Gut Check Part Four – The Scream
Continuing the topic from a previous post, I note with some sorrow both the lack of charity in the debate, and the thinness, the intellectual bankruptcy of the debate. No one seems to be able to talk about this topic rationally, as befits civilized thinkers grappling with an issue of great weight.
The fault, I fear, is not with this topic only, but this topic emphasizes the fault. I here offer only a speculation as to what makes discussion on abortion unsatisfactory to a philosopher. The short reason is that philosophy is in neglect in all departments of our culture, what is left of it.
1. We live in an age where metaphysics, the queen of sciences, is neglected and despised, and so the metaphysical question of the essential nature of humanity cannot be discussed. We have neither a vocabulary nor a shared set of assumptions, a mental framework, to discuss it.
2. We live in an age of selfishness, where only rights, not duties, are debated.
A moral philosophy that never discusses duties is one that simply refuses to examine its axioms. It is an analysis that cannot examine things to the root, and therefore cannot be other than shallow, for whatever ignores the roots of things is shallow.
No philosophy actually excuses all duties as voluntary. Even the most extreme form of denying involuntary duties always assumes at least one natural, involuntary duty. Every voluntary duty assumes that there is an involuntary duty by which one already is bound to abide by.
Take a promise to be honest, for example. One cannot only be bound to be honest after the promise is made, because one must be honest before any promises are made in order to be a person who can make promises at all.
3. We live in an atomistic age, where only individuals, not families, are discussed. Only the conflict of the rights of mother and her unborn child are debated. Fathers, though legally bound to support any child he fathers, or to pay for needed prenatal surgery, need not even be dropped a polite note when his wife or paramour decides to kill his beloved son or daughter.
4. We live in an age of gross and disgusting inhumanity. No one holds it shameful or monstrous to declare some other person’s life not worth living. We live in an age of pleasure, were vulgar and degraded souls cannot imagine a life without pleasure to be worth living. Here is a coma victim: her life would not cause a shallow man like me pleasure, ergo she should die. There is a child born to impoverished parents of dark skin or slanted eyes. Who would want to be a poor black child? Far better he be killed. Look, a Jew! No one wants to be one of them. Look! A retard! Death. This is what passes for compassion and enlightenment among those who hold themselves to be our betters.
5. We live in an age of cruelty and indifference. Concern for the weak and helpless is not in evidence, at least, not on this one topic. The mother is stronger than her unborn child. The child is more dependent on her when in the womb than he is during any other stage of his life. It is this fact, this absolute weakness, this unparalleled helplessness, which is used as the main argument, not to protect his life with stricter bulwarks, but to expose him to death. Because he is weak and only because he is weak (so runs the argument) ergo his mother owes him no protection and no love, aside from what her need or pleasure grants. He is not even human unless she says he is. This is the argument of Thrasymachus, the argument that the strong ought to oppress the weak merely because they can.
6. We live in an age of passion, not reason, and so rights belong to those who seem most sincere and authentic in their mindless screaming, rioting, and vandalism. Whoever cries the loudest gets his way: and the unborn cries are never heard at all. No one sees them; no one sees the little corpses.
The debate is between a healthy view of life and people who have been crippled by all the mental pollution of the modern age. They live lives of fear and desperation, hopeless materialism, joyless pleasure, pointless selfishness; and they are intellectually numb, spiritually drained, and their fear and severe moral retardation makes them cruel.
If you want a visual picture of the moral landscape of these modern nihilists and existentialists, look at “The Scream” by Edvard Much (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream). You will see the dreary shapelessness, the blurred distortions, the neurotic half-nightmarish flux of undefined color of a the conscience that has lost its moral compass, of the consciousness that rejects the intellectual discipline needed for reasoning.
Our culture, turning its back both on faith and on reason, our philosophy, which neither trusts collective tradition to be wise, or trusts individual thinking to be reliable, has not taught the partisans of the Party of Death how to “do” morality. The positive and negative signs have all been reversed, and they are told whether twice two is four is a matter of opinion. They cannot do simple moral arithmetic. How do we expect them to do moral calculus? No matter how smart they are (and some of these partisans are among the most learned academics of our age) they have not the mental tools to do the work.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
