Last week, I mentioned briefly a little gem of a book: Enzo Pennetta’s L’Ultimo Uomo: Malthus, Darwin, Huxley e l’invenzione dell’antropologia capitalista (The Last Man: Malthus, Darwin, Huxley and the invention of capitalist anthropology) published in 2017.
In this little book – it has only 195 pages – Pennetta, whose tertiary education revolves around biology and pharmacy studies, summarises and explains some of the tenets of contemporary ideology.
If you think that this is all airy-fairy, consider what Pennetta has to say about the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. A reader of this paper could ask: Why should I care what an Australian philosopher has to say? Well, you should – because Singer’s ideas percolate down into the cracks of public discussion and are then taken up by campaigners and the journalists who support them. These people will subsequently regurgitate these ideas and present them to you as if they were the Truth, not as the premasticated ideology that they are in reality. And your life ends up being shaped by them.
Pennetta summaries Singer’s take on politically corrected ideas according to the Darwinian approach thus:
1. Reject the idea that parents have any authority over their own children
2. Contest the contents of the Bible
3. Refute the idea that human beings are superior to animals
How are these principles being applied around us?
Recently, worried parents were told essentially to shut up when they expressed their concern at what their young children are being taught at school as “sexual education”.
1. Certain newspapers alternate pro-abortion articles with faith-based articles. The strategy is to build the case for abortion and discredit those who oppose it, as if the debate on abortion was simply religious and those who prefer a religious approach are cut off from reality, fanatical readers of holy books. Clearly this latter image is a caricature, as in reality we have a very moderate Church and a very fanatical (neo-)liberal lobby.
2. Not too long ago, a solitary animal-rights campaigner tried to whip up support for putting an end to slaughtering pigs. This was given a lot of publicity by one particular newspaper, which also supports pro-abortion arguments. Let’s not forget that, according to the philosopher Singer, a pig should enjoy more rights than the unborn human child.
The pattern described by Pennetta is clearly applied and adhered to. But Pennetta also discusses tricks used in the campaigns for the acceptance of (neo-liberal ideas, such as Singer’s.
He analyses the strategies used by the American Civil Liberties Union which, you will find, have many elements in common with strategies used by civil-liberties lobbies in Malta:
1. Dispose of big sums of money, the origins of which are not always transparent
2. Find political support
3. Their origins are at times tied to personalities who acquire icon status
4. Enjoy credit with the media
5. Have important contacts within the academic, industrial and financial worlds
Their plan of actions usually involves:
1. Choosing a field of action
2. Creating interest in their objectives
3. Mobilising political and legal support
4. Obtaining social, or even just media, consensus for their objectives.
The obvious question is: who is behind these structures, and who stands to benefit from them? Cui bono? – who stands to gain? – as Slavoj ?i?ek loves to remind us.
A conversation with psychiatrist Mark Xuereb
The abortion debate is still raging, also because it is mentioned in the election manifesto of one of the Parties. During a recent conversation with Dr Mark Xuereb – a psychiatrist specialised in crisis management teams – I asked him about his perspective on the abortion issue. He reminded me that he spoke from 15 years of experience as a psychiatrist, having qualifications in emergency medicine and family medicine, and as the clinical lead of the crisis teams.
He told me that he still had to find one woman who has either had an abortion or thought about one – and her significant others – who hasn’t been psychologically affected in one way or another. This does not mean that they are more necessarily prone to suffer from a mental or a psychological disorder, but it does leave a wound: “There isn’t a day when I don’t think about this baby, there isn’t one day that I don’t think ‘if only’, there isn’t one day when I don’t feel angry at my mother/my father/my boyfriend, who dragged me into doing this abroad” is what the psychiatrist often hears when he and his team has to manage this not infrequent crisis.
Even if there isn’t any overt regret, there is a big risk that this experience is introjected – in a very Freudian sense – and displaced to the unconscious. People may become irritable, get headaches or develop somatic symptoms.
Some are pushed to suicide because of guilt, he claimed, not necessarily religious guilt but the guilt of having harmed somebody, of not having any control, of not having thought clearly at that moment, of “having been coerced or forced by mummy/daddy to save our reputation”. Because, you know, it is considered a very bad thing to have a teenage pregnancy, and “my daughter could lose her career, opportunities, she would remain single, etc, etc”, he said.
On the other hand, continued Dr Xuereb, people who are counselled say: “Thank God I saved the baby!” Again, this is not about guilt trips, and neither is it about judging. It is about reaching out to people in non-dismissive ways. These people are in crisis and go through a lot. They need tonnes of love and support and even forgiveness at times.
At this point I interrupted him, asking him if he accepts that abortion is a right that belongs to women.
It’s about the innate humanity we all have, was his immediate reply. We all have rights, including the unborn child.
Dr Xuereb explained that it is important to empower people, that is to enable people to make “informed decisions”. This is what our Malta Medical Council and similar world establishments insist on. The Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine and even the Malta College of Family Doctors, for instance, have training modules about the ethics of helping people make informed decisions. “Informed” means giving all possible pros and cons, and consequences by trained and up-to-date professionals.
One of the consequences of aborting, he underlined, is in fact a risk of psychological ill-health – in its broadest: depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, somatisation, and loss of function in extreme cases. Rarely, women may develop paralysed arms and legs. When you dig deep in their psychoanalytic history you will find that they would have amputated themselves – a symbolic gesture representing aborting the foetus.
The latter are called ‘conversion or medically unexplained symptoms’. Conversion is a psychoanalytic term that refers to when an anxiety-provoking issue, or ‘psychic pain’ you face, is introjected, moved from the conscious to the unconscious, and then it is displaced, manifested through physical symptoms, nervousness, amnesia (loss of memory), fainting, etc.
This is the mind’s way – through the body – of dealing with the experience. Everybody is affected by abortion, no matter what people say. It has nothing to do with whether you are weak or strong: there is always an impact.
Some women or loved ones may also develop psychological issues due to concomitant factors (e.g. psychosocial deprivation, pre-existing mental illness or poverty).
A crisis can be life-long guilt, which again can trigger suicide. And, yes, we have seen in Malta, through Crisis Resolution Malta (that has been around for nine years now), about 13 cases of women who have contemplated or tried to commit suicide because they had had an abortion.
“This guilt is the anguish of having done this to a vulnerable, defenceless person. Obviously we do not want to point fingers, but – going back to the informed decision – an informed decision means that the counselling professional has to know the good and the bad about every procedure, and then you allow the person or couple to make an informed decision.”
Abortion brings in its wake a significant risk factor for mental ill-health, for a crisis.
I had to interject, saying that there are women who claim that it did nothing to them.
“Those women who make such claims, who dismiss it as ‘just the removal of a piece of meat’ could – but I don’t want to generalise – have morals that are of a different standard to those prevalent in society,” was his answer. “They may act on impulse or out of helplessness, or because they don’t have the financial or social means to care for the baby.” He explained that their conscience could be very different to that of society. “There might also be personality issues such as dissocial traits.”
I then asked him about what should be done when finding oneself in such a situation. His eyes lit up. “There are so many couples”, he said, “who cry and beg for children and spend thousands and thousands of euros on IVF. And consider the anguish – you have to pump up this woman with steroids, she may become hairy, plump... we see the anguish in couples every day going through the IVF cycles. Imagine waiting for the moment to see if the embryo is growing or not or seeing your peers having kids and you can’t.
“So, my appeal is: don’t abort! Give your child for adoption! Like this it would be a win-win situation!” Out of something which was apparently a crisis, you create an opportunity. “You make the best out of the situation. I understand that it is easier said than done. But with support, with help, one can overcome the crisis.”
There are anecdotal crisis arguments, he said, such as rape and developmental difficulties in the foetus. These may be valid arguments in terms of the suffering women and their loved ones go through. But again, such scenarios are an opportunity to grow, to learn, to give children out to couples who are desperate to have a child. “I feel passionate about it because the crisis teams and I see this very often. We want babies to live and have a loving family. In essence, do we waste a life and promote psychological ill-health or do we support life and help infertile couples give the child the love and care they deserve?
“By not aborting, you are actually saving a life, empowering yourself and taking the opportunity to manage a crisis successfully.
“However, I must once again stress that we have to help and reach out to these people in crisis in a non-judgmental way. There is help out there. Get it. You will be surprised at what an exhilarating experience saving a life is and how psychologically beneficial it is to everyone when you offer the baby to couples who are yearning to be parents.”
If you are in crisis, get help on the free 24/7 Crisis Line +356 9933 9966, on Facebook (Crisis Resolution Malta), or on [email protected]. There is always hope.
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Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (1991) is an excellent debunking of the myth that the belief in a flat Earth was a dominant idea of the Middle Ages, and that the journey of Christopher Columbus did away with that idea.
Indeed neither Columbus nor his contemporaries thought the Earth was flat. This curious illusion persists today because it was firmly established with the help of the media, textbooks, teachers, and even noted historians. The error was first propagated in the 1820s and 1830s – thanks also to the efforts of noted writers Washington Irving and Antoine-Jean Letronne – and then snowballed to outrageous proportions by the late 19th century.
The erroneous idea that the Middle Ages believed in a flat Earth owes much of its popularity to its political usefulness. By creating the myth of an obscurantist, superstitious, and essentially ignorant Middle Ages, you can then hurl the abuse “mediaeval” at all those who do not support your (neo-)liberal agenda.