Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Dutch Treatment

(Reprinted from the issue of December 9, 2004)

The Associated Press reports that a hospital in the Netherlands has “recently proposed guidelines for mercy killings of terminally ill newborns.” Moreover, the hospital has already begun carrying out these “procedures” without waiting for any form of official review or approval.

One of the ominous things about this news is that it hasn’t been reported, as far as I know, in the big New York and Washington papers I read daily. I happened to see it because it was picked up by the Richmond Times- Dispatch, where it appeared on the front page.

You’d think such a dreadful story would be front-page news everywhere. What’s left of civilization has taken another decisive step downward — as someone has said, not on a slippery slope, but over a vertical cliff. We’ve reached the point where what should be the most frightening news is hardly news at all. It’s neither good news nor bad news nor even interesting news. It just isn’t news.

Once again, the Dutch are leading the way in “progressive” medical ethics, the practical expression of the Culture of Death. And our news media take this horrible and portentous story in stride.

It has been Pope John Paul II’s great insight that the sexual revolution is inseparable from the Culture of Death, in which children are seen as disposable inconveniences. The natural progression has been from contraception to abortion to infanticide and euthanasia, fulfilling the darkest warnings in a startlingly short time.

Even if I were an atheist, I often reflect, I’d find it very unsettling to live in a society that can discard its oldest convictions and moral traditions so lightly. I recently quoted Chesterton on this: “Most men now are not so much rushing to extremes as merely sliding to extremes; and even reaching the most violent extremes by being almost entirely passive.”

One unbeliever who does marvel at this is the brilliant writer Tom Wolfe. For 40 years he has been amazed, as a detached observer, by America’s casual acceptance of the sexual revolution, abandoning old morals and manners alike. This is the theme of his new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, whose title character, a naive and virginal Southern girl, arrives at an Ivy League college and is soon initiated into a world where casual promiscuity is both flagrant and routine. And virtually obligatory.

Wolfe doesn’t explicitly disapprove of all this. But, as he has explained in interviews, he is astounded by it. Hasn’t anyone even noticed that an entire way of life has, for better or worse, passed away? Even if we accept the change, can’t we even ask whether it comes at some price? Can any great social transformation — and this certainly is one — be all gain, and no loss?

Someone has well said that Wolfe has a gift for “losing his head when all others are keeping theirs.” And despite his cool demeanor, he is pleading with us to lose our heads just a bit.

By now it isn’t easy. One of his critics has suggested that Charlotte Simmons’s innocence is a bit hard to believe in. Unless her family doesn’t own a television set, how could such a bright girl reach high school, let alone college, without being exposed to the salacity of American life today? Is it still 1955 where she comes from?

Old people have always been alarmed by the young. If only today’s young people could be alarmed by their elders! It was, as Walter Williams points out, the “greatest generation” that failed to transmit to its children the morals, norms, and customs it grew up with. The crassness of today’s young people is their parents’ fault. Given the hedonistic assumptions they’ve been raised on, how do we explain to them why infanticide is wrong?
 
Utter Derision

As always, the latest monstrosity begins under humane pretexts. Infanticide is introduced to spare babies suffering. When this is accepted, it will become a parental right. Abortion too began with hard cases, such as rape and incest; and the list lengthened until it became an unqualified right. Contraception was originally assumed to be for married couples, especially the poor; now it’s for everyone, including schoolchildren.

By the way: Now that the great majority of Catholic couples see nothing wrong with artificial birth control, where are all those dissenting moral theologians who used to justify it only “for grave reasons” and “in certain circumstances”?

Do they feel that perhaps they have succeeded only too well, and that maybe it’s time to remind Catholics that there are at least some moral limits? Fr. Curran, where are you?

I allude to Fr. Charles Curran, formerly of Catholic University, who decades ago made a stir by leading the Catholic protest against Humanae Vitae.I wrote one of my first Wanderer columns about a speech he gave, which I attended. I’d expected him to speak with at least some respect of the Magisterium and to offer a reluctant dissent. But on the contrary, he spoke of the Church with utter derision. He assumed and encouraged the audience’s scorn for the teaching.

In those days I was shocked to hear a priest mocking the Church. I felt dizzy, as if I’d walked into an anti-Catholic rally by mistake. A priest egging young Catholics to jeer at the Pope! In a way, I was disappointed too: Curran struck me as utterly shallow, with none of the gravity I expected in a famous moral theologian. He said nothing of serious interest.

In his way, he was speaking as an agent of the sexual revolution. He imparted no sense of the holiness of Christian matrimony, or of anything else. One felt that there was literally nothing holy to him.
 
The Dark Ages

Liberalism is taking us back to the Dark Ages it scorns — not to the era when the Church dominated Europe, but to the beginning of that era, when the Church’s civilizing task was still ahead. Over several long centuries she discredited or abolished the common evils of a pagan culture: abortion, fornication, infanticide, pederasty, divorce, and many others.

Today, as these evils are reintroduced in the West, liberalism calls it “progress.”

It’s actually the reversal of the greatest period of progress in human history. And, as the latest news from the Netherlands illustrates, it is already near completion.


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Joseph Sobran