Choice Superstition
Patrick Gray on Abortion Rhetoric & Common Sense
The Kentucky farmer and philosopher Wendell Berry called a recent book “An Essay Against Modern Superstition,” and many readers must have asked: If an idea or practice is modern, isn’t it free from superstition? Superstition is something primitive, unscientific, and unmodern. Fear of the “Evil Eye” and belief in palm reading are superstitions. Anyone who thinks that a person meets misfortune as the result of a dirty look or can avoid misfortune by following the advice of a fortune-teller does not know how the real world works.
What is superstition? Philosophers of old, as well as modern philosophers like Bertrand Russell, identified the corruption of the rational faculty by the passions as the hallmark of superstition. I would add that this corruption is marked by a rejection of common sense and ordinary language for wishful thinking and redescription of reality.
Nowadays we define superstition by contrasting it with science, our “common sense.” Whereas science sees the world as rational and predictable, superstition sees the world and the powers that rule it as irrational and unpredictable, and therefore a source of constant anxiety. Thus, superstition appeals most strongly in connection with births, deaths, illnesses, romance, and other situations in which our human fragility is most palpable.
Scientists deal in hypotheses that can be tested by other parties and discussed in objective ways. The superstitious reject scientific explanations in favor of esoteric theories that can never be disproved and are often presented in an odd and mystifying jargon. Both science and superstition are ways by which people try to understand the world into which they have been thrown and try to manipulate it to get what they want. By artfully avoiding certain hard questions, the superstitious can remain convinced that their way presents a reasonable, effective answer to life’s problems.
Prime Candidate
Is Berry right? Are there modern superstitions that no one currently thinks of as superstitions? A few hundred years from now, what modern beliefs and customs will look to everyone like rank superstition?
Although Roe v. Wade purportedly settled the question in a modern, enlightened way, a closer examination of the movement to establish abortion as a basic human right may well show its rhetoric and reasoning to be fundamentally superstitious. In their passion to legitimate the practice, advocates of abortion have abandoned common sense and ordinary language for wishful thinking and redescription of reality in a manner characteristic of the superstitious mentality.
These advocates cannot admit that the procedure results in the death of a real, living person (in part because admitting that “abortion stops a beating heart” would be politically fatal to their cause). To get around admitting a reality to which common sense and science bear witness, they must assert that whatever gets aborted is not a living human being, for it is impossible to kill something that is not alive in the first place or to abort something that has not in some sense already begun.
So when confronted with the basic question of what is aborted, if not a living human being, they must resort to wishful thinking and redescription of reality. It is first an “embryo,” they say, and then at a slightly later stage of development, a “fetus.” And what is this embryo-turned-fetus? A progressively more sentient being, not yet “alive” (for that would allow the possibility of its dying), but clearly not dead, either; not yet human (for that would give it rights), but not anything else for which scientists can name the genus and species.
Thus, anyone who defends the practice of abortion must posit a state of limbo, a literal no-man’s land somewhere between life and death, between human and non-human, inhabited exclusively by embryos and fetuses. Many would extend this interim state to the moment of birth, when the fetus mystically becomes, in the twinkling of an eye, a human being. Some, like Princeton’s infamous Peter Singer, would extend the state even further, to some months, or even years, after birth.
Patrick Gray teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and their two children.
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more on abortion from the online archives
30.3—May/June 2017
on the Misuse of Property Rights to Justify Slavery & Abortion by Robert Hart
27.2—March/April 2014
on C. S. Lewis & the New State Paganism by W. E. Knickerbocker
24.1—January/February 2011
How Planned Parenthood's Founder Played the Christians, and Won by Allan C. Carlson
more from the online archives
33.3—May/June 2020
on the Wisdom of the Good Doctor Edmund Pellegrino by Allen H. Roberts II
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