Axioms 

An axiom is a proposition that must be true without proof. Otherwise, nothing else can be proved. To prove anything, you need to posit an axiom that cannot be proved and that can serve as the foundation for other deductions. You can’t prove that points A and B are connected by a distinct line unless you assume the axiom:  for every two distinct points, there exists exactly one line that contains both of them. Unless you posit at least one axiom, reasoning never gets off the ground. You will land in an infinite regress, like the child wanting to know what an apple is:

It is a fruit.

What is a fruit?

A fruit is the sweet and fleshy product of a tree or other plant that contains seed and can be eaten as food.

What is a tree, plant, and food?

Etc.

There has to be something known to bring this chain to an end.

 . . .

     We have unquestioned core convictions about what the world is – more or less conscious. They function like axioms or primitive definitions in our thinking and feeling. Upon them, world versions are built. At least two sorts of axiomatic core convictions. One grounds the life world we live in. I am expressing these mostly taken-for-granted beliefs as though they were axioms in a logical system.

  The first set consists of axioms no sane human being could deny no matter from what culture or historical epoch. For example,      

• I was born and I will die.
• The world was here before me.
• If I don’t eat and drink, I will die.
• Things don’t just happen without some cause.
• I need air to breath.
• Children are conceived through sex.
• Babies grow into children; children into adults.
• Adults age and die.
• P cannot be both true and not-true in the same sense of P.
•  If p is true, then not-p cannot be true.

 A second set goes almost as deep but expresses a core understanding of what it is to be human at all.

•         We should give a newborn baby a name and not a number.
•         A pig is sentient.
•         A rock is not sentient.
•         All things being equal, it is better to be pain-free than in pain.
•         All things being equal, it is better to be alive than not be alive.
•         Death is to be feared, all things being equal.

You could keep expanding the list of axioms for a long time. Such axioms, again, are the product of being socialized in our world. They are rarely the result of conscious reflection or argument. They are like what is under the surface of the metaphorical iceberg, our consciousness being only the tip of that iceberg. They can be called into question, however. Socrates perplexed his contemporaries because he lived as though death were not to be feared, and even made arguments to back up his life. 

    Just touching the surface of the water is a third set of axioms peculiar to each one of us. These are facts and judgments, beliefs and convictions that we cannot doubt.

•         My name is Gary.
•         I was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1959.
•         My parents were James and Verna.
•         They loved me.·        
•     They took care of me when I couldn’t take care of myself.
•         I regret not being a better brother.

Finally, there is a fourth set, what I consider metaphysical axioms. They are intimately connected to the first two sets, though conscious reasoning may be more active here:

•         The universe has no intrinsic value.
•         The universe is dead matter and energy.
•         The universe is indifferent to human aspirations.
•         There is no Creator of the universe.
•         The universe is an accident.
•         Human consciousness is an accident.
•         Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
•         Value, love – sentimental projections onto an indifferent background.
•         For every effect, there is a physical cause explainable by science.
•         Nothing is real except matter/energy as these phenomena are understood by our best science.

 There may be harmony between these sets of axioms or not, or contradictions internal to them. For example, within metaphysical axioms, the belief that the universe was without inherent value would conflict with a belief that my love for a person was not a sentimental projection. If I love a person and that love is a response to the person, then at least one thing that exists in the universe has inherent value. I cannot logically maintain both axioms. Translated, I would suffer a lack of inner peace if I believed both things at the same time.  In my examples, the entire set of metaphysical axioms would conflict with “we should give a newborn baby a name and not a number” from the first set, and “my parents loved me” from the second. We live with such contradictions, of course, but have cognitive dissonance from them at some level.

     If our world version were just coherent and nothing else, we would all still be cut off from reality, living in our own virtual reality. Our world versions must make some sense of the world, must disclose reality in some way. This is not at all clear. As I love many things, as I have known great beauty, as I have on rare occasions been visited by joy, I cannot believe the metaphysical axioms I listed above. They would make these formative experiences into illusions. To keep them, to believe that they disclose reality rather than project sentimental feelings onto it, I must reject those axioms. But I must also believe that my loves are appropriate responses to a reality that cannot be reduced to what I would like to believe. Indeed, the idea of Creation is part of a world version in which these formative experiences can  disclose reality. I might lose my belief in Creation someday, but I can’t imagine taking over beliefs that would negate my experiences, which are the most real for me. If I came to reject the Idea of Creation then only because some other Idea makes better sense of what I cannot doubt without losing myself – the axioms in the second set included.

     World versions – the sets of a person’s axiomatic convictions, beliefs, judgments, or values (always filtered through the world or form of life the person is part of) – are what we accept as given under normal circumstances. We reason based on the axioms that make up our world version.

   That implies that we do not come to our core convictions through a chain of logical reasoning.  If x is self-evident to me, but not to you, well, rationally, logically, we are stuck – but only rationally, logically, abstractly. We have a common ground to stand on – life, those axioms neither of us can deny, and those overlapping ones that we share. That makes a kind of human, finite, fallible reason possible.

      If x is an axiom for me but not for you, then we cannot reason together except in this fashion. No scientific experiment, no empirical method can prove that the universe as a whole is meaningless and without intrinsic value. No mathematical-logical proof can prove that either without assuming as axioms the very beliefs that are in question. I cannot prove to you that x is an axiom any more than you can prove that x is not an axiom. It either fits in with the massive web of axiomatic beliefs, judgments, values, etc. that informs your thinking – or not. And thus with your formative (prägende) life experiences – or not. No metaphysical starting point can be proved – though such starting points are limited by the first category of beliefs. A metaphysical starting point that denied our mortality would be a non-starter.

    Indeed, life forces most axioms on us. We wouldn’t know what to do with a person who denied that we are mortal or denied that we are born. No one is completely cut off from another, epistemologically – unless we are dealing with severe insanity.

    And as our lives are different, at the upper levels different things may be forced on us through our loves, joys, sorrows, sufferings, traumas. The axioms that go deep in us usually have their source in prägende (formative) experiences. Sublime experiences of joy or terror, for example. These may or may not be considered “subjective.” They may or may not disclose aspects of reality. For me – just like thoughts – they may tell us more about ourselves than reality. But they may also, when free of the “fat, relentless ego” (Murdoch), disclose reality. Depends on your core convictions – which must make sense of all the core axiomatic convictions as a whole, that is, of your life and world version as a whole.

 . . .

    This is important to me because if it were true –  provable – what my friend said (in a certain mood; it doesn’t represent his final thinking), then all my axiomatic convictions would be false and I would have to accept the sad truth that I have been living in a sentimental bubble. There would be no conceptual space for hope, faith, and love. There would be no conceptual space to deny what the young C. S. Lewis believed true:

Such, then, was the state of my imaginative life; over against it stood the life of my intellect. The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.

The dark possibility expressed here is not a fact of life. It depended, as Lewis recognized, on a particular world version that elevates science and logic to the status of religion, which of course is absurd because it contradicts axioms internal to science and logic. I can believe every proposition of science and my core convictions would not be affected at all. As Wittgenstein wrote:

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

If a person makes a religion out of science and logic, it is not because Reason forced that conclusion on them. It is for the same reason that I reject that possibility: namely, that it is in tune without our deepest fears, hopes, and joys; or more sadly and superficially, with the requirements of the “fat, relentless ego” to elevate itself over other egos.

     We buy hope, faith, love at the price of the necessity of believing through hope, faith, love. We may hope only because we may have no certainty in a purely logical-rational sense. A limited skepticism is our friend. We live from hope, faith, love – or die from the lack thereof. The human condition.

Nihilism

                                              Mephisto

There are no more answers to the question Why?

                                  - Nietzsche

. . .

Peter (a writer): Is there anything more terrifying than the destruction of the world?

 Lloyd (a physicist): Yes. The knowledge that it doesn't matter one way or the other. It's all random, resonating aimlessly out of nothing and eventually vanishing forever. I'm not talking about the world, I'm talking about the universe, all space, all time, just temporary convulsion. And I got paid to prove it.

 Peter: You feel so sure of that when you look out on a clear night like tonight and see all those millions of stars, that none of it matters? 

Lloyd: I think it's just as beautiful as you do, and vaguely evocative of some deep truth that always just keeps slipping away, but then my professional perspective overcomes me; I just wish for a more penetrating view of it, and I understand it for what it truly is. Haphazard. Morally neutral, and unimaginably violent.

                                                                                                                             Woody Allen, September

 . . .

Mephistopheles:

I am the spirit that negates. 

And rightly so, for all that comes to be

Deserves to perish wretchedly;

‘Twere better nothing would begin.

Thus everything that your terms, sin,

Destruction, evil represent—

That is my proper element. 

                                                                                       Goethe, Faust, translation Walter Kaufmann

 

. . .

 Human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. It's a sick joke that the closer we get to truth, the further we get from meaning. The rational thing to do is to stop breeding and die out, or blow out our brains, but we're all too scared of the unknown. – a good friend

  Well, that's the darkest possibility. It has haunted me for a long time. True, when you have children it seems about as possible as Descartes' evil spirit making the external world an illusion. In the armchair, you can imagine it but when you go out into life you just can't live as though it were true. Of course, that is no argument. Could be an illusion required by evolution or some other explanation.

   The spirit whispering this dark possibility to me is my ultimate dialog partner. The core of my thinking is a dialog with him. Call him Mephisto. We’re discussing what the world is, what life is, and whether anything makes it worth living. I used to watch Woody Allen movies as therapy against this dark but possibly true thought. He believed it true. I think he used his movies to work through it, in his crazy way. It might have destroyed his soul somewhere along the way, I don’t know. I think I combat the dark view in some way every day. I either write to Mephisto, or at least he is in the room with me when I write.

    “I am the spirit that negates, and rightly so, since all that comes to be deserves to perish wretchedly.” Mephisto can’t prove that. Thus, what my friend movingly wrote – “the closer we get to truth, the further we get from meaning” – is true only within one world version, the dark one. Mephisto can prove that within that world version, this is true. But he can’t prove the world version as a whole.

    I disagree with Kant about many things. I think limited but valid metaphysical knowledge is possible. It is a metaphysical fact that human beings are radically finite and fallible, for example. If human beings are fallible, then there is an Idea (a criterion) built into things that allows us to distinguish between fallibility and infallibility. Such knowledge is limited because it presupposes a world version in which it makes sense for it does not make sense in Mephisto’s world version. And here I agree with Kant: We can't know in any scientific or logical sense which world version is true as we can know what is true (partly) within a world version; we'd have to get out of the world and our consciousness of it to compare each metaphysical representation of the whole with the whole of the world as it is unrepresented. We'd have to see the world as God would, from no location within it. Kant wanted to deny Reason to make conceptual space for hope, and I think that understood in this sense, he succeeded. So Hume was also right after all when he wrote: “Tis not unreasonable for me to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger” – if you add: “depending on your world version.”

     World versions become more or less intelligible as they make sense of people’s actual lives. You can’t just go shopping for an interesting world version. And nihilism does make sense of our world, even for those of us that oppose it. The sociological and historical reasons for this would require a book to elucidate.

      I think this battle is fought out in the human heart – not in philosophy class. There have been times in my life when I couldn't defend myself very well against it. Not because it was so intellectually persuasive but because I was in something like despair. We all experience moods of despair when the philosophy of Mephisto starts sounding persuasive. With luck, the mood of despair, however, does not become a permanent condition. When we love a person or a place or a book we leave the mood, at least temporarily. Love is the negation of nihilism. Love is the conviction that something real is good; that the existence of the beloved is good. The conviction – not an argument.

      If reason could establish that Mephisto’s world version were the true world version, then despair would be the spiritual state most in harmony with the world. To despair would be the most authentic way to be. Thus, the comparison to Descartes’ thought experience questioning whether anything outside my stream of consciousness is real misses something. No one can live as though nothing were real outside of his own mind. But people can and do live as though the world were meaningless, violent, absurd. Many draw the logical conclusion and blow their brains out. But I would submit – agreeing for once with Hume – that suicide is ultimately no more rational than scratching an itch. That's why I don't think that the closer you get to truth, the farther away you get from meaning. That would be true only if reality as a whole were as the dark possibility - a real one - imagines it. That can become a conviction - despair is just the conviction that the world is meaningless, absurd, violent - that it would be better if it did not exist. But a conviction is not an argument. It is enough to live by, for better and for worse. 

     

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 The Belief of Autonomous Man, That "Values" are Subjective, is False

                                           Milton's Satan, Paradigm of Autonomous Man

    Therefore a pillar of modern culture is false. The Good is grounded in reality. When we find something truly beautiful, we are not merely projecting our feelings onto the blank screen of a meaningless, beauty-less nature or work, but responding in our human way to something very real. Or when some of us are saddened and disturbed by the brutality inflicted on animals in the meat industry, we respond to the violation of the real animals; we don’t project feelings onto the blank screen of the animals because we enjoy being disturbed (unless we are sentimental). If we believed we were projecting feelings – that we were sentimental – then the ground of our sadness would be removed. When the victims of war crimes cry out for justice, it is because violence, terrible wrong has been done to real human beings. We don’t project our horror onto beings that are objectively without value or meaning. If that is what we believed, then our horror would mean nothing. If we hurt a friend, our remorse is not just a social evolutionary mechanism to ensure the survival of the species. Our remorse is a response to our friend and the real hurt we caused them.

       When we value something, when in thought or action we respond to anything according to some judgment or pre-judgment of what it is and its true value, we respond to reality, adequately or inadequately. To conform our minds, hearts, lives to real people, places, and things seems to me worth striving for. To want to make ourselves the creator and judge of value is to want to become like God – or better, like Milton’s Satan: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Goodness is Absolute 

   That is, the opposite of the goodness of something being relative to a set of criteria directed to some pre-given purpose – the goodness of a knife is relative to how well it cuts. There is no means-end relationship involved at all. Absolute goodness is reality as love-able, which is to say: ‘good that it exists.’ (The deepest passage in the Old Testament is Genesis 1:31 – And God looked upon what he had created and saw that it was good, very good.) The consequences of actions, to the extent there are any, are secondary to the action or person’s ability to reveal other human beings, the Creation, or the Creator even as love-able, as good. Good is not whatever conduces to happiness; the Good is what judges whether any particular conception of or means to happiness is decent or right or good. As such it is outside all conceptions of happiness. I can't make myself happy by betraying another person and plunging them into misery. Such happiness is worthless. The Good judges all actions designed to make us happy. 

    The same applies to evil. There are some acts that are never justifiable, period. Regardless of the circumstances, to rape is evil. It is always more than understandable that a rapist suffer remorse. 

       Philosophers with no antenna to this dimension of reality like to list horrible scenarios designed to bully us into admitting that goodness is a sentimental illusion. They believe if they get us to admit that in a certain situation we would rightly do something generally considered evil, then they prove that neither goodness nor evil is absolute but both are relative to something subjective, like happiness or social harmony or the happiness of the many. If I could save humanity and ensure a good life for every human being by betraying my children and giving them over to human sacrifice or some such nonsense, then not to save humanity, so the supposed reductio ad absurdum, would show that I was acting immorally, showing a too precious concern for my moral purity. That is a vulgar attitude. Such examples prove nothing except that human beings can be put in situations in which only a choice between evils is possible. Such choices ... I think of an extreme one in a novel: Sophie’s Choice, by Willian Styron, where a Polish mother was allowed to choose which of two children got sent to the gas chamber and which one survived... such choices usually destroy a human being, but that fact about us proves what I am saying. ‘Well, I must choose between my children. Rationally, the boy has a better chance of survival; hence, I will sacrifice my daughter. I acted rationally and thus no guilt attaches to me but only the Nazis.’ Well, I suppose that is what she would hear from a “therapist,” but in the novel despair took her, and we pity her, showing that a novelist can understand more about the human soul than a moral philosopher or a “therapist”.

    What is the Good? What did Plato mean by it? He couldn't say. The Idea of the Good was beyond conceptualization. I think I can do a bit better, though I agree with Plato that it is ultimately beyond conceptualization. The Good is that which is enjoined by the purest love - a love untainted by the "fat, relentless ego" (Iris Murdoch) or by sentimental fantasy. Christians often ask: What would Jesus do? That at least points in the right direction. 

Make Your Own Label 

I saw an ad for Jack Daniels whiskey going to work last week: translated – “Be your own brand! It worked out for Black Jack.” The perfect expression of the connection between capitalism and narcissism. I hear: the social media influencers or content creators are their own brands (or labels). They market themselves. And this is a pervasive feature of personality formation in general in capitalism, almost a description more than a metaphor. Everybody in the system is induced to become their own brand – or become a nobody. Individuality as a brand. The narcissistic personality type is reproduced by the economy and its social structure. It is, for example, quite different from the socialist personality type. "Identity" is another word for brand. Pseudo-individuality. In reality it is the desire to be a thing, analogous to a product that other people desire. The fear of being a real individual, defined by character, virtue, vices, actions, decisions, choices, thinking, loves, etc. The fear of being 'authentic'. The fear of freedom and the desire to escape from it. Capitalism and consumerism are premised on that fear. Defined by the products you buy and the 'identity'-image that is constructed for you - that is not your soul. The sociology behind that is not only the semi-omnipotent market but the systematic uprooting, dislocation, family breakdown, and drying up of rural life – all formed by a media structure that is not only coincidentally perfect for generating pseudo-individuals and virtual realities. Whoever has read Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979) and Stuart Ewen's The Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (1977) will be in a better position to grasp the changes. What we have now is a turbo-version of a trend that pre-dated social media for decades.

 Loving the Unlovable

A friend wrote some interesting things to me privately about my first entry (see November 22), pointing out the facts that we humans love all kinds of things and people that would be hard to affirm.

   I don't think you can love something intrinsically evil or rotten or bad. You can love someone who as a human being is intrinsically good but who has been corrupted. The form that love takes is pity. Those idiots who loved Hitler loved a man they fantasized was good. But that was a delusion.

  The movie (and book) Dead Man Walking explores this crazy possibility: without sentimentality, the possibility of loving a man who was capable of horrific evil, and what that means for the parents of families. It was not only pity at the end. After Sean Penn's character confessed, faced the truth of what he had done, things got real. There was real grief after his execution, even juxtaposed to the unspeakable grief of the parents whose children he had helped violate and murder. This is either supernatural or sentimental. It is impossible on a purely human level. It makes no human sense. 

    The idea is that unless one finds it intelligible that someone might love them lucidly and purely, they won't find their existence worth affirming - deep down, subconsciously. Loving someone confirms, makes it intelligible to themselves, that their existence is good, meaningful. Children denied love will have a hard time finding themselves loveable. How can a Hitler, how can such a murderer and rapist, find himself lovable except by deluding himself?

    My friend tells me that even Hitler had a girlfriend. I don’t deny Eva Braun probably "loved" Hitler in some sense, and within the bubble of the Nazi world, it was intelligible to see Hitler as loveable. But she has to see him through rose-colored glasses and from a perspective within an ideology that made evil good, good evil – probably because she was screwed up herself. Human love is messy and unpredictable – because imperfect and often a result of fantasy or sentimentality – especially when it comes to sex.

     I am just saying it contradicts the very idea of love to love what is evil because it is evil, and lucidly grasp the evil as evil. I think at bottom love –  the very idea of it, the geometrical form of love as opposed to our imperfect reflections of it –  is a form of believing or judging that what or who is loved is good. Good just means that someone or something an intelligible object of love - or would be if you really understood them or it. There are conceptual relations between loving, goodness, and being. But there are so many forms of love – pity, compassion, friendship, eros, patriotism, vocation, amor mundi, grief, etc. And love is always filtered through fucked up human beings, so it is rarely pure. Like sunlight filtered through a polluted atmosphere. It is hard to see the thing itself. But in certain people, it does shine through.

    I think love is a key – to meaning, to understanding reality, to understanding morality. I think apart from the mythology – which may or may not also weirdly be history. Christianity gets that right. In fact, I learned from the New Testament. 

    In a way, the reason that love does not have more power to give us joy and affirm life is precisely because even Hitler had a lover of sorts. We don't trust human love to reveal that it is wonderful that we exist; to reveal our soul. That's why a lot of folks need God. Perhaps in some sense everyone does. Not as a power-authority figure; not as an all-powerful being that gives commands; but as Christ understood God, as the Creator whose love never fails. God's love never fails – a conceptual point about God's love, not an empirical one; it’s like saying a circle is always round or a square always has four sides.

     I recall watching Cadfael, a BBC medieval mystery series based on the Cadfael novels of Elis Peters. Cadfael was a crusader for 20 years who became a monk and solved mysteries. In one episode a former crusader, a great warrior admired by all, friend and foe alike, came down with leprosy. Incognito he follows his niece around as she is abused by her guardians - who get what's coming to them. In the end, Cadfael urges him to reveal himself to her rather than continue to let her think him dead. Then the old crusader shows Cadfael his hideous face – a face no human can bear. Cadfael, in a moment of love, tells him that God sees not with the eyes of men. He sees the heart and will find it beautiful. A good illustration of why men need God to feel that their existence is good. Human love is limited and fallible. It can reveal us, partly; but like our imperfectly drawn circles, it points to an Idea from another dimension. 

Abortion 

   Is it an unborn child? Is it just a fetus, a part of a pregnant woman's body - like the appendix? Depends on whether you see it as a human being at a certain stage of development in the light of love (mothers and fathers to be do love their unborn babies) or reduce it to a biological phenomenon that makes no claims on us to exist. That in turn depends on how you see the world, and whether you see the world right.

 I wrote a long, tortured essay on the morality of abortion, but the matter is quite simple. (The debate around the legal right to kill an unborn child is a different topic.) Taking the morality, that is, taking the responsibility out of sex, imagining it is a purely personal matter between consenting adults, implies a right to abortion. Sex cannot be separated from fertility – except for surgical sterilization. None of the contraceptive technology is full-proof or fool-proof – life finds a way. Therefore, pregnancy is always possible. Unwanted pregnancies are a predictable outcome given our sexual culture. Most people don't want the Church or the morality police in their bedrooms (which I can understand); thus most people believe they must be free to deal with unwanted pregnancies as they see fit. 

       That reality imposes obligations on every sexual encounter if conceiving a child is a morally serious matter. Which it is, though our culture makes it hard to see it. The “fetus” – de-meaing if precise biological language replaces the language of love, like conceiving an amazing forest as “raw material” to be killed for the profit of the capitalist. We must devalue that which we intend to damage or kill to remove the pain of guilt that comes from lucid understanding. We do it all the time: the masters did it to the slaves; the miners to it to the land; the Europeans did it to the native peoples; the military leaders do it to the bombed populations; the lazy student does it to the math they don't feel like learning. We de-mean that which we can't include as one of "us." We don't give the hog a name we slaughter and eat; we don't slaughter our pets, who have names, making them one of us. In this we resemble lions: they feel no pity for the antelope they are about to kill and devour. 

   To not take seriously the possibility that a woman suffering remorse because she had an abortion is lucid is to be in the grip of a rationalizing ideology. We can't stipulate what is real or not. We can't stipulate that the unborn child is not a human being any more than we can stipulate that the African slave, the Cherokee, or the Palestinians or Jews are not human beings. We can't stipulate what things mean. Our 'autonomy' does not include that power - contra Milton's Satan. We don't choose whether the unborn child is a human being; our love is a response to the fact that is it a human being, one we brought into being. Or our guilt over the lack of a love that should be there is a response. To make a thing out of an unborn child in the mind is a form of meaning blindness.

     The valuing of the right to sex-without-responsibility over the unborn child is the sum total of the moral issue. Almost the sum total: extreme cases like rape and incest pose different questions; sometimes genuine health concerns must be considered. Indeed, nothing causes so much irrationality and suffering as sex in our post-community world. I agree with liberals: the state forcing women to bear children no matter what raises still other problems - I don't think the state should, but don't want to argue that here. What I do want to argue is that both adult lovers are morally bound to accept the consequences of their actions (all things being equal). 

     The right of adult pleasures, additions, lapses of judgment, or lusts should not weigh more than the life of an unborn human being because of our alleged 'autonomy'. Well, we do have a legal right to - consensually - have all kinds of bad, irresponsible sex. And few would want an Iranian type "morality police" to enforce taking away that right. (Not the state but the community and culture has to job of limiting bad irresponsible sex - and capitalism have destroyed both.) We have a right in many circumstances to lie, cheat, betray, and otherwise sin. Having a right to some behavior doesn't imply that behavior is good - expresses love, respect, reverence, decency, sanity. The consequences of irresponsible sex can be soul-destroying, even if the state shouldn't intervene. 

     Abortion is part of a capitalist culture that literally mines our sexuality to sell shit and entertain. It is part of a culture of family breakdown, divorce, uprootedness, autonomy, and quiet (and not so quiet) desperation. I have been right in the middle of that breakdown, suffering from it and contributing to it. You won't find me casting stones. But it is part of a capitalist culture that sees all of nature – and thus the body – as property to be disposed of as we see fit, empty of all intrinsic meaning and reality. Property is a way of demeaning that which makes a claim on us to exist, to be loved. Slaves' bodies were conceived as property. Why would I want to conceive my body or yours in similar terms?

    The right language to see the reality of the unborn child is not the language of rights, property, or the market, but the language of love. A father and mother falling in love with their unborn child is not sentimentality but a response to the reality of the unborn child. Seeing the unborn child as a capitalist sees his property in forests is a denial of that reality. It is really that simple, morally. Using fetus outside of the biology class, in moral contexts, is to use it as a euphemism, as when someone giving a tour of a slaughter house refers to the chickens going through the killing machine as "units of production" to mask their reality.

     I know in the fallen world we face all kinds of horrible dilemmas that result from historical damage and irresponsible choices. I am in the middle of this. I have absolutely no authority to condemn anyone morally. I can imagine circumstances in which well-meaning people can disagree how to feel about an abortion in particular cases. In few other areas is it more important to simply obey Christ and love and refuse to condemn - whether you are Christian or not. But that doesn’t negate the Idea of goodness any more than the messy, imperfect circles I have drawn negate the Idea of the perfect circle that judges them. Kyrie Eleison. 

December 21, 2023

Additional thought. What disturbs me as well about the way the abortion debate is framed is what it means for "human dignity" - the sense, emotional and intellectual, that every person is somehow a limit to my will; that remorse would be an intelligible response to wronging anyone; that someone might intelligibly grieve their death; the belief that everyone has someone in them that makes it intelligible to see them in the light of some form of love, if even only pity. Or using a religious picture, that we are created in the image of God, who created us in love and loves us still. 

    Imagine an American woman who is grieving over the loss of a child. Imagine that woman watching TV and observing the "grief behavior" of a Palestinian mother who has lost her child in a bombing raid. The American woman is briefly tempted to commiserate as she is also a grieving mother, then stops and says: "It is different with them. They can always have more." This is a familiar racist attitude. Our grief is genuine because our lives have the kind of meaning that can only come from feeling - more a matter of feeling than intellect - that each one of us is an individual in a special way. Sometimes we speak of a "soul" to capture this difference. Animals are not individuals in this way. They are more tightly bound to their species-character. They can't love and be loved as a soul. You don't tell stories or write biographies about mice. And their lives - the Palestinians - can't mean what ours do for the meaning-blind. "They can always have more" means that they lack the kind of individuality, the kind of meaning that we have. They display grief behavior but it will pass; it doesn't go deep. We love and grieve; they can only "love" and "grieve." I think we all recognize this familiar racist way of seeing other people.

   Presumably it would mean something different if one of us - remaining in this racist world - had an abortion and one of them did. Well, the we-group have lives that matter, feelings that go deep (disclose the reality of the kind of individuality we mean with abstract concepts like "dignity"). But in the world of those who feel abortion is morally unproblematic, who believe that the unborn child is not a limit to our will in the way a newborn baby is, who believe it is purely an individual decision whether the unborn child is seen as an intelligible object of love or raw material for the pharmacy industry - in that world no unborn child is part of us, except by decision of the mother. No unborn human being has inborn dignity. At that stage, any mother can always have more. Well, bodies are property, and we are sovereign over our own property, can do with it what we want. Property -whether a car, slave, or unborn child - by definition does not make claims on us to exist, does not limit our will. Who can be a person is not given by nature, is not a question of what is real; we define who can be and who cannot be a person, as long as we have the power to do so, of course. The unborn are completely powerless, like the rest of nature we dispose over. And the aborted fetus is generally raw material, given to the industries profiting from genetic technologies. Stem cells are worth quite a lot on the market. 

   The attitude I am focusing on here, I submit, is based on feelings that do not know of human dignity, feelings and thoughts which see the unborn as the racist sees the demeaned other. When we come to feel that we can always have more, when this attitude becomes the taken-for-granted cultural norm, then we have lost the conceptual space for "human dignity." This is what is at stake, culturally. I have known a woman who, after an abortion, took the body of the fetus and in grief solemnly buried her - having given her a name - in a quiet woods. No putting the stem cells on the market. When our culture can only see that as an act of pure sentimentality, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   If you think of yourself as a limit to others' wills, if you think of yourself as more than just an exemplar of an original model, a variation of the same species-theme, then it seems obvious that you were just that particular unborn child at one stage of your life. Had your mother decided to abort you and have more, someone else and not you would have existed. If it doesn't matter, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   I have know mothers and fathers who loved their unborn child. Who named the child, talked to it, anticipated its advent, seeing all the changes in the woman's body in loving ways. When our culture can only see that as an act of pure sentimentality, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   And when our culture uniformly believes that we or the state, not reality, defines which lives have meaning and which do not, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. We can always change our definitions. 

  Abortion is the perfect expression of the worldview of capitalist-industrialism, of science-engineering-technology. Whoever of us has the power become the lords and masters of nature, the conquers of nature. The contempt the capitalist feels for the forest they want to log, many of us - feminists included - feel for the body. To see the body as "my property" and thus the unborn child as my property is to be blind to the reality of the body and the unborn child, a reality that only discloses itself in the language of love. This kind of feminism is one of the saddest things I know, for I cannot but see it as a form of extreme contempt for women and their bodies. That many women see capitalism-science-technology as a liberation from nature only reinforces this. 

   Philosophically, I have just been explicating one world version, and pointing out the consequences of another. Within the worldview of science-capitalism-technology, abortion makes perfect sense, as does the use of fetuses as raw material for industry. Within the worldview of science-capitalism-technology, the form that feminism takes - of which the philosophy of the pro-abortion movement is a part - makes perfect sense. My argument is that if the worldview of science-capitalism-technology becomes the only possible worldview, not only the lives of the unborn will be demeaned and unprotected. 

  I confess: most pro-life people do not represent my way of thinking. So many of them are too full of hate, too devoid of compassion. So many of them use the abortion issue to feel self-righteous at the expense of the bad guys - something they perhaps learned from their progressive opponents. But apart from all the smugness, what some people call "the culture war" is the very real conflict between capitalism-science-technology and its political expressions on the one hand, and world versions that leave space for human dignity grounded in nature or reality on the other. This is a real conflict. Abortion is one of those areas - morally - where there is no middle ground. I am unequivocally an opponent of science-capitalism-technology as a worldview.

[Again, this moral issue is too deep for the state. Given that birth is a choice mothers - and I think fathers, as the child is also their responsibility, morally - have to make, the state should not criminalize abortion. That movement is, with important exceptions, not an attempt to preserve human dignity but punish ideological enemies.]