Live right on

In Wendell Berry's novel Hannah Coulter, Hannah's husband Nathan has a repeated saying: "We're going to live right on." As Hannah trenchantly notes, Nathan does not say it often, and he says it only when living right on is going to be difficult.

In the end, Nathan gets cancer in his old age, and he declines treatment that he deems extraordinary and goes through a dying process that we now associate with home hospice care, eventually dying naturally in his own home in the presence of his wife and a close friend.

But Hannah finds it difficult at first to accept Nathan's decision to decline aggressive cancer treatment. Here is part of the scene:

My tears were falling into the bowl of beaten eggs and then my nose dripped into it. I flung the whole frosthy mess into the sink. I said, "Well, what are you planning to do? Just die? Or what?"

I couldn't turn around. I heard him fold the paper. After a minute he said, "Dear Hannah, I'm going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself."

He came to me then, an old man weakened and ill, with my Nathan looking out of his eyes. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came. I fixed some supper, and we ate.

He lived right on.

I must confess here that, since the Covid-19 pandemic began, I have often felt a sense of paralysis that has prevented me from blogging, especially about the pandemic. Those who follow my public content on Facebook know that that has been loosening somewhat lately, as I state more forthrightly what I think in public posts. But for a while, I was simply not talking publicly. At first I wanted to tread carefully while watching how the empirical situation unfolded. Then I was almost stunned with horror at the destruction I saw being carried out by what I considered (and still consider) to be the disproportionate, unwise, and dystopian governmental response to the virus and, perhaps even more, by the fracturing and disagreement among otherwise sane and sensible people, including Christians and pro-lifers.

There were other reasons for not writing much on this topic. For a while I was finishing drafting my forthcoming book on John, The Eye of the Beholder. That manuscript is now with the publisher for electronic typesetting. Then I was working hard on my blog posts and video scripts for my responses to Michael Licona. That playlist and blog series are now completed. Then I was not wanting to do anything that might confusingly intersperse current posts at this blog with the massive archiving project in which others copied my apologetics and biblical studies posts over many years from What's Wrong With the World to this blog. So there was always something. And now I still have other work to do, including my duties at home.

In the back of my mind, too, was a feeling of utter weariness and a certain amount of shock at the attitudes being taken and their vehemence: Whom would I offend if I said openly that I think many if not most of the measures being taken against this virus are overly draconian and to that extent misguided, vastly overlooking spiritual and other intangible harms? Would that undermine my work in New Testament and apologetics? Who might hold such comments against me? Who might use them to portray me as some kind of anti-science kook? How much should I allow such considerations to weigh? And who has time for the never-ending squabbling of social media?

But recently, perhaps partly (in an odd way) as a result of the horrifically tragic death of Mike Adams, I have begun speaking out more, though in what I hope are judicious and thoughtful terms. See, for example, here, here, here, and here.

Today (it might seem, irrelevantly) I got my car's oil changed. While sitting in the waiting room at the dealership, clad (more or less) in a dutiful face shield, I was reading a back issue of The Human Life Review, produced during the New York City lockdown. It was a bit of a time capsule (of a time only a few months ago), with some articles showing no awareness of the pandemic and others being all about it. As usual with HLR, there were several well-researched and interesting articles about such esoteric and interesting matters as the under-reporting of abortion complications and the character of Abigail Adams (really). The short pandemic op-eds contained at least one cautionary note about the possible ill effects of lockdowns, but two of them expressed horror at what the authors saw as the brutal rhetoric, incompatible with a pro-life position, of those speaking against lockdowns. As we have seen for months, the pro-life version of, "You just want Grandma to die" is the claim that those who are raising the dangers of lockdowns see those in vulnerable populations as expendable. 

Now, to be fair, it absolutely does not help when some people speak against lockdowns by using talk of "quality of life years." Yikes! Don't do that. You just blur distinctions that need to be un-blurred, and you definitely give fodder to the "expendable lives" claim. Of course, others have pointed out more eloquently than I, and with more statistics, that many people will die as a result of economic and other indirect effects of the lockdowns themselves--people driven into poverty, people who don't get needed medical care, people driven to despair. Are their lives expendable?

As part of the archiving project, this older post of mine came to light--an important bit of work, if I may say so myself.

But now I can add to it. What I argued there is that there is a great danger in our own time of loving death too much rather than loving life too much. I pointed out that older Christian writers, such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, saw a kind of vitalism or transhumanism that seeks to retain and lengthen life at all costs as the great danger in their time, whereas our own danger is somewhat different.

All true. And yet we are also now faced by paradoxes. Consider: In Canada, elderly people (and non-elderly people, for that matter) can choose euthanasia but can't (as in most nursing homes in the U.S.) have relatives visit them, lest they contract Covid-19 and die. Think about that. They can choose death, even due to the loneliness of the Covid restrictions (see this anecdotal comment), but they can't risk death by way of such an ordinary activity as seeing their children, friends, and grandchildren. Euthanasia advocates have even scrambled to be sure that euthanasia assistance is available by Zoom.

As this conversation points out, because ours is a materialistic culture, the physical goal of avoiding death is elevated to the detriment of intangible goods. True. But at the same time, abortion clinics were kept open in my state of Michigan as "essential" even during the hardest lockdown. Not only did this involve deliberately killing babies, it also exposed the mothers and their relatives, bent on the death of the child, to potential medical complications and, for that matter, virus infection, for the goal of making sure that no unwanted child was born. This seems to mean that Thanatos will have his sacrifice, come what may.

Does our secular Western country fear death too much or too little? Does it worship Death or run from him?

As it turns out, both. As a woman planning to access assisted suicide says openly here, it's all about control. "I choose to be in control," she says.

Now, this is just exactly morally backwards. In answer to the misguided hand-wringing about supposedly heartless and "Darwinian" concerns about lockdowns, masking, and other draconian measures, and also in answer to the death doctors, we must distinguish all of the following:

1) Killing people directly and deliberately (as in abortion and assisted suicide and euthanasia). (Always wrong)

2) Foregoing treatment that the patient understandably deems extraordinary. (Sometimes entirely legitimate)

3) Withholding basic care, such as food and water. (Always wrong.)

4) Engaging in otherwise entirely legitimate actions, such as spending time with friends, opening a legitimate business, singing, going to church, traveling, etc., which by an entirely indirect and unintended process causes a death.

It should be evident that #4 is something that we all have to risk doing all the time. It is impossible to live at all without risking causing someone else's death. It is shallow to say that we can take risks only for ourselves. As I pointed out here, we must take risks for other people constantly. Just driving down the road to take your child to get a vaccination risks causing a death by an indirect process, in an accident--your child's death, for one. There is nothing remotely un-pro-life, much less "Darwinian," about saying that you, and others, should go ahead and live life in a more or less normal way, doing moral and even praiseworthy activities, even if this risks causing a death as a result of someone's catching Covid. Of course we must take into account the degree of risk and the importance of the activity in question, and of course there are reasonable precautions we can take (I am not advocating "Covid parties"!). And of course reasonable people can and will differ on what count as reasonable precautions. The point is that risking an indirect and unintended death by engaging in a legitimate activity is business as usual in a contingent world, not heartless immorality. Indeed, by not acting in a way that carries risk, for ourselves and for others, we may indirectly cause more deaths! 

This is where the older authors such as C.S. Lewis have much to teach us. Lewis's characters in his Narnia books talk boldly about "taking the adventure that Aslan sends us." In the water world of Perelandra, the unfallen Green Lady emphasizes the importance of "accepting the wave" that God sends rather than demanding certainty and security. This is exactly what we are now being told never to do. Our hyper-controlling world worships the god Death at the same time that it fears him with a great fear, and the end result is that we never accept the wave or the adventure. In a grisly reversal of all right values, we flee from Death even to the extent of killing our incarnate friendships and our joyful gatherings, while at other times those in our secular world choose to seek out Death (at the abortion mill, at the hands of the euthanasia doctor) to offer him a living sacrifice, unholy and acceptable. Being Christians helps us to see where all of that goes wrong, though one should not need to be a Christian to see it. 

Life is a contingent gift and must be embraced and lived. If you do not believe in God, you may not know how to express that, and in a sense you may not consciously believe it. But in your best moments, you sense it and know it. And you also know that life must be lived and seized and that life is not without risk. Indeed, any driving instructor knows that the student who tries too hard to avoid risk in making a lefthand turn is often the student whose driving is the most dangerous, the most indecisive and tentative, and hence the most likely to cause an accident. Prudence is not dithering. Prudence is not the vain attempt to avoid all risk. Prudence must not be turned into the enemy of all gallantry, courage, joy, and generosity. And prudence is not trying literally to put human relationships and societies into "freeze" mode, shutting them down indefinitely or over and over again, in the hopes that a pathogen will pack its bags and leave in discouragement and that one will do more good than harm by such means. (Nor is such a hope scientific in its basis. Wherefore acting on it is not, ultimately, prudent!) 

At the same time, if you actually do love and care about human life, you ought to be able to see the terrible irony in continuing to kill humans deliberately while compassing land and sea, causing untold spin-off harms (including deaths), in order to avoid causing a single accidental death by means of a single, specific virus.

So if the lady in the nursing home wants to see her relatives, let her see her relatives. Let her take that risk. Let them hold each others' hands and see each others' faces. That is a healthy attitude. It can and should be a part of a healthy worldview that is as far removed as possible from the euthanasia mindset. And if others want to work and rejoice and gather and see each other face to face, don't tell them that this must mean that they do not care about the elderly lady. Their actions can and should be part of a healthy worldview that is as far removed as possible from the desire to see others die or even to neglect them. It should be part of embracing life and should provide the society (both economically and interpersonally) in which the elderly can be cared for rather than being isolated "for their own good." But beware: If you tell all of these people that they must be anti-life to think this way, you risk their believing you, which would be a tragic confusion.

I hope to continue saying these things as a reminder from time to time, while I continue working on other things. 

Live right on. Dying will have to take care of itself.

John Derbyshire's hatred of the good

I'm long behind the times. In fact, I'm about to write about a book review that was written just over a decade ago. I'm quite sure that there are more examples out there, by this same author, of what I'm going to write about here. But in a sense that's part of my point--namely, that this author was writing material this bad this long ago. Occasionally one will run into anguished "race realists" or Trump supporters or alt-rightists or other characters who seem to be deeply upset about the fact that National Review removed John Derbyshire from its stable of writers in 2012. How terrible that the right thus purges itself! What an example of wimpy political correctness! What a loss! And so on, and so forth.

Now, my own impression at the time that the actual divorce took place was that they could and probably should have chosen a better last straw. There had been (even by my cursory estimate) so many other straws that should have been the last. And, yes, perhaps one could write a little treatise on the psychology of National Review editors and on why it was something Derbyshire wrote about race relations (which wasn't anyway as bad as other, imaginable things he could have written about race) instead of his militant atheism and his hatred for the pro-life movement that pushed them over the edge.

But I'm not going to write that psychological musing. I'm just going to talk about his visceral and creepy hatred for the pro-life movement, which did not strike me with full force (perhaps because I was always somewhat bored by Derb and hence inattentive) until I read this old article.

Why write about such an old article? Well, for one thing, because Derbyshire hasn't dematerialized or anything. He's still out there and still writing and being read. So, unless he's repented (ha ha) in dust and ashes for this interesting piece of vitriol and the ideas it expresses, the article remains, in a sense, ever-timely. Second and perhaps more important, Derbyshire's long stint at National Review after writing this article (six more years) as well as the unfortunate rise of the alt-right in 2016 tell us all too loudly and clearly that there are people who want to be called "conservative," and who sometimes succeed in getting that label affixed to them rather firmly, but who hate human life and hate those who fight for human life. It would be well for those of us who have closely identified American conservatism with the pro-life movement and ourselves with both of these to be aware, and wary, on this account. These anti-lifers mean business, and we and they have no common ground on which to meet. Third, and related to both, is the fact that normal conservatives are now being pressured in comboxes by alt-rightists to denounce loudly National Review's getting rid of Derbyshire in 2012. That's happening today. In light of this 2006 Derbyshire piece, my response is a strengthened version of my original impression. Namely, my only regret is that it didn't happen sooner and on the even more solid ground of his visceral hatred of the pro-life movement, a movement for which (allegedly) the National Review stood as the flagship journal of American conservatism. Derbyshire's absence from National Review and from mainstream conservatism is therefore to be praised, not mourned, and the more informed we become, the more we will realize that. This should lead us to be skeptical about the supposed "martyrs of political correctness" whose purgings from polite company we are told we should mourn with the Internet equivalent of black armbands and righteously angry scowls.

The various strands of conservative fusionism in America are coming apart with a vengeance in the current Presidential election. We have a GOP candidate who cares nothing whatsoever for the defining social issues and his vicious followers  of the alt-right who talk much like Derbyshire (and worse) about pro-life conservatives. At the same time, a European-style Christian Democratic party has appeared on the American horizon, manned by people who appear to be deeply sincere in their commitment to the sanctity of human life but who are (not to put too fine a point on it) dangerously out to lunch on virtually all economic, environmental, and other prudential issues, including the size and power of government.

The Derbyshire article in question, which recently came to my attention via this interesting post by David Mills, is a review of Ramesh Ponnuru's pro-life treatise Party of Death. Derbyshire's review was published in the New English Review in 2006.

A dead giveaway that Derbyshire really, really dislikes pro-lifers is that he starts by (more or less) calling the pro-life movement (which he dubs RTL for "right-to-life") a cult. From that point on, he literally can't bring himself to refer to it as anything normal, not even a cause. He has to have a pause before "cause," as if every reference to it is distasteful.

Can Right to Life (hereinafter RTL) fairly be called a cult? This is a point on which I cannot make up my mind. Some of the common characteristics of culthood are missing—the Führerprinzip, for example. On the other hand, RTL has the following things in common with every cult in the world: To those inside, it appears to be a structure of perfect logical integrity, founded on unassailable philosophical principles, while to those outside—among whom, obviously, I count myself—it seems to some degree (depending on the observer’s temperament and inclinations) nutty; to some other degree (ditto) hysterical; and to some yet other degree (ditto ditto) a threat to liberty.

[snip]

Ramesh Ponnuru is one of the best advocates a cult—cause, movement, whatever—could hope for;

See, for example, this exceedingly back-handed compliment for Ponnuru:

Whether it is a cult or not, RTL is made as presentable as possible in Party of Death, with writing that is engaging and lucid. Will Ponnuru’s book make any converts to the RTL whatever-it-is? That depends on how much exposure it gets outside RTL circles. Just to be on the safe side, the mainstream media are studiously ignoring the book—a sad reflection on the current state of public debate, and of respect for rhetorical virtuosity. RTL-ers are welcoming Party of Death very joyfully, though, and they are right to do so, as it is an exceptionally fine piece of polemical writing in support of their... cause.

"Their...ewww...[picks up spider with forefinger and thumb] cause."

We get it, John, you're disgusted by the pro-life movement. Did it ever occur to you that people who are less (what was that word? ah, yes) hysterical than you are about the DANGEROUS pro-life movement might find you rather creepy for your inability to write a single smooth sentence in which you refer to it as a cause?

But pro-lifers aren't the only ones who disgust Derbyshire. Those they defend also disgust him. Indeed, it wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that Derbyshire is disgusted by pro-lifers precisely because they defend the lives and humanity of people by whom he is disgusted. For example, he cannot bring himself to speak of Terri Schiavo without triggering his own gag reflex. She, and her daring to live when she should have died here sooner, clearly disgust him viscerally:

The second of those ratings [degree of hysteria] would have been lower before the grotesque carnival surrounding the death of Terri Schiavo last year, when a motley menagerie of quack doctors, bogus “Nobel Prize nominees,” emoting relatives, get-a-life monomaniacs, keening mobs of religious fanatics, death-threat-hissing warriors for “life,” dimwitted TV presenters straining to keep their very best my-puppy-just-died faces on while speaking of “Terri” as if they had known her personally from grade school, pandering politicians, and shyster lawyers all joined forces in a massive effort to convince the American public that RTL was a thing no sane citizen ought to touch with a barge pole while wearing triple-ply rubber gloves.

[snip]

The word “polemical” needs emphasizing. Some people would say that a writer who refers to embryos as “the young,” to Mrs. Schiavo as “disabled,” or to the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment as having carefully pondered its implications for abortion, is just plain dishonest.

Heaven forbid anyone should call Terri Schiavo "disabled" or should refer to embryonic, individual members of the human species as "the young."

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.

One has to pause to admire (?), be struck dumb by (?), the Nietzschean-Darwinian logic by which Derbyshire decrees that Michael Schiavo's unfaithfulness to his disabled wife and the production of children with a woman to whom he was not married make him positively admirable. "Merrily procreating" and "vigorous." Yes, that's what we normal, moral people always call a man who behaves like that! As for "usefully employed," why yes, that is obviously an important criterion for a life worthy of life. Arbeit macht frei.

And just in case you thought referring to a living, breathing human being as an "insensate relict" was as low as Derbyshire could go in dehumanizing those he wants to see killed, out of pity for those whose real lives they are interrupting, you were wrong, because there's also this:

Here I meet a man whose loved wife has gone, never to return, yet her personless body still twitches and grunts randomly on its plastic sheet, defying years of care and therapy.

You will notice that "Mrs. Schiavo" has disappeared, in every sense, by this point in Derbyshire's manifesto.

Derbyshire makes it quite clear that his detestation for pro-lifers and those they defend is not based upon argument or principle. Indeed, he seems faintly resentful of the fact that Ponnuru has carefully mustered a coherent, well-argued philosophical position. The resentment shows, for example, in this artful little bit of well-poisoning, in which he does not interact with a single argument of Ponnuru's but rather dismisses Ponnuru's arguments on the grounds that they are "inspired by religious belief."

Yet it remains the case that our Constitution does not permit the framing of laws based on the peculiar tenets of any religion or sect, and Party of Death is obviously inspired by religious belief. The philosophical passages strictly follow the Golden Rule of religious apologetics, which is: The conclusion is known in advance, and the task of the intellectual is to erect supporting arguments. It would be an astounding thing, just from a statistical point of view, if, after conducting a rigorous open-ended inquiry from philosophical first principles, our author came to conclusions precisely congruent with the dogmas of the church in which he himself is a communicant. Yet that is the case, very nearly, with Party of Death. Remarkable! What if, after all that intellectual work, all that propositional algebra, all those elegant syllogisms, the author had come to the conclusion that abortion was not such a bad thing after all? I suppose he would have been plunged into severe psychic distress. Fortunately there was never the slightest chance of this happening.

However well-written the periods of that (snarky) paragraph may be, the attentive reader will notice that they, at any rate, cannot be accused of containing any intellectual work, much less any elegant syllogisms. Why bother with all that when one can accomplish what one wants to accomplish instead by disdaining intellectual work and insinuating that Ponnuru undertakes his own intellectual efforts in bad faith? But this is very nearly the definition of the abuse of rhetoric. Thrasymachus, call your office.

It is ironic that Derbyshire, the atheist, obviously thinks himself much superior to religious believers in terms of rationality. But his complaint in this context against Ponnuru and his fellow pro-lifers is that we insist on using arguments and following inconvenient principles when instead, if only we were not cold, heartless, bastards, we would be relying solely on gut feelings.

Our preferred method for dealing with the unpleasant side of life, including topics like abortion and euthanasia, is to think about them as little as possible. In the fuss over Mrs. Schiavo, it was not hard to detect a general public irritation at having had the whole unsightly business forced on our attention. Perhaps this is not humanity at its most noble, but:

Show me what angels feel.
Till then I cling, a mere weak man, to men.

A corollary, though Ponnuru seems unaware of it, is that people who are obsessively interested in these topics seem, to the rest of us, a bit creepy. We may even find ourselves wondering which side, really, is the Party of Death. 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 potatoes 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 like Ponnuru who think differently are working against the grain of human nature, against our feelings—yes, our feelings—about what life is. The life of a newly-formed embryo, or of a brain-damaged patient who has shown no trace of consciousness for fifteen years, is worth just as much as the life of a healthy adult, Ponnuru insists. Well, most of us instinctively but emphatically disagree, and no amount of argumentative ingenuity is likely to change our minds. Hearts, whatever.

[snip]

If, from the principles of Natural Law, it ineluctably follows that women who discover that they are bearing Down Syndrome fetuses should not be allowed to abort those fetuses, then I can assure Ramesh Ponnuru that Natural Law principles will be tossed out of the window by every juridical authority in the land, so long as we remain a democracy. And that is as it should be.

And thus Derbyshire works himself up to his pro-death, feeling-based, furious peroration:

Here I find a couple who want a lively, healthy child, but who know their genes carry dark possibilities of a lifetime’s misery and an early death. They permit multiple embryos to be created, select the one free from the dread traits, and give over the rest to the use of science, or authorize their destruction.

The RTL-ers would tell me that these people, and the medical professionals who help them, are all moral criminals, who have destroyed human lives. They support their belief with careful definitions, precise chains of reasoning, and—I do not doubt it—sincere intentions. Yet how inhuman they seem! What a frigid and pitiless dogma they preach!—one that would take from the living, without any regard to what the living have to say about it, to give to those whom common intuition regards as nonliving; that would criminalize acts of compassion, and that would strip away such little personal autonomy as is left to us after the attentions of the IRS, Big Medicine, the litigation rackets, and the myriad government bureaucracies that regulate our lives and peer into our private affairs.

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 this 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 for the vegetative, incapable, or incurable? Not at all. Do we need to do 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 schoolmarms tell us what to do with our wombs, or when we may give up the ghost, or when we should part with our loved ones? Absolutely not! Give me liberty, and give me death!

(Did someone say something about only pretending to do hard thinking so long as one is careful to come to predetermined conclusions? Why, yes, I believe someone did. But the pretense here is very thin. Derbyshire merely talks, for one sentence, about "doing hard thinking." He doesn't actually do any himself. Indeed, there is something of the fakery Derbyshire affects to despise in his talk about the importance of "having a discussion" and "doing hard thinking" in the very midst of heaping angry scorn upon anyone on the other side of such a "discussion" who comes to conclusions different from those endorsed by his own feelings.)

Well, now that we know that Derbyshire thinks that those who want to protect the unborn (yes, even the unborn with Down Syndrome) and the inconvenient helpless are "another manifestation of the hypertrophied and academical egalitarianism, the victimological scab-picking, the gaseous sentimentality, that has afflicted our civilization this past forty years," we can make our decisions accordingly. My own decision, had I been an editor of National Review in charge of such things in 2006, having read this venomous, murderous, irrational, fascistic screed against the defenders of life and the victims for whom they speak (Lebensunwertes Leben in Derbyshire's anti-egalitarian ideal world), would have been to boot Derbyshire's posterior out the door so fast that any film of the event would have caught nothing but a blur. If the other editors, through misplaced patience and an abstract notion of the free exchange of ideas, kept around someone who so despised the pro-life movement, a central pillar of American conservatism, for six more years and then fired him for a different reason, you will find it difficult to induce me to shed any tears over the final outcome.

This is not conservatism, and anyone who holds with Derbyshire concerning the wicked "egalitarianism" of the pro-life movement is not an ally social conservatives can work with.

I do not know what will happen in the end to American conservatism. I have lived to see both the birth and, in a sad and important sense, the death of the American religious right, with its shameful endorsement of Donald Trump for President. And I'm not even that old. What will rise from its ashes is beyond any mere man's power to predict. But I do know that no good can come of despising the weak, the helpless, and those who cannot speak. No good can come of treating human life as a commodity with a value on a sliding scale, so that those humans who seem to us attractive, vital, and productive have "a life, a life," while those unfortunate human beings who don't arouse such feelings in the rest of us must get out of the way.

So I'll keep looking for candidates and allies, even if I can't find a party, who understand those things. I'll also (sorry, American Solidarity Party) want them not to be incredibly foolish about the use of practical political power and about economics in the United States. And (sorry, Constitution Party) their candidates should not be nuts who coyly refuse to say whether or not they are 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Those of us who represent the last of the fusionists, a dying breed, may be doomed to disappointment in the world of politics. But the one thing we won't do, if we have any principle at all, is give up on the social issues. Because whoever turns out to be right on the pragmatic issues, on the matters of fundamental principle we know that we will have the last word, when it all comes tumbling down, when "The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare."

This is the true face of the alt-right

I enjoy having full comments moderation turned on here at Extra Thoughts. It allows me to filter the nastiness I get in response to posts like this one. I've also decided to start posting more, and shorter, posts here, more like Facebook updates.

I just learned of this bit of despicable trash today. As one Facebook wag put it, I wonder how it reads in the original German.

This is the face of the alt-right. If you are a conservative with any conscience left, have nothing to do with it, period. And, yeah, I really couldn't care less how upset you are with the betrayals of establishment Republicans. You must be really messed up if you think for a moment that "being frustrated with the betrayal of conservatism by establishment Republicans" can somehow be expressed by joining an utterly destructive movement that stands for none of what conservatives have stood for, run by foul-mouthed little boys pretending to be he-men, who think that they can carry out big Accomplishments for The Right Side by being, and encouraging, bullying jerks on Twitter and by attacking Ted Cruz, one of the most intelligent, principled, hard-working conservatives to come along in a long time. So don't be fooled like that.

Oh, and while we're at it, you know that word that starts with a c and ends with "servative" that I keep telling people at What's Wrong With the World is despicable and won't be tolerated? If you think it is a mere synonym for the older English word "cuckold," use Google and get a little more information, huh? Because it isn't just a synonym for that word. And it should have clued you off in the first place that it's a little bizarre and twisted to criticize someone for spinelessness or lack of principle or whatever you thought you meant by the word (the alt-right, of course, means "any conservative we hate") by referring to him merely as a man whose wife has been unfaithful, since that doesn't in itself necessarily mean anything bad about the character of the man.

Yes, I'm being blunt, here. So maybe I will merely a) preach to the choir and b) tick off the alt-righters and their fellow travelers.

But if you are a fellow traveler who can still be reached, read the above-linked article, back off from the alt-right sites you read, and ask yourself, "What am I becoming by making excuses for these people? And what of any enduring value am I gaining by associating with them?"

It's never too late to reject evil. It's never too late to turn back.

Abortion and punishing women

Consider the following scenarios:

--A man kills his wife in a hunting “accident.” The police are convinced that it was deliberate but know that they will not be able to prove mens rea, so they don’t even consider prosecuting.

--A thirteen-year-old girl cold-bloodedly poisons her grandfather and two other people in her house for “being mean” to her. She keeps a diary bragging about how clever she is. She is prosecuted but will never face the death penalty, because her state does not have the death penalty for minors as young as she is.

--A young man forcibly rapes his girlfriend, who had willingly gone to his apartment for dinner but had no intention of having sex with him and gave him no indication that she was willing. In her mental turmoil afterwards, she foolishly waits to report the rape until two weeks later, when the bruising on her wrists and arms has disappeared, so the evidence is he-said, she-said, and no prosecution is possible because due process will protect her rapist.

--A mafia hit-man meticulously plans an assassination, but his gun jams at the last minute. Due to the circumstances, he doesn’t have time to fix it and drops that particular assassination attempt. The police get evidence of the attempt but can try him only for, at most, attempted murder, even though his guilt is identical to that of a successful hit-man. He was “saved” from actually committing the murder only by a morally lucky accident.

--A woman commits a heinous murder, but the police gather the evidence (for some reason) by way of a blatantly warrantless search, so it is inadmissible in court, and she goes free.

--A man urges his wife to kill someone against whom he has a grudge, believing that a jury will go easier on her because she is a woman. She eventually complies and is duly tried, convicted, and punished. He can be tried only for incitement or as an accessory and cannot be subject to the death penalty, though the whole idea was his.

--A young woman kills her five-year-old child and pretends that it was done by someone else. She is tried and acquitted and afterwards goes on a talk show bragging about how she committed the murder and got away with it. She can now never be convicted of that murder because a retrial would violate double jeopardy.

What do all of these cases have in common? They are all similar in that someone gets away with doing something evil that, it seems natural to think, the law ought to punish. Or someone gets a lesser legal penalty in a situation where, logically, it seems that his guilt is equal to that of someone who gets a greater penalty. In each case, however, there is a completely explicable legal reason for the lesser punishment or even the impossibility of prosecution altogether (as in the rape case). I would argue moreover that in each case the legal reason is a good legal reason and that abandoning the legal principle involved--allowing young minors to get the death penalty, prosecuting men for rape in cases where the evidence is scanty, abandoning the prohibition on double jeopardy--would be a bad idea. Yes, that means that some guilty escape, but our common law legal tradition has always held, rightly in my view, that the law should err, when it must err, on the side of false negatives rather than false positives. Also, the legal tradition of the west has been (again, rightly) that invasive legal or police procedures that are likely to harm the innocent should be eschewed, even if this allows some of the guilty to get away. That is why our Constitution emphasizes the rights of the accused. That is why mens rea is such an important legal principle. That is why the fourth amendment principle of no unreasonable search and seizure makes it impossible to use illegally obtained evidence, even if irrefutable evidence of a heinous crime, in court.

One might say that all of this means that the law is not perfectly logical, if we require for “perfectly logical” that the law should always track moral guilt and mete out to every man his just deserts, letting none get away without their just deserts, at least for publicly accessible crimes (like murder and rape) that would in the general legal run of things be legitimately punishable by law. That is, in fact, not how law works in many cases, and not even just because of prosecutorial discretion. Nor would it really make sense to say that “ideally” the law would always do so, if the only way for such alleged ideals to come about would be to abandon principles like no double jeopardy, the fourth amendment, the requirement to prove mens rea, the requirement for conviction beyond reasonable doubt, and so forth. These, in fact, are parts of an extremely carefully balanced legal set-up, and we shouldn’t even be aiming to abolish them incrementally.

Notice that all of this introduces an ambiguity on a word like “should” as in the following statements: “Morally cognizant thirteen-year-olds who cold-bloodedly commit murder should be punished equally with adults.” “All men who commit rape should be punished.”

In one sense, one could say that such statements are true. They may even seem uncontroversially true. That is, in the sense of “just deserts.” The thirteen-year-old poisoner deserves to die. The rapist who didn’t get reported in time deserves to be punished. But in another sense it is quite arguable that such statements are false. That is, in the sense that “should” refers to how we are obligated to attempt to structure the legal system. We are not obligated to attempt to structure our legal system so that all cold-blooded, thirteen-year-old murderers are punished equally with adults or so that we insure that all rapists are punished without exception. There can be countervailing considerations (such as the danger of punishing the innocent or those who are not fully morally responsible for their acts) that would make it imprudent and hence actually wrong deliberately to structure a legal system with that goal.

All of this brings me to the question of punishing women who procure abortion. This question has arisen recently apropos of the candidacy of a completely insincere and disgusting candidate who means nothing and whose words should not be allowed to cause reasonable people to go running to their computers to have a big debate, as though he really had made some meaningful and sincere pronouncement.

However, I suppose the question is interesting enough in itself, and some of those who just love to accuse pro-lifers of being inconsistent (on the left and on the right) have taken it as their opportunity to make extreme claims.

In general, what these claims (“You’re an inconsistent pro-lifer if you don’t aim to have women punished for procuring abortions”) have in common is a failure to recognize this: Even in a situation where abortion was treated, as far as the abortionist is concerned, as first-degree murder (with the death penalty in relevant states), all of the general messiness of law in the real world would apply to the situation and in particular to the woman involved. Nobody except foolish feminists thinks that the requirement in law for evidence beyond reasonable doubt in cases of rape means that “we don’t really think women are human beings.” Nobody except a fool thinks that we don’t think human beings are human beings because we apply the principle of double jeopardy to a bragging murderer who has been acquitted. Nobody thinks that the victims of the plotting thirteen-year-old “must not really be believed to be human” if the law fails to punish the thirteen-year-old as harshly as an adult. And so on through a million places where law makes distinctions, yes, even distinctions that tend to favor describable groups of people, such as those who incite someone else to murder rather than committing it, those of a younger age, those whose crimes are committed in cases where intent or state of knowledge is difficult to prove, etc. In none of these cases is the humanity of the victim being impugned. Rather, the general idea is that the common good is not served by always trying to give every wrongdoer his just deserts. Again, this is not only a matter of prosecutorial discretion. Sometimes these matters are set up in statutory law ahead of time.

A legal situation with harsh penalties for abortionists and zero penalties for the procuring woman would be just another such rough-cut distinction made by law, based on considerations like the difficulty of proving the woman’s state of knowledge or intent, information about the prevalence of mitigating pressure and even coercion on the woman, the widespread deception practiced upon pregnant women, the fact that the woman is not confronted with the humanity of the victim in the same way that the abortionist is, and so forth. (Abortion is unique in that the victim is physically hidden, and can remain hidden, from one of the people who is complicit in the victim’s destruction.) All of these could well make it both impractical and imprudent for the law to get involved in trying to exact legal penalties upon the woman. Moreover, the pro-life goal that every child should be recognized as a human victim and protected in law would be accomplished by harsh penalties for the abortionist as a murderer, who sees the humanity of the child in the very act of killing. And, just as the reality and humanity of the victims is not denied in any of the above scenarios where someone who is morally guilty doesn’t get his just deserts, so it would be here. Such a legal set-up does not deny the humanity of the unborn child but is based on the intrinsically messy nature of the real world in which law operates and on the difficulty of the necessary task of proving mens rea.

Perhaps the tweaked and slightly more “perfect” legal situation would be one in which the woman could in theory be charged as an accessory before the fact but in which the law expressly provided for what is known as an “affirmative defense” which would block the prosecution. Such affirmative defenses could include lack of knowledge, having been lied to about the nature of the unborn child within her, or outside pressure from other people urging her to have the abortion. Often when a law expressly allows a fairly broad affirmative defense, prosecutors don’t even bother to prosecute that person at all. It would also be possible to offer complete immunity from prosecution in return for testimony against the abortionist. However, in some utterly blatant cases of heartlessness and knowledge on the part of the woman, where this can be proven, prosecution as an accessory would still be possible in theory. Certainly nothing I have said here means that it would be per se unjust for the law ever to punish any woman to any extent for procuring an abortion. Indeed, legal punishment might be well-deserved in some cases.

But even this latter scenario is not one that I think pro-lifers should pursue, for prudential reasons. I do not consider that it is necessary to our cause, and I think that treating it as a goal of our cause merely creates additional and unnecessary odium. Our goal should be the prosecution of the abortionist with, in that prosecution, the full recognition of the humanity of the unborn child. That is a far-away enough goal that we shouldn’t have much energy left over for grousing about how allegedly stupid and inconsistent our fellow pro-lifers are for not loudly pursuing the prosecution of the mother. Again, statements like, “The woman should be punished” or “The woman shouldn’t be punished” are ambiguous concerning what sort of “should” is in view--whether referring to what a person might deserve or to what policies ought to be pursued.

I don’t use the catch phrase that the “woman is always the second victim in an abortion,” because I think it is too sweeping and sometimes untrue, perhaps even more often untrue than one would like, in charity, to believe. I don’t like catch phrases anyway and avoid them whenever possible.

Sometimes, however, it is true that the woman is to some extent or other a second victim, and the new misogyny that has become prevalent in some unpleasant corners of the “right” is ideally placed to blind people to just how widespread such situations are--situations of coercion, pressure, lying, etc.

There are indeed heartless women who have abortions; there are also deceived and pressured women who have abortions. It’s not a failure to “really believe” in the humanity of the unborn child or even in the general moral agency of women to sketch out, as a legal goal, going after the abortionist instead. And contrary to the impression you might get, what I’ve said here is not unique. It is not the case that all pro-lifers are out there saying that it would be wrong per se under any circumstances for a woman to be punished at all in law. Scott Klusendorf, for instance (about as mainstream pro-life as it gets) emphasizes the prudential issues and the issue of mens rea in a public Facebook post.

Doug Wilson emphasizes similar issues.

However disappointing this conclusion might be to those who want to find and crow over “wimpy, feminist conservatives letting women off the hook” around every corner, the approach to policy that I am recommending in this post is the type of thing that is common and legitimate in the western legal tradition and in political action and is entirely compatible with full recognition of the humanity of the unborn child.

The pity of it all

I have a new post up at What's Wrong With the World. Its theme is why Matt Walsh is a healthy corrective to some bad trends in our Western thinking.

Toward the end of the post I start talking about the positive aspects of what Walsh writes and about how he is not just a corrective to wussiness but also a corrective to mere bitterness and destructiveness.

I wanted to say more about that temptation here, where I have full moderation turned on, because I think it is something some conservatives need to hear.

There is a reaction going on right now against wussy conservatism. I get that. I get not liking wussy conservatism. I'm not a wussy conservative myself. But the reaction (sometimes known as "neoreaction") is dark, disturbing, and often outright vile. We get, for example, the implication that if young women get raped by Muslims and the young women were so-called "SJWs," we shouldn't worry too much about it, because they are our political enemies and wouldn't thank us for our concern. We get a similar implication about anybody assassinated by Vladimir Putin: If he was probably somebody "we" don't care about, then "shrug" about his being assassinated.

Then there was the utter vileness directed at David French for having the gall to tackle the Alt-Right and for the additional crime of having adopted an African child.

On and on goes the drumbeat in those circles--"SJWs always lie" "SJWs are traitors," "We shouldn't care what happens to SJWs" and so forth.

I'm perfectly happy to use the word "evil" where it fits. I'm willing to say that the left supports grave evil.

But when it comes to the point that we are implying that the rape and murder of those on the political left is no biggie because they are "SJWs" and "traitors," that is destruction, not conservatism.

It is also stupid and immature. If you live in the real world and know real people, you begin to get a sense of the pity of it all. What I mean by that is that most real people who support evil policies fall somewhere on a continuum of muddled-ness, and that muddled-ness itself is a cause for pity and sadness. Yes, the saying that the line between evil and good runs through the middle of each human heart gets overused and (in a sense) isn't entirely true. When people were shoving Jews into gas chambers and when the abortionist literally rips off the head of the unborn child, this isn't some kind of generic evil that is "the same for everybody."

All true. But back up a level. Back up to the people who shut their ears to the Holocaust or who even accepted and parroted Nazi talking points. And on our side of the Atlantic and in our own time, ponder for a minute those who parrot pro-abortion or pro-gay talking points.

My point is that people are to some degree brainwashed from the time that they are young. The schools are a huge source of this brainwashing, as are TV shows, the mainstream media, and employers. It is self-propagating, too. Brainwashed people go on to brainwash others. This does not make them free of responsibility, but it does mitigate their acceptance of evil ideology. It should all the more mitigate it when the people we're talking about are not themselves the ardent persecutors--not the people bringing the lawsuit but merely the people making dumb, intensely annoying, muddle-headed comments about how maybe the baker should have been nicer and baked the cake after all, for example. It should make those of us who see reality more clearly have somewhat of a "There but for the grace of God go I" feeling. Here's a friend or relative whom you like, care about, or have family loyalty to, and suddenly he's going on about how maybe gay "marriage" isn't so bad, because after all it's only civil marriage, and we shouldn't try to "impose Christian morals" on non-Christians in the secular world--some nonsense like that. Or a friend is rattling off a talking point about how abortion is a "difficult choice" and he doesn't want to tell a woman "what to do with her body."

Is it disappointing? For sure, especially if you expected that the person would be able to think more clearly than that. Is it even infuriating? Definitely, especially if you try calmly debating and feel like you're getting nowhere.

But on one day or another, I challenge you, you need to be overwhelmed for a moment by the pity of it all. All the hearts, all the minds, all the souls gone astray. All the people led into darkness and confusion by the Spirit of the Age. It's part of the tragedy of human history.

Once you have felt that, once you have seen that, once you have grown to that point, you should never, ever fall for cheap shots about how it doesn't matter if someone gets shot, killed, or raped, because he (or she) was just an "SJW." You should never cooperate with fantasies about getting into a literal shooting war with the left.

Do I believe in the culture wars? Yes, indeed. I consider myself a proud culture warrior. One of the reasons I don't give up on speaking the truth and fighting the rearguard in Christian circles is because I have a strong sense of how error spreads like a disease through the institutions and the churches. We must never give up on the culture wars, and it literally doesn't matter to that "never give up" advice if we are losing. Indeed, we should fight the harder if we are losing, for the sake of our own souls and the souls of our children.

But "culture war" doesn't mean literally not caring about or even kind of liking the picture of the people on the other side getting killed. "Culture war" doesn't mean increasingly hating anybody on your own side of the issues who seems more squeamish than you are about calling a spade a grub hoe. (Frustration, yes. Hatred and vitriolic contempt, no.) "Culture war" doesn't mean having no sense of degrees of guilt, or mitigation, or ignorance. Culture war doesn't mean having no love whatsoever for anybody at all except for some extremely narrow group one has designated as those who "get it." "Culture war" may mean using language that the left, and the wussy right, calls "demonizing"--language like "evil" and "baby killer." But it doesn't mean demonizing in the sense that you talk so much about "SJWs" and "traitors" that eventually you don't care about murder and mayhem as long as you can convince yourself that the victims were (probably, mostly) people who disagree with you! That is appalling. That is not what conservatism stands for or ever should stand for.

This is why I actually consider Walsh, in a sense, a moderate. Before anyone dissolves in laughter, here's what I mean by that: Walsh is outspoken to the point of brashness, he pulls no punches, but he is not representative of the truly nasty "alternative right" (or "identity right" or "manosphere" or "race-realist right") that is unfortunately arising among us. He doesn't seem to be pandering to them, either, as Ann Coulter is. In fact, he almost seems blissfully unaware of their existence (lucky man).

"Be angry and sin not" is much easier said than done. In a culture war in which we are increasingly the less powerful side, it is an indispensable skill. Somehow we have to keep our righteous anger both glowing and untarnished. We have to have a combination of dash, energy, courage, and chivalry. We have to fight hard and never give up, but never fight dirty. We have to hate evil with a passion but not hate people--not even wicked people.

"Be angry and sin not" is one of those things we cannot afford to get wrong, so we have to keep trying until we get it right. In that struggle, some groups are our enemies just as much as, if not more than, the left.

A pro-abortion canard

If you've spent much time at all arguing with those who are pro-abortion, you've doubtless heard this canard: "Scientists think some huge percentage of embryos naturally fail to implant--at least 50%. You pro-lifers don't worry as much about those but only about procured abortions. Your lack of energy expended upon attempts to protect embryos from natural implantation failure shows that you don't really believe that the embryo is human from conception. You just want to control women."

There are so many things wrong with this that it's hard to pick one. Just one is the fact that the pro-abort making this argument is talking vaguely. What precisely does he think we should be doing to "show that we care" about natural implantation failure? One's being pro-life hardly commits one to the (usually left-wing) politicization of natural death, disease, and disaster. It is normally the leftist who wants everyone to show that they care about x disease by calling for more government funding for research on x. It isn't a sign that I don't think women with breasts are human beings (!) if I don't constantly carry on and yell loudly that "we" must "do more" to try to "stop breast cancer."

The pro-abort who makes this argument also shows no awareness of how difficult it is to know what to do about natural implantation failure. Given that most of the time we don't even know when, much less why, it occurs, preventing or stopping it is incredibly difficult, as fertility doctors will tell you. In fact, if one believes that IVF is morally wrong, one would probably have reason to oppose much of the research that is done to try to figure out what causes implantation failure, since the best way to test various methods to prevent it is in an IVF context where researchers know there was an embryo in the first place. In this case, IVF embryos cannot simply be created and treated as cannon fodder for the alleged greater good of trying to find a solution to the implantation failure of other embryos. Using persons as means rather than ends, ethics, etc., etc.

So this is a pure head-fake, pure vague talking with no cash value. We're supposed to "worry about" a particular class of natural deaths in order to prove that we really believe that those who die in those cases are really human.

And then there's the question of whether we really know that such a high percentage of embryos naturally fail to implant. Very likely some do, but the inferences that bolster the statistical claim are always indirect and by no means decisive.

The bottom line is that we don't generally have to show that we believe that the members of some identifiable group are human persons by a particular amount of worry or fuss over disease and natural death that afflicts that group. How many of even the most PC liberals feel that they have to put in a daily or monthly quota of time worrying about deaths from sickle cell anemia to prove that they really believe blacks are human persons, or about deaths from Tay Sachs to prove that they really believe Ashkenazi Jews are human persons?

It makes no sense whatsoever to say that an attempt to protect members of a group from targeted, direct killing must be bolstered by equal (as measured by whom?) amounts of "worry" about natural deaths within that group, on pain of having one's belief in the humanness of the victims challenged. Even the word "protect" makes far more sense when applied to stopping deliberate killing than when applied to trying to solve some problem of disease or natural death.

So here's an analogy to use next time this nonsense comes up:

Suppose that someone wanted to make it legal to chop the heads off of unwanted five-year-olds in the U.S. Let's say for some reason they would put an upper limit of five hundred on the number of unwanted five-year-olds who could be executed--first-come, first-serve basis for applications made by the mothers. It would be an obvious red herring for that person to say, "You don't really believe that five-year-olds are human persons, because there are five-year-olds in Africa dying of malaria, a lot more of them than would be killed by people who took advantage of this legal policy we want to enact, but you aren't putting as much energy into fighting childhood malaria deaths in Africa as you are putting into fighting our attempt to legalize beheading some unwanted five-year-olds in America." Naturally we don't want kids to die of malaria in Africa. But there is a limited amount one can do to protect children from malaria (a disease borne by mosquitoes), whereas it is completely straightforward to lock people in prison (or execute people) who chop off children's heads. And it's deeply evil for government policies to put in place the principle that five-year-olds are non-persons who can be killed at will. It's just plain stupid to measure our belief that five-year-olds are truly human persons by the amount of energy we put into worrying about malaria deaths as compared to the amount of energy we put into trying to stop policies that legalize murder.

The wrong Mr. Spock

Old Star Trek fans will remember the episode "Mirror Mirror," in which some members of the Enterprise crew end up switched with their evil counterparts in a parallel universe. Mr. Spock is one of the switched characters. His counterpart is just as smart as the Mr. Spock we all know and (sort of) love, but this Alternate Spock uses his intellectual gifts in an amoral way to achieve wicked ends. Naturally, in the end, the real Kirk suggests to the evil Spock that the system of assassination and intrigue in his world is illogical.

Well, yes and no. Far be it from me to disparage logic. God is the source of all truth and reason, and true reason will lead us to God. However, there is such a thing as being merely consistent while starting with bad premises. If, in that case, one regards it as a virtue of logic (a false kind of logic) to refuse to admit any reductio ad absurdam, to be consistent with the premises one started with to the bitter end, then one will be in one sense logical (i.e., consistent with one's original premises) but not therefore rational in the broader sense of conforming to true reason. For true reason can never contradict true goodness. But logic, very narrowly conceived, can be one tool in a toolkit, as used by fallen man, that leads one away from true goodness. In that case, one can become the wrong Mr. Spock.

Now, I'm going to launch out here into the realm of speculation, being sure to offend as many different types of people as possible in the process: There are certain corners of the blogosphere (if you haven't encountered them, count yourself lucky) in which misogyny lives on, partly as a reaction to feminism. One will sometimes see conjectures in these corners, or in (as it were) corners adjacent to them, to the effect that perhaps men are naturally more virtuous than women because men are more logical. If one has ever tried to discuss the humanity of the unborn child with a ditzy, hysterical, pro-abortion woman who refuses to stick to the point, one will have some understanding of where such a conjecture might come from. Those conversations can get really wearisome really fast.

I'm a complementarian and by no means a feminist, so I don't entirely mind discussing virtues and vices as "more masculine" or "more feminine," as long as those concepts are sufficiently qualified. E.g., Many individual women manifest "more masculine" virtues (such as being logical, sportsmanlike, and professional) and many individual men manifest "more feminine" vices (such as being illogical, whiny, and manipulative).

But as regards the question of whether being more logical leads one to be more virtuous, an interesting point arises: Just as there is a "more masculine" virtue of being highly logical, there is also a "more masculine" vice of turning oneself into the wrong Mr. Spock. The ability to turn off one's emotions and one's instinctive reactions has some utilitarian value. For example, a soldier has to be able to turn off his instinctive aversion to killing people. A surgeon has to be able to overcome any instinctive aversion to plunging a knife into someone. But sometimes one's emotions and instincts are deeply important clues to the meaning of the universe. The instinctive aversion to strangling a baby, for example, is part of the braking system that God has placed into mankind. It's the good part of human nature, a manifestation of the image of God in man. It is that part of the imago dei that pro-lifers access when they show either beautiful images of babies in the womb or shocking images of aborted children. When one says that that instinct is "mere emotion" and turns it off in response to a false "logic," one becomes Kermit Gosnell.

I conjecture that men are somewhat more likely than women to stifle their instinctive aversion to doing bad things by way of reasoning consistently from faulty premises. For example:

1) This being in the womb of this woman is not a person. (Because I studied personhood theory in ethics class, and there I learned that the fetus has not attained personhood.)

2) It is not always wrong to kill non-persons. In fact, non-persons can be killed for sufficient reasons of convenience as determined by persons.

Therefore,

3) It is not always wrong to kill this being in this woman's womb.

4) This woman is a person and has a sufficient reason for wanting to kill this non-person in her womb.

Therefore,

5) It is not wrong now to kill this non-person in this woman's womb.

6) I am a professional technician who can help this woman to kill this non-person without doing harm to her, the person.

Therefore,

7) It is not wrong for me to kill this fetus in this woman's womb.

And proceeds to carry out the procedure, however bloody, stifling all his horrors and qualms as simply something he needs to get over to be consistent with "logic."

Don't misunderstand me: There are plenty of women who go through this reasoning process as well. But I conjecture that this sort of false use of logic is somewhat more common among men, especially the sort who pride themselves on being logical (as does Mr. Spock).

Something similar is at work in the thinking of the ethicists that I discuss in this post. They argue that it is legitimate to dehydrate some people to death even if they are asking for water, because the patients lack "true capacity" to change their minds and ask for something they previously refused. As I pointed out in that post, this position is consistent with the ethicists' own premises regarding food and water, autonomy, and so forth. But that doesn't make it any less crazy. The ethicist who argues for dehydrating a woman to death even when she verbally asks for water has become the wrong Mr. Spock. A good dose of yuck factor and human compassion could cure the craziness and would be in an important sense more rational to follow than the argument they are using, but they have deliberately cut themselves off from that source.

What all of this means is that human nature is a many-orbed thing. God has given us various ways of getting access to moral truths, and we should not despise instinctive responses as simply unreliable as a guide to moral truth while elevating logical reasoning from given premises as simply reliable. At that point, it all comes down to the premises, doesn't it? What this means about men and women is that, if it's true that men are in general more logical and women in general more emotional, we are given to one another to complement one another, and this complementary value can sometimes carry over into the realm of morals, where we should each value the other's gifts. Women should value logic, and men, especially men who enter philosophy, should watch out for the danger of becoming the wrong Mr. Spock.

Obamacare and abortion

Per Bill Luse's suggestion here, I have posted here a piece on Obamacare and abortion. The short version is, yeah, it looks like it will pay for abortions, but with an accounting fig leaf thrown in to make it look like it doesn't. And the Commissioner (remember him?) gets to decide how much of the premiums is going for abortion coverage. And in an even stranger twist (see the update), poor people who get the "public option" may even be required to pay a bit extra so that the plan can contain full abortion coverage while claiming that federal money isn't paying for it.

Addendum to that post: Michael Gerson puts the point pretty well here:

[T]his is a cover, if not a con. By the nature of health insurance, premiums are not devoted to specific procedures; they support insurance plans. It matters nothing in practice if a premium dollar comes from government or the individual -- both enable the same coverage. If the federal government directly funds an insurance plan that includes elective abortion, it cannot claim it is not paying for elective abortions.

And as NRLC points out here, the government will be collecting and funneling even the "private" premiums to the "private" insurance plans. This fits with my impression of the bill here, according to which it would be the federal government who made the contracts with "health care exchange" insurance plans. So the money is passing through the government's hands anyway, making the distinction between "premiums" and "subsidies" even more artificial.

I've also just updated the W4 post to include some additional information about the "public option" and abortion coverage. Update is at the end of the post.

HT Keith Pavlischek for link to Gerson article

The things which belong unto thy peace

[This is a re-post from a few days ago at What's Wrong with the World. It was prompted by some of the posts it links from Wesley J. Smith's incredibly important blog, Secondhand Smoke (now at a new location as part of the First Things blog family).]

And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation."

We humans usually don't know what's good for us. Jesus addressed the City of Peace and said that its inhabitants would not know the things that belonged unto their peace.

It is often said by conservatives, and rightly, that ideology is a great danger. The ideologue gets hold of one truth and makes it into the only truth, the only thing that matters. He sacrifices all else to that one thing. That one ideal might be equality, beauty, health, or love, but when one makes second things first, the second things always turn vicious, and horrors follow.

But there is another point, compatible with that point, that must be made too: When second things are made first, they destroy themselves. The ideologue does not even know what is best for the ideal he professes.

Take love, for instance. It's been said times without number that the sexual revolution wasn't really about love. But there were people who thought it was. If you had told them that the revolution they were founding would ultimately destroy love, even romantic love, even sexual love, they would not have listened. They would not have believed. Yet it was true, as numerous broken-hearted, broken-bodied men and women, men and women who have tried sex without honor can attest.

And now, in this our day, health is another god, another second thing made first. In the name of health we harvest the dead, we destroy embryos, our scientists promise us cures of all diseases if only we will dispense with ethical limitations on research. They are wrong, of course, and much of the promise is hype. But beyond that, we are in the process of losing all sense of what actually constitutes health. Doctors are under pressure to cooperate in the destruction of unborn infants as part of their profession. How is that serving health? Suicide on demand, for any reason whatsoever, assisted by doctors, is all the rage. What does that have to do with the medical profession's job of helping people to be healthy? Yet restless people whose relatives have had trouble finding people to cooperate in their suicide would actually like writing suicide prescriptions to be mandatory upon doctors. Bodily mutilation of healthy limbs is being considered as a "treatment." This is not serving bodily health and integrity.

In other words, the utilitarian attempt to elevate health as a good above innocent human life and above all ethical restraints has turned out to be profoundly anti-human and, consequently, is undermining the medical profession and the very notion of health itself.

If human beings knew the things that belong to their peace, then their perception of some good--love, health, beauty--would guide them to do the right thing. But they don't. They never seem to see it coming--the self-destructiveness of topsy-turvy priorities. They never seem to realize that when second things are made first, you end up with nothing, not even the second things.

It is time to ask ourselves what things belong to our peace. If we believe in healthy bodies, love, beauty, and human joy, we cannot serve these things best by treating the human body as mere matter. We will lose it all, and our house will be left unto us desolate.

Quote of the week--If you don't help Herod, are you "honoring" him?

I usually don't do quotes of the week, but this one was really good.

From a commentator at Zippy's blog, apropos of Obama Catholics who defend Notre Dame in offering him an honorary degree with the "we are supposed to honor our leaders" shtick:

[T]he Magi's circumvention of Herod was in direct contrast to Paul's command to honor leaders.

That just nails it.

Laws against abortion with exceptions--an analogy

Caveat: What follows is not intended to mean that I endorse a democratic ideal of the family nor that I think that husbands have to defer to wives when it comes to forbidding their children to do things. It is meant for illustrative purposes only.

Suppose that you and your wife become alarmed by the fact that Junior is starting to do some bad things that you never had to have explicit rules about before. In particular, he's doing X and Y, which you quite reasonably regard as species of the same wrong act. In fact, if you prohibited someone from doing X, he'd probably assume he was also prohibited from doing Y unless you expressly stated otherwise. Your wife thinks that Junior should be stopped from doing X but should be allowed to do Y. You and she go back and forth for a while and can't come to any nearer agreement. Meanwhile, Junior is merrily going on doing both X and Y without the slightest fear of reprisal, fear of God not being Junior's strong suit, and fear of man (namely, his parents) not having been brought to bear on the situation. It seems to you rather important that he should be stopped, right away, from doing as much of this stuff as possible. So after one more conversation with your wife, you go to Junior and give him the following speech:

Son, we've not been stopping you from doing X and Y, but that situation is about to change. From now on, if you do X, you will receive such-and-such a punishment. You are hereby forbidden to do X. Unfortunately, your mother and I cannot agree about Y, so for the time being you are not threatened with any punishment from us for doing Y. This doesn't mean that Y is not wrong or that you shouldn't be punished for doing Y just as much as for doing X, and the situation with regard to Y may well change later on. Meanwhile, we're going to make good and sure you get in big trouble if you do X. Got that?

Now, I don't think anyone could say that you were authorizing or endorsing your son's doing Y. Nor does there seem to be any important distinction here to be made between the "author" of the prohibition thus stated and its other supporters. In this case, even though you are the one who wants to prohibit both acts, you are the "author" of the speech to Junior, and your wife is its supporter, rather than vice versa, but it seems to me obvious that that fact does not put you in the wrong. That is to say, you would not be in any morally better situation if your wife made a parallel speech to Junior and you "voted" for it or endorsed it in some other way. In fact, by putting yourself forward as the "author"--the one actually to speak to Junior--you can be especially careful that nothing that even looks like an endorsement of the moral licitness of Y gets into the speech, and you can warn Junior that his days of freedom to do Y may be numbered.

I think this is actually quite a good analogy for the situation of a pro-life legislator who gets an opportunity to write and propose a law outlawing abortion in some cases but allowing exceptions in others, where such a law will vastly improve the legal protection for the unborn in his jurisdiction, and who does so.

It might also be worth pointing out that the heinous and iniquitous court decision Roe v. Wade is not analogous to either of these things--to the pro-life legislator writing a law with exceptions or to the parent speaking to his child. For Roe really did attempt to lock the states into a situation where they could not protect unborn children, and it did so by saying (which was patently false) that abortion is a constitutional right. In so doing Roe's intention and effect was to strike down state laws that protected the unborn. Roe in that sense really did "authorize" abortion in a very specific way, and it is to Roe most of all that we should apply statements about the evil of "laws" (or in this case, the quasi-laws that are court precedents) that authorize abortion.

See here and here for the background to this post.

To my comrades in the cause of the unborn child

Byhrtwold grasped his shield and spoke.
He was an old companion. He brandished his ash-spear
and most boldly urged on the warriors:
"Mind must be the firmer, heart the more fierce
courage the greater, as our strength diminishes...."

"The Battle of Maldon," Anglo-Saxon poem, translation by Kevin Crossley-Holland

When a cause is losing, that is the very time when it is most worth fighting for. In fact, it may well be that the only causes worth fighting for are those that are, or appear, to be lost in earthly terms. That your side has seen no results of the sort it hoped for, even for many years, is in no way an argument for endorsing the other side. If the Enemy can say that he has won the souls of the last defenders of the innocent, will that not be his greatest triumph of all?