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Here is part 2 of the previous post ….

If Miss O’Connor popped out of the grave today, what would surprise her most about the Church?

I think probably the disunity, the near-sundering of the American Church. I think she would be horrified, and probably most of all by the nuns, by what happened to the Georgia nuns, to the Louisiana nuns, and I guess to most of the others. They completely fell apart. They were seduced, not by feminism —which the pope approves of, in the sense of the right of women not to be discriminated against —but by radical feminism. Many of the nuns I know were completely seduced by it, to the point of rebelling against any sort of discipline. They began to mix up the magisterium with macho masculinism, as if the Pope were Hemingway. I think that would horrify O’Connor more than anything else.
Speaking of Flannery O’Connor, how did you happen to use as the leitmotif of The Thanatos Syndrome a passage from one of her essays: Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.
Did she say that?
It’s at the end of her Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann.
I’m amazed. I would happily admit that I did that consciously because I’d love to give her the credit.

Could you explain what “tenderness leads to the gas chamber” means?

I don’t know what exactly Flannery said, but I was thinking of the Nazis and of my experience of the Ger-mans, whom I liked very much. I was in Germany in 1934, the year after Hitler came into power. The Germans seemed to me extremely likable people, extremely sentimental people; they had tremendous tenderness in their conversations. After all, the romantic Gefuehl, openness to feeling, comes from the Germans. God knows they did great things with it: the great German composers from the nineteenth century, for instance. The apposition of German feeling, German tenderness, and the gas chambers struck me as a great mystery at the time. Yet is it a paradox? If Gefuehlor tenderness is all you have, it can lead anywhere. The opposite of tenderness is not cruelty.

That passage from O’Connor about the gas chambers is, in a way, the most political thing she ever wrote. It begins: “In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness” (emphasis added). Similarly, it seems that your last novel is, in one sense, the most political work you’ve written: the subject matter is Tom More foiling a plot against the public weal. Then there’s your recent, unsuccessful effort to publish a letter in the New York Times warning about the danger of taking innocent life by abortion, euthanasia, etc.
The Times was offended. Nothing offends the American liberal more than being compared to the German liberals of the Weimar Republic. There’s a book —not by Nazis, in fact long before the Nazis —advocating abortion and the elimination of life “without value.” It was written by German doctors of the Weimar Republic, which was probably the most liberal democracy in Europe. Not only did large-scale abortions start in the Weimar Republic, not under the Nazis, but euthanasia did, too, as did the elimination of the malformed and “unfit.” All these practices were justified in a book by two liberal Weimar physicians: The Defense of the Destruction of Life Without Value. The whole notion is very reasonable without the Christian ethic —no, it’s got to be more than the Christian ethic, it’s got to be an article of faith. We talk about the sacredness of life as if it’s a democratic swear-word, but unless you really mean it, what’s more reasonable than doing what the Weimar scientists did? Why bother with people whose “quality of life” is inferior?
Why are abortion rights so central a feature in the ideological canon of groups who are usually committed to what we would call compassion or tenderness?
That’s a very good question. If I had anything to say to the liberals, in the usual sense of that word, it is that I agree with them on almost everything: their political and social causes, and the ACLU, God knows, the right to freedom of speech, to help the homeless, the poor, the minorities, God knows the blacks, the third world —their hearts are in the right place. It’s actually a mystery, a bafflement to me, how they cannot see the paradox of being in favor of these good things and yet not batting an eyelash when it comes to destroying unborn life.
They also pride themselves on being scientific, yet the scientific consensus is, in the matter of Roe v. Wade, how wrong Blackmun was when he said there’s no scientific agreement about when human life begins. That’s absolutely untrue, scientifically. It was a stupid statement, and I’ve heard indirectly that he knew better. To get back to the liberals, I feel a great sorrow that this tremendous energy that goes into all the other causes with which I agree is not going into the protection of life.
Would the disregard of the spiritual have something to do with that? Many criticized the character Father Smith in your last book because he keeps leaving the world and going up into the fire tower to wrestle with his God. Spiritual life, it seems, is unimportant; only good works matter.
Absolutely. That’s the Christian scandal: the emphasis on individual human life. Absent that, what’s wrong with improving the quality of life? What’s wrong with getting rid of people who get in the way? What’s wrong with putting old, miserable people out of their misery? What’s wrong with getting rid of badly handicapped, suffering children. Once you’re on that slippery slope, where does it end? It ends in the gas chamber. If the consensus is that the Jews are bad for the polity, what’s wrong with getting rid of Jews? How do you make the argument that we shouldn’t get rid of Jews, or gypsies, or Catholics, or “anti-social blacks”?
A novelist you admire, Saul Bellow, recently endorsed Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind. But it’s not as well known as it ought to be that you stated Bloom’s thesis almost 20 years ago. Tom More in Love in the Ruins complained that “Students are a shaky dogmatic lot. And the `freer’ they are, the more dogmatic. At heart they’re totalitarians: they want either total dogmatic freedom or total dogmatic unfreedom, and the one thing that makes them unhappy is something in between.”
That’s not bad, is it? [laughter]