10.28.2009

The Essence of the Thing

It's of no special import to hear another Catholic (or any Christian) decrying the unholiness and selfishness of homosexuality. The arguments against it and gay marriage are as common as they are wrong, and don't need to be recounted here. Most of those who spew these ideas are equally unremarkable in their unthinking, anti-life views, and most also lead lives of terribly mixed premises. They may live in a somewhat self-interested mode implicitly (at least most Americans of this stripe), but when confronted with obvious questions of morality, espouse the altruism that has been spoonfed them since birth. These are the people you see every day.

However, some of them have really thought about it and try to apply the principles of altruism consistently, intellectually, like Guam Archbishop Anthony Apuron. And occasionally, such a man will in the process expose the true heart of Christianity.

In what appears to be a position paper in response to a proposed domestic partnership law in Guam, Apuron said:
The culture of homosexuality is a culture of self-absorption because it does not value self-sacrifice. It is a glaring example of what John Paul II has called the culture of death. Islamic fundamentalists clearly understand the damage that homosexual behavior inflicts on a culture. That is why they repress such behavior by death. Their culture is anything but one of self-absorption. It may be brutal at times, but any culture that is able to produce wave after wave of suicide bombers (women as well as men) is a culture that at least knows how to value self-sacrifice.
Let that sink in for a bit. And note the universality of what he said. Take out the references to homosexuality and replace them with "rational self-interest" or "individualism," because he is smart enough to see that the core of his argument is altruism vs. selfishness, not vs. homosexuality.

When you do this, you see that he understands the good-against-evil nature of the battle, and consistent with Christian teachings and altruism itself, in the name of what he upholds as the good, he sides with evil. As a refresher, let's look at the objective meaning of evil, from Ayn Rand's Virtue of Selfishness:
The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics—the standard by which one judges what is good or evil—is man’s life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man.

Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.
As if to make sure we don't miss it, Apuron applauds the efforts of Islamists and suicide bombers in their fight against self-interested behaviors.

He then assures us that he doesn't support brutal repression per se, but that the self-interested actions of Americans really do make us deserving of the title "The Great Satan."
Terrorism as a way to oppose the degeneration of the culture is to be rejected completely since such violence is itself another form of degeneracy. One, however, does not have to agree with the gruesome ways that the fundamentalists use to curb the forces that undermine their culture to admit that the Islamic fundamentalist charge that Western Civilization in general and the U.S.A, in particular is the 'Great Satan' is not without an element of truth. It makes no sense for the U. S. Government to send our boys to fight Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, while at the same time it embraces the social policies embodied in Bill 185 (as President Obama has done). Such policies only furnish further arguments for the fundamentalists in their efforts to gain more recruits for the war against the "Great Satan."
There is no room for compromise here. If you hold self-sacrifice as the good, it is you who are upholding a "culture of death." And like Apuron, if you wholly accept this view of man's life and morality, and apply it consistently, it won't be long before you're approving of violent deaths of those who disagree. "Crush the individual, for the good of God or the collective, but crush him nonetheless." There's your rallying cry.

Any proponent of altruism in whatever form -- be it social/collective or religious -- is this man's brother-in-spirit. Mr. Mixed Premises, when you meet him on the street, might recoil from the "extreme" views of our esteemed archibishop, but he would be wrong to do so. Apuron openly advocates the essence of the altruist ethics, and perhaps unwittingly makes the logical leap to the inevitable results of the code of self-sacrifice: death. His death eventually, but mine and any other proud, rational individual's death right now, violently, righteously. To not follow that reasoning is to willfully evade the true nature of altruism, which is all that is necessary for it to continue on its bloody course. As Ayn Rand said:
The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

--The Objectivist “Altruism as Appeasement,” The Objectivist, Jan. 1966, 6.
Apuron may or may not be one of the small minority of "truly and deliberately evil men," but those who sit in his pews on Sunday and evade the horrific implications of his ideas form a cluture only a few baby steps away from a "culture that is able to produce wave after wave of suicide bombers."

10.14.2009

Stop Thinking You're So Great

If you've wondered what could have prompted Obama's worldwide apology tour, or gave the Nobel Committee impetus to award him the Prize, look no further than this Boston Globe op-ed: One nation, under illusion.
THE HOARIEST and most oft-repeated cliche in American politics may be that America is the greatest country in the world. Every politician, Democrat and Republican, seems duty bound to pander to this idea of American exceptionalism, and woe unto him who hints otherwise. ... As if this weren’t enough, Jimmy Carter upped the fawning ante 30 years ago by uttering arguably the most damning words in modern American politics. He called for a "government as good as the American people," thus taking national greatness and investing it in each and every one of us.

... The fact of the matter is that whenever anything really significant has been accomplished by our government, it is precisely because it was better than the American people.
The columnist, Neal Gabler, has laid it out pretty clearly right there. "Who the hell are we to think we're great?" he asks, and then says that the only "significant" accomplishments of the government have come in spite of the American people. To his credit, he seems to get that he's operating under a very specific value system and that he's using it to decide what "great" means. He asks, "By what standard is one nation any greater than any other nation?"

He displays his standard of value in the examples he lists. Gabler faults the US for income inequality, citing the egalitarian Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. He cites the UN's "Human Development Index" which lists the American standard of living 15th behind that of the welfare states of Europe. He refers to the WHO's "quality of care" rankings which listed US health care 37th. (To which Richard Ralston said, "When you hear this, always ask, 'Ranked by whom and how?' ")

Gabler's standard of value is quite obviously the same as that of UN and all the organizations he cites: altruism-fueled egalitarianism and cultural relativism. When he asks "By what standard is one nation any greater than any other nation?" he's not looking for an answer. He's implying that it is impossible for one nation to be any better than another. Well, except that the US is actually worse because its welfare programs aren't up to snuff, but let's not split hairs. Still, he assures us, he's not saying that America is bad, per se:
The point of all this isn’t that America doesn’t have a lot to be proud of. It does. The point is that just about every country has a lot to be proud of, and America has no more right to assume it is the greatest nation in the world than does France, Switzerland, China, or Russia. [bold added]
China? Russia? Really?

As I alluded to earlier, this view is exactly why Obama has the Nobel Peace Prize. This is why he felt compelled to take a Global Apology Tour. He and Gabler firmly believe that America has no right to think itself better than proto-dictatorial Russia, dictatorial China, or theocratic-totalitarian Iran.

I've said it before, and will keep repeating it because it's unassailably right: the only criteria by which to judge a government is the extent to which it protects individual rights. In this light, all of Gabler's conclusions are completely wrong. Despite the fact that people like him and Obama are trying their damnedest to drag the country into European welfare statism, America is still the freest, most moral, greatest country in existence. It is not "arrogance", "hubris", or "overweening pride," as Gabler called it, but a cold, rational statement of moral judgment.

But because of our hubris, Gabler is concerned that the Gods will visit their wrath on us:
A nation that brooks no criticism, a nation that feels it is always better than any other, a nation that has to be endlessly flattered and won’t face the truth, a nation whose people think they possess some special moral exemption and wisdom, a nation without humility is a nation spoiling for calamity.
He's right that we're headed in the wrong direction, spoiling for calamity. What he doesn't understand (or is evading) is that it is precisely the ideas he champions that are leading us there.