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KARL KEATING'S E-LETTER
TOPICS:
JEFFREY HART: AN UNCERTAIN GUIDE
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
After several months, I have gone back to one of my favorites, Samuel
Johnson. I am reading through "The Rambler," the moral essays he wrote
twice weekly between 1750 and 1752. Let me give three quotations:
1. "Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed." This is why
apologetics is easier than it otherwise might be. Most people have a large
but subterranean reservoir of good instincts and right thinking. Those
instincts and thoughts just have to be brought to the surface. If everyone
had to be instructed from scratch, the apologist might give up in
frustration.
2. "Nor would ever any thing wicked, or often any thing absurd, be
undertaken or prosecuted by him who should begin every day with a serious
reflection, that he is born to die." Johnson was not a Catholic, but he had
a Catholic appreciation of the value of an examination of conscience, and
he knew that to reflect on one's end was a particularly useful exercise.
3. And then there is a comment that should humble any writer: "A transition
from an author's books to his conversation, is too often like an entrance
into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but
spires of temples, and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of
splendor, grandeur, and magnificence; but, when we have passed the gates,
we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable
cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke."
(Translation: For your own good, don't talk to me. Just read what I write.)
BEING WRONG ON THE RIGHT
Jeffrey Hart is professor emeritus at Dartmouth and has served for decades
as an editor of "National Review," the magazine founded by William F.
Buckley, Jr. Hart was born in 1930, received his Ph.D. from Columbia
University, and was a bit of a character at Dartmouth. One reviewer
described him as "sporting raccoon coats, using walking canes, sipping
alcohol from a flask at football games, driving gas-guzzling cars, [and
wielding] a wooden grabbing contraption used to great effect at faculty
meetings."
Many years ago I knew Hart briefly, when he was a trustee of an
organization I was associated with (not Catholic Answers). Unfortunately,
like many political conservatives, Hart is a Catholic who does not
subscribe to all that is taught by the Church.
(In this he parallels Buckley, who offered heterodox opinions as long ago
as the 1960s; I have in mind in particular Buckley's contributions to
"Spectrum of Catholic Attitudes," edited by the late Robert Campbell, O.P.)
In the April 19 issue of "National Review" Hart wrote a column against the
magazine's opposition to embryonic stem cell research. Hart is a very smart
man, when it comes to English literature and to his other field of special
interest, the reform of higher education. But his column is hopelessly
muddled, as pointed out in an immediate following column written by Ramesh
Ponnuru.
Hart says that "The entire NR case against stem-cell research rests, like a
great inverted pyramid, on the single assertion that these cells are 'human
beings'--a claim that is not self-evidently true. Even when the naked eye
is aided by a microscope, these cells--'zygotes,' to use the proper
terminology--do not look like human beings."
Ponnuru, who also is an editor at "National Review," had the perfect
response: "Actually, they look exactly like human beings--the way human
beings look at that particular stage of development. We all looked like
that, at that age." Ponnuru could have extended his argument by noting that
the newborn does not look like the nonagenarian, and so what? A fetus looks
more like a newborn than a newborn looks like someone in extreme old age.
In such cases outward appearances tell us little.
Hart falls back on a long-discredited line: "I think we must conclude, if
we are to use language precisely, that the single fertilized cell is a
developing or potential human being." This is half true and half false.
The true part is that the fertilized cell is a developing human being. The
same can be said about any later stage of human life. I have been walking
for more than half a century, and I am still a developing human being. Some
of the development is physical--I am developing more wrinkles each year,
for instance--and some is mental and some is spiritual. (I just wish the
spiritual would develop more quickly than it has!)
What is false about Hart's line is that the fertilized cell is a "potential
human being." It would be right to say that it is a "potential adult human
being," but the same can be said of a teenager. What Hart means, of course,
is that the fertilized cell, as a "potential human being," is not yet a
real human being.
If that were so, the fertilized cell would have to be something else. What
is that something else? It isn't enough to say, "I just told you--it's a
potential human being." The phrase "potential human being" means only that
a thing is not at this moment a human being but might become one. It is
like a negative sentence without a "not," and it leaves open just what kind
of being exists right now.
If the fertilized cell is not a human being but only potentially a human
being, then it is something else--something that, in the future, may cease
to be what it is and may become a human being. So what is it now? It is not
a frog, an antelope, or a cabbage. We could list thousands of others things
it is not. What we cannot list is what it is, if we insist that the
"potential human being" is not already a human being.
Hart is at a logical impasse. Either the fertilized cell is a human being
or it is something altogether different, as different as a frog, an
antelope, or a cabbage. I suspect Hart knows this perfectly well. After
all, he is a well-read and well-written man, yet he offers up an argument
so sophomoric that many sophomores would see through it.
Moving on, Hart wonders what should be done with existing lines of
embryonic stem cells. "It seems to me that the prospect of eliminating
horrible, disabling ailments justifies, morally, using cells that are
otherwise doomed," he says. "But," replies Ponnuru, "we would not kill one
five-year-old child for the certain prospect of curing cancer, let alone
the mere possibility--because the act would be intrinsically immoral."
Of course. Christianity always has taught that we may not perform an evil
act even if some great good might flow from it. To Hart, the fate of a
fertilized cell is determined by the principle that the ends justify the
means. To Ponnuru, and to the Catholic Church, the applicable principle is
that the ends do not justify the means.
In other contexts, I am sure, Hart would affirm this, but here he gets
things exactly backwards. He is not alone. This kind of poor thinking is
distressingly widespread among political conservatives, even Catholic ones.
As late as the 1960s conservatism in America was, at least in its
theoretical constructions, largely a Catholic movement. In four decades it
has become much more secular. Many of its leaders (not just in politics but
in other fields) give scant evidence that their thinking on public policies
has been formed by twenty centuries of Christianity.
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