On the Road to the Gas Chambers?
In "Introduction to A Memoir to Mary Ann," written on December 8, 1960 and contained in Mystery and Manners, Flannery O'Connor wrote:
"One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him. The Alymers whom Hawthorne saw as a menace have multiplied. Busy cutting down human imperfection, they are making headway also on the raw material of good. Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus' hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."
I thought of this passage this morning after reading Peggy Noonan's excellent column on the possible impending death of Terri Schiavo. She asks why the "pull-the-tube people" are so passionate about killing Schiavo; why are they so insistent that her life be snuffed out? What motivates them, she asks?
Why are they so committed to this woman's death?
They seem to have fallen half in love with death.
What does Terri Schiavo's life symbolize to them? What does the idea that she might continue to live suggest to them?
Why does this prospect so unnerve them? Again, if you think Terri Schiavo is a precious human gift of God, your passion is explicable. The passion of the pull-the-tube people is not.
Also this morning, Robert Novak says that he hasn't seen such bitterness in Washington since the Vietnam War:
The intensity was brought home to me at the Saturday dinner party. A fellow journalist asked me what I thought about the congressional intervention. When I responded that I approved, several colleagues asked how in the world I, of all people, could approve of federal intervention in local affairs. I told them I did not care about that issue but wondered why they were so anxious to end Terri Schiavo's life. They responded that Republicans in Congress were only interested in politics. I had not engaged in such a heated debate with colleagues since the Vietnam War.
I don't know Bob Novak personally, but he doesn't strike me as a man who shies away from heated argument. If even he feels more heat from this subject than from any other since Vietnam -- more than Watergate, more than debates over detente or Reagan's arms build-up, more than that engendered by Clinton's impeachment, more than we heard in the last election -- then we know the stakes are very high indeed.
I think that O'Connor, writing 44 years ago, comes closer to explaining the roots of these emotions, and the consequences of the victory of the sentimentalists, than most of us can hope to do. She answers Peggy Noonan's question, what does Terri Schiavo's life symbolize to them? It's an astute question, and the answer is, it symbolizes a created cosmos in which truth has been revealed. This is a radical, even revolutionary, belief that they cannot brook. It violates their misanthropic ontology, their insistence that human life is an accident, a meaningless (or, at best, a darkly ironic) gesture in an infinite void. This clash, then, goes much deeper than mere politics, although it has been infused with the political. Whatever its outcome, it further reveals a profound chasm in the modern mind.
Update: Kenneth Tanner has two different posts on dying of thirst, here and here, at Mere Comments.
| Mar. 24, 2005 | 8:56 AM