Rod Dreher: The Shadow Of One Dark Wing

[Kamaji]

The Shadow Of One Dark Wing

C.S. Lewis knew as far back as 1945 that the post-Christian West was descending into a long midnight

Rod Dreher
Feb 2, 2023

"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk," wrote Hegel. His point was that true historical understanding only becomes possible as the phenomenon we wish to understand is in the past. We are only now beginning to learn what the passing of Christianity out of the West means.

Ever heard of "whole body gestation"? It's the idea of women choosing to donate their bodies -- brains dead, but otherwise intact, and the plug on life support not yet pulled -- to be impregnated, and to bring a baby to term for a couple that wants one. I learned about it through this tweet:

https://twitter.com/santspliego/status/1620417997503602690

Here's a link to the bioethics journal article where the idea is bruited.

Some years back, when I was writing The Benedict Option, a senior physician who worked at the time in a top medical facility in the US, told me that as a believing Christian, he was horrified by the things he could see coming down the pipeline. He said he knew a few other believing Christians on staff, and would take them aside and try to engage them in conversation about this stuff. He said every one of them shut down. Their cognitive dissonance was overwhelming. He came to realize that they had to live in denial about what they were participating in to be able to maintain their careers and their faith. He no longer works at that facility.

I'm just about to finish C.S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength. I finally got around to reading it at the strong urging of "Will," the ex-occultist I mentioned in my previous post. He said that the prophetic vision that Lewis lays out in that novel tracks very closely to what he learned from the demonic intelligences with whom he was in close contact during the years he worshiped them. Lewis's novel, the third in his Space Trilogy, centers on the NICE, an organization of scientists and social planners that endeavors to control humanity through technology and rationality, eliminating all things that are truly human. Ultimately, they are in service of demonic intelligences. The battle to stop NICE, then, is ultimately a spiritual battle. Will said that this is pretty much what the plans of the demons are to destroy us. Is he crazy? Maybe. But I don't think so. For one thing, I believe in demons, and for another, I know a lot more about Will than I can say here, and I believe he was genuinely in touch with evil potencies, at a very high level. He no longer is, but is living out a very painful recovery.

*  *  *

We have gone very far down this road. Reading Lewis last night, the hero of his novel says towards the end (no spoilers) that the West has been lost to Christianity, and wherever the West touches in the world, the light of truth fades. A passage:

"You do not understand," he said. "The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their mother and from the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is all over [the Earth]."

*  *  *

Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-shadow-of-one-dark-wing/

[jmyrlefuller]

Treating corpses as incubators so people who want children can have them: if that's not satanic, what is? It's the total instrumentalization of human life. But then, we laid the groundwork for that the first time we made a baby in a test tube. The principle is established; the only question is how far we will go in realizing it.

Notwithstanding the fact that, if this were ever to happen, it would only be available to the wealthiest people...

...the fact that this is even necessary is the real tragedy. And yes, something like this IS a necessary development, because the West and much of the developed East is rapidly abandoning child-bearing.

I read this morning a story about a wealthy man in Singapore who resorted to lawsuits against women who romantically rejected him. Singapore has a replacement rate of 0.8 births per woman. This is because, much like its Chinese cousins, Singapore overreacted to the baby boom with strict family planning measures that limited families to two children. Now they can't get those numbers back up. (I'll note that, thanks to the Supreme Court, the introduction of birth control had similar effect here in America, without the dictatorships of East Asia.) Apparently "involuntary celibacy" is an epidemic there.

It is the men who have been spurned by the indulgent, narcissistic and selfish women of this generation--one need only look at the exit poll crosstabs from 2022's elections to prove my point--who are in most dire need of an alternative to a traditional family that their female peers have denied them. Or, should I say as one of those men, us.

This is not a viable solution. There would never be anywhere near enough women in such a situation, let alone any who would even think of letting their bodies be used by men when permanently unconscious (the west would call that rape) to fulfill the high demand for incubation.

But from a theoretical standpoint, if artificial gestation could be made available on a scale wide enough that "incels" such as myself could access it... it would lead to massive revolution. I can only dream of such a day.

[Fishrrman]

j myrle lamented:
"something like this IS a necessary development, because the West and much of the developed East is rapidly abandoning child-bearing."

This is a problem that will eventually resolve by itself.
Perhaps not for another 150-200 years, however.

Unfortunately, by that time at least one race may be in danger of disappearing entirely. Can you guess which one that is?