The “world community” is acting to restore peace, as they say, in
East Timor. This sounds like a good thing, and doubtless it is true that
thousands of Australian troops will help discourage further massacres of
priests and nuns. But peace is more than the silence of guns, and this
week seems an appropriate time to raise the question of what would be
necessary for the “world community” to really be an agent of peace, or
even a community at all.
These days, of course, the “world community” typically means “the
United Nations.” So the question is, can the U.N. be a cause of peace? I
say it cannot, at least as long as it is riddled with institutions,
organizations and activists whose principal objective is the destruction
of the true sources of human community, and therefore of peace, all over
the world. While the troops arrive in East Timor, we should remember the
deeper implications of the agenda promoted by U.N. activists under the
rubric of the promotion of “rights.” Primary among these is the
elimination of the very notion of motherhood.
It is remarkable, but no coincidence, that the idea of rights has
been much in vogue in a century that has seen more disregard for human
rights and human dignity than any other period in history. Rightly
understood, respect for human rights can be the basis for securing human
dignity and building institutions to nourish it. But the modern notion
of rights held by the legions of population planners and “feminists”
infesting the U.N., seeks to free human life and will from all
authority, and from all principles of moral judgment that are not
somehow determined by human choice. The U.N. agenda has at its core the
assertion of human willfulness at the expense of the transcendent
authority without which human will often becomes an engine of human
atrocity.
To see this, we need to turn from diplomatic and bureaucratic
sophistications to some common sense. The opposite of rights is wrongs,
injustices. But how can you tell the difference between rights and
wrongs, if there is no objective difference between right and wrong? The
very concept of rights, therefore, rests upon a foundation of objective
moral truth.
The crucial question is whether the ground for moral truth can be
sustained simply by human will, choice and power. Is convention, as the
ancient Greek saying put it, “king of all things”? Sometimes people
agree on things that are atrocious. Does this make them right? Honest
historians in the future will consider the 20th century to be the worst
century in the history of human existence up to its time, because of the
number and scale of human atrocities, all over the world. Perhaps the
only thing that kept pace with these atrocities was the ominous
expansion of the horizons of a certain kind of materialistic human
knowledge.
This was no accident, because part of the basis for that expansion of
scientific knowledge was an abandonment of the view that the world is
ordered by a will beyond human will and law. We have dared to treat the
world as if the order that we perceive in it implies no moral foundation
for human life, but presents only a potential that can be used or abused
according to human will. When scientific materialism dominates one’s
understanding of human things, then human beings as such cease to be
ends in themselves. They cease to be sacred vessels of something that
transcends the material world, and they become instead mere things, just
like the elemental forces that we can use or abuse to make our cars go
or build nuclear power plants.
The denial of a transcendent and objective will in the world offers
tyrants and their clerks a grave temptation to disregard of the
universal claim of human dignity. And what does the word “rights” mean
then? It all too often becomes simply an empty label placed on policies
that aim at the attainment and concentration of power in human affairs.
Human beings simply become the playthings of ambitions, appetites and
theories — theories that may perhaps aim at realizing a concept of a
better world, but which do so at the cost of our ability to distinguish
between what is truly better and worse in the human realm.
This is why the international “rights” agenda focuses so much on the
whole issue of so-called “reproductive rights,” and why abortion has
become a central focus of the battle. The practice of abortion
translates most directly the dehumanizing results of scientific
materialism into the human context, asserting that it is not only
legitimate, but necessary for the larger good, that we should treat
human beings as if they are mere things, with no more intrinsic
significance than any other elements of the material world that we deal
with and manipulate.
The body-destroying assault of concentration camps and extermination
ovens has not been the most gruesome aspect of the atrocities of
modernity. It has been the soul-destroying assault, which attacks the
organic wholeness of both the human person and human institutions and
societies, that has most deeply destroyed peace in our century. It is a
great irony that throughout the U.N. and its associated activities are
found so-called champions of women’s rights who actually do their best
to undermine the understanding that the opportunity to be a mother is a
central part of a woman’s nature. They know that the real aim of their
agenda of death must be not just the destruction of physical life in the
womb. The very concepts that sustain our elemental human institutions
must be either translated into a new and meaningless language, or else
destroyed.
Without the formative concepts of family and mother, the world
literally will no longer contain individuals worthy of the name, because
there will be nothing about them that is acknowledged as elemental or
indivisible, deserving respect in itself. The only acknowledged organic
whole will be created by the power of government and other institutions
which are supposed to represent the higher welfare or purposes of human
society. These institutions will have as their raw material millions of
animate bodies that are tolerated as they pursue their satiating
pleasures. But they will not acknowledge individual souls that can lay
claim to any intrinsic respect against the powers that seek to
manipulate them into being docile parts of a larger whole.
Standing in the way of realizing this totalitarian future are the
institutions that most nurture the moral sense of the human individual,
that teach us that we are not in the world simply to serve the purposes
of others — of government, of society, of institutions — but rather as
ends in ourselves, to be respected as such in our dignity.
Most human beings learn this lesson from mothers, who show in so many
ways that the significance of their children goes beyond the fragile
little body. Mothers treat the helpless little child as if it were the
king of the world. In doing so they teach the world the most important
lesson of all about the intrinsic and universal dignity of man. The love
of mothers teaches us to acknowledge the presence of God in the child.
Through this affirmation we realize the real foundation of the human
claim to dignity, which is that spark of divinity in each of us that
makes us moral beings, with a dignity that goes beyond our circumstances
and condition.
The agenda of proliferating “rights” and of the supposedly liberating
freedom from such things as motherhood and family leads directly to the
view that the worth of human beings is determined by material
conditions. The shrill chorus of demand for “rights” to material success
and personal liberation confines the field of human hope to our physical
circumstances and our ability to manipulate those circumstances through
scientific trickery. Such an understanding of the human condition denies
our capacity to transcend all such material conditions and
circumstances, and thereby ignores the anonymous heroism of cradle and
hearth throughout the ages of the world.
Whatever material efforts the world community makes to restore peace
in the world’s “trouble spots” will be in vain until the nations cease
to acquiesce together in the deepest war of all — the revolt of human
will against the nurturing constraints of nature that God has not
imposed, but given, to make us free to be His children. There can be no
“world community” except on the basis of this truth, and no true peace.
