The big question

The God question: listen to your inner voice

The Australian

12:00AM OCTOBER 28, 2017

GREG SHERIDAN

Foreign Editor

Melbourne

And what remains when disbelief is gone?

It is more rational to believe in God than to believe there is no God.
In fact, belief in God is much more rational than atheism.
The resting place of the mind, its natural equilibrium, as it were, is belief.

This is, in truth, a statement of the obvious. But it seems radical, shocking. This is because in Australia, and in Europe, many of our leading figures, certainly the loudest of them, and a substantial and growing minority of the population believe, or at least pretend to believe, in the religious faith of atheism, the faith that holds there is no God.

In subscribing to atheism they are in radical opposition to the vast majority of people on the planet today, and the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived in history. There’s our first clue.

Last week the Institute of Public Affairs published important research that showed most Aus­tralian university courses make no coherent effort to teach the main elements of Western civilisation. This is partly because Western civilisation, like most civilisation and human nature itself, rests on the knowledge of God.

Knowing and believing in God has always been entirely rational. It is not only rational, of course. To know much more about God than merely that he exists requires faith.

But faith is not, as it is frequently represented, the enemy of reason. Rather, faith is the basis of reason. Almost all of rational life is based on faith. Most often faith is not a question of what you believe but who you believe.

I have faith that I am the son of my parents. I have no real empirical evidence for it. It makes the most sense as an explanation of my life, it is the proposition that best fits with everything I know. But the main reason I believe it is faith, my regular, normal faith in my parents. So this is a faith-based belief, entirely rational, confirmed by experience, but certainly not rationally proven.

Most of our lives are lived in this way. I have faith that my car will work when I turn the key in the ignition, but I have absolutely no idea why or how. Nonetheless I am convinced that my faith is consistent with rationality, that my faith itself is rational.

Part of the crisis of belief in our society is a crisis of knowledge. Because the high points in our elite and popular culture have been colonised by a militant and intolerant atheism, our young people have been denied the fruits of thousands of years of intellectual effort on matters of faith and belief by the best minds humanity has produced. This is wickedly unfair to children.

To have a rounded sense, even intellectually, of the idea of God it is necessary to use all the human faculties — reason, spirit, intuition, emotion, conscience, memory, imagination — to name a few.

Nonetheless, you can get to a knowledge of the reality of God through reason alone. It is important to understand that atheism is also consistent with rationality. Atheism does require its own radical leap of faith, but its biggest problem on rational grounds is that it is inconsistent with the world and life as we know it. It is a hypothesis with feeble powers of prediction. But it is not altogether irrational.

Modern science has not made atheism any more or less rational. Science tells us a great deal about how, but nothing about why. It is a misuse and a misrepresentation of science to pretend that it answers the why questions. There were atheists in the ancient world. The Psalms of the Old Testament refer to people who deny the existence of God. It was always open to a person to say: the world is complex, I don’t understand how it works, but I don’t believe that God created it.

And some people did think that. It is the most insufferable condescension and unjustified vanity on our part to think of all of the rest of humanity, in the past, and beyond our little slice of the West today, as trapped in superstition, while we alone are wise, enlightened and free.

For while more than just reason is involved in faith, reason always played its part. The philosophers of ancient Greece, long before the birth of Christ, reasoned their way to God. This is most often associated with Aristotle, but it was a movement among many philosophers and poets of ancient Greece.

Their insights were integrated into Christianity in the 13th century by the greatest of the Christian philosophers and theologians, Thomas Aquinas.

Famously, Thomas provided his five ways to God through reason. Some Christians mistakenly took to referring to them as the five proofs of God. In truth, by reason alone you cannot absolutely prove God or disprove him.

Thomas was trying to understand, not to prove, though understanding often leads to belief.

First, Thomas suggested that motion had to start somewhere, that there had to be an unmoved mover.

Second, the chain of cause and effect is so long, but it too had to start somewhere; there had to be an uncaused cause.

Third, contingent beings — that is, beings who rely on some antecedent for their existence — must inevitably proceed from a being who relies on nothing for their existence, a necessary being.

Fourth, there is so much goodness in the world, it must correspond to or proceed from a self-sufficient goodness.

And fifth, the non-conscious agents in the world behave so purposefully that they imply an intelligent universal principle.

That is a crude summary of what is called Thomas’s argument from design (which bears no relation to the modern fringe theory of evolution called Intelligent Design). And it all seems pretty dry. People don’t generally come to any serious belief in God purely through this or any other rational process.

But it is important to understand that there is nothing in reason that contradicts God. That our public culture so routinely suppresses this knowledge, mocks it and teaches the reverse, demonstrates just what a strange and dangerous cultural dead end we have wandered into. Yet even in our moment, in our society, there is already a nostalgia for God.

Reasoning from first principles, of course, is not even the primary rational way you can come to a rational knowledge of God.

For it is one of the central realities of humanity, one of the deep mysteries of the human condition, that all truth involves a balance of truths. Rationality needs a context in order to be rational. In isolation from all the other human faculties, it becomes a cult of hyper-rationality. And this is not more and better rationality but distorted rationality, and often leads to irrational conclusions. For example, you may describe in exquisite, painstaking rational detail a finger pulling the trigger of a gun, which fires a bullet, which kills a child. The description can become extraordinarily detailed and rational, following an unassailable logic. You can claim as a consequence that you have rationally and exhaustively explained the death of the child.

Yet you have not explained murder. You have said nothing about the morality, or even in a larger sense the cause, of the child’s death. Rationality alone is not sufficient — necessary, yes, but not sufficient.

Consider something entirely different. In one of the most important decisions we make in life, rationality is a part, but only a part, and not always the most important part. When you choose, say, your life’s partner, the decision is partly rational but not purely or wholly rational. There is a spark of romance, an intuition of commitment, an excitement, a sense beyond the rational of adventure and deep homecoming.

These types of considerations are not irrelevant to a rational belief in God.

Let’s look at that a bit more. The subject that humanity understands best, and has the most experience of, is humanity. The proper subject for the study of man is man.

What clues does humanity itself offer us about belief in God?

All of our strongest instincts, all of our strongest desires, correspond to a strong reality. Hunger indicates food. Tiredness suggests sleep. Sexual desire implies sex.

This is true not only of physical desires. Loneliness implies friendship. The desire to behave decently implies the existence of decency.

And as long as we have known human beings, they have yearned for and believed in God. It makes you ponder, this long, consistent, human intuition, or it should do. The long hunger for God implies God.

These are just clues, they are not proofs, but they are clues that are powerfully consistent with God.

In his magnificent book, From Big Bang to Big Mystery, Brendan Purcell, among countless scintillating insights, assesses our professional or scholarly knowledge of several of the earliest human burial sites that we have found.

These date back many tens of thousands of years. Almost every one involves some ritual, and some symbolism. Many involved artefacts, or tokens, or tools buried with the dead, which paleoanthropologists believe indicate a belief in the afterlife. The tools buried with the dead are symbols of what the person would take with them to the afterlife.

There are clues and questions beyond humanity, which belief in God answers rationally but to which the faith of atheism offers no answers at all.

Why is there something rather than nothing? How come our world is so incredibly receptive to the evolution of life? It’s highly improbable statistically. What caused the big bang? Why is nature so regular from one minute to the next?

Most of these questions are not necessary or sufficient proofs of God. They are open to atheist conjecture. But cumulatively they make more sense with God.

There is a variety of sneering, intolerant and remarkably poorly informed atheism popular on TV talk shows and the like. It is faux clever but strangely old-fashioned, trotting out a venerable retinue of cliches and platitudes but demonstrating an almost complete lack of familiarity with theology or metaphysical philosophy.

This kind of atheism is associ­ated with figures such as Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion, which sold three million copies. Dawkins is an eminent scientist in one field, with no particular expertise in any other field and an apparently wilful ignorance of the variety and subtlety and history of the claims and ideas of Christianity. He is a kind of atheist fundamentalist and he conjures an extreme, fundamentalist Christianity, a rhetorical straw man (unrelated to the main lines of Christianity) that he can beat down with science.

This kind of atheism is also associated with Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens was in some ways a splendid journalist, brave and witty and engaged, but he was a poor philosopher, a tremendously tendentious historian and an astonishingly ill-informed theologian.

With a few other popular atheist celebrities, men such as these seek (or sought) to impose the new, and frighteningly narrow, religious orthodoxies of our day. They mount a million wild attacks on belief in God, most of them absurd. Let’s consider just two.

One is that evolutionary science has replaced God in explaining humanity.

This is nonsense. Evolutionary theory and science offer marvellous explanations of how, they offer no explanations of why. This is no challenge to belief in God. In fact, it is a fundamental point. If God brings the physical universe into being then of course he uses physical processes. Understanding the processes a bit better doesn’t bear on the questions of why, of purpose, of meaning, at all. Most scientists believe that evolutionary science is consistent with religious belief or atheism. I think they’re right.

Nonetheless, evolutionary theory poses a much bigger problem for atheism than it does for religious belief. Some atheists argue that human beings evolved a religious instinct because it enhanced their chances of survival.

There is some appeal in this proposition, and also a lot of logical problems with it. But let it pass.

Consider, however, its implication. If the rational power of the human mind is so feeble that for countless millennia it could believe in God, when this belief is a delusion for which allegedly there is no evidence at all, how can we now accept that this same mind has miraculously developed a new capability to get to the truth and to understand evolutionary theory? If the mind is shaped by evolutionary theory to irrational ends throughout history it might just as well be shaped to irrational ends when it embraces evolutionary theory. This is not what I believe but it is an inescapable implication of the Dawkins style of atheism.

If our minds and personalities and consciousness are no more than physical atoms and electric impulses, what basis do we have for believing that the mind can reliably apprehend reality at all?

The answer is that there is no basis for such belief within this atheist framework. You have to take it on faith. It is one of the many leaps of faith required in atheism.

The other frequent ground for a sneering assault on religious belief arises out of the science of the big bang itself.

That we now know so much more about the history of our planet, of our solar system, of our galaxy, leads some to the mistaken conclusion that God is superseded as an explanation.

I think rather that what all this knowledge really indicates is the majesty and generosity of God. That the physical universe we know is apparently 14 billion years old tells us nothing about who created it or why.

Dawkins and Hitchens and the others spend hundreds of pages claiming that God is impossible. Then when they admit that they cannot disprove God, they assert, with absolute dogmatic certainty, that God wouldn’t behave in a manner they deem inefficient or unsatisfactory or worse, profligate.

How would they know how God would behave?

It strikes me as absolutely characteristic of God that he would spend 14 billion years preparing a gift for human beings.

There are countless clues of God throughout our world and within humanity itself. There is the strange phenomenon of joy, the even stranger delight of humour, the inescapable intimation of meaning in beauty and music. There is the mystery of love, along with the equal mystery of our consciousness and our self-awareness. It’s a lot of clues to ignore.

There is one clue I like more than any other — the clue of the inner voice. Is there a single person alive who has not said, in some difficult moment: let it be this! don’t let it be that!

Who are we talking to at those moments?

Most of our life is spent with our inner voice, thinking things over, weighing things up, rehearsing our triumphs, dreading our failures, contemplating the people in our lives, anticipating the future, interpreting the past.

Isn’t there a sense in all this, that we are involved in a conversation?

Transgender&research

First cut is the deepest but reversal also traumatic for trans community

12:00AM October 28, 2017

The Australian

JANET ALBRECHTSEN

The transgender cause is pitched as the civil rights movement of the 21st century. It is no such thing. No legitimate civil rights movement would emasculate the rights of women or show scant regard for the welfare of children or disregard the wellbeing of the most vulnerable, people suffering con­fusion and underlying traumas.

Nor would it ignore the growing number of adults who regret ­undergoing gender-reassignment surgery. And there is nothing “civil” or “right” about a political movement that silences dissenters and punishes those who try to bring nuance to a complicated story about sex and gender.

Forget dystopian fiction. The real-world trajectory of trans­gender activism deserves scrutiny. That’s why James Caspian has had his name splashed across British newspapers. His story is a common one about the convergence of political correctness, the disproportionate power of a minority political movement and a faint-hearted university.

Caspian, a registered psychotherapist, has worked for a decade with hundreds of transgender and transsexual patients and sup­ported many through gender transition. In 2014 he enrolled at Bath Spa University to undertake research into what he was hearing from within his profession: more and more people seeking surgery to reverse their gender-reassignment surgery.

It’s true that this is not for the faint-hearted. When men undergo gender-reassignment surgery, their penis and testicles are ­removed and a vagina is medically constructed. Reversing this surgery is equally awful.

After a long application process that involved altering his ­research parameters and resubmitting his proposal, the university ethics committee rejected Caspian’s application in November last year. The committee’s report stated the research was “politically incorrect” and “the posting of unpleasant material on blogs or social media may be detrimental to the reputation of the university”. The ethics committee advised him to do a “less ethically complex piece of research”.

The university’s position shows how political correctness has become the coward’s way out. It stops us considering difficult ­issues, the ones that require the most deliberation. It makes us dumber. And in this case it will end up harming vulnerable people. After all, Caspian’s research idea wasn’t plucked from thin air.

In 2014 he spoke with Miroslav Djordjevic, a leading genital ­reconstructive surgeon working in Serbia and New York, who mentioned he had done seven ­reverse gender-reassignment sur­geries. All were transgender women wanting to restore their male genitalia. Djordjevic said someone needed to research this new phenomenon. Soon after, Caspian started doing preliminary work for his planned research and, over the phone from Hastings in East Sussex, he told Inquirer he was shocked by what he found.

“I found that, particularly in the US, there are increasing numbers of very young women who decided they were trans, had taken testosterone, some had breasts removed and then ­realised, typically in their early 20s if not before, that it was a mistake. This is a hugely under-researched field,” he says.

People who had reversed their gender-reassignment surgeries con­tacted Caspian but were too traumatised to speak publicly about it. Caspian recalls being contacted by a spokeswoman for a group of women who said “quite a lot of us have taken testosterone, had breasts removed and have gone back to living as women. But we don’t all reverse our surgery, which would mean breast ­implants. So we just live with the scars.”

Caspian’s determination to ­research this area also grew out of the changing profile of his own ­patients. “I certainly noticed that much younger people were coming in, and many more were natal females wanting to transition to men.” This matches Djordjevic’s experience. The surgeon told London’s The Telegraph newspaper this month that in the past 20 years the average age of his ­patients had more than halved, from 45 to 21. That means very young adults are having gender-reassignment surgery. With a push to lower the age limit for surgery to below 18, Djordjevic told The Telegraph: “I’m afraid of what will happen five to 10 years later with this person.”

Caspian is gravely concerned that transgender activism is altering the standard of care, removing the requirements for counselling to make access to treatment easier. “The World Professional ­Asso­ciation for Transgender Health, which drew up the guidelines, has become much more activist-oriented. Previously it had been more psychiatric-oriented.”

He points to the growth of gender clinics and how many operate on an affirmation basis. “So the idea is that if someone tells you they have a new gender identity, you accept that. You must not question it, and that’s being written into law and policy. If you can’t question this, if you can only ­affirm, then you don’t explore.” Caspian’s experience is that people seeking gender-transition treatment are varied and complex, and many have serious under­lying issues that are not ­explored. “My concern is for safe clinical practice and to do no harm.”

Once the legitimate pursuit of transgender rights became a broader political movement, everyone from Facebook with its 58 gender choices to political parties of all stripes have jumped on board. Caspian says Momentum, the grassroots group behind British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, is “very pro-trans and they won’t know the first thing about who walks into a gender clinic and why”.

Last week the British government proposed that the term “pregnant woman” should not be used in a UN treaty because “it may exclude transgender people who have given birth”. Needless to say, plenty of women have a problem with their biology being erased by transgender politics. And proposed changes to Britain’s Gender Recognition Act, again under the watch of conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, will make gender self-certifiable. That means if you say you’re a woman then legally you are. And you don’t need a doctor’s diagnosis.

Caspian told Inquirer “already some women are noticing men going into women’s change rooms, claiming they are women when there is nothing ­female about them. Women end up getting changed in a broom cupboard. The Gender Recognition Act cements this stuff.”

Last month, when some women organised to meet at a London community centre to discuss these changes, a small group of angry trans activists found out and told the venue they would disrupt the meeting. The community centre cancelled the event. Women then gathered at Hyde Park’s Speakers Corner to agree a new venue. Janice Turner, a journalist at The Times, was there. She wrote that the activists “rang every conceivable venue within a mile radius to promise mayhem”.

Turner saw Maria, a 60-year-old woman “in specs and sensible shoes” who was taking photographs, get smacked in the face by a trans activist after another activist smashed her camera. As police arrived, Turner asked a young activist if she was OK with men smacking women. “It’s not a guy, you’re a piece of shit, and I’m happy they hit her” was her reply.

Trans politics has become a textbook case of trying to silence dissent, with bogus claims that ­violence is justified. And the most innocent victims include children who are encouraged to go down a path of gender reassignment with puberty blockers, chemicals and, when they are older, gender-­reassignment surgery. Doctors who work in the field report a spike in the number of these children in the past three years.

Caspian says it’s a one-size-fits-all affirmation ideology, a case of: “Great, you’re trans, let’s get you on the pathway and if your parents object, then they are transphobic. And anyone who has any concerns is transphobic.”

In the US, research is being done into something called rapid-onset gender dysphoria. Caspian says rapid onset involves “somebody who has not displayed the more typical long pattern of feeling they are the other gender. Suddenly, and often after intensive internet exposure, they develop gender dysphoria; dysphoria meaning unhappiness. They are invariably young, minors, under 18s and young adults.”

Doctors tell us that patients of gender clinics are six times likelier to be on the autistic spectrum and vulnerable to being drawn into a social movement where trans is considered a place where they can belong. Increasingly it’s girls who hate themselves for being female, hating their bodies. Many of them have been raped and sexually ­abused and gender transition is a means to escape from the conflict they feel being female. This trauma is not the same as someone who, from a very young age, feels they are essentially male.

As Philadelphia-based clinical social worker Lisa Marchiano has written, we are told that “gender is between the ears, not the legs”. That’s true. It’s also true that there is much more going on between the ears than gender identity.

And today there is much confusion between gender identity and gender roles. There have ­always been children who don’t fit gender roles and who don’t want to conform to them.

Last year British actor Rupert Everett gave himself as a reason not to medicate children with hormone therapy. He spent his childhood wanting to be a girl, often decked out in dresses, but said: “Thank god the world of now wasn’t then because I’d be on hormones and I’d be a woman. After I was 15, I never wanted to be a woman again.”

We need to be able to discuss this serious business of gender transition by gathering research and listening to clinicians. But, as Caspian says, too many clinicians are afraid of speaking up. “One clinician told me she felt like a heretic, another said that ‘I didn’t think we were allowed to talk about this de-transitioning’. They are afraid for their careers.”

While Caspian waits for Bath Spa University to conclude its ­investigation, he is considering legal action, claiming a breach of his right to freedom of expression. It’s not easy fighting a Goliath, so he is raising funds through crowdjustice.com.

These are high stakes for the most vulnerable people, espec­ially those wrongly drawn into gender-reassignment surgery, which is why Caspian doesn’t mince his words. “I think we are going to look back on this in 20 or 30 years and say: what on earth were we doing?”

TheOveruseOfAbuse

Harvey Weinstein scandal: #Notmetoo if it’s lynch mob justice

• The Australian
• 12:00AM October 25, 2017
• SaveJANET ALBRECHTSEN
• 

  Columnist

  Sydney

  @jkalbrechtsen

  

Jogging past four older blokes on their early morning walk this week, I smiled when I heard one tell his friends “she gave me a terrific massage!” He raised his arm with a little jig to motion just how terrific it was. Some things probably can’t be said any more, not after the expose of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged history of sexual harassment, including sleazy requests that actresses massage him. Then again, it’s precisely now that some things need to be said about the wicked legacy of the Weinstein scandal.

Given the constant flow of allegations, with more last weekend about Weinstein’s sexual depredations, it’s easy to assume that he’s guilty. Yet there is something deeply unsettling about this trial by social media. The now infamous Hollywood producer may be guilty of being a repeat offender of horrible sexual crimes. Even so, when guilt is the criterion for turning an old-­fashioned lynch mob into a roving online alternative justice system, we take a big step away from the rule of law.

This is not a defence of Weinstein or other alleged perpetrators of sex crimes against women. This is a defence of testing claims of criminal conduct in a legal system premised on the rule of law. And it’s a defence of basic fairness beyond the legal system, so that claims of all kinds are treated as ­allegations, not the final word.

The upshot of Weinstein’s trial by social media is a series of equally disturbing sequels. There are now more online trials before people have paused to properly consider the dangers of lynch mobs.

The #MeToo campaign started within days of the Weinstein expose, inviting women to add their own stories. Then came an altogether different beast, a Google.doc list with women in the US adding men’s names to a roll of sexual predators.

In Australia too, journalist Tracey Spicer has popped up, stating her intention to “name and shame” men who are “serial predators” in their workplaces. Using Twitter, she has asked women to contact her. “We’re actually looking at prosecutions as well as exposing these people,” Spicer said.

The glaring flaw in Spicer’s predictable campaign is that she conflates a police investigation and a courtroom with her name-and-shame media campaign. The latter lacks the legitimacy of the former. A name-and-shame campaign encourages women and their supporters to become online prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner of men who cannot possibly defend themselves in a forum of collective outrage.

And an inherently emotional forum can easily misfire against innocent men and the broader cause of punishing real acts of sexual depredation.

As certain as we may be of someone’s guilt, our justice system is premised on the presumption of innocence. Weinstein’s denials of wrongdoing, for example, may sound far-fetched, but only a courtroom can properly test the evidence.

That’s why legal systems within liberal democracies are committed to the rule of law. Law is order. And reason, not emotion, is the best way to determine someone’s guilt or innocence.

It is a hideous conceit of modernity to imagine that technology is always an improvement on the world of our forebears. Yet that’s the claim by #MeToo supporters who say the internet age has ­better equipped people to deal with issues of sexual harassment.

Trial by Twitter is no substitute for the rule of law, a concept explained by Aristotle more than 2000 years ago. The pre-social media Greek philosopher understood that rule by man “adds an ­element of the beast, for desire is a wild beast, and passion perverts … the best of men. The law is reason unaffected by desire.”

A lynch mob is still a lynch mob, no matter how fine its intentions, and regardless of whether the lynching takes place online or on the streets. It’s still pack-hunting outside the legal system, akin to tyrannical regimes where people are declared guilty of a crime after a sham trial, or no trial at all.

The social media trial of Weinstein may prove itself deeply flawed in another way, too. If Weinstein walks free from a courtroom trial because the ­online and media lynching has made a fair trial impossible, that won’t be a failure of the legal system. That will be the fault of those arrogant enough to think their extrajudicial prosecution and guilty verdict is a legitimate warm-up act to a real trial.

Indeed, the #MeToo campaign suffers more misguided conceit when its supporters laud its social media presence for democratising feminism.

Here’s the common flaw of modern feminists: gather as a collective, speak as one and assume that a moral righteousness em­erges from the volume and uniformity of its voice. Social media hasn’t democratised feminism but it has found a new way to disperse an old conceit more widely and loudly: that a women-led campaign necessarily speaks for the sum total of women’s experiences.

Contrary to Clementine Ford’s claims, not all women have stayed silent about sexual harassment because of deep cultural conditioning that causes women to feel shame or self-doubt. Maybe lots of women, women like me, haven’t joined the #MeToo online sharing campaign because we have nothing to say. Not because nothing happened but because we put oafish male behaviour in the same category as women behaving rudely. It happens. It’s even common in a world made up of imperfect people. But no damage was done then, no shame, no self-doubt. And my gender doesn’t warrant me now converting boorish behaviour into sexual harassment for a #MeToo campaign.

That’s not to devalue the pain clearly felt by many women who have been sexually harassed or sexually assaulted. It’s just a note to the #MeToo crowd that not all women have the same reactions, and presuming to speak for all women is a demeaning paternalism that women should surely ­resist.

The related defect is how the #MeToo campaign is colonising dubious terrain. It’s true that in a furiously competitive marketplace of outrage, you need lots of loud voices coalescing around a common cause, but inviting women to share trivial slights along with the most serious assaults undermines the credibility of an important cause.

Last week, the ABC’s 7.30 program chose to feature in its #MeToo story an actress who said that “99 per cent of the women in this room have been harassed, sexually harassed or assaulted and raped or whatever. It’s literally that prevalent.”

The ABC’s seven-minute salute to the #MeToo campaign ­failed to ask the most basic questions about the cost of lumping together sexual harassment with rape and “whatever” into the #MeToo basket.

The #MeToo crusade repeats the mistakes of the dodgy report released in August by the Australian Human Rights Commission that defined down the meaning of sexual harassment to include staring or leering, a suggestive comment or joke, or an intrusive question about your private life.

Just as it is dishonest to pretend a hashtag can distil one voice from the gamut of women’s experiences, distorting language is no win for women either.

When we weaken the censuring power of words, we lose the ability to identify the worst sexual predators. It’s entirely possible that these social media trials kicked off by the Weinstein scandal will prove to be an own goal for women.

The Modern World?

OCTOBER 11, 2017

Open Your Eyes Father Martin

ANTHONY ESOLEN

Father James G. Martin, S.J., is either a cruel or a foolish man. It does not seem to be the first. But if it is not that, it must be the second, because that alone can explain how a Catholic priest can live in the midst of massive and unprecedented family breakdown, and the chaos, loneliness, and alienation consequent upon it, and still wave the banner for the latest innovation in sexual confusion.

He is good at telling stories. Let me tell a few.

Fifteen years ago I was in a Boston hospital, lying on a bed in an out-patient ward where the sexes were not separated. In the next stall was a pudgy young woman, sniffling. When the nurse came round, she asked the girl whether she was sure she wanted to go through with the “procedure.” The girl said she was. For the record, the nurse asked why.

The reason was straightforward enough. She had a two year old at home whose father was nowhere to be found. The child she was carrying was begotten by another man, also not in the picture. She did not have the energy to take care of both. When the nurse asked if she had any way of getting home, she said her brother was going to come get her after work.

That was that, and the nurse left. The girl kept up the sniffling. You see, Father, what the god of this age hath wrought?

I know a young man who was a firm Catholic when he left home for college, but he was unformed in theology, and the ethos roundabout him was secular and hedonistic. He fell in love with a girl, and one evening when they were on the floor doing things they should not have been doing, she surprised him with a trick from Sodom; and from that evening on, he lost any sense that the Church had something to say about that whole realm of human action. The affair went on, because he was in love, after all. His mind was clouded, he says, and he did things that years later still bring him intense shame. The results were predictable. Nervous days, fearing—fearing!—the natural result of what they were doing, while he, making foolish excuses, told himself that of course they would keep the child and get married. Right; she and her divorced parents would never have stood for it.

The story of the Sexual Revolution is writ in blood. This time, by happy chance, it was not, but it could well have been. The girl found someone else to play the game of hedonism with, someone less serious about marriage, and the boy was left angry, hurt, and, such is the stultifying effect of lust, unapologetic about the pleasant wickedness wherein he and she with full consent had conspired. Multiply him by fifty million. Then I think of a clever and energetic little boy whose family I love dearly, and who is lucky enough to live with grandmother and grandfather, and with plenty of other family around him, but whose father is a dreadful man, having sired children upon three different women. What are the chances that that boy will not learn the lessons of fornication all around him?

I know of a parish whose priest was a homosexual abuser. His foul deeds robbed the local churches of their meager funds, including bequests made by faithful parishioners at their passing. He had portrayed himself as a manly fellow, interested in coaching the teenage boys at wrestling and boxing. One day a friend of mine, a teenage boy, called on the rectory and the priest answered, his arms slicked with oil up to the elbows. My friend recalled that detail years later, saying that at the time he had no idea what it might mean. It was clear that those boys were not coerced, but enticed, seduced. After all, they outnumbered the priest, and they were big. The abuser had won their consent.

Catholic rainbows have no desire to enter into the mind and heart of a young man who has been so enticed. What so gnaws upon him later, if not the warping of his natural manhood, is being led to engage in a deed against which the gorge rises. Yet they would leave young men by the millions beset by such offers, such enticement, ever more frequent, persistent, and shameless, and all that separates the lonely or fatherless boy who manages to grow straight and tall, and one who is led into the depravity of manhood abused, is the chance presence of someone on the lookout at a solitary place or a dangerous time.

Shall we say more? I know a lovely woman whose husband left her and her children for another woman; that story is now as common as dirt. I am sure that Father Martin would not smile upon the abandonment, though he might smile upon the new liaison, the pseudo-marriage, and that is just as bad as far as the abandoned are concerned. They are invisible. It was most fortunate in this case that the woman devoted herself all the more powerfully to the welfare of their children, cheering them on in their sports, hosting parties at her home, and never once distracting herself by the siren call of personal pleasure or a second chance at love. When they were grown, the family home had to be sold, as per a provision in the divorce settlement.

One of her children took his own life.

Shall we say more? Priests have told me that many men who become addicted to pornography—also as common now as dirt, but not nearly so salubrious—seek sexual thrills farther from the bounds of the normal, procuring pictures of children, or engaging in the act with other men. I can explain this only by keeping in mind the depravity of that all-consensual product called porn, and by the example of the Marquis de Sade, who gives us to know that it is not the act that pleases, but its being forbidden, or, as the pelvic Left has it, “transgressive.”

His testimony was confirmed for me by the confession of a young man who longed to return to his faith and to the natural sanity of the human body and its functions. He told me that porn had led him and some of his male friends to sodomize one another, while maintaining the fiction that they were only fooling around. One of those friends has yet to extricate himself from the demonic habit thus developed.

More? Consider the intense loneliness of young men and women who are invisible to the sexual innovators, because they do not parade down Fifth Avenue in orange sequins and jock straps. They are trying to follow the commandments and the natural law. They get no confirmation, no praise, no accompaniment; at best a sniff of condescension. Some will give up on faith and morality, feeling that they have been played for chumps, because the leaders of their former Church evidently do not really believe that sodomy, let alone natural fornication, is wrong. If you really believe that the mushroom is poisonous, you do not serve it at dinner. It is as if sin were not real, but only regarded so; a social pretense, with no connection to the human constitution as created by God.

And more? What hath Kinsey wrought? That fraud and pederast lent a veil of intellectual respectability to all manner of sexual immorality, and mass entertainment followed happily along. Tell us what you see now, Mr. Hefner. Who gives young people the slightest assistance in remaining innocent and clean? I have seen it again and again. Boys and girls blessed with a sweet temperament and parents who love them suddenly reach the whitewater of puberty, and then, far from lending an oar to help, their very schools are like rocks beneath, waiting to rip their canoes clean through. Father Martin will “accompany” them if they fall into a certain form of perversion, accompaniment that costs nothing, a pat on the back after the harm has been done. Who walks with them when the danger first threatens?

Who stands up for the poor against those who ravage the family? Name for me one impoverished or oppressed people in the history of the world who rose to prosperity or who threw off the yoke of their oppressors while living in sexual license and remaining content with the ensuing family chaos. Name one. The Irish were brutalized by the English for three centuries, yet they did not lose the family, and they prevailed. Had my Italian grandfathers been indifferent to the morals of their children, I would not now be writing these words, because only a strong family headed by a good father can channel the energies of a young man with a rebellious streak who is stronger than his mother and smarter than his teachers. No, it is easier to blame a social specter, like an all-pervading racism or the fog of “privilege,” than to reckon with the uncomfortable facts of common observation, biology, and history, and the testimony of every human culture, from stone knives to the microchip.

The western world is dying, literally dying. No one is getting married. Hedonism has led to its own demise; Eros has slain himself on his own altar. Do you wonder, Father Martin, why you do not see boys and girls holding hands? Because the world you bless has raised the stakes too high. They dare not do so; it will be a sign that they are in bed with one another, and embarrassment, if not moral qualms, will keep them from making that sign in public. I could go farther. They do not hold hands, because they do not do much at all with one another anymore; evil has crowded out the good, and spread its pall over what was once innocent and sweet. I know many young people who have never known the delight of that gesture, because all of the beautiful land lying between first sight and marriage has been razed as by nuclear war.

What applies to boys and girls applies in a different way to boys and boys. Many young men are lonely and long for masculine affection, expressed in a healthy way, but they cannot find it, because the visibility of the homosexual life has rendered those longings suspect. Father Martin has nothing to say to them. They too are invisible. Yet it is precisely such young men, whose masculine development has been made needlessly difficult, who have most to say about the peculiar harm wrought by the banners for Sodom—while their foes sneer, and say that they might “really” be homosexual deep down. Get lost, kid, or get to the bathhouse. No sympathy for you.

Or for the father whose teenage son announced, on Thanksgiving, that he was “gay,” causing Father Martin to give glory to God for the boy’s honesty. Such callousness takes the breath away. He does not consider that any decent and responsible father would be devastated by the news. It would be the darkest day of his life. He would know that he and his son had failed, and that his son had already acted upon his confusion; that sodomy had set its tentacles into the son’s soul, that he had done things that disgust a normal man, and that his life henceforward must dabble in disease and decay. Boys do not do with boys what chivalrous young men do for the girls they love, nor do they wait for marriage, for in the marsh of the unnatural there is no need. In Sodom, the acceptable time is always now.

Shall we turn to the poorest among us? What two centuries of slavery and another century of relentless indignities failed to do, the Sexual Revolution accomplished in one generation, the destruction of the black family in the United States. Nor has it reserved its foul work to blacks. It has ruined such families as my grandparents could depend on, when they were mining coal for a pittance in Pennsylvania.

Who could have predicted that license would enslave? Everyone: all the pagan philosophers, even Epicurus; all the prophets, lawgivers, and evangelists in the testaments old and new; all the Fathers of the Church; all the schoolmen, all their enemies among the Renaissance humanists, all the Protestant reformers, all the American founders, even Jefferson, all the Victorian moralists, even the feminist George Eliot, all the popes, especially those who like Leo XIII wrote extensively on the social troubles of the modern world—anyone with eyes and a beating heart.
    

Father Martin says he is no theologian, but you don’t need theology to see the ruin. I beg him to open his eyes. The single pragmatic question that should guide our course of action is simply this. What customs, and the laws that promote and protect them, give boys and girls the best chance to grow up with a married mother and father committed to one another for life, and to learn the feelings and ways that are natural and normal for their sex, so that they will be attracted and attractive each to the other, and determined to have lifelong marriages of their own in turn? Answer that question first, and then we can figure out what to do for those who fall afoul of nature or the moral law or both. That would be mercy indeed, and not indifference (or complicity) with a grin.

GoodIntentions??

Bad policy outcomes ignored in obsession with virtue signals

MATT RIDLEY

The curse of modern politics is an epidemic of good intentions and bad outcomes. Policy after policy is chosen and voted on according to whether it means well, not whether it works. And the most frustrated politicians are those who keep trying to sell policies based on their efficacy, rather than their motives. It used to be possible to approach politics as a conversation between adults, and argue for unfashionable but effective medicine. In the 140-character world this is tricky (I speak from experience).

The fact that it was Milton Friedman who said “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results” rather proves the point. He was one of the most successful of all economists in getting results in terms of raising living standards, yet is widely despised today by both the left and centre as evil because he did not bother to do much virtue signalling.

The commentator James Bartholomew popularised the term “virtue signalling” for those who posture empathetically but emptily. “Je suis Charlie” (but I won’t show cartoons of the Prophet), “Refugees welcome” (but not in my home) or “Ban fossil fuels” (let’s not talk about my private jet). You see it everywhere. The policies unveiled at the British Conservative Party conference show the party is aware of this and (alas) embracing it. On student fees, housing costs and energy bills, the Tories proposed symbolic changes that would do nothing to solve the underlying problem, indeed might make them worse in some cases, but which at least showed they cared. I doubt it worked. They ended up sounding like pale imitations of Labour, or doing political dad-dancing.

“Our election campaign portrayed us as a party devoid of values,” said MP Robert Halfon said in June.

“The Labour Party now has circa 700,000 members that want nothing from the Labour Party but views and values they agree with,” lamented Ben Harris-Quinney of the Bow Group last week.

I think that what politicians mean by “values” is “intentions”.

The forgiving of good intentions lies behind the double standard by which we judge totalitarians. Whereas fascists are rightly condemned in schools, newspapers and social media as evil, communists get a much easier ride, despite killing more people. “For all its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big,” read a New York Times headline last month.

“For all its flaws, Nazi Germany did help bring Volkswagen and BMW to the car-buying public,” replied one wag on Twitter.

Imagine anybody getting away with saying of Mussolini or Franco what John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn said of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez. The reason for this double standard is the apparently good intentions of communist dictators: unlike Nazis, communists were at least trying to make a workers’ paradise; they just got it wrong. Again and again and again.

Though Corbyn is a leading exponent, elevating intentions over outcomes is not entirely a monopoly of the left. It is something that the coalition government kept trying, in emulation of Tony Blair. Hugging huskies and gay marriage were pursued mainly for the signal they sent, rather than for the result they achieved. (Student loans, to be fair, were the opposite.) Indeed, George Osborne’s constant talk of austerity, while increasing spending in real terms, was an example of the gap between intention and outcome, albeit less sugar-coated.

I can draw up a list as long as your arm of issues where the road to failure is paved with counter-productive benevolence. Gordon Brown’s 50p top tax rate brought in less tax from the richest. Banning fox hunting has led to the killing of more foxes. Opposition to badger culls made no ecological sense, for cattle, hedgehogs, people — or badger health. Mandating a percentage of GDP for foreign aid was a virtuous gesture that causes real inefficiency and corruption — and (unlike private philanthropy) also tended to transfer money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

Or take organic farming, which has been shown repeatedly to produce trivial or zero health benefits, while any environmental benefits are grossly outweighed by the low yields that mean it requires taking more land from nature. Yet the BBC’s output on farming is dominated by coverage of the 2 per cent of farming that is organic, and is remorselessly obsequious. Why? Because organic farmers say they are trying to be nice to the planet.

My objection to wind farms is based on the outcome of the policy, whereas most people’s support is based largely on the intention. There they stand, 90m tall, visibly advertising their virtue as signals of our commitment to devotion to Gaia. The fact that each one requires 150 tonnes of coal to make, that it needs fossil fuel back-up for when the wind is not blowing, that it is subsidised disproportionately by poor people and the rewards go disproportionately to rich people, and that its impact on emissions is so small as to be unmeasurable — none of these matter. It’s the thought that counts.

The Paris climate accord is one big virtue-signalling prayer, whose promises, if implemented, would make a difference in the temperature of the atmosphere in 2100 so small it is practically within the measuring error. But it’s the thought that counts. Donald Trump just does not care.

One politician who has always refused to play the intention game is Nigel Lawson. Rather than rest on the laurels of his political career, he has devoted his retirement to exposing the gap between rhetoric and reality in two great movements: European integration and climate change mitigation. In his book An Appeal to Reason, he pointed out that on the UN’s official forecasts, climate change, unchecked, would mean the average person will be 8.5 times as rich in 2100 as today, rather than 9.5 times if we stopped the warming. And to achieve this goal we are to punish the poor of today with painful policies? This isn’t “taking tough decisions”; this is prescribing chemotherapy for a cold.

Yet the truth is, Lawson and I and others like us have so far largely lost the argument on climate change entirely on the grounds of intentions. Being against global warming is a way of saying you care about the future. Not being a headless chicken — however well argued your case — leads to accusations you do not care.

THE TIMES

The forgiving of good intentions lies behind the double standard by which we judge totalitarians ‘Where do I think the line should be? I think we need to decide, not the government’