Served Up on a Petri Dish

"It may, I think, even be argued that Communism in Russia, National Socialism in Germany, and Capitalism and Liberal Democracy in the Western countries are really three forms of the same thing, and that they are all moving by different but parallel paths to the same goal, which is the mechanization of human life and the complete subordination of the individual to the state and to the economic process.  Of course I do not mean to say that they are all absolutely equivalent, and that we have no right to prefer one to another.  But I do believe that a Christian cannot regard any of them as a final solution to the problem of civilization, or even as a tolerable one.  Christianity is bound to protest against any social system which claims the whole of man and sets itself up as the final end of human action, for it asserts that man's essential nature transcends all political and economic forms.  Civilization is a road by which man travels, not a house for him to dwell in.  His true city is elsewhere."  (Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Modern State, 1938).

     And Dawson was writing before the sexual revolution, that great whore, had wedded the giant of mass culture and the mass economy.  What he would say now is, I think, not difficult to guess.  Eros, which some people, as Josef Pieper suggested, thought was the last green thing in the world, now seeks to keep its rickety frame propped up with mechanical devices and pills for things that don't "perform" as well as we'd like and for things that perform all too well.  Sex is now like one of those faceless aliens in a bad science fiction movie, half iron, half muscle. 

     Enter the latest threat to a return to something, anything, approaching the lovely and natural: the desire of some few people, against the makeup of their own bodies, to use the machinery of the state to declare that they can do what they manifestly cannot do; and thereby to remove from the state's list of rivals that utterly natural and prepolitical union called marriage.  What comes next is easy to see.  If a woman and a woman can pretend, by virtue of the godlike decree of the state, that they are married, then said pair will demand, as a "medical" procedure ("curing" bodies that have absolutely nothing wrong with them), the production of embryos from their genetic material.  Of course, Christians who have had trouble conceiving children in the way God has prescribed for it have stupidly prepared the way for this; though at least said Christians could have claimed that the laboratory jiggering of embryos was meant to remedy a bodily failing.  Then, once the priniciple is established, that people have a "right" to manufactured embryos, we will hear calls for those embryos to be tailored to meet the specifications of the manufacturers -- first the pseudogamous couple, then the married couples whose marriages will increasingly mimic the structure of pseudogamy, and then, since such momentous decisions cannot be entrusted to the people en masse, the state.  After which the abolition of man will be complete: he will be, in the most "private" and personal corner of his life, the tool of his tools; not merely a client of the state, and of those technocrats who will preserve the pleasant illusion that some human beings somewhere are still running the machine, but a product himself of state manufacture.  He will not merely dwell in some ghastly Levittown; he will in his own right be a dingy flat in that soulless place.

      Then there will be no civilization for man the pilgrim to pass his days in.  Such people as retain a love for the simply human and the natural will have to reconceive their status in this vale of botox smiles.  The Christian will have to be more than homo viator.  He will be homo fugax, in rebellious flight from that government of tools, by tools, and for tools, until man remembers who he is and what his tools are for, and refuse to perish from the face of the earth.

Comments

[Rob G]

Tony, that's amazingly good -- one of the best short pieces you've ever written.

[ben]

When I read your work, it stirs something in my soul. I feel called to action, but I'm not sure quite what to do. Rob G is right. This piece is excellednt.

I also just read your piece in the recent Latin Mass Magazine. I have 3 friends becoming fathers in the next 2 months. Each of their wives has a history of working outside the home. I will be making sure they read it too.

[bonobo]

homo fugax indeed!

Matthew 24:15-16 When therefore you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place: he that readeth let him understand.
Then they that are in Judea, let them flee to the mountains:

similarly Luke 21:20-21.

[GL]

Very good, Tony. I am reminded of C.S. Lewis, who saw so clearly the world into which we were headed in his day and at which we have arrived in our own:

Ransom replied, "Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. . . . Half of her orb is turned towards us and shares our curse. . . . On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place."

The vile arts which Lewis foresaw, we now have and Christians, as you note, have led the way in practicing them so that now young men lie not with maidens whom they have married, nor even with images of maidens, but with other men, images of themselves, whom they pretend to marry, and maidens (if they may be called such) lie not with young men whom they have married, nor even with images of young men, but with other women, images of themselves, whom they likewise pretend to marry. And to have the children which are not possible to have by their "marriages", they take up the vile arts which Christians have already been practicing to fabricate for themselves in secret places their own real children.

I fear that "it will be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for" us.

[GL]

I suppose I should have cite the Lewis quote: That Hideous Strength, chapter 13.

[GL]

Closing italics.

[GL]

Closing italics.

[JD]

As if this was in queue waiting for Anthony's post.....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6546448/Three-parent-babies-take-a-step-closer-to-reality.html