In the previous posting in this series — the one on the meaning and purpose of life v. swill stroganoff — we made the point that the point of life is to become more fully human, not simply to meet material needs. Reducing the meaning of life to working in order to have the money to buy food in order to have the strength to work is the road to madness, for it takes all meaning out of existence.
The only thing worse than reducing the meaning of life to
meeting material needs is to insist that we reintroduce the “spiritual” or
“religious” element by meeting the material needs of others. This, too, is madness, for it is simply
another way of saying that the only thing that matters is meeting material
needs, whether of ourselves out of justice, or others out of charity. The meaning and purpose of life is reduced to
a bowl of swill stroganoff, whether obtained through your own efforts, or
received as charity from another.
Asserting that “social justice” involves the State or a
private elite taking care of everybody else is, therefore, to misunderstand
social justice — and the natural law. To
summarize, the meaning and purpose of life is to become more fully human. We
become more fully human and fit ourselves for our proper “end” (in the
philosophical sense) by acquiring and developing virtue — “human-ness.”
We acquire and develop virtue by exercising our natural
rights, primarily life, liberty (freedom of association/contract), and
property. Man being by nature “a
political animal,” we exercise rights within a social setting, that is, an
institutional environment. Just as
individuals become more fully human by acquiring and developing habits of doing
good, society becomes more fully social by implementing and maintaining institutions
— “social habits” — within which human beings ordinarily exercise their natural
rights, thereby acquiring and developing virtue.
Thus, any proposal or program that, instead of providing
equality of opportunity for the exercise of rights so that they can meet their
own needs through their own efforts, meets those needs directly, defeats the
whole purpose of the natural law — of even having a society, for that
matter. As C. S. Lewis has “Screwtape”
instruct the Assistant Tormentor, “Wormwood,” after one of Wormwood’s
“patients” goes over to “the Enemy” (God), and converts to Christianity,
“Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which
is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a
churchman. The Enemy allows this
disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavor. . . . The
Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these
disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His ‘free’ lovers and
servants — ‘sons’ is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading
the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged
animals. Desiring their freedom, He
therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affects and habits, to any of
the goals which He sets before them: He
leaves them to ‘do it on their own.’ And
there lies our opportunity. But also,
remember, there lies our danger. If once
they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less
dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.” (C. S. Lewis, “Letter
II,” The Screwtape Letters. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1974,
13-14.)
Abandoning reason and giving in to emotion is therefore critical
if “Our Father Below” is to keep mere human beings sufficiently confused to
enable the hellish program to advance.
The idea, of course, is to maintain as many people as possible in a
condition of dependency via the wage and welfare system so that they cannot
provide for themselves by exercising their natural rights, and thereby grow in
virtue. That is, according to
professional devil Screwtape, who as an Undersecretary of the Department of
Temptation in the infernal lowerarchy, ought to know his business.
That is why we must revisit the comment made by our second
commentator regarding our non-review of John Mueller’s book, Redeeming Economics. In response to our observation that Mueller’s
approach undermines the natural law, the commentator declared that, “it would very much surprise
me if the author misapplies the natural law.”
Observe
the problem here. The commentator
complained that we were unfair to Mueller in taking someone else’s word about
what he wrote, and making our decision as to whether Mueller’s book was worth
reading based on that. Rather than go to
Mueller’s book and find a fact or an argument to correct our impression,
however, the commentator went to a description of Mueller’s book by a third
party, and declared — based on the
description by a third party — that he simply didn’t believe that
Mueller would do what another third party said he did!
This
is what used to be called “the pot calling the kettle black.”
Demonstrating
the success of the demonic program at which Screwtape hinted, it becomes
questionable whether most people today even know what logic or reason are.
