The Measure of Man

There are a lot of things out there in the world today that are in a state of crisis.  That word gets thrown around a lot.  We usually declare a crisis based upon a series of events or symptoms where instability or volatility is pretty observable, but it usually involves something definitive in terms of a possible outcome.  What often gets lost in declarations of crisis is that you have to sort of know what you are transitioning from and what you are barreling towards.  It’s usually taken for granted that those two end points need to exist, since it is intuitive that something preceded a series of events and something predictable will happen if there is change.  How can you know if a current situation is a crisis without knowing what it was like before or where it might lead?  Maybe it’s just the normal state of affairs?

So, with that in mind, we have the existential crisis of manhood.  There are many that acknowledge it as a current problem.  For instance, this article in the Telegraph, oddly enough written by a woman, points to things such as suicide statistics to provide evidence for men feeling lost and incredibly unhappy.  On a more religious side, you have Catholic groups who also feel this crisis is a major problem, so groups like the New Emangilization Project have been taking root to address it.  The NEP contains many interviews and articles about the ongoing man-crisis.

Although they are two very different sources, there is a common thread to both of them: neither address what a man truly was, is, nor where men are heading.  All they discuss are observable symptoms of a problem, but again, you can never understand a crisis without knowing where you started or where you are going.

A.) ASK THE RIGHT QUESTION

The true question that needs to be addressed is this:  what exactly is a man, and what does it even mean to be one?

The article in the Telegraph has many common themes in terms of how men are viewed in society today.   What you’ll notice is that, contrary to the popular self-esteem boosting phrase “you are not your job,” men are described as, well, their job.  The entire discussion centers on man’s loss of worth when they are removed from their work or their relationships.  There is an implied dependence upon external things, therefore the implied solutions revolve around coping with changes to those external things.  So, the name of the game is acceptance of change, and the crisis is occurring because of a stubborn refusal/laziness when it comes to that.  What’s lacking in that, of course, is that we still don’t know what a man was and, if change is necessary, what they should be.  All we see are symptoms of unhappiness and attempts at diagnosis.

Unfortunately, the New Emangilization Project falls into the same morass.   They have a list of core questions in terms of their project, and they all mostly revolve around diagnosis and man’s relation to external activities:

What is state/health of the faith life in men in the Catholic Church?  If there is a “man crisis” in the Church, what are the root causes?  How are men different (if at all) to women in terms of engaging in Catholic/religious life?  Does the evangelization of men require a different approach than women?  Are targeted efforts necessary?  What is the status of the evangelization efforts of Catholic men in the Church?  What kinds of specific evangelization techniques are effective in drawing men to Jesus Christ?  What role do the Sacraments play in the conversion of men?  Stepping back from the details, what are some guiding principles for the New Emangelization?

This is largely a list of actions to be performed on men or by men.  Although there is an effort to try and find root causes and a general state of affairs, the answer really lies in the seemingly simple question they are not asking: what is manhood?

In total, these give two very different spins on the man-crisis depending on your view.  Either a.) what we perceived as “manhood” was, in fact, wrong, and it needs to change to what it really is, or b.) we are trying to change manhood into something that it is not, and we need to return it to what it was.

B.) SUBSTANCE IS NOT ACCIDENTAL

What I do want to do is refocus the discussion on that core topic: defining manhood.  Maybe we’ll stumble upon an answer along the way.

A good philosophical basis for defining anything can revolve around the Aristotelian/Thomasian concepts of accidents and substance, mostly because someone hasn’t come up with a better model in the time between then and now.

Nor are they big enough to pick up entire buildings.

Essentially, what something truly is, what defines it, is its substance or essence.  An accident, on the other hand, is a property that has no necessary connection to the essence of a thing.  So, for instance, having four legs doesn’t make a chair a chair, since a chair can have any number of legs (or none at all).  Therefore, having four legs is an accidental property of a particular chair and not really a part of its substance or “chair-ness.”  It’s a mere adjective, but not a part of its true definition.

What’s truly interesting, from that Aristotelian approach, is that you begin to realize how difficult, if not impossible, it is to truly define the substance of any object in its fullest capacity, whether it be because of the limits of language or our inability to drill that far down conceptually.  A lot of it boils down to you just kind of “know one when you see one.”  This is partly because of a combination of counterintuitive truths, in my opinion, that come together when trying to define something: 1.) we base our understanding of substance on our senses, 2.) we cannot fully understand what something is without also understanding what it is not, and 3.) we can’t understand what something is not without something to compare it to.  So, without a full knowledge of everything in the universe, we quite possibly can never fully understand or fathom the substance of any given object or concept (although we can get close enough) because we can’t fully define what it is and is not.

For example, imagine nothing exists.  Zilch, nothing, nada.  Kind of impossible to do, but get as close as you can.  Now, imagine that, all of a sudden, a circle bursts into existence out of the nothingness and becomes the only thing that ever existed.  How would you describe it?  Some easy things come to mind, like saying it’s round.  But, can you conceptualize round when the only thing in existence is round?  Does round have meaning when there is no such thing as something that isn’t round?

“What if you drew a giant circle? What if it went around all there is? Then would there still be such a thing as an outside? And does that question even make any sense?” -They Might Be giants

To gain meaning to any possible description you could give that circle, you need something else to compare and contrast.  Let’s visualize a square next to the circle.  Now, round has a whole different meaning, because we now know what “not round” looks like and it looks kind of pointy.  That meaning is still limited further, though, if we consider everything in existence, because we all know there are a whole host of objects that exist that are either round or not round.  So, quite literally, your concept of round changes with each new thing that you discover that either shares, or does not share, that trait.  Imagine how bad your head would hurt if you thought everyone had brown hair and met your first blonde person.  Your concept of what defines people would completely change.

With each new concept we add, the image comes more into focus.  When we started with one lone object in existence, accidents and substance kind of blend together and are one in the same because every trait is unique to that lone object.  Much like peeling off layers of an onion, we slowly start taking away things that we think are substantive, but we later figure out are accidental, because we find something that shares that characteristic.  Essentially, we’re striving to get to the core where no more layers exist, because that is the substance of the object.

What this path leads us to is that the substance of any thing or concept has to be unique and exclusive to it, because two things of the same exact substance would necessarily have to be the same thing.  It has to be a property that is necessary; something of which if you took it away or changed it, would make it no longer be the same.

C.) MAN DID NOT COME FIRST

This core philosophy about substance is present all throughout theology.  It’s present in the concept of transubstantiation in Catholicism, where there is a belief that the substance of the bread and wine change although the accidents do not.  It is part of the reason why there were recent translational changes in the language of the Nicene Creed used at the Mass, where consubstantial holds more meaning in regards to something being the same thing as something else (in this case, Christ and God) than the phrase “one in being with” because it conveys that they are the same substance.

We should be able to apply these same concepts to man.  What does man possess that is unique and exclusive to him?  Where is the core?

Regardless of one’s belief, the Bible paints a beautiful picture that flows well with this line of thinking.  When we read the creation accounts in Genesis, we are given two slightly different pictures as to the creation of man.  In Genesis 1:27, the event is not very detailed for this purpose:

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

Mankind is what is created as the core concept, and we are further delineated as male and female.  Male and female, in this case, share in the substance of mankind.  Neither has exclusive ownership over humanity, and both can claim to be created in God’s image.

In Genesis 2:18-23, we are given a more detailed account:

¹⁸ The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

¹⁹ Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. ²⁰ So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.

But for Adam no suitable helper was found. ²¹ So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. ²² Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

²³ The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.”

In this passage, we get a glimpse of the shared substance of man and woman in terms of being members of mankind like in the earlier chapter through a different lens.  There is a quite literal transfer of substance through the rib of the man.  However, in this account, we are first given a notion of difference between man and woman in terms of the “suitable helper” description, a descriptor used for one but not both.

What’s telling, here, is that the writer shows that there was a period of time where mankind, much like the circle in my above example, only had one feature in existence: man.  However, man had no distinction or true definition apart from the concept of mankind, for he was the only part of mankind and there existed no other.  So, arguably, the concept of “man” did not exist yet.

When God declared that it was not good for man to be alone, there is an inherent recognition there that something else was needed to give mankind greater meaning.  And so, woman was created.  It’s easy to look at this and think that woman was created second and man first, but that is not the case.  Truly, just like Genesis 1:27, mankind was created first, and then man and woman.  Man did not come into existence until woman did, which then gave something for man to compare himself to and contrast.  Man’s “helper” in fact was the thing needed to give man his substance.

D.) WHAT WOMEN CAN TEACH US ABOUT MEN

If we look at woman through the same lens as man, can we determine her substance?  Will that help us arrive at a conclusion?

Woman holds a unique advantage over man in this discussion because woman has a very physical, tangible exclusivity that man cannot share: pregnancy and childbirth.  Only women can experience new life growing inside of them, become intimately connected physically through an organ that grows for the sole purpose of supporting new life, and, until the recent advent of formula, only woman could nourish the young child until it was old enough to eat food on his/her own after birth.  Much of the physical body completely revolves around this process as a woman constantly goes through cycles of preparing to receive new life if it should arrive.

This isn’t to say that having children is the woman’s sole purpose in life.  That is hardly the case.  Rather, it is simply a core trait that is completely exclusive to them within the realm of mankind that man cannot ever touch.  Much of current cultural debate actually centers on this very fact.  The battle for reproductive rights, as it were, is at its core about issues of maintaining autonomy over woman’s very substance, whether they choose to partake in it or not.  Likewise, it is emotionally and physically challenging whenever a woman finds out that they cannot have children when they desperately wish to bring new life into the world because it cuts to their very core.  However, this substance is physical and tangible, and the progression into discussion of motherhood, including childless motherhood, can certainly be made.  It can assuredly provide a foundation to further the discussion.

Can man say the same thing?  Physically, yes, men are different, but is that man’s core?  In terms of reproduction, other than mode of delivery as it were, do women not share the same substance in new life by supplying half the genetic code?  Isn’t reproduction, the forming of new life, something that is shared by man and woman as members of mankind?  There does not seem to be much that man can claim in the realm of the physical that women don’t also share in terms of substance as a member of mankind, whereas the opposite cannot be said because of the very intimate connection women have with new life upon its creation and afterwards.

This leaves us in a conundrum.  Any description you can use for man, you need to ask yourself: can women do it too?  Are women also the same in that regard?  We define the world around us with our senses, yet it’s difficult to find something substantive about the physical when it comes to man.  Everything man can do, woman seemingly can as well.  If we cannot observe substance there, that leaves us with a lot of things that are merely accidents in terms of the observable.

Anything you can do I can do better. Including tangible substance.

Interestingly enough, turning to the Catholic Encyclopedia, we find the same dilemma.  If you look up “man” there is an article about mankind in general, but no article specifically as it relates to man himself.  The opposite is true of woman, which has an entire article dedicated to the philosophy and role of womanhood (although slightly antiquated, there are still a lot of great philosophical points).  It is only in the article about woman do we find a discussion about the role of man.

In there, we see familiar themes: duties, none of which are tangible.  Leadership.  Support.  Protection.  Can a woman lead?  Can a woman support the family?  Can a woman protect?  Besides that, these again are all duties, but they all carry the same core concept in the fact that they are entirely external to man.  How can one lead without anyone to lead?  How can one protect without something to protect?  How can one support with nothing to support?

In its own odd sort of way, not being able to find a discussion of man except in the article about woman is a microcosm of the entire problem.  Whereas woman appears to have a strong, physical, tangible foundation that is exclusive to woman, man does not.  It’s a thread that is carried the whole way through, from Genesis onto this point, and that thread is this: man’s entire core is dependent upon things outside of himself.  Man is entirely reliant upon the differentiation that was created when next to woman.  Man is reliant on externalities, while woman can rely on internalities.

E.) SOMETHING FROM NOTHING

Perhaps then, in a strange way, man’s very substance is not in exclusivity to any role or duty.  Man’s entire substance lies within the fact that he is dependent upon woman to give him meaning.  In other words, man can’t claim to hold exclusivity over those duties, but rather man’s exclusivity lies in the fact that those duties are all that man can do.  Therefore, it would seem that man’s core substance is one of complete sacrifice and complete reliance upon helping others, and that is the essence of manhood.  Woman can sacrifice just as well as man, but only man is completely defined by it.

It comes full circle in light of Ephesians 5:25, in the stunningly short, yet beautiful verse:

“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”

Isn’t that the core of what Christ did?  Did he not love the church in a completely self-sacrificial way, giving his entire being to his duty?  It is the highest of standards, but even if you are not a Christian, it is arguably the very substance of man.  Man’s very substance is dependence, because sacrifice is meaningless without something or someone to make a sacrifice for.  And, arguably, we would never fully understand or comprehend the sacrifice of Christ without that substance.

The article in the Telegraph and efforts like the New Emangilization Project, then, are kind of on the right track.  Man is, to an extent, his duties.  Perhaps the true crisis lies not in admitting that we are our jobs , but rather that we have forgotten why we are our jobs and how we should conduct them.  Then, perhaps those middle aged men could find happiness again, because even after all of these years, Aristotle was right.  Happiness is obtaining virtue and using it, and that’s the substance of man in the end.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Ducks

There’s one thing that sits pretty high on my list of things I can’t stand, and that’s when people of authority knowingly and willingly bend things to intentionally mislead people who rely upon them for insight. So, of course most politicians fall into that category at times. Media personalities and pundits fit the bill, too. So, of course, it was inevitable that it would happen in regards to Indiana’s recently passed Religious Freedom Restoration Act. An article in the Atlantic by Garrett Epps, a constitutional law professor, has been making the rounds as a shut-down piece to show how terrible the law is, but it fits the bill nicely in terms of meeting the criteria for deception.

A.) FALSE EQUIVALENCE

Let’s start with the beginning. And by beginning, I mean an anecdote that takes up almost half of the article and really has zero to do with the issue other than to inflame emotions. Mr. Epps uses the story of Maurice Bessinger, a vocally racist restaurant owner from the South that brought a case in the 60’s, to paint a picture. And what picture is that? Why, to make all supporters of the RFRA a racist bigot, of course. It’s a divisive journalistic device of false equivalence. In the context of Indiana’s RFRA, it does as much to provide “a good background against which to measure the uproar” as mentioning that Hitler loved dogs does when discussing dog license regulations. Sure, religion is mentioned in both, just like dogs in my example, but the use of a polarizing figure as a lead in to the story is done for purely manipulative reasons.

Are you good and angry now? Do you hate that mean racist guy? Good. Hold onto that anger while we start talking about the actual subject at hand.

B.) IF IT WALKS LIKE A DUCK

The main crux of Mr. Epps’s article is to argue against another article in the Weekly Standard, which makes the assertion that Indiana’s RFRA is substantially similar to all of the other RFRAs out there, including the federal one from 1993. Mr. Epps disagrees, and endeavors to point out two main reasons that Indiana’s law is not the same as the federal one or most of the state equivalents. So, let’s look at the first one:

First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.

So, South Carolina does, but somehow this is unprecedented? Does South Carolina provide any evidence for abuse of RFRA to allow for discrimination? That aside, Mr. Epps claims that the federal RFRA doesn’t contain that language. Yet, curiously, he states this a few paragraphs later:

What these words mean is, first, that the Indiana statute explicitly recognizes that a for-profit corporation has “free exercise” rights matching those of individuals or churches. A lot of legal thinkers thought that idea was outlandish until last year’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in which the Court’s five conservatives interpreted the federal RFRA to give some corporate employers a religious veto over their employees’ statutory right to contraceptive coverage.

So wait, the federal RFRA was interpreted to give some for-profit corporations RFRA protection? But I thought the federal RFRA didn’t contain such language?

It’s all semantics. You see, the statute doesn’t explicitly contain such language, sure. However, the Supreme Court has interpreted the statute to include some for-profit corporations. So, yes, the federal law DOES now extend that way.

The intentionally misleading part comes in here. Mr. Epps states that the Indiana law explicitly allows ANY “for profit-business” to assert the right. But the federal law after the Supreme Court case? SOME “for-profit businesses.” Hobby Lobby limited the use of the defense to only include for-profit businesses that are closely held and operated by the owners. See? Different. Indiana allows it for ALL, as is clear by the language of the statute:

Sec. 7. As used in this chapter, “person” includes the following:

(1) An individual.

(2) An organization, a religious society, a church, a body of communicants, or a group organized and operated primarily for religious purposes.

(3) A partnership, a limited liability company, a corporation, a company, a firm, a society, a joint-stock company, an unincorporated association, or another entity that:

(A) may sue and be sued; and

(B) exercises practices that are compelled or limited by a

system of religious belief held by:

(i) an individual; or

(ii) the individuals;

who have control and substantial ownership of the entity, regardless of whether the entity is organized and operated for profit or nonprofit purposes.

Emphasis mine. So, no, not ANY for-profit business. Just ones with individuals that have control and substantial ownership over the business. Which is the definition of a closely held business. Which is the same as the Supreme Court interpretation of the federal RFRA.

Therefore, yes, the Indiana law is the same as the federal law in that regard, although Mr. Epps intentionally left that part out and, quite frankly, made a dishonest distinction by saying the Indiana law was open to ANY and the federal law was just SOME. The truth is, the Indiana law looks like it was written expressly with that Supreme Court case in mind by including the same closely held business limitations.

C.) AND QUACKS LIKE A DUCK (MAYBE)

The second assertion made in the article is this:

Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a business’s “free exercise” right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government.

The singling out of businesses is unnecessary, because it applies to all individuals under the definition of the statute. Also, like his first example, he points out Texas has similar language in their RFRA, so this is also not a novel concept. That aside, this too is a semantics game that is mostly due to the fact that the issue hasn’t gotten the whole way up to the Supreme Court yet. If you read the literature on the matter, you’ll see that there are a substantial amount of courts that DO think RFRA provides a defense in cases between private entities. Heck, even the Department of Justice has alluded to it. For instance, take the DOJ’s own words from its support of a motion to dismiss in Wheaton Coll. V. Sebelius in 2012:

[I]f plaintiff were sued by a plan participant or beneficiary in the future, plaintiff, in its defense of such an action, would have an opportunity to raise its contention that the contraceptive coverage requirement violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”‖ Reply in Support of Motion to Dismiss at 3-4, Wheaton Coll. v. Sebelius, No. 12-01169 (D.D.C. Aug. 20, 2012).

That is the DOJ saying, if a private citizen sued Wheaton, they could use the RFRA as a defense. Although Wheaton is considered a religious institution in terms of being defined as a person, Hobby Lobby has since extended that to closely held corporations as well (as mentioned above).

It doesn’t end there, though. A Virginia Law Review article from 2013 nicely summarizes where this issues stands on the Circuit Court level:

Some circuits (hereinafter “defense circuits”) have allowed RFRA to provide a defense in citizen suits, finding the statute’s language and purpose sufficiently broad to create a defense regardless of the parties to the suit. Under this reading, an unambiguous version of the text would be modified to say, “A person whose religious exercise has been burdened in violation of this section may assert that violation as a claim or defense in a judicial proceeding and may obtain appropriate relief (including against a government).” This reading makes clear that relief against a government is merely an additional right—a subset of the more generally obtainable relief under RFRA. Thus, “claim or defense in a judicial proceeding” is freestanding and not limited by the “obtain relief” phrasing.

Those circuit courts include the 2^nd, 8^th, 9^th, and D.C. To be fair, there are also circuit courts that take the opposite view, namely the 6^th and 7^th. Arguably, the “pro” circuit court areas cover a larger portion of the population, but at best the issue is still up for interpretation. So, with it still being uncertain, is there anything wrong with Indiana making their version of the RFRA less ambiguous rather than waiting for the Supreme Court to decide?

Regardless of the answer to that question, Mr. Epps also left out this part of Section 9 of the Indiana law:

If the relevant governmental entity is not a party to the proceeding, the governmental entity has an unconditional right to intervene in order to respond to the person’s invocation of this chapter.

So, even if the government is not a party, they can enter a lawsuit between private parties at any time when the RFRA is invoked as a defense. The government will always have an opportunity to participate if it so chooses in order to respond and lend support to statutory interpretation.

For this second point, then, Mr. Epps may or may not be correct depending on how you view the way the interpretation of the federal RFRA sits at the circuit court level. However, to insinuate that it is a unprecedented take on the matter is false on its face.

D.) THEN IT’S PROBABLY A DUCK

Where does that leave things? Mr. Epps’s assertion is that Indiana’s law is not the same as RFRAs, like the federal RFRA, because it “explicitly recognizes that a for-profit corporation has “free exercise” rights matching those of individuals or churches” and because it “explicitly makes a business’s “free exercise” right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government.” The trouble is, the federal law does the same thing in the former case and arguably the same thing in the latter, and Indiana’s law is certainly not novel in either of those instances.  What that show is that Indiana has essentially mirrored the current legal landscape in drafting a law that 19 states and the federal government already had on the books for at least 20 years.

The broader trouble in all of this is that it is, again, a perfect example of our current heated state of affairs. We develop gut feelings and shoot first. Then, when we get into the details for whatever reason, confirmation bias kicks in and we tend to look for any evidence that supports our views while discounting the others. This is a pretty horrible way to go about any debate on a difficult topic, particularly one where it deals with the intersection of rights of two individuals.

What only makes that situation worse is when people, like Mr. Epps, use their position to fan those flames when they really have a heightened duty to be as objective as possible. The law is tricky, it deserves thorough scrutiny, and it certainly is not served well by using an article as confirmation bias bait for your own personal opinions distributed to an audience that is arguably not aware of all of the subtle nuances. There is a duty there to explain the subtle nuances, not hide them because you know your audience isn’t going to bother looking into it themselves. Mr. Epps knows people will be looking for bullets, so he is more than happy to craft one under the guise of a reputable source.

The takeaway is this: never use another person’s opinion in substitution of your own research, and shame on authors like Mr. Epps for continually fanning the flames with hyperbole, intentional omissions, and obfuscation to further their own agenda.