THE CONTRADICTIONS OF WESTERN MORALITY
Written by Vladimir Moss
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF WESTERN MORALITY
One could be forgiven for believing that our society is the most hedonist and all-permissive in human history. Vice of all kinds is not simply tolerated but positively encouraged. Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing on the present-day Babylon… And yet man is not so much, as Aristotle said, a political animal, as the moral animal; that is, he cannot help thinking in terms of good and evil, right and wrong. Even a gang of thieves and murderers has its system of morality – and woe to those who transgress its rules. So if you look closely at the way the modern West conceives of morality, you will see that while very much that was considered evil in the past is now considered good, there are some things that are condemned with an extraordinary and wildly excessive zeal. It is as if we have to compensate for so much evil by being excessively censorious about something, even if that something is really quite innocent.
A case in point is child sexuality. In an article entitled “Aged five, and accused of sexual crimes”, Peter Stanford writes: “Joanne, let’s call her, teaches eight- and nine-year-olds in an inner-city state primary. She doesn’t want to give her real name or that of the school, she explains, because safeguarding is such a sensitive area of a teacher’s work.
“The curriculum requires her to take swimming lessons. ‘One of the boys recently pulled down another boy’s swimming shorts as a joke,’ she recalls. ‘He was just being ridiculous and I knew there was 100 per cent no sexual motive in what he had done. But still I filled in the form, because it’s better to report something – and it be nothing – than the alternative.’
“Joanne is highlighting the pressures and additional workload now being placed on primary-school teachers around the issue of safeguarding. Her comments to some way towards the almost tripling in reporting of ‘sex crimes’ in schools over three years that was revealed this week. In 2011-12, the number stood at 719. In 2014-15, it had risen to 1,955…”[1]
Of course, seemingly reasonable reasons can be given for this criminalizing of children. Child abuse has grown enormously in Britain, as in the whole of the West; the recent apprehension of a paedophile ring discovered millions of photographs of child abuse on the ring’s computers. The police, who are overburdened already, now have to take on an enormously increased work-load in order to satisfy the horrified public’s quite understandable demand for justice and prevention. In order to help them, they need to identify potential child abusers at an early age. Then, if and when one of them is brought before the courts in later life, the reports of their “safeguarding” by primary school-teachers will be invaluable in order to secure a conviction.
Paedophilia is indeed a horrific crime. It should be targeted and punished with the full weight of the law. But has it occurred to modern legislators that the vast apparent increase in paedophilia, along with many other adult sex-crimes, such as rape, are the result of the collapse in Christian morality that we see throughout the western world? It seems intuitively likely, for example, that paedophilia and homosexuality are psychologically related, and that the legalization of homosexuality among adults should have encouraged the sexual abuse of children; for in the mind of a pervert there must seem little difference between the “legal” vice of homosexuality and the “illegal” vice of child abuse. Therefore the licence given to adult homosexuals may be being paid for by the abuse of children.
Christian morality is simple and easy to understand, even if difficult to fulfill. All sexual activity is forbidden outside the lawful marriage of a (non-transgender) man and woman. So a man who is trying to follow the Law of God will check his sexual impulses, whatever the age or sex of the object of his lust. Modern “morality”, on the other hand, says: “You can do this and this and this (which was forbidden for your parents), and you can even “come out” about it and be proud of it, but you can’t do that unless you want to land up in prison (because he or she is too young). At first sight, there appears to be little logic in these distinctions, and no motivation to fulfill this “law”.
Nevertheless, let us try and find some logic in modern morality. The general principle seems to be: you can do what you want provided you do not harm another person in doing it (this is a version of John Stuart Mill’s “Harm Principle”). Therefore all sexual acts involving just yourself are permitted. However, sexual acts with another person must be consensual. Rape is by definition non-consensual; sex with children must be presumed to be non-consensual because the child is probably too immature to understand what is happening and too weak to resist if he does. In accordance with this criterion, adultery is wrong because it harms the betrayed husband or wife. However, fornication and polygamy (for Muslims) are alright.
Now let us examine the contradictions here… First, why should all sexual acts involving just yourself be harmless? In Christian societies masturbation (or onanism, the sin of the Biblical figure Onan) was always assumed to be harmful, stunting and warping a man’s sexual development because it placed sexual pleasure outside the context of a loving married relationship. This idea has been mocked by modern liberal educationalists. However, recent psychological research suggests that the watching of online pornography leading to masturbation leads also to impotence. One young man found that he had to watch more and more extreme and violent pornography in order to produce the same physical reaction, and that he had trouble finding girls attractive as his sexuality “was completely wired to porn”.[2]
Now it is already well-known that there is a direct connection between watching violent porn and paedophilia. This new research suggests that it also damages the man himself, making him impotent. So there is truth in the traditional view after all – and we have not even begun to talk about the consequences for a man’s relationship with God…
What about homosexuality? It is said that this is “moral” so long as it is between two consenting adults, and that it does harm neither to them nor to society as a whole. But is that true?
One obvious harmful effect is HIV, which is clearly that `”penalty” of which St. Paul says: “men with men committing that which is shameful, receiving in themselves [i.e. in their own bodies] the penalty of their error which was due” (Romans 1.27). HIV is mainly, although not exclusively, spread by homosexual activity. For that very rational reason homosexuality remains a criminal offence in several African countries. Not so in the West! Why? It is difficult to find a rational answer to this question. After all, smoking has long ago been banned in the West because of its proven links to lung cancer; it is a health threat both to smokers and to those “passive smokers” who inhale their smoke. For similar reasons we place severe restrictions on the use of poisons and (except in the USA) guns; and we do not allow people to drive faulty cars or other kinds of potentially lethal machinery. But no restrictions whatsoever are placed on homosexual behavior, which kills just as surely (on average, homosexuals die much younger than heterosexuals). Of course, “safe sex” is encouraged in our society - but is not compulsory, and very often not practised. Moreover, vast amounts of money are poured into research on HIV, and HIV patients demand to have the latest medicines even if they are very expensive – and that money could be used more cost-effectively on other kinds of illness. Again, homosexual couples are allowed and even encouraged to adopt children, although this deprives the child of the vitally important experience – vitally important for his normal psychological development - of growing up with both a mother and a father.
Another example of the inconsistencies of western sexual morality is abortion. Not only in Christian societies, but in very many other cultures, this is considered a crime and murder. It harms both the mother, who very often suffers profound psychological consequences, and of course the child, who is murdered in an excruciatingly painful way and is deprived of the possibility of life on earth (if not in heaven – there is some evidence that God counts aborted babies as having been baptized in their own blood). The usual argument in favour of abortion is that it is the woman’s own body and she can do what she likes with it. But even from a purely physiological point of view it is manifestly not her own body, since its cells have a different DNA from hers.
Between them, abortion and homosexuality are turning the West into a giant geriatric hospital from which the young people are disappearing. Soon, if it is not destroyed by nuclear bombs, the West will perish for these causes alone. So why are they tolerated, and even celebrated?
“Human rights” cannot be the answer. For human rights is simply the philosophy that everything I want I have the right to have. Behind this adult infantilism, this philosophical “justification” of complete selfishness and hedonism, there must lie something deeper…
That something deeper is: Satan. Being, as the Lord says, “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8.44), he wishes to kill us – first spiritually, by either making us commit mortal sins that lead us after death into hell and the fire of gehenna, or simply by “approving of those who commit them” (Romans 1.31), and then physically, through abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia and suicide (another mortal sin that the West no longer disapproves of, but considers a “right”) – all justified through the insanely cruel and stupid philosophy of “human rights”. Indeed, the West may be said to have been seduced by Satan into committing a slow collective suicide through its new, disastrous and completely irrational and contradictory system of “morality”. And the root of it all is its loss of faith in the one True God, Who alone can be the foundation of a true and consistent morality.
Nietzsche said, already over 150 years ago, that “God is dead”. But, madman and antichrist though he was, it is often forgotten that he said this with regret and even in despair, for he knew that it would lead to also to the death of all that was great and heroic in human life. Hence his desperate attempt to build a new system of morality going beyond the old system of good and evil. It would be based on pride in man alone, but would still exalt self-sacrificial heroism and denigrate the cheap materialism that he saw all around him. His contemporary Dostoyevsky said, “Without God, everything is permitted”. But Nietzsche spent his tragic life trying to prove the great Russian wrong, that although God was dead, some things were still not permitted. He failed, and yet it is not Nietzsche’s failure, but the contemporary West’s “success”, that has conclusively proved Dostoyevsky right. For it has shown that one can build a godless society in which everything is permitted, that there is a kind of “morality” that involves no sacrifice or self-restraint whatsoever, and that there is absolutely no heroism, or anything even remotely honourable, in hedonism…
August 4/17, 2106.
The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.
[1] Stanford, The Sunday Telegraph (London), August 14, 2016, p. 23.
[2] Rosie Taylor, “Online porn harms young men’s health”, Daily Mail (London), August 16, 2016, p. 7.