By DONALD DeMARCO
Banking can be an educational experience. In my most recent adventure, I requested cash for a small check. The teller informed me that she must first deposit the check into one of my accounts before she could withdraw it and hand me the cash. If she deposited the check into one particular account which pays a minuscule interest rate rather than another which pays virtually nothing, I would be charged $5.00 if I made a second withdrawal from that account before the month was over. I wisely chose the account with the pauper’s interest.
It all seems so terribly arbitrary!
The check included 37 cents, which, since Canada has taken the penny out of circulation, could not be given to me. That modest figure would be rounded off to 35 cents. The additional two cents would disappear into a kind of financial black hole. My teller, wise in the ways of banking, kept the two cents in my account, thereby keeping it in existence. My two cents will ride the wings of even a paltry interest rate and balloon someday to 38 cents. At that time, if I cashed it out, I would receive 40 cents. Scrooges of the world, take note.
I find this all amusing. The notion is that if something is put in one place, it continues to exist, but in another place it disappears, never to be seen again.
Philosophers are attracted to the persistence of being. Their object of inquiry may be challenging, but it does not do a disappearing act. In the Western Tradition, God is seen as both Creator and Conserver.
For Aquinas, existence is the “perfection of perfections.” It is not to be taken lightly. Rational thinking is possible because things are causally connected, one thing to another other. If beings suddenly popped out of existence, this causal chain would be broken and rational thinking would come to a lamentable end.
A philosopher, then, may look at the current world with a certain curiosity. If an unborn child exists in a petri dish as a result of in vitro fertilization, the child is regarded as a “test-tube baby” and is highly valued. On the other hand, if the baby exists in the womb of a mother who wants to abort it, the baby is devalued to the point where its humanity is vaporized.
In the world of same-sex marriage, the notions of “husband” and “wife” are disappearing. Even the time-honored notions of male and female are undergoing a systematic journey into oblivion.
Yet beings persist, even when their names and values fluctuate in a contradictory fashion. Real entities do not depend on how we name them. They are what they are, and it is incumbent on us to name them according to what they are.
As St. Thomas Aquinas has stated: “The human intellect is measured by things so that man’s thought is not true on its own account but is called true in virtue of its conformity with things” (Summa Theologiae I-II, 93, I ad 3). One may be sure of always hitting the target if he identifies the target as where his arrows land. The archer, however, must first aim at the target.
Pluto is no longer considered to be a planet. But this is not because the smallest of the planets in the solar system had been improperly categorized. It is because astronomers now know much more about Pluto’s real makeup. Science, like philosophy, is directed outward to a reality that it did not create.
If people are free to name things as they please, or to suit their ideology, or to deny their moral responsibilities, then communication becomes impossible.
As the eminent scientist Norbert Wiener has remarked, “We cannot go through our communicative or scientific lives shadow-boxing with ghosts.” We should hold to the position, he goes on to say, that a person must accept “that he is dealing with an honest God, and must ask his questions of the world as an honest man.” God’s intelligible creation and man’s inquiring mind meet in the province of objective knowledge.
Justice Harry Blackmun, in his opinion for the Supreme Court in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, did two things that were decidedly unrealistic. First, he chose not to “resolve the difficult question as to when life begins.”
But the issue has been resolved by scientists. It is simply a textbook truism that human life beings at conception when the spermatozoon of the male fuses with the egg of the female.
Secondly, despite his confessed ignorance, he decided, in effect, that human life does not begin at any time prior to birth. Fellow Justice Byron White was fully justified in labeling Blackmun’s thinking as an exercise in “raw judicial power.” Robert George, in his thoughtful book, The Clash of Orthodoxies, found the decision “absurd from the scientific viewpoint, and indefensible philosophically.”
The decision had far-reaching effects, including rendering the unwanted unborn child as valueless as a Canadian penny. But this conjurer’s trick does not destroy the value of the unborn. Unlike the antiquated penny, it persists, and many are they who are witnesses to that stubborn fact. And these people are, at the same time, witnesses to reality.
Two cents may not go very far in today’s market — but it can be translated into a prolixity of words that may be worth much more in the arena of thought. Reality will not be obsolesced.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review.
(His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad; Ten Major Moral Mistakes and How They Are Destroying Society; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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