The Latest Attack on Catholics, Bush, and All Our Rights to be Heard in the Public Square

Catholics, Christians, People of other faith tradition, Pro-lifers, and many other will miss President George Bush when he is gone. Bush is going through what all President go through in the last year of a second term. That is being the punching bag of both political enemies and yes even friends. Many of the people I have mentioned have come down with the worst case of amnesia as to what having an ally in the White House has accomplished. Part of this is because these segments of the American electorate shall a common bond. They truly are not paying attention.

There was a amazing attack on the Bush White House, Catholics, and all that are concerned about Life Issues this week.

In fact , if you think the humanities are important in everyday life it was a attack on you. The attack came not from some yahoo pundit at the Daily Kos. It came from Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and best-selling author of books on language, cognition, and evolutionary biology in the pages of the latest issue of respected New Republic magazine. He is a big deal.

His incredible rant can be found here at The Stupidity of Dignity Conservative bioethics' latest, most dangerous ploy. This was all in response to the President’s Council on Bioethics — established by President Bush in 2001, which one of its many purposes is among other things, “provide a forum for a national discussion of bioethical issues” What got Mr Pinker going was this collection of essays laying out the a whole bunch of views on the issue human dignity for the public to look at.

Mr Pinker stated:
. The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin, who had been fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to squelch research and therapy, threw down the gauntlet in a 2003 editorial, "Dignity Is a Useless Concept." Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy--the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another. This is why informed consent serves as the bedrock of ethical research and practice, and it clearly rules out the kinds of abuses that led to the birth of bioethics in the first place, such as Mengele's sadistic pseudoexperiments in Nazi Germany and the withholding of treatment to indigent black patients in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, "dignity" adds nothing......

one has to look more deeply at the currents that underlie the Council. Although the Dignity report presents itself as a scholarly deliberation of universal moral concerns, it springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine...

I do appreciate he points out the contribuations of Catholic Thought though. We see

Of the remaining 21, four (Leon R. Kass, David Gelernter, Robert George, and Robert Kraynak) are vociferous advocates of a central role for religion in morality and public life, and another eleven work for Christian institutions (all but two of the institutions Catholic).

Bush invited Kass to form the Council. Kass packed it with conservative scholars and pundits, advocates of religious (particularly Catholic) principles in the public sphere, and writers with a paper trail of skittishness toward biomedical advances, together with a smattering of scientists (mostly with a reputation for being religious or politically conservative.

But the pervasive Catholic flavoring of the Council, particularly its Dignity report, is at first glance puzzling. In fact, it is part of a powerful but little-known development in American politics, recently documented by Damon Linker in his book The Theocons.

the problem becomes who will formulate and interpret these standards. Most of today's denominations are not up to the task: Evangelical Protestantism is too anti-intellectual, and mainstream Protestantism and Judaism too humanistic. The Catholic Church, with its long tradition of scholarship and its rock-solid moral precepts, became the natural home for this movement, and the journal First Things, under the leadership of Father Richard John Neuhaus, its mouthpiece. Catholicism now provides the intellectual muscle behind a movement that embraces socially conservative Jewish and Protestant intellectuals as well. When Neuhaus met with Bush in 1998 as he was planning his run for the presidency, they immediately hit it off.

Three of the original Council members (including Kass) are board members of First Things, and Neuhaus himself contributed an essay to the Dignity volume. In addition, five other members have contributed articles to First Things over the years. The concept of dignity is natural ground on which to build an obstructionist bioethics. An alleged breach of dignity provides a way for third parties to pass judgment on actions that are knowingly and willingly chosen by the affected individuals. It thus offers a moralistic justification for expanded government regulation of science, medicine, and private life. And the Church's franchise to guide people in the most profound events of their lives--birth, death, and reproduction--is in danger of being undermined when biomedicine scrambles the rules. It's not surprising, then, that "dignity" is a recurring theme in Catholic doctrine: The word appears more than 100 times in the 1997 edition of the Catechism and is a leitmotif in the Vatican's recent pronouncements on biomedicine.

The sickness in theocon bioethics goes beyond imposing a Catholic agenda on a secular democracy and using "dignity" to condemn anything that gives someone the creeps.

This is just a Small bit. He then attacks the concept and what many of us view as truth of Dignity.

The whole thing is bizarre and what is at stake here is far more than the right of Catholics or others to try to introduce concepts we have learned from experience over thousands of years of human existence. However it shows us what we are up against.

A few people have responded to this much more fluently than I could. I recommend reading this piece by Yuval Levin that does a great job talking about what is behind all this at Indignity and Bioethics Steven Pinker discovers the human-dignity cabal. Ross Douchet over at the Atlantic has take notice with excellent pieces at Pinker On Dignity, and Pinker vs. Humanism. I suspect other have commented and I intend to udpate when I find responses from the Catholic viewpoint.

One last thought. Is not the important meeting that is occurring in Europe right that the Vatican is involved in take on more significance?Go read the link at my post from yesterday Atheist scholar is ally (Reluctant) With Pope Benedict . The Cambridge Scholar that is the subject of that article stated in part:

In his keynote address this morning, Blackburn returned to the theme.
“Relativism attracts suspicion and hostility for a good reason,” he said. “Suppose I voice an honest and heartfelt opinion about anything, from mathematics to aesthetics. The conversation stopping remark ‘that’s just your opinion’ is not only beside the point, but more importantly dehumanising. It signals that your words do not deserve to be taken seriously, but only taken as symptoms, like signs of a disease.”
“It is not only the conservative half of each of us who cannot stand this patronage,” Balckburn said. “It is each of us in toto, agents attempting to reason our way through the practical problems with which life tries to trip us up.

I will give Mr Pinker Credit. At least he recognizes that Bush takes Catholic/Christian/ Western Thought on the Dignity of Life seriously. Too bad most Catholics and others perhaps will not appreciate it till it is too late

Update-
A good Read here at James Poulos piece Dignity vs. Neediness in the Bioethics War

The Cigarette Smoking Blog brings in St Basil (Another part of the Papal Conspiracy) at Pinker, Patristics, and Pain

Mirror of Justice has Pinker, "The Stupidity of Dignity" by Rick Garnett

Ramesh Ponnuru has thoughts here at Steven Pinker vs. Dignity

American Magazine has good thoughts on Pinker's assault of Dignity at You're not going to believe this

Yuval Levin has more thoughts here