Alex Pretti Was Murdered by the State

You have already been introduced to this essay’s “thesis statement”. But before coming back around to its narrow defense, we will have to do some significant ground-clearing.

I have never understood, let alone been able to respond to, multiple-choice questionnaires soliciting my “political views”. The problem with being asked to say whether I am “pro-immigration” or “pro-choice” or the like is that there is always an overarching meta-issue, left totally unaddressed by the solicitors, concerning what Isaac Levi once described as “the most neglected modal” — to wit, feasibility.

Along with a reasonable concern to fix this modality, the respondent obviously also has an interest in knowing what sort of time-frame one should have in mind. In an absolute sense I would like to live in a world without borders, without abortion, without prisons, without police, and indeed without states. But I don’t think it makes sense, in the present state of the world, to say that I am an advocate of open borders or prison abolition, and I am definitely opposed to criminalizing the choice to terminate pregnancies made by girls and women in a society already so hostile to them, and so dead-set on making it as hard as possible to raise happy, healthy, prosperous children.

Still, I really do believe that prisons, wars, abortions, capital punishment, industrial agriculture, and many other things many of us take for granted as inevitable constitute real moral failures of humanity. For in all these cases there is a being of real moral interest —even if it is “just” a fetus, or indeed “just” a disconsolate calf torn from its mother, or “just” an enemy soldier or “just” an ear of Monsanto corn—, from whom (yes, whom!) the love due to them as creatures of God has been sinfully withheld. (Capital punishment, in contrast with all these other issues, is a problem that, given the minuscule numbers involved, could be solved tomorrow. There simply is no basis for believing that the state has any sovereign power over any human life. It should be abolished immediately.) It is the work of serious thinkers to envision a world without such withholdings, and to begin to lay out drafts of plans to get from here to there. So leave us alone with your mind-numbingly simplistic questionnaires, I always want to respond, and come help us think instead!

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