Rant Number 570 23 January 2014
There was once a baby about to be born. However, the story goes, as he poked his tiny head out of the warmth and security of his mother’s womb the baby took a good, inquisitive glance at the world into which he was emerging. You know what? What he saw gave him such a fright that he rushed back the maternal womb!
To be or not to be? That baby made a clear choice. And an informed one at that. The sights he glimpsed were just too horrid. ‘Why should I enter life, come to be into such a hell?’ So he chose to remain unborn. Not to be.
What things would have put him off the boon of life? Had he been a Syrian child his decision might perhaps make sense. Consider the slaughtered innocent, the beheaded prisoners, the tortured victims, the cursed, bombed out towns, the ruined landscape. The grim, squalid refugee villages. Also on almost all sides fanaticism, cruelty, sadism, fear, hatred, even worse, the callous indifference…Would any sensible child really desire to be born into the mayhem, the disaster that is Syria? Would you blame him if he did not? If he preferred not to be? Non- existence to existence in such conditions?
‘But poor Syria is an extreme case. Not all of God’s earth is like that. Britain, for example – a blessed, free and prosperous land?’
It depends. For one thing, the baby might not have any choice in happy Ukania. Someone else may choose non-existence for him, whether he likes it or not. In 2011 alone, 196.082 abortions took place in England and Wales. Had he been among those…too bad. Apart from contraceptives, of course – tricky matter there – non-existence is decided well before the chance to exist – different set of problem. Oh, well, as the hypothetical kid would never peep out of mummy’s womb, the knotty existential question arises not.
Mind, this baby is not a life-hater. He is a bit of an empiricist. A sharp observer. It is some circumstances of life that frighten him, not life itself. Not unlike Hamlet. The Dane’s dilemma – to be or not to be – spells it out. Human life’s evils, Shakespeare opines, include: ‘…the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office’ and so on. Old age, injustice, tyranny, abuse by the powerful, unrequited love, social wrongs of all kinds – sounds familiar? Hamlet confesses the list depresses him so much that he would sooner choose not to exist – kill himself – than to exist, was it not for his ‘dread of something after death’. Maybe the same or similar ills put off our far-sighted baby from being born, who knows?
This child however is no existential, tragic hero like Hamlet. Nor would he agree with that line by Spanish poet Calderon: ‘Pues el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido’ – to have been born, that is man’s greatest crime. Schopenhauer quoted that with glee. For the great pessimist, not just particular sins made life insufferable but life itself, in its essence, was a sin. Maybe same Eastern religions concur with that. By contrast, that is a view which no Christian could ever uphold. This is God’s world and man – made in God’s image – belongs here. And it is for the sake of humanity that God sent his only Son into the world, not to damn it but to save it. Thus for a follower of Christ hatred of life per se is a blasphemy, a theological absurdity.
I suppose it would be deemed a very churlish, unsocial and sour child who disliked the jolly spectacle offered by contemporary British society. Still, what if his mum lived in some South London unlovely council estate? Such as portrayed in Daniel Barber’s 2009 movie starring Michael Caine, Harry Brown. A broken society? That would be understatement. It is a Hobbesian state of nature world, where life seems nasty, brutish and short. Where man is wolf to man. So the baby looks out into a grim universe of run-down tower blocks, sin-bin housing, graffiti-defaced walls and dirty, rubbish strewn landings and alleyways, haunted by feral youths. Where stabbings, robberies, assaults, rapes, shootings and drug-dealing are a matter of course. And where the old, the weak and the vulnerable crouch in their poky flats in daily fear. He sees places with names like Peckham, Streatham, Brixton, New Cross, Hackney, Bethnal Green…A veritable jungle a wonderful, proud, parliamentary liberal democracy has created.
All right. It is a narrow, exaggerated viewpoint. And Harry Brown is only a film (though it has the ring of truth). Not all of Britain is like that. The baby could well view a very different landscape. And people could be far removed from the movie’s sick, twilight creatures. They could be better off, sure. Like the rutting, fornicating, hedonistic youth you see getting stoned and drugged in town centres at week-ends. That sight would only offend a very moralistic and puritanical baby, eh? May the Lord deliver such from such a judgmental boy! Nor would the mobs that only three years ago devastated, looted and set fire to the same town centres justify any right-thinking child from wanting to be born. To be fair, he would also behold a harmonious, multi-coloured rainbow nation. That is something anyone would be glad to begin his life into, no doubt.
That fussy baby the priest learns of in a passage by an obscure Austrian Catholic preacher of two centuries ago. A pre-modern, rural, more traditional world. The evils the lad would have discerned outside the womb were both different and the same today – because human nature does not change. The point of the image for a preacher however is the same. To reject indifference, laziness and fatalism. To pretend that you can’t do anything about human suffering. That children must go on being afraid of being born. Instead, evils must be fought, minimised and ultimately overcome. As Jesus Christ fought long ago, so his servants must fight the good fight to be – with all their might.
Revd Frank Julian Gelli
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