Passion for Life vs. Lust for Power

I received an e-mail from Congresswoman Diane Russell (D-Maine) urging me to sign a petition opposing Republican efforts to cut government support for Planned Parenthood. “STOP the war on women and Planned Parenthood,” she intoned. “Don’t cut a dime in federal funding for Planned Parenthood.” This e-mail was followed by one from the “liberal” organization, MoveOn, asking me to contribute money to its efforts to resist the “anti-choice militants” who seek to take away this “vital women’s health resource.”

There are so many ways for intelligent minds to respond not only to the crude reasoning of these appeals, but to the posturing by which the debate over abortions is conducted by both sides. Characterizing opposition to abortions as a “war on women” can just as easily be turned around to label abortions as a “war on unborn children;” styles of discourse whose genesis can be traced back to school playgrounds. Nor can the bumper-sticker sloganeering that reduces the question to “pro-life” and “pro-choice” considerations be looked to for any substantive meaning. Most supposedly “pro-life” adherents tend to be eager supporters of wars and capital punishment, positions that can hardly be defended in terms of commitments to the value of life. Nor do the allegedly “pro-choice” advocates have any inclination to extend to taxpayers the “choice” of whether to have the government fund abortions, child day-care centers, or any other government programs that fit their ideological agenda.

In our vertically-structured, institutionalized world, engineers have replaced poets. Those who help to design and maintain the machinery are more highly regarded than are those who question  the presence of the machines. I have no opposition to technology per se, but only to what Jacques Ellul called “the technological imperative” (i.e., if something was possible to create [e.g., the atomic bomb] it was necessary to do so). When the machines dominate our lives, we become the machinery; the robots that function, mechanistically, to keep the structures functioning on terms that serve their purposes.

The human capacity to understand and to manipulate the environment for our material benefit has been what has made us such a wondrous species. Most of us no longer huddle in caves for shelter, or forage for wild berries or insects for nourishment. We have evolved into what Seamus Heaney called “hunters and gatherers of values.” But what values? In efforts to bring nature under our control, we have also undertaken to exploit and manipulate other persons, a habit that is contributing to our undoing as a species.

Is it possible – or even desirous – for us to abandon our treatment of fellow humans as resources to be converted to serve our interests? How would we go about doing so? Albert Einstein provided two observations that are apropos our inquiry: “our technology has exceeded our humanity,” and “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Can our present mindset provide us alternatives that do not depend on human sacrifice? If a higher price for the livers and kidneys of babies will help a body-parts manager pay for her desired Lamborghini, should such practices be applauded for entrepreneurship? It has been nearly four-hundred years since Jonathan Swift offered his satirical A Modest Proposal, wherein he suggested that poor people could sell their children to the rich as food. Has our well-organized madness led some to a literal application of Swift’s humor?

Is the reported Planned Parenthood program offered as satire? Ideologists – such as those who occupy the “politically correct” wing of the feminist movement – lack the requisite sense of humor for satirical works. Nor have I seen any awareness from within the feminist practitioners of realpolitik of just how fundamentally evil is this practice of harvesting unborn babies of their organs. My first thought, when this news story broke, was that this practice might prove detrimental to those feminists who embrace the sanctity of life, and who wish to continue exploring their inner voices. Or would feminist inquiries be confined to what is politically useful, namely being a base of operations for those who lust for power over others?

If our conscious minds are prepared to grant an audience to the inner voices that scream for our attention, we might rediscover what we long ago abandoned to those who insist upon ruling us: the passion for life and for those conditions that give life meaning. Life has an energy all its own that resists its manipulation or destruction. This energy can be measured by the amount of force that political systems must mobilize against its expression. That the state is necessarily and unavoidably at war with the life force should be enough to cause all decent people to walk away from it, and to withdraw their children from its evil grasp.

We need nothing so much in this extinction-driven age as to observe and listen – just observe and listen without engaging in impulsive reactions – to what we are doing to one another in our world, and to what our inner voices want us to know. As the mainstream media continues to entertain us with the mindless, unfocused babblings of those who seek nothing higher (or lower) than unrestrained power over the rest of us, our minds must be elsewhere. Perhaps we can begin with how we treat children, that stage in development that informs us whether mankind will thrive or join other extinct species in history’s dust-bin of failed experiments. We may discover that it is not in the lust for power, but the passion for life, that our well being depends.