By DONALD DeMARCO
The late Fr. James Schall, SJ, was a great admirer of Samuel Johnson and, by his own admission, read something from Boswell’s Life of Johnson almost every day. Dr. Johnson was one of the most formidable figures of literature and life of the eighteenth century. He made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. What was it that so attracted Fr. Schall to this literary giant?
“These truths are too important to be new,” Johnson wrote. It is an aphorism that Fr. Schall held close to his heart. Novelty is ephemeral, truth is everlasting. As a philosopher, James Schall drank from the same well of truth that energized his literary hero. It was obvious to both that truth will serve us far better than trends.
Walter Jackson Bate, in his biography of Samuel Johnson, observed that the secret to Johnson’s literary power was his unblinking perception of reality, his refusal to abide fashionable sham. For Bate, Johnson had that habit of attending to “that rarest of all things for confused and frightened human nature — the obvious.”
The reluctance to acknowledge the obvious is humorously narrated by Hans Christian Andersen in his story about the Emperor who paraded naked in his “new clothes.” No one was willing to acknowledge the obvious until a child cried out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all.”
When William Bennett was President Reagan’s secretary of education, the author of The Book of Virtues said that much of what he was doing in the line of education was simply “restating the obvious.”
For many people, however, the obvious is tame and uninteresting. But if people are suspicious of the obvious they should be far more suspicious of what is less obvious.
In Canada we have a prime minister who is adamantly “pro-choice,” although he does not allow any person to be a member of his Liberal Party who chooses to be pro-life. There is at least an inconsistency here, if not a blatant contradiction. The obvious is overlooked so that the ridiculous can be maintained.
As a rule of thumb, when the obvious is no longer obvious, it is replaced by the dubious. It has been obvious from time immemorial that a woman who is carrying a child in her womb is called a mother. But ideologies have a way of obscuring reality. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has emphatically stated that “a woman who exercises her constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy, is not a ‘mother’.” Her legion of supporters, nonetheless, remain loyal, chanting, “There is no truth without Ruth.”
It has also been obvious since human beings walked the planet that it was only too obvious that there were boys and girls, men and women, males and females. One’s sex was the first thing a person noticed and the last thing he was likely to forget.
Political correctness is a powerful weapon in creating doubts about the obvious. The new view is that sex is fluid and multiple. A person may be female at sunrise and male at sunset. It is no longer fashionable to divide the human race according to two sexes. Many people allegedly feel very uncomfortable, according to one writer, being classified according to “hegemonic taxonomies of bourgeois heteronormativity.”
In this instance, not recognizing the obvious has been injurious to many who have begun to doubt their own sexual identity as well as to those who have sought gender reassignment.
According to the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”
Science, however, has shown, clearly and unambiguously, that human life begins at conception when a sperm fertilizes an egg to form a zygote. Consensus is not required in order to see what is obvious. The fact that some people do not see the obvious does not mean that the obvious is not obvious. Rather than “speculate,” the court assumed that life did not necessarily begin at conception and thereby assigned millions of unborn human beings to an early death. Here, what replaced the obvious was the murderous.
Let us imagine what the authors of the Declaration of Independence might have written had they been unable to recognize the obvious and substituted the fuzzy thinking that has become fashionable in the contemporary world. For these writers, “self-evident” was a synonym for what is “obvious”: “Some of us hold these speculations to be of some possible merit that human beings may or may not have a certain dignity conferred upon them by a possible God. But who knows? We must keep an open mind and do our best to avoid rigidity.”
In this case, the self-evident, or obvious, would give way to the nebulous. Foundations, however, must be sturdy so that the edifice upon which they are built does not collapse. America can be forever grateful that its founders were not deconstructionists.
It should also be obvious that there are many people in high place who do not see what is obvious. Our “confused and frightened human nature” is perhaps our worst enemy. We need the Samuel Johnsons and James Schalls of the world to embolden us so that we find the courage to acknowledge the obvious as obvious and not flinch.
Fortitude is one of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. We should pray for fortitude, not so much to enlighten us about extraordinary things, but to allow is to see and to stand by the obvious.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus of St. Jerome’s University and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest two books, How to Navigate through Life and Apostles of the Culture of Life, are posted on amazon.com. 12 Values of Paramount Importance is in process.)
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