Page 1
of 2 National extinction and natural
law By Spengler
National Geographic made headlines last
week out of my favorite object lesson in human
frailty, namely the extinction of half the world's
languages by the end of the century (some other
estimates are even more alarming). But it is not
just the Nivkh of the Siberian tundra or the
Kapayo of the Amazon rain forest who will
disappear. At present fertility rates so will the
Russians, Japanese, Germans and Italians, not to
mention the Persians.
The death of a
culture is an uncanny event, for it erases not only
the
future but also the past, that is, the hopes and
fears, the sweat and sacrifice of countless
generations whose lives no longer can be
remembered, for no living being will sing their
songs or tell their stories.
When nations
go willingly into that dark night, what should we
conclude about human nature? Unlike extinctions of
the past, today's cultures are dying of their own
apathy rather than by the swords of their enemies.
People of dying cultures kill themselves at a
frightful rate, as in the case of Brazil's Guarani
Indians, who after their displacement from
traditional life have the world's highest suicide
rate. I long have argued, for that matter, that
the Arab suicide bomber is the spiritual cousin of
the despondent aboriginal of the Amazon rain
forest (Live and let die, Asia
Times Online, April 13, 2002).
In the
ancient world of perpetual war, nations perished
by violence, and it was assumed that they would
have preferred to survive. The modern world, with
few exceptions, removes the violent threat to the
national existence of small peoples, yet the rate
of their extinction by strictly voluntary means is
faster than ever before in history.
We
find it hard to come to terms with the suicide of
an acquaintance; how do we come to terms with the
suicide of a nation? In the aftermath of World War
I, Sigmund Freud claimed that human beings
possessed a death-drive as much as an instinct for
self-preservation. If we judged by the numbers
alone, we would have to agree with Freud, given
that most of the world's cultures, advanced as
well as aboriginal, seem likely to annihilate
themselves.
Freud offered in effect a
Satanic parody of the old-fashioned Catholic view
of "natural law" (today's Catholic view is more
nuanced). The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911
defined it as "those instincts and emotions common
to man and the lower animals, such as the instinct
of self-preservation and love of offspring. In its
strictly ethical application - the sense in which
this article treats it - the natural law is the
rule of conduct which is prescribed to us by the
Creator in the constitution of the nature with
which He has endowed us." Sadly, most human
societies evince no instinct for
self-preservation, and certainly no love of
offspring, for they do not bother to have
sufficient offspring to survive.
No matter
what assumption we make about God and human
nature, we land in logical trouble. If our nature
inclines us toward the moral law without the help
of revelation, it is not clear why God is strictly
necessary. That was the position of the Catholic
Church as of the First Vatican Council (1870),
which proceeded from the view of St Thomas
Aquinas. Again, the Catholic Encyclopedia:
Theoretically speaking, man is
capable of acquiring a full knowledge of the
moral law, which is ... nothing but the dictates
of reason properly exercised. Actually, taking
into consideration the power of passion,
prejudice, and other influences which cloud the
understanding or pervert the will, one can
safely say that man, unaided by supernatural
revelation, would not acquire a full and correct
knowledge of the contents of the natural law (cf
Vatican Council, Sess III, cap ii).
[1]
In this system, God isn't strictly
necessary, merely convenient, because humankind is
"capable of acquiring a full knowledge of the
moral law", although prone to mistakes without the
aid of supernatural revelation. That helps explain
why a certain kind of Marxist philosopher always
has found it easy to become a certain kind of
Thomist; in both cases, nature is in the driver's
seat. [2] Either human reason can work everything
out on its own, or it can't. Natural theology
leaves humankind half-pregnant with reason.
It does not help much to reject natural
theology and argue instead for "divine command
ethics", in other words, to assert that what is
good is simply what the Bible (or some other
preferred scripture) tells one to do. That was the
view of Karl Barth, the great Reformed theologian
of the 20th century. Whatever the Bible might
require, humankind still is God's creation, and if
God intended us to hearken to his revelation, he
must have made us capable of responding to it in
some fashion.
There must be some
correspondence, in other words, between the nature
of human beings and any divine revelation that
makes it possible for humans to accept Grace. We
know that there is a correspondence between nature
and the human imagination, or we would not have
discovered planetary orbits or split the atom; why
should there not be a correspondence between
nature, that is, Creation, and the imagination of
our hearts? If it is divine love that elicits from
us a response to Grace, how can we separate our
capacity to respond to love from our nature?
Thus the debate between "natural theology"
and "command ethics" continues around the circle,
and I see no end to it. Of course, we can argue
that some people are pre-programmed to receive
grace and others are pre-programmed to reject it,
but that is no more satisfying than Freud's
contention that some people follow eros
while others follow a death-drive. We are left
watching
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