Defining Human

A long discussion on abortion on the Extropian public list posted to the Internet during 1998 began with my position that the polycentric principles that are so central to the Extropian philosophy meant that the Supreme Court of the U.S. should have left the abortion question entirely to the states to decide. No matter how carefully I defined my principles, the rhetoric became heated, then irrational, finally threatening. A physicist seriously suggested that anti-abortion individuals should be guillotined and a Dutch (of course) transhumanist suggested that all anti-abortionists should be deported to a ghetto. They were serious and never retracted their suggestions and neither did anyone ever publicly rebuke them. In fact, I only received private support, never public support; the dogmatic Peter Singer pro-abortion stance was complete and total, impervious to reason or civility.


Developing Selves and Limited Sovereignties

Developing our own selves is our own business. Developing other selves is entering the political arena. Exercising individual rights is one thing, ownership of other selves is quite another. I will take the question of when “fetal tissue” - a dehumanizing definition, propaganda developed against the enemy - becomes an unborn child to be equivalent to the question of when developing your own self becomes developing another self. The process of developing another self begins with conception, it doesn’t matter if it’s natural conception or artificial. When conception occurs is a matter of the completion of the normal full set of chromosomes within the fertilized egg. I am not arguing for a moral absolute in the treatment of fertilized eggs, I am simply saying that any treatment becomes a political question, not an individual question and not a judicial or executive question.

Interestingly, the same groups that want animal rights typically support mothers murdering their unborn children. Likewise, the same groups that lobbied to have alcohol and tobacco warnings for pregnancy typically support the right to murder what the warnings are meant to protect. If a mother can murder her unborn child, why can’t she smoke and drink to her heart’s content without being warned about it? Even the most hardcore ethical relativist has a twinge of conscience over the birth of crack babies, permanently maimed human beings, maimed in the area of volitional freedom. Yet if a mother can murder her developing child, why can’t she smoke all the crack she can afford? If the unborn child is just fetal tissue, why not genetically engineer it in vitro or in utero to become a slave or worker drone? Why not maim it deliberately, using worse methods than crack, just out of cussedness, that’s freedom of choice isn’t it?

There will never be an anti-cloning or anti-designer baby law that will logically hold water with the Supreme Court until Roe v. Wade is overturned. The right to murder an unborn baby because it has been defined away coincides with the right to use the baby however the mother wishes to use it. They are inseparable. If an unborn baby is a disposable “thing,” and it is the sole property of the mother, since the father has no legal right to stop the mother from aborting it, then the mother can treat the unborn baby as property. Anything can be logically be done to it, anything at all. The abortion issue thus is close kin to the slavery issue, the so-called “right” to an abortion can only be upheld if the mother owns the unborn human. If the mother owns the unborn human, and the baby is born with deformities (really anything less than perfection), then the baby, as it gets older, obviously can demand reparations from the mother for any deviation from perfection, after all, she could have aborted it. The logic of abortion leads to horrible consequences once ownership passes from the mother. It leads to horrible consequences if ownership never passes from the mother, also.

I can’t make sense out of the Peter Singer (bioethicist and professor of bestiality at Princeton University) philosophical position that individuals on this list adhere to. The possession of intelligence is the source of rights? How much intelligence is enough to get on the rights wagon? Who grants these rights and can I talk to them? Who defines intelligence and why is it the same as consciousness? If we are unconscious, say when we’re sleeping or in a coma, do our rights go away?

Welcome to the slippery slope, by restating the Peter Singer case of graduated rights, you have made a case for infanticide here. In fact, with this line of reasoning, you can’t draw a line anywhere for any inconvenient entity to be bumped off at any time. Why not the old and decrepit, or the handicapped, or anti-government types or anyone? When you speak of the “source of the rule” all I see is the very oldest rule of all, “might makes right.” Nature is red in tooth and claw. If it is legitimate for the strong to prey upon the weak, sooner or later, we will end up, not as a civilized society, but as isolated systems of perfected self-defense staring at each other across no-man’s land.

A fertilized egg with a normal full set of chromosomes is the starting point for human development, not earlier. At that point, with genetic engineering, we can modify what nature hath brought together. The environmental factors that influence the whole development of a human begin right at this point, and it is these factors that produce a unique human entity every time, no matter how identical the raw material is to begin with. The environmental factors are all political questions, e.g., smoking and alcohol advisory warnings for pregnancy.

In America, no political conclusion has been reached, only a judicial usurpation of the political question. This is judicial tyranny, to define away human life without recourse to the Constitutional Amendment process, such as was used when slavery was abolished. Slavery and abortion are all about the private ownership and disposition of human life. The crux of the philosophical issues in both cases was and continues to be definitional.

My alternative is polycentrism, or particularism, many jurisdictions trying out many different treatments of the issue. The judiciary cannot usurp the legislative role. Individuals should have the choice to move to jurisdictions that honor life, or that worship death. The type of society that evolves in each jurisdiction will provide the incentive or disincentive for movement, but I know from moral reasoning from first principles that families trying to raise children will be drawn towards jurisdictions with an ethic of protecting and enhancing life.

Why would permission for medical usage of fetal material be needed under current abortion laws? If the sewage treatment plant wants to make use of a mother’s fecal material, no one expects it to ask for permission, and the fetal tissue in the eyes of the law is exactly equivalent to fecal matter. What’s wrong with the Chinese Communists harvesting body organs without “permission” from prisoners they’ve bumped off and selling them on the world market? What’s wrong with commercializing all life, at all stages of development, including humans, intelligent or otherwise, conscious or otherwise? Just make all life into products in the marketplace, all custom designed for any use whatsoever? If destroying it is acceptable, why would any use not be, living or dead?

I don’t think that jurisdictions who allow abortion for rape, incest or the life of the mother will slip far into the culture of death. A child forced on a woman is tragic and so is that child’s legalized murder. However, I see no good reason why jurisdictions shouldn’t be able to disallow this, if that is what they think is best for their society. I believe the results of diverse abortion laws will result in a better atmosphere for raising children where abortion is minimized and a worse atmosphere where partial-birth abortion is allowed.

The key is in the concept of development. Development of the self means others should stay hands off. But development of other selves, that is, non-consensual development, is ownership of other selves. Other selves have every right to question this activity and to bring the activity into the political sphere. The concepts of guardianship and power of attorney evolved in society to champion the rights of developing selves that are incapable of acting as their own champions.

“Preventing a person from coming into existence” is a definitional stance unconnected with reality. The reality is the person in question has been in existence since conception and that what you call “prevention” is actually murder. This is the same difficulty that the abolitionists had with defeating slavery, the Constitution said slaves were only counted as 3/5 of a person for apportionment purposes, less than fully human. It was solely and entirely a definitional tug-of-war, exactly as abortion is. We diverge here definitionally, it’s the same old problem of “whose rationality?”

I know that deep down, we do not diverge in our reverence for life ascending, nor do we diverge in seeing that the polycentric approach - the liquid realm - is where ascension has the strongest chance of success. Different jurisdictions should be allowed to answer these considerations in their own way. The proof of which way is best would then be found in the pudding. My line of moral reasoning is permissible only when definitions at the foundation of the issue are agreed on. Short of agreement on this, we inhabit separate worlds and cannot grant legitimacy to each other, let alone understand one another.

I fully agree that man does not live by bread alone. I think this accords with my earlier point that developing your own self should be free from interference. However, I cannot see where, in the course of an individual’s life, he becomes “developed.” Developed is a static concept that I have never observed in living entities. Life is always “developing,” from conception to death. Even with indefinite longevity, no one will ever be “developed,” they will indefinitely be “developing.” If I change your sentence to read, “A developing person’s right to life must include the right to remove interferences with that life when that interference results from something that is not a person,” the flavor of the argument shifts to protections for the unborn child. If I tack on to that sentence “and the responsibility to submit to legitimate political authority in cases where that interference results from another developing person,” then I think we have arrived at something close to my position.

Understanding can only proceed after definitions are agreed on. So the logic is that on core definitional issues, such as what is human and what is less than human, choices are made prior to mutual understanding. Reason takes a back seat to values in such a choice. Values can be chosen with the aid of reason in the form of past consequences of various options, yet reason itself cannot make the choice. Hence my comment about “whose rationality?” It’s a very old problem. Yet even Jane Roe changed her mind, so anyone can.

Because the choice of who is human and who is less than human - the old slavery issue - is so absolute, so stark in its consequences, friendships can and have been lost, even within families. It is a civil war issue because the logic embedded within the culture of death demands that everyone, not just a jurisdiction here and there, but everyone partake in it. If death is the means by rule and not exception to implement the good - abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia, execution, genocide, etc. - then no competing jurisdictions can be allowed to show the subject population an alternative which would uphold the values of promoting and enhancing life. The comparisons between the pathology of societies within the culture of death and the health and vitality of societies within the culture of life are too stark and cannot be allowed.

As we slip closer and closer to a world government of some sort or another, there will be no place on earth left to move to in order to escape the culture of death. The impetus towards world government is from oligarchs concerned most of all with world demographics, the UN Cairo Depopulation Conference made that abundantly clear. They must impose abortion, etc. on everyone, there must be no alternative to the global unity they envision. As I have previously written, there is no compromise or accommodation possible between extropic worldviews and entropic worldviews. The entropic worldview spreading globally today is primarily an urban, moneyed phenomenon. I like Spengler’s word for it, “unfruitfulness.” It happens sooner or later everywhere urbanization develops. Having children is simply viewed as too expensive, inconvenient, or pointless. Defining the unborn child away, the developing self, is a sleight of hand to get away with murder. Death, whether via barbaric nihilism or via tyrannical order, takes center stage and remains there, crowding out all alternatives.

If so-called “rational” extropians cannot discuss the definition of human without resorting to vitriol, irrational ethical emotivism and kneejerk bigotry, what can we expect from the “irrational” general public after human speciation occurs, after we’ve created super posthuman master races - of whatever form? I would add that we should expect our daughter species to be giving short shrift to humans who have exhibited a pronounced death fetish regarding the weak. Not a good example to our masterful progeny who may very well view us as embryonic.

Why should the public listen to individuals who represent themselves as extropians, supposedly holding to principles of protecting and enhancing intelligent life, when they condone the murder and arbitrary use of developing selves until those selves are capable of standing up and shouting “I claim rights for myself”? If children, born or unborn, have no rights until they can claim them, adults can use them as resources for anything a twisted mind can conceive. The general public is not brain dead yet, extropian credibility just took a turn for the worse.

I read recently where China has 53 million missing females, they are statistically expected from normal demographic trends but simply not there. Guess why they’re not there. They were not referred to as missing “fetal tissue” or missing “viable tissue mass” or missing “clumps of tissue” or missing “small lumps of biological matter.” They are missing women. I can’t think of anything being more “anti-woman” than this capital fact.

This is the result of the vision of world unity that the self-anointed world demographic managers hold - the High Priests and Priestesses of the Cult of Unfertility - and I can’t believe that self-proclaimed extropians are in league with them, passively by sharing their definition of human, or actively. Real extropians view developing selves as more gray cells. The self-anointed depopulation experts view them as more alimentary canals. The difference is stark and uncompromising. Think of what 53 million Chinese women might have thought of to improve and enhance life; the abortion fanatics just think of 53 million stomachs to fill and 53 million bowels to empty. Call me a hopeless optimist, but I am with the late Julian Simon in believing that intelligence trumps resource limitations, and the more gray cells the better. The Malthusian vision is false, the race between humans and resources is not a fair race because resources are stupid and individuals are not.

Outright infanticide, as some so-called extropians have inferred should be allowed, will have to wait a bit for the Supreme Court to follow its own logic out to its deathly end. If all lines drawn as to when a developing self is entitled to rights are arbitrary - that is, all lines drawn after conception - then the line can be moved anywhere at all on an emotional whim, from 2 weeks to 40 years. There is no rationality involved in arbitrarily picking a line, only different levels of emotional squeamishness. If we desensitize our population through education and popular culture, we can do anything we want. If we can eliminate enough squeamishness, we can deal with the minority who remain squeamish. For example, there’ll be no more messy frog dissections in high school biology. Rather, the dissections will be done on computer simulations of humans, encouraging the entropic view of them as “meat machines.” Our squeamishness is sanitized as our students are brutalized.

The arguments for rape, incest, life-of-the-mother and fatal defects are rational, even if they prescribe tragic consequences. These can be worked out, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. But in America, they amount to roughly 3% of all abortions. It is not rational to open the sluiceway to the culture of death to deal with small numbers of exceptional cases.

As to being shipped off to the Vatican, I don’t think we can squeeze 5 billion people into a postage-stamp size country. Will the world death-worshipping elites allow them any other jurisdiction “with liberty and justice for all”? Your solution in medieval times was known as ghettoization. I predict that those who oppose the oncoming world government’s forcing abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide “rights” on everyone, will in fact, be ghettoized, at least until the elites develop a final solution to them. I see this tangibly, as if I were reading today’s headlines. The logic in entropic worldviews is inexorable.

When I drive by the local abortion “clinic” every day, I can’t help but be reminded of Nazi or Stalinist death camps. There are death camps spread throughout the world, in neighborhoods. Those who would condemn the German or Russian citizen for living next to their death camps without speaking up or questioning have little grounds to do so unless they recognize the holocaust going on in their own backyard. The 11 million illegal aliens in America are here because the demographic managers have allowed them in to replace the missing Americans who have been aborted, and who would have continued to prop up the base of the Social Security pyramid scheme. Every time some politician or over-active bureaucrat proposes a new restrictive law or regulation “for the safety and sake of the children,” I always substitute “for the survivors” in my head. The moral logic of doing anything for children within the culture of death is twisted beyond recognition.

When you say “one is human after conception because ‘something’ happens then even though they don’t know what that something is,” you are misrepresenting my position. Conception initiates the development of a self. From conception onward, we can alter the environmental factors and the genetic makeup that largely determine individuality. Before conception, any alteration to environmental factors or genetic makeup associated with any constituent biological precursors are allowed because there is no assurance that conception will occur. It is only when conception occurs that “selection” has taken place - success. We are no longer tampering with our own developing self, we are tampering with another developing self without that self’s consent. Because it is without consent, society has a right, through the political process, to ensure that the tampering is in the best interest of the unborn child according to the wisdom embodied in society’s ideals and accumulated experience. It is a similar situation to how society deals with resident non-citizens and with individuals mentally or physical unable to enter into contracts.

You cannot truly claim to be “life-promoting” and yet allow the murder of the weak, the sick and the old. To claim to be “life-promoting” without “a commitment to the anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia stance” is to live an ugly lie. Subject, of course, to the reasonable polycentric options I have previously spelled out.

The Death Wish

Friedrich Nietzsche, in Will to Power had this to say about nihilism:

[T]he nihilist does not believe that one needs to be logical. The reduction to nothing by judgment is seconded by the reduction to nothing by hand.… [T]he most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the ‘meaningless’), eternally! It is the most scientific of all possible hypotheses. We deny end goals: if existence had one it would have to have been reached…. Nihilism as a symptom that the underprivileged have no comfort left; that they destroy in order to be destroyed…. [T]he overall aim is...: ‘better not to be than to be.’ I see all philosophers, I see science kneeling before a reality that is the reverse of the struggle for existence as taught by Darwin’s school - that is to say, I see on top and surviving everywhere those who compromise life and the value of life.

Extropians, listen to the authority here. “Those who compromise life and the value of life” are nihilists, not extropians.

The idea that we are “meat-machines” is prevalent here. Machines have no rights, machines may interact in a dumb physical way with each other, but they do not have relations between subjective “I’s” in any sense. This is an entropic death-worshipping worldview, no humanity is contained in it whatsoever. It is self-fabricated license to murder and send humans to chop shops. Again, the premise is inherent in totalitarian regimes, the ordered realm of despots and tyrants. Any abhorrent action at all can be and has been rationalized away with “meat machine” as the central premise of human life.

Physicist: I have no definition for the word “evil”, however, if the word has any meaning at all then those who oppose assisted suicide are evil. Making a person live who wants to die is as horrendous as making a person die who wants to live, both are saying that my life is not my own and they can decide my fate, it’s the moral equivalent of murder. Such dangerous monsters should not be ghettoized, they should be guillotined.

But you are all for late term abortion, you support murder. Your embrace of the culture of death blinds you to the fact that assisted suicide is licensing doctors to murder developing selves of a greater age than the unborn. Individuals can die on their own, they just need to wait, no one is stopping them by not granting doctors a license to murder. The whole culture of death is all about the privileged place murder has in society.

When you declare that it is a moral imperative to guillotine opponents to the culture of death, at least you’ve dropped that “non-coercion” palaver that so many others who share your worldview pretend to. “Non-coercion” often serves as cover for the purpose of duping what’s left of civil society, while doing as you please willfully heedless of the negative consequences within society of your actions. This intentional ignorance of secondary consequences is what the philosopher David Stove called “autism” in a quote I previously posted: “...No ideal could be more destructive of human life than the ideal of non-coerciveness. [The only way] of producing a non-coercive human being is to produce an autistic one.” It is clear that amongst competing irreconcilable worldviews that someone is going to be coerced, to try to pretend otherwise is intellectually dishonest or lazy. 48% of Oregon voters, including me, voted against doctor-assisted suicide, aka, licensing doctors to murder. You’d better crank up your guillotine, because you have a lot of work “cut” out for you. To you, of course, you’re just pitting one machine against another, a “meat machine.” Guillotining half my state to you is no different than unplugging a toaster.

Albert Camus accurately described the nature of society when purpose and its derivative, values, are absent. Values are absent in the worldview of scientific nihilism which denies the presence of purpose in the universe. This quote is from The Rebel:

[I]f we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible and nothing is important. There is no pro or con; the murderer is neither right nor wrong. One is free to stoke the crematory fires, or to give one’s life to the care of lepers. Wickedness and virtue are just accident or whim. We may then decide not to act at all, which comes down to condoning other people’s murder, plus a little fastidious sorrow over human imperfection. Or we may hit upon tragic dilettantism as a substitute for action; in this case, human lives become counters in a game. Finally, we may resolve to undertake some action that is not wholly arbitrary. In this case, since we have no higher value to direct our action, we shall aim at efficiency. Since nothing is true or false, good or bad, our principle will become that of showing ourselves to be the most effective, in other words the most powerful. And then the world will no longer be divided into the just and the unjust, but into masters and slaves. Thus, whichever way we turn in the depths of negation and nihilism, murder has its privileged position.

Thus, the human-as-information-processor worldview wends it way over to the guillotine sooner or later.

In this barbarian nihilistic world, twisted “meat machines” find the value in an asset (that is, child) to be in the abuse and destruction itself. There are always plenty more where that one came from, they’re only machines (products) after all. Once you’re purchased a product you can do whatever you wish with it, you could practice your guillotining skills on babies, children, whatever product you desired. This goes against the grain of the core ethics of Western Civilization that have worked well for centuries on end, namely, humans are not to be used as means because they are ends in themselves. This would not produce less misery, only tyranny of the most brutal kind.

When you say that since we don’t agree on definitions, you’ll choose for individual freedom of choice, do you mean the unborn child’s freedom of choice? I didn’t think so. The developing self is weak and the mother is strong, not an equal standing, and the damage to society being able to uphold the values of life is due in part to the very obvious fact that the mother lays down her guardianship role, the keystone of civil society, to “choose” to murder her own unborn child. When the keystone falls, society falls.

What the Law Is

The Declaration of Independence is America’s Articles of Incorporation, the Constitution is its By-Laws. The By-Laws have no meaning without organic reference to the Articles of Incorporation. When the Supreme Court makes decisions that are cut free from the Declaration of Independence, it is acting as a law unto itself with no legitimacy at all, simply force, if it can get the executive and legislative branches to acquiesce.

As to what Roe v. Wade legalized, this is the law of the land: “In America, abortion is legal on demand right through nine months, in fact, right up to having the baby 2/3 out of the birth canal on its due date.” A Gallop poll conducted in the spring of 1990 found that 80 percent of Americans disagreed that abortion was legal on demand through nine months and 65 percent disagreed strongly. It is a common case of legal illiteracy. A majority of five justices is all it takes to continue the holocaust. The Webster and Casey cases did allow some states to place some conditions on abortion, but the fact remains that if you live in America, you can legally find a place that will abort your child on its due date with the child 2/3 out of the birth canal for any reason whatsoever. Even the doctor who recently testified before Congress that partial birth abortions were rare and primarily done to protect the life of the mother, later recanted his testimony out of shame, and admitted that they were far more prevalent than the orthodox press dared report and that 90% were elective, i.e., on demand.

Let me clarify the current law. I am going to quote from Before the Shooting Begins by James Davison Hunter (1994) pgs. 247-249:

In 1973 Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion for the Supreme Court, arguing that a woman’s decision to terminate or continue her pregnancy is a fundamental right, part of a ‘right of privacy.’ [...] In Roe itself, abortion was proscribed after viability, yet after viability (measured typically at the end of the sixth month) states must permit abortions that are necessary to preserve maternal life or health. In Roe’s companion decision, Doe v. Bolton, the court defined ‘health’ as ‘all factors... relevant to the well-being of the patient - including emotional, psychological, familial [factors] and the woman’s age.’ [...] Subsequent decisions not only reaffirmed Roe but extended its interpretation, overturning virtually every effort to restrict the practice of abortion. [Examples incl. Planned Parenthood v. Danforth (1976), City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, Inc. (1983), Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (1986).] What was so unique about this evolving law was that it forbade any state regulation of abortion for the sake of preserving the fetus until viability. Even after viability there would be no federal regulation oriented toward protecting the fetus until birth. [...] In practice, then, a pregnant woman could get an abortion at any time during pregnancy if she desired it and if a single doctor (who might be the one performing the abortion) judged the abortion necessary to preserve her health (broadly construed to include a notion of well-being). In sum, Roe was a ‘compromise.’ It did not technically permit abortion on demand for the full nine months. On the other hand, by defining abortion as a ‘fundamental right’ and striking down efforts ‘to protect the developing fetus’ in challenges subsequent to Roe, the Supreme Court did provide a foundation for the practice of abortion on demand for the full nine months.


I am going to post a few quotes from Evangelium Vitae (1995) by Pope John Paul II because he makes very cogent points that are life-affirming.

In fact, while the climate of widespread moral uncertainty can in some way be explained by the multiplicity and gravity of today’s social problems, and these can sometimes mitigate the subjective responsibility of individuals, it is no less true that we are confronted by an even larger reality, which can be described as a veritable structure of sin. This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable “culture of death”. This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency. Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of “conspiracy against life” is unleashed.

The eclipse of the sense of God and of man inevitably leads to a practical materialism, which breeds individualism, utilitarianism and hedonism. The values of being are replaced by those of having. The only goal which counts is the pursuit of one’s own material well-being. The so-called “quality of life” is interpreted primarily or exclusively as economic efficiency, inordinate consumerism, physical beauty and pleasure, to the neglect of the more profound dimensions - interpersonal, spiritual and religious - of existence. In such a context suffering, an inescapable burden of human existence but also a factor of possible personal growth, is “censored”, rejected as useless, indeed opposed as an evil, always and in every way to be avoided. When it cannot be avoided and the prospect of even some future well-being vanishes, then life appears to have lost all meaning and the temptation grows in man to claim the right to suppress it. In the materialistic perspective described so far, interpersonal relations are seriously impoverished. The first to be harmed are women, children, the sick or suffering, and the elderly. The criterion of personal dignity - which demands respect, generosity and service - is replaced by the criterion of efficiency, functionality and usefulness: others are considered not for what they “are”, but for what they “have, do and produce”. This is the supremacy of the strong over the weak.

If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds. Each one wishes to assert himself independently of the other and in fact intends to make his own interests prevail. Still, in the face of other people’s analogous interests, some kind of compromise must be found, if one wants a society in which the maximum possible freedom is guaranteed to each individual. In this way, any reference to common values and to a truth absolutely binding on everyone is lost, and social life ventures on to the shifting sands of complete relativism. At that point, everything is negotiable, everything is open to bargaining: even the first of the fundamental rights, the right to life. This is what is happening also at the level of politics and government: the original and inalienable right to life is questioned or denied on the basis of a parliamentary vote or the will of one part of the people - even if it is the majority. This is the sinister result of a relativism which reigns unopposed: the ‘right’ ceases to be such, because it is no longer firmly founded on the inviolable dignity of the person, but is made subject to the will of the stronger part. In this way democracy, contradicting its own principles, effectively moves towards a form of totalitarianism. To claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others.

In seeking the deepest roots of the struggle between the ‘culture of life’ and the ‘culture of death’, we cannot restrict ourselves to the perverse idea of freedom mentioned above. We have to go to the heart of the tragedy being experienced by modern man: the eclipse of the sense of God and of man, typical of a social and cultural climate dominated by secularism, which, with its ubiquitous tentacles, succeeds at times in putting Christian communities themselves to the test. Man is no longer able to see himself as ‘mysteriously different’ from other earthly creatures; he regards himself merely as one more living being, as an organism which, at most, has reached a very high stage of perfection. Enclosed in the narrow horizon of his physical nature, he is somehow reduced to being ‘a thing’, and no longer grasps the ‘transcendent’ character of his ‘existence as man’. Life itself becomes a mere ‘thing’, which man claims as his exclusive property, completely subject to his control and manipulation.


My biggest worry for the future is this combination of the sense of life being a ‘thing’, the increasing commercialized production of all life including, of course, human life, with a global bureaucratic tyranny. Under these conditions, with these presuppositions and ideals, what nightmares are possible?

Reilly Jones

© 2001

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