Pro Incest Advocacy in the London Times! Proof I am Right About the New World A' Borning
In my recent Weekly Standard article about Spain's pending legal adoption of the Great Ape Project, I worried about the consequences that would follow from demoting human beings from the moral pinnacle. I wrote:Should that come to pass, the ancien régime (as they view it) based on the sanctity and equality of human life would crumble. In its place would emerge a society sufficiently hedonistic to eschew moralizing about personal behavior (Singer has defended bestiality), but also humbled to the point where people would willingly sacrifice our own flourishing "for the animals" or to "save the planet" and utilitarian enough to countenance ridding ourselves of unwanted human ballast (Singer is the world's foremost proponent of infanticide). Thus, in the world that would rise from the ashes of human exceptionalism, moral value would be subjective and rights temporary, depending on the extent of each animal's individual capacities at the time of measuring.
I rarely comment about issues of personal behavior here, but now my allusion to hedonism as a coming primary societal value--being but one of the costs that flow from eschewing human exceptionalism--was reinforced by an article in the Times of London, in which a woman, using pretty frank (although not graphic) language, defended incest with her brother and announced that she not only does not feel guilty, but has has fond memories of the relationship.
I won't quote it here, but I think the issue isn't whether the woman bedded her brother. We all know that such events happen. It is that the Times editors thought it was worth publishing! I mean this isn't Penthouse, after all. The Times is one of the world's premier publications, a newspaper that is about as mainstream as mainstream gets. Publishing the column there has the effect of granting society's respectability to voluntary incest! Good grief.
Labels: Hedonism. Human Exceptionalism.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 5:56 PM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
Thanks for the language warning. I'll skip reading the article itself. Of course, the "mainstream" world, perhaps esp. in England and Europe (I hear German TV is worse than our own) _is_ becoming increasingly coarse. Not only is nothing regarded as out of bounds, there seems to be an attempt to say more and more horrible things just for the heck of it, or to see if people's dulled senses can be stimulated. I was searching today for reviews and information on bread-making machines. I'm shopping for one. I kid you not, I came all unsuspecting upon amazingly unpleasant, explicit pictures of pretty-much-naked women with messages like "watch here" on the advertizing sidebars at shopping web sites giving reviews and information about bread machines! It was insane. I didn't want to be seeing this stuff, but there it was, in my face. One reader on another blog stated that at his white-collar job, he has male co-workers come up to him and push into his face (literally) their cell phones with images of acts of bestiality on the cell phones as "humor." So that is now regarded as water cooler humor in the business world.
This article seems to be more of the same. It's going to get to the point where one nearly needs to crawl under the bed and have one's meals delivered if one doesn't want pure dirt put into one's minds when one is simply living one's life. And that's _not even mentioning_ TV.
This is related to a rejection of human exceptionalism, but I think the rot set in in a sort of parallel moral universe while most people still accepted human exceptionalism, at least in theory.
Wesley, the posted comments on the article at the Times site show that your comments are prophetic. But maybe this just gave the fringe a chance to come out from the shadows in anonimity. We can only hope.
Why would the times publish that?!! It is not journalism it is purely Penthouse Forum stuff. I find it all hard to believe as well.
In light of some of the supportive comments that accompany the article I do think it highlights another problem. The more we loose ourselves from objective values and moral limitations to what is allowed or encouraged the more the power of emotional empathy will deconstruct taboos. Brokeback Mountain was powerful as a tool in this regard. I remember one critic asking the question, “Are they homosexual because they love each other or do they love each other because they are homosexual?” In the end she concluded that it did not matter; only the power of their enduring love mattered. So if we have no understood moral outrage, then all that someone has to do is craft a beautiful story about the passionate love of a brother and sister who can never be together though they fully and passionately love each other and reviewers will be asking the same silly questions. How can it be wrong if they love each other? Don’t you understand the power of love and attraction? Aren’t you aware that morals are constructs and as such do not apply in evaluating these actions? They love each other and they make each other happy and that is the highest priority.
Still, I think the story sounds phony and am disappointed that The Times would give it the light of day regardless. Thanks for the warning on the content and I wish I would have taken it.
Jay Watts. Howdy. It doesn't matter whether it is fiction or not. This is a frontal assault on right and wrong, a subversion of the very notion that society can set boundary lines beyond which personal behavior should not stray. I only recently realized this aspect of our current situation was part and parcel of the other matters we usually discuss here at SHS.
Peter Singer values are triumphing in this regard, and yet, it is interesting to note, not in his more altruistically minded prescriptions. And the suffering and injustices this will lead to will be monumental.
Howdy back.
Fiction is hugely powerful as a motivator, and I did not mean to minimize the impact of the story based on its veracity. In fact, my point was that moving fiction impacts how people perceive reality for both good and bad. As a student of the Civil War, you know full well the impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Roots is not real, but still its footprint on the culture was huge and it continues to get attention.
After the American President came out, I remember talking to someone about gun control and they attributed the fictional President Shepherd's speech to President Clinton and then talked at length about their admiration for that speech. Aaron Sorkin is apprently adept at creating that confusion between reality and fiction as I had similar instances in reference to Sportsnight and West Wing.
My point was that fiction in the absence of moral certainty is a powerful motivator and can seriously undermine people's natural moral revulsions with strong empathy for those who violate those moral standards. How can I judge them when I emotionally understand them? That is more dangerous to a culture governed by absolute moral standards than many people I talk to are willing to recognize.
The fact that Singer's views are becoming more accepted is chilling given his honesty about the where those views ultimately lead. Troubling.
Worse than troubling. Alarming.
I think, too, Jay was pointing out that if the story is phony, while they are pretending it's a true story, this just makes the Times's publication of it that much of a greater indication that they are losing their grip on any sort of journalistic integrity.
I often turn around a saying of Denis de Rougemont that C. S. Lewis liked: "When Eros is made a god, he becomes a devil." We see this everywhere in our culture, and what I think, Wesley, you are cueing to is the fact that ultimately this will mean that the helpless are preyed upon by the strong more than ever. I have posted a couple of times on the subject of what I call "choice devours itself." You begin with hedonistic "choice" as your highest value and you end up ignoring the fact that the choices of the helpless--women and children in sexual slavery, minors sexually abused who, it is pretended, just have "boyfriends," women forced to have abortions--are being forced upon them.
Here's a bizarre thing for you: In the 1950's a weird and unpleasant little book was published called _Love and Death_ by a guy named Gershon Legman. Legman was a worshiper of Eros and regarded himself as part of the avant garde of the sexual revolution that, in fact, only fully dawned in the next decade. He argued in that strange little book that if pornography were made legal, then "love" (by which he meant sex) would conquer "death," and depictions of sadism and violence in the popular media would gradually disappear, overcome by the gentleness of depictions of sex.
Well, as they say, we now have the data on that. Legman's suggested experiment was tried, and history has answered the question of whether he was right or not ambulando. And he was, as any normal person could have predicted, wildly wrong. In fact, violence has increased not only along with but as a consequence of the legalization of pornography, as people keep watching more and more horrific and sadistic material as their sensibilities become calloused and jaded.
I'm not usually one to say "everything is connected to everything else," but it really is true that the values of the sexual revolution are connected to the victimization of the weak.
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