Friday, March 29, AD 2024 5:12am

Reality Always Wins

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One of the recurring themes of this blog is that reality always prevails in the end. Professor Anthony Esolen, who has commented here, has a brilliant post at Crisis on this theme:

 

It may be that all of the mad errors of the last hundred years have risen from one first and terrible error: that of refusing to honor reality, including human reality, as it is. In generations past, if you did not honor reality, you paid for it swiftly and severely. Try to plant strawberries in a desert, or fig trees in a swamp, and your belly will tell you that you have been a fool, even if your mind is stubborn and slow to admit it. Send your women out with the oxen and the plow, the cross-cut saw and the mattock, while your boys do the laundry and the mending, and the very stones will testify to your stupidity. But our wealth and sophisticated technology are a great buffer between us and those stones. We can seem to ourselves, for a while, to get away with ignoring the real.

Not that we actually do get away with it. Ideologies treat man as if he could be pressed into any shape, like molten plastic poured into a form. Stalin tried his hand at the human extruding machine, ignoring the ordinary farmer’s love for the land to which he and his forebears had given their sweat and their souls. The result was to turn one of the great breadbaskets of the world, the Ukraine, into barrens, while six million people died—not before some of them had sunk below the beast and eaten their own dead. Mao tried his hand at the human extruding machine, ignoring the ordinary man’s piety towards his ancestors and their ways, and the result was a mass destruction of culture, and sixty million people dead.

These are flagrant sinners against God and the reality he made. But the murderer of only one man is a murderer all the same, and more pleasant or vacuous sinners against reality are still sinners and still work harm. In the aggregate they can destroy every bit as much as Stalin and Mao did. Abortion of course is one obvious example of a refusal to look at reality. The child-making act has as its natural and foreseeable end the making of a child. We do know this, just as we know that men should revere their parents and grandparents, and that people who have lived on a tract of land for a hundred years love it and will tend it more carefully than a cadre of bureaucrats could ever imagine. We simply pretend that we do not know it. We pretend that when a man and a woman do the child-making thing, and they make a child, it can strike them as an utter surprise, a bolt from the blue. If you are walking beside a row of high-rise row houses, and you are struck by a piano falling from a great height, that is a surprise, that is an unnerving accident. Not the other.

 

But, having stiffed the real and embraced a fantasy, here the ideology of sexual liberation, having played at being husband and wife without being husband and wife, we claim all at once to be Surprised by Baby, Dismayed by Baby, Utterly Undone by Baby, and, hence, we want Baby out of the way. To have it out of the way, we have to plunge ourselves even deeper into the unreal. We have to pretend that the baby is not human, when we know, of course, that it is, and that it is not alive, when we know that if it were dead, it would be called a miscarriage, and no moral problem would arise. We have to cleave our minds in half to have our lives of license whole.

So it is that Planned Parenthood, which has never helped any woman to become a parent, sells as human body parts the members of the human beings they have killed under the fiction that they were not human at all, calling it “medical care” when nothing is remediated. So also the Pill, destructive of the common good and (like all synthetic growth hormones) deleterious to the health of the women who use it, is called “medical care,” when no disease is cured, and no limb or organ is restored to its normal and natural function; rather, its purpose is to thwart the natural function of the reproductive system, even at the cost of the woman’s health. It is thus not like an inoculation to protect you against a communicable disease. It is like deliberately putting a joint out of socket.

Go here to read the rest.  Lincoln put it succinctly long ago, when he would ask how many legs a dog had if we call the tail of the dog a leg.  Four he would say, because calling something by a name, does not transform it into something that it is not.

 

 

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T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Thursday, December 17, AD 2015 6:47am

Seen at Instapundit blog.

“Magical thinking – Islam and the left (both cases omitted “evil” because it would be redundant), lack self-awareness; are incapable of introspection; make excuses for their excesses; and always attempt to exercise control/power.”

Clinton
Clinton
Thursday, December 17, AD 2015 10:57am

Professor Esolen’s piece in Crisis is excellent. Thanks for pointing
it out, Mr. McClarey.

Philip
Philip
Thursday, December 17, AD 2015 11:20am

Let freedom ring. When the truth is written, the essay regardless of length, is succulent to behold. Anthony Esolen served up a winner.
Thanks for sharing.

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Friday, December 18, AD 2015 9:24am

Another great essay by Anthony Esolen.

Reality: “The world or the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.”

Many people believe reality is what is perceived, not what is. They live in an imaginary reality, one of day dreams, of what might be. This could be due to ego centrism or selfishness. It a belief that we are in control and can make things happen the way we want.

To face reality requires courage and commitment which, among many folks today, is simply lacking. Facing reality is much easier when we believe in God and have faith in Him and that He will help us.

Perhaps the reason so many folks will not accept reality is because they do not have faith in God.

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