under the patronage of St Joseph and St Dominic

By the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept, remembering Zion;
on the poplars that grew there we hung up our harps. . . Ps 136

SUBJECTIVISM’S ‘MORAL EVILS’

“ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE
EQUAL THAN OTHERS”[1]

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The moral law is an objective reality written in the hearts of men by their Creator  [Cf. Romans 2: 15].  The evils it condemns are summarised in the Ten Commandments.  In every civilised society these evils are proscribed in posited law: the more civilised a society, the more precisely its procriptions will conform to moral principle.  Even in backward societies the demands of the moral law are present in the psyche of the people.  At root is the supreme moral principle, Do good; avoid evil, and its corollary, It is illicit to do evil that good may come of it.

Though its source is centuries old, subjectivism did not begin to dominate public thinking until the latter part of the twentieth century when its doctrines began to flourish in the universities.  Those who were to teach in our schools, to frame and enforce our laws, and to treat us in hospitals and medical surgeries were formed under its influence. It percolated into the thinking of journalists and social commentators and so came to influence the man in the street. Advances in technology ensured that this change in philosophy occurred with great speed.  Indeed, there has been nothing in the history of mankind to compare with it.

As subjectivism denies reality, so does it incline its adherents to deny reality’s author, Almighty God; to deny that nature is His creation; to deny the rights He has bestowed on man with respect to the creatures He has made; and to deny the moral law and the duty to comply with it.[2]   But man was made to be subject to law.  It was inevitable, then, that just when subjectivism began to deny the force of the laws mandated by nature, it would seek to create its own, laws grounded in ideology.[3]

Anti Discrimination
According to the ideology of Feminism (as, indeed, also those of Marxism and Secular Humanism) the equality between a man and a woman is a simple equality.  Men and women should be treated equally in all circumstances.  In this claim one hears an echo of the slogan of the French Revolution.[4]   And just as the ‘equality’ to which its revolutionaries appealed was without distinction—an equality dislocated from reality—so is the ‘equality’ to which these ideologies appealed.

For the claim is false.  Men and women are equal, but they are also unequal; equal under the essential aspect that both are persons, unequal in their ordinations.[5]   While a man tends to focus on the universal, a woman tends to look to the particular.  Man deals with the world of things, fashioning them to serve his ends.  But woman, since she was created as a helper for man [Genesis 2: 18], deals with human beings and their needs.  The equality between men and women is not, then, a simple equality but a proportional equality, one that takes account of these different ordinations and of the rights and duties that attach to each.[6]

Their error led these ideologues to insist that those who treat men and women other than as simply equal were being unjust, and that this ‘injustice’ should be remedied.  The device adopted was the novel ‘offence’ of anti-discrimination.  In and after 1970 legislation began to appear in the legislatures of western countries prohibiting conduct ‘discriminating’ between men and women in social intercourse, in employment, in courses of education, in accommodation, in membership of associations, and so on.  Citizens were penalised for treating someone less favourably than, in the same circumstances, they would treat a person of the opposite sex.   It mattered not that they might have sound reasons, i.e., reasons rooted in reality, for so acting; they were forbidden to do so.

So the principals of a hospital, or of a school for young children, who desired, because of their peculiar talents in this regard, to train young women as nurses or as teachers, could not direct their advertisements solely to young women.  Carpenters, boilermakers, plumbers, or builders who wished, for a like reason, to apprentice young men to their particular trades were now forbidden to preclude young women from applying.  Nor, once persons had applied for the respective positions, could the principals exclude an applicant on the ground that he, that she, did not fall within the sex he wished to favour.  This social tinkering was disruptive and burdensome.

That the proscription embodied in ‘anti-discrimination’ offends the natural law is readily shown.  Almighty God created all things in love.  That character, love, manifests itself in His creatures, particularly among the living elements of His creation, especially in the sensitive and intellective—brute animals and men.  Every animal loves itself and the life it enjoys.[7]   It also loves the perfections with which God has endowed it and loves them, too, where they occur in others.  This is the reason why every animal prefers its own kind; why horses associate with horses, cows with cows, sheep with sheep, and so on.

This is why a man loves himself and the perfections with which he has been invested, perfections infinitely more various than those enjoyed by the most sophisticated of brute animals.  As the man who is a woodworker loves the perfection of woodworking which is his talent, he loves it also in other woodworkers; which leads him to associate with other woodworkers.  A woman who is a nurse loves the perfection of caring for others with which she has been endowed.  She loves it in other nurses and that leads her to associate with them.  In the same way, musicians tend to associate with other musicians; painters with painters, and so on.  For the same reason men of one race or language tend to associate with others of the same race or language; men of the same colour tend to associate with others of that colour.  The inclination to favour one over another is natural, its exercise an essential part of human freedom.  Man is discriminatory by nature.

Once a principle is admitted, the consequences flow.  The principle of ‘anti discrimination’ being accepted by a populace lacking insight into the foundation on which it was constructed, it was not long before the categories of prohibited conduct expanded, each new category grounded in another simplistic equality.  As (it was advanced) that—
       men of all races are equal,
       men of all classes are equal,
       men of all talents and abilities are equal,
       the married and the single are equal,
       the pregnant woman is equal with the woman who is not,
       the disabled and the able bodied are equal,
       the young and the aged are equal,
       children must be treated no differently to adults,
       the sodomite must be treated no differently to the unperverted; and so on.
In each case the appeal to material identity was accompanied by a refusal to acknowledge any formal distinction.  All material beings are equal in being material—for they are all equally comprised of matter.  It is only in formal differences that the reality of each is uncovered, whether the form be substantial or accidental.  Each of the instances of false ‘equality’ cited above refers to some determining form which is accidental.  But there are not wanting ideologues who think that one may ignore substantial formal differences.  The philosopher, Peter Singer, for instance thinks a pig is more deserving of life than the unborn child.

This novel legislation was duly enforced by executive action involving the creation of quasi-judicial ‘anti-discrimination’ commissions and associated bureaucratic structures.  The policing of these ‘illegalities’ was a great drain on the public purse.

As each category of simplistic ‘equality’ was introduced, human freedom was further curtailed and the detriment to society enlarged.   But there was a further, and more significant, detriment.  To organic disruption there was frequently added the promotion of moral evil.  Thus a man possessed of a dwelling and desiring to rent it out for a just reward is bound under the moral law not to rent it to persons whom he can reasonably suspect will use it for immoral purposes.  The reason is clear.  To do so would involve him in proximate material cooperation in their moral evil.  By the appropriate ‘anti-discrimination’ legislation, he was precluded by penal sanction from refusing to rent the dwelling to such persons.  To the extent that such legislation has this effect it is morally illicit and operates, as St Thomas Aquinas says, not as a lawful command, but as a species of violence.[8]

There are any number of instances of this violence masquerading as law in the field of ‘anti-discrimination’.  One of the most significant and troubling for parents is that preventing the principals of a school from refusing to employ sodomites or lesbians as teachers of their charges.  Hardly less so is that preventing school principals from refusing to employ atheists and secular humanists.

*                                                  *

How are we to combat the dominance of subjectivism’s pernicious influence over our lives?  We must isolate ourselves from it.

If you wish to protect your children from mindless ideology, you must remove them from the schools in which, daily, they are taught to deny that there is a God who made them; to deny that the majesty of the world is His creation (merely something that has ‘evolved’ accidentally from mindless matter!); to deny that they have a duty in moral matters to anyone but themselves; and so on.  Teach them yourself.  You will be joining innumerable others who, placing their welfare before all else, refuse to allow their children to be lost to them through indoctrination.

Get rid of the television set.  Supervise what your children read, or see, or hear in the productions of the media, or on the internet, or in movie houses.  Supervise the peers with whom they associate, for these will exert more influence over them than you and, if not prevented, will infect them with the poison from which you seek to isolate them.

Michael Baker
March 4th, 2010—Thursday in the Second Week of Lent