As I was saying (2) . . .

In my previous to last posting, I described Camille Paglia as effectively saying: ‘Abortion is murder, Sisters. A necessary murder—but still murder.’ In the follow-up posting, I suggested that, while still a supporter of the right to abortion, the implication of Paglia’s extended statement was that it was a right perhaps better left unasserted.

I also said that I thought that Simone Weil would have found much to admire in both formulations. Not least, she would, in her own words, have admired the ‘lucidity of mind’ involved in Paglia’s declaration, flensed as it was of the usual hypocrisy and weasel words that generally accompany discussions of the issue.

One thing that Weil paid special attention to was the role of necessity in relation to the physical universe. By ‘necessity’ she meant the fundamental, mechanically-operating processes that lie at the root of all nature and the world. The things that happen to us in life happen as a result of that necessity. Not a purposive necessity, tailoring our experiences to our needs, but rather a blind necessity. The things that happen to us are simply the things that happen to us—containing no special message or wisdom or providence. Yet it is our duty to love that necessity, because it was created by God and works in the way he intended it to work.

This necessity was to be seen as operational also in human affairs: she speaks in places of things happening ‘in conformity with necessity and the mechanism of human nature . . .’

In her essay Forms of the Implicit Love of God, which is contained in the collected edition of her religious writings, Waiting for God, Weil speaks of an episode from the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, as related by Thucydides. The island of Melos, despite being a colony of Sparta, had attempted to remain neutral in the conflict. For its refusal to abandon its neutrality and join them, the Athenians sent an army to conquer the island. The Melians cited the justice of their position, the Athenians dismissed the idea of justice as having any relevance in the situation. Their reply was that it was in the nature of things that everywhere and at all times the strong compelled the weak to do their bidding, a fact that the weak disobeyed at their peril. The consequence was that the Athenians ‘put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and settled the place themselves.’

To Weil, this represented the operation of necessity in the power relationships of the world. It didn’t involve any moral judgement, it was simply the way things were in unvarnished nature. It was the way the world worked in the absence of God. Everywhere and in all situations, the strong must of necessity and in the final analysis oppress the weak.

But what was important to Weil in the words of the Athenians (or perhaps just of Thucydides) was the intellectual recognition that this was the way things were. The Athenians were not just imposing their power out of some mindless instinct, but rather were rationalising it. She supplies a translation of Thucydides that underlines the point:

‘“As touching the gods we have the belief, and as touching men the certainty, that by a necessity of nature, each one commands wherever he has the power. We did not establish this law, we are not the first to apply it; we found it already established, we abide by it as something likely to endure forever; and that is why we apply it. We know quite well that you also, like all the others, once you reached the same degree of power, would act in the same way”’ (emphasis mine).

At one level, Weil would have admired these words for their pure uncluttered objectivity. No weasel words here of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or ‘poor little Belgium’ or whatever. Rather, to strip it down and paraphrase it: ‘We do what we do simply because it is within our power to do it.’

Equally, I think, Weil, in the context of ‘Abortion is murder, Sisters. A necessary murder—but still murder,’ would also admire Paglia’s declaration for the same reasons: its lack of hypocrisy and its reflection of the reality of power relationships (between woman and unborn infant) in the modern world.

Now this ‘admiration’, if I can use that term, was not at all equivalent to support for or agreement with the operation of necessity as outlined by the Athenians; rather her admiration was—once again—for the intellectual honesty and the factual accuracy of the Athenian statement. If by a trick of the imagination we were to allow her to comment on Paglia, I think the same restrictions would apply.

Weil could write of the Athenian statement: ‘Such lucidity of mind in the conception of injustice is the light which comes immediately below that of charity. It is the clarity which sometimes remains where charity once existed but has become extinguished. Below comes the darkness in which the strong sincerely believe that their cause is more just than that of the weak.’

Weil regarded the Athenian position as one of injustice, and the statement of it as a rationalisation of that injustice. Indeed, she regarded the Athenian position as representative of a fallen state, a step down from the supernatural, or truly human, to the merely material. The Athenian statement was true solely to the extent that one discounted the existence of anything wider than a purely material universe.

The Athenian reply to the Melians, when the latter fell back on the justice of their position, was to say: ‘. . . since you know as well as we do that right [or ‘justice’], as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’

In other words, justice is something that comes into play when one is not certain of being able to achieve one’s end by pure superiority of power. One might read it almost as an inversion of Clausewitz’s famous dictum that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means.’

Weil herself was to advance a ‘supernatural’ concept of justice that involved the powerful individual lowering himself, like the operation of locks on a canal, until such time as he has raised the weak to a position of equivalent power. Such a demand, taken to its logical extreme, is a call to transcend human nature—effectively, for the strong to go on their knees and expose their throats to the weaker, in the pure and charitable hope that they won’t be cut.

But this is all by the by . . . It is impossible for me to give more than an indication of the richness and complexity of Simone Weil’s thought. What I have written—and to the questionable extent it speaks accurately for her—has all the pallidity of a speared fish in comparison to the marvellous colours of the living specimen. Weil is better read first hand—the totality of her religious writings isn’t large; nor is it for the most part especially difficult.

I set out with the intention of . . . I’m not sure what. Certainly of using Weil to help elucidate aspects of Paglia’s position—even if only for my own sake. There is no doubt in my mind that the first characterisation I gave of Paglia’s position is logically in tune with that of the Athenians, and that Weil’s response to it would have been similar.

The second characterisation—the one that interprets Paglia as taking a step beyond the usual feminist position, and, while still supporting the right to abortion, seeing it as perhaps a right best left unclaimed—could be viewed analogously as perhaps bearing some relationship to Weil’s idea of the ‘supernatural virtue of justice’—although Paglia, as a declared atheist, might well reject the idea. Certainly it involves the notion of the strong relinquishing her power out of respect for the weak.

And the idea that Paglia advances of a pro-life feminism, viewed in the context I have been discussing, perhaps offers the possibility of a way out the current impasse in relation to abortion, and one certainly worth exploring.

Finally, just as I have praised Weil, so also must I praise Paglia—for her iconoclasm and the rawness of her humour, if nothing else. If all you are familiar with is the pedantic leftist whine of mainstream feminism, then read Paglia by way of a hangover cure.