Michel Foucault on Sex

If yesterday I woke up snarky and bitchy, today I woke up horny ... uh, make that sex-minded. That's not unusual for me — or, I assume, for anybody else — and it got me to wondering about how freedom of sexual expression can possibly go along with the spirit of solidarity.

Classically, among the reasons we rein in our sex drives is not to have the world become a cauldron of sexual jealousy. What can be more divisive of a community than to have it become a Peyton Place? (For you younger folks, that's a reference to a "scandalous" novel from the 1950s, by Grace Metalious, in which the denizens of a supposedly staid suburban community were secretly sleeping with one another.)

Michel Foucault

Crossing my mind was the name Michel Foucault, the late, influential French philosopher whose importance is summarized by Wikipedia here. Foucault challenged a slew of fundamental assumptions most people make about what's going on here in this world. One of them was the common assumption that the modern West has been beset by a regime of sexual repression since about the 17th or 18th century.

Foucault said au contraire. According to Modules on Foucault II (which I'll refer to as "MoF II") in refuting the "repressive hypothesis" Foucault held that all the so-called "repression" actually transmuted into "a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex — specific discourses, different from one another both by their form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward."

(Another common assumption Foucault disputed was that we each have a fixed personal "identity." For him, identity was free-floating, "more of a performance given to the world," according to this web page. I disagree. I think the most basic parts of our identity, once they're established, never change. See The Structure of Personal Identity. I don't, however, mean this fatalistically. People can change what they are. They just can't change who they are.)


At any rate, Foucault didn't much believe in a fixed anything. Instead, he believed in the applications of "power" that are signified most especially by and through our "discourses." These applications of power, these discourses of ours, shift. They're in flux over time. So it makes no sense to Foucault to ask how much power so-and-so has, as if power were an intrinsic part of that person's self. Rather, ask how one is presently using power — claiming it, principally by means of one's discourses.

So the "discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward" with respect to sex has really been the history of a sort of changing power relationship manifested as much by all that is said and written — our discourses — as by what we actually do.

MoF II says, "Far from silence, we witness 'an institutional incitement to speak about [sex], and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail'."

I assume that by "agencies of power" Foucault means all such agencies, not just governmental ones. For example, the popular media. (I recently was exposed in an auto shop waiting room to a Maury Povich TV show where the fun revolved around learning which of an endless procession of male possibilities was the actual, DNA-tested father of a woman's child.)

Still, even if government was not always intentionally front and center in bringing on all the back-and-forth about sex, "the effect of all this rational discourse about sex was the increasing encroachment of state law into the realm of private desire: 'one had to speak of [sex] as of a thing to be not simply condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum. Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered'." Anyone care to discuss whether gay marriage ought to be legal?


I interpret all this as meaning that (whatever does or does not go on between the sheets these days) we all have this compulsion to communicate about sex. Talk about it. Hash out its rights and wrongs. Condemn those who don't agree or don't live up (or down) to our standards.

Not to mention, we have this urge to confess what we do, supposedly in private — not just to a priest (in that kind of power relationship) but right up there on the national TV screen to Maury or Dr. Phil or whoever.

I'm against all this. That was really my main point in an earlier post, Hooray for Hypocrisy!. In it, I complained of (a) people today being mainly interested in self-gratification and (b) people being not the least bit hypocritical about admitting (a).

I won't try to argue the self-gratification point here. But the idea that people are not the least bit reticent to talk about or otherwise communicate (tattoos, visible bra straps, navel exposure) their sexual attitudes goes right along with Foucault. It's as if his comments (he died in 1984) have been amplified through a cultural megaphone in the last two decades.


I basically don't get it. I admit that. Why all the incessant harping on sex, which used to be something done behind closed doors and never advertised — or so I thought?

MoF II says, "Our continual call to speak of sexuality in the present age (on television, in popular music, etc.) is, therefore, not significantly different from the ways state power imposed its regulations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: through the continual demand for discourse."

OK, I sort of see that ... as long as Foucault was not trying to say that state power has been applied in such a way as intentionally to turn up the volume on sex talk. To me, since you never turn on C-SPAN and hear Congresspersons urging more, uh, congress, it would seem to be the exact opposite. The state and other institutions of formal power (say, the office responsible for implementing the Hollywood Production Code of yore) would seem to have tried their mightiest to quash all the sex talk (if movies, rap, etc., qualify as talk).

To me, all the present sex talk represents an insurgency against these erstwhile agencies of censorship. It's as if people in general have claimed their power by using the topic of sex basically as a wedge issue in the requisite discourses.


MoF II goes on: "Foucault also argues that censorship is not the primary form through which power is exercised; rather it is the incitement to speak about one's sexuality (to experts of various sorts) in order better to regulate it."

That would seem to confirm what I just said. If power is now being expressed via "incitement" rather than its opposite, censorship, then where is this incitement coming from?

From the very institutions of power that ostensibly try to stifle sex, Foucault says, in what seems to me quite a subtle point.

(I note in passing, by the way, that "to speak about sexuality to experts of various sorts" is an umbrella phrase that covers what goes on in the confessional as well as what goes on on national TV.)


My "hypocrisy" post made it clear (I hope) that I'm big on silence when it comes to sex. Foucault had this to say about silence about sex, according to MoF II:

Silence itself — the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers — is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.... There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

Well, if silence is itself a discourse, what isn't a discourse? I worry about philosophers who start using a word like "discourse" to describe a category of thought and eventually lead you to believe that nothing is not in that category, even stuff that would seem to be its direct opposite.

But that's not really what's going on here, in Foucault's discourse. Foucault's point was really that enforced silence really just encourages prolixity:

Foucault gives the example of eighteenth-century secondary schools. Sex was not supposed to be spoken of in such institutions; however, for this very reason, one can read the preoccupation with sexuality in all aspects of such schools: "The space for classes, the shape of the tables, the planning of the recreation lessons, the distribution of the dormitories..., the rules for monitoring bedtime and sleep periods — all this referred, in the most prolix manner, to the sexuality of children."

But isn't that just a rewording of the classic complaint about regimes of sexual repression: that the really foster resistance? They function like the command "Don't think of an elephant!" to produce the exact opposite state of affairs.

No, I don't want people to be forced to stop all the sex talk. I just wish they'd abandon it on their own. Maybe if there was a return to sexual mystery, not so many men would need to spend their money on Viagra.

Plus, maybe if we were voluntarily mum about sex, we'd be able to gin up a jealousy-free zone for the furtherance of the spirit of solidarity in our society.

The Structure of Personal Identity

Today I woke up feeling snarky, bitchy, apt to find fault with anyone I set eyes on. In a word, full of hostility. (I know, I know ... that's three words.)

I drove out to Lake Elkhorn for a morning constitutional — twice around, 50 paces running, 50 walking. The two laps took an hour. By the time I was done at a little before 10 A.M., the temperature was already approaching 95°. But I felt better.

On the way home, I wondered what makes me feel so hostile sometimes.

The first thing I came up with was that the stuff other people do that I don't like — even if they "do" these things only in my imagination — is stuff that I try not to admit I'd be doing if I wasn't such a "good person." Did that so-and-so cut me off in traffic out of his own general antisocial nature, or just out of not giving a damn? Either way, it's something I don't have to visualize myself doing ... as long as I can project all the fault on him.

Then, just as I was congratulating myself for being so insightful, another, deeper insight came along. The insight was this: it all has to do with identity.

That guy who cut me off ... he's a total stranger. He's not someone around whom I build any part of my personal identity. I'm equally alien to his identity structure, and my knowing this is why it's so easy for me to imagine him blowing me off on purpose as he lane jockeys to his heart's content down Route 29.

We all have identities, a fact which comes as no surprise. What does come as a bit of a surprise, at least to someone as slow on the uptake as I classically am, is realizing how crucial other people are to our individual identities.

That's why I call each person's identity a "structure." We construct our identity — each one of us, starting from day one of our lives — through our relationships.

At first, it's relationships with family members — mother, primarily, at the outset; then father, brothers and sisters, members of the extended family, and so on — that help us define in our own minds who we are. Then come people from the neighborhood and wider community outside the home. Then come our age peers in school. By the time we are adults, we ideally have constructed a well-formed, well-rounded identity structure which will serve us well as we branch out into the world.


Family ties are so crucial. That's a (to me) subtle lesson I've learned from one of my favorite series of novels, the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee mystery stories by Tony Hillerman. Leaphorn and Chee, Hillerman's protagonists, are Native American detectives serving on the Navajo Tribal Police in New Mexico.

Leaphorn is impatient with the old tribal ways, but they still exert a pull on Chee. Often, in the course of his investigations, he visits a traditional Navajo family at home. The etiquette requires that both parties spend the first several minutes, if they are strangers, laying out their respective family trees. This is not just to determine if they have relatives in common, though it is that, too. It is also a recognition of the fact that one person cannot convey his or her identity to another without giving the basic template of that identity's structure: the person's nuclear and extended family.

When I taught freshman English and the University of Maryland, I assigned a you-pick-the-topic essay. I asked the students one by one to announce in class what they'd be writing about, and why. One young woman, mentioning that she was an adoptee, said she would discuss the importance to her of locating her birth mother. I was caught by surprise, since I hadn't really expected students to pick topics of personal emotional importance. When I questioned her about that, she was adamant; this was the topic she wanted to address.

Looking back, I now realize that to her, her very identity was at stake at a vital point in her life. One obviously draws part of one's sense of identity from one's birth mother, even if one has yet to meet her.


I'd say the father is equally important as the mother, if not right away. At some point in a child's development, he or she will wind up with a stunted or lopsided identity structure if "Dad" isn't there and doing his job.

The late guru of myth Joseph Campbell always made a big deal about sons' initiations into male society via the father and his male associates, a rite of passage which involves radically severing the apron strings tying the boy to his mother. (I'm not quite sure how applicable this process is to daughters, I admit.) I'm also aware that, according to psychiatrists, men with ingrained criminal tendencies, when interviewed in prison, typically are found to pretty much worship the ground their mothers walk on. Mom is usually the only person the male criminal would not cheat or rob.

Putting both of these observations together, I surmise that (at least for boys) it is absolutely crucial, at a certain age, that "Dad" get built into a child's developing identity structure.

How surprising is it, then, that fatherless, broken homes in the inner city so often produce boys that join gangs as soon as they can and get into trouble? The gangs become prostheses, as it were: fake identity structures that will have to do since "Dad" is long gone.


Identity structures are yet more complex, though. At some point, each young person will need to fit into a community. Translation: the community will become part of his/her identity structure. This is what it means to "have a good name": to be able to fit into the community and be accepted by it.

If someone is not deemed acceptable to the community at large, he/she may (again) develop a stunted or lopsided identity structure.

The perpetrators of the recent "transit bombings" in London were apparently Muslims from "South Asia," which I assume means Pakistan. According to news coverage, second-generation Pakistani men in Britain feel alienated, unaccepted by the white Britons. Out of this alienation seemingly came the willingness to kill total strangers and sacrifice one's own life in doing it.

In the terms of this discussion, these suicide bombers seem to have had a stunted, lopsided identity structure because they weren't able to patch their individual identities into that of the broader community, at the point when that process was supposed to occur in their young lives.

We are who we build into our identity structures in our youth, and if the construction process doesn't go right, there'll be hell to pay.

Rededication: To Solidarity, Above All

Martin Scorsese in My Voyage to Italy

Martin Scorsese says at one point in his documentary film My Voyage to Italy, quoting the great Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, "People today only know how to live in society, not in community. The soul of society is the law. The soul of community is love."

For me, the word community implies the Christian ideal: communion. All of us together, sisters and brothers in the body of Christ. A reign of unshakeable fidelity, humanity, and solidarity.

Not to sound pompous, but I hereby rededicate this blog to fortifying my personal search for that spirit of solidarity.

For the awful truth is, although the idea of compassion and human solidarity moves me deeply whenever I am put into a position of having no other choice but to confront it, I soon enough set it aside again in favor of other, less challenging claims on my allegiance.

At bottom, this problem — which of course I am far from alone in — is one of dishonesty. Or, rather, it amounts to an aversion to looking at the human predicament through the eyes of absolute honesty. When I squirm aside and look the other way, as I typically do, I simply don't see the suffering, heartbreak, and pain in the world.


When I watched Mr. Scorsese's self-presented documentary on DVD, or for that matter when I viewed his earlier A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, I was struck by the man's gentleness onscreen, the wideness of his mercy. This, from the director that has given us such violent films as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

Most of the Italian and American films Scorsese extols as influences on his own work are dark and gritty. Typically, they have been called subversive. When Rossellini made The Miracle, a segment of his L'Amore (1948) in which a mad woman gives birth to a child she believes is the Christ child, Catholic officials denounced it as a blasphemous parody. But, as Scorsese shows, it communicates "something very elemental about the nature of sin."

"It's a part of who we are," Scorsese goes on to say, "and it can never be eliminated. For him [Rossellini], Christianity is meaningless if it can't accept sin and allow for redemption. He tried to show us that this woman's sin, like her madness, is nothing in comparison to her humanity."

Rossellini, by filming this story about the redemption of a despised outcast and the miraculous nature of the life she gives birth to, showed us all the need for compassion and solidarity — and Catholic Church officials didn't get it.


What was it that they didn't get? Albert Nolan, a provincial for the South African Province of the Dominicans, wrote in his book Jesus before Christianity, "The one salutary effect of this moment in our history, its one redeeming feature, is that it can force us to be honest."

He was writing from a time, 1976, when the nuclear standoff between the superpowers made the destruction of the world a real possibility. But it was also a time, like now, when the world's rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer, there was widespread disease and starvation, and the sustainability of the planet's natural resources was in doubt.

In short, there was much suffering ... and it might well get worse.

The "subversive" films that Martin Scorsese makes and the ones by other filmmakers that he loves the best also "force us to be honest" — about suffering, about inhumanity, about despair, and most of all about the dangers of hiding our heads in the sand and not acknowledging all of the aspects of the human condition, both beautiful and ugly. For these are aspects we all share, in our common humanity, and our refusal to look at some of them is a dishonesty we cannot really afford.


In Jesus's day, Nolan points out, a great many Jews in Israel were treated by their fellow Jews as lepers, as demon-possessed or worse, simply because they were poor and "obviously" existed outside God's favor. These unfortunates were seen as positive dangers to an Israel already living under the yoke of Roman occupation: signs that God was angry with the Jews, and that Roman enslavement was their just desserts. The poor whom Jesus so conspicuously befriended were, in a word, scapegoats.

Thus was Jesus's primary message, Nolan says, one of solidarity. God is never a God of exclusion and social bifurcation, of shunning and despisal of the poor and the different. That above all was what Jesus taught us, says Nolan, by his words and by his deeds.

That's why I think it wrong to censor (or self-censor!) our solidarity with our brothers and sisters through scapegoating their supposed sins, or simply by remaining stony-faced to their manifold sufferings.

It's why I think it wrong for us to get so wrapped up in our debates about who gets to determine the laws our society lives by — for instance, ought gay marriage to be legal? — that we lose compassion for those dying of AIDS. Laws are only the "soul of society." What of the "soul of community," love?

And it's why I want to dedicate this blog henceforth to countering my own long-ingrained habit of resisting full honesty about what it's really like for all of us to be ... alike. So, herein, I'll be trying to learn to see the world through eyes more like Martin Scorsese's or Albert Nolan's than the ones I have right now.

Harry Potter: A Subtle Seduction?

Harry Potter

There are lots of things in this world I simply don't get — one of which being Pope Benedict XVI's objections to the Harry Potter books (see "Report: New pope pans Potter" at the CNN.com International website).

"It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because these are subtle seductions which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly," Benedict wrote to Gabriele Kuby, who has written a book called Harry Potter — Good or Evil?.

The full text of the pope's two brief letters to Ms. Kuby, a supposedly "devout Catholic," may be read here. They were written in 2003 while the pope was still Cardinal Ratzinger.

My problem is, I don't see how stories of personal heroism in which the protagonist, young Harry, is called upon to resist the evil inherent in his powerful antagonist, Lord Voldemort, "deeply distort Christianity in the soul." Where is the "subtle seduction" in fighting evil?

It's not as if Harry thrusts himself forward with an eye to personal glory. Just the opposite. He fully realizes that his adventures force him to violate the rules set out for him and his fellow students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He completely grasps the perils of using the magic he as yet so little understands. But he seems to find that destiny won't let him stand idly by while malignity prevails, menacing the very order of life and every innocent soul beholden to it.

What could be more Christian than that — to put oneself at the greatest risk to save others?

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!