Let Him Who Has Ears, Hear

     In a post earlier this week I argued that when the people of a nation put their trust in God, they implicitly constrain the "freedom" of some to constrain the legitimate freedom of everybody else.  Let's now broaden that thesis to include a belief, fundamental to our humanity, that there is a natural law that we must respect -- not the codified results of moral philosophy, but the axiomatic preconditions for any kind of moral reasoning at all.  Apparently, if the natural law does not exist, all things are permissible, including the use of genetic engineering to ensure, insofar as our current science can, that one's child will be deaf: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/health/05essa.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. (Many thanks to stalwart blogger James Altena for the tip.)

     Where to begin with such a story?  In how many ways have the actors violated the essence of what it means to be human? 

1. Unable to conceive a child by the normal means, they do not resort to medicine.  They resort to manufacture.  It is crucial to spell out the difference -- and, given what I think is the colossally unwise acceptance of IVF among many otherwise thoughtful and faithful Christians, it pains me to have to spell it out here.  But medicine heals a wound, cures a disease, or mitigates damage.  If you cannot conceive because there's scar tissue in your uterus, then let us thank the good Lord for the ingenuity of surgeons who have developed ways to remove the tissue, and return at least some health to the womb.  Someday, who knows, someone may come up with a prosthetic for women whose tubes have been destroyed by PID.  But if you cannot conceive, and medicine cannot help you, then the only moral choice remaining if you still wish to have a child, the choice that does not separate the act of love from the act of conception, and that does not turn baby-making into manufacture, quite aside from the question of wasted embryos, is to adopt.

2.  Of course, the lesbians in the article could never conceive a child by any natural act of love.  So they employ a satisfactory bull, a sperm donor willing to sell his seed so that others may use it in various forms of manufacture or animal husbandry, whether those involve a Petri dish or a syringe.

3.  Unable to love a man in the way that a woman is intended to love a man, the women turn inward, loving one like themselves, and carelessly deprive their child of a father.

4.  Steeped in narcissism, the lesbians employ genetic engineering to determine, insofar as our current science can, what their child will be like.

5. Specifically, since the lesbians are both deaf (graduates of Gallaudet), they see to it that the sperm donor is a deaf man, giving them the greatest possible chance to bear a deaf child.

6. They blaspheme against the Lord who came to heal us of sin and the effects of sin, chirpily claiming that to bear a hearing child would be "a blessing," but to bear a deaf child would be "a special blessing."

7. When the child, a now fatherless boy, is born with some ability to hear, they withhold from him any hearing aids, doing their best to render him as deaf as they are.  Since they will never be able to hear the subtle modulations of a human voice, a laugh, the clutch in the throat as someone recalls a lost friend, the happy ramblings of a little child, neither will he.  Since they will never be able to hear the odd sharps in a Bach fugue, neither will he.  Since they will never be able to hear the silly mockingbird on the fencepost imitating a cardinal, a bluejay, a wren, and a truck backing up, neither will he.  Had he been born fully hearing, what but the sheer residual sentimentality of people who used to believe in good and evil would prevent them from ordering an operation to puncture the eardrums?

     If even the idea of a personal and providential God, a God of righteousness, is a powerful protector of the weak against the strong, since weak and strong must both stand before His throne of judgment, against what does a belief in the natural law -- and its concomitant revulsion against the unnatural -- protect us?  C. S. Lewis gives the answer in The Abolition of Man.  We must respect the natural moral law, which is no other than the structure of our rational being created by God, or we find ourselves as "free" as gods, ultimately to manipulate the race, to mass-produce ourselves, to consider ourselves as no holier than the wood we hew or the metal we work.  In other words, we rise above nature on our own only to fall below it, and in the very act of the supposed supersession.  When we deny our nature -- a created nature, as Christians affirm -- and subject it to the combination of sophisticated technology and untrammelled will, we become not masters of the tools, but tools ourselves.  We abolish man.

     A Christian might put it this way.  We may obey the laws of our created nature, laws that demand only what is good for us anyway, and that forbid only what is bad for us anyway, and in our habitual obedience, made possible by God's grace, be set free.  For God, the ground of our being, made us for Himself, and in Him are pure goodness and pure act; in obeying God, then, we unite ourselves to the One who freely made us and whose will is that we should share the joy of his freedom.  We may do that; and in one form or another, so say the greatest sages of the cultures of the world.  Or we may deny that nature, and in seeking to overmaster it or to subject it wholly to our own godlike wills, forge our own chains.  Either creature, or product, then; either a mysterious soul ascending the ladder of Jacob's dream, or a congeries of biotic specifications on some conveyor belt; either a human being who submits, great of heart, to the liberating law, or a cultural construct that capitulates to a license that enslaves.  There is, finally, no third choice.

Comments

[dilys]

This is one of the most miserable and often unconscious aspects of a tribal strain in humans -- the targeted damage, physical or psychological, to one's children's characteristics so they won't have the capacity to reach higher or wider than the family or tribe. To permanently brand and shackle them as "one of us." It is not only a physical, or medical-engineering, phenomenon.

[James A. Altena]

Extraordinarily insightful and eloquent, as always, Tony.

The bitter fruits of relativism are seen here in full perversity. It is simply denied that to hear is objectively better than to be deaf, that to be of normal stature is objectively better than to have a normal torso with disproportionately small limbs. Instead, the narcissistic logic of "better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven" enters and the child must be made defective in order to validate the parent's selfish assertion that her genetic defect is not such, but an alternative of equal value which society must accept as such. The child is simply a manufactured product to serve the ends of gratifying the parent's ego, not a person of intrinsic worth in his own right.

[Judy Warner]

These two women are graduates of Gallaudet College for the deaf. The students of this college recently forced out the newly appointed president because she wasn't deaf enough. That is, although she was deaf, she had been taught lip reading and she learned sign language only in her 20s. I imagine that Helen Keller must be the very devil to these people.

[Bobby Winters]

Wasn't there a PBS documentary a few years back about deaf people attempting to block cochlear implants in children? They didn't want the children robbed of their deafness.

[Bobby Winters]

It's called Sound and Fury . My family watched it and became very angry at the parents for not helping their children.

[Francesca Matthews]

>>This is one of the most miserable and often unconscious aspects of a tribal strain in humans -- the targeted damage, physical or psychological, to one's children's characteristics so they won't have the capacity to reach higher or wider than the family or tribe. <<

What an excellent point! I'm thinking of the stereotypical Yorkshire miner who doesn't want his son to go to college and of cults that keep their members in ignorance.

What are the root causes of this tribalism? A sense of inferiority that consolidates group bonds? Or of superioty? Or distrust of the wider culture?

[Judy Warner]

The worst example of this tribalism here and now is the part of black culture that calls doing well in school "acting white." That it is a fairly recent phenomenon doesn't make it any less tribal. At least the deaf people have some sort of a culture of their own.

[Bill R]

"The child is simply a manufactured product to serve the ends of gratifying the parent's ego, not a person of intrinsic worth in his own right."
--James A. Altena

Exactly, James. Which I suppose is the reductio ad absurdum following from the abandonment of the acknowledgement that children are a gift from God, entrusted to us for a short time for their own good (not ours). It follows, ironically, from the pro-abortionist's logic, who concludes that "if we're going to have the little beggars after all, they're darn well going to be made in OUR image."

[dilys]

Bloggish synchrony:

"The child is simply a manufactured product..."

"In [sociopaths'] minds, other people are not independent human beings with their own desires and needs, but are objects whose sole purpose is to provide gratification for the desires of the Sociopath." -Shrinkwrapped

And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.--the Terry Prachett book, Carpe Jugulum, quoted by The Anchoress 

[Mark B, Hanson]

"When I grow up Dad, I wanna be just like you." And when I said it, I did. At least my father left me the ability to choose otherwise later on. As a culture, we are moving away from desiring for our children better than we have to wanting for our children just what we have (or worse, just what we think would be best) - and exercising our power to make it so.

We so often forget that an "act of God" can as often be a blessing as a problem. More often, though less often identified as such.

[Korora]

IIRC Huckleberry Finn's abusive father was incensed because Huck was learning how to read. Different bucket, same type of crab.