From jhforest at gmail.com Thu Feb 3 03:41:26 2011 From: jhforest at gmail.com (Jim Forest) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 09:41:26 +0100 Subject: [percy-l] A Walker Percy piece written for the NY Times 30 years ago Message-ID: A Walker Percy op-ed piece written for the New York Times not quite 30 years ago... New York Times / June 8, 1981 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/percy-abortion.html *A View of Abortion with Something to Offend Everybody* Covington, La. -- 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 15 million in the Ukraine? Atrocities become banal. But a 20th 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 seen 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 13th 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. * * * Walker Percy's latest novel is "The Second Coming." * * * *Jim & Nancy Forest* Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com Jim's books: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/ Photo collections: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/ In Communion site: www.incommunion.org On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/ A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/ * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From janetcantor37 at yahoo.com Thu Feb 3 08:32:19 2011 From: janetcantor37 at yahoo.com (janet cantor) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 05:32:19 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] A Walker Percy piece written for the NY Times 30 years ago In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <812642.10290.qm@web63603.mail.re1.yahoo.com> I am so glad this was sent out. If anyone has looked at my reactions to The Moviegoer, it is evident that I was trying to figure out Percy's bottom line. This seems to comport with the conclusions I drew about the epilogue of the book. I wish I had seen this before I led my discussion with my book group. I would have been more confident. But then I might never have discovered the Percy Lists. Janet Cantor ________________________________ From: Jim Forest To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Thu, February 3, 2011 3:41:26 AM Subject: [percy-l] A Walker Percy piece written for the NY Times 30 years ago A Walker Percy op-ed piece written for the New York Times not quite 30 years ago... New York Times / June 8, 1981 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/percy-abortion.html A View of Abortion with Something to Offend Everybody Covington, La. -- 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 15 million in the Ukraine? Atrocities become banal. But a 20th 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 seen 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 13th 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. * * * Walker Percy's latest novel is "The Second Coming." * * * Jim & Nancy Forest Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com Jim's books: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/ Photo collections: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/ In Communion site: www.incommunion.org On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/ A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/ * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wriddick at usa.net Tue Feb 8 00:23:34 2011 From: wriddick at usa.net (Wade Riddick) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2011 23:23:34 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] A Walker Percy piece written for the NY Times 30 years ago In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 12107 bytes Desc: not available URL: From janetcantor37 at yahoo.com Tue Feb 8 11:20:18 2011 From: janetcantor37 at yahoo.com (janet cantor) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2011 08:20:18 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] A Walker Percy piece written for the NY Times 30 years ago In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <915498.31458.qm@web63606.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Whew! Walker Percy announced that he was speaking as novelist, not as a doctor. He gave his opinion as a novelist. He also complained that some of his allies give him as big a pain as his opponents on this issue. You don't give him credit for this admission. As a free citizen with an opinion he has a right to offer it. You don't seem to show that you think he has that right. I appreciated your scientific descriptions and they are interesting to bring to the table. And I loved your comment about Dracula. That was something I expect the novelist, Percy would have appreciated a lot. Here's where you go too far, I think. Remember I too am a free citizen with the right to express my opinion. To talk about the authoritarianism of the anti abortionists without acknowledging that pro choice people have their own authoritarianism is to be either blissfully unaware or to leave out a big fact. I am willing to consider all sides in this complicated issue. I don't have a real side. I agree with some things in both arguments. But when I listen to pro choicers, they are much more obnoxious and closed minded than most pro lifers I know. And I know personally a lot of leaders in the pro life movement. I find them as people much more affable and open to argument than my pro choice friends, whom I often find utterly unwilling to accept the good intentions of the pro life people.This is a complicated issue and neither side should dismiss the other's humanity or good intentions. Talk about authoritarianism - the pro choicers take the prize in my small experience. Talk about brandishing literalism, the pro choicers again show much more evidence of that than most pro lifers I know. When I argued with no less than William F. Buckley on this very subject about his wrongheadedness in trying to foist his will on mothers whom he, then, would have no responsibility for what they would have to bear because of his forced decision, he agreed with me and devoted a full half of a future issue to present all sides of this compllicated issue. show me any pro choicer who would be so generous. Your paragraph on your difficulty because you are autoimmune and don't like when scientific decisions are made by people with no scientific knowledge is apt. But then why would you celebrate government bureaucrats deciding your life and death decisions in a nationalized health care or insurance plan? No one is working to keep you from getting health insurance. In fact you should applaud those who are working to try to make insurance more affordable and available. But you are assuming that only if the government provides it is it good. It seems to me you talk out of both sides of your mouth. You ask what is the point of making something a crime if you can't detect it. Will you also decry Obamacare's plan to make it a crime if a doctor does not do exactly what the government forces him to do, to the tune of $100,000. per instance? Is this what we want from our government? You ask what Walker Percy is suggesting in this editorial. He is suggesting, as an observer of humanity, that when someone cavalierly destroys a fetus because a baby is an inconvenience, instead of thinking beforehand and behaving more responsibly, that he destroys his humanity and perhaps our society. Percy may be naive, but he is a free citizen and has the right to express his opinion. You can compare it to when Nancy Reagan said, "Just say no." We all know that is naive and impossible. People take drugs. They are self destructive and stupid, but some people just are that way. But how does it hurt our society if a public person tries to set a good example? Walker Percy showed in the epilogue to The Moviegoer, I believe, that he had something like this on his mind. We should take responsibility for ourselves and for others. We should make choices that do no harm, or less harm. His writing this editorial is consistent with what he thinks. Why are you so threatened by what he is expressing here? What is it you see when you look in the mirror, I wonder? ________________________________ From: Wade Riddick To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Tue, February 8, 2011 12:23:34 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] A Walker Percy piece written for the NY Times 30 years ago >age than most. People get desensitized. Who wants to go about his >business being reminded of the six million dead in the holocaust, the It was twelve million in the Holocaust, wasn't it? 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 13th 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. So what do we want to discuss here - the fact that the _Roe v. Wade_ decision is consistent with the early 19th Century Catholic church's views on abortion - before the church altered them over French political concerns? Speaking of addressing modern facts, do we want to discuss the fact that - for purely natural reasons - conception is a messy trial-and-error process in which half of all fertilized eggs never make it to term? Are we to count this as a 50% infant mortality rate? I'll tell you why we don't add millions more to the infant mortality statistics every year. That would mean there was a "disease," a potentially addressable, "life-saving" medical concern that would necessitate research. We would have to spend money investigating human fertility in a petri dish. We couldn't do it with monkeys because humans follow a particular, peculiar development pattern unique to our species. And what's the church's position on in vitro fertilization work of any stripe? What will we do with reckless endangerment and homicide charges? If a woman doesn't know she's pregnant and drinks or smokes or exercises too strenuously and the blastocyst doesn't implant, do we prosecute her? How will we know it wouldn't have been one of the "natural deaths" instead of the woman's fault? Do we install electronic monitors in every womb? What's the practical point of making something a crime if you can't detect it? How many abortificants will we remove from the store shelves? Will we ban birth control pills - which, when taken in the proper combination, act as a "morning after" pill? Will we ban herbs like rosemary and thyme? (Remember that old Simon & Garfunkle standard, "Scarborough Faire?" One of the old Child ballads upon which it's based is purported to be a folk recipe for abortion using common herbs.) 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. I don't know too many human beings you can slice in two to make two completely new human beings. You can do that with blastocysts - but then that wasn't proven until the 1980s, after Percy wrote the editorial. Still, the existence of identical twins points to the existence of this natural process in the womb. This means blastocysts - embryonic stem cells - are qualitatively different than the actual embryo. I don't know what Walker Percy is suggesting in this editorial. Is he just venting at changes in the sexual mores of American society wrought by a post-hippie hangover? Is he proposing actual changes to the legal code? I certainly applaud his denunciation of the infant formula companies. The processed food industry has damaged a lot of lives because it substitutes political interests for rational, scientific evidence when making business decisions. (I am, at this very moment, struggling with a sinus infection that I could treat with over-the-counter decongestants if only they didn't all contain allergens like food dyes and sugars I can't tolerate. These fillers have nothing to do with efficacy but are added for marketing reasons to make the pills colorful and palatable to consumers. The FDA makes these allergy pills available over-the-counter because they are deemed "safe." But in order for me to get the medication properly compounded in a form that won't make me sick, I have to go to a doctor for a prescription because, you know, getting allergy pills that don't cause allergy attacks is really, really dangerous and I, as a consumer, have to be protected from that.) I may deplore living in a culture of easy abortion and easy sex when, in fact, neither is ever easy, but on a practical basis what do you expect the law to do about it? Government can't bring about heaven on Earth. It's not here to maximize happiness, as the Benthemites desire. No government can instill virtue in its citizenry. Government can make it easier to behave well and harder to behave poorly but one should never expect perfection in humanity. It's a bad idea to base public policy on misunderstood science - which Walker Percy does here - or on an intolerance for sin - which he doesn't. We have, in our current era, a prominent combination of both errors. Authoritarian movements are, by their very natures, intolerant of the truth and devoid of irony. Like Bram Stoker's Dracula, their narcissism is so deep they cannot see their self reflected in any mirror. They depend on ideology to triumph over reality. They brandish literalism, fundamentalism and constitutionalism to quash the independent-mindedness necessary for democracy to function. When Christians fall into literalism, like all literalists they become functionally illiterate. The general issues of justice and fairness in society slip as politicians focus instead on empty symbols of perceived civic virtue. And that's the real lesson, I think, here. Be careful who you get into bed with. These same people who profess such a love for human life have worked so diligently to keep me from getting health insurance. These are the same individuals who advocate torture for terror suspects - despite ample evidence of its ineffectiveness. Disliking, even denouncing, abortion may be appealing for Christians, but drawing on the law to prohibit it during an ambiguous period of human development is impractical. I don't know if Percy would have ever turned his own tools of irony detection on abortion but I learned from his writings, I follow the science and I keep an eye out for such incongruities. Last year, a Republican Federal District Court appointee ruled that federal financing of embryonic stem cell research violated the ban on using federal money for abortion. For those interested, I've appended one of the comments I posted on the web at the time that decision came out. It points to ample ironies in the judge's flawed reasoning. You've had some comments on the legal nature of the judge's decision equating embryonic stem cell research with "embryo destruction." I'd like to comment on the science. Judicial findings of fact are supposed to be rooted in science but this entire area has been so highly politicized, basic biological reality has become unrecognizable - but then, that's the point. The judge basically declared that maintaining an embryonic stem cell line - i.e., *not* killing it - is tantamount to abortion under federal law. This simply isn't the case. In fact, as a consequence of the ruling many researchers who depend upon federal funding may well stop maintaining these lines and let them die. This insanity stems from an ironic misapprehension of fact. When an egg is fertilized, it begins dividing into a ball of undifferentiated embryonic stem cells called a blastocyst. These cells are called undifferentiated because they have the capacity to turn into every tissue type in the body. After a few divisions, these cells lose their embryonic stemness and begin to differentiate to form the various tissues of the embryo. Embryonic stem cells come from undifferentiated blastocysts and NOT embryos. Embryonic stem cells are the cells that create embryos and then disappear. There aren't actually any embryonic stem cells left in an embryo worth harvesting. The judge's reasoning is like saying hairs are the same thing as hair follicles. They aren't, and no amount of political ideology can make it so. Hair follicles may create hairs but they aren't actually the hair itself. If the judge understood this, he would know how patently absurd it is to refer to the creation of embryonic stem cell lines as "embryo destruction." Culturing a blastocyst like this does just the opposite. Theoretically one fertilized egg can be coaxed into a line of a million cells which can then be turned into a million babies. You can stick a blastocyst on a slide and chop it up with a razor and get twins, triplets-however many clones you would like. We've been doing this sort of cloning with cattle for almost three decades now. On the other hand, if you slice up an actual embryo, it dies. It's differentiated tissue; E.S.C.'s are not. That's why they are so valuable. They can turn into so many different tissues. If the cell lines involved actual embryos - as the judge alleges - their special qualities of stemness would be lost. There does not appear to be anyone left in science journalism either able to understand or courageous enough to state these basic facts. It's outrageous the way in which the popular press has been coopted by these uneducated radicals who deny basic elements of cosmology, evolution and climatology so they can live in their own little corner of darkness. Scripture tells us to light a candle instead of cursing the darkness. Instead the press seems as delighted about banging our shins in the dark as the rest of the willfully ignorant. As someone who is severely autoimmune, I really resent the fact that science policy is being determined by guys who flunked high school biology while all the biotech and I.T. jobs flee to China and India. I also resent the fact that members of the Supreme Court have decided major cases about pager and cell phone technology while needing an embarrassingly rudimentary primer on electronics in open court. Consider the following policy absurdities that come from equating fertilized eggs with embryos. Half of all fertilized eggs don't make it to term for natural reasons. We don't understand why. That's just the messy way nature designed the process. That would equate to more than three million "embryos" lost every year in America. Has the right wing ever understood enough science to have the infant mortality rates adjusted to reflect this loss of "life?" Why does the Catholic Church claim it protects fertilized eggs but then blocks research into basic fertility that might prevent this implantation failure? I take a blastocyst, cut it in half, put half in the mother and use the other half to create an embryonic stem cell line/tissue bank for the baby. The baby gets born and there's a stem cell line. Where's the dead embryo? I take a hair out of my arm, take the stem cells out of the fleshy bulb at the end, add the right chemicals to make them revert to an earlier embryonic stem cell state - and, voila, suddenly I got pregnant and gave myself an abortion. (This might turn out to be quite easy. To turn hair follicle stem cells into pluripotent stem cells, you just have to activate the genes Oct4 and KLF4 <.) In vanished twin syndrome, one blastocyst absorbs another in the womb giving rise to a hybrid individual with two distinctly different sets of genes (technical term: chimera). Do you plan on declaring an accidental homicide and charging the survivor? When a blastocyst splits to make identical twins or triplets, will these individuals be considered a single person under the law? I don't know of any people you can hack in two to make clones - but you can do it with blastocysts *because they aren't embryos yet*. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lowry.charles at gmail.com Tue Feb 8 11:43:03 2011 From: lowry.charles at gmail.com (Charles Lowry) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2011 11:43:03 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] A Walker Percy piece written for the NY Times 30 years ago In-Reply-To: <915498.31458.qm@web63606.mail.re1.yahoo.com> References: <915498.31458.qm@web63606.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Wade has, perhaps inadvertently, drawn into focus what is the heart of the matter: "Disliking, even denouncing, abortion may be appealing for Christians, but drawing on the law to prohibit it during an ambiguous period of human development is impractical." The point that many pro-life advocates argue, and it is a point that has noticeable impact on the ideological equilibrium of pro-choice advocates, is that every scientific advance in embryology takes us further and further from regarding life in the womb as "an ambiguous period of human development." I wonder if the increasing queasiness of larger and larger numbers of Americans about the moral and legal status of abortion is connected not to false science, but to the advance of science and the more precise knowledge we have of the stages of fetal development. There is near universal revulsion over the practices of the Philadelphia doctor who concluded many of his "abortions" by using scissors to sever the spinal cord of living infants. But is it just a matter of timing? What we are also finding, I submit, is that more and more of our neighbors slogging their way through what the ancient hymn calls this vale of tears are reluctant to engage what we may refer to as the backwards clock, to come to the conclusion at a definite point, "yes, not human today, okay to fix the 'problem,' but probably human tomorrow." It is ironic for both sides in this debate that the advance of science has not liberated us, but has offered us knowledge of the stages of human fetal development that, on the contrary, constrict us. Chuck Lowry Brooklyn, NY -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jay_thompson at rocketmail.com Tue Feb 8 13:39:27 2011 From: jay_thompson at rocketmail.com (Jay Thompson) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2011 10:39:27 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] Percy-L Digest, Vol 80, Issue 2 Message-ID: <836199.5532.qm@web65316.mail.ac2.yahoo.com> "You ask what Walker Percy is suggesting in this editorial. He is suggesting, as an observer of humanity, that when someone cavalierly destroys a fetus because a baby is an inconvenience, instead of thinking beforehand and behaving more responsibly, that he destroys his humanity and perhaps our society." (Janet Cantor) I appreciated the comments by both Wade Riddick and Janet Cantor, though I would suggest that Riddick's scientific Summa Biologica essentially points back to Percy's essential dilemma with science in the first place: what does science say to the matter of actually living as a human being? Or, in this case, what does it ultimately say about the ethical dilemma of abortion or the philosophical aspects related to the origins of life. At the end of the day, surely a healthy respect for science, alongside the muse of the novelist/poet, and the logical arguments of the philosopher can at once be informative to our culture - a culture (as Percy would surely agree) is increasingly soul-less. Jay Thompson jay_thompson at rocketmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jay_thompson at rocketmail.com Tue Feb 8 13:40:57 2011 From: jay_thompson at rocketmail.com (Jay Thompson) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2011 10:40:57 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] Fw: Percy-L Digest, Vol 80, Issue 2 - Re: A Walker Percy piece written for the NY Times 30 years ago Message-ID: <374842.43032.qm@web65309.mail.ac2.yahoo.com> ----- Forwarded Message ---- From: Jay Thompson To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Sent: Tue, February 8, 2011 12:39:27 PM Subject: Percy-L Digest, Vol 80, Issue 2 "You ask what Walker Percy is suggesting in this editorial. He is suggesting, as an observer of humanity, that when someone cavalierly destroys a fetus because a baby is an inconvenience, instead of thinking beforehand and behaving more responsibly, that he destroys his humanity and perhaps our society." (Janet Cantor) I appreciated the comments by both Wade Riddick and Janet Cantor, though I would suggest that Riddick's scientific Summa Biologica essentially points back to Percy's essential dilemma with science in the first place: what does science say to the matter of actually living as a human being? Or, in this case, what does it ultimately say about the ethical dilemma of abortion or the philosophical aspects related to the origins of life. At the end of the day, surely a healthy respect for science, alongside the muse of the novelist/poet, and the logical arguments of the philosopher can at once be informative to our culture - a culture (as Percy would surely agree) is increasingly soul-less. Jay Thompson jay_thompson at rocketmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From janetcantor37 at yahoo.com Tue Feb 8 15:26:58 2011 From: janetcantor37 at yahoo.com (janet cantor) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2011 12:26:58 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] A Walker Percy piece written for the NY Times 30 years ago In-Reply-To: References: <915498.31458.qm@web63606.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <797585.90416.qm@web63603.mail.re1.yahoo.com> I think the point of the Percy Lists is to discuss Percy, not argue the Scopes trial. Percy had a point of view based on his experience and observations. My reason for giving such a long response is to try stick to analyzing Percy's idea. Often an author has ideas or characters that are unappealing to me, but in a book discussion, it is not my place to judge him, but to analyze him and what he is trying to say. I may dislike Iago, but Shakespeare still wants me to find him interesting and to try to find reasons to identify with him. Janet Cantor ________________________________ From: Charles Lowry To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Tue, February 8, 2011 11:43:03 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] A Walker Percy piece written for the NY Times 30 years ago Wade has, perhaps inadvertently, drawn into focus what is the heart of the matter: "Disliking, even denouncing, abortion may be appealing for Christians, but drawing on the law to prohibit it during an ambiguous period of human development is impractical." The point that many pro-life advocates argue, and it is a point that has noticeable impact on the ideological equilibrium of pro-choice advocates, is that every scientific advance in embryology takes us further and further from regarding life in the womb as "an ambiguous period of human development." I wonder if the increasing queasiness of larger and larger numbers of Americans about the moral and legal status of abortion is connected not to false science, but to the advance of science and the more precise knowledge we have of the stages of fetal development. There is near universal revulsion over the practices of the Philadelphia doctor who concluded many of his "abortions" by using scissors to sever the spinal cord of living infants. But is it just a matter of timing? What we are also finding, I submit, is that more and more of our neighbors slogging their way through what the ancient hymn calls this vale of tears are reluctant to engage what we may refer to as the backwards clock, to come to the conclusion at a definite point, "yes, not human today, okay to fix the 'problem,' but probably human tomorrow." It is ironic for both sides in this debate that the advance of science has not liberated us, but has offered us knowledge of the stages of human fetal development that, on the contrary, constrict us. Chuck Lowry Brooklyn, NY -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wriddick at usa.net Wed Feb 9 02:52:11 2011 From: wriddick at usa.net (Wade Riddick) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 01:52:11 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] A Walker Percy piece written for the NY Times 30 years ago In-Reply-To: <915498.31458.qm@web63606.mail.re1.yahoo.com> References: Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 15138 bytes Desc: not available URL: From larsonovic at gmail.com Thu Feb 10 10:27:34 2011 From: larsonovic at gmail.com (Michael Larson) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 09:27:34 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] Lewis, 1943 Message-ID: The following is excerpted from C. S. Lewis?s *The Abolition of Man*, pages 68-78. My apologies for the length of it, but it is salient to the present discussion and a companion of sorts to Percy?s thought, though from a generation prior. Kind regards, Mike Larson Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever. [?] Nature seems to be the spatial and temporal, as distinct from what is less fully so or not so at all. She seems to be the world of quantity, as against the world of quality; of objects as against consciousness; of the bound, as against the wholly or partially autonomous; of that which knows no values as against that which both has and perceives value; of efficient causes (or, in some modern systems, of no causality at all) as against final causes. Now I take it that when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience, we reduce it to the level of `Nature' in the sense that we suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity. This repression of elements in what would otherwise be our total reaction to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful: something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room. These objects * resist* the movement of the mind whereby we thrust them into the world of mere Nature. But in other instances too, a similar price is exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipulative power, even if we have ceased to count it. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected, and the old opposition to Galileo or to `body-snatchers' is simply obscurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost. >From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We reduce things to mere Nature *in order that* we may `conquer' them. We are always conquering Nature, *because* `Nature' is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. The wresting of powers *from* Nature is also the surrendering of things *to* Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same. [?] It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man's power to treat himself as a mere `natural object' and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one's first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners. [?] I have described as a `magician's bargain' that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power. And I meant what I said. The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious?such as digging up and mutilating the dead. [?] The true object [for the practical scientist] is to extend Man's power to the performance of all things possible. He rejects magic because it does not work;5 but his goal is that of the magician. In Paracelsus the characters of magician and scientist are combined. No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power; in every mixed movement the efficacy comes from the good elements not from the bad. But the presence of the bad elements is not irrelevant to the direction the efficacy takes. It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it was born in an unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour. Its triumphs may have-been too rapid and purchased at too high a price: reconsideration, and something like repentance, may be required. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From janetcantor37 at yahoo.com Thu Feb 10 14:32:54 2011 From: janetcantor37 at yahoo.com (janet cantor) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:32:54 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] Lewis, 1943 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <194119.18004.qm@web63607.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Thank you. How apt indeed. I don't think Percy would celebrate the purely scientific view. He is interested in the soul and wants our humanness to keep that in mind as we make our choices. ________________________________ From: Michael Larson To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Sent: Thu, February 10, 2011 10:27:34 AM Subject: [percy-l] Lewis, 1943 The following is excerpted from C. S. Lewis?s The Abolition of Man, pages 68-78. My apologies for the length of it, but it is salient to the present discussion and a companion of sorts to Percy?s thought, though from a generation prior. Kind regards, Mike Larson Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever. [?] Nature seems to be the spatial and temporal, as distinct from what is less fully so or not so at all. She seems to be the world of quantity, as against the world of quality; of objects as against consciousness; of the bound, as against the wholly or partially autonomous; of that which knows no values as against that which both has and perceives value; of efficient causes (or, in some modern systems, of no causality at all) as against final causes. Now I take it that when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience, we reduce it to the level of `Nature' in the sense that we suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity. This repression of elements in what would otherwise be our total reaction to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful: something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room. These objects resist the movement of the mind whereby we thrust them into the world of mere Nature. But in other instances too, a similar price is exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipulative power, even if we have ceased to count it. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected, and the old opposition to Galileo or to `body-snatchers' is simply obscurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost. From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may `conquer' them. We are always conquering Nature, because `Nature' is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same. [?] It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man's power to treat himself as a mere `natural object' and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one's first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners. [?] I have described as a `magician's bargain' that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power. And I meant what I said. The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious?such as digging up and mutilating the dead. [?] The true object [for the practical scientist] is to extend Man's power to the performance of all things possible. He rejects magic because it does not work;5 but his goal is that of the magician. In Paracelsus the characters of magician and scientist are combined. No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power; in every mixed movement the efficacy comes from the good elements not from the bad. But the presence of the bad elements is not irrelevant to the direction the efficacy takes. It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it was born in an unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour. Its triumphs may have-been too rapid and purchased at too high a price: reconsideration, and something like repentance, may be required. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com Fri Feb 11 01:12:56 2011 From: rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com (RHONDA MCDONNELL) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 23:12:56 -0700 Subject: [percy-l] Lewis, 1943 In-Reply-To: <194119.18004.qm@web63607.mail.re1.yahoo.com> References: , <194119.18004.qm@web63607.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I agree Janet. He had a knack for reconciling the two positions. I hold as a touchstone for my own belief a comment he once made that went something like this: I believe in creation through evolution. --Rhonda "You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing." Walker Percy Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:32:54 -0800 From: janetcantor37 at yahoo.com To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: Re: [percy-l] Lewis, 1943 Thank you. How apt indeed. I don't think Percy would celebrate the purely scientific view. He is interested in the soul and wants our humanness to keep that in mind as we make our choices. From: Michael Larson To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Sent: Thu, February 10, 2011 10:27:34 AM Subject: [percy-l] Lewis, 1943 The following is excerpted from C. S. Lewis?s The Abolition of Man, pages 68-78. My apologies for the length of it, but it is salient to the present discussion and a companion of sorts to Percy?s thought, though from a generation prior. Kind regards, Mike Larson Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever. [?] Nature seems to be the spatial and temporal, as distinct from what is less fully so or not so at all. She seems to be the world of quantity, as against the world of quality; of objects as against consciousness; of the bound, as against the wholly or partially autonomous; of that which knows no values as against that which both has and perceives value; of efficient causes (or, in some modern systems, of no causality at all) as against final causes. Now I take it that when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience, we reduce it to the level of `Nature' in the sense that we suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity. This repression of elements in what would otherwise be our total reaction to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful: something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room. These objects resist the movement of the mind whereby we thrust them into the world of mere Nature. But in other instances too, a similar price is exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipulative power, even if we have ceased to count it. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected, and the old opposition to Galileo or to `body-snatchers' is simply obscurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost. >From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may `conquer' them. We are always conquering Nature, because `Nature' is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same. [?] It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man's power to treat himself as a mere `natural object' and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one's first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners. [?] I have described as a `magician's bargain' that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power. And I meant what I said. The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious?such as digging up and mutilating the dead. [?] The true object [for the practical scientist] is to extend Man's power to the performance of all things possible. He rejects magic because it does not work;5 but his goal is that of the magician. In Paracelsus the characters of magician and scientist are combined. No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power; in every mixed movement the efficacy comes from the good elements not from the bad. But the presence of the bad elements is not irrelevant to the direction the efficacy takes. It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it was born in an unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour. Its triumphs may have-been too rapid and purchased at too high a price: reconsideration, and something like repentance, may be required. -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ Visit The Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @ sign when addressing email) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dabeck at iupui.edu Thu Feb 17 14:17:35 2011 From: dabeck at iupui.edu (Beck, David A) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 14:17:35 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] percy movie Message-ID: <20110217141735.akqythqdwskgocso@webmail.iu.edu> For those interested, the Walker Percy documentary is now available on dvd: http://www.walkerpercymovie.com/buythedvd.html I'm looking forward to seeing it. Can anyone who has seen it give a brief review? -David