Paedophilia and child euthanasia

Please use your own imagination for what a Google image search for 'Death and Sex' might produce....

     
So, on the one hand, we have the current brouhaha over the involvement of the National Council for Civil Liberties and the Paedophile Information Exchange, and on the other, we have the introduction of child euthanasia in Belgium.

Both cases reveal something of the difficulties reliance on consent hits when it comes across the big issues of life such as sex and death, and when it moves away from fully rational, completely informed adults as agents. Consent is a rather fiddly notion that only makes sense against a background of freedom. Which doesn't really help very much as freedom itself is an extraordinarily difficult notion...

In common-or-garden situations, consent is a socially constructed practice which is intended to slow things down at a time of a big decision. So, in the case of double glazing purchases, there are the formalities of documentation and cooling off periods etc, not so much to check in any deep philosophical sense whether we really really want some of those new PVC units, but to exclude some of the more obvious external tricks: rushing someone into a decision, lying to them, pretending they said yes when they really said maybe etc... The point here is that a reasonable person, in full possession of the facts, might want double glazing: it's a perfectly good and reasonable aim, and in constructing a social process of consent, we're just excluding some obvious abuses rather than exploring the depths of that consent. Which is quite a good thing, because it's not at all clear what the depths of freedom might involve here. (Is it possible, for example, to purchase double glazing with full autonomy unless you've read Marcuse on false needs?)

Since the 1960s, a dominant strand in thinking about sex is that intercourse is just a (really) pleasant feeling. Society has repressed sex and progress consists in liberating ourselves to enjoy this physical pleasure without regret. Someone who doesn't want free sex is really still in thrall to a (primarily religious) taboo. Increasingly, a similar picture is being accepted of euthanasia. A good death consists simply in slipping away without pain. Anyone who rejects the possibility of euthanasia is really still in thrall to a (primarily religious) taboo.

The child euthanasia law in Belgium is based on the importance of ensuring that children can access a great good (pain free death) and is therefore not terribly concerned about the depths of consent: like double glazing, it's only concerned to exclude some gross external abuse without troubling itself overmuch with what freedom in its depths might mean for an infant. As nice Dr Riddington puts it:

As a doctor, I am thankful that progress is being made to address the anguish of people, children included, who find themselves in utterly intolerable situations. 

So it's not really surprising, is it, when children are being deprived of an obvious good like guilt free sex, that progressives think it rather a good idea to get rid of those nasty (primarily religious) taboos which get in the way? In fact, I'm only surprised that they seem to have gone rather silent on this one, having abandoned their previous enthusiasm:

...paedophile interest groups emerged from the 1970s in numerous countries...In 1979, a petition to the Dutch Parliament calling for the legalization of consensual sexual relationships between children and adults was supported by the NVSH [Dutch Sexual Reform Organization], feminist organizations, and the COC, the oldest still-existing gay rights orgainization in the world...Around the same time, the Protestant Foundation for Sex Education (PSVG) distributed tens of thousands of copies of an information booklet with the title Paedophilia to Dutch elementary schools (1979-81).


[Not from some barking mad religious text, but Veronique Mottier's Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction, which gives other examples of 'progressive' campaigning for paedophilia round the world.]

If you think that painless death is a simple good, then why worry too much about consent? If you think sex is a simple pleasurable good, then why worry too much about consent? Come on, let the kids have some fun: it's only death and sex after all.

Robocop and the resistance of the natural

The message of the original Robocop was apparently described by its producer as ' "fascism for liberals" – a politically liberal film done in the most violent way possible'. [Here.] Certainly, the director, Paul Verhoeven, has a habit of slipping in subversive political messages in what, superficially, appear to be typically gung-ho right wing movies. (I suppose it's most obvious in Starship Troopers where the ostensible message of 'let's go nuke the enemy' is undermined by its hyperbole.) Watching the remake, I couldn't help wondering whether it would be better described as 'liberalism for conservatives' -slipping in a profoundly conservative message under the whizz and bang of 'fighting against the man'. The director of the new version, José Padilha, has apparently emphasized the political aspect of the film, so let's push that a little and see how far it will go.

The surface of Robocop is political in a straightforward way: society is busy turning human beings into drones. Bad. But that essentially liberal message doesn't survive much of a probing.   There are few absolute villains in the film, but many broken reeds. Populism comes in for a drubbing. The ranting media, personified by Samuel L Jackson, demands law and order and isn't terribly worried about the details. Public opinion swings backwards and forwards depending on the last big story. Politicians generally just follow the mood. Science, personified by the doctor/engineer Gary Oldman, compromises its humane instincts under corporate and personal pressure.

What is reliable is Robocop's traditional family (his wife's emotional attachment to him and his relationship with his child is one of the key aspects of his salvation) and biology (much emphasis is placed on the way his (surviving organic) body keeps rebalancing his dopamine levels to restore his emotional life when the corporation tries to turn him into a mindless drone).

Add to this some subtle details -the villain's office is decorated with Francis Bacon's Oresteia trilogy (above) -images symbolic of the breakdown of the family (Orestes) and the body  (Bacon's usual butcher's eye view of the world); the film ends with the Clash's version of 'I Fought the Law and the Law Won' (not the Detroit police department which is exposed as a nest of corruption, but the Moral Law embodied in Robocop)- and you have a paean to traditional family life and the natural law as reservoirs of resistance to the vagueries of politics, popular opinion, the media and big business and, in particular, their delusion that you can remake people and society according to a perfect plan.

On reading Walter Scott...

 
                                                    All in the best possible taste.


As most Scots, I shall be spending the months leading up to the Independence referendum reading Sir Walter Scott. (Certainly the novels and may branch out.)

I'm only about half a dozen in so far, so I reserve final judgment. Having read a scattering of them before, I've found that a concerted effort pays off: you need to get into his rhythm and popping in and out over a number of years doesn't make this easy.

My main reasons for even attempting this are fairly straightforward. Scott is one of the seminal figures of European culture and, in particular, romanticism. He is clearly one of the central figures of Scottish literary culture. He offers an imaginative engagement with the past, particularly Scotland's past, when we are told, by our nation's new clerisy, that our past is merely a 'dark place'. Moreover, now that all that is worthwhile in Anglicanism has been received into the Catholic Church as part of the Ordinariate's patrimony, it is probably worthwhile grappling with Scott as part of that Episcopalian tradition which itself grappled with the Catholic heritage of the Middle Ages.

Anyway, apart from that broader concern to engage imaginatively with the past, a couple of more specific issues have quickly emerged from starting on the novels. First, there is Scott's multiplying of perspectives: fictitious introductions, notes pointing his divergence from historical accuracy, Lowlanders looking at Highlanders etc. A key aspect of this is what A N Wilson notes as Scott's double perspective:

Two voices seem to be heard: that of an eighteenth-century Tory rationalist, and that of a timeless lover of romance, marvels and chivalry. 

In addition -again noted by Wilson- there is the emphasis on the possibility of the life of private virtue, in particular, within the household, as opposed to the life of the state, but without abandoning an involvement in that public life: there is due respect here paid to the family, civil society and the state, but without the modern tendency, all too prominent in modern Scotland, to reduce everything to the state.

If I were sticking on my cultural nationalist bonnet, it's hard to resist the initial thought that, through the lack of an education in Scottish history and culture (let alone religious history and culture) in our schools, we have raised up a generation that, even though laying claim to a national identity, cares little about the historical specifics of that identity: modern nationalism as a creature of the emaciation of culture rather than as a reaction to that emaciation. (And we might entertain similar thoughts about the rest of the UK and, indeed, the Catholic Church: is the failure to engage adequately with the past the single greatest cultural failing of our age?)

More, no doubt, in due course...