THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW

"I'm in charge here," Secretary of State Alexander Haig famously rushed to say when President Reagan was temporarily laid low by John Hinckley's bullet. He was criticized and made the butt of jokes for this overly dramatic leap into the pilot's seat, but in his defense, at least he had some grounds for his claim (Vice President George Bush being temporarily absent).

Nowadays "I'm in charge" is explicitly or implicitly everyone's understanding of the way their lives should be run. The French revolutionaries cast down the statues of kings, prelates, and saints, overturning the traditional hierarchies and the secular and religious bases for authority. In their place, however, they at least raised a statue to Reason, thus maintaining in theory an appeal to a neutral outside authority.

We today, however, are not publicly constrained by a universally binding understanding of the claims of reason either. Intellectual movements in the 19th century—the fallout of evolutionary theory, Freudian psychology, even Marxism with its thesis-antithesis-synthesis cycles of change—all cast down Reason's statue by presenting its workings as subjective, changeable, ever developing or moved by lurking desires for survival, sex, pleasure, and the like.

"I'm in charge" may now be a nearly universal claim, but it is not a proud boast so much as a rudimentary default system. It is not that we are thereby raising ourselves to heady heights of wisdom and competence; we are simply occupying a vacuum left by the exodus of other acknowledged authorities. We are like the night watchman or the office maid working in deserted quarters of a large lighted office building long after all "essential personnel" have left. If the phone rings, we may answer it, and we may even have to make a decision if forced to it (though more likely we will simply let nature takes its course), but we cannot defend our actions based on special qualifications or anything other than serendipidity—we happened to be there at the time.

Thus, "I'm in charge" for feminists means I have a right to choose—whatever. Sexual orientation and activity, giving birth or aborting, etc. The great thing about the dethroning of Reason is that the feminist does not have to give convincing reasons—does not have to convince others that she has made the right choices. If there is no higher authority to which appeal can be made, there is neither the possibility nor the duty to convince another that you are doing the right thing. Because there is no right thing, in an absolute sense. There is only the thing you have chosen, for whatever "reasons" or emotions or biological impulses, to do.

Thus, to be "personally opposed" to something is effectively an oxymoron. There is really no other way than "personally" to be opposed to something. You can recognize that you would not do something. You can even recognize that you don't like it when other people do that very same thing. But unless that unlikable thing is being done to you, you cannot universalize your distaste or aversion by demanding that someone else stop doing it.

Of course, living (and "thinking") like this can be pretty isolating, even lonely. It gets a bit tiresome not ever being sure you are really connecting with someone else, not sharing special claims, duties, common acknowledgment of a common authority or ethos. You can talk to or associate with others who have arrived at the same opinion or choice as you. You can recite your reasons, in a vestigial ritual exercise that now owes more to a desire for self-expression than to a belief that others really should or could be convinced by the universal claims of reason. But that's a bit like reciting your name, rank, and serial number—things that belong to you but which won't necessarily give the hearer any useful information.

One woman writes an article in a women's magazine on the joys of pursuing an education and a career and how an unlucky pregnancy almost threatened her whole future, until she chose to have an abortion. Another woman can write in the same magazine—in the same issue, perhaps—of the joys and unlooked-for fulfillment of watching her children grow. Perhaps she will admit to cutting back on her career for now so as not to miss any delightful stages of development in her young ones. Or she will present her own childcare or educational decisions and what motivated her choices. She will give "reasons" but not expect them to be binding on another—not attempt an appeal to Reason. She will be fashioning not an argument but an autobiography.

Most popular non-fictional nonscientific writing nowadays consists not so much of argument as autobiography. Self-help books are like this, with a coating of nutritional or economic or psychological detail. They are primarily self-expression, and even when the object is to give someone else the benefit of one's learning or experience, they are designed to do so gently, obliquely, non-authoritatively. One Man's (or Woman's) Opinion might be the title for most of them—opinion understood not as a carefully thought out position after looking at the evidence in a rational way, but as a response to a highly individualized situation by a subjective psyche that hopes, but can't be sure, her thoughts and feelings may resonate with others.

People are therefore almost desperate for self-expression because they doubt whether there is anything else to express. Is there Truth? Is there Beauty? Is there Goodness? Or is there only my truth, my aesthetic sensibility, my altruistic impulses or sense of gratification from helping others?

Things are not nearly that bad, you may say, and with some truth. Even apart from traditionally religious people, parents tell their children every day what is good and bad, and teachers tell their students, and Ralph Nader and the vegans and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and Greenpeace and all sorts of highly opinionated people lay down the law, literally or metaphorically, to other people every day. Newspaper readers and TV news viewers react with horror to stories of evils such as child abuse, murder, and genocide. They go well out of their way to help the poor and disadvantaged, needy neighbors and ailing family members. What are these responses and reactions if not a testimony to the survival and drawing power of real truth and goodness?

One way to understand the difference is to put it this way: If in some sense people are now worse than they think they are, in another sense they are better than they think they are. That is, they are worse than they think they are because they routinely act in all kinds of ways that any pre-modern could tell you were wrong—cheating, lying, fornicating, committing adultery, acting immodestly and unchastely, patronizing pornographers and the like. It is not that people in earlier societies never did these things or things as bad (though to match current volume, you might have to go back to Sodom and Gomorrah). After all, many pre-Christian societies routinely practiced infanticide. Yet even these societies would condemn all the above-named practices, while a great many moderns condone or fail to condemn many instances of all these things on subjective, special-cases grounds of personal happiness or fulfillment, or on nose-counting grounds of "everyone does it."

On the other hand, to the extent that people still viscerally recoil from certain kinds of acts and from people who perform those acts—pedophiles, torturers, child murderers, to name some non-controversial examples—they are in some sense better than they know, because they are responding to an appeal to conscience that is not subjective, and would not recognize exceptions or special pleading. Nothing could make the child-torturer's choice right—no grievances, no claims of happiness or pleasure or fulfillment through that activity, no W.C. Fields-like complaints against the child. But why? How well can we articulate the reasons now in a way that will not also invalidate many of the choices we would defend our right to continue making? Do we use the argument that a child-torturer is harming another? But what then of other choices that harm others, such as abortion, divorce, adultery, to name a few? How much harm is too much harm? How much pain is too much pain? Do we know? Can we construct a convincing argument, for ourselves as well as others? Or are we left floundering with our emotional reactions, which we hope and expect on these extreme issues to coincide with the emotional reactions of others?

Contemporary people seeking ways of dismissing or rejecting other people's choices without making moral judgments often seize on the diagnosing of illness. People who do bad—really bad—things are sick. This is a self-defining or circular argument, but it is better than nothing when we are confronted with cases of people who murder their own parents or children or make human torches of members of another race, or gang-rape a mentally retarded girl. It is our severest condemnation of another's behavior to call it "sick." Where earlier generations would have reached for the term evil, we substitute "sick" with similar intonations of horror and loathing.

New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's recent denunciation of an exhibit at the Brooklyn Art Museum as "sick art" is a perfect example. The traveling exhibit by contemporary "artists" included controversial items such as the bust of a man made from frozen blood, and a depiction of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung. Earlier eras would use words like blasphemy, sacrilege, desecration, but not sickness. They would assume that the artist "said what he meant and meant what he said," and let his own acts condemn him. It would not occur to them to include this under the category of mental illness, though they knew the meaning of insanity.

But this September, a restrained New York Times subhead on the story read: "No More Talks on Art That Some Find Offensive." The chairman of the Brooklyn Museum of Art's board, in announcing litigation contesting New York City's right to withdraw funding from the museum, said "It is being undertaken in the interests of all public institutions—museums, universities and libraries—that are dedicated to the free exchange of ideas and information, and in the interests of the people they serve."

Did the museum board chairman's diagnosis of the offensive works differ from the mayor's? Did he conclude that neither the artists nor their works were "sick," though Mayor Giuliani might well be? We do not know, since he sidestepped the question of the artists and the character of their work, instead framing his argument in the familiar extreme interpretation of the First Amendment right to self-expression that we moderns are so comfortable with. No need to make difficult distinctions. No need to prove or disprove ideas, arguments, attitudes, or motivations. If it issued from someone in some way, shape, or form, and that someone or his agents wish to publicize it, it may be defended on First Amendment self-expression grounds.

Unless it happens to gore a modern sacred cow. Homophobic or racist "art," for example, would not be likely to earn the self-expression defense from the Brooklyn Museum's board. That kind of art would pose a danger to tolerant attitudes; in fact, it would incite intolerance of recognized victim groups. It might even be labeled "sick." Charges of inconsistency would not greatly trouble a museum board nixing this kind of exhibit, since argument does not nowadays prove so much as it wages war. It serves more as tool or weapon than justification. The museum, for example, does not quote from Milton's defense of free speech in his Areopagitica, but cuts to the chase with a lawsuit and a legal defense. It asserts a seemingly unqualified right to self-expression, but does not bother to trace the reasons why it is necessary for a free society to have such a right. The arguments, such as they are, offered by the board chairman in the Times story have to do with the freedom of public institutions to make whatever decisions they want without messy interference from government entities. But they don't explain why such unbounded freedom is necessary, or useful, or desirable, and they don't touch on possible exceptions. They are assertions, not efforts to convince or make distinctions.

An interesting event on the very crossroads of the shift from "evil" to "ill" was Ronald Reagan's labeling of the Soviets as an "Evil Empire." That was probably already an anachronistic use of the adjective in many circles, but Reagan carried it off—despite shocked criticism from the detente school— partly through the magic of Reagan, himself a warmly accepted anachronism for most Americans, and partly through the Spielbergesque echo of Star Wars in the term.

Bacteria, viruses, microbes of all sorts—these things, like other material manifestations, are still allowed objective existence, verifiable by any handy microscope. Unlike the state of the soul or the convolutions of speculative thought, illnesses are hard to explain away when a) modern science has taken such pains to document their origins and b) they may threaten our health or even our lives but not our authority to make choices. So successful has modern medicine been in explaining and treating and alleviating many modern ills, that illness-metaphors have become for us as common and powerful as mechanical metaphors were for the Deists at the dawn of the Machine Age. Hence computer viruses.

Thus in our uncertainty about how to universalize criticism of certain behavior, we reach whenever possible for clinical, medical, and psychological labels. Addiction (alcohol and drug abuse) is an illness that harms the body and shortens lives. An earlier generation called it a behavior, and identified its chief evil effect as the unraveling of self-control, the sapping of moral strength not only to choose but to carry out moral choices.

In my home state of Maryland, it is now a crime not only to sell cigarettes to minors but for a minor to smoke or have cigarettes in his possession. Of course the intent is to discourage children from developing a physically harmful and sometimes lethal habit. Yet, to extend the legal smoking prohibition along the lines of drug prohibitions ignores the historically understood much greater harm of moral debilitation that follows on addictions to alcohol, cocaine, or heroin. If we were not mesmerized by the idol of the indefinitely expanding lifeline, the distinction would be obvious. Anyone who has known well a smoker/drinker can testify as to which was by far the more deforming and destructive habit.

But this is merely one instance among many, where the chief crimes are crimes against the body. This may be because we are more doubtful than our forebears about immortality, or because we doubt the idea of eternal punishment for wrongdoing. Illness and death are much easier for us to objectify, and hence unite around, than morally objectionable behavior. An earlier generation, which took for granted laws outlawing abortion and pornography and homosexual behavior, also registered lower rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and single parenthood. It also lacked seat belts and bike helmets, and paved its playgrounds with concrete. More stringent safety codes can save lives and prevent accidents, but as T.S. Eliot wrote in Murder in the Cathedral, "the worst treason/[Is] To do the right deed for the wrong reason." There are things worth dying for. A paved playground is not one of them, but if our hypochondriacal preoccupation with health and physical well-being also makes us recoil from those sacrificial acts worth making, then we are morally and spiritually—yes, and psychologically—much poorer, no matter how high our average life span rises.

So if our "scientific" diagnosis of traditionally reared people as homophobes also pushes us to be tolerant of sexual practices and unions that undercut crucial social institutions like marriage, and consign many young lives to unhappiness and emptiness, we—heterosexual and homosexual alike—are gravely harmed even if a cure for AIDS is discovered.

Let's return to the loneliness of those living with themselves as ultimate authority. It might seem, from the heightened levels of talk and the popular electronic means for exchanging confessions, explanations, and revelations—cable TV, the Internet, even talk radio—that our ability to connect with other people is much greater than ever. But there is a desperate frenetic quality to the sheer volume and uninhibited exhibitionism of much of this "shared" communication: the exposé books, biographical or autobiographical, the Sally Jessy Raphael kind of confessions of weirdness. What else can we do but present ourselves as autobiographies, if we cannot reach confidently for the shared thoughts, beliefs, and reflections on eternal verities that earlier people could assume they shared? Yet, how can we know others will find our lives worth sharing, worth accepting, since our choices are only our own and other people claim for themselves the same sphere of authority? Yes, these stories are gobbled up by readers, viewers, listeners. But being consumed for our entertainment value is not the same as being listened to, respected, accepted as teacher, explicator, sage or fellow follower of the truth. Our stories are used as long as we are found useful, and then they are discarded in favor of the next arrival.

In contrast, consider the Old Testament prophets. Much of their message was neither nice nor pleasant to hear. They knew nothing of toleration or nonjudgmental attitudes. Judgment—God's judgment—was their business, and when that judgment was heeded, it led to complete capitulation by the former offenders—sackcloth, ashes, rending of garments, repentance. When it was not heeded—when the people obstinately chose to continue transgressing the moral law, divorcing themselves from God and those who chose the clearly defined moral law—the result was also hard to miss. The unheeded prophets were imprisoned, exiled, or killed. Complete acceptance or complete rejection, with no room for "I'm O.K.—You're O.K." And that acceptance or rejection was based on the hearers' judgment of whether the prophet spoke truly, and if so, whether the hearer was willing to risk great tribulation by continuing, à la Jezebel, to violate that truth.

Societies that cohere around a commonly held ethos that imposes morally binding behaviors upon all will still squabble over the details, such as how to apply that ethos to newer conditions. A minority of their members will always reject that ethos in theory and perhaps a majority may slip from time to time in practicing it. Despite this, such societies are united, are true communities in a way that modern self-consciously "tolerant" societies less and less resemble. The sun may shine on the just and unjust alike, but even the unjust know what the sun is and that evil deeds should be saved for darkness.

Meanwhile, in the modern world of independent little monads, those who still recognize and subject themselves to higher authorities carry on much of their commerce with one another outside the boundaries of the unfriendly domain of the naked public square. They do not ignore public life or public duties—they vote and talk about current events, and attempt to change the culture where it impinges on them, with fruitless letters to Michael Eisner and Disney boycotts and agitating about objectionable items on the required reading lists in the public schools. In the midst of living and working and raising children and worshipping their Creator, they do the best they can to be salt and leaven, wryly recognizing how unsalty they often find themselves, how imperfectly differentiated from the culture.

Critics of Paul Weyrich's letter last year, in which he suggested that Christian families may need to separate themselves from the worst effects of the culture, may have imagined that he was recommending a kind of Ruby Ridge lifestyle, but those who inhabit or interact with these pockets of semi-separated populations know differently. There is a real dilemma, which traditionally religious people who attempt to pass on their beliefs and behaviors to their children (while loving and suffering with their country) live with. The "intolerant" segments of society—those who insist that all of us live under a higher authority—have not found a way to successfully engage the "tolerant" secularists on moral matters. This is true even if we measure success in the modest terms of achieving the common starting point of accepting the claims of a higher authority—whether that is a person or a Law of Nature. That is one reason why the Columbine high school shootings, and particularly teenager Cassie Bernall's martyrdom, had such a galvanizing effect in Christian circles. Not only did it stunningly reemphasize the need to put first things first, whatever the cost, but it stirred even the jaded what's-worth-dying-for secularists. Maybe something similar went on in the psyches of world-weary Romans of the first three centuries, munching the ancient world equivalent of popcorn as they observed Christians getting the worst of their encounters with lions.

Al Haig never gained much steam in his later bid for the Republican nomination, partly because, rightly or wrongly, his public moment of being "in charge" did not impress most people with his gravitas. Our century or two of emboldening cries that "we're in charge here" are not very impressive either, when we look at the body counts, the debased culture, the unhappy children and frantic adults and large numbers of "sick" people and "sick" acts.

In the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence of Walt Disney's Fantasia, Mickey Mouse finds himself in a similar position after a similar power grab. The waters rise higher and higher as the brooms and buckets Mickey has brought to life with the help of the sorcerer's magic wand inexorably do their work. Only the return of the true sorcerer—and the apprentice's surrender of the wand he lacked the authority, power, and wisdom to control—end the escalation of chaos.