Feature
No Country for Young Children
What Kind of Society Can Countenance Such Evil?
Let us begin with a question that seems never to occur to the proponents of abortion. What must a country become, or already have become, if abortion is permitted? Here I don't mean simply that there is evil in the world, and that when you perform an evil deed you yourself are your first and most injured victim. That principle would apply in a healthy society as well as in a sick one. If the Amish farm boy assaults his neighbor's daughter, he throws the doors wide open for Satan to enter his heart; or, if you prefer to speak only psychologically, he begins to bind himself to an evil that will render him less and less able to love a woman for herself, her simple being. Yet we would not say that the Amish community itself is sick. In fact, they probably understand far better than the pro-abortion feminist professor of sociology does, just why what the youth has done is to be condemned.
Nor do I mean simply to say that a country that permits abortion is sick. The question is, what exactly is the sickness? Here, too, we must be careful. We are talking about human beings, not machines. If I see a pinkish fluid dripping from the bottom of my car, I surmise that I have a leak in my automatic transmission. But the transmission is only a part of the car, and its relationship to the rest of the car is strictly a matter of position, of one thing being next to another thing and acting upon it mechanically. A machine is thus only a distant imitation of a body. The sick man lying upon his bed of death is something utterly different from a broken-down car. The whole of the man is involved in each part; the pain he feels invades his mind; but his mind can embrace the pain or attempt to rise above it; he is other than his sickness, although there is not one member of his body that does not share in the suffering.
What I am trying to do is to avoid the mistake of our materialist opponents, who do not really know what a human being is, and therefore can never know what a human society is. They are spellbound by modern science's facility with machines. They therefore think mechanically. If a tank springs a leak, you plug it up. That is their approach to all political and social problems—call it plugging or soldering. John is poor; give him money. Jane is pregnant and doesn't want her child; clean out her womb.
So our sickness is not just that we allow abortion, nor is abortion merely a predictable but contingent consequence of an underlying sickness, in the way that coughing up blood is a predictable consequence of tuberculosis. If abortion were made illegal tomorrow, as in justice it ought to be, we would still be a terribly sick people, because we are still a people for whom abortion is conceivable and even desirable. What kind of people are we?
Mystery, Invulnerability & Holiness
Here I turn to the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel, in his book Reflection and Mystery. Marcel asks us to consider someone who is entirely vulnerable, "a sleeping person, especially a sleeping child." If we think only of physical action, "the sleeping child is completely unprotected and appears to be utterly in our power; from that point of view, it is permissible for us to do what we like with the child."
To do what we like with the child—a terrifying phrase. Recall the end of the film To Kill a Mockingbird. A boy has been brutally attacked by an evil and vindictive man. The boy is lying unconscious in his bed, his broken arm in a sling. The doctor says he will live. Standing at the bed is his little sister and the man-child who saved their lives, and who killed the attacker. That man-child does not speak a single word in the film. We never learn whether he can. The children have been afraid of him and his "haunted" house, ruled by his heartless and wicked father. But now he stands there, clear and innocent.
The sister is small enough to take his hand and not feel embarrassed. "You can pet him, Boo," she says, reading his mind. "He's asleep, but he'd never let you do it if he was awake." And the man gently brushes the boy's hair on his forehead.
The director does not have to tell us that we are in the presence of the holy. That is not a machine in the bed. It is a being, irreducible to a list of facts or measurements. It is not a machine that strokes his head. It is a being, one who responds to the holy. Says Marcel: "From the point of view of mystery, we might say that it is just because this being is completely unprotected, that it is utterly at our mercy, that it is also invulnerable or sacred."
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more from the online archives
31.4—July/August 2018
Life & Love Are Real Despite Theatrical Illusions by Anthony Esolen
31.1—January/February 2018
The Wisdom of the Victorian Quest for Innocence by David Sandifer
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