Religion & Law

More on "dependence"

By Rick Garnett

I cannot pretend to know exactly what Rush Limbaugh was getting at, with the remarks that Rob quoted here.  It seems unlikely, though, that he was proposing for our consideration a deep, well-considered moral-anthropology claim, i.e., a claim about the nature and destiny of the human person. 

So, when Michael says "no politically conservative Catholic with a well-formed conscience could assent to Rush?s aspirations of radical autonomy", I guess I agree, if we assume, for discussion's sake, that Rush is inviting us to a particular vision of the person -- a misguided one, for reasons that, Mary Ann Glendon, Alasdair MacIntyre, and many others have set out.  After all, in a chapter I contributed to Michael S.'s book, I wrote:

We [Catholics] have . . . an alternative vision to propose, one that turns the received anthropology on its head, one that emphasizes not so much our autonomy and moral self-sufficiency as our dependence and incompletion.  After all, the fact that freedom of choice is a gift, and even that its value is ?inestimable,? does not make it the only valuable thing; that we are distinguished by our capacity for choice does not mean that our dignity is reducible to that capacity. We are not merely agents who choose; we are people who belong, who exist in and are shaped by relationships. We live less in a state of self-sufficiency than in one of ?reciprocal indebtedness;? A Christian anthropology acknowledges our limits. It recognizes, as Professor Gilbert Meilaender put it recently in a beautiful essay, that we occupy an ?in between? place, ?between the beasts and God.?  It grounds our dignity not so much in claims of self-sovereignty as in our status as creatures. That is, it proposes that ?the greatness of human beings is founded precisely in their being creatures of loving God,?and not self-styled authors of their own destiny. Its fundamental proposition is that ?the person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love? and whose ?proper due is to be treated as an object of love.?

That said, it seems more likely to me -- I could be wrong, of course -- that Rush was not purporting to say anything well considered about the nature of the human person, and was instead expressing his views that, for example, some policies might create dignity-sapping dependence on government, or that it is healthy, in a free society, for persons and families to be, to the extent possible, not entirely dependent on the public authority for support and maintenance. 

We might disagree with these views, but they are certainly not ruled out by a Catholic understanding of the human person.

Now, the rhetoric Rob quotes certainly lends itself to criticism, and maybe Rush really is proposing that we take reasonable and appropriate skepticism about government programs "to another level, turning it into a principle that stands in direct conflict with the nature of the human person, as expressed through the ideas of solidarity, reciprocity, subsidiarity, and the common good."  If so, he's wrong.  But again, to worry about the kind of "dependence" that many conservatives believe is created by some government programs -- and is unhealthy -- is not to embrace the anthropology of the mystery passage.

Full post as published by Mirror of Justice on January 16, 2008 (boomark / email).