J. Budziszewski

The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man

Spence Publishing, 1999

Reviewed by Jeffrey Stueber

Eighteen years ago, as J. Budziszewski stood before the Government Department of the University of Texas to give a talk, he was fresh out of graduate school and looking for employment. He attempted to show the faculty his "stuff" by telling him his two abiding propositions by which he hoped to lay out a ten-year plan for rebuilding ethical and political theory. The first was that human beings merely make up the difference between good and evil; the second was that we aren't responsible for what we do. Budziszewski was a nihilist and got a job teaching the young, which proves one thing. You don't need to possess great philosophy, or correct philosophy for that matter, to get hired. Neither do some educational institutions understand the ramifications of the philosophy of the professors they hire to teach the young.

"The holes in the preceding arguments are so large that one can see light through them," Budziszewski says of those which led him to adopt his nihilism. His denial of free will, his leading argument for nihilism, was self-referentially incoherent; other problems cropped up, of course, which would require more detail and perhaps fill a large volume. Suffice it to say he was led out of his philosophical malaise by surfacing feelings of guilt which eventually led him to reconsider his philosophy. He also became acutely aware of the Savior he left behind as a younger man. He came to know that we "can't not know" right and wrong and it is here he builds his current philosophy and writing. What he refers to is "natural law," when he says we "can't not know," a bane to humanists and agnostics alike who prefer to wander about in murky seas of relativism.

Now once it is realized we "can't not know," several possible actions appear. We can't admit we cannot know what is right and wrong, so we can deny our innate sense of right and wrong written on our heart. Since doing wrong provokes visceral feelings much like hunger pains, we must feed our consciences like you feed puppies table scraps in hopes of calming them. Conscience, as Budziszewski says, is not a "restraint, a resistance, a passive barrier." It is instead an "active force." Although it can hold us back, it can also drive us on. How it drives us on is by forcing us to adopt strategies of coping with our conscience and denying its presence. Usually, as I've found, it involves deceptive philosophy and personal denial and spoiled virtue, something to which I will return. As an active force driving us on, it pushes us to newer depths of depravity and decadence in order to sustain our sin.

Take the abortion movement, a favorite topic of mine, one Budziszewski returns to several times. First we were to approve of elective abortion well before birth; now we are to approve of partial-birth abortion and the selling of fetal body parts for money to fund probable cures for diseases. First we were to find abortion was a "choice," then a "right," now a choice preferable to birth. First we were to debate the medical possibility of the humanity of the fetus. Upon discovering the medical facts favor its humanity, we are to say the fetus is not a person; it's "potential life," not life with potential. Now we are to say killing a fetus is self-defense; some even claim it's a kind act or even the kindest act a parent can ever do. Now we are even to kill the elderly or seriously ill without their consent, much like we kill the young. Because we can't not know killing is wrong, we kill more and justify our acts by self-justifying philosophy that would fill our stomachs to the brim. Yet it's like filling our stomachs with junk food. Our inability to repent at the feet of our Savior drives us on into worse behavior; by denying our sin we harm ourselves. Budziszewski tells of a woman who, upon learning of her husband's unfaithfulness, aborted her second child to punish herself for her first abortion. "By trying to atone without repenting, she was driven to repeat the sin."

Not everything in this book concerns itself with the knowledge of moral law and the socio-political effects of denying it's existence, something that could make the book seem unbalanced. Budziszewski's critiques of conservatism have little to do with natural law, but are useful for Christians and Jews to consider, especially assumptions that America is some nation destined by God to fulfill some Biblically nebulous prophecy. More important, and promising as a critique of our current political malaise, are his comments on liberalism which may serve as useful banter about the dinner table since there are as many definitions of liberalism as there are stars in the zodiac. Budziszewski's definition of liberalism seems best typified by his story of two friends debating the merits of antipoverty governmental policies - one maintaining opposition to them and the other maintaining their usefulness. The friend who maintained that antipoverty programs had caused more harm than good had apparently convinced the other of this, but he steadfastly maintained his advocacy of them, arguing "we have to do something." It appeared that doing a lot of harm while trying to help appears better to him than doing not enough. Since we can't not know right and wrong, it appears the friend that was advocating the harmful antipoverty programs was attempting to assuage his guilt for not doing enough and hence was adopting a philosophy centered on spoiled virtue - a distortion of the good Christian virtue of giving of yourself to help those in need. Obviously liberalism suffers from this malady because its philosophy entails taking from others to give to the needy. Other philosophical positions bring up the rear: that humans "make themselves, belong to themselves, and have value in and of themselves," that man is not responsible for his actions, and so forth. The ideas and ideals of liberalism, as Budziszewski defines them, are obviously at odds with Christian beliefs and compare roughly with George Lakoff's conception of liberalism (Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't, 1996, University of Chicago Press) when he refers to the liberals' abiding philosophy as "nurturant parent morality" and Thomas Sowell's conception of liberals (The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy, 1995, BasicBooks) although he refers to them as the "anointed." It is no surprise that more liberals will be for abortion because liberals seek to allow women to abort their children to fix the problems of excessive sexuality instead of teaching them abstinence and stressing it in our broader culture. We assuage our guilt for not fixing overt sexuality by granting the right to kill. Liberals for homosexuality seek to promote respect for "diversity" instead of stressing abstinence and treatment. Liberals for public funding for the arts would rather take from taxpayers to fund material they find objectionable than suffer, knowing little art was funded - even though so much of it may offend the many Christians who occupy our fair land. There's taxation; and then there's stealing. Only spoiled virtue allows one to convert one to the other. And liberals who are aware of God's presence and His moral law credit evolution with the same creative power of our Lord and claim any knowledge of a moral law is a remnant of an evolutionary survival instinct to help others. The circle of deceit is complete.

Orwell would have been pleased to see such a spectacle as our denial of right and wrong and would have authored another book to describe this denial. For now, at least we can put the phrase "we can't not know" in the lexicon as a reminder that, yes, moral obligations can never be displaced or wished away by clever sounding words or "hollow and deceptive" philosophies. (Colossians 2:8 NIV)