Good grief…
Our culture-wide support for – or at least ambivalence over – intrauterine infanticide makes us callous and cold, most indifferent to those most in need of compassion. Worse, the utilitarian arguments that undergird all claims of “just” homicide consistently move their champions toward ever-greater atrocities, such that – as should be obvious – abortion is just a stepping-stone to genocide.
But it gets worse. For the fanatical cult of abortionism that is the motivating force behind the Ayn Rand Institute robs the human race of its humanity itself.
Ayn Rand’s positions on marriage, career and abortion might seem like good advice to give to a teenager: Have some fun, learn a trade and avoid entangling alliances. Isn’t that just the further extension of carefree youth into young adulthood? Into old adulthood? To the grave?
But exactly. The official-Objectivist plan for life consists of an extended adolescence, a life-long rebellion against the actual nature of humanity. Older official-Objectivists are typically miserable, wheezing along with the ‘what’s-the-use?’ resignation we see in the vagrants in Atlas Shrugged. But they’re miserable not because of a defect in human clay but because they stopped molding that clay at the emotional age of 18 – the age when we expect children to grow into self-responsible adulthood. Being materially involved in an abortion will result in life-long regret, but, much worse, being a champion of abortion will make you a life-long teenager.
A pregnancy, expected or not, makes you take the long view. Choices that once seemed inconsequential – take that job or hike the Andes? – are now throbbing with moment. Adults commit to their spouses in their marriages, to their children in their families, to their neighbors with their homes and to their communities by putting down roots. None of these things happen for the adolescents-of-any-age who choose to – or expect to – slaughter their own offspring. They die alone, unfamilied and unmourned, but all of Western Civilization dies with them.
Marriage makes us adults and families make us self-responsible parents. But since the family is the sine qua non building block of peaceful civilization, to be anti-family is necessarily to be anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life.
We become human in consequence of human upbringing, but if that upbringing is arrested at age 18 – if we live as Ayn Rand counseled, as perpetual teenagers – we alienate ourselves from our very nature as things.
What would you call bears who devour their own young? What would you say about fish deliberately poisoning their own eggs? What observations might you make about a once-social species that suddenly became overwhelmingly solitary, with any random social encounters being explicitly organized against reproduction? What rhapsodies would you sing about a breed of organisms whose greatest existential peril – the threat most likely to kill them – is their own parents? In what ways would you praise those outcomes, lauding them as being improvements upon mere nature?
Ayn Rand was a solitary genius who rhapsodized the lovingly-detailed concept of the solitary genius and who counseled her thoroughly normal, overwhelmingly Sociable followers to pretend that by acts of affectation they, too, could live the life of a solitary genius. She was a very rare bird who raged against her minions for not being just like her. She celebrated their individuality by grinding it to dust, but here’s what is so much worse: They let her get away with it.
Ordinary Sociable kids – the only kind who will keep coming back for more of the abuse Cautious tyrants like Ayn Rand spew incessantly – molded their still-plastic human clay into modern-day monsters, gargoyles who insist that true human nature consists of a life that is casually-committed to a series of romantic ‘affairs’, is fully-committed only to work and is barren or all-but-barren of children. Because a Randian ‘ideal man’ abhors commitment to any value outside of his own skin, every extra-dermal concern is inessential – temporary and fungible. Official-Objectivists don’t put down roots because the very idea is offensive to their de facto atomism.
Am I being unfair to Ayn Rand? She rationalized an ‘open’ adultery with her chief acolyte, driving her husband to a slow-motion suicide by alcoholism – all while insisting he was her “top value.”
So you know, the cardinal value of the uniquely-human life is the self. If you don’t love it first – as the only possible “top value” among your values – you will issue endless rationalizations for the bad behavior resulting from your cognitive dissonance.
Tens of thousands of children were spawned by young couples in the thrall of Ayn Rand, and tens of thousands of children were slaughtered at the official-Objectivist idol of the ‘ideal.’ That’s horrifying – children murdering their own children under the approving eye of their virtual mother, who was in her turn killing her tens of thousands of virtual grand-children – but the enduring consequences are all worse:
• The couples broke up. They couldn’t look each other in the eye knowing what they had done.
• Each of those people never married, or if they did, they married casually, expecting every relationship to be shallow and temporary.
• They never had children, or if they did, they had them late in life and few in number, treating them as an unwelcome distraction from the important things in life.
• They never committed to adult values, to the enduring storgic loves of marriage and family, to a home “beloved over all”, to their neighbors, to their community – and to the future.
We hear it all the time: Children are our future. That is so unbearably true that no one can bear to acknowledge its truth: The future belongs – entirely! – to the children of the parents who had and raised them. No one else will be there – which means no official-Objectivists will be there, since they slaughtered all their children. But for most of us children are the reason for the future, the goad that gets us out of bed and keeps us working – and hoping – for more and better things. We want for our children to have better lives, but we want for the future to be better for everyone because we will live on in it through our children.
None of that can happen for advocates of intrauterine infanticide. Even if they don’t take the awful step of self-annihilating the future, they don’t believe in it – not in the way parents and grand-parents do.
Ayn Rand made a holy sacrament of abortion, and in doing that she destroyed any chance that her philosophical movement might live beyond the comfortable death of official-Objectivism’s intellectual error.
Much worse, she ruined the lives of the teenagers who entrusted their minds to her, turning them into brittle, angry faux Incandescents – the only way a Sociable personality can survive a Cautious tyranny – while robbing them entirely and forevermore of love, marriage, family and legacy.
But worst of all, her argument for intrauterine infanticide and others like it have robbed all of modernity of its future. What day beyond tomorrow should concern the childless? Why none of them, of course. They would be perfectly ‘rational’ to ask, “What’s in it for me?”
“In the long run we are all dead” means either ‘I don’t have kids’ or ‘I don’t give a shit.’ And that – de facto utilitarian Marxism – is the long-range philosophical impact of Ayn Rand’s fanatical abortionism.
