Ruth Institute Blog

I went to see Atlas Shrugged Part III the night it opened. The evening led me to reflect on what had attracted me to Ayn Rand as a twenty-something graduate student in economics.

And let it be said: I was very attracted to her ideas. I appreciated how she dramatized the evils of a centrally planned economy. I was persuaded by her depiction of the fast descent of economic control into a totalitarian state.

Most of all, I loved how she said it was ok to be selfish. There it is. The naked truth about the appeal of Ayn Rand. Selfishness and an irrational individualism continues to be a glaring weakness of much of the Right today.

But why exactly, was selfishness so appealing to my twenty-something self? Read more…

Philosopher Thaddeus Kozinski takes up these questions in his very interesting article in today’s Public Discourse.  His bottom line: “am I saying that only an ethics rooted in the divinely revealed truth of creation-as-gift and creator-as-love can coherently and adequately make sense of the universal experience of ought? Indeed I am, though I think that purely philosophical explanations are similarly indispensable.” 

I’m just lifting elements of his argument. You should really read the whole thing. 

We all have had the experience of ought, of something that, at least in a subjective sense, renders our imminent action morally relevant, so that what we are about to do or not do is more than a mere question of what will be pleasing to us, socially beneficial, psychologically comfortable, or useful for some plan of action. … What seems right also seems good, and if it did not, it would not seem right; indeed, it could not be right at all. Thus, the good and the right seem correlative and inseparable in experience, though Read more…

Bored to Death is the title of an article by philosophy professor Russell Snell. He talks about boredom as the “stance toward the world most evident in the historical and social space of contemporary Western life.” 

Many of us no longer find the world beautiful, or good, or of worth, and since the world and the things of the world are quite worthless in themselves, they bore us. Of course, since we too are inhabitants of this world without worth, we find almost no worth in other persons either, or in ourselves. At the same time, many find this boredom impossible to give up—we like this stance, we like the boredom—because the meaninglessness of the world allows us to treat it and others and ourselves exactly as we wish. We are free! Since the world, for us, does not have the weight of glory, we owe it nothing and can do with it precisely as we wish. But a culture of freedom without truth, a culture where freedom is unchecked by the good of being, ends up as a culture of death. Our bored culture is a culture actively engaging in a revolt against limits, place, order, and we are willing to harm and kill our world, each other—especially the weakest among us—and ourselves in a pique of freedom.

I would take it one step further: not only are we willing to harm and kill our world, and one another, we are willing to kill ourselves. I have often wondered whether the increase in suicide, especially among the young, is related to this theme. Nothing has any meaning, including our own existence.  We keep telling the young that nothing matters, and some of them are believing us…..

Matthew Franck writes today about how we have lost the moral vocabulary to even talk about what’s wrong with incest. 

natural hierarchies, duties, and trusts are shattered by incest, even between “consenting adults.” But the recent discussions of this matter reveal how decayed is our moral vocabulary for considering it, how nearly lost is any understanding that our various loves have their natures and purposes, which must be respected if those loves are to conduce to our happiness. Only such decay can account for the failure to grasp that a man cannot be a father to his lover, or a lover to his daughter…. Read more…

Here is a thoughtful article by Friend of Ruth, Rev. Dr. Dale Kuehne. He starts with this example, to illustrate how morally unglued we are becoming:

I recently had a discussion with a Middle School student in which s/he shared that s/he was bi-sexual.

Having done a fair amount of research on sexual orientation, my reading of the scholarly literature tells me that a person won’t fully understand their sexual orientation until their late teens or early 20’s. Hence, I was surprised to hear such a discovery from someone of such a young age.

When I thanked the student for trusting me with such an intimate revelation, I asked how s/he had come to this self-understanding? Read more…

Dr. Stuart Schneiderman has a new column out about same sex “marriage.”

What is a funeral when no one died? It is theatre. What is a dinner where you go through the motions of eating without there being any food? It is pantomime.

Same-sex marriage is a fiction. Even if everyone believes that the fiction is real– or be too afraid to say otherwise– that does not make it less of a fiction. The world does not become flat just because everyone says it is. In many ways the strangest part of the current debate over same-sex marriage is how little of it involves rational argument. Read more…

Over at the Public Discourse Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis, young proteges of Robby George, respond to Prof Andrew Koppleman’s claim that marriage is nothing but a social construct. They get the better of Prof Koppleman, but there is one point I would add, for the benefit of the libertarians who come around this site.

It is clear from the context that Prof Koppleman believes that all human institutions are mere conventions, constructed for convenience. Therefore, he believes human institutions can be reconstructed at will. My point to the libertarians is that they would never accept this argument with respect to the market, or the right to private property. Read more…

Albert Mohler weighs in on the incest controversy that we have already discussed on this blog. I want to add one point that I haven’t seen anyone raise. People seem to think that the “ick” factor is not significant because it cannot be entirely explained on rational grounds. (Mohler’s quote from Wm. Saletan is to this effect.)

But we should not entirely dismiss the “ick” factor. To say that incest is “icky” is to say that it is unthinkable. That is what taboos are supposed to do: take a given behavior off the table, to make that behavior completely unworthy of consideration by any decent person.

Why? Because if people start asking themselves, “gee, would sex with my father really be so harmful in this particular case?” or “could I get away with sex with my daughter in this particular case?” Read more…

So this morning, I’m reading the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review on the treadmill at 24 Hour Fitness, “Who’s Afraid of Original Meaning?” by George Thomas of Claremont McKenna College. I won’t pretend that I understand the twists and turns of his argument about why Scalia’s interpretation of Original Meaning isn’t as original as it should be. Part of the argument is about the incoherence of the Court’s concept of “fundamental” rights. I care about this, because the opponents of natural marriage want to say that marrying the person of your choice is a “fundamental right.”

George Thomas (no relation, I assume to Clarence) sees the incoherence of the Court’s position on “fundamental” rights.

Consider, for a moment, the right to travel. This right is not enumerated in constitutional text and yet it has been held to be a fundamental right. Curiously, the Court held it to be a privilege of citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment in one of the few cases that rested on that clause since the Slaughter-House Cases. But the Court showed little interest in breathing life into privileges and immunities, or situating the right to travel in a larger context. Rather, the Court’s protection of the right to travel was more consistent with selectively protecting rights it deems fundamental. Rights that are as deeply rooted in history and tradition as the right to travel, but that touch on economic issues, for instance, have been erased from constitutional protection. And other rights, such as the right to privacy, have been deemed to be fundamental, but with little explanation of the scope or foundation of “privacy.” Thus private choices that deal with contraception or abortion are said to be fundamental. Read more…

I have been reading the new book, , by William Voegeli at Claremont McKenna College, with great interest. His theme is that the advocates of the welfare state have never been able to give a coherent account of the proper size and scope of their ambitions. How much assistance to the poor is enough?

I think he is correct about the “Progressive” economic agenda. But I believe there is an even more insidious and destructive part of their agenda: their revision of what we might call the “sexual constitution.” The radical forms of feminism, as well as the destruction and redefinition of marriage, are part of restructuring the fundamental rules of engagement between women and men, and between adults and children. I have come to the conclusion that the Left’s inability to define limits is no accident.

My thesis is that the impossibility of achieving the agenda is precisely its appeal to the Left. In economics, it is impossible to eliminate all income differences in even a partially free market, since the huge variation in personality, abilities and behaviors that are normal among human beings are precisely the basis for differences in income. Yet, if the Radicals are able to create a moral urgency around “equality,” they will have justified an unlimited amount governmental power.

The feminists have insisted that any difference between men and women are the results of unjust discrimination and hence must be eradicated. The government must “do something,” to eliminate these differences. However, since men and women really are different, Read more…