Social Matter

Part of what makes post-war culture unusual is the emergence of the widespread taboo against death.

The development of antibiotics, vaccines, prenatal care, and advanced obstetrics has greatly reduced infant mortality. The regular occurrence of the death of an infant or child in the family has been all but eliminated, in part thanks to antibiotics but also because of increased sanitation, more reliable transportation, heating, and cooling technology.

Over time, as people have become less directly familiar with death, risks that might result in death have become more morally suspect than they were in the past. Even wars with relatively tiny numbers of casualties have become unacceptable to educated public opinion in America and Europe. The Battle of Gettysburg caused about 50,000 total casualties: only a bit less than the number of American casualties incurred throughout the entire recent war in Iraq. Foreign policy is heavily shaped by this taboo, as politicians know that the general population is unwilling to accept deaths. Ending the draft has only seemed to exacerbate this tendency, when one might otherwise it to be the opposite.

The drive towards greater socialization of medicine in the US has also been boosted by this historically odd inability to stomach death. There is an idea that, if it is possible to delay a death, any cost that can be paid is worth paying, even if that person or their family is unable to pay. The notion that it’s a moral imperative to delay death for as many living people as possible also provides moral lift to fundraising pitches for international aid organizations.

This generalized unwillingness to accept death as the natural end to life extends even to animals. People that can afford it will often spend massive sums extending the lives of their pets (which are usually cheaply replaceable compared to livestock), spending thousands of dollars on potions and surgeries for their cats and dogs.

Life itself, no matter how sickly, has been accorded excess sanctity, during exactly the period that culture as a whole has become less concerned with sacred things above humanity itself. The human creature (apart from the occasional god-emperor, priest, or saint) has rarely been regarded sacred as a thing in and of itself. The decisions to make this shift happened decades ago, and the policies put in place to support it were, also.

What it’s resulted in is a culture that does almost anything that it can to preserve the sick and dying, and little to promote the flourishing of the young and vital.

The idea of creating a society that is worth sacrificing lives for has been displaced by the idea of a society in which vitality ought to be sacrificed to keep it together. The story that the West tells itself is that, in making humanity itself a sacred idea, it has elevated itself above the past cultures that considered man to be a mostly profane thing crafted in the image of the divine.

The taboo arose in part as a reversal of the policies held by all the combatants in World War II, which was that of rigid materialism: man is just meat, and bombs are just tools for making cooked hamburger out of millions of them. America was able to build up its post-war empire by offering an alternative narrative that it affirmed the sanctity of the individual and would promote it and manage it through a system of international law that would prevent war at a similar scale and level of savagery from breaking out ever again.

That trade-off is becoming less sustainable as time goes on. Elevating life itself to a sacred value that over-rides all else promotes a lot of what could be called human life at the cost of what tends to make life worth living. You can live, but your range of action is restricted, what tends to give life meaning is regulated or otherwise discouraged, and enervation depletes the society’s organizing narratives.

The right has tended to focus much more on the ‘sacredness of life,’ but for something to be sacred, it must be something that you can sacrifice. People need to be willing to die good deaths, and we mustn’t blindly promote the idea that promoting life itself irrespective of everything else is a sensible value.

A well-ordered garden is more beautiful than a field of weeds infested by snakes. Liberalism in its terminal stage has elected to drown the garden in Miracle-Gro, putting more of it on the nettles and less of it on the roses, in the name of equality of all plants, while proclaiming tree-trimming to be cruelty.

Bringing death and its proper place in life back into the public discussion is critical to any restoration of political order to Western countries. Democracy promotes life without concern of the moral quality of those lives. Aristocracy considers moral quality to be more important than individual life, and to be elevated above life, and expects its leaders to demonstrate that when the situation demands it.