Restauratio Legis Naturale

NATURE'S UNRAVELING IS WHAT the modern immoralists seek to attain. Whether it be the use of artificial contraception which severs the natural tie between sex and procreation, or whether it be the normalization of homosexual sex, which itself is sterile, and an ultimately vain, meaningless act. Whether it is the unnatural murder of a child in his or her mother's womb through some invasive procedure, or the unnatural, forced death of the elderly through drugs or through withholding of nutrition and hydration. Whether it be simple cloning to the more grotesque creation of hybrids between animal and man such as "admixed" embryos which force upon us new words such as "cybrids," or "chimeras."** These acts are acts against nature. They seek to declare an independence from, and a control over, nature.

Budziszewski makes an interesting comparison between man's efforts to obtain mastery over nature through technology without regard to any boundaries as a resurgence of black magic. The relationship between technology and magic has, of course, been noted before by, for example, Bernanos. In his Profiles of the Future (1961), Arthur C. Clarke stated what is commonly known as Clarke's "Third Law": "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Human-Dog Hybrid by Patricia Piccinini
The result of goeteia

Their [the immmoralists, those who reject the natural moral law] methods do not require the eye of newt, but they may as well. In essence, they are forms of goeteia,* of the ancient practice whose goal was to acquire power by "breaking" nature, unpatterning its patterns, uncreating creation. . . . There you have the essence of goeteia. There is no nature; there are not givens; reality is what we decide. Black magic. . . . The immoralist movements are not isolated phenomena, but branches of the goetic arts; they are united in their hatred of human design, and, by extension, of its Designer.

Budziszewski (2003), 198-99, 200.

To try to recovery the field will require confrontation with the enemy. We will have to become "cultural activists." In confronting the advocates of immorality as cultural activists, two things ought to be kept in mind. First, it is an imperative that the advocates of traditional morality, that is, the advocates of natural law, recognize the conflict that they face. "Right reason" is still achievable, though it does not come easily to fallen nature.
--J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not KnowOne must know the enemy, and what he is about. As Polybius stated in his Histories (III.81): "For it is mere blind ignorance to believe that there can be anything of more vital importance to a general than the knowledge of his opponent's character and disposition." The immoralists seek to overthrow human nature, its design, and its Designer. Since the immoralists seek to sever the relationship between the way things are, they also are free with matching or paring concepts and words with realities. There is therefore a second requirement: "The second necessity is to abstain from the polluted languages of goetic incantation." Budziszewski (2003), 200. Abortion is not "choice." Sodomy is not "gay." Motherhood is not advanced by "feminism." Cloning or fetal stem cell research is not about "healing," but about playing God. Euthanasia is not "mercy killing," but simple intentional, premeditated murder.

In confronting the advocates of immorality, it is not unlikely that we will give offense, and we should not offend unnecessarily. But in confronting the modern purveyors of black magic, there will be unavoidable offense.

There is no virtue in giving offense, but there is a difference between avoidable and unavoidable offense. To fail to avoid the avoidable kind is the vice of scandal. To try to avoid the unavoidable kind is the vice of complicity in evil.

Budziszewski (2003), 200.

In appraising our enemy, we need also to appraise ourselves. We are not playing on a level playing field. Our enemy has some permanent advantages, and we have ours. Following Budziszewski's analysis, then, we can identify certain advantages (and weaknesses) of the immoralists, and certain advantages (and weaknesses) of the natural law advocate.

Evil's advantages	Evil's disadvantages	Good's advantages	Good's dis- advantages
Evil can rationalize	The evil are open to the possibility of redemption	Their argument is based upon "ultimately inescapable human moral design," i.e., moral reality	Their recognition of the moral evil may drive them to despair
The good can succumb to temptation to do evil		The "deep conscience" in all men, though it may be squelched, witnesses in their favor
		Divine aid, His providence, and recourse to His aid through prayer
		The theological virtue of hope

There we have it: our advantages, our disadvantages, our enemies' advantages and disadvantages.
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*Goeteia (or goetia) comes from the from Greek word γοητεία (goēteia) which means "sorcery."
**These terms are specialized: "admixed" embryos is a generic term, a neologism, used to describe any early-stage embryo combining human and nonhuman genes or tissue. It includes both cybrids and chimeras. A cybrid (a combination of cytoplasmic and hybrid) is an artificial hybrid cell produced by introducing nuclear material from one organism into a cell (of the same or different species) from which the nucleus has been removed. A chimera, on the other hand, is an organism which is composed of two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells originating in different zygotes.

Relatio Publici de Nefas Moralis: Descensus Profundus

ERIC VOEGELIN in his various books identified a new gnosticism in politics. For Voeglin, political gnosis (the Greek word for knowledge) could be defined as a direct, immediate vision of truth that was gained without sufficient critical reflection; it was the possession of a political elite, the adepts. Political gnosticism was the product of that gnosis. The modern political gnostics sought to implement and design policies based upon their privileged thinking, to "immanentize the eschaton," and thereby to solve the political problems confronting society through the ushering of some new utopian design where there would be heaven on earth, so to speak.

Now such activity is not necessarily well-taken by the population, particularly if this supposed esoteric knowledge is a corruption of the good, that is a promotion of evil under the guise of an apparent good. In such a case, there will invariably be one truth for the adepts and one truth for the rabble, the public. Budziszewski calls this phenomenon "doubling the script." There is one script for the adepts, the "shock troops," and one script for the people outside the movement.

Some such doubling of the script takes place in every movement for moral wrong, not just in totalitarian regimes but in stained republics like our own. . . . The reasons for the difference between the insider script and the public script are fairly plain. The first is that, driven by the Furies,* the shock troops of a movement for moral evil have different psychological needs. After they have plundered the palace of moral knowledge for material wherewith to build allurements to the evil they promote, they must go back into the palace and ransack it all over again--this time for sacrifices to appease an avenging conscience. The second reason is that it would be imprudent to discuss such dread sacrifices in front of outsiders. The details would shock and repel them, not draw them in. Immoralist movements require converts, or at least fellow travellers.

Budziszewski (2003), 192.

Nude Descending Down a Staircase
Marcel Duchamp

One of the most commonly used techniques in communicating to the public is the ignoring or silencing of certain truths. Myriad examples of doubling of the script through silence in the public script can be given. For example, the public is fed the line that homosexual "marriage" is a great good, and that fairness and equal rights demand that homosexuals ought to have the right to enter into monogamous(?), stable relationships just like a man and a woman. What you don't hear is the real truth, which is that homosexuality is intrinsically promiscuous, and that the "cheating ratio" of gay males, over time, approaches 100%. This is in marked contradistinction to male/female unions, where according to a 2010 University of Chicago study only 14 percent of wives and 20 percent of husbands(which is bad enough, but not near the promiscuity of the homosexual men) admitted to extramarital affairs.** Something other than the need for "marriage" for homosexuals is in place here. In other words, we are promoting a guise of stability where there is no stability. The evil that is promoted is the demise of traditional marriage, a bastion of Christian faith, and it is attacked under the guise of freedom, fairness, and tolerance. So there is one script for the public (which includes silence of the intrinsic promiscuity of gay men) and another within the adepts (who, of course, know about the promiscuous nature of gays).

Another way to double the script is to use euphemisms when addressing the public. The classic case may be abortion advocates who dare not use the word "baby" to describe what is in the mother's womb during the 9-month gestation period. At first, the medical term "fetus" was used, but that Latin term simply meant "baby in the womb," and that was too close for comfort. So that term was changed into "product of conception," "POC," or even inhumanly "blob of tissue." The term "abortion" is negative, and so the debate is defined in terms of "choice" without any clarity of what the "choice" really entails.

Sometimes, terms are redefined when the adepts communicate to the public. The definition of "person" is conveniently changed from a function of being, to a function of doing or having. By this sleight of hand, the child in the womb (who lacks certain functions such self-consciousness) is de-classified as a person.

Sometimes the meaning of terms are not changed, but the terms themselves are replaced with innocuous ones or with neologisms. By changing and softening terms, the public is persuaded of moral enormities not aware of the entirety of the truth. Sometimes the more literal terms are banned in public discourse: you are not allowed to call gay men "sodomites," because of the value-laden import of the term "sodomite," which, of course, brings down (for those who remember) the entire tradition of Sodom and Gomorrah, and all that fire and brimstone stuff. Fornication is replaced by the more clinical premarital sex. Spouse becomes "significant other." The list goes on and on.

Doubling the script is an effort at evasion, a first effort at avoiding the inconveniences at telling the whole truth. But it never is sufficient.

Inevitably, the public relations of moral wrong require lies, and a lot of them. . . . Professional advocates for the so-called new moralities are specialists in such mendacity . . . . [They are at] the advantage, because the average falsehood takes only five seconds to utter but a hundred and fifty to explode. A sound bite lasts only ten.

Budziszewski (2003), 195.

Under the modern means of communication, and the bad faith of the advocates of the new morality, the cards are stacked against the advocate of natural law and traditional morality. For the peddler of falsehood under the guise of good, there is therefore a tremendous temptation to be mendacious. Budziszewski identifies "seven degrees of descent on the downward case of honesty."

1. Sin: to cover up our own sin, we lie.
2. Self-protection: one lie requires others, and so "soon the liar is smothered in layers of mendacity, as numerous as onion shells, as thick as flannel blankets."
3. Habituation: lying slowly becomes habitual, a "second nature," and we lose respect for truth. From lying we become liars.
4. Self-deception: immersed in habitual lying, we begin to believe in our lies, and lose any desire or grasp on truth.
5. Rationalization: to suppress our self-deception and the ennui that arises from living a lie,we begin to rationalize the truth itself, usually falling into some sort of nihilism or relativism.
6. Technique: We get better and better at lying, polishing it into a fine art.
7. Duty turns upside down: this is the nadir and final conclusion of lying: lying is required, a duty, and truth is the evil to be damned, excoriated, lampooned, ridiculed.
   

The West has reached the nadir in many particulars, and now it is our bounden duty to promote artificial contraception, support easy divorce, support abortion rights, and support homosexual marriage. All of these just two generations ago would have been perceived as abhorrent evils, as evidences of a dissipated, unvirtuous people. Modernly, these are the enlightened positions, "human" rights, and to advocate the contrary is positively evil: an imposing of one's backward notions upon progress and enlightenment, a suppression of the the legitimate aspirations of people, an effort of the rule of clerics. The world has become topsy turvy. White has become black. Light has become dark, and dark has become light.

This is where we are, and this is who we are becoming. The problem is not just in our politicians, for they came from us and we elected them. It is not just in the shock troop of evil, for we have made room in the big tent for them.

Budziszewski (2003), 197.

We turned away, and when we returned our glance, we learned that we all have become gnostics. The world groaned, and we all became gnostic. And we have bought a "truth" which is falsehood, which is no longer Truth. And we in fact despair at knowing the Truth: about God and about man.

Do we dare at last yield ourselves to Truth, to be scraped, scoured, and made honest until we can give back His Light?

Budziszewski (2003), 197.

That is a very good question, Dr. Budziszewski.
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*The Budziszewskian notion of the five "Furies" has been addressed in prior postings. Search the blog under the term "Furiae" to access these prior postings.
**See Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, After the Ball (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 304-320, and Colson, "Gay 'Marriage' and Fidelity," http://www.christianpost.com/news/gay-marriage-and-fidelity-52196/

Relatio Publici de Nefas Moralis: Haeresis et Quasiconscientia

IN A WAY, MAN LIES TO HIMSELF if he thinks that he is completely autonomous, and can create new moralities. Man cannot "create" the moral law. At best, he can corrupt it by ignoring certain of its precepts, by misconstruing them, by overemphasizing them. In short, every kind of morality is derived from the authentic morality. Every morality that is not the natural moral law is a heresy of the natural law.*

There is no vast array of possible moralities. Natural law is not the one true star in a galaxy of false ones; it is the only star. There is only one possible source of value judgments, one possible well from which moral duties can be drawn, one tree from which they can be plucked. The so-called new moralities do not pluck from different trees. They pluck from the same tree, but selectively. . . . The foundational principles of right and wrong can neither be created nor destroyed by man; therefore, the only way to defeat the natural law is to make it cannibalize itself. Put another way, there are no new moralities, but only new perversions of the old one. This insight is crucial for understanding how the so-called new moralities are able to make us believe them. Moral error is a parasite on morality, and sucks all its plausibility from its host.

Budziszewski (2003), 186-87. Whatever public or private morality or system of morality is advance--Communism, Nazism, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Relativism, etc.--the strategy is always "to select one moral precept, exaggerate its scope and importance, and use it as a club to beat down others." In short, it is a heresy, a blend of truth and error mixed. In the past, we suffered Christological and Trinitarian heresies. Currently, we suffer from Moral heresies.

In Budziszewski's analysis, moral heretics undertake their "black magic" or "spells" against the moral law by two means: imposture and unraveling.

St. Augustine Refuting a Heretic
From 13th Century Manuscript

Imposture takes a moral principle, perverts it, and then replaces the original principle with the perverted (or impostor) principle. For example, the advocates of homosexual "marriage" take the notion of fidelity between a man and a woman (an essential principle of marriage), extricate it from the fact that its context is precisely between a man and a woman, and then pervert it to apply to fidelity between a man and a man or a woman and a woman, and that therefore the latter are marriages also. The fidelity advocated here is an impostor.

The other method is unraveling. This is defined by Budziszewski as "the perversion of one moral principle against another." Homosexual "marriage" also gives us an example of this. In this instance, the principle of "fairness" is perverted and used to attack the principle of marital purity, chastity, and conjugal relations. "Fairness" is perverted to mean the principle of treating people differently, but this is a perversion of "fairness." Fairness is in fact the principle of not treating people differently arbitrarily. There is nothing wrong, in fact there is everything right, in treating people in different circumstances differently. Thus a man who has worked 40 hours is entitled to pay from his employer, whereas the man who has refused to work is entitled to no pay from his employer. This is fair because there is a reasonable, non-arbitrary reason for treating the employees dissimilarly. In fact, it would be unfair to treat them the same. It is not unfair to treat the sterile relationship between a man and a man or a woman and a woman differently from the relationship between a man and a woman in permanent marriage. There is no arbitrarily-imposed distinction, but a clear, apparent, and natural reason for treating the relationships differently.

Obviously, in confronting the advocates of false morality, we have to be sensitive in perceiving the legitimate principle they are taking and perverting and how they are using the perverted principle illegitimately.

In addition to the heretical methodologies used by opponents to the natural law, we might also consider the seduction of what Budziszewski calls "paraconscience,"** which as far as I can tell is a neologism, but a very valuable one. Paraconscience should be distinguished from (deep) conscience proper and the "belt of conscience."*** Paraconscience is the handmaid of conscience proper, and consists of "desires and emotions," and includes such emotions such as the desire for the good, outrage, indignation, the feelings of a desire for justice or disdain for injustice, pity, compassion, the desire to render aid, modesty, shame, avoidance of the unseemly or indecent. Paraconscience is, to a certain degree, a second nature. It is one that is subject to training, to education, to formation (unlike deep conscience, which is unalterable). Virtue is what binds the paraconscience to the conscience, so that if one is virtuous, the paraconscience (those desires, emotions, etc.) support the conscience. Vice is what opposes the paraconscience to the conscience. Enemies of the natural law have wreaked havoc in the area of virtue or paraconscience, and what counted once as vice is hailed as virtue, so that the desires and emotions we are often inculcated with now act against conscience.

In our day, the seduction and redirection of the emotions and desires has achieved its greatest success with the feeling of compassion. In compassion we feel with the sufferer, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. One way relieves his suffering, the other relieves what I suffer for him; one gives him what he needs, the other merely gives him what he wants--or just puts him out of sight. . . . False compassion is a great deal less work than true. . . . False compassion has other advantages too. It sits easier with unrepented sins . . . [i]t certainly requires less moral reflection . . . . [and is] especially useful for corrupting the minds of the very young.

Budziszewski (2003),189-90.

Though compassion seems to be that part of the paraconscience that is the choice of modern liberalism and relativism, this does not mean that the other desires and emotions cannot be seduced. "It makes no difference how noble a particular desire or passion may seem to be; the noble it is in itself, the baser it will be if corrupted." The advocate of abortion--who has clear emotions that there is an injustice to the woman if such a "right" is restricted--has had her paraconscience as it relates to justice seduced. The homosexual who feels himself aggrieved by the fact that marriage laws allow marriage only between a man and a woman has had his paraconscience seduced. The manager of a Planned Parenthood or a High School nurse, who believes that children ought to be given contraceptives as a matter of public health and policy, has had his or her paraconscience seduced. One could go on and on, as in the modern world, virtue and vice have, to a large degree flipped places, and the paraconscience, for a whole host of reasons to complex to go into here, is all askew.

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*The word heresy comes to us from the Greek word hairesis (αἵρεσις). Its roots suggest the notion of faction or choice, and suggest that followers have chosen one truth over another, or emphasized one truth over another, or chosen not to believe one truth so as to believe a falsehood.
**Since the word conscience is Latin in origin, it may be more appropriate to call this notion quasiconscience, or perhaps pseudosynderesis or parasynderesis. Or perhaps that's just being pendantic.
***See the prior posting on this in De Testimonio Quatuor Testibus: Conscientia Profunda.

Laborem Solis Sive Eclipsis Moralis: Affectiones, Nihil Plus Quam Affectiones

“FEELINGS,NOTHING MORE than feelings," goes the song by Morris Albert, and similarly does modern society sing. It is modern society's cult of feelings--feelings over reason--what Budziszewski calls the "bondage to the emotions," that is the "last great reason for the eclipse of the natural law." (The others identified by Budziszewski in his fine book What We Can't Not Know, the reader may recall were treated in prior postings: the atrophy of tradition, the cult of the expert, the return of the sophist, the infantile regression of public reflection, the disabling of shock and shame, the prolongation of adolescence). As examples of the modern cult of feelings, Budziszewski invokes such characters as the poet John Keats and the fictional Ben (Obi-Wan Kenobi) of Star Wars Fame :

O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!

"Luke! Trust your feelings!"*

Modernity finds itself in thrall to feelings, and this enslavement to emotion comes to us from every direction, and from a variety of different sources. It is as if feelings is trying to vanquish reason and battles it from what Budziszewski sees as seven fronts: (1) Romanticism, (2) Transgressivism, (3) Determinism, (4) the Cult of Pleasant Feelings, (5) Aestheticism, (6) Spiritualism, and (7) Moralism. Each of these varieties has one consistent dogma: the adoration of emotion over and against reason.

The Moral Life is More Than Feelings
The Aristotelian "Happiness" is more than a "Happy Face"

The first varietal of feelings cult is Romanticism. Romanticism, of course, was a broad reaction against the over-emphasis of reason of the Enlightenment and the rationalization of the world in the Industrial Revolution. It is a movement with which one can emphasize. The cold, calculating, steely reason of the Enlightenment thinkers--Kant's Blossen Vernunft ("Reason alone") and Reinen Vernunft ("Pure Reason")--leaves one rather wanting. But like most things, the evil lies in the extremes, and not in the means. We ought to find that golden mean so that we live within the boundaries of Reason and Emotions, not Emotions alone or Reason alone. The error of the Romanticists was to overemphasize Emotion at the expense of Reason. The error of the Enlightenment thinkers was to overemphasize Reason at the expense of Emotion. Indeed, so extreme was the Romantic reaction, that one of its more extreme advocates Percy Bysshe Shelley would lionize madness as a virtue, would make poets legislators of the world, so that law would be based upon the sheer arbitrariness of emotional whim. In his famous essay, "A Defence of Poetry," Shelley distinguishes between Reason and emotional Imagination:

Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance. Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be “the expression of the imagination”: and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

But to place Reason and Emotion in separate, discrete compartments, and to overemphasize one at the expense of the other is quite poisonous to the moral quest which is a combination of human reasonable inclinations and the inclinations of reason.

It is a quality of feelings that their cult forebodes dissipation. Feelings are jealous gods, and, if they are worshipped, like all idolatry, they lead us invariably the futile thinking and the darkened and foolish hearts which St. Paul referred to in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans. So from simple Romanticism, man steps off into the "cult of forbidden feelings" or Transgressivism. There will be an "inversion of values," and it is "where all romantics will arrive if they follow the romantic path to the end." Budziszewski (2003), 177. Transgressivism is Romanticism on steroids, and it entraps one not unlike hashish traps the smokers in their dark, dreary opium dens, prisons of their own making. So weird, unnatural preoccupation with death, with darkness, with sexual perversions of all sorts. Black lipstick, black leather, chains, piercings, witchcraft and seances, where foul is fair and fair foul.

Another variety of the feelings cult comes from Determinism. Here, feeling are not only the source of decision-making, but feelings are irresistible. It is the view that we are "merely catspaws of genes, or hormones, or neural circuitry, and declare in an unintended parody of Martin Luther, 'So I feel; I can do no other.'" Budziszewski (2003), 178. We hear this determinism all the time implied in the words we hear ad nauseum: "I can't help how I feel," and "I feel I have no choice." In Sixwire's song, "I Can't Help How I Feel," we have the perfect popular example of the determinism of feelings:

I can't help how I feel
It's out of my hands
This time it's for real
. . .
I can't help how I feel
Just like you can't help how you don't.

It is apparent that if feelings are the basis for moral discussion, then there will never be any discussion, because feelings are entirely subjective, and do not provide any common, much less transcendent norm which would provide common ground for reason's purchase.

Not all feelings are dark, such as those sought by Transgressivism or those justified by Determinism. Some seem innocuous, even benign. But this is just apparent. Budziszewski identifies this variety as the "cult of pleasant feelings." It is a modern atavism of hedonism. In some ways, this cult is perhaps the most insidious. One would think that emphasizing "good feelings" is an unquestionable good. But as Budziszewski warns, the "morality of pleasant feelings" is not a safe moral code. There are many goods that are obtained only by going through the valley of bad feelings: that is what is at the heart of the entirety of virtue that relates to the irascible: fortitude or courage. The "morality of pleasant feelings" ignores that virtue relating to the concupiscible appetite: temperance. After all, temperance is a limitation on "good feelings." The "cult of good feelings" results in us being cowardly and dissipated.

To overcome the errors apparent in the hedonistic "cult of good feelings," some would try to refine the dross. We have those like the utilitarian J. S. Mill, who distinguishes between the pleasure of a pig wallowing in the mud versus the pleasure of Socrates's pursuit of the truth. "It is," Mill famously said, "better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." "And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion," J. S. Mill continues, "it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides." And it is these latter words that bear the ominous implication: who is the "other party . . . who knows both sides"? What happens if that person is Peter Singer (who justifies infanticide on the grounds that the "feelings" of the infant is not to be given much, if any, value: the infant's feelings are those of a pig) or a Hannibal Lecter (who justifies his moral enormities on the ground that his feelings are refined relative to those of his victims)? It does not take a rocket science to answer those questions.

Feelings are ubiquitous, and we find them leaving the world of sense and aspiring to metaphysical, even spiritual status. But here the error is grosser than the other varieties. To equate spiritual truths with emotional states is a disaster to both reason and faith. It is a short haul from emphasizing religious feelings to the altar of worshiping the feelings themselves which is nothing less that a worship of self.

One form is the naive exaltation of religious feelings as the voice of God--but [from] exalting religious feelings, to exalting feelings a religious, is a shorter step than we realize. . . . [to] [w]hatever you feel, that is holy, because you are God, and God lives in what He feels."

Budzidzwewski (2003), 179-80. It is, of course, hard to argue morality with a man who thinks he or his feelings is God.

Another variety of feelings that is equally insidious is what Budziszewski calls the "cult of moral feelings, or moralism." Budziszewski (2003), 180. "Head and shoulders," this cult is "above the other feeling cults, yet it too is fatally flawed." It uses feelings are a cover for reason (as Budziszewski suggests James Q. Wilson does) in which case it is nothing less than confusing. Or, worse, it seeks to build an entire construct of ethics on the most fickle foundation imaginable. As George Allen Pegram puts it well enough:

[M]oral feelings are fluctuating, as well as are other kinds of feelings. One day it would be one thing, and the next day it would be something else. Emotions are moved, and moved more or less by environment. Then if moral action were based upon feelings only, that would put the moving and molding influence and the springs of moral action over and around us, instead of within us. And so in that case, we would be entirely at the mercy of our environment. Furthermore, under the influence of the world and the devil, the major portion of our impulses would be very liable to be on the wrong side of moral questions. It takes something more than fitful fickle feelings to direct and sustain the moral conduct of mankind.**

Morality, it would seem, ought to be based on something more than emoticons.

Budziszewski concludes:

Our emotions give charm and energy to our lives, andeven the inconvenient ones give information. The problem is that their char is not self-evaluating, and their information is not self-interpreting. Virtue certainly includes feeling the right desires and emotions, but at the right times, toward the right people, and for the right reasons. . . . We should not be like the Stoics, sad men who took counsel with each other to rid their souls of feelings. But neither should we bow to our feelings as masters.

Budziszewski (2003), 181.

In short: neither Reason alone or Emotion alone, but Emotion within the bounds of Reason and Reason buttressed by Emotion. We don't want to be thinking, unfeeling moral cads. Nor do we want to be unthinking, feeling moral cads. Nor, lastly, do we want to be unthinking, unfeeling moral cads. We want to be thinking and feeling, and feeling and thinking, which means we don't want to be moral cads at all.

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*The quotation of John Keats comes from a letter to Benjamin Bailey dated November 22, 1817. "I am more zealous in this affair because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning - and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of sensation rather than of thoughts!"
**George Allen Pegram, The Moral Adjustments of a Christian Life (Mount Morris: Kable Brothers, 1915), 110.

Laborem Solis Sive Eclipsis Moralis: Adolescentia in Perpetuum

IT IS NOT GOOD FOR MAN TO BE ALONE says the Book of Genesis (2:18), and yet it seems that there is a tendency modernly to increase the time between the biological readiness to begin a family (post-puberty) and the readiness to want to assume those responsibilities (marriage). Budziszewski calls this the "prolongation of adolescence," which seems to be the most common term given to this phenomenon. Professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett (Clark University) has called it "emerging adulthood." Some time ago, Arthur Goldberg even fashioned a neologism for the study of this phenomenon: Juvenatrics (although the neologism never caught on). Equally infelicitous is the phrase "adultescence." Darrin Patrick called the male between the "boy" and the "man" a "ban," and following that reasoning we might come call the female between a "girl" and a "woman" a "goman" or "giman." It is a phenomenon that was lampooned in the movie Failure to Launch.

In traditional societies, adolescence is relatively short, whereas in contemporary civilized that time seems to be expanding. It appears to be the result of two interacting phenomena: the earlier onset of puberty and the later onset of marriage and the shouldering of its responsibilities, including the procreation of children. More boys live in their parents' basement, playing video games and engaging in other less fruitful endeavors.

The problem is measurable, and the statistics do not lie. In 2010, using data from the U. S. Current Population Survey, Vanessa Wight of Columbia University showed that in 1970, the median age for a first marriage was 20.8 for women and 23.2 for men, but that it has increased to 25.9 for women and 28.1 for men.* All told, in just forty years there has been an approximate 5-year prolongation of adolescence.

One would not think that this prolongation of adolescence would raise moral issues, but, according to Budziszewski it does:

The unnatural prolongation of adolescence poses a variety of moral problems. Normal erotic desire is transmuted from a spur to marriage to an incentive for promiscuity. Promiscuity thwarts the attainment of moral wisdom, and makes conjugal love itself seem unattractive. Furthermore, prolonged irresponsibility is itself a sort of training, and a bad one. Before long the entire culture is caught up in a Peter Pan syndrome, terrified of leaving childhood. At this point even the responsibilities of marriage and family lose their transformative character.

Budziszewski (2003), 176. It is this problem that was humorously handled in the movie Knocked Up.

But while we can identify the problem and make movies about the phenomenon, we cannot seem to fix the problem. We seem to be raising children who avoid marriage, avoid responsibility, delay effective contribution to society, and contribute to moral decay be continuing to insist on sex outside of marriage without any ties to the conjugal life and without any connection to the procreation of children.

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*Cited in Pundit and Pundette, "Adulthood Undermined," http://www.punditandpundette.com/2011/07/adulthood-undermined.html.