Ministerial Exception Leads To Dismissal Of Part of Nuns’ Sexual Harassment Claims

This is from religionclause.blogspot.com which you can find here:

In Brandenburg v. Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North America, (SD NY, June 1, 2021), two nuns who formerly worked at a Greek Orthodox monastery sued the Archdiocese and several clergy members for sexual harassment by Father Makris at the monastery. One of the plaintiffs also sued over the conduct of Father Makris when he was Dean of Students at the religious college she attended in Massachusetts. When the student reported a sexual assault by a male student, Makris made her marry her attacker to cure the assault.

Invoking the ministerial exception doctrine, the court dismissed plaintiffs’ sex discrimination claims and their retaliation claims to the extent they are based on tangible employment action (hiring, firing, job assignments, promotion, compensation).  However the court held that the claims for constructive discharge survive, as do the claims for retaliation to the extent they are based on harassment and not a tangible employment action. Some of plaintiffs’ defamation claims also survived the motion to dismiss.

You can learn more about this issue here.

The trouble with capitalism

This is from edwardfeser.blogspot.com which you can find here.  This blog is written by Edward Feser who is a Christian philosopher who I have been recently introduced to who I think provides effective clear, sobering, and direct responses to the advance of secular culture.

__________

Posted on May 22, 2021 here.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.  (Matthew 19:24)

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?  (Mark 8:36)

Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. (Matthew 4:4)

When people use or hear the word “capitalism,” some of the things they might bring to mind are:

1. The institution of private property, including private ownership of the basic means of production

2. Market competition

3. The existence of corporations as legal persons

4. Inequalities in wealth and income

5. An economic order primarily oriented to the private sector, with government acting at the margins and only where necessary

Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of those things.  Indeed, some of them (such as private property and a government that respects subsidiarity) are required as a matter of natural law.   Eliminating all economic inequalities (as opposed to remedying poverty, which is a very different matter) is neither possible nor desirable.  The concept of the corporate person has long been recognized by, and regarded as salutary within, the natural law tradition (whatever one thinks about its instantiation in modern business corporations).  Socialism in the strict sense, which would centralize the most fundamental economic decision-making, is intrinsically evil.

On the other hand, other people using or hearing the term “capitalism” might have in mind things like:

6. A doctrinaire laissez-faire mentality that is reflexively hostile to all governmental economic intervention

7. The market as the dominant social institution, with an ethos of consumerism and commodification of everything as its sequel

8. Corporations so powerful that they are effectively unanswerable to government or public opinion

9. Doctrinaire minimalization or even elimination of social welfare institutions, even when there is no feasible private sector alternative

10. Globalization of a kind that entails dissolution of corporate and individual loyalties to the nation-state and local communities.

Now, all of these things are bad and should be opposed on natural law grounds.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but merely illustrative.  And what it illustrates is that it is unhelpful to talk about either embracing or rejecting capitalism full stop.  The term has too many connotations for that, and needs to be disambiguated.  Hence the sweeping claims often made by both sides in the debate over capitalism inevitably generate excessive heat while reducing light.  When people say “I support capitalism,” they often mean “I support 1-5” but their opponents hear them as saying “I support 6-10.”  And when people say “I oppose capitalism,” they often mean “I oppose 6-10,” but their opponents hear them as saying “I oppose 1-5.”  To a large extent, they talk past each other.

When we do disambiguate the term, we get more light and less heat.  But we also lose the simpleminded pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist slogans.  No doubt that is precisely why friends and critics of capitalism alike prefer not to disambiguate it. 

Does this entail that no interesting general claims can be made about actually existing capitalism (as opposed to the abstract models of capitalism put forward by its defenders and its critics)?  Not at all.  Having pleaded for nuance, let me now boldly make some sweeping claims of my own.  I can at least promise that I will offend both sides.  Here are the claims:

I. Capitalism has made us materially much better off.

II. Capitalism has made us spiritually much worse off.

In defense of the first claim, I would simply refer to the standard arguments made by libertarians, free market conservatives, and liberals like Steven Pinker, which I regard as unanswerable.  The rule of law, stable property rights, the price mechanism, the division of labor, and other aspects of modern market economies have made possible astounding wealth creation and technological advances that have raised the material conditions of everyone.  As Pinker writes:

Together, technology and globalization have transformed what it means to be a poor person, at least in developed countries.  The old stereotype of poverty was an emaciated pauper in rags.  Today, the poor are likely to be as overweight as their employers, and dressed in the same fleece, sneakers, and jeans.  The poor used to be called the have-nots.  In 2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV.  (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.)  Almost half of the households below the poverty line had a dishwasher, 60 percent had a computer, around two-thirds had a washing machine and a clothes dryer, and more than 80 percent had an air conditioner, a video recorder, and a cell phone.  In the golden age of economic equality in which I grew up, middle-class “haves” had few or none of these things.  (Enlightenment Now, p. 117)

Before you respond that government had something to do with this as well, let me emphasize that I don’t disagree with that.  Again, I am not talking about the laissez-faire fantasy capitalism of libertarian dreams and socialist nightmares.  I am talking about actually existing capitalism, which has always had a significant public sector component – government provision of basic infrastructure, military research and development vis-à-vis technology, redistributive programs, and all the rest.  The point, though, is that it was precisely the governments of capitalist countries that oversaw these advances, because they protected and supplemented the overall capitalist order rather than subverted it.  Even redistributed golden eggs have first to be laid by the market economy goose. 

But affluence can have a high spiritual cost, as classical philosophy and Christian theology alike teach us.  Modern capitalist society is essentially an instance of what Plato called the oligarchic sort of regime, which he regarded as the third-worst sort – or third-best, if you want to accentuate the positive.  It is better than democracy and tyranny, but worse than either the rule of the Philosopher-Kings or what Plato called timocracy. 

Now, keep in mind that the way Plato characterizes the five sorts of regime that he distinguishes is primarily by way of the kinds of souls which predominate in them, and that the characterization thus presupposes his tripartite conception of human nature (in terms of reason, the spirited part of the soul, and appetite).  A society governed by the Philosopher-Kings is one in which the highest part of the soul, reason, is idealized and is dominant in those who govern.  A timocracy is a society in which the spirited part of the soul, and the martial virtues that characterize it, is dominant in those who govern it.  A democracy, as Plato characterizes it, is a society in which the lowest, appetitive part of the soul dominates and tends toward licentiousness.  A tyranny is what results when a particularly ruthless democratic soul imposes its will on the rest. 

Oligarchy as Plato conceives of it stands between timocracy and democracy.  Like democracy, it is governed by the appetitive part of the soul.  But the specific appetite it fosters, the desire to acquire wealth, is not as unruly or chaotic as the pursuit of sensual pleasure that dominates democratic society.  Its satisfaction requires some degree of self-discipline and delay of gratification – and thus the bourgeois virtues, which, though not as noble as those honored in the two higher sorts of regime, at least put some restraints on the other appetites.

The trouble is that, for one thing, later generations within an oligarchy, who enjoy the benefits of affluence without having had to exercise the discipline required in order to create it, tend to become soft and decadent.  And for another thing, there is money to be made in catering to the lower appetites.  Hence oligarchy tends to decay into democracy in Plato’s sense.  And that is why the America of the robber barons and of the military-industrial complex eventually gave way to the America of Woodstock and the sexual revolution, and now to that grisly amalgam of the two – the America of contemporary woke capitalism. 

If easy affluence is corruptive of the natural virtues, it is even more corruptive of the supernatural virtues.  The rich young man, though he showed initial interest in following Christ, opted instead to hold on to his possessions when he had to make a choice (Matthew 16: 19-22).  This famously led Christ to warn that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). 

Now, superficial readers of this passage suppose that it is fundamentally about the duty of material assistance to the poor.  They overlook the reaction to Jesus’s teaching:  “When His disciples heard it, they were greatly astonished, saying, ‘Who then can be saved?’” (Matthew 19:25).  Why would they ask such a thing, since only a minority of people are rich?  St. Augustine answered as follows:

When the Lord says that a rich man does not enter the kingdom of heaven, his disciples ask him who can be saved.  Since the rich are so few in comparison with the poor, we must understand, then, that those who yearn for such material goods must realize that they are included in the number of those rich. (Questions on the Gospels)

Or as Haydock’s commentary puts it: “The apostles wondered how any person could be saved, not because all were rich, but because the poor were also included, who had their hearts and affections fixed on riches.”  The problem with the rich young man, then, was not that he was rich, but that he valued riches above following Christ.  And that is a spiritual malady that can afflict even those who are not rich, but who cannot bear the fact.  Indeed, they can be in even worse shape if they add to this sin of avarice the sin of envy. 

But it is a commonplace that those who suffer want of any kind are more likely to perceive their dependence on and need for God, whereas those who have much can become self-satisfied and distracted by worldly concerns.  In particular, they are in danger not only of the sins people usually associate with wealth – avarice, gluttony, and pride – but of the even more insidious sin of acedia or distraction from the highest, spiritual goods.  Hence the rich stand in special need of warning.  How many more are bound to be in this spiritual danger, then, when many more are affluent – as they are in modern capitalist societies?

That Plato’s and Christ’s warnings have been borne out is obvious from the collapse of traditional morality and widespread apostasy from Christianity that have characterized modern capitalist societies, and from the way of life that has replaced them.  In such societies, “success” is conceived of in terms of the acquisition of material wealth.  Preparing the young for adulthood is conceived of in terms of training them for a “career” that will assure them this “success.”  Pursuit of this goal is the preoccupation not just of an elite, but of everyone – achieving it is the “American dream.”  Social justice is conceived of primarily in terms of enabling as many as possible to achieve this “dream.”

Everyday life is devoted to making money that one might spend on dining, entertainments, travel, and other material goods – which enable one to rest up so as to be ready to get back to making money.  Advertising is ubiquitous, and consumers dutifully pursue the latest new product, the latest pop culture fad, the latest fashions, or the latest enthusiasm in cuisine.  Though political fights may arise over various cultural and moral controversies, in the end it is the state of the economy that tends to determine who gets into power.  Even conservative parties tend to cave in on “social issues” but will fight tooth and nail for tax cuts, deregulation, and the like.  “It’s the economy, stupid!” is the bipartisan conventional wisdom. 

Even otherwise traditionally-minded Christians become suckers for obscene materialistic distortions of the faith, such as the “prosperity gospel.”  Liberal Christians, meanwhile, emphasize helping the poor and marginalized – not to save their souls, but rather to get them into the same rat race that the rest of society runs in.  Christ says: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).  But secularists and modern Christians alike, whether conservative or liberal, take the highest end of moral and political endeavor to be to build a world where no one ever has to deny himself anything and there are no crosses of any kind.

From a traditional Christian point of view, then, the main danger of actually existing capitalism is not that it makes people poor, but on the contrary that it makes them rich compared to most people who have ever lived, and certainly fixates them on the acquisition of material wealth.  It has thereby led the mass of mankind into a particularly insidious sort of temptation that relatively fewer were faced with in previous ages.  Most people read passages like Matthew 19:24 and smugly think of the rich as “them.”  But to paraphrase Walt Kelly, we have met the rich man, and he is us.

Is the solution to abolish riches?  No, because wealth is not intrinsically bad, and indeed is a positive good.  Again, the problem is not riches per se, but the fixation on riches.  And the fixation can exist even when riches do not.  The solution is to counter this fixation.  Sound principles by which this might be done were set out by popes Leo XIII,  Pius XI, and John Paul II, who condemned socialism in absolute terms, but defended capitalist institutions only with significant qualifications of a kind that no libertarian or classical liberal could accept – and who insisted that both the crisis of modernity and the social transformation needed to remedy it are fundamentally moral and religious rather than economic in nature.

Related reading:

Hayek’s tragic capitalism

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx

Liberty, equality, fraternity?

Aquinas contra globalism

Continetti on post-liberal conservatism

NEW FAITHS OF THE SELF

C. S. Lewis wrote that to be modern is to be consumed by the magical impulse “to subdue reality to the wishes of men.” This entails giving up one’s soul in exchange for power. “Once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.” We will also have forsaken the ancient wisdom which holds that the soul is only truly free when in harmony with what is real.

Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton’s survey of America’s post-secular religious landscape, examines prominent twenty-first-century attempts to “subdue reality” by force of will. Contrary to the popular perception that America has become increasingly secular, Burton shows that religion is flourishing, albeit in non-traditional guises. Insofar as “religion,” in Burton’s functionalist usage, names those beliefs and practices that serve “both individually and societally to give us a sense of our world, our place in it, and our relationships to the people around us,” it has always and everywhere suffused human life. Today that suffusion is apparent even in avowedly “secular” institutions like the Supreme Court, which recently enshrined the sacral metaphysics of gender theory in law. The George Floyd protests also demonstrate the power of the progressive social justice religion to effect a nationwide Durkheimian “collective effervescence.”

Burton describes the new religions practiced by more than fifty percent of Americans today as “Remixed.” The religiously Remixed, “shaped by the twin forces of a creative-communicative internet and consumer capitalism,” prefer “intuitional spirituality” to institutional churches. They mix and match different practices to form their own rituals and belief systems. While most Remixed are “nones” or “spiritual but not religious,” many self-identified Christians also practice Remixing.

Remixed religion, Burton suggests, would be impossible apart from our long conditioning by consumer capitalism. At its heart, Remixed religion is selfish, choice-obsessed, therapeutic, and adaptable to expediency—making it a natural bedfellow of progressive politics. These new religions of the self may partially satisfy the human need for narrative and wonder, but they threaten to dissolve our civic institutions in a sea of “personal authenticity and experiential fulfillment.”

Burton traces the roots of the Remixed to the intuitionalist faiths of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, and Quimby’s New Thought. While the postwar economic boom accelerated individualist trends in American religion, America has always been fertile ground for self-worship and charlatanry.

Today’s charlatans are the “spiritual entrepreneurs” who reinvent snake oil in the myriad guises of a “wellness” industry worth $4.2 trillion, exemplified by Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience bazaar Goop. The theology of wellness is gnostic, pitting the intuitional self against society. According to the gospel of wellness, we each have a “moral responsibility to take care of ourselves first before directing any attention to others.” But because the work of “self-care” is never complete, care for the other is never quite justified.

Among the darker forms of self-worship, Burton examines the recent explosion of occultism among American progressives. This movement drew scrutiny last year when the proprietors of Catland, an occult supply store in Brooklyn, ritually cursed Brett Kavanaugh and President Trump. Modern witchcraft combines “progressive feminist politics with a fervent opposition to institutional Christianity—which is dismissed and derided as a bastion of toxic patriarchy, repression, and white supremacy.” Dakota Bracciale, co-owner of Catland, is an apologist for “black magic,” which is countercultural, dangerous, and a tool for resisting oppression. Bracciale, a white male, argues that non-whites and queer people should “decolonize” witchcraft and restore its African roots by embracing the language of white European Luciferianism. Such farce is typical of the incoherence of the Remixed.

Even apart from witchcraft, Remixed religions consistently exhibit Lewis’s magical impulse. For the Remixed, nature—especially our sexual nature—exists to bear the imprint of human will. “If wellness culture centers the perfectibility of the body as the locus of personal spiritual growth,” writes Burton, “then sexual utopianism takes that corporeality to its logical conclusion . . . why shouldn’t sexuality be the place for us to access not just pleasure but meaning and purpose?” Remixed sexuality casts a vision of a transformed social order. And that vision is increasingly popular. One-fifth of Americans admit to experimenting with “ethical non-monogamy”; even more have experimented with BDSM and other kinks. Authenticity, after all, requires acting on our desires. Refusing to indulge one’s kinks is thus to forsake one’s own perfection.

While the Remixed faith of the sexual utopian may seem like New Thought by way of Thelema, it is perhaps best understood as—to coin a phrase—neoliberalism of the body. Remixed religion is so appealing, in part, because it “is inseparable from a consumer-capitalist model of sexuality.”

But not everyone has the same purchasing power in the sexual marketplace, and thus not everyone can access the meaning-making power of Remixed sexuality. In her penultimate chapter, wryly titled “Twilight of the Chads,” Burton examines the ressentiment of “incels,” men who for want of good looks, money, or social skills are “involuntarily celibate.” Incels want to burn the world down (along with all the sexually successful Chads and Staceys), and Burton’s characteristic empathy is muted as she walks us through their misogynistic world. Incels are a small but noisy subset of what Burton calls “nihilistic atavism,” a Remixed religion focused on reclaiming ground lost to feminism and progressivism. At its most reasonable, the new atavism may resemble Jordan Peterson’s program of renewed male responsibility. But it is best characterized by outsized denizens of the “manosphere” such as Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), who advocates a muscle-bound, homoerotic Nietzscheanism that longs for the emergence of Übermenschen worth submitting to. It is hardly accidental that BAP’s obsession with submission resembles the sexual utopian’s affinity for kink.

Burton believes three rival strands of Remixed—social justice culture, nihilistic atavism, and Silicon Valley’s techno-utopianism—are battling to become America’s new civil religion. Each belligerent resembles the others. Whereas intersectional feminists want to destroy society for its misogyny and racism, new atavists want to destroy it for having yielded to the enervating forces of progressivism. Both the cult of social justice and the cult of techno-utopianism prize disruption, valorize the self, and see nature as an obstacle to the body’s perfection.

By emphasizing narrative, Burton renders complex phenomena accessible to general readers without sacrificing precision, and her analysis flows directly from the testimony of the Remixed themselves. But readers will be left with questions. To what extent is the egocentrism of American religion intrinsic to the American project itself? In the context of liquid modernity, are genuinely new faiths possible? Or are all new faiths doomed to serve only as therapies for the “spiritually fluid”?

Remixed religion is mutable and prone to imitation because, at its heart, it preaches only the self and its will to power. No civilization whose civic religion is so crassly nihilistic can long survive. And no self whose faith is Remixed can long endure as a self. Remixed religion is in the business of producing what Malachi Martin called “aspiring vacuums”: denatured souls dispossessed of the ability to will that which is proper to their natures; that is, individuals ripe for possession by the will of another. Most despairing of all, the Remixed are trained to welcome such demonic subjugation. One woman interviewed by Burton explains that during BDSM sessions she pictures herself as a “hollow cane of bamboo,” an empty vessel for external will (“energy”), rejoicing in the annihilation of self.

This is the false re-enchantment of the magician’s bargain. The unmaking of one’s soul is disguised by therapeutic appeasement. And yet re-enchantment remains perhaps the most important task for a civilization incapable of experiencing the meaning inherent in our world. That meaning cannot be “chosen” by humans. It can only be discovered—by participation in what Lewis called “Deep Magic,” the unbegotten power that sang the world into existence. Burton says in her introduction that she has rediscovered such enchantment in a return to faith. I’m not alone in hoping she will share that journey in her next book.

By Tara Isabella Burton and published in First Things on June 29, 2020 and can be found here.

Texas Passes Heartbeat Abortion Law With Broad Civil Enforcement Provision

This is from religionclause.blogspot.com which you can find here:

Today the Texas legislature sent to Governor Greg Abbott for his signature SB8 (full text), the state’s version of a “heartbeat” abortion law. Except in medical emergencies, it bans performing or inducing an abortion if the physician has detected a fetal heartbeat. Unique to the Texas law is a provision that allows any private person to bring a civil action against a physician who has violated the statute, and against anyone who knowingly aids or abets the abortion, including reimbursing the costs of an abortion through insurance, regardless of whether the person knew or should have known that the abortion would be performed or induced in violation of the statute. However, no action may be brought against the woman on whom the abortion was performed. Plaintiff may recover statutory damages of not less than $10,000 for each abortion the defendant has been involved in. Daily Beast reports on the new statute.

You can learn more about this issue here.

Defining Social Justice | Dr. Voddie Baucham

Every now and again I come across something the warrants posting here; I recently came across this a video which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

___________________________________

Indiana Trial Court Dismisses Catholic School Teacher’s Suit Against Archdiocese

This is from religionclause.blogspot.com which you can find here:

As previously reported, in May 2020 in Payne-Elliott v. Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Inc., an Indiana trial court refused to dismiss a lawsuit against the Catholic Archdiocese brought by a Catholic high school teacher who the Archdiocese ordered fired after he entered a same-sex marriage. In July 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court broadly interpreted the “ministerial exception” doctrine as it applies to teachers in religiously affiliated schools. Subsequently, in State of Indiana ex rel. Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Inc. v. Marion Superior Court, (IN Sup. Ct., Dec. 10, 2020), the Indiana Supreme Court denied a writ of mandamus and prohibition and remanded the case to a different trial court judge “to consider new and pending issues and reconsider previous orders in the case.”  Now, in Payne-Elliott v. Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Inc.,  (IN Super. Ct., May 7, 2021), the trial court dismissed the case for failure to state a claim on which relief can be granted. Legal Reader reports on the case.

You can learn more about this issue here.

STEVEN PINKER’S MUSCULAR SECULARISM

Steven Pinker, as his blurb reminds us, has been reckoned by Time magazine among the “hundred most influential people in the world today.” In Enlightenment Now he devotes more than five hundred ­pages to making the case for “reason, ­science, ­humanism, and progress.” It’s not really clear why pushing a rolling stone downhill should be such hard work, but Pinker seems to think that the four horsemen of the Acro­polis are under attack now as never before. I can’t say I’d noticed. There aren’t that many people against reason or science, and as for humanism and progress, well, it all depends on what you mean.

For the most part, Enlightenment Now is an effective enough demonstration against professional doom-mongers that the world ­today is populated by more, healthier, ­wealthier, longer-lived, better-housed, better-educated, and better-equipped people than ever before. If Pinker confined himself to setting people straight on some key facts, no problem. But there is an element of mission creep as he glides effortlessly from the domain of facts and science to the domain of values and judgments—a domain in which the scientific method certainly has not managed to produce consensus. For Enlightenment Now is not just a recitation of reasons to be cheerful. It is also an exercise in confessional polemics, and it displays the virtues and vices of its genre. The polemics are in aid of secular humanism rather than Christianity or Islam, but the methods are much the same. It is often jolly and entertaining, especially when on the attack against confessional targets such as religion or postmodernism, but it can be preachy and it tends to the prolix. And it subjects its own presuppositions to somewhat less ­critical scrutiny than those of its opponents. Tedium is likely to beset those readers who simply want to focus on the arguments, though the liturgical incantation of the ­triumphs of the truth will comfort true ­believers. The tricks of the trade are all on show: selectivity, special pleading, sleight of hand, straw men, strategic statistics, suggestio falsi, suppressio veri.

Pinker is not averse to having his cake and eating it. For “Enlightenment” turns out to be shorthand for “what I like.” And “­Enlightenment thinkers,” likewise, seem to cash out as “people like me.” Is it mere coincidence that the Johnstone Family Professor of ­Psychology at Harvard University sees the members of this various group as “inquisitive psychologists”? When they receive the Pinker seal of approval, they are “Enlightenment thinkers.” At other moments, they are peremptorily excommunicated. Thus ­Rousseau, an Enlightenment thinker on page 10, becomes on page 30 a Romantic reactionary pushing back hard against Enlightenment values, before being readmitted to the fold two hundred pages later.

The “Enlightenment thinkers” invoked throughout this story therefore remain an ill-defined and ill-assorted bunch. Their role in the argument is reminiscent of that of the “Fathers” in Christian controversy, with Pinker as the self-appointed pope whose ex cathedra obiter dicta decide what is, and what is not, in the authentic tradition. These “Enlightenment thinkers” are the subject of bold if unsubstantiated claims. Thus “most” of them, it seems, rejected the idea of an “anthropomorphic God” (as do most theologians). But “some” of them were deists (though not theists) and “others” pantheists, while “few” were Christians. In the absence of definitions or numbers, it is rather difficult to put this taxonomy to the test. It bolsters that sneaking suspicion that “people like me” is indeed the functional criterion.

But then again, some of the lists of “Enlightenment thinkers” call even that into question. The presentation of opponents of war gives us Swift, Dr. Johnson, Pascal, and Voltaire: two Tory Anglicans, a Jansenist, and a Jesuit-educated deist anticlerical. Historical scholarship on the Enlightenment has for quite some time deprecated the simplistic secularism of the interpretation that Pinker espouses. Enlightenment Europe remained predominantly Christian (though deism and atheism were now firmly on the intellectual and moral menu), and most of those who read the Enlightenment thinkers, and were influenced by them, were themselves Christians. Education, health care, and social and political reform (such as the abolition of slavery) may indeed have been Enlightenment causes, but this did not stop them being Christian causes as well, or at least causes for Christians. Christians of all kinds, Presbyterians, Quakers, Evangelicals, Catholics, clergy and laity alike, were busy in the processes by which what Pinker defines as Enlightenment values were given real expression in the nineteenth century. But confessional partisanship often encourages polemicists to exaggerate the achievements of their own side and to diminish those of others. There is no obvious reason why confessional atheists, or humanists, or rationalists like Pinker should break that particular mold.

The glide from science to ethics is accomplished with the aid of the trademark Pinker graphs, seventy-five in this book. Graphs make things look very simple and persuasive. In books like this, that’s what they’re for. But they depend on counting things, and counting things depends first and foremost on deciding what does and doesn’t count. Counting things has worked very well where “things” are clear-cut, predominantly in the natural sciences. But in the tangled webs of human society, things aren’t always like that, as Pinker is well aware. Counting things does not always make for good history (as was once said, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, count”) and is virtually useless for purposes of philosophy. Moreover, carefully selected and carefully drawn as they are, Pinker’s graphs do not always bear out his slick ­generalizations.

The first education graph, for example, apparently informs us that until the Enlightenment, all languished in ignorance, while since that happy dawn, all have come to the light. But the graph itself tells a less ­binary story, showing a long, differen­tiated rise in much of Europe and the West since the later Middle Ages. In ­Pinker’s version of the story, religion is mentioned only to explain why Spain remained so long in benighted ignorance: all those nasty clergymen in control of the schools, teaching only creeds and catechisms. Maybe so: Education and literacy arguably advanced slowest in Europe where the Inquisition was strongest. Yet it was the clergy also, or at least definite Christians—including, toward the end, nuns—who provided almost all the schooling anywhere prior to 1800, and most of it over the next hundred years. In many countries, the march to near universal literacy was achieved largely under the leadership of priests and pastors—fastest, after the Reformation, in Protestant countries, perhaps because direct familiarity with the Scriptures was so highly prized. Over the longue durée it was the Church, and then the churches, which built up so many of the institutions of learning. Within the context of European culture, the high social valuation of education that Pinker appropriates for his secular Enlightenment was a Christian and even a medieval cultural legacy. But we hear nothing of this. Pinker himself is only too well aware of the insidious effects of cognitive bias. So it is salutary to observe how easy it is for even Steven, the high priest of reason, to succumb to it.

That the world as a whole sees less per-capita everyday lethal violence than in the early modern era, and vastly less than in ancient and again in prehistoric times, has become something of a truism. To get a sense of what living in the ancient world was really like, for example, try reading Josephus’s Jewish War, his account of the century or so culminating in the Roman sack of ­Jerusalem. But the self-­congratulatory narrative graphed in Enlightenment Now fails to persuade. It is difficult to see “the Enlightenment” as the bringer of peace when we consider the spectacular destruction and death tolls of the wars of the ensuing two centuries. Of course, using the vigorous gymnastics of controversial exigency, one can deflect responsibility for those wars onto “Counter-Enlightenment” forces. But it is harder for those who are not confessionally committed to the Enlightenment to exonerate it so completely from responsibility for revolutionary fervor, nationalism, imperialism, and Marxism—the driving forces of the ensuing slaughters. Pinker chalks up World War I to a populist nationalism that he feels entitled to cut off from the Enlightenment. But the Kultur of German propaganda in 1914–1915, endorsed by hundreds of scientists and academics, sounds like a war cry for Enlightenment values (or some of them) against decadence on one front and primitivism on the other.

Nor is one entirely persuaded by the secondhand statistics of Matthew White’s “necrometrics,” adduced to justify such claims as that “religious wars” (a tricky category if ever there was one, at times little more than a construct by which the emerging secular nation-states sought to legitimize their own power), particularly of an earlier age, were so much more destructive and lethal than the wars of the era of mature nation-states and global empires; and that civil wars tend to be less destructive and lethal than other wars (as say on page 164, before undercutting that view on 199). Of course it helps to define civil wars such as those in Britain in the seventeenth century and in France in the sixteenth century as “wars of religion.” (Pinker himself manages to insinuate that the American Civil War might somehow belong in that category.) And it may be just as helpful to set the innumerate claims of medieval chroniclers on a par with the meticulous casualty lists of modern conflicts, or to gloss over the extent to which, until relatively recent times, so much mortality in war was a matter of epidemic disease in unsanitary encampments (thus, often, displacing and intensifying the impact of disease rather than indexing brutality and cruelty). The whole exercise of weighing up wars in this way, though well worth the attempt, is fraught with those problems of definition and verification on which, in other contexts, Pinker himself is the first to insist.

What some critics identify as the bitter fruits of the Enlightenment, then, Pinker simply picks off and hangs on other trees. Populism, to which he is as allergic as the next bien pensant, owes part of its appeal to a thoroughly Enlightened rejection of aristocracy and authority. Nationalism is hardly unconnected with the Enlightenment. Some “Enlightenment thinkers” may have been “citizens of the world,” but most were more specifically rooted than that. Romanticism itself, which Pinker sees solely in terms of a “Counter-Enlightenment,” is a product of the Enlightenment as well as a reaction against it. The nation-state and nationalism, treated alike with aloof disdain, are a major part of the explanation for that massive decline in everyday levels of violence which Pinker documents. Either they are part of the Enlightenment, or they are not. Either way, the Pinker thesis will have to give a little.

For a more delicate and differentiated inquiry into the intellectual and moral condition of modernity, one might turn to Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, which combines historical rigor with philosophical acuity, and fully acknowledges the material and moral achievements of Western modernity, while not allowing itself so readily to absolve that same modernity of the excesses and atrocities that Pinker offloads onto the obscurantist enemies of Enlightenment. Gregory’s disquieting but irrefutable observation that “the fundamental categories at the basis of Western modernity’s most influentially institutionalized philosophy—liberalism—cannot be rationally legitimated on the terms of the scientistic naturalism that prevails in research universities in the public sphere” offers a robust counter to Pinker’s humanistic huffing and puffing. Modern liberalism and modern science are both, from one point of view, products of the Enlightenment, but that does not make them the same thing, nor does it even establish any logical or necessary relation between them.

Liberalism and science both presuppose the fact-value distinction of the Enlightenment, but science is all about facts, and liberalism is all about values. The Pinker ­project, pursued through its seventy-five graphs, is to make us think that the values of liberalism can be established by the methods of science, that morality can be established em­pirically. Well, we’ve known since Kant that it can’t. Kant labored valiantly to base morality on reason alone, offering the dogmas of conscience and the categorical imperative as the dictates of pure practical reason. But here we have to take some heed of Nietzsche, who, more mercilessly than anyone else, called out the empirical nakedness of the Kantian imperator. At one level, all he does is stand Kant on his head, responding to the categorical imperative—“You must”—with the equally categorical interrogative of the obstreperous child: “Why should I?” It’s a good question.

While he figures in Pinker’s narrative simply as the arch-enemy of the Enlightenment, Nietzsche takes us to the heart of the problem. For if he is the Enlightenment’s most potent critic, he is likewise its rebellious child, turning its distrust for authority against itself. Pinker is quite right to quote the immortal Jeeves’s lapidary judgment that Nietzsche was “fundamentally unsound.” But the Wodehousian allusion brings ­irresistibly to mind another of the master’s comic creations, the Reverend Harold ­Pinker, the clumsy clergyman who could not be trusted within ten feet of any occasional table freighted with ornamental crockery. An exponent of muscular secularism rather than muscular Christianity, Professor ­Steven Pinker shoulders his way into the china shop of history with equally devastating effect.

By Richard Rex and published in August 2018 in First Things and can be seen here.

Ethnic Gnosticism | Dr. Voddie Baucham

Every now and again I come across something the warrants posting here; I recently came across this a video which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

___________________________________

Vermont State School Board Orders Payment Of Tuition To Religiously Affiliated Schools

This is from religionclause.blogspot.com which you can find here:

In In re Appeal of Valente, (VT State Bd. Educ., April 21, 2021), the Vermont State Board of Education, in appeals by three families, ordered local school boards in districts without public high schools to pay students’ tuition to religiously affiliated high schools. Vermont law requires school districts that do not have public high schools to pay tuition for students to attend another public or private school. The Vermont Supreme Court in Chittenden Town School Dist. v. Dept. of Educ.,(1999) limited the ability of districts to pay tuition to religious schools, while the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the 1st Amendment bars exclusion of religiously affiliated schools from general aid programs. The Board of Education said in part:

The type of use restriction and certification discussed in Mitchell may provide a reasonable option going forward for harmonizing the state and federal constitutional requirements. School districts … could ask all … schools to certify that public tuition payments will not be used to fund religious instruction or religious worship. Such an approach would place all independent schools on an equal footing; regardless of perceived or actual religious affiliation, all independent schools would be asked to provide the same assurance regarding the use of public tuition payments. No school would be excluded based solely on its religious affiliation. And no school would be required to “refrain from teaching religion.” … Schools themselves would be left to decide whether to accept public tuition payments that could not be used to fund religious worship or religious instruction. 

The Board offers these observations with the caveat that this is not a rulemaking proceeding and it cannot, in this context, provide any binding direction to school districts. Further, as explained above, constitutional questions remain unsettled. As litigation moves through the courts, the permissible legal parameters may become clearer. Ultimately the courts will have to resolve whether the use restriction that Chittenden requires can co-exist with First Amendment requirements.

VTDigger reports on the decision.

You can learn more about this issue here.

C. S. LEWIS ON MERE SCIENCE

By M.D. Aeschliman in October 1998 and can be found here.

In The Abolition of Man C. S. Lewis noted that nothing he could say would keep some people from saying that he was anti-science, a charge he was nevertheless eager to refute. In fact he had received the kind of philosophical education at Oxford that enabled him, like John Henry Newman before him, to resist the two opposed temptations that the historian of science Richard Olson has labeled “science deified” and “science defied.” On this centenary of Lewis’ birth, we might describe his attitude as an appreciation of “mere science.”

“Science deified” is scientism, radical empiricism, materialism, or naturalism, an implicit or explicit rejection of all nonquantifiable realities or truths, including the truths of reason. Its logical terminus is determinism or “epiphenomenalism,” Huxley’s notion that the brain and mind are fully determined by-products of irrational physical processes. As the German materialist Bernhard Vogt put it, “Thoughts come out of the brain as gall from the liver, or urine from the kidneys,” implying that thoughts are just as irrational and beyond our control. Vogt and the other materialists contradict themselves, though, because—as Lewis often noted—they claim that their own scientific thoughts are true.

The deification of science first became explicit in the writings of the atheistic French philosophes La Mettric, D’Holbach, and Diderot. Thoughtful twentieth-century commentators such as Lester G. Crocker and Aldous Huxley have seen its reductionism leading straight to the moral nihilism of the Marquis de Sade, and later to Social Darwinism and the Nietzschean transvaluation of values in the interest of amoral strength and force. Lewis’ Abolition of Man is, inter alia, an extended treatise against the deification of science.

Yet there is an opposite temptation that Lewis also criticized—the temptation to defy science, from the standpoint of either romantic/pantheistic gnosticism or theological fideism. The first was familiar to him from the theosophy of his close friends Owen Barfield and A. C. Harwood and from the whole history of Romanticism, culminating in the work and world of W. B. Yeats. (Yeats was probably the model for the magician in Lewis’ Dymer and for Merlin in That Hideous Strength.) The appeal of pantheistic gnosticism was something that Lewis understood and withstood; it lies at the heart of occult “New Age” spirituality, “Deep Ecology,” and a good deal of “Eco-feminism” today. Romantic self-absorption and pantheistic gnosticism are targets of Lewis’ satire in The Pilgrim’s Regress. Much as he criticized radical empiricism and its sterile, truncated rationalism, he was himself too much of a rationalist in the classic, Aristotelian sense to countenance esoteric or occult mysticism and the depreciation of reason. He would not defy science on romantic or gnostic grounds.

Lewis knew that science was one of the great products of the human mind, but he insisted that it was a subset of reason and not simply equivalent to it. Scientific reason, if accurate, was valid, but it was not the only valid kind of reasoning: noncontradiction, validity, truth, value, meaning, purpose, and obligation were necessary presuppositions of the scientific method but not themselves scientific phenomena. Lewis thought that, in Alfred North Whitehead’s words, scientists who were “animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.” He satirically depicted such scientists in That Hideous Strength, especially in the figure of Frost. Of all radical empiricists, from La Mettrie and Hume to A. J. Ayer, who would undermine the authority of reason and its procedures, Lewis tirelessly pointed out this contradiction. He believed in the old adage that “the only way to avoid metaphysics is to say nothing,” because in some important sense language and thought themselves are non-natural, supernatural, transcendent, and metaphysical. “In order to think,” he wrote in 1942, “we must claim for our reasoning a validity which is not credible if our own thought is merely a function of our brain, and our brains a by-product of irrational physical processes.”

Lewis’ love of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was due largely to his loyalty to an epistemology that he thought had been caricatured and misunderstood by Bacon, Descartes, and the French Encyclopedists of the eighteenth century. As a careful student of the history of philosophy and ideas, he knew that the great flowering of scientific thought in the seventeenth century had not only Greek roots, but medieval ones. Whitehead pointed out long ago, in Science and the Modern World, that the habits of medieval rationalism prepared the way for the scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century, an insight given far more documentation, depth, and scope in the writings of the historian and philosopher of science Stanley L. Jaki in our time. Long before Bacon, Jaki has written, Christian philosophy had steadily inculcated “the conviction . . . that since the world was rational it could be comprehended by the human mind, but as the product of the Creator it could not be derived from the mind of man, a creature.” The “metaphysical realism” of St. Thomas Aquinas (and of Richard Hooker in England) avoided the extremes of empiricism and idealism and thus paved the way for Newton.

Jaki’s work has confirmed some of Lewis’ insights about the origin and development of Western science, and particularly its indebtedness to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo to escape from mistaken Aristotelian ideas about time and matter. The importance of the medieval thinkers Buridan and Oresme for science had been rediscovered by the great twentieth-century French physicist Pierre Duhem, whose own work Jaki has done so much to restore to the prominence it deserves. The active intellectual discrimination against Duhem, and subsequently against Jaki”despite their enormous erudition and unquestionable distinction—would not have surprised the man who wrote “The Inner Ring,” “Bulverism,” The Abolition of Man, and That Hideous Strength.

For among historians of science it is most prominently Duhem and Jaki who have provided the documentation of the importance of theism and “metaphysical realism” not only for the origin and development of modern science, but also for the possibility of its coherent continuation and moral direction. Duhem and Jaki have provided security for Lewis’ claim that “Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared—the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific Age.”

And as a believer in the essential sanity and continuity of Western Civilization, Lewis would surely have concurred with Jaki’s characterization of the Middle Ages: “In Western philosophy that was the first and thus far the last major epoch in which broadly shared respect was paid to the fundamental difference between ends and means . . . . If we do not wish to help turn this most scientific age of ours into the most barbaric of all ages, we had better stop using the term ‘medieval’ as synonymous with obscurantist. In doing so, we may make our mental eyes more sensitive to that light which comes from the Middle Ages.”