Of course, in some sense we make profound decisions many times each day, when we accept the aid of grace and do the right thing, or shrug it off and sin. Each tiny sin says “no” to eternal life, while each virtuous act says “yes.” But we rarely see things so starkly, and indeed if we did we probably couldn’t function. For most of us, it only happens a few times in our journey that we are presented the chance to say a stark “yes” or “no,” to exercise what some theologians have called a “fundamental option.” I’m reminded of the incidents in the Gospels where Jesus calls a fisherman to drop his nets, a tax collector to leave his stall, “and follow me.” We aren’t told, but I wonder if there weren’t a number of potential apostles who told Christ to take a hike. Even Our Lady was utterly free to reject the invitation of Gabriel; our God does not act like Zeus and pluck human brides like fruit from a tree.

Since Roe v. Wade removed the sanctity of human life from the realm of free democratic decision-making by an act of breath-taking judicial hubris, tens of millions of American women have acted—many under enormous pressure—to say “no” to life. An equal number of men have surely cooperated in these actions. By some estimates, one in three American women in the post-Roe generation have ended the lives of their preborn children. It won’t be in this life that we will understand the toll that has exacted on their souls.

I know what one such act cost me, and what it made me decide to do. I would like to cast some light on the choice Mississippi’s voters will be making by sharing my story here.

It was a Saturday morning in the fall of 1988. I lay half-awake, half-asleep, my body aching from the football game the night before. The sound of footsteps coming up the stairs and the smell of bacon from the kitchen stirred me a little. The door to my room opened and someone fell under my blankets. Pulling back the blanket expecting to see my baby sister, I was surprised to see my girlfriend looking up with tears in her eyes.

My first thought was she’d had a fight with her father. Two words and my life would be forever changed. “I’m pregnant.”

I don’t know why, but I was overcome with happiness. My girlfriend began to cry and laugh and we just held each other, doing that, not saying a word for minutes.

We spent that Saturday in my room, which was half a child’s and half a man’s — with a Walter Payton poster on the wall, a Scooby Doo pillowcase, and artifacts from each of my 17 years spread around it — trying to make a plan. We came up with a very simple one: I would drop out of high school and join the Army. Katie would wear baggy sweaters and take vitamins. And we would live happily ever after. That was the plan.

And soon after I was on my way to Basic Training, my Scooby-Doo pillow case filled with the required list of supplies: two pair of socks, two pair of underwear, toothpaste, toothbrush and a razor blade. Katie took her vitamins and wore her baggy sweaters. With less than two weeks left of Basic, I got a letter from Katie saying: “If the baby is a boy you can pick his name but if it’s a girl I want to name her Jessica.” It was a deal.

On the Sunday before we would “graduate,” I was cleaning pots and pans. Not having been raised a Christian, I didn’t go to church, so I often pulled extra detail on Sundays. A friend came into the kitchen and said, “Jones, your girlfriend is on the phone…. She’s crying.” I never heard a woman cry like that before or since. Her soul was crying. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” was all she could say.

Then her father grabbed the phone. “I know your secret and your secret is gone…. I took Katie to get an abortion!”

A drill sergeant reached over my shoulder and hung up the receiver. I hit him as hard as I could. Another sergeant grabbed me and dragged me into his office. I was sobbing out: “He killed my baby! He killed my baby – call the police!”

At this, that large Army Ranger started crying himself. He made me explain. When I did, he looked blank. “Private, we can’t. Abortion is legal.” I just stared at him. So my captain delivered the Cliff Notes version of Roe v. Wade, then gave me a roll of quarters. As I zombie-walked to the PX, I was heartbroken at the loss of my child and the sound of Katie’s pain. But just as strongly what I felt was shock and confusion: This is all perfectly legal. Under law, a fetus is not a person. That was the rotten heart of Roe v. Wade (and it still is today — despite three pro-life presidents who won office dripping with promises).

I had never been to church in my life. I was a high school dropout. I didn’t know much. But I knew that my daughter Jessica was a person. She was worth something. She had a human dignity you don’t grant a lump of skin cells. I also knew that a terrible injustice had been done — to all three of us. When I got to the PX, I called my girlfriend and we talked straight through that roll of quarters. Then the mechanized voice on the phone warned, “You have one minute left. Please deposit change.” I was desperate to say something comforting before we ran out of time, so I blurted out what was in my heart. “I am going to end abortion — for you!” I know now that that is a foolish promise for any one person to make — but I really meant it. And I still do.

I ask each of you reading this to do something for the Katies of America, for the Jessicas, for the goofball high-school dropouts like I was. We must take away the fatal choice, the deadly temptation that is abortion on demand. It seems so easy, it makes things so much simpler, it wipes the slate clean of inconvenient human lives… by pretending they aren’t real. It tells the young and the scared that they can have a more abundant life, if only they will accept this tiny lie about a tiny creature whom they’ll never have to see. “Just play pretend with us, with us judges and doctors and lawyers, and everything will go back to what it was before.”

I ask you to support the Personhood Initiative—with your votes, if you live in Mississippi, with your voices if you don’t. There are some well-meaning people who say it goes too far, it cuts too close to the heart of Roe v. Wade, and it will backfire. They want us to keep on nibbling away at the edges of this monster. But we have been trying to do that for almost 40 years—and what have we accomplished? American abortion laws are the most permissive in the world, far worse than in “decadent” Western Europe. And why? I would argue because we haven’t faced down the lie and told the truth: A preborn child is a person. Period. Our laws should reflect that. And we should fight until our laws tell the truth. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said to sum up the message of his work: “Live not by lies.” Or better: “The truth shall set you free.”

It took the “radical” decision of Brown v. Board of Education—which many civil rights advocates were afraid went too far, too fast—to drive a stake in the heart of legal segregation in America. It took Rev. Martin Luther King demanding real, complete, equality to make our country listen. No wonder his niece, Dr. Alveda King, is a leader in the Personhood Campaign. In this new and even graver assault on human dignity, this lie that squats at the heart of our legal system, we need to do something simple: to tell the truth.

Extending the protective blanket of legal personhood from the moment life begins through all stages of life is the first step our country can take toward renewing itself in countless other areas. When I “manned up” and joined the Army to care for my child, it helped turn this boy into a man. When we gain the strength to tell the truth and protect the most helpless Americans, we will also gain the courage and grace to face our other challenges. We certainly won’t solve them by hiding, running, and lying.

On Tuesday, November 8th, I will be in Mississippi, helping to get out the vote. Twenty years ago I made a crying girl a promise I could never keep, by myself. None of us can change the world all by ourselves. But we can tell the truth. When we vote for the truth, we tell the truth together, and that can change the world. In fact, as Our Lady knew when she told the angel, “yes,” the Truth is the only thing that can.

But Chesterton was no ideologue, and he also saw the virtue in America’s churchy soul. As you’d learn from reading What I Saw in America (1922), the democratic Chesterton was deeply impressed by Americans’ commitment to fair play. Leave aside for a moment the ugly fact of racial segregation, and America was the place in the world that most disdained inherited prestige or unearned political privilege. Our culture and economy were built on the presupposition that any person, through hard work and talent, could rise to be the equal of anyone else. It didn’t matter who your grandfather was, or whether you spoke with a “posh” accent. America cared what was inside a man, and what he was willing to do. As a self-made man himself, Chesterton respected that culture of openness, that love of justice. He also knew where it came from.

Over and over again, throughout our history, Americans have been moved to test themselves against abstract ideals, sometimes at the expense of their short-term self-interest. The American Revolution was driven not so much by outrage at trivial taxes on stamps or sacks of tea, as by the sense that King George and his Parliament had no moral right to tax the Colonies without allowing them representation. This violated the traditional rights of Englishmen, but as Thomas Jefferson carefully explained in the Declaration of Independence, it also flouted the laws of “nature’s God.” He built his rationale for the bloody, risky venture of American independence on the groundwork of “inalienable rights” endowed by our “Creator.” It was to defend these rights that the signers of the Declaration pledged “our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor.”

In other words, the very existence of the U.S. rests on a proposition about reality: the existence of an objective, transcendent moral order. By making the rights of the person the cornerstone of the national edifice, Jefferson won sympathy from like-minded people across the world, who might otherwise not have cared about a tax-dispute among Anglophones. He also planted a time-bomb, an intellectual premise that would be used again and again to challenge unjust institutions—such as slavery, a sinful arrangement from which Jefferson himself drew benefit. While it would have been impossible to unite the Colonies and also abolish slavery, by making “inalienable rights” the core American principle, Jefferson wrote slavery’s epitaph in advance.

As the abolitionist movement grew in strength, it would use the Declaration as its chief rhetorical weapon, pointing out the stark hypocrisy of slavemasters who cherished their “liberty.” While they never won a national consensus for outlawing slavery, the abolitionists did make the practice so repugnant that Americans opposed its expansion into new, Western states—and were outraged when the Fugitive Slave Act compelled Northern, free states to act as slavecatchers. The election of Abraham Lincoln was the expression of this outrage. While he fought first to save the Union, Lincoln saw in the midst of war an opportunity: by tying the fight for Union to the cause of Emancipation, he made of the Civil War a crusade for America’s founding principles.

The post-war Jim Crow laws that were enacted throughout the country (not just the South) prevented the full recognition of the rights of non-white persons. It would take another century for the Civil Rights movement to force Americans to take another look at the core principles upon which our country rests. And many tried to paint the Civil Rights protestors as anarchist or Communist agitators. But because our very existence as a nation was only justified by this set of transcendent moral laws, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was able to make the case that equal rights for all was a patriotic principle. Despite the bitter resistance which claimed King’s life, America was able to enact full, legal equality for all without tearing itself apart.

America is not the first or only country to recognize a transcendent moral order. In fact, the realization that positive laws must accord with (or bow to) the laws of heaven goes all the way back to the roots of Western culture—to Classical Greece. Sophocles put this awareness in the mouth of Antigone, when she defies King Creon’s unjust law: “Nor did I think your orders were so strong that you, a mere more mortal man, could over-run the gods’ unwritten and unfailing laws.  Not now, nor yesterday’s, they always live, and no one knows their origin….”

St. Thomas Aquinas did know their origin, and he taught that an unjust law is no law at all, and need not be obeyed.

The roots of international law were planted by Catholic jurists in 16th-century Salamanca, when the Church informed the conquistadors that Native Americans were fully human, and should not be enslaved. (Sadly, nobody listened—there was too much gold to be plundered. But the principle was established.)

When they tried the Nazis at Nuremburg, instead of mere victors’ justice (favored by the vengeful Soviets), American and British judges pointed to a transcendent moral law that overrode the laws of National Socialist Germany.

Martin Luther King, Jr. did not rely on racial groupthink or tribal self-interest when he called for civil rights from the Birmingham Jail, but cited the great Western and Christian tradition: “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God… An unjust law is a code out of harmony with the moral law.  To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas: ‘An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” Because he cited the core principles of our country and our culture, King’s arguments prevailed.

That is how we will prevail in the fight for the sanctity of life—by pointing out, again and again and again that our opponents are merely cynical, that their arguments are purely pragmatic, hedonist and selfish, of no more merit than the rationalizations of slaveholders, the muttered excuses of Nazi guards or the empty rhetoric of segregationists. If America ever had the right to exist in the first place, or had the right to fight the Civil War and abolish slavery, it is only because our ancestors strove to conform our little laws to the Great Law that is writ in every human heart. That struggle is the source of our greatness, decency and cohesion. If we abandon it for the sake of short-term convenience or sexual “freedom,” we will have thrown away our national charter—taken the deed to our house and used it to line the gilded bird cage of a spoiled and selfish generation.

So let’s talk about shoes. One of the authors to whom I owe the most intellectually is the political philosopher Hadley Arkes, of Amherst College. Arkes is the world’s leading advocate of a deeply unfashionable theory called Natural Law. You never hear about that notion any more, but it played a major role in certain historic events: the American Declaration of Independence, the Abolitionist movement, the U.N.’s post-war assertion of human rights that transcend the laws of nations, and the U.S. Civil Rights movement. It’s almost stunning to think that an idea with such a pedigree could simply be dropped by the world’s intellectuals, like a toy that a child grew bored with, but that is what has happened. People will still assert human rights, or insist that our government act with justice, plucking fruit from the branches of a tree they pretend isn’t there. (I won’t speculate for the moment why they do this. Just take it from me that “Natural Law” is a term you shouldn’t use in academia, law, or politics. It will brand you as an extremist.) Anyway, in one of my favorite books by my favorite thinker, Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, Arkes starts by talking not about abstract right and wrong but a particular pile of shoes. That has a better philosophical precedent than you might think: One of Heidegger’s most famous essays concerns the making of shoes.

But Arkes isn’t interested in what Germans have thought about crafting shoes, as in the careful way they protected them, kept shoes safe from heedless destruction in time of war, gathered them carefully and avoided wherever they could the needless waste of a single shoe—almost as if each pair had a unique and irreplaceable destiny, a dignity no man could rightly ignore. You have probably guessed by now where the shoes that interest Arkes were found: piled neatly, outside the gas chamber at an extermination camp. Those shoes, and other personal items like gold teeth, were extracted from the items of human waste those plants efficiently processed into smoke. They remain with us as a testimony to modern economy and thrift. Really, I can think of no other single thing (not a skyscraper or a space ship) that sums up the essence of what it means to be modern as that pile of Jewish shoes.

The age we mark as modernity began with grand, exhilarating gestures: discourses on method that would set us free from the dead hand of tradition (Descartes); declarations of the rights of man (the French Revolutionary Assembly); manifestos rejecting the tyranny of mere economic laws over the lives and labor of men (Karl Marx). The grand progression of the movement Henri de Lubac dubbed “heroic humanism” was full of such golden moments, which moved through the dark night of history like torches leading us forward, ever forward, to a glittering future that would make life at long last worthy of man. At the end of all the struggles, after the next (surely final!) conflict, or the next, we were promised without any irony a brave new world, an earthly paradise. Descartes had no doubt that science would end disease and aging, so men could live forever. Robespierre offered public safety and a reign of absolute virtue. Marx fought to eliminate war, inequality, and even boring jobs: in the stateless, classless Communist endpoint of history, no one would even have to specialize in anything. We could move from one career to another from day to day, and have ample time in the evening to philosophize or write poetry. As Thomas Paine said, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

And we did. That’s what we spent the 19th and 20th centuries doing, energetically. We broke up historic empires into nation-states, where men forgot their loyalty to tiny village or global Church, and learned to think as members of ethnic tribes or aggrieved social classes. After these collectives had done their work, and proved themselves too dangerous (in 1945, and 1989, respectively) we set about smashing them, too. We broke down the ramshackle, inefficient structure of the old extended family to its minimal, nuclear core—and then when that didn’t prove as economically useful, we split that into atoms. When we learned that families have no economic use or political import, we redefined them at last as consensual, temporary alliances of adults—to whom the State contracts the duty of caring for children overnight, in the hours when schools and daycare facilities aren’t open. We have very thoroughly accomplished the job modernity’s founders set us: liquidating every barrier to the assertion of the Self, short of the laws of physics. We have killed all the fathers. We are free to make of ourselves exactly what we will, no less and no more. And here we sit with the treasure we’ve won: this pile of shoes.

The road we took to get here should be clear: In the high-minded, ruthless war of liberation we fought against the past, against authority, against every duty or imperative that each of us as individuals had not freely signed on to as consenting adults, we had to destroy the village in order to save it. That village was the vision of human life our superstitious ancestors us clung to, in which a human being was something radical and unique, an amalgam of spirit and flesh whose destiny may have begun inside the uterus, but which stretched on forward into eternity. You would meddle with such a mystery at your peril, remembering that the penalties could haunt your own eternity. So the peasants used to mutter at the soldiers and the secret policemen, who laughed as they carted them off. They weren’t afraid of judgment, and had no hopes of pie in the sky when they died.

The only support, it turned out, for having a high opinion of other people’s lives (our own are sacred by definition) lay not in the shiny new laboratories or libraries we were building, but in the drafty, candlelit houses of worship we had to bulldoze to make room. The old sacred books that old men quoted to thwart the free play of our desires, which we piled in bonfires or smirked at as curiosities, were more important than we realized. They held crucial information, the shibboleths needed to make men treat each other a certain way—a way we had come to take for granted. That way of treating people—respecting the weak, sacrificing for the young, venerating the old—emerged in human history as the side-effects of specific assertions about the world. We didn’t want to believe this. We were sure we could have the milk without the smelly cow or the raging bull. So we killed them, and used the leather to make… that pile of shoes.

To suit the way we feel about ourselves, we act as if life is sacred, the individual is precious, and each of us has a dignity no one can deny. What we see in nature is that life is cheap, that all our DNA cares about is replicating itself, and we are no more than one species among many millions, on a trivial planet in a clockwork universe (one of many) that’s gradually running down. We are atheists who want to think of ourselves as angels, and know deep down that we are beasts. We are free of the very things that gave us the right to freedom. We “know” that we are special, and realize that we aren’t. I’m not, and neither are you. But we will each agree to pretend that we don’t know this, and go on dancing the minuet as the lights slowly fade to black and the knives come out.

 The moment the darkness fell, when the real message of modernity was fully felt, is the subject of my favorite movie of 2011, Sarah’s Key. I don’t want to spoil this powerful film for you, but I must give a tiny summary. In it, Kristin Scott Thomas plays a middle-aged French journalist, married with just one child—a twelve-year-old daughter. She is working on a story about the deportation of Jews from Paris, which many Frenchmen still like to pretend was forced on France by the Nazis. But records show that it wasn’t, that French officials willingly offered those Jews to Hitler, French policemen dutifully rounded them up, and millions of Frenchmen watched without protest while it was done. This is the story Thomas is telling, but along the way she discovers something strange. The quaint old apartment her husband has just inherited from his family fell into their hands during the War—at exactly the time that Jews in their part of Paris were rounded up for the camps. She starts to dig into the family’s dirty laundry.

While she’s doing the hard journalistic work, Thomas starts to feel physically drained, exhausted, and nauseous. At first she attributes this to the dark material she’s exploring, but the doctor informs her otherwise: She is pregnant. Her shock is palpable (and very well played by Thomas in a stellar performance). She and her husband had tried for years to have a second child, even resorting without success to in vitro fertilization. She arranges a cozy, romantic dinner to break the news—and is staggered at his response. He no longer wants a second child. Things have changed in the past few years, he explains, and we built a life that makes both of us happy. You love your work, I love to travel, and our daughter will soon be away at school. We’ll be free again, like newlyweds. Do you really want to spoil all that, for… this?

Thomas is angry, of course. She feels rejected, ashamed, disgusted. But she cannot deny the force of his arguments. This is an unasked-for intrusion on their lives, a biological accident like leukemia or cancer, a rebellion of mere matter that threatens what’s really sacred: their freedom to pursue the lives they wanted. As arbitrary as the dictates of a king or the tenets of a religion, this biological problem threatens to break up her happy marriage—indeed, her husband insists he will leave her if she doesn’t terminate the pregnancy. He’s within his rights; did he ask her to get pregnant? Did they discuss it beforehand, and both agree to this course of action? Then how could he rightly be bound by her decision? No one has the right to force someone else to become a parent, does she?

Thomas redoubles her work, and unearths the story of the Jewish family displaced from her husband’s family apartment. She tracks down and follows the fate of each of its members, and confronts her father-in-law about his family’s history. She learns to love the little Jewish girl Sarah, pulled out of her family home at nine years old by the neighborhood policeman, and shipped off to a concentration camp. She neglects everything else—including her decision about her pregnancy—in search of some trace of Sarah. She learns to see the Holocaust not as some black and enormous monolith, but up close and near-at-hand. She picks up, if you will, a single pair of shoes. She learns what it means. And she makes her choice.

That power of choice, that freedom which Roe v. Wade held as more sacred than life itself, is nothing to speak of lightly. Liberty is the hard-won product of thousands of years of struggle. It’s the logical implication of Classical reason and Jewish-Christian revelation. It’s the crowning glory of human dignity. It is every single one of these things—or else it is nothing at all, a mere illusion, a flickering of electrical activity in the brain stem of a mammal. We are each of us the envy of angels. Or else we are accidents, as unfree and scraped clean of meaning as a pile of dead people’s shoes.

Since this is a harvest festival like Bavaria’s Feast of St. Martin, marked by the hearty consumption of “comfort” foods, our thoughts also turn to abundance. As the Puritans were grateful that they could scrape a living out of their chilly New England settlements, the immigrants who came later were thankful for the vast farms full of rich black earth which they could own outright (unlike their peasant parents in teeming, feudal Europe), for the new industries exploding with productivity and the bold new cities like Chicago and Detroit that emerged to dwarf the settlements in the Old Country. We have longer lives and better health than even our parents, and the leisure to wring our hands about how to fund 15-20 years of healthy retirement. (When Social Security was set up, the average life expectancy was right around 65—in other words, it existed to support the Methusalehs among us. Now most of us live long enough to collect for many years—a very good problem to have.)

Which leads to ask, why exactly:

Are our public parks full of angry, scraggly young people, pounding bongos and complaining that our “system” has cheated them, that we’ve bargained away their future, and allowed a tiny fragment of society to soak up an unprecedented percentage of the wealth?

Do Tea Party activists in odd, tricornered hats warn that the government is becoming the enemy of its people?

Was was Patrick Buchanan able to make a solid case that we are engaged in (as his new book’s title says) “the suicide of a superpower“?

Is our Congress—faced with spiraling deficits that threaten our nation with debt default—completely unable to impose modest tax raises and deep cuts in unsustainable social and military spending?

While Americans once laughed up our sleeves at the squabbling, socialist Europeans with their cheese mountains and their general strikes, their oily corruption and Communist trade unions, we now face a very similar fiscal crisis. The Europeans aren’t even bothering to ask our help, but are going hat in hand to our largest creditors—the Chinese, whom we are busy provoking by placing U.S. Marines in Australia. (Who is else is that aimed at containing—head-hunters from New Guinea?)

Where did the West go wrong?

The tragic flaw we share with our cousins over in Europe is not so much political or economic as cultural. You see, Marx was wrong: Economic reality is not the DNA that forms the social organism, dictating which poems will be written and which constitutions amended. Marx’s vulgar materialism, predicated on an a priori rejection of God, refuted itself over seven blood-soaked decades from Königsberg to Cambodia, as the world re-learned this truth: It is culture that drives politics, and the dance between the two that produces the kind of economy which emerges from a country. Leave aside “black swan” events like the Potato Famine or the Black Death, and you can trace a people’s economic fortunes to the social values that motivate them, and the institutions these values have built. The hyperinflation that ravished Germany in the 20s and paved the way for Hitler was caused by the debt and reparations incurred during World War I—which the Germans launched after some 90 years of post-Napoleonic romantic nationalism and militarism. The stagnation and instability that pervades the Islamic world can be traced straight to their credal rejection of reason and even causality in understanding nature. (A rock falls not because of gravity, but because God happens to will it—and it’s perfectly possible that any given rock might hang in mid-air forever, should He wish it.) I could multiply instances all day—but like you, I’ve got some turkey sitting here that’s not going to eat itself.

What shared cultural illness, then, explains the current crisis all across the Western world? Is it, as those who occupy Wall Street would have us believe, a failure of the free market system? Is it the fault of government gone wild, printing money to fuel “irrational exuberance” and fund folks on food stamps buying investment properties in Nevada? Is it the flight of American factories to former Third World countries, where people are willing to hazard long hours and harsh conditions, sacrificing their present for the sake of their families’ futures? Yes, yes, and yes, but these are all symptoms, like that extra pants size you gain after six months of sedentary snacking. There is a common cause underlying the national bankruptcy that faces our nation—and the nations where most of our ancestors came from. Crony capitalism, nanny-state socialism, fat welfare states where postal clerks retire at 58, colleges full of whiny, indebted students majoring in sociology and women’s studies—these aren’t an unconnected grab-bag of “leftist” and “rightist” ills, but the symptoms of a fundamental Western illness:

We live now for ourselves, and for pleasures in present or future.

Our culture, and hence our economy and politics, now stand for absolutely nothing else. To cite the old Seinfeld line, we are now a “civilization about nothing.”

Our forefathers may have lapsed from time to time into foolish, self-destructive acts of hedonism, but the culture in which they lived and the faith they followed called things what they were: They knew sin as sin, and knew the need for repentance and reparation. These people knew that we live not only for ourselves, but at the very least for the sake of our children. Italians planted olive trees which their children would some day profit from; now they have ceased even to plant the children, attaining one of the lowest birth rates now on earth. (They compete with the Spaniards and the Quebecois for that honor.) Even American big-government, free-spending Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt built their policies on the assumption that the basic unit of society was not the individual but the family. As Allan Carlson documents in his classic The American Way, for all the flaws of the New Deal (it centralized power in Washington, wasted money, starved the private sector, was largely unconstitutional and probably prolonged the Depression), at least its policies were driven by a deeply wholesome agenda: to let men be the breadwinners for their families, so women could raise healthier, smarter, more productive citizens. That common-sense, instinctual principle is now considered so radically retrograde and offensive, simply stating it is enough to drive a politician out of public life. (A fine book Sen. Rick Santorum published asserting such things, It Takes a Family, probably helped him lose his seat in the Senate; a recent Republican governor’s candidate had to disavow an academic thesis he’d written long before along these lines.)

Since the Sexual Revolution and its ugly stepsister, feminism, overturned our assumptions about what sex means and what it’s for, we have almost forgotten how to form families, or what they are. Divorce laws have made the contract of marriage laughably easy to escape from, even as we have tightened up bankruptcy laws and canonized student loans as sacramental covenants. Voters—not just judges, real live American voters—have redefined marriage in several states to include homosexual unions. Single people can adopt children, and couples can cook them up in petri dishes, discarding the “surplus” embryos or sending them up to Harvard to be cannibalized for parts. What agenda is served by all these bizarre acts of rebellion against the plain nature of things and the immemorial structure of human society? Nothing so elevated or insane as Marxist-Leninism. Nothing so cool and mathematical as capitalism. The philosophy underpinning our current crisis, which explains our Keynesian politics and addiction to credit card debt, Europe’s falling and our own flat birth rates, our willingness to tax our children (via deficits) instead of ourselves, is a simple creed known to every teenager: “We want the world and we want it now,” in the words of Dionysian rock-god Jim Morrison, who died a bloated shell of a man at age 28, leaving behind no acknowledged children, but at least 20 paternity suits filed by women he had abandoned.

Repulsed by the gray “organizational men” who toiled without credit or creativity inside massive corporations, the young (who are now middle-aged) took as their creed a vulgar hedonism, papered over for some by New Left politics. Even when hippies cut their hair and got “real” jobs, the creeds they had popularized changed our economy and politics, all across the Western world. Gone was the stern frugality of the Depression generation, the optimistic fecundity of those who birthed the Baby Boom. In its place came a cleverly calculating Epicureanism, a breed of men who lived for pleasure but knew how to avoid overdoses and V.D., who relied on now-legal abortion to clean up the unintended consequences of pleasure, who looked to vacant New Age spirituality, or endless acquisition for its own sake, with endorphin rushes from risk buffered by the certainty that their banks were “too big to fail.” When the focus of life becomes not pursuing the Good, or even transmitting life so someone else has the chance to, and descends instead to the accumulation of diverse, amusing experiences, man as an organism ceases to function as he was built to. His machines, lazily tended, break down and fall apart. His governments, overburdened and underfunded, welsh on their debts. His countries are either depopulated or colonized by fertile foreigners. He looks around, and he shrugs. If he majored in English, he might use the line, as he shuffles offstage: “Not with a bang, but a wanker.”

If we are to restore effective government and prosperous economies throughout the West, the first step will have to be averting our gaze from the funhouse mirror into which most of us have been staring for much of our lives. We must start to think as members of families first, and individuals second. We need to see our fertility not as a toxic waste that sometimes spills, but a primary purpose in most of our lives (celibates excepted). Leave God out for the moment; our parents made the sacrifice to put us on this earth. The least we can do is to pay it forward, and replace ourselves. (Those of us whom faith has taught to see life as a gift will surely wish to do more, where it’s prudent.)

But there is the rub. Having children is ipso facto proof that each of us is replaceable—for here are the little ones ready to replace us. That means we are mortal. And who wants to admit something like that?

I think that a sober meditation on the past century that has unfolded (since 1914) would confirm this truth: Human existence is, at root, a paradox.  Any answer which fails to admit this is dangerously misleading.

Our lives are a bundle of howling contradictions, of seemingly irreconcilable truths that pull us in different directions like wild horses yoked together, threatening to rip the fragile, complex truth into jagged, hazardous pieces. We are animals and mathematicians, street fighters and symphonists, carnivores and pet-lovers, jingoistic champions of our tiny tribes who are haunted by the brotherhood of man.  We are Adam newly born from the hand of God, and the sinners who cringe at the Last Judgment; we are Macbeth and we are Hamlet, we are Romeo and Cordelia. We are the “naked ape” who stole fire from heaven, and we are Oedipus, blind but wise. Cain and Abel, Barabbas and Jesus are equally our brothers.

The great temptation of ideologues is to divide the sheep from the goats – to resolve man’s paradoxical nature into brutally stark polarities. We’re told that “our people” (our tribe, class, or party) represent what is best in man, and we must unite to purge the “other,” a unity that elicits the very basest tendencies we tell ourselves we don’t share.

Perhaps the most bitter truth about the human paradox comes from the mouth of a man who did more than almost any other to divide and persecute, Joseph Stalin. Stalin was the architect of the Great Famine and The Purge, Hitler’s willing ally in 1939 and the inventor of the Gulag. He once said: “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” Stalin’s war against the people of the Soviet Union killed, in peacetime, more than 21 million people—so many that historians cannot agree on an accurate count.

Stalin may have been a butcher, but his words ring true. A master of backroom politics and political blackmail, this former seminarian had an intimate knowledge of our soul’s darkest unswept corners. If Mother Teresa was right that any one of us (herself included) is capable of committing any crime, then each of us has something to learn from Stalin.

He knew (and in his thuggish way, admitted) something most of us won’t put into conscious thought: Life is at once both sacred and cheap.

We know this to be true, both instinctively and from experience. In the first place, we consider our own lives sacred, our own rights inalienable. When we are threatened by violence or victimized, we swell up with righteous anger and rouse each other to action. Our perception of self-sacredness extends easily to those we love. Some of us have held a tiny child of our own, looked at each of his perfect fingers and gleaming eyelashes, felt the faint flutter of his heartbeat, tended to his needs when he cried. In these moments we are suddenly so certain that this innocent life is of infinite importance, and the very thought that someone might snuff it out fills us with rage. Our conviction may even make us willing to sacrifice our life in order to save it. This is how we typically love a sibling, a parent, a spouse.

Like a drop of ink in a glass of water, the intensity of our feeling tends to diminish as it spreads. For friends and neighbors, for those who look like us, or pray like us… and finally for our fellow citizens, we feel some shadow of that same passionate attachment we feel for ourselves and those we love.

With each degree of separation from the ego, our conviction fades, until at last, at the furthest extension of our empathy, we find total strangers – those on the other side of the world with whom we have little in common beyond the human condition. Some may even be our enemies. At this distance our ability to understand the sacredness of human life finds little support in our viscera. Suddenly, what we once understood so well requires the active support of our minds, an abstract philosophical or religious opinion. We will ourselves to care, and sometimes we succeed—which is why billions of dollars in private charity flow to foreign countries every year.

Sometimes, however, we fail, and our failure explains the ease with which we overlook or even cooperate in the abuse of humans far from home. “Our people” become soldiers killing civilians, businessmen poisoning rivers, or social engineers sterilizing poor women “for their own good.” Hannah Arendt pointed out forty years ago in her Origins of Totalitarianism that well-formed British and French soldiers, who would never have stolen a stick of gum in their mother country, were capable of appalling savagery in “the colonies.” In our own, American history, white men could not long stand the presence of white indentured servants—soon replacing them with black Africans.

If we can manage to stand far enough away, the life we knew as sacred appears more and more expendable. It’s much like driving past a graveyard full of strangers and reacting with only a melancholy shrug.

Of course there is nothing wrong with loving your family members more than you do some stranger—in fact, if you love a stranger more, it’s probably because you love your own family too little. (Think of Charles Dickens’s character Mrs. Jellyby, who denied her own children milk so she could send milk money to the missions.) But if we want strangers – who may feel little for us – to respect our lives as sacred, we must accord them the same courtesy. This is the base treatment, the bare minimum every human being deserves simply by virtue of being human.

It may sound utilitarian, but respecting human life is not some charade we engage in solely to protect ourselves, rather, it is an act of the will that cleaves to a fundamental truth—the one truth that can guard us against totalitarianism and imperialism, utilitarianism and eugenics: the intrinsic moral equality of every human being. The fact that the right choice may also seem useful is only evidence of the fact that truth is accessible by reason.

Had the men leading great nations in the bloody twentieth century been convinced of this single truth, there might still have been wars, poverty, and repression, just as there were in the Middle Ages. What would not have happened is the mass destruction of “undesirable” civilians by their own governments, and the callous use of “strategic bombing” against defenseless populations in enemy countries. Only the most profound failure of empathy, motivated by ideology and animated by technology, could achieve the colossal death toll of the 20th century—which historian R.J. Rummel, in Death By Government, estimates at 169.2 million civilian deaths caused by the state.

The more distant, alien, or unattractive we find people, the harder we must work not to act on what we feel (indifference, or even hostility), but on what we know: That each of these people was once a child whose mother was certain, in the wrenching way we know this of our own offspring, that his life was infinitely precious. That we must will to respect others is a truth that applies equally to soldiers in foreign countries and to the civilians who surround them, to the loved ones we cherish across the dinner table and to the inmates in our prisons, to helpless children in the womb and vulnerable Alzheimer’s patients.

When we start making exceptions to suit our convenience, we will not stop—since the list of human beings who may prove an obstacle to what we want is as potentially limitless as our desires. History proves the height of this slippery slope. This stern truth, that innocent life is sacred, is the antidote to tribalist vengeance, ideological hatred, and technological hubris. It was known to the Israelites, whose Commandments said “Thou shalt not murder,” and to the Greeks, whose Hippocratic Oath made doctors promise “to give no deadly medicine.”

If we want them to inherit a better century than our own, we owe it to our own children to help restore worldwide respect for the intrinsic dignity and incomparable worth of the human person.  We must affirm the founding truth our civilization:  that each of us is made in the image and likeness of God.
Part I of this series appeared on Big Government on Sept. 11, 2011. Parts II, III, and IV will appear in this space in the next few weeks.

It was a brilliant summer day in a world at peace. The world’s superpowers, once locked into conflict by irreconcilable ideologies, were now alike committed to stable, prosperous co-existence. Their vast military establishments, they said, existed solely for self-defense. Except in a few backward lands, horsetrading had replaced brinksmanship. New industrial and information technologies were annihilating distance, uniting mankind and globalizing the world economy. The English language had leaped far beyond its island home, and now knit together hundreds of millions of people on four continents. Medical advances were rapidly stretching the human lifespan, while new agricultural methods offered hope of eradicating hunger. Research, science, and philosophies of progress had weakened the hold of religion in countries that once had fought bloody doctrinal conflicts and persecuted dissenters. Transnational organizations in defense of human rights were striving with rising success to eliminate evils like forced labor and torture, and reform movements in once-tyrannical countries promised to gradually introduce democracy. Man had become, more than ever before, the measure of all things, and political philosophers predicted with confidence that mankind’s self-destructive history was drawing to an end; we had entered a new and perhaps the final phase of human development, an age of reason. The sun that dawned that morning shone bright as all our hopes in a sky almost clear of clouds.

 So it was on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand came to visit. So also on September 11, 2001 in Manhattan, as millions of New Yorkers made their way to work. Those of us who remember what occurred just ten years ago should know that all of it happened once before: an act of political terror committed by a small band of conspirators plunged the world into a conflict that would take on a life and logic of its own—claiming countless lives, causing undreamt-of destruction, consuming vast resources, making mincemeat of ancient liberties, reviving bloodthirsty fanaticisms that enlightened people had thought long-dead, toppling governments, causing ethnic cleansing that displaced millions of civilians, and plunging the wealthiest part of the world into economic stagnation and crippling debt. The fact that history grimly repeats itself should only surprise those who do not believe in original sin—which means that it surprises almost everybody.

 What can we learn from reading these two great signposts of disillusion? Perhaps there is no useful lesson we may draw beyond a bitter irony, a grim smile of agreement with Rudyard Kipling:

 As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return! 

But that is too easy, isn’t it? It might do, for those who plan to have no children, to leave behind no hostages to fortune. For anyone else, what is needed is more than cynicism, or stoic acceptance of what Freud called the “thanatos principle,” man’s inborn compulsion to build, tear down, then re-build the Tower of Babel. We want more than insight. What we crave, more than bread, is hope. 

Hope is radically different from optimism. Stock analysts and campaign managers are optimistic—even when caution is called for. Optimism is the fragile dream that pervaded the West in 1914 and 2001. It was shattered by just one attack. Hope can survive in cancer wards and even concentration camps—as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Victor Frankl have testified. Hope exists, if you will, in a fourth dimension that cuts across the world we can see at an angle we cannot imagine. It rises from secret places in the heart where the torturers cannot find it, and spreads through quiet gestures or silent prayers they cannot quash. Hope is what Winston Smith hungered for in 1984, but all he knew how to look for was optimism—a plausible prospect for social change. And so he cursed God and died.

 If we in our darkening times would not learn to love Big Brother, we need a higher, indestructible Love. To find it, we must claw our way through the detritus that blocks our path. Much of the rubbish consists of the empty boxes that held our optimism, the wrapping paper from the gifts we gave ourselves. We must realize, deep in the bone, that there is no salvation in a cargo cult, that we can place no faith in princes, or in whispered, promised knowledge that will help us be “as gods.” The centuries-long effort to place man at creation’s apex, which our ancestors hailed as “humanism,” ended by goading men to sterilize, butcher and bomb their brothers. The adventure of secular science led by a straight, steady path from Galileo’s ebullient, “Eppur si muove!” to Robert Oppenheimer’s epiphany: “I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Without renouncing the wondrous powers to improve man’s life that come with scientific discipline, we urgently need to rediscover what too many humanists and scientists impatiently set aside. We must rummage through their libraries and labs to find the questions they suppressed, the data they fudged. We have spent five centuries asking only “How?” We must step back and ask again, “Why?” The answer will help us resist many temptations, of the sort our race falls into so very easily—to use the superhuman powers we gain in inhuman ways, to treat the weak, the “other,” the Enemy, as subhumans, as flies we can kill for sport. (King Lear)

 To restrain ourselves and each other, to prepare a liveable future, there are certain fundamental axioms we need to accept as the bedrock of human rights and lasting peace. We do not need an infallible authority to reveal them; any honest student of twentieth century history could piece them together by looking at which perennial truths totalitarian movements systematically sought to deny:

 I) The unique and absolute value of every human person, at each stage of life, who must be treated not as a means but an end in him or herself. 

II) The transcendent moral order against which every law, custom, or policy must be judged, regardless of culture or government. 

III) The duty of governments to serve the governed and defend—not replace or control—the free institutions of civil society. 

IV) The priority of certain core humane values over economic or political expediency. 

In the next several articles in this series, I will unfold the implications of each of these “inconvenient truths”—so styled because they stand in the way of every “pure” ideology that has emerged in the course of modernity, each partial truth about man that claims his absolute loyalty. They are speed bumps, if you will, on the road to any bruited utopia. 

By slowing or even stopping us short of choosing “easy” shortcuts that render us less human, these “gods of the copybook headings” may well be thought of as commandments—or if you prefer, the wisdom of history, for which our parents and grandparents paid such a very high price in past hundred bloody years.

 Jason Jones, a movie producer, is president of H.E.RO (www.theGreatCampaign.com)