The Culture of Death & the Green Revolution

My daughter is furious at  her geography text; her teacher, she tells us, is ok and  more balanced.   The book, however, finds much wrong with globalization (and little good) and even more wrong (and less good) with the green revolution.   Although she has a  quiet strength and has always been concerned with ethics,  she has not been impassioned in her teen years as were her sisters.   Within the last year, however, she has developed enthusiasms for bands few have heard, for certain styles, and for the free market.   This is not because she reads (or cares much about) the blog on which her mother writes but because of a charismatic economics teacher (she took his enthusiasm with some salt, but came to believe he was generally right it fit with her worldview  and  her belief in self reliance).   Lately, she’s  bought  an appropriate t-shirt, since his were the first books she  seemed to really like.   Her uncle  pioneered no-till practices and Borlaug’s influence (lightly) touches our community.    She was not unaware  both globalization and the green revolution were complicated and some effects weren’t positive.    But she also assumed that  over all,  life wasn’t a bad result.  

Whether globalization is or  isn’t a good idea may include a debate over quality of life if, eventually,  life  itself.   The green revolution well, that moves pretty quickly to a debate over life’s quantity,  life itself.   Some talk about the “culture of death” and they mean abortion.   Others complain of the body count in movies & television.    Others think of jihadists.     Dissing the green revolution seems an equally  perverse expression.

Not that we haven’t seen a pattern emerging.    Dealing death in Pakistan as the  Ramadan fast  is broken  seems perverse, but we aren’t surprised yet more Muslims have been dealt a bloody death by fanatics.    In our more comfortable world however,  we see Oregon’s letters to those with fatal diseases (well, at this point, 95% fatal).   The unlucky patient won’t get health care, but the state would pony up for physician-assisted suicide.  Ed Morrissey sees this as  the inevitable result of nationalization (or statism).     So we aren’t surprised  Baroness Warnock,  a “medical ethicist” announces:   “If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives your family’s lives and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service.”    The Anchoress thoughtfully addresses Warnock’s ethics  from a deeply spiritual perspective today; she also refers to her own earlier, moving  essay  about the death of her brother.    Vanderleun discusses the Baroness’s comment with the usual (but unusually  apt and chilling) analogy.

This addresses neither her spiritual depth nor his historical one.   I am insufficiently versed in theology or ethics or politics or biology.   I’m neither spiritual nor very sympathetic.  Nonetheless, in my simple equation, life trumps about everything else.   You can complain about air quality and disease,  but that we live longer  than our great grandparents  seems  the most remarkable of  our achievements.   Of course, my best student last year wrote a paper canonizing Rachel Carson; a student with a fraction of her skills peer reviewed her paper.   That reader asked me, quietly, if she could ask the author why the number of malaria deaths the writer acknowledged (in appropriate argumentative form) didn’t diminish Carson’s achievements.  I said, sure, it seemed to me a big deal.   The author carefully couched her defense in the paper she handed in the next day –  assuring me  her science teachers (she was a senior in environmental science at the research school & I know nothing of science) had only admiration for Carson;  they figured the mosquitoes would have developed immunity sooner or later.   My daughter’s text is in the social sciences, but I believe this student  majored in a division of the “life sciences.”    

We live longer, we are more comfortable and now we doubt our purpose.   Maybe if our lives were more tenuous the purpose would be more obvious.   (Bettelheim’s analysis of suicide in The Seven Beauties comes to mind.)   My husband’s colleague who is quite religious and prays before Planned Parenthood regularly  sees our culture of death in casual (and frequent) abortions.   My political friend sees it as a liberal phenomenon; she quickly snapped when I described my daughter’s complaint, ‘well, that’s the liberals – they just want us all to die.”    They do disdain  western culture, which  has provided a vector for the life force with its diminishing violence and  increasing life spans.   Those who neither reproduce nor defend themselves have signalled their death wish (see the vehicles the French give to their soldiers, for instance).    This is the theme of books like  Berlinski’s and Bawer’s .   A religious colleague in the coffee room sees evolutionary determinism as the lens that darkens life for many.  Of course, in the hands of some, its  vision robs man of his purpose.    Of course,  Loren Eiseley (that great Nebraskan) writes beautifully of the life force pulsing through evolutionary paths; n his mystic moments, a providential order certifies the evolutionary process.  

But I digress.   Another friend sees it embryonic in the arguments of Henry Adams a century ago describing a society turning from the fecund holy Mary to the powerful dynamo, a society proud it has become “sexless.”   It seems  reflected  in the increasingly  self-consciously naval-gazing changes  in the narrative voice of our literature, which moves from the intense focus of limited third person to stream of consciousness to later flat, affectless and unconscious voices; these also move from a precious concentration on real if precious ethical choices  through determinism  and on to the fragmented, sad, purposeless  perspectives of modernism.   Then again, we see other doubts  arising  from what the Victorian critics call the “disappearance of God” in the narrative voice of the nineteenth century.    Certainly Arnold felt that; his  “Dover Beach”    may be  a rich poem but  few feel it fills that void.    

Whatever, we all see convergence.    In some places it seems too much religion, in others too little.   It isn’t all as easy as the despair of almost a century ago, the despair intensified (or defined) by the slaughters of the first world war.   I don’t know what’s going on – maybe this is small potatoes.   Maybe it isn’t.   We probably won’t know in my lifetime.   But surely there’s something off kilter  in a culture  that finds more wrong than right about  saving millions of lives.    Is the world really better off without Western culture?   Indeed, given that the millions saved were not western but eastern, is the world really better off without man?

 I want to be honest; I’m entangled in a family of daughters and husband whose lives I want to influence but not to burden.   I cannot imagine not being restless; I can’t imagine a worse fate than being buried within my own body.   To me, the self pretty much begins with words and ends with them.   I’m not spiritual.   But even to someone who feels as I do, Oregon’s letters and Warnock’s remarks are chilling, my daughter’s text disturbs.   I feel a good deal closer to Benjamin Franklin than to John Winthrop: being useful (as Morgan pounds home in his lovely biography of the old sage) and achieving felicity seem to me admirable and sufficient goals for this lifetime.   But, I’ll admit that faced with the chill of a Warnock, it is the Anchoress and Winthrop that have the more persuasive answer.  

And, so, again, I quote that early great sermon. Many died in those first years (half of those that came in the first ships).   Still, it wasn’t death but life that they came here to embrace and we might consider that passion and, indeed, try to understand it and even feel it, today.   Our children deserve the sense that we have chosen them – we have chosen life.    Winthrop was a man in the world, a governor and lawyer; he concludes his layman’s sermon

“Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil,” in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.

Therefore let us choose life,

That we and our seed may live,

By obeying His voice and cleaving to Him,

For He is our life and our prosperity.