By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, October 05, 2016
Did you know that the study of cuteness is a legitimate
and rather busy field of academic inquiry? It is not as trivial as it sounds.
The features that constitute cuteness, and the response of human beings to them, are nearly
universal. Cuteness is partly related to infantile physical features — babies
are cute for the same reason that puppies are cute — and is heightened or
triggered by certain contexts, such as helplessness or distress. That is why
the baby with the bowl of spaghetti upturned on her head is cuter than babies
in other contexts, and why sad and penitent-looking puppies are cuter than
puppies that are ripping the stuffing out of something living like the natural
carnivores they are.
Cuteness brings out our protective paternal and maternal
instincts, in light of which fact the cult of kawaii in aging, childless, sterile Japan is less evidence of
pop-cultural eccentricity than it is the bright and cheerful wrapping paper
around a parcel of profound and mortal sadness, a self-bought birthday present
for a nation of cat-ladies.
We feel protective toward that which is cute, and those
who study evolution believe that this serves an obvious adaptive purpose: that
we, as families and as a species, are better off when adults are instinctively
protective of the young, the tiny, and the vulnerable. This is so deeply
ingrained in us that we do not need to be taught it. The Apostle Paul had not
heard of DNA or natural selection, but perhaps he had it about right when he
wrote of those who had not been instructed in religious law who nonetheless
were bound by “the law written in their hearts.”
(Or thereabouts.)
Tim Kaine apparently is blissfully unaware of the fact,
but it is a long part of the Christian tradition, and especially prominent in
the Catholic tradition, that the basic facts of the universe — physical and
moral — can be discerned through the light of human reason, independent of
religious revelation. In his famous notes on the Bible, the American
Presbyterian minister Albert Barnes expands on Paul’s language:
The revealed Law of God was written
on tables of stone, and then recorded in the books of the Old Testament. This
law the Gentiles did not possess, but, to a certain extent, the same
requirements were written on their hearts. Though not revealed to them as to
the Jews, yet they had obtained the knowledge of them by the light of nature.
The word “hearts” here denotes the mind itself, as it does also frequently in
the Sacred Scriptures; not the heart, as the seat of the affections. It does
not mean that they loved or even approved of the Law, but that they had
knowledge of it; and that that knowledge was deeply engraved on their minds.
The idea was an ancient one by the time Paul got around
to writing his letters, and it is by no means a uniquely Christian concept
(Marcus Aurelius understood it well) or a European one (as the thought of
Siddhārtha Gautama shows). It is not even the exclusive property of the
religious and the spiritual: The famously atheist Ayn Rand argued throughout
the entirety of her tedious oeuvre that morality is not merely a question of
opinion but a discoverable facet of the reality in which we live.
Intellectually, Tim Kaine’s argument about abortion is
incoherent and indefensible; it is, in fact, illiterate. He argues that while
his own Catholic devotion points him in a pro-life direction, the fact that we
are a pluralistic society with a constitutional guarantee of religious freedom
precludes him from supporting initiatives that would enshrine certain Catholic
preferences in law. That did not stop him from campaigning against capital
punishment and from using his gubernatorial powers to that end (the Catholic
position on the death penalty is not absolute and, given the history of the
church, hardly could be; its prohibition of abortion is absolute) any more than
the First Amendment has stopped any cookie-cutter progressive with an Italian
or Irish surname from citing the example of Jesus when arguing for this or that
social-welfare program. (Never mind, for the moment, that this misconstrues
that example.) Back in the ancient days when he was running for president,
Barack Obama cited his faith in explaining his opposition to homosexual
marriage.
But it is not the hypocrisy that rankles so much as the
stupidity: There are millions, perhaps billions, of people on this planet who
oppose abortion who are not Catholics, who are not bound by Catholic practice,
who are not informed by Catholic teaching. There are pro-life Jews,
Protestants, Mormons, Muslims (though those who denounce the so-called
Religious Right as the “Christian Taliban” would do well to appreciate how
liberal sharia actually is on the question of abortion), Hindus, pagans,
agnostics, atheists, chiropractors, witch-doctors, and people who believe in
horoscopes. My friend and colleague Charles C. W. Cooke is a pro-life
non-believer.
I very much doubt that I am the only person in the world
who is Catholic in part because he is pro-life, and not the other way around.
My religious views have changed over time, but my opposition to abortion never
has. One of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church years ago was the
mystery of how that particular corporation, practically alone among the
important institutions of the world, fully appreciated the inhumane violence of
abortion, understood the ways in which that violence echoes far outside of the
local Planned Parenthood abattoir, and placed that knowledge at the center of
its public affairs.
Kaine’s understanding of the teaching of the church to
which he purportedly belongs is, properly understood, not religious but superstitious.
The Catholic view is not that a thing is true because the church teaches it,
but that the church teaches it because it is true. The difference is profound:
It is the difference between something being “true for Catholics” and true.
Tim Kaine has it exactly backward: It may be that one
needs to be pro-life to be a Catholic — perhaps the Most Reverend Francis
Xavier DiLorenzo, bishop of Richmond, has some thoughts on the matter he’d like
to share with the congregation entrusted to his care — but it is indisputable
that one need not be Catholic to oppose the horrifying brutality of abortion.
We do not need to be taught this in Sunday school: Emotionally normal and
mentally stable human beings do not need to be taught that butchering babies is wrong at all. We naturally recoil
from it.
That people understand this instinctively is why abortion
advocates in places such as Colorado have — First Amendment be damned —
prohibited abortion protesters from displaying images that simply make clear
what it is that an abortion does. The evil of abortion does not need to be
explained to a functional adult any more than does the cuteness of a baby.
Kaine’s silly and illiterate arguments notwithstanding, it is the pro-abortion
side that has retreated into convenient metaphysics — the nonsensical issue of
“personhood” — while the pro-life side is content to deal with the biological
facts of life, i.e., that what is present in the womb of a pregnant woman is
not a rutabaga or a catfish.
On the subject of abortion, Tim Kaine is a mess
intellectually and a coward morally. That some people find his argument
persuasive is only another sign of how attenuated we have become, nationally,
in our facility for reasoned argument. The facts of abortion are the facts of
abortion, irrespective of what any pope, president, governor, senator, or mere
justice of the Supreme Court says.
Being a Catholic is one reason to oppose abortion. Being
a human being is another. Tim Kaine, a cheap and shallow sophist, isn’t a
particularly inspiring example of either.
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