By ANTHONY ESOLEN
The evil is to reduce a human being to a commodity, like a prize steer. It is to think of a man or a woman or a child as a thing, a product. God made man in His image and likeness. We sinners would like to raise men like cattle, or to produce men, like articles of furniture.
The slave owner had a rejoinder ready. “We treat our slaves well,” he might say. “We feed them, we care for them when they are sick, we introduce them to the faith, we rejoice with them and we mourn with them. They are more than slaves to us. They are a part of our family.” We need not suppose that all of the people who said such things were simply lying. Many of them must have believed what they were saying. They were not monsters. And that is one of the mysteries of evil, that people who are by nature no more monstrous than anyone can become accustomed to monstrous evil. Yet they can never be entirely unaware of it, either. So it's no surprise that, after the Civil War, the men and women who had had their mouths pried open for buyers to check for cavities shied away from the buyers, and vice versa. Not a “race instinct,” as the apologist for segregation would have it, but bad conscience.
Have we learned the lesson? No, man never does learn. Oh, we learn it as it applies to the specific form of the evil; we are not going to turn human beings into cattle for sale, to help pick cotton. We will turn them into cattle for other purposes.
Or into artifacts. Some of my readers will have heard of the man suing a surrogate mother (whom he has taken out on lease, like a milk cow), trying to compel her to thin out the triplet-herd she had conceived by him by “reproductive technology.” The evil here spreads like a fungus far beyond the vile murder-on-demand. Or you will have heard of attempts by others, especially homosexuals, to mix and match genes, so as to produce children of two or even three “parents,” just as you would mix paint colors, or plan out the moldings on a remodeled parlor. Or you may have heard of the doctor in the aptly named Netherlands, upon seeing a child with Down Syndrome, jesting with sang froid, “Looks like we missed one!” Such children are culled out, like misshapen loaves of bread coming down the conveyor belt. They are factory rejects, human garbage. The rest of us are wrapped up in cultural cellophane and tagged with a Grade A. Only the best, you know.
So we speed along like brainless teenagers on a debauch, to a new slavery, the manufacture of mankind according to the specifications of the makers. Perhaps we will grow little ones to provide us with healthy organs for harvesting. Who knows? There is no bottom to the evil to which man can fall. If there were a bottom, that would imply that evil was a thing in itself, like matter with an absolute limit of cold, rather than a privation, a defect of being, a disintegration. Chaos knows only one limit, and that is nonexistence.
God help us.