Learning to Deal with Absolutes

For a decade betweeen 1992 and 2002 I nursed an overly skeptical outlook on life. Disavowing, among other things, all forms of faith and all strong convictions, I tread water in the sea of agnosticism, while fish from the nihil depths nibbled at my churning heels.

Then something happened. In August of 2002 the U.S. entered into what I believed to be an illegal and unconstitutional war with Iraq. I had already begun studying political theory by that time in my life, and in my research I stumbled upon the court transcripts from the Nuremburg war tribunals. The defense counsel for Germany kept accusing the prosecuting nations of harboring "false sentiment". His assertion was that the trials were a political performance staged by hypocrites who in truth cared nothing for those who'd fallen beneath the boots of the Germans. The criticism was this: you who feign outrage over the spilling of blood, and thirst for blood in turn, are you more just than these men?

That was a powerful notion to me, who, having disavowed objective notions of morality, nevertheless felt outraged by political events I saw taking place in the world around me. I continued studying political philosophy and history, looking for a way out of my paradoxical state of mind. My studies eventually led me to a quest to read and comprehend everything ever written by Plato. I invested in a complete set of the Loeb Classical Library texts, which have been the irreplaceable iron core of my personal library ever since. I'm never far from a Loeb text.

I found in my studies that I'd taken too many things for granted, including my skepticism about morality. How can one profess outrage when one doesn't have a clear concept of right and wrong?

What is the difference between knowledge and belief? Between truth and opinion? Between the good and the pleasant? How can one feel injustice when one has no consistent notion of justice? Most importantly, how can I be so certain of the injustice I see in an aspect of the world with which nearly everyone else I meet approves?

My studies began in earnest that Autumn, just as I was about to complete my undergraduate studies. These were the October days leading up to Senator Paul Wellstone's death. In those weeks, trying to understand and oppose a war that nobody believed had already begun, I stumbled onto one of the most profound truths about American society. It regards civil rights. We didn't create them. We don't confer them on each other. We cannot by vote or majority strip a person of them. They are beyond us.

I realized that no matter what happens, no matter how the rest of the world feels about it, no matter what the polls say, right and wrong have nothing to do with opinion. They are fixed, permanent. Unyielding. They aren't supernatural (nothing is), but neither are they fashioned by human writ. They are absolute. Not because someone says so. Not because they're written in a piece of scripture or in the Constitution. They exist prior to our acknowledgement of them. That's what the Framers meant when they wrote about Natural Law.

I was forced to admit the possibility of laws, order which is beyond the purview of human law or action. I have since developed a keen interest in theological and philosophical treatises, but stepping into the domain of unalterable order also led me to geometry, music and aesthetics. The whole classical tradition stretched out before me.

I'm still distrustful of ritual and fable. I still deeply distrust tendencies towards hero-worship in academics. My respect for humanity is too great to permit unbridled appreciation for any of its members. But whatever else I believe I have made my peace with the absolute, permanent, universal laws that human hands did not write. I'm grateful for them, and for my ability to occasionally recognize them. I am comfortable in submitting myself to them, and I have satisfied myself rationally as to the necessity of their absolute goodness.

I could furnish any number of examples, many which are easily retrievable by spending a weekend with Euclid (though the reader should take care with his parallel postulate). But having a collection of principles in a book isn't to have them at all. The reader would do better to discover them independently.

As I continue my studies, I now turn my healthy skepticism toward irrational reliance on merely mechanical logic, formalism, positivism, materialism, idealism, aristotelian sense-dependency, hateful polemics, and other human errors.