A former British soldier, Adam Smith-Connor, was last week convicted of silently praying for the soul of his aborted child outside an abortion clinic in Bournemouth and ordered to pay legal costs of £9,000. Private prayer in public in Britain can now be a criminal offence, if it in any sense interferes with what are now called “reproductive rights”.
When language fails, truth duly follows. Whether or not you approve of abortion, it is not a “reproductive right” but an “anti-reproductive right”, namely the killing of a viable foetus. In New York, when Governor Cuomo signed the law permitting the full-term abortion of babies of nine months’ gestation within the womb (usually by uterine beheading), the roomful of women exploded in applause, after which he ordered the One World Trade Center to be illuminated with pink floodlights in celebration. So much for the belief that women are a “kinder” sex.
Mankind has been telling itself a great many lies about human nature since the great sexual revolution of the 1960s. These falsehoods are based on individual human rights, which if regarded separately from our existential duties as a species, will naturally confer an all-embracing “equality” on women. We all know (but usually without admitting it) how spurious that “equality” is in practice: nobody demands 50/50 gender-equality for sewerage-workers, plumbers, deep-sea welders or steeplejacks. Ukraine allowed its women to flee the war while compelling all men to stay, without a word of complaint from the world’s feminists.
Indeed, much of the feminist agenda is profoundly hypocritical, and all of it, without exception, is predicated on individuated rights. The outcome across the world has been existentially catastrophic. North America and Europe are undergoing deathbed demographics that are largely concealed by immigration, but unconcealed so too are China and Japan. South Korean women have 0.7 children each instead of the 2.1 necessary to continue the species. In a quite enchanting example of threat-denial, South Korea is responding to this crisis by producing a range of armoured fighting vehicles to be manned by two men instead of four. Sorry to break the bad news, Seoul, but two-man tank crews won’t fix your population problems.
The beliefs that have brought about this downward demographic spiral are complex in origin but simple in outcome: species extinction. We can’t keep hoping that some miracle will save us from the fatal results of so-called gender-equality, which itself is based largely on the sharing of privileges, not of painful duties. One uniquely painful duty is superior to all others. It is female. It is to have babies, which is something that women, in species-jeopardising numbers, no longer wish to do.
One of the defining fictions that have brought us to this cliff-edge is the belief in the universality of Darwinism. Every form of life owes its existence to the winnowing of unsuccessful genes and the triumph of useful genes. In other words, for all species, from amoeba to zebra, the history of their evolutionary experiences exists in their DNA today. They cannot live in environments and do things for which they have had no genetic preparation. Only humans can do that.
Yet human evolution stopped long before we invented writing or arithmetic, though all humans can do both. Speeding around the Arc de Triomphe at rush-hour while thousands of other drivers are doing the same is not something for which we are genetically prepared, yet anyone (with practice and, by God, some nerve) can do it.
How did a million years of merely messing around with primate-genes on the Serengeti produce accountants, bassoonists, chandlers, dentists, ecologists, footballers, geologists, horologists, illustrators, jurists, knitters, lexicographers, machinists, novelists, orthopaedists, politicians, querists, roofers, singers, teachers, urologists, venereologists, wheelwrights, xylophonists, yeomen, zitherists? Each one of these specialists can be endlessly subdivided. The bassoonist plays alongside trumpeters and percussionists, all of whom have non-interchangeable skills. Likewise, footballers: the left-sided midfielder cannot play on the right, the scrumhalf cannot play out-half, the quarterback cannot be a line backer, and so on, endlessly. Crows caw, robins warble, each with a limited range, whereas humans produced Terfel, Pavarotti, Callas, Schwarzkopf. Each was born with a musical range that could not possibly have benefitted its holder in the brutal rough-and-tumble of evolutionary competition. All appear to have benefitted either from the intentions of a god, or the amazing foresight of “predictive evolution”, which is of course an impossibility, or a contradiction in terms. Likewise, how on earth (as the expression goes) could a million years of unassisted and unfocussed evolution in East Africa have produced an Elon Musk, a Yehudi Menuhin, an Albert Einstein, a Bach, a Shakespeare or, yes, even you?
For all the mental bafflement that such speculation leads us to, one conclusion remains unavoidable. We are a mutually-dependent species, not just a collection of individuals with rights that are to be pursued through the courts and codified by politicians. Unconditional indulgence in those rights will bring about the end of the species. This is not a witless threat from an illiterate doom-monger or a primitive warning from a God-fearing reactionary, but an actuarial certainty.
The one obligation that civilisation expects of us is that we keep open minds on all matters that do no harm, of the kind that finally allowed Christianity to flourish and finally for the Reformation to occur. Likewise, the glories of the Italian rinascimento, which is bizarrely called the Renaissance in English, which gave us Dante, Leonardo, Michelangelo and a hundred others. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution followed, along with the great intellectual triumphs that revealed the universe, the secrets of the atom and the sinisterly ceaseless sub-atomic depths within.
One thing that characterised human “progress” – a term that is only meaningful if it results in more knowledge, kindness and comfort for everybody – is that it was never achieved by punishing those with whom we disagree merely for expressing their opinions in silent prayer. That path sooner or later leads to the gas-chamber, the Gulag and the heretics’ bonfire. Melodramatic? Not in the least: if anything, understated.
Communism, Fascism and National Socialism were seen by their early adherents as being enlightened and progressive, and when in power, all punished silent, prayerful dissent. Europe’s Left worshiped at Stalin’s shrine, while millions vanished into the Gulag, to die of cold, hunger and work. The Nazi pioneers in murder were doctors who had all taken the Hippocratic oath and who for “humanitarian” reasons began gassing the mentally-deranged. Within a few years, they were practising their skills on Jews, and such matters didn’t end there.
Soon after the alphabet of genocide was revealed – Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno – a particularly-gifted foreign student won a scholarship to study in France at the École d’ingénieur généraliste en informatique et technologies du numérique, located in the Parisian suburb of Villejuif, which – as its name implies – was probably Paris’s first Jewish ghetto.
His studies completed, this brilliant young electronics engineer returned home, determined to make his country a better, fairer place. In 1968, the Kmher Rouge under his leadership opened their terrorist war against the Cambodian government, resulting in the murder of about 1.5 million captives. The same year that Pol Pot began his murderous insurgency to make this world a better place, the Abortion Act came into effect in Britain, and its essential stipulation was that the aborted foetus must be incapable of being born alive.
We know now where that has taken the abortion-industry: to the uterine beheading-shears for fully gestated young human beings who would survive if born. It is also part of that range of individuated “freedoms” that will quite soon place much of the human-race on the brink of extinction: three generations of 0.7 babies/woman will do the job nicely, as the world’s seas wash wanly on largely unpeopled shores.
Big apes, but not small humans, come under protection of Spanish law