John C. Wright's Journal

While I am pleasedwith the kind interest and attention displayed by people who have taken the time to comment on the controversy of aborticide, I fear my point was lost amid the wording. None of the comments I received in return eased my suspicion that I was unclear.

Therefore let us clarify. The argument runs:

1. As a matter of cause and effect, injury done to the unborn, if permanent, will continue until and after birth, appearing as an injury in the person who results. If you deliberately lop off the limb bubs of a fetus, the child who comes from this will be an amputee. (This is a matter of fact: we can take it as a given.)
2. Parents have a duty to see to the wellbeing of their offspring. (If nothing else, laws against infanticide, child abuse and child neglect, paternity laws, and truancy laws sufficiently confirm civilized peoples place a burden of childrearing on parents.)
3. To see to the wellbeing of one’s offspring includes not to injure them. (This follows by definition.)
4. If this duty only applied to offspring after birth, it would be “not dereliction” for parents to injure an unborn deliberately. It would be acceptable under this duty, to intend to cause, and to cause, permanent damage and to be responsible for this injury in the resulting person: which is absurd.  If I deliberately lop off the limbs of a fetus, the child who comes from this will be an amputee, and in no sense of the word can I be said to be not responsible for the injuries.
5. Therefore the duty applies before as well as after birth.
6. Aborticide is a special case of prenatal injury, namely, intending to induce, and inducing sufficient damage in the unborn that he dies of his wounds or of the damage caused by the depravation of his nutriment or oxygen.
7. Therefore aborticide is a dereliction of parental duty.

Logic dictates a duty begins to operate the moment I can take an act to see to the duty, likewise the moment when some failure to act is negligence of that duty. Otherwise the concept of duty means nothing. If I can legitimately get out of a debt due by Tuesday by destroying the subject matter of the debt on Monday, it is not really a debt.

If I vow fealty to the King of England, it does not excuse me of that fealty, indeed, it is the very definition of treason, if I kill the King an hour before his coronation: certainly it is no defense for me to claim the crown-prince being dead, I now never owed any duty to the King.

Our common sense reaction to a woman who will not give up cocaine during pregnancy is that she is a bad mother. No matter whether the unborn is legally a person or not, giving birth to a crack-addicted baby, when one could have given birth to a healthy one, is a dereliction of a mother’s duty of care.

If harming the unborn is dereliction of parental duty, harming it to the point of death is more so. Taking cocaine in sufficient amount to kill the baby would not somehow make one a mother who fulfilled her duty, or was legitimately excused from it.

To carry out a duty, in law, requires action in good faith at all times. This is an ancient principle in legal reasoning. To will the end is to will the means to the end. This is an ancient principle in moral reasoning. I do not think my argument comes to a result that is contrary to what common sense and common decency dictates. If we were talking about any other topic but aborticide, the logic would pass without comment.

If the child dies of her wounds in the closet, it is no argument to say the duty to raise and protect is excused on the grounds of impossibility. From a legal standpoint, that makes about as much sense as the parricide arguing for leniency on the grounds that he is an orphan. If the child is dead due to the parent’s negligence or deliberate act, the duty to raise and protect condemns that parent; the parent is not excused from the duty.

If one has a duty, on the other hand, negligence of that duty is culpable, as is deliberate malfeasance. Come now: if I were to reach into my wife’s womb with a medical instrument and poke out the developing eyes, or lop off the tiny buds of limbs, it would be no excuse to say that the unborn organism is a foetus and not a human being. Once she was born, the malformations I induced would be present. I would win no awards as the world’s best parent. Merely doing the act before the child has a legally protected status does not change the chain of cause and effect: if I maim a child in the womb on Monday, and she is born on Tuesday, I am liable for the damage to the child on Wednesday, as I was the cause of it.

Now, how does this logic change if I maim the child severely enough that she dies? If I slay a child in the womb on Monday, and she is stillborn on Tuesday, I am free from all liability for my actions on Wednesday? Have I fulfilled my duty as a parent to raise and protect my child in a reasonable fashion, making a good faith effort?

Again, how does this logic change if I meddle with the unborn child’s genetics, so that she grows into a blind paraplegic? If preventing the limb from growing in the first place is as blameworthy as cutting off the limb as it develops in the womb, then the undeveloped blastula, even from the first moment of its existence, falls under the same parental duty to protect it. If I have a duty to raise and protect the child, this duty applies to any actions of mine that damage the child, including those that take place before the child is recognized as a legal person with rights.

Once we admit that it is immoral to maim a child by meddling with the blastula at the earliest stage of pregnancy, it follows a fortiori that it is immoral to kill the child by aborting the blastula at the earliest stage of pregnancy.

If we hold it to be blameworthy that the mother does not foreswear cocaine and cigarettes during pregnancy, lest the child develop birth defects, in what sense is it praiseworthy to damage the child beyond this degree, indeed to make the child cease to live? Surely a dead baby is damaged more severely than merely a damaged one? Surely having a medical technician puncture your skull with scissors induces more of a birth defect, indeed, one is dead at this point, than some petty disorder like being born with a cocaine addiction?

If the pre-born organism is not a human being, then it is not cannibalism to take the flesh left over from partial-birth abortions and cook it into steaks on the grill. If, on the other hand, the medical risks, the moral judgment, we might notice upon beholding a mother eating the tissue taken from the an unborn organism that once was growing in her womb, is more severe than the medical risk she runs, or does not run, or the moral judgment we feel, or don’t feel, we might notice seeing her eat a Cheeseburger, it cannot logically be maintained that the organism in question is not a human being. If one argues that what grows in a mother’s womb is not human tissue, the diseases incumbent to cannibalism must be absent. If one admits it is, biologically, human tissue, one cannot argue that human tissue comes from a non-human organism.

Themother should at least be able to tan and stuff the little corpses and mount them, as big game hunters do. If Junior is not a human being before he comes out of the womb, what is the ground for an objection? Why not proudly display the fruits of your exercise of this constitutional right? How would showing off Junior’s wee little big-headed body be any different than wearing an “I VOTED” sticker on your lapel after Election Day?

Again, the argument that slaying the child in the womb causes the child no pain is false, at least in the case of later stages of development. Indeed, I have heard soft-hearted aborticides seriously contemplating whether the “organism” should be given anaesthesia, to ease the pain, before death is induced. There is moral retardation for you: discomfort is bad, but death is a choice.

If there were any honesty on the death cult side of things, they would not be so adamant about not letting the mother see images of the child in the womb during examinations. It is a natural and honest impulse, a maternal instinct, that must be lulled.

Notice my basic argument does not care, and does not raise the non-issue of the child’s humanity. It does not matter to me when the child has a so-called right to life. If my duty is to see to it that the child is raised and educated, and if being born is a necessary logical precondition, then QED I must not take steps to prevent the birth of the child if I am to raise her, no matter what her status is, human or not.

The intelligence of the child has nothing to do with anything. Retarded children are still children; and my cat is smarter than my newborn. Intelligence is a characteristic of humanity, not a definition of humanity. Like other characteristics, it does not exclude us from humanity if we do not deploy it. Humans are bipeds; Long John Silver is not a biped; is Long John a human?

If my disinclination to shoulder so weary a task does not excuse me of the duty to raise my children, I do not see how I have fulfilled the duty by killing the child in the womb: indeed, this seems to be as complete and entire a neglect of that duty as anyone can imagine. The child never even sees the light of day: even a single afternoon on Earth is denied to her.

And I am just a man. My sense of paternal instinct, one would hope, is weaker than that of a woman toward the helpless life within her. The mother-child bond is alleged, in a sane race, to be the strongest there can be. That this bond has been weakened to the point that , not only are we discussing this matter in the public forum as if the child-killers had some sort of argument, the argument is expressed in terms of the emancipated mother’s RIGHT to contemplate and commit infanticide.

The logic of Moloch escapes me. If aborticide were a right, it is one that can only be exercised by a woman whose own mother did not exercise it. Let us say that, at the least, it is not an inheritable right.

By the way, I have yet to hear a reasoned argument against my argument. Usually the cultists merely snarl at me, because I use the term “child” to refer to the offspring of an organism, and did not use their particular Newspeak jargon. They insist that all right-thinking people call homo sapiens in utero “foetus”, and that no foetus can be a homo sapiens. A dictionary shows that, in the ordinary (non-nuts) meaning of these words, a child is an offspring, a foetus is a stage of development, just as adolescence is a stage of development. As if they were to say teenagers are not homo sapiens, because they are going through puberty. As if they were to say a puppy is not a dog, ergo not of the canine race.  To argue an infant is not a human infant because it is going through a infantile stage of development is not only not an argument,it is not even a convincing play on words.

The other argument I encountered was that there was no such thing as “duties” and that therefore it was a moral obligation incumbent on me to support aborticide, or, in other words, a duty. Again, this logic was less than crystal clear.

WORLD OF NULL-A by A.E. van Vogt. Movies like MINORITY REPORT or DARK CITY show there is at least some audience for this kind of paranoid thriller about an amnesiac superhuman. A better choice might be SLAN: the opening scene kills the boy’s mother, and everyone can sympathize with the character who defies the worldwide police state.

MOTE IN GOD’S EYE by Niven and Pornelle: this one might be too huge to compress into a film, but it has all the classic SF themes of first contact, the mystery of the Moties, and the SFX could be impressive.

RINGWORLD. A classic. Great visuals. The plot is a little slow for movie-dom, however.

CITY OF CHASCH, SERVANTS OF THE WANKH, THE DIRDIR, THE PNUME: Jack Vance does planetary romance right: this would be a thrill ride adorned with great special effects, swordfights, gunfights, intrigue, gallantry, and, best of all, good dialog, a thing Hollywood lacks and needs.

THE STAR KING, THE KILLING MACHINE, THE PALACE OF LOVE, THE FACE, THE BOOK OF DREAMS: as above, Jack Vance does a brilliant job of retelling Count of Montechristo in space.

Doc EE Smith’s “Lensman” series. Space opera. ‘Nuff said.

I am glad to see CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY on this list. It is really Heinlein’s strongest work, and the least preachy.

STRANGER IN A STRANGE BED has not held up on rereading for me. The inhabited Mars was out-of-date when he wrote it, and the social-sexual-religious mores portrayed in the book (may I say propagandized by the book?) have not stood the test of time. One cannot crack the pages without thinking: “How quaint! An artifact from the vanished civilization of the Summer of Love.”

DUNE is still the book I would hand to any muggle if I wanted to introduce them to science fiction. Since our genre is entirely concerned with the new ideas and latest technologies of the unimaginable far future, of course we read mostly about the Late Roman Empire in Space where aristocrats fight with swords and daggers. But Frank Herbert handles all these themes adroitly, telling a griping tale of intrigue and religious revolution.

He also lists solid contributions from Wells, Verne, and Clarke. Any top ten Best SF list lacking these names is not serious.

Nothing by A.E. van Vogt? I am a little surprised. De Camp and Miller have done good work, to be sure, but are the books listed here more significant to SF than SLAN or WORLD OF NULL-A?

Jules Verne makes a cannon shot to the moon seem realistic, even though we know such a thing is fantastic, by adding what we really do know about ballistics and astronomy to the mix. He places his moon-cannon in Florida for the same reasons in real life NASA launched from Florida: there the science is so realistic it is actually real.

I call it an illusion because story-telling, ultimately, is like casting a magic spell. If the spell does not work, the illusion is shattered, and the reader can no longer suspend his disbelief. In the case of Hard SF the illusion depends on the reader’s interest in, or familiarity with, real science.

Soft SF can rely on less plausible science, because science is not the emphasis, the humanities or some other discipline, like anthropology is. Character development means more than problem-solving in these stories.

Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451 is a fine example of a ‘soft’ SF book. The robot dogs or giant wall TV’s are not needed to tell the story. (The movie adaptation told the story with no mention of the robot dogs.) The science is peripheral. The solution to the problem of book-burning, that a devoted cadre memorize the texts, is not a hard science solution. The book is really about Montag’s rebellion against conformity of a intellectually deadened society.

Contrariwise, Larry Nivens’ NEUTRON STAR is ‘hard’ SF. The story cannot be told without telling real astronomy, what causes tides. The props like hyperdrive and invulnerable spaceship hulls are not scientifically realistic, but they are scientific in atmosphere, and so their use does not break the illusion of realism, as, say, a Harry Potter on the broomstick would do.

Let me mention in passing the THE COLD EQUATIONS is famous because it took the Campbellian premise of real science seriously, but did not add the Campbellian premise of can-do Yankee optimism. The problem is not solved and the girl dies. All other Hard SF stories are like chess problems; THE COLD EQUATIONS are a checkmate. The enjoyment of a chess problems story or checkmate story cannot be had except by someone who admires the rules of chess.

If I may press this analogy one step further, even if Hard SF invents a new chessman, a knight that captures like a pawn, let us say, the enjoyment of the story depends on using that chessman according to the rules, displaying an appreciation, shared by the reader, for the cool intellectual pleasure of the game.

I deem some traditions have less insight than others: There may be, I suppose, some spiritual enlightenment to be found among the Aztecs, but it does not shine as brightly as that found among the Jews, for example, than whom no people on Earth ever enjoyed a clearer insight into justice, law, and purity.  

My belief in an underlying ground of truth, a moral order of the universe, predates my conversion. There are certain questions which, because of their very nature, cannot be open to question. One cannot have an honest discussion with someone who does not axiomatically value honesty, any more than one can have a truthful discussion with someone who does not believe in truth. One cannot debate the morality of honesty with a dishonest philosopher any more than one can debate the ontology of truth with an untruthful one. It is as paradoxical as debating with a solipsist. The philosophical school of solipsism must be a lonely one: it can only really be sure of having one member.

My belief that there are ultimate mysteries reason cannot penetrate also predates my conversion: The ground of consciousness is something one cannot step outside of consciousness to examine. The nature of logic is something one cannot step outside of logic to justify. The nature of cause and effect is an antinomy of reason: one cannot deal with objects in the real world without such an axiom (no matter what Hume or Schrodinger say) nor can one deal with human beings in the real world with such an axiom (no matter what Skinner, Marx, Freud say): humans qua objects are bound by causes, humans qua humans are not. 

Regarding the alleged war between religion and science, I stand firmly with Kepler and Newton.

Since I just got done reading a science article explaining that everything in the universe is merely information (like the Logos of the Christians) projected from a higher dimension to create what in 3-D is merely a hologram (like the Maya of the Buddhists) I am not convinced that there is any innate hostility between religion and science.  http://www.newscientistspace.com/channel/astronomy/mg19225751.200-the-elephant-and-the-event-horizon.html

I am not of the camp that disputes Darwin. I have read ORIGIN OF SPECIES: in my considered judgment, his conclusions are as firmly grounded as any finding can be, given the subject matter. Note that the theory of speciation by means of descent through natural selection is not open to disproof in the Karl Popper sense: however, the elegance of the explanation, the abundant confirmation from other sciences, places it firmly beyond the boundary of legitimate dispute.

In order for my esteemed coreligionists to not open our beloved Church to accusations of frivolity and scientific illiteracy, it would be necessary for them to come up with a theorem making specific predictions, containing explanatory power, elegance of assumptions, in alternative to evolution. They have not yet. Quibbling with specific findings, or casting doubts on carbon dating techniques is, if you will excuse the harsh word, trivial. It is as if one were to hold up the geocentric model of the solar system on the grounds that the Hubble Space telescope measurements of distant quasars were inconsistent with the age of the universe predicted by the Big Bang theory. Sorry, but minor inconsistencies and doubtful conclusions surround every science: this is not the same as a viable alternate theory of real explanatory power. Disputing the measurements of Eratosthenes is not an argument in favor of the Flat Earth.

Newton could not explain the procession of the perihelion of Mercury. This in itself was not an argument in favor of Aristotelian physics. The relativity of Einstein could explain the procession of Mercury. This was a legitimate theorem: it makes testable predictions and has explanatory power. If Intelligent Designers can erect a theory as revolutionary as Relativity, which explains any inconsistencies found in mutation theory, geology, astronomy, atomic physics, but which has better explanatory power, this will be a tremendous step. Until then, the argument about Final Causes in nature belongs to philosophy or theology. It is not part of empirical science, because empirical science is too humble to make any contribution to such speculations. The meek spirit of science must remain silent when her older sisters, metaphysics and theology, debate questions too profound for her.   

Convinced by Darwin, I am therefore an opponent of Darwinists, by which I mean eugenic arguments that one race of man is more fit to survive than another, or that man has no moral value because he is not unique—I suspect Darwin would also oppose Darwinists.

Darwin is to Darwinism as Science is to Scientism. Measuring cosmic rays with the Milliken experiment is science; explaining the procession of the perihelion of Mercury by means of Lorenz transformations is science. Claiming that love is an epiphenomenon of a reproductive behavior; or suicide a by-product of a death-instinct; or that altruism is explained by the ratio of one’s genes in one’s nephews: these are metaphysical speculations, or, more precisely, articles of faith, since they are not open to disproof by empirical observation. Scientism is a science-flavored religion that has as little to do with science as UFO-watching has to do with Science Fiction: there is an historical, but not an intellectual, link. Freud is Scientism, Marx is Scientism, Skinner is Scientism.

Consider how deeply the Freudian heresy has penetrated our culture. It is now so routine to speak of “phobias” rather than “fears” that even in politics, movements and ideas with which little minds disagree are called by them “phobias.” The belief that Islam is an aggressive, Jihadist religion is “Islamophobia”; a preference for decency over perversity is “Homophobia”; and so on. As soon as polygamy becomes a matter for heated public debate, monogamists will be described as suffering from “Amoraphobia” or some such convenient term.

Note the difference in the attitude of the speaker toward the subject. A man has a fear: Hector is afraid of Achilles. Hector can be encouraged, shamed into assuming the virtues of a man. A mental patient has a phobia. One would no more reason with a mental patient than talk sense to a malfunctioning Asimovian robot: there is merely something wrong with his mental equipment.

I’ve read Freud and consider him a fraud. His case studies are short stories, like the stories of Kafka, meant to produce by their art a certain conviction in the reader, not an attempt to convey a scientific finding. Freud’s insight into human psychology, his theory of dream-interpretation, came to him in a dream. He is the new Joseph, interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams, not the new Newton. His behavior, especially toward Jung, was that of a religious leader, not a scientist: he was a man who fathered a cause. Jung was excommunicated. The scientific community does not excommunicate heretics; because there is no dogma in science. Religions excommunicate heretics, as they must.

When beliefs are based on an assent of the will rather than an assent of the reason, the will can be tamed by rewards and punishments: whereas it is mere nonsense to reward or punish the assent of the reason. One cannot make oneself believe it is night at noon, or twice two is five, no matter the incentive. One can make oneself have faith in the Brotherhood of Man, and to love one’s neighbors, as this is an act of will. If Freud punished Jung for heterodoxy, the conclusions in dispute were credo, not scientific findings.  

The only real progress in the study of mental illness has been in neuro-pharmacology. Now, just imagine finding someone who has something physically wrong with his brain due to a chemical imbalance, and telling him that his errors of judgment and unreasoning fears are due to a hidden and suppressed desire to commit incest with his mother!

It is an accusation that has no proof, and no way to disprove it. Since it is a ‘hidden’ desire, the lack of evidence is taken as evidence of successful repression. It is like arguing about fairies with a conspiracy theorist. The successful conspiracies are always invisible. Fairies vanish when they don their wee little caps. 

What a horrible thing to do to some madman who trusts you, who came to you for help.

Think of the damage done to our society, to our sanity, by this widespread belief that repression is bad. This belief hobbles the exercise and training of virtue, the pursuit of public decency and decorum. In this madhouse theory, courage is the repression of fears; filial piety the repression of father-hatred; chastity the repression of oedipal instincts. Armed with these theories, we have raised three generations of cowardly and insolent libertines. As if we were to train horses to bear riders without “repressing” their natural instinct not to carry a man on their spines. I am sure the modern horses all feel very progressive and good about their self-esteem, but they are not much use in a cavalry charge.

Between this floor and ceiling, the metaphysical truths that no one, without self-contradiction, can deny, and the metaphysical mysteries no one, no matter his pretensions, can assert, there is wide latitude for respectful and rational disagreement. The modern world by and large has fallen outside this realm of allowed latitude: any theory which wipes out the theorist has fallen below the floor of the self-evident. Any theory that denies the power of the human mind to apprehend and assent to the truth wipes out the theorist.

Likewise, any theory that makes an assertion of knowledge where than can be no knowledge, is mere presumption. How is the mind related to the body? What is the boundary between cause-and-effect and free will? What is consciousness? What is Man that thou art mindful of him? Modern theories along these lines consist, not of explaining, but of wiping out explanations: mind is an epiphenomenon of the machinery of the brain, say the materialists, and consciousness is an delusion. Cause-and-effect is all, say the determinists, and free will is nothing. Man is not man, but merely an naked ape.

The sheer stupidity of these so-called explanations is breathtaking. If consciousness is a delusion, who is being deluded? Am I (wait for it!) CONSCIOUS of being deluded? Did you decide to be a determinist, or were you programmed to be? If man is a naked ape, why are we the only animal who wears cloths? Even in climes where clothing is not necessary, why do we decorate ourselves?

The three great pillars of modernism are the Darwinist, which reduces humanity to merely one animal among many; the Freudian, which removes the conscience and the virtues; and the Marxist, which removes free will, justice, and individualism.

The third is mere evil, and was meant to be so from the beginning. Marx was a man consumed by irrational hate, this mental sloppiness shined through his written works, from his flimsy arguments to his dishonest msiquotes. Marx’s central claim to have discovered the scientific basis of history, that man is an irrational product of a material dialectic of means of production, is presented without facts, evidence, or argument. As a predictive theory, history has shown it false as decisively as the subject matter admits. Capitalism produces wealth, not misery, and communism produces not the next evolutionary step of man, but piles of stiff corpses in the snow outside the barbed wire. Devout communists might still dogmatically have faith in the coming of the messiah, but the intellectual glamour is gone from this particular bit of diabolic enchantment.

The second has also lost currency, to the point where a man with a mental disorder treatable by drugs sued his Freudian psychoanalyst for malpractice. The theory of Freud is now in the same category as a doctor who bleeds you with leeches to restore the balance of your humours.

The first is merely an absurdity, one Darwin himself would never support, and which has no bearing on religion rightly understood. As a man of faith, I am thrown into no confusion to find the Bronze-Age poem that opens my Holy Book, one of the most beautiful things written in any language, is not a literal scientific treatise. If the Creator can guide the Chosen People in their random-seeming wanderings in the desert to the Promised Land, surely He can guide the random-seeming deaths and generations in nature to produce Man from his apish ancestors.

Among the Jews, the phrase “knowledge of good and evil” refers to the age when a boy can make moral choices, the age at which the innocence of infancy is left behind. The fruit of the tree of “knowledge of good and evil” is not wisdom and learning—it is not knowledge in that sense. The fruit of loss of innocence is shame; the fruit of sin is death. That is the point of the myth. If the Garden of Eden should turn out to be a real place in West Africa where the first ape-man turned into a man concerns me not in the least: I have seen, as every father has, the Garden of Eden in the cradle, children who are innocent of the knowledge of good and evil. My youngest son has not yet learned shame at his nakedness, and runs around the house at bath-time in his birthday suit, whooping. There is the real prelapsarian man.