by S. Adam Seagrave
The recent high-profile controversies touched off by the HHS Mandate have elicited excellent debate—both here in Public Discourse and elsewhere—regarding the meaning, importance, and application of the American idea of religious liberty. They have not, however, elicited any substantial debate regarding the rational grounds for opposing the use of contraception in itself. In the numerous conversations I have had on this subject with family, friends, and fellow academics during this time, I have encountered a startlingly universal admission on the part of those opposing the contraception coverage mandate that their opposition was a matter of faith rather than reason. Almost no one, it seems—and the religious no more than the non-religious—thinks there is any rational basis for disapproving of the use of contraception.
The sort of argument put forward by Aquinas in the Summa Contra Gentiles(III.122), though in fact quite cogent, now fails to be widely persuasive as a result of the influence of modern philosophical critiques. This argument requires strong natural philosophical presuppositions and a carefully nuanced understanding that preclude its popular acceptance in the current intellectual and political climate.
There are, however, other and very different arguments available for contesting the desirability of widespread contraceptive use. Although these arguments stand little chance of altering the short-term course of public policy, there is still value in attempting to uncover true arguments simply for their own sake. And true arguments, if defended over an extended period of time, tend to become practically effective ones as well.
Tocqueville on Democratic Politics
In the famous speech containing the original invocation of America as a “city upon a hill” (1630), Puritan leader John Winthrop elaborated on the harmful effects of the Fall for political societies. Winthrop asserted that, through original sin, “Adam, himself rent from his Creator, rent all his posterity also from one another; whence it comes that every man is born with this principle in him to love and seek himself only…” Selfishness, according to Winthrop, is an integral part of fallen human nature, and individual isolation an inevitable consequence of the Fall.
Two hundred years later, Tocqueville, the most astute commentator on the early American Puritan communities, echoed Winthrop’s assessment of fallen human nature by identifying “personal interest” as “the only immobile point in the human heart.” According to Tocqueville, self-interest contains the dangerous potential to corrupt democratic political societies from within unless it is educated to become “self-interest well-understood,” i.e., self-interest that is enlightened by recognizing the integral relationship between one’s own ultimate interests and the interests of others with whom one lives. Self-interest becomes “well-understood” when people are drawn out of themselves through participation in local political communities as well as other voluntary associations.
This theme of educating self-interest, combating the sort of selfishness Winthrop identified as a direct consequence of original sin, is not a minor or ancillary point in Tocqueville’s famous analysis: it is, in many ways, the unifying thread of Democracy in America taken as a whole. According to Tocqueville, the focus on the value of equality in democratic societies naturally encourages an attitude of isolation on the part of democratic citizens. The built-in social connections of a hierarchical hereditary society are gone, and since everyone is like everyone else, it isn’t clear why anyone needs anyone else.
If a political culture of individual isolation comes to predominate in a democratic society, the society becomes ripe for the emergence of despotism or tyranny. This is because, as political thinkers since the ancient Greeks have commonly noticed, despots have a much easier time dealing with subjects one-on-one. Friendships and associations among subjects are actively discouraged by despotic regimes, since they rightly recognize these as a potential threat to their absolute power. Brutus, after all, wouldn’t have killed Caesar on his own.
For this reason, Tocqueville dedicates his entire two-volume work—including the famous discussions of the New England townships and of the crucial importance of Christianity—to describing how the early Americans have managed to counter the natural isolating tendency of democracy and maintain the sort of healthy self-interest that alone can sustain political liberty in an age of equality.
Applying the Tocquevillian Lens ...
Conclusion ...
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The Foundations of Natural Morality:
On the Compatibility of Natural Rights and the Natural Law
by S. Adam Seagrave
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