Light On Dark Water

Culture War, or Holland With Nukes?

It’s being said, quite rightly, that the Terri Schiavo case is forcing us to face fundamental questions about the value of human life and the conditions under which positive action may be taken to end it. When I emailed several of my children this excellent piece by Fr. Rob Johansen, I included words to the effect that the matter ought not to have turned into a liberal-vs.-conservative question. Of course that it would do so was predictable enough, but what I was thinking when I made the statement was that there ought to be no reason inherent in liberalism putting it on the side of ending Schiavo’s life. It’s clear enough why religious conservatives would be on the side of preserving life. But why is liberalism on the other side? Why, for instance, have left-wing feminists not taken to the streets to protest this exercise of life-and-death power over a woman by her husband?

To ask the question is disingenuous; we all know the answer, which is that liberalism’s commitment to abortion rights has superseded its commitment to the sacredness of human life. And with the whole question of “what’s so special about human life anyway?” standing silently in the wings, the two sides step into their familiar opposition.

But there’s another question involved here, one that is further in the background but even more fundamental and even more muddled: the question of how we know what is right and wrong, and of how or even whether this knowledge is embodied in law. This is a question from which we as a nation would prefer to avert our eyes. We don’t want to face it because we know we are deeply and perhaps fatally divided over it.

As I write this, Terry Schaivo’s feeding tube has been removed and there is no hope of intervention from any state authority; therefore an effort is underway to pass emergency legislation in that would allow her parents some sort of opportunity to argue their case in a federal court. For the past couple of days much of the argument has been over whether this intervention is wise or constitutional. Liberals are indignant that conservatives are attempting, in defiance of their natural instinct, to override state authorities with a clumsy intervention. This is not much of an argument; since the left in general is more than happy to extend federal power, the complaint amounts to nothing more substantial than a charge of hypocrisy.

But the posturing about federalism misses the crucial point entirely. No one believes that a state has the right to do anything that is in flagrant violation of the Constitution. Pull a conjecture out of the air: suppose a state passes a law—observing every legal nicety in the process—which establishes capital punishment as the standard penalty for insulting the governor. Such a law would not stand for ten minutes, and no reasonable person would question the federal government’s right and indeed duty to set it aside as a violation of the Constitution’s protection of free speech, which in turn is protected because it was deemed by the framers to be a fundamental right. The argument in the Schiavo case is not about whether the states can violate fundamental human rights protected by the Constitution. It’s about whether this particular case involves or at least may involve such a violation—which leads right back to the substantive question of the definition and meaning of human life, and the conditions under which it may be ended.

When the Constitution is silent or ambiguous, we have to turn to first principles. We have to ask “what is right?” And we can’t answer that without asking how we know what is right. The instinctive answer of the contemporary American to questions like this begins with “Well, I think…” followed by a list of very subjective likes and dislikes. For many Americans, there are two types of moral judgment: those which are held instinctively by everyone (with the possible exception of Nazis and serial killers) and those which are matters of personal taste. They have no means, no vocabulary, with which to discuss the foundations of matters in the first class, thus no means of responding to a challenge to their beliefs on those matters, and therefore no reliable means of resisting the slow drift of many moral questions from the first class into the second. That is one way of looking at the sexual revolution.

Religious people who have a very clear set of first principles which includes sexual morality are not so easily moved. That is one way of looking at the culture war. The latter is a terrible thing which may prove to be our undoing. But if the condition of arguing fruitlessly and often incoherently about these things, of being deeply divided about them, is bad, think how much worse it will be if a consensus emerges around the wrong answer. Even those of us who believe the USA to be in general and on balance a force for good in the world are dismayed, to say the least, by the prospect of a union of American power with the emerging secular moral consensus. Better a culture war than “Holland with nukes,” to borrow a term used by James Freeman in a comment on Amy Wellborn’s blog a few days ago.