In an interview in Humanities (May-June 1989), the late Walker Percy called this century “the strangest century that I’ve ever heard or read about.” What does this strangeness consist in? For Percy, this century is at the same time the most humanitarian century and “the century in which men have killed more of each other than in all other centuries put together.” Percy was particularly concerned with the abortion record and how to understand it. From his novel The Thanatos Syndrome Percy cited a speech by the priest about the violation by doctors of their Hippocratic Oath. “Two million abortions a year and you guys [doctors] haven’t turned a hair, with a couple of exceptions. Not one single letter of protest in the august New England Journal of Medicine.”
In looking for a reason for this phenomenon, Percy recalled his visit to Germany in 1934 and a passage from Dostoevsky. Percy found the key for understanding this strange century in The Brothers Karamazov when Ivan Karamazov responds to his brother’s question, “You don’t believe in God?” with these famous words: “If God doesn’t exist, all things are permitted.” Percy bravely maintained that, intellectually, today’s medical profession was in the same position as the doctors not of Nazi but of liberal Weimar Germany. What was the essence of this similarity? “There’s no reason not to use technology to improve society even if it means killing people…. They [the Weimar doctors and scientists] were qualitarians—improving the quality of life—either by trying to cure people, or if you can’t cure them, you get rid of them. It’s better for society.”
The Canadian courts liberalized their abortion rules in 1988. In response a most useful book has appeared, A Time to Choose Life: Women, Abortion, and Human Rights, (Toronto: Stoddart, 1990). The first essay is by the late and renowned philosopher George Grant. Grant’s essay is entitled, “The Triumph of the Will,” which happens to be, as Grant pointed out, the title of a famous film of Leni Riefansthal about the Nuremburg National Socialist Congress in the 1930s. Grant took up the same question that Percy wondered about—what is the intellectual position that leads courts, women, professors to accept so willingly the abortion of our kind? The irony is doubly manifest, as Grant remarked, because with the work of the French scientist Dr. Jerome LeJeune it is no longer possible to deny on scientific grounds that, as the Holy Father keeps stating, “human life begins at conception.” Science and faith are at one on this question. Religion is not at odds with science, but the abortion culture is.
Though he took a slightly different approach, Grant agreed with Percy that if we are going to kill the human fetus in its most helpless state in the womb and not only legally permit it but pay for it, then we must invent a body of thought that will allow us to deny a science and a tradition that maintains that every human life is unique and sacred. Percy recalled the principle from Dostoevsky, if God does not exist, all things are permitted. This is the first step, the step that evaporates from the universe any ultimate reason why we are not free to do whatever we will. If God exists and establishes an order in the world that can be known by human reflection, freedom means following the order we discover to be placed in ourselves and the world. If God does not exist, there is no order in the world. We can act on it for our own purposes. In such a position the highest reason is not the welcoming and protecting of each particular human life, whatever its form, but the “improvement” of the world by allowing only those who are best—the thesis of the “qualitarians,” as Percy called them.
Grant began his essay with these blunt, almost shocking words:
The decisions of the Supreme Court [Grant is speaking of the Canadian court, though his principles could equally apply to the U.S. Court] concerning abortion could be seen as a comedy—if they did not involve the slaughter of the young. Any laughter is quelled by a sense of desolation for our country. Yet the comedy must be looked at, too, if we are to understand our political institutions. It arises from the fact that the majority of the judges used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought—the triumph of the will.
Again, I use the word bravery of this passage from Grant as I did of Percy’s similar comment, for it takes great courage to speak the truth in a democratic society, perhaps even more than in a totalitarian one, I sometimes think.
In a careful reflection, Grant explained how various sections of our society, from the courts to the women’s movement came to use essentially a fascist or will philosophy to justify what they insisted on doing morally and politically. The key figure for Grant was Nietzsche.
What makes Nietzsche such a pivotal thinker in the West is that he redefined “will” to make it consonant with modern science. “Will” comes to mean in modernity that power over ourselves and everything else which is itself the very enhancement of life, or, call it if you will, “quality of life.” Truth, beauty, and goodness have simply become subservient to it.
“Will” in this modern sense cannot be deterred by any “reasons” in man or nature because no such things are found if God does not exist. Modern “will” can project whatever it wants on reality. Its very doing so is the sign of human autonomy or freedom. This absolute freedom is what “pro-choice” really means.
Both Marxism and liberalism claimed that they were seeking something other than themselves. Questions of abortion, euthanasia, and other forms of genetic engineering, however, carry these systems to the logical conclusions of their real premises. For it is clear in the case of abortion that something human is being destroyed for no other reason than the will of someone else. As Grant says,
In their desire for liberation, [leaders of the woman’s movement] want not only to keep their gender, but also to use it as they will. But their ability to use their gender, and not to be controlled by it, requires their life and death control over other beings than themselves. For the “given” which their wills need to control is those individual members of their own species within their body.
At this point the classic fascist doctrine of will joins the need to destroy without admitting the truth of the fact that human beings exist from conception or if admitting it, denying that it hinders “pro-choice,” free action.
Several political thinkers have seen the record of the Third World since World War II as a testimony to the victory of fascism or national socialism. In form of government, economy, and attitude toward society, the ideals projected in fascist theory have on close examination predominated. In the case of abortion, Grant pointed out why the intellectual premise of fascist theory is now prevalent in that First World sector of modern culture that justifies abortion.
With the coming of mass abortion in our society, untruths have been spread by those who do not know they are untruths. Current scientific knowledge tells us that a separate human life is present from conception, with its own unique genetic pattern, with all the chromosomes and genes that make it human. It is the very heart of fascism to think that what matters is not what is true, but what one holds to be true. What one holds to be true is important because it can produce that resolute will, turned to its own triumph.
“Will” theory does “justify” abortion because such theory frees us from any norm of God or nature or obligation to protect what is killed. The triumph of the will is the most lethal of theories.
Grant began his essay by remarking that the Supreme Court decisions on abortion would be seen as “comedy” if they were not so lethal, they are so much contrary to common sense and science itself. It is almost amusing that Western courts should embrace the essence of fascist theory. Interestingly, the interview with Walker Percy ended with a discussion of his use of comedy in his serious novel on the “death” syndrome of our society. Percy observed:
There’s nothing funny about what Father Smith is talking about…. My justification is that Soren Kierkegaard said true comedy is deeply related to religion…. The comic condition is the last stage before the religious condition…. People have the wrong idea about comedy. People think the comic is the opposite of the serious, but that’s not true at all. The comic can also be part of high seriousness.
In the strangest century, the Supreme Courts are a lethal comedy. But their “comedy” forces us to questions of the highest seriousness, about whether all is permitted, about whether it is merely our will that decides the truth or whether we need to look to see what is there, from conception.