When it is Reasonable to Say 'No' to Unreason
The "Vagina Monologues" to be presented (again) at Notre Dame
DATE: March 18, 2008
TIME: 9:00 AM EST

Last week I began a two-part column exploring and critiquing some of the postulates of the emerging field of 'neuromorality.'  I will get back to that after Easter. I felt compelled to interrupt that topic, however, because I was so disturbed to hear that The Vagina Monologues would once again be presented (for a sixth year, in fact) at Notre Dame University.  [I wish to note, however, that this is not altogether unrelated to the topic of how brain relates to morality.]

• The play may only be presented if sponsored by an academic department. This year's presentation is sponsored by the departments of sociology and anthropology; last year, no department sponsored it, so it had to be presented off campus.
  

• The presentations may only be done in an academic setting, (a classroom, not a theater);
  

• Immediately following each of the six scheduled presentations, there will be a mandatory panel discussion during which Catholic doctrine will be clearly expounded on the issues raised by the play;
  

• The presentations shall not be aimed at fundraising for any purpose.
  

While noting that Fr. Jenkins would clearly be in his right, as president, simply to disallow the play, I also recognize that he has his own prudential reasons for allowing it. I also hasten to add that this six-year old saga should not be construed as a bad reflection on Notre Dame as a whole. I lectured at the Law School there in January and I have friends on the faculty. I must say I was delighted with what I saw and experienced on campus: wonderful things are happening at Notre Dame.

That said, when I first heard news late last week about this year's presentations of the Monologues on campus, I was immediately reminded of that wonderful quote from G.K. Chesterton:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.

Now, President Jenkins was quoted as saying, in support of his decision to allow the play on campus again this year, that:

It is an indispensable part of the mission of a Catholic university to provide a forum in which multiple viewpoints are debated in reasoned and respectful exchange—always in dialogue with faith and the Catholic tradition—even around highly controversial topics.

Well, amen to that.

But here, is it not the case that the virtue, if you will, of 'reasoned and respectful exchange' has gone a little mad? I don't deny, of course, that it's possible to have a reasonable discussion even about different forms of moral depravity. But no matter what the topic, reasonable exchange of thought presupposes many things, among them a prudent setting, and a morally inoffensive presentation of the facts. Fr. Jenkins has made an effort to supply the former in requiring that the play be presented in an academic setting, but the latter condition remains unmet.

Now, how would we conduct a reasonable dialogue, say, of the exploitation of women through pornography? By gathering faculty and students together in a classroom to view and discuss blowups of Playboy centerfolds?  Without having viewed the Monologues myself, I know enough about it to know that it is crudely offensive in a similar way and renders the very idea of a substantive, genuinely reasoned discussion preposterous.

It is therefore a striking instance of serendipity that not three weeks after the presentation of the Monologues on the Notre Dame Campus, Pope Benedict will be meeting (as reported last Friday by The Washington Post) with more than 200 top Catholic school officials from across the country.  

What can we expect the Pope will say at the meeting? I expect his remarks will echo much of the substance of his papal address at the University of Regensburg (about which I've written in previous columns). Which is to say, Pope Benedict will likely make affirmations to the effect-and to echo the words of Fr. Jenkins-that "an indispensable part of the mission of a Catholic university is to provide a forum for reasoned and respectful exchange of ideas."  And no matter what else he might say, we have here the very reason why any institute of higher learning should refrain from making a mockery of reasoned discourse, and refuse demands for anti-cultural trash such as the Monologues.

To be sure, sponsorship of the Monologues is not by a long shot the only or even most egregious instance of unreasonable nonsense being passed off as culture at Catholic or secular universities. Nonetheless, it is central to the mission of intellectual stewardship that faculty and administrators at institutes of higher learning muster the backbone  to say 'no' to unreason, and to say 'no' when necessary to very vocal minorities or majorities, no matter how vocal or how vicious.

***

And turning now to a superlatively more worthwhile topic, to all those taking the time to read this column today, I want to extend my warmest best wishes and the assurance of my prayers for a very blessed Holy Week and celebration of Easter.

Rev. Thomas V. Berg, L.C. is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.

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Morality as Genetic Predisposition and Neurobiology
A look at the emerging field of moral psycology.
DATE: March 11, 2008
TIME: 9:00 AM EST

Within the intersecting disciplines of psychology, neurobiology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and cognitive science, a new field of inquiry has emerged of late.  Although it goes by different names, including such recent coinages as ‘neuromorality’, the field is perhaps best referred to as moral psychology.  I have touched on this topic in a previous column, but given the recent preponderance of media fixation on this topic, I thought it was time to take a closer look.

One might consider moral psychology as an emerging field of research that delves into questions that have long captivated the curiosity of a broad array of disciplines in the Arts and Sciences, some for several centuries:  To what extent do our own bodies influence and determine our moral judgments and behavior? Are there genetic predispositions for everything from altruism to serial killing?  How are we to make sense out of the uniquely human endeavor of formulating moral judgments? Can an understanding of neurobiology and genetics shed any light on this?

For many researchers in this field, such questions boil down to the challenge of mapping out what some would call the "neuro-anatomy of moral judgment." Across the country, moral psychologists, working in tandem with behavioral psychologists, evolutionary biologists and persons in related fields, believe they are hot on the trail of figuring out how humans are "wired for morality."

As a token example of the work in this field, we could note the investigations of Harvard university psychology professor Marc Hauser, author most recently of Moral Minds:How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (2006). Hauser was featured last May in the Harvard University Gazette On-line:

In a talk April 26, psychology professor Marc Hauser argued that our moral sense is part of our evolutionary inheritance. Like the “language instinct” hypothesized by linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky, the capacity for moral judgment is a universal human trait, “relatively immune” to cultural differences. Hauser described it as a “cold calculus,” independent of emotion, whose workings are largely inaccessible to our conscious minds.

Hauser, along with other leaders in this emerging field would have us conclude that morality is ultimately explainable in empirical terms: genetic evolution and inheritance, brain anatomy, neuronal activity, mixed with our environment and education—this and little more.  

And that is where the trouble with neuromorality begins.  It is indeed unfortunate that the pioneers of the new moral psychology—given all the potential for truly breathtaking and worthwhile insights which their discipline can provide—appear to be all too ready to succumb to that intellectual hubris that would reduce the broader whole of understanding to one very narrow vantage point.  And this is already leading to untenable extremes.

Case in point is a recent lengthy exposé that ran in New York Times Magazine entitled “The Moral Instinct,” authored by another Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. I will engage in a lengthier critique of Pinker’s article next week, but just to give you a better taste of some of the unfortunate excesses of neuromorality, allow me to share and comment on the following amazing paragraphs. Writes Pinker:

The gap between people’s convictions and their justifications is also on display in the favorite new sandbox of moral psychologists, a thought experiment devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the Trolley Problem. On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says ‘yes’.

Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way… When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either (p. 35, emphasis my own).

What this is supposed to show is that our deepest convictions about right and wrong are not based on reasons, but on deep-seated tendencies, hardwired into our brains by our DNA and evolutionary history.  The fact that people have a hard time coming up with reasons for their moral convictions is educed as evidence that either there are no reasons, or that any reasons given are utterly relative and may or may not reflect the deeper workings of our DNA driven psychological dispositions.

Pinker’s interpretation of the Trolley Problem —and presumably that of most people in the survey—fails to distinguish between intending to harm and allowing a foreseeable harm on reasonable grounds. The former is immoral; the latter might constitute a licit option depending on the case. Which is to say, the natural law tradition clearly provides reasons why it might be licit to pull a lever and divert the trolley onto a spur (the first case), and reasons why it would never be licit to throw the fat man down onto the tracks (the second case). The fact that persons surveyed had trouble articulating reasons for their moral convictions should not suggest that morality is ultimately irrational—determined within the deep recesses of our genetically predisposed subconscious—but simply that most people today have little or no formal training in ethics, let alone natural law theory. But more on this next week.

To conclude, the field of moral psychology is in many ways fascinating. It will undoubtedly make many valuable contributions not only to our philosophical understanding of human nature and morality, but also to our cultural considerations about how to educate our young people to live sound moral lives. It will do a grave disservice to the same, however, if moral psychologists aim to reduce entire fields of human understanding (in this case moral knowledge) to "nothing but" the stuff of neurological function and evolutionary biology.

Rev. Thomas V. Berg, L.C. is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.

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McNihilism goes to church (when it feels like it)
A new sudy finds religous affiliation in the U.S. to be "extremely fluid"
DATE: March 4, 2008
TIME: 9:00 AM EST

A couple weeks ago I was reflecting in this column about the American appetite for “facts” amidst our growing anxiety over how little we really seem to know and understand about our world. I suggested that this lust for the easy knowledge-chunk and the inside story was a symptom of cultural ill-health, that it could indeed be “the very dynamic that perpetuates and aggravates the McNihilism that is eating away the very core of our culture, and even our mental health.”

By ‘McNihilism’, I mean that ubiquitous, routine, and largely subconscious, brand of Joe-on-the-street nihilism lived by millions of Americans.1 It broadly describes the situation of a person who feels quite incapable of bringing ‘transcendence’, ‘purpose’, or ‘meaning’ in life into sharp focus—and who is largely uninterested in doing so anyway. It means the more or less conscious acquiescence to the perception that there is no overarching ‘meaning’ or ‘truth’ out there; no one specific, ultimate reality that will fulfill us in life; no ultimate point of reference for explaining ‘right’ and ‘wrong’; no God, no great, unalterable truths. Only ourselves.

Americans of course, along with most human beings, want to live with their feet firmly planted on as many certainties (in addition to death and taxes) as possible. Uncertainty is naturally disconcerting.  That sense of uncertainty however, is normally not alleviated by a steady diet of “facts” for one simple reason: a steady flow of information, bereft of an overarching sense of meaning in which to assemble our facts, is about as useful as bricks without mortar. Additionally, too many of our “facts” are nothing more than snippets of hearsay, conjecture, inaccuracy, or illogic. Lusting after factoids –whether it’s the latest gossip about Britney, or the latest numbers on Obama, or the latest theory of the universe—doesn’t help ease that sense of the ground endlessly shifting under one’s feet. One way of dealing with that unease, of course, is simply to get used to it, and get over it, and accept that all is in flux, all is relative, paradigmatic and what academicians like to call “perspectival.” 

It comes then as no surprise that so many Americans—as a groundbreaking new study suggests—appear to be embracing sexier brands of McNihilism in the forms of “spirituality,” “scientism”, “secularism” and “agnosticism.”

Focused on the religious affiliation of the American public, with a survey sample of 35,000 American adults queried between May 8 and August 13, 2007, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life discovered the following:

• 44% of adults have switched religious affiliation, or moved from being unaffiliated to affiliated, or dropped any religious affiliation whatsoever;
• 28% of adult Americans have abandoned their religious affiliation of birth to move on to another religion or no religion at all;
• Of adults between ages 18-29, 25% (one in four) describe themselves as being unaffiliated with any particular religion;
• 12% of the entire adult population willingly describes its religious affiliation as “nothing in particular.”2

Of course, the meaning of these statistics will generate much debate for years to come. As was noted in a Washington Post article:

Some [scholars] think that secularism is underreported as people may check a box correlating to a faith group without actually believing its tenets or following its practices. Others think the growth of the unaffiliated (sometimes called "religious nones," because they check "none" when asked their faith on polls) disguises the number of people who consider themselves "spiritual but not religious."

Tom Smith, director of a major sociological survey at the University of Chicago, estimated that about 25 percent of U.S. adults think of themselves as spiritual but not religious. "Some trends show there is less support for organized religion but either a steady or, by some measures, rising support for personal religious beliefs," Smith said.

The idea of being “spiritual but not religious”, and the evident fluidity of American religious affiliation raise a serious concern about the shallowness of the religious experience of Americans. And it should. Yet, I think there is a deeper concern it should trigger. This shiftiness, the existential inability to persevere in a religious tradition, all the religious window-shopping that goes on in America, all the doctrinal cafeteria-style picking and choosing that goes on within Christian communions of late, is too often nothing but a further manifestation of the pervasiveness of McNihilism. 

This is perhaps nowhere more evident than within Christianity. The last two centuries have seen Christianity ravaged by ideologies posing as theology which have proposed the steady regression from Ecclesial Christianity, to Christianity without Church, to Christianity without Christ, to Christianity without doctrine—a Christianity, that is, which can embrace all belief systems because it has been virtually emptied of any positive doctrinal content (save for the universal injunction that Christians should be “nice”). And last of all, today, we have “spirituality” without Christianity.

This emptying out of Christianity, its loss of form (and consequently the nihilism which it embodies) is not a recent phenomenon; it was already being decried in 19th century Germany by that most famous victim of nihilism himself, Friedrich Nietzsche. Speaking of the theological tendencies of the Germany of his day (the following was penned in 1873), Nietzsche's air of exasperation presages our own:  

"What are we to think if we find Christianity described by the “greatest theologians of the century” as the religion that claims to “find itself in all real religions and some other barely possible religions,” and if the “true Church” is to be a thing “which may become liquid mass with no fixed outline, with no fixed place for its different parts, but everything to be peacefully welded together” — what, I ask again, are we to think?"3

Of course, we should not be led to think that all those who have bought into the neutering of Christianity or who engage in religion-shifting are nihilists. Many have been deeply disturbed by the prospect of the nihilist nightmare and are trying to evade it by searching out a “true” religion.

My fear, however, is that far more, if not most, have indeed succumbed to the nightmare. For them, shifting from one religion to another, then to no religion, then back again means merely to acquiesce to the deeper truth that there is no transcendent truth to which any religion could direct us anyway. And that is why the McNihilist relegates religion to the status of just one more personal preference. 

In sum, my concern arises not because of religious change as such, but because of what I perceive to be one of the root causes of that change.  If such change were rooted in a serious and widespread religious search motivated by a sense of one’s duty to seek the truth, this would not be a bad thing. 

However, such fluidity is more clearly rooted in treating religion, as the late sociologist Philip Rieff described it, “therapeutically.”4  For far too many Americans, emotional self-contentment—not truth—is the real factor behind religious affiliation. When one set of religious symbols, practices, and forms no longer “feel” good, the McNihilist moves on and tries on another set of religious accoutrements to see if they “fit” or “feel” better.  Whether such symbols are true or not is a question that simply does not arise. After all, what is true for the McNihilist is simply whatever works wherever he or she is—not something that makes claims upon us regardless of our preferences. What is there, asks the McNihilist, beyond personal preference anyway?

Rev. Thomas V. Berg, L.C. is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.

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1 The term is used in a manner loosely analogous to a term coined by political theorist Benjamin Barber in his 1996 best-seller Jihad vs. McWorld. ‘McWorld’ here becomes a shorthand term for western-style globalization.

2 And then there’s the heartbreaker for Catholics:

Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one in three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one in four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic. These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration.

The study goes on to point out that it is immigration (along with a constant trickle of converts) that keeps the American Catholic population at about 25% in the U.S.

3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, translated by Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1957), 43.

4 See Philip Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

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