Towards a Culture of Life, Part 1

I guess my secret is out: something in my psyche has recently reached a tipping point. I now feel suddenly averse to my erstwhile pro-choice, pro-abortion rights attitude. (See Are We at a Tipping Point? and, in another blog, Can We Have Too Much Liberty?.)

I now think those who espouse a "culture of life" are right on the money.

Ever since Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in 1973, the culture has gone to the dogs. By that I mean that we have become a nation of "slob divas" (see Hooray for Hypocrisy!). The lives of each and every one of us, in the way in which we live them, shout "It's all about me."

What do I mean? I just saw the new movie The Fantastic Four. Great special effects, but whatever happened to superheroes for whom the overriding concern is about more than curing their own space-zapped DNA? Mr. Fantastic, The Thing, The Invisible Woman, The Human Torch — what is the point of their transformation, in this movie, except to oppose the only slightly more self-absorbed Dr. Doom, their onetime colleague. He wants world power, they want ... what? To put things back to where they were before, not for the world's sake but for their own return to comfort.

Well, OK, maybe I can relate to that, after all. I'd like to put things back the way they were before, partly for my own sense of comfort. I've grown uncomfortable in a world in which the needs of the community take second place to personal prerogative.

So when I say I'd like to reaffirm a "culture of life," that's my not-so-hidden agenda. This is not only a symbolic thing, but it's nonetheless true that at the level of psychological symbolism, legalized abortion sanctions just about every version of extreme personal prerogative you can name.


What I'm talking about is ethos. Ethos is a fancy word for shared community values, unwritten rules which hem in our conduct and mold our attitudes. We live in a world in which a once-unified ethos has become balkanized. A world in which each is notably free to pick the rules he or she lives by, and to do so independently of everyone else, one-from-column-A-two-from-column-B-style, à la a Chinese restaurant.

We live in a world where in the province of human knowledge we have developed "the inability to make vocabularies intersect from subject to subject" — words by Brother Patrick Ellis, former president of the Catholic University of America, writing in his "My Turn" column in the 7/14/05 Catholic Review (p. 9).

This particular essay is called "Welcome to the Pope's Mind." In it, Ellis rues the "20th-century compartmentalizing of knowledge with the spin-off of the natural sciences [from other knowledge domains] and the fraying of the theology-philosophy fabric" at the same time as he extols the new Pope Benedict XVI's reaffirming "the doctrine of conscience."

A few weeks ago, I couldn't have agreed with Ellis on that. Now I feel I can.

Maybe I'm a part of the "geezer generation" Ellis speaks of. Maybe I got my basic education before "the fragmentation of knowledge" — and the balkanization of ethos — got under way. But I now consider myself like him in linking the disrespect for life in an abortion-legal land with all the general fragmentation and balkanization.


I can't immediately put my finger on where I read it, but I've heard this fragmentation and balkanization spoken of as the essence of post-modernism. Deconstructionist literary theory, post-modernism's badge, says that no "text" — no body of words — really means anything beyond what we read into it. And each of us reads it in his or her own way. Sure, there are cultural overlays; as a member of a Catholic subculture, I read Brother Ellis differently than a Protestant would. But the point is that no one culture or subculture's interpretation of any given text ought to be privileged over any other.

If no text, no set of symbols has intrinsic meaning, whither ethos? Whither the human ability, so amply demonstrated in the past, to enshrine a body of values and live by them as a community? That's what we've lost today, and it's killing us slowly but surely. And the first step back to ethos and true community, it seems to me, is to embrace a "culture of life."