On the Consolation of Philosophy
This is something of a confession on how I wasted a good deal of my life. It was brought to mind by a reader with the ursine name of Bear. He writes:
When my wife was pregnant with our third and presumably last child, the ob/gyn, with whom we had no problems previously, became cagey. Due to my wife’s age (she is in her forties) he recommended amniocentesis. When she refused, he wished to do a blood screening. She refused again, because she believed he would push her for an abortion should the child turn out to have some perceived defect. He then ran the tests on some of her regular blood samples anyway. Our son was healthy, so nothing more came of it. Even so, I still had others recommending to me that I push my wife to terminate the pregnancy, for reasons of overpopulation, risks, the fact that I am a poor man, and so on. I would be irresponsible, I was told, to have the child. Kill it, was their message. They never sai: You are poor, let another take your child and raise it as their own. Only: Kill it.
As I read the quotations you cited, I felt ill, thinking of what they would have had me do to my child. I thought of your son, and I could only imagine the emotions this would stir within you.
Let me say something about those emotions, and perhaps my tale will serve as a warning to others.
The epiphany which led to my becoming an ardent anti-Abortionist happened while I was an atheist.
Being an atheist, I thought it was my duty not to allow myself to be mislead by any previous thinking. Ergo I had to create my own entire moral code from scratch just as all independent intellectuals must do — to be certain that my code of life was mine, and no one else’s, and that there was not one iota of anything in my code that was not independently, logically justifiable without reliance on any authority or tradition.
It worked pretty well, with only two defects: chastity and aborticide.
I did not have the experience to know that a family structure is needed to raise children, and that a man does not naturally make a good breadwinner and a good father and a chaste husband, so therefore the formal sanction of law and the informal sanction of peer pressure, culture, and consensus must be brought to bear on him in his youth to train, habituate, encourage or coerce him to adhere to these standards.
I also had no way, using pure reason alone, to decide between the claims of the pro-abortionists and the anti-abortionists, since the point at which a cluster of cells became a “human being” was a gradation, but the legal right to kill or the legal prohibition from it was binary, yes or no, not gradual. I made the unexamined assumption that the human right to life comes from human nature, specifically from human self-awareness and moral consciousness.
When I first looked upon the ultrasound image of my unborn son in my wife’s womb, and I realized, with a shock I cannot put into words, that I had been willing to kill him should he prove defective, to kill my own son, I realized that the most appallingly evil crime I could imagine was not only legal, but that I had been exposed my whole life to this crime’s reprehensible lies, and that these liars had imposed upon my absolutely strict standards of reason and fairmindedness to grant themselves a hearing in my conscience of their filth.
Had I, in that moment of rage, been given the power instantly to murder each and every pro-Abortion advocate and partisan on the planet, and reduce them to a puddle of ash, gladly would I have done so. Surely there is justice in executing someone who aids, abets, and plans a murder, even if he does not pull the trigger himself? Speaking in the abstract about killing an entire class of human beings, be it a holocaust of the Jews or a holocaust of the unborn, is tantamount to assenting and aiding in the death of each and every person slain, is it not?
For what happened in that moment when I first saw my son, is that I fell in love. Now, I had know, in an abstract way, that those who favor abortion are liars, because they routinely use words to mean the opposite of what they really mean — but, being fair-minded, it occurred to me that just because a liar says something false, does not mean his other claims are not, perhaps by accident, true. So I had actually listened to them, the murderers, the people who tried to kill my son.
I actually listened when they told me that the offspring of a human being is not a human being, or that an organism that is alive is not alive. One particularly dishonest Morlock (a colleague met at a science fiction convention) told me that even if a girl-child in the womb has an XX chromosome pair, she is not a member of the sex “female” on the grounds that she is not a member of the species “homo sapiens” on the grounds that she is not yet born, and, for this reason, she only POTENTIALLY is a member of the female sex.
I should have realized that the lying was an essential part of, not an accidental accretion to, their philosophy of death. One cannot have an absurd axiom, as “unborn humans are not humans” without reaching an absurd conclusion “unborn human females are not females.”
Now, my emotion passed, as all emotion does, and it not to be relied upon as a tool of cognition. But I knew I had been lied to. Where was the lie?
It was in the whole frame of the argument. The Death Eaters argue about rights, and they weigh the rights of the unborn child against the rights of the mother and find the mother’s right superior because she has ownership of the flesh surrounding junior. By that logic, the whale that swallows Jonah has the right, without any breech of the moral law, to end his life, because of Jonah’s trespass onto property not his, even if the whale’s own act led to Jonah’s presence within. Or, to use a science fiction example, the living ship Moira from the television show FARSCAPE has the right, without any breech of the moral law, to kill any innocent passenger aboard at any time, including ones Moira herself, by her actions, brought aboard.
But even so, the frame of the argument is wrong. It is not an argument about a conflict of rights. It should be an argument about duty. We hold it proper to use the force and terror of the law to ensure a father sees his children get an education: he can be punished by truancy laws. We hold it proper to use the informal sanction of peer pressure and social conditioning to get a mother to stop smoking during pregnancy, and to watch her diet with care, and to do other things to avoid a birth defect.
On what grounds can these duties be imposed? There is duty of parents to care for their child. This is not a right that comes from the child, but a duty that issues from the parent just from the fact that they are parents, and the fact that humans are altricial, a race whose young are helpless. Consequently, this duty obtains from the first moment it is possible to do some act whose consequences might damage the child, or hinder his education, or hinder him reaching the age of majority, when the duty is discharged.
It is possible to do such acts before birth, and, indeed, before conception. In the same way we would hold it immoral for an employer to expose a virgin to chemicals that might linger and cause birth defects once she weds and bears a child, we would hold an unwed girl in the same despite, if, long before pregnancy, she took chemicals that might cause a birth defect in children as yet not conceived nor even contemplated.
Deliberately aborting the child in the womb is like giving him a birth defect, except that instead of bearing an unhealthy child, his unhealth is induced to the point of killing. In one or two very rare cases the attempt at abortion fails, and the baby lives, and grows up with a birth defect induced by the attempt.
Morally speaking, whatever condemnation applies to harming and maiming an unborn child applies to killing him, since to kill is merely to harm to a point where no further harm is possible.
A mother could hire a doctor to reach into her womb with an instrument and sever the unborn child’s upper limbs, so that the boy would be born and grow up without hands, as a freakish cripple. Anyone who holds it to be immoral that a mother should do so, must of necessity also hold it to be immoral that the mother hire a doctor to pierce the boy’s skull, since the damage done is no different in essence, merely more effective.
The logic condemning abortion is based on one inescapable and inescapably obvious fact. A daddy is supposed to love his child, to love, to protect, to raise, and to guard his health and well-being. A mommy’s love, if anything, is even deeper, for she gives of herself in every way.
The question is not when the child has rights, at birth or before — that question is a lie, a deception meant to obscure a simple and great moral truth.
The question is when is mommy and daddy supposed to start loving and protecting the child, at birth or before.
Put that way, no coherent answer can be given asserting the duty to love and protect only after the child’s head clears the opening of the womb. If the duty to protect the child starts at the point in time, not when the child is born, but when any chain of cause and effect leading to the loss of well-being for the child can begin, then logically this begins before the child is even conceived.
Logically, aborting the child is a failure to love and protect; and this is made obvious from the fact that the supporters of abortion will not even call your son or daughter “a child”.
If there was no duty to protect and love the child that obtained before birth, and if the Death Eaters were not aware of this duty and attempting to elude and avoid mention of it, then they would not fear the words used to refer to your son or daughter.
After all, no one uses any euphemisms to refer to slaughtering a pig for bacon, because such an act (vegetarianism aside) is not held to be a violation of any moral duty. If the liars were serious, they would say what they mean. Instead they talk like people not trying to defend a practice, but trying to get away with something. Elusive talk is a sign of guilty conscience.
So runs the logic that condemns prenatal infanticide. It is not because the child has rights — the question need not be reached — it is because the mother and father have duties, including a duty to love and protect, that abortion is an abomination.
But I did not know this at the time.
Because of this inability on my part to reconstruct the entire moral order of the universe by myself with only my unaided powers of cogitation, I committed what I now regard as abominable violations of that moral order. They would have been much worse had I been in circumstances even slightly more favorable for their commission — and it is due to blind luck that my blind folly produced nothing worse than it did, or due to the providence of a merciful heaven.
I almost committed child murder on my own son. I contemplated it. The doctor advised it. To make matters worse, the disease they feared my son might have was imaginary, a figment of a misdiagnosis. All the cherished and golden years of joy — my boy is in Boy Scouts now — would have been abolished, stillborn, aborted, had his mother given that doctor as much attention and consideration as I did.
When the horrifying truth is pressed in upon me with the brightness of a blinding and inescapable light, the only conclusion I can reach is that, had I been less proud, less independently minded, and more willing to use the multi-millennial-old moral code that other men, wiser than I, in their countless generations slowly evolved, I would perhaps have been less able to defend each nook and niche of my moral reasoning from a (purely theoretical) skeptical inquisition, but more able to do moral things.
There was no need for me to reinvent the wheel. It was inefficient, it was folly, and it came, despite my best efforts, to nothing in the end. Here is the moral order man has discovered:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition4.htm
You can imagine with what impatience I, who so diligently and for so many years checked and rechecked, argued and re-argued each axiom and each link in the argument for any trace of logical defect, hear arguments from lazy-minded intellectuals whose education consists of nothing but the simple, single, stale, and pointlessly repeated pointless argument that all who disagree with them have bad motives, and therefore must be not merely wrong and evil, but undeserving of any counterargument.
I hear nothing from the Left but ad hominem, endlessly stupid and endlessly repeated. One of the ad hominem mantra-phrases they recite is that theists are uneducated, ignorant, bigoted, and hypocritical, whereas the Children of Light are educated, knowing, fair-minded, enlightened, and honest.
Then the Enlightened say an unborn baby is not a baby; and they don’t know who Aristotle is; and they do not recognize a formal logical error when they commit it; and they sneer at people who do.
So what was the end result of all my years of studying philosophy, and of trying, unlike every other student of philosophy I knew, not to be merely a student of philosophy, but actually to discover the rational principles behind all actions, and to live my life accordingly, not to read philosophy, but to live it?
Well, the ones at whom I sneered for taking such deep matters on authority were right, entirely right, right without a single exception no matter how slight. My effort was wasted. I walked all the way around the world to come back to my starting point.
Meanwhile, the ones in whose camp I at one time served had proven to be entirely unworthy of my service.
They did not care if I gave a tightly-reasoned and rigorous argument in favor of their atheistic hedonism. They are hedonist because it grants them pleasure; they are not logical because logic does not grant them pleasure; insulting men smarter than them grants them pleasure, and so they do that instead of heeding any reasoned argument.
Nor do I get any credit from them for having used their alleged tools, education and logic, to reason my way out of their camp. It is an irrational article of faith with them that they are reasonable and all other systems of thought mere bigotry and nonsense: and no evidence, and no reasoning, will convince them otherwise.
Sad experience show that these are men without honor or a shred of honor, unwilling to admit the possibility that other views might come from other axioms or other experience, too partisan to pretend respect toward opposing views. To the fanatic, there is no honest opposition. Whoever opposes the Enlightened are Benighted.
There are, to be sure, one or two rational atheists out there somewhere, men whose honest appraisal of the evidence convinces them that reports of supernatural things are unconvincing. One can reason with such atheists, and have rewarding and mutually interesting conversation.
Then there are hedonists who hate God, hate God, hate God, and want to kill unborn babies, who are atheists because saying the words “I am an atheist” gives them pleasure.
Whether the words are true or false does not matter to them. No words matter. Only their emotions matter.
One can exchange witty insults and put-downs with such creatures, and it might amuse idle onlookers for an hour, but there is nothing to gain from traffic with them.
The hedonist atheist is in the conversation for psychological reasons, to uplift a flagging ego, a weak sense of self-esteem, and after, in the first moment of conversation, he plays a childish verbal trick to assure himself that he is your moral and mental superior, there is nothing further to be gained: continuing the talk merely welcomes the repetition of the same tired verbal trick, again and again and again.
And, of course, the Internet allows such beings to indulge without cost or restraint in this psychological masturbation, at the expense, sad to say, of any rational atheists out there willing and able to discuss these deep and interesting topics. Bad money drives out good, and trolls drive out talk.
There may be some aesthetic appreciation to the serious study of philosophy, nor can I count my life an entire failure since my study did eventually lead me back from the void to the moral order of the cosmos, at least as far as human reason can lead — and this was close enough to the divine things the Church teaches to open my eyes to the possibility that God might, after all, exist, and that possibility was enough to force and honest and honorable philosopher like myself, one with no regard for emotion, reluctance, pride, or whatever would argue against the pursuit of truth, to experiment, as the saying goes, to knock, that the door might be answered.
But, on the whole, a lifetime devoted to philosophy earn scorn from the sophomores (who do not believe real philosophers exist) and does not lead the seeker reliably enough quickly enough into the chambers of the truth to be of practical use.
It is, alas, all vanity. A single charitable act done for a man in need would have done more good in the long run than all my clever musings.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
