Reading Notes: As I Lay Dying, Moby Dick, The Iliad, and the Noetic Effects of Sin and Anger-and-Revenge's Power to Degrade

Several months ago I read Gene Fant's article at First Things titled "William Faulkner's Peculiar Calvinism: As I Lay Dying." The author reflects on elements from a handful of different works by Faulkner, highlighting his "Peculiar [Read Redemption-Less] Calvinism", and vouches for the truthfulness of Faulkner's Southern characterizations (Fant is a native-born Mississippian). The author's reflections are tied up with the recent film adaptation of As I Lay Dying, written/directed/starring James Franco.

This has made me think of when, several years ago, I first read As I Lay Dying: I thought it was an emotionally-weighty but good read, especially since the noetic effects of sin are soberly portrayed. (The characters in As I Lay Dying do genuinely bizarre and irrational things again and again.) Also, recently I finished reading Moby Dick (I already read half of the book 3 or 4 times, but finally plowed through to the end. Yay!), and, again, I was impressed by the noetic effects of sin: Melville captures that untoward power in his characterization of Captain Ahab, a man who, like Achilles from The Iliad, becomes drunk with anger and revenge to the point of his own demise. Yikes. Gives me the heebie-jeebies.

First Things: June/July 2012 - Life Too Inconvenient for Life - Poisonous Seed Indeed

I have subscribed to First Things for a couple years. Editor R. R. Reno pens the opening, editorial article "The Public Square" in the hard-copy publication. In the June/July 2012 publication, in "The Public Square" under the heading "Life Too Inconvenient for Life," Reno writes:

The Journal of Medical Ethics, an altogether mainstream, peer-reviewed scholarly publication, recently published an article justifying "after-birth abortion," a locution authors Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva use to describe killing newborns whose parents don't want them.

"Children with severe abnormalities whose lives can be expected to not be worth living" can be "terminated," as the Groningen Protocol in the ever-merciful Netherlands currently allows. Then the authors follow the ruthless logic of the pro-abortion position to its conclusion. "If criteria such as costs (social, psychological, economic) for the potential parents are good enough reasons for having an abortion even when the fetus is healthy," they observe, and if we can't give a cogent explanation why a fetus suddenly becomes a person simply by passing through the birth canal, "then the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn."

If we can kill a healthy child in the womb for a whole range of reasons, then why not in the hospital nursery? Why not abortions "after birth"?

At first I thought the article was meant as cutting humor. The clattering machinery of the simplistic syllogisms seem positively Swiftean, a satire of our present-day moralists. Want to kill newborns? OK, OK, give me a minute or two, and I'll give you the arguments.

But no, the editors of the Journal of Medical Ethics apparently think that these sorts of arguments should be taken seriously. They will of course say that the journal is committed to "stimulating discussion" and "airing controversial views." What's the harm in thinking it through? Aren't free exchanges like this good for us? Doesn't it help us refine our moral arguments and perhaps overcome our irrational responses of disgust and moral dismay?

In 1920, two distinguished German professors published an argument in favor of euthanasia. The argument turned on the clam  that there are some lives unworthy of life. Giubilini and Minerva use that haunting phrase, perhaps unaware of its origins. And they extend it. Their argument for "after-birth abortion" gives us permission to destroy newborns who aren't unworthy but are inconvenient.

As Jonathan Haidt observes, our moral culture is shaped primarily by emotion. Very few people reason out moral truths. Most of us have gut reactions. The fixed points in our moral universe are the deeds so heinous we can't imagine performing them. And I can't imagine killing a newborn. Which is precisely what Giubilini and Minerva and the editors of the Journal of Medical Ethics want us to coolly entertain as a real option.

Lebensunwerten Lebens: life unworthy of life. The idea expanded the German imagination, and in 1939 the Nazis gassed 75,000 mentally ill and handicapped Germans. They were burdensome, inconvenient, and an impediment to their goal of racial purity. Soon they focused their attention on another impediment, whose victims are counted in the millions.

There is nothing remotely original or philosophically sophisticated about Giubilini and Minerva's pedestrian reasoning. The editors' rationale for publishing their article advocating "after-birth abortion" was to break new ground, to "expand" our moral imaginations, to "problematize," as progressive professors like to say. That's what the distinguished German professors did in 1920. That's what our professional ethicists are doing today.

St. Paul teaches that we will reap what we have sown. This, dear readers, is a very poisonous seed indeed [Emphasis CCS].