The Negative Man

I have been regularly watching on You Tube one Father Mark Goring, a remarkable young priest in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. A recurring theme of his is to look for the positive good and to do positive good: it will make you good.

In college, and I really should find it to reread, a class assignment was to read Dr. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Dr. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor. As I recall, a story from his book was how one prisoner gave a hidden potato to another prisoner who was (if this can be imagined in such atrocity) in more dire shape. I still marvel at such a moral good coming from any given man under the unimaginably horrible circumstances of a Nazi death camp. Dr. Frankl believed that part of survival was finding something to be positive about and to do positive good.

My overriding point here is that we should strive to find, act, and be positively good. This can be done without denying the horrors of what is negative and working all along to fight them.  Fr. Mark for example when he feels angry prays to find a moral good to focus on and to do, because they're out there even in trying times. Indeed, it may be all the more important to seek the good when evil, yes, evil, seems so prevalent. But the thing is, if you seek the positive you find it.

The corollary is that if you search for the negative you will find that. If you find it you likely will wallow in it. When you wallow in it you become the Negative Man. When you then look in the mirror, will it be a vision worth seeing?

Abortion: a Moral Evil

Pope Benedict XVI has said that human embryos are 'dynamic, autonomous individuals.' It is a good and clear statement of what seems a reasonable philosophic position: human beings have human babies.

It is high time that we state things clearly and emphatically where human life is at stake. We aren't talking about potential, we are talking about reality. The sooner we begin to emphasize that, the sooner we might begin to convince all but the hardest hearted that abortion is a great moral evil.

This is not a wholly, or even particularly, religious position, yet many will attempt to dismiss it as such. Concluding that, again, human beings have human children is no more inherently religious than asserting that rape, theft, or kidnapping is evil. Not that the religious aspect of this or any other moral question isn't important, but only that, when trying to convince someone not particularly or even openly hostile to religion that something is wrong we cannot use religion to defend it. We have to play the game on their field until such time as they come around to a more inclusive point of view.

Fortunately their field offers arguments not directly religious. We have defenses based on reason: if they are reasonable people, they will eventually begin to see these for themselves. If they are not reasonable people, well, they face a future of their making, either secular or religious, at their own peril.

On Individual Choice.

Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican party, is in trouble over a remark that abortion is 'an individual choice'. What could he mean by that?

He insists that he's pro-life and was merely illustrating the practical aspects of the question. And as a practical matter, he is right. All choices eventually devolve into what a person decides to do at a given time over whatever question may be under consideration at that point. No matter how many laws tell us that theft is wrong, someone somewhere will still abscond with the property of someone else.

The trouble is that attitude, properly called "cavalier and flippant" by a conservative wag, if made a benchmark of moral analysis, leads to very dangerous conclusions. Liberal conclusions, I should add. If moral choices, not only about abortion but on any moral issue, are only individual choices, what do we have left?

No true morality, that's what.

We need to understand that there's a difference between the practical aspects of an issue and the question of how we ought to handle or address the issue. Sure, some folks will choose to do wrong no matter what. But are we obliged, as neighbors and friends and countrymen, to tolerate it when the natural moral code clearly shows a given behavior to be a moral evil?

Of course not. So the question then becomes, did Mr. Steele really mean it that way? In light of his remarks about Rush Limbaugh and gay marriage, it is fair to wonder. Is he the type of Republican who wants a big tent, an attitude which I must say simply translates into a desire for political gain? Or is he a Republican of virtue who wants what is right, not only for the benefit of the people he would lead, but for rightness sake? Because if he doesn't want that, then he may as well exercise his individual choice and join the party of the moment and become a Democrat. At least he would be among his philosophical peers.