Columnist Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times, says the aftermath of the Terri Schiavo case is likely to bring "more intimidation in the name of God and more political intervention that undermines the rule of law." May it also bring semi-hysterical secularists like Krugman some new ideas. The old ones are showing their age.

Someone trying to understand the ideological roots of the Schiavo case would do well to read a paper presented by eminent Stanford University philosopher Richard Rorty under UNESCO auspices in 1996. (It's on the Internet.) The subject is "moral universalism and economic triage" — triage being the practice of withholding or withdrawing assistance from particular people on presumably rational grounds. Rorty's argument goes like this.

The credibility of ideas like human nature and "the natural" — ideas that for centuries were the foundation of morality — collapsed during the last century and a half, rendered "obsolete" by the evolutionism of Charles Darwin.

This is to say the credibility of these ideas collapsed in the world of thought inhabited by secular intellectuals like Rorty. It didn't collapse in my world or, perhaps, in yours. But no matter — the ideas' widespread abandonment by "recent Western philosophy" (i.e., Rorty and those who think like him) requires finding some other basis for morality.

Believers have no trouble finding it in faith — the conviction that, as children of God, human beings live in familial relationship that generates mutual obligations. But religious faith gets no hearing outside religious circles. For secular intellectuals it's a matter of faith that faith is irrelevant to life.

Rorty finds the criterion for moral solidarity — of a sort — in whether he can see some way of helping someone else. This is one more way of saying truth is subjective, created by and existing in the mind, rather than objective, grounded in the reality of a world that is as it is, whether I recognize it or not. In his new book Memory and Identity (Rizzoli), Pope John Paul remarks that this kind of thinking, traceable to the French mathematician-philosopher Rene Descartes, has been the ruin of much Western philosophy since the 17th century.

But what of Terri Schiavo, the disabled woman who died March 31 after her feeding tube was removed with court approval? A person looking within himself to see if he could help her might decide there was nothing he could do. Her alleged lack of consciousness placed her beyond the reach of moral solidarity. In which case — withdraw the tube.

In certain respects such thinking is very old. Some primitive tribes are said to have abandoned their elderly and disabled when larger tribal interests were at stake. Brutal as that was, it made a measure of sense in relation to survival needs of the tribe. But it's a mystery how killing Schiavo serves the larger interests of our affluent society.

Rorty is not a monster, and if he has views on the Schiavo case I don't know what they are. But he is a pragmatist and a son of the Enlightenment. Today's secular intelligentsia generally think along these lines. Here is the philosophical framework for what is taught in elite law schools and other sectors of academe — and so for what judges, college professors, media pundits and other opinion leaders take to be true.

Firewalls against future Schiavo cases are needed in many fields — medicine, law, media. But the underlying problem won't be solved until its sources in thinking like Rorty's are addressed. As Krugman must know, this is what the culture war is about.