Taking it Hard

"Take it easy."

I honestly can't remember when was the last time - 1995? - that I heard that phrase as a part of someone's friendly leave-taking. Certainly not from anyone who was gainfully employed - and who planned to remain that way.

Some Riper Fruits of Abortion

Things often dawn on me very slowly. And so it's just recently occurred to me (more than a little late in the game, I confess) that the consistent application of a mother's right to abort her child would make the lives of each of us, without exception, precarious in the utmost extreme. Just imagine trying to apply the principle forwards no less than backwards in time. Applied backwards, each of us has the right to be here solely because at one time our mothers "wanted" us, and saw fit to carry us to term. Doubtless over time, as bit by bit we got a little older, the "wanting" part of it became less pronounced, and the "putting up with" part took on a more preponderant share of the burden. But in what sense, I wonder, are any of us adults still wanted? And what happens when, however much we oldsters may continue to be suffered to go on living, we will have pretty much ceased to be wanted altogether? What will happen when I get so much older, and become - if one could imagine it - even more unproductive than I am now? What will become of me, when I become not a relatively small inconvenience and encumbrance to a couple of human beings - one of whom is able to carry me about within the confines of her own body - but a great big gnarly, ungainly burden to five or ten or more busy people? "Oh but you're something of a dinosaur," you assure me confidently. "Back when you were born, you may have been wanted - after a fashion. But how much of that wanting was a tired, bitter, grudging thing, done from a sense of duty? And sadly, I'm afraid, that may even affect how well you are treated in old age. But please understand, in the world to come, virtually everyone alive will be here because of their parents' freest, most unfettered possible choice. And as a result everyone's chance of being no less freely loved and appreciated will be that much stronger." 

Fine. In that case I have another question. In this idyllic future world, as you unscroll it before me, every child may be that much more loved and appreciated on account of being "wanted" at birth. (Never mind how much the parents may end up regretting their decision three months later; apparently they're all but guaranteed to become virtual saints of parenting because of a decision they made while basking in the rosy glow of an ultrasound). Answer me this, then: As each of these children grows up, and slowly or quickly ceases to be as desirable as a darling newborn, will it be easier for the adults around them to give them what they need - to listen, to understand, to nurture, to restrain and correct and discipline them - or will it be harder? Remember, in most things human 'tis practice makes perfect. So regarding these enlightened adults of the future: how practised will they be in exercising patience with a "terrible" two-year-old, if they feel neither guilt nor shame in disposing of a child's life when it is by comparison far more helpless, and (normally) nowhere near as obnoxious? In short, I just can't summon much enthusiasm for this near-utopia of prenatal choice. The fact that a given society is willing to entrust the very beginnings of human life - life at its least demanding and most elementary level of need - to the discretion of one or two confused and frightened individuals, whose presence and peace of mind may vary sharply from week to week, or even day to day, is very poor assurance of that society's humaneness in more trying circumstances. Above all, it does not reassure me concerning that same society's power to "put up with" human life as it becomes more complicated, more demanding, more inconvenient. And even less does it persuade me concerning our mutual capacities - yours and mine - to put up with each other, as one or both of us gets older. Not all of us reach old age, of course; some of us don't make it to adulthood; others don't get to be a teenager; and a few of us don't get much of a childhood or even an infancy worth mentioning. But every living one of us has been born in some fashion or other. And for nearly all of us - until there can be devised a more nurturing receptacle - the human womb will continue to be the place where we first drew breath, and began the process of becoming recognizably sentient and human. It is where we all came from. If human life does not continue to be sacred there, it is unclear to me how it can go on being sacred anywhere. 

And observe already how that sacredness is become rather a sick joke. Indeed one may plausibly argue that, in today's abortion-on-demand culture, life has become so cheap a few of us are prepared to kill an abortionist or two in defense of it. And in this bold new age of Apocalypse-as-Entertainment, what quicker path to universal conflagration than to fight fire with fire? And what a wholesale conflagration it has been - and continues to be - however slowly the fires may spread. Even now we are fools to think abortion poses no similar threat to life outside the womb. Once again, if "helpless" life be an irksome thing when merely kicking, will it be less of a nuisance when it starts talking? and talking back? and becoming not passively helpless but a positive hindrance to other fun things we'd like to do? 

Meanwhile back at the adult ranch, we wonder why it's getting so hard - and so impractical! - to value human life for anything more than the productivity we can extract from it. Recall, even before the onset of mega-recession, how we trembled at the thought of paying even our most productive workers a wage remotely commensurate with record profits. Good heavens, man, what would Wall Street think? Or worse yet, Beijing? And then we watched - for what else could we do? - we watched as consumer spending, on which our US economy always depends, became more and more fueled, and households more and more strangled, by runaway debt. I mean, the spending had to come from somewhere, right? And then we had the dunderheadedness to be shocked and angry at the severity of this downturn. But what were we expecting - utopian endless prosperity? Why, of course we were! Because as every rational economist knows, the less you value human beings as economic instruments, and the more you regard them as so much costly overhead, the more hopeful they will feel about their own life prospects. And thus - freed from the siren voices of fear and panic - the more rational and clear-headed decisions they will make to secure those prospects. I believe it was St Therese of Lisieux - the aptly-named "Little Flower" of Jesus - who said we love flowers not for what they do but for what they are. On the strength of that analogy, I'd say nowadays we Western humans have all been assigned the proportionate value of chemically-treated hothouse tomato plants. Certainly there are few if any flowers left in our gardens. And let no one forget good fertilizer is expensive . . . 

But maybe you think I'm being much too hard on our poor, hapless, misunderstood, "God knows I'm only trying to make a humble profit" Western nations. I wish I could find a reason for going easier. But even now I see little if any progress in Human Efficiency's most vital component: the way we humans treat each other - and in particular the way we treat those peons on whom we depend to keep our operations running, not from year to year, or even month to month, but from one God-given day to another. Perhaps we're being compensated by our superior moral rectitude in some other area. But how big of an area can it be? And what power of microscope does one need in order to see it? Let's face it: these days we Westerners are not exactly moral paragons in much of anything. Certainly not in the realm of anything one might call procreative morality. Nor are we necessarily, I fear, the first to notice it. A beam in one man's eye seldom keeps him from detecting the mote in his neighbor's. And if a being as visually obstructed as Satan can retain a sharp eye for the sins of his enemies, what on earth is there to stop the likes of al Qaeda from discerning ours? 

And don't believe for a second our enemies don't see what's going on. They see the wastefulness and ease with which we Westerners use, abuse and dispose of healthy human life - mostly, again, in the name of something we call profit (though I suspect it bears about as close an affinity to real profit as the Pharisees' system of moral debits and credits resembled real holiness). From there the rest is a familiar story. Our manifold Western sins provoke in them a predictable kind of sanctimonious moral outrage: the kind that makes our modern jihadist work all the harder - please note - not to set for us infidels a better moral example, but to become for us a far worse one. And yes I know, we can debate that delicate point till all the cows come from test tubes. At all events I see no reason for our present and future Osamas, whatever religion they may hail from, to look down on the rest of us, much less to feel morally superior. Really, given the amount of indiscriminate blood already caking their own hands, one is moved to wonder if they intend to establish a class of combatant hitherto unknown in the history of warfare: The equal opportunity destroyer. Meanwhile, if nothing else, I would hope our modern jihadist might feel a tremor or two of gratitude towards us in the West. And even for our culture of on-demand abortion which he professes to loathe. Didn't we, after all, help create the moral climate in which he lives, and moves, and is prepared to sacrifice all being?

The Future of Despising the Past

Although I've been a fairly frequent visitor to Britain over the years, I have never been a British citizen, nor do I have any immediate prospect of becoming one. In other words, I've about as little reason as any Yank for having a personal dog in the race of domestic British politics. And yet, somehow, I don't think I've ever longed for the political departure of anyone - no, not George Walker Bush, or even William Jefferson Clinton - as eagerly as I now await the close of the Long Reign of Gordon Brown.

Here, it seems to me, is a man who - if I may paraphrase Cromwell - has been sitting where he is far too long for any good he's been doing there. And yet I've found what I most dislike in Prime Minister Brown is not any one, two, or three things he may have done or left undone during his two successive offices. Rather, it is the entire way he thinks: - a certain ingrained disposition towards the world, and one that I've no doubt has shaped, in ways both massive and subtle, just about everything he's ever said or done since he first entered politics.

I understand he's a warm appreciator of my country, or at least of certain American ways of doing things. And in particular those American ways that make us seem not only a far more modern country than Britain, but far more impatient with and dismissive of not just Britain's, but every nation's Past, including our own. Mr Brown strikes me as one of those admirers of America from a comfortable distance who can be found in considerable numbers at every point of the British political spectrum, with the possible exception of the Lunatic Left. And yet - speaking as one American - it seems to me that both he and others like him are making a key and very unfortunate mistake. They're making the mistake of applauding precisely those aspects of America's political and economic success that are most - how shall I put it? Most cocky? Insolent? Hubristic? Heedless of past wisdom? Or perhaps, in a word, most "smartass." In effect, they're allying themselves with precisely those elements of our culture which are implicitly most destructive, in the long run, of both America's and our allies' positions, and leverage, and credibility in the world.

Then again, if you're really good, and know you're good, who needs credibility anyway? And just how do you measure leverage? Assuming we Yanks really did attain our unique pre-eminence in the world entirely by our own merits, with neither grace nor help nor prayer from any manner of soul dead or living, why should we care what anyone else - including our allies - wants or thinks? Why, to do so would be little short of immoral, or at least grossly irresponsible. I mean, to vacate our place at the head of the Headlong March of Mankind, when every thinking person knows it cannot be slowed down for any one or any thing? and that nobody but nobody can drive it faster than us Yanks? In brief (though I doubt he'd savor the comparison), it seems to me that what Mr Brown likes most about us - about our American drive, American efficiency, American success - can best be summed up in two words: Donald Rumsfeld.

There is one other thing, however, that bothers me even more about him. As far back as his university days, one of Mr Brown's chief political inspirations - if not his foremost political hero - was the radical socialist and MP James Maxton of Glasgow. Maxton lived from 1885 to 1946 - a highly critical period in British and world history, to say the least. He was a man of undisputed political courage, integrity, conviction and independence - besides being driven by a fierce, heartfelt compassion for pretty much anyone poor or marginal. Yet for some reason, the best way he could find of translating this compassion into the language of foreign policy was to become a passionate admirer of Lenin in the 1920s and '30s, and a resolute appeaser of Hitler in the '30s and '40s. In other words, Maxton spent the better part of his life crusading against tyranny and oppression wherever he could recognize them, only to end up misreading completely two of the very worst embodiments of those evils modern history had yet seen.

And this is the best our Mr Brown can do. At the very onset of his public life, this was the soundest point of departure he could find for his own intellectual journey into politics. Given, then, this severe ideological handicap from almost the start of his career, I wonder if the real future historians' debate will concern not how much or how little Gordon Brown did things wrong during his time in office, but whether, and how far, he ever had much chance of doing anything right.

All speculation, of course. But in all this I do find a remarkable thread of consistency, both in Maxton's political career (including his weakness - or strong stomach - for bold iconoclastic dictators) and in Brown's choice of Maxton as posthumous mentor and forerunner. Like Brown, Maxton was a conscientious disrespecter of tradition wherever he found it. Not to be outdone, his disciple, together with his "Cool Britannia" predecessor, appear to have taken their country as far down paths of multiculturalism and political correctness as any nation on earth. Or at least any nation that doesn't plan to commit suicide. And all with famously stellar results for Britain's violent crime rates, incidence of unwed pregnancy, levels of social cohesion, and other sane measures of national sanity. The net result of both master's and disciple's careers, then, may yet prove to be a Britain far more disdainful of its modern history - far more guilt-ridden, ashamed and revisionist concerning even its 20th-century moral record - than anything even we post-moderns can foresee. And with what dividends, especially to those ultra-revisionists who are convinced Churchill's Britain was fighting the wrong enemy all along, I can only shudder to imagine.

An easier question to answer may be whether, even now, both the master's legacy and the disciple's work have succeeded in producing a more just, more humane, and generally less drunken and debauched British society - or even one able to provide a credible moral alternative for its own disaffected elements. And these include (lest we forget) Britain's apparently growing numbers of potential recruits to jihadism. Granted many of these types are probably unassuageable already. So why not - if I'm reading the Blair/Brown line correctly - why not give them yet more cause to be sickened and disgusted with mainstream British society?

At all events, I do hope these two men's examples will invite us both, Brits and Yanks, to take a second - and kinder - look at certain things whose value we may all too easily deride or minimize in this globally enlightened world of ours. Things like history and tradition, or continuity and precedent. A kinder look, in sum, at all those ways of approaching and exploring the Past that require the use of tools more subtle than bulldozers and jackhammers (or even Orwell's jackboots and truncheons, for that matter). And who knows? Having endured a decidedly ugly and bullying face of Headlong Progress over the past two decades, we may find some form of Conservation starting to look more comely with each passing day.

Surviving (this version of) America

Next fall will mark the 10-year anniversary of a still-popular "reality" TV series. And 10 months into the reign of our ostensible Deliverer, America remains, I believe, very much a "Survivor" society. Just think of it: we still haven't figured out how to treat each other on a desert island! That is, you and I may work together decently enough (for the time being) to ensure that somebody else's loss is our eventual gain. But in the final count - and I'm told this happens in offices and boardrooms no less than on TV shows - my gain must require some substantial and irrecoverable loss on your part. At the same time, apparently it's not enough that so many of us should find ourselves living the drama five or more days a week; it must also be ours for the viewing. Having both given and received our own quota of stress and humiliation for the day, we must now sit down to relax and enjoy somebody else's.

So. And meanwhile, this is also the Nation - I'm told - whose big banks and Federal Government are suddenly going to listen to the needs not just of large, but of medium- and small-sized businesses. And whose medium- and small-business owners are suddenly going to listen to the needs, not just of their technical and corporate, but of their human components and clientele. Or at least enough to engineer some semblance of a long-term recovery. But how, pray tell?

One more question. Is this the society whose random passers-by are somehow going to wrench ears and eyes away from cell phones and BlackBerries, or at least long enough to re-discover (try not to laugh too hard) each other? Whose everyday folks-you-meet-on-the-street are suddenly going to re-learn how to recognize, and accept, each other's common humanity - each other's residual creaturely goodness, if nothing else? Or at least enough to close ranks against an unprecedented enemy? An enemy, might I add, whose peculiar methods of keeping (his) God unoffended may demand - at any time, in any place - the slaughter of any number of innocent, defenseless men, women and children?

Somehow I don't think so. Those of us who've lived in the US for more than two generations have probably lived in several distinct Americas over the course of one lifetime. I can't say which if any of these previous versions of my country would have been up to the job of our present challenges. But definitely not this version. All evidence to date suggests our "Survivor" society constitutes neither an effective army nor an effective weapon in the real war - the ideological and spiritual war - against Holy Terror. Indeed, if anything, our present, ever-so-productive ways of looking and living past each other may yet prove the ultimate self-sabotage.

I get the feeling we don't know the first thing about survival either. Much less prosperity.

Exploring the Rooms at the Top

I don't think I've ever heard of a joyful cynic, or a happy misanthrope. Not even one who was enviably rich and successful, and blessed with an uncanny eye for opportunity. And I'm sure I've never met anyone whose happiness - whose joy in living - did not include at least some capacity to enjoy other people, and other people's happiness. At least on some occasions. Why is that, I wonder?

Whatever the reason, may I share with you something I've been suspecting for quite a long time (albeit my manner of suggestion may be a mite too bold and categorical for some tastes)?

There is no human creature we meet in the flesh who is not an opportunity. The most randomly irrelevant individual we meet is a priceless invitation to gain Something hardly any of us seeks expressly or consciously - though there is not one of us who does not long for It in the quieted deeps of our souls, in a secret place, and language, whose music no human words could ever express. The sorriest human being you or I know, then, is much more than an opportunity to exercise patience, or even kindness. The most wretched excuse for man, woman or child you can think of is also an irreplaceable chance: - a golden opportunity, for both you and me, to invest, and grow, and prosper. But in what?

Not necessarily in anything material, though that too may come with time. But, for now, simply in that most exquisitely attentive and appreciative depth of Knowledge, that richly brocaded strand of Wealth, that modest, mostly unapplauded, yet utterly satisfying peak of Success we call love.

A Taste of our own Medicine

I suspect one of the reasons why it's so devilishly hard to "swallow our pride" is that it tastes so plain bloody awful. Then again, if we can barely stomach our own pride, imagine how it must taste to other people.

A Toast (with belated apologies to Commodore Stephen Decatur)

To my country:
In her domestic and foreign policies may she be ever in the right.
But Right or Left, she is still my country.