The Party of Death

Restaurants and bars have closed; major sporting events have been canceled, with parts of the playing season called off.  Small businesses have been locked down, threatening their solvency along with the material support of the families that depend on these businesses.

In this adamant conviction about the saving of human lives, there has not been a flicker of doubt even among the talking heads of the liberal media. They don’t seem to doubt that the overriding purpose is to save lives, of the young and healthy, as well of people who are older and at the edge of their lives.

Danse Macabre by Michael Wolgemut, 1493 [Duchess Anna Amalia Library, Weimar, Germany]

The commentators are apparently willing to save the lives of people they don’t know, and so they cannot know that all of these people are equally deserving of their concern.  The mandate to protect human life is evidently cast over everyone, even people the media find repugnant, and the only rationale can be that these are the lives of human beings. 

By now many of my readers know where this has been heading:  If the overriding commitment is to protect human life, in all conditions and all ages, how could the same liberal commentators show not the least concern for the killing of around 860,000 small, innocent human beings every year in this country in abortions?

There, they stand back not merely with indifference, but with rapturous celebration of the “right” to kill in that way for one’s own self-interest.

That the contradiction has not broken in on them is a reflection of something that has gone deeply dysfunctional in what used to be thought a staple of liberal education: some elementary practice in reasoning about matters of moral consequence in a principled way.

Aristotle well understood that this kind of exercise might have little appeal to people who are more interested in doing rather than knowing. But as he recognized in the Ethics, “the defect is not due to lack of years but to living the kind of life which is a succession of unrelated emotional experiences.”

Our "Catholic" Senator gets a shout-out...

In my last column, I recalled the matter of the Born-Alive Survivors of Abortion Act, making its way finally to the floor of the Senate.  In opposing that bill, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois offered an impassioned concern for the higher rate of “infant mortality” among black newborns.  And yet he surely had to know that in cities like Chicago and New York the abortions of black children have often exceeded the live births.

Durbin reflected the same obtuseness I’ve been noting here for the liberal political class in the crisis over the virus.