Back in 1983, at the time of the first Right to Life Referendum campaign, one of the left groupings came out with a pamphlet by someone who is now a middle-ranking academic in an Irish university. In the pamphlet she wrote of a woman’s right to an abortion up to (and I am relying on memory here, because it would take too much time rooting through files to find the original) ‘the last hour of the last day of the last month’ of the pregnancy.

A rather extreme view, one might think, reading it at first glance. But then, on reflection, not at all so.

Liberalism and its militant feminist element raise the biggest hue and cry over the most controversial cases. This is understandable—but it is purely a propaganada device. For individual cases, whether they be controversial or uncontroversial, have no role to play in the abortion argument as it is put forward.

A woman’s right to abortion, a woman’s ‘right to choose,’ is precisely that—a right. Or so the liberals would have it. And being a right it requires no justification. If, for whatever reason, a woman wishes to have an abortion, under the liberal prescription she has no need to make a case for it. It is purely a matter of individual choice. As possessor of a right, she is entitled to indulge that right as she sees fit—irrespective of whether, in the case of abortion, it be in the first month or last month of the pregnancy, or for cosmetic reasons, or reasons of maybe a more serious nature.

Now a right, on the liberal agenda, consists in general of something you pull out of the air, not because it is true, but because you want it to be true. The thing then is to propagandize it and sloganize it until it becomes embedded in the popular consciousness simply as a result of repetition. The ‘woman’s right to choose’ is a case in point.

Usually there is little by way of argument involved in the process. But the ‘woman’s right to choose,’ simply because it runs counter to at least two thousand years of thinking differently—for instance, Elaine Pagels, the feminist biblical scholar, speaks of ‘the everyday crimes of pagan culture’ as categorised in the Didache, one of the earliest Christian texts, predating at least some of the Gospels: ‘“You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not have sexual intercourse with boys . . . you shall not practice magic; you shall not murder the child in the womb, nor kill newborns . . . you shall not turn away the destitute”’ (Beyond Belief, The Secret Gospel of Thomas: Elaine Pagels: Pan Macmillan, 2005)—it is for this very reason, the liberal case for abortion, faced with the longstanding Christian antipathy to the practice, was forced to produce at least some justification for its position.

This consists simply in the assertion, assisted by a trawl through history for anything that might back up the contention, that the child in the womb is not a human being until the moment it is born. This is another of those assertions that is true simply because the liberals and feminists want it to be true. It leads to a surreal Tommy Cooper type of situation. On the one hand, we have the infant in the womb, at the point of birth—but according to the feminists it is not really an infant, but rather a thing, a foetus, a—in the words of a feminist speaker at a meeting in Cassidy’s in Park Street back in the early 1980s—zygote; and thus amenable to being disposed of.

On the other hand, a few moments later the infant is born, and—‘just like that!’—it is suddenly a child, and subject to the full rights of a human being, including the right to life, not to mention the full panoply of feminist ooh-ings and aah-ings that often accompany such events.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a sort of schizophrenia—to use the word in its everyday sense as a synonym for split-personality—at the root of the whole liberal and feminist position on abortion—a position that is hard to square with the often over-the-top concern with children’s rights and children’s interests that is another stated mainstay of the liberal agenda.

On a certain level, of course, both positions are held cynically, as political devices aimed at furthering the interests of the women’s movement—or whatever it is that underlies the women’s movement. But at another level, where the ‘argument’ shades off into the hysterical, one can sometimes sense the operation of something different—conscience, perhaps.

Faced with the dichotomy that lies at the heart of their position, many feminists go simply into denial mode. Animated by a repressed sense of guilt over abortion, their instinctive reaction is to exaggerate the maternal and caring sides of their natures by way of unconscious compensation. But that is another day’s argument . . .

One commentator, at least, has set herself the task of cutting through the whole web of prevarication that has clouded the issue. Writing in 2008, Camille Paglia, the prominent and controversial American feminist, goes on to say:

‘Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice . . . [However] I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue.’

To put it another way: ‘Abortion is murder, Sisters. A necessary murder—but still murder.’ A chilling statement, no doubt—yet one that penetrates to the heart of the debate with all the sudden clarity of the sun through the portal of Newgrange on a cloudless 21st of December.

'I shot a man in Reno . . .'

I may indeed be getting the wrong end of the stick here, because all I’ve really heard or read are the headline reports on television and in the newspapers. But I am going to plough on regardless. What I am talking about is the recently proposed changes in the law in relation to killing.

Now the first proposed change, regarding the killing of intruders, seems to me to miss (and again I have to admit that I have not read the particular report but am flying by the seat of my pants) an important point. The fact of whether somebody confronts an intruder or doesn’t confront him has historically, I would suggest, been little influenced by the matter of law. There are those who will have a go, irrespective of what the law says, and worry about it afterwards. Then there are those who shrink from confrontation, not because of the law, but simply because it is in their nature to shrink from confrontation.

These things happen in the heat of the moment, and an appreciation of the finer points of the law is unlikely to count for much, other than as a post-facto excuse by those who have shrunk from confrontation.

But then there is another category: those hell bent on mayhem, who imagine it lovingly in detail, and create fictional scenarios where they can accomplish their desire, scenarios usually involving various degrees of provocation. Usually the imagining is sufficient, and the fantasy serves its own end of reducing mental tension. In such situations, fear of consequences, and the anticipatory imagining of such consequences, is usually enough to take the edge of such wimpish bloodlust.

It’s a bit like masturbation really . . .

But now it is proposed that the situation be changed. The wimp is to be given free rein. It’s rather like Hemingway’s Francis Macomber—the type of guy who goes on safari with a big game hunter in order to shoot animals from a safe distance and think himself macho.

One can imagine the scene . . . something, to use another fictional analogy, along the lines of Michael Douglas’s character in All Fall Down, sitting there night after night, shotgun on knee, window left provocatively open . . .

Make my day, Suckah . . . !

The second proposed change to the law—the one concerning the definition of provocation—seems to me (to the extent that I understand it) even more contentious. The idea of a delay—for such was the way it was described on television—between provocation and killing, involving the idea that something was playing on your mind, until one day ages later it suddenly triggers you to action, seems to me potentially very dangerous.

One aspect of the proposal, according to the newspaper reports, is to enshrine the concept of cumulative provocation in law—the idea that while no one incident of provocation taken on its own is sufficient to justify killing, the totality of such provocations may nonetheless be taken into account.

Under pressure of the feminists, we have had for several years now a de facto open season on husbands. Some possibly deserved it—but there were other cases where one was left with the distinct sense of the whole thing being framed in such a way as to take advantage of the changed atmosphere. Also, it was very much a one-way street—the idea of cumulative provocation didn’t at all seem to apply to men.

The problem with this whole idea of cumulative provocation, no matter how evenhandedly it is applied, is that, in the end, it seems likely to encourage the Frank Carson “It’s the way you tell ‘em!” type of approach. The idea of evidence and probability takes second place to the creation of a good narrative.

Simone Weil (and I seem to be writing of her a lot lately) was critical, not of the operation of the law, but of its cold majesty, and the contempt it showed towards the offender. But nowadays one gets the sense that things have swung diametrically in the opposite direction. It may be a consequence of the general decay of leadership and authority, but one gets the impression that judges are less and less the remote and frightening figures of tradition, and more akin to football referees, grinning as they hand out yellow cards by way of deflecting aggression.

Law has to change to some degree with the times, but perhaps the process has become too pro-active (whatever that actually means). One gets the impression of law lecturers and commentators etc.—often, one suspects, with an ideological bias—acting more like X Factor contestants and chasing popularity than genuinely considering the implications of what they are doing.

But then perhaps they are afraid . . . perhaps they’re all afraid of what they can see subliminally coming down the line . . . all reactively as lemmings guessing as to which will be the winning side.

There are other issues involved in the new proposals that seem to carry even more serious implications than those discussed . . . but I would need to read the actual report itself before venturing into that argument. And time is a factor.

If I get the opportunity, I will come back to the matter . . .

'If the left one don't get you, then . . .'

I was going through some old papers recently, and I found two pages from the Daily Mail of March 13, 2008, featuring an article headed, Sexual Predator or a Victim? It was to do with the matter of Cathal O’Searcaigh, which was causing much hand-wringing in cultural circles at the time. Had he been an ordinary poor hoor of no particular talent then the verdict would have been immediate and damning. As it was, because of his fashionable homosexuality, and the fact that he was also a poet, the matter caused a certain indecision amongst those members of the chattering classes who in other circumstances would have been only too willing to jerk the knee.

The article consisted of opinion pieces by different media personalities. One segment was by Philip Nolan, described as an author and journalist, who went on to say of O’Searcaigh: ‘He is not a paedophile, because each of the boys was over sixteen, the age of sexual consent in Nepal.’

This immediately provokes the surreal, but not at all absurd, picture of someone forearmed with a schedule of international sexual legislation and a flexible travel plan being able to pick his or her steps from country to country without ever falling foul of the law. While at the same time, your common or garden blunderer, pursuing exactly the same course, but in a less organized way, could well find himself locked up in some local clink and internationally demonized as a paedophile.

The meaning of terms such as paedophile cannot depend on the vagaries of legislation if such terms are to have any rational use. To raise things truly to the level of the absurd . . . if the government was to decide overnight to raise the age of consent to, say, twenty-five—something in itself not necessarily that absurd, in that, for example, Adler put the upper limit of adolescence somewhere around the age of twenty; Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjieff at twenty-five—then they could put the whole country in jail.

But, of course, this is to miss the point. The word ‘paedophile’ is one of those words whose use would only be hampered by too close a definition. It is no longer primarily a rational term, but rather a means of abuse. In its current usage it is akin to the daub of paint on the door of those to be killed during a pogrom or a yellow star on the coat of a Jew during the war.

A sure sign that a word has left the confines of the dictionary and become lodged in the viscera—especially if it is a complicated word—is the extent that it becomes second nature in the mouths of those who in other circumstances would find it hard to spell ‘bus’.

Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. Every age and every political system has had a need for meaningfully sounding but conveniently vague catchphrases as a way of dealing with its perceived enemies and distracting the populace. It’s just the way things are . . .

But at least we have the assurance that Cathal O’Searcaigh is not a paedophile.

But just when you might think he was out of the frying pan, along comes Terry Prone, in the same article, to put him instead into the fire: ‘The problem is that a sexual relationship with a much younger person does not have to be physically coercive in order to be abusive. Having sex with these young men when he is so important to their continued health, livelihood and even existence is wrong—because it cannot be between equals. Coercion takes many forms, not all of them violent.’

Now it is clear here that, at least implicitly, Prone accepts that O’Searcaigh’s behaviour was not paedophilic. But she still wants to have another bite at the cherry and express her disapproval in a different way. And quite possibly she is right. But the thing that fascinated me at the time was the way in which this argument was likely to be used as a stalking horse for the entry of the ‘equality agenda’ into the whole matter of sexual relations.

Prone, of course, put it in best case format, speaking of ‘sexual relationship with a much younger person’. Now the first point to make is that this would obviously be a person above the age of consent. The second is the old saying that ‘hard cases make bad law’.

Now, of course, law is not involved here—at least for the moment. It is more in the matter of a moral stance—implicitly a moral stance with teeth. But where public pronouncements of morality go, especially in relation to controversial matters, the law is often not far behind.

And even in relation to arriving at moral judgements, it is worth reading between the lines of Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing though he was in relation to law: "Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment."

The other point is the sheer relentlessness of the equality agenda, the weapon that is being used more than any other to unpick the current fabric of society. Give it a toehold in any situation and, like the beggar on horseback, it will ride to the devil.

Now Prone made her argument with some finesse, but that was not the case with some of the incidental commentators on the controversy, many of whom seemed hardwired to the pursuit of maximum equality.

It was with this in mind, rather than specifically Prone’s contribution, that I wrote the following letter to the Irish Times. Of course, it wasn’t published. Mercifully so, because it is a bad letter—crass and vulgar. But then it was meant to be so—for it was intended to be provocative.

It also implicitly involved a sideswipe at the hypocrisy of the politically correct—ever ready to condemn ‘sex predators’ (whatever they be?) and ‘inequality’ on the one hand, while queuing up at the Square to cheer Bill Clinton on the other.

Dear Editor.

Let me say at the outset that I have not seen the documentary nor followed the controversy or correspondence in the press. But that being said, you would want to be deaf, dumb and blind not to become at least peripherally aware of it.

The thing that interests me is not what Cathal O Searcaigh did or didn’t do - it is instead this presumption that has crept into the debate that sexual relations demand some basis of equality. In this case, economic equality.

It seems nowadays, at least in some circles, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a man of even comparatively modest means to enjoy life’s basic pleasures. The argument seems to be that if you are having a casual sexual relationship with a person who is better off than you are then automatically you are being exploited.

The issue of consent doesn’t enter into it. The theory seems to run along the lines that one person’s comparative wealth must inevitably – like some human form of ‘lamping’ - dazzle the other person into volitional paralysis.

But why stop at economic inequality? There is no end to the inequalities potentially available in human relationships. What, say, of differences of class or intelligence or education? Are those with only a second-level education - or no education at all - to be ring-fenced from the attentions of those with university degrees?

No doubt, at this point, some those most vehement in the debate are - like stock Victorian fathers - muttering about the matter of one’s ‘intentions’. But intentions are old hat, now. We live in the era of relationships and one night stands and, to paraphrase (in the interests of getting printed) Erika Jong, the ‘zipless sexual encounter.’ In that sense, it strikes me that the debate to date has engendered a great deal of hypocrisy.

Leaving the matter of Cathal O Searcaigh aside for the moment, the general point I am trying to make is that if people today want to be regarded as independent and liberated, then it must be taken as given that they are capable of being so, and of using their natural intelligence, despite the blandishments of wealth and power, not to go into places or relationships where they shouldn’t. And if people still get burned, as inevitably they will, then the best one can say, outside of a certain basic sympathy, is: Get on with it! . . .

Yours etc.

A localised front . . .

It might seem that I wrote somewhat dismissively of Simone Weil in my last posting. But it would be wrong to see it this way. I was writing about psychoanalysis, and the secular view that underlies psychoanalysis, i.e. that there is only the material world and everything is assuageable and explicable solely in terms of that world. It is a subject not particularly associated with Weil in her role as a mystic, whatever about as a philosopher. And, as such, I was only writing about her in passing . . .

In a certain sense, too, Weil’s attitude was closer to that of Idries Shah’s (also discussed in the last posting) than I have previously indicated—to the extent that she could equally write that ‘Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.’

The difference between the two of them was that to Shah this matter of a compulsive seeking of attention represented a psychological absurdity, whereas for Weil it was the cry of the bruised soul, something to be taken seriously, and dealt with compassionately, something that one opened oneself up to at the cost of real personal pain.

The deepest level of human suffering, Weil described as affliction [that she had a special definition of what constituted affliction need not concern us here]. What it involved was an agony that paradoxically also represented the possibility of being approached by God. Thus, what was torment on the physical and/or mental plane might equally be interpreted as a mercy on the spiritual one.

What differentiates the Christian (and not just the specifically Christian) from the secular point of view is that Christianity offers to the convinced believer the possibility of a meaning to suffering. And not just to the sufferer but also to those who minister to suffering. In taking aboard the suffering of the afflicted, they also in some sense share in the possibility of the approach by God.

By contrast, to the secularist suffering is simply an evil with absolutely no redeeming qualities attached. Nor is there any consoling message in suffering for those heroic secularists who devote their lives to treating it. Which may explain why, in America, anyway, physicians have almost three times the suicide rate of the general population; while in terms of the medical profession itself psychiatrists seem to hold top spot.

Nor does this simply apply to those dealing with human misery, it applies also to the sufferers themselves. A study in hospitalized patients suffering from depression, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry (2004), has been described as finding that ‘religious affiliation is associated with significantly lower levels of suicide compared to religiously unaffiliated people, atheists and agnostics.'

For the secularist, the only method of dealing with suffering is to abolish it—something ultimately futile, in that the afflicted, like the poor, are, and always will be, with us. Suffering is not susceptible to eradication—it simply changes its form.

In a passage that may at first glance seem contradictory to the general thrust of this posting, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her seminal book, On Death and Dying, said, in relation to those who died best: ‘Religious patients seemed to differ little from those without a religion. The difference may be hard to determine, since we have not clearly defined what we mean by a religious person. We can say here, however, that we found very few truly religious people with an intrinsic faith. Those few have been helped by their faith and are at best comparable with those few patients who were true atheists. The majority of patients were in between, with some form of religious belief but not enough to relieve them of conflict and fear.’

What Kübler-Ross is saying here is not that religion was of no benefit in terms of facing up to death, but rather that it had to be a religious belief of, arguably, an almost transcendent quality. When I wrote above that ‘Christianity offers to the convinced believer the possibility of a meaning to suffering . . .’, I should really have also italicized the word ‘convinced’.

Thus, on the one hand, you have the convinced atheists, and, on the other, those of a convinced religious persuasion, with bookended in between the great morass of everyone else.

Interestingly enough, certain parallels can be drawn here with the experiences of Bruno Bettleheim, the psychologist, in Dachau and Buchenwald, where he found that the people who were least likely to be broken by the camp system were the Jehovah’s Witnesses, followed by, in second place, the communists.

Notice that the two ‘best’, or at least the most committed, groupings in both Kübler-Ross and Bettelheim form a very real dichotomy—and one that is not predicated on class or politics or race or whatever. This fundamental opposition is between those who, for want of a better term, accept that there is a spiritual substrate to existence, and those who don’t.

It is this primal dichotomy, I would suggest, that underlies all the lesser dichotomies of class and politics etc., which are really only subsets of it. It is the manifestation in human affairs of the cosmic struggle between light and darkness—which struggle alone supplies the possibility of understanding the meaning and purpose of universal existence.

What I am saying is that the fundamental conflict in the human world is between, to simplify things, those who believe in God and those who believe only in nature. Those seriously involved on both sides—in terms of the examples given: the atheists-cum-communists and the religiously committed—confront each other in a conflict with cosmic implications.

And then there are the rest of us . . .

Writing of the middle ground or morass, and in terms of what was clearly a worst case situation, Bettelheim went on to discuss those members of the ‘apolitical German middle class,’ who for whatever reason also found themselves in the camps—and he is writing here of Dachau and Buchenwald in the years 1938/39, when the purpose of the concentration camps wasn’t as yet primarily exterminative:

‘Non-political middle class prisoners (a minority group in the camps) were those least able to withstand the initial shock. They were utterly unable to understand what had happened to them and why. More than ever they clung to what had given them self respect up to that moment . . . No consistent philosophy, either moral, political, or social, protected their integrity, or gave them the strength for an inner stand against Nazism. They had little or no resources to fall back on when subject to the shock of imprisonment. Their self-esteem had rested on a status and respect that came with their positions, depended on their jobs, on being head of a family, or similar external factors . . . Nearly all of them had lost their desirable middle class characteristics, such as their sense of propriety and self respect. They became shiftless, and developed to an exaggerated extent the undesirable characteristics of their group: pettiness, quarrelsomeness, self pity. Many became chisellers and stole from other prisoners . . . They seemed incapable of following a life pattern of their own any more, but copied those developed by other groups of prisoners. Some followed the behaviour pattern set by the criminals. Only very few adopted the ways of political prisoners, usually the most desirable of all patterns, questionable as it was. Others tried to do in prison what they preferred to do outside of it, namely to submit without question to the ruling group. A few tried to attach themselves to the upper class prisoners and emulate their behaviour. Many more tried to submit slavishly to the SS, some even turning spy in their service (which apart from these few, only some criminals did). This was no help to them either, because the Gestapo liked the betrayal but despised the traitor’ (The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age: Bruno Bettelheim, Macmillan Free Press, New York, 1960).