Dr. McCoy, Mr. Spock, and “Responsibility”

President Trump halted funds to the World Health Organization (WHO) citing their poor performance regarding the coronavirus but let’s be clear: he also despised their pro-abort agenda, which, ironically, is the very reason that President Biden reinstated funding shortly upon entering office. During the pandemic, an article on the WHO website boldly stated, “A global pandemic requires a world effort to end it—none of us will be safe until everyone is safe.”

Everyone? Really? Isn’t this the same organization that insisted that abortion “services” were “essential” during the pandemic? Essential, as in that which comprises the essence of something?

Apparently, death is the essence of health.

For the year 2020, the official global tally for death by COVID was around 1.8 million. The yearly global death toll from abortion is around forty times greater. Why is the life and health of the unborn not important to the World Health Organization? Is it because their end game is control, and their preferred tool is cold, hard, merciless logic?

The “greater good” they seek is one narrowly defined by their Malthusian ideology: a world without disease—a world with a lot fewer people. Disease threatens them personally; abortion does not. A simple demographic reality is that higher population density contributes to the spread of disease, a reality that has not escaped the bureaucrats at the WHO, and as we shall see, they take their responsibility very seriously.

Logic ceases to be logic when it fails to serve truth. In the 1960s television series Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry gifted us with Science Officer Spock, a character from Vulcan, a planet whose culture was completely dedicated to logic, which had, for all intents, become their religion. But Vulcan logic did not look much like classical logic simply because it was completely devoid of the metaphysical; that is, the search for the meaning of existence.

Deeply embedded in that ancient Greek discovery is a craving to understand why we are here, and a subsequent devotion to first things—those things we know intuitively to be true. But Mr. Spock’s constant end-justifies-the-means recourse to the importance of the collective and the relative unimportance of the individual is disturbing.

Nothing happens in a vacuum, so please bear with me as I try to place the appearance of Spock’s character into a cultural context. The original Star Trek series first aired in 1966, the same year that Presbyterian Priest Joseph Fletcher darkened minds with his book Situation Ethics: The New Morality. To give you a taste of the caliber of the man, here is a quote from a work he co-authored, “The Right to Die”, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1968.

People [with children with Down’s syndrome] …have no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down’s syndrome baby away, whether it’s “put away” in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible lethal sense… True guilt arises only from an offense against a person, and a Down’s is not a person… There is far more reason for real guilt in keeping alive a Down’s or other kind of idiot, out of a false idea of obligation or duty… [emphasis added]

Fletcher said that all decisions must be based on the most loving outcome and that the final decision as to what would be the most loving could not be scripted; it could only be made in the moment after weighing all of the factors of the situation. He saw absolutes like The Ten Commandments as incapable of yielding to the requirements of the situation.

Following his logic to its natural conclusion, he would eventually embrace atheism: the denial of the metaphysical, of absolutes, of a higher power; the denial of Christ—the denial of the very Love that was supposedly the object of his new moral theology. Fletcher’s philosophy was an answer looking for a question, and his answer for everything was death. One is “responsible” when one kills. In his own words:

Theologically oriented people often get the idea that life is God’s alone, to deal with as He wills or pleases. (They stick to this idea even if they practice birth control! The really consistent vitalists are across the board opposed equally to contraception, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia—that is, to any form of human initiative and responsibility whatsoever.) …The sanctity (what makes it precious) is not in life itself, intrinsically; it is only extrinsic and bonum per accident, ex casu—according to the situation.

You see, there is a god after all: his name is Situation. His priests, the intelligentsia, will let you know if your life has any value—expect them to be very “responsible”. Fletcher abandoned the God of love to embrace the god of pragmatism. What could be more progressive than to be pragmatic; that is, to be willing to yield to whatever it is that gets the job done? It just seems so methodical, so scientific. If you throw out the science of metaphysics; if you dismiss the desire to understand the nature of existence, pragmatism is all that remains.

Pragmatism poses no questions and answers no questions; it is efficient, practical, and fatally responsible; it is the parent of all pseudoscience. The Servant of God, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, accuses Pontius Pilate of being the first notable pragmatist. Pilate sacrificed the life of an innocent man to prevent a riot, possibly averting the deaths of many—truly pragmatic and, obviously, the most loving outcome. Right?

Fletcher’s cold shadow provides the dark, pragmatic dogma of the WHO, but the Church also felt its chill. In last week’s article, I quoted Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI concerning the general breakdown of moral theology in the late twentieth century. After Vatican II, in the spirit of ecumenism, there was a desire to create a moral theology based entirely on scripture, an effort that drew theologians (in particular, Jesuits) into the same dank alley that had attracted Fletcher; not that scripture itself can in any way be faulted, but because one can too easily ignore scripture’s underlying natural law principles as expressed by St. Paul in a letter to the Romans. This “culture of death” insanity would eventually be countered brilliantly by Pope St. John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor, reaffirming the Church’s natural law tradition.

I know people who knew John Paul II personally. How much fun could it have been to hang out with a Pope with a degree in anthropology? Those who knew him, say that the weight of his office did not prevent him from being a jokester and that there was plenty of good cheer whenever Karol Józef Wojtyła was involved.

And the subject of hilarity brings us back to Mr. Spock, a character with absolutely no sense of humor—which is also an attribute of the narrow, self-serving logic that plagues our times. From the talking heads of the alphabet media to the pedigree-less monarchs that rule the WHO and all bureaucracy, all take themselves so seriously as to be comical: their somber demeanors mere caricatures of solemnity.

If not for true logic, humor would scarcely exist. It is recognition of the ludicrous that ignites humor. The greater our sensitivity to real logic, the keener our sense of the incongruous and the sharper our wit. It is no accident that the word wit is used variously to describe both humor and intelligence. Any truly classically logical person, like Gilbert Keith Chesterton, finds humor in nearly everything.

Concerning the logical approach always taken by his brother and fellow author, Cecil, Gilbert wrote,

When I say his weapon was logic, it will currently be confused with formality or even frigidity: a silly superstition always pictures the logician as a pale-faced prig… In fact, it is generally the warmer and sanguine sort of man who has an appetite for abstract definitions and even abstract distinctions.

But Mr. Spock’s character was a product of a decade that would thrust situation ethics into the limelight at every opportunity, always attempting to make it appear logical and serious; the same decade in which humor began to be sucked from the very essence of our lives.

Because the grossly incongruous has now been dubbed the norm, it is politically incorrect to laugh at anything except to mock tradition and those who uphold it. At the base of such modern humor, we find the sneer, the “irreverence” so revered by movie critics. Far from being poised to “go boldly where no man has gone before”, our culture is once again poised to slip down the same old modernist slimy slope of self-destruction. It seems that the humble decency of common sense, not space, is our “final frontier”.

To the late Gene Roddenberry’s great credit, Star Trek’s writers were certainly not afraid of humor, and Mr. Spock’s dubious assertions were often passionately and successfully countered by the characters of Kirk and Bones. But the strident masculinity of Captain James T. Kirk and the down-home sensibilities of Dr. Leonard H. McCoy are not valued by the narrow logicians of our times: the talking heads who take themselves and their imagined position at high-society’s helm very, very seriously. Despised by the narrow, fixated minds of the WHO, the Dr. McCoys of the world—those who believe that life has intrinsic value—are banned, and censored because their scope is galactic, their vision too personable, and their values far too universal.