The Mainstream Media Misses the Mark

When a disease breaks out, we analyze data to find a cure.  When a natural disaster strikes, we analyze data to determine how to better prepare for such future disasters.  But what do we do when a mass shooting happens? That’s when we disregard any meaningful data, propose baseless solutions simply because they fit our political agenda, and smear everyone with different solutions as evil bigots who want children to die.

We hear pleas for an open and honest discussion on gun violence in America: something the Republican Party, the NRA, and lawful gun owners sincerely desire.  For an honest conversation on this topic, we must rely on facts and reason.  Facts and reason indicate that gun control is a terrible idea.  From the 141% increase in annual homicide in just sixteen years following a Washington, DC gun ban, to an 89% spike in gun crime in the ten years following the gun ban in Britain, the evidence is not on the side for gun control.  Even in the case of Australia, which instituted a gun buyback so commonly praised by the left, a 2008 study from the University of Melbourne concluded that Australia's gun buyback had no effect on the gun homicide rate; the national homicide rate was already declining prior to this gun control measure. But this evidence is not shown, because instead of featuring highly qualified gun control experts and crime researchers, the mainstream media instead gives airtime to news anchors with absolutely no knowledge about guns, musicians and movie stars who have armed guards protecting them wherever they go, and traumatized seventeen-year-old high school students.

The Democratic Party and the mainstream media do not want a real conversation.  Colion Noir, an NRA commentator and attorney with eleven years of gun advocacy experience, says, “on every issue in this country, we strive to find the most knowledgeable people we can find on the topic, but when it comes to guns, it’s like we pride ourselves on finding the ‘smartest’ dumbasses to talk about guns, and then have the audacity to call it common sense.”  Common sense tells us to base our laws on factual data and logic.  The data discovered by the Center for Disease Control under President Obama showed that guns are used defensively anywhere “from about 500,000 to more than 3 million” times per year in the US.  In contrast to this, according to left-leaning research institute Everytown, there are an average of thirteen thousand gun homicides every year in America.  Even if we take the statistics most favorable for gun control advocates, guns save at least thirty-eight times more lives than they spare each year.  The passage of gun control legislation and gun-free zone laws only affect one group of people: the law-abiding.  We base our gun control laws on the false premise that the same people willing to break the law to kill people will somehow follow laws telling them where and how to do so.  Like sheep among wolves, we leave the law-abiding citizens defenseless against criminals who will go to any measures to cause harm.        

These facts I’ve already presented clearly establish that gun control is in no way the clear answer to preventing gun violence.  Yet, even if the data didn’t line up, and even if it wasn’t as clear that guns deter more crimes than they foster, that would not change the fact that you and I have an inherent right to defend ourselves and our families.  There is no right more precious and fundamental than the right to life, and the best protection against a bad guy with a gun who threatens the lives of others is a good guy with an equally powerful gun in his hand.  Guns serve as great equalizers.  One’s size, strength, and weight are no longer of importance when armed with a firearm.  How is a frail elderly man able to fend off a strong young burglar?  With a gun.  How is a young woman able to fend off a violent male rapist? With a gun.  How is a citizenry able to fend off a tyrannical government?  You guessed it: with guns.

Look no further than the twentieth century for why we need the right to bear arms.  Too many times we have seen governments claim to be the only necessary protector of the people and take away their guns, only to then turn back around and use their monopoly of force against the people in horrible ways.  In fact, gun control is nearly always the first measure governments enact before they begin to strip the citizenry of its natural rights.  It’s why over 100 million people were killed under tyrannical communist regimes in the twentieth century, and it’s why six million Jews were exterminated under Hitler.

Despite all of this, it is the gun-control-supporting Democrats who compare gun advocates to Nazis.  It is the gun-control-supporting Democrats who compare Second Amendment supporters to terrorists.  It is the gun-control-supporting Democrats who compare gun owning Republicans to segregationists.  In a recent panel about a new Disney movie, Oprah compared the gun control movement to the Civil Rights movement.  She is right; there are extraordinary connections between gun rights and racial issues throughout American history.  However, gun control advocates of yesteryear were not on the side she would have expected.  The first US gun control measure in 1640 was not enacted to stop school shootings. Rather, it was a Virginia law that prohibited blacks from owning guns.  Until the mid-twentieth century, gun control in the US was used almost exclusively to disarm African-Americans and other minorities.  The right to keep and bear arms was actually a fundamental force behind the Dred Scott decision; the Chief Justice of the case said that acknowledging the citizenship of blacks “would give them the full liberty to keep and carry arms wherever they went,” and thus the court ruled that blacks were not citizens.  After the Confederates surrendered in 1865, one of the very first things the southerners did was round up all the guns from freed blacks.  As Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire said, “gun control has been the single most important tool of white supremacists for centuries.” 

What was the NRA doing then?  The organization was founded in 1871 by Union soldiers who fought to free the slaves. As blacks continued to be disarmed for the next century by the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist southerners, the NRA was fighting to ensure that the right to keep and bear arms did not exclude African-Americans.  The NRA was possibly the most important organization in the fight for civil rights, as the Second Amendment is the only protection from infringement upon all other rights.  As Chief Organizer of the NAACP’s Jackson Movement in the 1960s, John Salter, said, “no one knows what kind of massive racist retaliation would have been directed against grassroots black people had the black community not had a healthy measure of firearms in it.”

Now, it is important to remind you that it was not the Republican Party that actively attempted to strip black Americans of their right to bear arms.  It was not the Republican Party that fought for the “right” to own slaves.  It was not the Republican Party that enacted the Jim Crow laws.  Contrary to popular belief, it was not even the Republican Party that voted in a larger number against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  No; that was all the Democrats.  Fortunately, these are no longer principles that the Democratic Party subscribes to, but as Delegate and 2018 Senate candidate, Nicholas J. Freitas said in a recent speech on the Virginia House floor, “[we] would really appreciate it if every time you want to make a powerful point, you don’t project the sins, the atrocities, and the injustices [of the Democratic Party] onto us.” 

Support for the Second Amendment is not only on the right side of the political spectrum, but it is also on the right side of history.   If we really want an open discussion about guns in America, the Democrats and the media better start giving us the respect that we deserve.  But until then, Molon Labe. 

State of the Union Bolstered by Tax Reform

Continuing the constitutional duty of informing Congress of the state of the union, President Trump demonstrated that his first year in office was a resounding success. From his inauguration on January 20, 2017, President Trump has accomplished policies on every conservative’ wish list. According to Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank located in Washington D.C., the Trump presidency has accomplished a greater percentage of conservative policies than Ronald Reagan did in 1981. The administration’s policies of cutting costly regulations, nominating conservative jurists to lifelong court tenures, increasing military spending, and enacting a foreign policy aimed at asserting the will of America and its allies have been immensely successful. Since its passage in late December, the Republican tax cut has bolstered the national economy, causing economic optimism to skyrocket. 

Contrary to the apocalyptic rhetoric about the tax bill used by Democratic politicians, emails sent by leaders in higher education to students, and media pundits, the tax bill is becoming a source of victory for the Grand Old Party. Back in December, party elder and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that the tax breaks would only help the rich while stating that the only benefits received by the middle class would be “crumbs” compared to the rich. Disgraced former Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz expressed a similar sentiment to that of Leader Pelosi when she said that a thousand dollars does not go very far for people. I think college students and people struggling from paycheck to paycheck would appreciate an extra thousand dollars in their pockets. Initially, the apocalyptic rhetoric of ensuing economic doom expressed by the Democrats like Pelosi and Wasserman Schultz was successful in eliminating popular support for Republicans’ tax law. According to several polls conducted before the law was passed in December, nearly a third of Americans had negative opinions of the law. However, as the Democratic rhetoric subsided and reports of investment by companies were published, Americans slowly began to favor the law. 

Since the Republicans passed tax reform in a partisan fashion, several companies have promised greater investment in their workers, charity, or technological advancements. As of January 14, a hundred and forty companies have given raises to their workers as a result of the tax bill passed in the first year of the Trump administration. Companies like Bank of America, Hostess Brands, and Disney have given benefits to their workers which will economically improve their life through raises and stock options. With corporations across America eagerly helping their workers, the economic condition of many people will continue to improve in 2018. As a result of these companies giving thousand dollar “crumbs” to their workers, the American people have swung their support to the law and the Republican Party in manner unprecedented in the Trump Presidency. Polling indicating American voters’ party preference gave the Democratic Party a double-digit advantage over Republicans. However, in recent weeks the same polling has seen the Democratic advantage slip to just a mid-single digit lead, which represents a strong Republican improvement. The combination of both Republican improvement within polling on the generic ballot and President Trump’s increasing poll numbers should raise some alarm for Democrats. While there are nine months until midterm elections and the Republicans are in defense, the Democrats should recognize that some of the political opponents' policies are popular among segments of the American public. As a result of the Democratic Party’s partisan opposition to the tax law, Americans across the nation recognize the Party which economically advanced their lives. 

During the State of the Union, this message was refined as Americans, sitting in their living rooms across the country, saw the Democratic Party refuse to acknowledge the benefits of the law. Concerning African American employment, the economic policies of the current administration has made a modest increase, which should be celebrated. Admittedly, President Obama decreased African American unemployment more significantly than President Trump, but having African American unemployment at an all-time low should have elicited bipartisan cheers. However, it was recognizable that only the Republican half of the chamber applauded while the Democratic Party, along with the Congressional Black Caucus, simply sat there. Throughout his speech, President Trump called for and articulated policies which should have evoked bipartisan support and Congressional unity, but widespread opposition came from the Democratic half of the chamber. The lack of bipartisan intent could be fatal to the Democratic members of Congress. Polling taken after the State of the Union indicated that three-fourths of those polled supported the speech, with a significant percentage believing that Trump acted in a bipartisan manner. 

Admittedly, there are nine months until midterm elections and the political climate will change substantially by then. Furthermore, conservatives and liberals alike argue that the lack of incoming revenue as a result of the lower taxes will lead to an increased national debt. Moreover, critics of deregulation assert that the economic advantages of slashing regulations fail to outweigh the health and environmental benefits. 

Despite the causes for alarm, America’s immediate economic outlook appears prosperous. The tax cuts have emboldened companies to invest in their workers while also allowing those same workers to keep a larger portion of their hard-earned money. As the tax cuts continue to fuel a continually growing economy, Americans of all economic backgrounds will be affected positively. If the economic changes improve the condition of millions of Americans living in poverty, then there should be hope for bipartisan support for the policies that improved the state of the union. 

De-Emotionalizing DACA

If the last six months have indicated anything about the current state of our political discourse, it is that it’s nearly impossible to engage in bipartisan political dialogue without an overload of virtue signaling from members of the left. The left’s dogmatic standard in civic conversation is based upon the notion that feelings trump fact, instinct trumps reason, and emotional impulse trumps logic. This has left a noticeable taint on the way we carry out conversations on public policy. The consequences of such a standard are damaging and destructive. Of course, emotion plays a central role in the human experience and it’s only natural that it has some bearing on one’s political leanings and tendencies, but when it comes to public policy, one must rely on the objective and impartial rather than the infinite and indeterminate. Although emotional bias as a legitimate basis for diplomatic discussion has taken over seemingly every component of our political discourse, it is most prominent in discussions concerning DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Despite the policy’s blatant executive overreach and unconstitutionality, the emotion-infused policy proposals and overly euphemistic language of the DACA debate are ultimately detrimental to the integrity of political discussion on both micro and macro levels in the United States. 

In 2011, one year prior to former president Barack Obama’s reelection, he rightfully acknowledged on his campaign trail the antidemocratic and unconstitutional ramifications that an executive order like DACA would create: “Sometimes when I talk to immigration advocates, they wish I could just bypass Congress and change the law myself. But that’s not how democracy works.” 2011 Obama was correct: surely everyone who has passed a seventh grade social studies class knows that the legislative branch makes laws while the executive branch merely enforces them—to suggest otherwise runs contrary to the sociopolitical and constitutional foundations of the United States government, and the former president was right to clarify the issue in the honest and transparent way he did. 

Come 2012 reelection season, however, in an effort to frame members of the Republican Party as cold-hearted and compassionless (a rather masterful political move), President Obama decided that the integrity of the executive branch ought to take a backseat to his own partisan needs (the Republicans had won the House majority in 2012 as well, so he had to rely upon an executive order to push his agenda through, which stands in stark contrast to the current administration’s lawmaking tactics). His unilateral political maneuvering won, and before anyone knew it, DACA was instituted as a “temporary measure,” and any attempt to question the moral and constitutional foundations of the order was met with snide and pompous remarks from political opponents. What was once “not how democracy works” suddenly became “who we are as a people,” as Obama wrote when President Trump announced plans to end the program in September 2017. What was once considered executive overreach became known as “basic decency,” what was once illegal and unconstitutional became acceptable and encouraged, one who was once called an “illegal immigrant” was suddenly referred to as a “dreamer,” and what was once a desire to uphold the Constitution is now known as “racist” and “xenophobic.” 

Of everything we have learned over the past several months of immigration policy debate, the most striking would be the power of words. Politics and persuasiveness go hand in hand, and it’s no coincidence terms like “dreamer,” “family reunification,” and “undocumented” have been brought to the forefront. The left’s approach to the immigration debate is one of overblown euphemisms and emotionally persuasive language—and to their credit—it has worked quite well. Even the rather partisan Holy Cross administration has given in to such emotionally permeated language (which in and of itself speaks volumes about the school’s political priorities given that the administration rarely, if ever, focuses its attention to critical Catholic issues like abortion and the rise of the anti-Catholic cultural influences, while it does not hesitate to comment on immigration and refugee concerns), with members of the administration saying on multiple occasions that they are “troubled” by what was initially a temporary instance of executive exploitation being repealed. 

Surely, it is difficult to blame these so-called “dreamers” (illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children) for the wrongdoings of their parents, and even the most far-right politicians and pundits don’t have any real desire to deport hundreds of thousands of innocent and hardworking migrants for something that was no fault of their own. Unfortunately, though, that’s not the point. No matter how much we may sympathize for these individuals, facts are facts: the executive order allowing them to remain in the United States is glaringly undemocratic. Compassion does not hold a candle to constitutionalism, regardless of any political or emotional stakes. 

In more recent weeks, President Trump has held several bipartisan meetings on the future of DACA, and he has made it clear on multiple occasions – most notably in his first State of the Union address—that he is willing to compromise with Democrats on DACA and other pressing immigration issues so that both parties are satisfied. More specifically, the President has proposed his “four pillars” plan that would provide a pathway to citizenship for approximately 1.8 million “dreamers,” $25 billion for border security measures including the construction of a wall, an end to chain migration, and an end to the Diversity Visa Lottery Program. Of course, this proposed plan is quite generous and more than reasonable despite its neglect for the Obama administration’s unconstitutionality—as President Trump himself indicated, it “covers almost three times more people than the [Obama] administration. Under our plan, those who meet education and work requirements, and show good moral character, will be able to become full citizens of the United States over a 12-year period.” To no surprise, most Democrats are not budging: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi suggested that “the plan is a campaign to make America white again” while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed that Trump was using his plan “as a tool to tear apart our legal immigration system and adopt the wish-list by anti-immigration hardliners." This rationale, of course, is ludicrous. As political pundit Ben Shapiro said, “to suggest that allowing in millions of illegal immigrants and millions more legal immigrants is somehow a reflection of underlying racism is pure demagoguery.” The Democrats are, of course, politically posturing to their far-left base, and their inability to even consider a compromise as generous and balanced as President Trump’s sheds light on where their highest priorities truly lie. 

As unavoidable as emotional influence often is when it comes to major public policy issues and as challenging as it can be to resist such influence, if we truly want a shot at preserving the moral and constitutional integrity of our country, it is time to set emotion aside. Likewise, and more importantly, real debate cannot exist in an environment in which those with opposing viewpoints are shut down as “racist” and “bigoted.” When emotion takes the forefront in our public policy debates, it is easy to resort to name-calling, moral patronization, and virtue signaling, but what good do such antics do for the country? Passion and emotion are important, but they have their time and place, and politics is not one of them. The future of the country depends upon our willingness to sacrifice feelings for fact and sentiment for common sense and the rule of law. That journey starts here and now. 

Treason and the Culture of Deceit

We live in a culture of deceit. Two events this winter have proved that point abundantly. On January 5th, Michael Wolff published Fire and Fury, a gossipy account of the Trump White House. Taken to task for the fact that many of his sources (from a former British Prime Minister, to major Trump allies, to a slew of journalists at the New York Times) explicitly denied quotes attributed to them, Wolff found himself on the back foot. He wouldn’t produce the recordings of their conversations which he (allegedly) possessed. No, the public doesn’t need hard evidence to support contested claims. Instead, Wolff proposed a novel method to prove what was true and what wasn’t: “If it rings true, it is true.” What does that mean, in essence, except for “It’s true if you want it to be true?” Different things will sound true or false to different people. In that case, my biases distinguish what’s true from what isn’t. On a closer investigation, they do more than that; my biases come to constitute the truth. 

On February 5th, President Trump spoke at a manufacturing plant in Ohio. Apparently prickled by insufficient applause at his State of the Union address, he said of the Democrats, “They were like death and un-American. Un-American. Somebody said, ‘Treasonous.’ I mean, yeah, I guess, why not. Can we call that treason? Why not?” Cue media firestorm number three hundred and seventy-nine, even though the President was probably joking. As with a lot of media meltdowns over things Trump says, there’s something here worth being upset about. Nationally elected figures shouldn’t call their political opponents traitors, even in jest. But, as a Holy Cross alumnus over at National Review has pointed out, the left lost the ability to complain about that a long time ago. 

When? Oh, seven years ago, that time Joe Biden said Republicans in Congress and the House “have acted like terrorists” by playing debt-ceiling politics. Or six years ago, when Senate majority leader Harry Reid started speculating that Republicans were deliberately tanking the U.S. economy in order to score political points against Barack Obama. Or three years ago, when Hillary Clinton compared pro-life Republican politicians to “terrorist groups.” Or even three months ago, when Andrew Cuomo accused Republicans who voted for tax reform of violating their oath. “It’s treasonous,” he said. “It’s modern-day Benedict Arnold.” 

All of this puts Trump in his context. For nearly a decade in mainstream politics, and substantially longer in media circles, we’ve been transforming our political opponents into terrorists, traitors, and totalitarian sympathizers. But does that have anything to do with Michael Wolff? Of course it does. Trump and Clinton, Joe Biden and Harry Reid are all enthralled to the Wolff standard for truth. It has nothing to do with whether the accusation can be proven, whether the facts can support it, or indeed whether a conversation actually happened. No, none of those things make a quotation or a story true or false. But they ring true, so Democrats are traitors and pro-lifers are terrorists and the Republicans want to destroy the United States of America. 

But why does it matter? This isn’t a new phenomenon. We can find this sort of casual relativism at the headwaters of Western culture, critiqued in the plays of Sophocles and the dialogues of Plato. While that’s true, there’s an important difference now. We can see it in the standard that Michael Wolff proposed. He didn’t say “It’s true because I said it’s true,” or “It’s true because I can persuade you that it is.” He said, “It’s true because it rings true,” which is to say, “It’s true because you want to believe it.” 

And sadly, whether it’s a treason accusation or an invented quote by Tony Blair, we all too often do believe it. The great and good turned out in hordes to cheer for Fire and Fury back in January. Hillary Clinton even stood on stage at the Golden Globes to read selections from it. Trump’s crowd cheered on those treason accusations with gusto, and we know the far-right wing agreed. A heap of students at this college would gladly lend their voices to the Clinton-Biden siren song of Republican traitors and pro-life terrorists. Our society makes biases primary, and tries to conform reality to it. Truth? What is Truth? 

This rot runs from the roots of the tree to its crown: on campuses, in the news media, in Washington. It has real consequences. For obvious reasons, when truth doesn’t exist, nobody believes anything the other side says, so we make things up and decide they’re true instead. Conservatives will be content to believe that the Democrats want to recreate the Soviet Union, and liberals will think that Republicans have a hankering for Germany circa 1936. There results an alchemy of outrage which transposes minor policy disputes into raging culture wars. And, because we don’t believe the other side will tell the truth, compromise becomes impossible. 

The issue of “fake news” reveals another facet of the problem. The term should diagnose a real problem—the kind of “journalism” produced by Infowars that intentionally misleads people to manipulate their voting preferences. But instead, it has become a synonym for “bad press,” or even just “honest reporting.” CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are “fake news” in a lot of conservative circles. National Review and the Wall Street Journal earn the same title among my liberal friends. The assertion isn’t merely that they’re biased; it’s that any of those five news outlets will make up facts whole cloth in order to score political points. Of course, every media outlet has a slant. But if the NYT and WSJ are “fake news,” what are Breitbart and Buzzfeed? 

Pontificating about how the West is facing a cultural crisis has become a cottage industry of considerable scale. I’m not going to toss my hat in that particular ring. You need perspective to do that, and the perpetual screaming match of a New England campus doesn’t offer it. This hill isn’t high enough to see that far. But the limited view from here shows us a particularly vicious kind of tribalism—fractious groups of like-minded people glommed together against their political opponents. Factions in the Church. Identity groups on the progressive left. The seven kinds of conservative. The unmoving progressive/traditionalist battle line. These reveal a bloodless form of blood feud, in which common good and common decency are trampled to win the ideological campaign. A truthless society makes for a culture at war, and culture wars are tribal wars. 

A lecturer I heard back in September put it best. He argued that our public life has lost the images of the covenant. Although drawing on religious imagery, he was talking about the signal forms of social solidarity, like stable marriages, civil friendships, and personal loyalty. Is that our fundamental problem? I don’t know. But the religious imagery can tell us some -thing. “Covenant” is a biblical word, evoking God’s fidelity to his covenant with Israel. In Exodus, the Hebrew for covenant fidelity is emet. When ancient Jewish scholars translated the Bible into Greek, they rendered emet with a word that also stands for “truth.” Fabricated “truths” betray our social covenant. That’s the treason of the culture of deceit. 

"To Take the Risks of Love": an Interview with R. R. Reno

Dr. Reno is the editor of First Things, America’s largest journal of Religion and public life. He holds a Doctorate in Religious Ethics from Yale University, and was for 20 years a professor of Theology and Ethics at Creighton University.  This interview was conducted on September 21st, in connection with Dr. Reno’s lecture, “A Christian Interpretation of the Age of Trump.”  It has been edited for length.

Claude Hanley: What would be, in your estimation, the place of the university in American life now, and what should its task be?

R.R. Reno: Well, the purpose of the university is to provide a community of learning, it’s a place for the formation of a secular society that is committed to the life of the mind, and then obviously most students go on to professional work.  Most don’t become professors, but the educational experience serves as a leaven in society at large. I think especially on Josef Pieper’s wonderful short book Leisure, The Basis of Culture.  The American idea of the four-year liberal arts degree is of a time in your life when you’re not actually pursuing professional activities, but leaves you with something that’s closer to contemplative. Pieper argued that is actually necessary to have culture.

Now our view about the role of the university in the public square is shaped by the fact that after World War II, with the GI Bill, there was a big upsurge in college enrollments. And for the men that were coming back from World War II, the university became a kind of place where they looked at questions about what kind of society they were going to have. Consequently, we have this false view that the university is this kind of crucial place where the future of our society is debated and formed and shaped. I think that that’s distorted. It’s obviously true for some of our universities, but we overemphasize that because of the 50’s and 60’s, when we saw this sort of new, emerging middle class, different people from ethnic backgrounds being integrated into America’s leadership. Universities were the focal point for that process.  So universities would ideally be more nourishing, and less political than they are today.

CH: How do the humanities disciplines contribute to that mission?

RRR: Well, I’d put it more broadly, as the liberal arts. I mean, studying astrophysics doesn’t serve any practical purpose. It’s not clear studying evolutionary biology serves a practical purpose either.  Fossil records, all these sorts of things, contribute to our knowledge of the natural world, which we can perhaps use technically at some point.  Mathematicians also, they’re famous for coming up with things that have no relevance whatsoever, and then a hundred years later, people discover practical uses for their mathematical models. But it’s the wonder and joy of knowing that precedes their practical usefulness. And that’s a liberal education; it’s for its own sake, and not for some other end. That strikes me as what is so important about a liberal arts education.  We are made to know, and it is an intrinsic good to know truth.  Not every project can offer that; the liberal arts humanize us, and they make use more fully human.

CH: How does that humanization translate to society and to politics?

RRR: Whether it’s Shakespeare or astrophysics, you go out into the public square, if you’re liberally educated, and you’re less likely to be swept up in a thousand ideologies of the time. It gives you a kind of independence of mind.  I think it’s important, in any society, that you have people who have this independence of mind. John Henry Newman referred to education leads to an enlargement of mind.  You become more capacious…capable of grappling with a full range of experience. I don’t want to privilege the humanities in this regard.  I started out in physics as an undergraduate. My sister’s a physics professor at the University of Iowa. You have to specialize, you can’t know everything. It’s not like you’re swallowing all this food until your gut gets full and distended. It’s not just the amount of facts.  Instead, it’s developing a kind of mental plasticity, and flexibility, and a capacity that prompts you to think about things in such ways.

CH: It’s said that there is a lack of intellectual diversity, of that independence of thought in universities today. The same people are promoting the same kinds of ideas that are getting preeminence. Do you think that’s a valid criticism of the American university?

RRR: I don’t like to use this new term diversity here. We should have diversity of some things and we should have unity of other things. So, I think it’s not a cure-all. But there is a problem, it seems, where there isn’t independence of thought, there’s too much group think. And I don’t think it’s a matter of, as people often say, “Well, it’s because all the professors are liberals.” Now, I went to a small liberal arts college, not unlike Holy Cross.  The professors were ninety percent registered Democrats, they were certainly liberals.  But it didn’t feel like an environment that was closed or limited. To be capacious, to encourage adventure, to have the security as a faculty member to accept the fact that sometimes your students will go in a different direction -- These are qualities that I think that one hopes for in a faculty, but I see less of them today. It could be that the problem is not lack of diversity, but a kind of careerism on the part of faculty.  Or perhaps people want a cheap emotional payoff of feeling that their work has a great moral and political significance.  As a result, there’s a kind of works-righteousness around our salvation, at least our secular salvation by making sure that our  classes teach the right political lessons. I think we need to dig more deeply.  It’s not just a lack of diversity. That’s a symptom, not a cause.

CH: So, to continue this theme, one of the main challenges now is academic freedom and freedom of speech. I think of the events at Middlebury last year, and similar controversies.  What do you think at least some of the underlying issues are that cause this sort of tension?

RRR: Our society is very divided. Grownups don’t tell young people what life is for, and they’ve rebelled.   Everything is open, you choose your own values, et cetera et cetera.  I think it’s quite natural that students want to find some consensus and stability. The radical schools that want to shut down who they perceive to be bad people, I think are misguided.  But that may not be an altogether unhealthy desire, that they need right and wrong. So, I think we’re seeing these perverse dysfunctions in education because we the grownups have created that need.  It’s being filled by some sort of ideological, imposed consensus, rather than a real, genuine consensus.

CH: And this critique reaches back to the same idea, that we’ve lost the ability to pursue the human good?

RRR: Right. If we’re concerned about academic freedom and free speech (and we should be concerned about these things), we need to be clear about what the education at the institution is for, and why shouting people down harms the proper end of education. We’re a community of inquiry.  In a community of inquiry, if people can’t speak, in that sense there’s an imposed consensus, and there’s not a lot of inquiry any more. I’ve talked with young people, and they’ve told me that they find more and more, that it’s just wise not to say what’s on their minds. It’s too dangerous. Well, how can you make progress in the pursuit of truth if you can’t articulate what you think the truth is, and hear what others have to say in response? The problem with shutting down speakers is that it impedes us in achieving the end of education, which is to refine our ideas and make them more in accord with the truth. So I don’t think that academic freedom is an end in itself, it needs to be the means to the end -- having a healthy medium of inquiry. I don’t think that Holy Cross should invite a creationist to give lectures. It just doesn’t help advance the pursuit of truth.  You and I can come up with examples where “no, that’s not going to help.” The problem again is that then the sort of ideological frame of mind comes into play.  It’s a crazy view that the political opinions of half the country are taboo. How could any reasonable person think that? It’s irrational.

CH:  So we have to balance academic freedom with a duty to truth.  What duty to truth does a Catholic university in particular have, and how should it be balanced against academic freedom?

RRR: I think that a Catholic university has an absolute duty to teach what the Catholic Church teaches. A Catholic university that does not teach that which the Church teaches is not betraying its Catholic identity; it’s betraying its identity as a University. The purpose of a university is to encourage people to pursue the truth, and also to transmit the truth. And we believe, as Catholics, that what the Church teaches truths that are indispensable, not just for our salvation but also for our fuller understanding of the human condition. There’s a question of priorities. It’s not the job of the Catholic university to represent all possible views of what it means to be human; It is absolutely the responsibility to propose to students, and to the world, that the Church teaches what it means to be human. That entails defining priorities: hiring priorities, what kind of courses to acquire, etc. It’s not a violation of academic freedom to say that Catholic theology is required, but a Jewish Studies professor’s course is not required. It’s not a violation of academic freedom; that’s the institution establishing its priorities.   Nor is it a violation of academic freedom for the university not to invite speakers who hold positions contrary to what the Church teaches. Now there could be student groups or others who want to invite those people.  Then the university has to make a judgement about whether it harms the mission of the university, which is to transmit and encourage students to pursue the truth. In many cases, Catholic universities have confidence in their own students. If it is doing what it should be, which is to ensure Catholic teaching is clearly taught, it can tolerate dissent quite easily.

CH: How does that concern influence the other disciplines, outside of philosophy and theology?

RRR: It applies across the board. For instance, one problem we have is that in the sciences, there’s often a materialistic metaphysics that’s operating very close to the surface: that our brains are our minds, and we’re just neurons firing. A university should guard against teaching this. It’s scientism, it’s not science. The same goes for economics.  Economics is a powerful and important discipline that teaches us to think in a critical way about markets.  It models the human behavior in terms of maximizing authority, where that’s understood as maximizing one’s material interest. That’s fine for modelling, but it easily can lead to a generalization that humans are nothing more than utility maximizing achievements. That’s not true for the human person either. So in many different disciplines, there needs to be reflection on how we as an institution can present our view of the human person. Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech dealt with that.

CH: Are there any particular reforms you think should be made, or is it more a change in attitude toward the project of the University?

RRR: I think Catholic universities really need to get a grip on the hiring of faculty. We’ve spent too many decades now trying to imitate secular higher education. We need to return to the wisdom of our own tradition, and recognize that the metaphysical poverty of our time is quite acute, and we need to focus on hiring people, not the people who all agree, that’s absurd, you’re never going to find that [laughs], that’s the whole idea. You can’t even find Thomists who agree. It’s not a question of agreement, it’s a question of whether or not there are faculty members who believe that there’s truth, and that truth transcends a particular discipline. In Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech, he looked back with nostalgia on his years at Regensburg, when faculty members often would gather together and try to talk about the big questions, transcending the specialized knowledge that they had in philosophy or theology or science or literature or history. One has to grope towards these larger theories together, and we have to hire professors who are committed to try to do that together. That’s what it means to be liberal, not having a collection of specialists.  And I think because the Catholic Church opposes a compromise of truth about the human person, both as to our manifold destiny in God, as well as to our natural duties and responsibilities, and because it presents a comprehensive vision of the human person, we in particular have an inheritance that allows us to recognize the poverty of our present age. We should address that poverty by building institutions that pursue a larger vision.

FR: But that would entail first recognizing our inheritance.

RRR: Right.  Catholic universities have a natural excellence of the life of the mind. Most of what goes on at Catholic universities functions in the area of the natural virtues -- intellectual integrity, intellectual honesty and intellectual zeal. This is encouraged and elevated by the supernatural virtue of faith, but these are natural virtues. It’s possible that we can draw upon educational models and experiences at secular universities. It’s not that we only have to hire people with degrees from Catholic universities, etc., etc. But it does require a kind of recognition that higher education in the United States is not in good shape. We see this from this dysfunctional campus environments. And because it’s not in good shape, consequently we should not just be imitating what other, elite, universities are doing.  We should be returning to our sources and asking ourselves, “What is it that the Catholic tradition proposes as a vision of the Truth?”

FR: In conclusion, what piece of advice would you give undergraduates about how to take their four years of undergraduate education?

RRR: Don’t worry about what comes next. Bill Deresiewicz, who wrote a book called Excellent Sheep about today’s college students, said that there are two religions that dominate higher education today. One is a religion of political correctness, and the other is a religion of success. Both of those religions actually feed on each other, because political correctness is a way of baptizing a person to success. So I would say that success is a far more powerful god than political correctness. So beware of that idol. Study the things you love.  One of the great poverties of our age is that it really is a loveless age. People don’t feel that they even have permission to take the risks of love. If you love physics, study physics. If you love theology, study theology. Don’t worry about what you’re going to do for a living right now.  In the United States, we have society set up for people to do well. We don’t have a society set up for people to cultivate the life of the mind. Cultivate it now, and it will carry you through many of life’s difficulties and setbacks, which are inevitable even if you are successful.

No "Right to Healthcare"

Our current healthcare system is, to put it bluntly, unsustainable. The cost of treatment inflates yearly to exorbitant new levels, and the system as a whole is laden with inefficiencies. Those who lack adequate health insurance rarely receive preventative or proactive care and often times preventable illnesses become costly emergency-room cases. In an effort to address this crisis, the American left has united behind a common rallying cry: “Healthcare is a fundamental human right!” 

The aim of such rhetoric is admirable. Confronted with the stomach churning reality of the large number of Americans who die each year because they could not afford decent medical treatment in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, those who make such proclamations are responding to a very real injustice. Nonetheless, this maxim is a caustic one. In claiming that access to healthcare is a fundamental human right they both distort the concept of human rights and imply a perverse set of assumptions about what it means to live in a society. 

Fundamental human rights exist in order to preserve the dignity of the individual. Rights such as the right to free speech and the right to practice one’s religion ensure that individuals within a society are free to act according to their conscience and beliefs, so long as they do not impede others from doing so. The establishment of basic rights preserves the dignity of the individual by protecting him from unjust coercion from his fellow citizens and the government itself. Under this schema of human rights, the claim that the right to healthcare should be included quickly breaks down. Medical treatment, or the resources used to procure it, inevitably come from another human being. The assertion that one has a right to healthcare thus implies that one has a right to the property or resources of another human being, and ultimately, that one has a right to coerce another to serve his own ends. At this point, a “right” no longer serves to protect the dignity and integrity of the individual within a society; it involves an overreach into the integrity of another. 

At this point the argument in favor of the government providing a basic healthcare safety net to its citizens appears to collapse. And indeed, under the terms of the prevailing mode of moral discourse in our society it does. But that is because the discourse is shaped by an unnatural, pernicious notion: that as a society our obligations to our fellow human beings extend only as far as the bare portion we owe to them as an absolute right. Such a conception of what it means to live in a society is one-dimensional and cold. It ignores the cooperative aspects of human nature that compelled us to sacrifice our natural total freedom in order to enter into a society in the first place. It labors under the delusion that the height of human political good in a society is a sort of cage match- a contest of all against all monitored by an indifferent referee whose only purpose is to cut things short when certain lines are crossed. 

When the obligations we have to each other by virtue of our common human nature are cast only in legalistic, bare bones terms -- of force and rights, of what I can and cannot be made to do, of what I owe and am owed -- we lose the freedom required to regard others as human beings deserving of our compassion. We transform them, instead, into entries in an accountant’s ledger, against which we must balance the books. Those who advocate for a government that operates on such terms advocate for an unnatural government, a government that exists not to support a society but a pack of individuals in constant competition. Even our founding fathers recognized this when they allowed the federal government to collect taxes for the “general welfare.”

I object to the argument that healthcare is a basic human right, not because I disagree with the need for government sponsored healthcare, but on two other grounds. Firstly, that it dilutes the precious concept of what exactly a human right is and our reasons for protecting them. Secondly, because it operates under and thus affirms the assumption that our debts to one another extend no further than political rights; that our society can do no better than hostile and reluctant concessions. I believe more of human nature.

On the Malice of the NRA

In the wake of shooting in San Bernardino, California in December 2015, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement strongly condemning gun violence in the United States. It called on Catholics to urge their congressmen to enact legislation such as universal background checks, limitations on high capacity magazines, and improved access to mental health care. 

That did not happen, despite almost overwhelming public support for universal background checks (86% according to Gallup in 2015). To this day, federal firearm legislation remains stagnant. If this makes anything at all painfully evident, it is that Congress would prefer to take money from the NRA than ensure domestic tranquility. 

And so, it happened again. On October 1, 2017, a gunman fired into a large crowd of people attending a music festival and killed 58 of them, wounding over 500 others. He is reported to have fired about one-thousand rounds, and used a modification known as a “bump stock” to allow his semi-automatic rifle to fire at a rate nearly equal to that of an automatic. Why, as a society, are we allowing individuals to buy high-capacity magazines and modifications to essentially create military grade hardware? You don’t need a machine-gun with state of the art optics and a 100-round drum magazine to kill a small deer. 

The United States stands alone amongst highly developed countries when it comes to the savage frequency of mass shootings. Two researchers, Jacyln Schildkraut and H. Jaymi Elsass, cataloged data from mass shootings in eleven countries (Australia, Canada, China, England, Finland, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States) from 2000 to 2014. The US had more shooting deaths and incidents than the other ten countries combined. The common counter to this statistic would be the that, with the exception of China, the US is much more populated than the rest of the countries surveyed. However, when adjusted for population, only Switzerland, Norway, and Finland outrank the United States. 

Writers at PolitiFact note that data here is slightly skewed, as all three of these countries have very small populations coupled with only one or two mass casualty events. The US, nonetheless, appears to have a higher than ordinary number amount of shooting incidents than other countries of a similar level of development. This is a problem. A problem that lawmakers have continually failed to address. Neither Newtown, nor Aurora, nor Orlando, nor Las Vegas, nor Sutherland Springs have resulted in any substantial, long-term gun control legislation. 

Nor are mass shootings the only manifestation of America’s gun problem. As of September, The Washington Post reports that forty-three people were shot by toddlers in 2017. Meaning, on average, an American is shot by a toddler every week. It is absolutely ridiculous that children are being put in positions where they could cause serious harm to themselves or others, and US lawmakers refuse to do anything out of fear of the NRA. How many massacres, how many cases of children accidentally shooting each other, how many school shootings, before congress realizes that there is a gun problem in this country? How many more dead before something is actually done to address this problem?

Immediate legislative action is needed to prevent further deaths. I am not naïve. I do not think that stricter gun control will completely stop mass shootings, or gun related deaths. However, if even one life is saved, then we’re on the right track. 

But where to start? Universal Federal background checks might be a good place to begin. They would impede and, hopefully, prevent those with a history of crime or mental illness from purchasing a firearm, but would not prevent law-abiding citizens from purchasing firearms. Prohibiting high capacity magazines, and modifications that alter the rate of fire of semiautomatic weapons should be next. Then, of course, in response to these rather modest measures, a cacophonous chorus screams out “the 2nd Amendment!” Mind you, I do not wish to scorn the US Constitution, but it’s a bit odd that some in this country are using a document meant to shield US citizens in a bid to harm them. Do we imagine even for a moment that background checks could be unconstitutional? Or that any regulation whatsoever on magazine sizes is beyond the constitutional remit of federal power? I’m no legal scholar, and it may very well be against the law to enact the measures which I have proposed. But constitutionality is not the point of this piece; moral obligation is. The Constitution does not establish moral obligation; it establishes legality or illegality. If the 2nd Amendment does, indeed, guarantee unrestricted access to firearms, and any common-sense gun legislation would be unconstitutional, then the Constitution ought to be amended. For I consider laws which protect the lives of the citizenry to be the mark of a good state. If our founding document makes it impossible to prevent some of the 34,000 firearm fatalities this country sees each year, it is our duty and responsibility to modify them. Anything else is beyond immoral.

The Second's Opinion

Throughout the fall, the sight of mass shootings and similar gun based atrocities occurred so frequently that some American citizens and their politicians called for limitations as to prevent such horrors from happening again. In the months that followed the deadliest mass shooting in American history in Las Vegas in early October, victims of gun violence have been found at a Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas and a California elementary school. Almost immediately after such acts, Democratic politicians called for a vigorous expansion of gun laws while politicians on the right refuse to act because they, like the base, believe that they possess an inherent right to carry firearms.

Using the Second Amendment as the explicit reminder of Americans’ intrinsic right to use firearms, these advocates challenge any legislation that their gun control opponents propose. Noting that the first gun control laws proposed by the American Founders in the early republic mandated that most household be armed, believers in the Second Amendment argue that its purpose is to allow for the defense of the pubic liberties, in case the government acts tyrannically and violates these fundamental rights. Granted that America in 2017 is not acting tyrannical, the Second Amendment is not mooted by the cultural bond it has with politically active hunters and firearm aficionados. Although these enthusiasts engage in lawful activities and vote accordingly, they are often vilified by gun control advocates for “assisting” in mass shootings. Look no further than the statement of the disgraced Harvey Weinstein, who proposed pursuing actions that would eliminate the NRA’s influence from the political process after the Las Vegas shooting. 

Despite the outcry condemning Weinstein’s statement, a significant portion of the country still cannot fathom the close bond that their fellow citizens have towards guns and continue to remain isolated from people who “cling to their guns.” Second Amendment skeptics, like like Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), have called for the banning of AR-15, a specific type of semiautomatic assault rifle. A Democratic colleague of the Senator Murphy, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), proposed a bill banning AR-15s in the U.S. Senate days after the deadly shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas. 

While the proposals of these Democratic Senators and other gun control advocates are well intentioned, they are severely misguided because the man who brought the shooting to an end in Texas used an AR-15. If there had been legislation banning the legal acquirement of an AR-15 that man, Stephen Willeford, could not have acted and the shooting could have lasted longer with even deadlier implications. Unlike the densely populated communities with police stations nearby where most gun control advocates reside, the communities reliant on their firearms for self-defense live significant distances away from law enforcement officials. Furthermore, Secret Service officers were able to prevent further injuries to Congressional leaders or House Majority Whip Steve Scalise because they were able to respond rapidly to the shooter at the Congressional Baseball practice. The presence of a deterrent firearm is the best precaution against mass shooting because it allows the rapid response that saves lives.

In the aftermath of the Las Vegas and Sutherland Spring shootings, gun control proponents frequently asserted that firearm laws needed be strengthened because it would then prevent future atrocities from ever occurring again. Such proposals are absurd; they fail to take into account the fact that the people who intend to break the law by murdering people will have no qualms about violating laws in order to obtain guns illegally. 

But what of background checks? They are a current requirement for people purchasing guns. However, due an error in the processing stage, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System failed to recognize that the shooter in Sutherland Spring was courtmartialed for domestic abuse because the Air Force failed to submit the records. The extension of background checks usually gains support across the partisan lines so policy proposals aimed at eliminating the inefficiencies between the agencies so that authentic checks could occur would most likely gain bipartisan support. Until recently, Congress has discussed bipartisan support for the elimination of bump stocks.

While Democrats and gun control advocates have been hesitant to respect the wishes of gun owners, they should listen to their voters because their options are going to be a matter of major political significance in eleven months. In a public opinion poll taken after the Sutherland Springs Shooting, Gallup found that only 36% of those surveyed would support legislation banning AR-15. With Democratic Senators representing deep-red states with a heritage of hunting, it would be politically imperative for Senators Tester, McCaskill, Heitkamp, Donnelly, and Manchin to oppose any regulation infringing upon the rights of gun owners. If they refuse, it is safe to assume that a politically coherent class of gun owners would be motivated by the NRA to select a Republican who shares their values. Hopefully these Senators will listen to their constituents, the American people, and the not the more radical members of their own party.