Spare not the Rod

David Bentley Hart’s First Things article on natural law, which I criticized a few days ago, got some positive responses elsewhere in the blogosphere.  One of its fans is Rod Dreher at The American Conservative, who wrote:

If you don’t believe there is any cosmic order undergirding the visible world, and if you don’t believe that you are obliged to harmonize your own behavior with that unseen order (the Tao, you might say), then why should you bind yourself to moral precepts you find disagreeable or uncongenial?  The most human act could be not to yield to nature, but to defy nature.  Why shouldn’t you?  Or, to look at it another way, why should we consider our own individual desires unnatural?  Does the man who sexually and emotionally desires union with another man defying [sic] nature?  Well, says Hart, it depends on what you consider nature to be.

Well, yes, it does.  This is news?  Who, exactly, are the natural law theorists who have ever denied this?

As I noted in my response to Hart, what natural law theorists of either of the two main contemporary stripes (“old” and “new”) maintain is that there are objective moral truths that can be known through purely philosophical arguments, entirely apart from divine revelation, scriptural authority, or ecclesiastical diktat.  They do not deny that the philosophical arguments in question are controversial and sometimes difficult for the average person to understand. 

In this respect, natural law arguments are no different from the arguments of Rawlsian liberals, utilitarians, libertarian economists, feminists, or what have you -- all of which are, needless to say, also controversial and sometimes difficult for the average person to understand, but all of which also make no reference to revelation, scripture, etc.  And that is the point.  If these other arguments have a place in debates over public policy despite their controversial nature, then there are no grounds for excluding natural law arguments.  In particular, the moral conclusionsthe critics of natural law don’t like -- concerning abortion, “same-sex marriage,” or whatever -- cannot be excluded on the assumption that they have no justification other than an appeal to religious authority.  For that assumption is false.

Now Dreher is right to maintain that the specificphilosophical theses that natural law theory rests on, however rationally defensible, are going to meet a great deal of resistance in a culture in which materialism, individualism, and allied doctrines are widely and lazily taken for granted.  That is one reason why, in my own work, I have emphasized that it is the entire set of false metaphysical assumptions (about causation, substance, essence, etc.) that have come to define modern thought that the defender of natural law (and of natural theology and traditional philosophical anthropology, for that matter) has to challenge.  There is no short cut. 

But that entails only that the work of the natural law theorist is more difficult than it would have been in previous generations, not that it isn’t worth doing.  And there are at least three reasons why it must be done.  The first and most important reason is that natural law theory (in its “old” version, anyway) is true.  And the truth has a right to be heard, especially in a cultural context in which it is little known and unlikely to be well received. 

The second reason is that the liberal, who claims to favor intellectual pluralism in the public sphere, needs constantly to be forced to put his money where his mouth is.  If you press against him natural law arguments against abortion, “same-sex marriage,” etc., then you thereby compel him either seriously to engage with those who object to his social liberalism, or to reveal himself as a hypocrite.  But if you fail to press such arguments, you cannot blame him if he dismisses opposition to the liberal social agenda as without a rational foundation -- and if he is also able to convince the fence-sitters that it lacks one.

That brings us to the third reason, which is that it takes an idea to beat an idea.  Again, Dreher is right to point out that the individualist and materialist sensibilities that prevail in contemporary social life make it difficult for natural law arguments to get traction.  But those sensibilities are there in part precisely because of generations of liberal and secularist argumentation.  Dreher writes:

This is why I don’t have any faith in the natural-law-based arguments against same-sex marriage.  It’s not that I disagree with them necessarily; it’s that a) they are hard for ordinary people conditioned by our culture’s modes of thought to grasp, and b) partly because of this, they (understandably) prompt a, “So what?” response.

But suppose the liberals or secularists of generations past had taken a similar attitude.  Suppose that, in light of the conservative and religious sensibilities then prevalent, a liberal or secularist in 1970, 1980, or 1990 had written:

This is why I don’t have any faith in [feminist, Rawlsian, utilitarian, libertarian, or gay liberationist] arguments [in favor of abortion, acceptance of homosexuality, or] same-sex marriage.  It’s not that I disagree with them necessarily; it’s that a) they are hard for ordinary people conditioned by our culture’s modes of thought to grasp, and b) partly because of this, they (understandably) prompt a, “So what?” response.

Obviously, had such an attitude won the day and the liberal arguments in question not been relentlessly propagated by the intelligentsia -- in academic journals, in the classroom, and in the simplified journalistic form that ultimately influences popular culture and electoral politics -- then the sensibilities Dreher identifies would never have come into being in the first place.  As Keynes famously wrote:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.  Indeed the world is ruled by little else.  Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.  Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.  I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

Dreher writes that “as long as the will remains unconverted, and unwilling to consider conversion, reason is mostly powerless to change things.”  But the will can be won over to some proposition only if reason first perceives it to be true, only if it would be contrary to reasonfor the will not to accept it.  Hence, while an appeal to another’s reason is not sufficientfor converting him, it is necessary. 

It is ironic, then, that in his defense Dreher cites, of all books, Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences.  Note that Weaver’s title is not Prevailing Cultural Sensibilities Have Consequences, or The Will to Believe Has Consequences, or Leaps of Faith Have Consequences.  His remarks about the will (quoted by Dreher) notwithstanding, Weaver is appealing to our intellects, to our heads rather than merely to our hearts. 

Folks of The American Conservative stripe like to complain that contemporary mainstream conservatives have lost sight of the ideals of the founders of the modern American conservative movement -- of men like Weaver, Frank Meyer, and the young William F. Buckley.  But those men knew that the struggle between the Right and the Left just is, ultimately, a war of ideas, and cannot fail to be given that man is a rational animal.   Without an actual argument to back it up, the cri de coeur or leap of faith Hart and Dreher seem to be commending to us is just an appeal to emotion or sheer willfulness.  It is, in short, a further manifestation of the modern disease they want to fight, not a cure -- a conservative subjectivism, perhaps, but subjectivism all the same.