Speaker 1: Pushkin. On February eighteenth, two thousand and eight, on the
Speaker 1: first day of spring training, a Major League Baseball player
Speaker 1: named Andy Pettitt held a press conference. He was a
Speaker 1: pitcher who, over the course of a long and brilliant career,
Speaker 1: played for the New York Yankees and the Houston Astros.
Speaker 1: A straight arrow, a beloved teammate, one of the good guys.
Speaker 1: But now an investigation by Major League Baseball had found
Speaker 1: that Pettit had, on several occasions used performance enhancing drugs.
Speaker 1: I want to apologize to the New York Yankees and
Speaker 1: to the Houston Astros organizations, and to their fans, and
Speaker 1: to all my team mates and to all of baseball
Speaker 1: fans for the embarrassment I have called them. He reads
Speaker 1: from notes, his head bowed and shame. I also want
Speaker 1: to tell anyone that is an Andy Pettit fan, I
Speaker 1: am sorry. Pettit wanted to come clean, sort of. I'm
Speaker 1: not that much of a baseball fan, but I have
Speaker 1: to say I've always been obsessed with his case. Obsessed
Speaker 1: to the point where if you sat next to me
Speaker 1: in an airplane, I would bring it up without warning
Speaker 1: and bend your ear for a good half hour. First off,
Speaker 1: what sort of bizarre apology is this? I want to
Speaker 1: apologize for the embarrassment I caused others others I thought
Speaker 1: this was about Andy Pettit and what Andy Pettit did wrong.
Speaker 1: I never took this to get an edge on anyone.
Speaker 1: I did this to try to get off to DL
Speaker 1: and to do my job, and again for that, I
Speaker 1: am sorry for the mistakes I've made. Pettit says I
Speaker 1: was injured. I took performance enhancing drugs to get healthy,
Speaker 1: not to get ahead. Does that distinction matter? Then he
Speaker 1: segues into this long thing about his dad, who he
Speaker 1: somehow dragged into the whole mess and now wished to
Speaker 1: drag out of it. He goes on and on about
Speaker 1: his dad's heart problems. It's all very emotional, But what
Speaker 1: does his dad's heart condition have to do with the
Speaker 1: fact he cheated? At the time, everyone waited on Anti
Speaker 1: Pettitt's public statement, including my favorite, a professor named Hollyweeks,
Speaker 1: who in the pages of the Harvard Business Review called
Speaker 1: it a self protective string of explaining back padding and
Speaker 1: minimizing with a small wan apology tucked in ouch. My
Speaker 1: name is Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to Revisionist History, my
Speaker 1: podcast about things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This episode is the
Speaker 1: first of a three part series about how to make
Speaker 1: sense of novel problems. Because what happened to Andy Pettitt
Speaker 1: was a novel problem. And if a problem is novel,
Speaker 1: if we've never seen that kind of problem before, how
Speaker 1: do we know how to think about it. I think
Speaker 1: we're really bad at figuring out novel problems. I think
Speaker 1: we need some help. I have a suggestion. Is good
Speaker 1: Rome to the Church of the Jesus. In the seniority
Speaker 1: the Church of the Jesu, built in fifteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: the spiritual home but perhaps the most storied of the
Speaker 1: many separate divisions of the Roman Catholic Church, the Jesuits.
Speaker 1: It is impossible to describe the interior. It's breathtaking color ornamentation.
Speaker 1: Take one of those standard issue Renaissance cathedrals that you
Speaker 1: can find all over the world, caffeinated heavily. That's the
Speaker 1: Church of the Jesuit. And you can see on one
Speaker 1: side you can see Saint Ignacious being presented to God
Speaker 1: by Saint Peter. Saint Peter was the first spoke and
Speaker 1: Ignatius was the first superior general of the Jesuits. Saint
Speaker 1: Ignatius is buried there. Huh. While Saint ROSSI Savior his
Speaker 1: only his right arm, as you can see on the
Speaker 1: older this is right now. You choose to baptize so
Speaker 1: many people so that only his right arm is everywhere
Speaker 1: where is arrested in India. The Jesuit order was founded
Speaker 1: in the sixteenth century by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a
Speaker 1: Spanish nobleman. They're famous as the educators of the Roman
Speaker 1: Catholic Church. There may well be a Loyola High School
Speaker 1: or university in your town, or a school named after
Speaker 1: Saint Francis of Xavier. Another legendary Jesuit, Georgetown University, is
Speaker 1: a Jesuit school, so as Boston College. The Jesuits are intellectual, austere,
Speaker 1: and five hundred years ago, the Jesuits pioneered a specific
Speaker 1: approach to solving problems that were new to the world.
Speaker 1: It's called casuistry. I have to admit that I've fallen
Speaker 1: in love with casuistry. In this episode and the two
Speaker 1: that follow, I want to explain the beauty and the
Speaker 1: power of the Casuistic method. It can help with life
Speaker 1: and death issues, help us resolve some of our most
Speaker 1: divisive controversies, but also smaller things as well. From the
Speaker 1: Church of the Jesuit, my guide took me next door
Speaker 1: to the rooms where and Ignatious lived. His shoes are
Speaker 1: still in the bedroom from five hundred years ago, all
Speaker 1: battered and worn. And then I walked a few minutes
Speaker 1: north to Via del Seminario, to the graduate school of
Speaker 1: the Jesuit Order, a magnificent building with an enormous sunlit
Speaker 1: courtyard and a staircase so wide a carriage could drive
Speaker 1: up it, but not ornate, spare simple. I sat in
Speaker 1: a small room off the main entrance, where I imagine
Speaker 1: Jesuit theologians had been receiving visiting journalists since the late
Speaker 1: sixteenth century. I would like my listeners to learn how
Speaker 1: to think like a Jesuit. So here I am, so
Speaker 1: here I am now. Casuis Street comes from the word
Speaker 1: causes in Latin something happened. So you give a case,
Speaker 1: which is a narrative, you say, something happened. That's the
Speaker 1: theologian I went to see in Rome, James Keenan. Father
Speaker 1: Keenan is in his sixties, short reddish hair, a gracious manner.
Speaker 1: He was wearing a pair of old sneakers, which for
Speaker 1: some reason struck me as odd. But then I remembered
Speaker 1: Saint Ignatius's battered shoes, and I thought, that's fairy. Jesuit
Speaker 1: Keenan says the Jesuit way of approaching problems is a
Speaker 1: function of what they were asked to do for the church.
Speaker 1: The sixteenth century, when the Jesuits get their start, is
Speaker 1: the age of colonial expansion. The West is being explored,
Speaker 1: the East is opening up Columbus, Magellan, Cortez. And it's
Speaker 1: the Jesuits who go out with these expeditions. The Pope
Speaker 1: asked them to be his emissaries to the world, diplomats, businessman.
Speaker 1: And if you're out on the road thousands of miles
Speaker 1: from Rome, encountering new people and new things, you start
Speaker 1: to think differently. How could you not You're not sitting
Speaker 1: behind the walls of a monastery in splendid isolation. You
Speaker 1: have to be practical, pragmatic. In Augustine, one of the
Speaker 1: greatest of early Christian thinkers, thought that the biblical commandment
Speaker 1: thou shalt not lie was absolute. You should never lie, ever,
Speaker 1: but that's not very helpful to a Jesuit in the
Speaker 1: sixteenth century in a place like say England. Now, say
Speaker 1: you're in England and Queen Elizabeth is the queen, and
Speaker 1: she's not recognized as the sovereign by the Catholics, and
Speaker 1: you've just arise as a priest, and if you tell
Speaker 1: the soldier that you're a priest, you're going to be dead.
Speaker 1: So is it moral to lie if you're being asked
Speaker 1: if you're a Catholic When answering truthfully means that you're dead.
Speaker 1: That kind of question is just the beginning. There's never
Speaker 1: been international law because everybody had their own countries. Now
Speaker 1: they're finding out that there are not only new lands
Speaker 1: that have never been explored, but there are people in
Speaker 1: those lands. What jurisdictions are there, What questions of sovereignty,
Speaker 1: what questions of prerogatives are there? And a whole host
Speaker 1: of questions arise that are political, goal and governmental, and
Speaker 1: that's going to raise well, how do you make a
Speaker 1: decision about this? In response, the Jesuits reach a really
Speaker 1: important conclusion, which is that when it comes to new problems,
Speaker 1: you can't start by appealing to a principle principles don't
Speaker 1: help because principles are the product of past experience, and
Speaker 1: they're only helpful so long as you're still living in
Speaker 1: the world. Those past experiences help create When you're confronted
Speaker 1: with a situation you haven't encountered before, then you're in
Speaker 1: uncharted territory. In those situations, the Jesuits argue you have
Speaker 1: to proceed on a case by case basis. Now what
Speaker 1: does that mean? Well, to give just one example, there
Speaker 1: was a huge controversy over maritime shipping in the sixteenth century.
Speaker 1: Keenan has studied it extensively. The Catholic Church in those
Speaker 1: days had an absolute prohibition against usury. It was immoral
Speaker 1: to charge any interest on a loan. When that prohibition
Speaker 1: was enacted centuries before it made sense. Many loans were
Speaker 1: from wealthy people lending to desperately poor farmers, and the
Speaker 1: farmers were being exploited. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth century,
Speaker 1: as the world opened up, merchants started shipping valuable cargoes
Speaker 1: overseas t furs from the New World, sugar rum and
Speaker 1: they wanted to buy insurance on their cargo. But was
Speaker 1: the premium that someone might pay an insurance carrier usury.
Speaker 1: It was a huge issue within the Church at the time.
Speaker 1: Many said it was usury, but the Jesuits replied, no,
Speaker 1: insurance is a novel problem, and you can't solve novel
Speaker 1: problems with old principles. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century
Speaker 1: wrote that a general rule applies generally, and the more
Speaker 1: you descend into the particulars, the more it's no longer
Speaker 1: a general rule. Descend into the particulars, understand what is
Speaker 1: distinctive about the case under consideration. That's what the Jesuits
Speaker 1: started to do. How First they would find a standard case.
Speaker 1: That is, a case that's in the same general territory
Speaker 1: where we've already reached agreement. So usury looks like an
Speaker 1: insurance premium, and everyone agrees that usury is wrong. That's
Speaker 1: a standard case, The Jesuits say, though, there's another relevant
Speaker 1: standard case. Think of the captain of the ship. He's
Speaker 1: also a kind of insurance. People pay him something like
Speaker 1: a premium to make sure the ship travels safely from
Speaker 1: point A to point B, and everyone agrees the captain
Speaker 1: is a good idea. Next, the Jesuits create what they
Speaker 1: call a taxonomy. They ask how close does the case
Speaker 1: in question come to the standard cases. So is the
Speaker 1: premium paid for maritime insurance more like something you would
Speaker 1: pay a loan shark, or more like the money you
Speaker 1: would pay for a good captain. So they keep looking
Speaker 1: for all sorts of similarities, and then they look for
Speaker 1: where's the breaking point, where is it no longer legitimate?
Speaker 1: And in the case of maritime insurance, the Jesuits say,
Speaker 1: insurance doesn't look that much like usury. It looks like
Speaker 1: the captain. The captain is there to make sure the
Speaker 1: ship gets from A to B safely. Insurance is there
Speaker 1: to make sure the value of the cargo gets from
Speaker 1: A to B safely. Do you see how brilliant that is?
Speaker 1: Everyone was going in circles around this question, and principles
Speaker 1: weren't helping. One side shouting Pope Gregory the Ninth ruled
Speaker 1: on this in twelve eighty seven, the other side accusing
Speaker 1: the Church of being stuck in the past. There are
Speaker 1: pirates out there, round and round and round. Jesuits just
Speaker 1: say stop, let's break it down step by step. Maritime
Speaker 1: insurance is just another kind of captain, and we're all
Speaker 1: in favor of captain's right. I was not raised as
Speaker 1: a Catholic. This was all new to me. It so next,
Speaker 1: let's go jesuit on the case of Andy patted. For
Speaker 1: more than a decade, there has been widespread illegal use
Speaker 1: of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing substances by players
Speaker 1: in Major League baseball. In January of two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: George Mitchell, former Senate Majority leader, former key negotiator in
Speaker 1: the Northern Ireland Peace process, testified before Congress on the
Speaker 1: results of his twenty month investigation into the use of
Speaker 1: performance enhancing drugs in baseball. The evidence we uncovered indicates
Speaker 1: that this has not been an isolated problem involving just
Speaker 1: a few players or a few clubs. The Mitchell report
Speaker 1: was four hundred and nine pages long. It named countless
Speaker 1: baseball players as illegal drug users, including on page two
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty four, Andy Pettit. The allegation came from
Speaker 1: one of Pettitt's closest friends, his trainer, Brian McNamee. Quote.
Speaker 1: From April twenty first to June fourteenth, two thousand and two,
Speaker 1: Pettit was on the disabled list with elbow tendonitis. Mactimye
Speaker 1: traveled to Tampa at Pettit's request and spent about ten
Speaker 1: days assisting Pettit with his rehabilitation. Mactimy recalled that he
Speaker 1: injected Pettit with human growth hormone on two to four occasions.
Speaker 1: The year before, the same allegation about Pettit had surfaced
Speaker 1: in a news report. Pettit had denied everything, but now
Speaker 1: baseball was in turmoil over performance enhancing drugs. Names were
Speaker 1: being named. Pettit was forced to come clean. I want
Speaker 1: to apologize to the New York Yankees and the Houston
Speaker 1: Astro's organizations and to their fans, and to all my
Speaker 1: team mates and to all of baseball fans for the
Speaker 1: embarrassment I have caused them. But then the apology isn't
Speaker 1: good enough. People get upset at him. He gets defensive,
Speaker 1: round and round. You deny, you get caught, you apologize.
Speaker 1: The apology doesn't work, the same circus that happens with
Speaker 1: all these cases. Okay, but what would the Jesuits say?
Speaker 1: They would say, wait, this is a novel problem. Baseball
Speaker 1: players using genetically engineered hormones to heal injuries. Isn't something
Speaker 1: that's happened before our set of existing principles do not
Speaker 1: help us. This is a time for casuistry. So are
Speaker 1: there standard cases out there, something reasonably analogous that we
Speaker 1: all agree on to help us make sense of this
Speaker 1: novel problem. It turns out there are standard case number one,
Speaker 1: A picture named Tommy John. Perhaps you've heard of him.
Speaker 1: Tommy John was very good, as good as Pettit. He
Speaker 1: played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Yankees. A big,
Speaker 1: friendly guy from the Midwest, also raised Catholic, as was
Speaker 1: Andy Pettitt. Not that it matters, but if you're gonna
Speaker 1: go jesuit and matters at baseball, maybe it's more appropriate
Speaker 1: to stay into family. July seventeenth, nineteen seventy four. I'm
Speaker 1: pitching against the Montreal expos I get right to the
Speaker 1: point where you're going to throw, and I felt this
Speaker 1: pain in my elbow like I've never had in my life.
Speaker 1: That's Tommy John in an ESPN documentary looking back on
Speaker 1: the injury that made him famous. When I shake my arm,
Speaker 1: get the ball back, and I throw again in the
Speaker 1: same pain and a ball goes home played. He's clearly
Speaker 1: told the story a million times, for he has it
Speaker 1: down the grimace, the aborted throwing motion. I go time,
Speaker 1: I walk off the mound. Wald Austin's coming this way,
Speaker 1: and I said, Walter, I've hurt my arm. Get somebody in. Tommy.
Speaker 1: John tore the ulner collateral ligament in his elbow, which
Speaker 1: is a tendon that basically holds your arm together. Baseball
Speaker 1: pitchers are always tearing their ulnar collateral ligament because throwing
Speaker 1: a baseball at ninety five miles per hour is an
Speaker 1: extraordinarily unnatural act. And in that era, the early nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: if you did that to your elbow, your career was over.
Speaker 1: You'd never pitch again. But John had a very resourceful
Speaker 1: orthopedic surgeon named Frank Job, and Job had a brilliant idea.
Speaker 1: He'd take a very similarly sized tendon from the forearm,
Speaker 1: a tendant that isn't much used, and grafted onto John's
Speaker 1: damaged ligament. John got his brand new elbow at the
Speaker 1: age of thirty one, and he ended up pitching in
Speaker 1: the major leagues until he was forty six years old,
Speaker 1: which is bananas. Other players look at how John saved
Speaker 1: his career and they start asking for the same surgery.
Speaker 1: It becomes epidemic. Close to five hundred major league pitchers
Speaker 1: have thus far had what's now called Tommy John surgery,
Speaker 1: not to mention thousands of teenagers in minor league pitchers.
Speaker 1: Baseball players get Tommy John surgery the way the rest
Speaker 1: of us floss our teeth. Okay, let's look at another
Speaker 1: standard case. The pictures are on the right field. Forget
Speaker 1: about it. This one has hitted for no jersey. How
Speaker 1: about the baseball player Barry Bonds, who's widely believed to
Speaker 1: have used performance enhancing drugs at the end of his career.
Speaker 1: Bonds used to be slender and fast. He became huge
Speaker 1: when Bonds was thirty seven, at an age when most
Speaker 1: baseball players are retired. To Arizona, he had one of
Speaker 1: the greatest seasons for a baseball player ever. Largely because
Speaker 1: of Bonds and a dozen or so other stars from
Speaker 1: baseball's so called steroid era, the league banned all use
Speaker 1: of peds. Barry Bonds is the case that most of
Speaker 1: us agree is unethical. So in one corner we have
Speaker 1: Tommy John, and in the other corner we have Barry Bonds.
Speaker 1: In our taxonomy, who is Andy Pettick closest to Tommy John,
Speaker 1: Barry bonds to help me figure things out. I called
Speaker 1: up two of the most learned baseball experts I could
Speaker 1: think of. Hi, my name is Jonah Carry. I am
Speaker 1: a writer for the Athletic and for Sportsnet. Jonah Carry,
Speaker 1: who was one of those people I suspect tried rocket
Speaker 1: science as a kid, found it too easy and took
Speaker 1: up baseball analytics instead. I interviewed doctor Frank job back
Speaker 1: in two thousand and two, I believe, and he said
Speaker 1: that the big risk of this surgery was that if
Speaker 1: you did it, the person hand would become a claw,
Speaker 1: which is terrifying. That you put a new tendon in
Speaker 1: and essentially it messes with the arm so much that
Speaker 1: you don't even have any tactile ability whatsoever. That was
Speaker 1: the risk. That was the risk that Tommy John took.
Speaker 1: Carrie points out that creating a new ulner collateral tendon
Speaker 1: doesn't make you a better pitcher. It just means that
Speaker 1: you can pitch the way you pitched before. It's restorative.
Speaker 1: The tendon is there as a stabilizer that it essentially
Speaker 1: allows you to use the force that you have and
Speaker 1: the mechanics that you have in the physical strength that
Speaker 1: you have to throw as hard as possible without risk
Speaker 1: of anything happening. It keeps the arm in place. There's
Speaker 1: not a huge amount of difference between Tommy John's stats
Speaker 1: before his surgery and Tommy John's stats after his surgery.
Speaker 1: The surgery turned him back into the Tommy John we
Speaker 1: have always known. That's not the same as bonds. Bonds
Speaker 1: use drugs. That turned him into something new. A man
Speaker 1: who typically hit between thirty and four, he home runs
Speaker 1: a year suddenly and unexpectedly hits seventy three. Seventy three,
Speaker 1: there's all the all time. Next, I called up. This
Speaker 1: is George Will, political commentator, baseball fanatic, and, most crucially
Speaker 1: for our purposes, the son of Professor Frederick Will, philosopher
Speaker 1: an epistemologist. Are we now recording? Should I proceed? Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: we're recorded. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you
Speaker 1: taking a time. Okay, well, it's good fun. I always
Speaker 1: take time to talk baseball. Okay. If you think it
Speaker 1: sounds like I was calling George Will from my car,
Speaker 1: you are entirely correct. He's a busy man. I had
Speaker 1: to take whatever time with him I could get. Let's
Speaker 1: look at the universe of cases that we've had over
Speaker 1: the last thirty years or so, and sort can we
Speaker 1: draw a line between the ones? Can we sort of
Speaker 1: put them on a continuum from I have a real
Speaker 1: problem too, I have less of a problem. So his
Speaker 1: Bonds at the far end. Sure. Sure, When Barry Bonds
Speaker 1: goes to a spring training one year and he used
Speaker 1: to wear a size forty two jersey and now he
Speaker 1: wears a size fifty two jersey and his half size
Speaker 1: has gone from seven on eighth to seven on a quarter,
Speaker 1: that is fundamental structure of his body has changed. Then
Speaker 1: you have to say, to compete with Barry Bonds, other
Speaker 1: people have to be willing to put their bodies through
Speaker 1: this strange transformation. And that's not fair somehow, so our
Speaker 1: casuistry tells us that we're fine with restorative interventions, but
Speaker 1: were dubious of transformative interventions. So who is Andy pettitck
Speaker 1: closest to Barry Bonds or Tommy John So Pettit, we
Speaker 1: understand you know the story fight better than me. We
Speaker 1: understand it. Andy Pettit, who is a superb pitcher right. Yes,
Speaker 1: At one point he admits that he took human growth
Speaker 1: hormone in order to help recovery from an injury so
Speaker 1: that he could pitch longer. Is that in any way
Speaker 1: different from what Tommy John did? Kerry said he couldn't
Speaker 1: see a difference between the two. Pettitt had an elbow injury,
Speaker 1: just like Tommy John. Pettit used cutting edge medical science
Speaker 1: to recover from an elbow injury. Just like Tommy John.
Speaker 1: Tommy John didn't have multiple surgeries to replace each of
Speaker 1: his body parts with a bionic upgrade. He did at
Speaker 1: once to recover from injury. Pettit didn't use human growth
Speaker 1: hormone on multiple occasions. He used it to treat a
Speaker 1: specific elbow injury two to four shots over a single
Speaker 1: seven week period when he was on the disabled list.
Speaker 1: And if you look at Andy Pettitt's performance after he
Speaker 1: got himself injected with human growth hormone, it looks almost
Speaker 1: identical to his performance before or he injected himself with
Speaker 1: human growth hormone. He briefly used performance enhancing drugs to
Speaker 1: become himself again. Andy Pettitt is Tommy John same case.
Speaker 1: Did you have an opinion on Andy Pettitt only again,
Speaker 1: as you say, taking him at his word that it
Speaker 1: was only for recovery from exertion and b that if
Speaker 1: anyone else wanted to match them, they would not be
Speaker 1: putting their health in jeopardy. That seemed to me to
Speaker 1: be benign. So why are we so mad at Andy
Speaker 1: Pettitt for doing the same thing as Tommy John? Why
Speaker 1: are we scrutinizing his apology for being insincere? His apology
Speaker 1: was insincere because he had nothing to apologize for, and
Speaker 1: that little bit of hair splitting that got him in
Speaker 1: so much trouble. I never took this to get an
Speaker 1: edge on anyone. I did this to try to get
Speaker 1: off to DL and to do my job. That's not
Speaker 1: hair splitting. That's exactly the point. He didn't do it
Speaker 1: to get an edge, And that's why it's okay. Why
Speaker 1: is it okay if someone operates on my elbow but
Speaker 1: not ok if someone injects my elbow with a syringe.
Speaker 1: Is there a philosophical distinction between a scalpel and a
Speaker 1: syringe that I somehow missed. We're going to turn now
Speaker 1: to that Barry Bonds verdict. The baseball star's trial over
Speaker 1: steroid use ended yesterday and he's been found guilty of
Speaker 1: at least And what about Barry Bonds. This little bit
Speaker 1: of casuistry tells us that our problem with Bonds isn't
Speaker 1: one of principle. Bonds isn't wrong because he used performance
Speaker 1: enhancing drugs, and using performance enhancing drugs is always wrong. No,
Speaker 1: the issue is how he used drugs. Barry Bonds would
Speaker 1: have been okay if he had just dialed it back
Speaker 1: done what Tommy John and Andy Pettit did, which is
Speaker 1: to use medical science to smooth out the bumps at
Speaker 1: the end of their careers. Barry, next time, don't hit
Speaker 1: seventy three homers. If there were a way to ramp
Speaker 1: this up gradually, where okay, hit twenty seven home runs
Speaker 1: in at thirty thirty five, whatever, If there was some
Speaker 1: general progression going on, I could kind of see it.
Speaker 1: Jonah Carry was clear on this right. If at thirty
Speaker 1: seven he turns himself into a bulkier power player without
Speaker 1: the speed you know, who walks a lot and is
Speaker 1: hitting thirty homers a year, He's not only just in
Speaker 1: the hall in an instant, he's one of the greatest
Speaker 1: players of all time. Right without a knee. We're all
Speaker 1: celebrating Barry Bonds. If that happens before my conversation with
Speaker 1: Jonah Carry, I'd never thought about bonds that way. That's
Speaker 1: what casuistry does. It reframes the problem, and it says
Speaker 1: that there is a way to make sense of difficult
Speaker 1: problems without retreating into the trenches of principle. Will and
Speaker 1: Carry reminded me of a story the philosopher Stephen Tullman
Speaker 1: once told. Tullman was a casuist. He was once in
Speaker 1: a National Ethics Commission, one of those Blue Ribbon all
Speaker 1: star groups that consider weighty topics like euthanasia. The group
Speaker 1: was drawn from every walk of life, but he convinced
Speaker 1: them to work case by case the Jesuit way, and
Speaker 1: lo and behold, they all agreed. It was only at
Speaker 1: the end of their deliberations when everyone was asked to
Speaker 1: explain the principles that underlay their decisions, when they all disagreed.
Speaker 1: Suddenly they were all shouting at each other, which made
Speaker 1: Tullman wonder, if all principles do is divide us, why
Speaker 1: do we bother talking about them at all. Oh, and
Speaker 1: while we're on the subject of Stephen Tullman, let me
Speaker 1: share with you this little bit from an interview he
Speaker 1: did years ago that I stumbled across on YouTube. I mean,
Speaker 1: quite often when I'm teaching, I take my dogs into
Speaker 1: class and they sit quietly while I lecture. But I
Speaker 1: don't like to take them in when I'm lecturing on
Speaker 1: Dickcart because I'm compelled to say that Descartes thought the
Speaker 1: dogs who are merely machines, and this is an insult
Speaker 1: I'm not prepared to expose them to in my presence.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think, and the one thing I'm quite
Speaker 1: sure is that Descarte never owned a dog. Descartes was
Speaker 1: a man of abstract principles. I think therefore, I am
Speaker 1: Tullman was a casuist who brought his dogs to his
Speaker 1: philosophy lectures and assumed they were following along. I mean,
Speaker 1: whose side are you want? This is a sat question.
Speaker 1: The Jesuits are of the Catholic Church, as X is
Speaker 1: to Why is it like the Marine Corps is to
Speaker 1: the military. Yeah, but they yeah, they calls the Pope's Marines.
Speaker 1: James Martin, Jesuit priest, writer, editor at large of the
Speaker 1: Jesuit magazine America. But the other the other line is
Speaker 1: you probably are this. If you've met one Jesuit, you've
Speaker 1: met one jesuit. Yeah, Martin is very twenty first century Jesuit.
Speaker 1: He looks like he runs marathons, very energetic. He's two
Speaker 1: hundred and forty six thousand Twitter followers. I asked him
Speaker 1: to talk to me about casuistry because it's obviously been
Speaker 1: applied to much more troubling situations than ethics in professional baseball.
Speaker 1: And he told me a story. It was about the
Speaker 1: aftermath of that terrible shooting a few years ago at
Speaker 1: the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Across America tonight an
Speaker 1: emotional response and here in Orlando, hundreds of people lining
Speaker 1: up all day long to donate their own blood after
Speaker 1: so much bloodshed. Martin heard about it like all of
Speaker 1: us did, and was devastated. And I didn't quite get
Speaker 1: at the beginning that it was a gay night club,
Speaker 1: and you know, it was at the time the largest
Speaker 1: mass shooting in US history, forty nine people, and so
Speaker 1: it was, you know, a pauled as everybody else was.
Speaker 1: And truly I waited for responses the USCCB, the US
Speaker 1: Bishop's Conference, because I knew that in every other instance
Speaker 1: before that and since that, the Bishop's Conference and the
Speaker 1: local bishops come out immediately with his statement, you know,
Speaker 1: we stand with our brothers and sisters wherever in Texas,
Speaker 1: and this Methodist Church and this stopping mall wherever, we
Speaker 1: are with you. Nothing radio silence. I really, I really
Speaker 1: couldn't believe it, and I thought they can't even rouse
Speaker 1: themselves to say they're sorry. Do you think it was
Speaker 1: deliberate like that or was it? No? You know, one
Speaker 1: of my professors of moral theology at Boston College who
Speaker 1: I think you'd really like in terms of his writing,
Speaker 1: Jim Keenan, I met perfect person to talk to. He
Speaker 1: points out that for Jesus in the Gospels, sin is
Speaker 1: usually not where people are weak but trying, you know,
Speaker 1: people are really struggling, but where people are strong and
Speaker 1: not bothering. So, for example, the Good Samaritan, the priest,
Speaker 1: and the Levite simply they don't bother. They just don't bother.
Speaker 1: They could help the guy, but they don't bother. And
Speaker 1: so Jim Keenan said, for Jesus, sin is a failure
Speaker 1: to bother to love. And so after Orlando, the bishops
Speaker 1: just didn't bother. They didn't bother, and I thought that
Speaker 1: was sinful, and I was really angry. About it. Now,
Speaker 1: James Martin is angry. He thinks that some of his
Speaker 1: religious superiors have acted sinfully. So what does he do?
Speaker 1: He descends into the particulars. The specific case in front
Speaker 1: of us is about the Catholic Church's moral response to
Speaker 1: gay people. Are there gay people within the Catholic Church? Yes,
Speaker 1: there are. Who are they exactly? Well, they are people
Speaker 1: with a certain sexual orientation, but they're more than that.
Speaker 1: I mean. The thing that most people misunderstand about LGBT
Speaker 1: Catholics and LGBT Christians is that for them, it's it's
Speaker 1: not often about their sexual wi. It's about Jesus. It's
Speaker 1: about prayer. It's about God and the relationship to the
Speaker 1: church and the sack ements and helping the poor and
Speaker 1: their friends, and so their sexual lives are just a
Speaker 1: part of it. So it would be like saying that
Speaker 1: a straight person came to me, what would you say
Speaker 1: to about sex? Well, that might be one thing we
Speaker 1: talk about, but that's not the whole thing we talk about.
Speaker 1: What's the most important particular about gay people within the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church that they're Catholics. I always like to say
Speaker 1: to people, you know, it's not a question of making
Speaker 1: them Catholic. They're already Catholic, they're baptized. It's their church
Speaker 1: just as much as the pope or the bishop or me.
Speaker 1: Now Martin does some taxonomy. We have a group within
Speaker 1: our church who, in one respect behave in a way
Speaker 1: that's contrary to church teaching. What other cases are like that? Well,
Speaker 1: he says, there are actually lots of people, quite happily
Speaker 1: welcomed within the Catholic Church who in some part of
Speaker 1: their life also violate church teaching. You see with LGBT
Speaker 1: people being fired. You know, even these days, you're not
Speaker 1: following this rule? What about the other rules? And we
Speaker 1: say to people, are firing people who practice birth control
Speaker 1: or in vitro fertilization, No, we're not. Do you fire
Speaker 1: people who aren't generous to the poor? Oh, we would
Speaker 1: never do that. Why not? That's a pretty important rule
Speaker 1: from Jesus. Oh, well, that's that's different. The casuist asks,
Speaker 1: why is that different? How is the biblical directive to
Speaker 1: give to the poor, a teaching that has been at
Speaker 1: the center of Christian practice for two thousand years, somehow
Speaker 1: less essential than being straight. If you fire people for
Speaker 1: one sort of rule violation, why aren't you firing them?
Speaker 1: For another? After his initial response to the Pulse shooting,
Speaker 1: Martin wrote an article on the church in the gay
Speaker 1: community and then a book. And what's strange about reading
Speaker 1: both is you keep waiting for the other shooter drop.
Speaker 1: So here's my question, though from an outsider, so one
Speaker 1: responsive annonswer might be, if you're that disappointed in your church,
Speaker 1: why don't you leave the church? Because this is on
Speaker 1: the First of all, it's only one part of what
Speaker 1: the church is doing. Yeah, right. Second of all, you
Speaker 1: could just say that about your country or your family.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, like you know, the current presidential administration.
Speaker 1: Why aren't you leaving? People say, well, I'm an American. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm a Catholic too, and truly, you know, given that
Speaker 1: I'm not challenging any church teaching and really talking more
Speaker 1: about the Gospels, there's no reason to leave. I've also,
Speaker 1: you know, to be clear, I've also made several promises.
Speaker 1: I took a vow as a Jesuit that i'd stay.
Speaker 1: I made a promise as a priest at my ordination
Speaker 1: that i'd stay. So I'm not going anywhere. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: to me is not even a question. Now again, consider
Speaker 1: what he says here. I'm not challenging any church teaching.
Speaker 1: He's not tackling this issue at the level of theological doctrine.
Speaker 1: I have to admit that this puzzled me at first.
Speaker 1: Martin is an intellectual, a scholar, a serious person like
Speaker 1: most of us. I assume that to be an intellectual
Speaker 1: and a serious person is to engage first and foremost
Speaker 1: with principles. But Martin isn't interested in bouncing on some
Speaker 1: point of church doctrine. He's a Jesuit thousands of miles
Speaker 1: from the Vatican, trying to live his faith in the
Speaker 1: real world. Saint Ignatius famously told his followers that their
Speaker 1: first obligation on their travels was to console those who
Speaker 1: were suffering or marginalized. That's why you descend into the particulars,
Speaker 1: because if you do not immerse yourself in the specifics
Speaker 1: of someone's life and circumstance, then all you can offer
Speaker 1: is platitudes or outrage. You cannot truly offer consolation. And
Speaker 1: so I'm trying to sort of encourage my brothers, says
Speaker 1: are Catholics, to do with their LGBT brothers and sisters.
Speaker 1: You encounter the person as they are and the accompany them,
Speaker 1: which is what Jesus does. So you know that's jesuetical.
Speaker 1: So be it, Yeah, so be it. Revisionist History is
Speaker 1: produced by Meil LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer.
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Carli Migliore, Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Weisberg. Revisionist History is brought to you by
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladoe.