Try A Little Tenderness

This post on abortion made me think of a particular line from Flannery O'Connor that serves as the theme of Walker Percy's last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome. I found it summed up online in this Claremont Institute article:

[O'Connor] was also pleased that Kirk was about to launch a conservative journal (Modern Age), and she favorably reviewed his Conservative Mind. In her copy she marked the words, "Abstract sentimentality ends in real brutality." She may have had that passage in mind when she wrote in her finest essay,

If other ages felt less they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness.... [But when] tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber.

Her friend and fellow Southern Catholic novelist Walker Percy made "tenderness leads to the gas chamber" the leitmotif of his last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome.

Update: Evidently the literary references were too obscure for lawyer Epp and too infuriating for Prof. Newquist, who apparently thinks that interpreting literature is a technical feat that should be left only to the English professors.  Apparently he is unaware of the history of political philosophy in which commentary on the poets (what today we would call literature) is well founded (two examples: Plato and Rousseau).  At least Todd has a sense of humor about it.  I particularly like "The Fallopian Tubes of Wrath."  It sounds like one of those monster movies Prof. Blanchard loves so well.  A couple points. I didn't bring up the South Dakota abortion bill.  I didn't refer to it, didn't mean to refer to it, never talked about it.  If people apply what I wrote to a piece of legislation, that's their own reading, not mine.  Thus, I did not claim to conscript Flannery O'Connor or Walker Percy to the support of this bill.  You see, I didn't mention the bill.  It can be said that both O'Connor and Percy were devout Catholics very disturbed about cruelty of the modern secular world.  I suspect O'Connor would have been deeply troubled by the abortion culture, but since she died in 1964, I guess we'll never know.  Percy was pro-life, as can be seen in this column from 1981.  Does that mean he would support this particular bill?  I don't know and didn't claim to know.  Heck, I don't know if I support the bill. 

So what is the post about?  What I take O'Connor and Percy to be saying is that tenderness in and of itself, detached from God, can lead to unspeakable evil.  There is no end to the horrors that can be justified in the name of doing good.  Think of the millions killed by Chairman Mao in the name of building a better China.  If one reads the blog I linked to, the writer comments about how people are perfectly sanguine about killing unborn children because, after all, it's all for the better.  What made me think of the O'Connor/Percy quote was this line from Richard John Neuhaus, ""There is a greater tolerance for evil if it is perpetrated with a long face, furrowed brow, and the requisite wringing of hands."  I take that to mean that we can justify almost anything in the name of solemn doing of good.  Do not weep for the dead unborn, after all, they're better off dead, and we are better off with them dead.  So we convince ourselves that killing is actually a good thing.  Does that make America the same as Mao's China?.  I don't think so, but I still think we should be ashamed at how at ease we are with the taking of unborn life.                                                                              

By the way Todd, Walker Percy won the National Book Award in 1962 for his first novel, The Moviegoer, and you can read his Wikipedia entry here.  To assuage Prof. Newquist, who is under the impression that blog entries are held to the same academic standards as journal articles, the O'Connor quote is from the introduction to Memoir of Mary Ann.  I don't have a copy of the book handy, so I can't give you a page number.  The Percy quote is on page 361 of the Picador edition of Thanatos Syndrome and reads thusly (the character Fr. Smith is speaking):

"My brothers, let me tell you where tenderness leads."
A longer pause.
"To the gas chambers.  On with the jets." 

Does this mean I can keep my job?