John Derbyshire reviews Ramesh Ponnuru’s Party of Death
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!
Not that Derbyshire actually engages Ponnuru’s arguments very much in this review, mind you. It’s mostly a rant about how much pro-lifers bug him and how insane it is to value embryonic human life, etc. Which is actually one of the points Ponnuru makes in his book: that pro-lifers, accused of being irrational and (in Derbyshire’s words, here) "sentimental," actually rest theirs more explicitly on principles of reason, logic and science, while the other side tends to take a view of human life that’s rather mystical – you’re human when we’re say you’re human, and it all rests on how we feel about you. Today.
A pro-choice reader will find much to savor in this essay (Andrew Sullivan has already praised it), but when he has finished nodding along to Derb’s various barbs, he should remember that Derb supports abortion rights and euthanasia for the same reason he dislikes gays, favors rough treatment of prisoners, and said of an overturned ferry in the Red Sea, "I don’t care about Egyptians" – because the world is a dark and violent place, and the best way to survive in it is to conform moral principle to gut-level instinct, rather than the other way around. Which might incline the pro-choicer to consider whether his own principled support for "reproductive freedom" and "death with dignity" doesn’t also contain a trace of Derbism – a worldview in which not all lives are worth living, in which taking a stiff drink and getting on with your life is the appropriate thing to do after an abortion, and in which the ruddy health of Michael Schiavo is reason enough to let him kill his vegetative wife.
The state cannot “leave us alone” in deciding under what circumstances to kill one another. There have to be rules, and we have to find some basis for figuring out what they should be. The notion that everyone’s natural feelings lead to support of abortion and euthanasia, and that intellectuals have recently been trying to overcome these natural inclinations, is preposterous—something, indeed, that only an intellectual could believe. That abortion was a crime used to be something nearly universally accepted, and felt. It took, among other things, a lot of intellectual work to change that. Many people changed their feelings in response to new ideas, and new situations partly created by those ideas. (And some people changed their ideas based on their feelings.) How should we feel about abortion? Is it a good thing or a bad thing that we feel less appalled by it than we used to? These are intelligible questions. You don’t have to have a high estimate of “the power of reason in human affairs” to think that the enterprise of reasoning about these matters should not be dismissed.
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