Raplog

"I would we were all of one mind, and one mind good." --Cymbeline, V.iv.209-210. An English teacher's log. Slow down: Check it once in a while.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

"Left on Down"

Thanks to the Drudge Report, we have this inevitable news from Switzerland. I say “inevitable” because it represents but one more step in the long march from traditional values toward a future devoted to—well, to what? Let’s see where we end up if we plot the course laid out by certain promoters of social and legal “progress” in recent years.


By “progress” I don’t mean legitimate improvements in the justice system or wiser practical balancing of the sometimes opposed values of liberty and equality. I am referring, rather, to the Oregon and Netherlands laws permitting assisted suicide and euthanasia, respectively; to the push for gay marriage; to the argument that any woman has a “right” to choose to have an abortion; to the promotion of sex-change surgeries; to the attempt to assert the “rights” of animals (as opposed to the responsibilities of human beings); to the defense of lucrative traffic in addictive drugs, pornography, and in sex slaves; to the justification of homosexual pedophilia among certain fringe groups; to the state-wide proposal in California to legalize marijuana; to the refusal of Homeland Security, against all practical reason, to countenance so-called “profiling” while justifying what in any non-government operation would be considered sexual harassment. You may wish to add examples of your own.


All these movements, backed by passionate groups of devotees, are predicated upon the valid principles of individual liberty and equality under the law. They reason thus: If all men are created with equal rights, as they interpret the words, “who is to say” that women can’t choose to abort, that two men can’t choose to marry, that any man or woman can’t be the gender he or she would like to be, that an underage child can’t sexually love an older person, that a white great-grandmother or Asian infant should be immune to the kind of body search more properly directed at swarthy middle-eastern Muslim men between the ages of 18 and 40? Why not die when you feel like it or marry your sister if you wish? The problem is that the backers admit no limits imposed by the same authority by which we claim our rights to liberty and equality, namely “nature and nature’s God.”


The only traditional reason not to do any of these things is civilized tradition itself, rooted in ancient wisdom, religious faith, the practice of neighbors and nations for millennia. The legalization of incest, whether Switzerland passes the bill this time around or not, is but one more in the long list of rebellions against all tradition in the name of the freedom to make the world correspond to any desire we may conceive instead of having to correspond ourselves to once universally acknowledged rules of human behavior.


But my assertion of the validity of those traditional values need not be repeated. Anyone interested in the fundamental arguments for them may read C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, so often referred to on this weblog. Today I want to ask instead toward what world the supporters of these various progressive advances imagine they are moving us. How do they picture us living if they should have their way?


I realize that not all those who embrace one item in the list above will necessarily embrace all, or even any, of the others. I also realize that the devil is in the details. But promoters of all of the above changes have in common the similar intellectual stance that nothing may justly hinder anyone from living out his or her heart’s desire. Well, let’s say government did get completely out of the way. Where would we be? What would be the practical effects of the success of these movements?


At a certain point in the decline of ancient Rome, if things didn’t quite go your way—say you had a rebellious child or lost an election or couldn’t pay a debt—you’d get into a warm bath and slit your wrists. Any child of either gender not under fairly careful protection might be subject to sexual abuse by any passing epicure. All the trees of Italy were burned to make hot running water in Rome. Caligula could marry his horse. Is ancient Rome in collapse to provide the picture of our own ideal future?


Suppose all incest taboos were renounced as antediluvian superstition. We might not suffer a flood of mental and physical impairments or supernatural punishments. Wouldn’t something nonetheless be lost? To the ancients, Oedipus was that man to whom the worst thing that could possibly happen to a man happened—killing one’s father and marrying one’s mother. If our enlightened northwest were to go the way of Switzerland, how many thousands would blaze a new Oregon Trail in order to clear a senile old man out of the path to a trophy mother? If only Oedipus, like us, hadn’t had the gods in his way, bugging him for doing what came naturally! Who are non-Oregonians to say that Oedipus didn’t deserve a happy life too?


Imagine a child growing up in a world in which he knows that one day his parents will ask him to kill them as he will be expected to ask his own future children to kill him to get him off their impatient hands; a world in which married couples may be any mix of genders or transgenders and of any blood relation; a world in which a boy is taught no sexual responsibility because women can have free abortions any time and children are available for his future sexual needs as he is available at present to those of his elders; a world in which animals may not, but people may, perhaps must, be eaten; a world in which there are no Jewish ethicists, no Catholic confessionals, no Protestant Bible-thumpers curtailing our freedoms and ruining our fun; a world in which no vestigial notions of higher divine authority or higher human calling will be permitted to stand in the way of the satisfaction of any material desire, practical or sensual.


Do the promoters of these perverse ideas of progress really believe that man is naturally good? That without the constraint of law and custom mankind will not fall to barbarism? That the abandonment of all traditional virtues will involve no loss of happiness, contentment, or meaning for the individual in society? Do they actually think that the goods of civilization won from nature in years past are so permanent and secure that all restrictions of individual desire can be safely dismantled? If they do, they must be utterly ignorant of human history, or utterly mad—or both.


We cannot have it both ways. Either we are moral beings, created in a context of neutral nature to aspire to meaning and happiness consistent with goodness by constraining our illicit impulses for the sake of ourselves and our posterity, or we are mere bundles of desire whose mission is to indulge in every pleasure that strikes our fancy until such time as nature itself prevents us, at which point we are free to end our desperate and ultimately meaningless lives before others end them for us. As Charles Embree puts it, “It’s either right back up or left on down.”


If you agree with me that we are moral beings, answerable for our choices to the power that made us, we had better start drawing some non-negotiable lines—at incest if no closer.

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You obviously argue strongly against abortion; any non-sociopath would see the issue with rape, and this blog touches on the law regarding incest. How does abortion play into those other two circumstances? Would you argue against abortion even in very specialized circumstances (early on, and after rape or incest)?

10:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"But promoters of all of the above changes have in common the similar intellectual stance that nothing may justly hinder anyone from living out his or her heart’s desire."

That is in inaccurate characterization of the beliefs of many of those who support those things you list of abominations. Even a threadbare version of liberalism imposes limits on what one may rightly do -- for instance, drawing the line at those actions which violate the rights of others (however defined). And many defenders of political liberalism also believe in all sorts of notions of the good and virtuous. One may be for gay marriage, for instance, and yet believe in duties, responsibilities, et al, though their conceptions of those duties and responsibilities differ from yours.

The real fight is over which responsibilities, how they apply to specific situations, and who should have the power to impose their conception of these responsibilities on others.

6:30 PM  
Blogger GRap said...

I don't know what is meant by "seeing the issue with rape." I do claim not to be a sociopath.

I am not an authority on Jewish law. As I understand it, the rabbinic position on abortion is that it is forbidden except to save the life (not the mental or emotional or financial ease) of the mother, as determined by a competent physician. Rape, congenital defect, or poverty is thus not a sufficient reason to end the life of an unborn human being. To save the life of the mother, however, a fetus must be aborted at any stage until its head crowns at birth, at which point both lives are treated as equal and must be fought for equally. This is my own understanding of the guidelines in my own tradition. People with specific questions about Jewish law should consult a competent rabbi.

Aristotle argued that a being is already what it will become in the normal course of nature, and the Catholic Church, as I understand it, adopted his authority on this. Hence its assertion that a fetus is a human being from the moment of conception.

Until being revised in recent times, the Hippocratic Oath always contained the following clause: “I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.”

Having said the above, my general practice is to refuse to argue about abortion unless the conversation includes a discussion of sexuality. Unless and until we admit that the explosion in the use of abortion as a method of contraception has arisen from the culture’s unquestioned assumption that sexual gratification ought to come without any personal or social responsibility, commitment, or consequences, we cannot have an honest discussion of abortion. We now live under the pervasive influence of a popular culture in which the miracle of conception and human life are treated as no more than a nuisance thrown in the way of sexual liberation. The idea that a woman has a “right to choose” to have an abortion but neither woman nor man has an obligation to choose restraint if pregnancy is not wanted is one of the absurdities of our time that my blog was addressing.

Rape and incest are straw man issues. I don't know the precise statistics, but I do not believe that the majority of abortions performed in this country are a consequence of either rape or incest.

3:53 AM  
Blogger GRap said...

To Anon.2:
True, most individual people, including those trained up in leftist-liberal thought, will have their own limits and constraints. As I said, the devil’s in the details. My point is that without an authoritative set of guidelines, such as those provided by religious tradition, the limits are slithery things. Our present society of individuals, each with his or her own personal opinions about what the limits are, looks more and more like a chaos of slippery slopes. I hope it is needless to say that mere thoughtless obedience to arbitrary authorities is not my picture of a better future either. But true authority there needs to be, or society is headed for the fate of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, blown ceaselessly about the abyss by winds of fruitless passion.

3:55 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Exceptional post Dr. Rap! It is ironic that real pleasure is found in the power and as a consequence of living morally and not found in the constant attention to one's own self gratification. The great psalmist of Israel said, "my delight is in the law of the Lord." This is ironic, not in experience, but in light of our culture's progressive beliefs. Our culture presses on to fulfill every whim and gratification that its lust conceives, every step of the way becoming hungry for more perversion and being less satisfied. May we seek for true pleasure indeed!

7:26 PM  
Blogger GRap said...

Let me complicate my paragraph about Jewish law above with some excerpts from an article by Dr. Daniel Eisenberg, M.D. (quoted from http://www.aish.com/ci/sam/48954946.html):

“Fundamentally, abortion is only permitted to protect the life of the mother or in other extraordinary situations. Jewish law does not sanction abortion on demand without a pressing reason. . . .

“As a general rule, abortion in Judaism is permitted only if there is a direct threat to the life of the mother by carrying the fetus to term or through the act of childbirth. . . . [O]nce the baby's head or most of its body has been delivered, the baby's life is considered equal to the mother's, and we may not choose one life over another. . . .

“Judaism recognizes psychiatric as well as physical factors in evaluating the potential threat that the fetus poses to the mother. However, the danger posed by the fetus (whether physical or emotional) must be both probable and substantial to justify abortion . . . [A]ll agree that were a pregnancy to cause a woman to become truly suicidal, there would be grounds for abortion. However, several modern rabbinical experts ruled that since pregnancy-induced and post-partum depressions are treatable, abortion is not warranted. . . .

“In cases of rape and incest, a key issue would be the emotional toll exacted from the mother in carrying the fetus to term. . . .

“Every woman's case is unique and special, and the parameters determining the permissibility of abortion within halacha [Jewish Law] are subtle and complex. It is crucial to remember that when faced with an actual patient, a competent halachic authority must be consulted in every case.”


It will be seen from the above that in traditional Jewish law there is no such thing as a “right to choose.” There are moral, ethical, and spiritual obligations to act in accordance with divine will and religious tradition, and proper discernment of one’s obligation in applying the general rules to any particular case requires the involvement of a competent rabbinic authority.

11:32 PM  

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