The Seventh New Commandment:

Thou Shalt Not Discriminate

This particular New Commandment, not to discriminate, might sound like a restatement of the Third, not to be intolerant; but actually, it's quite distinct. The idea here is that individual differences must be suppressed, especially differences (on the high end) of intelligence, on the grounds that "all men are created equal"--or rather, excuse me, "all persons are constituted equal."

Let me say at the outset that this is exactly the opposite of what Jefferson was driving at in this clause of the Declaration of Independence. He was denying the English notion that some people were born "nobles" and others "commoners," that there were natural, genetic classes of human beings, who were intrinsically different from one another; and if you were born into one class, there was nothing you could do about it, and you had to "accept your lot in life." Jefferson took it as given that human beings are not genetically separable into different groups, and individual differences must be allowed to come to the fore, so that a person born of poor and ignorant parents could rise to the highest levels in our new society based on his talent alone, not on his "blood."

What we have done, in true First New Commandment fashion, is turn this idea on its head. Since reason is only the servant of instinct, and feelings are the real truth of anything, and our feelings are all the same (or at least, we feel they are; how could we know?), then we're really all the same; and so if anyone is smarter than another, he makes the other feel bad and inferior, and this must not be allowed. At the same time, following the Third New Commandment, we classify ourselves into racial, sexual, and ethnic groups, and assert that all these are equal, but they are intrinsically different from and irreducible to one another (presumably, on the basis for this New Commandment, because black feelings are different from white ones or Asian ones). Therefore, a member of one group, just by "blood," cannot possibly hope to understand a member of another group. (By the way, underneath the "diversity" shibboleth that the mere presence of people with different skin color and so on is a bonus in a classroom has to be the hidden idea that these races feel distinctively about things--because as far as thinking is concerned, you either understand the facts or you don't.)

Anyhow, what was thought to be a self-evident truth about human individuality, based on reason as our highest and controlling faculty, has been perverted into an excuse for collectivism, in which individual excellence based on intellect is looked on as deadly sin, and one which must be stamped out.

That this is a New Commandment and a moral imperative is clear from the fact that it's simply taken for granted that you can't discriminate. Have you ever heard anybody say, "Well, why not? What's so bad about discriminating?" What's so bad? It's obvious! Why that's--that's--discrimination, for heaven's sake!

Behind this, of course, is that it's the essence of inhumanity to discriminate, because we all know that all men are created equal. Don't you believe in human rights?

Equality and rights.

There are several things going on here, the first of which is the notion that we have rights because we're equal--something which seems to follow, but doesn't, from Jefferson's claim of equality. Notice that he didn't actually say that; the fact that men were endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights was another of the self-evident truths on which the secession from England was based, not necessarily the conclusion from the truth that we're all equal.

So let's get something straight here. Rights are not based on equality; they're based on personhood: the fact that persons can direct their lives by their choices. As long as someone can set goals for himself and direct his actions toward fulfilling these goals, he's a person, whether he's equal to others in his ability or not. And the reason persons have rights is, as I said, that it's inconsistent with me as a self-determining individual to use my self-determination to prevent you from determining yourself. This has nothing to do with whether we're equal or not.

And so a child, who is not the equal of an adult, is nonetheless a person, and therefore has rights. Granted, insofar as he doesn't yet understand that his actions have all their consequences and not just the ones he'd like them to have, he has to be prevented from determining himself (or he'd inadvertently do harm to himself); but this inferiority doesn't mean that he doesn't have human rights--because he is human, even though not as human as he's going to be.

But it's incredible how violently this manifest truth about the inequality in our humanity is fought in our culture--precisely because of this notion that if we're not equal, then we lose our rights.

No doubt I've shocked even you. But think a minute. What does it mean to be a human being? That your body is organized with the human form of unifying energy (human corpses aren't human beings). And what does that mean? It means, fundamentally, that your body is capable of doing human actions. But the human genetic structure not only determines us qualitatively, so that we're different from lions and giraffes, it determines for each of us a limitation on the human activities we can perform; so some people, like Michael Jordan, can do things with a basketball that I couldn't in my wildest dreams aspire to; and I can do things, I'm willing to bet, (say, with my mind) that Michael Jordan can't do. So what?

So it means that my humanity, as humanity, is different from Michael Jordan's. I'm inferior to him in some ways, and superior to him in others. Or maybe not. Maybe he's smarter than I am, too. He's certainly handsomer. Be clear on this. Humanity, when looked at in terms of its relation to activity (which is what human nature means), means the ability to perform human acts. It follows that a human being who can perform fewer human acts than another is less human than another. We recognize this in the case of the "human vegetable," the person in a "persistent vegetative state" who can't do anything but breathe and metabolize food artificially supplied. There are those who would say that such a person isn't even human any more--and, following the notion that rights come from equality, would deny him the right to life. We'll have to address this later.

But if Michael Jordan is more human than I am, does that give him rights that I don't have? No, because we have rights because we're persons, and we have human rights because we're qualitatively the same, not because of the degree of humanity we have. Just as we have civil rights because we're all the same as citizens, though some persons have greater ability to act as citizens than others. For instance, the Senators who tried the President have civil powers that I don't have.

And in fact, the whole trial of the President turned on this. The Clinton defenders essentially said that we should let him alone because he's so important to the country and he was freely elected and all the rest. That is, he's more of a citizen than we are, so he shouldn't be subject to the same petty things that would get the president of a corporation or the general of the army fired, and would land him in prison to boot. The Republican House managers, on the other hand, argued that we're all the same as citizens, whether we're equal as citizens or not; and the laws apply to citizens because of the fact that they're citizens (i.e. qualitatively), not based on their degree of citizenship.

In other words, the Democrats discriminated in Mr. Clinton's favor, and it's the Republicans in this case who didn't.

But since rights are based on sameness rather than equality, why should I be so anxious as to whether I'm Michael Jordan's equal or not? What difference does it make? How does it harm my ability to live up to my full potential if Michael Jordan, in living up to his full potential, can do a greater number of human acts than I can do?

Remember, a right is violated when actual damage is done to the present state of a person by the actions of some other person. Let us suppose that Michael Jordan doesn't exist, and I develop my talents to the extent to which I want them developed. Fine. Now, bring him, with his talents as developed as he has them, into existence. How has the fact that he is what he is and does what he does diminished what I am or what I have done? It hasn't affected it at all; I'm still exactly what I was on the assumption he didn't exist. So his greater talent, riches, and so on, have in fact no deleterious effect on me; they neither diminish what I now am, nor diminish my ability to do what I can do, in making myself greater in the future. So his inequality to me doesn't violate any right I have.

--Unless, of course, you assume that rights are based on equality. Then, the mere fact of his being unequal harms me. But anyone who claims a right has to be able to show some factual evidence that he is being damaged (actually less than what he otherwise would be) by what someone else is doing, and the "title" (the aspect, remember, that's damaged) to this "right" of equality can't be shown in anything that I am, because in point of fact, I don't have the same innate talent he has, and no lessening of my reality occurs because of his greater ability.

In other words, all men are created unequal. That is the truth. No two human beings have the same talents, the same genetically given level of human existence. Live with it. That's the way things are.

And this silliness in saying that "all men are equal" in that quantitative sense (instead of "all men are the same" qualitatively) leads us into forcing everybody to be equal; the outstanding must not be allowed to develop to their full potential, or this will make them unequal to those poor ordinary slobs who just can't compete.

This is what this "equality of outcome" nonsense is all about. We have to make sure that nobody gets ahead of anyone else, because that means that the people who are behind are somehow not really persons, and this violates their "rights" as equal to everyone else.

I have to enter a disclaimer here, however, to make it really consistent with the New Morality. When it's a question of physical (athletic) ability, most New Moralists have no problem with recognizing excellence--though there are some educators who are uncomfortable even with this, as witness the (I think it is) high school soccer league somewhere in New England (where else?) that won't keep score in its tournament so that no one will feel bad at losing. But this is an aberration--in many senses of the term.

The reason for this exclusion of athletic ability from the attempt to force the excellent not to be excellent is obvious once you think about it. According to evolution, it's the body that evolves; and the human body is still evolving. From this it follows that some advanced bodies (those headed toward the next stage) will be better adapted (read: more talented) than others. They are to be celebrated, not put down.

But the mind is a different story. The mind is the "spirit," and is that evil thing called "reason" and "logic," which is cold and calculating and inhuman, and has nothing to do with feelings, which are our true reality. Hence, excellence in the mind is a perversion, and must be suppressed.

Now no New Moralist is going to be this crude (or this logical), because New Moralists don't work this way. They just have a "gut feeling" (of course) that there's something wrong with geeks who can do math and have no trouble with computers and cell phones and can even program VCRs. You certainly don't want your children to turn out like one of them--and a lot of them even become conservative when they grow up!--and would you have your daughter marry one?

So we've got to strive for intellectual equality, because that's our true reality. But of course you can push the really stupid as hard as you want and they'll never be able to measure up even to the average person; and so the only way to remedy this "evil" is to dumb down what you're teaching so that nobody will progress farther than the dumbest; otherwise, the dumbest aren't equal.

Now I stress that no educator would ever actually say that this is what he's doing (because you "have to challenge every student," and "every student is an individual, and learns at his--sorry, 'their'--own pace and in 'their' own way"), because no educator wants to make it obvious that he's so blind to reality that he doesn't recognize that some kids are bright and others are dumb. But he'll add this little sophistry to what he claims: "But all kids are equally capable of learning, if you just find out how to reach them." And that, of course, is nonsense. Let me repeat that. It's nonsense. It's as much nonsense as that lots of practice will make anyone, me included, into another Michael Jordan. Trust me, I've been an educator for thirty-five years; it's nonsense. The trouble is that lots of educators actually believe it.

I remember a few years ago when KERA, the Kentucky Educational Reform Act, had just been passed, an official from the State (my college is in Kentucky) came to tell us about it--from my point of view, to warn us of what we were to expect in just a few years. The idea was that it was "outcome-based education," in which the kids produced portfolios of the work they did, rather than pass tests to find out how much they knew. And they'd work on the portfolio until they got the material right, no matter how long it took them, and no matter how they did it; and then they'd move along to the next grade. "And that way, no one fails," the learned educator beamed.

I piped up, "Then if no one can fail, no one can succeed." He, of course, was clueless as to what I was driving at, which was this: if they'll pass no matter what they do, guess what they'll do? The minimum. Why should they do any more? Why should they push themselves to the limits of their ability, if it doesn't make any difference?

As it happens, several years before this, I had stumbled into making an experiment in "outcome-based education" before the term ever existed--and so I know that it doesn't work, and I know why it doesn't work. I had for a long time been annoyed at the fact that, though I handed back very carefully corrected tests during the semester, the students tended to miss on the final exam the same questions they had missed in the earlier tests. They obviously hadn't restudied after the test to learn the material, since they'd already got the grade on that part of the course.

So this particular semester, I said, "Nobody is allowed to get less than a C in this course. If you get a D or an F, you have to retake a test on the same material until you get at least a C. The original grade will then be erased, since what I'm interested in is that you know the material, not in how long it took you to get it." See how kind and compassionate I was!

Well, I was stunned. First of all, the students who got Cs resented the fact that those who had received Ds and Fs wound up with Bs and As after the retakes, while they were stuck with their Cs. So I had to allow them to retake the tests too. I had tests and retests coming out the wazoo! (I loathe correcting tests.) Then I found out that on the second and third tests, I had an absolutely humongous number of people who failed the first time around. Why? Because if you didn't study before the test and you failed it, you found out what kinds of questions I was going to ask, and then you'd only have to study that part of the material for the retake.

But the kicker was that on the final, the students still missed the questions they had missed on the earlier tests, in spite of the retakes (some three and four times). I thought about it, and it wasn't long before the answer dawned on me: They didn't restudy to learn the material; they restudied to retake the test, and as soon as the retake was over successfully, they promptly forgot everything.

So these lovely portfolios the KERA kids are producing don't mean they actually know anything a year--five minutes!--later; it just means that they managed to jump through the hoop once. Hell, I hit a 200-yard drive once straight down the fairway; but that doesn't mean I can play golf.

And the kids entering college from now on will be these KERA kids. Woe to you, college professors who have any intellectual standards! All the kids coming out of high school will come out equal, because they've all just had to prove they did something once. Even the bright ones will have only done it enough to make the portfolio. It won't have stuck. But the great thing is that no one will have failed, so no one will feel bad about himself, and no one will feel inferior to anyone else.

I'm going to make an important qualification in a second, but let me state here the general principle that no individual--as an individual--has a right not to be discriminated against, unless the discrimination does some other harm to him than that others are given advantages that he doesn't have. That's what I was getting at earlier.

What I'm saying is that we're not equal, and so to treat us as if we were equal is to falsify our reality. But to treat us as different, some more talented and others less so, is by definition to discriminate. So, since in fact some people are superior to others, then the inferior ones have no right not to be discriminated against--in the sense in which all that's being done is that they're recognized as not being as talented as the others.

When you start depriving them of opportunities that they (in their less talented condition) can in fact take advantage of, then that's the "other" harm I was speaking of. But, for instance, to give Johnny, who has a gift for languages, classes in Spanish, French, Greek, and Latin, that Freddy, who can't do anything with languages and who asks to take them, is refused, there's discrimination but no harm.

So you can see that it also follows that no individual has a right to equality of opportunity with other individuals. The reason should be clear from the example I just gave. In fact we're not all equal; and if you give everyone the same opportunity, then the untalented will be incapable of taking advantage of it (and might be harmed by being forced to), and the very talented will be deprived of the opportunity to develop themselves to their full potential. Giving everyone the same educational opportunity is what has resulted in the dumbing down of everyone, which is a tragedy for the bright kids, and not great for the dumb ones or even the ones in between, who think they've accomplished something when they haven't. Evidence: American kids come out on top above almost all other kids in how well they think they can do math; they score near the bottom on how well they can do math.

Which would you rather have? A nation of kids who can do math, but don't think they're very good at it, or a nation of kids who think they're whizzes and can't do squat? --Maybe I shouldn't ask that question; I'm afraid of what the answer might be.

Now obviously, each person should be given the opportunity to develop as far as he is capable of developing--which is what the people of common sense mean when they talk about "equality of opportunity." But words have meanings. The opportunities in this case will precisely not be equal; more opportunity will be given to those who can receive more, and less to those who can't. Everyone should be challenged; but to challenge the untalented in the way in which the talented are challenged would be to invite them to despair, while to challenge the talented only at the level at which the untalented are pushed to the limit of their ability is to do them a disservice.

This means, however, in practice that some people will soar far about other people, and it will be obvious that they aren't equal and aren't treated equally. But in fact that's the way things are; the talented will rise above others anyway, even in spite of being put down--and you aren't doing kids a favor when you pretend that things are different. Kids know that they're not equals; the untalented know they're not as good as the talented ones. It follows from this that they know you're lying to them when you pretend that they're just as good at the task as the talented kids. So what if they feel bad? Their feelings reflect the reality of the situation.

Notice how shocked you are when I say that? It just goes to show how you've been trained to regard negative feelings as the real evil. I'll expand on this in the interlude that follows.

Racial discrimination

But let me now make the important qualification I mentioned a while ago--and it'll take some thinking to follow me on this one, so be ready. The prejudice against discrimination started off on the right foot. It was part of the Civil Rights movement. What it was reacting against was the assumption, based on a person's skin color, that he couldn't have the ability to be a doctor or professor or engineer or anything demanding intelligence, and therefore, "for his own good" he would be excluded from pursuing these studies.

In other words, black people supposedly lacked abilities just because they were black--abilities which had nothing to do with the color of their skin. Now this is contrary to fact. Granted, as I mentioned earlier, black people had, during slavery and beyond, acted stupid (and trained their children to act stupid) because that way (in slavery) they could avoid work, and (after slavery) they could make whites feel guilty. But the fact is that the genes that determine skin color do not prevent a person from being bright enough to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever. We see that, now that blacks have been given the opportunity, they do very well in these professions, thank you.

It was precisely this kind of thing--this categorization of people based on "birth"--that was what "all men are created equal" repudiated. Thus, the kind of discrimination that puts people into "ability" or "opportunity" groups because of a characteristic that has nothing to do with ability is morally wrong, and violates the rights of the members of the group, because it acts as if these people are not what they are.

And my conservative friends should take note that the people's instincts in the Civil Rights movement were originally on the right track, when at the beginning, they engaged in affirmative action--which involves a kind of reverse discrimination upon individual members of the majority. This is moral because no individual, as I said, has a right as an individual not to be discriminated against, and so preferential treatment of blacks, say, which prevented some white individual from an opportunity he otherwise would have had to enter medical school, say. did not harm that individual--because the white individual had no right as an individual to become a doctor.

Be clear on this: to become a doctor is what a person wants in the future; it is not some damage done to his present reality. Thus, depriving him of it is not a violation of a right.

The point here is that, insofar as the while people were, wittingly or unwittingly, engaged in a conspiracy to keep all black people (just because they were black) out of medical schools, then this conspiracy, as immoral, had to be broken up. The most practical way to do this is to give blacks preferential treatment (getting less qualified blacks into places taken by more qualified whites), until the time when blacks and whites can both get into medical school based on talent and preparation, not the color of their skin. The reverse discrimination does not discriminate against whites as such, but only against individual whites, who happen to be marginally more talented than the blacks who are preferred in order to break up the conspiracy. So a certain amount of reverse discrimination in these circumstances is legitimate--until there is no longer a policy of excluding the minority group because of that irrelevant characteristic.

(I'm not saying, by the way, that this preferential treatment was necessarily the best way to correct the wrong of invidious discrimination. I suspect a better way might have been figured out; but it would have taken longer. All I'm saying is that you can make out a case that this temporary preferential treatment was not immoral and not a violation of the rights of the individual majority members who were affected by it.)

Blacks will say that the time to stop preferential treatment has not yet arrived, because there's still a conspiracy to keep opportunity away from blacks just because of their skin color. But I think they're being unrealistic. Granted, many blacks are "educated" in the worst of our public schools--which means that they've had appalling treatment--and so are unprepared for college and medical school. But this isn't because they're black, except for those New Moralist blacks who subscribe to Third Commandment paranoia. No one, in fact--I suppose I should qualify that, and say that no one except for some fringe kooks--is trying today to keep blacks away from medical schools because they're black; the opposite is the case almost universally.

And so at the present time, the cry against preferential treatment is justified. Now that the conspiracy has been broken up, it is no longer moral to give members of the minority group preferential treatment, because it does just what the preferential treatment was supposed to correct: it categorizes people into unreal "ability" groups based on a characteristic that is irrelevant to the ability.

And, as has been documented, this only exacerbates the racism that it was trying to correct, for the simple reason that the differences in real ability do show up afterwards, and the blacks who are (because of affirmative action) just as qualified as the whites are apt to show themselves as less competent, which reinforces the stereotype that no blacks could make it on their own, and they're all only where they are because of preferential treatment. This, for instance, is what they (both blacks and whites) said of Clarence Thomas, in spite of the fact that he got through college and law school before the days of affirmative action, when all the cards were stacked against him, and in spite of the fact that his decisions are very well-reasoned and cogent. And the tragedy is that, instead of being a model for blacks at what they can aspire to by hard work and dedication, he is despised by them as an Uncle Tom, because he has the intelligence to agree with the position I am stating here.

Now none of this is to say that there's anything wrong with "affirmative action" in the sense of giving extra help to a talented individual who has had bad breaks in the past. (Justice Thomas also happens to agree with this, and puts it into practice in a quiet way too.) Here, you're giving the person an opportunity that is commensurate with his individual ability; and this is consistent with the reality of the situation. If he happens to be black, and you happen to like black people and wish them well, there's nothing wrong with this either, provided you wouldn't deny help to a disadvantaged white person just because he's white. It's the groupification of the individual that's the problem.

And this groupification makes the whites feel good about themselves, because they're trying to make up for the past; they care, and that shows how good they are. The fact that it produces the exact opposite effect from what they're trying to do is irrelevant; because they feel that they're doing the right thing. So here we are again; feelings are all, and feeling that you care is paramount; it doesn't matter what damage you do, provided you do it caringly.

This leads us to "self-esteem," which I'll defer to the interlude.

The connection with firearms.

But there are a couple of spinoffs from this attitude that we're all equal, stemming from the idea that rights are based on equality, one of which is very serious. But let's take the less serious one first.

There's a corollary of this New Commandment that's almost a Commandment in its own right: Thou shalt not use or own firearms. You know how really bent out of shape New Moralists get about "violence" (ignoring the violence of protests that advance the New Moralist agenda, of course), and how this translates itself into an attempt to rewrite the Second Amendment of the Constitution, and claim that it means that militia (the national guard) can have weapons, but not individuals.

I'm not going to argue the meaning of the Amendment; I just want to point out the basis of this anti-gun-ownership sentiment, and link it to this New Commandment not to discriminate.

A firearm makes an individual powerful; so powerful, in fact, that he can defy even the officers of the government. Furthermore, in having a firearm, a human being far outmatches poor little Bambi, who doesn't have a chance against him. And so, he threatens the ecology with his hunting, and terrorizes the rest of us.

Now there's no question that firearms in the hands of the lawless are a terrible thing, and therefore, crimes involving firearms should have punishments that create strong disincentives against using them against other citizens--and those laws must be strictly and swiftly enforced.

But this won't assuage the New Moralists. They can still be used for hunting, which makes us unequal to the animals, and they still can be used to thwart the Government--which is precisely why the amendment to the Constitution was put there--when the Government becomes tyrannical. The individual, or small groups of like-minded individuals, can stand up against the State if they have firearms; otherwise, they're totally helpless.

Oh, come on! Tyrannical? Well, I just heard of a case where a school board almost took a nine-year-old away from her parents because they were home-schooling her and she wasn't getting enough socialization. The fact that she went to church was irrelevant; she wasn't getting educational socialization (read, indoctrination into the New Morality.) Fortunately, since she was in a consortium of home-schooled kids who went on field trips, the government let the mother keep her child.

But, you see, for the New Moralist, Government is always good, because it's in business, so to speak, to help people; and individuals are evil, insofar as they stand out as individuals, and insofar as they resist Government's benign attempts to force them to do what's good for them.

In the light of this, consider the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. Sure, they were religious fanatics; sure, they had stockpiled weapons. But they had stockpiled them because the Government, following the Tenth New Commandment we'll see later, was making threatening moves against the Religious Right, and they wanted to be able to defend themselves against attack. They weren't amassing them to come out of their compound and force the rest of Texas to belong to the Branch Davidians.

It was the mere fact that they were Religious Right fanatics and they had these weapons that made them a threat to society, in the New Moralists' minds, not some action they were doing. How can you trust these people? They hate us, and we know what we'd do if we hated something and we had all those firearms! So we can't let that happen! We've got to attack!

Now of course charges were trumped up (maybe they were valid, but the point is that they were an excuse) that they were molesting children--and so we did it for the children--of course we did. You can sell anything to the public if you say that you're doing it for the children. And so we went in with tanks, for God's sake--I mean, for Reno's sake--and this led to setting fire to the compound, burning everybody down to save the children. And it was their fault, of course. It certainly wasn't Bill Clinton's. He said he didn't even know about the attack, until Janet Reno told him it happened. Of course he didn't. I guess it depends on what you mean by "know" and "attack" and "happened." You'll have to ask her; she's the one who ordered it.

And like a good lackey, she "took responsibility" for it--in spite of the fact that the one responsible for something like this is, as I said, the one in control; and the one in control of things like this is the Commander in Chief, not the Attorney General.

Put it this way: (1) if Clinton didn't know what she was doing during the prolonged siege that led up to the attack, he damn well should have known, because he, in the last analysis, was in charge. So it's gross neglect of duty for him not to inform himself of what she was planning and either okay or veto it. If he didn't, then it's the same thing as if he okayed it. (2) If she didn't inform him, then why is she still Attorney General? It was serious insubordination to take over control from her boss. So the proper course of action if Clinton got surprised by her actions was to fire her on the spot--which indicates that he did know. (Of course he did! How can you believe she'd do a thing like that on her own?) And so, he is at fault for condoning such an abuse of Government power. Tanks! Think about that. Tanks!

But you see, they had firearms, and they were the Religious Right, and that made them ipso facto people who had to be either disarmed or wiped out.

Here's tolerance of different lifestyles for you.

Add to this the fact that violent crimes go down when citizens are allowed to own and pack firearms (sure they do; would you try to mug someone who might be packing?), and still the New Moralists, ignoring facts as always, are pushing for gun control--alleging "evidence" that serves their agenda, and denying the existence of everything else.

What's behind this--the real agenda--is that the New Morality can't be enforced if the Old Morality bears arms; and so it mustn't be allowed to do it--because then the individual is the one who is important, not the collectivity. Groups can have power, but not individuals.

The de-humanizing of the unequal.

Finally, there's the most serious corollary of all. We're reading out of humanity, as I mentioned, all those who are obviously not equal, like fetuses, defective persons, people in comas and so on. You'll notice that these people, because of their handicap, are now called "not meaningfully human," because if they're human, then they're equal--and (logic does have a way of intruding, doesn't it?) therefore, if they're not equal, they can't be human.

We're so scared of losing our rights, which we think we'd lose if we admitted inferiority to anyone, that we do one of two things: (1) We invent terms like "visually challenged," to pretend that blindness isn't really a handicap and "a blind person can do everything a sighted person can do; he's the equal of everyone else; he just does things a different way." (Tell that to my father.) Or (2) when this pretense can't be sustained, we deprive defective people (whose inferiority not even we can deny) of their rights, on the stupid grounds that they're not really people--and by so doing, we arrogate to society the right to decide when someone is and is not a person, which is a direct repudiation of the Declaration of Independence, the very basis on which we exist as a country. And once we do this, we've lost any hold we had on the rights we ourselves claim (since the idea of any right is that you have a right whether others "decide" you have it or not).

As I've said before, logic tends to work itself out in practice, even when it's denied; because logic is the mental reflection of the way things have to work. If you want to base rights on equality, then you have rights only when you're equal. But since no two human beings have the same talents, then there's no factual basis for equality; and so what's going to happen is that the blatantly inferior will lose their rights.

Beware. Hitler is only two blocks down that road. You wait till you get to be eighty, and find that the younger generation finds your life not worth living, and your abilities impaired, and decides that you're no longer a person, and you're going to be Kevorkianized whether you like it or not.

As I was working on the first draft of this chapter some time ago now, I had just received a letter from a priest who up until about five years previously had been a brilliant, if traditional, philosopher, and who was then now in a nursing home, for reasons you'll see when I quote the letter. "Warm greetings to both of you. I hope your greeting by mail is very friendly. I do not do very much in that respect though I could do more greeting by mail or even by telephone than I have in fact done. A point of fact that can be done is to let you know that on January 25 my age will be 90 years old. This is not highly numerous because we do not have a high number of age facts among our retired old folks. God bless you and help you in acceptance of age."

Doesn't that make you want to cry? Especially if you knew him when he was teaching the distinction between substance and accident in St. Thomas Aquinas. Therefore, he should be killed? He should be hugged! Comforted! Loved! Cherished!

But he's obviously not human any more, and so let's dump him in the same trash bin as the fetuses. Actually, he died naturally and quietly since I wrote the first draft of this, thank a merciful God. He's happy now, in full possession of all his former brilliance, and possessed of enlightenment we can't even imagine. But getting rid of nuisances like him is all part of this Seventh New Commandment. We must not discriminate--which means we must make the grossest of discriminations in order to avoid the lesser ones. Do I seem to recall a phrase about a gnat and a camel I heard somewhere? But what do you expect, when you're basing everything on feelings instead of facts?