CANDID VS. CANDIDE

Krieger: Jones' remarks a blot on happy month (Dave Kreiger, May 1, 2003, Rocky Mountain News)

It was a day for being gay at the old ballyard.

Well, not for being gay, per se, if you don't mind a little verse with your sports. I imagine Todd Jones, arbiter of manliness, will find it suspicious, but I'm guessing he won't mention it.

It was more a day for talking about being gay. Or, if you'll put up with one more correction, for not talking about it, which is what Jones and Clint Hurdle did.

The confusing thing is the Rockies have more reason to be gay today than almost ever. They just completed their second-best April. There's certainly reason for optimism, if not outright gaiety.

But first they had to deal with the reaction to Jones' recent comments about gays, which were offensive, apparently, if you could decipher them.

"I wouldn't want a gay guy being around me," Jones said. "It's got nothing to do with me being scared. That's the problem: All these people say he's got all these rights. Yeah, he's got rights or whatever, but he shouldn't walk around proud. It's like he's rubbing it in our face. 'See me, hear me roar.' We're not trying to be close-minded, but then again, why be confrontational when you don't really have to be?"

The question was how he would feel about a gay teammate. Judging by his response, he seems certain the first openly gay ballplayer will also be a drag queen.

This was not exactly how the Rockies envisioned closing a sterling first month. They quickly posted a message on their Web site calling Jones' comments "unfortunate," which is better than calling them incoherent.

Hurdle referred reporters to that statement and refused to discuss the subject further, which is too bad, because he gave the club its best chance to say something intelligent.

For his part, Jones just dug his hole deeper, with determined intent. "I hope there's this kind of coverage when we're in first or second place come July or August," he sniffed.

Earth to Todd: If the Rockies are in first place in August, al Jazeera will be here to cover it.

In fact, the media horde on hand Wednesday night was about the same size as the night before. Jones might not have noticed, but with the Avalanche having finished prematurely, the second choice was a Colorado Mammoth retrospective.

"I think my only mistake was that I made my views public," Jones said. He apologized to the Rockies and his teammates for the inconvenience, but not to gays, whom he seemed proud to have offended.

Mr. Jones is correct: while the overwhelming majority of men agree with him completely, and while gay players would create a tension that would potentially destroy a team, such things are no longer said in public, or else the Thought Police are on the case.

In his excellent new book What We Can't Not Know, J. Budziszewski explains the process that's at work here very well, it's what he calls reconciliation. Here's how he describes it in an essay:

Things are getting worse very quickly now. The list of what we are required to approve is growing ever longer. Consider just the domain of sexual practice. First we were to approve sex before marriage, then without marriage, now against marriage. First with one, then with a series, now with a crowd. First with the other sex, then with the same. First between adults, then between children, then between adults and children. The last item has not been added yet, but will be soon: you can tell from the change in language, just as you can tell the approach of winter from the change in the color of leaves. As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation "intergenerational intimacy": that’s euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term "sodomy": that’s avoidance. My students don’t know the word "fornication" at all: that’s forgetfulness.

The pattern is repeated in the house of death. First we were to approve of killing unborn babies, then babies in process of birth; next came newborns with physical defects, now newborns in perfect health. Nobel-prize laureate James Watson proposes that parents of newborns be granted a grace period during which they may have their babies killed, and in 1994 a committee of the American Medical Association proposed harvesting organs from some sick babies even before they die. First we were to approve of suicide, then to approve of assisting it. Now we are to approve of a requirement to assist it, for, as Ernest van den Haag has argued, it is "unwarranted" for doctors not to kill patients who seek death. First we were to approve of killing the sick and unconscious, then of killing the conscious and consenting. Now we are to approve of killing the conscious and protesting, for in the United States, doctors starved and dehydrated stroke patient Marjorie Nighbert to death despite her pleading "I'm hungry," "I'm thirsty," "Please feed me," and "I want food." Such cases are only to be expected when food and water are now often classified as optional treatments rather than humane care; we have not long to go before joining the Netherlands, where involuntary euthanasia is common. Dutch physician and author Bert Keizer has described his response when a nursing home resident choked on her food: he shot her full of morphine and waited for her to die. Such a deed by a doctor in the land that resisted the Nazis.

Why do things get worse so fast? Of course we have names for the process, like "collapse," "decay," and "slippery slope." By conjuring images--a stricken house, a gangrenous limb, a sliding talus--they make us feel we understand. Now, I am no enemy to word-pictures, but a civilization is not really a house, a limb, or a heap of rocks; it cannot literally fall in, rot, or skid out from underfoot. Images can only illustrate an explanation; they cannot substitute for one. So why do things get worse so fast? It would be well to know, in case the process can be arrested.

The usual explanation is that conscience is weakened by neglect. Once a wrong is done, the next wrong comes more easily. On this view conscience is mainly a restraint, a resistance, a passive barrier. It doesn’t so much drive us on as hold us back, and when persistently attacked, the restraining wall gets thinner and thinner and finally disappears. Often this explanation is combined with another: that conscience comes from culture, that it is built up in us from outside. In this view the heart is malleable. We don’t clearly know what is right and wrong, and when our teachers change the lessons, our consciences change their contents. What once we deemed wrong, we deem right; what once we deemed right, we deem wrong.

There is something to these explanations, but neither can account for the sheer dynamism of wickedness--for the fact that we aren't gently wafted into the abyss but violently propel ourselves into it. Nor, as I will show, can either one account for the peculiar quality of our present moral confusion.

I suggest a different explanation. Conscience is not a passive barrier but an active force; though it can hold us back, it can also drive us on. Moreover, conscience comes not from without but from within: though culture can trim the fringes, the core cannot be changed. The reason things get worse so fast must somehow lie not in the weakness of conscience but in its strength, not in its shapelessness but in its shape. [...]

If the law written on the heart can be repressed, then we cannot count on it to restrain us from doing wrong; that much is obvious. I have made the more paradoxical claim that repressing it hurls us into further wrong. Holding conscience down doesn't deprive it of its force; it merely distorts and redirects that force. We are speaking of something less like the erosion of an earthen dike so that it fails to hold the water back, than like the compression of a powerful spring so that it buckles to the side.

Here is how it works. Guilt, guilty knowledge, and guilty feelings are not the same thing; men and women can have the knowledge without the feelings, and they can have the feelings without the fact. Even when suppressed, however, the knowledge of guilt always produces certain objective needs, which make their own demand for satisfaction irrespective of the state of the feelings. These needs include confession, atonement, reconciliation, and justification. [...]

The need for reconciliation arises from the fact that guilt cuts us off from God and man. Without repentance, intimacy must be simulated precisely by sharing with others in the guilty act. [...]

The reconciliation need has a public dimension, too. Isolated from the community of moral judgment, transgressors strive to gather a substitute around themselves. They don't sin privately; they recruit. The more ambitious among them go further. Refusing to go to the mountain, they require the mountain to come to them: society must be transformed so that it no longer stands in awful judgment. So it is that they change the laws, infiltrate the schools, and create intrusive social-welfare bureaucracies.

The similarities to the doctrine of tolerance are obvious: starting from an admirable desire to reduce the tensions in our diverse society, and therefore accepting that some deviance from the norm may occur, we end by abandoning the idea of norms, denying what we know in our hearts to be true, that right and wrong exist and that we are perfectly capable of distinguishing between the two.

Now, what's paradoxical about this is that folk quite honestly believe that they and their fellow men are being "liberated" by such processes. Instead, the bitter truth is that once we sacrifice our capacity to make judgments ourselves and deny the right of the Church or any other traditional bodies to make them for us, the only arbiter left is the State. And so, as always, the ideology of extreme liberty leads to its opposite, to an ever more powerful central government. Man is freed from a morality universal and internal only to be subjugated by the diktats of the governing and intellectual classes. We call this progress, here in the best of all possible worlds. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 1, 2003 9:24 AM