NUTHIN' FROM NUTHIN' (via Thomas Nicholson)

Go forth and multiply (Mark Steyn, January 27, 2003, National Post)

A society whose political class elevates "a woman's right to choose" above "go forth and multiply" is a society with a death wish. So today we're the endangered species, not the spotted owl. We're the dwindling resource, not the oil. Abortion is like the entirely mythical "population bomb" touted by the award-festooned Paul Ehrlich, who predicted millions of Americans would be starving to death by the 1980s: It's a prop of the Western progressive's bizarre death-cultism. We are so bad, so racist, so polluting, so exploitative that we owe it to the world not to be born in the first place. Abortion fetishism and our withered birth rate are only the quieter symptoms of the West's loss of self-confidence manifested more noisily elsewhere, from last weekend's Saddamite demonstrations to Chirac and Schroeder's press conference. The issue this week, according to the Ottawa
Citizen's David Warren, is simple: "Is what we are worth defending?" If you think the Euro-appeasers' answer is pretty pathetic right now, wait another decade, after the birth rate's fallen even lower and their bloated welfare programs are even more dependent on an increasingly immigrant workforce.

The abortionists respond that every child should be "wanted." Sounds nice and cuddly, but it leads remorselessly to Italian yuppie couples having just the one kid in their thirties. In a healthy society, not every baby is exactly "wanted": things happen, and you adjust to them. Legal abortion was supposed to make things better for that small number of women who found themselves clutching a handful of cash and riding the bus to a backstreet abortionist in the next town. But "unwanted" is a highly elastic term: in Romania in the Nineties, three out of four pregnancies were being terminated. Europe, in eliminating "unwanted" pregnancies, is eliminating itself. In Canada, meanwhile, Patricia Pearson assures us there's plenty of other folks to take up the slack:

"Immigrants to Canada from China and Eastern Europe are, I think it's fair to say, more secular and more accustomed to official support for abortion and gender equality espoused in the socialist and communist states they have fled from, than those immigrants to the United States who come from Catholic Latin America."

Well, that's one way of putting it. "Official support" means China telling you how many babies you can have: not a woman's right to choose, but the state's right to choose for the woman. Some "tolerance."

Those of us less persuaded than Miss Pearson by the benefits of totalitarian approaches to birth control will just have to do our bit as we can. Next time you're in a rundown diner and the 17-year-old waitress is eight months pregnant, don't tut "What a tragedy" and point her to the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic. Leave her a large tip instead. She's doing the right thing, not just for her, but for all of us.

It would make life so much easier if only we could all hate humankind as much as the Left does. But you can't care about Man and reconcile yourself to who we're becoming, or not becoming, if defenseless enough.

As always when I read something like this, the mind turns to one of the most insightful paragraphs of Albert Jay Nock:

Burke touches [the] matter of patriotism with a searching phrase.  'For us to love our country,' he said, 'our country ought to be lovely.'  I have sometimes thought that here may be the rock on which Western civilization will finally shatter itself.  Economism can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being.  It can not build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the irresistible attraction that loveliness wields.  Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer.

Isn't this, in fact, precisely what is happening in Japan, Canada, and Europe, where countries with wealth that was previously unimaginable are,
rather than thriving, killing themselves off? And, if we're honest, who among us didn't have at least a brief frisson of terror on 9-11 that we too had slouched so far down the road to Gommorah that our time of reckoning had come? And wasn't part of the undeniable thrill of the days following simply a function of our relief that we remain a decent, courageous, and surprisingly substantial people at our core?

Europeans mock us for our religion, our moralism, our conservatism on social issues like abortion and cloning, and our relative prudishness about sex (think Clinton scandal), but ultimately it must be the case that it is these very remains of what we (and they) once were and the strong pull that they continue to exert on our society, almost uniquely, have given us the only still rising nation in the West. We may well be growing hideous, but somehow enough folks here are raging against the dying of the light that we, unlike the rest of the West, aren't quite ready for annihilation yet.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 31, 2003 1:15 PM