Collapse: The Blog

Abortion as a Sacrament

Abortion is a sacrament for the leftist antireligion -- ritualistic child-sacrifice on the altar consecrated to the human will. So says Joseph at Arimathea (h/t Kristor):

Last month before the March for Life, I was thinking about an idea that I have encountered in recent years that abortion is a sacrament for the Left. Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life notes that Ginette Paris published the book, The Sacrament of Abortion, in A.D. 1992, wherein she supports abortion as a pagan affirmation of life. I was surprised that the idea has its origin on the Left, but I should get used to the perversity of this world. Although the prophet Isaiah proclaims, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!,” one must not forget that the wicked delight in wickedness.

Upon reflection, however, I think that the Left’s position is remarkably consistent given human nature. Consider sacrifice and its place in human society. Sacrifice is pretty much a universal human phenomenon. Man gives up something dear to his gods. Crudely, this act is seen as a transaction wherein the sacrificer seeks to appease divine anger or curry divine favor. The more philosophical understanding is that by sacrifice man makes clear to himself and to everyone the proper order of being, where lesser goods are given up for greater ones. The act of sacrifice to the gods demonstrates vividly to the human soul and to the human community the appropriate hierarchy of the world; it is an impressive (as in impression making) act that proclaims the community’s ranking of values.

As Joseph notes, the idea of abortion as a sacrament actually originates on the left.

On Work and Human Nature

Long-time readers know that I regard employment as key to the health of any society. Employment integrates the individual with society in the pursuit of the common good; it enables him to discharge his duties to himself, his family, the state, and God; and it keeps him healthy, happy, productive, engaged, and mindful of his obligations to others. Unemployed people suffer physically and mentally, their families tend to disintegrate as they sink into poverty and despair, and they tend toward political extremism, crime, and other indicators of social pathology. A society that doesn't take employment seriously, that thinks having a sizable proportion of its people unemployed is good, and that is willing to tolerate any degree of chronic and involuntary unemployment, is radically deficient, not only organizationally but morally and with respect to its basic priorities.

Work, in other words, corresponds to human nature in a very real and powerful way. (Hobbies and social activism serve the same purpose for those who are moneyed enough not to need to work, at least not regularly). It's not for nothing that earlier societies envisioned work as a form of prayer: a divine office, executed with a humble heart, in accordance with the will of God.

Unfortunately, modern society has more or less succeeded in severing the link between work and the natural human impulses that rationalize and ennoble it. Man is atomized, reduced to interchangeable cogs in a utilitarian economic machine. He is fired wantonly and encouraged to change jobs for reasons of even minor convenience. The resulting bitterness, despair, and alienation is captured perfectly in movies like Office Space and Falling Down. The modern historical norm of hating one's job, detesting one's coworkers, resenting one's superiors and exploiting one's subordinates is grossly unhealthy from both an individual and social perspective.

For myself, I feel ludicrous guilt even contemplating leaving my current job, and not only because there are many who'd be happy to have it and my gripes are pretty minor. Work itself is a gift, and man ought to -- indeed, wants to -- be in a position in which he can cherish it, as he would any good thing. Modern society affords him no such opportunity; indeed, it abstracts from our economic order all that makes it human and salvages only that which makes it impersonal, bureaucratic, and insufferable. This is true not only at the micro level but at the macro, too. Suppose our elite was presented with two economic plans: one would cause the Dow to shrink to around 2,000 (much closer to the historical norm) but cause unemployment to drop within rounding error of zero, putting all those who want work in stable jobs that would provide for at least their basic necessities; the other would put 20% of the population out of work but cause the Dow to rocket up to 50,000. Which would they pick? We all know the answer.

What can be done to repair this situation? For one thing, recognition of the fact that stability in employment matters is necessary. It's not enough that a man should always be able to find a job somewhere; having to find a new job every 12 months is a bad, or at least suboptimal, situation. He must, if he wants, always be employed at the same place or by the same company. A community of fellows (which is really all a workplace is, and the demand for which arises from human nature) cannot spring up where the population is transient. Ask anyone who lives in a sizable military town.

Deprioritization of economic goods in favor of basic human goods matters, too. "Is this good for GDP" should be asked only after "Is this good for the health of the polity" is answered favorably. We should resort to technocratic economic number-crunching only where failure to do so imperils our primary goal of promoting a healthy and integrated social order, and even then subordinate it to that goal, seeking to cause as little disruption as possible.

How do we enforce this? Possibly the same way we enforce our present order, which seeks to smash the traditional family, unduly elevate talentless minorities just to stick it to white people, and enrich psychotic criminals. That is to say, announce a set of standards and then proceed to severely sanction--socially, financially, and legally--any employer who does not comply, while rewarding to the greatest extent possible those that do. Carrott and stick. It works for the PC apparatchiks; it can work for us, too.

The Perverse Consistency of Modern Thought

I recently praised the remarkable consistency of reactionary thought. In truth, though, we don't have a monopoly on coherence. There is a perverse consistency to modern thought, too.

Let's begin with my presupposition that modernity is simply the product of a critical mass of people who are utterly insensible to the sacred. The sacred permeates the entire order of being and thus impacts the way it is experienced for religious people; the inability to experience it as sacred thus should entail a pretty comprehensive deformation of life experience.

Reactionary thought binds everything together: ontology, epistemology, theology, ethics, and politics. Can modern thought accomplish this same binding act, taking as its starting point the inability to experience anything as sacred?

Sure.

Let's start with theology. If nothing is sacred it can only be because there is no source of the sacred, i.e., no God. So spiritual autism leads to atheism.

If there is no God then it must be the case that there is nothing transcendent. To transcend, after all, is to point upwards, and we supposedly live in a purely horizontal world. So the appearance of that which is transcendent, such as ideas or universals, must be illusory. In other words, everything must be reducible to the lowest level of being: matter. Thus, the unofficial modern ontology: materialism.

Of course, if matter is all there is, then the study of matter is all that produces knowledge. Thus, modern epistemology: scientism.

And if everything is reducible to matter, then it follows that even ideas like "good" and "evil" are reducible to matter. Indeed, in a materialist ontological paradigm, they are reducible to pleasure and pain (sensate reactions to material stimuli). "Good" and "evil" may be said, at best, to arise out of some kind of arbitrary psychological abstraction of these two concepts. This gives us modern ethics: utilitarianism (the reduction of "good" and "evil" to mere pleasure and pain/harm).

If the order of being is not sacred, then there is no reason to respect the duties it appears to impose on us. So status, which arises from the fixed nature of the order of being, gives way to contract, a state of fluidity. Thus, modern politics: democracy (a state of permanent, sanctioned revolution).

Out of these things arise several other pathologies. Democracy gives us technocratic managerialism, the rise and rule of experts. Atheism and materialism combine to give us the aggressive sacrilege of the modern age. Materialism and utilitarianism have conspired to butcher a few tens of millions of unborn children. Scientism and materialism fuel one another. This dark unity explains all the characteristic impulses of the typical modern: the parousiasm of his politics (e.g., the hysteria surrounding President Obama's 2008 campaign), the reductionism of his rhetoric, his general anger ("f***ing fascist homophobe!"), and so on.

In fact, just as surely as the reactionary equivalents of these things are all simply different expressions of the sense that the order of being is sacred, so too is modern thought comprised of modularized expressions of the sense that life itself is meaningless and unjust and that God is dead. The withered and toxic fruits of a spiritually poisoned tree.

On Living a Nonmodern Life in the Modern World

Our sometimes-commenter Peter S. remarks over at Bruce Charlton's Miscellany:

This is the key issue: how to find or create a spiritual ‘modus vivendi’ that allows one to be ‘in the modern world but not of it’? This is the terrible spiritual position of the individual embedded in modernity, for, if a normative civilization quite naturally provides supports for the remembrance of God and the spiritual life, the modern world substitutes, in practical fact, these supports with impediments. In effect, instead of swimming with the spiritual current of a normative civilization, the individual must swim against the current of the modern world if he is to escape spiritual ruination.

As Don Colacho – whose aphorisms are available once again – critically observes, “Today the individual must gradually reconstruct inside himself the civilized universe that is disappearing around him.” [http://don-colacho.blogspot.com/2010/10/2046.html]

There is a twofold effort that is required: intellectual, in that one must see through the errors of the modern conception, and build, for oneself at least, an understanding of things that relates back to the Transcendent and to spiritual realities; operative, in that one should try, in whatever partial and intermittent manner, to orient one’s daily life toward prayer and the remembrance of God. Modern life is inherently centrifugal, scattering one’s attention to the periphery; the task before one is to return, again and again, to the Center, to quite literally ‘re-collect’ oneself before God.

As Frithjof Schuon recommends, “In short, one must live ‘in a little garden of the Holy Virgin,’ without unhealthy curiosity and without ever losing sight of the essential content and goal of life. That is ‘holy poverty’ or ‘holy childlikeness’; it is also, so to speak, ‘holy monotony’.... dominated by the proximity of the sacred, and on the margin from the uproar of this lower world.... This seems obvious, but most believers take no account of it.”

Abortion and Modern Reductionism

Speaking with a friend recently about abortion, I heard an old line I hadn't heard in a long time: "The fetus is just a bundle of cells, who cares about it?" (Or something like that).

Well, in the modern reductionist worldview, everyone is "just a bundle of cells." That's why it's called reductionism. And this includes the abortionists whose murders so inflame the average liberal. Why should we care about them any more than a fetus if they're both equally reducible to valueless particles bouncing around deterministically in the void? What's to stop anyone from sucking the brains out of anyone's skull with a vacuum cleaner if we're all just meaningless globs of tissue? (Or is it the case that societies can and do tell people, all the time, what to do with their bodies, and do so legitimately, and can reasonably expect compliance and punish noncompliance, so that "my body, my choice" suddenly rings strikingly hollow?)

Abortion is the one issue in which the rank inhumanity of the modern worldview shines through most clearly, and puts normal people ill-at-ease.

For this reason, it's one of the few areas in which the left's triumph has been constrained almost solely to the political sphere. They simply have not succeeded in affecting total cultural sanction of abortion, and their efforts to do so, as Jehu points out, almost always reveal them for the tin-eared, touchy, ungrateful, infanticidal degenerates that they actually are. And, as such, it's the one issue on which the right ought to push hardest.

Modernity and Spiritual Autism: A Question of Chickens and Eggs

I have previously diagnosed modernity as the ascendence of rebellion against the order of being. And this, I have argued, arises from spiritual autism, the inability to experience the order of being as sacred. The predictable result is the demand for ever-more freedom: first political freedom, then freedom from want or need, then freedom from social conventions, from morality, and finally (I hope, anyway) from biology itself. (Taxpayer-subsidized elective sex changes for all!)

I have, in other words, regarded insensibility to the sacred as having causal priority over rebellion agaisnt the order of being. I wonder now if that is the correct ordering of things. Is it possible that man's atheism is instrumental -- that he denies God because he yearns to be free of the order of being, not vice-versa. It is the distinction, in other words, between spiritual autism as akin to literal autism (a simple pathological defect of understanding, will, and spirit) and as the intentional affectation of ignorance so as to rationalize the unfettering of one's will from basic rational and ethical considerations.

Discuss!

More on Unasked Questions

On two occasions now, leftists have commented on Collapse: The Blog (to their credit, in generally genial fashions) objecting to the attitude exhibited toward gay "marriage" and transgenderism. The general objection is that my proposed responses toward these phenomena (i.e., formal recognition that gay "marriage" does not and could never exist, and formal prohibition of purely elective sex change surgeries) somehow run afoul of the "rights" of homosexuals and transgenders. (In one case, the implication was that the mere act of objecting to them ran afoul of their "rights.")

In both cases, I have asked for an explanation of what "right" is being violated, what is meant by "right," and where this "right" comes from. No answer there. But let's think about what they might mean.

Certainly, there is no natural right to gay "marriage" (given that there isn't even a natural right to gay sex). Likewise with elective sex change operations, that is, those operations which are not intended to correct some defect or anomaly but are simply intentional self-mutilation to accomodate the whims of a disordered personality. So what "right" is being referred to here?

Is it simply a "civil" right? Well, why should I care about those? Societies cannot licitly recognize a "right" to do that which is evil, that is, that which contradicts the natural law. A society that does is deficient. At any rate, as I've said previously, a "civil right" is simply a convention or a concession made by the state, ones which can be changed -- ones, indeed, which I want to be changed. They certainly do not carry the force of moral obligation.

Certainly not a divine right, in the sense that God revealed Himself and declared that we must legalize and in some cases subsidize homosexuality. In this respect, revelation is quite clear. Manhood and womanhood and the sexual complementarity they entail are gifts to be cherished, not prisons to be broken out of. (Not that I'm suggesting leftists would recognize a right on the grounds that it is God-given; just covering all the bases here).

What remains? One of the vague and nebulous and ever-shifting "human rights" that leftists make up every five minutes as they continue to work through the logical implications of their poisonous ideology? How can there be such a thing as a "human right" if there is no such thing as "human nature" (which, being positivists and nominalists, they reject)? How can a right to dynamism arise from a nature that is static? Does it arise from the equally vague concept of "human dignity"? Again, how can a person be dignified by nature if he has no nature? And if he does have a nature, why does dignity consist in rebellion against it? How can "human dignity" simultaneously arise from his nature and entail its destruction (and thus the "dignity" which arises from it)? If anything, shouldn't "human dignity" require that man live according to his nature, with all the unfree obligations that such entails?

I have to wonder if the average street leftist ever asks himself these questions (hence my previous post). He certainly doesn't seem to; he just takes it as a given that there is a "right" for anyone to do whatever they like, provided it doesn't result in an arbitrary and unfixed quantity of harm being inflicted on others. As I argued once before,

when a leftist declares that something is a "right" -- or an "inalienable right" -- or a "natural right" -- or, most odious of all, a "human right" -- he is almost always confused and incoherent (at best) or deliberately lying (at worst).

He is not saying: "Man, by virtue of his nature, his dignity, and his status as a subject of God, enjoys, forever and without condition, the right to do or say or believe X."

He is saying: "I happen to like X, so I think society ought to tolerate, then endorse, and, ultimately, subsidize its practice."

"Rights-thinking" on the left is confused, absurd, and irrational, as confused and absurd and irrational as the attempt to extract transcendental concepts like "rights" from a worldview that is characterized by its rebellion against the transcendental. If all rights ultimately arise from contract (which seems to be the leftist consensus), why should it be positively immoral to object to them? Contracts are negotiable and renegotiable. That's what makes them contracts. I have no more moral obligation to respect homosexuality-as-a-civil-right than I do to accept my present salary as binding in perpetuity.

What conclusion is there to reach but that "rights" are the left's way of hijacking popular discourse to endow their beliefs with a moral normativity it didn't earn and doesn't deserve?

Biology, Teleology, and the Modern

Why aren't there more reactionaries among biologists? Despite the nominalist presuppositions that are prevail among them (stemming more from simple philosophical ignorance and general leftist idiocy than anything about their field inducing them to believe it), biology is among the most rigidly teleological of all the sciences.

Take the heart, for instance. It is really quite impossible to be taken seriously by denying that the heart serves the end of pumping blood. This is a normative feature of hearts, arising from nature itself. Even small deviations from that norm (which we call disorders for a reason) produce ludicrous amounts of suffering; larger deviations tend to produce death. There is simply no sense saying that hearts have no normative nature and that to speak of "heart disorders" is a linguistic convention that in no way corresponds to objective reality. Tell someone with atherosclerosis that she should accept her heart for what it is and not try to conform herself to society's oppressive narrative that anyone with thicker arterial walls is unhealthy and see if her brothers don't come over to your house and stomp your face into blood pudding.

I'd go further and say that, in a healthy society, biologists would be among the most well-respected people. They study the natural order of being where sociologists study the social and theologians the divine; philosophers join them at all three levels. Of course, modern society is deeply unhealthy (and one need look no further than its historically alarming fertility rates), and so instead, we get silly garbage like the demented burbling of this ignorant asshole. So I guess, in retrospect, it's not that surprising there are few (if any) reactionaries who are professional biologists. There are few reactionaries anywhere.

Modern Reductionism

I wrote a post a while back on the reductionism of modern epistemology. I tied it to my general thoughts on spiritual autism (Schelling's/Voegelin's pneumopathology), arguing, essentially, that the modern seeks to reduce or simplify the vast complexity of reality because he is incapable of perceiving its organic unity and thus is overwhelmed and revolted by it.

But what are moderns not reductive about? They don't just reduce all knowledge to the merely empirical (positivism). They reduce all being to mere matter (materialism). They reduce all of politics and society to the individual (individualism). They reduce all of ethics to mere pleasure-seeking (utilitarianism).

Swedish feminists lobby for repeal of the topless sunbathing ban because they're "just breasts." People discard traditional sexual mores because it's "just sex." P. Z. Meyers desecrated a bit of consecrated host because it's "just a cracker."

Perhaps it's the fullest expression of the modern war against the order of being.

What a radically deficient way of thinking and being and experiencing the world. What recommends it to anyone?

The Best Evidence for the Falseness of Modernity

The best evidence for the falseness of modernity is that it lacks explanatory value. Not only can it not fully account for itself, it also cannot fully account for those outside of itself.

When a Marxist atheist like the late Christopher Hitchens says he opposes religion because he wants man to be "free," we know exactly what he means. He means that he wants to destroy the natural order of being because it imposes on man duties and obligations he is not free to choose or avoid. He is, in some sense, declaring war on God -- and thus on reality itself. He doesn't merely object to political tyranny. He objects to (what he sees as) the tyranny imposed on him by biology, by the circumstances of birth, by his own nature as a human being. "Freedom" for him is the total freedom of his will, unfettered even by the material facts of reality.

All this makes sense to us. We recognize it for what it is: rebellion against God, as old and uninteresting as the demons which inspired it.

But it makes no sense to him. Our talk of God and the natural order of being sounds like gibberish to him, and he responds to it as if it were gibberish, with a kind of frustrated dismissal and gasping irritation. The best he can come up with as to why people don't see the world as he does or experience reality in the same way he does is that they're just stupid, irrational, superstitious, or dishonest (but he will continue to say, always, that reason is enough, that man is a reasonable creature, and he will never reconcile this in his head with the fact that, by his own standard, the vast majority of man is irrational); and he will continue to believe it even as he meets plenty of intelligent, reasonable, and diligent people who disagree with him.

This is a serious, glaring deficiency on the part of the modern mode of being: it cannot account for the fullness of the human experience, even as the reactionary mode of being can -- and does.

The whole modern mode of being is such a stupidly rickety thing, hastily slapped and bandaged together, gushing steam from its joints and creaking noisily as it stumbles blindly through the world. Nothing but ignorance of and dishonesty about its own nature keeps it going. So radically deficient. And that which is deficient cannot last: entropy will claim it before long.