I would first like to acknowledge Mr. Matthew J. Peterson for his posts on the Remedy, a blog affiliated with the Claremont Institute. His emphasis on the liberal arts of our world today is similar to my view towards one of America’s biggest problems today: abortion. I would like to reply to Mr. Peterson’s articles which I truly enjoyed reading and examining.
“If one responds that we have grown out of these older notions, how many students or professors at the top ten liberal arts colleges could give an account of why this change is justified, or give any sort of rational basis for the structure and curriculum of their college at all? Of course there will always be ongoing arguments over what exactly constitutes a liberal arts education. The frailty of human knowledge being what it is, we must admit a certain amount of elasticity to the sorts of things we think we ought to study for the obvious reason that we don't know everything. The problem today is that most of the modern liberal arts colleges have entirely rejected the idea that there is any particular body of knowledge that human beings ought to study inasmuch as they are human because these colleges think that we can't really know anything.” -Matthew J. Peterson (The Remedy)
I completely agree that the lack of concentration on Liberal Arts has debased our culture and intellectual thinking. Abortion and other infractions upon human rights are a result of foolish thinking, something common in our world today. Of course I am not as fluent in writing as Mr. Peterson, or Mr. Hadley Arkes (an author for the Claremont Institute) but I will try my best to present my position here.
The cause and blindness towards abortion can be attributed to the lack of Liberal Arts taught in our communities. As Mr. Peterson said, the lack of Liberal Arts has debased our intellectual skills to the point where we are making unreasonable decisions without seeing the evils that build upon them. Not only by the lack of studying the Liberal Arts, but also by the methods with which we are taught have we become ignorant to the teachings and truths established by ancient philosophers of old. Schools exclude certain curricula, vital for the mind, and states remove religious innuendo from their songs or slogans. The attitude with which teachers, parents, and leaders educate our students today, as a result of our culture, do not establish the students with a desire to know what is in our future, our past, and our present. They say ignorance is bliss, but is bliss here desirable? Do we want to live our lives in ignorance, living in ways that undermine what our founding fathers set down for us? Of course not, but it is inevitable to a certain extent now because of the lower educations out there. Few truly work for better education, training their mind for the world in front of them, anticipating the events that surround them. Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Socrates’ teachings and moral values have dissipated from our world today. Only a few rigorously study these concepts, because they are the ones that desire a higher level of knowledge, they understand that there is something out there that can not be abandoned.
America’s biggest problem is also a result of positivism. No, this is not a way of living optimistically, it is something addressed by our late, holy father, Pope John Paul II. I assume most of you are familiar with the phrase “I think, therefore I am”. That is positivism. We look at abortion through a tinted window of positivism. Indeed, aborting the baby benefits the woman in many ways. She will not have the financial difficulties, or the limits of having a child to take care of. She will not have to worry about teaching this little one how to read or write. She’s free of many hindrances that could have stopped her from doing things that she would have otherwise wanted to do. Does this make it right? To them, yes. That is positivism. That is what is wrong with America. The holocaust benefited the Germans in many ways. It brought their fragile country more together through a feeling of superiority. Of course they were tearing thousands of Jews’ lives apart, but who cares? As long as it benefited them, it was just, right? This is a dangerous and perhaps, scary philosophy that is being embraced throughout America.
Abortion is not the first time Americans have abused the rights of others. We all remember how the blacks from Africa became subservient to the whites, forcing them and their families to serve the needs of their fellow homo sapiens. Abraham Lincoln, one who read the classics and studied liberal arts inside a cold cabin in Illinois, rose up against the injustices that were being carried out against our fellow homo sapiens because they simply looked different and were susceptible to us. During his debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln addressed the concept of slavery……..
“You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then: the lighter having the right to enslave the darker? Take care! By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.
You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.”Here Lincoln wisely refuted the statements made against him by his opponents. Perhaps his reading about the principles of the early philosophers aided him here?
The act of abortion is an infraction of the rights of the little human being carried in its mother’s womb. What rights? Its natural rights. The founding fathers recognized these as being rights given to us by God, inalienable, that cannot be taken away. Not even by the government? Gosh, that means that the fetus in the woman has rights! No, it’s not human, it’s not alive, and therefore it has no rights. Is the fetus alive? Of course it is! Its little heart beats as quickly as our own! Hadley Arkes explains that the fetus does not experience a change in species during its period in the womb. What species could it be except human? It therefore has the same rights that the rest of us hold.
Many of us believe that our rights come from God. This is also what the founders believed. But what if there is an atheist who denies the baby having its natural rights? What if the government elected to take away all these man’s rights and kill him? What would the atheist say? He would state that it could not be done to him. Why not? Because it’s wrong, he would reply. Exactly! Here, the atheist recognizes that he has some inner rights that are outside the spectrum of the government that cannot be taken away or bended to the government’s will. No one can take away our rights. They can ignore them, but they cannot take them away. The government simply administers our rights and regulates the country, however, whether the government decides to recognize them or not, we still hold our rights and will never lose them. Our natural rights establish what is right and what is wrong. The fact that people continue to ignore this, digs a deeper hole for our country. We continue to sink into the mucus of evil, confusion, and misconceptions of what is right and wrong. We begin down or continue down a path of positivism.
Why are we so confused about these simple concepts? Aristotle understood. Plato, our founding fathers, and Lincoln did. But we don’t. What do Aristotle, Plato, the founding fathers, and Lincoln have in common? They were philosophers! Of course Lincoln and the founding fathers did not call themselves this, but what does the word philosopher mean? It means one who loves wisdom. These men saw that there was something out there to attain. Whether it was Lincoln on his bed in his cabin reading, the founding fathers writing the Declaration of Independence, or Plato and Aristotle teaching their students, they all recognized that there was something more to be grasp than simply what our senses tell us. What is it? It is a quest for knowledge (as my mom calls it) : A desire to learn, a desire to grasp the world with both hands and pull it close, and a desire to do the right thing. This circles back to Mr. Peterson’s statement that a lack of Liberal Arts is hurting our country.
Recently, with upcoming appointments for our Supreme Court Justices, many Christians believe that the end of abortion is near. Indeed, we are beginning down that road, but it is a long route. First, Roe vs. Wade must be overturned in the Supreme Court. Some say after that it will be up to the states to determine whether it is legal or not. No! That is not the right way to approach it! The states should not be allowed to decide upon option of killing humans before birth. It should be overturned, finished, and recognized that the states have the same limited power to enslave or wrongfully take the lives of humans. We can and must pray that our president, justices, and governors of today and the future, will recognize what and where our rights come from, respect them, and respect life.
