Out of touch with reality and reason.

I wasn't surprised to read that some anorexics celebrate their condition. According to a daily media report some time ago, they promote anorexia nervosa as a lifestyle and seek recruits.

I wasn't surprised because like the witches in Macbeth, who proclaimed that fair is foul and foul is fair, many individuals and groups in our post-Christian society have distanced themselves from reality. They no longer regard reality as normative. Consequently, they can't or won't distinguish between health and disease, success and failure, good and evil.

The report reminded me of a news item that appeared a couple of years ago in a religious weekly I regularly scan. It concerned a group of deaf people who said they dislike the term hearing impaired. To them, deafness is a cultural diversity, not deviance from a norm. They even talked about the right to be deaf.

If there is nothing wrong with anorexia nervosa or deafness, what about blindness or lameness? Like many my age, I admit to some osteoarthritis. When it affects the way I walk, is this a cultural diversity? Is the pain I sometimes experience an alternative way of feeling? If my doctor tries to cure me, is he a cultural imperialist?

Of course not. Most of us, I suspect, can still recognize that bodies were meant to be nutritionally fit, ears were meant to hear, eyes to see and limbs to move. Nutrition, hearing, vision and mobility are human goods that we naturally delight in. We therefore seek to develop, preserve and, if necessary, recover them.

But the blase response to the pro-anorexia and pro-deaf reports indicates that the inability or refusal to accept reality does not seem as bizarre as it once did. As American social commentator Thomas Sowell has suggested, many increasingly see reality as optional. If they don't like it, they ignore it or deny it.

The dismissal of reality is not just cultural. It is religious, philosophical and ethical. It didn't begin with those who, like the anorexic and the deaf cited above, are likely to suffer immediate adverse consequences when they act on their beliefs. It began with cultural elites who are well enough situated financially and socially that they can get away with rejecting reality, at least for a time.

It is they who have imposed on us such an extreme egalitarianism that otherwise sensible people are brain washed into thinking that fair may well be foul, and foul may well be fair. How else can we explain widespread sympathy for the assertion that single-parent households are constitutionally as good as intact families? How else can we account for the growing acceptance of the moral equivalence of homosexual and heterosexual unions?

When we extol single-parent households, we applaud a deficiency of fatherhood or motherhood, both basic human goods. When we acclaim homosexual unions, we celebrate a deficiency of procreative power, an even more basic human good. A deficiency is the absence of a good, but not just any good. It is the absence of a good that is supposed to be there. If we appreciate what nutrition and hearing are about, we recognize that anorexia nervosa and deafness are deficient. They lack goods that are supposed to be there. If we appreciate what families and sex are about, we recognize that single parenthood and homosexual intercourse are likewise deficient. They also lack goods that are supposed to be there. If we are in touch with reality, in other words, we appreciate both what ought to be and what ought not to be.

Reality is the ultimate teacher. To the extent that we heed it, we gain insight into the goods we need to fulfill ourselves, biologically, morally and mentally. To the extent that we disregard it, we distance ourselves from what is healthy, ethical and sane. The insane, in fact, are sometimes described as out of touch with reality. Traditionally, the deliberate refusal to accept reality has been considered a vice. Indeed, it is the deadliest of the seven deadly sins: pride. Humility, the opposing virtue, is not a kind of mincing self-effacement. It is the habit of accepting reality.

When Lucifer, the chief protagonist in the story of the war in heaven, said "I will not serve," he rejected reality. He denied the relationship between creatures and their creator. When the Greek skeptic Protagoras said "Man is the measure of all things," he denied the relationship between men and the universe. When modern pseudo-moralists hold that emotion is on a higher plane than reason, they deny the relationship between principles and practices.

Such denials indicate a refusal to accept that at its core reality is objective and instructive. When it is widespread, this refusal indicates a society that is losing touch with reality, that is spiralling into madness.

Joe Campbell writes from Saskatchewan and contributes frequently to Catholic Insight on a wide range of issues, but especially on Catholic social teaching.