Warren Defies the Empire of Lies
David Warren tells of the profound lesson he learned on a filthy, stinking, overcrowded traincar in India many years ago.
For the next eight hours we rolled towards Raxaul, on the Nepalese frontier. I did not share a language with these people, who tried to address me in their musical Bengali, then included me in their glances after giving up on speech. While clearly allowing that I came from another planet, they adopted me for the duration of their trip. When they produced chapatis and fishpaste out of a battered tin container, I was casually offered my share; and one of the little boys fell asleep on my lap. They were ragged people, there were lice in the boy’s hair; they were ludicrously poor, and I the pampered child of Canadian parents (who could wire home for money if I ever really needed it). For only these few hours, we lived, this extended family and I, in a state of equality.
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This by way of explaining what I learnt on that cattle-car. It was something which contradicted everything I, as a product of the post-industrial West, had expected about human nature. Without ever having been told in so many words, I had come to believe that people who live in poverty and squalor must be miserable and in some sense, oppressed. And surely the pressure and uncertainty of migration would make this all the more oppressive. Let me concede this may well be the case, for the migrant or refugee who is alone. Yet these people were profoundly contented and — I shall never deny this — profoundly free. They were — all of them, but especially that serene, pregnant woman, at the centre of them all — quite possibly the happiest people I had ever met, to my tender age of eighteen. They seemed to exist perfectly for each other.
Please by all means read the whole thing:http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/2014/02/15/breeding-instructions-revisited/
I want to make a comment on the ending of the article, but it would be a crime against letters for me to quote out of context that powerful crescendo of the essayists art.
It is a crime I must commit in order for my comment to make sense, but all I can do by way of penance is is ask, nay, beg the reader not to read any further until you have clicked the link and read the essay in its full and subtle power.
Please do not click below the link until you have read this short essay. It is but a few paragraphs, but worth the five minutes it will take to read. Here is the conclusion:
I have the old press release here (from 1990): “Unless women have control over their own lives and fertility, family planning goals will not be reached, and environmental damage will hit danger level. … But there are major obstacles that stand between women and their human rights.”
It would be impossible, in the course of mere argument, to show how much freight was carried by that glib statement, how many assumptions it made, and how poisonous they were. Nor was it, like some inscription from ancient Carthage, an artefact of some lost age. The same views are still pressed by the same agencies — if anything with more glibness, presumption, and poison in them today. Nevertheless I will mention the first half-dozen outrageously false assertions that come to mind:
They assumed that this pregnant Bengali woman had no control over her life, which was a lie.
They assumed that she did not want her children, which was a damnable lie.
They assumed that these children prevented her from fulfilling her destiny, when they were her destiny.
They alleged that she, and her family, were a threat to the environment, when they were as near to harmless as humans can be.
They implied that she was inferior to the emancipated women of the modern, eugenic West, when she was not inferior; that her children were inferior, and thus not worth the pain.
They concluded that obstacles stood in the way of her liberation, when those obstacles were part of her very identity as a living human being.
Looking back, from my present vantage, I still see with vividness that beautiful woman’s face; still remember the light and joy in it. And while I did not then, today I think of Mary Mother of God, and her Yes to God’s creation. But then as now: let God decide which of us is not worth having.
My Comment: the devil only tells one lie, but we are prone by our fallen nature to believe it, and so he need not invent any other. He told it to the mother of the race in Eden, when he slyly implies that God did not want her to achieve the goodness and divinity the apple of Knowledge of Good and Evil would bestow. He failed to mention that God from the beginning intended man to be divinized, to suffer apotheosis, to become like Him, of His nature, to become creatures of pure love as He is pure love. The devil has only one lie: God is not the source of goodness (says the devil) God is the barrier between you and goodness. To reach goodness, destroy God and toss Him aside.
(I am reminded, silly man who reads children’s books that I am, of the promise made by the White Witch to Edmund when she tempts him with Turkish delight: namely, that he shall be a Prince in Narnia. She did not tell him that he already, by virtue of being a Son of Adam, a King in Narnia. The Green Witch says the same lie to Rilian in a later book, telling him to conquer a country which, had he only known it, was already his by right, and eager to welcome him.)
So, here. The Progressives in their smirking self-righteous piety and grotesque self-imposed ignorance are henchmen of the devil. Some know it, most do not. They stand between a woman and her human nature, her happiness, her children, and they speak the selfsame lie. The source of your happiness is the barrier to happiness. Destroy the source of your happiness, toss happiness aside, and you will be happy.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
