Let there be light

I confess that I, too, was not surprised by the alacrity of Kenneth Wain's response (Let There Be Democracy, February 21) to my article. After all, he has frequently, if only recently, taken it upon himself to wade into battle in support of his sacred cow and it would have been disappointing not to welcome him into the foray on this occasion too.

I was, however, appalled by the inescapable implications of his treatise on the derivation and practice of a modern democracy. If one trims the argument of its occasional bouts of cerebral self-indulgence, reducing it to its bare bones, one is left with a statement that reads: A society is free to do anything it likes, as long as it is done in correct democratic fashion without infringing the rights of others to freedom of expression, lifestyle and association. In other words, institutionalised foeticide, eugenics, the elimination of randomly defined social groups... all these are fine as long as they operate within the diktats of established democratic principles. The means justifies the end.

As with any institution that is the product of a human mind, democracy is not a concept without its fallibilities - it is simply the best of its kind that we have been able to come up with. It is the very attempt to treat democracy as an infallible concept - an exercise into which Prof. Wain pours so much of his energy - that renders it most vulnerable to abuse, re-engineering it into a tool for the degeneration of society and the degradation of humanity. This, of course, is exactly the opposite result to that which was intended over the centuries throughout which the concept was crafted. It is the stubborn refusal to acknowledge this fact that induces the disfigurement of this noble concept and this is nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the disquieting, not to say cynical, conclusions that Prof. Wain draws in his treatment of the subject. They emanate from the debris of a surfeit of conflicting relativistic philosophies that supplant, and ultimately eradicate, any clear moral purpose or direction.

I cannot speculate as to whether Prof. Wain would ever turn for guidance, far less inspiration, to the late Pope John Paul II but I submit the following quotation in any case. It was made in 1996, on the eve of the celebration of the end of the two totalitarian empires of the 20th century - Nazism and Communism - during which the people were urged not to allow the emergence of "a radical individualism which ends up by destroying society". The Pope then set out what seemed like a set of directives for a new international order, which he had already outlined in his speech at the University of Riga. I would particularly like to draw the good professor's attention to the sixth statement: "First, the fruits of the earth belong to all; second, private property is an indispensable guarantee of individual freedom; third, labour is not to be regarded as a mere commodity; fourth, the world must promote a humane ecology; fifth, the state must accept that it has responsibilities to society; sixth, democracy must be based on values".

It is precisely this non-negotiable quantity that is so starkly absent from Prof. Wain's vision of a modern democracy. It is not based on core human values, whereas nations stand or fall depending on the way in which they vigorously uphold unchangeable values that are intrinsic to our God-given human nature and condition. It is precisely the attempt to glorify the democratic process beyond criticism, to depict it as the ultimate virtue, trumping any other consideration that, in fact, reduces it to a soulless edifice.

I applaud the effort to identify a provenance to the "right to life" but I fear it won't wash. What is lovingly described as a truth, profound or otherwise, that is merely "the fruit of experience and political maturation", is actually the acknowledgment of a truth, and not the truth itself, that has emerged, painfully and at great human cost, as a consequence of the human experience. The truth concerning the right to life was born concurrently with the emergence of humanity itself and the attempt to confound these two concepts amounts to little more than unbecoming sophistry. Furthermore, even the statement that everyone is free to believe what they like and free to express themselves as such, has its obvious limitations - one cannot believe that cyanic acid is a healthy tonic and survive for long nor can one abuse freedom of expression to incite others to lynch an inconvenient neighbour. Humanity has long realised this fundamental reality. It has frequently been pointed out that all people, even criminals, appeal to a universal standard when trying to excuse their own behaviour. Even those who claim that right and wrong are mere conventions will hotly protest when wronged - yet our philosophers believe that moral relativism is the hallmark of an emancipated society. They are children of an age, of a fad that has its time and will pass away as so many others before it. It is actually the defence of decadence.

The irony of the situation is that, in fact, the good professor need have no worry whatsoever about the Gift of Life proposal violating the principles of a democracy. If anything, by tightening the noose around the deliberate corruption of those principles, it will actually strengthen the core values upon which they are based. Interestingly, there was a time, not a hundred years ago, when our constitutional democracy was genuinely and violently under attack, when gross travesties of justice were enacted daily. There emerged another breed of defenders of democracy back then, individuals who didn't shy from laying their necks on the line when the threat came from fully-grown thugs - not unborn children. Our latter-day champions of the Constitution, on the other hand, were not very much in evidence in those days. Their learned discourses were notably absent then. It is another exquisite irony that those exercising their democratic right to petition Parliament are labelled fundamentalist by the very individuals who undergo spontaneous combustion at the thought of anyone daring to resist the values that they would impose on us - values that amount to little more than a turgid hodgepodge of spiritually barren and quasi-narcissistic tributes to humanistic wisdom as they perceive it.

...And throughout it all, in the whole murky miasma of heated defences of our sacred institutions, I have yet to hear one peep, one apologetic squeak, even a whisper in defence of the only genuinely sacred, most fundamental right of the lot - the right to life itself. A right that has been stripped away from the most defenceless of our species, whom we are behoven to protect above all others, whose silent cries really do reverberate throughout heaven, even as we are exhorted to emulate the vast and shameful roll-call of nations that have done away with every shred of moral decency in order to accommodate this barbarism. We are called upon to follow their ghastly example, lemming-like, for no other reason than that they have done it and therefore we must too - the supreme irony being that our reluctance to participate further in the blind, uncivilised, inhumane practices of our neighbours is labelled backwardness by these advocates of social nihilism.

In closing, should there linger any doubts as to what direction the road of moral exclusion will take us down, I invite anyone who may still not have got the picture to accompany me on a guided tour of the grisly reality of the abortion industry - to witness pregnant women being carefully instructed to proceed to the toilet shortly after having been given an early-abortion pill - this so that, should the pill not work properly and by some ill-fate a baby should be delivered alive, it will drown anyway. A dead baby is what was ordered and a dead baby is what they will get.

Following this edifying little introduction, we could proceed to the dismemberment of an older child, at which we could offer to carry out the bucketful of still warm human remains, to be tossed, more often than not, unceremoniously onto the nearest rubbish heap.

And finally, I wish to invite them to a performance of the grandest manifestation of surgical butchery of the lot - the partial birth abortion. We will stand around and observe the surgeon deliver an entire child except for its head and then, as we crane our necks for a better view, we will watch him exercising the precision of a professional executioner as he inserts a pair of sharp scissors directly into the baby's brain - swiftly and accurately. A sharp hiss of escaping air, a brief convulsion of little arms and legs... and it's over. Another bucket required. At this point, we could repair to the nearest canteen for a bun and a cup of tea - there to discuss philosophy and sacred constitutions.