(Mercator) Both candidates in next month’s election for President of the United States are vague about their policies. As The Economist put it: “Kamala Harris’s plans lack detail; Donald Trump’s are sometimes untethered from reality”.
But there is one issue on which Harris is, to quote her campaign emails, “relentless, focused, determined, and disciplined”: abortion. In fact, it is the only clear policy in her campaign. It has defined her candidacy.
At a rally in Wisconsin the other day, she explained why she supports “reproductive rights”. "We will move forward because ours is a fight for the future, and it is a fight for freedom — for freedom,” she said. “Like the fundamental freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do."
We ought to cut her a bit of slack. Harris is a politician, and it’s futile to examine a politician’s rhetoric too closely. They use slogans which crumble easily, words as coherent as graffiti messages spray-painted on old factory walls.
However, “freedom” underpins everything in a democratic society. Ever since the dawn of the Enlightenment 300 years ago, freedom has always been at the top of the agenda. It is the defining dream of modernity. In fact, modern science and technology, democracy, tolerance, atheism and scepticism, rationality, human rights – the whole Enlightenment project – are riffs on the word freedom.
Freedom justifies abortion, resistance to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, varieties of breakfast cereals, transgender surgery, the right to post on social media, the right to delete posts on social media, the right to worship, the right to watch porn … in our society almost every policy invokes “freedom”. We are entitled to ask what Harris and her supporters mean by the word. After all, if they don’t know what this “freedom” is, how can they be sincere or consistent?
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Ratzinger on freedom and truth
In the 1990s Joseph Ratzinger, as he was before he became Benedict XVI, wrote a perceptive – and prescient – essay on Kamala Harris’s species of freedom entitled “Freedom and Truth”. His theme was one that he pursued in the documents that he wrote as Pope a few years later – that freedom and truth are inseparable.
It’s interesting that he chose abortion to analyse the internal contradictions of contemporary “freedom”. Transgenderism or drug abuse are other examples, but abortion demonstrates the conundrum in particularly vivid way:
In the radical version of the Enlightenment’s individualistic tendency, abortion appears to be one of the rights of freedom: … It is a matter of the right of self-determination. [But] …What kind of a freedom is this that numbers among its rights that of abolishing someone else’s freedom right from the start?
This is a familiar pro-life argument. But Ratzinger pursues the idea to its source. What is freedom for? After all, rocks manage without it, as do dogs and photocopiers. This has always been a sticky issue for Enlightenment thinkers, he writes.
Take Karl Marx. The aim of his whole philosophy, his programme of Communism, was to free man from his social, economic and political shackles. Eventually, when the Communist paradise emerged, man would be free. But, surprisingly, Marx was vague about what this entailed – even vaguer than Kamala Harris’s policies, if that’s possible. In a famous passage in “The German Ideology”, a book he co-authored with Engels, he described the worker’s paradise:
in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
This was Marx’s freedom? Fishing without a bag limit? Hunting without seasons? It sounds more like a Valhalla for Good Old Boys. People rightly sneer at visions of Christian Heaven which depict souls strumming on harps on fluffy white clouds. Marx’s was far more pedestrian.
Ratzinger then linked Marx to the insights of Jean-Paul Sartre, the French writer of the post-War years. (He was one of the few people who refused to accept a Nobel Prize.) Sartre’s version of existentialist philosophy was thoroughly atheistic. Without a Creator to give man a nature, direction and limits, Sartre’s man was left only with his freedom. “Man is condemned to be free,” he wrote. And, as Sartre acknowledged, the task of writing a script for freedom in a life without a purpose is desperate and ugly. Ratzinger writes:
An animal lives its life according to the pattern of law that it has inbuilt within it; it does not need to consider what to do with its life. But the being of man is undetermined. It is an open question. I have to decide for myself what I understand by ‘being a man’, what I can do about it, what shape I can give it. Man has no nature but is simply freedom. He has to live his life in some direction or other, yet it runs out into nothingness even so. His meaningless freedom is man’s hell.
A multi-faceted man, Sartre also translated his philosophy into a novel, Nausea, short stories about meaningless lives, and several plays. They show, in Ratzinger’s words,
this complete absence of truth, the complete absence also of any kind of moral or metaphysical restraint, the absolute anarchic freedom of man constituted by his self-determination… [It] is revealed, for anyone who tries to live it out, not as the most sublime exaltation of existence, but as a life of nothingness, as absolute emptiness, as the definition of damnation.
As I said, it would be a mistake to read too much into Harris’s words, but by exalting abortion as a manifestation of freedom, isn’t she close to endorsing Sartre’s bleakness and despair? A distinctive moral feature of abortion is being alone – radical alienation from both the child and her partner. The particulars of every woman’s experience of abortion must be different, but the pattern is the same. In a radical assertion of her own will, her own freedom, she flees from those who are – literally – nearest and dearest to her into the solitude of her own choice.
Sartre’s philosophical papers were notoriously dense and convoluted, but his literary works are eminently quotable. These lines from the play “No Exit” are unforgettable:
So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.
Ratzinger recasts this in philosophical language: “Sartre regards the freedom of man as being his damnation”.
I’m sure that such thoughts are far from Kamala Harris’s head. But she is an intelligent woman. If she wants her words to mean anything, she should stop abusing the precious word “freedom” by using it to justify abortion. Perhaps she should say plainly that killing an unborn child is self-defence. Or cheaper. Or more convenient. Or a justifiable act of defiance. But not that women become more free by snuffing out a child’s freedom.
Editor's note: Michael Cook is editor of Mercator. This article was published by Mercator and is reprinted with permission.
