This morning I’m in Christianity Today with a column titled “Why Christians Oppose Euthanasia."
This morning I’m in Christianity Today with a column titled “Why Christians Oppose Euthanasia."
TIL
Overheard on west Texas Christian radio:
“You may feel like you’ve got 99 problems, but … {beat} … God is your number one solution to all of them.”
It was a long wait to see how that Jay-Z allusion was going to resolve.
In Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz reports on Barry Jenkins making Mufasa for Disney. Almost makes me want to see the finished version. Almost.
Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them “The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females”; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them “Murder your mother,” and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same. Say to them “It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be modified also even in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet”; say this to them, and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their face. But say to them, in a simple, manly, hearty way “Let’s eat a man!” and their surprise is quite surprising. Yet the sentences say just the same thing. Now, if anyone thinks these two instances extravagant, I will refer to two actual cases from the Eugenic discussions. When Sir Oliver Lodge spoke of the methods “of the stud-farm” many Eugenists exclaimed against the crudity of the suggestion. Yet long before that one of the ablest champions in the other interest had written “What nonsense this education is! Who could educate a racehorse or a greyhound?” Which most certainly either means nothing, or the human stud-farm. Or again, when I spoke of people “being married forcibly by the police,” another distinguished Eugenist almost achieved high spirits in his hearty assurance that no such thing had ever come into their heads. Yet a few days after I saw a Eugenist pronouncement, to the effect that the State ought to extend its powers in this area. The State can only be that corporation which men permit to employ compulsion; and this area can only be the area of sexual selection. I mean somewhat more than an idle jest when I say that the policeman will generally be found in that area. But I willingly admit that the policeman who looks after weddings will be like the policeman who looks after wedding-presents. He will be in plain clothes. I do not mean that a man in blue with a helmet will drag the bride and bridegroom to the altar. I do mean that nobody that man in blue is told to arrest will even dare to come near the church. Sir Oliver did not mean that men would be tied up in stables and scrubbed down by grooms. He meant that they would undergo a loss of liberty which to men is even more infamous. He meant that the only formula important to Eugenists would be “by Smith out of Jones.” Such a formula is one of the shortest in the world; and is certainly the shortest way with the Euphemists.
—G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), chapter 2
In a typically charitable mode, George Scialabba reviewed Charles Taylor’s big book on romantic poetry for Commonweal’s 100-anniversary issue. In an equally typical move, however, he writes the following toward the end:
“Clearly,” he writes, “to understand this ethical growth we have to suppose an Aristotle-type theory of the human Form, a set of innate goals which demand fulfillment.” It’s regrettable that Taylor should invoke that most archaic of philosophical notions: the human telos. According to Aristotle, there is one human telos, corresponding to invariant human nature. There is not a contingent, or individual, telos for each human being. Individuals do not choose their telos, or purpose; they learn it from their elders. Now, while it is certainly true that, like every other animal, humans have “innate goals” (though not always the same goals, since our genetic endowments vary), these come from millions of years of biological and social evolution, not from an ahistorical metaphysical Form. And they are only predispositions, strong or weak, which socialization may override. Our purposes do not—cannot—preexist us; we choose them, after deliberation and painful experience. The same is true of societies.
Notice the strange upturned nose of “that most archaic…” More to the point, notice the false contrast: “millions of years of biological and social evolution” versus “an ahistorical metaphysical Form.” I love Scialabba and read everything he writes, but this implicit opposition is present in all that he writes and is his intellectual Achilles' heel.
Even if religious, philosophical, and theological varieties of metaphysics were not true, anyone familiar with them as systems of thought understands that they are not “either/or” frameworks, in a kind of vulgar reflection of evolutionary just-so stories. On the contrary, the entire point is that they are not competitive with natural accounts of (e.g., as in this case) biological and social goals, desires, and forms of life. Precisely because God creates ex nihilo, he is not a cause or factor on a par with, or located somewhere within, the spatio-temporal network of secondary causes and effects. In fact, his transcendence of the network as such enables his immediate presence to every item of it, in intimate and immanent care and purpose. In which case, my desires and goals—my nature and end—may simultaneously come from God and from evolution (or society, or whatever), without logical or metaphysical contradiction.
As I say: Argue with this account; declare why it’s wrong. But don’t set up a binary that no actual theologian or philosopher would endorse or accept, phrased as a takedown. The effect is an exposure, but not the sort intended.
I make it a point to read everything Eve Tushnet writes, whether books or blog or newsletter or essays. This may be the best thing she’s ever written.
Earlier this week I did a webinar with the Siburt Institute on catechesis, witness, literacy, and reaching the next generation of Christians; the recording is now available on YouTube.
Melanie Springer Mock wrote a very generous review of LFS for Current.
Here is the first official edition of my newsletter, which is little more than a monthly rundown of my writing, appearances, and forthcoming stuff. It’s not a Substack and there’s no original essay writing, and it’ll only be twelve times a year. Sign up on the bottom of my website’s home page.
Christopher Caldwell reviewing Jackson Lears is the Platonic ideal of reviewer and subject.
She’s right: sin is boring.
I went on the podcast for the Yale Center for Faith and Culture to talk about Letters to a Future Saint with Drew Collins. It was a delight; Drew is a great guy and one of the kindest readers of my work out there.
Here is the video of my lecture last month at Wycliffe College in Toronto in honor of Ephraim Radner’s retirement. The lecture was about Radner’s theology of Scripture; here is a video of his response.
I expect the paper will be published as an article here in the next year or two.
I went on The Cartographers podcast to talk spooky Christianity with Ashley and Bryce Hales.
Read Myles Werntz on the new Bonhoeffer movie. It’s a sober, thoughtful assessment—including important reflections on the relationship between politics and faith, both then and now—but there are also some howlers.
The one that made me snort: “If this scene included fireworks and a montage of Dietrich doing calisthenics to prepare for the weeks ahead, it could not have been more perfectly written for a spy thriller.”
The one he cut from an earlier draft: “This film’s relationship to the historical Bonhoeffer is the relationship of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter to the historical Lincoln.”
Rowan Williams reviews Jordan Peterson’s new book on the Torah.
My only quibble is his parenthetical, “not really what the text is about,” commenting on Peterson’s reading of Jonah as a parable that stands opposed to forms of environmentalism that prize “nature” over human well-being. I take the openness and flexibility of spiritual interpretation to mean that one can never declare, a priori, what a text is or is not about; what matters is the reading produced and the reasons offered on its behalf. If I recall correctly, Williams himself once gave a lecture about the ecological ethics of the tale of Noah’s ark. He wasn’t wrong to do so! These things are licit. Which doesn’t mean that every such reading is good; that none can be bad. Peterson’s might be. But not because he reads Jonah as “about something it’s not.” That’s what allegory is.
I’m in CT today with a review of Jordan Peterson’s new book on the Torah, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine.
Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989), p. 163:
Alan Jacobs published this piece on Didion, stories, and politics on the eve of Election Day. It has aged well.
