Natural law, modern equality, and more on turning the corner

Last month, I wrote a bit about the renewal of family life as part of overall social renewal. I said it would require men and women to see each other as complementary, so they would have a reliable basis for building stable, functional, and generally satisfying lives together. It would also require acceptance of something like Catholic sexual morality, so that the sexual impulse could once again join rather than disrupt.

These needs are acute in an urban industrial society that weakens other supports for family life. In our society, though, the solution is fantasy. People reject the disciplines and changes in outlook such a transformation would require, and “human rights”—our highest public moral standard—are thought to require sexual autonomy and abolition of distinctions between men and women.

More fundamentally, perhaps, today’s sexual mores and overall understanding of morality are supported by a shift in focus from the acts of individuals and their immediate relations to other people—e.g., family connections—to overall economic and social arrangements. That shift seems difficult to avoid in an industrial society that thinks about things in technological terms.

The Church herself seems to have moved in that direction. Issues of social justice as understood by progressives now dominate high-level presentations of Catholic moral teaching. The Pope has remarked that sexual morality is less important than freedom, justice, and equality, and certainly nothing to divide the Church over. And recent papal pronouncements have emphasized tolerance, accompaniment, and personal discernment—practically speaking, personal choice—with regard to sexual matters.

The one issue taken seriously is equality, as exemplified by the call in Magnifica Humanitas for restorative justice to make up for what is considered the unjust tendency to treat men and women as different.

How could you get people to change such views? They can’t be forced to do so. People may pay lip service, but they’ll throw off the yoke the first chance they get. It’s not even enough to convince them that customs are beneficial. If it were, obesity would have disappeared long before Ozempic. For customs to change on such basic and often troublesome points, people must come to think the revived customs express who they are, so that anyone who violates them violates themself. The issue is one of metaphysics—what we truly are—and understandings of personal honor.

It would help, of course, to convince people that there is something wrong with the current outlook. Men and women are obviously different, and no one consistently says otherwise. It seems, then, that attitudes and expectations toward them should differ. And both the disaster that is transgender “medicine” and the much-discussed events at a Cornell fraternity demonstrate the stupidity of autonomy as an ultimate standard in something as basic to human life as sex.

More generally, energetic attempts to apply the progressive understanding of social justice practically, as seen during the peak woke period of 2020-2022, end badly for almost everyone. These points should be emphasized in public discussion. We should also point out that “human rights,” as now understood, are less a great step forward in moral understanding than a denial of basic human realities and idealization of a technocratic public order based on that denial.

These rights are defined theoretically by an open-ended, self-defining freedom devoid of any common understanding of the goals of social life other than freedom itself, along with concerns like equality and safety. As such, their requirements expand indefinitely: we can always be more free, equal, and safe. Social practices at odds with these ever-growing demands are viewed as violations of human rights that must be eradicated.

The result is ever-more-comprehensive regulation of human relations, so that we do not oppress each other. Saying “Merry Christmas” or defining “woman” as “adult human female” become offenses. That process destroys freedom as normally understood. It also destroys the informal, natural, and evolved—that is to say, traditional—social order necessary for a sustaining way of life. It attempts to make people interchangeable and orient their lives toward choice, comfort, safety, and career.

And it recognizes only global markets and expert transnational bureaucracies as legitimate public authorities—anything else would be particularistic and therefore unjust—with elections giving the people the opportunity and duty of registering their approval of decisions reached by other people for reasons other than their own.

What’s the alternative? Ideally, of course, a society in which Catholic doctrine plays the role that human rights do now as the ultimate standard for social and political legitimacy. Failing that, we should promote acceptance of evident social and moral realities. In other words, natural law.

That would include basic points included in human rights as now understood, such as respect for human life and for the public good as the guiding principle of government. But it would oppose current understandings of what those things are. Respect for human life should include, for example, opposition to abortion, while the public good should include more than freedom, equality, safety, and prosperity.

Natural law would also include the importance and complementarity of sexual differences. Men and women are basically different in some ways. These differences relate to their obligations to each other, and to violate such obligations should be seen as a violation of what they are as men and women. Something like traditional sexual morality should be treated as among these obligations, and its violation as deeply dishonorable.

Social renewal would thus require denial of what are taken now to be important aspects of freedom, equality, justice, and human rights, including sexual autonomy and the interchangeability of men and women. Acceptance of that denial, at least as a legitimate position, is a sine qua non of fundamental improvement in social life.

Once that has been attained, we could begin to argue for more practical measures. Primarily, these would involve working toward a system of the kind I proposed last month, in which attempts at overall social administration like those required by attempts to realize feminist goals are replaced by a relatively few constraints that have been found to help people carry on good lives in cooperation with those to whom they are connected.

The first step would be the elimination of laws and policies based on a belief in the illegitimacy of many aspects of the natural functioning of social life. These include the pervasive attempts to suppress sexual distinctions, and many measures to promote inclusiveness—that is, to suppress the practical relevance of traditional arrangements such as family, kinship, sexual distinctions, and religious and cultural community.

By themselves, such measures would lead to a more libertarian society that allows people to connect with those they feel connected to, and enforce informally the social standards their community considers proper. That would be better from the standpoint of human flourishing than our current socially progressive society.

But it is difficult to limit the role of government in that way since government demands loyalty and obedience that extend to matters of life and death. To demand that level of commitment, its orientation has to line up with the orientation of society as a whole. Libertarian government thus implies a society that values freedom more than anything, which leads, when pursued seriously, to an unpleasant combination of social dissolution and bureaucratic tyranny.

Government needs to be guided by a conception of the good adequate to the whole of social life. The police power has traditionally enabled it to protect morals and the general welfare, and government needs to exercise that power intelligently in light of those concerns. Examples of measures likely to be helpful include suppression of destructive vices like pornography. Others include restrictions on immigration and even Sunday blue laws to protect informal local communities from various sources of disruption. They might also include limitations on the power of informal local communities, which sometimes really do grow oppressive. Such things are a matter of prudence to be guided more by experience than theory.

Far more could be mentioned. What they should be and what more might be needed—for example, ways of persuading people in today’s world of the defects of the administered society, the validity of natural law, and the importance of personal honor properly understood—are issues I hope to discuss further in the coming months.