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"What Will Future
Generations Condemn Us For?"
Part One of Three By Dave Andrusko Good evening, and thanks once again for reading Today's News & Views. Part Two is a wonderful offer that you should take advantage of. Part Three is a thank you to the Texas Attorney General who refuses to allow abortionists to skirt requirements. Over at National Right to Life News Today (www.nationalrighttolifenews.org), you learn that the Chinese government is not letting up on its repressive one-child policy. Obama Senior Advisor David Axelrod offers some unintentionally illuminating remarks on his way out the door. Please send your comments on Today's News & Views and National Right to Life News Today to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha
The author of "What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For?" is Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton University professor of philosophy. His overarching point is that behavior that was commonplace, sometimes seemingly forever, is now rightly condemned. After citing various examples, he writes, "Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?" Before I go any further, let me make a couple of clarifications. For starters, as he points out, "not every disputed institution or practice is destined to be discredited." (More about that below.) And it's not as if there weren't people who vigorously protested against these evils. Although he doesn't use the idiom, Appiah is discussing the culmination--the tipping point--at which the light goes on. Collectively, we are astounded by what we passively tolerated as, if not acceptable, at least as not worth going to the trouble of eliminating. We were blind, but now we see, although how those blinders were removed is not discussed. In determining which conduct/institutions will someday be thrown into the dustbin of history, Appiah looks at past discards and argues that they were characterized by "three signs." "First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries. "Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, 'We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?') "And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit." The reader needn't be particularly prophetic to anticipate that Appiah would make the case that "our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today." He offers four candidates. I offer a fifth: abortion. Borrowing from Appiah's analysis, when abortion is overthrown, it won't come like a shot out of the blue. You have laid the foundation by patently illuminating why it is wrong to take the lives of innocent unborn children. An abortion-free America will be the culmination of your unstinting labors. When all else fails, pro-abortionists figuratively throw up their hands: "There have always been abortions," which, of course, is the stick with which defenders of slavery clubbed abolitionists. If you ever saw the movie, "Amazing Grace," you would have heard an eloquent case made by British defenders of the slave trade that if Great Britain wasn't trafficking in Africans, someone else would. (Kind of reminds you of the opponents of state parental involvement laws--the kids will just go to another state.) Likewise, truth acts like an acid that eats through the strongest rationalizations. We are advancing the cause of Life by systematically eliminating the defenses that enable people to avoid demanding an end to abortion. Appiah, the author of "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen," shrewdly observes that the abolitionists moved the debate from abstract arguments about slavery to its sheer brutality by focusing on the incredible carnage associated with the "middle passage" from Africa to the United States. In the same way, "choice" has that soothing, can't-we-all-get-along? tone to it. But when Nebraska passes the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act" or when NRLC leads the charge to ban partial-birth abortion, the education that made those possible converts the gauzy abstraction of choice to a concrete picture of mind-numbing, soul-wrenching violence. When future generations ask in astonishment, "How COULD you have killed your own unborn children?" it will be because you opened their eyes to truths they desperately wished to avoid. |
Such
was the headline on an op-ed that appeared in Sunday's
Washington Post. My wife took one look and said, "THIS is
Today's News & Views material." And surely Lisa was right.