The Western Cult Of Death - I Change My Mind

After the recent passing into New York law of The Reproductive Health Act, I read the book “Second Opinion” by a Birmingham, UK doctor going under the pen-name of “Theodore Dalrymple.”

The doctor’s experiences working in hospital and the nearby prison ought to convince most readers that not only should capital punishment be reintroduced, it should be revived on a massive scale. He himself is opposed, but merely because there would have to be a gallows on every street corner to accommodate deserving cases: the drink- and drug-addled violent, thieving layabouts who impregnate their women and then throw them down the stairs or kick them in the stomach to get rid of the unwanted results of sex; or abandon mother and child shortly after the birth, leaving them to Society’s care.

Away with tentative moral argumentation about immediate-post-partum termination; let’s really go for it, Deuteronomy-style: infants, teens, young adults…

Below the duties to God, and above all the duties to one’s fellows – even the proscription of murder, comes the Commandment to honour your father and mother; and like the other nine, it is lethally enforced:

18 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:

19 Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;

20 And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.

21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

[I'm not sure whether we could involve adults who are in loco parentis, but there could be interesting implications for discipline in schools.]

Note, by the way, that the son need not be a mere child. A worthless, disobedient wastrel can be terminated at any age.

But why wait for a plaintiff to bring a case to court? As in other fields, let us replace complaint-driven processes with bureaucratic regulation and oversight. Fabian Socialist, George Bernard Shaw proposed a periodic, systematic reassessment of all citizens:

Where would we be without our thinkers?

Instead of bleating about the sacredness of human life, let’s admit that whereas (it used to be said) life was cheap in the East, here we are well on the way to declaring it completely valueless. Or, at least, a commodity to be priced against its utility to other people, and rejected if overpriced.

It’s particularly wonderful that religion need not come into the debate any longer. Reason alone, based on financial calculations rather than Enlightenment principles that themselves have no objective foundation, justifies the slaughter of, not the sinner or the criminal, but the expensive and inconvenient. An extra bonus is that we could then dispense with hypocritical excuses (“health” etc) – we can proceed openly and without self-deception, honed blades of rationality.

We will get there.

Won’t we?