Is there a government in the House? Hair-pulling squabbles should not erupt among adults over whether a non-confidence motion swept Paul Martin out of office earlier this week. It is not a matter of theatrics or spin. Governments that can obtain from the House the revenues necessary to their program command its confidence; those that can't, do not. That's all there is to it, and all there needs to be. At least one newspaper editorial said Tuesday's pseudo-non-confidence motion should count because it sends a signal that if a real non-confidence motion came before the House, it would pass. But if so, the signal was unnecessary and if not, it was inaccurate. The Citizen editorialized that "Strictly speaking, the federal Liberals are correct" that it "was not a vote of non-confidence ... But it was a sign that the end is clearly close at hand." Really? The motion instructed a committee to tell the government to resign. Suppose the committee refuses, as it may well. Is a vote that fails to command the rhetorical assent of one of its committees sufficient to dissolve the entire House? Why not just defeat the budget instead?

Another newspaper began an editorial: "Paul Martin's Liberal government has lost the confidence of the House of Commons," and ended by urging the government to "(g)ive the House an immediate chance to vote confidence or no-confidence in the government." What, again? Or did you just admit it hadn't yet done so?

Columnist Andrew Coyne exploded that "we now have a new form of government in this country: government by technicality." A strange way to describe the rule of law. He then concedes that technically "it would be ideal if the vote were on a 'clear' motion of non-confidence, or a supply bill of some kind. But let us remember why we are in this situation, where the House is forced to ask for the government's resignation by way of a report of one of its committees: because the government would not allow it to vote on anything else." So the government exercises tyrannical control over a House it doesn't control. It does not compute.

Our Constitution is not some silly game with arbitrary rules. My old friend John Duffy, "a volunteer adviser to Prime Minister Paul Martin," got it right in Wednesday's Citizen: "The sound and fury of last night's House of Commons vote signifies nothing, and changes nothing. ... The 'confidence of Parliament' is not a matter of perception or symbol. It is like pregnancy; there or not." (His subsequent partisan depiction of the dispute was as ludicrous as it was irrelevant.) Without government, we would succumb to anarchy, but without controls on government, we would succumb to tyranny. So our system tries to steer between these perils in a way grownups can easily understand, by allowing the executive to govern, but only with the consent of the people.

Its method has evolved through hard historical experience. But its unchanging foundation is that, as government is the power of the purse backed by that of the sword, the executive may only carry out its plans, and raise the revenue it requires, with the consent of the peoples' representatives. Any executive that cannot gain that consent is replaced. And the test is simple: Can it pass money bills and non-budgetary motions inextricably connected to them, such as the throne speech or important resolutions concerning the police and military power, and defeat direct censure motions?

These conventions have the merit of being logical and clear. So why not simply vote the government out the old-fashioned way? Especially as the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party long complained that too many bills were treated as confidence motions. We wouldn't be in this mess today if it weren't for the Conservatives' cunning plan to keep Paul Martin in power by not opposing the budget in March, a breach of constitutional convention they scorned to explain. Trying to topple the government via an instruction to a committee is a further breach of such convention, not a restoration of it. So is interrogating themselves in question period. Can't anybody here play this game? Don't they read history books? Are the names of Dicey and Forsey unknown to them?

Stephen Harper just accused Paul Martin of "threatening to slay democracy," while Andrew Coyne says we face a constitutional crisis. People, please. Have some respect for our system and quit the hair-pulling. The government is about to present its budget legislation. If Parliament passes it, the government commands the confidence of the House. If not, it falls because it does not.

There is no novelty here. And none is needed.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The conservative mind? In 1953 it didn't even seem to exist. When Russell Kirk first published The Conservative Mind: From Burke To Eliot in 1953, the New Deal meant prosperity, the United Nations meant perpetual peace and scientific sociology meant true human fulfilment. The book was absurd, even impudent. And very successful. Kirk quotes famous critic Lionel Trilling writing, in 1950, that "In the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." Trilling was less than thrilled with the vitality of liberalism, Kirk adds, "but he could perceive no alternative body of ideas."

Kirk challenged this orthodoxy as part of a reinvigorated, literate conservatism that included, two years later, William F. Buckley founding National Review magazine expressly to stand athwart history, yelling "Stop." But not irrationally, not inarticulately, and not futilely. Kirk's book found an audience, first with influential reviewers at the New York Times Book Review and Time magazine. Then, as Kirk himself put it in his 1986 foreword, "the book's success exceeded his [own] hopes ... Directly or in someone's paraphrase, presently its chapters reached those people who, [British political jurist Albert] Dicey says, are the real (if unknowable) shapers of public opinion: a multitude of thinking men and women, obscure enough, who influence their neighbours and their communities. The book was read by professional people in particular."

His readers learned that there were coherent themes in conservative thought going back to the Age of Reason, to Edmund Burke and the American Founding Fathers, based not on dyspepsia but on intelligent, reasoned skepticism about human perfectibility especially given the real experience of the French revolution. And he described a vital ongoing tradition with dozens of supple, vigorous minds engaged with their times, from politicians like John and John Quincy Adams, to novelists like James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne, plus Benjamin Disraeli who was both. He even claimed Sir Walter Scott. If such familiar and trusted counsellors, friends of our youth, espouse true conservatism, it must be intellectually and morally reputable, not some dreadful thing lurking under the basement stairs. And evidently they do espouse it, given the many witty, compelling and distinctly non-progressive quotations Kirk presents.

The book has its flaws, including Kirk's eccentric denial that conservativism is an "ideology" reducible to articulate principles even though he himself lists them in his very first chapter. He also gets a bit arch; by the 20th century the hope of conservatism is meant to be T.S. Eliot who, perhaps, ought to have been a pair of ragged claws but if so most people do not know why and never will. But the main problem is that the book is too long. By the time he asks, on page 396, "How is one to sum up the work of W.H. Mallock, which fills 27 volumes, exclusive of ephemerae?" the reader wonders desperately instead how to prevent any such attempt. But by the time one feels compelled to stand athwart the book yelling stop, any even remotely sympathetic reader sees he has made his point with compelling force and too many examples to permit quibbling about individual cases.

By this point it is clear that the programs put in place by liberals half a century ago enjoy powerful political support due to their redistribution of income away from the wealthy few and the inarticulate poor to the organized and articulate middle classes. But by now it is difficult to discern very many liberal ideas in general circulation, though a reactionary liberal impulse frequently asserts itself in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas. It is in part due to The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Kirk.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It is, without qualification, good that the four federal party leaders found a way to put aside their quarrels and attend ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of VE-Day. So, definitely with qualification, is Paul Martin's explanation of the decision: "I think we've got to put politics aside," he told reporters. "This is simply too important." He accidentally said something profound which, in his profession, is about the only way it happens. Remarkably, his utterance does not seem remarkable. Participants and observers of the political process nod sagely and move on. But wait. Try to imagine anyone in any other business talking that way.

If the French president were coming to town, would the chef charged with his care and feeding say, "I think we've got to put cuisine aside. This is simply too important"? Would the garage tuning up his limousine say, "I think we've got to put mechanics aside. This is simply too important"? And if he were nevertheless to suffer a traffic accident or food poisoning, would his attending physician tell the press, "I think we've got to put medicine aside. This is simply too important"? It is, transparently, unimaginable.

I could go on and on. Actually, I couldn't. My editor does not believe that in trying to make my column readable "we've got to put editing aside." Such a statement would be inexplicable babbling in his or any other profession. Yet in politics, we instinctively understand and sympathize. Indeed, from Jack Layton's disparaging of "political games" to endless proposals for arms'-length commissions and electoral reforms and independent counsellors to take the politics out of decisions, there is a determination verging on mania among politicians to remove their profession from their profession.

Of course they might all, by their own reckoning at least, be statesmen, not politicians. After all, a chef, in dismissing that lukewarm noodle and tasteless chicken ball with neon-red sauce thing you get in malls, might also deny that those who cooked it were "chefs." A skilled surgeon might call a hapless colleague a "butcher." A talented columnist might describe yours truly as a "hack."

It would be a bit strange to be knee-deep in statesmen without a drop of statesmanship in sight. But I decided the subject was not too important for research. So I phoned the offices of each of the federal party leaders to ask, in essence: "Is it fair to say that your boss's profession is 'politician'?"

One of the prime minister's press secretaries unflinchingly answered "Yes." Perhaps they should have asked him first.

Someone in Gilles Duceppe's office asked, "What would they be instead?" but, after asking him, called back to say he "would describe himself more as a representative of his constituents of Laurier-Sainte-Marie of Montreal than a politician and usually he also says that he's a defender of the interests of Quebecers. It would be more appropriate." If asked flat out if he's a politician, "he would be a bit more precise. He would say 'Yes, but' or something like 'a form of' .... He would need a correction, that's for sure. He wouldn't just say 'Yes, I'm a politician.'"

Layton's office e-mailed back, "Mr Laytons profession is that of professor." (What, no apostrophe? Is higher education too important for punctuation?)

Stephen Harper's office did not respond.

I also checked "PROFESSION" on their parliamentary websites and found that Mr. Martin's is "Businessman, lawyer"; Mr. Duceppe's is "Union organiser"; Mr. Harper's is "Economist, lecturer, writer"; and Mr. Layton's is, indeed, "Professor." Gad. A kitchen full of food, pans sizzling away, and not a cook in the place. I think I'll eat somewhere else. Oh wait. I can't.

Samuel Johnson said, "It is not sufficiently considered, that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed." Indeed. There is much that we can't not know, but that we often manage not to think about, including that politics is sordid. We know it. But we talk, and legislate, as if politicizing health care will make us better; politicizing marriage will make us more loving; and politicizing economic decisions will make us wealthier. Now Mr. Martin has reminded us that it won't. (As for government without politics, the historical record surely shows it to be a cure worse than the disease.)

It really is of great importance that we understand the accidentally profound significance of the prime minister's remarks. And no, I don't think we've got to put journalism aside. This is simply too important.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

And they're off. No wait, they're not. The Layton horse seems to be nuzzling the Martin horse. Uh, now he's ... biting him? As for the good-government nag, I think it was put down years ago. Newspapers are full of their own and the politicians' speculation about whether this is a good time for an election -- meaning how well will various parties do if it is called now. Polls are endlessly fascinating, even though the responses are not necessarily honest; if honest, not necessarily accurate; and if accurate, not necessarily enduring.

Still, I'd like to look up from the racing form long enough to ask, at least in passing, not whether the people want an election, but whether the country needs one. How poorly is our government functioning? Here one can expect little help from the politicians who, even when they accidentally state their true opinions, add little of value to the discussion.

Take Paul Martin -- please. On Tuesday, he explained the Liberal-NDP budget deal thusly: "This agreement is fiscally responsible and progressive. Why are we doing it? We are doing it to make Parliament work." But whether something is working depends on what it's meant to do and how. Parliament needs a government that wields the power of the purse, and an Opposition that exposes government weaknesses to advance an alternative spending program. By which standard, having the Opposition prop up a government that has lost control of the purse is deeply dysfunctional.

I don't think Mr. Martin is lying. I think he genuinely doesn't understand our constitutional system. Note that in his televised, urgent, pointless Adscam speechlet, he promised an election within 30 days of Justice Gomery's final report. Why? If his government is successfully implementing a progressive and responsible program, why have an election? And if it isn't, why wait?

As for Mr. Layton, his pseudo-explanation was, "We're not actually supporting a government, we're supporting a budget. When the vote comes on the government, believe me we'll be running hard against them." But the government, in a parliamentary system, is that group of MPs reliably able to pass money bills, so supporting the budget is supporting the government. To spend public money is to govern, and vice versa. Mr. Layton's statement is utter bosh. As for his claiming voters hadn't sent New Democrats to Parliament to play political games, there's a reason they're called "politicians."

Winning elections for a politician is like breathing for an organism or profits for a business: not the point, but a necessary precondition. Unfortunately, nowadays it seem to be all they think about. Literally. It isn't just what occupies the bulk of their attention during the working day. It seems to be the only thing on which they have opinions.

For instance, Stephen Harper says of the new deal "This is not how Parliament should work." Unlike, say, the Official Opposition making the unprecedented decision to abstain on the original budget while feeling no apparent obligation or perhaps capacity to explain why the precedent didn't apply here, or why it even existed. They read some polls and all their brain cells were full. As to how they could swallow a projected $50-billion spending hike by 2009-10, but not postpone some corporate tax cuts, does that much policy make their heads hurt? (What makes mine ache is that only the Bloc Quebecois seems to grasp that its job is not to keep Paul Martin in power.)

I don't expect marble statues to run for office. As Sir Humphrey Appleby says, statecraft is about surviving until the next century; politics about surviving until Friday afternoon. Especially in this parliament. And I have no illusions about government in the age of Alexander Mackenzie, Mackenzie Bowell or Mackenzie King, let alone Charles I or Caligula. But this brings me back to my central complaint: Do the people pathologically desperate to govern us even know it's hard?

Not to judge by their words, or how they use their time. They really seem to feel that, because we're us and they're them, all practical difficulties will vanish if we win. I, too, dislike corruption in government and think the Liberals need to be hosed down, then benched. But there's a lot more to good government than decent bookkeeping plus horseshoes.

Why doesn't Mr. Martin dare campaign on what he thinks he should govern on? And why don't Jack Layton and Stephen Harper dare campaign against what they think Mr. Martin should not govern on? Especially as, no matter how fast or slowly they run, all them horsies seem to be going around in a circle.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

We cannot destroy the Earth. Regrettably the reverse appears not to be true. A most amusing web site (ned.ucam.org/~sdh31/misc/destroy.html) says, "The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners..." But speaking of asteroid hits, Monday's Citizen says 300-metre-wide "2004 MN4" will whoosh past in 2029 just 24,000 to 40,000 kilometres away, "close enough to be seen by the naked eye."

I don't mean to cause panic here, so please walk slowly to the cemetery. But the moon is 400,000 kilometres away and some scientists worry whenever anything lethally huge passes within twice that distance. Which is surprisingly often. Bill Bryson's excellent A Short History of Nearly Everything calls an asteroid missing by 106,000 miles "the equivalent of a bullet passing through one's sleeve without touching the arm." So 24,000 kilometres is like having it go between your hat and your head.

The Citizen says astronomers "are sure it will miss," but Earth's gravity "might put 2004 MN4 on course for a collision in 2034 or a year or two later." Whaddaya mean, "might"? I thought scientists had a pretty good handle on stuff like orbits.

Superstring theory may be a jury-rigged, 26-dimensional mess, but the lab coats know exactly when, where and why Jupiter will next align with Mars. However, there's a surprising amount of "uncertainty" about asteroids, though NASA (neo.jpl.nasa.gov) gives the exact day (April 13, 2029) they're totally convinced 2004 MN4 will miss us and then do who knows what. Which is one reason, Mr. Bryson says, that those films where they spot a killer asteroid heading for the Earth and blast it apart in an inspiring international effort that ushers in an era of global peace and co-operation are a tad unrealistic.

No, not the Age of Aquarius bit. The science. We don't have rockets to carry nuclear warheads into space, an asteroid arriving in chunks isn't that much better, and we can't predict orbits well enough to know which way to deflect it if at all even if we see it in time.

Hold on, I hear you cry. What's this last "if"? Surely we're looking out for giant space rocks of death? No. Not really.

A few years back, I noticed scientists' habit of looking up from their telescopes and saying: What do you know, this incredibly huge rock just went by, sorry we didn't mention it sooner. As a June 21, 2002 Citizen story explained, "There is no program searching for NEOs (Near-Earth Objects) approaching the southern hemisphere and NASA ... only looks for bodies bigger than a kilometre."

Mr. Bryson adds those objects would be hard to see even if more people were looking. So from a clear blue sky, in one second, we're vapourised and a giant wall of flaming debris is roaring toward Nebraska.

You may object that it wouldn't, technically, amount to the Earth destroying us. But with us orbiting the Sun at 105,000 km/h, it's a bit like hitting a moose with your car: The moose gets some credit, but you do most of the actual work.

Still, don't panic about the sky. For one thing, Scientific American says the chance of Earth copping a civilization-ending asteroid in any given human lifetime is just one in 5,000, though a city-masher, well, who knows? For another, Mr. Bryson says from what little we know it's even worse under our feet. For instance, those kimberlite pipes they find diamonds in: Are they next to the kimberlite cigars, or like kimberheavy pipes but less dense? No. "(D)eep in the Earth there is an explosion that fires, in effect, a cannonball of magma to the surface at supersonic speeds. It is a totally random event. A kimberlite pipe could explode in your backyard as you read this."

One didn't in my case, but you never know. Also, he says, Yellowstone Park is one gigantic volcano prone to sporadic vast eruptions, possibly including one of those six-years-of-darkness-everyone's-dead-Dave kind of events. Recently, a lake in Yellowstone tipped. Weird, huh? Plus there's earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides ...

In short, the killer asteroid will probably arrive too late, especially if you eat lots of fatty foods. And space also stocks gamma-ray bursts, sinister clouds of dust and many other ha-ha-remember-life-on-your-planet novelty items.

So if you can do a good deed, do it now before Earth's magnetic field weakens and the cosmic rays come to lunch. And forget riding it out in a backyard bunker. Remember: kimberlite.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

As the narrator of Russell Kirk's ghost story The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost wanders the sordid main drag of his decaying parish, a neon sign above a stripper bar flashes "Stark Naked or Your Money Back." What a slogan for our times. Consider the story in Monday's Citizen about a new online survey, by America Online and Salary.com, ranking the sexiest jobs in North America. Evidently firefighters are first, flight attendants second and CEOs third, so the story was accompanied by an absurd photo of a supposedly sexy male firefighter. Honestly he had nothing I don't ... other than an incredibly muscled glistening torso, the sort of rugged good looks that imply a hidden capacity for tenderness, and a job involving prodigious athleticism and physical courage saving innocents from death, disfigurement and tragedy, possibly including whisking female survey respondents out bedroom windows to safety in his strong arms. But I'm not bitter or jealous.

No really. Because, you see, the fourth-sexiest job is... reporter. Ha ha! Vindication. Economist and historian didn't rate. But since a columnist is practically a reporter, I'm even sexier than interior designers and event planners. I bet those girls who wouldn't go out with me in high school are sorry now. (By the way, my high school counsellor never even hinted that "event planner" was a ticket to the Austin Powers lifestyle. Mind you, if he'd been an expert on career fulfilment he probably wouldn't have had the job he did which, you'll notice, doesn't exactly rate high on the "babe magnet" scale.) In case you care, the top 10 was rounded out by nurses, teachers, doctors and lawyers. To each their own, say I. But enough about sex. Let's talk about sex.

What particularly struck me was the explanation by Salary.com vice president Tim Driver that, in choosing careers, people "are increasingly going for meaning first and pay second." Meaning? Does anyone out there remember when we could find meaning with our own clothes on, say by feeding orphans or visiting the bed-ridden?

Mind you, talk is cheap. The Citizen also quoted a skeptical Max Valiquette, president of "Toronto-based trend and marketing consultancy, Youthography" (another career possibility they didn't mention to me in high school; back then people had jobs like construction worker or history professor or car salesman where you could actually tell what they did) that "It's really easy to say, 'I'm looking for meaning in my job.' But let's see if you're looking for meaning when you're thinking about $55,000 a year versus $85,000 and a car allowance." Besides, that extra $30,000 will buy a lot of philosophy books. But it's not much of a step toward idealism to claim that instead of money you're looking for sex. At least you could in principle donate some of the money to charity.

Mr. Driver said survey respondents seemed to be defining sexy in various ways, so "Those results are actually more interesting to us than what you would see at first blush." Dude, if we were given to blushing we'd probably start with the burgeoning field of "parent coaching" the Citizen reported on Sunday; given how interested we all are in sex, how can we be so baffled by its ordinary consequences? But I think we've moved on from shame now.

I recognize that this attitude is not the only one out there. There are people increasingly determined to switch off that neon sign over our culture. But sexual fulfilment, Malcolm Muggeridge's "mysticism of materialism," is the dominant theme in the zeitgeist. Scan the popular magazines; look at the best-sellers; read the surveys. Everyone's telling us how to transcend the mundane by getting more, better you-know-what. So what the heck. Now that my job is among the sexiest around, I think I'll cash in by becoming a romance consultant.

Next Valentine's Day or anniversary, guys, forget the chocolates and roses. Get her a few of my columns or one of those special fire axes with the pointy back ends. And while taking her to a special restaurant and a show might seem to qualify as "event planning," I think the idea is to do a conference and make sure there are magic markers for the flip charts and those little pads at everyone's seat. (Did I mention I had trouble getting dates in high school?)

Incidentally, I know what the sign said, but please don't try to get your money back from the newspaper when I confess that I wrote this column fully clothed. Hey, when your job is as sexy as mine, you don't have to undress.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Pope John Paul II is dead, but his challenge is very much alive. Cynics might struggle to explain all the fuss over an admittedly charismatic old Polish guy in a funny hat who talked to God a lot. The rest of us are confronted with the possibility that there might be truth. Or rather, that there must be. It would be silly to lay entirely aside his particular understanding of truth. But the larger question that draws millions to Rome, including a buzzing cloud of some 3,500 journalists, is whether anything can be true in the way that he said Roman Catholicism was.

We're a bit like Marlon Brando's character Johnny Strabler in 1953's The Wild One: "What're you rebelling against, Johnny?" a girl asks and he replies, "Whaddya got?" Aside from the Pope the shelves are a bit bare, intellectually speaking.

People might seem to have all kinds of philosophical grounds for rejecting the claims of conservative Roman Catholicism. But speaking of bare, if you listen closely, virtually every criticism of John Paul's views concerns what one theologian called "pelvic issues."

A baffled editorial in the April 4 Globe and Mail asked "But can a church that calls all homosexuals sinners really claim to be modern?" Evidently the writer did not realize the church calls all people sinners, including the Pope. Or that to someone who thinks truth is as real, unchanging and solid as, well, a rock, the problem is not whether Christianity is modern but whether modernity is Christian. But he or she did notice the sexual-restraint bit.

Why? There are seven deadly sins and John Paul II was against them all. I understand why the slothful were too lazy to protest, and when he talked about greed people thought he meant somebody else. But why aren't the wrathful angry? Why instead the biggest flap about God and groins since Jehovah explained circumcision to the Israelites? Why did that same Globe editorial, after gays, rattle off ordaining women, condoms and the rhythm method? It's like the guy who thinks every Rorschach ink blot is a naked woman and when the psychiatrist says he's obsessed with sex he replies, hey doc, you're the one showing all the dirty pictures.

As Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, "Sex is the mysticism of materialism. We are to die in the spirit to be reborn in the flesh, rather than the other way around." A passionate defence of any other deadly sin, in theory or practice, requires intellectual adherence to some putative truth. But lust comes from the brain stem. Orgasms feel good even if you're Jean-Paul Sartre. But then the feeling goes away and you're left thinking: Is that all there is? John Paul said no. And we can't look away, not so much from the content of his belief that Jesus was "the way, the truth and the life" (John 14:6) as the fact of it.

To a post-modern world intellectually inclined to put mocking "scare quotes" around any hint of Truth with a capital T, this assertion is like a car wreck: horrifying yet fascinating. For people, even in this Age of Anxiety, not only hunger for truth, they instinctively believe in it. It is one of J. Budziszewski's Things We Can't Not Know. Logically speaking, the statement that there is no truth can't be true. The statement that there is truth is in many ways puzzling. But it's not self-contradictory. Indeed, as C.S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity, it is an empirical fact that you believe it. Yes, you. Look inside your own head and you will find belief in right and wrong.

Some materialists admit to an inborn sense of moral truth but claim theirs, like mine, yours and everyone else's, is just a trick of the genes: It is evolutionarily advantageous to act as if we believed in justice, so we are hard-wired to. In short, they claim not to believe what they believe. Passionately, in speeches, letters, columns and books.

Like the Globe editorialist. That piece ended "John Paul was right to restore the Church's moral compass. He was right to fight for human dignity. He was right to underline the sanctity of life. He lit a moral beacon in a changing world. But his successor must find a way to adapt to that world, or the Church that John Paul strove so hard to raise up will slide into irrelevance." Feeble.

We can't not know we need a moral compass. And deep down we can't not know it doesn't point to our own navels or slightly south.

John Paul's first words as Pope were "Believe! Do not be afraid to believe." They still echo.

Do we dare to believe anything? And if so, whaddaya got?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Are you ready for the humanzee? If not, you'd better start preparing, because something's simian over there in the lab, and it involves human-animal hybrids. No, I'm not reading The Island of Dr. Moreau. I'm reading a recent piece by Jeremy Rifkin in the Los Angeles Times about researchers who injected human brain cells into mouse fetuses and produced mice with partly human brains, and are now considering making mice whose brains are 100-per-cent human cells. Eeek!

Cloning, regrettably, won't go away. You can say that again. And again. And again ... Indeed, we have already been grazed by this issue. Mr. Rifkin says years ago Scottish researchers combined sheep and goat embryos and got a goat-headed, sheep-bodied "geep." Cute. Except that, technically at least, if you can do it with other species you can do it with ours; thus "Already ... scientists have created pigs with human blood running through their veins and sheep with livers and hearts that are mostly human."

As genetic technology improves, such stories become routine. This Tuesday, The Wall St. Journal's online OpinionJournal casually mentioned researchers genetically engineering mice to be allergic to cats, then injecting them "with a newly developed part-feline, part-human protein."

Did you say half-cat, half-man? What's going on here?

At one level, just better medical research. The closer lab animals are to humans the more useful the experiments. So, Mr. Rifkin says, "Some researchers are speculating about human-chimpanzee chimeras -- creating a humanzee ... the ideal laboratory research animal." But clearly, at another level, we're crossing the line between natural and unnatural. As he asks, "Would such a creature enjoy human rights and protections under the law?... Would society allow inter-species conjugation? Would a humanzee have to pass some kind of 'humanness' test to win its freedom? Would it be forced into doing menial labour or be used to perform dangerous activities?"

His conclusion, instinctively appealing, is that we should "prohibit any further research into creating human-animal chimeras." Prohibiting isn't preventing; some nations may not impose or enforce bans and some people break laws. But we ban murder anyway, both to reduce its incidence and because it is inherently wrong. I would do the same here. But how shall we turn our instinctive reaction into a reasoned one to overcome the obvious objection that most of the people who have opposed the advance of science ever since phlogiston was all the rage look absurd in retrospect?

Man could, it turned out, survive the physiological stresses of being hurled along by a railway train at speeds exceeding 20 miles per hour, and the sociological stresses. As to the moral stresses, years ago B.C. Report quoted a pediatrics professor at the University of Western Ontario that, "When we invented automobiles, we didn't need a new debate about running over pedestrians. Technology makes actions quicker or cleaner; but it doesn't change them morally."

Generally not. But it does when it creates new possibilities that look deceptively like old ones. For instance, researchers long bred mice to be more susceptible to cancer. Then they learned to manipulate their genes, not just their parentage. Then they learned to insert human genes. Surely one of these things is not like the others. But why not?

Before grabbing a vine and swinging off the stage, I say genetic engineering to cure spina bifida is good, but making a humanzee is not, because it is right to use technology to give everyone as full a human life as possible, but wrong to use it to create a new and better person. And I say it because I say it is not for us to play God. (To atheists I say we are not qualified to fill that post even if it is vacant.) For the same reason I would not permit the use of human embryos, deliberately cloned or the product of abortions, even to let lame men walk, and I have raised questions about what constitutes "euthanasia."

Because so much is at stake in these matters literally of life and death it is important to debate them with as much intelligence and civility as we can muster. Technology has long given us power to end life prematurely and, to a lesser extent, prevent it from ending prematurely. Now, suddenly, it is giving us troubling new powers to create and prolong it unnaturally.

Can we talk about it rather than shrieking? It seems to me this is no time to go ape. Indeed, it may be our last chance not to.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]