Roe, Casey, and Originalism

John Roberts

President Bush's nomination of appellate judge John G. Roberts Jr. to fill the vacancy left at the U.S. Supreme Court by Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement is provoking interesting op-ed commentary, including "Search for 'original intent' leads to constitutional confusion," published by The Baltimore Sun on July 21, 2005.

In it, Tim Baker and Emily Baker, a father and daughter, write of Roberts as if he is wedded to the doctrine of constitutional interpretation called "original intent," or, if not that, the closely related one called "originalism" or "textualism."

Tim Baker is a former U.S. Attorney for the State of Maryland and law clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. His daughter, Emily, studies constitutional law at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "If, as expected, Judge Roberts is an originalist," they aver, "he will join Justice Antonin Scalia and turn to history, demanding that courts sing from that hymnal. But the voices of the past often sang from different pages."

What is that supposed "hymnal" from which today's originalists/textualists claim to sing? At the very least, it is "the meaning upon which the people originally agreed when they democratically adopted a provision" of the U.S. Constitution, as amended.

The doctrine of "original intent" takes originalism a subtle step further: "to ascertain the meaning that the framers had in mind." That is, where originalism per se "eschews any attempt to ascertain the framers' subjective states of mind and focuses instead on the text itself, giving it the objective meaning that reasonable people would commonly have understood at the time of its ratification," original-intent proponents want to know what the framers were actually thinking.


I find two problems with the Bakers' analysis. First, they pretty much accuse Roberts of being an originalist — "If, as expected, Judge Roberts is an originalist" — even though he specifically denied belonging to that or any other easily named branch of constitutional interpretation theory when he was vetted prior to his 2003 approval as an appellate judge.

See "Roberts has avoided tipping his hand" in the same edition of the newspaper for more on that. "I don't know if that's a flaw for a judicial nominee or not, not to have a comprehensive philosophy about constitutional interpretation, to be able to say, 'I'm an originalist, I'm a textualist, I'm a literalist or this or that,'" Roberts said during his confirmation hearings in 2003, according to the article. "I just don't feel comfortable with any of those particular labels."

The second problem I find with the Bakers' analysis is that they malign originalism by undermining original intent. They provide a short history of how the founders in their public and private declarations and acts often went against the words and spirit of what they had put in the constitution.

Both Washington and Jefferson, for example, vacillated as to whether to own to a Supreme Being (in Washington's words) "in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old." So what were they really thinking when they erected (in Jefferson's words) "a wall of separation between church and state"? Original-intent interpretation requires that we know ... which we can't.

But, it seems to me, that objection has nothing to do with originalism/textualism, focusing as it does not on the framers' subective states of mind but on the objective meaning the words conveyed to reasonable minds of the times.


It still may be the case, of course, that the "objective" meaning of the constitution's words when and as written is likewise unascertainable — and originalism/textualism accordingly a bad idea. But the Baker's argument doesn't really establish this. It merely points out why determining "original intent" is a vain hope.

Even so, we can be sure we'll be hearing about "original intent" and "originalism/textualism" — along with "literalism," "judicial activism," and all sorts of other putative approaches — until we're sick to death of the whole matter.

In the question of whether or not abortion can be outlawed, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was based on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the woman's right to privacy, except where there has been "due process of law" carried out on the part of the state.

The amendment, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, does not actually mention "privacy." The "right to privacy" asserted in the Roe decision was (rightly or wrongly) read into the text. The text does say: "... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." This is, in fact, the entire Due Process clause.

(The amendment also says, in what is called the Equal Protection clause: "... nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The full text of the amendment is here, at the U.S. Constitution Online website.)

Justice Harry Blackmun noted in his written decision (online here) on behalf of the Roe majority, in view of the lack of explicit mention of the right of privacy in the clause in question, “Appellant [i.e., Roe] would discover this right in the concept of personal ‘liberty’ embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause.”

The same "discovered" right of privacy had previously been cited by the Supreme Court in striking down laws prohibiting interracial marriage, mandating sterilization, hindering the use of contraception, and curtailing parents’ roles in education.


The Roe decision was shored up in 1992, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. The Casey decision created an “undue burden” standard. In upholding Roe, it said unduly burdensome restrictions on abortions were unconstitutional, though certain state restrictions such as informed-consent and parental-notification laws were not automatically held to be unduly burdensome.

Casey upheld Roe (invoking, in part, the time-honored rule of stare decisis: "Let the decision stand") in terms of its “essential holding.” Yet, overturned by Casey was the putative “right of privacy” as it supports abortion. The majority opinion in Casey (online here) written by Justice O'Connor, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Souter said:

The Roe Court reached too far when it analogized the right to abort a fetus to the rights involved in [various supposedly applicable decisions named in the Roe opinion], and thereby deemed the right to abortion to be "fundamental." None of these decisions endorsed an all-encompassing "right of privacy," as Roe … claimed. Because abortion involves the purposeful termination of potential life, the abortion decision must be recognized as sui generis, different in kind from the rights protected in the earlier cases under the rubric of personal or family privacy and autonomy.

So “privacy” was no longer a valid rationale for setting aside state anti-abortion laws.

The Casey decision then stated:

The correct analysis is that set forth by the plurality opinion in [the 1989 Webster v. Reproductive Health Services case]: a woman's interest in having an abortion is a form of liberty protected by the Due Process Clause, but States may [nevertheless] regulate abortion procedures in ways rationally related to a legitimate state interest.

"Legitimate state interest” could, in other words, justify abortion restrictions ... but under Casey, even so, considerations of personal "liberty" invalidated sweeping state laws banning all abortions outright.


It seems to me (and I'm no constitutional expert) that Casey is actually something of a blessing in disguise for abortion foes. First, it allows Roe's abortion "right" to be "hollowed out" by various state-imposed restrictions, as long as due process is observed and no "undue burden" is placed on the basic "right" found by the Roe court.

Second, Casey changes the rationale underpinning that "right" from "privacy" to "liberty." If Roe is overturned, other Supreme Court decisions based on "privacy" will still stand: the ones striking down laws prohibiting interracial marriage, mandating sterilization, hindering the use of contraception, and curtailing parents’ roles in education, which no one wants to go by the boards.

So, when people talk of overturning Roe, what they really mean is overturning Roe as "corrected" by Casey.

And when people talk of "original intent," "originalism," or "textualism," in this regard, they mean that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment — or reasonable people of the day reading its text — would never have considered a citizen's essential "liberty" to include the right to choose to have an abortion.

It will be interesting to see, should John Roberts take a seat on the Supreme Court, and should Roe/Casey eventually be struck down in part because of his vote, whether he in fact will have acted on the basis of such considerations of "originalism/textualism."


For I personally don't think that's the right way to overturn Roe/Casey. (Again, I'm not a lawyer or constitutional expert.) I think the right way is to take up where another potential Supreme Court nominee on the president's short list, appellate judge Edith Hollan Jones, left off when she wrote in her decision in a key 2004 abortion case, "If courts were to delve into the facts underlying Roe's balancing scheme with present-day knowledge, they might conclude that the woman's 'choice' if far more risky and less beneficial, and the child's sentience far more advanced, than the Roe court knew." (Source: this post at SCOTUSblog, a weblog about the Supreme Court Of The United States.)

I particularly underscore the part about the child's sentience being "far more advanced" than was understood when Roe was decided. Medical science has since determined, I believe, that a fetus's heartbeat, brain activity, and reaction to pain begin a lot earlier during the nine-month gestation period than had once been thought.

Basing the overturning of Roe/Casey on that new information doesn't comport well with a doctrine of constitutional originalism/textualism, in my opinion.

In 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment insisted "... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," I doubt whether any reasonable reader of those words would have considered a fetus a "person." Not that many readers of these clauses would have felt abortion to be right or moral; just that (I'm admittedly guessing here) the words of the amendment didn't at all apply to the subject of abortion, since no one in those days of medical ignorance would have considered an early-stage, pre-viable fetus remotely a "person."


If I'm right about that, then I don't see how originalism/textualism can overturn Roe and Casey.

Originalism/textualism is a doctrine designed mainly, I gather, to block judicial "activists'" widening of constitutional protections in the Bill of Rights and elsewhere, by which "liberal" jurists have ostensibly "discovered new rights" such as those making it harder to prosecute and convict the criminally accused. Roe's right to "privacy" for a woman seeking an abortion was, in some eyes, one of those "discovered" rights.

But, by that logic, so were the other "privacy" rights mentioned earlier: the right to engage in interracial marriage, the right of the mentally deficient to avoid forced sterilization, the right of married couples to use contraception or birth control, and parents' rights to take an active role in their children's education.

Roe was decided — and "corrected" by Casey — in a world in which it had become understood for perhaps the first time in history that women could and should no longer be chained to their reproductive capacities. There was, at bottom, an element of humanity — compassion toward women as "persons" — underlying the Roe/Casey decisions.

In other words, our understanding of who deserves our full human compassion enlarged to include women, in all their humanity. As that happened, so, too, did the applicability of our nation's constitutional guarantees, in order to keep pace with our widened understanding and compassion.

That's not something that is permissible under originalist/textualist doctrine.

What I think needs to happen is for our compassion and humanity to widen further now, to include the fetus as a "person" deserving of constitutional protection. When the Fourteenth Amendment states, "... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," I think we ought to include the unborn fetus under its umbrella of personhood, based on recent advances in understanding of fetal development.


In the past, I have argued that no one is a "person" until born, since it is unlikely that the fetus, prior to birth, has yet become truly self-aware. I hereby recant. I think that reasoning was flawed. It's not that I think self-awareness begins before birth — as far as I know, there's no evidence for that — but that I think a non-self aware fetus still ought to command our full compassion and humanity.

After all, it's not clear that a baby born terribly brain-damaged ever develops precious self-awareness, and yet no one would fail to extend the umbrella of sacrosanct personhood to such an unfortunate. Terminating his or her life, even for reasons of "mercy," would still be considered murder under the law.

So, if a fetus ought to command our full compassion and humanity because its heart, brain, and nervous system have kicked in by a seemingly very early stage of development, then I say it ought to be accorded the status of being a "person" under the constitution and the law.

It's a matter of widening the ambit of constitutional protections to bring them in accord with present-day knowledge — not of shrinking it to fit the more limited "textualist" or "originalist" understandings of the past.

This is why I think originalism/textualism to be the wrong remedy for Roe. And I hope that Judge Roberts, should he ascend to the High Court and take on the issue, will vote to overturn Roe and Casey on other than originalist/textualist grounds.

Dysfunctional ... Us?!?

"You need to have lovable characters for people to like you," Dean Young, author of the "Blondie" comic strip, says in "'Blondie' Marks 75 Years on Comics Pages," The (Baltimore) Sun, July 16, 2005. No one could be more lovable than the characters of "Blondie":



Young, who is the son of the strip's originator, Murat "Chic" Young, and who co-creates the strip now with artist Denis Lebrun, goes on: "And I think a lot of that has to do with the love that Dagwood and Blondie have for each other in the comic strip. Look at all the dysfunction that's going on everywhere, and here's a man and wife, they love each other and they've loved each other all these years. The passion continues undiminished. And hopefully it's funny, too."

Here's an ostensibly lighthearted newspaper story about a slice of cultural Americana ... yet Mr. Young tosses off a reference to "all the dysfunction that's going on everywhere." What's up with that?


The July 25, 2005, issue of TIME magazine contains a feature story by Lev Grossman, "J.K. Rowling Hogwarts And All," wrapped around his interview with the famed author. Rowling's much-anticipated sixth of a planned seven Harry Potter novels, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, has just skyrocketed — as everyone expected — into the annals of bestselling children's literature.

Rowling tells Grossman, "As I look back over the five published books, I realize that it's kind of a litany of bad fathers. That's where evil seems to flourish, in places where people didn't get good fathering."

The absence of good fathering leads to the flowering of evil: if that isn't the epitome of dysfunction, I don't know what is. Mr. Dithers may find Dagwood a slacker at the office, but at home there's no question. He's always been there for offspring Alexander and Cookie Bumstead:



I think it's about time we woke up to the dysfunction in our society — the rot in our culture, in ourselves — and realized that our current attitudes toward sex, love, marriage, procreation, parenting, and the like lie at the root of it!


Evil is what happens when we make bad choices, period. Dysfunction is what happens when we make the wrong choices about our most important relationships. They're two sides of one coin.

Rowling on her stories' morals:

Rowling refuses to view herself as a moral educator to the millions of children who read her books. "I don't think that it's at all healthy for the work for me to think in those terms. So I don't," she says. "I never think in terms of What am I going to teach them? Or, What would it be good for them to find out here?"

"Although," she adds, "undeniably, morals are drawn." But she doesn't make it easy. ... . People aren't good and bad by nature; they change and transform and struggle. As Dumbledore tells Harry, "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."

We seem to be stuck in a Catch-22. We're shortchanged on our ability to make good choices if, as youths, we don't have at least a Professor Dumbledore as a wise father substitute. So we grow up to make some terrible choices about sex, love, marriage, procreation, parenting, etc. Then, if a pregnancy we don't want happens anyway, we use the prospect of a fatherless (and perhaps motherless) upbringing for the child as a rationale for abortion instead.

What's wrong with this picture?

Why can't we do it right?

What needs to happen before we start making better choices?

Towards a Culture of Life, Part 2

In Towards a Culture of Life, Part 1, I said I hoped for a new or recovered ethos in which human life, even unborn human life, would be held sacred. How do we get to that ethos? How do we scale that particular Mount Everest?

Having the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade, it seems to me, amounts to no more than establishing a base camp on the lower slopes of the mountain. It's necessary, it's good — but it's not enough. From there, we have to actually lower the number of abortions, which may or may not be prohibited by law in the various states after Roe dies — if it dies. Ultimately, we have to change minds, hearts, and behaviors so that discretionary abortions on demand are no longer sought.

Quite a tall order.


Meanwhile, just gaining that Roe-less base camp will take a minor miracle. As Catholic ethicist George Weigel points out in this column from late 2004, the Supreme Court is not divided 5-4 in favor of letting Roe stand; it's divided 6-3. Only Justices Scalia and Thomas and Chief Justice Rehnquist can be counted on to overturn Roe. Even if Justice O'Connor's replacement is solidly anti-Roe, that only makes four votes in favor of overturning Roe and its follow-on, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the case "which shifted the ground of the right [to have an abortion] from Roe’s 'privacy' to the Fourteenth Amendment’s 'liberty'."

To get to five votes against Roe, assuming an anti-Roe jurist replaces O'Connor, one of justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Souter, and Stevens would also have to retire and be succeeded by a justice who would overturn Roe. (And Rehnquist, if poor health ends his career, would have to receive an anti-Roe replacement.)

Moreover, a case which could conveivably be used to reverse Roe would have to find its way to the Supreme Court's docket. The docket for any current session is generally set at the end of the prior session. Then it can take up to a year for a case on the docket to be heard, and then an indeterminate time until it's decided.

Furthermore, Weigel says, there's no suitable case in the federal judicial "pipeline" even to be considered for the docket. It's not clear to me, no constitutional law scholar, what kind of case it could be, anyway. Who is entitled to sue on behalf of an unborn fetus whose life and liberty are threatened by legalized abortion?


Then there's the strategy question. Weigel is probably right to assume that Roe/Casey will have to be "hollowed out," to the extent possible, by means of state laws — clinic regulations, parental-notification statutes, informed-consent mandates, etc. — which circumscribe the availablity of abortions while not, in the eyes of the current Supreme Court, placing an "undue burden" on the supposed abortion "right" per se.

Weigel points out that Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision enshrining "separate but equal" treatment of Negroes and thwarting later civil rights advances, was never formally overturned — "it was gutted over time, in a series of cases, to the point where Brown v. Board of Education could administer the coup-de-grâce in 1954."

If the hollowing out process takes a lot of time, it may be years before Roe and Casey bite the dust. If they ever do.


If the states do regain the ability to outlaw abortion someday, it will be a sign that "base camp" has been reached, and all systems are go for an assault on "the peak." But at the end of the day, hearts and minds and the attitudes we take toward procreation, sex, and marriage will need to change. Then and only then can the "culture of life" pennant be planted proudly on the sacred mountaintop.

Overturning Roe and Casey, if it happens, would definitely get folks' attention. I'm hoping it would take our society to a "tipping point" such that a widespread embracing of a respect for human life becomes far easier than it has been for decades.

But resistance to the final tipping of this "tipping point" would be strong. What interests me even more than how this war can be won in a legal/constitutional sense is how it can be won in the hearts and minds of all of us.

Towards a Culture of Life, Part 1

I guess my secret is out: something in my psyche has recently reached a tipping point. I now feel suddenly averse to my erstwhile pro-choice, pro-abortion rights attitude. (See Are We at a Tipping Point? and, in another blog, Can We Have Too Much Liberty?.)

I now think those who espouse a "culture of life" are right on the money.

Ever since Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in 1973, the culture has gone to the dogs. By that I mean that we have become a nation of "slob divas" (see Hooray for Hypocrisy!). The lives of each and every one of us, in the way in which we live them, shout "It's all about me."

What do I mean? I just saw the new movie The Fantastic Four. Great special effects, but whatever happened to superheroes for whom the overriding concern is about more than curing their own space-zapped DNA? Mr. Fantastic, The Thing, The Invisible Woman, The Human Torch — what is the point of their transformation, in this movie, except to oppose the only slightly more self-absorbed Dr. Doom, their onetime colleague. He wants world power, they want ... what? To put things back to where they were before, not for the world's sake but for their own return to comfort.

Well, OK, maybe I can relate to that, after all. I'd like to put things back the way they were before, partly for my own sense of comfort. I've grown uncomfortable in a world in which the needs of the community take second place to personal prerogative.

So when I say I'd like to reaffirm a "culture of life," that's my not-so-hidden agenda. This is not only a symbolic thing, but it's nonetheless true that at the level of psychological symbolism, legalized abortion sanctions just about every version of extreme personal prerogative you can name.


What I'm talking about is ethos. Ethos is a fancy word for shared community values, unwritten rules which hem in our conduct and mold our attitudes. We live in a world in which a once-unified ethos has become balkanized. A world in which each is notably free to pick the rules he or she lives by, and to do so independently of everyone else, one-from-column-A-two-from-column-B-style, à la a Chinese restaurant.

We live in a world where in the province of human knowledge we have developed "the inability to make vocabularies intersect from subject to subject" — words by Brother Patrick Ellis, former president of the Catholic University of America, writing in his "My Turn" column in the 7/14/05 Catholic Review (p. 9).

This particular essay is called "Welcome to the Pope's Mind." In it, Ellis rues the "20th-century compartmentalizing of knowledge with the spin-off of the natural sciences [from other knowledge domains] and the fraying of the theology-philosophy fabric" at the same time as he extols the new Pope Benedict XVI's reaffirming "the doctrine of conscience."

A few weeks ago, I couldn't have agreed with Ellis on that. Now I feel I can.

Maybe I'm a part of the "geezer generation" Ellis speaks of. Maybe I got my basic education before "the fragmentation of knowledge" — and the balkanization of ethos — got under way. But I now consider myself like him in linking the disrespect for life in an abortion-legal land with all the general fragmentation and balkanization.


I can't immediately put my finger on where I read it, but I've heard this fragmentation and balkanization spoken of as the essence of post-modernism. Deconstructionist literary theory, post-modernism's badge, says that no "text" — no body of words — really means anything beyond what we read into it. And each of us reads it in his or her own way. Sure, there are cultural overlays; as a member of a Catholic subculture, I read Brother Ellis differently than a Protestant would. But the point is that no one culture or subculture's interpretation of any given text ought to be privileged over any other.

If no text, no set of symbols has intrinsic meaning, whither ethos? Whither the human ability, so amply demonstrated in the past, to enshrine a body of values and live by them as a community? That's what we've lost today, and it's killing us slowly but surely. And the first step back to ethos and true community, it seems to me, is to embrace a "culture of life."

Hooray for Hypocrisy!

I mentioned in Are We at a Tipping Point? that the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has put the handwriting on the wall for Roe v. Wade and legal abortion ... and that I was as I remain: surprised to call myself glad of it!

Why am I glad? It seems to me that in this present age our culture is typified by (a) people being mainly interested in self-gratification and (b) people being not the least bit hypocritical about admitting (a).

How does abortion figure in? Abortion is what happens when "mistakes are made" with regard to sex, and when it comes to self-gratification, sex (at least, the way it is used today) is the Big Kahuna of gratifying the self.

Or at least it is one of the top three, along with binge eating and not stopping in favor of oncomig traffic while exiting a parking lot when talking on a cell phone and not looking where one is going.


We've become a nation, not just of slipshod drivers, but of slob divas.

The term "diva" used to apply to temperamental female singers in the world of opera. No more. After making a brief stop as a description for temperamental female singers in the world of pop, it is now getting applied to, among others, overpaid baseball players, decidedly male. I guess that means that to the extent we all act the way a Barry Bonds acts or Sammy Sosa used to act before being traded to Baltimore — or to the extent that we would if we thought we could get away with it — we're all divas.

As for the "slob" part, check out Susan Reimer's article "Flying the friendly skies with slobs" in the 7/12/05 edition of The Baltimore Sun. Reimer chastises a fellow traveler waiting in the airport security line for berating a woman ahead of him in line for wearing Arab clothing, saying to her, "Why can't you dress like an American?" Then Reimer scowls at the "team jackets, sleep pants and flip-flops" worn by a traveling sports team; the women's attire consisting of "halter tops and strapless tops and spaghetti-strap tops and tops that failed to cover pierced navels"; and the "men wearing those sleeveless undershirts that are often called 'wife-beaters'."

"I saw young people wearing T-shirts," writes Reimer, "that said stuff you are not allowed to say in public. (Although none of them said, 'Why don't you dress like an American?')"

If this is the sort of thing is Americans are wearing to fly these days, Reimer says she opts out. "What ever happened to khakis and a golf shirt?" she writes. "I know we are in the dog days of summer, but what about a sleeveless shift and a pair of dress sandals? Does everybody have to look like they just stumbled out of a Laundromat?"

Yes, Susan, they do ... if there is no self-gratification in dressing nicely, and if the primary statement people want to make is, "I may be a slob, but at least I'm not a hypocrite about it."

And it goes deeper. There seems to be a kind of unstated conspiracy going on, to the effect that slob-diva behavior in public on my part sanctions slob-diva behavior in public on your part, and vice versa. If we all act slobbish and sluttish, cynical and rude, then everyone's doing their part. We're acting as a community of slob divas, which in the old days would have been an oxymoron, as if one had said people were generally acting selfishly unselfish.


I contrast the current scene with what things were like when I was growing up in the 1950s and early '60s. That's right ... I mean the Eisenhower administration, recently lampooned by Stephan Pastis in his Pearls Before Swine comic strip:



"Locked in some past era that has almost no connection to present times," à la Bil Keane's daily Family Circus panel? Sounds good to me.

I can't really prove that people were less into self-gratification then — and more into being kind, gentle, chaste, polite, and neatly dressed — but everyone knows that's how they seemed. It was a Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Norman-Rockwell-picture-on-the- cover-of-the-Saturday Evening Post world, and if people in their private lives weren't really as apple-cheeked as all that, at least they kept up appearances.

In other words, say I, hooray for hypocrisy!

Are We at a Tipping Point?

In Can We Have Too Much Liberty?, a post to the blog I maintain as oldstyleliberal, I wrote of my conversion to believing that we as a society may be better off if Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court turns out to be the last straw for Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion.

Though I think that abortion ought to be legal on paper, in the real world its legalization ushered in an era of extreme personal self-indulgence and hyper-entitlement (see this article, "The entltlement generation," which recently appeared in The Baltimore Sun). It wasn't just a sexual thing, by any means, but a sense of no-holds-barred sexual license was its leading edge. People who can do no wrong sexually — if you goof up, "mistakes were made"; just have a surgical procedure to put things right — typically can do no wrong in any other venue of life.


If Roe went bye-bye, what would happen? I don't mean to ask here about the specific sequence of events that might follow Roe's demise. Doubtless there would be a series of legislative and judicial occurrences that might lead to abortion being more or less legal in some states, more or less banned in others. We'll just have to wait and see.

Be that as it may, what concerns me now is the "macro" effect of making anti-abortion laws constitutional once more. I think it might have an "avalanche effect" throughout the culture, as a result of which the society would move to the right morally and behaviorally.


As I've mentioned in my Beyond Darwin blog, I'm a great fan of complexity researcher Stuart Kauffman and his book At Home in the Universe. Kauffman finds that complex systems such as life on Earth are prone to "self-organized criticality." The research done by Per Bak and others into the behavior of sandpiles(!) furnishes him with a conceptual model. As new grains of sand are dropped on an accumulating sandpile one by one, they may or may not trigger an avalanche. If they do, the avalanche may be a tiny one, a huge one, or any size in between.

There's no way to be sure in advance what size of avalanche, if any, will happen. Yet over time, several things emerge. One, the smaller the avalanche, the more likely it is to occur. Two, a huge avalanche will occur eventually. And three, when the sizes of avalanches are plotted against their frequencies, the curve is a regular one: a power-law function.


After a huge avalanche has transpired, but not before, we can be sure that the "system" — i.e., the sandpile itself — had poised itself at an edge of what has been called "self-organized criticality." Then, as the very next grain of said fell, the system abruptly went "critical." Result: a major avalanche.

To me, this looks to be approximately the same idea as the one extolled by Malcolm Gladwell in a newer book I have not actually read, though I've read about it: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Gladwell writes that, for instance, a major epidemic breaks out if and only if the conditions that might lead to one are exquisitely poised at a certain "tipping point," in which case any seemingly innocuous trigger can play havoc with the public health.


Not all "avalanches" or "epidemics" are bad. If as a result of a reversal of Roe, there were a spate of follow-on changes which would rein in our private egos and their unbridled claims to rule the day, it would be a case of a beneficial "avalanche" or "epidemic" in American society, I believe.

Little things make big differences sometimes. I believe (hope?) that overturning Roe might be the grain of sand that would tip our culture into a kinder, gentler, less self-assertive mode of doing business.

Novus Ordo Seclorum

That Latin phrase, Novus Ordo Seclorum, appears on the back of the one dollar bill. Meaning "New World Order," it reflects the belief of the founders of the United States of America that their new nation put the world on a unprecedented and vital track.

Today, we hear echoes of Novus Ordo Seclorum in speechifying about what we are doing in the Middle East, in Iraq; in Afghanistan; and in the war against terrorism. President Bush the Father said his Gulf War coalition against Saddam Hussein reflected "a new world order," remember?

Connecting the affairs of one country, ours, with the order of the entire world is nothing new. It is the basis for American "exceptionalism." And that idea, our exceptionalism, is one of the major (if often unstated) bones of contention between those who support the war in Iraq and those who oppose it.

In fact, I think it is the decisive bone of contention.

I say this because I think no war could ever be more "faith-based" than this one in Iraq. What else can we say about a war whose two ostensible rationales, weapons of mass destruction and secret support by Iraq for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, turned out to be bogus? Whose author, President Bush the Son, switched by the time of his second inaugural to justifying his signature war in furtherance of world democracy? Whose supporters' "arguments" generally devolve upon lambasting opponents' patriotic resolve?

Not that the antiwar "arguments" are all that compelling. If you were asked to name one American who (a) holds any truly important elected office and (b) has spoken out unequivocally against the war, you'd be hard put to come up with one. Yes, we hear chafing about the war being "open-ended," with no terminus in sight. War opponents never tire of citing how many of our brave young men and women have died or been wounded to date. And when the insurgency in Iraq heats up, they're the first to wail and gnash their teeth. But as far as calling clearly and simply for our troops to come home now, we don't even get that from Howard Dean any more — if we ever did.

We hear from hawks that the Iraq war is really a chapter in the longer war on terror ... but without any real proof. From doves, we hear just the opposite, that there's no connection whatever ... again, without any real proof.

We hear from doves that the Afghanistan initiative was as justified as the Iraq one was not ... but we hear very little from doves or hawks about why we are still there.

There's considerable hand-wringing among doves over atrocities at Abu Ghraib and "Gitmo," while Administration hawks seem distressingly nonchalant. Meanwhile, neither side has done or said anything substantial to end the atrocities.

It's as if everybody's tongues are powerless to speak the whole truth. It's as if the whole truth cannot be spoken because it has not yet emerged. It's as if Bush's initiatives in Iraq and elsewhere are based 100% on faith in what that whole truth will be, when it finally does arrive.


So, yes, I've changed my mind about Iraq. I think Bush will be proven right. I say this as one whose instincts are profoundly dovish, as one who opposed the first Gulf War ... until we won it, that is. I was against the Vietnam War, back in the day. There hasn't been an American military action since I was knee-high to a grasshopper that I could get behind.

This one feels different. This one is so faith-based, it almost has to succeed.

As I have tried to make clear (see The Moral Arc of the Universe), I believe there is a heart-reality beneath our everyday eyes-reality. It is what arcs the cosmos, at the end of the day, toward justice. For the nonce, it is but a latency which we, acting at our most heroic, can help make true. Until it does come true, this heart-reality doesn't make a lot of sense ... except, of course, to our foolish hearts.

I believe the Bush war in Iraq, along with the other prime inititiaves on the world stage by which his administration will be judged, are heart-guided. They can't be justified by reason alone. They do not — for example, take the case of Iraq — always conform to the traditional Roman Catholic strictures for a just war.

In fact, I think it grows increasingly clear that those traditional strictures no longer serve. If only because this is not a declared war, and there may well never be another decleared American war, we have to redraw the guidelines.

A new, emergent world order — that is what we await today. One superpower, us, is acting exceptionally. Boldly, it is going against received, conventional wisdom to sow democracy where skeptics say it cannot grow. As it does so, it is generating "new world order" all the while.

American liberals and doves don't get it — or, if they get it, they don't like it. For them, the whole idea of American exceptionalism is bogus. No underlying heart-reality, no buried template of cosmic justice, requires this nation to act any differently from France or Switzerland, if that latent reality is to be brought to the surface.

I don't buy that. I think our nation's history is imbued with exceptionality. I think we have a special role to play, a heart-guided one that can't be pinned down by rules of the head.

Admittedly, I don't have all the answers to questions like, if that is so, what is to rein us in? How do we know as a body politic what is right, good, proper, and in accordance with the world's hidden heart-reality? Can Bush do no wrong?

No, I don't believe Bush can do no wrong. Make no mistake about that. But neither do I believe that the liberal shibboleths we hear today can guide us to the new world order I think God wants this country to usher in.


Though I say I've changed my mind, I have been edging toward this view for quite some time. It's mostly been a matter of some inchoate inner voice nagging at me, telling me to look beyond all the obvious reasons why this war is so seemingly without justification.

I have never felt comfortable — and still don't — with what Bush's neo-conservative minions say in support of their war, a litany of assertions which don't add up. In fact, it is the lack of real coherence in their official stances and positions which convinces me they are acting as much from faith as anything else. It's an "I know it's right, but I can't really say why" attitude that they convey, and I know it maddens liberals for just that reason.

But neither do I feel all warm and fuzzy about liberals' approach to this situation, to the sketchy extent that they have actually set one forth. Mostly all they say is "Bush was wrong to do this" and "Bush is misguided to do that."

It's as if both sides' base assumptions are inadequate to the new reality, which is bigger than the both of them. At least the Bush side is feeling its way along, meeting the situation that develops as best it can. When the history of all this is written, I expect Bush will in retrospect be congratulated for hewing as faithfully to his worldview as President Reagan did in standing up to the Soviet Union, precipitating its collapse. Remember how foolish Reagan looked to us liberals at the time?

The Moral Arc of the Universe

Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker has this to say about the recent conviction of 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen in the Philadelphia, Mississippi, murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner some 41 years ago: justice has at long last been served. The ghosts of the three young men who were killed by Klansmen for registering Negroes to vote during Freedom Summer in 1964 had witnessed convictions of only seven of the eighteen men charged with their deaths ... until now, with the successful prosecution of the supposed minister of God who masterminded their slayings.

Tucker wraps up her column, which chastises all who today find Killen's prosecution inappropriate, by quoting the also-slain Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

No words could be more apt to my own worldview. I could not believe in God if I didn't believe there's a moral arc to the cosmos, bending it ever so slowly toward justice.

Nor could I believe in the moral arc if I did not believe in God. The two ideas are, in my mind, virtually synonymous.

More and more, I find that my belief in God says there are in effect two realities, one of which we perceive with our eyes and the other with our hearts. But the eyes-reality is, ultimately, false. In the end, the heart-reality will win.

The eyes-reality is the one which our egos attach themselves to, which is why, at bottom, Christianity is a matter of "crucifying the private ego" — see my thoughts on this phrase of Father Ron Rolheiser's in To Crucify the Ego (Part I) and To Crucify the Ego (Part II).

I would go so far as to say that every story of heroism — Dr. King's, Jesus's, ours — is fundamentally one in which the hero is led to abandon his everyday, practical, ego-identified reality and follow "the Force" toward justice, where justice is anything that reveals the heart-actuality beneath the "eyes" pseudo-reality.

Moderate Christian Soldiering

John Danforth is an Episcopal minister and former Republican U.S. senator from Missouri whose op-ed piece, Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers, appeared recently in The New York Times. In it, he speaks up on behalf of politically moderate Christians with strong religious convictions, such as myself:

Many conservative Christians approach politics with a certainty that they know God's truth [Danforth writes], and that they can advance the kingdom of God through governmental action. So they have developed a political agenda that they believe advances God's kingdom, one that includes efforts to "put God back" into the public square and to pass a constitutional amendment intended to protect marriage from the perceived threat of homosexuality.

Moderate Christians are less certain about when and how our beliefs can be translated into statutory form, not because of a lack of faith in God but because of a healthy acknowledgement of the limitations of human beings. Like conservative Christians, we attend church, read the Bible and say our prayers.

But for us, the only absolute standard of behavior is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Here, then, Danforth exposes the crux of one of the most important debates of our time: the question of certainty.

Along those very lines, Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page has written this recent column. He points out that those whom he calls "sultans of certainty" were oh, so sure that Terri Schiavo was not all but dead, but might someday reawaken. Then, after her doctors arranged for her final demise at the behest of her husband and a sitting judge, an autopsy showed their certainty to have been misplaced.

Columnist Cal Thomas's Church, not state, must advance moral agenda actually supports one of Danforth's main points, that it's wrong for Evangelical conservatives to look to government to change people's hearts. This, even though Thomas is himself an Evangelical and a conservative. (Go figure!)

Yet I find that Thomas doesn't really get it. Danforth's dictum that "religion should be inclusive, and it should seek to bridge the differences that separate people" draws this response:

John Danforth seems to flirt with universalism when he says that he and his fellow religious moderates believe "religion should be inclusive." Not exactly. Different religions make competing claims and the Christian faith separates "sheep from goats," the saved from the lost, and heaven from hell.

"Competing claims" characterizes not just different religions, but the differences among all those who are nominally Christian ... not to mention the differences between atheists and those who believe in God. If, as Thomas does, we see this fact in the light of "Jesus said he came to bring a sword. A sword divides," then Danforth's reluctance to declare certainty on important issues can only be the road to perdition.

Or so it would be logical to conclude. We can't have it both ways, as Cal Thomas seems to want to do. It cannot possibly be enough to back off and stop trying to win the culture war through governmental and civic action. Those who call themselves Christians must also practice heartfelt tolerance. They must not, with Thomas, sniff:

[Jesus] told the woman taken in adultery that while he did not condemn her, she was to "go and sin no more." To a moderate, I guess that was intolerant.

No, Mr. Thomas, to a moderate that was tolerance personified. Which is the whole point. Today's Christians ought to be a lot more tolerant and forgiving than they are ... and a lot less certain that they alone have the final answer to everything.

Feeling the Force

In To Crucify the Ego (Part II) and its predecessor, To Crucify the Ego (Part I), I discussed Fr. Ron Rolhesier's contention that the true message of Christ's cross — love — implies we ought each to (in his phrase) "crucify our private ego."

In the World According to Rolheiser, Jesus, who is "the paragon of mature human love," through his redeeming death on a cross teaches us that love:

... lies at the base of everything, the cosmic, the biological, the emotional, the psychological, the sexual, the spiritual. There is no level of reality where one doesn't see the relentless deep pull inside of all things towards a unity, community, fusion, and oneness beyond self. Love stirs all things, speaking to every element in the language it can understand. Deep inside of us, we know too that this alone can bring us home.

In Star Wars, love is the Force that guides us aright when we "let go" of our ego and its mandate to control everything.


One of the things which fascinates me about Rolheiser's worldview, accordingly, is that it's really no different from that of Star Wars, or any other hero epic for that matter.

Take Lord of the Rings. Frodo Baggins, a mere Hobbit, leaves the comfortable Shire under extreme duress and takes a hero's journey in search of the Crack of Doom, the unique place where he can destroy the One Ring, the epitome of power. Evil Sauron, who, à la Darth Vader, epitomizes George Lucas's "Dark Side of the Force," wants Frodo's Ring as well, and the Ring wants to go to Sauron. Which side will win?

The Force is powerful, but so is the Dark Side. The Dark Side tempts even Frodo to wear the Ring and claim its power.

Unqualified, the Force represents (in Rolheiser's lingo) the "crucifixion" of the private ego. Qualified by the term "the Dark Side," accordingly, the Force represents what happens when the resurgent ego co-opts the Force's power to do good. When Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker turns into Sith Darth Vader, his ego has experienced what might be called the demonic parody of Christ's resurrection.


This would seem to be a universal message, this neverending story of the ego's crucifixion in hero after hero — Parsifal, King Arthur, Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca, Spiderman, you and me (sometimes) — with Christ the paragon of all heroes.

So the question I have is this: if we all respond so deeply to messages of love, ego-crucifixion, and heroism like these, why isn't it more widely understood that Christ is the paragon of all heroes?

When I was a college freshman at Georgetown University, where most students are Catholic, my "Introduction to Psychology" professor, Fr. Juan B. Cortés, a Jesuit, asked the class the first time we met to think of the name of a hero. He called on several students, whose answers varied ... but no one named Jesus. This fact Fr. Cortés commented on at some length, for the point of the exercise was exactly that something in the modern psyche, as it has developed, misses that Christ could conceivably be the Hero among Heroes.

That was in 1965. Twelve years later, the first Star Wars movie came out. I never made any connection then between the Force and the Gospel message.

Some ten years after that, my life took a turn, and for the first time I got religious. At about the same time, I imbibed Joseph Campbell's PBS series, The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers. Many of the points I've just made about heroism and the Force came to me courtesy of the late myth guru, Campbell. But Campbell identified Jesus with the Buddha — also a hero, yes, but the Buddha-Jesus link obscured (at least for me) Rolheiser's point about the cross.

To wit, it is the paradigm of all heroism.

To Crucify the Ego (Part II)

In To Crucify the Ego (Part I) I suggested that the open-yet-hidden significance of Christ's cross is that reality is surprisingly constituted. Instead of the royal road to metaphysical harmony being either of those imaginable extremes, self-glorification or self-mortification, a Middle Path exists. It is the path Father Ron Rolheiser calls "the crucifixion of the private ego."

In his article The Jesus Code - Unravelling The Secret, Fr. Rolheiser shows that the link between Jesus's crucifixion and that of our individual private egos has to do with each one of us coming to understand "the deepest mystery within the universe," namely, love:

It lies at the base of everything, the cosmic, the biological, the emotional, the psychological, the sexual, the spiritual. There is no level of reality where one doesn't see the relentless deep pull inside of all things towards a unity, community, fusion, and oneness beyond self. Love stirs all things, speaking to every element in the language it can understand. Deep inside of us, we know too that this alone can bring us home.

"Slowly, painfully, with many setbacks, over the course of a lifetime," Rolheiser says, we crack the inner code of love — its secret DNA, as it were.

And "the paragon of mature human love," says Rolheiser, was Jesus's "refusing to resort to any kind of superior physical power to overwhelm his adversaries, refusing to give back in kind, and refusing to give himself over to bitterness and cynicism."

Rather, "innocent, trusting, unwilling out of love to protect himself against suffering," Jesus was intent on "absorbing hatred and sin, understanding and forgiving those who were murdering him." Through his selfless heroism he saved us.

Thus does the cross of Christ present us with a paradigm for our personal heroism, the crucifixion of our own private egos.

It's hard to know exactly what that could mean: to crucify the ego.

I think it means something relating to the fact that we humans are unique in having self-awareness, the knowledge of "I-ness." After all, ego in Latin is the first-person singular pronoun, the one that means "I."

Psychologists speak of the ego as something that develops in our infancy. It's an aspect of the psyche that lets us negotiate a complex world as we preserve our own existence and identity. It's a lot more than just having a swelled head. And it's not necessarily "bad."

But it can make us selfish, blinding us to the importance of those people and things that don't necessarily help us get along in life.

The prerogatives of the ego within the ambit of the total human psyche turn out to be limited, short-sighted, and biased. When the ego is running things, we easily find ourselves thrown out of inner — not to mention outer — harmony and peace.

This fact, that doing all the "sensible" things that further our private interests and feather our own nests is not the royal road to happiness, makes no sense whatever to the ego-dominated human mentality.

That's why, I suspect, we need to undergo a "religious" experience to help us "crucify" our private egos. The "meaning" of Christ's cross and its messages of love from above and of our own love for our fellow beings makes sense in this light. We need to experience some sort of radical conversion, a spiritual "attitude adjustment," if our egos are ever going to be "crucified."

To Crucify the Ego (Part I)

Fr. Ron Rolheiser

The Jesus Code - Unravelling The Secret, a recent column by Father Ron Rolheiser, comes as close as anything I've read to encapsulating in a few short paragraphs what the Christian religion is all about.

Fr. Rolheiser is a Catholic priest and president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He writes a weekly column, available online and via various Catholic newspapers such at The Catholic Review here in Baltimore, MD. (Access Fr. Rolheiser's column archives here.) On a consistent basis, I find his pieces unusually insightful. This piece is especially so.

In it, Rolheiser plays on the human need to crack secret codes to find the hidden wisdom buried within — as evidenced by all the recent interest in Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code. Rolheiser says the code of codes of our human lives is "the Jesus Code."

"Jesus makes it very clear that there is a hidden, secret wisdom," Rolheiser writes of the Gospel of St. Mark, "that needs to be grasped if one is to understand the deep design of things. What is it?"

(Maybe not everyone would like to "grasp the deep design of things," but many of us do. I'd place my own self in this company quite readily.)

Well, according to Rolheiser, the "whole life and mission" of the Jesus of the Gospel stories "are an attempt to lay open for everyone the deepest secret of all and to make that secret accessible to everyone, as accessible as the nearest water tap or the village well. Since Jesus, the deepest secret is an open secret. What is it?"


What is it, indeed? Rolheiser says it's the "code" that's "hidden in the cross of Christ," the one "we have to break open if we are to learn the deep secrets of life. The cross contains a wisdom, the wisdom of the crucified, which is a prism through which all else is to be viewed."

What is it, this "open secret" that "love is most truly revealed in the brokenness of Jesus on the cross?"

What is it? It's that

... there is a necessary connection between certain things: Isn't a certain prior suffering and humiliation always the condition for glory? Don't we all, like Cinderella, first have to sit in the ashes before the glass slipper will fit our feet? Isn't sublimation always the means to the sublime? Isn't it precisely when we are vulnerable and unable to impress or overpower others that we are finally open to intimacy, love, and family? Aren't self-sacrifice and self-denial, in the end, the way real love manifests itself?

"Isn't the crucifixion of the private ego the route to empathy and community?" Rolheiser adds. "Isn't the forgiveness of those who hurt us the final manifestation of human maturity?"

I find that phrase, "the crucifixion of the private ego," to be the real nugget of wisdom here. One of its most important synonyms is the one Fr. Rolheiser gives in the next sentence: "the forgiveness of those who hurt us." It is the canonical synonym, even, because outright forgiveness is the hardest sacrifice we ever have to make. But I'd say there are clearly other synonyms, too.

In fact, I'd go so far to say that everything that we do that's good at least hints at the crucifixion of the private ego, and everything we do that's bad at least hints at its nemesis: the private ego's glorification.

"Glory" without "prior suffering and humiliation": isn't that what the ego is always interested in? The secret wisdom of Christ's cross is that that's an impossibility, even an oxymoron.

Now, I'm no angel. I don't want to claim that the crucifixion of my own personal private ego has actually taken place — nothing of the kind. I don't have any special handle on goodness. My inner sense, furthermore, is that my ego is usually firmly in charge of my affairs. Most of the time, I'm far from a saint.

Even so, I find that Fr. Rolheiser's concept of the crucifixion of the private ego as the open-yet-hidden message of Christ's cross resonates deeply with me. I'd like to explore some of the reasons why.

One of the first things that comes to mind when I contemplate the notion of ego crucifixion is the worry that it's an invitation to a life of self-flagellation. Some people assiduously seek their own self-mortification. Can this be right?

Jesus, though, was not a self-flagellator; no self-mortifier he. In Matthew 26, Jesus's prayer in Gethsemene in preparation for his betrayal and death included the words, "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt" (v. 39 KJV). I have always wondered about this prayer. Under the assumption that Jesus was God and privy to the sheer, ineluctable necessity of the events that were about to take place, what possible sense could his "if it be possible, let this cup pass from me" make?

It makes sense, I'd say, only in the context of revealing his nature as a non-self-mortifier, one who does not have an inner urge to self-destruction. Ergo, ego crucifixion, like Jesus's own crucifixion, is not a rationalization of suicide.

Hence, the ego crucifixion which Fr. Rolheiser speaks of is a sort of Middle Way (see also the earlier post The Middle Way: No To Sithhood). It is a path that lies somewhere between the two extremes of self-glorification and self-mortification. The fact that it is a Middle Path is one of the reasons the concept of ego crucifixion resonates deeply with me.

The Middle Way: No To Sithhood

Statue of Standing Buddha

The Buddha extolled the Middle Way or Middle Path as always best, by which he basically meant "the practice of non-extremism."

Specifically, according to Wikipedia, the Buddha chose "a path of moderation away from the extremes of self-indulgence and opposing self-mortification. Gautama [Buddha] found the middle way after experiencing extremes — he renounced his luxurious royal family life and became an ascetic before attaining Enlightenment."

I'd like to think that I too, though no Buddha, am inclined to look for the Middle Way in all things.


This has relevance in the context of a "debate" which can be constructed between two recent opinion columns. From the right comes "In Defense of Certainty," an essay by Charles Krauthammer in the June 6, 2005, TIME. From the left — or, actually, is it the middle? — we have Clarence Page with his May 25, 2005, op-ed piece "'Darth Bush'?".

Krauthammer has it that the liberal secularists among us have launched a "campaign against certainty," their thinly disguised way to oppose "unseemly religiosity" among President Bush's judicial nominees and others.

Though Krauthammer admits that he himself is "not much of a believer," in any religious sense, clearly the columnist holds "deeply held views" concerning "moral certainty" in the abstract. To wit, he favors it.

Page is not so sure. He worries that the desire for moral certainty paves the way for dictators, à la the recent Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith movie.

To understand what Page is on about, it helps to read Baltimore Sun movie critic Michael Sragow's review of the movie, "Jedi Masterful", in which Sragow says "you witness with understanding as well as horror the desire for certainty that transforms the Republic into an evil Empire."

The film documents the turning of the good Jedi knight Anakin Skywalker into the dark lord Darth Vader. Anakin loves Padme Amidala, a princess who is his secret wife. His "fear of Padme's death, which he sees in a prophetic vision, reflects his emotional greed and irrational urge for control." That, in turn,

.... makes him vulnerable to the Dark Side [of the Force] and to the manipulations of Chancellor Palpatine, his friend. Palpatine takes on ever-more dictatorial powers, promising peace and stability to the Republic (and to Anakin, the power to save Padme). In effect Palpatine says he will destroy the Republic to save it -- and in the shrinking circle of Jedi and uncorrupted Senators like Padme and [certain others], only Anakin accepts his word.

So the Jedi knight becomes the evil Sith. It is Anakin's conversion to the Dark Side, out of his all-too-human need for certainty and control, which brings on the Evil Empire. "The whole movie is about," writes Sragow, "the difficulty of steering a true course when a galaxy is in turbulence."

Here's Page's own synopsis of what's at stake in the film:

"If you're not with me, you're my enemy," declares Anakin Skywalker as he drifts over to the "dark side" morphing into the evil Lord Darth Vader and echoing [President] Bush's warning "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Ouch.

Anakin's mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, retorts: "Only a Sith thinks in absolutes." Double ouch.

Bad-guy Chancellor Palpatine exploits war fears to consolidate his power, suspend democratic rule and turn the Republic into a dictatorship. It's not hard to hear echoes here of Congress' rush to pass the USA Patriot Act that expanded government search and eavesdropping powers after the Sept. 11 attacks. Padme Amidala ... laments, "This is how liberty dies: with thundering applause." Triple ouch.

"Only a Sith thinks in absolutes," if true, would make the likes of Charles Krauthammer, along with President Bush, most of his administration, and many of his supporters, Siths.

If one thinks in absolutes, one cannot find the middle way. The middle way lies between two extremes which, at first blush, seem to exhaust all possibilities and present us with an ineluctable either-or choice. At first, no third way, no middle path, is evident. There just seem to be the two opposed absolutes, one of which is perforce good and the other of which is evil. Make your choice.

The middle way is the way of creation. One creates it as much as finds it. It's the secret door in every fantasy story, the one which isn't apparently there to begin with, and if discovered can't be opened without the right incantation.

Often, it takes the naivete of a child to know what to do. Star Wars creator George Lucas represents the creative power of supposedly childish intuition in the first film of the series, Episode IV—A New Hope, when Luke Skywalker, at the climactic moment, hears Obi-Wan Kenobi's voice telling him to "Feel the Force, Luke!" Luke turns off the high-tech guidance system of his space fighter-bomber and uses his intuition to guide him to his target.

But Krauthammer and his ilk have a different definition of Force: That Which Militates Against Uncertainty. The pundit waxes nostalgic for the post-9/11 shock and awe, when our first instinct was to name an enemy and lash back, as one, in any way we could:

Do you remember 9/11? How you felt? The moral clarity of that day and the days thereafter? Just days after 9/11, on this very page, [TIME essayist] Lance Morrow wrote a brilliant, searing affirmation of right against wrong, good against evil.

For one brief, shining moment, a reeling America was heavy into control and certainty, unity and uniformity. We ought to return to that spirit, Krauthammer says. Thus, in the Krauthammer worldview, it is wrong for us to leave abortion decisions in the uncertain hands of individual women. Wrong to keep a high wall of separation between church and state, making God's status among us less than certain. Wrong to question our president's own moral cocksureness in waging his war in Iraq.

I'll certainly never expect to encounter Charles Krauthammer on the Middle Path!

Of Pedestals and Fulcrums

As I said in my post on Cardinal Keeler's Boycott of the recent Loyola College commencement, I am a pro-choice Catholic. That puts me at odds with my church. Herein, before I talk about why there needs to be a dialogue among people on various sides of this and similar issues, I'd like to point out where I think the source of our disagreement lies.

Let me sneak up on it this way. In 1952, when I was five and my family had just gotten its first TV set, every adult in America was agog over Lucille Ball's real-life/in-the-show pregnancy on I Love Lucy. But Lucy couldn't tell husband Ricky Ricardo (played by real-life husband and expectant father Desi Arnaz) that she was "pregnant." The word was considered too indelicate. She had to be "about to have a baby."

It seems so antiquated today, that attitude of putting a woman and her fertility — her ability to conceive and bear children — on a pedestal in a hushed inner sanctum of mystic adoration. Except, that is, if you are a member of the Roman Catholic hierarchy of a certain age. When Lucy bore "Little Ricky" into the world, William Henry Keeler was already a young man of 21 or so. Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, though he probably never saw I Love Lucy in Germany, was four years his senior.

These men, in other words, underwent their personal formation as regards women, fertility, and sex in a different epoch, on, forgive me, a pre-feminist planet that no longer exists. If life is a see-saw, if it is a plank hopefully balanced on a fulcrum, well, let's just say that this particular teeter-totter board has long since shifted leftward.


Putting female fertility on a pedestal: it explains a lot. It explains why the church opposes artifical birth control to prevent fertility's fruition. Why abortion, which interrupts fertility's outworking, is considered wrong. Why gay and lesbian sex are forbidden: no chance of pregnancy.

Fertility-on-a-pedestal explains why the church considers marriage and the family to be the root of all community. Why divorce is verboten. Why heterosexual sex outside marriage is considered a sin. Why any sexual practice such as masturbation or coitus interruptus that cannot fertilize an egg cell is bad.

Fertility-on-a-pedestal undergirds the erstwhile standard that women should keep silent and cover their heads in church, and bow to their husbands' authority at home. After all, their presumed role in life is not to struggle with the mundane details of how to run a religious (or secular) establishment. That's a job for mere wombless men. So too is the task of organizing and carrying out the family's plan for interacting with the outside world: breadwinning, voting, etc.

Fertility-on-a-pedestal accounts for the church's insistence on a celibate male priesthood. True, women can become nuns, but only in view of the fact that Catholic sisters are considered married, symbolically, to Christ. They offer up their fertility to God for the greater good.

Meanwhile, male priests and religious offer up their sexuality. It's sort of like an OB/GYN setting aside his attraction as a healthy male to female private parts so that he may serve his patients' personal needs properly. There are situations when the best way to affirm a community's most important values is to eschew them personally.

My point here, though, is not to debate which of these assumptions are good and which not so good. Rather, it is to demonstrate that, behind all these assumptions, there is a single overarching core belief: the sanctity of female fertility. It's as if every pregnant woman — or every potentially or imaginably pregnant woman — were a Madonna.

That core principle of life in the world community, as endorsed not only by the Catholic Church but by many other institutions and individuals as well, is not a ridiculous one. Indeed, it was the stated or unstated principle which, in a bygone era, made Lucy Ricardo's being in "the family way" a matter of the utmost delicacy on 1950s' TV.

Idealizing female fertility has, in fact, served the Western World well for millennia. It has been essential to the traditional Judeo-Christian way of life.


The problem today with putting women and their fertility on a pedestal is that it is anti-feminist. Just as from the fertility-on-a-pedestal core value you can derive the whole panoply of traditional Catholic attitudes that are now being called into question, from its opposite belief — that female fertility has to be taken down from its pedestal — you can derive the entire feminist agenda.

From legalized abortion to equal pay for equal work, from an end, sexually, to the proverbial double standard to the need for day care, from the right to vote to the right not to be sexually harassed, everything feminists have fought for flows logically from the axiom that female fertility should no longer be elevated as an object of extreme devotion.

Funny thing about that, by the way: in a world in which the womb is held supernal, the possessor of the womb so often gets no respect. Any woman who is less than a perfect Madonna may get treated as a whore.


Now, along comes Cardinal Keeler with his refusal to share the stage with ex-NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani at the Loyola College graduation, on grounds that Giuliani has supported women's abortion rights as a public official. To me this implies that the cardinal, as the head of the Baltimore Archdiocese, has taken up a strategy by which to fix our society's leftward-tilting teeter-totter.

When a teeter-totter is alop, there are two ways to fix it. One way is to move the fulcrum. If the left end of the see-saw has sunk down to the ground, it is presumably because the board has slid leftward — or, equivalently, because there are now more people than before on the teeter-totter's left end. Either way, the teeter-totter can be rebalanced by shifting its supporting fulcrum to the left.

But that's not what the Cardinal and the church want. They want to rebalance the teeter-totter by calling our attention to the notion that the present, i.e., traditional, fulcrum position is one (or so they say) eternally ordained by God. Our reaction to that reminder is, hopefully, that we'll run back around to the right end of the see-saw and rebalance things that way.

So the church wants people to start behaving again as if female fertility were sacrosanct. No more abortion, or divorce, or free sex, or uppity women who put career before family. No more condoms or birth-control pills or information thereon in school. An end to gay and lesbian sex, much less gay and lesbian marriage. No more calls for female, or non-celibate male, priests. No more militant feminism.

In other words, back to the future. Take back the night. And other words to that effect.


It should be obvious that I personally object to this. The reasons are manifold, but my main reason is that I don't see how feminism can be served by it ... and I like feminism. I like the idea that women are no longer seen as having one transcendent purpose in life: to make full use of their wombs (or, as nuns, to sacrifice their fertility to God and the broader human community).

I believe the world is better served when female fertility is demoted from its once-lofty status.

At the same time, I recognize and admit that what goes on today — abortions by the millions each year, rampant casual sex, etc. — is no good. It would be wrong to shift the fulcrum as far left as it needs to go to accomodate this.

No, there needs to be a compromise. The fulcrum has to shift some, and we, the people, need to be called back to the other side of the teeter-totter some.

To get that to happen, there has to be a dialogue between the fulcrum-shifters and the people-movers. But, right now, Cardinal Keeler just wants to be a people-mover. His boycott of Mr. Giuliani's Loyola College address should be taken as, at an abstract level, a sign that he is not interested in pursuing this particular dialogue.

I think he's making a big mistake.

Cardinal Keeler's Boycott

Cardinal Keeler

Last Friday, the commencement ceremony at one of my local institutions of higher learning, Loyola College, was boycotted by Baltimore's Cardinal Archbishop William Keeler because former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has said he supports women's abortion rights, spoke. In today's edition of The Sun, in "Abortion views take priority over respect," columnist Susan Reimer had this to say:

The Catholic church is not an open society, and it is not a democracy, but it exists, in this country at least, within the borders of one. Its refusal to participate in any discussion on abortion ... will not advance its cause among this season's college graduates, some of whom are still forming their views on these issues.

Hear, hear! Like Reimer, I am one of Cardinal Keeler's Catholic flock, I am conscientiously pro-choice, and I am mightily incensed that Keeler would not share the stage with a man who was being honored for his courage and leadership on and after 9/11, and not for his views on abortion. Reimer, again:

And finally, Keeler's refusal to share the stage with Giuliani is an inexcusable show of disrespect for a man who, whatever his politics or his personal failings, walked into the mouth of hell on Sept. 11 to comfort his people.

It was the kind of selfless act of service that should recall for Keeler his own priestly vows.

Guiliani, after all, has not been a pro-abortion zealot. He has stated that he personally opposes abortion, but that he, as a public servant, recognizes that the right to choose does exist under American law, and that as an elected official he would be bound by that fact. This earlier article in The Sun says:

In 1989, when Giuliani was running for mayor, his campaign issued a statement firmly stating that he backs abortion rights, according to The New York Times.

"As mayor, Rudy Giuliani will uphold a woman's right of choice to have an abortion. Giuliani will fund all city programs which provide abortions to insure that no woman is deprived of her right due to an inability to pay. He will oppose reductions in state funding. He will oppose making abortion illegal. Although Giuliani is personally opposed to abortion, his personal views will not interfere with his responsibilities as mayor," the statement said.

It's accordingly clear that Cardinal Keeler's boycott was based not on Giuliani's personal support for abortion, since the ex-mayor is actually "personally opposed" to it, but on his stance as an elected official in this great and commodious land.

Since America, unlike the Catholic Church, is an open society with a multiplicity of religions and a diversity of opinions about abortion, I think Cardinal Keeler's boycott was wholly inappropriate.

Not only that, it sends an awful signal. Since it was a boycott not just by Cardinal Keeler personally but by every member of his official staff, it must be seen as a considered action of the church itself. By dint of it the local Baltimore church, if not the whole church worldwide, is trampling the spirit of pluralism so essential to the American enterprise.

Furthermore, it calls seriously into question the 1965 Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), also called "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World," which asserts that each of us must act according to "the voice of conscience." Can anyone doubt that Mr. Giuliani's stance vis-à-vis the legality of abortion is a personally difficult one, taken in all good conscience?

Modern Immaturity

Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth

“What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?” Bill Moyers asked the late guru of myth Joseph Campbell in the mid-1980s interviews that became The Power of Myth, the TV series and book. “What we’ve got on our hands,” was Campbell’s reply. “If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read The New York Times.”

Moyers: And you’d find?

Campbell: The news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people who don’t know how to act in a civilized society.

Moyers: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind. I think of that passage in the first book of Corinthians: “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.”

Campbell: That’s exactly it. That’s the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done (The Power of Myth, pp. 8-9).

No longer, though, is scarifying physical trauma inflicted in the name of turning children into adults. That's an excellent thing, but perhaps it's not equally good that there is not much of an emotional, psychological, or spiritual rite of passage either. In our Peter Pan culture, we never really grow up.

No wonder today's polarized politics take on an odor of playground rumbles, Sharks vs. Jets with verbal stilettos. No wonder we turn so much more frequently to lawyers and law to settle our manifold differences. We don't have a unifying mythos any more, a common ground upon which to base our personal and communal rites of passage into maturity.

We desperately need one again, Campbell told Moyers. We need "the literature of the spirit" once more to guide us to eternal values, center our lives ... and save us from terminal immaturity. We need myths, particulrly those which speak of “youth coming to knowledge of itself," as “guidesigns” to our “inner thresholds of passage.”

But it can't just be the old myths recycled, without reinterpretation. They served particular cultures, often justifying hostility to other cultures, and often promoting indifference to nature. The myth we need now is a new, worldwide, nature-friendly myth:

... the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future [Campbell told Moyers] is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it. … And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with – the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through [late adulthood and old age], and then to the exit; and then how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. That’s what the myths have all talked about, and what this one’s got to talk about. But the society that it’s got to talk about is the society of the planet. And until that gets going, you don’t have anything (p. 32).

As Campbell pointed out, one of the things we lose when mythos falters is ethos, a set of shared — if not necessarily written — rules for conduct. Without ethos, there is no shame. Without ethos, there is Janet Jackson's accidental-on-purpose "wardrobe malfunction" at the recent Super Bowl halftime show. Without ethos, there is Abu Ghraib.

And how puerile, how juvenile both situations were, though one was as trivial as the other was horrendous. I mean, really: peeking at women's nipples is the preoccupation of a twelve-year-old boy. As is humiliating other people while mugging for the camera and saying, "Hi, Mom."

Christianity — my own religion, as a Roman Catholic — is supposed to be a unifying, worldwide myth. The word "catholic" means "universal." Joseph Campbell was a Catholic who departed from his church to spend his life finding what was, for him, a more satisfactory myth.

I don't necessarily agree with Campbell that the way to save the Christian myth is to make Jesus into a sort of Buddha walking the paths of the Middle East. I think the Gospel message concerning the existence, love, and forgiveness of God goes well beyond recapitulating the wise teachings of Gautama Buddha.

But, at the same time, I don't think the cultural conservatives who want to yank the church back 50 years, or a century, or five, have the right idea either. Campbell was correct to point out that monotheism has a long history of intolerance toward others, including other monotheists. No, we have to reinterpret the monotheist myth so that never happens again.

Actually, I see that in the offing. Under Pope John Paul II, and now under Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has been digesting the modernity implicit in its Vatican II reforms of the early and middle 1960s. It's been touching base with its eternal values, trying to see how to move forward without undermining them.

This is why we see such apparent contradictions as Pope Benedict reaching ecumencially out, as he recently did, to the Anglican Communion, while as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger he refused to accept Anglicans as members of a "sister church."

In other words, all the hairsplitting going on now bespeaks a gathering of energies in preparation for a great leap forward in harmonizing the Catholic message with that of other Christian and non-Christian communities. It is like negotiators first laying out the boundaries within which all subsequent negotiations can proceed.

Seeing that is so doesn't necessarily make me all that happy or comfortable, as I happen to be a "liberal" who would like more respect paid to the earth-shaking 1965 document Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), also called "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World," one of the highlights of Vatican II pronouncement. (See my earlier post The City of God.) This (in the words of TIME magazine) "mandate for the church to come into synch with modern Western culture [meant] loosening its hierarchical authority, encouraging internal debate and external outreach and honoring individual freedom of conscience."

But I do see that top-down authority can be loosened, debate can be encouraged, and individual freedom of conscience can be nourished only in an atmosphere of widespread personal maturity. Contrast that type of situation with the late-'60s outburst of radicalism. On the heels of Vatican II, "yippies" and New Lefters self-righteously throwing glorified temper tantrums became the norm.

So we have a sort of chicken-and-egg problem today. We need an aggiornimento, an updating of our central organizing mythos, if we are to reinstitute the rites of passage that can make us mature adults and give us a shared ethos. But we must be ready to manifest that greater maturity, if we are to be trusted not to rip the nascent new ethos to shreds, late-'60s-style, when erstwhile liberals like Joseph Ratzinger felt "mugged by reality."

Miguel de Unamuno

Miguel de Unamuno

A while back, in "Throw Those Crutches Away ... ", I had occasion to mention the Basque-Spanish writer-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), who said, "To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as though He did exist."

I have another blog, Beyond Darwin, in which I also mentioned Unamuno (see Grounding Faith in Reality? (I.D. IV)). I noted that Wikipedia's article on the man says:

Unamuno's philosophy was not systematic, but rather a negation of all systems and an affirmation of faith "in itself."

The topic of Unamuno's thought had come up briefly in a book I was (and still am) reading, William A. Dembski's Intelligent Design. In it, Dembski presents an argument to the effect that biological evolution has "information content" that may be detected scientifically, thereby demonstrating that the origin of living species has "intelligent causation." Theologically, that cause is God.

Dembski insists that signs from God must have what he refers to as "empirical content," of which "information" is a prime type. Early on, Dembski, a Christian (as was Unamuno), equates such empirically detectable signs to the significance inherent in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here in particular is where Miguel de Unamuno comes in:

For signs to induce conviction they actually have to occur. It is not enough to pretend a sign has occurred or to wish that it had occurred. According to [the Basque-Spanish writer and philosopher] Miguel de Unamuno [in 1913's Tragic Sense of Life], "To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as though He did exist." The faith de Unamuno describes is not grounded in reality. The faith confirmed by signs is. (p. 42)

Just from that and what I then looked up in Wikipedia, I knew Unamuno's thought resonated with me deeply and personally ... even though I admitted I knew next to nothing about Unamuno. I also found that I disagreed deeply with Dembski about the need for "empirical content" in signs from God. Basically I discovered that, to me, the search for "empirical content" empties faith and hyperinflates reason.

Tragic Sense of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno

At any rate, I sought out Unamuno's book, Tragic Sense of Life, which I have begun to read. The book apparently goes back to 1912, or 1921 in its English translation. The excellent introduction by Salvador de Madariaga (1886-1978), the Spanish diplomat, writer, historian and pacifist, confirms that Unamuno and Dembski would not have gotten along:

It is on the survival of his [Unamuno's personal] will to live, after all the onslaughts of his critical intellect, that he finds the basis for his belief — or rather for his effort to believe. Self-compassion leads to self-love, and this self-love, founded as it is on a universal conflict [between faith and reason], widens into love of all that lives and therefore wants to survive. So, by an act of love, springing from our own hunger for immortality, we are led to give a conscience to the Universe — that is, to create God. (p. xvii)

Madariaga says Unamuno, before anything else, is

... a whole man, with all his affirmations and all his negations, all the pitiless thoughts of a penetrating mind that denies [religious truths], and all the desperate self-assertions of a sould that yearns for eternal life. (p. xvi)

Madariaga's subject is, simply because of "that passion for life that burns in Unamuno," a "knight errant of the spirit" (ibid.). Accordingly, Unamuno embraces all the contradictory aspects of the life of a man, including — especially — "his inner deadlock" (p. xvii).

Dembski avoids the deadlock; Unamuno embraces it. Dembski looks for ways reason can bypass doubts about God and the afterlife. Unamuno leverages those doubts into "love of all that lives." Dembski whistles past the graveyard which taunts us that our "reason can rise no higher than scepticism" — a reason that, says Madariaga, "unable to become vital, dies sterile." Unamuno admits to the problem ... and declines to knuckle under to it:

... [H]e feels that, despite such conclusive arguments [for atheistic skepticism], his will to live perseveres, [so] he refuses to his intellect the power to kill his faith. (p. xvi)

I consider Unamuno's outlook — which I chucklingly characterize as "I fret, therefore I am" — as handsome as Dembski's is homely. Dembski's makes us merely rational; Unamuno's makes us human.

(More later.)