The Mechanical Governess,
attr. to Vichy et Fils, circa 1880
It is not often that people across both the country and the
media are shocked and sickened by the practices of a liberal darling
organization like Planned Parenthood. Nonetheless, Cecile Richards who leads
the group was defiant
and many stood by the nation’s largest abortion provider including the White
House and the Democratic 2016 presidential
frontrunner. Their practice of harvesting the intact body parts of aborted
babies and selling them is not an unfortunate departure from the modern world’s
march of progress. It’s what happens when scientific civilization divorces
Christian civilization and becomes a technologically empowered cult of selfish
autonomy.
Modern people expect to control the world. It’s what modern
means. The world out there is a chaotic and dangerous place in need of taming
to make it predictable and safe. Modern science promises and provides that.
Ancient and medieval inventions improved life, but they were few and haphazard.
Modern inventions have flowed like a river with an ever wider and stronger
current. This was no accident of time. The distinctly modern understanding of
reason as calculating and production-oriented directed the efforts of the
mechanically ambitious through a disciplined method toward the conquest of
nature for the relief of our estate.
But the blessing has been mixed. The information revolution
of the internet has given us easy access to vast reservoirs of information and
rapid email communication, but also a deluge of pornography and shattered spans
of attention. Infant mortality rates have plummeted, but abortion technology
has made pre-natal infanticide “safe,” clinical, and somewhat respectable. And
so on.
The problem is not just the technology that appears equally
open to good or evil uses, but the view of creation both human and non-human
that technology assumes. God commanded us to “take dominion” of the earth
(Genesis 1:26), which modern technology helps us to do. But that requires that
we see ourselves as God’s image bearers in God’s world under God’s authority
for God’s purposes. Without that understanding, we are left with tyrannical
domination over the universe—including the human, even the soul, the psyche—with
no moral guidance except our selfish desires. Whatever we can do we should
(e.g., human cloning, designer babies), because mastery must extend as far as
possible so that my autonomy may be as wide as possible.
In The
Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis warned that man’s control of the universe
through an atheistic science necessarily becomes the power of some people over
most people. And because reason is no longer also for hearing and understanding
God but now only for conquering and calculating, we are left only with the
passions for guiding our use of that power, most often the selfish ones.
Sir Francis Bacon, the early 17th century author
of the modern scientific project to make us masters of the universe, tried to
calm people’s fears (notice, there were fears even then) that this greater
power over nature would bring even greater evils upon us. The products of the
new science, he assured us in New Organon
I.129, would be governed by “sound reason and true religion” (recta ratio et sana religio). But he
knew that both of these are historically rare and that his new science would
undermine both. He expected this modern empire of man to be pagan and dangerous
though peaceful and comfortable, and, as Christian restraints are falling away,
that is precisely what it is showing itself to be.
As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama defended
abortion rights as necessary to "ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms,
and opportunities [control] as our sons to fulfill their dreams [selfish
desires].” For women to
share equally with men in modern personal autonomy—unconstrained by God,
morality, or nature—they must have free access to abortion, even, if necessary,
as the baby is being born.
The prophet Daniel confessed that the sins of his people were his own sins too (Daniel 9:4-11). The sobering truth is that modern Christians share in this morally and spiritually unrestrained drive to conquer the world technologically for our comfort and convenience. Until we properly distinguish the uniquely modern from the Christian, a form of distinguishing Christ from the world, we will continue to be complicit in these horrors.
[Portions of this post first appeared in my Worldmag.com column, August 10, 2015, "Abortion and the Modern People We Are."]
