra hundred dollars to the collection plate is not as good as giving an extra thousand, still both are goods, and there is no immorality in opting out of the heroically generous higher option. That is an ancient doctrine of the faith, but too often today people shy away from it and try to mitigate the revealed truth that a religious vocation is more perfect than any secular life can be. The message of Our Lord and St. Paul in the Scriptures, and that of the Church’s tradition throughout history, is simply this: “Let those who can take religious life take it.”

God tells Jeremiah that he knows well the plans he has made for him, “plans for his welfare and not for his woe.” What he does not say is that Jeremiah will likewise know these plans before they come to fruition. God promises never to abandon the Christian in his pilgrimage towards Heaven, but not that the path ahead will be made clear to him before he walks it. Does this seemingly radical rejection of “personal vocation” mean that God does not care what I do with my life? Of course it does not. It simply means that God does not condemn all ways but one.

The Christian ought to make major life decisions as he ought to make all decisions: by evaluating how he can serve God, by choosing a course of action accordingly, and by having the courage to follow through and do it. As Pope Benedict XVI writes, “If I listen to [God] and walk with Him, I become truly myself. What counts is not the fulfillment of my desires, but of his will. In this way life becomes authentic.” May we each have the courage to live such an authentic life, free from the unnecessary burdens we impose on ourselves by becoming too preoccupied with what one of my friends refers to as “an over-devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Discernment.”

Michael Hannon studies philosophy, religion, and medieval studies at Columbia University.

Become a fan of First Things on Facebook , subscribe to First Things via RSS , and follow First Things on Twitter .

Continue Reading »