Pray for Albion

This has been a clarifying week

Last week I wrote a last, futile plea for England to be spared the naked politics of extreme bio-libertarianism. I lost a few subscribers making that case, which felt like my first real falling-out with you, my readers. It left me thinking about what a strange, intimate thing it is to do, writing directly for an audience as one does here.

I was going to write about those reflections this week. But as it turned out, events have been so unremittingly bleak week that this topic will have to wait, as I have a more urgent request: pray for Albion.

As I noted last week, in domestic terms at least my homeland has historically hewed to a political tradition of pragmatism and moderation. Last week blew that out of the water - or at least revealed that whatever the people’s sensibility, we are ruled by a cabal of swivel-eyed extremists. Labour have now finally chosen to what end they will mobilise their undeservedly large Parliamentary majority: they have wielded it twice in seven days to ram through policies of death, at stark odds with the general mood of the country.

First, an amendment decriminalising self-administered abortions all the way to full term, for any reason at all. This measure, as I argued last week, effectively decriminalise infanticide. It will communicate to the public at large the fact that our government no longer views killing your unborn child as a big deal, even if that child could survive outside your womb. This is, or should be, obviously morally repugnant. And, secondly, legalising “assisted dying”. Or, more plainly, suicide on demand for the old or terminally ill, administered by a “healthcare professional”.

There is plenty of extant evidence on how slippery the euthanasia slope is, so all I’ll say on that is “google MAID". Taken together, though, this week has rocked England’s longstanding political foundations. Whatever the practical second-order consequences of these policies turn out to be, metaphysically speaking they represent a radical, top-down, official challenge to settled baseline assumptions about what it is to be a person: assumptions. And the broadly Christian anthropology that, for a long time, underpinned and guided England’s common political life is now simply gone. It feels a bit like that weird interlude after a tooth extraction, when you can’t stop nudging at the gap with your tongue.

It felt like a metaphysical attack because it was a metaphysical attack. The passing of these two policies of death signals England’s definitive institutional transition to a worldview other than Christianity: one for which perhaps the politest and least denunciatory term we could use is “extremist bio-libertarianism”. It’s a worldview that rejects out of hand the idea that anything about our embodied life as human beings should be regarded as given, from our form, our development, our natural history, or our relations to others. For bio-libertarians, every means possible should be used, whether financial, political, judicial, or technological, to liberate us from anything that might be experienced, residually, as beyond our individual choice and control.

I’ve discussed elsewhere, including in Feminism Against Progress, the way this plays out when attacking normative human development, physiology, and form. Here’s a recent example of what it looks like, as expressed by internet attention-seekers:

In law and policy it looks like gender activism. It also looks like (among many other things) commercial surrogacy, and it looks like those people (you find them on the Right as well as the Left) who seem to think we can escape the human form and our human nature, and perhaps re-engineer humans into something altogether new and better. Elsewhere I’ve called this rejecting imago dei for ‘imago DEI’.

We can understand last week’s two-pronged attack on life and death in the same context, and as a continuation of the same programme: an attack on the given-ness of new life and likewise of death, and the way these speak to our normative form and basic relatedness as social creatures.

Full term abortion and euthanasia on demand don’t just demand to control the stuff of life itself. Such measures also attack the presumption that we are directed toward one another: that humans are relational beings. If you begin from the assumption that everyone is a solitary monad, and all relationships are opt-in, the idea that we should be free to end our lives whenever we choose makes perfect sense. The notion that others might have a stake in that decision simply never arises, and if it does may be shrugged off as others imposing their values. Similarly if you begin from the assumption that no one has an automatic claim on our care, let alone (as with mothers-to-be) the hospitality of our very bodies, then the right to refuse such hospitality at any point also makes perfect sense.

I dare say some of you will find unsatisfying the coexistence in my writing of these arguments and also what I last week called “abortion centrism”. I’m not going to spend too long trying to litigate this, as the focus of this essay is elsewhere and in any case my thoughts will (much as last week) doubtless satisfy nobody. I will only say that when I experienced a miscarriage at 10 weeks’ gestation I was grief-stricken at the loss of my baby, and also know that had the loss occurred in the third trimester the devastation would have been incomprehensibly vaster. Personal feelings are a notoriously unreliable guide to big philosophical questions, so I don’t set all that much stock by my own in this case. And yet what that experience led me to reflect is that the baby-ness of a developing baby has a “you know it when you see it” quality of coming slowly into focus. That’s how it felt, to me at least. In a sense it’s always a person, and in another it’s a potentiality that takes some time to unfold.

Such reflections are, of course, not much use when crafting legislation, which is one of the reasons this issue is so bitterly contentious. But another is that it suggests an insight that fundamentally resists litigation, namely that ending such an unfolding is always a grave deed, but also that it becomes steadily graver as the unfolding progresses. So from this perspective I both struggle with the question “where do you draw the line” and also know without a shadow of a doubt that by the time the baby is full term that line is sharp and clear, and crossing it is a terrible thing to do.

Decriminalising full term abortion signals a profound moral bankruptcy in England’s leadership class, made all the more grotesque by the thin and (I suspect) bad-faith arguments about compassion to “desperate women” under which this measure has travelled. The same goes for legalising the killing of our old and terminally ill, in a bill that rejected any duty to improve palliative care provision or even give regard to ensuring no one is coerced. This reveals the truth, that the animating desire for these policies of death was never compassion. It was always the political imposition on us all of radical alone-ness: complete liberation for each individual, from the givens of embodiment and our relatedness to one another.

We cannot, in this vision, be fully free until every vestige of human nature and purpose has been scrubbed away by the solvent power of technology and the all-powerful state, leaving only contingent causality and the brute stuff of our flesh. Needless to say I reject this vision utterly. Last week I said something to the effect that England neither wants nor needs a culture war on questions of life. But I will say this about the dark week England has lived through since I said this: these events have been been clarifying. It seems we’re getting a culture war whether we want one or not. And after this week just gone, I know which side I’m on.