House's Humanity

I don't watch TV much, but I do have a couple shows I really enjoy and watch rather religiously. My favorite show on right now is '24' - I like it not only for its intense pacing, (usually) inventive plot, and interesting character development, but also for the way it deals with ethical questions and moral theory played out in a sort of thought-experiment mock-reality.

The other show I watch fairly frequently is 'House' - though often the morality portrayed on this medical drama is questionable and should be viewed carefully. My interest with this show, however, is far more myopic; unlike '24' there aren't a number of reasons I find myself drawn to it. There's really only one: I think Dr. Gregory House's character, played wonderfully well by Hugh Laurie, is one of, if not the most interesting on television, and the other characters are great foils. In many ways, he is like a child that never grew up. In other ways, he is jaded beyond belief. I find his view of people, ethics, science, and God to be fascinating and instructive for me as I apply worldview analysis to his character.

For instance, last night's episode ended differently than all the others. Every time, House and his team have a last minute epiphany and diagnose the mysteriously (and ususally terminally) ill patient just in the nick of time. Not so last night. The patient died - died, in fact, directly as a result of a mistaken diagnosis and treatment by both House and Dr. Foreman that proved to be fatal. As Foreman was dealing with the guilt, he received the following advice from House: it doesn't matter how you feel. The numbers say that, though this kind of thing happens much more frequently to doctors in their line of work, they save many more lives and much more difficult cases than most other doctors, and the numbers don't lie. The guilty feeling is meaningless, because it is rooted in subjective emotion, and should be ignored.

As often is the case, though, House's quite inhuman comments collide headlong with his own very human actions. One of the subplots involved his best friend, his best friend's ex-wife, and their dog who lived with her but who wouldn't stop misbehaving since the ex-husband left. House had manipulated her for information, and then at the end of the show, after just having given Foreman this pep-talk on the illusory nature of guilt, ended up taking the dog in himself out of guilt. House's callous philosophical stance was undermined by his own undeniable humanity. He can espouse the outworkings of his presuppositions, but at key points in his humanity, he cannot live with them. This is the tension Francis Schaeffer spoke and wrote so often about:

...in fact, no non-Christian can be consistent to the logic of his presuppositions. The reason for this is simply that a man must live in reality and reality consists of two parts: the external world and its form, and man's 'mannishness', inclusing his own 'mannishness'. No matter what a man may believe, he cannot change the reality of what is...

...every man is in a place of tension. Man cannot make his own universe and then live in it...

...every man is somewhere along the line between the real world and the logical conclusion of his non-Christian presuppositions. Every person feels the pull of two consistencies, the pull towards the real world and the pull towards the logic of his system. He may let the pendulum swing back and forth between them, but he cannot live in both places at once. He will be living nearer to the one or to the other, depending on the strenght of the pull at any given time. To have to choose bewteen one consistency or the other is a real damnation for man.

In the Face of Evil

Two events have gobbled up the headlines over the last few days: the Virginia Tech shootings and, to a lesser extent, the Supreme Court's upholding of the federal partial-birth abortion (D&X) ban. These two things may seem totally unrelated, but there is a thread connecting them that I'd like to draw out. Part of me wants to apologize for and warn you in advance of the graphic nature of some of this post - but the rest of me realizes that, without the full truth being told, no one can make an accurate judgment, not only on if my point here is correct, but on a life-or-death issue that involves the moral conscience of our society. There is more at stake here. So I make no apology - though as you read this, know that I am not posting this with the purpose to shock you to disgust or offend you; but if you are shocked, disgusted, and offended, you'll be a living example of my point via your own experience.

People are talking this week about evil. The actions of Cho Seung-Hui on Monday at Virginia Tech bought our nation face to face with the potential for evil in the human heart, and even the media has not been silent in using this language to describe the shootings. The New York Sun released an editorial on the massacre titled A Glimpse of Evil, calling Cho a "monster." As Ilana Mercer of WorldNetDaily reported, "Cho's poetry teacher, Nikki Giovanni, uses the word evil to describe him. She refused to put up with his intimidating presence in her classroom and had Cho removed." Dennis Prager has given voice to the thoughts and feelings of many with these words: "...why is it always referred to as a 'tragedy'? Virginia Tech wasn't hit by a cyclone. That would be a tragedy. This was evil. Call it that." And as one Blacksburg pastor (the VT campus chaplain) said, "Evil came to campus." America is having a hard time not reacting to the brutality of this event and this man with these sorts of visceral moral judgments, and this is happening across the board – in other words, there is no real controversy in these statements.

Juxtaposed against this is the much more controversial 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in favor of the partial-birth abortion ban. I believe much of the popular controversy stems from a lack of understanding of what precisely partial-birth abortion is. It doesn’t help that the field of public discourse on this matter is littered with red-herrings – such as issues of “women’s health” or “rarity of procedure” or even the application of the term “abortion” (really a misnomer in this case, as Greg Koukl explains here). I am not saying that we shouldn't take care in dealing with these issues - far from it, actually - but that we must first begin, not at a point of theoretical abstraction, but at the point of our own humanity.

This requires us to expose ourselves to the procedure itself. The following medical description is taken from "Dilation and Extraction for Late Second Trimester Abortion", an instruction manual on D&X procedure for physicians by Dr. Martin Haskell that was included in "Second Trimester Abortion: From Every Angle," (materials presented by the National Abortion Federation and distributed at the NAF Fall Risk Management Seminar, held September 13-14, 1992, in Dallas, Texas) pages 30-31.

The surgeon introduces a large grasping forceps, such as a Bierer or Hern, through the vaginal and cervical canals into the corpus of the uterus.... When the instrument appears on the sonogram screen, the surgeon is able to open and close its jaws to firmly and reliably grasp a lower extremity. The surgeon then applies firm traction to the instrument causing aversion of the fetus (if necessary) and pulls the extremity into the vagina....

With a lower extremity in the vagina, the surgeon uses his fingers to deliver the opposite lower extremity, then the torso, the shoulders and the upper extremities.

The skull lodges at the internal cervical [opening]....The fetus is oriented dorsum or spine up. At this point, the right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left hand along the back of the fetus and 'hooks' the shoulders of the fetus with the index and ring fingers (palm down)....

While maintaining this tension, lifting the cervix and applying traction to the shoulders with the fingers of the left hand, the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger.

...The surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull or into foramen magnum. Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening. The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.

What is called "abortion" here is clearly nothing more nor less than infancticide. Koukl responded to this description in his article Nothing Hidden in D&X in this way:

Nothing is hidden in D&X abortion. This is not a piece of tissue or a mere part of a woman's body. This is a little boy or girl dangling between the legs of its mother. You can clearly see its sexual organs, male or female. It squirms and kicks. Its hands open and close, grasping for something to hang onto, until the moment when the doctor's instrument pierces the back of its skull. Then, of course, everything goes limp, because the baby is dead.

Brenda Pratt Shafer, a registered nurse from Dayton Ohio, accepted assignment to Dr. Haskell's clinic because she was "strongly pro-choice." In testimony before the
Senate Judiciary Committee, nurse Shafer described the end of life for one six-month-old "fetus."

"[Dr. Haskell] delivered the baby's body and the arms--everything but the head....The baby's little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors through the back of his head, and the baby's arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall....[Then] the baby was completely limp....After I left that day, I never came back." [NRLC brief, "Senate Hearing Explodes Pro-Abortion Misinformation About Partial-Birth Abortions," Nov. 28, 1995, p. 1.]

You see, Brenda Pratt Shafer “saw” something important that day. An abstract belief could no longer sustain her once she came face to face with the brutal reality of the procedure. As she later testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee, she was not able to shake free of the visual image of that small body going from struggling and alive to limp and dead at the hands of a doctor. She saw it every time she closed her eyes for weeks afterward, and even had trouble looking at her own children without experiencing deep emotional turmoil.

It is this visceral perception, this deep awareness of evil that humans can't help but have that is the thread that connects these two events. In the face of evil, true evil, if we are not sufficiently bent and twisted around the core of evil in each of us, we all recoil. We all have an intuitive sense of this. When one has truly experienced something like this - when one has come face-to-face with evil - we can no longer retreat into relativistic platitudes of merely personal violated sensibilities or cultural norms. Nancy Pearcey put it this way:

After World War II, when the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps came to light, it created a crisis among many educated people. Steeped in the cynicism and relativism typical of their class, they perceived for the first time in a visceral way that evil is real. Yet their own secular philosophies gave them no basis for making objective, universal moral judgments - because those philosophies reduced moral judgments to merely personal preferences or cultural conventions. Thus they found themselves trapped in a practical contradiction, which created tremendous inner tension.

The dilemma is that humans irresistibly and unavoidably make moral judgments - and yet nonbiblical worldviews give no basis for them. When nonbelievers act according to their intrinsic moral nature by pronouncing something truly right or wrong, they are being inconsistent with their own philosophy - and thus condemn it by their own actions. (Total Truth, p. 396)

We as a culture can run from this awareness, but ultimately, when the rubber meets the road in our own lives, we cannot hide.

Arrgh!

I just had my first (and completely infuriating) experience of the internet eating a large blogpost - over an hour's worth of work. It was supposed to go up today. I'll see if I can't reconstruct it in time to still accomplish that.

Grrr. Well, lesson learned, I guess - work off of a Word document or something, rather than the Blogger page.

I'd rather be blogging

Some days, I wish I could make a living by blogging. Until such an opportunity comes up, I guess I'll keep my day job. I mean career.

Prejudice - Wrong, but why? The answer matters.

Even in our deeply - and often simply - relativistic cultural milieu, the notion that it is wrong to be prejudiced (specifically in the sense of an unfair bias toward a perceived minority group) enjoys widespread acceptance. In fact, it is often taken as an unquestioned truism, and few people give much thought to if it is indeed wrong, and if so, why it is wrong. The Christian has a unique answer to offer to both questions, and (leaving aside the implications of calling something "wrong" that should be highlighted for our culture) the difference between those answers and the answers given by most secular non-Christians is quite telling, though often unarticulated.

A couple of days ago, I had occasion to talk about this with the youth group at my church. A parent had noticed displays of prejudice both from some of the youth and from himself, and wanted to talk with the group about it. There was some discussion at the outset about what prejudice is, how we can identify it in our own lives, and how we can avoid it. I didn't let the conversation get very far, however, before asking the question, "Do you know why prejudice is wrong? Specifically, why is it wrong for you as a Christian?"

The first answer I received was not really all that suprising. It is the answer usually given from the secular worldview- in fact, the only logically consistent answer available to today's common combination of moral relativism and the materialistic view that reduces morality to an evolved characteristic of the human species derived from self-interest (a la Dawkins' The Selfish Gene) . "You wouldn't want someone to treat you that way, so you shouldn't treat other people that way. If you're prejudiced towards other people, they'll probably be prejudiced towards you, so that makes it wrong."

This idea does more than merely root morality in empathy (as many have mistakenly done*); it says morals, even the most altruistic, are driven by the evolutionary forces of self-interest and self-preservation. That, because we evolved as social animals, and these rules of social interaction were advantageous to our ancestors in getting their DNA passed on into the next generation, we now have moral notions like "it is wrong to be prejudiced" - and that ultimately, whether something is "right" or "wrong" depends on how it will benefit or harm me, and my moral reasoning should be subject to my own self-interest.** So prejudice is wrong because it will have a negative impact on me - which is really the only consistent answer a materialist can give.

The Christian, though, has a different answer, as I tried to explain to the youth that night, and that answer makes all the difference in the world. For the Christian, basic human dignity and equality is grounded in the imago dei - that we are all created in the image of God and because of that have intrinsic value as individuals. Furthermore, "good" derives its definition from God's character; "evil" is a deviation, a departure from that character. We as humans were originally created to be in line with the character of God, but, as Francis Schaeffer said, man is now abnormal - we have been separated from our Creator by our sin through the Fall. This has had dire ramifications on our relationships with our fellow man. We do not treat each other as we should, as we were originally intended to treat one another. When we participate in evil, then, we are not being true to what we were initially created to be.

This helps to make sense of the two greatest commandments Jesus pointed out: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself (neighbor here meaning fellow man, not just the folks next door). You see, because of the relational love within the Godhead between the Father and the Son from all eternity (Jesus spoke of this in John 17), and in light of our being created in God's image in this way, we should love our neighbor; and acts of prejudice (pre-judging), whether verbal or mental, is a falling away from - a bending and twisting of - our original purpose as people. It is certainly not loving. That is why, as a Christian, I can say that prejudice is wrong.

This is one of those increasingly rare areas where a popular, politically-correct moral notion does in fact correspond to a Christian moral principle. It is incumbent upon us as Christians to not just unthinkingly agree with this sentiment, but to be clear about why we hold prejudice to be wrong, and thus bring glory to God and an avenue of hope for a world in rebellion.

* Quite the opposite, actually - empathy is a result of moral knowledge, not its cause.

** This is dealt with rather well by Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason.

I've been blocked!

Apparently Communist China doesn't want any of its citizens reading my blog. I have been officially blocked by their uber-censoring firewall. Maybe because I've used the word 'Christian.' I wonder if I should have used 'Kristian' or some such camouflage. Well, at least I can sleep easy tonight knowing I'm not subverting the populace of the People's Republic of China. And, if nothing else, my little blog feels like a real blog now in some fashion.

If you'd like to see if your site is blocked, check out the Great Firewall of China.

HT: Maverick Philosopher

I'm baaack...

Wow, March is over, and I'm alive! Okay, so I didn't get any posts off in March, but that just means I've got some good stuff that's been stewing for a while coming your way this month...

Link Update

My post on February 14 on Classical Christian Education included a link to The Dawntreader blog which is no longer working (I believe it was a trackback link that has expired or something). So here is the permanent link to the archived post.

Also of interest on the subject of Classical Christian Education, here are a few links I have found helpful:

One of the best descriptions of the Trivium I have read.

The Association of Classical and Christian Schools website.

Classical Conversations, a support organization for Classical homeschooling.