Sex and the innovators.

December 30th, 2010 admin

David Brooks, that sociologist of postmodernity, contributed a stimulating essay to the April 2003 number of Atlantic Monthly entitled, provocatively, “The Return of the Pig.” That is, the male chauvinist pig. He surveys influential constituents of popular culture — Maxim magazine, Comedy Central’s The Man Show, rap musicians — and concludes perceptively that feminists have beat a rather hasty retreat in disarray from this new (if we can properly call it new) incarnation of the notorious male chauvinist.

The most interesting thing about the surge of retro-sexism is how unprepared feminists and other enlightened thinkers are to deal with it. The ironic tone of the material defeats them. Feminists seem to know they are being toyed with. They don’t want to appear to be earnest plodders in the face of hip, playful gestures, and they don’t want to grant that anyone is more postmodern than they are.

Popular culture, in other words, has outwitted the feminist faction. Mr. Brooks goes on, exhibiting, with some justice, a certain glee at his discoveries:

We have a dynamic urban culture that treats women like whores and that regards owning a Mercedes as the highest possible human aspiration, and the leading articulators of progressive opinion have almost nothing to say about it. They can’t seem to bring themselves to admit out loud that their most effective ideological enemies have turned out to be the same underprivileged people they wanted to rescue from exploitation.

That last remark about “ideological enemies” strikes me a bit strained, but Brooks’ analysis carries a distinct element of truth, I think. His writing is, characteristically, clear, calm and agreeable; his reasoning solid; and his ideas insightful. Also characteristically, however, Brooks resolutely abjures all but the most modest of judgments. He fancies himself a diagnostician, not a surgeon. There is unquestionably a role for both vocations. My own preference is to see them evidenced in the same writer. Mr. Brooks’ essay cries out for some polemics; perhaps the reader will indulge me supplying my own.

Feminism has been a disaster for women; sexual liberation has liberated no one so much as the predatory male. When a man reads of the late trend in women’s fitness of “pole-dancing” classes designed to “bring the animal out of you,” he may be forgiven for the conjecture that feminism has largely been a conspiracy of the predatory male. For many centuries a fairly considerable portion of the energy of Christian civilization has been dedicated to the very considerable effort of restraining the biological tendency of most men toward infidelity. This effort has met with uneven, but very real and admirable success; and the resulting social structure centered on the traditional family is one deserving of reverence and obedience, even in the absence of any thorough knowledge of its sources and development. We might state it this way: that there is a conditioned prejudice, in most people, in favor of the traditional nuclear family; and that that prejudice ought to be cultivated, because it cleaves very close to the truth — the truth as apprehended through the centuries of human social organization.

This prejudice, and the natural reverence for inherited wisdom it represents, ought to be greater still because the structure it addresses is a delicate one, and resists immediate penetration and appreciation by rationalistic or empirical thought. Rationalism relies on blunt instruments, and in its baser forms, it tends toward a gaunt and shallow utilitarianism, a cold calculation of pleasure and pain which forswears all those dimmer, profounder human things which go by names like love and honor and virtue. At best, as Oakeshott put it, Rationalism is a mere abridgement of an authentic tradition; at worst it is a easy path, through the intoxicant of the facile abstraction, to ruin. There is a superficial plausibility to arguments about self-actualization through sexual freedom — plausibility which is augmented by the multifarious failures of men and women to live up to the Christian ideals of chastity and matrimony. When resourceful people attack an institution like the family, they are not at a loss to find soft targets; nor can the same institution’s defenders grasp so readily at outstanding examples for their defense. This institution’s great successes are usually inconspicuous; its failures, spectacular.

But what the “progressive” innovators, among them the feminists, undertook was not merely to castigate the failures of the traditional Christian ideal of matrimony, but rather, dubbing the whole of it, ideal and all, a failure, to dismantle it comprehensively. Now here was a revolutionary project worthy of the name; and, despite provoking a vigorous and formidable reaction, which may ultimately overwhelm it, this project has become, to an astonishing degree, part of our social state. This is an old story. The method was initially to sever the idea of sex from the idea of child rearing, from the responsibilities, from the sacrifices, from the hardships, joys and virtues — all of it, root and branch. Sex was to be one thing, procreation and parenting another. The advent of easy-access chemical birth control assisted things immeasurably, and once the rather meager conventions against birth control were defeated, the project could proceed apace: the divorce (an apposite word) of sex from marriage itself.

A concomitant here — a concomitant to the innovators’ project, but ultimately a thing with vast and terrible life of its own — was the undermining of the entire idea of sin in a sexual context. What is natural, it was argued, cannot be sinful, and so adultery became not a violation of the moral order of things, not a transgression against vows taken before God and family, but, if condemnable at all, a mere breach of contract. Chastity was no longer a virtue but an heroic abnormality; and it was foolish to even think that young men and women might restrain their urges. This large step was accomplished in law through the mechanism of the “no-fault divorce,” which stipulates that marriages may be voided by simple consent of the two parties. Once manage to conceive of marriage purely as a contract between autonomous individuals, dissolvable without any complaint of violation or even explanation, and alienated altogether from the interest of the community, or of the created order; once accomplish that and a blow has been struck at the substance of the ideal itself, not simply its forms. Marriage became, in Burke’s vivid phrase, the “vilest concubinage.”

The damage inflicted on individual men, women and children, and on the social fabric of the nation, by the effacement of the traditional ideal of marriage and family is extensive. It hardly needs delineating at this late date. A few statistics suggest the outlines of the wounds inflicted. Illegitimacy rates have more than tripled in a mere thirty years. Among minorities the numbers are staggering: fifty, sixty, even seventy percent of children are born without fathers who so much as acknowledge responsibility for their existence. And I think it is safe to say the damage has been borne primarily by women and children. The enterprise undertaken to sever sex from all its viney entanglements with the rest of human life was hardly a surgical thing, though the social science rationalizations built up around it seemed to imply that it was; it was rather a wild and maniacal hacking at part of the roots of our society; the action of madmen, deracinated creatures poisoned by self-loathing. “Ten thousand women,” Chesterton wrote, belittling the feminism of his day, “marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.” More modern feminists, and their comrades in the sexual revolution, thundered and marched for freedom, for liberation from the restraints of Christian sexuality, and ended up in bondage to the caprices of licentious males, and to the scars of shattered lives and the guilt of more ghastly “innovations.” Much of the action of Christian civilization, as it bent itself over the problem of sexual sin, was an effort to tame the baser urges of men (and, to a lesser degree, women); for men are disposed to promiscuity, and mankind is disposed to sin. This was part of our constitution as a civilized people.

Nothing is so vital, but few things so frail, as the human procreative constitution. The idea of overturning it is an indescribably monstrous one. What Burke wrote of the state goes a fortiori for human sexuality. “No man,” the great Irishman wrote, “should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; [nor] dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion.” Rather,

he should approach to [its] faults . . . as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country, who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds, and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father’s life.

The sexual revolution is accomplished; we have cast Procreation in the kettle of magicians. The extent to which the very concept of sexual sin strikes us as so jarring today reveals the depth of this revolution in our social state. That the wedding ceremony centers on vows of faithfulness taken before God, family and the wider community is lost on us, though that fact constitutes the wisdom of civilized man imparted to posterity.The revolution is accomplished, but the totality of its consequences remains unknown. Rising before us, it seems, is the specter of its transformation from a social revolution into a technological one; the transformation, as has often been noted by wise men and women, of the idea of Procreation into that of Manufacture. Biotechnology, genetic engineering, human cloning — many have honorably, if moderately, undertaken to confront these things; but it is crucial, I think, to be mindful of the now dim but tremendous backdrop to them. That backdrop is the sexual revolution, which was also a dissolution, a fragmentation of ideas from their natural unity. Sex would exist apart, first, from Fruitfulness, then from Love; it would become Pleasure only. And we have become slaves to that idol; we are pilgrims in an unholy land where the gruesome covetous god is Pleasure.

But Biotechnology adds a new and almost astonishing twist; it proposes to make the whole procreative question no longer even human. Sex will have not the remotest relation to procreation because technology will replace the human act. Sex, sinful or not, at least still remains on the side of humanity, even when it means only base human pleasure. What confronts us now is something more than merely Sex without Fruitfulness and Sex without Love: what confronts us is Sex without Pleasure. The bewildering thing in this is to reflect on how men who worship Pleasure will be led dumbly down a path that will end in its obliteration. The only answer is that they do not see where it leads. “Men have been sometimes led by degrees,” observed Burke, “sometimes hurried into things, of which, if they could have seen the whole together, they never would have permitted the most remote approach.” Could the feminists and their assorted Leftist allies in the sexual revolution ever have imagined that the dark day would dawn when the oppressed and idealized proletariat would turn on them with such ironic ferocity, casting shadows of chauvinists all about them like horrible phantoms from the Victorian age? David Brooks’ “The Return of the Pig” is their nightmare and their nemesis: against it they are disarmed.

And against the Biotech Age even the libertine will be disarmed. Utility will overpower Pleasure, and some clever writer of the future, echoing Brooks, will pen an essay entitled “The Reprise of the Free-Lover” or “The Resurrection of Libertinism.” Only this Libertine’s preachment will be against the awful gods of efficiency and predictability, the virtues of a machine. He will worry that the pleasure-seekers have been made to wear a scarlet letter, not because they are promiscuous but because they are crudely organic. The innovators who once argued that with sex what is natural is not sinful will find themselves defeated by the new innovators who hold that anything natural is sinful. The libertines will be thought disordered, not on moral grounds, but on purely material grounds; because their pleasure seeking might possibly result in unexpected procreation, which will disturb the finely wrought balance of manufactured populations.

Behind all this, too, will be the sexual revolution. Behind all this will be the dissolution of the ideal of matrimony and Western civilization’s millennia-long struggle to tame desire, to redirect its frustrations toward service, and regulate its antinomy by sacrifice. And I wonder: will the Manufactured Men remember that once there was opposition to stem cell research, or that some once fiercely controverted the idea of manufactured men? We hardly remember that, not so very long ago, things like birth control were controversial; we forget that opposition to divorce, not so very long ago, was so strong that divorcees were ostracized from their communities. Barbarians! we exclaim. And barbarians they will call us.

On Roger Scruton on Dying Quietly

December 29th, 2010 admin

My Right Reason blog colleague, eminent British conservative Roger Scruton, has posted an excerpt from his forthcoming book, A Conservative Philosophy, on Right Reason. The excerpt concerns end-of-life issues and the possibility of legalizing euthanasia in England.

Since Professor Scruton is indeed a widely acclaimed conservative thinker, readers of EM may be surprised at my saying, and will have to forgive me for saying, that I am unimpressed and not a little disturbed by the piece. Indeed, I found the piece as a whole not only questionably conservative but also, and more importantly, seriously wrong on several points.

First, for the credit side: Professor Scruton is opposed to creating a right to assisted suicide or euthanasia and to the explicit legalization of euthanasia. And he opposes these things on the grounds (inter alia) that he fears they will weaken our respect for the value of individual human lives. He cites “piety” as an argument against them and implies quite clearly that we should not rely solely on a cost-benefit analysis when considering the question of whether to kill a person.

So far, so good.

But the debit side is weighty, and it can only be found by reading all the way through the excerpt, not stopping after the first few paragraphs that encourage respect for the dead and meditate on the continuity of the generations, nor even after the next few paragraphs that begin the discussion of the “philosophical view of death” and that counsel us on the importance of reverence for the distinctiveness of the individual human life–though (as some quotations will show), even some other parts of those paragraphs might well begin to cause unease in the pro-life reader. And it is important not to be swayed by the sheer beauty of Scruton’s writing. Talk about love, for example, is merely talk about love, as we shall see. It does not make what is said ipso facto profound and right.

Briefly, here are several of the major problems with the piece (further discussion follows below):

1) Scruton expressly wishes for the good old days, as he regards them, when doctors supposedly left an overdose of morphine by the side of the bed for the patient to kill himself with and when this was “none of the law’s business.” I have real doubts as to whether this was the legal situation many years ago (and I’m glad to think it wasn’t), but in any event, such a scenario is hardly one a conservative, much less a Christian, should laud.

2) Scruton is pretty clearly enamoured of the idea that a doctor should hasten a suffering patient’s death by an ambiguously large dosage of pain medication. I think there are real ethical problems with deliberately doing this. In any event, it is already done frequently all over the Western world, though Scruton seems unaware of this and evidently thinks patients don’t receive palliatives that will hasten death nearly readily enough. (The blog post, rather ominously, is called “Dying Quietly.”)

3) Scruton implies again and again that a huge problem right now in England (and one would guess he would say the same of America) is that so many people are “tyrannized” by being cruelly kept alive by technology when they should be allowed to die. I will have more to say below about how incredibly and perniciously out-of-date this worry is. Indeed, I’m reminded when I hear such talk of C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape, who tells Wormwood that all the pundits will warn people most earnestly against the very problems they don’t have, thus pushing them farther along the wrong path they are already following. The problem now for patient after patient–especially the elderly or disabled–is not being allowed to refuse treatment but rather getting treatment. Indeed, the problem now is getting food and water, even if you beg for it.

4) Scruton appears to advocate (though here something has been lost a bit in the excerpting process and his statement is not completely clear) a legal situation in which a person is charged with manslaughter when he commits active euthanasia but where he is permitted an affirmative defense that he acted out of mercy. This, he seems to be saying, will both keep in place the idea that it is a crime deliberately to take another person’s life and also “leave the individual conscience in charge.”

5) Scruton talks quite a lot about love and implies that people who live to be very old will, in the very nature of the case, outlive the love of their children and other family members. He nearly equates longevity with living without love, in unpleasantly resonating sentences like these: “The critical question is longevity itself, which has brought about a situation in which we all have something to fear worse than death, namely the living death of the loveless.” “A world in which increasingly many human beings are without affectionate relations with their kind, persisting as burdens to be carried rather than companions to be enjoyed, will be a world in which human life seems far less precious than it seems to us today.” He frets about the possibility that people will be “kept alive by medicines beyond the point when love expires,” as though love were by its nature the sort of thing that comes with an expiration date. (I notice he doesn’t bother to say “machines.” Apparently it’s bad enough if the old folks just take medicines that help to keep them going too long.)

6) Related to #5 is the following paragraph, which I found chilling almost beyond belief, as it comes from a conservative, and which deserves to be quoted at length: “It might be useful to lay down legal principles, which compel doctors to explain to their seriously ill patients, that they still have a choice, and that by refusing treatment and choosing palliatives they will both hasten their death and relieve their suffering. Such a law would create the conditions in which the tyranny of medicine might be broken – conditions in which people will once again recognize that death is not a calamity to be postponed for as long as possible, but a natural event for which one must prepare. The habit of timely death might then become engrained, and love restored between the elderly who possess the world, and their progeny anxious for a share in it.”

Let’s begin our slightly longer commentary with this last quotation, by stripping it of its fine language: “It is understandable that grown kids should want to inherit their parents’ worldly goods, and it’s too bad that the old folks should live on for so long, hanging on to all that money, while their heirs are anxious for it. We should require by law that doctors actively pressure their seriously ill patients (especially the elderly ones) to refuse treatment and to accept medication that will hasten their deaths. If we can only get more people to agree to these measures and to pop off sooner, maybe we’ll bring about more love between grown children and elderly parents.”

This is not good philosophy. This is not even conservative philosophy. This is half-baked sociology, short-sighted public policy, and bad ethics.

Let’s go back to Scruton’s nostalgia for the old days of doctors’ unpunished complicity in suicide by morphine overdose. Whether such old days ever existed, we have them in spades now. What does Scruton think the legal situation is now? Is he really unaware of the increasingly common practice of “terminal sedation,” carried out in innumerable hospital rooms and hospices?

In Scruton’s own England, we can forget about pining for the days when doctors left morphine by the bedside. We can do much better than that. Now we have the law squarely on the side of doctors who by their own admission tried to kill a 12-year-old disabled boy, David Glass, by mainlining lethal levels of diamorphine. They called this “letting nature take its course.” David was rescued by his relatives, who did jail time for scuffling with the doctors, and he has since turned nineteen.

We need a lot less “dying quietly” in our present age and a lot more awareness of the many actions being carried out all over the supposedly civilized world that would previously have been punished as murder and are now either passed over in silence or hailed as compassion.

What about all this talk of the “tyranny of medicine”? In reality, the present tyranny of medicine is not keeping people alive against their will but rather withholding not only treatment but basic care. Does Scruton not know that “treatment” now legally includes food and water, in both the U.S. and the UK (not to mention, God help us, Holland)? Does he not know that increasingly UK doctors (and U.S. ethics boards) are using their power not to force treatment on patients but to deny treatment, sometimes against the wishes of patients and families? Has he never heard of Leslie Burke, of Charlotte Wyatt, or even of the now-well-known Tony Bland (dehydrated to death in a precedent-setting UK case in 1993)? Or, in America, of Nancy Beth Cruzan (whose precedent-setting case was decided and who died of dehydration way back in 1990) or of Terri Schiavo, who, in the name of withholding supposedly “unwanted” “treatment” died last year through thirteen long days of slow dehydration?

Don’t worry, Professor Scruton. Everybody knows only too well that we “have a choice” to refuse treatment. That principle was enshrined in law and precedent years ago with such an ear-splitting bang of the gavel on both sides of the Atlantic that the present question is whether we will have a choice to be treated for our serious illnesses, to forgo, for ourselves and even for our minor children, lethal doses of “palliatives,” or even to receive food and water. Leslie Burke has been told that this choice will not be his in the end, when he finally becomes completely disabled and unable to communicate; the doctors will then legally have the final decision.

If Professor Scruton wishes for a world in which euthansia is viewed with sympathy, especially in “hard cases,” in which it is still formally illegal but almost everyone turns a blind eye when doctors assist in it, in which people are urged by their doctors to forgo treatment and accept heavy palliatives instead, in which people die quietly, in which people are terrified of living on and being an unloved burden, in which people equate getting too old with being unloved, and in which they write living wills to try to make sure, at all costs, that that doesn’t happen, then he’s in luck. We live, and have lived for quite a while, in such a world.

Scruton’s proposals are poor in themselves. But worse, they are very short stretches of a very slippery slope, and the West whizzed past them some time ago while, it seems, Professor Scruton wasn’t noticing.

Update: In response to a query in the blog thread on Right Reason, Max Goss has posted the following illuminating quotation from the essay as it appears in Scruton’s book:

Suppose John, who is terminally ill and suffering, has kept a lethal dose of some drug in order to put an end to his life in circumstances like these. But suppose that, being too weak to move, John were to beg his friend Alfred to administer the drug. Alfred does so out of compassion, but reluctantly and with no expectation of gain. Here we would surely not accuse Alfred of killing John. It is John himself who made the relevant decision, and called on Alfred, out of friendship and compassion, to help him to do what he could no longer do alone. The case is one of assisted suicide, in extenuating circumstances that remove the suggestion of criminal intent.

The sympathy for assisted suicide here speaks for itself. I would strongly contend that Alfred is guilty of having killed John, and that to say that his motive of “compassion and friendship” and his acting on John’s request make it the case that he has not killed John or has not had “criminal intent” is to beg the question as to whether suicide and assisted suicide constitute a form of murder, are wrong, and/or should be criminal. There will, of course, always be a plausible and perhaps a real motive of “friendship and compassion” in a case of assisted suicide. I note in particular that the blurring of the crucial moral and legal distinction between intent and motive is egregious in this passage.

Max has also clarified the excerpt in a way that makes it clear that I was quite correct in my conjecture in #4 as to Scruton’s proposal regarding the legal status of euthanasia: It should be illegal but the person who commits it should be able to defend himself by saying that he, like Alfred, acted out of friendship and compassion and (perhaps) at the other person’s own wish.

Just another one of many

December 29th, 2010 admin

Here’s a report, apparently substantiated by Missouri Right to Life, of one Kelly Meyer, now in her ninth day without food or water. The agitated friend who has drawn attention to the situation is almost certainly without legal standing and can do nothing but tell the world. The decision to remove the feeding tube from Kelly, a victim of a double stroke, was made by her mother. The friend says that yesterday Kelly was “feverish, fearful, and agitated.” No wonder.

I have no reason to doubt the report. During Terri Schiavo’s death by dehydration we agitated folks were told again and again by those advocating her death that, if her family had agreed, this would all have been quietly finished years ago, and that this sort of thing is done all the time, all over the country, without publicity or outcry. As if that were an argument.

So I’m sure that Kelly Meyer is just one of the many. For those Christians among my readers, if you happen to think of it, pray for her.

And may God have mercy on us all.

Maybe I was wrong

December 29th, 2010 admin

In the comments thread on my post below, I said that I didn’t know yet of a case where  legally custodial relatives have been unable to stop medical murder by dehydration. That may change soon, as indicated by this frustratingly sketchy report from Wesley J. Smith. The sketchiness is not Smith’s fault. The family, most unwisely, are resistant to publishing the name of the prospective victim, so all Smith has to go on is an e-mail without identifying details from a representative of a major Texas Right to Life group. This much we can glean:

The Houston hospital patient is an adult stroke victim with some degree of brain damage. She breathes on her own, is not dying, has no organ failure, and does not require a ventilator. Her mother evidently has legal rights, and the hospital “futile care committee” is trying to withdraw all “treatment,” including nutrition and hydration, against the mother’s wishes. Given all these facts, we can conclude that this decision would result in her slow death by dehydration.

There is something I don’t fully understand about this case, and I wish I could get more details. You don’t have to be in a hospital to be nourished by a feeding tube. Why can’t the mother take her home and administer the tube feedings herself?

My best guess is this: The patient has no insurance (a detail I didn’t mention above). Perhaps the mother is not physically strong enough to administer all the bed turnings and other necessary care, so the patient would normally go to a nursing home. But without insurance, perhaps no nursing home can be found. The mother may feel she cannot care for her at home. This is just conjecture but would fit the known facts. And the mother is described as “bewildered” by the committee’s discussion of removing food and water. Perhaps she just isn’t a hard fighter, and hence it doesn’t occur to her to say, “You can’t keep my daughter imprisoned here while you dehydrate her to death. I’ll check her out and do my best for her at home myself if you try that!”

Nothing has happened yet, and we can hope worst won’t come to worst. Not only would it be a great evil in itself, it would also be a terrible precedent, enforcing in the public mind the idea that, even if your loved ones don’t really have to be in a hospital for life-saving treatment, you have to leave them there to be killed if their food and water are declared “futile.”

I hope the family’s regrettable aversion to publicity does not prevent us from learning the rest of the story. I assume Wesley Smith’s blog will be the best place to watch for any further details.

A New Declaration

December 29th, 2010 admin

Or, An Experiment in Immigration Esoterics: The Logic of the Current Controversy.

When confronted by enormities cloaked in anodyne language that scarcely, if ever, rises above the euphemistic and obfuscatory (Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act? – few legislative monikers are further divorced from the actual content of the bills to which they are appended…), thoughtful observers often manifest an unfortunate tendency to analyze such proposals in a spirit of detached, clinical rationality, which is too often to concede the framing of the controversy, and the terms that may rightly be employed in carrying it forward, to those engaged in the original acts of linguistic and legislative legerdemain – which is a polite way of stating that someoneis engaging in acts of violence against truth. It seemed to me, therefore, better to refrain from offering, given the inverted nativism decried by John Derbyshire,, as well as analyses such as that of Robert Rector, a dispassionate analysis of the convergence of interests which has disgorged this piece of lunacy, eschewing as well, for the present moment, a descriptive account of what such transformations portend for American society and government. Things of great magnitude must first be felt before they can be assimilated by reason, for reason cannot of itself encompass what amount to movements of the spirit of an age, that spirit being the source of the objects of reason.

Herewith, then, The New Declaration…

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one Ruling Elite to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with the people of their nation, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and superior station to which their exalted social and moral endowments entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, and to those of their own people, does not require that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation; nevertheless, that Our greatness should be evinced to all and proclaimed among men, and Our prerogatives made the more secure, we do declare and affirm:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that some men are created more equal than others, that these are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Lives of Distinction, Liberty of Rule, and the Pursuit of Factional Happiness by means of public policy. — That to provide for these rights a field of exercise, Peoples are constituted from among men, deriving their identities and rights from the Consent of their Governors, — That whenever any people becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Governors to alter or abolish it, and to constitute a new People, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its sufferances in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Security and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Peoples long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shewn, that the Better Parts of mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Peoples to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under the fetters of republican liberty and the requirement of the preservation of their forms of life, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such a people, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of We Elites; and such is now the necessity which constrains Us to alter Our former Societies and Peoples. The history of the present People of America is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of a scheme of republican liberties, by which the forms of life of the People may be secured and maintained, and by which We, the Virtuous, may be enchained. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

-They have refused their inner Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necesary for Our good.

-They have sought to prevent Us, their Governors, from passing Laws of immediate and pressing importance to the Security of Our Interests, unless suspended in their fullest operation until their noisome clamour for the integrity of the Nation be satisfied; and when such measures as they importunately demand are proposed by Us to placate them, neglect to receive Our blandishments with due mental submission.

-They have refused to countenance the passage of Laws for the accomodation of Masses of Foreign-Born People, unless those People would consent to relinquish their Native and Superior customs, rights and glories inestimable to them, and formidable to retrogrades and perturbators only.

-They have expressed their malignant opinions to Us at times and places, and in manners, altogether inconvenient and inexpedient for Us, for the sole purpose of fatiguing us into compliance with their interests, so contradictory to Our own. They have even sought to displace Us from Our seats of Privilege repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness their invasions on the Rights of Rule we bear in Our Persons.

-They have refused for a long time, after such oppositions, to countenance the enactment of Laws conducive to Our Interests, reframed so as to mollify them; whereby the Legislative Power, incapable of alienation from Us, has, on these paramount questions, fallen utterly into abeyance; the State remaining in the meantime being denied the legitimation of a benevolent invasion from without, and the salubrious convulsions within, all of which conduce to the perpetuation of Our Rule and Prosperity.

-They have endeavoured to prevent Our repopulation of Our States, for that purpose attempting to resist Our Laws for the Preference of Foreigners; refusing to approfe further migration hither, and imposing new conditions upon the Reconstitution of the People.

-They have endeavoured to obstruct the adminstration of Justice, by having the temerity to critique the manner in which Our Bureaucracies have elected to interpret and decline to enforce the Laws for Our Benefit.

-They have, by means of their incessant and impertinent advocacy, sought to render Our Rule dependent upon their will and consent, even for the tenure of Our very Offices.

-They have erected a multitude of new media, and sent hither swarms of communications to harass Us in Our solemn Majesty, to prevent Us from increasing Our Substance.

-They have agitated for the maintainance, even during times of peace (the conceit being most utile during times of war as a tool of policy), of a common culture and way of life.

-They have affected the imposture that the People are independent of, and superior to, Our Rightful Power.

-They have combined amongst themselves to assert the illigitimacy of any jurisdiction not deriving its powers from the provisions of the Constitution, a mere scrap of parchment all but unacknowledged by Our Laws, according respect only to such statutes as are justified thereby:

-For asserting a right to perform duties which We, in Our Sapience, have declined to acknowledge.

-For the temerity of their assertion that their efforts in this regard are in no respect violations of Human Rights, the Sacred Abstractions which serve as the Symbol of Our Rule.

-For seeking to limit, or to establish themselves, the conditions of trade with all parts of the world, which are Our exclusive Jurisdiction, not to be subject to their scrutiny, and to the fruits of which they possess no just claim.

-For cavilling at the implicit modes of subsidy for Us that Our most Condign Policy requires they provide.

-For depriving Us, in many cases, of the monopoly of discourse which is Our Unalienable Right.

-For refusing submission of the intellect to Modes of Governance which entail both the dissolution of their idol of ‘National Sovereignty’ and the diminution of ‘Representative Governance’ for We Who Govern, and those Represented, are One and the Same.

-For striving to abolish the informal system of Administrative Laws, by which We have purposed to facilitate the emergence of a New People, in Our Border States, establishing therein motives towards a Government of Duties to them, enlarging it as a precedent so as to render it at once an example and a fit instrument for the promotion of the same Rule of the Base into other States.

-For petitioning for the abolition of the operational Charter of Our Prosperity, the abolition of Our most Profitable Practices, and the alteration of the fundamental forms of Our Governance in Our Interest.

-For proclaiming ‘We the People’ as a Power superior to that of Our Legislatures, and declaring themselves the original possessors of the Power wherewith We legislate for them.

-They have renounced by these reckless and rebellious acts their lived Consent to Our Rule and Protection, and by waging War against Our Right, have rendered forfeit any claim upon Us.

-They have blighted Our Seas, Coasts, Towns, and cossetted Lives by the meanness, commonness, and prosaic character of their flyover ‘culture’.

-They are at this time assembling and petitioning for the completion of their works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy against the Other scarcely paralleled in this Age of Enlightenment, and totally unworthy of the People of a Civilized Elite, and the Beneficent Rule of the Same.

-They have constrained Our fellows, dependent upon the approval of the populace for their livelihoods, to proffer opinions contrary to their Interests and Ours, as members of One Class; to become the political and philosophical foes of friends and Brethren, or to abjure their own Consciences in acts of false consciousness, betraying their special dignity as a People Apart.

-They have excited domestic political turmoils, and by this restiveness have endeavoured to resist the migration of the inhabitants of Our Frontiers, and indeed of the World as a Whole, whose logic, conducive to Our Power, Prosperity, and Virtue, is an undistinguished levelling of the distinctiveness of their base and contemptible ‘culture’.

In every stage of these Oppressions, We have Petitioned for Redress in the most appropriate terms – by decrying the bigotry of our antagonists: – Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated insubordination. A people whose character is thus marked by every act which may define the Uppity Servant, is unfit to be the People of a Free Elite.

Nor have we been wanting in attentions to Our American brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their noisome advocates to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the conditions of Our Entitlement and Preeminence here – Our superior Knowledge, Skill, and Virtue. We have appealed to the artiface of justice and self-abnegation we have endeavoured to inculcate in them, and we have conjured them by the ties of our mutual history of Progressive Liberation from the Injustice of Their Heritage to disavow these usurpations and impertinences, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and Correspondence as Rulers and Ruled. They have been deaf to Our voice of Justice and Historical Progress. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces Our separation, and hold them, as we would hold any others of mankind, Enemies in Insubordination, in Peace Valued and Dutiful Subjects.

We, therefore, the Rightful Elites of the United States of America – that is, the embodiments of the National Idea – in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Authority of the Good People of these States, namely, Ourselves, solemnly publish and declare, That We Elites are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent Governors; that We are Absolved from all Allegiance to the Substance and People of America, and that all representative connection between Us and the people, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a Free and Independent Class, We have the Full Power to reconstruct the People, Constitute a New People, Contract for the Importation of a New People, establish Commerce for the Furtherance of Our Rightful Prosperity, and to do all other Acts and Things which Governing Classes may of Right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection afforded by Our Possession of the Instruments of Power, we mutually pledge to each other Our monopolies of Virtue and Rectitude; Our guidance of the Organs of respectable Opinion; Our mastery of the Arts of legal writing and manipulation, bureaucracy, and administrative discretion; Our command of vast wealth; Our indomitable conviction of Right; Our immovable resolution; and the Honor to be accorded Us in the Future We have Ordained.

The people have refused the new constitution prepared for them? Very well! Let us constitute a new people!

Derbyshire, Ponnuru, and Really Bad Philosophy

December 29th, 2010 admin

Ramesh Ponnuru’s fine work on the fealty of many intellectual and political elites, particularly on the left side of the political aisle, The Party of Death, despite its status as a lucidly written and cogently argued presentation of the Culture of Life position on our ongoing cultural and political struggles over the relationships between and among science, progress, autonomy, law, and human life, has failed to garner much critical attention from those who reject the Culture of Life, yet decline to concede membership in its antinomy. This unfortunate phenomenon has been noted at Redstate, and has occasioned much spirited dialogue on lefty blogsites – to which I refuse to link – and at Ross Douthat and Reihan Salim’s blog, The American Scene, these these two threads running to well in excess of 50 comments apiece, totals which, while not entirely unprecedented, are at least atypical for literate, wonkish blogs.

However, there has been at least one serious attempt, on the part of a non-Culture of Life partisan to reckon with the argument of Ponnuru’s book. John Derbyshire, hereafter to be referred to solely as the Derb, has published a verbose, sprawling review for The New English Review in which he attempts a rebuttal of Ponnuru’s thesis.

For those who are willing to brave the pitiless savageries of ennui in order to wade through the entire coma-inducing review, in which nothing of the argumentation, save the particular forms of several sneers, appears to be new, there will be much to say about its numerous inadequecies of argument, its deficiencies of judgment, its superficial philosophizing, its supercilious hauteur, and, to reiterate, the state of bored stupefaction that its more-of-the-same quality induces in the reader. Nevertheless, having determined that a detailed refutation of the Derb’s argument would require, consistent with the gravity of the subject matter, a contribution in excess of 10,000 words, and that a competent fisking, which its spirit richly merits, would entail approximately 5,000 words, I have purposed to pass over, in dignified abstraction, the soporific details of his review in order to concetrate upon its distilled essence, for, this being itself gravely mistaken, everything predicated upon it must in necessary consequence be reduced to a stupendous farrago of mere assertion.

Leon has identified the money shot in the Derb’s argument:

Ponnuru says that it is unjust to regard some instances of the human organism as less alive than others based on how we feel about them. (Another RTL-er once derided this approach to me, in conversation, as “Barry Manilow ethics” – the worth of another human life judged by our own feelings, wo wo wo feelings…. I offer this designation for Ramesh Ponnuru’s future use, free of charge.) Unfortunately most of us do so judge; and feelings, wo wo wo feelings, are a much more common foundation for our social taboos than are Natural Law principles, or indeed any abstract principles at all. Why, if a woman’s husband dies, should she not use his corpse for garden mulch, or serve it up with mashed potatos and collard greens for dinner? I cannot think of any reason well rooted in pure philosophy, though there might be a public health issue to be addressed. we do not do such things because of the disgust we feel – we feel – at the mistreatment of human corpses.

We likewise feel that an adult woman’s life, even a few months of it, is worth more than that of a hardly-formed fetus; and that the vigorous, usefully-employed, merrily procreating Michael Schiavo has a life, a life, more worthy of the name than had the incurably insensate relict of his spouse. Those life Ponnuru who think differently are working against the grain of human nature, against our feelings – yes, our feelings – about what life is.

There is a veritable wealth of philosophical impoverishment in these words, and so many aspects of that impoverishment that could be teased out and exposed, in all of its nakedness and shame; and yet, quite apart from the specific failures and grotequeries expressed therein, its gravest failing is that it is ultimately, and utterly, a stranger to coherence. When read in connection with the Derb’s penultimate paragraph, the incoherence of his thesis will be made manifest:

For RTL is, really, just another species of Political Correctness, just another manifestation of the intellectual pathology, the hypertrophied and academical egalitarianism, the victimological scab-picking, the gaseous sentimentality, that has afflicted our civilization these past forty years. We have lost our innocence, traded it in for a passel of theorems. The RTL-ers are just another bunch of schoolmarms trying to boss us around and to diminish our liberties. Is it wrong to have concern for fetuses and the vegetative, incapable, or incurable? Not at all. Do we need some hard thinking about the notion of personhood in a society with fast-advancing biological capabilities? We surely do. (And I think Party of Death contributes useful things to that discussion.) Should we let a cult of theologians, monks, scolds, grad-school debaters, logic-choppers, and shoolmarms tell us what to do with our wombs, or when we may give up the ghost, or when we shoul part with our loved ones? Absolutely not! Give me liberty, or give me death!

There is a manifest, and profound, incoherence in this manner of philosophizing, which tends to reduce it to the lowest state of incogency (yes, that may be a neologism, but it fits, and I like it.). In the first place, it is historically anachronistic, which, I confess, is a polite way of stating that with respect to the history of Western thought, it is historically illiterate, inasmuch as while the Derb wishes to affirm an amorphous, indeterminate, and frankly pagan type of freedom from the tyranny of the rigid intellectualizers, it is the rigid intellectualizers, the ideologues and terrible simplifiers of our philosophical and political history who visited the modern doctrine of freedom-as-liberation upon us. Whether the sophists of the Enlightenment or the modern inheritors of the jacobin legacy who clamour for personal liberation from every moral constraint upon personal conduct that has been integral to civilization, it is the simplistic and jejeune cry for an unconstrained, illimitable freedom that has been accompanied by rigid dogmatizing and the annihilation of our innocence.

Second, for all of the prating in his review concerning the stability of our taboos and the lack of necessity that attaches to the rational examination of them, there is an obvious incompatibility between the contention of their stability and relative permanance, and the exaltation of freedom, sweet freedom, which permeates the review. That freedom means little if it cannot be utilized to question the taboos. Call the Derb’s philosophy, then, a performative inconsistency.

Third, and most critically, anyone who endeavours to take of the materials that the Derb has provided for our repulsion and fashion of them an approximation of a philosophy will be confronted by an aporia resulting from the disjunction between the celebration of feeling – let us say, instinct, in order to more nearly approach the inner meaning – of our first exerpt, and the damnation of those who would infringe upon Our Liberties, Dammit! – in the second exerpt. For the former is a crude caricature of the conservative doctrine which holds that much of what constitutes a civilization is not amenable to the endless rational dissections of the philosopher and the terrible simplifier, while the latter is the war-cry of those who, in the name of free thought, have sought to undermine and overthrow the reign of those inherited ways that the conservative always sought to protect from the nihilating gaze of the ideologue.

If one is at all inclined to discuss the forms of civilization in general terms, one is confronted with essentially two possibilities where the formation of the common habits of thought requisite to civilization are concerned. One may, on the one hand, side with the legacy of the radical Enlightenment and demand that each man Dare to Know! for himself, and may even institute some sort of educational regime for the inculcation of the habits of mind necessary to ‘thinking for oneself’. Conservative philosophy has always looked askance at this radical demand that everything be subjected to the bar of some dessicated critical rationality, and made conformable to some number of abstract principles which seem self-evident to a handful of intellectuals, and history vindicates this scepticism towards the radical rethinking of society, whether the project of an elite, as in most revolutionary dogmas, or of the masses, as in modern liberalism.

One may equally well, on the other hand, recognize that while there are things about which we must reason together, that there are vast numbers of things about which it is perilous to reason, and on which it is better to defer to the collective wisdom embodied in custom, tradition, and inherited practices, many of which, by the nature of the case, will be sustained and justified by recourse to authority, even religious authority. Which is to say that there are non-rational modes of knowing, and that the incursion of reason into their realms is an act of intellectual violence which bodes ill for society. Man must learn to think, yes; but as for the foundational precepts of his civilization – these he must receive as he receives his breath:

Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religioius association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs. His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct. Nothing is so important to him as prejudices. Let us not take this word in a bad sense. It does not necessarily mean false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, opinions adopted before any examination. Now these sorts of opinions are man’s greatest need, the true elements of his happiness, and the Palladium of empires. Without them, there can be neither worship, nor morality, nor government…

Joseph de Maistre may well have overstated the case, and yet it remains unassailably true that most of us do not reason ourselves into our most fundamental convictions, but arrive at them as the result of a process of slow acculturation, where they work unconsciously upon our minds until, when conditions of life may be propitious, they arise to the foreground of awareness. Most simply do not reason deeply about the weighty issue of human existence, but absorb and emote opinions on them on account of a legion of non and sub-rational processes. The Derb is correct to that extent.

Nevertheless – and herein lies the aporia – one cannot at once demand that the intellectuals leave the masses to their untutored, uncritical feelings about things, their unsophisticated, unphilosophical, often quite arbitrary and incoherent emotions, and demand that they be liberated from the ‘tyranny’ of schoolmarms, busybodies, and the other parasites the Derb claims to perceive in their toils for the Culture of Life. Either one will demand, and to some real extent, strive to teach everyone to think for himself, or one will strive to inculcate in all a reverence for authority as this is embodied in custom, tradition, inherited norms, folkways, the Church, and so on. What one cannot reasonably do is maintain, as the twin poles of a neopagan ethos of nonthought, that people ought not be subjected to the authority of those institutions and person who have been the embodiments of wisdom in a culture, and must be left to the imagined sanctity of their utterly untutored, unelevated wo wo wo feelings. Men must either think for themselves, and that deeply, to the depths – and conservatives have always been scpetical of both the process and the results of this – or they must yield, even bow, before some authority; but what they cannot do – what they should not attempt, for it is the peril of any civilization – is to wall themselves within their uncultivated feelings and urges, refusing to think about them same in some narrow, unspecifiable sense, and within some undefined limits, while repudiating the wisdom of those who may have, of whatever origins, some superior insight into the matters on which they are content merely to ejaculate their ignorance as though feeling something intensely were equivalent to either thought or knowledge, however obtained.

This, contra Derb, is the real frigid and pitiless dogma: the nihilistic solipsism that, trapped within its endless inward folds of nothingness, refuses to think, refuses to learn, only to feel and to assert itself, lashing out with peurile fury at those who would dare to interrogate its unmerited self-satisfaction, ever crying, “You’re not the boss of me!” Any society that assents to the Derb’s dogma as the expression of its vital principles will eventually learn that some are indeed, the bosses of them. For such societies perish from among the world of men.

The Coming Altercation

December 29th, 2010 admin

Paul H. Robinson and John M. Darley wrote a thought-provoking article nine years ago in the Northwestern University Law Review (91 Nw. U. L. Rev. 453, for those with access to such things), and the central thesis of this article bears commentary at the present juncture. Robinson and Darley sought to examine the ways in which the criminal law as a whole might gain or lose “moral credibility” with the populace. They posited a theory that certain issues are losers for the criminal law either way.

More below..

Our thinking predicts a set of circumstances in which the law’s moral credibility will be at risk regardless of the criminalization policy that it chooses. When a society contains groups with a strong and deeply felt moral disagreement, as ours does at this time on the morality of abortion, for example, the situation is destructive of the law’s moral credibility and thus its power to gain compliance. More critically, one side will feel that the law is immoral, either because it criminalizes an innocent act, or because it fails to criminalize a morally abhorrent act – in this case fails to criminalize what is seen as a particular kind of murder. Our thinking predicts the destructive consequences that this conflict has. Specifically, it suggests that the “losing” side, at this moment those who wish abortion to be criminal, will lose respect for the legislative process, for the courts that enforce the laws, and eventually, for the legitimacy of the entire criminal law system.

When one thinks that the law does not prohibit murder, one is inclined to “take the law into one’s own hands,” and we have seen anti-abortion people do this. Note the sequence of steps in what we might call the radicalization of the “pro-life” individual. Perhaps it begins with picketing the abortion clinic and then moves toward more coercive forms of picketing that are arguably legal violations of the rights of others. F or some, it moves toward spraying noxious sub-stances into the clinics at night – a line has been crossed to committing an undeniable and more substantial legal offense. The next step is setting fire to the abortion clinic, perhaps at night so “no one will get hurt,” but certainly this is an act of arson and possibly life-risking. Then death threats and finally the murder of a doctor or nurse who does abortions.

A similar destructive tension exists in Britain at this time. Those who are convinced that animals deserve more humane treatment are outraged at what one is allowed to do to animals under Common Market laws. They protest, seeking to block animal-transporting lorries before they cross the channel. As a recent article comments, for the activists, “the issue is radicalizing … It begins as a protest against abuse of animals. But if the law permits outrages, can it claim moral legitimacy? And if the police protect atrocities, are they not complicit?” 68 Again notice the radicalizing dynamic at work here. The people in question begin as classically law-abiding citizens, typically middle class, middle aged, conservative individuals, but some become willing to commit illegal acts because they regard those acts as morally required. What we have calledthe process of radicalization occurs most easily and dramatically when there is a group of individuals who are morally opposed to the content of some aspect of the criminal law, but also can occur for a single individual who opposes a law.

D. The Generalization of Disrespect

One might discount the danger of such moral disagreements on the ground that people who disapprove of a particular law – be it Prohibition or giving a right to an abortion – can distinguish this “bad” law from the remainder of the system. But we think the possibility for such compartmentalization of disrespect is limited; more likely is what we might call “the generalization of disrespect.” Consider the psychological processes that are begun when, for instance, a constitutional amendment prohibiting the use of alcohol is put in place. Examine the situation from the perspective of a person whose cultural traditions have a place for alcohol consumption on certain occasions, and whose individual opinion supports such use.

A law that criminalizes an activity, such as drinking, that I consider not immoral, may initially seem to me to be an isolated and aberrant one, and only the moral validity of that specific law will be denied by me. However, I cannot deny that it was a criminalization action taken by the same authorities that produced the entire criminal code, and I must now be willing to entertain doubts about the moral correctness of the criminalizing of the other activities that those authorities have chosen to sanction. By a process that is easily under-stood psychologically, if not logically, when the police apprehend me for violation of the drinking laws, I have a revelatory experience canceling the equation of all police actions with the apprehension of wrong-doers, and if the court system convicts, the hypocrisy that I feel that this court manifests is a candidate for generalization to other courts. If I become aware of another instance of the code violating my moral sensibilities, then all these generalizations, and others, are likely to occur. There is a natural process of spreading generalization of disrespect that the reader can intuit here.”

I apologize for the lengthiness of the quote, but it is important to understand the foundation of the argument, here – and it strikes me as a sound one. Apart from a gross exaggeration of the frequency with which the “radicalization” process of pro-lifers reaches the terminal stage mentioned here (I will, for instance, place the destructive record of the most radicalized elements of the pro-life movement against the same record for the ecoterrorists any day), the principle that the argument lays down is basically sound.

There are many policy debates which occur in this country, and on any given issue, there will always be a winner and a loser (and sometimes, in time, the “winners” and “losers” will see their positions reversed), but this is generally regarded as a necessary by product of a legitimate – even preferred political system. The abortion debate, as the article points out, is something else entirely. One side views that a particularly grisly form of murder is being systematically ignored by the criminal system. In the event that the roles were reversed, the other side would doubtless think that an act basic to fundamental freedom had been unjustly criminalized. There is precious little room for “meeting in the middle,” where this particular fight is concerned.

And moreover, this is not a debate about whether alcohol should or should not be legal, or whether corporate criminal liability is a good idea, this is a debate about fundamental concepts of the meaning of life and the legitimacy of the criminal law – there is nothing more basic to the pro-lifer than the notion that murder (of which abortion is a species) must be punished as a first principle. I am equally certain that to the pro-choicer, they are just as adamant that abortion represents a species of liberty that must be protected as a first principle. Justice Kennedy’s justly maligned opinion was on to something, indeed: these matters do get right to the heart of one’s concept of existence, meaning, and the universe – his fallacy was in assuming that the legitimacy of the criminal law could endlessly withstand a situation in which it would never be determined, to the satisfaction of all (or nearly all), whose concept of existence was correct.

There are some issues that time passes by, and the winning side becomes the “legitimate” side, for better or worse, from that point forward. Gauging the fatigue, even among conservatives, for the “gay marriage” debate, I have the distinct feeling that the writing is already on the wall for our side of that particular debate. Other times, most often when the democratic process has been removed, an issue will fester for generations, and will only be resolved at the price of great unrest. Witness Dred Scott, which derailed the democratic resolution of the slavery issue. Witness Plessy v. Ferguson, which spat in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was purchased with the blood of those who died for its ratification. And now, there is Roe and its progeny.

Whatever one might say about the process which gave us the rules encapsulated in decisions like Loving or Lawrence, it can hardly be doubted that the American public, almost as a unified whole, accepts the principles contained therein as legitimate. In the thirty-three years since Roe, no such mellowing has occurred – no legitimacy has been obtained – the debate is as rancorous as it ever was, and more so. Ugliness lies on the horizon.

Is it possible to avoid this? After all, have I not posited that neither side would accept a victory for the other side as being emblematic of a “legitimate” society? Perhaps.

If Roe were overturned, the disposition of abortion law would of course revert to the states. The likely result would be a regionalization of legalized abortion. It could possibly be that this regionalism would lead to the ultimate diffusion of tension, as the law would generally be in accordance with the wishes of those who live in a given locality, and what happens in other localities does not often rise in to the consciousness of the average citizen. However, as the Civil War tought us, regionalization does not necessarily lead to a diffusion of passions which are sufficiently national in character, and passions about the definition of life and the universality of liberty tend to be both deep and national (indeed, transnational).

However, the end of Roe would likely lead to another side effect which may potentially be efficacious:

Tyler reviews a number of studies that suggest that the level of commitment to obey the law is proportional to what Tyler calls the law’s perceived “legitimacy,” by which he means a community’s perceptions that, first, the law instantiates their moral beliefs, and, second, that the law came into being via fair procedures conducted by the appropriate authorities. Tyler reasons that, if one regards the law as a legitimate source of rules, if it has what we have called “moral credibility,” then one should be more likely to regard the law’s judgments about right and wrong actions as an appropriate input to one’s own moral thinking; in turn, one should be more likely to obey the law. Further, one should be more likely to support the authorities that promulgated the law. To test this contention he reviews a number of studies that examine individual differences in perceptions of the law’s legitimacy and relate those differences to differences in support for legal authorities and felt obligations to obey the law.

Presently, this feeling is lacking on the part of pro-lifers – who don’t feel yet that this is an issue they have lost by legitimate means. The legacy of the current abortion law has been bequeathed not by democratic processes, but rather by fiat from a majority vote on a panel of 9 individuals far removed from democratic accountability. Adding to the furor, over the past decade and a half, 7 of those individuals (at any given time) were appointed by Presidents who professed similar beliefs on the abortion issue.

Roe is not Griswold or Loving or even Lawrence. This issue is not going away, and pro-lifers will not accept defeat at the very least until they have had a chance to be heard democratically. Somewhat bizarrely (Cass Sunstein aside), the pro-choice side clings tenaciously to Roe despite this fact, and despite their repeated and confident assurances that the vast majority of the population is on their side, and that they would win in a landslide in any democratically contested fight on this subject. The tool which might avoid the looming altercation and simultaneously finally resign the pro-life movement to the dustbin of history is the one they dare not grasp.

I am only left to wonder – is it worth this? And, relatedly, why are they not more convinced that their message can ultimately be legitimized?

These are questions that, hopefully historians will not ask of our generation with scorn.

A compromise on American abortion?

December 29th, 2010 admin

There is nothing so foolish that some philosopher has not said it, and there is nothing so evil that some bioethicist has not proposed it.

– Anthony Daniels

Armando offers a “compromise” on abortion, in which it is unrestricted during the first two trimesters, and restricted at state-level option during the third. His intent, as I understand it, is to illustrate that such a compromise is impossible. He’s right: pro-lifers cannot compromise on the sanctity of human life, and to allow that life in the first two trimesters is either definitively not human, or not the sort of human one ought refrain from killing, is anathema. The first condition is irrelevant from the moral standpoint. As Peggy Noonan pointed out in the Schiavo case:

Ronald Reagan used to say, in the early days of the abortion debate, when people would argue that the fetus may not really be a person, he’d say, “Well, if you come across a paper bag in the gutter and it seems something’s in it and you don’t know if it’s alive, you don’t kick it, do you?” No, you don’t.

The second condition ought to be self-evident: outside of wartime, one simply doesn’t kill people. (This is a position I hold with regard to capital punishment as well: a topic for another time.) Somehow, though, the left, despite its tremendous (if opportunistic) anguish over dead American soldiers of late, cannot quite muster the moral courage to state that perhaps, maybe, one ought not kill children in the womb. They do this for several reasons, which bear examination: and in examining them, I suggest another, different compromise.

If we want to craft a compromise between pro-life and pro-abortion forces, we must examine the premises of the latter. They are all monstrous — and all inescapable. In brief, the arguments in favor of allowing abortion are:

  • Premised upon the denial-of-humanity of the unborn.
  • Premised upon the notion that a woman has total control over her child before birth.
  • Economic: a child not assured of a materially prosperous future should not exist.
  • Emotional: a child not assured of being “wanted” or loved should not exist.

The first argument is the only one which suggests little compromise: fortunately, it is also among the most self-discrediting. The basis for the denial of humanity of the unborn facilitates quite well the denial of humanity for the elderly, the infant, the ill, and the handicapped. (See the cited Anthony Daniels piece above for elaboration.) This is not to dismiss these dangers — the baleful example of the Netherlands gives us ample reason to fear a society’s onrush into these horrors — but it is to note that they are extreme and repulsive even to many, and perhaps most, on the left. A slender hope of compromise here lies in the possibility that those who adhere to this premise might accede to its uncertainty; and from there allow restrictions on abortion based upon reasonable inconclusiveness.

The second argument is a difficult one, resting as it does on ground where the pro-life cause is politically weakest. Telling a pregnant woman that she is not the sole moral actor in her situation is a difficult proposition. She’s not, of course: there is her child as well, which, though physically dependent on her, is not her existential possession. In this case, the area of compromise which suggests itself is the concession of a woman’s total physical self-sovereignty before pregnancy: which would necessitate the pro-life side’s abandonment of it’s recent move into anti-contraception activism. I understand and even approve of this activism on theological grounds — but politically, it strikes me as unwise, except as a chip to be bargained away in just this manner of compromise.

The third argument, leaving aside the risible proposition that people not paid-for should die, is utterly susceptible to compromise from the pro-life and conservative side. There is so very much that could be done to support mothers and families, from vastly more generous tax breaks, to outright subsidies for childbearing. Many of these solutions might offend the libertarian and free-market sensibilities of many pro-lifers. Certainly they would offend mine, and I believe that private charities would, if allowed, take care of most needs. (Indeed, 100% of my Combined Federal Campaign contribution went to a program run by the Catholic Diocese of Arlington that met the economic needs of pregnant women and mothers who might otherwise have sought abortion.) But in the hierarchy of values, I believe that most pro-lifers would rather sacrifice the purity of the market rather than allow the continued slaughter of the young. I would. Here, the pro-abortion camp may demand, and receive, almost any concession.

The fourth argument is actually one in which social conservatives can rightly claim some measure of vindication: they’ve been championing familial closeness and values since day one. The pro-life side’s “concession” here need merely be an affirmation of that which most of it already wants. And, I suppose, one might agree to throw some taxpayer money at adoption services.

So, let’s recapitulate the points of the proposed compromise here:

  • An end to all abortion.
  • An end to anti-contraceptive activism, policymaking, and agitation.
  • An extensive network (with details TBD, but almost wholly set by the erstwhile pro-abortion side) of formal support for mothers, pregnant women, and families.

I would agree to the above. I’m fairly close to a free-market absolutist; but I am a pro-life absolutist. The question is: would the pro-abortion left? Would they accept a more humane world that acknowledged their concerns — or would they spurn it in favor of an absolutist insistence on the right to kill the unborn? If they did spurn it in the face of such an offer, one thing would become immediately clear: they view abortion as a good-in-itself, to be defended for its own sake. And that would be the most monstrous thing of all.

Right After You Were Born, Mommy Sued Her Doctor Because…

December 29th, 2010 admin

In a lot of ways, our culture has made progress over the last 50 years in the way we treat the disabled – especially in the way we ensure access to facilities and treatment, and employment. In an entirely different way, we have engaged in the process of sending a message to the disabled that they would have been better off if they were never born.

So we find a story in this week’s issue of People magazine (Dated May 15, 2006, pp. 123-124 – unavailable online, as far as I can tell) in which the mother of a girl who is afflicted with spina bifida has sued her obstetrician for failing to perform an AFP test, which might have detected the spina bifida in utero, which would have allowed them to “make an informed decision about what to do.”

What would the girl’s parents have done if they had been informed, the article asks?

They decline to reply directly. “I don’t know if I can answer that just because of the fact that she’s here now,” says Colleen (mother – LW) as Leilani (the little girl – LW) plays nearby.

More below…

Under California state law, women expecting a baby must be informed by their doctors of prenatal tests that can help detect spina bifida and other conditions. Armed with the results, parents can then prepare for the bith of a child with a disability – or make the agonizing choice to terminate the pregnancy.

What a wonderful sentiment for the law to enshrine. Are we still going to pretend that eugenics is not alive and well in America?

Say the parents:

Dan Fraker and his wife, Colleen, want to make this clear: they adore their little girl. Dan, 29, delights as Leilani, a sparkly 2-year-old, allows her mouth to fill with macaroni, then playfully refuses to swallow until Dad pleads… “She’s like a little angel,” says Colleen. “She’s never given me any trouble.”

They love her lots. They’re just suing because the doctor didn’t give them the chance not to have to deal with a child with a disability. Is there any evidence that Leilani’s life is some sort of miserable horror show? The sum total is this:

Yet they worry about what life holds for their daughter – who is fully paralyzed below her knees, partially paralyzed below the waist, has recurring urinary tract infections and uses a wheelchair or walker to get around – and they resent not knowing about her condition sooner. “The main thing is, we were never given a choice,” says Colleen.

I’ve never had to raise a disabled child, so I can’t speak of the troubles that must be attendant there, and I’m sure that the difficulties sometimes lead parents to have momentary thoughts that they recognize as being not-genuine in times of quiet reflection. I can’t imagine the moral turpitude, however, that would allow a parent to proceed on such a ghastly theory all the way through the final settlement of a lawsuit, and then air such a sentiment as the one above in a national magazine. There is only one final conclusion to be drawn: these are not the momentary thoughts of weakness – at bottom, they resent being burdened with this child, and perversely, seem perfectly content to tell anyone who will listen about it. You can almost hear the palpable disappointment in the mother’s voice:

“I thought, ‘God, I had so many ultrasounds, how could they not see the spine?’”

That any person would say such aberrant things in a public forum, with no apparent sense of shame, does not bode well for the extent to which eugenic beliefs have become mainstream, especially among the Party of Death. The article, at least, has the decency to point out the blindingly obvious, buried near the end:

“The message is that the life of an infant or toddler with a disability is a mistake,” says Andrew Imparato, CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities. “To me that’s another way of saying that disability is worse than death.”

Why is this a proposition that is even up for debate?

One of these days, hopefully little Leilana will grow to be a fully grown and cognizant woman. Will her parents tell her of this story, and why they sued their doctor after she was born? What if she finds out on her own? How would they even conceive of explaining this to their child? “Well, daughter, we were upset that they deprived us of the choice to not have to raise you. I’m sure you understand, right?”

On your way around town doing your weekend errands, pick up a copy of this issue of People, turn to page 123, and see the picture of little two-year-old Leilana. Do yourself a favor and gaze into the adorable face of the little girl who shouldn’t have been born.

Acceptable Hatreds, Or: History Repeating Itself as Farce

December 29th, 2010 admin

The May issue of that journal of maddeningly -uneven quality in the discussion of religion and the public square, First Things, includes a review of Richard Pipes’ latest foray into the interpretation of Russian history and culture.

The gist of the review: Pipes ought not have bothered. Trees were felled needlessly to produce this ream of birdcage liners, from the draft process through publication.

Daniel Mahoney, in a review apparently to be denied those who have not put up the funds for a subscription, argues, and that persuasively, that Pipes has located his analysis squarely within the Orientalist school of Russian studies, and in so doing, has

….designate(d) Russia and the Russian political tradition the permanent European instantiation of Asiatic despotism.

Russian political culture has never, on Pipes’ reading, succeeded in transcending the legacy of what he terms patrimonialism, according to which

….sovereignty and ownership are radically collapsed and where the “owner-ruler had no notion that his subjects had legitimate interests of their own.”

This interpretive conceit has led Pipes, in the past, to press the alternative-reality argument that Soveit communism owed more to the legacies of the despotic Tsars than to revolutionary ideology, a risible claim for someone supposedly immersed in the literature of the Soviet past, and one that is not only redolent of the arguments of the apologists of communism, but entails that the Bolsheviks, for all of their protestations of revolutionary novelty and the creation of mankind afresh, were still somehow acting at the behest of some subconscious Russian Will-to-Despotism:

Pipes’ one-sided emphasis on patrimonialism as the “cause of causes” finally lacks all sense of proportion. He has as essentialist conception of the Russian past and present that leaves little room for responsible moral or political agency.

In the interest of refraining from potential copyright violations involving the reproduction of vast sections of a review essay not available free of charge, suffice it to state that this essentialism as applied to the interpretation of Russian history ill serves Pipes, leading to the conflation of outright theorists of patrimonial despotism and defenders of moderate, constitutional autocracy that would have been not at all unlike some Western regimes of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, and to a preposterous, pretense-of-omniscience judgment that none of the reform movements within pre-revolutionary Russia could have averted the re-emergence of a grotesque authoritarianism – Russia’s historic destiny. Pipes, as Mahoney notes, curiously attempts to bolster this thesis by appeal to what is thought to be the current trajectory of Russian politics (the anachronism of this maneuver ought to be opvious). However, as Mahoney notes:

“Managed democracy in Russia certainly leaves much to be desired. Putin has certainly done little or notihng to support vigorous local self-government. He has consolidated the state’s control of national television (because the TV stations were formerly the property of the oligarch class, a sort of cross between mafiosi and ayn Rand style ubercapitalists – Maximos) while allowing hundreds of independent newspapers and radio stations to flourish. … To his credit, Putin has had the courage to challenge the criminal oligarchy and he has had some success in marginalizing the Communist party. He has also gone some way to restoring the confidence of many ordinary Russians in their nations’ future after the predatory capitalism of the 1990s.

As Mahoney ably illustrates, Pipes’ interpretations verge on outright contempt for the Russian people, Were a scholar, of whatever repute, to publish a work of historical interpretation in which it was argued that the Jews possess no scope for the exercise of moral and political responsibility, and cannot but help to seek to subvert the societies in which they find themselves a minority population; or that Africa will always remain dysfunctional, because blacks are destined to remain in thrall to primitive tribal political cultures that mire the continent in poverty, disorder, and lurid violence, he would rightly be denounced for a bigoted sort of essentialism. Yet, it is acceptable, as it is acceptable to express contempt for Christians, to portray Russians as irreducible, irreformable despots and oppressors. It is almost as though certain pieces of, ahem, scholarship, are intended as ideological set-pieces, prefabricated justifications for some real-world policy…

And here is something that goes a long way towards disclosing the true significance of Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study In Political Culture. One demonizes those whom one has posited a reason to disregard; and one disregards and dismisses as of no good consequence those who are to be marginalized for the realization of some end one has given oneself. The question, therefore, is: What ends are served by a group dedicated to the dissemination of risible propaganda easily refuted by anyone capable of performing a simple Google search, propaganda dedicated to the transparently fraudulent proposition – which is, moreover, an egregious instance of special pleading – that the Chechen conflict has nothing whatsoever to do with the attempt of jihadists to establish a sharia-state along the vulnerable underbelly of Russia? One does not propound such patent prevarications, demonizing an entire society as an operative strategy of the dissemination of the untruth, without some “higher” objective in mind. What, then, is the nature of this objective, the reason for the untruth, the final cause of this “scholarship”?

Just asking.

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