An Age That Knows No Shame
The celebrated 17th century wit François de La Rochefoucauld once opined, “hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue”. In other words, we lie about what we are doing because we’re wise enough, at least, to be ashamed of it. What can we say, however, about an age that knows no shame?
I’m referring here to an article from Britain’s Daily Mail, whose headline blares:
Forget baby showers! Young couples are holding 'vasectomy parties' to celebrate the start of a childless family, and ask guests to name their CAR instead
While the Daily Mail further tells us that “The cost of having children is deterring a growing number of couples from expanding the family unit”, the comments of the seemingly happily self-sterilized couples in the article suggest other motives:
Instead of the traditional baby shower, couples also invite friends to 'car showers' where guests help them name their new car.
They also play board games like The Price Is Right, where they talk about what they can buy now that they've saved money by not having kids.
Clearly, it’s not that they don’t have money, they simply would rather spend their cash on toys for themselves than on their own progeny.
Now, in order to equate one’s child with a car - or not really equate, actually to value one’s own child as less than a car - one must engage in a certain amount of dehumanization. We can’t simply say that “I prefer playthings to my own sons and daughters”, so we instead we say things like:
‘All a baby shower is a party to celebrate that you had sex,' wrote another user [of the blog WereNotHavingABaby.com]. 'That a sperm managed to hit a fertile egg. A vasectomy shower is a party to celebrate soon to be sex.’
Nobody, including almost certainly the person who first wrote it, really thinks that a baby shower is intended to celebrate “That a sperm managed to hit a fertile egg”. People have baby showers to celebrate the creation of new life, to welcome a new member of the family, and as a way of sharing that life with the wider community. A “vasectomy shower”, likewise, doesn’t celebrate “soon to be sex”, it “celebrates” the decision to render that sex barren and empty, a meaningless self-indulgence. It is an attempt to glorify, or maybe better yet justify, saying “no” to life.
Not all vasectomy party supporters put the matter quite so crassly, of course; some aim for a more reasonable-sounding tone. One woman, for instance posted the comment:
I had swallowed the motherhood mandate hook, line, and sinker and I had never given myself the space and time to question whether I really, really want children.
In some ways this last comment is sadder than the in-your-face defiance the more outrageous sterilization promoters. She seems to have truly come to believe the current conventional wisdom that what she “really, really wants” should be the paramount thing. There is no sense that she owes anything to any children she might otherwise bear, to her family, to her community, or to her God.
Non Serviam!
We all want what we want, of course: that’s the way of our fallen human nature. Our wishes and desires are among our strongest motivators. At the same time, healthy societies have always recognized that if they are to flourish, or even just survive, more is required. Individuals need to see their own fulfillment as tied in with and subordinate to that of their society. There have always been positive incentives (calls to heroism, public acclaim, etc.), and also negative consequences: our modern word “idiot” comes from the Greek ἰδιώτης (“idiotes”), from the adjective meaning “one’s own”. The idiot was one who rejected the community to make his own way and set his own standards.
Gustav Dore's depiction of Satan cast down from Heaven |
That history is important, because it means that our current state of shamelessness is of a different order than that of the age of Caligula and Nero. The Romans of two thousand years ago were rejecting the the human wisdom of their forbears, which was foolish and destructive: one consequence is that the old patrician nobility of Rome, including families that had been prominent for centuries, virtually died out by the end of the first century A.D. In our case, we are rejecting not mere human wisdom, but Divine teaching and the example of God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, his gift of Himself offered up for us on the Cross. We are following a different example, that of Satan, into whose mouth the poet John Milton puts the words, Non Serviam!, “I will not serve!”.
Giving The Devil His Due
We don’t see these exact words come from the Devil’s mouth in the Bible, but they had been associated with him long before Milton composed Paradise Lost because they so accurately sum up the nature of Satan’s rebellion. And they do in fact come from Sacred Scripture, in the book of Jeremiah, where we see the prophet chastising the wayward people of Judah:
Your wickedness will chasten you, and your apostasy will reprove you. Know and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the LORD your God; the fear of me is not in you, says the Lord GOD of hosts. "For long ago you broke your yoke and burst your bonds; and you said, 'I will not serve.' Yea, upon every high hill and under every green tree you bowed down as a harlot. Yet I planted you a choice vine, wholly of pure seed. How then have you turned degenerate and become a wild vine?” (Jeremiah 2:19-21)
Michelangelo's "Jeremiah" |
Since Non Serviam (as it appears in the Latin Vulgate translation) so perfectly captures the attitude that led Lucifer to his fall, these words naturally came to be associated with the Devil. To take it a little further, if it was “evil and bitter” for God’s chosen people to abandon his ways, surely it is the same for us Christians, who also were planted “as a choice vine, wholly of pure seed.” The chastisement that inevitably flows from our collective refusal to Christ’s call to self-sacrifice is abundantly clear, if we’re willing to see it. It is evident in the disintegration of the institution of the family and all the needless misery that follows, we can see it in the dying populations of the formerly Christian countries of Europe and, soon, North America, and in many other social ills. Even worse, it is manifested in the decline of Faith, and the likelihood that many souls will be therefore lost forever.
Principalities and Powers
Jeremiah’s image of harlotry itself fits perfectly with our present situation. After all, isn’t our era’s great refusal of our Lord’s call to service precisely about indulging sexual desire without responsibility, or consequences, or any limits that we don’t choose for ourselves? Which brings us back to the vasectomy showers, a celebration of sexual pleasure without self-sacrifice, without true union, without real love. Non Serviam! And just as Satan looks to ensnare all of us along with him in his apostasy, the public glorification of sexual rebellion in vasectomy parties is intended to break down the walls of shame in order to make the repugnant seem acceptable . . . and, ultimately, good.
Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis (Buenos Aires Herald) |
Vasectomy parties and and the like may strike us as ridiculous, but they’re not funny. They might be only a small step on the proverbial Highway to Hell, but who wants to go that way? More than that, the fact that such a thing can be reported with, apparently, no shame attaching to its promoters is a sign of how far we’ve fallen. After all, despite the carnality of the battlefield, “We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). Whose battle standard do we want to follow?
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