Posted: 08/29/09 23:18
by Dave Mindeman
I get a little concerned about Katherine Kersten sometimes. She seems to be a little phobic about a number of things. I wonder if she has considered analysis?
Her column, this week, features Cassy Hough and the Anscombe Society at Princeton. This group is devoted to long term chaste, marriage oriented relationships.
As Kersten sees it, the Anscombe Society's promotion of marriage and chastity has an uphill battle against the drunken debauchery of college life. And, here I thought they were the halls of academia.
I got curious about the Anscombe Society though. Why that name? Well, their website answers that question:
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret (G.E.M., or Elizabeth) Anscombe (1919-2001), a student and literary executor of Wittgenstein, was a British analytic philosopher -- according to some, the 20th century's greatest. Her 1957 book Intention, on the role of reasoning in human action, has become a modern classic; her penetrating analysis of traditional sexual ethics in a 1977 essay "Contraception and Chastity" displays the rigor of her moral reasoning and the vigor of her defense of family values. A highly regarded Cambridge professor, wife, and mother of seven, she was chosen as our namesake for her unabashed dedication to the life of the mind and to marriage and family in her life and work.
Although Anscombe did have strong feelings on the subject -- she was a devout Catholic and anti-choice person -- that was only one of her public causes.
I wonder if Katie Kersten would be happy with Anscombe's other personna -- she was a stubborn peace activist. She worked against the US entry into World War II and considered Harry Truman a war criminal for his use of the atomic bomb on Japan.
Anscombe also shredded C.S. Lewis' arguments against naturalism and even though she was a devout Catholic, she could not accept Lewis's arguments that Naturalism was self-defeating (which in theory would prove the existence of the supernatural). A paper by Anscombe that thoroughly dissected Lewis point by point, caused the Christian philosopher Lewis to stop writing on pure religious theological argument, moving to his famous children and devotional books instead.
The Anscombe Society focuses only on Anscombe's 1977 essay "Contraception and Chastity". Which essentially sums up Anscombe's Catholic faith.
Now, the reason I go into this is that Kersten and Hough seem to want the world to be very simple. To Kersten, college life is about sexual mores -- not about learning, not about social contacts, and not about young people learning about who they are. To Hough, Anscombe is a hero to her because they share the idea of life at conception and marriage only sex....not about peaceniks or more complex theology.
College is a testing ground for young people. Some will meet Kersten and Hough's high moral standards....but many more will fall far short. Probably not total depravity but certainly short of the born again standard.
Kersten and Hough expect people to conform to a standard they choose. But people have their own choices to make. And only when young people get out on their own can they truly examine what their own philosophy will move toward.
Kersten may have low expectations about how those choices will turn out, but, in the end, it is not her choice to make.
Anscombe was a more complex person than Hough and Kersten give her credit for -- I think it is only fair that college students be allowed to move beyond simplified platitudes as well.
And really, Kersten still should consider that analysis thing -- this obsession with sex isn't healthy.
