Years ago a distinguished columnist, Nat Hentoff, received the National Press Foundation’s award for “lifetime distinguished contributions to journalism.”  A renowned ACLU-style civil libertarian–generally endorsing   the political left as a writer for the Village Voice–Hentoff was surprised at the award ceremony when a friend of his, a member of the jury, told him that he’d almost been blackballed, despite his highly regarded journalistic work, because he espoused a pro-life position.  The jury shared his non-religious, pro-labor, anti-capital punishment stands, but his opposing abortion nearly disqualified him. 

                To understand such journalistic prejudices, Hentoff recommends we read William McGowan’s Coloring the News:  How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism (San Francisco:  Encounter Books, c. 2001).  McGowan has reported for a variety of publications (Newsweek, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal), as well as BBC; he now works as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.  He represents a rather old-fashioned type of journalist, committed to “objectivity” and neutrality in reporting the news.  A decade ago, he says, journalists embraced “new religion”–diversity–and now kneel at its shrine (p. 10).  In 1992 the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., declared diversity as “the single most important issue” his paper should address (p. 19).  Similarly, Mark Willes, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, determined to appeal to women and minorities by requiring stories be “more emotional, more personal, and less analytic” (p. 18). 

                Consequently, as a veteran editor at the Washington Post, Bob Baker,  laments, reporters are pressured to “appeal to people’s most superficial qualities, their race or gender” (p. 19).   The nation’s elite newspapers, McGowan shows, now prescribe rigid dogmas and ruthlessly  punish deviations.  (The notorious Index and Inquisition are now dead in the Catholic Church, but they are alive and well, in secular form, in the nation’s newsrooms!)  This is particularly evident in the treatment of “race issues.”  Publishers and editors have decreed that racial minorities must receive favorable treatment in the press.  For example, journalists intent on avoiding “the demonization of black men” gloss over facts, including the fact that “nearly a third of all black men between the ages of 17 and 35 are either in jail, on probation or on parole” (p. 49). 

                So-called “hate crimes,” rather than targeting racial minorities, are disproportionately committed against whites.  The fact is that “in the 1990s blacks were at least three times more likely to commit hate crimes against whites than the other way around.  Yet in case after case, media coverage either refuses to acknowledge the racial subtext of such crimes, or fails to subject them to the same scrutiny used when the racial roles are reversed” (p. 60).  The same truth emerges when one studies the falsely alarming reports of black churches being burned in the 1990s.  In fact, fewer churches than ever were being burned, and white churches were ignited at the same rate as black churches.  But the press was not interested in the truth, so only the false reports (helped along by President Clinton’s effort to profit politically from them) gained attention.

                Media coverage of prominent black leaders dramatically illustrate race bias.  Despite assorted criminal behavior, Washington D.C.’s Mayor Marion Barry has generally received a pass by the Washington Post.  Reporting a meeting where several women reported that Barry had raped them, the Post’s reporter persuaded the paper’s “editors to use the word ‘coerce’ instead of ‘rape.’  ‘No use of the “R” word,’ she would later crow.  ‘Now that’s spin control!'”  Al Sharpton has received similar treatment–“toothless and partisan”–in the New York Times.  Ignoring the obvious, National Public Radio provided a profile of Louis Farrakhan, blandly declaring that he “was a misunderstood figure and that his anti-Semitism was exaggerated” (p. 71). That Farrakhan enjoys favorable press is understandable when one learns that “Members of the National Association of Black Journalists gave Farrakhan a standing ovation when he addressed their 1996 national convention” (p. 72).

                “Gay and feminist issues,” McGowen next shows, receive the same coloring.  Two murder cases reveal the power of homosexuals in the nation’s newsrooms.  When Matthew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming in 1998, an enormous outcry rocked the nation.  During the month after the crime, more than 3000 news stories appeared.  The New York Times devoted 195 stories to it.  Conservative Christians, such as James Dobson, were accused of incubating the malignant prejudice that led to Shephard’s death.  The next year, a 13-year-old boy, Jesse Dirkhising was brutally raped and killed by two gay men in Arkansas.  But only 46 stories treated it.  “The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC ignored the story altogether” until a guilty verdict was rendered (pp. 99-100).  When homosexuals are killed, the media seethes with outrage; when homosexuals kill, little is said. 

                Radical feminists in the media make sure the nation’s discussion of abortion receives a proper spin.  More than 80 percent of the nation’s journalists support abortion rights, and their commitment shows in the news.  Female reporters, for example, quote abortion advocates more than three times more frequently than abortion opponents.  “The most egregious misrepresentation of the issue, however,” McGowen shows, “came from CBS News’s 60 Minutes” (p. 125).  Treating the issue of partial birth abortion, Ed Bradley interviewed a woman who had needed the procedure to remove a baby with a brain growing outside his head.  Presenting her case as typical of such abortions, Bradley then interviewed a physician “who claimed no doctor would perform this procedure ‘on a healthy baby in the last trimester'” (p. 125). 

                Viewers were assured such abortions were rare, required by abnormalities of some sort.  Pro-abortion spokesmen claimed only 500 partial birth abortions were performed in the nation in any given year.  Ron Fitzsimmons, speaking for the National League of Abortion Providers, assured viewers of Nightline that such was true.  A New Jersey reporter, however, did some quick checking and discovered that 1500 partial birth abortions took place in that state alone!  Virtually none were done “for medical reasons” (p. 125).  Finally confronted with hard data, Fitzsimmons admitted that he had “lied through the teeth,” that he “just went out there and spouted the party line” (p. 126).  But the party line prevails, and few in the media dare defy it by questioning the legitimacy of unrestricted access to abortion.  Indeed, McGowen says, typical journalists cannot even understand how a person could be so ignorant and unenlightened as to oppose abortion-on-demand.

                Given  the media’s stance regarding “race and gender,” one would rightly assume they would support affirmative action on behalf of racial minorities and women.  They further support immigrants and virtually any preferential treatment they receive.  Such views underwrite, McGowen warns, a “demographic transformation” which “is unprecedented in America, turning a majority white nation with European cultural roots into a nonwhite plurality with no shared cultural heritage.  No other country in history has ever willingly attempted, much less accomplished, a social makeover on this scale” (p. 211).  America’s citizens (including Hispanics) have never approved this makeover, but powerful politicians, led by Senator Ted Kennedy, have orchestrated the process.  Few citizens realize what is occurring because the media champion the Kennedy agenda.  For example, despite the will of the people of California, evident in adopting Proposition 227, despite the failures of bilingual education, the Los Angeles Times consistently promotes the views of activists within the Latino community.  “Immigration and crime is an even touchier subject for journalists, even though one out of four federal prisoners is an illegal alien, and foreign felons, abetted by a dysfunctional visa system” (p. 199) easily enter and engage in criminal activities in the U.S.  Police who mistreat such criminals receive rapid, often ruthless examination.  But aliens’ crimes receive little coverage, for reporters never want to risk appearing racist.

                In his final chapter, “Reasons Why,” McGowan says there is no grand conspiracy, but simply an unexamined prejudice, which colors the news.  Journalists generally go to the same schools, live in the same neighborhoods, and talk to the same people, assimilating unexamined assumptions.  They “tend to be an inbred bunch, uneasy away from their own kind” (p. 227).  Though great effort has been expended on behalf of “diversity,” there is little true intellectual diversity in the media.  That white, black, Latino, and lesbian writers work together means little when they all agree on issues such as abortion and affirmative action.  Consequently, all too often “news organizations have become the same kind of petty, dysfunctional cultures as college campuses, where transgressions against the dominant line of thought can result in ideological blackballing and ostracism” (p. 230). 

                Coloring the News is filled with precise information, the result of careful research and balanced judgment.  McGowan cares for his profession, and he hopes to call his colleagues back to some of the finer aspects of journalism. 

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                The second book Nat Hentoff recommends is Tammy Bruce’s The New Thought Police:  Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds (Roseville, CA:  Prima Publishing, 2001).  Setting the stage in her introduction, she writes:  “I am an openly gay, pro-choice, gun-owning, pro-death penalty, liberal, voted-for- Reagan feminist.  Certainly a contradiction in terms” (p. xi).  During the 1990s she headed the L.A. chapter of the National Organization for Women, and, she says, “watched the development of a disturbing phenomenon that today has gripped almost all of American society:  the fear of offending by making a judgment and forming an opinion” (p. xi).  Intimidated by a corps of “new Thought Police,” led by organizations such as NOW, GLAAD, and the ACLU, increasing numbers of people fear to violate the canon of Political Correctness lest they lose their jobs, or their niche in polite society.

                “Groupthink,” Bruce insists, has become entrenched throughout the Left.  As George Orwell predicted (in 1984) “The Party is not interested in the overt act:  the thought is all we care about.”  The frenzy fomented by “hate crimes” and laws implemented to punish them illustrates this.  After taking, at face value, media reports of hate crimes, Bruce decided to look at the evidence and discovered that the FBI’s Hate Crimes Statistics Report for 1999 reveals that only 17 murders could be considered “hate crimes.”  No epidemic there!  But special interest groups, journalists and politicians, can manipulate reports of “hate” in order to suppress speech.  “Make no mistake,” Bruce concludes, “‘hate crime’ is a euphemism for Thought Crime, allowing the government to gain the public’s assent to prosecute people for what they think in addition to what they do” (p. 47).

                In her chapter entitled “Pot. Kettle. Black.  The Hypocrisy of the Gay Establishment,” Bruce explains that her disillusionment with the Left reached the breaking point when she defended a woman who had treated her kindly and helped her greatly, her colleague at KFI radio in L.A., Dr. Laura Schlessinger.  “Ironically,” she says, “in all my work with the feminist establishment, I seldom encountered the level of encouragement and support that Dr. Laura, the supposed anti-feminist, showed me” (p. 60).  Dr. Laura honestly disagreed with Bruce, but she cared for her.  When Dr. Laura tried to develop a television program, the homosexual establishment unleashed a campaign of villainy and abuse designed to destroy her.  Her statements about homosexual behavior were wrenched out of context, her sponsors were intimidated, and she received so many death threats that she needed bodyguards. 

                Responding to all this abuse, Tammy Bruce decided to write an opinion piece defending Dr. Laura.  Although The Los Angeles Times had eagerly printed her letters before, the paper declined to publish this one.  So she sent it to The New York Times, which initially accepted it.  Soon however, it became clear they would publish it only by re-writing her piece so as to misrepresent her position.  After two months, during which the anti-Schlessinger crusade gained momentum,  she finally managed to get an article published in the entertainment section of the LA. Times, though her most important paragraph was totally deleted.  Defending Dr. Laura cost Tammy Bruce considerably in the gay community.

                Defending Nicole Brown during the O. J. Simpson trial cost her equally in feminist circles.  While O.J. was on trial, Tammy Bruce (still heading the NOW chapter in L.A.) worked to highlight the problem of abused women.  To her amazement, the nation’s feminist leaders were more concerned with placating the pro-Simpson black community than standing up for a murdered woman!  Conversely, she was amazed to find “religious, pro-life, and other conservatives who wrote a check to Los Angeles NOW” because she dared stand up for abused women (p., 260).  “It was then I realized, although we disagreed on many issues, there were fundamental questions about values that truly separated conservatives from postmodern liberals.  For me, that finally exposed by counterpoint the soullessness of the Left” (p. 260). 

                Combining personal experiences with journalistic anecdotes, Bruce explains her break with NOW and its gender feminism.  Her problems began as soon as she was elected president of NOW’s L.A. chapter.  Entering the chapter’s office for the first time, she found it filled with Democratic Party operatives using the space and equipment “as though it were Party headquarters” (p. 119).  A Democrat herself, she recognized the impropriety of such activity in a non-profit organization and removed them.  Subsequently, she had various encounters with NOW presidents, Molly Yard and Patricia Ireland, whom she came to recognize as more deeply committed to socialism than feminism.  Gloria Steinem, too, as an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, clearly put political aspirations ahead of genuine concerns for women in America.  The national icons for feminism lost their luster once encountered.

                She also discovered why NOW’s leaders consistently supported Bill Clinton.  While mired down in the Paula Jones controversy, Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, granted California NOW a half million dollar grant.  The money, taken from the Centers for Disease Control’s Office on Smoking and Health, was designated for “tobacco control.”  More money, from the same fund, was granted the national NOW office during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  All told, NOW “received over three quarters of a million dollars ($767,099) during the Jones and Lewinsky scandals” (p. 138).  No wonder NOW leaders defended a President who seemed to be a walking negation of all the organization allegedly stood for.  

                The New Thought Police ranges far and wide, dealing with issues I’ve not mentioned.  It’s readable and illuminating.  For it gives the reader first-hand information regarding the innards of the cultural and political Left, written by one who knows it intimately.

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                The best known (though least impressive) of the three books Hentoff recommends is Bernard Goldberg’s Bias:  A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2002).  Its importance lies in its author, long a fixture on CBS, rather than the information he provides, for Bias is something of an angry diatribe, taking revenge for his own mistreatment, rather than a careful examination of the problem addressed.  Nevertheless, it is readable and illuminating, and Goldberg’s treatment, once he dared challenge the bias of his network, reveals how savagely the media treats whistle-blowers.            After three decades as a faithful employee of CBS, Goldberg dared to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal pointing out the liberal bias of media elites.  A smirking Eric Engberg had scoffed at Steve Forbes’ flat tax proposal, injecting his personal views into an alleged news report.  So Goldberg wrote his op-ed piece, condemning such “junk journalism.”  He quickly discovered that journalists consider only one thing sacrosanct:  themselves!  That he dared criticize his own profession identified him as a traitor!  One of his CBS superiors declared that his “betrayal of trust” was akin to “raping my wife and kidnapping my kids!” (p. 28).  Engberg, along with many of his erstwhile “colleagues, the news liberals who had always preached openness and tolerance, stopped talking to me” (p. 30).  Then his old “friend,” Dan Rather, who assured him that nothing could come between them, banished him from the inner court.  Something of a dictator, controlling CBS Evening News, Rather gets what he wants.  And he wanted Goldberg punished for his betrayal. 

                Suitably ostracized, Goldberg decided to detail the thesis of his op-ed piece, and Bias presents his argument.  He had never supported a Republican candidate, but he had noticed how reporters such as himself subtly shaded their articles to support Democrats.  “Conservatives” were almost always so identified, but reporters rarely referred to liberals as “Liberal.”  During President Clinton’s impeachment trial, Peter Jennings consistently identified “conservative” senators, but never referred to any “liberal” senators.  Goldberg also noticed that some problems, such as “homelessness,” miraculously disappeared once Bill Clinton became President.  Nothing had actually changed, but candidate Clinton could massage the “homeless” problem to get votes.  Once elected, journalists (89% of whom voted for Clinton), along with the President, forgot the problem! 

                Another favored group is the feminists.  Men now serve as convenient targets for media broadsides.  Harry Smith, long a co-anchor for CBS This Morning, is “as affable a feminist as you’ll ever meet” (p. 132).  According to Smith, men are “cheaters,” “philanderers,” frequently failing to care for their families.  In an interview, he referred to men as “putzes,” a Yiddish word for jerk.  Asked if he could have referred to women with a similar slur, Smith dismissed the question as a joke.  More broadly, Goldberg says, most anything can be said to disparage men, but one’s job is at risk for wounding feminist sensitivities. 

                Consequently, “the most important story you never saw on TV” would tell the truth “about the terrible things that are happening to America’s children” (p. 164).  This nation’s moms and dads are spending less and less time with their kids.  Parents work, leaving children alone at home.  Children suffer in many ways for this absence, but “elite journalists in network television have no desire to connect the dots.  They don’t report the really big story–arguably one of the biggest stories of our time–that this absence of mothers from American homes is without any historical precedent, and that millions upon millions of American children have been left, as Eberstadt puts it, ‘to fend for themselves’–with dire consequences” (p. 166). 

                Despite Goldberg’s penchant to settle scores with the CBS folks who turned against him, Bias persuasively documents the pervasive prejudice of mainstream media.  If you’re concerned about what to do regarding it, Goldberg has a simple solution:  turn it off.

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                 Princeton University, noted a century ago for employing stalwarts of the Faith like Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield and JamesG. Machen, has (notoriously) recently appointed Peter Singer as DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, granting him a position whereby he can propound his utilitarian views.  Such include protecting endangered animal and plant species as well as tolerating infanticide, at least during the first month of life.  Singer’s appointment elicited considerable furor, especially from disabled folks who understand his philosophy’s general drift toward eliminating the unfit who prove burdensome to society.  But the prestigious Princeton faculty said nothing to protest his views.  He is, after all, considered by some the most influential philosopher in the world, and to add his luster Princeton’s allure  apparently satisfies the professors.

                Yet there’s a less well known Princeton professor who steadfastly opposes Singer and his utilitarian ideology:  Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, one of America’s finest philosophers.  He was recently appointed by President Bush to the bioethics committee considering the implications of stem cell research.  A committed Roman Catholic, George upholds her traditional Natural Law ethics.  His most recent publication–a collection of essays–is entitled The Clash of Orthodoxies:  Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis (Wilmington:  ISI Books, 2001).  He seeks therein “to show that Christians and other believers are right to defend their positions on key moral issues as rationally superior to the alternatives proposed by secular liberals and those within the religious denominations who have abandoned traditional moral principles in favor of secularist morality” (p. xiv).  Conflicting orthodoxies clash, George says, in three main areas:  sexual behavior; pro-life issues; and the role of religion in the public square, themes that recurrently interlace the book’s 15 essays.

                The clashing orthodoxies deeply differ in their definition of human nature.  In accord with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, the great architects of natural law teaching, George especially emphasizes man’s unique capacity to reason.  Homo sapiens rightly defines us.  Much that’s wrong with the world, he thinks, results from a widespread acceptance of Thomas Hobbes’ and David Hume’s definition of human nature as an admixture of passing passions.  “Reason is and ought only to be,” said Hume, “the slave of the passions, and may never pretend to any office other than to serve and obey them” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 2, pt. 3, iii; quoted on p. 15).  Reason, he declared, simply rationalizes what we feel.  “Truth,” accordingly, describes subjective impressions, not objective realities, and changes from time to time and from person to person.  Rooted in Hume’s emotivist “orthodoxy,” implementing its implications, multitudes of moderns fail to think rationally.  Consequently they slip into epistemological skepticism and ethical nihilism.  And they deny or suppress the only Truth which enables them to live well. 

                But Truth, to Natural Law advocates such as Professor George, rightly affirms what is Real and aligns the mind with an objective reality.  There’s a Higher Law to which all human laws must correspond.   “Civil rights,” insofar as they have standing, sink roots in Something deeper than purely personal preferences.  America’s Declaration of Independence, revealingly, asserts that all men are created equal and enjoy “certain inalienable rights” that are derived from the Creator.  This means that truly all men, everywhere, share a given essence.  So too St. Thomas Aquinas declared that man, by nature, “has a share of the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper act and end:  and this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law” (Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae Q. 91, art.2;  p. 162).  Imbibing Aquinas through “the judicious Hooker,” John Locke said, in Two Treatises of Government, “the State of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one:  And Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions” (p. 162).

                As the Declaration of Independence insists, the primary natural right we all claim is the right to life.  The Natural Law ever upholds the sanctity of life–the right to life–throughout the entirety of one’s life.  “If we lay aside all the rhetorical grandstanding and obviously fallacious arguments,” George says, “questions of abortion, infanticide, suicide, and euthanasia turn on the question of whether bodily life is intrinsically good, as Judaism and Christianity teach, or merely instrumentally good, as orthodox secularists believe” (p. 8).  Indeed here’s the great question:  Is something in us good–or are we simply things that are good for something?  Pro-lifers hold that everyone is intrinsically valuable.  Pro-choicers think people are valuable only so long as they prove valuable to others.  George examines various pro-choice arguments, shows how they have shifted over time, and finds them both factually and logically flawed.  This is because abortion rights advocates forever fail–and cannot but fail–in their efforts to prove the difference between a genetically “human being” (clearly discernable from the moment of conception but disposable as a non-person) and a rights-endowed person (absolutely entitled to life). 

                Further supporting the Natural Law tradition, Professor George insists that careful thought–reason alone–leads one to uphold the integrity of heterosexual marriage.  Rightly defined, “Marriage is a two-in-one-flesh communion of persons that is consummated and actualized by acts that are reproductive in type, whether or not they are reproductive in effect . . . .  The bodily union of spouses in marital acts is the biological matrix of their marriage as a multi-level relationship; that is, a relationship that unites persons at the bodily, emotional, dispositional, and spiritual levels of their being” (p. 77).  This excludes “same sex marriage.”  Gay and lesbian activists, seeking to legitimatize their relationships, champion laws to that effect.  Laws, however, teach ethics as well as protect personal “rights.”  Laws that “teach that marriage is a mere convention which is malleable in such a way that individuals, couples, or indeed, groups, can choose to make it whatever suits their desires, interests, subjective goals, etc.” (ibid), inevitably encourage blatantly unnatural beliefs and behavior.

                Finally, Natural Law thinkers cannot embrace today’s firmly entrenched political liberalism. “Contemporary liberal political theory abets the culture of death.  My point,” George says, “in so bluntly saying so is not to be polemical or even provocative; rather, it is to be soberly descriptive.  Self-described liberal political theorists in the United States and elsewhere have, over the past two decades or so, quite explicitly set for themselves the task of justifying and defending the regime of abortion, euthanasia, and, increasingly, infanticide that constitutes the culture of death in the contemporary developed world” (p. 39).  This liberalism is best illustrated in the thought of John Rawls, the highly influential Harvard philosopher, who insists that religious values be excluded from public life.  Any questions capable of religious answers, Rawls declares, must be excluded from democratic discussion.  In a pluralistic society, he holds, decisions must be made behind a “veil of ignorance,” following purely pragmatic, instrumental criteria.  Following a careful, detailed critique of Rawls’ version of democratic liberalism, Professor George insists it “cannot withstand intellectual scrutiny” (p. 55). 

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                Professor George has also published In Defense of Natural Law (New York:  Oxford University Press, c. 1999), a collection scholarly essays, most of which earlier appeared on legal or philosophical journals.  Some of the essays pit himself and his allies (John Finnis and Germain Grisez) against other Catholic Natural Law advocates (such as Ralph MacInerny), illustrating a spirited debate raging over the proper interpretation of Thomas Aquinas.  Consequently, for folks less than consumed by the intricacies of this discussion, portions of this collection lose value. 

                Nevertheless, many of the themes that appear in The Clash of Orthodoxies found earlier expression in these essays.  George’s spirited defense of the sanctity of life, of heterosexual marriage, of the importance of religion, provide the reader with well-documented reasons to advocate such positions.  Illustrative of George’s prescience is his refutation of the relativism often espoused by modern liberals.  “Consider,” he says, “the following chain of reasoning:

    (i)    All Moral views are relative.

   (ii)   Thus, no one has the right to impose his view of morality on anyone else.

   (iii)   Therefore, laws forbidding allegedly immoral activities on the ground of their immorality are wrong.

The glaring defect in the logic of this argument,” he continues, “has been pointed out by virtually every serious writer on the subject . . . .  Propositions (ii) and (iii) express moral judgments.  These judgments are either relative or non-relative.  If they are relative, as (i) says that all moral judgments are, then there is no reason for someone who happens not to share them to revise his view in favor of the liberal position.  If they are non-relative, then proposition (i) is false and cannot provide a valid premise for propositions (ii) and (iii)” (pp. 302-303).  Case closed!

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                A decade earlier George edited Natural Law Theory:  Contemporary Essays (New York:  Oxford University Press, c. 1992).  Both supporters and critics of the Natural Law hold forth in these pages, providing an illuminating debate over its basic tenets.  Increasingly, philosophers have found the dominant ethical theories–utilitarianism, existentialism, Kantianism, contractualism–inadequate.  Thinkers like Alistair MacIntyre, for example, have refurbished the “virtue ethics” of Aristotle and Aquinas with clarity and conviction.  Understandably, as a major plank in the “perennial philosophy” which has ebbed and flowed for 2500 years, the Natural Law tradition has attracted renewed attention.  And it has been paralleled, Michael S. Moore, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, says, by an “increased acceptance of moral realism within philosophy” (“Law as a Functional Kind,” p. 188).  As a reviewer in the journal First Things noted, this book is a “superb collection of original essays on natural law theory . . . for anyone who might still believe that natural law theory is merely a relic of bygone days, discussion of which is kept alive by aging seminary professors and benighted religious traditions, Professor George’s book provides an indispensable antidote” back cover). 

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                Edinburgh University Professor Neil MacCormick says that John Finnis’s Natural Law and Natural Rights is “a book which for British scholars has brought back to life the classical Thomistic/Aristotelian theory of natural law” (“Natural Law and the Separation of Law and Morals,” in Robert T. George, ed., Natural Law Theory, p. 105).   Finnis, for more than 30 years, teaching and writing at Oxford University, has influenced an ever-widening circle of legal scholars and ethicists.  To MacCormick, Natural Law and Natural Rights proved to be “an intellectual landmark; one of those few books which bring about a permanent change in one’ understanding; a shift on one’s personal paradigm” (p. 106).  Finnis is, without question to anyone reading him, one of the most erudite and effective advocates of the classical natural law tradition.

                Finnis published Natural Law and Natural Rights (New York:  Oxford University Press) in 1980, and it remains a definitive exposition of his position.  It is, above all else, a careful presentation of his understanding of Thomas Aquinas.  Importantly, Aquinas taught that “the basic forms of good grasped by practical understanding are what is good for human beings with the nature they have” (p. 34).  Given the fact that man is a rational creature, Aquinas said,  “‘whatever is contrary to the order of reason is contrary to the nature of human beings as such; and what is reasonable is in accordance with human nature as such.  The good of the human being is being in accord with reason, and human evil is being outside the order of reasonableness‘” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 71, a. 2c; quoted pp. 35-36).  Thus vice and virtue differ insofar as they contradict or conform to reasonableness.  But we struggle to implement our convictions in daily activities.  So to Finnis, “the real problem of morality, and of the point or meaning of human existence, is not in discerning the basic aspects of human well-being, but in integrating those various aspects into the intelligent and reasonable commitments, projects, and actions that go to make up one or other of the many admirable forms of human life” (p. 31). 

                We cannot not know, by nature, what’s ultimately good, though we can easily suppress or deny it.  As St. Paul said, all men have “the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness” (Ro. 2:15).  Accordingly, Finnis holds that we naturally acknowledge basic principles, seven “universal values:” (1) life; (2) knowledge; (3) play; (4) aesthetic experience; (5) sociability (friendship); (6) practical reasonableness; and (7) religion.  Everywhere, at all times, people recognize life’s value and endeavor to preserve it. 

                Life’s valuable, absolutely!  Our instinct for self-preservation bears witness to our intuitive certainty that life’s precious.  So too does that fact that premeditated murder, the deliberate taking of an innocent person’s life, is universally condemned.  Equally important, folks who value life also value procreation and prescribe codes regulating sexual behavior.  Rape, incest, blatant promiscuity are universally condemned, for they violate the reverence for life all men share.  Knowledge is also valuable.  People everywhere desire to know the truth.  They value honesty and decry lies.  Keeping one’s word has always been expected as something due the one who hears it.  Men and women always try to educate their young–whether in practical matters such as hunting and cooking or in esoteric rituals celebrating the myths and traditions of their tribe or nation. 

                People everywhere design and enjoy games, testifying to the fact that human life involves more than satisfying elemental needs.  Indeed, Johan Huizinga, a fine historian, defined man as homo ludens to emphasize how incessantly he engages in purely playful behaviors.  Ball games, races, card games, wagers, word games and riddles seem intrinsic to the human experience.   Equally important is artistic work–whether painting on the walls of caves or intricately carving knife handles or decorating water vases.  And from antiquity to the present we humans treasure friendships and encourage social bonds.  Solitary “brutes” there may be, but men forever prefer to live together with others of their kind.  Families, villages, hunting expeditions, sewing bees, all reveal our essentially social nature.  Folks also want to know how to live well and make wise decisions.  And they have pervasive concerns for ultimate realities, basic to religious expression.  The bodies of departed loved ones are treated with respect, demanding religious ceremonies.  Marriages, sicknesses, family meals and beautiful sunsets all provoke deeply religious responses. 

                Any honest study of human history, Finnis holds, proves man’s need for such basic goods.  Consequently, we can assert, with equal confidence, certain absolute “rights,” rooted in these goods.  We have a right to life–no one should take it from us.  We have a right to know the truth, so we have a “right not to be positively lied to in any situation (e.g. teaching, preaching, research publication, news broadcasting) in which factual communication (as distinct from fiction, jest, or poetry) is reasonably expected” (p. 225). 

                Desiring such “rights,” aware of ultimate “goods,” Finnis holds, we should naturally lift our minds to God, the Ultimate Good.  Indeed, the great architects of the Natural Law tradition have found theism compatible with their views.  “It must never be overlooked that, for nearly two millennia, the theories of natural law have been expounded by men who, with few exceptions, believed that the uncaused cause has in fact revealed itself  . . . to be indeed supremely personal, and to be a lawgiver whose law for man should be obeyed out of gratitude, hope, fear, and/or love” (p. 392).  Deeply underlying the thought of Plato and Aristotle, “is their faith in the power and objectivity or reason, intelligence, nous” (p. 392).  And man’s nous directly participates in the divine nous. 

                Both Plato and Aristotle, Finnis says, claimed “a certain experiential access to the divine” (p. 394).  Thinking rightly enables us to know (to a degree) God’s Mind.  Wondering, the beginning of philosophical inquiry, is man’s response to a “divine attraction.”  Finding answers, discerning truths, involves sharing in some ways the thoughts of God.  Aristotle, famously, began his Metaphysics with the assertion that “‘by nature [physei] all men desire to know’.  From there he proceeds not only to the affirmation (i) that the most desirable object of knowledge is ‘the highest good in the whole of nature [physei], a good which he identifies as God, but to the further affirmations (ii) that understanding [or thought] ‘in the highest sense’ is concerned with God; (iii) that the supreme object of understanding or truth is God and that ‘intelligence [or thought] [nous] understands [or thinks] itself through participation [metalepsis] in the object of understanding [or thought]; for it becomes an object of understanding by being touched and understood, so that intelligence [nous] and the object of understanding are the same’; and (iv) that the best and most pleasant state, which is enjoyed only intermittently by us as always by God, is the contemplation (theoria) of that actuality which understanding has, as a divine (theion) possession, when it thus participates in its supreme object” (p. 395). 

                Similarly, we find Plato writing, in Laws:  “God, as the old saying says, holds in his hand the beginning, end and middle of all that is, and straight he travels to the accomplishment of his purpose, as is (his) nature [kata physin]; and always by his side is Right [dike:  justice] ready to punish those who disobey the divine law [theiou nomou].  Anyone who wants to flourish [eudaimonesein] follows closely in the train of Right, with humility . . .  What line of conduct, then, is dear [phile] to God and a floowing of him?  . . . Well, it is God who is for us the measure [metron] of all things; much more truly so that, as they [sophists, notably Protagoras] say, man.  so to be loved by such a being, a man must strive as far as he can to become like that being; and following out this principle, the person who is temperate-and-ordered is dear to God, being like him” (Laws IV; p. 396). 

                St. Thomas Aquinas most clearly expressed this with “his definition of natural law as participatio legis aeternae in rationali creatura:  the participation of the Eternal Law in rational creatures” (p. 398).  The ultimate good for man, beatitudo, “human flourishing,” comes through knowing God.  Participatio–participating in the very being of God–finally fulfills man’s deepest longings.  Aquinas held that “‘it is from God that the human mind shares in [participat] intellectual light:  as Psalm 4 verse 7 puts it “The light of thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us.”‘  The same scriptural quotation caps his account of natural law as a participatio of Eternal Law” (p. 400).           Natural Law, therefore, reveals God’s Truth to those whose minds are open to the Light.  As the extensive quotations indicate, Professor Finnis writes on a highly theoretical, thoroughly scholarly, level.  One never speed reads Finnis!  Yet, when patiently studied, his works never fail to inform and challenge.  The Natural Law, as fundamental for ethics and law, certainly makes sense.  No wonder many of the greatest thinkers in the past championed it.  Finnis’ Natural Law and Natural Rights is without question one of the finest works published during the past three decades. 

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                 Perhaps the best-known victim of the terrorists’ atrocities on September 11, 2001, was Barbara Olson, the wife of the nation’s Solicitor-General, Ted Olson.  Like her husband, she was a lawyer, a staunch Republican, closely connected to the Bush administration.  She had served as a prosecutor for the Department of Justice and as counsel to a congressional committee that investigated some of the Clintons’ scandals.  She frequently appeared as a guest on television and radio commentaries, for she was renowned within Washington’s beltway for blending gracious manners with resolute convictions.  She died aboard the hijacked airplane that smashed into the Pentagon, two days before her long-awaited book–ironically titled “Final Days”–was scheduled for publication.  In a hauntingly prophetic sentence, she noted:  “Since the end of the Cold War, Soviet aggression had been replaced by a number of particularly venomous threats, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama Bin Laden” (p. 20).  Her book, The Final Days:  The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2001), makes a microscopic examination of the pardons granted, the deals made, by the Clintons as their reign ended.  But her focused account provides readers with a wide-angle lens whereby one sees a broader picture, a troubling vision of a nation at risk.

                On January 17, 2001, President William Jefferson Clinton took his last flight on Air Force One, relishing all the perks of his office, making a round-trip from Washington to Little Rock, Arkansas.  Joking with the press corps accompanying him, Clinton asked, “You got anybody you want to pardon?” (p. 4).  Lots of folks certainly did, it seems, and during his last few days as president Clinton considered hundreds of cases.  Amidst parties and farewell ceremonies, he furiously  flexed his executive powers.  Openly anxious about his “legacy,” he sought ways to preserve his presidential achievements by doing things only the nation’s chief executive can do.  Consequently, in the final hours of his final day in the White House, President Clinton granted 140 pardons and 36 commutations.

                Though Clinton’s last-minute pardons captured headlines, Olson shows that they were by no means atypical of him.  In August of 1999 he pardoned some Puerto Rican terrorists–called “separatists” by the media to soften their image.  Members of the FALN–a Marxist group credited for 130 bombing attacks in the U.S.– they killed six people, injuring scores more.  Apprehended, tried and imprisoned, the FALN terrorists remained defiant, not requesting pardon.  Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department favored releasing them, but President Clinton proclaimed pardons at an opportune moment in his wife’s senatorial campaign in New York. 

                “Former U.S. attorney [Joseph] DiGenova remarked, ‘Let me just say, categorically, the Puerto Rican terrorists were pardoned because they were a political benefit to the president’s wife.  Make no mistake about it.  There is no justification for those pardons'” (p. 19).  Public outrage prodded Hillary to publicly disavow her husband’s actions, though what the two of them discussed in private will never be known.   Without doubt, however, the pardons burnished Hillary’s image among New York’s many Hispanics.  To Olson, however, these pardons portended travesties to come.  “The FALN incident was the first time the president used his pardon power to grant clemency to terrorists.  He would return to this theme again at the end of his presidency” (p. 21). 

                The folks who should have denounced such actions–particularly the allegedly “watch-dog” journalists–followed their script and granted the Clintons latitude to follow their own ends.   Following her election as a Senator from New York in November, 2000–and before taking her oath of office–Hillary negotiated a book contract with Simon and Schuster, taking an advance of $8 million, “by far the largest such advance offered to any government official” (p. 40).  Since she was not yet, technically, in office, she avoided the Senate’s “conflict of interest” provisos that forbade such deals.  Yet her media friends, her fellow Democrats who had howled with outrage at a book deal negotiated by Newt Gingrich a few years earlier, blessed her windfall. 

                Nor did many object to President Bill Clinton’s use of his “executive power” to issue wide-ranging “executive orders” in his final days.  The nation’s first five presidents, collectively, issued only 15 executive orders.  Following a very different political philosophy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an astronomical 3,522 edicts in 12 years.  Subsequent presidents followed suit, though with less abandon.  And Clinton found he could circumvent Congress and implement his agenda through executive orders.  Two days after he became president, for example, Clinton appeased his feminist fans by authorizing abortions on U.S. military bases.  “‘Stoke of the pen, law of the land.  Kind of cool,'” said Clinton strategist Paul Begala” (p. 79). 

                Clinton’s final weeks in office witnessed “a gusher of executive orders and presidential decrees” (p. 79).  Carrying through on his commitments to environmentalists, educators, affirmative action activists, anti-tobacco crusaders, and trial lawyers, the president pursued his agenda.  He set aside lands in the West as national monuments, creating nine of them on January 17, 2001.  He tried to subject America to the International Criminal Court.  He established by fiat an  abortion rights position, defining “a child as a ‘fetus, after delivery, that has been determined to be viable.’  Thus, instead of regarding an unborn child as a human being, the Clinton rule adopted the feminist language that characterizes a child as a fetus” (p. 91). 

                On his last full day in office, he also extricated himself from his own legal dilemma:  perjury.  “On January 19, 2001 President Clinton finally conceded that he had broken the law” (p. 97), lying to a judge.  Intricate legal maneuvers, involving the president and his team of lawyers, spared him from disbarment in Arkansas.  He signed a carefully-crafted statement, accepting a five-year suspension and $25,000 fine.  Though subtly stated, the document is simply a plea bargain.  He broke the law, but he sustained only a slight spanking. 

                Then there are the pardons during Clinton’s final days!  He pardoned a strange variety of folks.  “The list of beneficiaries of Clinton’s last-minute clemency orgy was as eclectic as one could imagine:  small- and big-time crooks, con men, bank robbers, terrorists, relatives, ex-girlfriends, a cross section of the  Clinton cabinet, a former director of the CIA, perjurers (appropriately enough), tax evaders, fugitive money lenders, Clinton campaign contributors, former members of Congress, and friends of Jesse Jackson.  The sheer number of pardons and clemency grants, coupled with their timing–the last day of the Clinton presidency and the first day of Bush Two–staggered the press and smothered the story” (p. 123). 

                Most egregious was the pardon of Marc Rich.  One of the world’s richest men, apparently without moral compass, he was ultimately indicted, on 51 counts,  for illegal trading practices and tax evasion.  A federal prosecutor, Morris Weinberg, said:  “The evidence was absolutely overwhelming that Marc Rich, in fact, committed the largest tax fraud in the history of the United States” (p. 131).  Rather than risk standing trial, Rich fled the country and had lived in exile since 1991.  A lavish supporter of Israel, he had influential supporters such as Elie Wiesel, Shimon Peres, and Ehud Barak.  And he had a charming former wife, Denise Rich, who ingratiated herself with the Clintons with lavish contributions.

                “Denise Rich gave at least $1.5 million to causes related to the Clintons.  The majority of it, nearly $1 million, came near the end of Clinton’s second term, when Rich’s lawyer and former White House counsel Jack Quinn” urged the president to do so (p. 137).  Rich’s attorneys also wooed Hillary Clinton, ever anxious for campaign funds.  Consequently, ignoring virtually all his advisors, Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich.  Informed of the pardon, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the U.S. attorney who spearheaded the Rich prosecutions, refused to believe it.  “He said it was ‘impossible, the president would never pardon a fugitive, especially Marc Rich.  It cannot have happened.’  But it did” (p. 141).  Ever mindful of the letter of the law, the president evaded clear quid pro quo connections.  But, as Olson insists, “Another Latin legal phrase seems to cover it:  res ipsa loquitur–the thing speaks for itself” (p. 146).  That also applies to the various pardons Bill Clinton granted in his final days.  He helped out his brother’s friends, his wife’s brothers, and a drug dealers who was the son of a prominent Democratic donor. 

                Incensed by Clinton’s final days, Hamilton Jordan, President Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff, declared that Carter would have fired him if he had dared suggest granting a pardon to the likes of Marc Rich.  The Clintons, he concluded, “‘are not a couple but a business partnership, not based on love or even greed but on shared ambitions. . . .  The Clinton’s only loyalty is to their own ambitions.'”  Nothing matters but attaining their ambitions.  “Jordan saw the Clintons as tawdry, unprincipled, opportunistic, taking advantage of anyone weak enough to fall for their stories.  He called them ‘grifters . . . a term used in the Great Depression to describe fast-talking con artists who roamed the countryside, profiting at the expense of the poor and uneducated, always one step ahead of the law, moving on before they were held accountable for their schemes and half-truths'” (p. 194)

                ***********************************

                Olson concluded The Final Days with a reminder and a warning regarding the deeply radical views of Bill and Hillary Clinton.  To understand them, one needs to read her earlier treatise, Hell to Pay:  The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 1999).  Olson’s eyes opened while serving as the chief investigative counsel for a House committee which investigated scandals involving missing FBI files and the firing of White House Travel Office employees.   Thoroughly familiar with the documentary evidence, Olson came “to know Hillary as she is–a woman who can sway millions, yet deceive herself; a woman who has persuaded herself and many others that she is ‘spiritual,’ but who has gone to the brink of criminality to amass wealth and power” (p. 2).  Olson has “never experienced a cooler or more hardened operator,” a more singularly calculating public figure.  Her “ambition is to make the world accept the ideas she embraced in the sanctuaries of liberation theology, radical feminism, and the hard left” (p. 3).  Machiavellian to the core, she proved herself “a master manipulator of the press, the public, her staff, and–likely–even the president” (p. 3).

                Reared in a prosperous, Republican home, Hillary “the Goldwater girl” slowly turned to the left, politically, as a result of her exposure to the “social gospel” in the Methodist church her family attended.  She was 14 years old when the Reverend Donald G. Jones came to the church as youth minister.  Social change, not personal salvation, concerned him.  Rooted in the theology Paul Tillich, Jones thought the Christian faith needed to be re-articulated as “a critique of society that took its inspiration from Marxist lines of thought” (p. 31).  So the youth pastor Jones had his adolescent protegees reading e.e. cummings and J.D. Salinger, discussing Picasso’s Guernica, and visiting inner-city Chicago to empathize with impoverished folks blighted by capitalism.   After two years, Jones moved to Drew University to espouse radical causes from a professor’s podium.  But his understanding of Christianity apparently shaped young Hillary.  Later,   as a college student, she devoutly read a Methodist publication for collegians, Motive.  “‘I still have every issue they sent me,” Mrs. Clinton would later say as first lady” (p. 58).  The denominational magazine was edited by Carl Oglesby, a SDS leader and theologian who defended Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro and was often described as a Marxist.  Naturally she was urged to oppose America’s involvement in Vietnam, to embrace the revolutionary ideology of “liberation theology.”

                Intellectually gifted, Hillary attended Wellesley College in the late ’60’s.  Awash in the currents of the counterculture, she gradually embraced its radical agenda, participating in antiwar marches, enlisting fellow students to change the world.  She was selected to speak at her commencement, featuring an address by Massachusetts’ Republican Senator Edward Brooke.   Rather than give her prepared speech, however, Hillary “‘gave an extemporaneous critique of Brooke’s remarks'” (p. 41), rudely reproving him.  The senator’s liberalism failed to please her.  “We’re not interested in social reconstruction,” she shouted; “it’s human construction” (p. 42).  Nothing less than the Marxist “new man” would satisfy her!  Students stood and applauded for seven minutes!  Hillary then gained a place in Life magazine’s “Class of ’69.”  She’d found her voice!

                That youthful obsession, Olson argues, still persists.  Hillary finds Western Civilization bankrupt, needing more than reform.   Only “remolding,” only radical new structures, can bring about the kind of social justice she desires.  Such can come only “from the top–by planners, reformers, experts, and the intelligentsia.  Reconstruction of society by those smart enough and altruistic enough to make our decisions for us.  People like Bill and Hillary Clinton.  Hillary, throughout her intellectual life, has been taken by this idea, which is the totalitarian temptation that throughout history has led to the guillotine, the gulag, and the terror and reeducation camps of the Red Guard” (p. 311). 

                While at Wellesley she also found her intellectual guide:  Saul Alinsky.  Her senior thesis was devoted to him.  (Interestingly, when the Clintons entered the White House, her alma mater imposed a new policy–“the thesis of any graduates who became first lady” was to be placed in a locked vault.)  Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals were playbooks for student radicals.  Dick Morris, famously influential in the Clinton administrations, followed Alinsky’s  prescriptions while helping students dodge the draft and stage protest marches in Washington.  So persuaded is Olsen of Alinsky’s influence that she places one of his statements before each of the chapters in this book!  And certainly there seems to be a remarkably symmetry between Alinsky’s words and Hillary’s career.

                From Wellesley College Hillary Rodham went to Yale Law School.  Here she linked up with folks Robert Reich, Mickey Kantor, Strobe Talbott, and Lani Guinier.  More importantly, she hooked up with William Jefferson Clinton.  They studied with professors such as Duncan Kennedy, an advocate of “Crits,” Critical Legal Studies, shredding the law with the “deconstructionist” ideology and methodology of Jacques Derrida.  Overtly Marxist, Crits took the law as a tool with which to engineer social transformation. 

                Another professor also influenced Hillary–Thomas Emerson, “Tommy the Commie.”  He encouraged her to involve herself in helping defend Bobby Seale and his Black Panthers, accused of murdering a fellow Black Panther.  Seale and his thugs were clearly guilty of a brutal murder.  But Hillary and her comrades cared little about guilt or innocence.  The saw the trial as an opportunity to advance the Black Panther cause, to enlist the public in supporting “racial justice.”  Agitation shook the streets, intimidation and threats seared the air.  “If Bobby dies,” they chanted, “Yale fries.”  Victory was obtained.  Seale survived.    While still studying at Yale Hillary spent a summer in Berkeley, CA.,  working as an intern for a noted lawyer, Robert Treuhaft, the husband of Jessica Mitford.  She was a zealous muckraker, and he had been a lawyer for the Communist Party.  “They were both committed Communists.  Stalinists, in fact” (p. 56).  Hillary has never criticized or repudiated Treuhaft and Mitford, so it’s not clear to what extent she accepted their views. 

                In 1972 both Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton worked for the McGovern presidential campaign.  They made contacts within the newly-radicalized Democratic Party which would serve them so well later on.  Bill then got a job teaching law at the University of Arkansas.  Hillary, after working for a Democratic committee intent on impeaching Richard Nixon, joined Bill in Arkansas and also taught law.  They married in 1975.  He began his famously successful political career, and sustained his equally famous sexual adventures.  Hillary saw in him her door to power.  So the “marriage” was secure.  Bill told some “friends that he recognized that Hillary was putting her own political future into escrow by coming to Arkansas” (p. 315).  Escrow maintains a deposit, and her day, she hoped, would come.  Meanwhile, they had a deal.  And that deal brought them both enormous wealth and power.   

                In the 1970s Hillary teamed up with Marian Wright Edelman, a well-heeled feminist and influential social activist.  She understand that the issues of the ’60s were fading, so radicals like herself needed some fresh “fronts” for their social crusade.  Edelman decided to use “children” to mask her radicalism.  Her “Children’s Defense Fund” came into being and served as a primary vehicle for Hillary’s political aspirations.  Her writings for CDF in the ’70s “reveal a leftist ideologue, dedicated to centrally directed social engineering, dismissive of the traditional role of the family, and interested in children primarily as levers with which to extract political power” (p. 105).  Taking seriously her writings, Christopher Lasch warned, in 1992:  “‘Though Clinton does not press the point, the movement for children’s rights, as she describes it, amounts to another stage in the long struggle against patriarchy'” (p. 108).

                Olson probes into a whole variety of Hillary Clinton’s involvements.  When Bill served as Governor of Arkansas, Hillary joined a prestigious law firm in Little Rock, the Rose Law Firm, though she seemed rarely to have actually practiced law.  She launched the Arkansas Advocates for Children, promoted Head Start, and publicly claimed to be concerned about the educational system.  She headed the Legal Services Corporation, a federally-funded nonprofit organization.  In this position, under President Jimmy Carter, she had access to millions of dollars and distributed in strategic ways.  They printed materials for “community organizations” and helped fund political campaigns.  They taught operatives how to harass opponents and unearth scandals so as to determine elections.  They doled out money in California to defeat a proposition that would have reduced the state income taxes.  Little done by the LSC fell under its intended assignment.  But it helped Hillary and friends.    

                Edelman’s lingering influence became clear when the Clintons assumed power in 1992.  For the transition team Hillary chose Dr. Johnetta Cole to oversee education  appointments. She was clearly Hillary’s choice for Secretary of Education.  She had strong ties to Fidel Castro, publicly supporting his military adventures, and “had founded a CPUSA front organization, the U.S. Peace Council” (p. 246).  Hillary also directed appointments in the Justice Department.  She brought aboard Peter Edelman, Marian’s husband, and tried unsuccessfully to get an old Yale friend, Lani Guinier, appointed as head of the civil rights division.  Janet Reno was finally named Attorney General, and she was a perfect choice for Hillary.  “She was liberal and warmly regarded by Marian Wright Edelman.  And she was a woman” (p. 249).  She also followed orders.  She first fired “all ninety-three U.S. attorneys.  This was a break with the tradition of disinterested jurisprudence” (p. 250).  But 93 new attorneys could be named, and Hillary saw to it that many of her cronies got the jobs.  The new appointees, of course, would prove less than concerned with certain scandals beginning to emerge from the Clintons’ past in Arkansas! 

                Hillary’s established modus operandi characterized her White House years.  Olson documents her involvements in the FBI files, the firing of the Travel Office employees, the HealthCare disaster.  The portrait given us is of a ruthless, sinister, masterful woman, capable of most anything in her quest for that fabled heavenly kingdom on earth. 

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BODY & SOUL

           In Body & Soul:  Human Nature & the Crisis in Ethics (Downer’s Grove:  InterVarsity Press, c. 2000), J.P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, two professors at the Talbot School of Theology, set forth a persuasive defense of a very traditional Christian anthropology, evident in Boethius’ classic definition of a “person” as “an individual substance with a rational nature.”  This provides one a deeply metaphysical identity–one is who he is, a particular being of enduring worth. 

          Immersed in a scientifically-shaped culture, forever reducing “reality” to materiality, human nature has suffered serious debasement, becoming a product of purely natural processes.  Even “Evangelicals” like Karl Giberson blithely embrace science as “the most epistemologically secure perspective that we have,” though it leads, inexorably, to the reduction of human nature to empirically-evident biological data, a composite collection of biochemical parts, a “property-thing” (to use the currently popular philosophical designation) rather than an “individual substance.”  A number of Christian “complementarians” envision “higher-level” properties that distinguish man as man, but deny him any discrete, purely spiritual essence.  Thus we find numbers of such thinkers arguing that when we die we simply die–dust to dust.  In the final resurrection, hopefully, God will raise us as “resurrected bodies.”  But there is no “soul” per se that eludes the grave. 

          But Moreland and Rae insist on a discrete, really real soul that gives the body its form.  What’s needed is a restored awareness of spiritual “substance,” a confidence that in our deepest self we are more than matter.  In The Divine Conspiracy, USC’s Dallas Willard says, “To understand spirit as ‘substance’ is of the utmost importance,” because, rightly understood, for both God and man, “spirit is something that exists in its own right” (p. 8).  The word substance fuses sub (which means under) with stance (which means stand); so substance means what stands under what appears to be–what really is.  Aristotle discerned this clearly, writing:  “That which is a whole and has a certain shape and form is one in a still higher degree; and especially if a thing is of this sort by nature, and not by force like the things which are unified by glue or nails or by being tied together, i.e., if it has in itself the cause of its continuity” (Metaphysics 1052a.22-25). 

          So Moreland and Rae argue we are both body and soul.  They reach back to the 13th century and refurbish a “Thomistic dualism.”   Importantly, unlike rationalistic philosophers following Descartes, “Thomistic dualism focuses on the soul, not the mind.  The mind is a faculty of the soul, but the latter goes beyond mental functioning and serves as the integrative ground and developer of the body it animates and makes alive” (p. 21).  Like the artist moving his brush, the soul arranges the genes, drives the DNA, shapes the molecules, forms the frame.  Thomistic dualism holds that the “soul contains capacities for biological as well as mental functioning.  Thus the soul is related to the body more intimately and fully than by way of an external causal connection, as Cartesians would have it” (p. 21). 

          A critical component of this position concerns the freedom of the will.  Cornell University’s William Provine, a naturalistic, atheist biologist, understands the implications of his stance, stating:   “Free will as it is traditionally conceived . . . simply does not exist. . . .  There is no way that the evolutionary process as it is currently conceived can produce a being that is truly free to make choices” (p. 105).  Only if one is a rational person, free to choose non-empirical goods, independent of material processes, can he transcend the flux of nature.  As John Finnis wisely says, “Everything in ethics depends on the distinction between the good as experienced and the good as intelligible” (Fundamentals of Ethics, 42).  Only free moral agents, of course, choose to do good or evil.  So, as the subtitle indicates, Moreland and Rae deal extensively with ethics.

          If a person is a discrete, ontological substance, there are simply cannot be “degrees” of personhood.  Age and physical condition do not add to or detract from one’s status as a person.  “For the Thomist it is impossible for there to be a human nonperson” (p. 225).  Facing today’s complex biomedical questions, when unborn babies are discarded as “fetuses” (i.e. not-quite-human), and elderly folks are “euthanized” (having forfeited their “personhood”), the Thomist insistence that we are essentially (not developmentally) human truly makes a difference.  Moreland and Rae say:  “Our view is that zygotes, embryos, fetuses, newborns, children and adults are all persons, though each is at a different stage of development and maturity.  A clear continuity of personal identity is bound up with the human person’s being a substance in the Thomistic sense” (p. 270).

            “Body & Soul is a quality piece of philosophical work,” says Stephen Evans.  It is carefully argued, attuned to contemporary scholarship, and adroit in applying the insights St Thomas Aquinas to today’s questions.  Though a bit technical at points, the book is generally accessible to folks outside the academy who understand the importance of its focus.

                 Were more of us more skeptical, less credulous, fewer of us would fear environmental collapse.  So argues Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus, in The Skeptical Environmentalist:  Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, c. 2001)–a densely documented repudiation of the environmentalist litany which orchestrates world opinion and political action.  As “an old left-wing Greenpeace member,” it was difficult for Lomborg to entertain second thoughts about the movement he’d supported, but reading an interview with Julian Simon prodded him “to put my beliefs under the statistical microscope” (p. xixi).  The results–displayed in charts and graphs on almost every page as well as 2,930 footnotes and 1,800 bibliographical entries– undermined the worldview he’d too easily championed.

                Economist Julian Simon is well known for challenging the dogmas enshrined in one of environmentalism’s foundational documents, Limits to Growth, by offering “to bet $10,000 that any given raw material” would drop in price.  Some Stanford University environmentalists, led by Paul Ehrlich, took up his challenge, breezily averring that “the lure of easy money can be irresistible” (p. 137).  They picked chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten, betting that in 10 years they would be more expensive.  In 1990, however, Simon won the bet, for these raw materials were all cheaper than they had been in 1980.  “Truth is,” Lomborg says, “they could not have won” (p. 137).  All basic materials–whether food or cotton or wool or whatever–were cheaper!  But Ehrlich and friends monopolized the media, and Simon’s truth garnered little attention.

                Lomborg first examines the doomsaying “litany”–best illustrated in Lester Brown’s Worldwatch Institute’s yearly  State of the World manifestoes and Time Magazine cover stories–chanted, in unison, by environmental activists.  Most of the claims made by Brown et al. cannot be trusted.  Respected “authorities,” such as Cornell University’s David Pimentel, often cited for his expertise and scientific rigor, err egregiously in their enthusiasm for the environmental agenda.  In fact, things are much better than they were a century ago. Summing up his conclusions, Bomborg says:

 

We are not running out of energy or natural resources.  There will be more and more food per head of the world’s population.  Fewer and fewer people are starving.  In 1900 we lived for an average of 30 years; today we live for 67.  According to the UN we have reduced poverty more in the last 50 years than we did in the preceding 500, and it has been reduced in practically every country.

      Global warming [he continues] though its size and future projections are rather  unrealistically pessimistic, is almost certainly taking place, but the typical cure of early and radical fossil fuel cutbacks is way worse than the original affliction, and moreover its total impact will not pose a devastating problem for our future.  Nor will we lose 25-50 percent of all species in our lifetime–in fact we are losing probably 0.7 percent.  Acid rain does not kill the forests, and the air and water around us are becoming less and less polluted.

      Mankind’s lot has actually improved in terms of practically every measurable indicator (p. 4). 

 

                We hear lots of bad news about the environment because bad news makes the news.  Popular publications, and public educators, pick up on alarming announcements, and all too quickly extreme cases become accepted as basic norms.  Fears fly faster and further than facts!  Ungrounded alarms send folks scurrying for shelter when nothing has happened!  Scientists, as prone to vanity as any other professional group, enjoy the spotlight as lonely prophets and feed the frenzy.  As preachers have long understood, to predict the end of the world always gets one attention!

                Contrary to those who lament the grinding poverty and immanent starvation of the world’s masses, Lomborg devotes a chapter to “life expectancy and health” to show how much better life is for vast numbers of us.  We’re healthier and live longer.  Food is more abundant and cheaper than ever.  Predictions by Paul Ehrlich in the ’70’s, direly declaring that massive famines would sweep across the globe, have been utterly disproven.  Lester Brown’s laments concerning the world’s declining fisheries conveniently ignore the rapidly-expanding fish farms which provide the world with more fish than ever before!  More food is certainly needed, but the Green Revolution, “a milestone in the history of mankind” (p. 63), makes it possible to provide for Earth’s burgeoning population.  China, impoverished 30 years ago, granted its people economic freedom when Mao died, and the people now have more than enough to eat.  China demonstrates that political, not ecological, factors determine whether or not a people will have sufficient food.

                Similarly, there is no grave “energy crisis,” for we have sufficient fossil fuel for the foreseeable future and alternative energy sources are already making their appearance.  Nor is there a “water crisis,” except in areas affecting 4 percent of earth’s population.  Plaintive appeals (implicit in a Time magazine headline:  “Forests:  the global chainsaw massacre”) to save the “rain forests” may touch the emotions, but in fact the planet’s forests are doing remarkably well.  From 1950-1994, a 0.85 percentage growth occurred.  The Amazon rainforest is neither the “lungs of the world,” nor is it disappearing!  In fact, 86 percent of the original Amazon forest still stands! 

                Lomborg devotes 68 double column pages to global warming, easily the most emotionally-charged current environmental issue.  He grants that many factors point to a slowly warming globe.  But the data are not totally persuasive.  And even worst-case scenarios will not unduly change life on earth.  Many of the headline-grabbing projections are little more than “computer-aided storytelling.”  Frantic efforts to retard the warming trend, evident in the Kyoto accords, would do little to alter the process.  We can expend enormous sums and reduce the initial amount of global warming, but in a century such efforts will make little difference!  So Lomborg urges us to invest in more realistic endeavors and deal with the consequences of global warming when and if they transpire.

                Lomborg’s work, rather than propaganda pieces such as Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance, demands careful study and implementation.  For too long Leftist extremists, now positioned throughout bureaucracies such as the EPA, have set the agenda for environmental legislation.  For man’s and the planet’s good, wiser guides are needed.

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                Much that Lomborg says was earlier set forth by Ronald Bailey in Eco-Scam:  The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse (New York:  St. Martin’s Press, c. 1993).  He indicts the same culprits, the super-stars of environmentalism:  Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, Dennis and Donella Meadows, Lester Brown, Jeremy Rifkin, Carl Sagan.  These “alarmists” must be exposed for “their faulty analyses, their wildly inaccurate predictions, and their heedless politicization of science” (p. xi).  They are, in fact, well-funded political activists, determined to replace capitalism with a socialistic utopia, not scholarly truth-tellers.  Hopes for the “New Soviet Man” having vanished, we’re now urged to prepare the way for a “New Ecological Person” (p. 11)  The “ban-the-bomb” folks, with their “peace and justice” mantras, found environmentalism a fertile field for their anti-Western revolutionary views.  The ancient allure of an egalitarian society, freed from the evils of private property, inspires the Greens in their various crusades. 

                Bailey invests much effort examining the errors of Ehrlich, Brown, Sagan et al. and the lavishly-funded organizations (Sierra Club; National Resources Defense Council; Environmental Defense Fund; Greenpeace; Nature Conservancy) which amplify their views.   In retrospect, their fantastic (and virtually always wrong) predictions do in fact seem ludicrous.  The major alarms sounded during the past 40 years have been false!  Ehrlich’s predicted “population explosion” now looks more like an implosion.  The “ozone hole” is hardly as serious as some proclaim it to be.  Soil erosion mainly shifts soil rather than actually losing it.  Screaming headlines, detailing disasters related to Alar pesticides on apples or toxic materials at Love Canal, misled the public, for we now know neither incident merited much concern.  Fears concerning “global cooling” resulting from the “greenhouse effect,” so dominant in the ’70’s, have shifted to fears about “global warming.” In all probability it too is simply another “alarm” sounded to persuade the public to appropriate more money for research and tolerate more government regulation.

                When these alarms were ringing, however, many of us took them seriously, thinking they were anchored in careful research.  More ominously, they guided public policy and deeply shaped the nation.  H.L. Mencken’s witty observation still holds:  “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary” (p. 1).  Politicians, such as President Jimmy Carter, embraced the radical environmentalist agenda, and Carter’s Global 2000 provided the movement the imprimatur what many of us assumed was a dispassionate federal report.  Al Gore, first as a senator and then as Vice President, provided a pivotal political entry point for radical environmentalists.  He imbibed the wild allegations of Paul Ehrlich and Jeremy Rifkin and argued we must radically change course if we are to survive.  When he held hearings in the Senate, he stacked the deck, favoring, by a 10-to-1 margin, radical environmentalists above their critics.  Scientists who disagreed with him were subjected to intense, badgering inquisitions.  He tried to intimidate people, demanding they “recant” their views on global warming or ozone depletion. 

                Gore-like politicians succeeded with media assistance.  Almost uniformly, the major media forces embraced radical environmentalism.  PBS aired persuasive series such as “The Race to Save the Planet” and “After the Warming,” pushing viewers to accept an almost certain doomsday–unless, of course, a radical solution were publicly embraced and funded.  Hollywood and commercial television added their support, blending the pro-environmentalist position into “L.A. Law,” “The Simpsons,” “Knots Landing” and others.  CNN, under Ted Turner’s guidance, openly declared itself in support of the movement.  When it comes to the environment, as in the pro-choice stance on abortion, only one view merits exposure! 

                Eco-Scam reads easily and provides ample documentation for readers concerned with its accuracy.  In the light of the just-published Skeptical Environmentalist, Bailey’s treatise looks quite trenchant!

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                Michael S. Coffman provides a different critique of environmentalism in Saviors of the Earth?  (Chicago:  Northfield Publishing, c. 1994).  By profession a forester, teaching and researching ecosystems, he for years considered himself an “environmentalist.  But in 1991 he decided “that there was an agenda behind the environmental movement that was far from being in the best interests of America, or even the environment itself” (p. 11).  He discovered the truth of Machiavelli:  “A hypothesis is always more believable than the truth, for it has been tailored to resemble our ideas of truth, whereas the truth is just its own clumsy self.  Ergo, never discover the truth when a hypothesis will do” (The Prince).  This book is a result of that awakening. 

                Though he glances at some of the bogus “catastrophes” proclaimed by environmentalists (pesticides, acid rain, CFCs, global warming, etc.), Coffman’s main concern is the religious worldview they embrace.  Facts matter little to the movement’s devotees, for they follow their feelings, their convictions that the world needs to change in accord with their beliefs.  Their beliefs are rooted in the thought of pantheists like John Muir or GAIA worshippers like James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (married for a time to Carl Sagan).  They share the socialistic redistributionism espoused by New Age theosophists following the lead of Helen Blavatsky. 

                The religious aspects of the movement are quite clear in prominent leaders’ statements.  Gro Harlem Grundtland, the Norwegian Prime Minister whose “Report” strongly emphasized the “sustainable development” stance adopted by the United Nations and other international organizations, declared “that living as we do will make it impossible for [our] grandchildren to life at all,” so we must support sustainable development as “a religious belief” (p. 189).  New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine hosts the “Gaia Institute,” which “aims to create ‘mother goddess’ cults throughout the west . . . and is a movement to create a new religion” (p. 146).  Maurice Strong, the Canadian industrialist who now leads the crusade for radical environmentalism, served as secretary general of the United Nations Conference on Environment–the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.  Addressing the delegates, he said:  “It is the responsibility of each human being today to choose between the force of darkness and the force of light.  We must therefore transform our attitudes and values, and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature” (p. 196). 

                Espousing such views, radical environmentalists advocate what Tal Brooke labels “The Great Lie.”  Formerly a disciple of a Hindu guru, Sai Baba, Brooke declares:  “‘The Great Lie is quite simply the belief that man is God, and that his true identity is the immortal self and is ageless and eternal, and that as God he will never die!'” (p. 256).  The Great Lie leaps out of a declaration of the Findhorn community–something of a Mecca for environmentalism–which says:  “At last, [you] no longer need to be controlled by events, but by your power of thought, you control them.  You can bring about anything by your thoughts.  That is why this new-found power can only be used when there no self left to mar it . . .  This is the secret of creation.  What you think, you create . . .  We are one.  Therefore, all that appeared impossible in the past is no longer so.  Everything is possible” (p. 150). 

                In view of all this, Coffman opposes environmentalism.  To be good stewards of creation is both a Christian calling and a reasonable way to care for the earth.  Such can be done without accepting the environmentalist agenda. 

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                Michael Cromartie’s Creation at Risk?  Religion, Science, and Environmentalism (Grand Rapids:  William B. Eerdmans, c. 1994), presents the papers and discussions of ten thinkers concerned with the state of the world.  Positions are clearly presented.  Disagreements are sharply expressed.  Conclusions are left up to the reader!

                Charles T. Rubin, author of The Green Crusade, argues that environmentalism, like Marxism, is primarily an ideology, a philosophical commitment “that arises out of utopian and totalitarian political programs for the complete reformation of human life on earth” (p. 3).  He particularly stresses the “totalitarian” aspects of much environmentalism, most evident in radical groups like Earth First!  Intent on setting a new course for man on earth, true believers accept no compromises, brook no dissent.  The noted ecologist Rene Dubos experienced this when he dared air some “second thoughts” and question some widely-held environmental dogmas. 

                Gregg Easterbrook, author of A Moment on the Earth:  The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism, argues that the planet is faring quite well, thank you!  Unlike the dismal doomsdays portrayed by radical environmentalists, in their efforts to generate funds and attain political power, things are actually improving.  Naysayers like Carol Browner (Clinton’s EPA head) the air, water, forests and land are fine.  In “The Challenge of Biocentrism,” Thomas Derr, a professor at Smith College, warns against the pantheism implicit in much environmental thought.  Despite their many failures, Christians have, in fact, treated nature quite well.  To embrace “biocentrism,” as have theologians like Carol Christ, will deeply compromise the Christian tradition. 

                Patrick J. Michaels, associate professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, the Virginia state climatologist, considered “The Climate-Change Debacle:  The Perils of Politicizing Science.”  Soberly evaluating the greenhouse effect and global warming, he explains why much that’s said is inconclusive.  The data simply don’t justify grand projections!  Computer simulations basically spit out what they’re programmed to–pessimism in, pessimism out!  He carefully considers the treaty signed in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro.  President Clinton, in 1993, pledged to implement its “Climate Change Action Plan.”  Under careful scrutiny, however, Michaels finds the proposal seriously flawed.  “We have entered into a treaty designed to prevent a ‘dangerous’ climate change that is predicted by models that aren’t working, and we have produced a policy that cannot succeed” (p. 50).  In the fifth, and final essay, “Can Markets of Government Do More for the Environment,” Peter J. Hill, a professor of economics at Wheaton College, sides with the former.  Clearly the markets can’t do everything.  But to assume government can is a fatal assumption!  Wherever the government controls given resources, the record is hardly admirable!  In part this is because the bureaucracies entrusted to implement laws rarely accomplish the laws’ intent.  Free markets are more efficient, more response to truly human needs, and ultimately better for the environment.

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                Much that the more scholarly publications assert are summed up in Facts Not Fear:  A Parent’s Guide to Teaching Children About the Environment (Washington:  Regnery Publishing Inc., c. 1996) by Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw.  “The goal of this book is twofold:  To alert you to what your children are learning, and to offer you a more balanced view of the many environmental issues they encounter” (p. 3).  Thus they document, on the basis of perusing some 100 texts used in public schools, the many inaccuracies and exaggerations designed to recruit children for the environmental crusade.  And they further demonstrate, by examining the major environmental “crises,” how scientific truths discount the hysteria so rampant in many circles.  They also provide names of the “academic and scientific advisory panel,” experts who read specific chapters, to indicate how seriously they sought to ascertain the truth concerning the book’s contents.

                Addressing the various issues, the consider “Will Billions Starve.”  In fact:  no!  More food is available than ever.  Where hunger exists, it’s because of political, not ecological factors.  Are natural resources disappearing?  No!  More and more are, in fact available, and new resources (such as fiber optics) make irrelevant former concerns for vanishing raw materials.  Are our forests dying?  No!  Forests are actually expanding, and even the rain forests are doing fine.  “American Wildlife–On the Edge?”  No!  Though the passenger pigeons have disappeared, most wildlife (bison; beaver) have revived.  Are species going extinct in alarming numbers?  No!  No one knows how many species there are, so assertions concerning the percentage of earth’s species disappearing lack meaning!  The air is generally improving, the planet may be slowly warming but not enough to prompt panic, ozone depletion is uncertain and greatly exaggerated, acid rain has been proven minimally deleterious.  There’s plenty of water for the planet.  Pesticides pose no great threat to health–and their banning often makes life far more fragile for millions of people.  We have plenty of space for trash disposal, and worth of recycling is basically a myth.

                On the basis of their analysis, the authors provide suggestions for parents:  try to make sure your children learn true science, not environmentalism.  Add to that some understanding of economics.  Know what’s taught in your children’s schools, and try to make a positive imput into the schools’ curricula.  All in all this is a most useful work.  It’s simple but accurate.  It provides plenty of information and clues to solid resources.  For folks without much background, it’s probably the best place to start.

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                In a response to another essay, businessman Fred Smith noted:  “The people who want to save the environment have greatly misunderstood what happened historically in America.  American common law’s remedies against pollution were sabotaged by the same progressive movement that led to collectivism in other areas.  Property rights were ignored when they might block economic progress.   We need to revisit those progressive policies and recognize that markets didn’t fail, property rights didn’t fail, so much as they were sabotaged.  This history is relatively unknown.  Progressive-era policies also blocked the evolution of institutional arrangements that would have allowed private parties to advance environmental values.  We force one-third of the United States in political ownership.  We banned private ownership of wildlife.  We advance the silly concept that trees should have standing, rather than seeking creative alternative ways of ensuring that individuals could act as stewards, standing behind trees, whales, and all the other things we care about” (p. 35). 

Allegedly one of the most widely-discussed books in the Bush White House is The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington (New York:  Simon & Schuster, c. 1996).  A professor at Harvard University, Huntington also directs the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and is a respected expert on international relations.  He argues, in this treatise, that the great conflicts in the century just become will take place for cultural–rather than economic or ideological–reasons.  For two centuries (1789-1989) the world’s great conflicts pitted Europeans and their allies against each other–“Western civil wars” as William Lind calls them, but that era has ended.

Today the world’s divided into hostile “civilizations.”  Huntington identifies them as follows:  Western (European and American); Islam (Turkik, Arab, and Malay); Confucian; Japanese; Hindu; Slavic-Orthodox; Latin American; and possibly African.  Differences between these civilizations are substantial, firmly rooted in history, and primarily religious in nature.  As the world shrinks, through communication and transportation, these civilizations cannot avoid contact and conflict.  The West, cavalierly controlling of the world at the end of  WWII, has been retreating for half-a-century and now finds itself merely one of several “civilizations” struggling for supremacy in various regions.  We now live in a “multipolar, multicivilizational world.”

Today’s clash of civilizations mainly results from recent religious revivals.  Rather than the increasingly “secular” world predicted by theologians like Harvey Cox in The Secular City in the 1960’s, the “unsecularization” of the world seems more dramatically evident.  “Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Orthodoxy, all experienced new surges in commitment, relevance, and practice by erstwhile casual believers.  In all of them fundamentalist movements arose committed to the militant purification of religious doctrines and institutions and the reshaping of personal, social, and public behavior in accordance with religious tenets” (p. 96).

In formerly communist countries this appears clear.  From Albania to Vietnam religion has revived.  Russian churches have been restored and attract impressive numbers of attendees.  This revival has especially transformed Islamic countries.  The irreligious “modernization” so confidently anticipated by secular thinkers shaped by Enlightenment dogma, has been tried and found wanting.  Man does not live by bread alone!  There are deeply spiritual longings in the human heart which can only be suppressed for a season.  Religion provides answers to life’s big questions, gives adherents a sense of identity and purpose.  “In Russia the religious revival is the result of ‘a passionate desire for identity which only the Orthodox church, the sole unbroken link with the Russian’s 1000-year past, can provide,’ while in Islamic republics the revival similarly stems ‘from the Cental Asians’ most powerful aspiration:  to assert the identities that Moscow suppressed for decades'” (p. 98).  “More broadly,” Huntington says, “the religious resurgence throughout the world is a reaction against secularism, moral relativism, and self-indulgence, and a reaffirmation of the values of order, discipline, work, mutual help, and human solidarity” (p. 98).

Of particular interest (since 9/11/01) is Huntington’s analysis of Islamic civilization and its pronounced hostility to the West.  Though politicians like Bill Clinton insisted that only a few Islamic “extremists” posed any problems, “Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise” (p. 209).  Despite interludes of peaceful coexistence, Islam and Christianity are deeply, dogmatically antagonistic.  Blitzkrieg Muslim conquests (632 A.D.-732 A.D.) overwhelmed and buried some of the most Christian realms in the world.  In response, Christian crusades (1095-1291) momentarily reestablished the Cross in lost lands.  Resurgent Muslims then captured Constantinople (1453) and pushed through the Balkans to the gates of Vienna in 1529, returning for al final assault in 1683.  For the next three centuries, technologically superior Western powers and colonial empires dominated much of the world, but today’s Muslims dream of regaining the powers they once enjoyed.

Multitudes of Muslims today consider the West “arrogant, materialistic, repressive, brutal and decadent” (p. 214).  Small corps of terrorists act out of their animosities, but they represent vast throngs of supporters who cheer them on–as was evident when Muslims around the world cheered at the Trade Center and Pentagon massacres. Muslim leaders rarely condemn terrorist attacks against the United States–the “Great Satan.”  Formerly secularized Muslim states, which were genuinely friendly prior to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, now exude a pronounced hostility to America and her allies.  Muslims like  Khomeini and Qadhafi thenceforth invoked jihad, holy war, in their diatribes against the West.

Verbal jousts and “transition wars” of limited breadth would be followed, Huntington predicted, by large scale “fault line wars.”  The Soviet-Afgan War, the first victory by Muslim warriors over a Western power, and the Gulf War, set the stage for larger conflict.  “The Afghan War became a civilizational war because Muslims everywhere saw it as such and rallied against the Soviet Union.  The Gulf War became a civilization war because the West intervened militarily in a Muslim conflict” (p. 247) almost totally opposed by Arabs outside Kuwait.  Conflicts in the disintegrating Yugoslavia further intensified the Muslim-Christian conflict.  Along the great fault line, dividing devotees of these two ancient faiths, will erupt in conflicts which will determine the shape of the world to come.

Beyond predicting conflicts to come, Huntington concludes his analysis with some advice for the West, if it desires to retain its historic importance.  Above all, it must regain its moral fiber.

Antisocial behavior, family fragmentation, disinterest in local associations, the loss of a strong work ethic, and the distressing decline of intellectual excellence, must be reversed if the West is to survive.  “The future health of the West and its influence on other societies depends in considerable measure on its success in coping with these trends, which, of course, give rise to the assertions of moral superiority by Muslims and Asians” (p. 304).

Huntington’s analysis illustrates how historical knowledge should appropriately inform current policies.  Had America’s leaders, a decade ago, heeded his warnings, our world might have been spared some of its recent anguish.

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D.G. Brander’s Staring into Chaos:  Explorations in the Decline of Western Civilization (Dallas:  Spence Publishing Company, 1998) provides readers easy access to three of the past century’s greatest historical thinkers:  Oswald Spengler; Arnold J. Toynbee;  Pitrin Sorokin.  Although quite different in many ways, each man sought to grasp the broad contours of human history, to find meaning therein, and to propose ways to move wisely into the future.

Before turning to his major thinkers, however, Brander details the deep and pervasive despair haunting some of the West’s most noted thinkers.  At the very time when the Industrial Revolution was transforming the world and the British Empire reached its apex–symbolized by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897–major thinkers such as Tolstoy, Boudelaire, Jacob Burckhardt, Nicholas Berdyaev, Henry Adams, and Albert Schweitzer (among others) lamented the West’s inner ills.  Working within that weltgeist, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin sketched their diagnoses, warning that Western Civilization was in danger if not in declining.

Though a mathematician by training, Oswald Spengler (“the master doomsayer”) immersed himself in classical and historical studies and published, during WWI, The Decline of the West, a blockbuster of a book which set the tone for Europe’s intellectuals between the world wars.  Taking his cue from Nietzsche, Spengler held that “cultures” constitute the core of the human story and sought to show how they all follow an unalterable biological pattern:  birth; growth; decay; death.  Past cultures’ collapses persuaded him that some developments guarantee the immanent end of a civilization:  a disinterest in having children and resultant depopulation; the loss of religious faith; the tendency to confuse indiscipline with freedom; spineless pacifism; self-coddling socialism.  The prevalence of such things a century ago persuaded Spengler that the West had entered its final hour.

Unlike Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee (“the master historian”) didn’t think anything was necessarily predetermined.  In some ways Toynbee, like C.S. Lewis, represents the last generation of Englishmen to receive a genuinely classical education–the approach to learning basic to the West for more than half a millennium.  Drawing upon that education, Toynbee sought to understand the whole of human history and wrote A Study of History–12 volumes, three million words, the longest historical work ever written.  (And, I might add, the focus on an intellectually-awakening directed reading project I completed during my senior year of college.)

Toynbee argued that civilizations begin when creative minorities respond to various challenges and inspire others to join them in building a great society.  In time they succeed.  But success, like aging cream, sours.  Folks grow complacent, let things go, and cultural disintegration ensues.  In some ways, it’s a suicidal process.  Though renewal efforts may prolong the process, civilizations ultimately die and disappear.  Some of them, however, incubate universal religions like Christianity.  And these religions become the bearers of a nobler life and human progress.  Civilizations, such as the Classical Greco-Roman, are the wheels which support the wagon of religion.  And this gives meaning to human history.  Unlike Spengler, Toynbee could not say whether the West was dying, one suspects he thinks it’s mortally wounded.

Pitrim A. Sorokin, “the master analyst” in Brander’s judgement, was a Russian-born sociologist who emigrated to the United States and launched Harvard’s department of sociology.  Rather than cycles of civilizations, Sorokin–in Social and Cultural Dynamics–thought history forever oscillates between two ways of life, two world views:  the ideational and the sensual.  In ideational eras, people revere and serve God or gods.  In sensate periods, they celebrate man and seek sensual satisfactions.  “For instance, an ideational society will spend enormous efforts erecting cathedrals, while a sensate society will put the same labor into building theaters and arenas” (p. 263).  Ideational thinkers pursue theology; sensate thinkers follow natural science.  In ideational societies ethics stand rooted in transcendent principles such as Truth and Goodness; they become relativistic and utilitarian in sensate circles.

Sorokin took seriously a people’s art, architecture, and music, philosophy and theology.  What a given society thinks worthy stands clearly revealed in its intellectual artifacts.  On that basis, he feared for the future of the West, now clearly sinking in a decadent, sensate swamp.  Though sensate thinkers envision a heaven on earth of some sorts, “Sorokin foresaw dark and violent times of bloodshed, cruelty, and misery, with humanity uprooted and the old, sweet humanist dreams swept away in a holocaust of change” (p. 352).  He warned that man would become increasingly secularized, living by such standards as “might makes right.”  Families would fragment and educational institutions fail, and life in general would become rather desperate and dismal.

In such desperate times, what’s needed, Sorokin said, “‘ is the man who can control himself and his lusts, who is compassionate to all his fellow men, who can see and seek for the eternal values of culture and society, and who deeply feels his unique responsibility in this universe'” (p. 361).  Such a man will hold things together in this time of troubles.  And fortunately, in time, a new ideational era will dawn.  There will be new St Pauls and St Augustines.  God, rather than man, will be worshiped and served.  A new creative epoch will dawn and all will be well–for a while.

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Jacques Barzun is one of the most highly-regarded academics of the past half century.  After a distinguished teaching career he became the provost at Columbia University where, despite administrative obligations, he continued his scholarly writing.  Now in his 90’s, Barzun provides us a broad interpretative historical work, From Dawn to Decadence:  500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (New York:  HarperCollinsPublishers, c. 2000).  Though he shares their concern for “decadence” and “culture,” unlike historicists such as Spengler and Toynbee, he finds no grand design or direction in history.  Rather, he says, he’s an historian, a “storyteller who tries to unfold the intricate plot woven by the actions of men, women, and teenagers” (p. xvi) whose ideas and actions shape the human story.   History, he argues, “cannot be a science; it is the very opposite in that its interest resides in he particulars” (p. 654).  And this book deals with particulars and more particulars!  Vignettes, excursions, parenthetical byways, make this book one to be tasted and savored without looking for grand explanations.  Bibliographical references, sparkling quotations in the margins, reminders of themes Barzun finds recurrent, “cross-sections” of cities in selected years, make this a volume well worth perusing.

Part One of Barzun’s account takes us from Luther to Newton, an epoch (1517-1688) dominated by religious questions, wherein “the West was torn apart.”  The Protestant Reformation, Jacob Burckhardt said, can be summed up as “an escape from discipline,” and it illustrates one of Barzun’s main themes:  EMANCIPATION.  Luther and his followers, stressing salvation for INDIVIDUALS, prescribed the demise of the civilization which birthed them.  Learned Humanists, such as Petrarch and Montaigne, Eutopians, such as More and Rabelais, also leave their mark on this era.  And then there are the scientists, Bacon and Copernicus, Descartes and Kepler taking the lead, whose breakthroughs signaled the beginnings of the modern world dominated by SCIENTISM. 

            Part Two takes us from the “monarchs revolution” in the 17th century to the French Revolution, “the Liberal Revolution,” in1789.  The place of the person in his world and the form of government which should guide it dominated ideas and events.  The Protestant Revolution had done “its best and its worst while destroying unified Christendom” and helped usher in “the Monarchical Revolution” personified by Louis XIV and the “reign of etiquette” at Versailles.  Machiavelli’s prescriptions and Hobbes’s Leviathan, proved portentous in articulating the political philosophy basic to the “age of absolutism.”  Rubens and Moliere set the artistic standards.  French philosophes, Bayle and Voltaire and Diderot, Franklin and Goethe, celebrated an “enlightenment” excelling everything hitherto done.

Part Three covers the era “from Faust, Part I, to ‘Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2” (1789-1920) deals with “Reason and Romanticism.”  During these years the great concern was the social and economic equality so evident in various socialist movements, oft touting PRIMITIVISM (the rejection of civilization), another major theme.  The Industrial Revolution prompted the Romantics to protest, with Emerson, that “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” but things in fact proliferated and the world forever changed.  Part Four, “From ‘The Great Illusion’ to ‘Western Civ Has got to Go,'” Jesse Jackson’s cheerleading chant at Stanford University 15 years ago, brings us to the present “decadence” Barzun discerns in our culture.  Labels often affixed to our “age” reveal much about it–Uncertainty, Nihilism, Anxiety.  The optimism of the Enlightenment, the confidence in progress characteristic of the 19th century, dissipated in the two great wars of the 20th century.  A “great switch” took place, leading to a decline in educational standards, relativism in ethics, absurdity in art, and welfare state paternalism in politics.

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A passing conversation with a colleague, Robert Smith, recently prodded me to re-read Jacques Ellul’s The Betrayal of the West (New York:  The Seabury Press, 1978).   Though much of the book (especially Ellul’s polemics), is dated, his central argument stands:  “The West represents values for which there is no substitute.  The end of the West today would mean the end of any possible civilization” (p. vii).  Indeed, no one else discovered “the astounding truth that is peculiar to man:  he is a maker of history, history understood as the expression of freedom and of man’s mastery of events, nature, and his own social life” (p. 32).   “The greatness of the West, then, consists in this, that it is the place where God has issued his final and most radical challenge to man, because it is the place where man has attained his greatest stature” (p. 76).

Ellul thus challenges those who routinely condemn Western Civilization.  To follow anti-Christian haters of the West such as Faucoult and Chomsky would plunge the world into a chaos caused by the loss of self-restraint which makes civilization possible.  Admittedly much evil has been done by  the West, and Ellul (in classics like The Technological Society)  has been one of its strongest critics.  But its failures do not render obsolete the West’s true grandeur.  Ellul especially analyzes the criticism proffered by champions of Islam.  They have generally assailed the West by comparing its principles with Westerners’ behavior but refused to do the same with Arab acts.  “Principles must be compared with principles (Islam and the gospel) and behavior with behavior (Muslim and Christian)” he says (p. 14).

In truth, much pro-Muslim rhetoric stems from the Marxist-shaped Left’s determination to undermine Western Civilization by exalting the “poor.”  Rather than proclaim salvation, Leftists preach a “gospel of the poor” which encourages them to resort to violence; rather than encourage humility, they exalt pride.  Still more:  the Left’s great love for the world’s “poor” is highly selective.  Little sympathy was expressed for the poor in Communist countries, though millions were brutally repressed.  Leftists such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre routinely attacked repression in South Africa or South Vietnam while blissfully endorsing Castro and Stalin!  Ellul argues that modern “poverty” is far more evident in public opinion than economics.  Truly poor people are folks such as the Kurds, are totally ignored despite their sufferings.

In Darwin’s God (Grand Rapids:  Brazos Press, c. 2001), Cornelius G. Hunter argues that Darwinism is preeminently a “negative theology,” a theodicy–a metaphysics developed to explain “the less-than-perfect side of nature” (p. 10)–rather than a rigorously scientific theory driven by empirical evidence.  The author, now completing a Ph.D. in biophysics at the University of Illinois, explores Darwin’s correspondence and personal life, finding therein personal explanations for his better-known published work.  Darwin repeatedly struggled with the tension between his Victorian image of God, as omnipotent and omni-benevolent, and the ruthless, bloody, imperfect natural world he observed.  His argument rests in a logical fallacy:  argumentum ad misercordium.  To appeal to pity–as when pro-abortionists lament unwanted pregnancies–obscures the issue with emotional mist.                  But the argument says:  if God were me, He’d have done things differently!  That, conviction drives Darwin’s desire to remove God from nature, leaving it the product of unguided natural selection.  Though he had no idea how to improve “the design of the crustacean or the flower,” he insisted God should have found a better way.  “God, according to Darwin, would not have made the brain or the bat that we find in nature, though he had little idea about how they actually worked” (p. 47).  A study of other evolutionists’ writings reveals equally facile shifts from metaphysical premises to “scientific” conclusions.  So the theory of evolution, Hunter thinks, relies less  upon proven predictions than the premise that a good God would ever create the world we see.

To demonstrate his hypothesis that natural selection, rather than God explains the world, Darwin relied extensively on “homologies” that suggest shared ancestry.  He (ignorantly) thought, for example, that certain vestigial organs we share with other primates–such as the appendix and coccyx–no longer serve any purpose and thus demonstrate an evolutionary process.  Ontogenetic parallels, from the zygote to the embryo to the adult creature, demonstrated (in Haeckel’s words) that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”  Neo-Darwinians uphold the same claim, pointing to the universal genetic code, indicating that all creatures are composed of the same genes, differently arranged.  But their claim that DNA demonstrates this has little basis.  Granted, all creatures are made up of basic genetic materials–just as they share the same atoms, reducible to subatomic particles.  The real question about DNA is its origin.  If tiny molecules are packed with incredibly complex information, where did it come from?  The genetic code is manifestly something received, so what or who sent it?  Precisely how did it develop?  Various highly speculative theories have been advanced to deal with this question, but no one really knows how information-less matter could inform complex living organisms.

Describing such “homologies,” all too many biologists think they have proven the evolutionary paradigm.  But there are, Hunter says, serious problems with the evidence!  And the argument is generally so general that it retrospectively explains everything, conforming to all kinds of disparate data.   It rarely makes falsifiable–and thus testable–predictions.  Homologies are trumpeted, but no clear, standard procedure is in place to actually compare specific creatures.  At times biologists compare structures which look alike.  Then, when the structures look different, they compare adjacent, positional similarities.  If neither of these work, they point to comparable developmental  patterns, even if the final results differ markedly.  Many alleged homologies are better understood as analogies.  Indeed many of them are false analogies–one of many logical fallacies subverting the Darwinian case!  Lots of things look alike.  Sharks and dolphins have broad tails, but that by itself hardly demonstrates common ancestry!  Nor does the fact that flies and crabs and zebras have eyes!

Yet another problem with the Darwinian argument flows out of the fallacy of equivocation.  The word “evolution” is variously used, taking on different meanings as the situation demands.  The word “species” may be based on physical similarity, niche adaptation, alleged evolutionary lineage, or half-a-dozen other factors.  It all depends on the biologist’s purpose.  The favorite move slips from documenting small-scale minor changes within a species, never denied by anyone, to large-scale assertions concerning the evolutionary nature of all of nature.  To move from a discussion of animal breeding, as Darwin did, to assertions concerning evolution through natural selection, is to use the word “evolution” equivocally.  It also subtly begs the question (the petitio principii fallacy).

Yet another fallacy endemic to much evolutionary discussion is post hoc ergo propter hoc–declaring that because something follows something it is caused by it.  A recent National Academy of Sciences publication asserts that the fossils demonstrate “evidence of systematic change through time–of descent with modification.”  Indeed the fossils reveal change through time.  But that hardly proves the Darwinian explanation of why things change.  In truth, the many “big bangs” of biology, especially evident in the abrupt appearance of all major phyla within a five million years during the Cambrian Era, and the “‘persistence of species once they appear'” (in the words of the noted paleontologist Niles Eldridge), seriously undermine one of the main evolutionary dogmas of gradual development over long periods of time.

To understand the dogmatic defense of  evolutionary theory, Hunter provides an overview of  “one long argument” which has sustained it for a century and a half.  It is metaphysical rather than scientific, most deeply an effort to deal with God rather than the world.  It was, interestingly enough, preceded by the theological “modernism” we recognize as an offshoot of the Enlightenment.  From David Hume to Rudolph Bultmann there’s been a determined effort to eliminate God from the natural world, thus excusing Him from any responsibility for its evil.  What Milton did for moral evil in Paradise Lost–to justify the ways of God to man–Darwin wanted to do for physical evil.  A good, wise God simply could not have made such a messy world!

Theological Liberalism, or Modernism, internalizes God.  He’s no longer the Creator of all that is–He’s a spiritual power within us.  Ancient Gnosticism and natural theology congealed in the Victorian modernism that ironically still shapes the views of Howard Van Till (something of a guru in evolutionary evangelical circles) and process thinkers such as John Haught.  Victorians like Darwin “could not believe that Christ the Savior could become involved with creation any more than the Gnostics could” (p. 130).  They imposed a metaphysical construct on the oft-incongruous data of the world.  Darwinism is not so much anti-religious as deeply religious.  It demands that God be the God we want Him to be–and if He’s not we banish him from creation.

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Jonathan Wells earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in religious studies and a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from the University of California at Berkeley, where he has also done post-doctoral work.  In Icons of Evolution:  Science or Myth?  Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2000) he looks at some favorite textbook illustrations, “proofs” for evolution, and shows how “students and the public are being systematically misinformed” (p. xii).  They’re being misled by scientists like Ernst Mayr, who asserted (illustrating the fallacies of ipse dixit and argumentum ad hominem) in the July 2000 issue of Scientific American:  “‘No educated person any longer questions the validity of the so-called theory of evolution, which we now know to be a simple fact.'”  Indeed, he averred:  “‘most of Darwin’s particular theses have been fully confirmed, such as that of common descent, the gradualism of evolution and his explanatory theory of natural selection'” (p. 229).

Critiquing such assertions, Wells looks first at the Miller-Urey Experiment, routinely cited to show how life emerged from a lightning-charged pre-biotic chemical soup.  In 1953, Stanley Miller, a graduate student, and his Ph.D. advisor, Harold Urey, sent some electrical current through a gaseous mixture they thought resembled the earth’s ancient atmosphere producing some organic compounds, including glycine and alanine, simple amino acids found in proteins.  Thenceforth, textbooks have declared that this experiment proves life could have spontaneously emerged from lifeless chemicals.  Despite such claims, however, geochemists now seriously doubt the earth’s early atmosphere resembled that Miller used in his experiment.  They think the atmosphere came from active volcanoes rather than drifting in as interstellar gas clouds, as Miller and Urey assumed.  Early earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere was quite unlike the gaseous mix Miller used.  “The conclusion is clear:  if the Miller-Urey experiment is repeated using a realistic simulation of the Earth’s primitive atmosphere, it doesn’t work” (p. 22).  Turning to a newer origin of life theory that relies on RNA, Wells argues that neither RNA or DNA could have resulted from entities that lacked them.  Esteemed researchers, such as Salk Institute’s Leslie Orgel, acknowledge that “‘we are very far from knowing whodunit'” (p. 24).  But Stanley Miller still trumpets his claim to fame.  And popular periodicals like National Geographic and biology textbooks repeat his claims.  A 1999 National Academy of Sciences cites the Miller experiment as proof that life evolved from lifeless matter.  When evidence discredits theory, ignore the evidence!  It’s an icon impossible to dethrone.

Wells then considers Darwin’s “tree of life,” the only illustration used in The Origin of Species, one of the most famous textbook illustrations of his theory of common ancestry.  Neo-Darwinians like Ernst Mayr insist all living organisms (fruit flies and human beings) must have come from a single original organism.  But the nicely shaped Darwinian tree, branching ever upward through time, cannot bear current data.  The record shows quite the opposite!  There’s no tree!   “Instead of starting with one or a few species that diverged gradually over millions of years into families, then orders, then classes, then phyla, the Cambrian starts with the abrupt appearance of many fully-formed phyla and classes of animals.  In other words, the highest levels of biological hierarchy appeared right at the start” (p. 35).  Darwin knew this, and admitted it contradicted his theory, but he believed subsequent geological investigation would unearth evidence for the gradual evolution of simple creatures in the Precambrian layers.  Eminent paleontologists now declare that “‘the single most spectacular phenomenon evident in the fossil record is the abrupt appearance and diversification of many living and extinct phyla’ near the beginning of the Cambrian” (p. 39).  Since that dramatic explosion, some phyla have become extinct, but no new phyla have evolved.  What we actually have is more a “tangled thicket” than a tree of life!  So an article in the 2000 Scientific American, entitled “Uprooting the Tree of Life,” concluded:  “Now new hypotheses, having final forms we cannot yet guess, are called for'” (p. 53).  But the tree still grows in textbooks!

One of the most frequentlyreproduced illustrations for Darwin’s hypothesis is “Haeckel’s embryos,” showing how the embryos of a fish, salamander, tortoise, chick, hog, calf, rabbit and human look alike in various stages of development.  Amazingly, for decades biologists knew that Haeckel, had faked his drawings!  Soon after the drawings appeared more than a century ago, biologists criticized them for their inaccuracies.  But the pictures met a need to visually persuade naive viewers.  Even the celebrated Stephen Jay Gould knew the truth but fed the fraud to his students until 1999, when another biologist called him to account.  Wells carefully demonstrates the drawings’ distortions.  And he also shows that college textbooks still print Haeckel’s pious fraud.

Other chapters deal with “Archaeopteryx:  The Missing Link,” England’s peppered moths, Darwin’s finches, fruit fly research, fossil records for horses, and the link between apes and man.  The peppered moths routinely appeared in evolutionary textbooks, allegedly showing how they adapted by to industrial pollution.  Now we know that the moths didn’t really change, but the population of lighter colored moths declined for a while and has now resurged.  We also know that evolutionists manipulated the evidence to “prove” their theory–pasting dead moths on tree trunks when they never rested thereon in the wild!  Textbooks still point to Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos as great demonstrations of his theory.  Recent research seriously discredits this view.  Finches’ beaks do oscillate, responding to droughts, but they return to a basic pattern.  It also seems that there may have been more, not fewer, finch species in the Galapagos and they may be merging rather than diverging.  Intensive research with fruit flies has demonstrated that strange flies (like two-headed calves) result from induced mutations.  Yet, Wells argues, nothing like “evolution through natural selection” has been demonstrated.

Finally, Wells looks at “the ultimate icon,” the evidence connecting man and ape-like ancestors.  What we actually find is a tiny collection of bones used to portray human evolution.  “‘One anthropologist has compared the task to that of reconstructing the plot of War and Peace with 13 randomly selected pages'” (p. 220).  Henry Gee, Chief Science Writer for Nature, noted in 1999 that “‘the intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent'” (p. 220).  No one really knows, for example, where to put Neanderthals into the human story.

Having discussed the “icons” of evolution, Wells then provides an appendix that evaluates currently used biology textbooks, most of which promote the evolutionary agenda.  Another appendix suggests these texts carry warning labels, such as:  “WARNING:  The Miller-Urey experiment probably did not simulate the Earth’s early atmosphere; it does not demonstrate how life’s building-blocks originated” (p. 259).  Then he fills 60 pages with extensive and detailed “research notes” that provide access to his sources and document the careful, current nature of his endeavor.

In Icons of Evolution, says Dean H. Kenyon, long a Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University who co-authored Biochemical Predestination, “Jonathan Wells has done us all–the scientific community, educators, and the wider public–a great service.  . . . .  he has brilliantly exposed the exaggerated claims and deceptions that have persisted in standard textbook discussions of biological origins for many decades, in spite of contrary evidence.  These claims have been so often repeated that they seem unassailable–that is, until one reads Wells’s book'” (backcover).

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Taking a totally different approach, John F. Haught, a professor of theology at Georgetown University, has written God After Darwin:  A Theology of Evolution (Boulder, CO:  Westview Press, c. 2000), arguing for a form of theistic evolution rooted in process theology.  Haught finds in the vision of  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin a master key to the cosmos–a key with some haunting Hegelian configurations.  He insists the Darwinian paradigm is absolutely true and, accordingly, we must redesign our image of God to comply with it.

Haught’s thesis is clear, though riddled with contradictions.  “Darwin has gifted us,” he says, “with an account of life whose depth, beauty and pathos–when seen in the context of the larger cosmic epic of evolution– expose us afresh to the raw reality of the sacred and to a resoundingly meaningful universe” (p. 2).  But just a few pages earlier he declares that Darwin has delivered us from concern with “order and design,” . . .  “that we must look beyond design” (p. x).  He later sees an “obvious directionality” (p. 129) in the cosmos, though how one can see the direction unless it’s intended he fails to make clear.  He finds the messy world of evolution so appallingly wasteful and cruel that he cannot believe God would have designed it, but then he later declares there’s a “beauty” everywhere evident bearing witness to God’s tender wooing.  To declare that the universe is meaningful, directional, beautiful, but to also declare there is no order and design anywhere, leaves one wondering at Haught’s illogical wandering!

Subsequently we read that Darwin’s “dangerous idea” dissolves pious illusions concerning a reasonable universe pre-planned by any Divine Designer.  The ancient creedal confession that “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,” no longer holds in Darwin’s world.  But we need not toss out God, as do strictly naturalistic evolutionists such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins.   We just need to redesign Him, taking as our key the “kenosis” text in Philippians and the Taoist understanding of the Tao as an ultimate void which mysteriously draws things into the future.  God, Haught says, suffers with creation, develops with it, enticing it to develop in rich and rewarding directions.

Haught’s God is not the Prime Mover, the First Cause, from which all comes.  Rather He is an Omega Point toward which everything goes (though never quite reaching).  Haught proposes a “metaphysics of the future” rooted in personal experience, which he assures us reaches out to an absolute reality of some sort.  It’s what the French Marxist Ernst Block called “not yet being.”  So we find God variously described as both evident and hidden, powerful and powerless.  Consequently:  “The ‘power of the future’ is the ultimate metaphysical explanation of evolution” (p. 90).  To the extent we have any clue concerning it, the future stands revealed in the victims, the poor and oppressed of our world.  In passages such as this, one realized how much of Haught’s treatise is a species of utopian Modernisn, a “vision” designed to align us with his socio-political convictions.

Haught’s at his best refuting the claims of the mindlessly materialistic version of evolution espoused by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins.  Drawing upon Whitehead, he shows the importance of “subjectivity,” of non-material realities we cannot avoid observing in the marvelous world around us.  He also makes a cogent case for an ecological ethic, rooted in a Christian worldview, to rectify the alarming environmental deterioration we confront.  From the standpoint of orthodox Christianity, however, Haught represents the same threat ancient Gnostics posed the Early Church.  We find no “God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.”  Christ’s Incarnation is portrayed as God becoming immersed in the physical world, deifying it through suffering.  Resurrection, for both Jesus and us, means plunging more fully into and being absorbed by the marvelously evolving cosmos.  Anyone familiar with Teilhard’s thought understand Haught’s.  And it’s clear why Pope Pius XII and the Vatican proscribed Teilhard’s musings.

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Having earlier read and relished the writing of Richard M. Weaver, most accessible in Ideas Have Consequences, I was delighted to recently acquire In Defense of Tradition:  Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1963 (Indianapolis:  Liberty Fund, c. 2000), edited with a thorough Introduction by Ted J. Smith III.  The materials are rich, extensive (800 pp.), and inexpensive!

In the first of eight sections, “Life and Family,” we learn something about the young North Carolinian whose academic trajectory led him from the University of Kentucky (where he joined the American Socialist Party in 1934) to Vanderbilt University, where he soon jettisoned his sophomoric Marxism and went through a kind of “religious conversion” to the “Church of Agrarianism” under the influence of  the “Southern Agrarians” who so helped shape the nation’s literature in the pre-WWII era.  This “little band in Tennessee, made up of a few of the Fugitives and some others,” Weaver said, ” was almost the only force that challenged intellectually the presumptions of scientific positivism” (p. 758).  One of them, John Crowe Ransom, the author of God Without Thunder, taught Weaver and proved particularly influential in his development.

Looking back on this era, twenty years later, he wrote a key essay entitled “Up from Liberalism,” detailing his intellectual liberation from one of the dogmas of his era.  “The chief result of what I now think of as my re-education,” he wrote, “has been a complete disenchantment with liberalism that was the first stage of my reflective life.  Liberalism is the refuge favored by intellectual cowardice, because the essence of the liberal’s position is that he has no position” (p. 49).  Thus the “liberal” who blithely defends individual rights when they are popular quickly turns totalitarian when will-to-power polices become voguish.  “In times of peace, the liberal is often a shouter for pacifism, but let something he dislikes appear upon the horizon and he is the first to invoke the use of armed force.  In education, he believes in the natural goodness of the child and abhors the idea of corporal discipline, but he believes in spanking nations with atomic bombs until their will is broken” (p. 49).

Rejecting Liberalism, Weaver crafted a “Critique of Modernism” which exposed the flaws of its underlying scientism, deeply rooted in the dogma of Francis Bacon which treasures “knowledge as power” and freely cavalierly authorizes doing whatever one can do simply because it’s feasible.  Resisting its imperatives, engaged as an English professor at the University of Chicago, he treasured the power of language, cherished the civilizing power of the humanities, and worked hard to uphold the “liberal arts” tradition in higher education, where constant pressure to make students’ studies “practical” and “profitable” had undermined that traditional notion of education.

Modernism, Weaver argued, has precipitated a “crisis of the first magnitude,” preeminently evident in “a decay of belief in standards” (p. 98).  This is amply evident in the widespread embrace of relativism.  Weaver, italicizing his words for emphasis, provides us one of the most thorough definitions I’ve encountered:  “Relativism denies outright that there are any absolute truths, any fixed principles, or any standards beyond what one may consider his convenience.  A theory is true only relative to the point of view of the individual, or to the time in which it is asserted, or to the circumstances which prevail at the moment.  Truth is forever contingent and evolving, which means, of course, that you can never lay hands on it.  Relativism is actually the abdication of truth” (p. 99).

Illustrating his definition, Weaver cites such influential 20th century worldview architects as Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, who said:  “‘A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.’  And the late Chief Justice Vinson observed the following:  ‘Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that all concepts are relative:  a name, a phrase, a standard [and I may call attention to his use of the term “standard”] has meaning only when associated with the considerations which give birth to the nomenclature'” (p. 99).  Thinkers who embrace relativism, however, will ultimately resort to brute force, for nothing else proves decisive when ethical and epistemological absolutes disappear.

“Education” is the focus in section three of this volume, followed by “rhetoric and sophistic,” and  “the humanities, literature and language,”  in sections four and five.  Herein we find some of Weaver’s most profound insights and proposals.  In particular, he provides an incisive critique–indeed a ringing rejection–of John Dewey’s educational philosophy, which is still the guiding light for American educationists.  In shaping what is called “progressive education,” Dewey “applied his talents and longevity to wrecking the educational philosophy which had been built up through twenty-five centuries of classical and Christian experience” (p. 249).  His views have subverted “the discipline which has been used through the centuries to make the human being a more aware, resourceful, and responsible person” (p. 190).  Rather than prepare students to discern and live according to what’s real, Dewey hoped to condition them for “some kind of projected socialist commonwealth, where everybody has so conformed to a political pattern that there really are no problems any more” (p. 189).

Dewey and his disciples seek to use schools for political ends.  If you question this, check out the leading objectives outlined at the 2001 national convention of the National Education Association.  Dewey envisioned the schools as tools “for the implementing of social democracy or democratic socialism, whichever arrangement of the phrase you prefer” (p. 215).  Whereas the classical tradition valued learning simply as learning, to progressive educators academic “skills” and personal development have value solely insofar as they contribute to the making of a better world.

In a remarkably concise and incisive section, Weaver details the “chief assumptions and tenets” of progressive education:

1.  First, as to knowledge, there is no such thing as a body of knowledge which reflects the structure of

reality and which everyone therefore needs to learn.  Knowledge is viewed as an instrumentality which is

true or false according to the way it is applied to  concrete situations or the way it serves the purposes of

the individual.  Since most of these educators have embraced the notion that the essence of the world is

change, there is no final knowledge about anything.  The truths of yesterday are the falsehoods of today,

and the truths of today will be the falsehoods of tomorrow.

2.  This being so, the object of education is not to teach knowledge but to ‘teach students.’  What this

means is that everything should be adapted to the child as child,  to the youth as youth and to the

particular group according to its limitations.  There are no ideals or standards of performance which

these are bound to measure themselves by or to respect.

3.  As a corollary of the above principle, the child should be encouraged to follow his own desires in

deciding what he should study, and what aspects of what subjects, and at what times.

4.  The teacher must not think of himself as being in authority, because the very idea of authority is bad.

5.  The student should never be made  afraid of anything connected with the school.  Marks and competition

are evil because they result in feelings of inferiority and superiority, which are ‘undemocratic.’

6.  The mind is not to be exalted over the senses:  democracy requires that sensory and  ‘activist’ learning

would be valued on a par with intellectual learning.  The mentally slow or lazy are not to be made to feel

that they are lacking; it is better to impugn the whole tradition of intellectual education than to hurt the

feelings of the less bright and  the indolent.

7.  Consequently there should be less education through symbols like language and figures and more

through using the hands on concrete objects.  It is more important to make  maps than to learn, them,

said John Dewey, the grand prophet of this revolutionary movement.

8.  The general aim is to train the student so that he will adjust not to the now-existing society, as is

sometimes inferred from their words, but to a society conceived as a thoroughly secular social

democracy.  (pp. 491-492).

Opposing such an apostasy from authentic education, Weaver insisted that a good education is “education for goodness.”  Central to this educational philosophy should be the perennial questions “what is man?” and “what should he become?”  If he is more than a higher animal, contra Dewey,  man’s education must engage his real self, his soul.  If he is free to make moral decisions, to cooperate in the formation of character, his education must be more than social adjustment, preparation for a slot in his world.  Consequently, “education’s first loyalty is to the truth” (p. 193),  and it “has a major responsibility to what we think of as objectively true.  But it also has a major responsibility to the person.  We may press this even further and say that education must regard two things as sacred:  the truth, and the personality that is to be brought into contact with it” (pp. 193-194).   

                To know the truth, to live rightly in accord with it, also means speaking and writing the truth.  In an essay every teacher should digest, “To Write the Truth,” Weaver explains how a fateful decision took place in the 14th century when rhetoricians replaced vere loqui with recte loqui.  To speak truly or to speak rightly–that is the question.  In time recte loqui descended to utiliter loqui–useful speaking.  Consequently, modern teachers often assume the ancient Sophists’ mantles, teaching students how to use words in order to pursue personal or ideological agendas, “making speech the harlot of the arts” (p. 230).

Such harlotry pervades relativism, one of the major threats to our culture.  It emerges from the darkness in the subtle but profound prevarication of words’ meanings.  “We mark a growing tendency among certain groups of people to refer to alcoholics, moral delinquents, and even criminals as ‘sick’ people.  The violence that this does to the legitimate meaning of ‘sick’ is easily seen” (p. 402).  Moral responsibility disappears in the smokescreen of such prevarication.  Still more, and most importantly:  “It has always been thought that society is the victim of the criminal.  But now it is being implied, through a tendentious use of language, that the criminal is the victim of society, which did not take appropriate steps to keep him from getting ‘sick.’  But this verbal trick, what was formerly considered worthy of punishment is held up for indulgent sympathy” (p. 403).

Vere loqui!  Language truly matters!  In John Milton’s memorable words:  “‘Nor do I think it a matter of little moment whether the language of a people be vitiated or refined, whether the popular idiom be erroneous or correct. . . .  It is the opinion of Plato, that changes in the dress and habits of the citizens portend great changes and commotions in the state; and I am inclined to believe that when the language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin or their degradation.  For what do terms used without skill or meaning, which are at once corrupt and misapplied, denote but a people listless, supine, and ripe for servitude?  On the contrary, we have never heard of any people or state which has not flourished in some degree of prosperity as long as their language has retained its elegance and its purity'” (p. 388).

Should we, like Weaver, wish to promote vere loqui, we must begin by helping students rightly name what is real.  As Plato so wisely shows us in Cratylus, names enable us to teach (didaskalikon) and distinguish aspects of reality.  Teachers know how to name what is, to provide words which unveil the essence of what is.  Objective truth, truth regarding a real world apart from us, must exist of we can teach anything at all.  Consequently:  “There are two postulates basic to our profession:  the first is that one man can know more than another, and the second is that such knowledge can be imparted.  Whoever cannot accept both should retire from the profession and renounce the intention of teaching anyone anything” (p. 233).

Weaver also helps us understand how to construct an argument, to reason in accord with what classical thinkers labeled four topoi, or topics.  First, we sometimes rely on definitions, arguing from genus, accurately identifying what is.  Second, we sometimes argue from consequences, showing the nature of something as it is displayed in what occurs.  Third, we reason from metaphors and analogies, similarities and differences, understanding what is unknown in terms of what is more immediately known.  Fourth, we rely upon authority, as when we follow a skilled performer’s example, or trust an older person with experience in a certain area, or believe the information in an instruction manual or holy text.

In section six, “politics,” Weaver demonstrates the reason he was one of the guiding lights for the combative conservatism highly evident in William F. Buckley’s National Review, for which Weaver regularly wrote book reviews.  By mid-century, “liberalism” had clearly triumphed in significant spheres of America’s public life.  As in education, John Dewey, was its great guru, and his devotees, trumpeting their views in the pages of the Nation and the New Republic, “have undermined the basis of discipline and disparaged the authority of knowledge.  No man can estimate the ravages that have flowed from this misguided philosopher” (p. 471).  Spokesmen for the regnant intelligentsia “are not afraid to attack those things which our forefathers regarded with deepest veneration–the concept of truth, the feeling of patriotism, the idea of personal loyalty, the belief that there are great men” (p. 470).  As radicals, they sought to make their will their law and impose it on their world.  Knowing what they wanted, they wanted to make everyone else fit into their fantasies for progress and “social justice.”

As in education, Weaver proposes realism as the political antidote to modern errors.  “It is my contention,” he said, in one of the best definitions I’ve encountered, “that a conservative is a realist, who believes that there is a structure of reality independent of his own will and desire.  He believes that there is a creation which was here before him, which exists now not by just his sufferance, and which will be here after he’s gone.  This structure consists not merely of the great physical world but also of many laws, principles, and regulations which control human behavior.  Though this reality is independent of the individual, it is not hostile to him.  It is in fact amenable by him in many ways, but it cannot be changed radically and arbitrarily.  This is the cardinal point.  The conservative holds that man in this world cannot make his will his law without any regard to limits and to the fixed nature of things” (p. 477).

Conversely, modern liberalism, with its collectivist commitment to the welfare state, endeavors to improve upon reality, to re-vision and re-construct things, above all making life more comfortable for everyone.  The liberal “shows a definite antagonism toward all strenuous ideals of life.  The code of the warrior, of the priest, and even of the scholar, denying the self for transcendent ends, stands in the new lexicon as anti-Liberal.  . . . .  ‘For they are moderate also even in virtue–because they want comfort,’ says Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra” (p. 548).  It follows, then, that individuals are used (generally by subjecting them to a variety of ever-burgeoning bureaucracies ) as means to an exalted end, a “great society” of some sort.

In Weaver’s judgment, “the chief enemy of freedom and virtue (and the inseparability of these constitutes his chief affirmative point) is the Liberal-collectivist dogma, which is summed up [by Frank Meyer] in a brilliant paragraph:   Emotionally, it prefers psychoanalysis to the dark night of the soul, “adjustment” to achievement, security to freedom.  It preaches ‘the end of ideology,’ admires experts and fears prophets, fears above all commitment to value transcending the fact” (p. 533).

Healthy antidotes to the illusions of liberalism include the study of  history, dealt with in section seven, a subject which engaged Weaver’s scholarly attention throughout his life, and an appreciation for his beloved region, the South, the focus of the eighth and final section.  Due to its disinterest in history and contempt for the South, Weaver believed, “Liberalism is the death-wish of modern civilization.  In its incapacity for commitment, its nihilistic approach, and its almost pathological fear of settled principle, Liberalism operates to destroy everything and conserve nothing” (p. 715).

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Gun-control advocates generally assume the intuitive “certainty” that guns per se encourage crime–so reducing the availability of guns would certainly reduce crime. However, in More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c. 1998), John R. Lott, Jr., demonstrates the converse. As a careful scholar, determined to demonstrate his conclusions with empirical data, Lott is distressed by the sensationalism surrounding this subject. When uninformed emotionalism (such as Rosy O’Donnell’s) gains a hearing in the nation, a citizenry needing the truth suffers. What we need is the facts! And Lott gives us facts. He has made his data available to other scholars, and academics at 24 of the nation’s finest universities have validated his conclusions. Lott lays out precise statistics and documentation–both time-series (1977-1992) and cross-sectional (all 3,054 counties in the U.S.)–noting all the variables and taking into account important regressions. He asserts that “This book is the first to study the questions of deterrence using these data” (p. 25), and it is, many analysts believe, the finest scientific study available.

When he first dared publish his research, in refereed journals, Lott was surprised by the antipathy his evidence aroused. Personal attacks, false accusations, lies and propaganda, rather than reasonable discussion, were the modus operandi of the gun-control forces. He discovered, to his dismay, “how much effort goes into deliberately ignoring certain findings in order to deny them news coverage” (p. 128) and then to discredit someone like himself who perseveres to make his findings public. He was also shocked by how virtually all the media promoted the gun-control advocates and misrepresented the facts he marshaled.

For the truth is simple: armed citizens deter crime. “The difference [between states] is quite striking: violent crimes are 81 percent higher in states without nondiscretionary laws. For murder, states that ban the concealed carrying of guns have murder rates 127 percent higher than states with the most liberal concealed-carry laws” (p. 47). Whereas the media dash to cover an accidental shooting or gun-related crime, they rarely report the frequency with which guns are used defensively to deter crime, to protect lives. “If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively [estimates range from 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 times a year], they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack” (p. 3). States or counties which grant permits for concealed firearms have enjoyed reduced incidences of crime. “Allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns reduces violent crimes, and the reductions coincide very closely with the number of concealed-handgun permits issued. Mass shootings in public places are reduced when law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry concealed handguns” (p. 19). Indeed, were concealed-carry laws enacted nation-wide, “murders in the United States would have declined by about 1,400” (p. 54).

Consequently, “Preventing law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns does not end violence; it merely makes victims more vulnerable to attack” (pp. 164-65). “In the final analysis, one concern unites us all: Will allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns save lives? The answer is yes, it will” (p. 165). While written for a scholarly audience and packed with statistics and learned qualifications, this book is the finest–and most widely-cited–treatise on this subject.

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Relying largely upon Lott’s study, Richard Poe makes the same case, for a more popular audience, in The Seven Myths of Gun Control: Reclaiming the Truth About Guns, Crime, and the Second Amendment (Roseville, CA: Forum, c. 2001). He confesses that is “not a hunter, a gun hobbyist, or a gun enthusiast” (p. xii). As a journalist, however, he writes with the conviction that the Constitution needs defending, and the Second Amendment is a critical lynchpin, essential to that document.

Myth One, alleges that “guns increase violent crime.” Poe reminds us that America is hardly a “violent” nation. Currently the United States doesn’t even appear in the top ten of industrialized nations. It’s totalitarian nations such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, nations with strict gun-bans, that ruthlessly slaughtered their own citizens. Rather than fear guns in the hands of free people, we should fear governments intent on controlling them. Professor Rudolph Rummel, in Death by Government, estimated that governments killed 170 million in the 20th century. Cuba and China, with their strict gun-bans, are the truly violent nations! In fact, “gun control” laws preceded genocide in most of these nations. Short of genocide, nations with strict gun-control laws are, in fact, riddled with violence. Criminals with guns fear little when citizens are disarmed. Among industrialized nations, Australia (having recently abolished the right to own guns) is now the world’s most violent, with some 30 percent of its residents having suffered violent crime. England (which, under Tony Blair, has made gun ownership and use virtually impossible) now ranks second. Amazingly, a crime victims survey (made public in February 2001) indicates that “Twenty-six percent of English citizens–roughly one quarter of the population–have been victimized by violent crime” (p. 101).

Certainly there are nations (such as Japan, where it’s illegal to own firearms) with strict gun-control laws that do not suffer much violence. But Japan is a “police state” whose citizens enjoy few of the civil liberties Americans take for granted. On the other hand, there are nations (such as Switzerland, where guns are everywhere) which have little violence and grant extensive civil liberties. Switzerland has fewer murders and robberies than England, which bans guns. Over the centuries, the Swiss learned that a free people must be armed, ever ready to defend their freedoms. Machiavelli, in 1532, observed that “the Swiss are most armed and most free.” All Swiss men are militiamen, trained to fight. Hitler planned to conquer Switzerland but thought otherwise when he calculated the cost of invading a nation where every man was armed and ready die defending his home. America’s Founding Fathers found Switzerland a suitable model for the new nation. John Adams, in his A Defense of the Constitution, praised the Swiss militia. George Mason thought the citizen soldier in Switzerland “preserves the Freedom and Independence of the Swiss Cantons, in the midst of the most powerful Nations” (p. 76). The Second Amendment, reserving to the people the right to bear arms, reflected an early confidence that an armed, independent citizenry would keep the nation free.

The second “myth” is that “pulling a gun on a criminal endangers you more than the criminal.” Ordinary citizens, in fact, routinely protect themselves with firearms. Criminals, generally cowards, avoid “victims” who may be armed. When a confrontation occurs, in 98 percent of the incidents no shots are fired. In only one percent of the cases does the criminal disarm the gun owner. Only 30 innocent people, mistaken for intruders, are killed in a given year. “Indeed, the data show conclusively that police are far more likely to shoot the wrong person than private citizens are” (p. 106).

Myth number three declares that “guns pose a special threat to children,” a mantra routinely chanted by Rosy O’Donnell and her cohorts in the Million Moms’ March. It’s endlessly lamented that 4,000 “children” are killed each year–but those “children” include gang-bangers who are 18 or 19 years old! In fact, fatal gun accidents involving children is at an all-time low. Only 200 children under the age of 15 die of gunshot wounds. Far more are killed on bicycles or drown in swimming pools.

The fourth myth insists that “the second amendment applies only to militiamen.” This stance, recently repudiated by the formidable Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Law School–probably the most respected constitutional scholar in the nation–still pervades the anti-gun argument. The Second Amendment, in fact, means what it says: citizens have a right to bear arms. Dictatorships, of course, grant soldiers the right to bear arms! Aristotle recognized that “those who possess and can wield arms are in a position to decide whether the constitution is to continue or not.” To pretend that America’s Constitution only grants the right to bear arms to soldiers seems ludicrous. The Constitution’s Framers, as is amply evident in the documents available to us, intended to protect everyone’s right to be armed! “The great object is that every man be armed,” said Patrick Henry. “To preserve liberty,” Richard Henry Lee declared, “it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them” (p. 148).

Myth five claims “the second amendment is an obsolete relic of the frontier era.” Rather, Poe argues, it’s as relevant as any part of the Constitution. For one thing, police cannot protect people. There are far too few of them to deter crime. Their real task is to apprehend criminals after crimes have been committed. Rarely do police, responding to a 911 call, arrive before the criminal has departed. So if you want to be defended, prepare to defend yourself! Policemen, by a significant majority, support the right to citizens to own guns and defend themselves. Equally important, especially in the light of what happened in Germany and Russia, armed citizens resist dictatorial governments. Hubert Humphrey, the Democrats’ 1968 presidential candidate, said, “The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible” (p. 163).

“We should treat guns the same way we treat cars, requiring licenses for all users,” is the sixth myth needing deconstruction. Granting government the right to license guns would easily lead (as it has in some cities) to arbitrary and corrupt licensing procedures. Too often the rich and powerful (such as Rosy O’Donnell and Senator Diane Feinstein) easily obtain gun permits for themselves or their bodyguards, while ordinary citizens find themselves swamped in bureaucratic minutia and endless delays. Licensing and registration never help apprehend criminals, who naturally find their guns from other sources.

Finally, it’s just not true that “reasonable gun-control measures are no threat to law-abiding gun owners.” The Journal of American the Medical Association, in its August 2000 issue, acknowledged that there is “‘no evidence that implementation of the Brady Act was associated with a reduction in homicide rates.’ On the contrary, many women have been raped and killed, because the Brady Law and other mandated waiting periods prevented them from obtaining guns when they needed them'” (p. 199). Publicly, Sarah Brady and gun-control advocates calmly assure the public they simply want to keep guns out of the hands of irresponsible people. Behind the scenes, however, groups such as Handgun Control Inc. seek to ban all guns. Their deliberately Fabian strategy seeks to slowly, through mounting pressure, diminish the right to bear arms until it disappears.

Having dealt with the seven myths, Poe concludes his treatise with an epilogue entitled “the end of manhood.” Underlying the gun-control controversy, “the real question” is “whether or not we wish to remain a warrior society” (p. 205). A confluence of cultural currents threatens the very notion of manhood. Leftists of all sorts celebrate the “soft male,” kindly but spineless. Radical feminists, especially, seek to emasculate men, ever attacking anything smelling of “patriarchy.” Gun control, to such women, is a way to control male sexuality as well as violence. Many feminists, inspired by Betty Frieden, implicitly embrace her hard-line (Stalinist) communism which condemned “male chauvinism” decades before it became a feminist byword. Carol Gilligan, one of the most influential feminists, has established a gender studies program at Harvard University, one purpose of which is to undermine capitalism! “‘Raise boys like we raise girls,’ advises Gloria Steinem'” (p. 243).

Poet Robert Bly, a leftist who awakened to the male predicament and wrote Iron John declared, “‘The fading of the warrior contributes to the collapse of civilized society. A man who cannot defend his own space cannot defend women and children'” (p. 210). Lest we become such, Poe urges us to resist the “seven myths of gun control” and preserve our rights as a people to bear arms.

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Lifting a title from Patrick Henry’s words: “The great object is, that every man be armed,” Stephen P. Halbrook, a law professor who has specialized in Second Amendment law, wrote That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (Oakland: The Independent Institute, c. 1994) providing us with a detailed examination of the Second Amendment. As one might anticipate, this is an erudite treatise, filled with historical data, legal citations and exacting discussions of court decisions.

He first explains that the Founders of this Republic understood what they were doing. They wanted to avoid the aristocratic, autocratic kind of government espoused by Plato. They followed the “libertarian tradition” of Aristotle and Cicero, establishing a constitutional government. To Aristotle, “‘The whole constitutional set-up in intended to neither democracy nor oligarchy but mid-way between the two–what is sometimes called “polity,” the members of which are those who bear arms'” (p. 11). To Cicero, the great defender of Rome’s Republic, the armed citizen the best (and probably last) hope for its resurgence.

This “libertarian tradition” found its English advocates in thinkers such as James Harrington and John Locke, who regarded self-defense as a natural right! Montesquieu shared his view, upholding “the natural right to self-defense.” For “‘Who does not see that self-defense is a duty superior to every precept?'” (p. 34). England’s common-law, as evident in the classic works of Coke and Blackstone, also yoked the right to bear arms and personal freedom. From the Common-law, Locke, and Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Patrick Henry absorbed many of the ideas which proved formative as the United States was established.

During the War for Independence, “undisciplined” colonial militias, filled with armed citizens, ultimately out-fought the British infantry. A Pennsylvanian, Tench Coxe, praised the militia, happy that “‘THE POWERS OF THE SWORD ARE IN THE HANDS OF THE YEOMANRY OF AMERICA FROM SIXTEEN TO SIXTY. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible‘” (p. 68). Patriots such as Coxe and Richard Henry Lee, in fact, vigorously argued against any standing army. In Lee’s judgment, “‘to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them‘” (p. 72). When the Constitution was submitted to the various states, New Hampshire first ratified it, recommending “that it include a bill of rights, including a provision that ‘Congress shall never disarm any citizen, unless such are or have been in actual rebellion'” (p. 75). Following such recommendations, the House of Representatives added the Bill of Rights in its first session. Elbridge Gerry, ever vigilant for liberty, insisted the Second Amendment was included primarily to protect people from dictatorial government.

Jurists in the antebellum era sustained this view. As William Rawle indicated, “‘No clause in the Constitution could be any rule of construction be conceived to give top congress a power to disarm the people'” (p. 91). Joseph Storey agreed: “‘The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of the republic; since it offers a strong moral check against usurpation and arbitrary power of the rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them'” (p. 93). Since the Civil War, the Supreme Court has generally followed Storey’s precept and upheld right to bear arms as existing “from time immemorial.” “Militia” has been understood to be the “whole people armed, and not a select group” (i.e. the National Guard). State and federal court decisions, however, have taken a variety of positions, many times curtailing the right to bear arms. Only time will tell how the Second Amendment will fare in the hands of the Supreme Court, which provides final guidance for this nation’s judicial system.

Replete with extensive documentation, restrained and cautious in its assertions, That Every Man Be Armed is an extraordinarily valuable compendium of information.

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For anyone interested in primary sources, there’s a handy collection of documents, The Second Amendment Primer: A Citizen’s Guidebook to the History, Sources and Authorities for the Constitutional Guarantee of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (Birmingham: Palladium Press, c. 1996) by Les Adams, a lawyer and publisher. In his “Foreword,” Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch notes that “in February 1982, few could have foreseen the wholesale political attacks on the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms which have occurred in the years since” (p. 1). But the attacks have come, and those concerned with defending their liberties, including the right to bear arms need the knowledge to do so.

Thus Adams provides quotations, from history, ancient and modern. The historical evidence, the 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria noted, reveals that laws forbidding the carrying arms “disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes” (p. 34). (Criminals, as is evident in Australia, England, and Washington, D.C., easily obtain guns.) Then nearly half of the book presents “appendices,” recent articles from legal scholars discussing the Second Amendment. They generally argue, with Jeffrey Snyder, that “Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is the master, not the servant of the people” (p. 244). Reduced to a bumper sticker, “If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns” (p. 204). And this, of course, was not the intent of the Constitution‘s Founders! Meticulous notes and extensive bibliography provide readers every opportunity to investigate the book’s selections.

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Dietrich von Hildebrand

In The Soul of a Lion: Dietrich von Hildebrand (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, c. 2000), Alice von Hildebrand helps us understand one of the 20th century’s great Christians. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in his “Foreword” to the book, says: “Dietrich von Hildebrand was exceptional in many ways. His extensive writings on Christian philosophy, spiritual theology, and in defense of the Church’s teaching, place him among the great thinkers of the twentieth century. His steadfast and determined opposition to totalitarianism, whether in the form of National Socialism or Marxist Leninism, a conviction that would cost him greatly during his life illustrates the profound clarity of his moral vision and his willingness to suffer for what he knew was true” (p. 9).

Born in 1889 to a prominent, aristocratic family in Florence, Italy, von Hildebrand enjoyed all the comforts and entitlements of his class. His father, Adolf, was a highly-esteemed sculptor whose work still shimmers in some Munich fountains. Though loving and cultivated, Dietrich’s parents had no religious concern and espoused a genially aesthetic, relativistic morality. Even as a child, however, he took an interest in religion and ethics as well as art. When he was 14, discussing morality with one of his sisters, he rejected her notion that “moral values were purely relative, depending upon the time, place, and circumstances in which men found themselves” (p. 59). Bested by her brother’s logic, she enlisted her father to settle the issue. When Adolf attributed Dietrich’s position to his youthfulness, “The boy was piqued, and answered, ‘Father, if you have no better argument than my age to offer against my position, then your own position must rest on very shaky grounds'” (pp. 59-60).

Such intellectual independence and desire for truth thereafter stamped Dietrich von Hildebrand. In his university studies, he focused on philosophy–a decision he made at the age of 15 as a result of reading (in Greek) some of Plato’s dialogues. Philosophy, for him, was truly a vocation, a calling, and two of his professors– Max Scheler and Edmund Husserl–deeply influenced him. In Scheler he found a profound thinker who warmly embraced Dietrich on a personal level, and who “represented quite another ‘world’ from that of the other professors. He was much more cultivated, and had a much richer contact with being” (p. 70). Scheler (though himself hardly a faithful representative of it) also pointed him to the truth of the Christian Faith. Von Hildebrand’s conversion to Catholicism resulted, in part, from conversations with Scheler.

Reading Husserl’s Logical Investigations in 1907 opened up another vista for von Hildebrand. “It was for me like experiencing a sunrise,” he remembered. “Skepticism and psychologism were refuted once and for all, and Husserl’s book opened up the blissful promise that the human mind could attain absolute certainty” (p. 78). So he transferred to the University of Gottingen to personally study with the father of phenomenology. Unlike Scheler, however, Husserl was not very impressive. His lectures were poorly prepared and occasionally incomprehensible. “It was the case of a powerful mind and a deplorable teacher” (p. 85). Yet von Hildebrand persevered, and ultimately Husserl accepted his dissertation, judging it “the most outstanding he had ever directed,” a major step in gaining access to Germany’s academic world.

In addition to his studies, von Hildebrand married his first wife, Gretchen, sired a son, and began moving toward the Catholic Faith. His conversion was encouraged by that of one of his sisters, Lisl, perhaps the least “religious” of his family. “But one day, while Lisl was contemplating the beauty of a tree, God’s grace mysteriously touched her soul” (p. 127). Then she read a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi. “She found Christ. She found the Church. And all the beauty that had enchanted her for thirty-four years now found its fulfillment in Him ‘in who are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge'” (p. 128). Lisl urged her brother to follow her example. So he did, and the “brilliant student of Edmund Husserl became the humble recipient of the Church’s teaching” (p. 132). In submitting to Christ and His Church, he found the certainty and authority he’d ever longed for. “He found it a blessing to know that there is a voice speaking from above that informs man how to serve God as He wants to honored and gives him guidelines for salvation” (p. 160). Truth, ultimately, is revealed, not humanly devised, and it enables the believer “to enter into a world of holiness for which he had unconsciously longed” (p. 137).

Credo ut intelligam thenceforth became his motto. He discovered “the importance of humility in intellectual life.” He believed “that philosophical errors are often caused by a proud and arrogant intellectual posture, but that they are rarely due to a lack of intellectual acuteness. In fact, he maintained that the most devastating intellectual errors have been made by remarkably intelligent people, for mediocre minds do not produce major errors. The same conviction led Chesterton to write: ‘We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamist are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them'” (p. 134).

Following WWI, wherein von Hildebrand worked as a surgeon’s assistant in a hospital, he embarked upon a very public philosophical career. And he discovered the truth of Kierkegaard’s dictum, in My Point of View for My Work as an Author: “Every religious writer, or speaker, or teacher, who absents himself from danger is not present where it is, and where Evil has its stronghold, is a deceiver.” Though he lived in luxury in a Munich mansion his parents left him, presiding over one of the city’s intellectual centers, and though he had increased opportunity to teach philosophy at the university, political developments soon sucked him into the struggle for Germany’s soul.

As soon as Hitler’s National Socialists appeared von Hildebrand opposed them. In 1921 he was already on their “blacklist.” When the famous Putsch placed Nazis briefly in control of Munich, von Hildebrand had to flee the city. Thenceforth, with the “soul of a lion,” he spoke out against Hitler and his henchmen. Unfortunately, few folks joined him! When the Nazis prevailed in 1933, von Hildebrand almost immediately left Germany, leaving all his possessions and positions, in order to freely oppose Hitler. “Dietrich, hating iniquity, saw clearly that God was calling him to sacrifice all those good things rather than to condone evil. For years to come, his motto was Deus providebit (God will provide, Gen 22:8)” (p. 236).

With the personal support of Austria’s Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfus, von Hildebrand settled in Vienna and began editing an anti-Nazi, anti-Communist magazine. Dollfus himself told von Hildebrand that: “Today, political questions are no longer purely political; they center on questions of Weltanschauung. For me the fight against National Socialism is essentially a fight in defense of the Christian conception of the world. Whereas Hitler wants to revive the old Germanic paganism, I want to revive the Christian Middle Ages” (p. 255). Dollfus, of course, was killed by Hitler’s thugs in 1934, and subsequent Austrian leaders sought to accommodate the Nazis. Von Hildebrand struggled on with his magazine, however, somehow making ends meet and bearing witness to the Truth.

For several years he taught at the University of Vienna, though he never obtained the full professor’s position Dollfus envisioned. His days there, however, were marked by constant Nazi harassment. On one occasion 48 policemen were called to keep the peace when von Hildebrand lectured! The only friendly professor on the faculty was the famed logical positivist, Moritz Schlick (who was tragically murdered in 1936 by a mentally disturbed man). Despite many pressures, von Hildebrand wrote one of his finest treatises, Transformation in Christ, which was published under a pseudonym, since the book could not have been sold in Germany with its true author identified.

In 1938 von Hildebrand’s endeavors in Vienna instantly ceased, for the Germans occupied Austria and he was, in the words of Franz von Papan, the German ambassador in Vienna, “the most dangerous enemy of National Socialism” (p. 291). The von Hildebrands caught the last train leaving Austria ahead of the Nazis. Everything they had acquired in Vienna was seized and sold by the Nazis. For a time they found shelter in France, living in Fiac, near Toulouse. He continued his writing and speaking, but as Nazi troops invaded France he again had to flee, managing (after a harrowing journey) to find refuge in the United States in 1940, where he received an appointment to a professorship at Fordham University.

The Soul of a Lion ends at this point. It’s an engaging story, providing us a portrait of an intellectual who stood tall for the cause of Christ during some of Europe’s most tumultuous years. The biography rests on some 5,000 pages written by Dietrich von Hildebrand, at his wife Alice’s request, toward the end of his life. His American decades, including the years spent with Alice (his second wife and fine philosopher in her own right), needs to be told, and one hopes she will provide us with an account of his continuing struggle for truth and justice in this country.

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Some of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s concerns, subsequent to his arrival in the United States, appear in a collection of essays entitled The Charitable Anathema (Harrison, NY: Roman Catholic Books, c. 1993). In the lead essay, which gives the book its title, von Hildebrand announced his life’s driving concern: “the absolute primacy of divine truth, which is the very primacy of God” (p. 1). He took his thesis from Blaise Pascal, who declared: “It is as much a crime to disturb the peace when truth prevails as it is a crime to keep the peace when truth is violated. There is therefore a time in which peace is justified and another time when it is not justifiable. For it is written that there is a time for peace and a time for war and it is the law of truth that distinguishes the two. But at no time is there a time for truth and a time for error, for it is written that God’s truth shall abide forever.”

Clearly von Hildebrand thinks our day demands doing battle for truth. In the 1920’s, Nazi lies demanded refutation. Today more deadly toxins threaten to gut the Church of her very being. In his opinion, “ours is, I believe, the period of the greatest crisis the Church has ever faced, a period in which the anathema has become unpopular and is unfortunately considered as incompatible with charity” (p. 33). To fight for truth, to denounce error–to pronounce the “charitable anathema” against heresy–is today’s imperative! Charity is due all men, but communion must be restricted to those who embrace the Truth of Christ. He especially assails theologians such as Hans Kung, Eduard Schillebeeckx and defenders of Teilhard de Chardin who (often celebrating the “spirit of Vatican II”) who work within the Church to subvert her doctrines.

Identifying reasons for his criticism, von Hildebrand says, of such clerics: “They no longer believe in Original Sin, the need of redemption, the fact of our having been redeemed by Christ’s death on the Cross. They no longer believe in the one thing necessary, our transformation in Christ, our personal loving relation to Christ. They are completely ignorant of the true charity that can arise exclusively in the heart that loves God above all–God as He has revealed Himself in Christ” (p. 93). Instead, they concoct visions of human progress, a “this-worldliness” indistinguishable from social reforms touted by various secularists. “The champions of this-worldliness speak much in their new catechisms of social justice, of pacifism and anti-Colonialism, of progress in natural science; they skip the Ten Commandments and say as little as possible about sin, hell, purgatory, contrition, penance, the transformation in Christ and eternal beatitude” (p. 128).

Such men, sadly enough, “who idolize our epoch, who thrill at what is modern simply because it is modern, who believe that in our day man has finally ‘come of age,’ lack pietas” (p 43). In their irreverence, they manifest one of the worst human traits, one von Hildebrand often addressed. The capacity for “wonder,” as celebrated by Plato and Aristotle, should mark good men as well as good philosophers. “Reverence,” von Hildebrand says, “is of capital importance to all fundamental domains of man’s life. It can be rightly called ‘the mother of all virtues’ for it is the basic attitude that all virtues presuppose” (p. 37). Reverence allows Reality to reveal itself. Reverence listens to the other, especially the Holy Other. Pride, conversely, prods man “to construct a world according to his own liking. It allows him to consider philosophy as a field where he can show off his sophisticated reasoning–a field that grants him the occasion of displaying his brilliance and superiority over others” (p. 111).

This means the Church must rightly educate the faithful. “Great is the responsibility of the religious educator in the present moment” (p. 99). Von Hildebrand anguished over the impoverished doctrinal content of post-Vatican II Christian education classes and urged a return to more traditional methods. He also stressed the importance of moral instruction. Good teachers must seek “to develop the moral sense of the pupils, to evoke in their souls the sense for the breathtaking beauty and splendor of moral values and a deep horror for sin” (p. 97). They should take to hear the words of one of von Hildebrand’s main mentors, St. Augustine: “‘Who is the hireling who, seeing the approach of the wolf, takes flight? He who seeks himself and does not seek what is of Jesus Christ; he who does not dare to frankly admonish the sinner (1 Tim. 5:20). See, someone has sinned, gravely sinned; he should be admonished, excluded from the Church. But, excluded from the Church, he will become its enemy and will try to ensnare it and harm it where he can. now the hireling, the one who seeks himself and not what is of Jesus Christ, will be silent and will not give any admonition, in order not to lose what he seeks, namely the advantages of personal friendship, and in order to avoid the unpleasantness, worry and personal enmity. The world at that moment takes hold the sheep to throttle them. . . . You are silent O Hireling, and do not admonish. . . . Your silence is your flight. You are silent, you are afraid. Fear is the flight of the soul.’ (St Augustine, Tractatus in Joannem, XLVI, 7-8) (p. 117).

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Reading these two recent publications led me to re-read von Hildebrand’s Trojan Horse in the City of God (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, c. 1967), wherein he annunciated some of the themes which resurface in The Charitable Anathema. Just as he early discerned currents of things to come in National Socialism, he understood many of the problems which would develop as “progressives” sought to impose their agenda on the Caltholic Church under the guise of “the spirit of Vatican II.” He thought “the present crisis the most serious one in the entire history of the Church” (p. 7). Thus he wrote Trojan Horse to defend absolute “Truth” against the onslaughts of relativism, the primacy of metaphysical reality over various humanistic concerns, the importance of Christian philosophy, and the traditional position that the goal of human existence is to be “transformed in Christ, becoming a new creature in Him . . . in the words of St. Paul, ‘This is the will of God, your sanctification'” (p. 5).

Repeatedly von Hildebrand attacked relativism, both historical (the view that every historical epoch has its unique truths and values) and ethical (the position that nothing is always, absolutely right or wrong). Just as he had strongly reacted to his sister at the age of 14, he repudiated those thinkers who espouse relativism, especially evident today in the pervasively pragmatic “substitution of the socio-historical reality of ideas for their truth” (p. 81). Though some truths never fade away, for too many folks today no longer understand “the eternal, unchanging nobility and attraction of truth, of which St. Augustine says, ‘Quod desiderat anima fortius quam veritatem?’ (What does our soul desire more than truth?) ” (p. 84). Consequently, “One of the most ominous symptoms of decay in the Church today is the increasing acceptance of modern amoralism” (p. 159). Ever sinful by nature, man rourtinely fails to uphold God’s standards. But the failure was always acknowledged! Today, rather than confess their sins, men prefer to lower (or even abolish) the standards.

The truths von Hildebrand holds most precious are metaphysical, spiritual. Inasmuch as “Truth is the echo of being” (p. 149), knowing truth enables us to know Absolute Being, God Himself. Above all else, we’re called to love God with all our being. To those who seek to reduce Christianity to a bland humanitarianism, von Hildebrand insisted “that every man’s primary task is his own, rather than his neighbor’s salvation. My chief task is to avoid offending God by sin and to glorify God through my own sanctification” (p. 22). Yet, as one of the century’s greatest theologians, Henri de Lubac, warned, the post-Vatican II “Church is facing a grave crisis.” Reformers intent on establishing “an anthropocentric society” threatened to design an apostate “new Church,” quite “different” from that established by Jesus Christ. (p. 2). To the extent the Church reduces its concern to social reform, social justice, political programs, it fails to uphold its divine mission. As urs von ‘Balthasar warned, “he who does not listen to God has nothing to say to the world” (p. 223).

Many of the Church’s needs must be met by Christian philosophers who sustain the tradition developed by thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas. There are solid correlations between divine revelation and human reason, between the truths of the Faith and the norms of the Natural Law. Philosophy, in particular, is needed for the important work of apologetics, defending the truths of the faith against those who deny or distort them. “Condemnation and the unmasking of errors is widely seen today as something hostile to love. No longer understood is the basic principle enunciated by St. Augustine–interficere errorem, diligere errantem (kill the error, love the one who errs)” (p. 64). The false claims of scientism–egregiously evident in the alleged social sciences–must be punctured. The false positions of non-Christian philosophers, such as Heidegger, must be exposed. The “theological fiction” of Teilhard de Chardin and his devotees must be refuted.

Looking back over the past 30 years, during which the Catholic Church has suffered a serious decline in attendance, as well as an erosion of orthodoxy in many areas, von Hildebrand’s alarms appear prophetic!