Apostles of Life: Remarks on Receiving the Evangelium Vitae Medal

Evangelium Vitae: the gospel of life. What is that gospel—that good news?

It is the good news—the very good news—that each and every member of the human family, as a creature fashioned in the image and likeness of the divine Creator and Ruler of all, is the bearer of profound, inherent, and equal dignity.

It is the astonishing news that, in the human family, everyone’s life is inestimably precious; there are no inferiors and no superiors in essential worth and basic rights.

It is, of course, true that people are different and, indeed, unequal in myriad ways. People are far from alike or equal in strength, intelligence, beauty, skill, dexterity, deftness, wit, and charm, as well as in wealth, power, influence, and social status. But the gospel of life relativizes all those differences and inequalities.

As creatures made in the image and likeness of God, every member of the human family is entitled to be treated with dignity and have his or her fundamental rights—beginning with the most fundamental and foundational of all rights, the right to life—honored, irrespective of such things as race, sex, and ethnicity, to be sure, but also irrespective of age, size, location, stage of development, or condition of dependence.

As children of the common Father, in whose image we are made, we human beings are a family. We are quite literally, and not merely metaphorically, brothers and sisters. Our bonds are familial bonds; our obligations to each other, familial obligations.

Injustices—above all, the unjust taking of human life—are not and can never be “none of our business,” for we are, again literally and not merely metaphorically, “our brother’s keeper.” And so our obligations—and let me be clear, our duties as a matter of justice to others—are not confined to not unjustly taking life. They extend to protecting others from those who would unjustly take their lives. When we fail in those duties, we commit injustices against those to whom the duties are owed.

Today, in the case of the precious child in the womb, justice demands not only that we refrain from taking his or her life, or directly cooperating in his or her destruction; justice requires that we, especially in our role as citizens, protect our unborn brothers and sisters and resist those who would expose them to the lethal violence of abortion. It is our fundamental duty in justice to demand that they—and everyone else—be afforded the full and equal protection of the laws. Those holding public office and exercising political power who sin against unborn babies, by exposing them to violent attack, commit a grave injustice. This injustice is intensified, not mitigated, when they claim to be people of faith and rationalize their wrongdoing by averring that they are simply declining to impose their religious beliefs on others.

 

The very same principles require that we reach out in love and compassion to the precious mothers of unborn children—mothers who sometimes are indeed in gravely difficult, dangerous, even dire situations; mothers who are often under intense pressure from boyfriends, husbands, parents or other relatives, or employers—intense pressure to, in those shockingly callous but all too familiar words, “get rid of it.” Our motto—“Love them both”—is more than a slogan. It is more than a pledge. It is not something “beyond the call of duty.” It is our duty. And it is a duty that the pro-life movement, contrary to the vile slanders of the pro-abortion movement and the chorus that echoes its talking points in the media, has been fulfilling for the more than five decades of its existence.

Can our movement do still more? Should we do more? Yes and yes. We can. We should. And we will. What we will never do is offer our beloved sisters the ghoulish pseudo-compassion of the abortionist’s knife. We will offer, instead, the healing balm of genuine compassion, compassion born of love, compassion that offers, not a quick and easy, but deadly, “solution,” but rather an open-ended, open-hearted, self-sacrificial commitment. We have done this for fifty years. We will continue to do it.

 

The Pro-Life Movement, before and after Roe

My own mother recruited me into the pro-life movement when I was a young teenager. This was before the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. Our movement formed in response to legislative efforts to weaken the protection of unborn children in states like Colorado, California, and New York. Those efforts were the work of a new movement that viewed abortion as the solution to two types of problems, the personal problems of women whose pregnancies were undesired and unwelcome, and the social problem of poor—and let’s not hide this fact—often minority children being born, children who, the pro-abortion movement said, would end up on the welfare rolls at taxpayer expense. The pro-abortion movement was further animated by the liberationist ethic, especially the sexual liberationist ethic, of the 1960s, and the belief—a ridiculous belief, as it turned out, but one widely held by elites at the time—that a so-called “population bomb” was on the verge of creating massive worldwide famines in which hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions, of people would die.

The pro-abortion movement claimed, knowingly falsely, that abortion needed to be legalized because tens of thousands of women each year in the United States were dying as a result of illegal, so-called “back alley” abortions. I repeat, and emphasize, that the pro-abortion movement made this claim while knowing it was false. We know that they knew, because the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a founder and leader of the movement, and himself a prominent abortionist, later in his life embraced the pro-life cause and revealed to the public that he and his colleagues knew the claims they made about death rates from illegal abortions were untrue—indeed, wildly untrue—when they made them. Nathanson also revealed that the movement he helped to found and lead, deliberately appealed to and stoked anti-Catholic prejudice to advance their cause, portraying opposition to abortion as nothing more than a reflection of Catholic dogma, and making the Catholic Church and faithful Catholic people out to be villains, who would rob others of their basic liberties, by imposing on them with the force of law their essentially sectarian religious precepts.

On the afternoon of Monday, January 22, 1973, I finished classes in the early afternoon and drove across town from my high school to join some women from my mother’s pro-life group in working a table at the West Virginia University student center, known as the Mountain Lair. As we were handing out our literature, a student walking past our table said to us, “Hey, there’s been a big decision from the Supreme Court on your issue.” “What is it?” we anxiously asked. “I don’t know” he said, “but it’s been on the news.” Well, we scurried off to find a radio—there being no internet or quick source of breaking news in those days. Then we waited for the hour, because there were no all-news channels; news was delivered “every hour on the hour.” We held out the hope that perhaps it was a big pro-life victory. But it was, of course, the very reverse of that. A constitutional atrocity and a moral catastrophe: Roe v. Wade.

To say that we were stunned would be the understatement of the century. After all, even non-lawyers knew that there was nothing in the text, logic, structure, or historical understanding of the Constitution that could provide a basis for the Court to declare a right to abortion, much less the sweeping right that was proclaimed in Roe v. Wade. It was clearly an illegitimate decision—in the words of dissenting Justice Byron White, an “exercise of raw judicial power.” On that day, our little group in West Virginia, like pro-lifers all across the country, vowed: “This will not stand.” We committed ourselves—our lives—to the project of overturning Roe. We didn’t know if it would be a five-year project, a ten-year project, or a twenty-year project. None of us, I suspect, thought that it would be a project that would take forty-nine years, five months, and two days. But we were determined to work as hard as we could for as long as it would take, even knowing that success in overturning Roe would only enable us to begin the next project—working through the mechanisms prescribed by the Constitution to secure for children in the womb actual legal protections, a project that would require us to persuade our fellow citizens to fulfill America’s promise of liberty and justice for all by bringing the unborn under the mantle of the law’s protection.

 

That, of course, is the challenge we face today. It is a challenge made even more difficult by the nearly fifty-year reign of Roe v. Wade. That is because, as Aristotle observed long ago, the law is, among other things, a teacher, a giver of moral instruction, a former of consciences. For forty-nine years, five months, and two days, our law taught a gross moral untruth. It taught generations of our people that the choice to destroy a child in utero is a basic liberty—indeed, a fundamental right. It taught that that the child himself or herself is as nothing—a blob of tissue, a meaningless mass, a mere object, a piece of property, rather than a person with dignity and a right to life. That is a false lesson that it is our job to help people to unlearn. And that will take effort … and time. We will, as Ryan Anderson, who leads the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., has recently pointed out in an excellent Wall Street Journal essay, need to go step by step, moving forward with determination and with prudence toward our goal of an America where every child is protected by law and welcomed in life. Victory will not come all at once, but each legislative achievement will plant the seeds of the next one.

A Dozen Pro-Life Heroes

I’m keenly aware that this is the first awarding of the Evangelium Vitae medal since the overturning of Roe v. Wade—an achievement that many people, those sympathetic to our cause as well as those unsympathetic to it, thought was not possible. After all, our opponents had everything going for them: power, money, prestige, control of the leading institutions of education, culture, philanthropy, entertainment, the economy, and, of course, the news media. We had, and have, none of those things. And yet, the reversal of Roe was made possible because pro-life people all over the country, people like my mother, never lost faith, never gave themselves permission to give up. Even in the face of devastating disappointments and betrayals, such as the grievous 1992 decision of the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, they kept hope alive and soldiered on.

It is on their behalf that I accept the Evangelium Vitae medal. I am not worthy of such recognition. They are. And I would like this evening to mention just a few heroes of our movement who did not live to see Roe fall, though they worked their hearts out to bring down that dishonorable decision. I hope that you will always regard them as the true recipients of the 2023 Evangelium Vitae medal. A complete list would include many more names than I will be able to mention and briefly profile. By no means am I diminishing the contributions of heroes I do not mention. But I would like to say a word about some of my personal pro-life heroes, people I knew and in some cases had the privilege of working closely with.

Dr. Mildred Jefferson was the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and the first woman to graduate in surgery from Harvard. She worked tirelessly to defend unborn babies and, after Roe was handed down, to overturn it. She was an implacable foe of the dehumanization of anyone, anywhere. She served three times as President of the National Right to Life Committee. She was my friend. I drew inspiration from her.

Congressman Henry Hyde labored tirelessly, year in and year out, to protect unborn babies and overturn Roe. He was our champion in the fight to ensure that taxpayer dollars were not used by the federal government to fund elective abortions. He too was my friend, and I had the honor of working with him on many occasions.

Mrs. Nellie Gray was the indomitable, unstoppable founder and leader of the annual March for Life. It is simply impossible to exaggerate the role of the March, and thus the importance of Nellie’s work, in keeping the flame of hope burning in the pro-life movement. Nellie was the living embodiment of our movement’s determination to prevail, no matter the cost, no matter the sacrifices, no matter how long it took. The March was for Nellie quite literally a labor of love. And she taught all of us in the movement to see our work in precisely that way. Love for babies. Love for mothers. Love as the answer to the violence of abortion.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus was a mentor and one of my dearest friends in the world. As a young Lutheran pastor, he had been a leader in the anti–Vietnam War movement and in the civil rights movement, where he marched literally arm-in-arm with Rev. Martin Luther King. A gifted thinker and a brilliant speaker and writer, he was poised to become America’s next great religious public intellectual, the successor to Reinhold Niebuhr. But then the liberal establishment opted, tragically, to embrace abortion. Pastor Neuhaus had to choose whether to make himself acceptable to the cultural, educational, and economic elite—an elite that would, if he yielded on the question of abortion, confer upon him the highest forms of status, recognition, and worldly honors—or stand with unborn babies and their mothers. For Neuhaus, it was an easy choice, and required not even a moment’s deliberation. He became our movement’s intellectual and, in many ways, its spiritual leader. His vow, that we will “never weary, never rest” until all our nation’s children are protected in law and welcomed in life, became our rallying cry.

Governor Robert P. Casey, the last of the great pro-life Democrats, was one of the most principled men I ever had the honor to know. I had the privilege of working with him as an advisor and speechwriter on pro-life issues. When he was told, by no less than James Carville, who was running his campaign for Governor of Pennsylvania in 1986, that unless he “softened” his opposition to abortion he would lose, he simply responded, “then I will lose.” He won. Then, after pushing major pro-life legislation through the Pennsylvania legislature, he won again in 1990—this time over a pro-abortion Republican opponent and by a landslide of historic proportions. Governor Casey showed other pro-life politicians that leaders lead, and that by proclaiming and defending pro-life principles, pro-life candidates can win elections despite polling suggesting that the pro-life position is a “political loser.” Pro-life politicians need to be reminded of that message today.

Notre Dame’s own Professor Charlie Rice was one of the intellectual architects and leaders of the pro-life movement. A Marine lieutenant colonel and a legal scholar, he taught generations of Notre Dame law students—and lots of us who were not formally his students—how to make the legal case against Roe and for the child in the womb. He brought together reason and passion in a way I found remarkable and inspiring. He knew how to be tough in making an argument without being a bully. That’s because he was genuinely devoted to the truth, and in that way was a truly exemplary scholar and teacher.

Mr. Joe Scheidler, whom I had the honor of meeting on one or two occasions, was an advertising executive who took our nonviolent movement to the streets in the way that Martin Luther King took the civil rights movement to the streets. The New York Times, an organ that is scarcely sympathetic to the pro-life cause, acknowledged Mr. Scheidler’s effectiveness, noting that he “became a leading figure in the anti-abortion movement by marrying media savvy with confrontational tactics.” That, indeed, he did. A graduate of Notre Dame, Scheidler was known not only for his willingness to be confrontational, but also for his ability to be in dialogue and even friendship with abortion advocates, such as Bill Baird. His pro-life convictions were born of love, a love so great that it would not only prompt him to bear enormous personal risks and make profound sacrifices on behalf of the babies, but also enable him to regard even his most determined adversaries as friends to be loved and cherished, not enemies to be hated and destroyed. For Mr. Scheidler, no one was beyond redemption.

Germain Gabriel Grisez was my intellectual godfather. His 1970 book Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments remains one of the greatest works of scholarship on the subject ever produced. Were the expression of truth by itself capable of resolving disputed questions, the debate over abortion would have ended in a grand pro-life victory three years before Roe v. Wade was decided. In our world, though, truth, even when stated plainly and defended decisively, can be obscured, or ignored, and shunted aside. Still, Grisez’s work enabled the pro-life movement to proceed with profound confidence in the intellectual integrity and soundness of its convictions—and this was no small thing. To this day, it is in many ways unsurpassed.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, in 1994, literally petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States in an amicus curiae brief to “reverse Roe v. Wade and declare the unalienable right to life of the unborn child.” Due to the kindness of my friend, pro-life attorney Harold Cassidy, I had the honor to be Mother’s lawyer as lead counsel (what is known as “counsel of record”) on the brief—a brief whose principal draftsman was not me, but was rather my beloved friend William Porth, with whom I worked.

Dr. Hymie Gordon was a deeply observant Jew, the son of a rabbi in South Africa, who came to the United States to make his career in medicine, first at Johns Hopkins and then at the Mayo Clinic, where he established a pioneering program in medical genetics. Known as “the father of fetology,” Dr. Gordon was a profound believer in the sanctity of human life, and a physician and teacher who dedicated himself to the Hippocratic oath and the principles of Hippocratic medicine. He was appalled by the decision of medical school after medical school to remove from the oath its express prohibition on physicians inducing abortions. When medicine, as a profession, began heading down the wrong path, he spoke as a prophet—an Elijah, a Jeremiah—reminding his colleagues that the presence of a human being from conception forward was an established scientific fact, not a matter of metaphysical speculation or religious dogma, and calling out academic medicine for compromising its most basic values and abandoning its vocation to heal the sick and infirm and preserve human life.

John Cardinal O’Connor, the late Archbishop of New York, above all others, stood up to those politicians who, while professing to be “personally opposed” to abortion, supported its legal permission and even its public funding, ostensibly on the ground that to do otherwise would be to impose their religion on other people, in violation of the Constitution. This argument was absurd on its face, since the science of human embryogenesis and intrauterine development is clear, and unanimous, and has been for more than fifty years. It was never—I repeat, never—made in good faith, not by Mario Cuomo or Geraldine Ferraro in Cardinal O’Connor’s time, not by Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or anyone else today. At a time when many religious leaders, for whatever reasons, were unwilling to call these people out for their bad faith and manifest injustice toward the most defenseless and vulnerable members of the human community, Cardinal O’Connor publicly confronted them and held them to account.

Nat Hentoff (who, as it happens, wrote a splendid, appreciative biography of Cardinal O’Connor), was the jazz music critic for the Village Voice newspaper, as well as its leading writer on civil liberties. He was an atheist, an old-school liberal, and a longstanding member and board member of the ACLU. Initially, he was fully onboard with abortion “reform.” But then he learned about “Baby Doe,” an infant diagnosed with a cognitive disability who was left by the parents and hospital staff to die. Outraged, he made a national issue of the Baby Doe case, only to find that his fellow liberals were all for abandoning the baby. If abortion was okay, they reasoned, what could be wrong with the infanticide of an infant whose life allegedly “wasn’t worth living’”? My friend Nat was shocked and scandalized by their reaction, and it made him think. If infanticide is not okay, how can elective abortion be okay? A man of unflinching intellectual honesty and moral integrity, he suddenly found himself in a place he never imagined being. He was a convert to the pro-life cause, and a passionate defender of the lives of all children, especially those most vulnerable—the unborn and disabled newborns. He wore his excommunication from the ACLU—which came, as you can imagine, in short order—as a badge of honor.

The Battle Ahead

Well, there you are. A dozen pro-life heroes, twelve apostles of life—from the atheist liberal Nat Hentoff to the Catholic saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta. We in the pro-life movement owe each of them an enormous debt of gratitude and we can and should continue to draw inspiration and strength from their work and witness.

 

And we will need that inspiration and strength, because, as I suggested a moment ago, now we face an even more daunting challenge than reversing Roe v. Wade. With Roe gone we are finally on the field of battle, but powerful forces are arrayed against us.

Nevertheless, “with malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.” It will be hard. We will have moments of disappointment. We will experience setbacks and, alas, betrayals. But we will not lose heart. We will not lose faith. We will not abandon hope. For we know that “He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat. He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat. Oh, be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet, for God is marching on!” And under His hand of blessing, trusting that He will never leave unaided those who in a righteous cause call upon His help, we shall overcome.

These remarks were delivered at the University of Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture on April 29, 2023.

The Surgeries Are Immoral

Florida has made it illegal for doctors to surgically alter the genitals of minors to treat gender dysphoria. In November 2022, after the Florida Board of Medicine took an initial step toward banning “gender-affirming” procedures, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado praised the board’s members for “ruling in the best interest of children in Florida despite facing tremendous pressure to permit these unproven and risky treatments.” The pressure was indeed quite strong. But describing the procedures as “unproven and risky” misleadingly suggests a technical difficulty that could be fixed with better data or tools.

The real problem is more basic: the surgeries remove healthy organs without good reason. That’s not risky—it’s harmful and morally wrong. The people who seek such surgeries are trying to alleviate very real suffering, but whether surgery addresses such suffering humanely is not a question patients are automatically best positioned to answer. That’s true of any patient seeking any medical procedure.

The question is both a moral and a political one. If the surgeries grievously injure the vulnerable people they’re supposed to help, then patients shouldn’t seek them, doctors shouldn’t administer them—and voters and legislators should seriously think about banning them.

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In many surgeries, acts that would normally be harmful and wrong are made beneficial and right by special circumstances. Sticking pieces of metal into a human hand is normally wrong to do, but certain hand surgeries require it. What makes that morally acceptable? Besides having particular shapes, hands have certain functions, like grasping and pushing and pulling. These functions aren’t accidental. Being able to perform them is what makes a hand good at being a hand. When a hand is limp or broken, then what would normally be harmful to the hand—adjusting bones, pricking its skin—is helpful if it’s what a surgeon needs to do to get the hand working normally.

 

The basic principle goes back at least to Aristotle. The parts of an organism ought to serve the whole organism. Helping someone’s organs function as parts of their body is how doctors care for a patient’s physical well-being.

Some of the surgeries administered to treat gender dysphoria involve acts much more extreme than small incisions. Hysterectomies, mastectomies, and penectomies don’t just alter but remove organs. Sometimes, taking out an organ is morally quite right—if an organ is cancerous, for instance, or at serious risk of becoming cancerous. Again, organs ought to serve the good of the whole organism—which, minimally, means that organs shouldn’t host agents of harm to the organism. That’s why bilateral mastectomies can often be the right treatment for breast cancer (or for the genetic risk of breast cancer), why hysterectomies can be the right treatment for cervical cancer, and so on.

For removing an organ to be morally permissible, you need a very powerful reason—something like countering a mortal threat from the organ. It’s true that there are cases in which removing a perfectly healthy organ from a patient is morally acceptable—live organ donation, for instance. But in all cases of licit organ donation, the functions performed by the donated organ are performed by organs that remain in the body. That isn’t true for the surgeries covered by the Florida ban.

The big question is whether something about gender dysphoric patients can justify the surgeries we’re talking about. I think the answer is no.  Even assuming the psychological facts most favorable to proponents of the surgeries, and even assuming ideal conditions of autonomous consent, the surgeries are unjustified and therefore harmful. Compassion demands acknowledging the pain of transgender people; it equally demands not performing surgeries that make their lives worse.

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Some patients seeking the treatments we’re discussing claim to be assigned to the wrong sex, to have a gender (a psycho-social sense of self) that doesn’t match their body. Surgery, this argument goes, could settle the conflict between, say, a female gender and a male body by surgically reforming the latter to mesh harmoniously with the former.

I think it is always an error to say you’re a woman trapped in a man’s body. Whether one is male or female is determined not by psychology, but by organs that serve distinct reproductive roles. Interestingly enough, this point actually seems to be accepted by those who say the bodies of gender dysphoric patients should be altered from one sex to the other. If whether someone is male or female isn’t determined by reproductive organs, why should gender dysphoria be treated by altering just those organs? The problem is not misassigned sex, because sex cannot be assigned or misassigned or reassigned. It can only be embodied.

But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that you could be a woman trapped in a man’s body. Surgery wouldn’t change that. Altering a man’s genitalia may disable him from engaging in reproductive acts, but it does not—indeed, it cannot—produce the organs that enable a woman to engage in reproductive acts. A man cannot become a woman, no matter what a surgeon does to his genitalia. If that weren’t true, then the many people who in the history of human cruelty have had their genitals forcibly removed would have thereby been moved closer to membership in the opposite sex. But that is simply not so.

 

Altering a woman’s genitals doesn’t make her into a man, and altering a man’s genitals doesn’t make him into a woman. Even assuming that the proponents of the surgeries are right about the psychological states of patients before the surgeries, the surgeries don’t achieve their intended result.

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Perhaps what’s morally relevant isn’t whether a surgery switches the patient’s sex, but whether it gives the patient psychic relief. If the patient is psychologically improved by the surgery, does that make the surgery morally permissible? Whether something gender-related caused a patient distress before the surgery isn’t relevant to our question; all that matters is whether the patient feels better afterward.

As before, let’s grant the proponents of surgery their best-case psychological scenario. Assume these surgeries do, in fact, induce relief, contentment, a sense of wholeness, or some such positive mental state. Here’s the problem: any positive mental state will be an unfitting response to the physical harm caused by the surgery. The patient might feel better, but they will feel better about a situation about which they ought to feel worse, so the surgery will have replaced one mismatch between mind and body with another.

Consider, for example, the mental state of fear. Fear is that distinctively unwelcome, repellent, dominating frisson. Fear is appropriate for dangerous situations and a bad fit for harmless ones. Fear has norms. There could be such norms only if fear, in addition to being a feeling, also depicted the world outside the mind in a certain way. To be afraid of something is for one’s mind to claim that the something is threatening, dangerous, to be avoided. If a situation is in fact dangerous—if fear is making a true claim about the situation—then fear is the right response. Otherwise, it is not.

As it is with fear, so it is with contentment, pleasure, relief, and other mental states. They can be judged appropriate or inappropriate only with reference to the situations to which they respond. Take contentment, for instance—that calm state of desire for things to continue as they are. That’s the correct response to a loving marriage or a good job. But it’s an incorrect response to injustice, because injustice ought to be rectified, and contentment is a state of satisfaction. Or take relief, that lessening of felt urgency or pressure. Relief is a good response to, say, the successful end of an important and difficult project, but not to the accidental, unexpected death of a beloved child. The same goes for pleasure, that warm feeling of attraction and inner harmony. Taking pleasure in another’s suffering is wrong, because suffering calls for sympathy, a desire to aid the victim, and perhaps anger.

For one’s mental states to respond improperly to the world is a sad thing, and it calls for compassion, not blame. People who have been depressed know how frustrating it is to feel numb at what ought to elicit joy or sadness. I know people for whom everyday stuff is terrifying. This is an awful experience, not because terror is always bad—it’s often fitting and valuable—but because everyday stuff just doesn’t call for terror.

The mental states we are discussing can be valuable only if they fit the situations to which they respond. So, even if removing a healthy sexual organ makes a patient content, the contentment itself is valuable and worth aiming at only if the removal of the healthy organ is something with which one ought to be pleased. But considered on its own, the removal of healthy organs is physically harmful.

Surgeons who try to relieve their patients’ pain by stunting or removing healthy organs are doubly in the wrong: they are harming their patients’ bodies, and they are doing it in order to induce an inappropriate mental response. It would be similar for a doctor to help a teenager cut herself to alleviate her anxiety.

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But maybe we should take a longer-term view of benefits to patients. Let’s say that some surgery relieved a patient of psychic distress that had blocked the patient from having the friendships they wanted, the job they hoped for, or some other aspect of human flourishing. Would the gain to the patient’s life outweigh the direct harm of the surgery?

No, because well-being shouldn’t be instrumentalized that way. Imagine that some people said you could be friends with them, but only if you did some degrading thing in public, or if you slept with every member of the group, or if you stole from your grandmother, all these acts would be as immoral as physical self-harm. Moreover, they’re not the sorts of things good friends would ask of someone, since good friends try to promote one another’s well-being, not to harm it.

Let’s imagine a friendship between two people, one of whom has gender dysphoria (but who has not had any surgeries). Besides the standard duties of friendship, the friend without dysphoria has duties owing to the other’s dysphoria: sympathetically acknowledging their distress, helping them to accept identity in their body, encouraging them to seek psychiatric treatment, and so on. If anything, surgery would make these duties harder to discharge, even if the surgery delivered psychic relief. The patient would be physically worse off (because they would have lost healthy organs) and would not be mentally well either (because they are now psychically relieved at having sustained a physical injury). Advancing the health of the dysphoric friend would mean undoing the psychological effects and alleviating the physical harm done by the surgery. Not advancing the health of the dysphoric friend would mean neglecting a basic purpose of friendship—to help unwell friends to get well, which at a minimum requires not acquiescing in their belief that they are well when the belief is false.

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Up until now, I’ve been exploring whether the surgeries can be justified by their benefits to a patient’s mental health, or to some part of their life that might be affected by mental health. I’ve assumed the psychological facts that are most favorable to proponents of the surgeries, and still, a good justification for the surgeries hasn’t been found.

It could be that we have been looking for the justification in the wrong place. Maybe it’s not the patient’s improved mental health (as well as related goods, like friendship) that makes a surgery moral, but rather autonomous consent to the surgery. In the preface to his book When Harry Became Sally, Ryan Anderson discusses a 2018 New York Times op-ed by Andrea Long Chu, who identifies as a transgender woman. Chu intended to undergo vaginoplasty surgery in the coming days, but he didn’t expect the six-hour procedure to make him happier or relieve his dysphoric thoughts. To Chu, that was beside the point: “no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies … withholding [the surgery]. … [S]urgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want.”

 

If a surgery considered in itself is wrong, it’s difficult to see how consent could make it right. Consent just doesn’t seem to have that power. Consider some other wrongful acts: tearing the wings off of butterflies, cheating on an exam, lying to a friend. Does the fact that one freely chooses to do these things somehow make them morally right? On the contrary, to quote the great liberal political theorist Joseph Raz: “Demeaning, or narrow-minded, or ungenerous, or insensitive behavior is worse when autonomously chosen or indulged in.” When a human being acts wrongfully and autonomously, she isn’t an accidental part of chain of events that produces something undesirable. She’s consciously willing the wrong thing.

At this point, a proponent of the surgeries might dig in their heels and say we have unlimited moral sovereignty over our bodies. I find it hard to argue against this opinion, though I find it equally hard to imagine how one might argue for it. But consider the consequences. Torture, live vivisection or burial, slavery, drowning, and so on would all be considered morally acceptable, as long as someone freely signed a consent form. Our basic dignity would be exchangeable if only we agreed to the exchange. The idea is obscene.

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None of the potential justifications for the surgeries has passed muster. If the surgeries aren’t justified, then the extreme acts they involve—such as amputation—are not helpful but severely harmful. That means patients shouldn’t request the surgeries, and doctors shouldn’t agree to perform them.

Generally, the medical profession can be counted on not to perform harmful procedures. Patients who have Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), for example, believe that they would be better off if an arm or a leg were amputated. Both BIID and gender dysphoria involve a deep alienation from one’s body. But while many doctors in America do remove organs to treat gender dysphoria, they do not amputate limbs to treat BIID (according to Dr. Peter Brugger, a Swiss research physician who’s published extensively on the disorder, whom I interviewed over email). This is not—so far as I can tell—because the law prohibits it.

Sometimes there are good reasons for the law to step in and just say no to a procedure. Many American states have made it illegal to perform gay conversion therapy. The risk of serious harm was judged too high to leave to the medical field to regulate. Sex-reassignment surgeries, which are increasingly popular to perform and risky to oppose publicly, should be banned on similar grounds. Such surgeries aren’t a run-of-the-mill vice like excessive smoking that the state should, given limited resources, leave to individuals. The surgeries do direct, grievous, physical, irreparable harm to the vulnerable, under the auspices of medical care.

There is a very brave and growing movement to persuade states to ban these surgeries, along with puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones, for minors. Proponents of such bans often argue that we lack empirical data about the treatments, that there may be bad long-term psychological effects to such treatments, and that minors are at a delicate stage in life and should wait until they have grown up (by which time their gender dysphoria may have abated).

I worry that appeals to data outsource the final word to the researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Given the present state of these professions, does anyone have serious doubts about the results the experts will deliver?

 

Untethered to a principled view that the surgeries are wrong, the anti-surgery camp may find itself making concession after concession—to the poignancy of severe cases of gender dysphoria, to the independence of the medical profession, to ignorance about the long-term effects of the surgeries (which ignorance could be remedied only by letting the surgeries be performed and observing the results), and, of course, to patient autonomy.

Instead, we should oppose the surgeries with an account of human freedom ordered toward the goods that make freedom a blessing rather than a curse. The goal of self-government, at the political level, is to help citizens govern themselves fruitfully in their personal lives. Addiction, loneliness, our inhumane sexual culture, and the ever more popular desire to reconfigure one’s body with surgery aren’t isolated problems—they result from a national refusal to put political and cultural heft behind the conditions of genuine flourishing.

Unfortunately, American conservatives are wary of political appeals to flourishing. They prefer to talk about freedom and leave matters there. That was fine when America’s enemy was the Soviet Union and when American culture generally promoted the fruitful use of freedom. What about when America allows 100,000 people to die from alcohol and opioids in one year, sees over half of all marriages dissolve, can’t find enough military recruits, empties out church pews, and fills heads with TikTok, porn, and Adderall? Americans are used to thinking of their free society as a humane society, and the more humane for being free. But a society can be both free and inhumane if that society’s culture and laws are neutral about the virtues enabling the proper uses of freedom.

Conservatives need to choose between their impulse to let people live as they damn well please and their opposition to the grisly stuff being done by scientists and surgeons. One of these days, artificial intelligence and medical technology are going to get together and transform flesh-and-blood men and women into bespoke apparatuses of circuitry and steel. What will conservatives say then?

Certain limits cannot be transgressed without abolishing our humanity. The time to build a political coalition around the significance of our embodied personhood is now, when the practice to be opposed is the not-terribly-alluring one of cutting off the genitalia of vulnerable people. Next time, conservatives may not be so lucky.

Contempt, Inquiry, and Rational Disagreement: Learning from Aquinas in the Internet Age

The seventeenth-century mathematician, philosopher, and Christian apologist Blaise Pascal once remarked, “The truth is so obscured these days that only those who love it will find it.”

Living at the advent of modernity, a time characterized by great ideological contests among and within philosophy, religion, science and politics, Pascal was quite aware of two facts about human beings. First, the need for truth is woven into the deepest impulses of our being. Second, the truth is not easy to ascertain. In many cases, the subject matter itself is difficult. But Pascal here speaks of truth being obscured, as if there were deliberate obstacles being placed before us. These obstacles are not just external forces that seek to deceive us. They are also internal, having to do with our own vices and disordered passions, our penchant for preferring our own fantasies over facts and our own will over that of others. If we have an impulse toward truth, we also cultivate impulses to evade the truth, even the truth about ourselves.

Fake news, irate passion, and violence are regular parts of our political life these days. Trapped in our ideological cul-de-sacs, eager to do battle with opponents in the disembodied world of social media, our default position is that anyone who disagrees with us must be both malicious and fatuous. Surveys show that there has been a marked decline in rich, personal friendships; meanwhile, civic friendship has been replaced by civic odium. We increasingly inhabit a culture of contempt. In response, there has been a great deal of talk about the decline in the quality of our public discourse. Thoughtful books on these topics abound, including Teresa Bejan’s Mere Civility, Danielle Allen’s Talking To Strangers, Arthur Brooks’s Love Your Enemies, Ben Sasse’s Them, Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized, and Aurelian Craiutu’s Faces of Moderation.

In this essay, I want to consider an element that usually drops out in the focus on civility: the habits, strategies, and methods necessary to seek truth and—as Pascal would have us do—to love it. That’s different from the goal of consensus, which is quite often desirable, if only rarely achieved. A more achievable goal would be rational disagreement, for which in our public life we currently often substitute irrational vituperation. Rational disagreement is an integral part of the pursuit of truth.

For guidance on these matters, I am going to turn to what may seem an unlikely source: Thomas Aquinas. At first glance, Aquinas may seem to advocate a model of reasoning that is highly abstract, a matter of moving from self-evident principles through lucid deductions to unimpeachable conclusions. That would seem to have little to do with rational disagreement or with the messy, passion-inflected give and take of public discourse. But this impression is misleading. In reality, Aquinas has a great deal to teach us about rational disagreement, and about the character traits that assist or hamper the pursuit of truth, especially the pursuit of truth in concert with others.

 

The (Anti-) Social Scene

A chilling scene from George Orwell’s 1984, the “Two Minutes Hate,” nicely captures the mood and culture of much of contemporary cable news and social media. The description of the practice of the ritual venting of animosity toward political enemies runs thus:

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

The posture of contempt is a radical defense mechanism, a way of making sure that we are not taken in by the ideology of our opponents on crucial, divisive matters. But it also renders us blind to the weaknesses in our own views. What’s more, it is contagious. Unchecked, it will infect all areas of human life and thought.

This posture also contributes to inaccurate estimations of political opponents. A recent study from the Brookings Institution entitled “The Perception Gap” “explores how Americans have a distorted understanding of people on the other side of the aisle.” It is not surprising, with the growth of partisan animosity, that erroneous opinions about political opponents have increased. What is surprising are the following results: the disconnection with reality was highest among “the best educated and most politically interested,” who “are more likely to vilify their political adversaries than their less educated, less tuned-in peers.” In other words, the least engaged and least politically active came the closest to having an accurate view of their opponents. Many self-proclaimed active and informed citizens are a far cry from the sort lauded in the Federalist Papers.

The mainstreaming of extremism, the widespread acceptance of conspiracy theories, and the ease with which we can retreat to like-minded technological communities render our political discourse both vindictive and shallow. The isolation that so many experience as a defining fact of their lives increases the need for belonging through ideological identification and for connection through social media. These conditions exacerbate unhealthy tendencies that have always plagued us as human beings.

The Christian tradition has always been acutely aware of these tendencies, which are borne out by research in contemporary moral psychology. In his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt argues that, contrary to our perception of ourselves as fair-minded rational agents, we are in fact largely dominated by passions and unexamined assumptions, in defense of which we expend a great deal of effort. “We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves,” Haidt writes. We rarely start with a dispassionate examination of evidence and then move to conclusions. Rather, Haidt continues, we “make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.” Underscoring the social influence on our thinking, Haidt concludes, “Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.”

Another significant problem here is that we think we are free when we are not. Technology may be making it more difficult for us to distinguish between freedom and manipulation. In his 2016 book, The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, Matthew Crawford reflects on the fact that, in a world dominated by technology, activity on screens and interaction through social media substitutes for encounters with the real world around us. The mode of interaction with the virtual world puts before us the tantalizing possibility of what he calls a “frictionless universe,” one in which we are presented with few or no obstacles to our will. Crawford effectively deploys Freud’s contrast between the pleasure principle, most characteristic of infants and children, and the reality principle, in which adults learn to navigate various ways in which the world and other persons push back against our will. A frictionless universe is one in which we are liberated from the reality principle, in which the world ceases to push back against our will and technology reduces to the vanishing point the gap between “I want it” and “it appears.” That’s just how Tolkien describes the similarity between magic and technology: both offer instantaneous satisfaction of wants.

When we seem most unencumbered in our online activity, apparently most free to get what we want, we are also most prey to algorithms, to advertising, and to the influence of groupthink. The feeling of freedom is no guarantee of actual freedom. This is especially true of our assumption that our preferences express “a welling-up of the authentic self.” As Crawford, warns, “Those preferences have become the object of social engineering, conducted not by government bureaucrats but by mind-bogglingly wealthy corporations armed with big data.”

 

Aspiring to Rational Disagreement: Three Key Steps

What are the remedies for these obstacles to truth? I’d like to turn now to Aquinas and consider his accounts, first, of rational inquiry, which aims at least partly at rational disagreement, and, second, the role of habits and passions in our communal pursuit of truth.

One of the defining features of Aquinas’s mode of inquiry, one that students find both frustrating and tedious, is his voracious habit for objections. The disputed question mode of argument, popular in the nascent universities of the West and a pervasive feature of Aquinas’s most well-known work, The Summa Theologiae, has a determinate structure. Thomas begins with the posing of a question; then he offers a list of objections to his own position; then he resolves the question; finally, he returns to the objections and responds to them.

What seems artificial to us is but a snapshot of the very lively and highly contentious form of public disputation in the medieval universities. Josef Pieper once insightfully remarked that the disputed question is a distant offspring of the Platonic dialogue. For Thomas, the ample consideration of objections is a necessary condition of rational inquiry.

In fact, I would argue that there are at least three degrees of, or stages in, rational argumentation for Aquinas. It is good to make a rigorous argument—an argument in which the conclusion or thesis is clear, the evidence or premises used to reach the conclusion are lucidly articulated, and the connections among the premises are made evident. But it is even more convincing to add to such an argument a consideration of objections—the stronger, the better. The notion that one would go in search of strong arguments against one’s own position is counter-intuitive only to those who see argument as a weapon for defeating opponents or as a tool for the quick scoring of points. It is an indispensable element in any serious pursuit of truth.

Aquinas’s mode of proceeding may seem overly intellectual, almost disembodied, as if we were living in a realm of pure ideas. Yet clarity and rigor of argument do not mean that we are operating without passion or conviction. By all accounts, Aquinas seems to have had an equable disposition. Even so, at times he cannot avoid expressing displeasure, frustration, or jubilation. For the error of identifying God with prime matter, he calls David of Dinant stultissimus, which we might translate as “colossally stupid.” In a legend dear to G. K. Chesterton, while dining at the royal court, Aquinas interrupted the convivial conversation by slamming his fist on the table and yelling, “That will refute the Manicheans!”

Thomas seems to be most exasperated by views that have three characteristics: a) they are about matters that matter a great deal, b) they are positions he is quite confident are false, and c) they are nonetheless supported by very complicated and in many ways impressive arguments.

 

Take, for example, the view of the Islamic philosopher Averroes concerning the unity of the agent intellect. This view would undermine the possibility of personal immortality and bears on the question of moral responsibility. Early and often, Aquinas rebuts the position, often with great vigor. He tries to show not just that the view is contrary to the explicit teaching of the faith but also that it is contrary to reason and to the texts of Aristotle. He even devotes an entire work to this topic alone. Aquinas is not above voicing his displeasure at Averroes’s position, going so far as to label him a “perverter” of Aristotelian philosophy.

It is worth noting what Aquinas does not do. He does not ignore Averroes. He does not seek to have his books banned. He does not simply invoke authority in an effort to forestall further debate or to reach a peremptory judgment. In fact, he returns to the topic repeatedly. What’s more, each time, he constructs different arguments, sometimes completely of his own devising, on behalf of Averroes’s position. For all this disagreement on this particular issue, he is more than willing to embrace other positions of Averroes and even to model his own commentaries on Aristotle after those of Averroes, who is called The Commentator.

The appetite for objections contrary to his own position is, for Aquinas, a requirement of the pursuit of truth. It is a practice intrinsic, not accidental, to the quest for knowledge. As he says in a number of places, it is impossible to untie a knot of which one is ignorant.

The path toward truth is through one difficulty after another. In the examination of difficulties, we will find ourselves both learning from and disagreeing with others. One of the suggestions that Aquinas makes about how such conversations might best proceed occurs early in the Summa Contra Gentiles (I, 2), where he urges that in disagreeing with an opponent, it is best to begin from some sort of common ground. He states that with Christian heretics, we share the New Testament as a basis for debate; with members of the Jewish faith, the Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures; and with all others, we have recourse to reason, which we share with everyone. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive points of departure. One can argue with Christian heretics using all three. The strongest arguments are those that come from within the position of one’s interlocutor. To be able to make such arguments in a convincing way can be quite difficult and is often possible only after one has learned the alternative position in a fairly deep and comprehensive way. In turn, this can require that we learn to see whatever question we are considering from a perspective quite different from the one we currently have.

Beyond clarity of argument and the response to objections, Aquinas offers something further in his account of rational disagreement. We can see it in his admiration for Aristotle’s mode of proceeding in the first book of the Physics, where Aristotle examines the nature of change. He begins by considering the received opinions about the matter, both those latent in common belief and ordinary language, and those that have been defended by philosophers. This is a common practice in Aristotle. It rests on the supposition that truth is like the proverbial door that no one can fail entirely to hit. I won’t take you through all the arguments, but he ends up arguing for a position that he thinks salvages the reality in our experience of both endurance and change. At the end, he doesn’t simply say, “I’ve made my arguments; that’s it.” He returns to the two most influential, inherited philosophical opinions about change: that of Parmenides, who through an analysis of the meaning of being and non-being insists that there is no such thing as change, and that of Heraclitus, who observes that all things are in flux and hence defends the view that permanence or endurance is an illusion. Aristotle takes the time at the end to go back over these positions, to sort out what is true from what is false in them, and then to explain how it is that they each depart from the truth. Presenting his own position as that which encompasses what is true in the positions of his rivals and showing where and why they go astray is the most convincing kind of argument.

So, in Aquinas, we can discern three stages in argumentation that enable rational disagreement: the giving of straightforward arguments, the consideration of objections (the stronger, the better), and the providing of an account of where and why rival positions differ from one’s own.

There is a further step, I’d like to suggest, in Aquinas’s account of rational disagreement, one that is quite close to what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the rationality of traditions. In a work like the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas seeks not only to give convincing arguments and to respond to objections. He is also interested in offering a comprehensive account of philosophy and theology as an integrated pursuit of wisdom, an account that engages and seeks to surpass the accounts found in the most ambitious philosophical and theological texts of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. He seeks to show where and why he disagrees with these various traditions of wisdom.

Now, such an ambitious model of rational disagreement might seem to be only relevant at rare periods in human history when there is enough in common to aspire to bring varied traditions together in this way. Interestingly, Cardinal Ratzinger proposes that the engagement of wisdom traditions is likely to be the most fruitful path for the development of natural law discourse in the modern world. In much of contemporary society, he notes, the very grounds for morality have been weakened and the conception of nature, on which Thomistic natural law rests, has been “capsized.” Ratzinger issues a caution to the excessive optimism of those who would seek to deploy natural law in the public square as a basis for moral or political consensus. Rather, he proposes that we recover natural law as surfacing in various communities or traditions, what he calls wisdom traditions. In his marvelous summary of Ratzinger on natural law, Russell Hittinger writes that the result is a “new emphasis on natural law . . . as a search or path.” The fruits of such an approach can be seen in the recent book, Natural Law: A Jewish, Christian, Muslim Trialogue, written by David Novak, Matthew Levering, and Anver Emon.

 

Careful Thinking Demands Care with Language

Few of us might have the opportunity or need to develop all the elements in Aquinas’s account of rational persuasion, though we can all aim for clarity and make the effort to examine objections to our views. But there is another feature of Aquinas’s approach that is relevant to all of us nearly all of the time.

Aquinas spends a great deal of time on what we might be tempted to call “grammar”: the clarification of the different senses or meanings of words. He is not inclined to think that all our disagreements are merely verbal. Still, he realizes that many of them are—or, at least, their resolution is greatly assisted by making distinctions about the meaning and scope of terms. Becoming reflective about the words we use can help loosen up the sedimentation that often afflicts our language. Sedimentation can have a variety of causes; perhaps our language has become overly and artificially technical or riddled with clichés and jargon. Clarifying terms helps us to frame the difficulty or problem in as clear a manner as possible.

In an essay titled “Politics and the English Language,” written long before the advent of social media, George Orwell has some pertinent observations about the decline of public discourse. Orwell highlights for us the danger of a kind of passivity with respect to the common language, the way in which a certain laziness with language atrophies the imagination and paralyzes thought. What sounds like a mere matter of style, mere rhetorical ornament, is for Orwell a matter of taking ownership of our own writing and thus of our own thinking. The habits he urges upon us have especially to do with skills of articulation, but these are inseparable from skills or virtues of inquiry and discovery. The realization that I don’t know exactly what I want to say or how to say it can generate questions: What do I think about this? What should I think? Why?

In a lesson that is spelled out in greater and more dramatic detail in his famous novels, Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell insists that if we don’t consciously use language, language will use us. Others can seize on the sloppiness or deceptiveness of language to use it and us for their own aims. Passivity in our writing allows ready-made phrases to “construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”

Such self-appropriation of language is particularly needed when we are in the grips of a ready-made vocabulary. Partisan discourse, whether in the form of the jargon of a particular philosophical school, in the catch-phrases of the social sciences, or in the clichés of approbation and derision of political movements, can all too easily control our thinking and speaking. Graduate students in philosophy, for example, would be well advised to learn how to explain their work in ways that are accessible to non-experts, to undergraduate students, and to those who inhabit different philosophical systems.

What Orwell is calling for in our writing, what Aquinas, in his varied modes of reasoning, is what the contemporary British philosopher, Bernard Williams, calls the virtue of accuracy, “a desire for truth for its own sake—a passion for getting it right.” Williams, who died in 2003, was a notoriously captious thinker, an agnostic and a skeptic of large claims in philosophy. Yet late in his life, in the book Truth and Truthfulness, Williams sought to provide a positive account of truth. He was concerned that we were entering an era, both in the wider culture and in academia, of a crisis of truthfulness, of a decline in truth-conducing practices.

 

Internal Obstacles to the Pursuit of Truth

In his analysis of the obstacles to accuracy, Williams turns our attention from external to internal obstacles to rational discourse, to the sorts of obstacles Jon Haidt and Pascal are fond of pointing out. Williams highlights laziness and a host of “desires and wishes” that “subvert the acquisition of true belief.” Thus, in addition to methods of investigation, accuracy also has to do with the will and the passions, with our penchant for self-deception and fantasy.

Aquinas seems to have an overly optimistic view of what reason can accomplish, as if it could operate in an unhindered way simply through practice. Yet he has a great deal to say about the way in which disordered passions can undermine our capacity for getting at the truth. In fact, he argues, for example, that we can hate the truth. Since our souls are naturally ordered to truth and goodness, it would seem that we cannot hate what it true. Aquinas counters that hatred is possible under certain conditions, namely, “when a particular truth . . . is considered as hurtful and repugnant.” Such conditions obtain when we strongly wish that something were not true, especially in cases where the acknowledgment of its veracity would get in the way of our fulfilling some desire. In another way, we can hate the truth when it concerns something about ourselves that we prefer would remain hidden. Aquinas quotes Augustine’s Confessions: we “love truth when it enlightens,” but “hate it when it reproves.” The aversion to truth exhibits itself in “blindness of mind,” evident in our turning away, sometimes quite deliberately, from a relevant truth or fact.

Such blindness can lead us to be unjust to others in ways that run from the innocuous to the heinous—a position Aquinas develops in his discussion of the vice of suspicion. Aquinas calls suspicion a “perversity or disorder of the affections” that has to do with thinking ill of someone based on “slight indications” or what we might call insufficient evidence. That’s a pretty apt description of the default disposition of many who are active on social media. In its gravest forms, suspicion involves the judgment that someone is evil, on the basis of flimsy evidence.

The vice of envy, which is rooted in sorrow over another’s good fortune, can also play a role here. What makes us sad is the alleged harm to our honor or good name caused by the good fortune of another. If justice looks to the good of the other, injustice, particularly in the vice of envy, is preferring my own good name or honor over what others deserve. This turning of the world in upon oneself, in an inaccurate estimate of one’s own worth and one’s own desires, is a source of injustice. Such a perversion of the just estimation of others can occur not just on an individual level but also on a communal one, when I prefer the good of my group, precisely because it is mine or ours, to the good of other groups or parties. The danger here is that we consider the truth to be our possession or our right and thus become envious when the argument of another is superior.

The interesting thing about our current divisions in relation to Aquinas is that he would recognize a basis for justified fear of opponents. And we are indeed fearful. A recent Pew survey reveals that 72 percent of adults think that, on the issues that matter to them, their side in politics has been losing more often than winning. Just 24 percent say their side has been winning more often than losing. The accuracy of such statements is less at issue than the fact that each side thinks this way. We on both sides are prone to apocalyptic pronouncements about what will happen if the other side wins. These are likely to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Each action on one side generates an opposite and exponentially greater reaction on the other.

Aquinas actually has something to say about such cases, and it is not hopeful. In the discussion of suspicion above, I skipped one type, which arises from “long experience” and can be justifiable. What if our suspicion is justified? What if it’s based on long experience or at least on sufficient evidence? In an odd twist, Aquinas finds in the high level of our mutual hostility grounds for justified fear of opponents. Aquinas identifies a type of envy, rooted in sorrow over another’s good fortune. Unlike the cases of envy that we mentioned above, in this case, the advance in another’s good fortune occasions sorrow because “it threatens to be an occasion of harm to” us, “as when a man grieves for his enemy’s prosperity, for fear” that “he may do him some harm.” Aquinas comments, “such like sorrow is not envy, but rather an effect of fear, as the Philosopher states (Rhet. ii, 9).” The divisions are great, and each battle, each election seems an all-or-nothing proposition in which if one side wins, it promises destruction of the other side. Aquinas would say fear is justified in this situation.

 

Joy, Inquiry, and Friendship in the Face of Irrational Incivility

The presence of feared evils or the prospect of their imminent arrival breeds sadness. If the sadness is not dispelled, it generates anger, a welling up of the powers of the soul in opposition to the present evil and the desire to defeat or evade it. It doesn’t take much observation of present-day America to see that we are a people consumed by anger. With Aquinas’s help, we might also see that the anger rests on deep pools of sadness, a depressing sense of isolation, loss, and fear.

Now, Aquinas does not think that anger is always evil. In fact, there are occasions when it is the appropriate response to evil. Still, he adds a warning from Gregory the Great: “We must beware lest, when we use anger as an instrument of virtue, it overrule the mind . . . instead of following in reason’s train, ever ready . . . to obey.” He also observes that anger is mostly useful in situations in which the evil can be directly vanquished by action. In cases in which we have to endure evils, the virtues of patience and hope are more important than anger.

I’d like to propose one other remedy to our divisive, sorrowful, angry culture. We can seek out those with different views who nonetheless have a genuine interest in truth and engage with them in a difficult but joyful pursuit. We can also seek to embody the standards of Aquinas on rational inquiry even in our interaction with those with whom we largely agree. Now, the paucity of folks with a love of truth may mean that the shared pursuit of truths across ideological lines will be rare, but we should also realize that the paucity is likely present on all sides, not just on the side of those with whom we disagree, perhaps even in our own souls.

This practice will not provide a quick fix for our political malaise. Nonetheless, the cultivation of such friendships can aid us in our individual and communal pursuit of truth, reshaping us into people who earnestly love the truth.

National Conservatives for the Status Quo?

The American right is in one of its periodic fits of introspection and internecine dispute. The midterm elections, which were widely anticipated to deliver victories for the “new right,” ended up being rather disappointing for the GOP as a whole. Instead of sweeping into power, Republicans not only failed to recapture but in fact lost control of the Senate, and they only narrowly secured control of the House. Moreover, political candidates aligned with nascent conservative factions plausibly bore much of the blame.

The relationship between the Republican Party and the conservative movement has never been direct. Even so, throughout the history of modern conservatism, different factions have gained dominance by securing champions in the political arena. The presence of such champions helps to mainstream a given group’s ideas, create new institutions dedicated to those ideas, and elevate actors within existing institutions who favor new currents over those who are seen as clinging to the status quo. The success of such champions, furthermore, can pave the way for the political triumph of like-minded compatriots.

The failure of such would-be champions, on the other hand, produces precisely the sort of infighting the right is seeing now. Given that the midterms failed to provide a decisive victory for any conservative faction, they all continue to advance their own priorities and interests while harshly criticizing the others. They agree, rightly, that there is much in modern American life that requires serious correction, but they differ in the prescriptions they propose.

One of the contenders for control of the movement is national conservatism, whose adherents claim to be the most fiercely agitated about modern American life and the best equipped to address what agitates them. But despite its leaders’ proclamations to the contrary, national conservatism is uniquely ill-equipped to accomplish what it sets out to do, because of its uncertain relationship to the American political tradition and its comfort with the sources of many of America’s current ills.

The Principles of National Conservatism

National conservatism can be broadly defined, as it has many adherents who hold a variety of positions on key policy questions. Last year, however, many of them signed a Statement of Principles written on behalf of national conservatism’s flagship institution, the Edmund Burke Foundation, which was meant to convey consensus on certain beliefs.

National conservatives attempt to distinguish themselves by their focus on the interests of the nation, as such; by their special attention to issues that directly concern the nation’s relation to other polities (especially immigration, trade, and foreign policy); and by their greater willingness to employ power at the national level to effect policy desiderata. The Statement—some of whose signers hail from other nations—puts it this way:

We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice.

In the specifically American context, it endorses “accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance.” This is all welcome, to a considerable extent, but it also sounds rather familiar. Concerns about our nation’s borders, our nation’s economy, and our nation’s presence abroad are common themes for conservatives, even in the restrictionist, protectionist, and less interventionist forms national conservatives favor.

Of course, as much as conservatives love to describe what they believe, they take equal—or perhaps even greater—joy in describing what they do not. One account, written by David Brog of the Edmund Burke Foundation, forcefully rejects alleged myths about national conservatism. Two are worth discussing here. Do national conservatives oppose the free market? No; they admire it, Brog wrote, but they “see the free market as the best means to an end and not an end in itself.” This makes them “willing to depart from orthodox laissez faire when the national interest requires it.” Are they foreign-policy isolationists? No; they reject the stale, discredited consensus of interventionism, but “see strengthening allies like Japan, South Korea, India, Israel, and Ukraine as the best way to protect our interests abroad.”

Yet these “myths” contain more truth than Brog admits. At the third National Conservatism conference in 2022, also a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, statements praising free markets were nearly always followed by caveats large enough to call into question the first part of the statement. “Ronald Reagan’s agenda was successful because it fit the specific needs of his time. We don’t need to—and we shouldn’t—throw out all our old ideas,” Rachel Bovard said at the conference. “But we do need to reprioritize them now—when our most basic government and economic institutions are ideologically weaponized against the public.” Similarly, the conference provided evidence both for and against isolationist tendencies. Some national conservatives, such as conference chairman Christopher DeMuth, support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia as an exemplar of national sovereignty, but many others question the U.S. interest there.

 

Embracing the Constitution, Rejecting the Declaration

Interestingly, there was a large Hungarian presence at the conference. This gave the proceedings a rather cosmopolitan flavor. Indeed, national conservatives sometimes drain conservatism of much of its national—that is, distinctly American—meaning. Nowhere in the Statement of Principles, for example, is the Declaration of Independence mentioned, or even implied. As one assessment of the Statement of Principles observed, “The national conservative effort to effectively write the Declaration out of American nationhood is manifest.”

Perhaps this can be attributed to the influence of Yoram Hazony. Hazony has been at the center of many recent attempts to define and advance national conservatism. Hazony is co-drafter of the Statement of Principles, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, and the author of both The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) and last year’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery. In the latter book, Hazony explicitly pits the Declaration against the American political tradition. In his view, the Declaration promoted

the Lockean doctrine of universal rights as “self-evident” before the light of reason; whereas the Constitution of 1787, drafted at a convention dominated by the conservative party, ended a decade of shocking disorder by restoring the familiar forms of the national English constitution.

Thereafter, everything bad in American politics has descended from the Declaration, and everything good in American politics has descended from the Constitution.

Hazony’s book frames this understanding of history, and the Anglo-American conservatism that emerges from it, as a rediscovery. But, as one review pointed out, it is better understood as a theory, and a flawed one at that. Start with the Declaration itself. It was not one-off twaddle by Thomas Jefferson. Although he was a primary force behind the document, he co-wrote it with John Adams, the kind of figure Hazony otherwise incorporates into his vision of what conservatism is supposed to be. Near the end of his life, Jefferson said the Declaration “was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”

It’s true that the Constitution represented a move toward stronger national authority than the earlier Articles of Confederation. But was it really a restoration of British government? As one Hazony reviewer has pointed out, the Constitution’s primary advocates said otherwise. In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton, another figure of whom Hazony approves, argues that the ratification of the Constitution presents an opportunity for Americans to decide “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Why does Hamilton believe Americans are capable of designing a new government? Because, as he wrote in Federalist No. 9, “the science of politics . . . like most other sciences, has received great improvements,” including new ways to limit government power. And in Federalist No. 84, Hamilton explicitly distinguished the Constitution from its British precedents. In the British context, bills of rights are “stipulations between kings and their subjects” and therefore “have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people, and executed by their immediate representatives and servants.” In our system, by contrast, “the people surrender nothing; and as they retain everything they have no need of particular reservations.”

In other words, historical evidence supports the idea that, though America owed a great deal to what came before, it was nonetheless consciously distinct. During the ratification debates, it was the Constitution’s opponents, the anti-Federalists, who believed that the document was attempting to restore British monarchical forms. As another reviewer of Hazony’s book pointed out, “Hazony argues that the anti-Federalists were right in their analysis but wrong in their value judgment.”

Most historical assessments judge the American Founding as something new. Hazony does not. “It is easy to overestimate how much of a change was involved in this establishment of republican government in America,” he writes. But in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, historian Gordon Wood argues that “the Revolution did not just eliminate monarchy and create republics; it actually reconstituted what Americans meant by public or state power and brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics and a new kind of democratic officeholder.” To be sure, the American Revolution was not the French Revolution. In important ways, it was held in check. Nonetheless, we should not underestimate the power of its change.

 

Abraham Lincoln, likewise, confounds Hazony’s analysis. Hazony writes that, “although Lincoln comfortably mixed Jeffersonian rhetoric with his imposing biblical imagery, his policies as president were in a tradition the Federalists would have easily recognized.” But Lincoln did more than comfortably mix these things. Jeffersonian rhetoric was central to his time as a public figure. Of the Declaration, Lincoln wrote that he gave “all honor to Jefferson” for introducing “into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” He also said, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”

Contra Hazony, Lincoln believed that the Declaration and the Constitution were inextricably linked. The Declaration, with its principle of “liberty to all,” was the “apple of gold,” around which the Constitution, “the picture of silver,” was framed. To take an example from Lincoln’s time: It took the moral force of the Declaration, together with the Constitution, to end slavery. We should consider ourselves fortunate, not weirdly embarrassed, as Hazony seems to be, about the Declaration’s centrality in American political life.

Losing Sight of American Tradition

What accounts for Hazony’s embarrassment? It seems like an attempt to create a new political tradition that he thinks better serves his current ends. But that would be at least as much a form of abstract rationalism as anything the Declaration attempted—one totally alienated from the unique American context. In its more benign forms, such thought would elide the distinctions between the American and British political traditions. We have already seen how they are distinct, though to confuse them is perhaps somewhat understandable.

But to confuse the American tradition and the Hungarian, as some national conservatives do? That’s a bit more of a stretch. Whatever popularity Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban might have with his people, why should even a good American nationalist be so invested in a European nation the size of Indiana with the population of Michigan? Any honest attempt to compare our national situations or traditions would find little overlap. Yet many conservatives praise Hungary anyway. Such praise often elides the two nations’ distinctions, and it fails to note that Orban’s government has played nice with Russia’s and has invited Chinese investment.

Still, it would be problematic for a supposedly American nationalism to be so focused on another nation even absent these other factors. This is what can result from untethering nationalism from America’s actual political tradition. That’s why that tradition is what should motivate American conservatism. At its best, America’s tradition is both concrete and accessible, powerful enough that a refugee from Cold War–era communist Hungary could say to his family that they were fleeing to America because “we were born American but in the wrong place.” National conservatism, at its worst, inverts this, redefining the American political tradition so that it somehow finds better expression elsewhere. Conservatives thinking about how best to confront our very real problems should root themselves in a proper understanding of America, and of its political history and traditions.

National conservatism often has trouble with this. The most obvious evidence comes in deviations from the American traditions of limited government ordained by the Constitution.

Return to the statement of principles. It contains a section on economics that, again, contains much one can agree with. “We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition.” It continues: “We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state.” So far, there is little deviation from the recognizable tradition of American conservatism.

But here comes the caveat: “But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation.” The statement then goes on to lament that globalized markets empower America’s enemies, weaken America economically, and enable “transnational corporations” to flood the country with goods that weaken national virtue. Thus, the statement asserts:

a prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare.

It adds helpfully that “crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-making by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.”

It is true, though not very controversial, to assert that “the free market cannot be absolute.” But while globalization has presented many challenges to America, the picture the statement paints of America’s economic situation is both hyperbolic and selective. Both trade and automation have played a role in reducing manufacturing employment, yet manufacturing remains a significant driver of our economy. And while both Adam Smith and Milton Friedman would agree that national security is an acceptable free-market exception, we already have many policies in place to that end. Moreover, many people work hard to take advantage of that exception. If you want to know why sugar is so much more expensive in the United States than elsewhere, thank the Florida sugar lobby’s success in making its product a national-security priority.

It is prudent not to be completely closed off to government policy in this area, to be sure. China presents a real threat to the United States. Actions like banning TikTok, a Chinese spyware app featuring short videos (which are pointless at best and soul-destroying at worst), and reshoring certain critical industrial capacities are worth considering. Still, we should be very careful how we do such things.

Internal Contradictions

There are also contradictions in this part of the statement of principles. As one assessment of the statement has argued, the attempt to “restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare” sounds a lot like industrial policy, in which the government picks winners and losers in the economy. If we’re going to see more of that (and let’s be clear, there is already a great deal of it), based on past examples, we’re going to see more of the same “crony capitalism” the statement ostensibly condemns. And if we’re going to see an expanded role for the government economically, it’s very hard to envision how we’ll achieve a “drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state.” Yet this is a policy priority the statement explicitly invokes.

On the one hand, this framework increases the scope for political patronage. Indeed, at last year’s National Conservatism conference, one speaker explicitly called for conservatives to “be a little less principled” so that we can “build an interconnected web” of “client interests” that are “committed to our political success.” And on the other, it increases the scope for action through the administrative state, an explicitly anti-constitutional part of our government bequeathed to us by the Progressive Era and grown by subsequent deviations from our constitutional order. Senator J. D. Vance (R., Ohio), who is one of the closest things in Congress to a national conservative, has said that “we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes.”

That national conservatives would have an interest in aggrandizing this feature of modern politics is, unfortunately, consonant with their deprecation of federalism. On this subject, the national conservative statement of principles does gesture toward an appreciation. “We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers,” it reads. “We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values.” However, it includes two statements that render these appreciations somewhat empty. “We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom.” More ominously, it adds that “in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.”

This gets the relationship between the states and the national government quite wrong. The states don’t have significant powers for the sake of convenience or efficiency. The states are, rather, meant to be serious political entities in their own right. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reads that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The states are not mere administrative units. Any political movement that does not understand this will have trouble succeeding in America—or it will “succeed” in a way that will not be recognizably American.

 

Defending the Status Quo

Attempts to criticize national conservatism often invite accusations that critics are merely gatekeepers, defenders of the status quo. To the extent they have anything to say, the argument goes, all such critics can do is attack those who actually take our problems seriously.

To be clear: modern American life is dissatisfactory in all sorts of ways. Though it remains possible to live a good life in America today, and while there is much that can be achieved through our political system by ordinary means, there is also much that needs improvement, even salvaging. It is unclear, however, that national conservatives should be the ones to lead such an effort. The contradiction about cronyism and the error about federalism help explain why.

National conservatism, supposedly a challenge to the status quo, actually doubles down on it. One of the biggest failures of conservatism since the end of the Cold War is its evolution into a business headquartered in Washington, DC. Increasingly, conservatives cared more about status and power in the institutions in the DC-centered conservative movement than about their ideological commitments. Conservatism lost a focus not just on the culture but also on the political importance of the states. To the extent that conservatives achieved success in these fields, they were often afterthoughts, exceptions, or even accidents. DC was the aim. Of course, as long as DC is our national seat of government, there will always be some need for a conservative presence in it. What truly national ends this country has, let’s debate them, and then pursue them well, through a restored emphasis on the proper channels of deliberation and decision-making that the Constitution ordains. But everything else must be redistributed back to the people and to the states.

National conservatives often forget or even downplay the virtue of restoring congressional supremacy and reviving federalism as a genuine distribution of power. This defect arises, in part, from the weak relationship between national conservatism and the American political tradition. In these respects, it is not a disruption from the centralizing status quo, dependent on deviations from our constitutional order, but a continuation of it. Some of its proponents, so keen on invoking “the people,” appear to be nothing more than power-hungry status-seekers casting about for a group in whose name they can create a comfortable life in DC. It seems we have a new vanguard looking for its new proletariat. They seek not to diminish the Beltway’s grimy sinecures, but merely redistribute them.

If this is all national conservatism amounts to, then it deserves neither prominence within the right nor electoral success. Indeed, as recent midterm elections showed, national conservatism has not in fact achieved such success. For now, therefore, its Beltway entrenchment remains uncertain. As for prominence on the right, for better or worse, national conservatism is now a recognized, coherent faction. It has introduced—or, more typically, renewed—a focus on certain issues that are welcome parts of intra-conservative political discussions and debates. But as a new direction for the conservative movement, it leaves much to be desired. Any conservatism that fails “to defend what is best in America. At all costs. Against any enemy, foreign or domestic,” as National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. put it, will not be worthy of the name.