Why Should You Care?

An article at First Things has a stunning opening, then leads to a deep question.
There’s a very short and very brutal poem by the Scottish poet Hollie McNish, written in 2019 and titled “Conversation with an archaeologist”:

he said they’d found a brothel
on the dig he did last night
I asked him how they know
he sighed:
a pit of babies’ bones
a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel

“It’s true, you know,” said the writer and lawyer Helen Dale when we had lunch in London last year and I mentioned this poem, which I chose as one of the epigraphs to my book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Helen was a classicist before she was a lawyer, and as a younger woman she had taken part in archaeological excavations of ancient Roman sites. “First you find the erotic statuary,” she went on, “and then you dig a bit more and you find the male infant skeletons.” Male, of course, because the males were of no use to the keepers of Roman brothels, whereas the female infants born to prostituted women were raised into prostitution themselves.

She of course ties this to our own addiction to abortion, a move she herself describes as "a provocation." I think there's a real division between those to whom the connection is obvious and those to whom it is a provocation. But she is not fully opposed to abortion; as she notes, she might want one herself someday. 

What she's really worried about is the end of Christianity's heritage in our moral understanding, including her own:

I’m emotionally and intellectually drawn to Christianity, and—like everyone else—I was raised in a culture suffused with fading Christian morality and symbolism. But I don’t believe, not really. 

So if you don't believe, why do you care? I mean the question sincerely: it's worthy of exploration. 

One possibility is that it's just a kind of hangover, a product of having grown up in a society that believed certain things, having rubbed up against those things until they were somewhat internalized, and now having the residue of that even though you aren't convicted. If that’s all that’s driving your moral feelings, you might as well abandon them; they were only ever an accident anyway. Nothing hangs on their passage, well, but for some lives of children.

Another possibility is that at least some of the claims of the faith are true: that there is a thing in us that longs for justice, and finds justice outraged by the killing of the innocent to serve the interests of those stronger and bigger than they are. (Even if this is not, as she suggests, 'murder,' noting that both infanticide and abortion almost could not be convicted in court in England or Scotland even while juries were all male and the society much more Christian than presently.) 

If there is something true to which you are responding, perhaps others will continue to respond. Even if you don't believe in the whole, you must at least believe some part of that to think it even matters if the morality of the public changes. 

She closes with another striking passage, which deserves mention. 

What if... we understand the Christian era as a clearing in a forest? The forest is paganism: dark, wild, vigorous, and menacing, but also magical in its way. For two thousand years, Christians pushed the forest back, with burning and hacking, but also with pruning and cultivating, creating a garden in the clearing with a view upward to heaven.

But watch as roots outstretch themselves and new shoots spring up from the ground. The patch of sky recedes. “Paganism has not needed to be reinvented,” writes Steven Smith: It never went away. “In a certain sense, the Western world has arguably always remained more pagan than Christian. In some ways Christianity has been more of a veneer than a substantial reality.””

With no one left to tend the garden, the forest is reclaiming its ground.

Paganism is also a clearing in the forest, though: we know that from the Venerable Bede, who recorded a conversation with a converting pagan on just this point. He likened the passage through life to that of a bird appearing in a fire-lit hall of an evening and flying to the other side. While it was in the hall and visible to others, it was bright and beautiful; but before it came in the hall, and after it left, nothing could be said about it at all. We knew nothing about the bird, as the pagan knows nothing about where the soul is before death or what happens after; the man is only visible for a short space. A clearing in the forest would do exactly as well in this metaphor as the fire-lit hall. 

Chesterton transformed that story into a few lines of his famous ballad, in which he characterizes the pagan's worldview even more despairingly than that.

‘For this is a heavy matter,
And the truth is cold to tell;
Do we not know, have we not heard,
The soul is like a lost bird,
The body a broken shell.

‘And a man hopes, being ignorant,
Till in white woods apart
He finds at last the lost bird dead;
And a man may still lift up his head
But never more his heart.

Chesterton wasn't quite right about that. The pagan thought of death as a return, of sorts; to the ancestors, or the land of the dead where souls wait to be reborn (perhaps, as in Valhalla, after a destructive turning that causes the whole world to be reborn). Still, a return to paganism doesn't create an escape from the problem; and the question of what, if anything, is owed to the weak and the helpless will remain. The reasons why we care about that are important. 

10 comments:

  1. I was also surprised, after her provocation of a beginning, to see her equivocate about abortion so openly. She sees it as on a continuum with infanticide, and yet...

    She has looked down many hallways and not sought the simple and easy answers. She looks at her own heart with courage, at least noticing that she does not have the intellectual, and thus moral courage that she should. It is not unfair that she frames this refusal to given entire condemnation to abortion in the vulnerability of women, even while noting that this is but a way station in Christianity to protecting all who are weak. She is only doing what Christian juries did even in times when abortion and infanticide were capital offenses. If the entire forbidding of abortion is a fulfillment of the Christian principle of using weakness to shame the strong, then allowing it for the sake of pity for desperate women is at least a partial expression of that same principle.

    She surprised me throughout the essay in what she tied in, though I saw the sense of it immediately each time. It is powerful and frightening. She stands at this turning with the rest of us and sees ahead to the cracks of doom. We are post-Christian, though with much that is residual, however unacknowledged. People don't really know what it would be like to live in a society where the doctrines of the faith have not penetrated, for even the Buddhist and Hindu cultures have had some of their worst excesses tamped down (or at least held up for shame). The evil European colonialists did some good work after all, especially for women and children.

    I will certainly link back.

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  2. Related, at Twitter: "post your favorite moral innovation", w/81 responses.

    https://twitter.com/RuxandraTeslo/status/1700980503275553173

    ...seems relevant to this discussion.

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  3. I don't know but would hazard that brothels had every bit as much use for little boys back then as they did for little girls. Certainly our wars in the middle east have shown that there is a distinct predilection for little boys in many places and it isn't restricted to the clergy or scout leaders.

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  4. I am far from an expert on homosexuality, in ancient Rome or anywhere else. I take it from the article that the poem's story was endorsed by an appropriate scholar. My guess is that male newborns in that case might have been like male chickens: you could have some use for a small number, but most of them are disposable.

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  5. Without making comment on the rest of her article, this initial bit about the infant skeletons being specifically or even mostly male by deliberate action has a just-so quality to me. I can certainly understand the presence of a mass of infant skeletons, given infant mortality and lack of effective contraception. My understanding of the way skeletons are gendered is that it's based mostly on differences that are at least enhanced during puberty like pelvic differences supporting child birthing. You also need to factor in the higher percentage of male births and possible differences in infant mortality by sex. So I am skeptical that an honest archeologist would be willing to make definitive claims about the relative number of male and female infants, or that the percentage alone would indicate deliberate infanticide of male babies.

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  6. That’s a reasonable point. She may be importing assumptions derived elsewhere, perhaps from historical research. Of course assumptions can mislead; I think of the occasional Viking grave whose occupant was assumed male from the warlike grave goods, but which proved to house a female.

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  7. Anonymous7:45 AM

    I also found this to be both moving, and more than a little creepy/off. For example, the repeated claims that infanticide was "hardly ever" prosecuted, and if so, was "hardly ever" convicted. If you go looking for the actual statistics, though, you'll see that 100% of the sources are organizations that not just support abortion through (and sometimes beyond) birth, but actually make their living doing so (e.g. Planned Parenthood). In other words, I doubt their intellectual integrity in these "studies", as much as I doubt the studies showing that defensive firearm use "hardly ever" happens, as reported by advocates for gun control.

    It's a great illustration of a theory of mine, that abortion is uniquely corrupting to the conscience. What I mean by that is, support of abortion doesn't just stay put at abortion, but rather, will eventually require sequentially sacrificing all other principles as well. This is primarily what convinced the Supreme Court to pull the plug on Roe: not that it's killing of human lives, but that it has systematically required cancellation of every other judicial principle (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, laws passed by the democratically elected representatives and applied equally to all, etc. etc. etc.) to maintain the "right" to abortion.

    This author seems to understand this at some level-- that taking away protections for these, the weakest of us, is going to lead inevitably to much worse for the rest of us. She must realize, at some level, that the wheel of life turns, and the fly on the top becomes the fly on the bottom; that somebody who is socially powerful and financially well-off in mid-life is someday going to be old, weak, confused, and in need of help from the people around her... I'm reminded of a situation told to me by an acquaintance, who met a strident older woman who told them, "I'm fighting to make sure my granddaughter can get an abortion"... they answered, "Oh, you don't need to worry about that; what you need to worry about is that your granddaughter will be able to put you down like dog when you start getting expensive".

    My own father is in assisted living now, and most days I need to stop what I'm doing, go over there, and make sure nothing is wrong and he's not lonely; interspersed with getting him to appointments, paying his bills, coordinating with all the various medical people, etc. The parallels to unwanted pregnancy, in terms of opportunities lost, cost, emotional stress, etc. are striking. I can imagine this author's granddaughter deciding, you know, this isn't a good life for Grannie, (and I've got a better use for her retirement money than paying an immigrant to change her diapers), so we should, you know, let her go with dignity now.

    Janet

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  8. “It's a great illustration of a theory of mine, that abortion is uniquely corrupting to the conscience. What I mean by that is, support of abortion doesn't just stay put at abortion, but rather, will eventually require sequentially sacrificing all other principles as well.”

    Would you like to elaborate on that? It’s well known that vices corrupt, so that things like adultery lead to deception and so forth. The argument that it is unique must hang on your idea that it is universally corrupting? But then no advocate of abortion would have any other principles, and I don’t think that is the case.

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  9. Anonymous6:02 PM

    I can try, but in this format I'm pretty limited in space (and just now, pretty limited in time).

    So... yes, all vices corrupt. That is, roughly, the distinction between a vice and what is merely a wrong or sin-- the vice begins taking over the healthy parts of the person's life, in support of the wrong. So, using your example: cheating on your wife is wrong, a sin. It becomes a vice (lust) when you begin to use the other good things in your life (intellectual ability, money, etc.) to the service of getting that adulterous sex.

    But abortion doesn't seem to stop at that. We've had plenty of presidents who committed adultery, even flagrantly. They would hide it, lie about it, pressure other people to conceal their actions, etc., typical of vice. But I can’t think of any case where they would try to force other people to participate in their affairs; yet pro-abortion people absolutely do try to require health-care workers to participate in abortion. They didn’t try to get the government or private employers to fund their affairs; yet pro-abortion people do so very vigorously. They certainly didn’t try to encourage affairs in foreign countries, or demand foreign governments change their adultery laws, or use foreign adultery laws as grounds for obtaining asylum here; yet all true for abortion. They didn’t insert pro-adultery lesson plans into school texts, arrest people who were praying outside the “No-Tell Motel”, demand that juveniles below the age of consent still be allowed to have affairs and conceal this from their parents, and so on.

    This author, Louise Perry, writes very clearly on the evidence she has on the perniciousness of abortion. This ranges from the physical revulsion her body feels even thinking about it, to a clear-eyed view of how abortion opens the door to violence against many other groups and tears at the seams of our society. Yet, she remains pro-abortion, can see herself actually doing the act, and, if she did, would want it to be publicly approved. So a third or so of her article is dedicated to trying to blur the details of historical record to make it look like abortion and infanticide were, you know, one of those things that we’re all “agnostic” about. (How something that is a capital crime can be something we’re “agnostic” about whether it’s evil or not, is, er, not clear to me.)

    I could go on, but for brevity, let me just say that, I think it’s clear we’re dealing with something that is a step-change for the worse from “mere” vice. Adultery is a vice, but it remains always about an individual getting access to sex. It doesn’t spread past getting sex. Whereas, abortion very much does so. Perhaps because, if you’re willing to kill your own innocent child, then there’s nothing else you won’t do when the chips are down? I don’t know. But I can’t deny that we’re dealing with something categorically different than “mere” vice, based on the behavior I see.

    Janet

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  10. Thank you. I shall think about that.

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