If Life Is Sacred
If life is sacred, then birth and death are inseparable from the moral purpose of being. These events can never be routine or purely secular. Those who pretend otherwise often seek new sacraments, typically one or another variety of self-worship. The gospel of self-indulgence casts its nets into the spiritual vacuum left by the decline of traditional religion, bringing in millions of lost souls.
Each has its own liturgy, emblems, founding mythology, martyrs, acolytes, and priesthood. Screen idols, racial/tribal idols, virtual idols, and the cults of bizarre sexual identities spawned by selfie-dom all compete for allegiance. The vast diaspora of the morally dispossessed is prone to expert direction into such frenzies as nationalist rage, electoral violence, mass injection of experimental drugs, or financial panic.
There is one species, however, wherein the sacred realm refuses to be banished. I refer of course to women. Life as we know it would not exist without them. Their alluring differentness from the opposite sex, their uncanny mind-reading, their ability to connect seemingly remote realms -- why I refer to women only half-jokingly as another species.
Women whether they like it or not come by their sacred role naturally, as the source of our very being, and like all mammals, are biologically and psychologically equipped for a long period of nurturing the young. In both Eastern and Western Christianity, particularly in its folk versions, the Virgin Mary is fervently worshiped for her miraculous life-giving powers.
The significance of her virginity is that humanity comes from a mysterious source, God, if you will. Japanese people recognize the goddess Amaterasu as the giver of life, and rice as the living embodiment of her gift, a rite celebrated in every Emperor's enthronement ceremony and every year in the rice-planting season. Women’s sacred role is affirmed in the practices of Buddhist, Hindu, Himalayan, Khmer, Malay, Persian, and many other peoples.
In both modern and traditional societies a sacred role is not for all women. They may opt-out of child-raising entirely, or be incapable of it, or inept at the dating game, or choose some other kind of fulfillment, or find some blend of family and professional responsibilities. From the vast literature and argument on these choices, it appears that women have a harder time of it than men. Perhaps the most agonizing dilemma for a woman is a pregnancy she either did not intend or did not want. Family planning agencies estimate that nearly half (45 percent) of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned (the categories of 'mis-timed' and 'entirely unwanted' are combined in this estimate). Of these, nearly half (42 percent) end in abortion. Thus about one-fourth of all pregnancies (in the U.S. and in the world) end in abortion. This adds up to about 930,000 abortions/year in the U.S., and 64 million between 1973 and 2020.
The sheer number of these sacrifices cries out for some sort of sacrament, something to appease the ghost of the victim, and to relieve the remorse of women making this awful choice. From 1973 to 2022, the highest U.S. sacramental authority, its Supreme Court, gave its blessing to this blood ritual, professing to find justification for it in unwritten 'penumbras' of the Constitution. The Court's 2022 Dobbs judgment de-sacralizes the practice, but does not end it.
What remains in private life is a curious reversal of corporate attitudes away from family-centric policies and toward childlessness, driven by increasing health-care costs. As Tucker Carlson notes in his June 28, 2022 broadcast, 'Corporate America wants you childless'. Families are expensive, and worse, from the corporate perspective, children divert employees' attention away from after-hours work. So employers propagate the idea 'Fight the patriarchy, have an abortion', to persuade young women that staying childless is best for their careers, and some companies even supplement that with extra money if they eliminate their inconvenient offspring. Carlson summarizes their sub-rosa pitch: 'Give us the best years of your life, and in exchange, we'll pay you what is effectively a subsistence wage, in whatever overpriced urban health state we're based in, and take from you the one thing that might give your existence meaning and joy in middle age, which is having children. That's the deal we're offering'.
'Your average college-educated NPR listener', Carlson continues after showing newsclips of demonstrations, 'becomes hysterical when someone suggests that maybe, there's another way to live. That it's at least theoretically possible that raising your own children might be more rewarding as a life choice than commuting into a slum on public transportation in order to claw your way up to middle-management at Deutsche Bank. But the very thought of that, of turning down Deutsche Bank in order to bring new life into the world, drives these people into a frenzy of rage.'
This extraordinary ferocity of the fairer sex is reinforced by another source, the role models presented to them by public sector diplomats. As suggested in my post on 'Reification',
those who have attained the pinnacle of public service seem to have done so by re-inventing themselves as men. Perhaps, having experienced the most monstrous maleness imaginable, they proceed to impersonate it. Their prominence in the body politic or cultural elite makes them role models for girls aspiring to that sort of success. This may be one source of the sexual confusion adolescent girls have succumbed to -- the perceived requirement to BE male in order to achieve worldly success. They are told by the media every day that their life chances as females are inferior in every endeavor to males.
At the same time, their role models act out the most brutal conduct, proving they can be equally or more monstrous than men. Case one: Hillary Clinton, who as Secretary of State engaged in gun-running and missile smuggling through Benghazi Libya, ignored warnings of an impending attack on the weapons-smuggling operation, and famously said about Libyan dictator Qadaffi 'We came, we saw, he died' (also butchering the Latin phrase of Caesar, 'Veni, vidi, vici'). On one jaunt to Libya, she falsely claimed to have landed in a helicopter under enemy fire, though this was news to her staff, guards, and everyone else in the area. Her murderous ambitions were not confined to errant despots; they also included Julian Assange, whom she proposed 'droning' (assassinating), and possibly Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who gave or sold a large trove of confidential DNC emails to Wikileaks, whose 2016 murder in Washington DC is still unsolved. Mrs Clinton certainly had plenty of issues with husband Bill, whose interest in female child welfare took him to Jeffrey Epstein's island via the Lolita Express no fewer than 26 times, according to flight logs. But she chose to put any resentment of her husband's preferences aside in the interest of her own political ambition.
Case two is Madeleine Albright, who cavalierly dismissed the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as 'worth the price'. A sanctions regime imposed by the U.S. and U.N. on Iraq from 1990 to 2003 in response to its invasion of Kuwait led to high rates of malnutrition, lack of medical supplies, and diseases from lack of clean water. Two U.N. sanctions administrators resigned in protest of what one of them described as 'genocidal' policies. Albright later disputed the numbers and claimed she was duped by the news interviewer, but never denied the sanctions caused hardships, as they were intended to do, though she admitted they failed to change Iraqi government behavior.
Case three is Victoria Nuland, who when informed on Feb 4, 2014 the EU might hesitate to provide diplomatic cover for violent U.S. regime-change operations in Ukraine, famously said 'Fuck the EU'. (See the Timeline for 2014 for further details.) This conversation is notable for other things besides that remark. In the call, two U.S. officials discuss who is to be the next Prime Minister of Ukraine. One of them votes for Vitali Klitschko, former world heavyweight boxing champion and Mayor of Kiev. The other U.S. diplomat, Nuland, votes for the more nerdy-looking Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whom she calls 'Yats', who, without further ado, becomes Prime Minister in February 2014. This is hardly the sort of conversation or electoral process applicable to an independent, sovereign nation. But it did enable the violent regime-change operation in Ukraine to proceed unhindered.
These three women helped engineer massive losses of human life. By this slaughter they seek to persuade themselves and others that they can be as tough as the most monstrous men. By their actions and by their words, they illustrate womanhood radically divorced from feminine grace, or any connection with the sacred realm. In Libya (Clinton), Iraq (Albright), and Ukraine (Nuland), the millions of people killed and maimed, families and homes destroyed, survivors' lives uprooted, and societies ripped apart count for nothing in this calculus. These victims simply do not exist, except perhaps as props in photo-ops. The message to young girls back home in the U.S.A., and right around the world, is 'You too can enjoy this success, if you will renounce every womanly feeling and strive for the most monstrous manhood'. Preoccupied with self-worship, these female diplomats help bring about the living hell of a de-sacralized world.
Young women in America and Europe are assaulted from many directions with a barrage of anti-family messages. Media and celebrities ridicule normal families as hopelessly outdated. Hollywood portrays children as aliens or devils. Corporate employers try to keep young women childless. Experimental mRNA drugs that young women are urged or forced to inject are known to concentrate in their ovaries, with possibly negative consequences for pregnancy. Government role models tell them they have to 'man up' to succeed. The grotesque sexual identities propagated by schools and libraries all direct victims to one end — foreclosing conception of children.
The common-sense question here is 'Is any of this contributing to human happiness?' And if not, what would? Despite strenuous efforts to re-package misery as self-realization, indicators such as abortion, family failure, sexual confusion, drug addiction, and violent crime speak of sorrow rather than joy. Those who discover in themselves a sense of wonder at the miracle of life are best equipped to enjoy it in others, including the new life forms they bring into the world. And when 'time's up', they are best-prepared to accept the end of a life well-lived. Birth and death truly are sacred, and inseparable from moral purpose precisely because, as philosopher Roger Scruton put it in Beauty and the Restoration of the Sacred (2017), they are beyond human understanding.
No further comment at this time....
A thought provoking commentary. The collective state's attack on family, parenting, and individualism is unrelenting. Religious zelots, those....