Screeds
Thursday, September 02, 2004
The Convergence Of The Death Cults
March 17, 2004
It’s a working postulate of the life sciences that “senescence begins when growth ends.” (Novelist James Blish called it “Lansing’s Law” in his novel They Shall Have Stars, but your Curmudgeon has been unable to determine whether “Lansing” was a real researcher or a fictional device.) This premise has been reinforced by observations of the life cycles of all the species known to Man, including Man himself.
What tends to go unremarked is that this is more than a biological phenomenon. It has political, spiritual, and social facets as well.
One of the attractions of Christianity, at its birth, was that it resurrected the concept of a bifurcated afterlife, the good alternative of which one could earn with faith and proper conduct here on Earth. This gave potential Christians an incentive to conform to the religion’s dictates; in a spiritual sense, it provided a “growth incentive.” Unfortunately, the promise of an ecstatic afterlife available on conditions can tempt one away from the proper approach to his Earthly life; it orients him toward death. The flagellation cults and recurring eschatological frenzies of medieval Europe emphasized that consequence of too afterlife-oriented a creed. The self-mortification practices of the Catholic-affiliated group Opus Dei are contemporary manifestations of the effect.
But there’s worse. If a large number of persons can be led to accept that eternal bliss is available on conditions, it encourages the formation of a church hierarchy that will manipulate the conditions out of self-interest. The conditions tend to press for ever deeper self-abnegation from the lay communicant, to the increasing temporal benefit of the hierarchy. Several pseudo-religious cults —Jim Jones’s group People’s Temple, Aum Shinrikyo, Heaven’s Gate / Higher Source, Islam—have gone in that life-denying direction, with ultimately catastrophic results.
It’s not your Curmudgeon’s style to lift such persons off the ground by their lapels and shake sense into them; he prefers weapons that act at a distance. But the impulse to scream at them that God designed Man’s life as He did because He meant Man to live it, not to reject it, sometimes overwhelms him.
However, though a death orientation as an unintended consequence of religious doctrine could itself occupy your Curmudgeon for days, it’s not all he’s here to discuss. The most interesting cases of a death orientation in our time have emerged from movements and scholia that would deny any taint of religion.
The most obvious anti-growth, and therefore pro-death, secular movements of today march behind the banner of environmentalism. There are some truly extreme and self-ridiculing examples of this, such as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which need no further disassembly by your Curmudgeon. But it’s important to note the death orientation imbedded in the pronouncements of the more “mainstream” environmental groups, too.
Environmentalism, as promulgated today, is inherently opposed to human growth. Earth, so far the only habitat humanity can count on, is physically finite. Therefore, more humans and more human activity mean more constraints upon the non-human world. According to the tenets of “mainstream” environmentalism, humans have expanded too far already and must pull back “for the good of the planet.” Though it chants such mantras as “sustainable growth” to hypnotize its lay congregants, environmentalism’s highest priority is the restraint of Man. This makes it a death cult, an enemy to be opposed on all fronts.
Strikingly, environmentalist spokesmen have opposed human progress even when it’s been shown to have large net benefits for “the environment” as they conceive it. Regard the statements of two of environmentalism’s highest prelates when it appeared that “cold fusion,” a cheap, resource-parsimonious, and entirely clean energy source, was approaching practical reality:
Jeremy Rifkin: “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet!”
Paul Ehrlich: “It would be like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.”
In these remarks, Rifkin and Ehrlich were restating the gospel of earlier enviro-messiah Amory Lovins, who said in a 1977 interview with Playboy magazine:
If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.
We can see from this that, in the environmentalist mindset, Man’s engineering bent is turned away from the inanimate materials upon which it more properly works and onto Man himself. The environmentalists would remake Man and his societies specifically for the benefit of that which is not Man. This could only be more obviously a religious vision if “that which is not Man” were just a little less material.
The eagerness to redesign Man didn’t originate with the environmental movement. It had a very conspicuous predecessor, whose adherents have amassed a staggering record of destruction: Marxism.
Marx originally advanced his economic hypotheses as a “scientific” vision of society, optimized to eliminate poverty, conflict and “exploitation.” When his followers gained political power and discovered that ordinary human motivations worked irresistibly against their scheme, producing not less want, strife and exploitation but more, rather than rejecting the scheme as incompatible with Man, they decided to redesign Man to fit the scheme. That’s when we started to hear about the New Soviet Man. That’s also when the death toll really started to mount.
But Marxism was not the progenitor either. Men have sought total power over other men for overtly idealistic reasons as far back as history goes. All have reaped the whirlwind. Every scheme for remaking Man to fit someone’s preferred vision has eventuated in mass death. Putting environmentalism on the altar would produce no different result.
To aspire to redesign or recondition Man, it’s necessary first to deny his nature. A creature’s nature is that set of characteristics that define him and circumscribe his possibilities. Though there will always be a gray zone around the perimeter of this concept, it is inarguable that without certain properties, most notably his awareness of himself as a moral entity and his possession of independent volition, Man would not be Man. At best, he would be an inanimate instrument to be manipulated by higher beings, and disposed of when he became an impediment to their plans.
C. S. Lewis explored the ramifications of this in two amazing works of the intellect: his essay The Abolition Of Man and his fictional masterpiece That Hideous Strength. He concluded that, to reach the pinnacle of death-orientation, one must simultaneously deny all moral constraint and reduce the priority of Man’s Earthly life to zero. The prelates of such a movement would be “materialist magicians”: they would perform an irrational abasement before imagined “forces” aligned with their programs, while disdaining all respect for nature and rejecting the existence of the soul. Such men would be devoid of all conscience or inhibition. Determined to impose their visions upon humanity as if it were mere clay to be molded as they choose, they would create horrors beyond anything a decent man could conceive.
The signal danger of our era is that all the death cults, whether powered by pseudo-religious zeal, by Marxian economic nonsense, by environmentalist visions, or by the simple desire for power, are reaching out to one another. In their shared enterprise of subjecting Man to the will of an elite, they will suppress their parochial differences, at least until an inescapable yoke has been fastened upon us.
Let it not be imagined that things would work out any better if their efforts were to succeed. For even if we all possessed the same priorities and standards, and agreed on the exact extent of Man’s imperfections—visionaries are forever harping upon Man’s imperfections—there is this: to be perfect is to cease to change. As two other, humbler visionaries put it:
- “Life is change. That is how it differs from the rocks.”—John Wyndham.
- “Perfection is finality, and finality is death.”—C. Northcote Parkinson.
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