There has been much persecution in the history of our world caused by various hates for various people and subjects. Great thinkers have been called heretics and put to death by corrupt religious and governmental organizations. Great prophets have been stoned to death by rabid, bloodthirsty mobs and even by corrupt governments. The pendulum has swung back and forth, every which way, but that is NO EXCUSE for persecution. The LDS church has never been guilty of persecution as a whole or in direct obedience to leadership. If members have ever been guilty of persecuting anyone at any point, it has NEVER been condoned by leadership. Rabid "Mormons Gone Wrong" have been the worst offenders of reading literature and junk internet information full of name-calling and laughable logical fallacies. Unfortunately, more recently, I've witnessed some Southerner friends attempting to appear unbiased and on the side of informed, intelligent thought-processes. My grandma was an Oaky and hated LDS people and passed that on to some of my family. It has been disheartening seeing some of my own family part of perpetuating continuing ignorance and persecution.
Why has there been such persecution? At best because of ignorance (varying degrees between accidental and willful), at worst because of premeditated evil.
Not much I can do about premeditated evil, except living a good life, treating my neighbors, friends and even enemies with love and respect. Also, teaching my children to treat others with love and respect because we're children of God. And, of course, simply trying to share information with those who aren't aware of it already in my attempt to expose evil for the stark-naked truth. Although just a blog, throwing the information out in cyberspace is my most promising outlet for the moment. Through the last year, trying to share information has been challenging! Friends have become offended because they feel that by sharing information, I'm saying they're ignorant...as if that is the worst thing they could be! If we can't admit our ignorance and seek learning, then when does the learning START?! We're all ignorant of something! I was surprised at the amount of pride revealed by the offense. My tendency to take so much to heart, I started wondering if people were reacting to me (my education level, my position in life, etc.). Maybe people would rather listen to a scientist, politician, church leader, or anyone who is distant enough from them in socioeconomic position. My suggestion is that perhaps throwing out information on a blog will do more good than presenting information on facade-book to my friends, acquaintances and family ever did.
Monday, November 12, 2012
How Do We Think About What Is Human?
http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=1650&tid=2
How Do We Think About What is Human?
Lecture by Dr. Jean Bethke Elshtain
Brigham Young University
October 24, 2006
INTRODUCTION: Jean Bethke Elshtain is a political philosopher whose work shows our connection between our political and ethical convictions. She is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, a position she has held since 1995. Prior to that she taught at the University of Massachusetts and Vanderbilt University. She has also been a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale. Dr. Elshtain received her undergraduate from Colorado State University and an MA and a PhD in Politics from Brandeis University. Professor Elshtain holds nine honorary degrees and in 1996, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She’s authored or edited twenty books and written some five hundred essays. Her book Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2003 by the Publishers Weekly. Dr. Elshtain is a contributing editor for The New Republic and has delivered several hundred guest lectures in the United States and abroad. She’s also received many prestigious research fellowships and other awards. She’s the recipient for the Ellen Greg Ingalls Award for excellence in classroom teaching, the highest award for undergraduate teaching at Vanderbilt University and I think as you listen to her today, you’ll see why she is known as a wonderful teacher as well as a scholar. Dr. Elshtain is married and is the mother of four children and grandmother of three. Professor Elshtain was born in the high plains of Northern Colorado and grew up in the village of Timnath, Colorado, population one hundred eighty-five. Her journey has taken her all over the world, but she remains, in many ways, a daughter of the high plains where she grew up among people who were hard-working, forthright and dedicated to families, friends and community. On a personal note, I find Dr. Elsthain’s writings to be always clear and cogent and imbued with deep conviction. Qualities that I also find in the writings of C.S. Lewis. So, I look forward today to hearing what Dr. Elsthain has to say about the topic, “How do we think about what is human,” C.S. Lewis, and the abolition of man. Please welcome Dr. Elshtain to Brigham Young University. [applause]
Thank you very much. It’s always great to come back to the Rocky Mountain West. I know I’m something of a Rocky Mountain West chauvinist, but I think it’s the best region in the country, myself. So I’m always happy to be here and I’m happy to be back at BYU. I think this is my third visit. The first time was about ten years ago, then a couple of years ago, and now on this occasion and so I’m always happy to be here. Thanks for the generous introduction and with that, we should just start thinking about C.S. Lewis.
In March 2005, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published an essay on the topic of euthanasia for newborns, printing up the protocol for such procedures as developed by some Dutch doctors. The New York Times magazine, July 10th, 2005, reprinted those protocols under the heading, “Euthanasia for Babies?” going on to ask, “Is this humane or barbaric?” Now this way of presenting alternatives under the guise of neutrality is typical, I fear, of much enlightened opinion today. I suspect that all of us know that the average reader of the New York Times prefers to choose the humane and not the barbaric alternative. And the humane course, it turns out, is one that favors infanticide provided the correct procedures are followed. Euthanasia of babies under such circumstances, we are told, is the way of reason. Those who cry that we should not cross that line advance the way of sentiment or unreason. Now, the essayist who wrote the piece up about the Dutch protocols asks the reader to imagine a heated dining room table argument about such matters. And the way of reason, he tells us, requires unflinching honesty by contrast to shrouding such matters in casuistry, as in the United States. Casuistry being the articulation of principles and then determining whether a particular case fits the principle or not and this way of doing things, allegedly, muddies the waters. For, casuistry involves moral sentiments, these sentiments are inertial and they resist the force of moral reason. Now the essay concludes in this way, “Just quote [Verhaegen, the Dutch doctor who advanced these protocols] his description of the medically induced infant deaths [not killing] over which he has presided.” And this is what Dr. Verhaegen says, “It’s beautiful, in a way. It is after they die that you see them relaxed for the first time.” And the essayist goes on to say, “Even the most spirited dinner table debate over moral progress will for a moment fall silent.” Now, the essayist obviously wants us to imagine the hushed atmosphere as one in which diners are overwhelmed by the vision of peace at last for congenitally deformed infants. I suspect that most of us in this room would fall silent from the sheer horror of it all. Let’s give these perturbed little spirits some peace at last, let’s kill them. Now, the essayist apparently believes the brutal candor about such matters is the ethically preferred root, “Yes, I’m killing them and that’s the right thing to do,” rather than the kind of muddling through that may involve permitting very seriously multiply handicapped infants to die, rather than using heroically sustained measures to keep them alive, for example. That’s the kind of tragic issue that is sometimes presented, but that course is labeled “casuistic confusion.” So any course that reflects our moral uneasiness, our worries, is dishonest. Any course that makes it candidly possible for doctors to kill is honest and reasoned. Now, does anyone doubt what C.S. Lewis might say about this, about the way in which dark suddenly becomes light and healers become killers? Those who are somewhat familiar with my work will know that these are issues that have long troubled me.
I have worried in print that in the name of enlightenment, we are, even now, eliminating whole categories of persons from our midst. For example, so overwhelming is our animus against the less-than-perfect, that fully ninety-percent of pregnancies that test positive for down syndrome are aborted in the United States today, precisely for that reason. All of this under the rubric of choice, although some women who have gone through this experience and later regretted it, indicated that the pressure was all to abort. That was the assumption. So, one wonders if it’s really choice at all. In the name of expanding choice and eliminating suffering, we are, at present, narrowing our definition of humanity and along the way a felt responsibility to create welcoming environments for all children. When we aim to eliminate, whether through euthanasia or a systematic aborting of flawed fetuses, one version of humanity, perhaps suffering humanity, but humanity, nonetheless, we dangerously narrow the boundaries of the moral community. In his ethics, the anti-Nazi theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, insisted that the most radical excision of the integrity and right of natural life is arbitrary killing, the deliberate destruction of innocent life. And the right to live, he tells us, is a matter not of sentiment, but a matter of, as he puts it, “The essence. The essence.” When we aim to eliminate one version of humanity, then we are engaged in, as Bonhoeffer tells us, “We are engaged in pretending that God doesn’t care about those who are being destroyed, but Bonhoeffer reminds us that, “Even the most wretched life is worth living before God.” Now, as with Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis was writing under the shadows of Nazism and Stalinism. His essay, “The Abolition of Man,” published in 1944, is subtitled, “Reflections on education with special reference to teaching of English in the upper forms of schools.” Now this would seem to have very little to do with the grave matters with which I have begun, not so. Lewis sees pernicious tendencies in, of all places, English elementary text books of his era. Now at first puzzling, this quickly makes more sense as we examine it. The general cultural milieu, a culture’s mores, its habits of the heart, as the French observer of democracy in America, Alexis De Tocqueville, put it, “These habits of the heart are always embedded and embodied in the books we require our children to read, the books we use to teach them.” So what on earth was going on with the textbooks of this era such that the great C.S. Lewis would take note of them? Well, first he detects an embrace of subjectivism, which means, speaking epistemologically, the embrace of both positivism and emotivism and I will explain them to you as we go. 1944 and the immediate post-war decades were the heyday of this approach and it had clearly made its way into the elementary schools even as it was the dominant approach to the teaching of philosophy at Great Britain’s elite institutions of higher learning. So emotivism, the reduction of values to subjective feelings, that sentiment opposed –allegedly- to reason of which the New York Times piece speaks. “Now this leads to the embrace or is itself a fruit of the embrace,” Lewis tells us, “of two interlocked propositions,” and this is the way he summarizes them. “First, that all sentences containing a predicate of values are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, not about truth, the emotional state of the speaker. And second, that all such statements are unimportant. One need not refer to the general philosophy at work, that all values are subjective and trivial,” Lewis tells us, “in order to promulgate this philosophy. Indeed many textbook authors do not realize what they are doing to the school child. Certainly, the school child cannot know what is being done to him. And in this way another little portion of the human heritage has been quietly taken from them, from the children, before they are old enough to understand.” Lewis describes this as, “slowly cutting out the child’s soul.”
Now let me provide an illustration of this from my own experience. When our daughter, Jenny, was in the fifth grade, in a public school in a town in which we then lived in New England, she was required to complete a worksheet distinguishing fact from value. And values, of course, were understood clearly as the subjective opinions of a speaker having no cognitive status, no defensible status, no truth warrant. So Jenny read aloud as she did this. She was trying to figure things out and her mother, myself, grew increasingly agitated, as I tend to do as I am confronted with this sort of thing. And finally, to help her understand, I said, “Well, Jenny, why I was objecting.” I said, “Well, Jenny, if I say something is wrong, does that mean I’m stating a fact or a value? Values, remember, being the things we all have and we cannot really distinguish between them because they are simply subjectivist emotions.” Predictably, Jenny answered that it would be a value if I said something was wrong --which means we are invited to ignore it, it’s just about my emotional state. And I continued, “Well, Martin Luther King said slavery and segregation were wrong. Suppose there is someone who says slavery and segregation are good and we shall have more of these. Couldn’t we say that that person is wrong and that Martin Luther King is right? And that that isn’t just Martin Luther King’s opinion?” Now Jenny was stumped for a moment and she was clearly troubled and then she said, “Well, I think slavery is wrong too, but it’s just my opinion.” As you might guess, our discussion didn’t end there. But this experience reinforces Lewis’s claim of the pervasiveness of the sorts of teachings he indicts in his essay. For Lewis when ordinary human feelings are set up as contrary to reason, we are on dangerous ground indeed. “For a botched treatment of some basic human emotion is,” he tells us, “not only bad literature, but is morally treacherous to boot.” His words, “By starving the sensibility of our pupils, we only make them easier prey for the propagandist when he comes.”
Now Lewis insists that in Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian and some Eastern religions, one finds something in common. One finds what he calls, “the doctrine of objective value,” the belief that certain attitudes are really true and others really false to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are, as human beings. And he refers to this shared claim that truths really exist, he calls it the Tao, certain trends, cultural, universal claims. “Thus,” he says, “Emotional states can be reasonable or unreasonable. They aren’t unreasonable by definition. For one must not traffic in a false distinction between reasoned and emotion, rationalism or rationality and sentiment.” For example, the horror experienced by, with deep emotion, by American soldiers when they liberated some of the death camps in Germany after World War II. Do we really want to say that was unreflective feeling with no wider claim on us? Lewis would say, “No, that is a reasonable emotion, in light of what they witnessed.” “But in the regnant approach, the regnant positivism,” as he tells us, “the world of facts, without one trace of value, and the world of feelings, without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another and no rapprochement, no coming together is possible.” And he says, “This is all a ghastly simplicity.” Now when I was a graduate student in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, this ghastly simplicity was, I’m sorry to say, the reigning approach. Now I never really got it, I have to say, so I wound up as a political philosopher instead because in political philosophy we are not obliged to sever our characterization of events from values, from certain norms and truth claims. That’s one reason we’re sometimes regarded as a little fuzzy-minded.
Now in my youthful optimism and naivety, I had for a time, believed that the decisive critiques of this approach that Lewis criticizes and that I’m criticizing in its current incarnations, the critiques mounted by important philosophers, like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, had really decisively defeated this way of approaching the study of political life and the human sciences, but this turns out not to have been so. This approach appears again and again. We find it nowadays in something called 'Rational Choice Theory'. Now in Rational Choice Theory... Let me say I’m not going to spend much time on what some of us call “Rat Choice Theory” here this morning, but suffice to say, expanded to become a total world view, a whole way of looking at the world, rather than to be utilized appropriately as a modest approach to a finite series of decision making processes, this kind of model (which precisely fits the bill that Lewis is criticizing) trivializes all statements of value. Here we go again, 'they have no truth warrant or claim.' As well, this approach enshrines a reductive view of the human person, all of us, all of you, as nothing more of a sum total of our preferences; our calculations of marginal utility. Within this approach, you cannot speak, for example, of the innate dignity of the human person, you can only talk about your preferences. Within this universe as well, everything in principle can be commodified, everything has a price rather than a value. Any restrictions that societies draw on where human preference might take us are considered arbitrary because there is no intrinsic good, intrinsic evil. Nothing is valued for its own sake. So for example, we may because we are often unreasonable creatures, value babies in a certain way. This is an ancient sentiment, but it has no rational content. Instead every value is at base a preference and is describable in this language of utility maximization.
Now let me give you another example: When I was teaching at a particular university, not the university where I now teach, an eager young political science job candidate gave his required job talk and to him everything in politics was a preference. There was no other way of talking about politics and no way, so far as I could tell of talking about the moral life. When he had completed his remarks, I asked, “When Martin Luther King delivered his great speech, he cried, ‘I have a dream,’ not, ‘I have a preference.’ How do you explain this? Is there a difference?” Now, the somewhat flustered young man indicated that what King was calling a dream was at base just another preference and there was no difference in principle –because I kept pressing him on this- between debating marginal alterations and the price of commodities and dealing with the issues of justice of which Martin Luther King spoke when he evoked the prophet Amos and the image of justice rolling down like a mighty river. So this way of thinking makes a hash of our moral sentiments and our capacity to reason about what is good and beautiful and true. Now this surely is what C.S. Lewis feared in 1944, feared that something precious and irreparable was being lost. And, as in 1944, those debunking the normative status and truth warrants of claims of value are in fact promoting values of their own. Writes Lewis, “A great many of those who debunk traditional, or as they would say, sentimental values, have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.” So one thinks of the skeptic who is skeptical of everything save his skepticism or the proclaimer of moral relativism who relativizes everything except his claim to moral relativism and so on. So Lewis feared in his Epoch that what had now come to matter, was not the dignity of each and every human life, but rather goals like the preservation of the species or improving the gene pool stripped from any moral norms. The moral norms infused in these most intimate activities having been drained out. Now, that speaks directly to how we think of those who enter this life with certain disabilities. These are people who will never maximize their reproductive potential, so they don’t have value there. These are people who will likely not contribute to production, they’ll be worthless on the marketplace, so they have no value there. We might attach value to them arbitrarily, but this is emotive and not reasoned. So it is interesting and troubling that we live in an age of human rights, par excellence, and yet there are forces at work in our world that undermine the rock-bottom claims of human dignity that alone can ground a robust regime of human rights. Certain excisions of our humanity are obvious and in the headlines every day. For example, Osama Bin Laden’s claim that, “Americans, Jews and infidels can be slaughtered whenever and wherever they are to be found; men, women and children, armed or unarmed.” We see the problem here immediately! Entire categories of humanity stripped of all rights in the rhetorical sense and, alas, in the practices of those inflamed by this rhetoric. People are to be killed for who they are, not for anything that they have done or left undone. But there are other forces at work, undermining the ground of human dignity by eroding the full force of our humanity, whether whole or broken, normal or abnormal, young or old. And totalizing, turning into an entire world view, the population biology or the econometric perspectives are two of the ways we have devised to do this. These approaches are utilitarian at base, but they have worked their way into ethics, including medical thought and practice. Now, I appreciate that many who share the view that seriously deformed infants should be euthanized, will be horrified by these remarks. They will insist, are being decent and humane, they are trying to prevent useless suffering. And here, those of us at work trying to counter the crude utilitarianism involved here should acknowledge these urgencies, that people one opposes are not monsters, for the most part. Though there are surely some who wield the needles bearing death who are monstrous, like the notorious Dr. Death himself, Jack Kevorkian. But instead let’s assume that most of those involved on the other side of this debate want to do the right thing. Lewis understood this, he understood that various ideologies, including what is now called “the right to die,” are views that have become arbitrarily wrenched from a context in the whole and that world of truth claims and values and norms. His reference point here is those fundamental truths and then he says when that happens these physicians are swollen to madness in their isolation. In this way, fundamental claims to human value, in his words, “are weakened and reduced to superstition.” Quote, “The Nietchzean ethic, the will to power, can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgments at all.”
Now at this point in the essay, Lewis turns explicitly to man’s conquest of nature, the way people in his era heralded a coming age of our triumph over nature’s arbitrariness. And his examples -remember this is 1944- of this power over nature –and the examples may surprise you- were the airplane, the wireless and contraception. The airplanes and the wireless, I’ll not spend much time talking about, but you can see why he has some concerns there, eclipsing distance, presuming that one can relate to people in the completely abstract way without encountering human beings in the flesh and so on. And I know this sounds pretty archaic to us in our cybernetic age, but that’s another discussion. I want to look at why he was concerned about contraception. Well, he argues that via this method, the living deny existence to the not-yet-living and we believe we can engage in selective breeding with nature as its instrument. Now remember he’s living in an era where in Germany you have this eugenics policy. We are going to maximize the births of the fit and minimize the births of the unfit or even destroy, even worse, the unfit. So these words may sound harsh, but I would ask you to consider what underlies his view here. “This exercise of power,” he goes on, the way this power can be exercised, I think would be a better way to put it implies, “the power to make our decedents what we please. For each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves us weaker as well as stronger. The final stages come when man, by eugenics, by prenatal conditioning and by an education and propaganda based on perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of nature that to surrender to man.” Now Lewis held out the hope that the sort of stubborn obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses- Now he came from a class in England where children were often raised as much by nannies as they were by their parents- real mothers, real nurses and real children, might preserve the human race in such sanity as it still possesses, but he’s worried. He tells us that the man-molders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omni-competent state and an irresistible scientific technique which shall at last get a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity on what shape they please. Now in the era in which Lewis lived, thirties, early forties, it wasn’t just in Germany that you had eugenics experiments. There were eugenics laws on the books in most of the western countries, including our own and these involved coercive sterilization of those declared unfit. In our country, this coercive sterilization of those deemed unfit was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case called Buck v. Bell in which the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes, upholding the Georgia statute said, “Three generations of imbeciles is enough,” and that the state of Georgia had not committed a serious infraction in coercively sterilizing a woman named Carrie Buck. In Sweden, these laws were still on the books until 1997 and there were something like 62,000 human beings coercively sterilized between the years 1934 and 1978 when that law finally came to light. So it wasn’t just Nazi Germany. Now the reference point for his readers would, in fact, have been Nazi Germany with its cruelly enforced eugenics. I doubt that many in Brittan suspected that their own society might one day enter this danger zone, not under the banner of totalitarianism, but under the rubric of human choice, human freedom. When C.S. Lewis wrote in 1944 of the abolition of man, he meant the end of humanity as we know it, brought about by humanity itself, by our inability to stem what St. Augustin called, “the lust to dominate.” Now this can take such obviously disgusting and evil forms as Gulags and death camps, but it can also appear in other guises in the name of doing good. Now I’m not trafficking in moral equivalences here. I’m not saying the Contemporary Positive Eugenics, as it is being called, is identical to the intentional slaughter of millions of people because of their allegedly sub-human, under-human, the “Untermenschen”(under-human) status, but I am alerting us to very real dangers in our own world. Current projects of self-overcoming are hard for us to get at precisely because they are cast in the dominant language of our culture- choice, consent, control- and because they promise an escape from the human condition into a realm of near mastery. We are readily beguiled with a promise of a new self, so I would ask you to consider, this morning, that we are in the throes of a structure of biological obsession about these matters that undermines recognition of the fullness and the limitations of human embodiment.
One premise driving the Human Genome Project was that we might, one day, intervene decisively in order to promote better, if not perfect, human products, thinking along the lines of manufacture, rather than the Biblical sense of begetting. Promoters of these developments run to the ecstatic, for example, a pronouncement by a geneticist in 1986 that the genome project is the Holy Grail of human genetics, the ultimate answer to the commandment, “know thyself,” the ultimate answer is in our genetic composition, kind of a genetic fundamentalism here. We are loathe, I think often, to grant the status of giveness to any asset of ourselves despite the fact the human babies are complex little bodies preprogrammed with all sorts of delicately calibrated reactions to the human relationships that nature presumes will be the matrix of child nurture. If we think of babies and of bodies concretely in this way, we are then propelled to ask ourselves questions about the world these little bodies enter. Is it welcoming? Is it warm? Is it responsive? But if we tilt in the direction of genetic fundamentalism, one in which the body is raw material to be worked on and worked over, the surround in which bodies are situated fades and a kind of abstract notion of the body as our own shining creation, a kind of Messianic project triumphs. It is unsurprising then that certain experts today declare, as a matter of fact, they don’t even think the point is worth arguing, “We must inevitably start to choose our descendants.” This is the sort of the thing C.S. Lewis fretted about. And they go on to say, “We now do so in permitting or preventing the birth of our children according to their medical prognoses, thus selecting the lives to come.” Again, this is a point that is not even argued and the argument continues in this vein, “so long as society does not cramp our freedom of action, we will stay on the road of progress. We will exercise a sovereign choice over birth by consigning to death those with a less than stellar potential for a life not marred by an excess of pain or disability.” Now, what C.S. Lewis called a certain kind of extreme rationality, not reason as such, but extreme rationality, that consigns to the dust bin of history, all claims of intrinsic value, because those embracing these claims cannot allegedly meet certain standards for a rationalistic defense of these values. Those who do this wind up promoting a subjectivism of values that they believe is somehow more honest and when that happens those whose values triumph will be those with the most overwhelming will to power and we won’t have any argument against them. By contrast, as Lewis tells us, “A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.” Well, we seemed to have moved rather far from Lewis talking about English textbooks to the real world dramas of seriously disabled newborns being intentionally euthanized, but I hope you can see the connection if I have done my job at all well. That is, I hope you can see in the celebration of deliberate infanticide -“It’s beautiful, in a way”- as something that’s courageous and humane, as what reason dictates. I hope you can see in that the sort of thing that Lewis warned us against in 1944. Why can we not love this helpless being in the time God has given to him or her? What can a profoundly disabled newborn teach us about grace and beauty and goodness, about caritas? Why can we not ameliorate pain and discomfort without believing we must either use extraordinary measures to keep alive or else boldly kill? A year and a half ago, the eighteen year old son of one of my cousins died. He was supposed to die when he was an infant, for he had been born anencephalic. He could never speak, he could never feed himself, he could not sit up unaided, he could not crawl, he could not walk, he could not do any of the normal things human beings generally do or learn to do. And according to the doctors, there was no “there” there. Aaron, in other words, was definitely a candidate for infant euthanasia, but to anyone who met him, Aaron was a beautiful child with the biggest blue eyes and most strikingly dark eyelashes imaginable. He stared out at the world, making no apparent distinctions until his mother came into view and then his face would beam, it would light up. I don’t know any other way to describe it. He knew her and he loved her and I would defy anyone to claim otherwise! And her love and care and devotion kept him going for eighteen years and when Aaron died, an entire family, parents, sibling, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and a wider community grieved their loss. My cousin, Paula Jean, never once bemoaned her fate or cursed God or wondered what might have been if Aaron had been born perfect. This had been given to her and she would do her job joyfully. And in those eighteen years, this beautiful, but helpless child, who could not move on his own, never once developed a bed sore. Those of you who have cared for the infirm know how difficult it is to prevent those. The story of Aaron and of my cousin, Paula Jean, is an amazing story of human grace and endurance and I ask you to contrast this story with a vision of peace promulgated by the euthanasia doctor. These are two contrasting images of our human future, one in which human beings will write perhaps the decisive chapter in the story of whether we will abolish man, that is obliterate what is truly human, or by contrast remember how to love and to cherish our humanity, however wretched, however broken. Thank you very much.
How Do We Think About What is Human?
Lecture by Dr. Jean Bethke Elshtain
Brigham Young University
October 24, 2006
INTRODUCTION: Jean Bethke Elshtain is a political philosopher whose work shows our connection between our political and ethical convictions. She is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, a position she has held since 1995. Prior to that she taught at the University of Massachusetts and Vanderbilt University. She has also been a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale. Dr. Elshtain received her undergraduate from Colorado State University and an MA and a PhD in Politics from Brandeis University. Professor Elshtain holds nine honorary degrees and in 1996, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She’s authored or edited twenty books and written some five hundred essays. Her book Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2003 by the Publishers Weekly. Dr. Elshtain is a contributing editor for The New Republic and has delivered several hundred guest lectures in the United States and abroad. She’s also received many prestigious research fellowships and other awards. She’s the recipient for the Ellen Greg Ingalls Award for excellence in classroom teaching, the highest award for undergraduate teaching at Vanderbilt University and I think as you listen to her today, you’ll see why she is known as a wonderful teacher as well as a scholar. Dr. Elshtain is married and is the mother of four children and grandmother of three. Professor Elshtain was born in the high plains of Northern Colorado and grew up in the village of Timnath, Colorado, population one hundred eighty-five. Her journey has taken her all over the world, but she remains, in many ways, a daughter of the high plains where she grew up among people who were hard-working, forthright and dedicated to families, friends and community. On a personal note, I find Dr. Elsthain’s writings to be always clear and cogent and imbued with deep conviction. Qualities that I also find in the writings of C.S. Lewis. So, I look forward today to hearing what Dr. Elsthain has to say about the topic, “How do we think about what is human,” C.S. Lewis, and the abolition of man. Please welcome Dr. Elshtain to Brigham Young University. [applause]
Thank you very much. It’s always great to come back to the Rocky Mountain West. I know I’m something of a Rocky Mountain West chauvinist, but I think it’s the best region in the country, myself. So I’m always happy to be here and I’m happy to be back at BYU. I think this is my third visit. The first time was about ten years ago, then a couple of years ago, and now on this occasion and so I’m always happy to be here. Thanks for the generous introduction and with that, we should just start thinking about C.S. Lewis.
In March 2005, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published an essay on the topic of euthanasia for newborns, printing up the protocol for such procedures as developed by some Dutch doctors. The New York Times magazine, July 10th, 2005, reprinted those protocols under the heading, “Euthanasia for Babies?” going on to ask, “Is this humane or barbaric?” Now this way of presenting alternatives under the guise of neutrality is typical, I fear, of much enlightened opinion today. I suspect that all of us know that the average reader of the New York Times prefers to choose the humane and not the barbaric alternative. And the humane course, it turns out, is one that favors infanticide provided the correct procedures are followed. Euthanasia of babies under such circumstances, we are told, is the way of reason. Those who cry that we should not cross that line advance the way of sentiment or unreason. Now, the essayist who wrote the piece up about the Dutch protocols asks the reader to imagine a heated dining room table argument about such matters. And the way of reason, he tells us, requires unflinching honesty by contrast to shrouding such matters in casuistry, as in the United States. Casuistry being the articulation of principles and then determining whether a particular case fits the principle or not and this way of doing things, allegedly, muddies the waters. For, casuistry involves moral sentiments, these sentiments are inertial and they resist the force of moral reason. Now the essay concludes in this way, “Just quote [Verhaegen, the Dutch doctor who advanced these protocols] his description of the medically induced infant deaths [not killing] over which he has presided.” And this is what Dr. Verhaegen says, “It’s beautiful, in a way. It is after they die that you see them relaxed for the first time.” And the essayist goes on to say, “Even the most spirited dinner table debate over moral progress will for a moment fall silent.” Now, the essayist obviously wants us to imagine the hushed atmosphere as one in which diners are overwhelmed by the vision of peace at last for congenitally deformed infants. I suspect that most of us in this room would fall silent from the sheer horror of it all. Let’s give these perturbed little spirits some peace at last, let’s kill them. Now, the essayist apparently believes the brutal candor about such matters is the ethically preferred root, “Yes, I’m killing them and that’s the right thing to do,” rather than the kind of muddling through that may involve permitting very seriously multiply handicapped infants to die, rather than using heroically sustained measures to keep them alive, for example. That’s the kind of tragic issue that is sometimes presented, but that course is labeled “casuistic confusion.” So any course that reflects our moral uneasiness, our worries, is dishonest. Any course that makes it candidly possible for doctors to kill is honest and reasoned. Now, does anyone doubt what C.S. Lewis might say about this, about the way in which dark suddenly becomes light and healers become killers? Those who are somewhat familiar with my work will know that these are issues that have long troubled me.
I have worried in print that in the name of enlightenment, we are, even now, eliminating whole categories of persons from our midst. For example, so overwhelming is our animus against the less-than-perfect, that fully ninety-percent of pregnancies that test positive for down syndrome are aborted in the United States today, precisely for that reason. All of this under the rubric of choice, although some women who have gone through this experience and later regretted it, indicated that the pressure was all to abort. That was the assumption. So, one wonders if it’s really choice at all. In the name of expanding choice and eliminating suffering, we are, at present, narrowing our definition of humanity and along the way a felt responsibility to create welcoming environments for all children. When we aim to eliminate, whether through euthanasia or a systematic aborting of flawed fetuses, one version of humanity, perhaps suffering humanity, but humanity, nonetheless, we dangerously narrow the boundaries of the moral community. In his ethics, the anti-Nazi theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, insisted that the most radical excision of the integrity and right of natural life is arbitrary killing, the deliberate destruction of innocent life. And the right to live, he tells us, is a matter not of sentiment, but a matter of, as he puts it, “The essence. The essence.” When we aim to eliminate one version of humanity, then we are engaged in, as Bonhoeffer tells us, “We are engaged in pretending that God doesn’t care about those who are being destroyed, but Bonhoeffer reminds us that, “Even the most wretched life is worth living before God.” Now, as with Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis was writing under the shadows of Nazism and Stalinism. His essay, “The Abolition of Man,” published in 1944, is subtitled, “Reflections on education with special reference to teaching of English in the upper forms of schools.” Now this would seem to have very little to do with the grave matters with which I have begun, not so. Lewis sees pernicious tendencies in, of all places, English elementary text books of his era. Now at first puzzling, this quickly makes more sense as we examine it. The general cultural milieu, a culture’s mores, its habits of the heart, as the French observer of democracy in America, Alexis De Tocqueville, put it, “These habits of the heart are always embedded and embodied in the books we require our children to read, the books we use to teach them.” So what on earth was going on with the textbooks of this era such that the great C.S. Lewis would take note of them? Well, first he detects an embrace of subjectivism, which means, speaking epistemologically, the embrace of both positivism and emotivism and I will explain them to you as we go. 1944 and the immediate post-war decades were the heyday of this approach and it had clearly made its way into the elementary schools even as it was the dominant approach to the teaching of philosophy at Great Britain’s elite institutions of higher learning. So emotivism, the reduction of values to subjective feelings, that sentiment opposed –allegedly- to reason of which the New York Times piece speaks. “Now this leads to the embrace or is itself a fruit of the embrace,” Lewis tells us, “of two interlocked propositions,” and this is the way he summarizes them. “First, that all sentences containing a predicate of values are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, not about truth, the emotional state of the speaker. And second, that all such statements are unimportant. One need not refer to the general philosophy at work, that all values are subjective and trivial,” Lewis tells us, “in order to promulgate this philosophy. Indeed many textbook authors do not realize what they are doing to the school child. Certainly, the school child cannot know what is being done to him. And in this way another little portion of the human heritage has been quietly taken from them, from the children, before they are old enough to understand.” Lewis describes this as, “slowly cutting out the child’s soul.”
Now let me provide an illustration of this from my own experience. When our daughter, Jenny, was in the fifth grade, in a public school in a town in which we then lived in New England, she was required to complete a worksheet distinguishing fact from value. And values, of course, were understood clearly as the subjective opinions of a speaker having no cognitive status, no defensible status, no truth warrant. So Jenny read aloud as she did this. She was trying to figure things out and her mother, myself, grew increasingly agitated, as I tend to do as I am confronted with this sort of thing. And finally, to help her understand, I said, “Well, Jenny, why I was objecting.” I said, “Well, Jenny, if I say something is wrong, does that mean I’m stating a fact or a value? Values, remember, being the things we all have and we cannot really distinguish between them because they are simply subjectivist emotions.” Predictably, Jenny answered that it would be a value if I said something was wrong --which means we are invited to ignore it, it’s just about my emotional state. And I continued, “Well, Martin Luther King said slavery and segregation were wrong. Suppose there is someone who says slavery and segregation are good and we shall have more of these. Couldn’t we say that that person is wrong and that Martin Luther King is right? And that that isn’t just Martin Luther King’s opinion?” Now Jenny was stumped for a moment and she was clearly troubled and then she said, “Well, I think slavery is wrong too, but it’s just my opinion.” As you might guess, our discussion didn’t end there. But this experience reinforces Lewis’s claim of the pervasiveness of the sorts of teachings he indicts in his essay. For Lewis when ordinary human feelings are set up as contrary to reason, we are on dangerous ground indeed. “For a botched treatment of some basic human emotion is,” he tells us, “not only bad literature, but is morally treacherous to boot.” His words, “By starving the sensibility of our pupils, we only make them easier prey for the propagandist when he comes.”
Now Lewis insists that in Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian and some Eastern religions, one finds something in common. One finds what he calls, “the doctrine of objective value,” the belief that certain attitudes are really true and others really false to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are, as human beings. And he refers to this shared claim that truths really exist, he calls it the Tao, certain trends, cultural, universal claims. “Thus,” he says, “Emotional states can be reasonable or unreasonable. They aren’t unreasonable by definition. For one must not traffic in a false distinction between reasoned and emotion, rationalism or rationality and sentiment.” For example, the horror experienced by, with deep emotion, by American soldiers when they liberated some of the death camps in Germany after World War II. Do we really want to say that was unreflective feeling with no wider claim on us? Lewis would say, “No, that is a reasonable emotion, in light of what they witnessed.” “But in the regnant approach, the regnant positivism,” as he tells us, “the world of facts, without one trace of value, and the world of feelings, without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another and no rapprochement, no coming together is possible.” And he says, “This is all a ghastly simplicity.” Now when I was a graduate student in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, this ghastly simplicity was, I’m sorry to say, the reigning approach. Now I never really got it, I have to say, so I wound up as a political philosopher instead because in political philosophy we are not obliged to sever our characterization of events from values, from certain norms and truth claims. That’s one reason we’re sometimes regarded as a little fuzzy-minded.
Now in my youthful optimism and naivety, I had for a time, believed that the decisive critiques of this approach that Lewis criticizes and that I’m criticizing in its current incarnations, the critiques mounted by important philosophers, like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, had really decisively defeated this way of approaching the study of political life and the human sciences, but this turns out not to have been so. This approach appears again and again. We find it nowadays in something called 'Rational Choice Theory'. Now in Rational Choice Theory... Let me say I’m not going to spend much time on what some of us call “Rat Choice Theory” here this morning, but suffice to say, expanded to become a total world view, a whole way of looking at the world, rather than to be utilized appropriately as a modest approach to a finite series of decision making processes, this kind of model (which precisely fits the bill that Lewis is criticizing) trivializes all statements of value. Here we go again, 'they have no truth warrant or claim.' As well, this approach enshrines a reductive view of the human person, all of us, all of you, as nothing more of a sum total of our preferences; our calculations of marginal utility. Within this approach, you cannot speak, for example, of the innate dignity of the human person, you can only talk about your preferences. Within this universe as well, everything in principle can be commodified, everything has a price rather than a value. Any restrictions that societies draw on where human preference might take us are considered arbitrary because there is no intrinsic good, intrinsic evil. Nothing is valued for its own sake. So for example, we may because we are often unreasonable creatures, value babies in a certain way. This is an ancient sentiment, but it has no rational content. Instead every value is at base a preference and is describable in this language of utility maximization.
Now let me give you another example: When I was teaching at a particular university, not the university where I now teach, an eager young political science job candidate gave his required job talk and to him everything in politics was a preference. There was no other way of talking about politics and no way, so far as I could tell of talking about the moral life. When he had completed his remarks, I asked, “When Martin Luther King delivered his great speech, he cried, ‘I have a dream,’ not, ‘I have a preference.’ How do you explain this? Is there a difference?” Now, the somewhat flustered young man indicated that what King was calling a dream was at base just another preference and there was no difference in principle –because I kept pressing him on this- between debating marginal alterations and the price of commodities and dealing with the issues of justice of which Martin Luther King spoke when he evoked the prophet Amos and the image of justice rolling down like a mighty river. So this way of thinking makes a hash of our moral sentiments and our capacity to reason about what is good and beautiful and true. Now this surely is what C.S. Lewis feared in 1944, feared that something precious and irreparable was being lost. And, as in 1944, those debunking the normative status and truth warrants of claims of value are in fact promoting values of their own. Writes Lewis, “A great many of those who debunk traditional, or as they would say, sentimental values, have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.” So one thinks of the skeptic who is skeptical of everything save his skepticism or the proclaimer of moral relativism who relativizes everything except his claim to moral relativism and so on. So Lewis feared in his Epoch that what had now come to matter, was not the dignity of each and every human life, but rather goals like the preservation of the species or improving the gene pool stripped from any moral norms. The moral norms infused in these most intimate activities having been drained out. Now, that speaks directly to how we think of those who enter this life with certain disabilities. These are people who will never maximize their reproductive potential, so they don’t have value there. These are people who will likely not contribute to production, they’ll be worthless on the marketplace, so they have no value there. We might attach value to them arbitrarily, but this is emotive and not reasoned. So it is interesting and troubling that we live in an age of human rights, par excellence, and yet there are forces at work in our world that undermine the rock-bottom claims of human dignity that alone can ground a robust regime of human rights. Certain excisions of our humanity are obvious and in the headlines every day. For example, Osama Bin Laden’s claim that, “Americans, Jews and infidels can be slaughtered whenever and wherever they are to be found; men, women and children, armed or unarmed.” We see the problem here immediately! Entire categories of humanity stripped of all rights in the rhetorical sense and, alas, in the practices of those inflamed by this rhetoric. People are to be killed for who they are, not for anything that they have done or left undone. But there are other forces at work, undermining the ground of human dignity by eroding the full force of our humanity, whether whole or broken, normal or abnormal, young or old. And totalizing, turning into an entire world view, the population biology or the econometric perspectives are two of the ways we have devised to do this. These approaches are utilitarian at base, but they have worked their way into ethics, including medical thought and practice. Now, I appreciate that many who share the view that seriously deformed infants should be euthanized, will be horrified by these remarks. They will insist, are being decent and humane, they are trying to prevent useless suffering. And here, those of us at work trying to counter the crude utilitarianism involved here should acknowledge these urgencies, that people one opposes are not monsters, for the most part. Though there are surely some who wield the needles bearing death who are monstrous, like the notorious Dr. Death himself, Jack Kevorkian. But instead let’s assume that most of those involved on the other side of this debate want to do the right thing. Lewis understood this, he understood that various ideologies, including what is now called “the right to die,” are views that have become arbitrarily wrenched from a context in the whole and that world of truth claims and values and norms. His reference point here is those fundamental truths and then he says when that happens these physicians are swollen to madness in their isolation. In this way, fundamental claims to human value, in his words, “are weakened and reduced to superstition.” Quote, “The Nietchzean ethic, the will to power, can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgments at all.”
Now at this point in the essay, Lewis turns explicitly to man’s conquest of nature, the way people in his era heralded a coming age of our triumph over nature’s arbitrariness. And his examples -remember this is 1944- of this power over nature –and the examples may surprise you- were the airplane, the wireless and contraception. The airplanes and the wireless, I’ll not spend much time talking about, but you can see why he has some concerns there, eclipsing distance, presuming that one can relate to people in the completely abstract way without encountering human beings in the flesh and so on. And I know this sounds pretty archaic to us in our cybernetic age, but that’s another discussion. I want to look at why he was concerned about contraception. Well, he argues that via this method, the living deny existence to the not-yet-living and we believe we can engage in selective breeding with nature as its instrument. Now remember he’s living in an era where in Germany you have this eugenics policy. We are going to maximize the births of the fit and minimize the births of the unfit or even destroy, even worse, the unfit. So these words may sound harsh, but I would ask you to consider what underlies his view here. “This exercise of power,” he goes on, the way this power can be exercised, I think would be a better way to put it implies, “the power to make our decedents what we please. For each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves us weaker as well as stronger. The final stages come when man, by eugenics, by prenatal conditioning and by an education and propaganda based on perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of nature that to surrender to man.” Now Lewis held out the hope that the sort of stubborn obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses- Now he came from a class in England where children were often raised as much by nannies as they were by their parents- real mothers, real nurses and real children, might preserve the human race in such sanity as it still possesses, but he’s worried. He tells us that the man-molders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omni-competent state and an irresistible scientific technique which shall at last get a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity on what shape they please. Now in the era in which Lewis lived, thirties, early forties, it wasn’t just in Germany that you had eugenics experiments. There were eugenics laws on the books in most of the western countries, including our own and these involved coercive sterilization of those declared unfit. In our country, this coercive sterilization of those deemed unfit was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case called Buck v. Bell in which the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes, upholding the Georgia statute said, “Three generations of imbeciles is enough,” and that the state of Georgia had not committed a serious infraction in coercively sterilizing a woman named Carrie Buck. In Sweden, these laws were still on the books until 1997 and there were something like 62,000 human beings coercively sterilized between the years 1934 and 1978 when that law finally came to light. So it wasn’t just Nazi Germany. Now the reference point for his readers would, in fact, have been Nazi Germany with its cruelly enforced eugenics. I doubt that many in Brittan suspected that their own society might one day enter this danger zone, not under the banner of totalitarianism, but under the rubric of human choice, human freedom. When C.S. Lewis wrote in 1944 of the abolition of man, he meant the end of humanity as we know it, brought about by humanity itself, by our inability to stem what St. Augustin called, “the lust to dominate.” Now this can take such obviously disgusting and evil forms as Gulags and death camps, but it can also appear in other guises in the name of doing good. Now I’m not trafficking in moral equivalences here. I’m not saying the Contemporary Positive Eugenics, as it is being called, is identical to the intentional slaughter of millions of people because of their allegedly sub-human, under-human, the “Untermenschen”(under-human) status, but I am alerting us to very real dangers in our own world. Current projects of self-overcoming are hard for us to get at precisely because they are cast in the dominant language of our culture- choice, consent, control- and because they promise an escape from the human condition into a realm of near mastery. We are readily beguiled with a promise of a new self, so I would ask you to consider, this morning, that we are in the throes of a structure of biological obsession about these matters that undermines recognition of the fullness and the limitations of human embodiment.
One premise driving the Human Genome Project was that we might, one day, intervene decisively in order to promote better, if not perfect, human products, thinking along the lines of manufacture, rather than the Biblical sense of begetting. Promoters of these developments run to the ecstatic, for example, a pronouncement by a geneticist in 1986 that the genome project is the Holy Grail of human genetics, the ultimate answer to the commandment, “know thyself,” the ultimate answer is in our genetic composition, kind of a genetic fundamentalism here. We are loathe, I think often, to grant the status of giveness to any asset of ourselves despite the fact the human babies are complex little bodies preprogrammed with all sorts of delicately calibrated reactions to the human relationships that nature presumes will be the matrix of child nurture. If we think of babies and of bodies concretely in this way, we are then propelled to ask ourselves questions about the world these little bodies enter. Is it welcoming? Is it warm? Is it responsive? But if we tilt in the direction of genetic fundamentalism, one in which the body is raw material to be worked on and worked over, the surround in which bodies are situated fades and a kind of abstract notion of the body as our own shining creation, a kind of Messianic project triumphs. It is unsurprising then that certain experts today declare, as a matter of fact, they don’t even think the point is worth arguing, “We must inevitably start to choose our descendants.” This is the sort of the thing C.S. Lewis fretted about. And they go on to say, “We now do so in permitting or preventing the birth of our children according to their medical prognoses, thus selecting the lives to come.” Again, this is a point that is not even argued and the argument continues in this vein, “so long as society does not cramp our freedom of action, we will stay on the road of progress. We will exercise a sovereign choice over birth by consigning to death those with a less than stellar potential for a life not marred by an excess of pain or disability.” Now, what C.S. Lewis called a certain kind of extreme rationality, not reason as such, but extreme rationality, that consigns to the dust bin of history, all claims of intrinsic value, because those embracing these claims cannot allegedly meet certain standards for a rationalistic defense of these values. Those who do this wind up promoting a subjectivism of values that they believe is somehow more honest and when that happens those whose values triumph will be those with the most overwhelming will to power and we won’t have any argument against them. By contrast, as Lewis tells us, “A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.” Well, we seemed to have moved rather far from Lewis talking about English textbooks to the real world dramas of seriously disabled newborns being intentionally euthanized, but I hope you can see the connection if I have done my job at all well. That is, I hope you can see in the celebration of deliberate infanticide -“It’s beautiful, in a way”- as something that’s courageous and humane, as what reason dictates. I hope you can see in that the sort of thing that Lewis warned us against in 1944. Why can we not love this helpless being in the time God has given to him or her? What can a profoundly disabled newborn teach us about grace and beauty and goodness, about caritas? Why can we not ameliorate pain and discomfort without believing we must either use extraordinary measures to keep alive or else boldly kill? A year and a half ago, the eighteen year old son of one of my cousins died. He was supposed to die when he was an infant, for he had been born anencephalic. He could never speak, he could never feed himself, he could not sit up unaided, he could not crawl, he could not walk, he could not do any of the normal things human beings generally do or learn to do. And according to the doctors, there was no “there” there. Aaron, in other words, was definitely a candidate for infant euthanasia, but to anyone who met him, Aaron was a beautiful child with the biggest blue eyes and most strikingly dark eyelashes imaginable. He stared out at the world, making no apparent distinctions until his mother came into view and then his face would beam, it would light up. I don’t know any other way to describe it. He knew her and he loved her and I would defy anyone to claim otherwise! And her love and care and devotion kept him going for eighteen years and when Aaron died, an entire family, parents, sibling, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and a wider community grieved their loss. My cousin, Paula Jean, never once bemoaned her fate or cursed God or wondered what might have been if Aaron had been born perfect. This had been given to her and she would do her job joyfully. And in those eighteen years, this beautiful, but helpless child, who could not move on his own, never once developed a bed sore. Those of you who have cared for the infirm know how difficult it is to prevent those. The story of Aaron and of my cousin, Paula Jean, is an amazing story of human grace and endurance and I ask you to contrast this story with a vision of peace promulgated by the euthanasia doctor. These are two contrasting images of our human future, one in which human beings will write perhaps the decisive chapter in the story of whether we will abolish man, that is obliterate what is truly human, or by contrast remember how to love and to cherish our humanity, however wretched, however broken. Thank you very much.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
A Multitude of Fools
"The danger to America is not Barack Obama, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools, such as those who made him their president." - Czech Republic newspaper, Prager Zeitungon
Lover Come Back
My feelings about public-school-product, state-produced, welfare-dependent, dumbed-down, lemming Americans:
"Nothing could induce me to again associate .. With that dull, insipid little group called THE HUMAN RACE...They didn't appreciate me when they had me, the fools. now, let them suffer...They want to be misled."
"Nothing could induce me to again associate .. With that dull, insipid little group called THE HUMAN RACE...They didn't appreciate me when they had me, the fools. now, let them suffer...They want to be misled."
Social Network
A waste and a drain
Done for now
Idiocracy keeping the reigns
Just for a while
Ride out the waves
And wait for the trial
Eyes open: fraud, murder, tyranny
Half of the masses duped
And naive
Cannon fodder like the rest
To be thrown in the chamber first...
Or last, but just like trash
Like the unnatural beasts who
No longer propagate naturally the human race
Will die, by their own will, tyrants',
Or their own. They'll die out.
Feeding on and killing their own,
Toasting victory.
Done for now
Idiocracy keeping the reigns
Just for a while
Ride out the waves
And wait for the trial
Eyes open: fraud, murder, tyranny
Half of the masses duped
And naive
Cannon fodder like the rest
To be thrown in the chamber first...
Or last, but just like trash
Like the unnatural beasts who
No longer propagate naturally the human race
Will die, by their own will, tyrants',
Or their own. They'll die out.
Feeding on and killing their own,
Toasting victory.
Waves of Heartache
Shock. Disbelief.
My heart aches.
My head hurts.
How can this be?
So many reactions, thoughts.
The rabid animalistic mob,
The threats, the evil one.
Infanticide: a gloating victory,
Destruction of God's innocents, their beauty.
Gloating victory of perversion,
Destruction of sanctity, purity.
Spiritual deformity, disease.
My heart aches.
My head hurts.
How can this be?
So many reactions, thoughts.
The rabid animalistic mob,
The threats, the evil one.
Infanticide: a gloating victory,
Destruction of God's innocents, their beauty.
Gloating victory of perversion,
Destruction of sanctity, purity.
Spiritual deformity, disease.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Starting Again
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