Live right on

In Wendell Berry's novel Hannah Coulter, Hannah's husband Nathan has a repeated saying: "We're going to live right on." As Hannah trenchantly notes, Nathan does not say it often, and he says it only when living right on is going to be difficult.

In the end, Nathan gets cancer in his old age, and he declines treatment that he deems extraordinary and goes through a dying process that we now associate with home hospice care, eventually dying naturally in his own home in the presence of his wife and a close friend.

But Hannah finds it difficult at first to accept Nathan's decision to decline aggressive cancer treatment. Here is part of the scene:

My tears were falling into the bowl of beaten eggs and then my nose dripped into it. I flung the whole frosthy mess into the sink. I said, "Well, what are you planning to do? Just die? Or what?"

I couldn't turn around. I heard him fold the paper. After a minute he said, "Dear Hannah, I'm going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself."

He came to me then, an old man weakened and ill, with my Nathan looking out of his eyes. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came. I fixed some supper, and we ate.

He lived right on.

I must confess here that, since the Covid-19 pandemic began, I have often felt a sense of paralysis that has prevented me from blogging, especially about the pandemic. Those who follow my public content on Facebook know that that has been loosening somewhat lately, as I state more forthrightly what I think in public posts. But for a while, I was simply not talking publicly. At first I wanted to tread carefully while watching how the empirical situation unfolded. Then I was almost stunned with horror at the destruction I saw being carried out by what I considered (and still consider) to be the disproportionate, unwise, and dystopian governmental response to the virus and, perhaps even more, by the fracturing and disagreement among otherwise sane and sensible people, including Christians and pro-lifers.

There were other reasons for not writing much on this topic. For a while I was finishing drafting my forthcoming book on John, The Eye of the Beholder. That manuscript is now with the publisher for electronic typesetting. Then I was working hard on my blog posts and video scripts for my responses to Michael Licona. That playlist and blog series are now completed. Then I was not wanting to do anything that might confusingly intersperse current posts at this blog with the massive archiving project in which others copied my apologetics and biblical studies posts over many years from What's Wrong With the World to this blog. So there was always something. And now I still have other work to do, including my duties at home.

In the back of my mind, too, was a feeling of utter weariness and a certain amount of shock at the attitudes being taken and their vehemence: Whom would I offend if I said openly that I think many if not most of the measures being taken against this virus are overly draconian and to that extent misguided, vastly overlooking spiritual and other intangible harms? Would that undermine my work in New Testament and apologetics? Who might hold such comments against me? Who might use them to portray me as some kind of anti-science kook? How much should I allow such considerations to weigh? And who has time for the never-ending squabbling of social media?

But recently, perhaps partly (in an odd way) as a result of the horrifically tragic death of Mike Adams, I have begun speaking out more, though in what I hope are judicious and thoughtful terms. See, for example, here, here, here, and here.

Today (it might seem, irrelevantly) I got my car's oil changed. While sitting in the waiting room at the dealership, clad (more or less) in a dutiful face shield, I was reading a back issue of The Human Life Review, produced during the New York City lockdown. It was a bit of a time capsule (of a time only a few months ago), with some articles showing no awareness of the pandemic and others being all about it. As usual with HLR, there were several well-researched and interesting articles about such esoteric and interesting matters as the under-reporting of abortion complications and the character of Abigail Adams (really). The short pandemic op-eds contained at least one cautionary note about the possible ill effects of lockdowns, but two of them expressed horror at what the authors saw as the brutal rhetoric, incompatible with a pro-life position, of those speaking against lockdowns. As we have seen for months, the pro-life version of, "You just want Grandma to die" is the claim that those who are raising the dangers of lockdowns see those in vulnerable populations as expendable. 

Now, to be fair, it absolutely does not help when some people speak against lockdowns by using talk of "quality of life years." Yikes! Don't do that. You just blur distinctions that need to be un-blurred, and you definitely give fodder to the "expendable lives" claim. Of course, others have pointed out more eloquently than I, and with more statistics, that many people will die as a result of economic and other indirect effects of the lockdowns themselves--people driven into poverty, people who don't get needed medical care, people driven to despair. Are their lives expendable?

As part of the archiving project, this older post of mine came to light--an important bit of work, if I may say so myself.

But now I can add to it. What I argued there is that there is a great danger in our own time of loving death too much rather than loving life too much. I pointed out that older Christian writers, such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, saw a kind of vitalism or transhumanism that seeks to retain and lengthen life at all costs as the great danger in their time, whereas our own danger is somewhat different.

All true. And yet we are also now faced by paradoxes. Consider: In Canada, elderly people (and non-elderly people, for that matter) can choose euthanasia but can't (as in most nursing homes in the U.S.) have relatives visit them, lest they contract Covid-19 and die. Think about that. They can choose death, even due to the loneliness of the Covid restrictions (see this anecdotal comment), but they can't risk death by way of such an ordinary activity as seeing their children, friends, and grandchildren. Euthanasia advocates have even scrambled to be sure that euthanasia assistance is available by Zoom.

As this conversation points out, because ours is a materialistic culture, the physical goal of avoiding death is elevated to the detriment of intangible goods. True. But at the same time, abortion clinics were kept open in my state of Michigan as "essential" even during the hardest lockdown. Not only did this involve deliberately killing babies, it also exposed the mothers and their relatives, bent on the death of the child, to potential medical complications and, for that matter, virus infection, for the goal of making sure that no unwanted child was born. This seems to mean that Thanatos will have his sacrifice, come what may.

Does our secular Western country fear death too much or too little? Does it worship Death or run from him?

As it turns out, both. As a woman planning to access assisted suicide says openly here, it's all about control. "I choose to be in control," she says.

Now, this is just exactly morally backwards. In answer to the misguided hand-wringing about supposedly heartless and "Darwinian" concerns about lockdowns, masking, and other draconian measures, and also in answer to the death doctors, we must distinguish all of the following:

1) Killing people directly and deliberately (as in abortion and assisted suicide and euthanasia). (Always wrong)

2) Foregoing treatment that the patient understandably deems extraordinary. (Sometimes entirely legitimate)

3) Withholding basic care, such as food and water. (Always wrong.)

4) Engaging in otherwise entirely legitimate actions, such as spending time with friends, opening a legitimate business, singing, going to church, traveling, etc., which by an entirely indirect and unintended process causes a death.

It should be evident that #4 is something that we all have to risk doing all the time. It is impossible to live at all without risking causing someone else's death. It is shallow to say that we can take risks only for ourselves. As I pointed out here, we must take risks for other people constantly. Just driving down the road to take your child to get a vaccination risks causing a death by an indirect process, in an accident--your child's death, for one. There is nothing remotely un-pro-life, much less "Darwinian," about saying that you, and others, should go ahead and live life in a more or less normal way, doing moral and even praiseworthy activities, even if this risks causing a death as a result of someone's catching Covid. Of course we must take into account the degree of risk and the importance of the activity in question, and of course there are reasonable precautions we can take (I am not advocating "Covid parties"!). And of course reasonable people can and will differ on what count as reasonable precautions. The point is that risking an indirect and unintended death by engaging in a legitimate activity is business as usual in a contingent world, not heartless immorality. Indeed, by not acting in a way that carries risk, for ourselves and for others, we may indirectly cause more deaths! 

This is where the older authors such as C.S. Lewis have much to teach us. Lewis's characters in his Narnia books talk boldly about "taking the adventure that Aslan sends us." In the water world of Perelandra, the unfallen Green Lady emphasizes the importance of "accepting the wave" that God sends rather than demanding certainty and security. This is exactly what we are now being told never to do. Our hyper-controlling world worships the god Death at the same time that it fears him with a great fear, and the end result is that we never accept the wave or the adventure. In a grisly reversal of all right values, we flee from Death even to the extent of killing our incarnate friendships and our joyful gatherings, while at other times those in our secular world choose to seek out Death (at the abortion mill, at the hands of the euthanasia doctor) to offer him a living sacrifice, unholy and acceptable. Being Christians helps us to see where all of that goes wrong, though one should not need to be a Christian to see it. 

Life is a contingent gift and must be embraced and lived. If you do not believe in God, you may not know how to express that, and in a sense you may not consciously believe it. But in your best moments, you sense it and know it. And you also know that life must be lived and seized and that life is not without risk. Indeed, any driving instructor knows that the student who tries too hard to avoid risk in making a lefthand turn is often the student whose driving is the most dangerous, the most indecisive and tentative, and hence the most likely to cause an accident. Prudence is not dithering. Prudence is not the vain attempt to avoid all risk. Prudence must not be turned into the enemy of all gallantry, courage, joy, and generosity. And prudence is not trying literally to put human relationships and societies into "freeze" mode, shutting them down indefinitely or over and over again, in the hopes that a pathogen will pack its bags and leave in discouragement and that one will do more good than harm by such means. (Nor is such a hope scientific in its basis. Wherefore acting on it is not, ultimately, prudent!) 

At the same time, if you actually do love and care about human life, you ought to be able to see the terrible irony in continuing to kill humans deliberately while compassing land and sea, causing untold spin-off harms (including deaths), in order to avoid causing a single accidental death by means of a single, specific virus.

So if the lady in the nursing home wants to see her relatives, let her see her relatives. Let her take that risk. Let them hold each others' hands and see each others' faces. That is a healthy attitude. It can and should be a part of a healthy worldview that is as far removed as possible from the euthanasia mindset. And if others want to work and rejoice and gather and see each other face to face, don't tell them that this must mean that they do not care about the elderly lady. Their actions can and should be part of a healthy worldview that is as far removed as possible from the desire to see others die or even to neglect them. It should be part of embracing life and should provide the society (both economically and interpersonally) in which the elderly can be cared for rather than being isolated "for their own good." But beware: If you tell all of these people that they must be anti-life to think this way, you risk their believing you, which would be a tragic confusion.

I hope to continue saying these things as a reminder from time to time, while I continue working on other things. 

Live right on. Dying will have to take care of itself.

Making the Inklings talk to the future--On Death

 

Making the Inklings talk to the future--On Death

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

In C.S. Lewis's introduction to Athanasius's "On the Incarnation," he has this to say about reading books from other time periods.

Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

I propose here to represent one of the "books of the future" in relation to Lewis's own writings, and Tolkien's as well. Only, making it easy on myself, I will write just a long blog post of the future rather than a whole book. (Though this post is now long enough almost to qualify as a book.) The subject I want to address is death, and specifically voluntary death.

Both Lewis and Tolkien believed with some firmness that the great danger concerning man and death lay in man's being too afraid of death and too opposed to death rather than being pro-death or attracted to death. Again and again, in their letters, in their fiction, in their glosses on their fiction, and in reported comments, they teach an acceptance of death and the goodness of "going gently into that good night" as a way of accepting the will of God and avoiding hubris--a kind of vitalistic clinging to life that is (as they view it) contrary to accepting our human nature.

This emphasis leads to a romanticizing of death and even to flirting with a "death with dignity" concept, as well as a problematic horror of the disabilities of old age.

Some of the relevant comments in Lewis's work are quite harmless. For example, in The Magicians' Nephew, the Witch tries to tempt Digory to take an apple that will make him immortal. This particular temptation bounces right off Digory:

"No thanks," said Digory, I don't know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I'd rather live an ordinary time and die and go to Heaven."

Which is okay as far as it goes.

More jarring when you stop to think about it is Jill's rather ruthless comment on death and old age in The Last Battle:

"Even if we are killed. I'd rather be killed fighting for Narnia than grow old and stupid at home and perhaps go about in a bathchair and then die in the end just the same."

Well, then! This is realistic dialogue put into the mouth of a girl of Jill's age (she's supposed to be in approximately her early teens), but it gives one a bit of a jolt to suspect that Lewis himself expects the reader to take it as a gallant and admirable sentiment (willingness to die in battle for Narnia!) as opposed to an expression of casual bigotry from the young to the old, an expression of disdain for the value of the lives of those disabled by old age. Heaven forbid that one should get "old and stupid" much less having to go about in a wheelchair!

Lewis's description and idealization of the Hrossa in Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis's contribution to the ancient genre of utopia literature, by the way) makes the same point: Acceptance of death is good. Resistance to death is bad and a sign of demonic influence. The rational creatures on Mars were apparently intended to be mortal and even short-lived from the outset; death was not (it seems) a punishment for sin--a literary idea found in Tolkien as well, which I'll discuss below. When Mars (the planet the Hrossa live on) became cold long ago in its history, so that more of them would die and more quickly than before, their angelic guardian was concerned only because Satan would make them fear death rather than peacefully, happily accepting it:

Many thousands of years before this [says Oyarsa, the angelic planet guardian],...the cold death was coming on my harandra. Then I was in deep trouble, not chiefly for the death of my hnau [rational creatures]--Maleldil [God] does not make them long-livers--but for the things which the lord of your world [Satan]...put into their minds. He would have made them as your people are now--wise enough to see the death of their kind approaching but not wise enough to endure it. Bent counsels would soon have risen among them...[These included the apparently sinful (!) idea of making space ships and traveling to other planets, which Lewis regards as inherently wrong in opposition to accepting the death of one's whole species.] By me Maleldil stopped them. Some I cured, some I unbodied [executed]....[O]ne thing we left behind us on the harandra: fear. And with fear, murder and rebellion. The weakest of my people does not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes your lives and befouls them with flying from what you know will overtake you in the end. If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace."

At this point, Weston, the villain of the book, bursts out, "Defeatist trash!" I suppose that if you feel that there is something...weird about regarding death and even extinction of the whole race as something good and no problem, you are also a villain like Weston.

In Oyarsa's analysis, the fear of death is the root of all evil. This is (I have to point out) not a teaching found anywhere in the Bible, nor a truth of reason. Indeed, it is quite rational to fear death, and St. Paul calls it "the last enemy."

Lewis so romanticizes the peaceful acceptance of death among the hrossa that he told one correspondent that he deliberately made their birth rates below replacement to show that they are not only happily accepting their own personal deaths but also the death of their whole race.

I admit I made the birth rates among the Hrossa a bit too low: but of course you must remember that I was picturing a world in its extreme old age--like an old man tranquilly and happily proceeding to his end. (Letter to Martin, July 10, 1957, Letters to Children, p. 70)

To be fair, in the next book, Perelandra, the characters on Venus are far more like Adam and Eve, and it is clear that death will come to them only if they sin and will be a curse. Ransom is very anti-death and tries to convince the Green Lady that death has a "foul smell." So Lewis is not entirely consistent in his literary approach.

In general, though, the notion of acceptance of death as a high-minded norm is Lewis's more common theme. It is sounded again in a letter to a friend where he treats voluntary death as a noble act, one that few people would undertake if the option were available.

Have you ever thought what it wd. be like if (all other things remaining as they are) old age and death had been made optional? All other things remaining: i.e. it wd. still be true that our real destiny was elsewhere, that we have no abiding city here and not true happiness, but the un-hitching from this life was left to be accomplished by our own will as an act of obedience & faith. I suppose the percentage of di-ers wd be about the same as the percentage of Trappists is now. (Letter to Dr. Warfield Firor, October 15, 1949)

This is a place where our perspective from the future is useful--as indeed it is useful on this whole subject of death. We actually now have many stories of supposedly "good" deaths, carried out by people who have had an ominous diagnosis and want to retain control by controlling the time of their death. There are happy-happy stories about how they gather their families around them and even have going-away parties. Priests are even being pressured to give them last rights just before they become "voluntary di-ers." Holland is even considering extending assisted suicide to those who merely "feel their lives are complete"--something that we pro-lifers see as dystopian but that bears a surprising similarity to Lewis's "voluntary di-ers," whom he regards as especially good Christians. It also resembles Tolkien's Numenoreans, about which more in a moment.

We now know that there is nothing particularly utopian or spiritual about choosing the time of your death and dying voluntarily. What looks to those who haven't lived in a world of assisted suicide like Christian renunciation looks to those who have fought the culture of death like an act of extreme human control-freakishness. "I will not allow myself to become disabled, a burden, unhappy, undignified. I will choose and bring about my own death sooner than that."

One could say, truly enough, that none of these passages in Lewis's letters or books actually touch explicitly on suicide or voluntary death in our own real world.

One explicit mention I know of is Puddleglum's statement in The Silver Chair that suicide is not "allowed," though the context even there is that Puddleglum is saying (rather disturbingly) that suicide would be "the best thing we could do" as self-punishment for accidentally eating talking stag!

Lewis did explicitly tell Sheldon Vanauken that he must not commit suicide after the death of his beloved wife Davy and even hinted that doing so might create an "unbridgeable chasm" between him and his wife--an implication that suicide, which Lewis called in that letter "disobedience," would cause damnation. (A Severe Mercy, p. 210)

But the most striking of all of Lewis's comments on the subject of death and suicide is recounted by a former student, Charles Wrong, in C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, p. 111.

About suicide: "You know, there's nothing to condemn it in the Bible, in the Old or the New Testament. I think it must be a pagan idea; comes from Plato. I accept it purely on authority. But I remember once I said to a doctor that I didn't see why the incurably sick shouldn't be gtiven release from pain; and I remember what he said: 'You've had no clinical experience, Lewis. Like most of the people who talk like that, you're in robust health. You'll find that it's hardly ever the incurably sick who want to be released, whatever the pain is like. It's their families who hate to see them suffer, and can't stand the emotional strain (or, of course, the worry and expense), that start saying, "Doctor, he mustn't be allowed to suffer--far better to put him out of his misery".'"

Wrong recounts this conversation as having happened on August 8, 1959, when he ran into Lewis in Oxford. Lewis's wife's cancer was in remission at the time, and Lewis sounds like he was in a particularly joyful mood as a result. (The cancer was found to have returned that October.)

This is an interesting set of comments indeed! Lewis apparently accepts that suicide is wrong, but solely on the basis of Christian "authority," though that authority isn't Scripture, which he emphatically points out says nothing on the subject. Presumably he means something like Christian tradition. Even there, he guesses that the tradition itself was influenced by pagan ideas, such as Plato's (partial) condemnation of suicide. He is saying that he had temporarily expressly endorsed euthanasia as "giving release from pain" in conversation with Havard, his doctor friend who wrote an afterword to The Problem of Pain and whom he is presumably referring to here. Havard responded with a point that is legitimate as far as it goes, a point that has been made in recent years by pro-lifers. Wesley J. Smith talks of "putting people out of our misery," which is what Havard is talking about. Nonetheless, even there, the objection is not one of absolute principle but a cautionary prudential point that voluntary euthanasia often ends up not being at the will of the patient himself but of his relatives. Lewis evidently accepted both what Havard said on the prudential side as well as the Christian prohibition on suicide. But his heart seems to have been on the side of the nobleness of peaceful, chosen death and the relief of being able to give and accept release from pain into death at the end of one's life. And for that matter, his reason, since he accepts the wrongness of such things purely on authority rather than as a matter of the natural light.

The letter to Vanauken shows that Lewis took the Christian prohibition on suicide quite seriously, as he would, but he does not seem to have felt or seen its wrongness, and the death-accepting defeatism and resignation (sorry to sound like the evil Weston) of Out of the Silent Planet is a good indication of where his mind and heart were at. (Interestingly, some dialogue in Out of the Silent Planet also reflects his acceptance of the idea that earth is headed for severe overpopulation and that this is a result of a disorder in human sexuality. The hrossa's low birth rates enable them to avoid overpopulation as well as bringing about voluntary extinction, which is seen as a good.)

J.R.R. Tolkien's letters and work show an interestingly similar approach to the subject of death to Lewis's, though I don't know of any place in non-fiction where Tolkien expressly touches on the general wrongness of suicide or euthanasia. In The Lord of the Rings, Denethor's despairing suicide by burning himself to death is condemned in the strongest possible terms, with special horror focusing on his attempt (fortunately unsuccessful) to take with him his sick and unconscious son Faramir. Gandalf's words are quite clear:

"Authority is not given to you, Steward of Gondor, to order the hour of your death," answered Gandalf. "And only the heathen kings, under the dominion of the Dark Power, did thus, slaying themselves in pride and despair, murdering their kin to ease their own death." The Return of the King, p. 157

But as an indication of Tolkien's general attitude toward voluntary death, this is not as straightforward as it might seem. For overall, Tolkien's mythos is that his "high men," the men of Numenor (from whom Denethor is descended) actually can naturally "order the time of their own death." (Though not by self-immolation!) Death, in fact, is said to be the gift of God to them, and the fear of death and desire to avoid it (as with Lewis's hrossa) is the greatest danger.

The wicked Numenoreans, says Tolkien, became consumed with "the desire to escape death" (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 155), and by it they fell by trying to go to the land of the immortals in the hopes of gaining immortality thereby. Tolkien is quite explicit that death is not a curse in his fictional mythos:

...[In the mythos of the story] [m]en are mortal by right and nature....It might or might not be 'heretical', if these myths were regarded as statements about the actual nature of man in the real world: I do not know. But the view of the myth is that Death--the mere shortness of human life-span--is not a punishment for the Fall, but a biologically (and therefore also spiritually, since body and spirit are integrated) inherent part of Man's nature. The attempt to escape it is wicked because 'unnatural', and silly because Death in that sense is the Gift of God (envied by the Elves), release from the weariness of time. Death, in the penal sense, is viewed as a change in attitude to it: fear, reluctance. A good Numenorean died of free will when he felt it to be time to do so. (Letter to Fr. Robert Murray, S.J. November 4, 1954, Letters, p. 205, footnote, emphasis added)

Yes, this certainly would be heretical if made as a statement about matters in the real world, since it expressly denies what Christian doctrine affirms--that human death is a curse and a result of the Fall. Perhaps realizing this, Tolkien "walks back" these comments in a different letter draft from 1958; there he says that this idea that death is not a curse is only the point of view of the time-weary and immortal elves (pp. 285-6) and that the mythology is not necessarily inconsistent with the idea that death is ultimately a curse and a result of an earlier human fall. But this is unconvincing and, in fact, the view Tolkien described to Fr. Murray is the consistent view of his published writings.

In the appendix to The Lord of the Rings that tells the story of Arwen and Aragorn, Tolkien pictures precisely the act of voluntary death when it is carried out by Aragorn. It involves simply lying down in the House of the Kings where the kings are entombed and accepting death willingly in old age. There is some revealing dialogue between Aragorn and Arwen, who tries to dissuade him.

"Would you then, lord, before your time leave your people who live by your word?" she said.

"Not before my time," he answered. "For if I will not go now, then I must soon go perforce. And Eldarion our son is a man full-ripe for kingship."

[snip]

"Take counsel with yourself, beloved, and ask whether you would indeed have me wait until I wither and fall from my high seat unmanned and witless. Nay, lady, I am the last of the Numenoreans and the latest King of the Elder Days; and to me has been given not only a span thrice that of Men of Middle-earth, but also the grace to go at my will, and give back the gift. Now, therefore, I will sleep."

Aragorn's diction, of course, is far different from Jill's reference to getting "old and stupid" and "going about in a bathchair," but the sentiment is quite similar. "Unmanned and witless" is clear enough. And Aragorn is suggesting a false dichotomy. He could abdicate from his kingship and cede his throne to Eldarion without dying. Many aging kings have done precisely that, abdicating in favor of a vigorous son and heir.

Because Tolkien is a very great literary genius, he makes it believable that this is right for Aragorn to do, as indeed it is allowed in the world he has built. He even concedes something to the tension between that mythos and the real world by having Arwen say, "[I]f this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive."

As a good Catholic, Tolkien would presumably have opposed all forms of suicide and euthanasia in our real world. But as with Lewis, there is the tendency to idealize as a "good death" a death that is not only foreseen but personally chosen and timed.

Both Tolkien and Lewis walk a narrow path between the Christian notion of renunciation and acceptance of the griefs of this world and a pagan notion that death is better than debility and dishonor. As Christians, they both had a good deal of latitude and even encouragement to advocate the way of renunciation. Nor do I want to say that fear of death can never spring from a lack of faith (though it does not necessarily spring from a lack of faith) or that clinging to life can never be done in a wrong way. For that matter, strictly unethical means of clinging to life (e.g., embryonic research to try to find cures for disease) have grown up in our own time alongside of the glorification of chosen "death with dignity."

I don't want to be anachronistic, and indeed I realize that the Christian teaching against euthanasia and suicide was not preached or understood quite as clearly in England in the mid-twentieth century as it has been since then. Dorothy Sayers, undeniably a Christian, puts an unequivocal endorsement of euthanasia into the mouth of the Dowager Duchess of Denver, generally the epitome of good sense in Sayers's mystery novels. The Duchess's style of speech is always wonderfully convoluted, but the meaning is clear enough on the subject at hand:

"...because, if I'm interfering, you know," said the Duchess, "I had much better be put in a lethal chamber at once, like poor Agag [a cat who has been euthanised]...--and why everybody shouldn't be if they feel like it, I don't know, when they get old and sick and a nuisance to themselves--..." Busman's Honeymoon, p. 352

It is a passing, a very passing, comment, but the fact that the Christian Sayers has the Duchess endorse Euthanasia for All! so casually and as if its rightness is obvious, when the Duchess is supposed to be always right, is quite striking and tells us a good deal all by itself about the climate of the time. Notice again the dismissive reference to debility: "old and sick and a nuisance to themselves." Both the Dowager Duchess and her creatrix, of course, are playing with counters. No one was actually going to put them in a lethal chamber, for that was still a legal world in which doctors could be prosecuted for over-prescribing morphine, a fact well-known to British mystery novel buffs.

As medical advances were moving and something like an early version of transhumanism brewing, Lewis and Tolkien perhaps understandably fixated upon a kind of uber-humanism and vitalism as the great dangers and incorporated this concern into their fictional worlds, making acceptance of death an unequivocally holy and peaceful attitude and the increase of longevity, putting off natural death, a Satanic thing. That this was consonant with their own, and their culture's, difficulty in seeing and feeling the wrongness of at least peaceful suicide and euthanasia was a point that went unnoticed. That it was all too consonant with their culture's casually cruel views of old age and disability was an undeniable blind spot, one that we pro-lifers have had to rid ourselves of in the succeeding decades.

This was, after all, a world in which mentally disabled children were often casually called "monsters" and routinely institutionalized while their parents tried again for a healthy child. Compassion for disability was not a self-conscious value even among many Christians.

It is easy enough for social conservatives to see the past through a golden haze, but many of the worst ideas that have borne fruit in our time were popular among intellectuals a full hundred years ago, especially those concerning death--euthanasia, eugenics and abortion. Moreover, the sophisticated pro-life arguments that have been forged in the crucible of political resistance since then were not as readily available. One of the most important of these is the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means and the distinction between not using extraordinary means of medical treatment and euthanasia. These nuances had yet to be explicitly hammered out in the 1950s.

Lewis, Tolkien, and even Sayers were humane, brilliant, and foresighted Christians, but it should not be surprising that even they had their blind spots, especially given the Christian tradition of renunciation, hope in the next world rather than in this world, and accepting death from the hand of God.

I do not press this dialogue between the present and the past to preen or gloat--"Look how we know better now than they did." Rather, the blind spots of the past can be a cautionary tale to the present, even on the very same issue. The combination of brilliance, erudition, generally humane conservatism, and an over-fondness for death, amounting even to an endorsement of euthanasia, are known in our own time when they are far less excusable.

As I mentioned here several years ago, the much-admired conservative icon Roger Scruton endorsed euthanasia for the elderly. (See Chapter 4, called "Dying Quietly," in A Political Philosophy, 2006.) Scruton's feelings expressed there are eminently British. He shrinks from an out-and-out euthanasia regime, especially if it is involuntary. He proposes instead that the old be gently pressured to shuffle off this mortal coil in genteel ways, such as by not using medications that will keep them alive longer ("medicines," which he mentions repeatedly, are hardly in themselves an extraordinary measure!) or by giving their families permission to give them an overdose of morphine, which the law will then wink its eye at in his ideal world. In this way the elderly will prevent their families from wanting to kill them involuntarily because they are, by their longevity, suffering the "living death of the loveless" (p. 76) and holding on to their own assets, which their heirs are in a hurry to get hold of (pp. 76-77).

But I shouldn't say too much, too snarkily, about the British here nor even about the fact that Scruton is a non-Christian. Just three years before the publication of Scruton's book, the possibly even more erudite and witty, not to mention Catholic, conservative titan William F. Buckley shocked pro-lifers by using his speech at the first Great Defender of Life dinner for the Human Life Foundation (!) (October, 2003) to endorse euthanasia and, specifically, the death of Terri Schiavo (then still alive), about whose situation he was full of an inexcusable combination of hubris and misinformation. Buckley was not the Great Defender of Life award winner himself. Henry Hyde was receiving the award. Buckley was one of the speech-givers involved in the presentation. The attendees at the dinner, the creme de la creme of the pro-life movement, got an unexpected, condescending lecture that evening. Buckley's speech was a sustained piece of propaganda for loosening our moral strictures against euthanasia.

After mentioning Terri Schiavo’s life in which she had been, says Buckley, “stricken into physical and mental immobility," clearly sympathizing with her husband, he moves back in time to the Karen Ann Quinlan case and seems to deem it unfortunate that she did not die when her ventilator was removed. He says, of her eventual death, “[I] do not doubt that the end was greeted with relief--by everyone.” One wonders how he thinks he knows that. After an allusion to Pope Pius XII’s condemnation of “heroic therapy,” Buckley continues:

Can such thought as gave rise to the factor of moral qualification apply today, a fortiori, to life that goes on, unwelcome by everyone, imposing great strains on the medical community, and strains also on family and beloved friends who need to act as though the insensate person were still with them, an active member of the family, though such is not the case? Exposing surviving loved ones to the sundering emotional drama of living with someone as though alive, though for all sensate purposes dead? ("Ventilating Life and Death: A Symposium: A Question that Begs for Moral Illumination," Human Life Review, Winter, 2004)

After this bit of appalling dehumanization of the cognitively disabled, which he clearly means to apply to Terri Schiavo and Karen Ann Quinlan, Buckley continues pompously,

This is the question I hope the Human Life Review will probe, inviting its superb stable of theologians and journalists to give thought to a question that begs for moral illumination.

Because of course the “superb stable” he smarmily flatters had never done anything like that before the fall of 2003 and needed him to prompt them to do so.

The Human Life Foundation directors were sufficiently taken aback by Buckley's behavior that they didn't include Buckley's remarks in the omnibus collection of the other speeches in the fall of 2003 issue. Instead, like the thinky people they are, they did just what Buckley suggested and convened a symposium, published in the Winter, 2004, issue. This included both Buckley's original remarks and a panoply of responses to them.

This embarrassing incident has mostly been forgotten by the pro-life community, but it was quite a bombshell at the time, and I remember quite well when it happened--when a supposedly conservative icon, selected to speak at a pro-life gala, stood up and haughtily lectured those who invited him for being opposed to euthanasia. It goes to show that we cannot take the solidly pro-life understanding even of high-profile conservatives for granted.

Buckley was clearly psychologically bothered by the same thing that worried the other thinkers (in my opinion better thinkers than Buckley) whom I have been discussing--the feeling of horror and misery at the thought that one, or one's loved ones, could be living on after they have lost what we are inclined to call their dignity.

It is a perfectly natural human feeling to hope wistfully that God will choose to take one to heaven, gently and naturally, in such a way that one avoids the suffering, debility, loneliness, and embarrassment that we associate with old age. Or for that matter, with accident or severe illness. Such a hope is not wrong in itself. Those things certainly are privations. There is no point in pretending otherwise. Being in a wheelchair is being disabled, not "differently abled." Mourning what we lose with age or sickness is legitimate.

It is interesting, though, how easily the desire to avoid suffering and loss can be made to seem to oneself like a noble acceptance of loss: Look at me, I'm willing to die whenever God wants to take me! This world is not my home, and something better awaits! ("That way I won't ever have to wear a diaper, forget things, and be a burden...") It's not as though it is wrong to hope, in the perfect divine plan, to avoid suffering and embarrassment, but we should see this hope for death for what it is--the opposite of renunciation and acceptance.

In a time when the lover-monster Death, the god Thanatos, has so many worshipers, it is important to bring to light our own temptation to embrace Death as a solution to the problem of our own long existence and as an answer to our semi-secret shrinking from those (including ourselves) who suffer.

It is by that door, perhaps even with a gloss of Christian theology, that I believe the temptation will come back, again and again. Not the temptation to cling to life but the temptation to choose death. And not by a legitimate, nuanced, careful decision merely to forego truly extraordinary or even unethical means of treatment but rather by some more diabolical route, disguised as "palliative care" and "letting go."

If the old thinkers whom we rightly admire did not fully recognize that danger in their own lifetime, we can learn from and avoid their blind spots, as we have so often learned from their insights.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on April 12, 2017 4:12 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (C.S. Lewis) (death) (euthanasia) (suicide)

John Derbyshire's hatred of the good

I'm long behind the times. In fact, I'm about to write about a book review that was written just over a decade ago. I'm quite sure that there are more examples out there, by this same author, of what I'm going to write about here. But in a sense that's part of my point--namely, that this author was writing material this bad this long ago. Occasionally one will run into anguished "race realists" or Trump supporters or alt-rightists or other characters who seem to be deeply upset about the fact that National Review removed John Derbyshire from its stable of writers in 2012. How terrible that the right thus purges itself! What an example of wimpy political correctness! What a loss! And so on, and so forth.

Now, my own impression at the time that the actual divorce took place was that they could and probably should have chosen a better last straw. There had been (even by my cursory estimate) so many other straws that should have been the last. And, yes, perhaps one could write a little treatise on the psychology of National Review editors and on why it was something Derbyshire wrote about race relations (which wasn't anyway as bad as other, imaginable things he could have written about race) instead of his militant atheism and his hatred for the pro-life movement that pushed them over the edge.

But I'm not going to write that psychological musing. I'm just going to talk about his visceral and creepy hatred for the pro-life movement, which did not strike me with full force (perhaps because I was always somewhat bored by Derb and hence inattentive) until I read this old article.

Why write about such an old article? Well, for one thing, because Derbyshire hasn't dematerialized or anything. He's still out there and still writing and being read. So, unless he's repented (ha ha) in dust and ashes for this interesting piece of vitriol and the ideas it expresses, the article remains, in a sense, ever-timely. Second and perhaps more important, Derbyshire's long stint at National Review after writing this article (six more years) as well as the unfortunate rise of the alt-right in 2016 tell us all too loudly and clearly that there are people who want to be called "conservative," and who sometimes succeed in getting that label affixed to them rather firmly, but who hate human life and hate those who fight for human life. It would be well for those of us who have closely identified American conservatism with the pro-life movement and ourselves with both of these to be aware, and wary, on this account. These anti-lifers mean business, and we and they have no common ground on which to meet. Third, and related to both, is the fact that normal conservatives are now being pressured in comboxes by alt-rightists to denounce loudly National Review's getting rid of Derbyshire in 2012. That's happening today. In light of this 2006 Derbyshire piece, my response is a strengthened version of my original impression. Namely, my only regret is that it didn't happen sooner and on the even more solid ground of his visceral hatred of the pro-life movement, a movement for which (allegedly) the National Review stood as the flagship journal of American conservatism. Derbyshire's absence from National Review and from mainstream conservatism is therefore to be praised, not mourned, and the more informed we become, the more we will realize that. This should lead us to be skeptical about the supposed "martyrs of political correctness" whose purgings from polite company we are told we should mourn with the Internet equivalent of black armbands and righteously angry scowls.

The various strands of conservative fusionism in America are coming apart with a vengeance in the current Presidential election. We have a GOP candidate who cares nothing whatsoever for the defining social issues and his vicious followers  of the alt-right who talk much like Derbyshire (and worse) about pro-life conservatives. At the same time, a European-style Christian Democratic party has appeared on the American horizon, manned by people who appear to be deeply sincere in their commitment to the sanctity of human life but who are (not to put too fine a point on it) dangerously out to lunch on virtually all economic, environmental, and other prudential issues, including the size and power of government.

The Derbyshire article in question, which recently came to my attention via this interesting post by David Mills, is a review of Ramesh Ponnuru's pro-life treatise Party of Death. Derbyshire's review was published in the New English Review in 2006.

A dead giveaway that Derbyshire really, really dislikes pro-lifers is that he starts by (more or less) calling the pro-life movement (which he dubs RTL for "right-to-life") a cult. From that point on, he literally can't bring himself to refer to it as anything normal, not even a cause. He has to have a pause before "cause," as if every reference to it is distasteful.

Can Right to Life (hereinafter RTL) fairly be called a cult? This is a point on which I cannot make up my mind. Some of the common characteristics of culthood are missing—the Führerprinzip, for example. On the other hand, RTL has the following things in common with every cult in the world: To those inside, it appears to be a structure of perfect logical integrity, founded on unassailable philosophical principles, while to those outside—among whom, obviously, I count myself—it seems to some degree (depending on the observer’s temperament and inclinations) nutty; to some other degree (ditto) hysterical; and to some yet other degree (ditto ditto) a threat to liberty.

[snip]

Ramesh Ponnuru is one of the best advocates a cult—cause, movement, whatever—could hope for;

See, for example, this exceedingly back-handed compliment for Ponnuru:

Whether it is a cult or not, RTL is made as presentable as possible in Party of Death, with writing that is engaging and lucid. Will Ponnuru’s book make any converts to the RTL whatever-it-is? That depends on how much exposure it gets outside RTL circles. Just to be on the safe side, the mainstream media are studiously ignoring the book—a sad reflection on the current state of public debate, and of respect for rhetorical virtuosity. RTL-ers are welcoming Party of Death very joyfully, though, and they are right to do so, as it is an exceptionally fine piece of polemical writing in support of their... cause.

"Their...ewww...[picks up spider with forefinger and thumb] cause."

We get it, John, you're disgusted by the pro-life movement. Did it ever occur to you that people who are less (what was that word? ah, yes) hysterical than you are about the DANGEROUS pro-life movement might find you rather creepy for your inability to write a single smooth sentence in which you refer to it as a cause?

But pro-lifers aren't the only ones who disgust Derbyshire. Those they defend also disgust him. Indeed, it wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that Derbyshire is disgusted by pro-lifers precisely because they defend the lives and humanity of people by whom he is disgusted. For example, he cannot bring himself to speak of Terri Schiavo without triggering his own gag reflex. She, and her daring to live when she should have died here sooner, clearly disgust him viscerally:

The second of those ratings [degree of hysteria] would have been lower before the grotesque carnival surrounding the death of Terri Schiavo last year, when a motley menagerie of quack doctors, bogus “Nobel Prize nominees,” emoting relatives, get-a-life monomaniacs, keening mobs of religious fanatics, death-threat-hissing warriors for “life,” dimwitted TV presenters straining to keep their very best my-puppy-just-died faces on while speaking of “Terri” as if they had known her personally from grade school, pandering politicians, and shyster lawyers all joined forces in a massive effort to convince the American public that RTL was a thing no sane citizen ought to touch with a barge pole while wearing triple-ply rubber gloves.

[snip]

The word “polemical” needs emphasizing. Some people would say that a writer who refers to embryos as “the young,” to Mrs. Schiavo as “disabled,” or to the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment as having carefully pondered its implications for abortion, is just plain dishonest.

Heaven forbid anyone should call Terri Schiavo "disabled" or should refer to embryonic, individual members of the human species as "the young."

We likewise feel that an adult woman’s life, even a few months of it, is worth more than that of a hardly-formed fetus; and that the vigorous, usefully-employed, merrily procreating Michael Schiavo has a life, a life, more worthy of the name than had the incurably insensate relict of his spouse.

One has to pause to admire (?), be struck dumb by (?), the Nietzschean-Darwinian logic by which Derbyshire decrees that Michael Schiavo's unfaithfulness to his disabled wife and the production of children with a woman to whom he was not married make him positively admirable. "Merrily procreating" and "vigorous." Yes, that's what we normal, moral people always call a man who behaves like that! As for "usefully employed," why yes, that is obviously an important criterion for a life worthy of life. Arbeit macht frei.

And just in case you thought referring to a living, breathing human being as an "insensate relict" was as low as Derbyshire could go in dehumanizing those he wants to see killed, out of pity for those whose real lives they are interrupting, you were wrong, because there's also this:

Here I meet a man whose loved wife has gone, never to return, yet her personless body still twitches and grunts randomly on its plastic sheet, defying years of care and therapy.

You will notice that "Mrs. Schiavo" has disappeared, in every sense, by this point in Derbyshire's manifesto.

Derbyshire makes it quite clear that his detestation for pro-lifers and those they defend is not based upon argument or principle. Indeed, he seems faintly resentful of the fact that Ponnuru has carefully mustered a coherent, well-argued philosophical position. The resentment shows, for example, in this artful little bit of well-poisoning, in which he does not interact with a single argument of Ponnuru's but rather dismisses Ponnuru's arguments on the grounds that they are "inspired by religious belief."

Yet it remains the case that our Constitution does not permit the framing of laws based on the peculiar tenets of any religion or sect, and Party of Death is obviously inspired by religious belief. The philosophical passages strictly follow the Golden Rule of religious apologetics, which is: The conclusion is known in advance, and the task of the intellectual is to erect supporting arguments. It would be an astounding thing, just from a statistical point of view, if, after conducting a rigorous open-ended inquiry from philosophical first principles, our author came to conclusions precisely congruent with the dogmas of the church in which he himself is a communicant. Yet that is the case, very nearly, with Party of Death. Remarkable! What if, after all that intellectual work, all that propositional algebra, all those elegant syllogisms, the author had come to the conclusion that abortion was not such a bad thing after all? I suppose he would have been plunged into severe psychic distress. Fortunately there was never the slightest chance of this happening.

However well-written the periods of that (snarky) paragraph may be, the attentive reader will notice that they, at any rate, cannot be accused of containing any intellectual work, much less any elegant syllogisms. Why bother with all that when one can accomplish what one wants to accomplish instead by disdaining intellectual work and insinuating that Ponnuru undertakes his own intellectual efforts in bad faith? But this is very nearly the definition of the abuse of rhetoric. Thrasymachus, call your office.

It is ironic that Derbyshire, the atheist, obviously thinks himself much superior to religious believers in terms of rationality. But his complaint in this context against Ponnuru and his fellow pro-lifers is that we insist on using arguments and following inconvenient principles when instead, if only we were not cold, heartless, bastards, we would be relying solely on gut feelings.

Our preferred method for dealing with the unpleasant side of life, including topics like abortion and euthanasia, is to think about them as little as possible. In the fuss over Mrs. Schiavo, it was not hard to detect a general public irritation at having had the whole unsightly business forced on our attention. Perhaps this is not humanity at its most noble, but:

Show me what angels feel.
Till then I cling, a mere weak man, to men.

A corollary, though Ponnuru seems unaware of it, is that people who are obsessively interested in these topics seem, to the rest of us, a bit creepy. We may even find ourselves wondering which side, really, is the Party of Death. Ponnuru says that it is unjust to regard some instances of the human organism as less alive than others based on how we feel about them. (Another RTL-er once derided this approach to me, in conversation, as “Barry Manilow ethics”—the worth of another human life judged by our own feelings, wo wo wo feelings... I offer this designation for Ramesh Ponnuru’s future use, free of charge.) Unfortunately most of us do so judge; and feelings, wo wo wo feelings, are a much more common foundation for our social taboos than are Natural Law principles, or indeed any abstract principles at all. Why, if a woman’s husband dies, should she not use his corpse for garden mulch, or serve it up with mashed potatoes and collard greens for dinner? I cannot think of any reason well rooted in pure philosophy, though there might be a public health issue to be addressed. We do not do such things because of the disgust we feel—we feel—at the mistreatment of human corpses.

We likewise feel that an adult woman’s life, even a few months of it, is worth more than that of a hardly-formed fetus; and that the vigorous, usefully-employed, merrily procreating Michael Schiavo has a life, a life, more worthy of the name than had the incurably insensate relict of his spouse. Those like Ponnuru who think differently are working against the grain of human nature, against our feelings—yes, our feelings—about what life is. The life of a newly-formed embryo, or of a brain-damaged patient who has shown no trace of consciousness for fifteen years, is worth just as much as the life of a healthy adult, Ponnuru insists. Well, most of us instinctively but emphatically disagree, and no amount of argumentative ingenuity is likely to change our minds. Hearts, whatever.

[snip]

If, from the principles of Natural Law, it ineluctably follows that women who discover that they are bearing Down Syndrome fetuses should not be allowed to abort those fetuses, then I can assure Ramesh Ponnuru that Natural Law principles will be tossed out of the window by every juridical authority in the land, so long as we remain a democracy. And that is as it should be.

And thus Derbyshire works himself up to his pro-death, feeling-based, furious peroration:

Here I find a couple who want a lively, healthy child, but who know their genes carry dark possibilities of a lifetime’s misery and an early death. They permit multiple embryos to be created, select the one free from the dread traits, and give over the rest to the use of science, or authorize their destruction.

The RTL-ers would tell me that these people, and the medical professionals who help them, are all moral criminals, who have destroyed human lives. They support their belief with careful definitions, precise chains of reasoning, and—I do not doubt it—sincere intentions. Yet how inhuman they seem! What a frigid and pitiless dogma they preach!—one that would take from the living, without any regard to what the living have to say about it, to give to those whom common intuition regards as nonliving; that would criminalize acts of compassion, and that would strip away such little personal autonomy as is left to us after the attentions of the IRS, Big Medicine, the litigation rackets, and the myriad government bureaucracies that regulate our lives and peer into our private affairs.

For RTL is, really, just another species of Political Correctness, just another manifestation of the intellectual pathology, the hypertrophied and academical egalitarianism, the victimological scab-picking, the gaseous sentimentality. that has afflicted our civilization this past forty years. We have lost our innocence, traded it in for a passel of theorems. The RTL-ers are just another bunch of schoolmarms trying to boss us around and to diminish our liberties. Is it wrong to have concern for fetuses and for the vegetative, incapable, or incurable? Not at all. Do we need to do some hard thinking about the notion of personhood in a society with fast-advancing biological capabilities? We surely do. (And I think Party of Death contributes useful things to that discussion.) Should we let a cult of theologians, monks, scolds, grad-school debaters, logic-choppers, and schoolmarms tell us what to do with our wombs, or when we may give up the ghost, or when we should part with our loved ones? Absolutely not! Give me liberty, and give me death!

(Did someone say something about only pretending to do hard thinking so long as one is careful to come to predetermined conclusions? Why, yes, I believe someone did. But the pretense here is very thin. Derbyshire merely talks, for one sentence, about "doing hard thinking." He doesn't actually do any himself. Indeed, there is something of the fakery Derbyshire affects to despise in his talk about the importance of "having a discussion" and "doing hard thinking" in the very midst of heaping angry scorn upon anyone on the other side of such a "discussion" who comes to conclusions different from those endorsed by his own feelings.)

Well, now that we know that Derbyshire thinks that those who want to protect the unborn (yes, even the unborn with Down Syndrome) and the inconvenient helpless are "another manifestation of the hypertrophied and academical egalitarianism, the victimological scab-picking, the gaseous sentimentality, that has afflicted our civilization this past forty years," we can make our decisions accordingly. My own decision, had I been an editor of National Review in charge of such things in 2006, having read this venomous, murderous, irrational, fascistic screed against the defenders of life and the victims for whom they speak (Lebensunwertes Leben in Derbyshire's anti-egalitarian ideal world), would have been to boot Derbyshire's posterior out the door so fast that any film of the event would have caught nothing but a blur. If the other editors, through misplaced patience and an abstract notion of the free exchange of ideas, kept around someone who so despised the pro-life movement, a central pillar of American conservatism, for six more years and then fired him for a different reason, you will find it difficult to induce me to shed any tears over the final outcome.

This is not conservatism, and anyone who holds with Derbyshire concerning the wicked "egalitarianism" of the pro-life movement is not an ally social conservatives can work with.

I do not know what will happen in the end to American conservatism. I have lived to see both the birth and, in a sad and important sense, the death of the American religious right, with its shameful endorsement of Donald Trump for President. And I'm not even that old. What will rise from its ashes is beyond any mere man's power to predict. But I do know that no good can come of despising the weak, the helpless, and those who cannot speak. No good can come of treating human life as a commodity with a value on a sliding scale, so that those humans who seem to us attractive, vital, and productive have "a life, a life," while those unfortunate human beings who don't arouse such feelings in the rest of us must get out of the way.

So I'll keep looking for candidates and allies, even if I can't find a party, who understand those things. I'll also (sorry, American Solidarity Party) want them not to be incredibly foolish about the use of practical political power and about economics in the United States. And (sorry, Constitution Party) their candidates should not be nuts who coyly refuse to say whether or not they are 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Those of us who represent the last of the fusionists, a dying breed, may be doomed to disappointment in the world of politics. But the one thing we won't do, if we have any principle at all, is give up on the social issues. Because whoever turns out to be right on the pragmatic issues, on the matters of fundamental principle we know that we will have the last word, when it all comes tumbling down, when "The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare."