As I write this, the Governor of
Virginia, Ralph Northam, is struggling
to keep his job as his own top political party leaders, backed by a vast army
of bien pensants with Twitter
accounts, are demanding his resignation from office. His alleged offense, no small one even when
it was committed some decades ago, was to engage in some stupid high jinks now
regarded as so hateful to God and man as to render their perpetrator unfit for
elective public office, utterly and in perpetuity. I am not a Virginian, and until recently I
could not have recognized this man’s name if it were on a multiple-choice
quiz. Nor did I ever suppose that
medical students assemble yearbooks, let alone ones that would embarrass your
average Alabama high school. Yet as it
happens, by the time the story of the appalling photograph was surfacing, I had
actually seen Gov. Northam in a television clip responding to questions about
an abortion rights bill under consideration by the State Legislature. He was saying that he approved of the
measure, and that it would indeed allow, under certain circumstances,
infanticide. He didn’t use that word,
and I don’t think he actually meant what he did say. I doubt that he actually accepts the
necessity of infanticide. But that is
what he said, and the only likely reason he said it was that he wanted to
demonstrate his progressive bona fides
to his party allies. Not that I believe
that infanticide is progressive or that people who call themselves progressives
generally do either. But the two episodes—abortion
interview and the flap about the photograph—are not unrelated. It now appears that Northam was “outed” with
regard to the now infamous photograph by somebody outraged by his extraordinary
remarks about the abortion bill.
Ordinarily I would avoid such a
dispiriting subject as the abortion question.
It is a topic that invites passion and outrage and nearly guarantees the
exacerbation of ill will with only the slimmest chance of advancing comity and
ethical clarification. It will continue
to do so as long as we continue to act as though “Pro Life” and “Pro Choice”
are not inadequate slogans but definitive adversarial categories like skins and
shirts or Guelfs and Ghibellines, tribes or teams to one of which each of us
gives our unqualified support. There
actually is an American consensus on the issue, but one unsatisfying to the righteous
appetite for certainty. Most Americans
are “against” abortion. Most Americans
are “against” the criminalization of abortion.
This means that most Americans are ambivalent about an issue concerning
which strident voices are demanding certainty.
What is progressive in the
development of civilization is the abandonment of barbarity, not its
continuity. Some brutal practices of
Antiquity are rarely remembered, but they do show up in myth, legend, and
literary texts. The motives for
infanticide were many, but their common denominator was the social or economic
inconvenience or potential long-term military or political threat posed by the
child to living adults. The “exposure”
of unwanted infants—dumping them to die in some desolate place—was not uncommon
in the Greco-Roman world. You don’t come
to be raised by wolves, even if you are Romulus and Remus, under ordinary
circumstances. The voice of the Hebrew
exile in the beautiful psalm Super flumina
anticipates with pleasure the prospect of dashing the skulls of Edomite
children against the stone walls of the city.
C’est la guerre. In medieval penitential texts there is
frequent mention of something called “overlying”. In peasant households several people might
sleep in the same bed. Babies were not
infrequently stifled in the night, asphyxiated by the weight of heavy adult
bodies, leaving moralists suspicious that many such mishaps were not in fact
accidents at all, but acts of postnatal birth control. Unless we wish to imagine widespread
depravity, and deny any natural bond of love between parent and child, such
episodes were evidences of a terrible desperation.
In fact our literature, which is
after all supposedly an “imitation of life,” has been on the whole perhaps more
truly enlightening than street demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. Among modern writers few are grimmer than
Hardy, and Hardy’s grimmest moment is probably in Jude the Obscure, in which a child, believing that his father’s
life chances have been blasted by his need to support a family, murders his two
junior siblings and hangs himself, leaving the chilling note: “Done because we
are too many”. It is impossible to
absorb the horror of the deed without considering the horror of its
motivation. Hardy was not the first to
believe in a malign biological trap in which the sexual instinct was and
forever would be a generator of tragedy for large swaths of the human
race. Dreiser actually put that word in
the title of one of the great novels of the last century, An American Tragedy, closely based, of course, on a “real life”
criminal case. One of my recent posts
concerned Farrell’s Studs Lonigan. In it the “biological trap” is but one factor
in a world that seems expressly designed for the destruction of its pathetic
anti-hero. But surely you don’t need to
“shout your abortion” or acquiesce, as Governor Northam did, in the idea of
“abortion” on the delivery table to avoid returning to that world.
