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Ave Maria Law School, where Marco Rubio delivered a commencement address on May 15, was founded in 1999 by Catholic fanatic Tom Monaghan and a few fellow papists from Michigan. That this is an explicitly, in-your-face religious school rather loosened Marco’s tongue, so that each time he said something truly lovely — such as
Ultimately, you will find that life is not about what the world defines
as happiness. In fact, what you’re really striving for is peace…
Peace [is] the ability to take anything that comes your way and see the
good in it. Peace is the ability to be happy in both good times and in
bad. When you have pain and when you have joy. The ability to be happy
with great disappointment and great triumph.
— he undercut it with something foolish, such as
And that peace will never come from any person, any job, or anything you
do. It’s supernatural and will require your complete reliance on God
to achieve it.
There’s something lovely about this commingling of the sublime with the
batshit, perhaps because it evokes an era of illusory but sweet unity,
when someone could express such sentiments and imagine he wasn’t gravely
insulting half his listeners on C-Span. Forty years ago, I’m sure
nobody would have hastened to point out that the peace to which Rubio
refers was well-known to Buddhists and Stoics long before anybody
thought to invent Rubio’s god.
But let’s point it out, because Rubio really does seem to believe, and want us to accept, that
peace is impossible without devotion to his particular version of the
Judeo-Christian deity. This was very nearly his only point during his
15-minute address.
Here’s how Rubio began:
I thought I would share with you what I hope, or wish, someone would
have told me 13 or 14 years ago. And it’s something that I’m sharing
with people like you who are very well prepared, have learned a lot
academically, gone to undergrad, probably did very well in high school,
did very well in your undergrad careers, spent the last three years
training to be lawyers, and learn not just the law, but how to think
like a lawyer — which is a process in itself. Especially that first year,
where your mind is remade to argue both sides of any issue. And, and —
so you’re well prepared for your career. And the one tip I can give
you, the one that I wish I had more fully embraced 14 or 15
years ago, when I began embarking on my career — not just as a lawyer
but interest in public service and in life in general — is this, and it’s
pretty simple: You cannot do anything without God. It’s a profound and
elemental truth. Not, you cannot do most things without God. You will
not be able to do anything that you want, truly, in fulfillment, without
God.
Hearing this, three responses immediately
spring to mind. Unfortunately, the first involves the lone expletive I’m
not allowed to use on this blog.
The second is: Quick! Somebody tell the Danes!
Because
when I think about “anything that I want, truly, in fulfillment,” I
think about living in a civil, sane, and tolerant society. I think about
prosperity, about the availability of medicine, and about education —
the ability to be educated and to surround myself with people who’ve
got a freaking clue. And I think about economic security. And if those
things are impossible without “God,” I wonder how to make sense of the
map at right, which compares the number of atheists in various European
countries. (The lighter the country is, the fewer people believe in
gods.) Unless I’m badly misjudging the desires of the human soul, “God”
has made far more things possible for the disbelieving Swedes, Dutch,
and Danes than for the pious Spaniards and Portuguese. I wonder: Could
it be that the Danes are lying when they’re polled about their contentedness? Or are their brains so befoggled by secular humanist nonsense that they don’t even know how miserable they are?
My third reaction takes a bit more explanation. Perusing Ave Maria’s website some months ago, I noticed that they have institutionalized belief
in “natural law.” That’s “natural,” as opposed to “positivist.”
Proponents of natural law theory believe that there is an objective
moral order to the universe and that it may be divined using reason.
Remembering this, and hearing Marco Rubio’s speech, called to mind the
modern giant of natural law theory, Thomas Hobbes, who tried to simplify
matters with his “Nineteen [Natural] Laws,” the tenth of which reads:
That
at the entrance into the conditions of peace, no man require to reserve
himself any right, which he is not content should be reserved to every
one of the rest.
Failure to make such reservations,
in Hobbes’ view, was the definition of arrogance, and I think that’s an
idea upon which Rubio would do well to meditate. I don’t doubt
that he knows what it takes to make himself happy, and he may even know
what makes Mrs. Rubio happy — and the above video aside, it’s not
inconceivable that he might have a few worthwhile bits of advice to
share with a bunch of fresh-faced young lawyers. But for a leader of a
religious polyglot people to stand before a camera and to say the people
who pay his bills will never have peace until they come around to his
side in a theological debate is cruel, stupid, and pompous.
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