Peter Kreeft - How to Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas from the Cultural Abyss

How to Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas from the Cultural Abyss

PETER J. KREEFT

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Cover art:
jrwasserman, iStockphoto.com

Cover design by
Riz Boncan Marsella

2021 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-268-8 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-64229-159-9 (eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number 2020946601
Printed in the United States of America

The single most necessary thing we can possibly do to save our civilizationthe single most necessary thing citizens can ever do to save their civilization, at all times and all places and in all cultures, whether they are good or evil, religious or irreligious, ancient or modernis to have children.

If you dont have children, your civilization will cease to exist. Before you can be good or evil, religious or irreligious, you must exist.

Having children is thus the most rational thing we can do. It is also the most trans-rational thing we can do. I remember hearing someone say once that Having fits is more rational than having children. They were quite right! But the conclusion they thought followed from that (So dont have children) did not follow. Having fits is more rational than falling in love, too. And having fits is more rational than being a saint (which is falling in love with God), being a martyr, or even being a hero.

Having children is the most heroic thing we can do because nothing changes your life more than having children. Martyrdom is easy; its over quickly. Children are never over. Never. Not even if they die before you.

Children are the masters; parents are the servants. The parents life, their time, their lifetime, their money, their attention, everything, changes and orbits like a planet around the sun of their childrens needs. Having children is the single most generous, charitable, loving, unselfish, saintly Christian act that a society can perform for itself.

It is the act of self-giving, and the first thing that parents give is the first thing the parents have: existence. It is very obvious, but easily forgotten, that no subsequent giftslove, education, support, attentioncan be given if that first gift (existence) is denied, or if that gift is taken away after it is given, by murdering the children that already exist. (One-third of all children conceived in America and Canada are aborted; I think our ancestors would literally not be able to believe that fact.)

Today you hear many people in our civilizationthe one that used to be called Christendom and is now called simply modern Western civilization and whose most accurate name theologically is apostate Christendomgive an astonishing explanation, or reason, to justify not having children or killing the children they already have. You hear this especially from men, who cannot feel the child inside the womb and who can relate to the child as a real entity only after (and if) he is born. The explanation is that I wouldnt want to bring children into a world like this. Its an irresponsible act to bring children into this world.

What do they mean by that? They can mean only two possible things: that the world is bad for children either materially or spiritually.

The primary concerns of people who say this are almost always not spiritual but material. When you ask them whats wrong with the world, they never say there is not enough religion. They say there is not enough peace, prosperity, security, comfort, health care, or environmental responsibility. In other words, not enough human control over nature and human nature. They do not think that the new Baconian summum bonum of Mans conquest of Nature is overdone; they think it is underdone.

To see how blatantly hypocritical this reasoning isin other words, to see that those who say this are literally lying, at least to themselvesjust look at the facts. Of all the civilizations in the history of the world, our modern Western civilizationEurope and North Americais the very best civilization ever into which to bring children by those very materialistic standards that the people who give this excuse are using.

No civilization ever had as much money as we do. Even the moderately poor today have more stuff, and more money to buy stuff, than the moderately rich of any past civilizations.

No civilization ever had as much knowledge and power, that is, science and technology, as we have. The Baconian project has worked spectacularly well. The average person before the twentieth century experienced at least ten times as much pain, perhaps 100 times as much pain, in his life as the average person today. Health, comfort, cures, and lifespan, brought about by medical technology, are spectacularly better than ever before. That fact is not controversial, nor is its desirability.

There is still much war and violence in the world, but not nearly as much of it here in America as there is in most of the rest of the world. Americans and Europeans hesitate to visit the Middle East or Latin America or even China because of the violence and danger and repression there, but citizens of these countries do not hesitate to visit America for that reason. Millions of refugees seek to immigrate to Europe or America; almost no one wants to emigrate out of Europe or America. Not one politician in Mexico, Palestine, Syria, or China is arguing for border fences to stop the immigrants from entering.

America suffered great and terrible losses in six wars: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, two World Wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Since then, the casualty rate has been far, far less.

America also suffered a Great Depression and a great crime wave during the Great Depression. Our recent recession was mild and short, and our current crime wave, by the standards of the past, is mild and getting milder.

That is the horrible world into which people refuse to bring their children.

It looks like nothing short of Brave New World will do for them, where the control is total and the pain is nonexistent.

But in Brave New World, children are manufactured, and there are no parents or families.

So that is the logic of the secularists, the children of the Enlightenment, the people who think the world is too religious. What about the religious people? What is their take on our world?

They also judge the world as bad, but for the opposite reason: there is not enough religion; there is too much materialism. They say that the modern world is not better than the medieval world, but worse, even though it is materially richer, because it is spiritually poorer because it has lost God. They say that He counts more than refrigerators, contraceptives, airplanes, anesthetics, and even Viagra.

And yet these are the people who never say they do not want to bring children into this terrible world. They say (and do) the exact opposite: they have children, they sacrifice themselves, they lay down their lives, literally, in sexual intercourse, not just for pleasure (of course thats a given, a universal), but also for children, for others. They do not complain about there being too many others; they think there are not enough others, so they create more of them.

And by all scientific data (ask your insurance company), these peoplereligious people and people who have childrenare the happiest. Just to mention the two most obvious criteria of happiness: they live the longest, and they commit suicide the least.

So who are the enlightened ones? Who are the ones who are standing in the light, who are telling the truth about their society and about themselves?