Barren Old Women: The Contrast Between Christmas and the Culture of Death

Christmas is a Christian holiday that celebrates life. No wonder leftists hate it so much - babies, hope, God - all the stuff they detest. But Christians love it: the wonder of new life, the joy of fertility, the hope for the future represented by all babies, but especially this one.

Mark Steyn has a wonderful column in the National Review today. Here is how it begins:

"Our lesson today comes from the Gospel according to Luke. No, no, not the manger, the shepherds, the wise men, any of that stuff, but the other birth: “But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.”

That bit of the Christmas story doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s in there — Luke 1:13, part of what he’d have called the backstory, if he’d been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician. Of the four gospels, only two bother with the tale of Christ’s birth, and only Luke begins with the tale of two pregnancies. Zacharias is surprised by his impending paternity — “for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years.” Nonetheless, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth’s pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive. If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle — the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus’s birth is the miracle; Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth — all life — is to a degree miraculous and God-given."

Steyn goes on to talk about how contemporary Western culture is old, barren and increasingly concerned with managing its own decline rather than building culture. It is striking how derivative and decadent so much of our own culture is today. The best music, architecture, theology and poetry are centuries old. And economic decline is our current lived reality. Steyn writes:

"The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency — “America’s heading for the same fate as Greece if we don’t change course,” etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren — i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social-democratic state where workers in “hazardous” professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again."

During the centuries of European colonial expansion the main export of Europe to the rest of the world was people; the excess population of Europe spread across the globe. But now:

As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent’s economic “powerhouse” has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: One in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. “Germany’s working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “Rural areas will see a massive population decline and some villages will simply disappear.”

If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people’s money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: It’s run out of other people, period.

In the Bible, children are a precious gift from God. The human race is commanded to be fruitful and multiply in Gen. 1 and Israel joyfully obeyed this command. But now, selfishness gets in the way of the most obedience to God of all: reproduction.

In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate’s somewhere around 1.2, 1.3 children per couple — or about half “replacement rate.” Japan, Germany, and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, 20 percent of 40-year-old women are childless. In a recent poll, invited to state the “ideal” number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered “None.” We are living in Zacharias and Elisabeth’s world — by choice.

What was for Elizabeth and Zacharias a tragedy and sorrow is for us a lifestyle choice made by so many people today that the very existence of our people is threatened.

The fact is that as societies cast off the Christian beliefs of their ancestors and embrace selfish hedonism as the meaning of life, those societies die. This is not an argument for the "usefulness" of Christianity, however. One thing is clear: people cannot believe in Christianity just because it is useful. You either believe it or you don't.

But it is also clear that when a culture or a country or a nation decides to reject Christianity, the only alternative is the culture of death. The truth of Christianity can be seen in the fact that those who reject it do not find life, vigor and joy, but long, slow, economic and demographic decline into extinction.

There is a way that seems right to a man; but the end thereof is the way of death.

Christmas is the festival of those who have chosen life. Merry Christmas!

W. B. Yeats and the Question of What Comes After Christianity in the West

Western culture has lost it soul. Its soul, of course, is Christianity. Twenty centuries of Christian influence on the West has produced a civilization which is, if not in a deep and profound sense Christian, nevertheless deeply and profoundly influenced by and shaped by Christian Faith. Augustinian Christianity holds that the City of God will never be realized perfectly on earth in the current age in the Church, in the State, or in the society in which a Christian Church and Christian State together guide the culture. Neither the State nor the Church can be completely purged of sin in this age; the City of God must descend out of heaven after the Return of Christ after this age comes to its conclusion.

Yet the sense in which Western civilization can be described as a "Christian civilization" is neither superficial nor trivial. There is a middle ground between the extremes of viewing Western civilization of merely co-opting Christianity to serve as a thin veneer over an essentially pagan essence and viewing Western civilization as the Kingdom of God on earth.

Western civilization is Christian, or rather, was Christian, in the sense in which it felt guilty for failing to live up to the moral standards of the Bible and this is neither trivial nor superficial. It is perhaps the deepest and most important way in which a civilization can be Christian in the present age between the first and second comings of Christ.

But now, Western civilization is crumbling because it has lost its collective faith. We see this process, named by sociologists as "secularization" and by political philosophers as "liberalism," beginning in the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century on the continent, delayed for a century by the Evangelical Awakening in Britain and America in the 18th century but coming to fruition in the 20th century in Europe and after the 1960s in North America.

Western civilization has no other religious-philosophical worldview or set of first principles to draw upon. The Enlightenment was a reaction against Christian metaphysics, epistemology and ethics and the embrace of the idea of equality as the sine qua non of morality. This idea of equality, combined with a romantic philosophical anthropology and a Utopian eschatology, led 19th century Marxists and 20th century Neo-Marxists to attack the Christian foundations of the West in the name of the new religion of Humanity.

The question of what is to come after Christianity remains murky. Surely they are correct who argue that post-Christian paganism will be extremely different from pre-Christian paganism because the former will have embedded within itself fragments of Christianity. Post-Christian paganism will have a conversionist zeal, a method of purification and redemption and a moralistic sternness that did not characterize the old, tired, paganism supplanted by Christianity in the first millennium of Western civilization.

We see a picture of what this post-Christian paganism looks like in the Nazi, Fascist and Communist movements of the 20th century. Liberalism degenerates into the will to power and the excrescences of religiosity left over after the death of orthodox Christian Faith degenerate into a bloodthirsty, neopagan, religious fanaticism.

I view W. B. Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, published in 1921, as prophetic.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The first 8 lines describe the anarchy, out-of-control violence and irrationality of the Great War. The "best" who lack all conviction are the secularized children of believers in Christ who believe in nothing more than liberal tolerance. The "worst" who are full of passionate intensity are those who are inflamed by nationalistic or simply bloodthirsty passions. We can see such people in charge by looking back to the French Revolution or forward to the rise of the Third Reich.

The next 8 lines look to the future; if Christian civilization died in the trenches of the Great War, what will replace it? No civilization can endure long without a soul; something must fill the void. A Second Coming must occur, but if Christian Faith is dead there can be no question of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ on the clouds of heaven in power and glory. That is precisely the Faith which has died. So whatever is to come must be an expression of the Spirit of the Age, which is antithetical to authentic Christian Faith.

The last 4 lines describe a new birth in Bethlehem, suggesting the founding event of a new religion that replaces the old, dead Christian Faith. What is born must incarnate the Spirit of the Age and therefore can be described as a "rough beast." It slouches toward Bethlehem to be born even now, but it has not been born yet. Out of the political, economic, religious, philosophical, ethical and military chaos - in short, civilizational chaos - of 1914-18 will emerge the "New Thing" that will replace, Christianity, the "Old Thing."

What happened in Nazi Germany is the logical expression of the decadence, madness and evil that fills a body whose soul has died. Old, Christian, Western civilization rose up one last time and spent nearly its last ounce of strength slaying the "rough beast" in World War II, but could only do so by making an alliance with another beast, which was nearly as bad. While the West could be said to have won the Cold War against Communism in a superficial, external sense, the tragic reality is that the Spirit of the Age - clothing itself in the ideal of Equality - has entered the Western bloodstream and infected it fatally.

Western civilization - Modernity - is dying. Europe is just playing out the string, while the United States fights for its life against the same infection that felled Europe. What comes next is difficult to describe because it is not a rational, logical, worldview like Christianity, but rather, the antitheses of such a worldview. It is the will to power with a clear conscience that is struggling to be born.

This all sounds extremely pessimistic and it is. But if one asks "Is there any hope?" the answer is always "Yes." But hope can only be found in that which the West has already rejected. Christianity is the only hope for the survival of Western civilization. We must not rule out the possibility of revival and rebirth because we are not fatalists or determinists. God's Providence is unpredictable and surprises may yet await us - especially in the United States where Christianity remains a living community of Faith.

But the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born - whether it is called the Spirit of the Age, the Antichrist, the Will to Power or Neopaganism - has clearly been born and is fighting for control of Western civilization. Its nihilistic, romantic, Utopian, anarchistic lust for blood and the destruction of the social order is dangerous and demonic. Christians will have to resist it by being willing embrace martyrdom. Revival will entail war.

Can Men Be Trained?

Well, civilization depends on it so it better be possible or we are all doomed. Ed West, in his blog post today at the Daily Telegraph entitled "The riots remind us that polygamous societies are naturally violent," reflects on the meaning of the urban lawlessness in Britain the past few days and says:

When we discuss “fatherlessness” in urban areas what we are talking about, effectively, is polygamy. And countless studies have shown that, the more polygamous a society, the more aggressive its males. Polygamous hunter-gather societies are absurdly violent.

Why? Because where male parental investment is low, the qualities that define a good male mate are strength, aggression and status. Where male parental investment is high, the most important quality becomes monogamy – because without it a woman’s children will starve. These qualities are partly hereditary, and on the male side this tendency for deadbeat lotharios to produce unfaithful sons was noted long before science dared to tread its feet into the field of evolutionary psychology. Science still cannot tell us to what degree male monogamy is influenced by nature; “allele 34” may influence vasopressin, the hormone associated with monogamy in male mammals, but then it may not (and even if it influences behaviour, men can still be “trained”).

It is interesting that West uses the word "polygamy" to describe the modern welfare state underclass. I would have said "promiscuity" but it comes to basically the same thing. Men want to have multiple partners and not stay with the the mother of their children and be good providers. Whether this is done through serial divorce, polygamy or unrestrained promiscuity with no marriage in the picture at all is only a matter of degree.

I find it interesting that he uses the theoretical framework of evolutionary biology to smuggle teleology back into the discussion after it was supposedly banned by modern science. But let's lay aside the pop psychology and pop biology and translate this discussion into the language of traditional Aristotelian and Biblical morality.

In our fallen world, men have a disordered sex drive. Strictly speaking, we are perverted. Our sexual desire is indiscriminate; the mere sight of a half-dressed, half-way attractive female stranger walking down the street is enough to arouse our desire. This is not normal; this is the result of the Fall into sin because lust is a perversion of natural sexual desire. Monogamy is natural; men should find their wives attractive and other women should not provoke lustful desires at all. But alas, we are sinners not only insofar as we make evil choices but because our sinful, fallen natures make us susceptible to making such choices even when we know better.

So, when West says that maybe a certain hormone makes us lustful he is simply talking about the efficient cause. The fact that our biology makes us promiscuous in our desires does not determine by itself the true purpose of our sexual desire. The fact that male sexual desire is strong is meant by nature to ensure the propagation of the race - to ensure that we get around to reproducing. But it is meant to operate monogamously -which is clear from the fact that mothers and children need fathers to help provide for the family - and not promiscuously. The indiscriminateness of male sexual desire is the problem, not the strength of the desire.

This is the germ of truth in the argument that sex is good and the Church therefore should not be against it. Of course the Church should not be against the goodness of strong sexual desire, but like any other great good, sex can be perverted and become destructive. So the Church rightly stands against the misdirection of strong male sexual desire outside the family.

This is why one of the Ten Commandments is "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and when Jesus deepens this commandment in Matthew 5 by saying that even looking lustfully on another woman is to commit adultery in the heart he is zeroing in on the real heart of what is wrong with adultery: the direction of the sexual desire away from one's wife to other women indiscriminately - promiscuity.

Civilization depends on marriage. Civilization involves training men to overcome the weakness they inherit from Adam: the fallenness of their sexual desires. Civilization depends on the family because it depends on channeling male energies constructively in support of women and children, rather than allowing they to wander all over the place indiscriminately and gradually peter out into destructive and meaningless behaviour. A society in which marriage is destroyed inevitably descends into barbarism and poverty. Does anything in today's headlines support such a thesis?

This is not some sort of novel social scientific theory. It is what your grandmother leaned from her grandmother. It is the hard won wisdom of several thousand years of civilizations rising, leveling off, declining and dying. The reason civilizations keep failing is original sin. History looks like we should expect it to look if the Bible is true. Brief periods of success punctuate longer periods of darkness and regression. There simply is no evidence for the truth of the false doctrine of Progress. You have to be an unscientific fanatic to believe in either unicorns or Progress.

If men can be trained to contain and control their promiscuous impulses through marriage, then there is hope. But if not, our civilization is destined to join the other twenty or so civilizations that once flourished but now are matters for investigation by archeologists.

The question of homosexuality is relevant here because we often hear that we must accept all sexual orientations as fixed, unchangeable and morally neutral. Does that include the orientation to promiscuity? The problem is that if we take whatever our fallen, sinful natures incline us to do as morally neutral, then we have no reason to fight for marriage as an institution that civilizes, directs and makes constructive male sexual desire. If the homosexual should just do what feels natural at the time, so should the married man whose secretary half his age seems to understand him better than the mother of his three children. Both have equally "natural" feelings. The problem with the modern sexual revolution is that it has no moral language to talk about the need to discipline and direct male sexual desire.

West's article is part of the problem because using the language of evolutionary biology is dangerous. Darwinism rejects teleology but then smuggles a different, more destructive, even demonic teleology in the back door. It is called social Darwinism and the Nazis used it logically. Once you elide the distinction between final cause and efficient cause by naively thinking the former is unnecessary, you open the door to people concluding that efficient cause (raging hormones) should be understood as final cause. Hence, promiscuity is seen as good. The will to power is natural and therefore justifiable.

The smart people who drove God out of the public schools and who rigorously exclude the traditional shame and blame morality from the curriculum didn't foresee the possibility that those taught evolutionary biology in an amoral fashion with final cause eliminated from the equation might just draw some logical conclusions from such teaching and use what they were taught to justify a descent in barbarism.

Or maybe they did foresee it and rejoiced ahead of time at what they were accomplishing. In that case, they must think the riots in Britain are just wonderful and noble.