October 31, 2008 | In: Abortion, Conscience, Culture of Life, Divine Law, Good, True and Beautiful, Society, Virtue
Thinking and Intelligence aren’t the Same as Wisdom
I was talking to my mom about politics yesterday. We were sharing our frustration with all of the negative ads that seem to be hitting a crescendo in the last week before the election. We were also sharing our incredulity at the number of Catholics and non-Catholic Christians who seem to be defending their vote for the pro-choice Barak Obama, even though he has promised to sign the “Freedom of Choice Act” into law as his first act as president. I shared with my mother one example of my frustration.
A recent editorial in our local newspaper made the following claim:
It really makes me sad and I can’t see how anyone with a Christian conscience can vote McCain-Palin ticket. Vote for McCain, vote for the alcohol industry. Oh, they are against abortion but apparently not against liquor and they neglect to mention that the McCains are making a killing, in more ways than one, on the alcohol industry. I guess you aren’t as dead when you have been killed by a drunken driver. Try telling that to the family of the mother and 10-year-old daughter who were killed by a former surgeon after his third drunken driving offense.
I don’t want to see anyone killed but I think it would be poetic justice if it was your family and not mine killed or maimed by alcohol which is the industry McCains make a living from. How can you be this blind.
Apparently McCain has family members who are high up in the management of some major businesses in the alcohol industry. Therefore, a vote for McCain is a vote in favor of drunk driving and alcoholism. Therefore, the writer of this letter concludes that a vote for McCain is just as pro-death as a vote for Obama. Q.E.D.
If I need to explain to you how ridiculous this argument is, I’ll buy you a pizza and a beer some time and we can talk.
My expression of frustration was, “People just don’t think.”
My mom replied, “Oh, people are thinking. That doesn’t mean they’re thinking right.”
Ah, the wisdom of my mother. That must be where I get it from, eh?
My mom’s statement hit me because I had just been reading about the supernatural virtue of temperance in the book Divine Pity by Fr. Gerald Vann. This is the book on which I have been meditating during Eucharistic adoration each week. What struck me was a small paragraph on intellectual intemperance.
Fr. Vann said that there are two kinds of intemperance of the mind
- to use the truth simply as a means of profit & pleasure
- to twist the truth and pervert it
Both of these errors sacrifice reverence for the truth, which is an expression of Truth Himself.
It occurred to me that the problem with American culture is not that we don’t think at all (which might be considered the sin of intellectual insensibility), but that we use our intelligence to rationalize evil. Rationalizing evil actually commits both aspects of intellectual intemperance. When we rationalize, we use parts of the truth to explain away an evil for our own profit and pleasure, and we have to twist and pervert the truth in order to make it fit our desires.
The American culture has become very good at rationalizing evil. Moreover, doing so has become a firmly entrenched habit. The problem is not that America is less intellectual than it should be, or that people do not think. The problem is that American does not know how to correctly handle truth. We think, and we are proud of our “enlightened thinking,” but we do not think rightly.
Way to go, Mom. You put your finger right on it.
The Divine Pity by Fr. Gerald Vann.
Father Vann uses the beatitudes as a springboard for a discussion on living the Divine Life as fully as possible. He identifies the subtle ways that Christians fail to fully live out the beatitudes, the virtues and the life of love. The social implications of the Beatitudes (the subtitle of the book) comes in with Father Vann’s persistent theme that we do not exercise the Christian life in a vacuum, but within a family.
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