I read this as Plough is launching our Jean Vanier biography, Jean Vanier: Portrait of a Free Man, written by his longtime friend Anne-Sophie Constant. Vanier, who died at age 90 in early April, was a Catholic layman, theologian, and liver-out-of-the-Gospel who, in the 1960s, was cut to the heart by the neglect of the mentally and physically disabled in institutions in France, and brought two young disabled men to live with him in a small house. They called it L’Arche, the Ark, because, he said, “we are all in the same boat.” L’Arche became a movement, with more 150 communities in 38 countries worldwide, than where disabled people and non-disabled people live together in mutual support, in communities where everyone contributes in the way that he is able, and each person is seen and valued as an ikon of Christ.
It is the human telos to develop and flourish and thrive, physically and intellectually; to grow up strong and healthy and full of joy and with minds sharp as knives. In the absence of the Fall, we all would. And when we see people who have reached that telos, we rightly rejoice: that is what we all want for every baby we ever hold, that’s what we want for the people we love who are struggling– or doing well; that is what we want for ourselves. It’s good and right to want that.
But where that telos is thwarted– by the neglect of others, by the absence of distributive justice across the world community, by sin, by accident, by any one of the many other reasons that people can be hurt– God is not absent from their lives. He has told us that his strength is manifest in weakness– and indeed sometimes those who are strong are more likely to not be aware of his presence in their lives, of the reality of their own value *as his images* and of the reality of the value of others.
It is very, very hard for us modern Times-op-ed-readers to grasp both of these corresponding truths at once. And the reason is very well expressed in the passage from Kristof above.
Children’s intellects are not natural resources whose purpose is to contribute to GDP growth. IQ is not a measure of value. Humans are not valuable because they have high IQ. To have a well-developed mind and body is good for a human– because it is good for humans to thrive, because they are already important, even before they thrive. They already matter. They are already– including those children who die before they are born– almost unbearably sacred. The fact that we have a tendency to grope around for abstractions like “IQ points which are going unexploited” when what we actually mean– what Kristof is responding to, as a human being and a writer– is already-valuable children, who will always be valuable, but who have been robbed– is a symptom of a basically technocratic and economizing understanding of human nature: it’s utilitarianism. We gotta kick that stuff right to the curb, guys. Like a tapeworm, that mindworm starves our intellects and hearts as we actually try to interact with other humans, as we try to think through policy.
I don’t know how all this will net out in the eschaton, and I’ll tell you this much, making plans for that is definitely beyond my paygrade. But I do know that Kristof’s approach and Vanier’s need each other. But Vanier knows better than Kristof what a human being is.
