A Daniel Come to Judgment! Yea, a Daniel!

January 9, 2007 by djackson.

In an editorial in yesterday’s Corpus Christi Caller-Times pundit Daniel K. Thomasson unleashes a verbal daisy-cutter aimed at those who demur from selective shopping for fetuses.  Mr. Thomasson, who writes for Scripps Howard News Service, believes that pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is humankind’s ticket into the luxury skybox of a Brave New World. He cites a case in which a cancer-prone set of parents held a casting call for a petrie dish full of aspiring embryos, culled the vulnerable, kept the “clean” candidate (I’m quoting Mr. Thomasson) and gonged the rest. His response to those who protest that such behavior usurps the prerogative of the Deity isn’t very original or very convincing: he asks, “Didn’t God give those scientists who developed this and other procedures the brains to make things better?”.  Yes, and the brains to make things worse.  God also gave us the soul to know better, though we frequently fail to employ it. 

I only want to respond at length to one of Mr. Thomasson’s statements.  He inveighs “against blind adherence to sectarian dogma that should be thousands of years in the past.”  Blind, secterian, outdated - this is a rhetorical hat-trick in which the writer goes 0-for-three. 

BLIND

Why is adherence necessarily blind?  Kiergegaard did indeed commend the “leap of faith,” but this was an informed act by which one completely abandoned one state for another.  The “leap” involved, not ignorance but commitment.  Mr. Thomasson seems to adhere (blindly?) to the definition of faith given by Richard Dawkins as “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.”  To this bold attack on a boogey-man Francis Collins, head of the human genome project, rightly replies,

That certainly does not describe the faith of most serious believers throughout history, nor of most of those in my personal acquaintance.  While rational argument can never conclusively prove the existence of God, serious thinkers from Augustine to Aquinas to C. S. Lewis have demonstrated that a belief in God is intensely plausible.  It is no less plausible today. 

SECTARIAN

One wonders how Mr. Thomasson defines this term.  My guess is that, as used in his sentence, it means, “Not everyone agrees with it, particularly not the people I run into at cocktail parties.”  But the term, properly understood, implies that something is narrow in scope, limited in outlook.  Is it indeed, a sectarian view that human beings, especially the weakest, should be treated with respect amounting to reverence?  In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis proposes a virtually universal moral code which he calls “the Tao.”  At the end of the book he provides an appendix which purports to show that virtually all great societies in all eras have recognized certain moral “givens” which, like the point, line, and plane in Euclydian geometry, cannot be proven but cannot be done without.  Under the heading, “The Law of Mercy,” Lewis lists the following:

The poor and the sick should be regarded as lords of the atmosphere. - Hindu. Janet, 1.8.

Whoso makes intercession for the weak, well pleasing is this to Sama. - Babylonian. ERE v. 445.

In the Dalebura tribe a woman, a cripple from birth, was carried about by the tribespeople in turn until her death at the age of sixty-six. - Australian Aborigines, ERE v. 443.

Under “Duties to Children,” Lewis includes:

Great reverence is owed to a child. - Roman. Juvenal, xiv 47.

The Master said, Respect the young. - Ancient Chinese. Analects, ix. 22.

Mr. Thomasson might like to relegate respect for human life to Evangelical trailer-trash, but he can’t.  And his contempt for that socially impoverished, though often spiritually wealthy, segment of society calls into question his claim that he would never want genetic screening to become cultural cleansing.

Outdated

Reverence for life, and special reverence for especially needy life, should remain “thousands of years in the past.”  But isn’t it significant that such conviction comes with a history that reaches through the topsoil of intellectual fashions to grip with deep roots the bedrock of civilization?  Job’s buddy Bildad got a lot of things wrong, but he displayed a valid epistemology when he advised,

Please inquire of past generations, And consider the things searched out by their fathers. For we are {only} of yesterday and know nothing, because our days on earth are as a shadow. Will they not teach you and tell you, and bring forth words from their minds?

Maybe my convictions should be thousands of years in the past.  The same cannot be said of Mr. Thomasson’s, because his views are strangers to that ancient era.

One more word.  Mr. Thomasson insists that “those with no interest in the matter (especially uninvolved men)” have no right to speak to the issue of reproductive roulette.  Let me make two responses.  First, the front page of the same edition of the same paper carries a story about Dr. Alex Rotta, a local physician, and Jamie Longoria, a two-year-old heart patient.  Jamie’s case has inspired Dr. Rotta to run in an upcoming marathon in order to raise money for the care of chronically ill children.  “This is a kid that’s been through the ringer several times,” Rotta says.  “He’s a fighter.”  But it occurs to me that, if Dan K. Thomasson had his way, Jamie wouldn’t be a fighter because a rubber-gloved assassin would have KO’ed him before he ever made it into the ring.  The little boy’s courage and the sacrifice it has sparked would both have been flushed down a laboratory toilet. 

Second, I plead innocent to the charge of being “uninvolved.”  I have a son who suffers from a genetic heart defect.  I would trade the three chevrons on my doctoral robe for the series of zippers that scar his chest.  They are marks of courage that come in second only to the reckless smile with which he has confronted life for sixteen years now.  On the day we discovered his imperfections, while he was still floating in amniotic ignorance of his rotten luck, a doctor told us that we had “choices.”  We told him that we didn’t.  Our son now distributes joy to the lives all around him.  A microscope might have told us his heart was one chamber shy of a quota and badly mis-plumbed.  It could never have predicted the wicked zest with which he wisecracks on his dad.  It could never have predicted that he would become my hero.

Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis?  I’ve read that Dr. Margaret Mead, asked to state the first archaeological sign of the emergence of civilization, replied, “A healed femur bone,” because members of the community had to care for that useless individual until the break knitted.  If a healed bone is the sign of civilization’s birth, a discarded fetus may be the sign of its death.

Posted in General | 3 Comments »