Jun 2, 2009
As I noted last month, President Barack Obama is a master at concealing under many guises a strident pursuit of an aggressive anti-life agenda. He knows too that there is no easier way to grab the moral high ground in a contentious debate than by appearing to be the most reasonable of all parties concerned. On that score, the President hit a grand slam with his commencement address at Notre Dame on May 17.
In the swirl of controversy which engulfed his presence at the erstwhile flagship Catholic university in the US, the President used the abortion issue to project a catholicized image of himself.
In recent decades, the Catholic church has had to assume the role of protector and promoter of the sound use of human reason, in everything from theology to social doctrine, to the relationship between religious creed and public discourse. Indeed, just such leadership was a hallmark of the universal moral appeal exercised by Pope John Paul II.
Team Obama seems to have understood this to some degree. Consequently, they confronted the whole Notre Dame controversy by orchestrating a speech that would make their boss look eminently reasonable, a speech that oozed every semblance of the deepest reasonableness.
Hence the President's call for a new, more respectful exchange of views on the issue of abortion, a call for "open hearts, open minds, and fair-minded words," a call to reach a new "common ground" on this paramount moral issue.
How disappointing -- to not say tragic -- that Fr. John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame, would be so intellectually shallow as to describe this whole episode from its very inception as a "dialogue." In a letter he addressed to ND graduates, he went so far as to dress up the dialogue lingo in the trappings of high sounding metaphors borrowed from his famous predecessor Fr. Theodore Hesburgh:
At the same time, and born of the same duty, a Catholic university has a special obligation not just to honor the leader, but to engage the culture. Carrying out this roll of the Catholic university has never been easy or without controversy. When I was an undergraduate at Notre Dame, Fr. Hesburgh spoke of the Catholic university as being both a lighthouse and a crossroads. As a lighthouse, we strive to stand apart and be different, illuminating issues with the moral and spiritual wisdom of the Catholic tradition. Yet, we must also be a crossroads through which pass people of many different perspectives, backgrounds, faiths, and cultures. At this crossroads, we must be a place where people of good will are received with charity, are able to speak, be heard, and engage in responsible and reasoned dialogue.
For all the talk of Notre Dame (and supposedly any Catholic university) being a "crossroads and a light house," it was a wild stretch of even the broadest definition of 'dialogue' to consider the President's commencement address to constitute precisely that -- at least in what I would call a classical sense of 'dialogue'.
The foundation of genuine human dialogue, of course, is reason. Dialogue in the classical sense is a mutual sharing of reasoned convictions about reality based first of all on very precise epistemological premises, namely, that reality comes first, that reasoning about that reality comes second, followed by our partaking of each other's convictions gained thereby.
What we might term post-modern dialogue, by contrast, emerges from very different epistemological grounds: reality is essentially the product of our reasoning; so reason comes first, reality -- ultimately the whole of what the post-modern mind conceives of as cultural and societal 'constructs' -- comes second, followed by our exchange of attitudes, values, preferences and convictions. The latter, of course, are ungulate on the quicksand of 'all things are possible', 'nothing is absolute', 'there are no ultimate reference points', 'all is construct', and 'values change with time and circumstance.'
Most importantly, classical dialogue is only possible on the basis of what Aristotle called homonoia, literally "like-mindedness" by which he meant the sharing of fundamental premises or principles which ground even our disagreements.
By contrast, the post-modern conception of dialogue presumes the non-existence of such a ground. It admits of virtually no absolute principles to be held universally by all with which to ground our (genuine) dialogue.
In that sense, classical dialogue is not possible with those whose existence has been thoroughly malformed and misshapen by dogmas of epistemological and moral relativism. (Not to mention that classical dialogue presumed education, erudition and a broad general culture, while post-modern dialogue is too often stunted by cultural ignorance.)
To be sure, the term 'dialogue' has been hijacked by the lower instincts of the post-modern self, or what the philosopher Michael Sandel has called the "unencumbered self," unencumbered, that is, by a shared conception of the good life that is normative for all persons. In the sharply individualistic worlds of unencumbered post-modern selves, morality is essentially of one's making, and the only shared moral tenet is that we are to respect the boundaries of personal views, personal values, personal conceptions of right and wrong. We may expand the boundaries of our own private sphere of preferences, beliefs and behaviors to the extent that we do not unlawfully impede upon the boundaries of others.
At those boundaries so conceived, post-moderns scrape together as much existential space as possible within which to pursue their own private conceptions of the good life with its pleasures and individual set of preferences. They also seek and crave the affirmation and validation of those preferences by other post-modern selves. A principle vehicle for obtaining that is post-modern dialogue.
A sparse commodity, dialogue affords them the self-validation they long for often in the form of "concessions" and attempts at finding "common ground." That was precisely the outcome demanded by president Obama at Notre Dame. Indeed, it was implied that dialogue must (necessarily) -- if it is to be considered genuine, and successful -- lead to common ground on issues which sharply divide us. In the classical view, that is of course, nonsense. The President also implied that disagreement is essentially equivalent to "demonizing" the opponent. In the classical view, candor is considered essential to civility; disagreement is not taken as an offense, but accepted when it is based on sound principles.
Notwithstanding all of this, to my amazement, the President ultimately acknowledged that our views on abortion are, indeed, irreconcilable, that the issue cannot be "fudged" as he chose to put it. Irreconcilable because here a fundamental principle, one which should be grounding genuine dialogue -- the respect for human life from its inception -- is in extreme conflict with other competing principles. Here, in reality there is no dialoguing -- in any sense -- on the value of nascent human life.
At such a juncture in our current state of American culture, we really have to ask ourselves, on issues as fundamental as the sanctity of human life, marriage as a stable union of man and woman, and a physician's right to follow conscience in healthcare decisions, whether dialogue in the classical view can have any meaningful role in our contemporary cultural milieu....