Morrigan Geleynse: The Abolitionists

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Mankind and Madness

'The madman', wrote G.K. Chesterton, 'is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.' Dostoevsky was no stranger to madmen. Decades before, he illustrated this precise point in his novel, Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov is a young man, an ex-student because of his poverty, and an intellectual. He murders a covetous old pawn broker and her sister with an axe. They are the price of his theory that there exist certain 'extraordinary men' who are above the judgements of conscience, possessing the inherent right to overstep the “certain obstacles” of morality, for they are men of vision and the agents of grand human progress, the attainment of which justiﬁes all the means necessary—even murder ('...would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?'). But there is something wrong, something that reeks of madness, in his theory.

Chesterton elaborates, 'the exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic… the main deductions of the materialist… gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human.' The madness of which Chesterton writes and that Raskolnikov embodies is not that of mental disease or disorder, but a far deeper madness: It is the self-dismemberment of one’s own humanity. Both Dostoevsky and Chesterton trace this dismemberment to the rejection of metaphysical truth.

Metaphysical truth is the truth that cannot be known by the senses. It is not about the physical world, but everything above and beneath it. It tells us, as if by a sixth sense, that self-sacriﬁce is noble, courage is admirable, beauty is sublime, justice ought to be done, goodness must be pursued, and that not all things are good. It tells us that murder is evil. There is something deeply human in the fact that we know these things so naturally, intuitively, and involuntarily, by an untrained, even unconscious faith in what we cannot see. Metaphysical truth is part of human nature, and so it is only by faith that this nature can be understood and gathered into a whole.

There is more to humanity than rationality and ﬂesh, and this is what Raskolnikov failed to understand. There was no room alongside his materialist, rationalist theories for the metaphysical—for the soul. As such, he rejected the truths that all human beings carry intrinsic worth transcending utility, and that the moral law stands above all men and women by their nature. He believed that he could overstep this nature, because he reasoned himself out of believing it was really true. He falls into madness because he is faithless, and the blood he spills seeps from that void.

In Western society, ours is a faithless age. It is Raskolnikovian (careering toward the image of the far worse Svidrigailov) in our rejection of metaphysical truth and so the abolition of our own humanity. Human rights are evidence of this. They are one of the vital signs inﬂamed with warning: Though we profess to believe in them, they suffocate in our grip—we do not know how to carry them, because we do not understand them, because we no longer understand who we are as human beings.

A Threefold Nature

It is, as such, with human nature that we must begin. C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, provides a basic, threefold understanding of human nature. He writes that we are creatures of the head (intellectual reason), the belly (the appetites and primitive instincts), and the chest (the spirit of morality, emotion, and 'proper sentiment,' to quote Mr. Darcy): 'The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.' In other words, it is the union of reason, grasping the things that are true, with deep feeling, that guides human beings toward virtue and goodness.

There are certain things, Lewis argues, that we ought to do and feel. We know this instinctively by what he calls the Tao, also called natural law. Natural law is the collection of moral inclinations or instincts that is embedded within human nature. This point is perhaps the most controversial. Clearly, not all cultures believe that all the same things are good or evil. How can this be, if all people have a universal sense of right and wrong? Lewis, in Mere Christianity, provides a challenge to tackle this question: 'Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing those who had been kindest to him… Selﬁshness has never been admired.' He continues, 'Whenever you ﬁnd a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will ﬁnd the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him, he will be complaining, "It’s not fair" before you can say Jack Robinson.'

Natural law does not assert that all people have the same moral beliefs, but rather that all people understand that some things are right and some things are wrong. Maritain summarised this point, writing that:

The only practical knowledge all men have naturally and infallibly in common, as a self-evident principle… is that we must do good and avoid evil. This is the preamble and the principle of natural law; it is not the law itself. Natural law is the ensemble of things to do and not to do which follow therefrom in a necessary fashion…

The speciﬁcs of this ensemble must be 'allowed to mature.' A mature morality develops when we come to understand the implications of what we already know is good and bad. It is by this deepening and broadening of moral comprehension that human rights have come to be recognized. They were always there, in spite of primitive ignorance before that recognition. (It is, by the way, possible for a contemporary, modern culture to be far more primitive than an ancient culture, or even a less technologically advanced culture living at the same time. Primitivity and progress are not determined by the year, but the values of the given culture.) The light of natural law, however, may also become dimmed, as the sun is dimmed by clouds—no less present or true, but obscured.

Through repeated transgressions and smothering rationalizations we are well capable of becoming deaf and numb to the sting of conscience and cold to the hearth of sentiment. Nevertheless, to whatever degree the natural law ﬂourishes or is shrunken, it still remains as part of human nature.

The deepest bond between natural law and human nature lies in the 'ought' of natural

law—why it urges, rather than merely suggests. Maritain called it, 'an ideal order relating to human actions, a divide between the suitable and the unsuitable, between what is proper and what is improper to the ends of human nature or essence.' The inclinations of the 'chest' are essential to human nature, because there is a core attachment between doing what is morally good and our purpose and essence as human beings. It is for this reason that we call Shiro Ishii, Mao, Nero, and Hamas terrorists 'monsters': By their evil, they forsake what it means to be human.

Aristotle believed that the purpose of something is key to understanding what that thing is, and so what its nature is. He called this purpose, or 'ﬁnal end,' the telos. That which supports the telos is generally good and that which hinders it is generally bad: An acorn’s telos is to grow into an oak tree. Rain, sun, and rich soil are good for the acorn. Drought and sandy ground are bad for it. None of these things are good or bad in themselves, except perhaps drought. Too much rain becomes a ﬂood, and sandy ground is good for desert animals. More importantly, none of these things, even if they were good in themselves, are morally good or bad, because none of them have free will. Drought does not choose to parch the acorn, nor does gentle rain choose to nourish it. They simply are, and their goodness lies in their effect, not in the things themselves. Morality depends on free will.

That which is evil can only be evil when it is freely chosen: We call those evil who we also blame. Ishii, Mao, and the others did not have to do what they did. They chose it, nevertheless. Conversely, Corrie ten Boom did not have to forgive her Nazi captors, St. Maximilien Kolbe did not have to sacriﬁce himself for another concentration camp prisoner, and Wilberforce did not have to ﬁght for the abolition of slavery—yet they freely chose these things, and for that they are noble and good. They are more human because of their goodness. They are more whole in their humanity. In these ways, they were fulﬁlling the human telos.

The telos is reﬂected through instinct and design: Seeds send their roots downwards, cats hunt small animals, geese migrate, all without being taught, all of these behaviours in service of what it means to be a seed, a cat, or a goose. So also the human telos is reﬂected in our own 'instincts': Our deepest inclinations are those of the chest, and so those of natural law. They urge us to pursue virtue and to seek truth. At the end of these things is our telos.

Aristotle believed that the human telos was ‘eudaimonia,’ which means a life of pure contentment that comes from living according to the fundamental human characteristics of virtue and intellectual reason.Yet, no one can, on this earth, ever reach a state of perfect contentment, let alone perfect virtue or intellect. If the telos exists, it must be attainable. Deepest eudaimonia is impossible to attain. Secondly, it fails to account for an Ultimate Reason and Goodness behind the human telos. Purpose must be bestowed, because to have purpose is to have meaning, and meaning cannot exist unless it has been intelligently ordained. Meaning requires both intelligent interpretation and intelligent ordination. There must be something ultimate that has endowed mankind with purpose, meaning, and goodness. In a word, mankind’s goodness and intelligence demands God. Andrew Klavan offers an argument for this starting from the moral angle:

if we concede that one thing is morally better than another, it can only be because it is closer to an Ultimate Moral Good, the standard by which it’s measured. An Ultimate Moral Good cannot just be an idea. It must be, in effect, a personality with consciousness and free will… true, objective good and evil, in order to be good and evil, have to be aware and intentional. So an Ultimate Moral Good must be conscious and free; it must be God. So we have to choose. Either there is no God and no morality whatsoever, or there is morality and God is real.

For this reason, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that the human telos is not in 'eudaimonia', but in 'union with God.' Our ﬁnal purpose is to be reunited with the Ultimate Good, whose goodness we reﬂect through virtue, to whom we are drawn by the pursuit of truth, and in whom we source our very being. Must one, then, be a theist to believe in human rights? For it is in the telos, the Ultimate Good, that human rights ﬁnd their meaning and substance: Human rights are those dignities and things which we possess and are owed by virtue of our humanity, so that we might be free to pursue our telos in society.

If we are to believe in human rights, we must only do so coherently, or else it will all come crashing down. Human rights are only coherent if they are rooted in a universal, metaphysical human nature. There must be things that are objectively true and good, because to have rights is to have a claim on that which belongs to you, which implies justice, which implies an ideal order, and if there is an ideal order then there must be objective truth and goodness that decides that order. Some things are fundamentally good for human beings, because some things will guide us toward this order, and we must be entitled to those things. But this is only possible if the universal human nature has intrinsic worth and value. It must carry goodness in itself, or else it cannot deserve goodness at all.

Goodness and truth can only exist if they are sourced in an Ultimate Goodness and Truth, by which all things are measured as good or true, according to their alliance with this Ultimate source. If human beings are worthy of goodness, then it means that their worth is founded in this same source, or else they do not deserve it. All that is good must come from this source, and that includes intelligence, and true freedom. To believe in human rights, therefore, demands that one also believe in this free, intelligent, and true Ultimate Good. It requires the imago Dei.

One does not exactly need to believe in the Christian God in order to believe in human rights. The key thing is to understand that human rights are those things that enable us to freely pursue the human telos in society—to choose what is good, and avoid what is evil, and that this depends on belief in objective, metaphysical truth, and a divine source of that truth. (Nevertheless, it is my contention that the Christian religion provides the true basis for this belief—but that is a different topic, which I will content myself to leave now for your own further consideration.)

All of this—human rights, natural law, human nature, goodness, truth, and meaning—is snuffed out by the same breath that scoffs at metaphysical truth. Without metaphysical truth, human rights are incoherent, a fabrication, and ultimately nonsense. The West has scoffed at exactly these things. It is ﬁlled with the inﬂuence of and the very people who Lewis called, 'Men without Chests.' They are those who reject sentiment and transcendent virtue as anti-reasonable. Put simply, they do not believe in a 'chest.' They are sceptics of the soul. Yet, because the soul exists as a part of human nature, to carve out the chest is to 'abolish man' and destroy one’s own humanity, for, 'it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.'

Ye Shall be as Gods

Western society generally believes in something called ‘human rights,’ but it also dismisses their metaphysical and transcendent roots. (George Orwell called this 'doublethink', the holding of two opposing ideas at once, as if they did not actually contradict.) But abandoning metaphysical truth creates a strange, enticing opportunity. It emancipates us from the burdens of a moral order to which we are subservient. We become gods, the writers of the rulebook, precisely because we have, as Nietzsche declared, 'killed' God. Our emancipation, we call freedom and progress. We call it Enlightenment. It is true that we walk unburdened from the moral standards that come with belief in the metaphysical truths of truth itself, moral goodness, and moral evil. The truth is that the consequences corrupt our grasp on our own humanity.

Rejecting metaphysical truth leads ﬁrst to materialism: Nothing is true except for the material, physical world. That which cannot be studied in a laboratory is invalid. If morality exists, it is not as an objective reality, but as a product of evolution. It is not good in itself, but only insofar as it happens to serve our immediate purposes. There is no ultimate human purpose, because that is also a metaphysical idea. In such a world, nothing can be truly good or evil in itself. Materialism leads to relativism: 'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so', quoth Hamlet in his madness, feigned or true. To believe that slavery, rape, child abuse, or abortion is evil can only boil down to a matter of personal preference or the current cultural consensus. There are only two solutions: Either you force your preferences upon others ('Might makes right') or you both shrug, 'Live your truth. I won’t impose my morals on you, and you don’t impose yours on me.' Whichever is chosen, neither can possibly be objectively better or worse, and neither can be true or false. In relativism, we reject the only source of true moral goodness, which is in metaphysical truth.

The culminating effect is that human rights cannot be good, intrinsic, or universal—all these are metaphysical notions. They can be nothing more than special privileges, arbitrary or utilitarian, without meaning or worth in themselves. No higher authority can have ordained them in the human soul. They are only 'rights' insofar as they are badly named. It falls, as such, into human authority alone (whichever governing power that happens to be) to choose, whittle, smother, tamper, sever, and conjure human rights to whatever ends they hold. This last temptation is the most dangerous: Its fruit is pseudo-rights, which are unnatural imposters. They wear the mask of benevolence, and walk in imitation of the soft tread of compassion and mercy. They are lies, and they fool their own mouthpieces. They are the axe in our hands. The blade is already dripping.

The Axe in Our Hands

It was an inevitable consequence of abandoning metaphysical truth, that human beings, in their emancipation, would give themselves the 'right' to kill themselves. This is what is meant by the 'right to die', as natural death comes for us all and it would be silly to speak of a “right to die’ unless the death in question was one incited by ourselves. Its supporters make two central cases for its right-hood: That it must be a right because bodily autonomy demands it, and that this, therefore, affirms human dignity.

Blasphemy.

All rights grant freedoms, but not all freedoms are rights. Rights are not in service of autonomy, but of moral goodness, and it is through natural law that human beings ﬁnd their dignity. Autonomy is often part of the pursuit of goodness. If something is to be moral and virtuous, it must be freely chosen, and thus requires autonomy. Autonomy, however, is not a good in itself, and that is why there is no right to rouse a lynch mob. Rights arise from human nature. Human nature is such that every human being is equal in value, and therefore rights in themselves do not include any actions that threaten and attack the fundamental dignity of any human person. A right will never defy that same natural law that gives life to it. Rousing a lynch mob, for instance, does exactly this, and it uses autonomy. Self-harm also uses autonomy, but it is the denial of one’s own dignity. Everyone has the ability to commit self-harm, but they do not have the right. Self-harm, by its very nature, has no potential for goodness. It is intrinsically bad. Therefore, the right to self-harm does not exist.

On these same grounds, the right to die does not exist: Suicide is the ultimate denial of human dignity. It is worse than the murder of another human being, for one might even then still retain belief in at least their own human worth. But to choose death, no matter how idyllic the setting, thorough the paperwork, or certain the choice, is to fundamentally assert that human dignity is weaker than the weight of whatever suffering has inspired suicide: To continue to suffer would destroy dignity, therefore dignity is weaker than suffering.

Human dignity has the same foundation as human rights. By deﬁnition it must be rooted in all human beings, and so in a universal human characteristic, which is human nature itself. ‘Dignity’ implies goodness, and so it can only arise from a nature oriented toward goodness, and goodness is a metaphysical truth. Our ultimate purpose is the reason for this orientation: We ﬁnd our telos in the Ultimate Good, the path to which is laid with truth, virtue, and reason. All that helps us toward this end is good, and all that hinders is bad. All that is good raises and enkindles human dignity. All that is bad forsakes it and stamps it out.

The word ‘dignity’ comes from the Latin dignitas, meaning 'the state of being worthy.' The Concise Oxford Dictionary deﬁnes ‘dignity’ as 'True worth, excellence.' To be worthy is to merit something, even if for a moment. To possess worth is to always merit something by virtue of what you are. Human worth and dignity belongs to all members of mankind. There is something universal that every one of us is worthy of, and that is our ultimate purpose—our telos. By extension, we are worthy of the things that the telos requires: life itself being ﬁrst and foremost among those things. Without being, there is no purpose.

To be worthy of something is to be worthy of not other things. We cannot be worthy of two opposing things at once, because human worth is rooted in goodness. Human rights are, by their nature, moral. If we are worthy of something, because of our nature, it is because that thing is good, virtuous, or moral. We cannot also be worthy of its opposite, because the opposite of a moral good is a moral evil. If human beings are worthy of, and so possess, the right to life, they cannot also have the right to die. The right to die does not exist. It is a lie.

Suicide declares that there is no more goodness to be reached, or that the goodness that may be reached is not worth the suffering that must be endured to reach it. This is the fruit (and even the foundation) of materialism: Whether one rejects the metaphysical entirely or not, the materialism of which I speak—and it is the only true kind—is the kind that, in the end, calls the material, Ultimate. It calls metaphysical goodness—hope, truth, courage, fortitude, magnanimity, love—subordinate. Either they, metaphysical truths of goodness and morality, do not exist, or they do not matter so much as strife and pain. The effect is the same, and its name is Despair. The so-called “right to death” does not endow, let alone uplift: It is an imposter, and a thief.

What, then, is human dignity, if not mindless autonomy? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recalled, from his time in the bowels of a Russian gulag:

the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but ... in the development of the soul. [...] In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the ﬁrst stirrings of good. [...] And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: "Bless you, prison!" [...] I . . . have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: "Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!"

True human dignity is not so weak as to rely on base autonomy, and certainly not the

self-destructive kind. It does not revolve around the ability to wash ourselves, to control our bodily functions, the preservation of our memory and reason, or any independence at all. It is not shattered in humiliation. It is far greater, deeper, and nobler than these. Its ﬂames roar in the hearth of the chest, as much in that of an old, dependent, and dying man, as in those of youthful kings. It is not diminished by, but magniﬁed in suffering: Only when we accept suffering can we grow in virtue. Courage only counts when there is something to fear, fortitude when there is something to endure, hope when there is darkness all around, faith when that which is sought is not seen, love when sacriﬁce is demanded, forgiveness when there is no guarantee of justice, and magnanimity—greatness of soul—when it requires suffering to be held—all of this, however near or far the coming of death in its own time.

That is human dignity.

But none of this can be accepted, unless you ﬁrst accept that there is more to man than his reason, and that there is truth beyond what we can see. If it cannot be accepted, it will not be upheld. Mankind is swept in the currents of logical implication, and the end of this is very grim indeed. Children as young as twelve, in the Netherlands, are already permitted euthanasia, if they are experiencing 'unbearable suffering.' No sane person could ever believe that anyone experiencing 'unbearable suffering' could possess the rightness of mind to make that decision, let alone a child. Unbearable suffering does not exist: All suffering, no matter how brutal, can be borne and has been borne by people long before and ever around us. That does not mean we will escape it. But we may become nobler souls because of it. All that is needed is the willingness to accept our suffering, and the knowledge that the strength to do this will never be exhausted, so long as we ﬁnd it outside of ourselves. This is the testament of saints and martyrs, of soldiers and mothers, of grateful people and joy in darkness, and stories of old. It is the testament of the human soul, looking up and reaching.

Looking Up and Reaching

The disﬁgurement and abuse of human rights is but a symptom of the disease. The West suffers from hopelessness because it has severed itself from the very metaphysical truths that are the wellspring of goodness, transcendental beauty, and meaning. It has doused the human hearth, perhaps because it fooled itself into believing that winter would never come again, and that the human soul could be satisﬁed by the physical world and its pleasures alone. That hearth has turned into a cold grate, heaped with the ashes of sentiments, virtues, heroisms, and higher calls longed for but no longer really believed in. How can people look up, at what most deeply matters, if they do not believe or know that ‘up’ exists, or that anything matters more than pleasure, whims, and wealth? But how we long for it, and how much we have suffered in searching for the name of this higher thing, because we lost it.

Human rights have not escaped from this disease. By their nature they grant us the freedom to pursue the human purpose by choosing what is good, true, and virtuous. If objective truth and virtue are not allowed to exist by the rampant relativism and materialism of our times, if they are scoffed at as nursery tales, it is no wonder that rights themselves are fraying before our eyes. Their putrid corruption brings us lies, death, and despair.

Any society that accepts euthanasia, as the West has done in swathes, also teaches that human life is only valuable until it suffers and the way goes dark: “You are better off dead than suffering greatly.” This is the logical implication, no matter how accidentally we have reached it. We impart culture as accidentally as we absorb it, if we are not careful. But these words are tricked. The speakers themselves do not understand what it is to be a human being. The inheritance of those words is one of meaninglessness and despair, for if the worth of life ends in the material realm (in suffering), then there is no higher metaphysical truth, and so there is no meaning, and there is no hope. Neither of these can withstand the void of metaphysical truth, because meaning and hope are themselves metaphysical. Despair is the greatest suffering. It is the ﬁnal madness. Through despair, we become Lewis’ abolitionists of humankind.

The healing lies in humility, repentance, and faith. Solzhenitsyn’s epiphany parallels Raskolnikov’s redemption: Both ﬁnd it as prisoners, and both by repentance and faith. Without humility, there is no repentance, because it takes humility to accept that you have done wrong. The West must accept that it has done wrong. Without humility, we cannot bring ourselves to look up at the Truth and Goodness by whose standard we have failed to do good. It is by pride that we crush all existence into the realm of our senses, insisting on its graspability. Humanity is not made for this kind of dominion, and its logic abhors the metaphysical truths that ground us in our own nature: Things can only be entirely in our grasp when they can all be perceived by the senses, and that is materialism (which breeds all manner of anti-human philosophies). Without faith, it does not matter where we look—we will still be blind.

What follows herefrom is love, courage, magnanimity, wisdom, and hope. In a word, it is re-humanisation, the mad scraps of men being drawn back into a whole: belly, head, and chest. The re-humanisation of society begins in individuals, families, and communities. Seek, then, for that which you are meant to seek. Seek God. Reach for what is good, true, and beautiful. Live by it. Build communities around it. Teach it to your children. There is no other way. In this gradual re-humanisation lies, 'the beginning of a new story – the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life.'

Morrigan Geleynse is a student of literature at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College.

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