Providence or mere politics? On the rebellion against Being

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 20, 2024

The partial halt to the enforcement of President Biden’s new K-12 Title IX transgender regulations for American schools is certainly welcome news from the US Supreme Court. It provides us with a little more time to derail these regulations. But it is also peculiar news. If you read our news story, you will find that parents of school students who join Moms for Liberty, or students who become members of Young America’s Foundation or Female Athletes United, by these memberships alone halt enforcement of the new regulations in their schools.

The wonders of politics and judicial reasoning will probably never cease. Nonetheless, in the absence of fundamental morality and logic it is nice to have fallback positions for defending the good. In addition, the new regulations cannot be applied to Catholic and other religious K-12 schools because of the statutory exemption in Title IX for these schools. Often it is very close to the essence of politics to find means of protection against government through exceptions and loopholes in the law, though at a certain point exceptions and loopholes often give way to brute force—or to lies, damned lies, and statistics—as the famous case against St. Thomas More proved in sixteenth-century England.

As then, so today: It is typically a rejection of Christ and the natural law which brings brute force to the throne. In our culture, of course, brute force often wears the velvet glove of bureaucracy. Title 9 controls over education are simply one case in an otherwise needlessly belabored point.

Restricted lives

In the good old days, tyrannical rulers simply governed for their own personal ends. Tyranny was more often a straightforward way to increase the wealth, control and influence of those who wielded political power. The exercise of power in this manner is always evil, but in our time it is also almost always ideological. I suspect this arises from the consistent attempt of modern tyrants not merely to coerce public action but to control public opinion, for in ostensibly “democratic” societies, public opinion must be controlled to maintain the democratic fictions. And so brute force is no longer considered sufficient; it must be brute force justified by a good reason or a high ideal. In other words, it must be brute force justified by ideology.

Today, ideology has become the way we express what Satan wants using terms designed to seem not only logical but inevitable. The central idea is that if we commit to the ideology, we will create the best possible world. Anyone who resists this best possible world must be disenfranchised, punished, or otherwise eliminated. In every ideological regime, it is a matter of urging people to join the “enlightened” side in order to achieve “social perfection”. Those who join are happy to feel a part of something big and wonderful. Those who do not are marginalized, relegated to the outer darkness. They are considered so backward as to no longer be worthy of consideration.

This is common throughout much of the world today. It is the reason that people who honor God and uphold the natural law—accepting both as guides to human morality and human affairs—feel as if they are on the outside looking in, and that they must very carefully avoid trouble by “privatizing” their thoughts and beliefs. Unfortunately, as I have repeatedly mentioned in other writings, this “privatization”—this constant dissembling about what we really believe—saves us from persecution only by making it all but impossible to convert others to the truth, or even to raise our own children well.

Diabolical

Human ideology is a trick of the Devil, and it is always the Devil’s trick to present himself as an Angel of Light while advocating darkness. The sleight-of-hand is accomplished by substituting selfish desire for reality—which, after all, is the essence of Satan’s own decision, the root of his own refusal to serve God. Just as we can never choose the good without recognizing that we are not personally the arbiters of the good, so too we cannot serve the infinite God without recognizing our own finitude. Being a created part of this mysterious thing called reality, we do not determine what reality is, or what reality means. We may grow in our understanding of it, but we cannot determine it. By contrast, it is the essence of the diabolical to live in denial, to constantly disrupt reality as much as possible, so as to pretend to be the master of reality, which is to say its Creator.

Just as pride goes before a fall, the denial of reality causes us to fall into our own illusions, and to prefer these illusions to reality—even to insist upon them as fundamental truths. The logic of this is simple: The only way we can appear to seize control of reality so as to determine it for ourselves is to cling to illusions of self-fulfillment instead of accepting with genuine wonder the gifts we have been given by the God Who Is. This is why, to those who remain outside the precarious bubble of false desire, all ideologies seem ludicrous.

Are we created as male and female persons beloved by God or are we each simply so many random building blocks to be rearranged in accordance with our confused desires? Is a marital union a commitment to spiritual and biological fruitfulness between a man and a woman or merely a conveniently limited reciprocal selfishness? Is an unborn child a blob of disposable tissue or a precious human life? Are health and sickness interchangeable goods or is health the good and sickness its absence? Is it better, as a guide to a well-lived life, to recognize the objective realities which are within us and surround us or to pretend that our own desires—which we all know are often transitory, confused and ill-motivated—are capable of determining reality?

And if we choose the latter, how can there be any common reality in which we all participate together? How can there be anything objective, anything real? How can there be anyone to love, or anyone to love us as we really are? It is especially these questions which give the lie to the elevation of our wavering human subjectivity above the piercing objectivity of What Is—which give the lie to our fundamentally selfish rebellion against the Law of the Gift, that is, against Being itself.

For us, being is received

A philosopher at the University of Dallas recently wrote a book on Aristotle with the title Is Being Better than Not-Being?. I am aware of it, and have read it, primarily because the author is my son, Christopher Mirus. It is a work of philosophical scholarship, but the title poses the most crucial question for a weak, fallen, and increasingly ideological world: Is being better than not-being? For some reason, it is often difficult for us humans to answer this question.

This is the issue each of us faces when we are confronted with the primary question of God’s existence and the secondary question of whether to accept or reject God’s creation, God’s love, and God’s will—that is, to accept or reject Reality Itself. The philosophical subtitle of the book is “The Metaphysics of Goodness and Beauty in Aristotle”, just as the philosophical subtitle of the story of our lives is the metaphysics of goodness and beauty as we participate in them.

For each of us, “being” is a gift. It is precisely the reality of that gift which gives the lie to every temptation, every ideology and every corresponding form of politics which seeks, in one way or another, to substitute fantasy for reality, wayward desire for the gift of self, and ultimately ourselves for God. Therefore, we must not be fooled. Even good politics may have many deficiencies, for it too is defined by the limitations of the human. But no politics can be good that does not recognize the limitations of the real, by which politics must always be defined.

The bottom line of all personal and social life is that we receive being; we do not create it. For this reason the greatest possible dangers arise from substituting fantasy for reality, or ideology for truth—or politics for Providence.