Jesus v. Abortion

They Know Not What They Do

Charles K. Bellinger

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781498235051, 9781498235075
• eBook ISBN: 9781498235068
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

There are three main positions that people adopt within the abortion debate: pro-life, muddled middle, and pro-choice. Jesus v. Abortion critiques the pro-choice and muddled middle positions, employing several unusual angles: (1) The question "What would Jesus say about abortion if he were here today?" is given very substantial treatment.(2) The abortion debate is usually conducted using moral and metaphysical arguments; this book adds in anthropological insights regarding the function of violence in human culture.(3) Rights language is employed by both sides of the debate, to opposite ends; this book leads the reader to ask deep questions about the concept of "rights."(4) The use of historical analogies in the abortion debate goes both directions, in the sense that both sides accuse the other of being similar to the defenders of slavery; this book contains what is probably the most sophisticated and sustained analysis of the meaning and legitimacy of such analogies.(5) Many important thinkers are brought into this conversation, such as Soren Kierkegaard, Eric Voegelin, Julien Benda, Simone Weil, Kenneth Burke, Richard Weaver, Rene Girard, Philip Rieff, Giorgio Agamben, Chantal Delsol, Paul Kahn, and David Bentley Hart.

Part One

Understanding Violence (and Human Rights)

The central elements of Part One:

• Violence is a prominent feature of our contemporary world, but it is a poorly understood phenomenon.

• A theory of violence needs to understand the deep roots of the impulse toward violence in the human psyche; that level is usually unconscious. People rarely have an articulate awareness of their own motives.

• The theory also needs to grasp how conscious-level myths and ideologies shape and direct violence.

• Rights language is an attempt to contain and overcome violence, but it is weak because it works on the conscious level and cannot reach the deeper unconscious level.

• The confusion in our culture regarding how to understand violence is related to the confusion regarding the employment of rights language.

• The central goal of Part One is to present a clear and compelling account of the anthropological roots of violence, and to outline a constructive account of how the concept of rights should be understood.

1

Why Are Human Beings Violent?

Examining the Question and Some Answers

Violent acts by human beings are in the news every day. In any given year, we hear reports of murders, terrorist bombings and beheadings, mass shootings by deranged gunmen, suicides, the police killing unarmed suspects, the police being shot and killed, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and so on, and so forth. Violence is a shape-shifting phenomenon, in the sense that it takes different forms in different contexts. Sometimes it is a crowd phenomenon, as when a mob lynches someone; sometimes it is an individual phenomenon, as when a disturbed person kills schoolchildren or parishioners at a Bible study; sometimes it is directed by the highest levels of the state, as in Nazism and Stalinism; sometimes it expresses itself as one ethnic tribe or religious denomination attacking another, such as Sunnis and Shiites attacking each other in the Middle East, Hutus killing Tutsis in Rwanda, Buddhists attacking Muslims in Burma, or Protestants and Catholics killing each other in Northern Ireland.18

Given that violence takes so many forms, we face a question as soon as we begin to ask the question, “Why are human beings violent?” The question that is raised by the question is this: “Is there one answer that is sufficiently general as to encompass all of these forms of violence, or not?” In other words, is “Why are human beings violent?” an unanswerable question because the different forms of violence require different answers? Or, is there a common root that feeds the differing forms of violence? Are the forms of violence like a cluster of houses, separated from each other, with each having its own architecture, or are the differing forms like the rooms in one big house, which would enable us to inquire into the nature of the foundation under the house?

I am a theologian, and I favor the latter answer; I believe that the forms of violence are like rooms in one large house, and we can inquire into the nature of the foundation. But there isn’t anything about being a theologian that would necessarily entail that approach. It is entirely plausible that another theologian might favor the notion that the forms of violence need to be understood separately; likewise, a person could be a nonreligious philosopher, social scientist, or historian, and go either way in response to this dichotomy. It all depends on what sort of theory the person finds to be most convincing as a way of understanding the phenomena that he or she is wrestling with.

Over the course of Part One I will lay out the theoretical understanding of human violence that I find to be most compelling and helpful. My task in this chapter is to stress the seriousness and difficulty of this line of inquiry by summarizing the attempts of various authors to articulate answers to this basic question: “Why are human beings violent?”

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Philosopher and literary critic Kenneth Burke provides one framework for interpreting violence. Burke argues that all children are shaped into social beings through their parents’ use of the word “no.” We are moralized by the negative. Our parents say to us: “Stay out of the street!” “Don’t hit your classmates!” “Don’t speak to me in that tone of voice!” “Don’t make a mess!” Burke is not critiquing parents for using the word “no”; he is simply reporting that they do. It is an unavoidable aspect of the human condition. On a higher level of cultural reflection, the Ten Commandments, with their “Thou shalt nots,” show that human beings are moralized by the negative. The difficulty that is created, however, is that we human beings cannot possibly live in accordance with all of the laws and moral teachings that we are presented with. We will always fail in various ways to be fully moral, fully just, fully respectful of others. We will thus have guilt feelings, which we deal with in one of two ways. If we turn inward, we are in a psychological state that Burke calls “mortification,” intense self-condemnation. If we turn outward, then we will seek to find a cathartic release of our guilt feelings by attacking others, whom we treat as scapegoats. Because the problem of guilt feelings is universal, and because turning outward is so much more common than mortification, human culture in general is a continuing process of seeking out scapegoats; culture is a “scapegoat mechanism,” a phrase that Burke coined in the 1930s.19 We can see this dramatic process at work in phenomena such as American racism and German Nazism.

Richard Weaver’s book Ideas Have Consequences also makes a contribution to reflection on violence, though his approach is more philosophical than psychological. This book was published in 1948, arising out of Weaver’s attempt to make sense of the catastrophe of World War II. As Weaver searches for the root of the human malaise, he reaches back into Western history, pointing to a late medieval philosophical school known as nominalism. The competing school, realism, taught that reality has principles and laws built into it by God, which human reason is capable of comprehending with a fair degree of competence. Nominalism taught that reality is not graspable by reason; therefore, we human beings must come up with interpretive schemes and then impose those schemes onto reality. We say what things are; we define reality. This contest of visions, between realism and nominalism, was slowly but surely won by nominalism over many centuries from the late medieval era to our own time. World War II was the fruit of that process of gradually leaving behind a respect for creation as it comes from the hand of God, and putting in its place a Promethean assertion of human will. If reality is not an order within which we find our place, but is instead like clay to be molded, then society and human nature become malleable. Hence, the competing visions of the Nazis and the Russian Communists, who were enacting in their own ways the concept of nominalism. Weaver’s book is a lament for the lost world of realism, where respect for the wisdom of tradition, for nature, for other human beings, and for God the Creator formed a coherent vision within which violence could be held in check through the concept of justice. In our modern world, violence becomes chaotic and without limits, because the human ego exists in a state of belligerence toward anything outside itself that does not fit into the plans that it dreams up and seeks to impose on reality.20

Carl Jung spoke of the different components of the human psyche as the ego, the persona, and the personal and collective unconscious. It is in the unconscious where the “shadow” side is found. The shadow consists of feelings of imperfection, guilt, finitude, shame, and so forth. We human beings typically repress the shadow side and then project it outward onto others. We don’t want to consciously acknowledge our guilt and inadequacy, so we label others as evil and ourselves as good. We project the shadow onto others as the Nazis did to the Jews, or as Stalin did with anyone he wanted to label as a “counter-revolutionary.” The Allies saw the Nazis and the Communists as incarnations of different forms of demonic evil, while thinking of themselves as the Children of Light. Everyone sees evil as external to themselves because they refuse to recognize their own shadow side and integrate it into their consciousness. The story of the woman caught in adultery in the New Testament speaks to this concept powerfully; Jesus reveals the self-righteousness of the lynch mob and forces them to face their own sinfulness. Jung’s focus on a lack of integration within the psyche was an attempt to improve on the theory of Sigmund Freud, whose comments on the aggressive instinct in human beings were suggestive, but which were never developed thoroughly by Freud himself.

Ernest Becker, an anthropologist who wrote several books in the 1960s and 1970s, attempted to synthesize the best insights into human behavior that had been articulated by authors such as Freud, Jung, Burke, Otto Rank, and Søren Kierkegaard. Becker forcefully argued in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death that the mainspring of human behavior is our fear of physical death.21 We are conscious of our mortality and we hate it because it will bring an end to our basic narcissism as self-aware biological beings. We want to go on living forever, but we cannot; this is the existential dilemma at the root of the human condition. What Becker calls the “basic lie” that human beings tell themselves is that they can transcend death somehow. We invent various “death-denial strategies” as attempts to avoid being honest about our mortality. One such strategy directly employs violence. We kill other human beings, treating them as scapegoats, with the implicit belief that they will die, we will not. The Jews will be killed off; the Nazis will establish a Thousand Year Reich. Even though it must be acknowledged that individuals will die, if they invest themselves in a symbolic entity larger than themselves, such as a nation-state, then they can pretend that they have somehow cheated death. Becker’s theory of death-denial has supporters in the academic world up to the present day.22

I turn next to psychologist Alice Miller, whose theory is significantly different from the other approaches we have been examining thus far. For Miller, the key to underst...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him”
• Part One: Understanding Violence (and Human Rights)
• Part Two: Arguments: Superficial and Deep
• Part Three: Historical Reenactments
• Part Four: The Way Forward
• Bibliography