Oh, Andrew Brown. Wrong in the very first sentence.
He’s writing about the Tuam babies.
Why is it that we are more shocked by what happens to dead babies than to live ones?
We’re not.
There, that’s done; no need to write the rest of that piece.
But of course he did write it.
The story that almost 800 dead babies were buried in a disused sewage tank outside Tuamin rural Ireland turns out to be problematic. It is certain that 796 babies did die under the care of nuns in a home for unmarried mothers there between 1925 and 1961 and that is in itself a shocking statistic. But what gave the story wings was the claim that their bodies had been dumped in a septic tank…
No it wasn’t. That was a squalid, mean, brutal detail, to be sure, but the terrible death rate was the real story.
Twenty babies dropped in a cesspit as corpses is a horrifying figure. Even one would be dreadful. And of course the whole story fits wonderfully into the larger stories of Irish nuns as heartless and cruel, which many undoubtedly were. But what’s interesting to a student of religion is why the desecration of dead bodies should be so very much more shocking than the deaths of living babies.
It’s not. It’s not, Andrew. Get a grip. It may be a poignant detail that startles people into paying more attention, but that doesn’t make it actually soberly more shocking than the terrible death rate. Don’t be so damn silly.
Then he says the same thing all over again – the death rate in the home was very high, way too high, surprisingly high –
But it still doesn’t horrify us in the same way as the thought of dead babies tossed into a cesspit does.
In the same way, possibly not, but that’s not to say it horrifies us less.
But Andrew gets himself to his own desired conclusion anyway.
This story will undoubtedly be used to attack religion. But what it actually shows is how very deeply religious instincts operate within us.
That’s what it shows, is it?! I say what it actually shows is that religion doesn’t stop people from being the most awful shits.
The subtext I’m getting is that any outrage which doesn’t fall on the process of abortion is an outrage not worth expressing.
Oh great; the old morality or compassion = religion trick thrown in at the end.
The nuns may have thrown babies in the septic tank, but without the system they represent we’d all be killing babies and disposing of their bodies in grossly inappropriate places all day long!
Anyone could play this game:
Yes, we are horrified by the brutal oppression under Stalin, as well as the luxury that he and other high officials indulged in while the common people starved. And yes, similar things happened in most other Marxist-LenInist states. But if the Party hadn’t taught us that oppression and severe inequality are bad, how would we know to criticize this behavior in the first place?
Why does he think all the babies were dead before being dropped into the septic rank?
Andrew Brown never met a Catholic institution that he didn’t love.
I guess that the Catholic church did not object to this form of post-natal abortion.
Jesus Christ, Andrew Brown. Cor. Zounds. Sweet Mother of God, aren’t you just a terrible person, bless your heart.
Um, I’m pretty sure that everyone understands that the deaths of living babies had to happen in order for the septic tank full of dead babies to exist, and that the shock and outrage is to the totality of the package, not just the resting place.
I’m pretty sure that everyone understands that the deaths of living babies had to happen in order for the septic tank full of dead babies to exist
Yeah, really. Dead babies are irrefutable evidence that there were living babies, and that they died. That the bodies wound up in a cesspit (instead of buried) is irrefutable evidence that someone was trying to hide the deaths because burials in consecrated ground or potters’ fields are both auditable events.
You win.
@ 9 dukeofomnium
It could be argued that it helps, rather than hinders.
Breadagh O Brien and David Quinn both of Lolek ltd (Iona), both wrote articles in which the Catholic church wasn’t mentioned once in connection to Tuam. Admit it happened but we can’t judge by today’s standards or it happened but they weren’t true catholics
“It may be a poignant detail that startles people into paying more attention, but that doesn’t make it actually soberly more shocking than the terrible death rate. ”
That’s right, but it is a bit more than that because the way these babies were ‘buried’ is so obviously secretive as well as repulsive. If these babies had been buried more ceremoniously it would not just have been more dignified, it would have been a lot more public.
Why do people care so much how the bodies were disposed off?
Well, it might be that the way of disposal usually tells us something about that person in life. When pieces of a corpse are found in the woods we don’t assume that Unle Albert died peacefully in his sleep at age 86. When a dead body is dumped like waste it’s safe to say that they were treated like waste in life.
In case somebody needs a spare F, there’s one in the comment above
True, true – the furtiveness and the callousness both indicate how they were treated before death. Good point.
How pathetic that it wasn’t Brown’s point.
Well, the devil’s in the detail, isn’t he? In this case, the ‘detail’ is highly relevant. It shows the utter contempt for these children throughout and after their lives. It shows a marked difference in the way they thought about legitimate and illegitimate children. It shows that they thought of the bodies as evidence of their own mistreatment and therefore a recognition that what they did was wrong.
So that detail isn’t something to be minimised by people like Andrew Brown. It is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be in our faces. It hammers home the motive. It might even induce empathy that can cut through the bullshit of religion.
The way the bodies were disposed of isn’t worse that there were bodies in the first place, but it makes the fact of the bodies a worse fact because it throws the motives of the institution into sharp relief.
i am actually kind of surprised that after this acutely horrible story surfaced, that anything could be more disgusting. Then, there’s That guy. Finding the focus on the plight of the corpses ‘interesting’. Single handedly making an already awful situation even more pathetic……judgey……condescending…..and taking the focus off the women and children who lived and lost through this. freaking clueless.
SO SO SO tired of the “can’t refute what you’ve said so I’ll mischaracterize what you said, and show you how wrong, wrong, wrong you are to have said it, which you didn’t, but you’re wrong anyway” line of argument.
Just read this post after a comment elsewhere saying that we are wrong, wrong, wrong to think that having Ubisoft add some female characters will fix the problems of video game being such male-only preserves–what about disabled people? People of color?–when of course nobody argued that at all.
That argument lies at the intersection of “can’t refute what you’ll said so I’ll refute something else” and “don’t have to work on improving society at all because society is big and we can’t please everyone all at once”.
Pfui.