WhenWeAreQueen

“Tommy was weak.  Tommy was stupid.  Tommy is dead.”

So says Ben Wade (played by the always-wonderful Russell Crowe (and hasn’t he been quiet since he got married and had kids?)) in “3:10 to Yuma.”  That was the iron law ruling man’s survival up until just recently.  It still is the law in much of the world, but not in the “civilized,” developed West.  What that really means is much of our behavior no longer has the kind of consequences that teaches us how not to act.  What it also means is that the bell curve of intelligent behavior is being pushed to the left, which is not a happy circumstance and does not bode well for our continued survival.

I think one of the subtle manifestations of this weakening of the law of appropriate consequences is in the realm of moral behavior.  Once upon a time, humans saw themselves always as moral agents, guided by rules and aware of the gravity of even everyday choices.  Sex was not taken lightly because pregnancy was life-changing.  Now we have women undergoing serial abortions from serial “hook-ups.”  We and they may delude ourselves into believing that such behavior exacts no cost from us, but that is, in fact, a delusion.  Our level of sophistication may have evolved to where casual sexual liaisons and multiple acts of scraping the unborn from the womb seem of no real import to us, but our consciences (still small voices that they may be) know better.  I do not think we can sustain this level of violence to the essence of what makes us more than animals (although animals submit without objection to the rules of the natural order).

Sex is not the only area where we commit a kind of moral mutilation; it’s just the one that comes easiest to mind.  I think those among us who want others to provide for their wants and needs, covering their demands of entitlement with fancy words about justice and systemic oppression, are similarly rotting from the inside-out.  One of life’s moral imperatives is that a being take care of itself once it reaches adulthood.  That’s a law of the universe:  There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.  A social system that infantilizes half the population while appropriating the property of the other half at the point of a government gun is not a moral system, anymore than was a system that enslaved humans for the enrichment of the majority. 

I think Admiral Lord Nelson summed it up nicely when he said, “England expects each man to do his duty.”  So it is with life, if we want to be strong emotionally and morally as well as physically.  Life expects each of us to care for ourselves and our families.  If we can’t or won’t do that, we become just the pets of those to whom we have entrusted ourselves—less than honest animals, really, who at least find their own food and bring up their own young, living and dying by the rule of nature.

Humans who no longer act as moral agents with a code of behavior are just a step away from becoming commodities.  That’s what babies are now—optional items to be brought into one’s life only when convenient, clumps of matter to be scraped away when it doesn’t suit to have them.  While the elite scoff, scientists are already talking about engineering sperm (sorry men, this just confirms that we don’t need you anymore); and a movie has been made about parents who have a child only for the purpose of donating body parts to another they already had.  Thousands of Fulan Gong have been sacrificed by the Chinese for organ harvesting.  Civilized Western governments in Northern Europe are deciding when the old are no longer worth keeping around.  We would be more honest if we just tattooed bar codes on every newborn; it might make things easier as we go along.