Part II of III
What Happened To the Human Race?
Human history is a long sequence of crises. The twentieth century, with two world wars and a cold war that threatened to annihilate the human race (and which remains in the backs of our minds as a possibility) was far more destructive than any century that preceded it. It was more barbaric than any other time in the world’s barbaric history. This fact alone should relieve us of any naive notion that humanity is progressing to a more enlightened state.
Scientists, such as Charles Darwin and the 21st century charlatan, Richard Dawkins, have convinced most people that life itself is an accident, which implies that there are no deities to which we must give an account. Scientific materialism allows each person to decide for himself what is true. This is another way of saying that there is no truth. If there is no truth, all views are equally valid (or invalid). In this context, the purpose of communication becomes manipulation. There may be no truth, but might makes right. Such a perspective is the engine of social anger and the growing desperation of ideological camps to seize power. The street talk may be pluralism but the back room discussions are about control strategies.
Of course, science has not proven that humans are an accident. Scientific research has crushed Darwinian evolution in a dozen ways (but the vested interests in the scientific community are working hard to limit the exposure of this information). In the meantime, they assure us that the intractable problems of evolutionary theory will be solved tomorrow “just as science has always solved every problem”.
Neither has science proven that no deities exist. Is there a more ridiculous statement than, “The only knowledge is scientific knowledge”? This is a statement that is inherently self-contradictory. If knowledge can only be derived from the physical universe, then whence the idea that knowledge can only be derived from the physical universe? The thought must originate outside the physical universe. Look where you will with your telescope or your microscope, you will find no element or energy making such a proclamation. If the universe “speaks” at all, it calls attention to its wondrous design. But while it “speaks”, it cannot speak. The idea that the only knowledge is scientific or materialistic knowledge originates outside of the physical universe. So if it is true, it is false.
But, beyond the claim being logical nonsense, it is also a head-in-the-sand opinion about knowledge itself. If the only knowledge to be had is in the physical world, no amount of research will ever stand to contradict the claim, because the research has committed itself to its own narrow presumptions. If scientific materialism insists there is no spirit world, it is bound to deny evidence from the spirit world.
All this is somewhat tangential to the subject, and my point is not that science ought to be discounted. Quite the opposite. We are bodily creatures and we, of necessity, must give attention to the information our senses can supply. In this way science has always been a blessing to humanity in many ways. But science provides no philosophical insights, no theological insights, no existential insights. The high priests of science are unwilling to recognize this, and their unwillingness has contributed greatly to the evacuation of the 21st century mind. The new materialism sells the idea that God is unnecessary and, in fact, a human construct. This serves the idea of human autonomy. The reality is that, while materialism removes all obligations to God, it replaces these obligations with the chains of determinism. As the product of the long chain of materialist events, all of our choices are delusional and all of our opinions are pointless.
But even within the grand pointless, materialist framework, there exists an apparent design. Darwin’s evolutionary theory rests on the idea that organic development and variation is an expression of various means of survival. Essentially, in order to survive, a species must procreate and last long enough for the offspring to continue the phenomenon called life. With humans, sexual intercourse is needed or, at least, it has been necessary for millennia. Perhaps our “enlightened” generations are thinking that the messiness, danger, and inconvenience of pregnancy, that horrible affliction that disadvantages females relative to males, is no longer necessary. Perhaps a time will come. But so far it has not.
Scientifically speaking, it makes no sense to mutilate one’s self in order to avoid reproduction, unless some sort of collective, Borgian consciousness has taken hold, determined to reduce the human population out of fear that the world is overpopulated. But if that’s the case, wouldn’t it be much cheaper, far less controversial, and far less physically damaging to undergo simple vasectomy or tubal ligation?
It seems that our “advanced” societies have rejected the idea of birth. Children have become much too inconvenient. Right-wingers worry about a “replacement” conspiracy theory engineered by Leftists, that labors to replace whites in America with blacks and Latinos, particularly through immigration. Clearly, Latinos make up a rapidly growing minority in this country and appear to be on the way to becoming the majority. But immigration is only part of the picture. The other part is that whites are not having children. Currently more non-white children than white children are being born in the U.S, even while it is also true that Blacks are aborting at a rate four times that of Whites.
According to Worldometer, 42.6 million abortions were committed in 2021, which is more deaths than by any other single cause, including COVID-19, cancer, or car accidents. One fifth of pregnancies ended in abortion in the U.S. in 2020 (more than 930,000), according to the Guttmacher Institute.
While the world is not currently losing population, fertility rates are below replacement levels, so shrinking populations are on the horizon. Twenty-three countries, including Japan, Italy, Spain, South Korea, and China are on pace to see their populations cut in half by the end of the century.
To maintain population levels, women must bear 2.1 children. Today, that is not happening in the more developed nations. As examples, the birthrate in France: 2.03; in the U.S.: 1.83; in the U.K.: 1.63; Canada: 1.57; Germany: 1.57; Spain: 1.27; Italy: 1.22; South Korea: 1.1. “At the end of the nineteenth century, the fertility rate per woman was more than five; today, it has fallen to 1.3. Until the end of the 1960s, the rate of natural increase of the Italian population was above 400,000; it had dropped to about negative 10,000 by the early 1990s, and it reached negative 432,000 in 2020. Annual births, which in 1948 were still above one million, fell to 400,000 in 2020.” – Virginia Cod Nunziante
If there is a leftist conspiracy, it is not due to immigration, it has to do with reproduction. Some would counter that the world population is too great and it needs to be reduced. This may be true but, if so, the reduction is not happening equally. Whites and Asians seem to be abandoning the earth. Western culture has embraced birth control, including the use of abortifacients, embraced abortion as a woman’s right, and is encouraging all sorts of sexual deviance, including homosexuality, lesbianism, bi-sexuality, transsexuality, sex indeterminacy, and so forth.
The world is in a chaotic place, certainly, but even a cursory review of history reveals that that has always been the case. Perhaps the ubiquity of news has filled us all with dread. It’s one thing to manage anarchists and lunatics at the provincial level; it’s quite another to have one’s pocket constantly beeping about the the anarchists, lunatics, and despots of the world. People are becoming afraid of life, deciding that their children would prefer to not be born. This is a kind of mental abortion in which parents cannot imagine that their children might turn out to be more courageous and resourceful than their parents.
Essentially, we are reaping what we are sowing…and we are sowing less and less. So, if we are Darwinian evolutionists who believe that the purpose of evolution is survival, it’s clear we have become Darwinian heretics. If, on the other hand, we are scientific materialists who recognize that science provides no “oughts” to the human enterprise, then we’re fine, because nothing we do matters one way or another.
Science does have something to say about the functionality of human sexuality, however. Scientifically speaking, human procreation takes place via intercourse between a male and a female. While there are certainly cases in which the differentiation process that takes place in the womb does not proceed according to this binary norm, the exceptions are rare. Cases of ambiguous genitalia make up between .1% and .2% of births. These situations are failures in the process of development that require considerable medical investigation and counsel with appropriate doctors. But these are physical challenges, and rarely have anything to do with the sexual dysphoria that is the subject of this article.
On a more practical level, science has performed some disservices relating to human sexuality. The Pill offers freedom from pregnancy. Its common use created a disconnect between sex and procreation. This observation is not to necessarily condemn birth control practices. There are surely good reasons for managing the circumstances in which children are born. But birth control’s separation of sex from reproduction resulted in an international habit.
“It is odd that simply because of its ‘sexual freedom’ our time should be considered extraordinarily physical. In fact, our ‘sexual revolution’ is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as an idea of pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of ‘freeing’ natural pleasure from natural consequence. Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this ‘freedom’ are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problems and an affront to liberty. Industrial sex, characteristically, establishes its freeness and goodness by an industrial accounting, dutifully toting up numbers of sexual partners, orgasms, and so on, with the inevitable industrial implication that the body is somehow a limit on the idea of sex, which will be a great deal more abundant as soon as it can be done by robots.” – Wendell Berry
Whatever the prophylactics, they were clearly not doing the job. Science was not to blame; it was people who could not be relied on to properly apply the science. Since “free” sex had been firmly established, the thought of going back was simply unthinkable. “You can’t stop people from having sex,” was and is the idiotic refrain. It’s about as relevant as saying, “You can’t stop people from throwing trash on the highway,” or, to be comprehensive, “You can’t legislate morality.” This is the definition of anarchy, which has been tried many times, and always for very short time periods. The truth is we can’t not not legislate morality. It’s simply impossible.
And then it became clear that certain kinds of birth control were not merely preventing conception, they were ending conceptions. Science has clearly demonstrated that life begins at conception but, well, out of sight, out of mind. Unintentional abortions didn’t raise a hew and cry. On the contrary, we are now entering the age of the “morning after” pill.
The sacrifice had to be the unborn. They weren’t talking, so they had no say in the matter. Medical abortion became commonplace. It was and is promoted as a necessary procedure for the liberation of women because, well, if men could enjoy sex without consequences, so should women. It was an argument for equality. The idea of making men responsible for their children was not pursued. Why? Because such an approach really puts a damper on sex. Because men cannot ever experience the burdens of pregnancy. Pregnancy is unfair to women. An implication of all this is that equality for women requires that they become men.
The casual sacrifice of children seems like it ought to have been the end of the matter. Humanity had reached bottom. But that was not the case. Science continued to push against the boundaries of human limitations, making the case that, not only could the effects of human functionality be altered, but so could human bodies. Bodies became a fungible attribute of the human mind. Bodies became something other than the human who inhabited them. Then bodies began to be seen as limitations and even afflictions if they did not conform to the aspirations of the ones who inhabited them. It followed logically that sexual attraction ought not be restricted by nature. If a man wanted sex with a man, good. If a woman wanted sex with a woman, good. Anyone can give sexual pleasure, and if all the parts don’t fit, and that “feels” like a problem, well, we, in our brilliance, can correct that, too. A little plastic surgery here, a few pharmaceuticals there…
But it is a delusion. We make men look like women and women look like men, but it is all expensive costume. The changes are superficial. The word “hypocrite” derives from the ancient Greek word for actor. Sexual transitioning is the practice of making phonies. Knock-offs. The new hypocrites cannot be the beings they have been made to look like. They cannot fully sexually perform; they cannot bear children. It is not a new, improved, realized self; it is a mutilated caricature. While the remade person may look more like he wants to, he has become something less. Of all people on earth these transitioned would be most to be pitied, if not for the fact that so many of them are also pursuing affirmation, so many of them are pursuing societal sponsorship, so many of them are evangelizing and thus exposing impressionable children to serious risk. Society’s complicity and approbation will not be able to heal the wounds of its transitioned victims.
The fundamental problem is that the human race has abandoned and forgotten its identity. It’s not that, having determined that it is a descendant of the apes that it has decided to act like apes. Apes are far more rational. It’s that, having determined that it is a descendant of the apes it has decided to be a bird…or a gryphon, or a unicorn, or a sphinx. The human race has become untethered, imagining the fulfillment of its own bizarre dreams as a human right. (And let us not fail to remember that human rights in an untethered world are equivalent to the privileges that can be seized by force.)
We have become a society that curses gravity. “I am so constrained. I want to fly like a bird. I will be what I wish to be.” Never mind that, without gravity, we would walk outside, take one step, and fly off into space. If we could not find something to hold on to—something that would keep us on the earth, without gravity we would die. (I’m not plumbing the complexities of physics here. I’m sure the loss of gravity would create many, many other problems and, from what I do know about physics, it’s not really possible to have an earth without gravity. But I’m running with a metaphor, not trying to explain physics.)
So if we woke up one morning to discover we no longer possessed gravity, we would quickly learn how dangerous the world had become. People would routinely fly off into space where they would freeze to death or die from lack of oxygen. How would we cope? Essentially, we would live indoors. We would build tunnels. And if we went outside we would clip ourselves to cables.
Perhaps then we would come to realize that gravity, rather than being a constraint, is a liberator. It allows us to walk outside freely any time we want. In fact, we can run out there, or ride a bike, or drive a car. When we drop a screwdriver, we don’t have to worry about never seeing it again—we know it has fallen straight down and that it cannot be far away. When we jump, we know we’re not going to fly off the earth. Our separations will be momentary. That’s a really good thing for all of us. Gravity was made for us. It is an important element of our amazing habitat. To blame it for being a constraint is asinine.
As a society we have come to the place of questioning the benefit of gravity, and by that I mean, we find it objectionable or, at least, that it’s optional. And by “gravity,” I’m actually referring to all of creation, because God has designed it to be our home. And the most important, intimate habitat God has designed for us is our bodies. We are not ourselves without them. To pursue the good health of our bodies is one thing; to experiment on them is something altogether different…and very dangerous.
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