Michael's Corner

Recently, I watched a podcast, featuring pro-life advocate Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire, and Bronte Remsik, an abortion activist. “Podcast Land”—its longform conversations can be a healthy alternative to the tedium of the cable news cycle—has become a crowded space, so one should choose wisely. Typically, I limit myself to Impact Theory, Modern Wisdom, and Dark Horse, but occasionally push the boundary. The pro-life/pro-choice dilemma was never one that lit my fire, nor had it ever applied (I’ve been a responsible adult), but I figured, what the hell; maybe Knowles or Remsik will present the dilemma in a light that will cause me to widen my parochial scope.

The result? I overestimated them and decided the podcast was not a good use of my time. Why? Remsik asked Knowles, “Do you know what the leading cause of death is in pregnant people?”

Knowles replied, “You mean pregnant women?”

Remsik doesn’t concede and steadfastly holds to the “in-vogue” notion many align with, advocating that pregnancy is not a condition exclusive to women. Knowles, backed by 50-million years of evolutionary biology, is equally unrelenting. And thus, there you have it: two people failing to broach the discourse because that cannot agree on who can and can’t get pregnant. Knowles and Remsik, in that moment, became a microcosm of America and the West. Americans shouldn’t ask one another, “Why is the government shut down?” When two people look up at the sky and can’t agree that it’s blue, that question should be, “Why wouldn’t the government shut down?”

There must be one (if only one) objective truth in the universe that unifies us and that we can point to and say: That’s a fact. If there’s no substratum upon which to erect a society, then nothing we build will have any durability. Indeed, the postmodernists may have gotten a few things right but only a few. What they fail to acknowledge is that if all of humanity is based on the feelings of individuals living in an increasingly atomized society abiding by no objective truths, that is, by definition, a house of cards next to an open window. Healthy progressivism delivers boundaries and goalposts with mobility not perpetuity. So, let us all celebrate the diversity of human software with the understanding it will flame out should it become too disconnected from human hardware. In other words, reach for the stars, but keep one foot on the shoulders of ancestral wisdom. Why is that important? While I submit that human beings are amazing creatures with an unparalleled ability to adapt to hyper-novelty, if we are repeatedly asked to transition from our formative years to adulthood, with no aspect of the former present in the latter, that isn’t progress, it’s chaos.

Okay, that was a long-winded way of saying, I don’t get too jacked up over pro-life versus pro-choice debates, but I’m not ready for “Pregnant people.”