Modern slave owners rail against Roe ruling

"The human embryo has no right to life"; "It is the woman's right to choose". Each is an echo of  “the negro is not equal to the white man;  slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition,” as stated in the US by Vice President Alexander H. Stephens of the Confederate States in 1861.

The belief in the right to own a slave, and that a white person was superior to an African, was so ingrained in the mentality of the people of that time in the United States that the white residents of the slave-owning states were prepared to die for that cause, along with the defence of more worthy principles.

On TikTok, as emotions were aroused by the pending decision affecting  Roe v Wade, a woman tells her infant daughter: "I could have killed you, but I chose to let you live. Yes, I realize what I just said and I stand by it." 

And then there was this photo:

Amanda Herring, taking part of the post-Roe decision protests. Photo CNN

Abortion activists know abortion kills a child, yet they continue to promote the evil of horrific violence as if the status, the reality, of being a human has no bearing on what they consider is necessary for their own pursuit of "happiness", of the furthering of their own individual existence.

Further, some US states and the federal government itself are putting into place—or trying to—some of the most extremely permissive pro-abortion legislation in the world. The Kaiser Family Foundation lists 20 states that allow late-term abortions for “health” reasons and seven that allow it for any or no other reason. As well, there is the effort of the Democrat politicians in Congress who seek to pass full-term abortion legislation. 

Compare that with the most permissive state in Europe, which is Sweden, where abortion is permitted only until the 18th week of pregnancy.

The mentality of "it's my body—I can do what I like with it" is part and parcel of the Western intellectual and moral upheaval that has occurred since the 1960s.  The causes of the downfall of social solidarity and respect for the traditions and mores of society  lie in the change of perspective toward individualism that came as an extension of "the death of God" that absorbed the mind of Nietzsche. 

Philosopher Charles Taylor, in his book 2007 A Secular Age, warned that "modern civilisation" has produced an "exclusive humanism".

As social analyst Stan Grant states, Taylor wrote that we have swapped God for a "culture of authenticity, or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfilment, 'do their own thing'.

Grant also finds insight into our predicament in this direction: 

Scholar of religion and politics Jocelyn Cesari has traced the evolution of secular modernity in her book, We God's People. We have now reached a point in Western Europe, she says, where "worldly" things are all there is.

There is a division between the immanent and the transcendent—between what is Caesar's and what is God's. The immanent is the realm of politics.

Believers, she says, "are expected to keep the transcendent to themselves".

According to Grant, the battle between secularism and faith grew out of the Thirty Years War—the wars of religion—that laid waste to Europe between 1618 and 1648. It led to the birth of the modern state and coincided with an explosion of new ideas that we call the Age of Reason or The Enlightenment. 

Grant continues:

While historically the West was founded on Christianity, the modern West was shaped by the break with God. People were sovereign. Liberalism prized the individual above all.

Sociologist Phillip Rieff said we swapped a sacred order for a social order. That accelerated in the 20th century with social revolutions up-ending society and demolishing old ethical and moral boundaries.

French writer Olivier Roy says "secularisation has given way to large scale de-Christianisation". There is now, he says, "a serious crisis surrounding European identity and the place of religion in the public sphere". 

Roy says: "Little by little, the very definitions of sexual difference, family, reproduction and parenthood have been redrawn." The scandal of child sex abuse in the Church has further stripped religion of its moral authority.

Personal freedom, Roy writes, "prevails over all transcendent standards." Society is now ordered on "new values…founded on individualism, freedom and the valorisation of desire".

Is there still a role for tradition? Grant provides a tentative answer:

Historian Tim Stanley thinks so. He says the "war on tradition" has "translated into a soulless consumerism, and, while some flourished, many felt alienated and unfulfilled."

In his 2021 book Whatever Happened to Tradition, Stanley fears our "liberal order is out of ideas, that's partly because we have deprived ourselves of valuable experience". 

Across the West, he says, "there is a dearth of purpose and spirit: we can't agree on who we are or what we are about, or even of these big existential questions matter." 

This habit of discarding old ways and old knowledge, including of who we really are, leaves us uncertain how to act, Stanley writes.

Therefore, in the West, identity is the new faith, according to Grant. "We are free to re-imagine and reinvent ourselves, untethered from the past; from family or faith."

Beyond the West, religion is booming

A valuable insight that Grant offers is that what is happening to the order of values in the West is not reflected in other parts of the world:

[Secularism] is a peculiarly Western phenomenon. Elsewhere religion is booming. The heart of Christianity has shifted from Europe to Africa and Latin America.

Officially atheist, China has experienced what's been called a Christian revival. It is estimated that by 2030 China may have the world's largest Christian population.

And despite what the census tells us is happening [in Australia], Christianity is not dying. Pew Research shows that in the century between 1910 and 2010, the number of Christians grew from 600 million to more than two billion.

Also, Islam is going to continue to grow as a substantial presence, because of the higher fertility of member groups, if for no other reason. 

Western individualism is off-putting for many in community-minded or family-oriented societies. Grant writes: 

Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University Professor of Indian History, asks: "Why should the history of Europe happen elsewhere?" In Bengal, he says, Hindus in the 19th century "rejected an unconditional embrace of the package of moral values of Western modernity". Modern individualism, he says, was seen as "impoverishing the character and content of collective life".

In modern India, he writes, even the secular "need and desire transcendence as intensely as the devout".

Kaviraj cautions against seeing the world through eyes of the West, not to speak, he says, "the facts of one history through the language of another". Yes, the West is more secular, less religious, and hyper-individualistic but that is not how most people in the world live.

The conclusion that Grant draws on his survey of responses to the mindset that bedevils us at this period of history is this:

[M]aking the human divine can be liberating and holds the promise of freedom. But it doesn't speak to all. It doesn't even speak to all in the West who replace old faiths with new faith, who feel alienated and alone, and long for somewhere to belong. 

For older generations in the West, rebellion against traditional mores goes back to the eruption of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, if not to the whirlpool of philosophies of the twenties and thirties that culminated in Jean-Paul Sartre's work Being and Nothingness, which shaped the enduring climate of rootless existentialism. 

A new religion takes shape 

For the generations arriving since Sartre, Camus and the Beat bohemians, this alienation from society has been answered by the search for new communities. The wokeness/wokeism movement and its drive to accommodate self-described rights, is one source of community and meaning. 

 A London street during the Pride month "occupation" 2022. Photo Twitter 

This has been seen over the past month when Pride flags have been flying in many cities of the West, and, of course, the throng of exhibitionists and virtue-signallers in Pride parades have created a temporary fizz of excitement. Though it is fashionable to identify in some way as homosexual or transgender, the young followers see themselves as a community of rebels, with such solidarity in following certain practices that they can be identified as adherents of a religion.

All this is borne out in the case of scholarly scrutiny of adherents of gender identity theory in Ireland. Colette Colfer, who has been studying and lecturing on religious groups for 16 years, began to note the typical marks of  a religion as she explored the world of gender activists. 

 

Colfer writes of her research findings:

Although there is no concept of the divine in gender identity theory, there are elements that could be considered religious. There are symbols, chants, flags, parades, and ‘holy’ days. There is a belief in what could be termed transubstantiation where the substance of the body is believed to change from one sex to another. A belief in gender identity involves a level of faith as there is nothing tangible to prove its existence which, as something divorced from the physical body, is similar to the idea of a soul.

The idea of a heretic or infidel is also relevant. People and organisations who don’t subscribe to gender identity theory, or who publicly criticise or even question it, have been denounced or ostracised, and products and publications boycotted. Detransitioners, who no longer subscribe to the theory, are akin to apostates.

The theory also involves a moral code and a creed that centers around concepts of equality, diversity, and inclusion. There is a clergy in the form of people from organisations who promote the theory and who give ‘sermons’ in training and workshops. Some people signal their adherence to the theory by using certain words or phrases or by including pronouns  in email signatures or on online public profiles. 

The impact of the rapid spread of this cult alarms Colfer:

My aim, as a phenomenologist, is to understand the belief and its associated practices without making value statements about its truth. I understand that gender identity is real for people who believe in it.

However, I am concerned by how quickly and deeply this theory is becoming embedded at the government level and what appears to me to be an increasing compulsion to believe.

So we return to the issue of why and how beliefs such as the right to own slaves, and to kill a human being at any stage as that human develops in the womb, take hold of a population. The answer can be found in the search for meaning that a community of believers provides. For our modern situation, when Christian beliefs have been sloughed off there is a gaping hole in one's life. If a social elite can provide a substitute system of belief, then that system will be accepted with joy. Until it all crumbles, as any purely human project is bound to do.

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