Derbism, or, the Morality of the Gut

For those who don't frequent National Review Online, the name John Derbyshire may not ring a bell. Which is a shame, because Derb is one of the more original, provocative and interesting voices on the political right. Derbyshire is a British import, and brings with him that typically pugnatious style of debate that is more common to our brothers across the pond than you see among political commentators here in the US. In a scathing review of fellow NRO contibutor Ramesh Ponnoru's latest book "The Party of Death", Derb defended abortion and euthanasia as the morality of a feeling, commonsensical people against what he called a "frigid and pitiless dogma" constructed by intellectualized nannies and schoolmarms:

Can Right to Life (hereinafter RTL) fairly be called a cult? This is a point on which I cannot make up my mind. Some of the common characteristics of culthood are missing—the Führerprinzip, for example. On the other hand, RTL has the following things in common with every cult in the world: To those inside, it appears to be a structure of perfect logical integrity, founded on unassailable philosophical principles, while to those outside—among whom, obviously, I count myself—it seems to some degree (depending on the observer’s temperament and inclinations) nutty; to some other degree (ditto) hysterical; and to some yet other degree (ditto ditto) a threat to liberty.
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"Party of Death” makes pretty free use of slippery-slope arguments, to varying effect. Not every slope is slippery. Most of our social taboos are in fact surprisingly robust, even when perfectly arbitrary. Anglo-Saxon cultures are, I believe, in a minority in having a taboo against the eating of horseflesh; yet our regular consumption of pork, lamb, and beef does not seem to be pushing us down a slippery slope towards hippophagy, even though nobody much (except Bo Derek) would care if it did. Given the above-mentioned pressures on the medical profession, though, I think the euthanasia slope actually might be slippery, at least in potential. That is not in itself an argument against euthanasia, only an argument for great vigilance and care in that area. Ponnuru makes it an argument, of course, and I think it’s a pity, from the RTL point of view, he didn’t do more with this. He didn’t, because he has other arguments that he prefers, arguments from abstract principles, which he much prefers to the untidy, relativistic, and hypocritical realities of human social life. “[Terri] Schiavo’s death was surrounded by euphemisms,” Ponnuru complains. Good heavens!—people are using euphemisms when talking about death? Whatever next?—the euphemizing of sex?
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The best thing in this third part of the book is Chapter 17, which deals with public opinion about abortion, and offers telling insights. This chapter also shows Ponnuru the intellectual at his best. His purpose is to make the case that support for abortion is trending downwards. The actual evidence he offers, however, paints an ambiguous picture—largely because of the admirable honesty with which he offers it. He takes his pluses where he can find them (“characters in prime-time television shows almost never have abortions”) while frankly admitting the minuses (“there isn’t a pro-life majority... exactly”).

What the poll numbers suggest to me is that the moral philosophy of the people of the United States is—as is, I would guess, that of people pretty much anywhere else—basically pagan, with a couple of thin coats of vague religiosity painted over it. We no longer smash sick people on the head with a rock, as I suppose our remote ancestors did, but invalids remain just as unpopular as they were back in the Paleolithic. Anyone who has endured a long confining illness knows this. Our preferred method for dealing with the unpleasant side of life, including topics like abortion and euthanasia, is to think about them as little as possible. In the fuss over Mrs. Schiavo, it was not hard to detect a general public irritation at having had the whole unsightly business forced on our attention. Perhaps this is not humanity at its most noble, but:

Show me what angels feel.
Till then I cling, a mere weak man, to men.

A corollary, though Ponnuru seems unaware of it, is that people who are obsessively interested in these topics seem, to the rest of us, a bit creepy. We may even find ourselves wondering which side, really, is the Party of Death. Ponnuru says that it is unjust to regard some instances of the human organism as less alive than others based on how we feel about them. (Another RTL-er once derided this approach to me, in conversation, as “Barry Manilow ethics”—the worth of another human life judged by our own feelings, wo wo wo feelings... I offer this designation for Ramesh Ponnuru’s future use, free of charge.) Unfortunately most of us do so judge; and feelings, wo wo wo feelings, are a much more common foundation for our social taboos than are Natural Law principles, or indeed any abstract principles at all. Why, if a woman’s husband dies, should she not use his corpse for garden mulch, or serve it up with mashed potatoes and collard greens for dinner? I cannot think of any reason well rooted in pure philosophy, though there might be a public health issue to be addressed. We do not do such things because of the disgust we feel—we feel—at the mistreatment of human corpses.

We likewise feel that an adult woman’s life, even a few months of it, is worth more than that of a hardly-formed fetus; and that the vigorous, usefully-employed, merrily procreating Michael Schiavo has a life, a life, more worthy of the name than had the incurably insensate relict of his spouse. Those like Ponnuru who think differently are working against the grain of human nature, against our feelings—yes, our feelings—about what life is. The life of a newly-formed embryo, or of a brain-damaged patient who has shown no trace of consciousness for fifteen years, is worth just as much as the life of a healthy adult, Ponnuru insists. Well, most of us instinctively but emphatically disagree, and no amount of argumentative ingenuity is likely to change our minds. Hearts, whatever.
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I wonder again: Who, actually, is the Party of Death? Here I see a woman who, having missed her period and found herself pregnant, has an abortion, comes home, downs a stiff drink, and gets on with her life. With her life. Here I meet a man whose loved wife has gone, never to return, yet her personless body still twitches and grunts randomly on its plastic sheet, defying years of care and therapy. Let her go, everyone begs him, and his own conscience cries; and at last he does, whichever way the law will permit. Here I find a couple who want a lively, healthy child, but who know their genes carry dark possibilities of a lifetime’s misery and an early death. They permit multiple embryos to be created, select the one free from the dread traits, and give over the rest to the use of science, or authorize their destruction.

The RTL-ers would tell me that these people, and the medical professionals who help them, are all moral criminals, who have destroyed human lives. They support their belief with careful definitions, precise chains of reasoning, and—I do not doubt it—sincere intentions. Yet how inhuman they seem! What a frigid and pitiless dogma they preach!—one that would take from the living, without any regard to what the living have to say about it, to give to those whom common intuition regards as nonliving; that would criminalize acts of compassion, and that would strip away such little personal autonomy as is left to us after the attentions of the IRS, Big Medicine, the litigation rackets, and the myriad government bureaucracies that regulate our lives and peer into our private affairs.

For RTL is, really, just another species of Political Correctness, just another manifestation of the intellectual pathology, the hypertrophied and academical egalitarianism, the victimological scab-picking, the gaseous sentimentality. that has afflicted our civilization this past forty years. We have lost our innocence, traded it in for a passel of theorems. The RTL-ers are just another bunch of schoolmarms trying to boss us around and to diminish our liberties. Is it wrong to have concern for fetuses and for the vegetative, incapable, or incurable? Not at all. Do we need to do some hard thinking about the notion of personhood in a society with fast-advancing biological capabilities? We surely do. (And I think Party of Death contributes useful things to that discussion.) Should we let a cult of theologians, monks, scolds, grad-school debaters, logic-choppers, and schoolmarms tell us what to do with our wombs, or when we may give up the ghost, or when we should part with our loved ones? Absolutely not! Give me liberty, and give me death!

I think at last it is largely a matter of temperament. Ponnuru has given his chapter on euthanasia the title “The Doctor Will Kill You Now.” I imagine the author meant this to have shock value. He plainly finds atrocious the notion of a doctor—a healer!—killing someone. I can’t say I agree. I can all too easily imagine circumstances in which I would respond to “The doctor will kill you now” with “Thank God!” either on my own behalf or a loved one’s. I suppose this, by Ponnuru’s standards and definitions, puts me in the Party of Death. It depends what you look for from life, and from the great cold cosmos—as I said, just a matter of temperament, really. Some of us are RTL absolutists: “You can’t do that to a living human being!” Some of us are personal autonomy absolutists: “Don’t tell me what to do with my own body!” Most of us are too unintellectual to be consistently absolutist about anything. We just favor one side or the other, more or less strongly. America would be a happier and freer nation if the accursed intellectuals would just leave us alone with our lives, our blunders, our tragedies, and our deaths.

Ponnoru's rebuttal is here.

Now I can't say that I totally agree with Derbyshire's views, but he has plucked a chord that resonates with me, and it has to do with the Schiavo affair. At the risk of re-opening some wounds from last year's debates on the matter, I do think that the Schiavo affair was the moment when the Right to Life movement, or parts of it at least, introduced a level of rigidity and extremism into the debate that divided the RTL movement from many basically conservative people who supported or had sympathy with it. While I haven't read his book, I do recall reading Ponnoru's opinion pieces regarding Shiavo, and realized that even opposing abortion was not enough for RTL hardliners like Ponnoru. If you held the opinion that the Florida court's decision should be upheld, that Michael Schiavo was the best person to represent Terri Schiavo's wishes, and that a desire to have feeding tubes removed in a situation of irreversible brain loss as suffered by Terri was a reasonable desire to have, then you were now part of the Party of Death, with no moral distinction between yourself and Peter Singer.

Another interesting thing to take away from Derbyshire's piece is his unique take on moral reasoning, at least from the standpoint of self described conservative. It is a viewpoint that trusts common feelings over abstract philosophies. Russ Douthat does an admirable job of capturing the essence of Derbism:

The Derb: I believe that there are few men more consistent in their conservatism than John Derbyshire - and by conservatism I really mean way, way old-fashioned conservatism, the kind that held sway not only before liberalism, not only before Christianity, but before what C.S. Lewis called the development of the Tao, and what Karen Armstrong calls "the Great Transformation." Derb has no interest in universals of any kind: his ethics are situational, his loyalties are tribal, his morals are instinctual. He is fond of the forms of his ancestral religion (Anglicanism, that is) and appreciative of religion's role in securing social peace, but he is generally dismissive of any religious system's truth claims, as he is dismissive of any system at all - save for the systems of modern science, because they offer immediate and tangible benefits to his bodily existence. He is openly prejudiced: He likes white people better than most other people, Americans better than foreigners, straights better than gays, and he makes no attempt to justify these prejudices with any kind of abstract theory, preferring to speak the language of kinship and taboo. He presents himself as a voice of common sense, and he is, in the sense that he speaks for the universal instincts that lie beneath the veneer of Mosaic morality in every Western mind, the kill-or-be-killed voice that aims to keep us alive in a hostile and uncaring universe. Favor your family and friends; kill your enemies or avoid them; regard everyone else with a certain suspicion - these are the tenets of Derbism, and it should go without saying that they breed a certain callousness toward human life and dignity. He is for torture, up to a point at least; he is for aggressive military action without any just-war jaw-jaw thrown in; he is more understanding than most commentators toward the motivations of rapists. And - as should come as no surprise, for a man who said of Abu Ghraib, "kick one for me" - he has no particular difficulty with legalized abortion.

I can't say that I subscribe to undiluted Derbism. Abstract principles have a role to play in the development of moral traditions. Such traditions evolve through experience and the clarifying view that reason brings to the grimy details of life, as the view from a mountaintop can provide a more revealing understanding of reality than a sole reliance on the ground level details can manage. The American experiment in constitutional governance would be untinkable without the theoretical groundwork of the Classical and Enlightenment thinkers.

However, as I argued in my tirade against Platonism, abstractions and essences are not the things in themselves. They are fictional representations of the real and the actual. Reasoning from them often results in magnificent castles of wispy pneumato, wonderful to behold but bereft of any practical value in comprehending reality. A rigid, totally consistent application of the "right to life" doctrine cannot result in the most humane decision in every circumstance. A moral philosophy that is not leavened with a good dose of Derbism will not result in nourishing fare.