Settling For Second Best
By DONALD DeMARCO
The basic mistake that Adam and Eve made was to opt for the second best. They left a privileged life in Paradise and journeyed east of Eden where they would suffer pain and death. They preferred to sever their tie with God and make it on their own. The gap between the best and second best in this case, however, is wide enough to allow entrance to all the evils of the world.
Choosing the second best is not advisable. And yet, we continue to make this egregious mistake. We choose, as did our primal parents, the illusion of autonomy over the reality of transcendence.
Sigmund Freud, as Philip Rieff asserts in his excellent work, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “proclaims the superior wisdom of choosing the second best.” He advises living on Easy Street rather than embarking on the “narrow road” that Christ mandated.
Consequently, he made a comfortable life that demanded few if any sacrifices intellectually respectable. “Life, as we find it,” wrote the founder of psychoanalysis, “is too hard for us; it brings too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures….The service rendered by intoxicating media in the struggle for happiness and keeping misery at a distance is so highly prized as a benefit that individuals and peoples alike have given them an established place in the economics of their libido.”
Freud was not interest in the sacraments.
The retreat into the self, however, contradicts the communal nature of the human being. It is tempting and even understandable. Yet it is false to who we are as transcendent beings and bitterly counterproductive.
In accordance with the mood established by Freud, Sartre, Nietzsche, and others, Gloria Steinem could say, without fear of embarrassment, “I either gave birth to someone else or I gave birth to myself.” She had an abortion when she was 22 and justified it to herself by stating that “I had taken responsibility for my own life.”
She summarily rejected the complementarity of the sexes by promoting the catch-phrase, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
An advocate of “reproductive freedom,” she ignored the fact that the choice to have or not to have a child does not spring from one’s autonomy.
The illusion of autonomy, of needing no one other than the self, has become not only attractive, but socially commendable.
Hence, Judith Jarvis Thomson, who authored the most widely read article in defense of abortion, can argue that an unborn child has no right to occupy the body of a woman. As she insists, “We are not morally required to be Good Samaritans or anyway Very Good Samaritans to one another.” We are, in Dr. Thomson’s view, presumably, islands of liberty.
Why settle for second best, we may ask, when the superior choice is incomparably superior? Why settle for the illusion of autonomy when we can attain the reality of transcendence, a life with God? We can “super-exist,” as Jacques Maritain reminds us, through knowledge and love.
Here is what Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has to say on the matter in his encyclical, Caritas in Veritate: “The human being is made for gift, which expresses and makes present his transcendent dimension. Sometimes man is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself, his life and society. This is a presumption that follows from being selfishly closed in upon himself, and it is a consequence — to express it in faith terms — of original sin.”
People continue to be ruled by the weaknesses they have inherited from the first sin, a desire for autonomy and a rejection of God. Having abandoned God, as St. John Paul II states in Veritatis Splendor, the human being “no longer grasps the ‘transcendent’ character of his ‘existence as man.’ He no longer considers life as a splendid gift of God, something ‘sacred’ entrusted to his responsibility and thus also to his loving care and ‘veneration’.”
The late Pontiff warns of “some present-day cultural tendencies” that give so much rein to freedom that it leads to “a moral autonomy which would actually amount to an absolute sovereignty.”
A full transition of man, who is innately communal, to a post-communal culture would seem to be unachievable. There are safeguards within the human being that prevent him from denying everything about his nature. Even Gloria Steinem, for example, who has vilified marriage between men and women, applauds same-sex marriage in the name of relational love. Human beings can atomize themselves only so far until that point is reached wherein their philosophy becomes both repugnant as well as unlivable.
Left to their own second-best preferences, the Israelites danced around the Ark and worshipped Mammon until a furious Moses came down from the mountain and redirected their individualities toward a communal purpose.
Is there a new Moses on the horizon who will do the same for the current generation? Great encyclicals outlining the nature of man and his transcendent destiny have been largely ignored.
In the meantime, as Philip Rieff has observed, modern culture is unique inasmuch as it has given birth to elaborately argued anti-religions, “all aiming to confirm us in our devastating illusions of individuality and freedom.”
If the needed reformation is not inspired by sound reason, then it will come about through prolonged suffering.
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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; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; 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.)