Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  1965

  A View of Abortion, with Something to Offend Everybody

  I FEEL LIKE SAYING something about this abortion issue. My credentials as an expert on the subject: none. I am an M.D. and a novelist. I will speak only as a novelist. If I give an opinion as an M.D., it wouldn’t interest anybody, since, for one thing, any number of doctors have given opinions and who cares about another.

  The only obvious credential of a novelist has to do with his trade. He trafficks in words and meanings. So the chronic misuse of words, especially the fobbing off of rhetoric for information, gets on his nerves. Another possible credential of a novelist peculiar to these times is that he is perhaps more sensitive to the atrocities of the age than most. People get desensitized. Who wants to go about his business being reminded of the six million dead in the Holocaust, the fifteen million in the Ukraine? Atrocities become banal. But a twentieth-century novelist should be a nag, an advertiser, a collector, a proclaimer of banal atrocities.

  True legalized abortion—a million and a half fetuses flushed down the Disposall every year in this country—is yet another banal atrocity in a century where atrocities have become commonplace. This statement will probably offend one side in this already superheated debate, so I hasten in the interests of fairness and truth to offend the other side. What else can you do when some of your allies give you as big a pain as your opponents? I notice this about many so-called pro-lifers. They seem pro-life only on this one perfervid and politicized issue. The Reagan Administration, for example, professes to be anti-abortion but has just recently decided in the interests of business that it is proper for infant-formula manufacturers to continue their hard sell in the Third World despite thousands of deaths from bottle feeding. And Senator Jesse Helms and the Moral Majority, who profess a reverence for unborn life, don’t seem to care much about born life: poor women who don’t get abortions have their babies and can’t feed them.

  Nothing new here, of course. What I am writing this for is to call attention to a particularly egregious example of doublespeak that the abortionists—“pro-choicers,” that is—seem to have hit on in the current rhetorical war.

  Now, I don’t know whether the human-life bill is good legislation or not. But as a novelist I can recognize meretricious use of language, disingenuousness, and a con job when I hear it.

  The current con, perpetrated by some jurists, some editorial writers, and some doctors, is that since there is no agreement about the beginning of human life, it is therefore a private religious or philosophical decision and therefore the state and the courts can do nothing about it. This is a con. I will not presume to speculate who is conning whom and for what purpose. But I do submit that religion, philosophy, and private opinion have nothing to do with this issue. I further submit that it is a commonplace of modern biology, known to every high-school student and no doubt to you the reader as well, that the life of every individual organism, human or not, begins when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with the chromosomes of the ovum to form a new DNA complex that thenceforth directs the ontogenesis of the organism.

  Such vexed subjects as the soul, God, and the nature of man are not at issue. What we are talking about and what nobody I know would deny is the clear continuum that exists in the life of every individual from the moment of fertilization of a single cell.

  There is a wonderful irony here. It is this: the onset of individual life is not a dogma of the Church but a fact of science. How much more convenient if we lived in the thirteenth century, when no one knew anything about microbiology and arguments about the onset of life were legitimate. Compared to a modern textbook of embryology, Thomas Aquinas sounds like an American Civil Liberties Union member. Nowadays it is not some misguided ecclesiastics who are trying to suppress an embarrassing scientific fact. It is the secular juridical-journalistic establishment.

  Please indulge the novelist if he thinks in novelistic terms. Picture the scene. A Galileo trial in reverse. The Supreme Court is cross-examining a high-school biology teacher and admonishing him that of course it is only his personal opinion that the fertilized human ovum is an individual human life. He is enjoined not to teach his private beliefs at a public school. Like Galileo he caves in, submits, but in turning away is heard to murmur, “But it’s still alive!”

  To pro-abortionists: According to the opinion polls, it looks as if you may get your way. But you’re not going to have it both ways. You’re going to be told what you’re doing.

  1981

  Foreword to The New Catholics

  HOW TO WRITE ABOUT conversion if it is true that faith is an unmerited gift from God? How to describe, let alone explain it, if this is the case? When it comes to grace, I get writer’s block. How to write about other people’s conversions when one hardly understands one’s own? What one does, of course, is write about the causes other than God’s grace, the “proximate,” the “material,” the “psychological” causes.

  One can write about conversion two ways. One way is to put the best possible face on it, recount a respectable intellectual odyssey. Such as: Well, my tradition was scientific. I thought science explained the cosmos—until one day I read what Kierkegaard said about Hegelianism, the science of his day: that Hegel explained everything in the universe except what it is to be an individual, to be born, to live, and to die. And for me this “explanation” would be true enough, I suppose. But then there is this. When I was in college, I lived in the attic of a fraternity house with four other guys. God, religion, was the furthest thing from our minds and talk—from mine, at least. Except for one of us, a fellow who got up every morning at the crack of dawn and went to Mass. He said nothing about it and seemed otherwise normal.

  Does anyone suppose that one had nothing to do with the other? That is, thinking about Kierkegaard’s dilemma and remembering my roommate’s strange behavior—this among a thousand other things one notices or remembers, which, if they don’t “cause” it, at least enter into it, at least make room for this most mysterious turning in one’s life.

  Here follows a motley crew of converts with whom I felt immediately at home, as motley (in the old, best sense of the word) as Chaucer’s pilgrims.

  Reading these seventeen very personal accounts, one finds oneself casting about for reasons for the variety, so many different kinds of people coming from so many different directions. One reason, of course, is the tumultuous pluralism of this huge country. Our materialism and consumerism are so commonplace that we are apt to forget the other term of the paradox: that we are the most religious of countries, more so than India, a vaster maelstrom of contending creeds and cults, not merely the hundreds of Protestant sects, the mainline Protestant churches, the Catholic Church, the varieties of Judaism, but also the new wave from the East, Far and Near, with more varieties of Buddhism, imported and homegrown, than are to be found in Tibet.

  But there’s another reason. It is not merely the catholicity of these Catholic-to-be pilgrims, coming as they do from every walk of life but also from every other sort of pilgrimage. These folk may be Rome-bound, but they’ve been most other places as well—Canterbury (C. of E.), Vienna (Freud), Albany (Seventh-Day Adventists), Down South fundamentalism, Up North New England parsonages, Harvard and Smith and Yale skepticism, “Jewish atheism” (as one writer described it), also “Orthodox Reformed Freudianism,” Marxism-Leninism, Buddhism, rock music, the earthly love of men for and by women. Augustine always made more sense to me about this last than Freud; that is, the translation from the love of women (or men) to God. “Repression” and “sublimation” surely say more about Freud’s dislike of women than about his quarrel with God.

  No, it is not merely the exotic provenances of these pilgrims that dazzle the reader, but the inkling that it is the very catholicity of the Thing, the old-new Jewish-Christian Thing, the one holy Catholic apostolic and Roman Thing that, come at from so many directions, looks so different at the beginning and finally so much the same. Sure enough, all roads seem to lead t
o, and so forth. Here they certainly do. She is the object of the pilgrimage and there She is, blemishes and all. Or, as one convert puts it here: What else do you expect anything this enormous and this old to be than, at times, something of a horror show?

  Some themes recur. More than one pilgrim finds himself standing at a strange rectory door, wondering how he got there, never having said two words to a priest—and here I have to smile, remembering how it felt and also hoping that he, she, would not run into some exhausted, unhappy, and otherwise messed-up human. They didn’t. In one case, the housekeeper answered the door, matter-of-factly shook her feather duster toward the parlor: “In there.” That helps. “Well, here I am,” one fellow said abruptly to the bemused priest. “What do I have to do?”

  An interesting Anglican current runs here. In no case is the tone polemical. Rather, there is a lasting affection for the lovely Anglican things, for the Book of Common Prayer, for dear England herself—and a sadness at her cutting off the magisterium. One pictures this pilgrim as he turns away from the spires soaring above empty cathedrals in the gracious countryside, and takes the road to downtown, bustling St. Agnes’s, where, lovely or not, the Lord is housed.

  Books and reading figure here as largely as one might expect, and the writers one would expect, from Aquinas to Merton. But guess who turns up most often? C. S. Lewis!—who, if he didn’t make it all the way, certainly handed along a goodly crew.

  Sometimes it is the very prosaicness of the reading that catches the eye. One woman—and she is my fellow traveler, because I did the same thing—read St. Augustine’s The City of God, was duly impressed, and then read Father Smith Instructs Jackson, no masterpiece to be sure but maybe all the better for the humble prose.

  I can still see the grayish paperback, probably picked up from that rack at the back of the church, with the good Father Smith on the cover and Jackson—Jackson!—an earnest young man with a 1920s Harold Lloyd sort of haircut, head cocked attentively, listening. There was some good news here.

  And there is good news in these remarkable stories.

  1987

  If I Had Five Minutes with the Pope

  NOT THAT YOU NEED my advice, Your Holiness, but since I’ve been asked, here’s a word or two—on the occasion of your visit to New Orleans.

  1. Do not suppress the Society of Jesus at this time. While it may be true that the Jesuits as a body no longer seem to enlist themselves in the defense of the primacy of the Holy Apostolic See as they have done traditionally since Loyola and Xavier, it does not necessarily follow that most American Jesuits are working for a schism in the U.S. Catholic Church. Most, I think, are not.

  2. Don’t worry about a schism in the American hierarchy. While it may be true that a few U.S. bishops are as wimpy and gutless as the English hierarchy in the early sixteenth century and would probably follow an excommunicated adulterous king rather than lose their sinecures and heads, most, I think, like Bishop John Fisher, would not. For one thing, we don’t have a king. For another, where would they go?

  3. Don’t worry about scientists. They pursue truth, from which the Church has nothing to fear. They become a matter of concern only when they begin mucking around with human life with their high technology; e.g., in vitro fertilization, wherein surplus fertilized ova are either discarded or frozen or experimented with—in the name of improving the “quality of life” of mankind. Such behavior bespeaks a certain confusion about the value of an individual human life. Scientists tend to be smart about things and dumb about people.

  My suggestion is that not you but the proper civil authorities deal with egregious offenders within constitutional constraints and according to established legal principles; viz., the punishment fitting the crime. For example, if a scientist is detected treating unborn human beings in such a manner—creatures that he probably calls zygotes—I suggest that the scientist’s own genetic material be examined by impartial fellow scientists and that the scientist himself be accordingly discarded, experimented with, or frozen.

  4. Don’t suppress “liberation theologians”—who, after all, have their hearts in the right place in wanting to liberate the wretched of the earth from the bonds of poverty and oppression—but do disarm them, so they won’t go around shooting people, a practice that may be condoned by Marxist-Leninists but that most theologians would agree is contrary to Catholic belief.

  5. Don’t bother about certain proud and fashionable unorthodox theologians in our Catholic universities. Academic freedom is important—remember the ruckuses in the University of Paris in the thirteenth century? It all comes out in the wash. Fact is, some of these popular dissenters strike me as showboaters out to curry favor with students—we all know the type—or sell their books. Some of them are worth listening to. Others will be remembered about as long as minor movie stars; e.g., John Travolta.

  6. Do what you’ve been doing; that is, visiting ordinary orthodox Catholics around the world, concentrating on the poor of the Third World. Perhaps it is no accident that your seminaries in the latter are bursting at the seams while there is this well-known “dearth of vocations” in our enlightened and affluent society.

  Don’t worry about the present “dearth of vocations” among our young people. The Western world, both capitalist and Communist, is so corrupt and boring that sooner or later young people will get sick of it and look for something better. All it takes is a couple of high-livers, like Francis of Assisi, a real dude, and Clare, a rich teenage groupie, to turn it around, to actually put into practice the living truth of the Church’s teachings, of the Gospel—indeed, of your own words.

  You speak from the heart, Your Holiness, and down here in Louisiana we understand you. We may not know much about such things as “the importance of the affirmation of social structures and empowerment rather than conversion,” but we understand you.

  Welcome to New Orleans, Your Holiness.

  1987

  An Unpublished Letter to the Times

  January 22, 1988

  The Editor

  The New York Times

  229 West 43rd Street

  New York, N.Y. 10036

  Dear Sir:

  The fifteenth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court seems as good an occasion as any to call attention to an aspect of the abortion issue which is generally overlooked.

  The battle lines between the “pro-life” and the “pro-choice” advocates are so fixed, the arguments so well known, indeed so often repeated, that it hardly seems worth the time to enter the controversy on the present terms. Thus, while it may indeed be argued that in terms of Judeo-Christian values individual human life is sacred and may not be destroyed, and while it is also true that modern medical evidence shows ever more clearly that there is no qualitative difference between an unborn human infant and a born human infant, the argument is persuasive only to those who accept such values and such evidence. Absent these latter, one can at least understand the familiar arguments for a “woman’s rights over her own body,” including “the products of conception.”

  The issue, then, seems presently frozen between the “religious”and the “secular” positions, with the latter apparently prevailing in the opinion polls and the media.

  Rather than enter the fray with one or another argument, which, whether true or not, seems to be unavailing, I should like to call attention to certain social and historical consequences which may be less well known—call the attention, that is, of certain well-known and honorable institutions such as The New York Times, the United States Supreme Court, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization of Women, and suchlike who, while distinguished in their defense of human rights, may not accept the premise of the sacred provenance of human life.

  In a word, certain consequences, perhaps unforeseen, follow upon the acceptance of the principle of the destruction of human life for what may appear to be the most admirable social reasons. One does not have to look back very far in history for an exampl
e of such consequences. Take democratic Germany in the 1920s. Perhaps the most influential book published in German in the first quarter of this century was entitled The Justification of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value. Its co-authors were the distinguished jurist Karl Binding and the prominent psychiatrist Alfred Hoche. Neither Binding nor Hoche had ever heard of Hitler or the Nazis. Nor, in all likelihood, did Hitler ever read the book. He didn’t have to.

  The point is that the ideas expressed in the book and the policies advocated were the product not of Nazi ideology but rather of the best minds of the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic—physicians, social scientists, jurists, and the like, who with the best secular intentions wished to improve the lot, socially and genetically, of the German people—by getting rid of the unfit and the unwanted. It is hardly necessary to say what use the Nazis made of these ideas.

  I would not wish to be understood as implying that the respected American institutions I have named are similar to corresponding pre-Nazi institutions.

  But I do suggest that once the line is crossed, once the principle gains acceptance—juridically, medically, socially—innocent human life can be destroyed for whatever reason, for the most admirable socioeconomic, medical, or social reasons—then it does not take a prophet to predict what will happen next, or if not next, then sooner or later. At any rate, a warning is in order. Depending on the disposition of the majority and the opinion polls—now in favor of allowing women to get rid of unborn and unwanted babies—it is not difficult to imagine an electorate or a court ten years, fifty years from now, who would favor getting rid of useless old people, retarded children, anti-social blacks, illegal Hispanics, gypsies, Jews …