Leon Kass has been awe-fully quiet lately, and I've been rather too preoccupied with the demands of mere living to go digging for him. Sometimes I disappoint myself.

But, as a diligent collector of Kassiana, when I unexpectedly stumble across the great man's freshly steaming spoor, well, the whole world seems just a little bit brighter.

A case in point. I found the following profundity (among others), over at Accelerating Futures, Michael Anissimov's transhumanism oriented blog.

"Even if it is true that the great majority of Americans still profess a belief in God, he is for few of us a God before whom one trembles in fear of judgment. With adultery almost as American as apple pie, few people appreciate the awe-ful shame of The Scarlet Letter. The sexual abominations of Leviticus - incest, homosexuality, and bestiality - are going the way of all flesh, the second with religious blessings, no less."

Well, those first two sentences are just stupid and wrong. Even if we judge them as mere rhetorical excess. Repeat after me. Stupid. Wrong.

But that last line is the real kicker. Just what is it, exactly, that Dr. Kass thinks we should do about the proliferating sexual abominations of Leviticus? Kill all the queers and furrys? Or, I suppose we could just force them into arranged marriages. Though that seems a tad unfair to their brides-to-be, to say nothing of The Children. Perhaps a life of enforced celibacy in solitary confinement is called for? Because if we lock them all up together, just imagine what mischief they'd get up to. If we're going to do that, we might just as well let them wander around at loose ends. But let me not put words in his mouth. Concentrate rather on those words he's actually said.

Then repeat after me. Stupider. Wronger.

So much for Kass and the Old Testament. Even better, to my mind, is his recent appearance live, on stage, in the heart of our nation's capital. The press of affairs prevented my attending, but Dr. Kass always provides a lively show, and as luck would have it, Julian Sanchez was there, to provide us with a dispassionate and thoughtful analysis...

More or less as I expected, Kass is a master of what (in honor of the late Alan Bloom) I've decided to call Bloombast: The conservative version of that special gift for conjuring a sense that you are in the presence of Profundity--and, indeed, perhaps even asserting as much repeatedly--without actually making a cogent argument or, indeed, pinning down a solitary clear concept...

I was a bit surprised to find that Kass does, however, give the impression of being a serious and, in a sense, intellectually honest fellow who's aware of and troubled by the gaps in his arguments...For various reasons, Kass is at pains to show that our Dignity, whatever it might be, is not reducible to any number of other familiar moral concerns, such as autonomy, experiential well being, equality, and so on...

The key rhetorical trick Kass employs...involves splitting the question into one of our "higher" dignity, which he calls the "dignity of human being" ("being" read as "fully flourishing") and the "lower" dignity of "being human," which is to say, simply existing as a biological member of homo sapiens...

The moralist concerned with coarse culture, say, will be more attuned to the former...Another sort of conservative especially outraged by abortion and stem cell research, on the other hand, may feel a little uneasy about this rather aristocratic conception of dignity (for how much of that does an embryo have?), preferring to insist this is a basic and unalterable property we have just as humans...

Now, watch closely for the sleight of hand. Kass runs through a series of conceptions of the "higher" dignity, beginning with the ancient Greek heroic sort, coming by turns to Kant's ideal, which he critiques (justly enough) as excessively formal...

Let me just interject here that "a series of conceptions" from Leon Kass should probably be taken with a healthy dose of caveat emptor. The totality of his primary source's thought is sometimes, um, lost in translation. Consider his ongoing treatment of Montaigne.

At the same time, though, Kass does say a number of highly plausible things about the higher order mental properties in virtue of which persons might be thought deserving of special moral respect.

On then, to that "lower" dignity. Here...Kass seems acutely aware of how inadequate are any of the accounts one might try to give of a "dignity" rooted just in some kind of biological humanity...

What to do, then? Here, we get a slew of metaphors in service of a spectacular act of Cirque du Soleil isometrics, with biology grounding and supporting the higher mental properties, which in turn reach down to elevate the biology. The circle is squared, the lady made whole: Biological humanity basks in the glow of the higher personhood for which it acts as necessary substrate.

Except, of course, it is just a trick: The lady was never really sawed in half, and no actual miracles occur when she's made whole...the false division he ultimately repudiates was rhetorically necessary to his argument: Whatever semblance of plausibility it picks up along the way depends crucially on the initial posit of a dichotomy. The counterfactual assumption is discharged, but Kass has snuck one of its consequents back into the main derivation. Because only by way of that imagined split between base biology and higher cognition does Kass justify talking about human biology in the abstract, about the physical, genetic species as a natural kind. Then, when they're reunited, he hopes he can skyhook the whole class into the Kingdom of Ends by way of the cognitive capacities we all recognize as morally significant.

Man, oh man. I sure wish I could write like that. But I am a peasant, from a long line of peasants, and such thoughtful criticism is beyond me. I just like to point at Dr. Kass and laugh. Philistinism? Sure. But it's a great big world, with room enough for even the likes of me. As has been pointed out over at Fight Aging!...

Leon Kass may not presently possess the high profile of past years, and these views are not expressed in the mainstream media in quite such volume these days, but the President's Council on Bioethics that was his podium is just as bad now as then - stacked with folk who believe it best to force you to age and die on schedule...These sorts of pro-death viewpoint are rightfully brought out in the sunlight, ridiculed, and squashed.

One does what one can. Kass's vision of human dignity would seem to demand that we wither and die, more or less on schedule. That's a piece of human dignity that would be well worth relinquishing, could we but do it.

H.G. Wells once voiced some thoughts that seem quite appropriate for this topic. He was talking about the human soul, but if you'll just substitute "human dignity" for "soul", you'll find that it still carries the gentleman's meaning quite clearly.

We are constantly being told that the human animal is "degenerating" body and mind, through the malign influences of big towns, that a miasma of "vulgarity" and monotony is spreading over a once refined and rich and beautifully varied world, that something exquisite called the human "soul," which was fomerly quite all right, is now in a very bad way, and that plainly before us, unless we mend our ways and return to medieval dirt and haphazard, the open road, the wind upon the heath, brother, simple piety, an unrestricted birth-rate, spade husbandry, hand-made furniture, honest, homely surgery without anaesthetics, long skirts and hair for women, a ten-hour day for workmen, and more slapping and snubbing for the young, there is nothing before us but nervous wreckage and spiritual darkness.

Man, oh man. I wish I could write like that, too.