Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (49 page)

The only thing that is forbidden is expressing disapproval about any other man or his way of life. Since man is fallen, the only thing forbidden is to recognize that man is fallen, or to seek some mystic water to wash away the stain of sin. The only thing forbidden is to seek salvation.

The Alliance

Now the great question is, if the Ideologues hate the worldliness of the Worldly Man, and if the Spiritualists hate the atheism of the Ideologues, and likewise the Worldly Man hates the injustice and greed of the Ideologue and the fuzzy-headed nonsense of the Spiritualist, why do they all agree with the default assumption of the Nihilist that truth is private and faith is in vain?

That is not what puzzled me. That is as obvious as the Sahara sun at noon at Summer solstice. Christ is critical of the Worldly Man, with his preoccupation with wealth and efficiency and his coldness to the poor. Christ condemns the Ideologue for his pride and greed and general bloodthirstiness. Christ has no dealings with the various witches and wizards which comprise the Spiritualists, who cannot accept the shocking statement that He is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. The witches insist that all the roads eventually lead to heaven, including the road paved with good intentions.

All parties in corruption agree that the Church is the enemy. Those who are not in open rebellion against Christ are at least in a position of discomfort, for they think that to speak or act in defense of Christ, or to rebuke slanders against Him, is in bad taste, is inappropriate, cannot be taught in public schools, cannot be said on public airwaves, and merely causes discontent and commotion in the public square. Those who are Christian in name only think Christ is a private matter, not to be discussed nor defended in public. The atheists among the Ideologues and the Witches among the Spiritualists have a guilt complex about rejecting and reviling the faith of their fathers, and are sickened when they look in the mirror and see themselves destroying Western Civilization, so they revile Christ either with the bellowing anger of a mad thing, or with the smirking, sneering, anonymous cowardice like that of a graffiti artist painting swastikas on Jewish headstones, but who runs away, giggling, at the sound of a footstep.

All parties differ only in degree and approach. They all like one part of the Christian teaching, but differ on which part. The Worldly Man says Christ established not one church, but many, and He meant religion to be a matter of private conscience only. The Worldly Man likes and will keep the teaching of Imago Dei, that all men are created equal. He will not keep the teaching that life on Earth is vanity, merely preparation for life in heaven, and that wealth is vain. The Ideologue likes the teaching of common property as seen among the Apostles, and likes compassion for the poor, but he will not keep the teaching that Christ is divine; the Spiritualist will not keep the teaching that there is but one Christ.

All parties are agreed on the one point. They are for the spirit of Antichrist.

The Puzzle

As I said, it was a great puzzle to me as to why anyone should so vehemently continue with this process of corruption. Logically the only thing for a Nihilist to do, once he is convinced that nothing is real and nothing is worth enduring life to achieve, is find some pleasing method of suicide, perhaps an overdose of morphine during an orgy, and slay himself at once. If he is too uncourageous for the manly suicide of paganism, at least he can shut the hell up and leave the rest of us, the decent and sane people not obsessed with the terror of the void, to live our lives in decency and sanity. But no. The accusations never cease. The servants of the nothingness never tire. And they never shut up, and never stop shouting at us to shut up. What gives?

Ours is not the first age to adore and support totalitarianism, but ours is the first to support totalitarianism in the name of liberty. Ours is not the first Dark Age, where ancient learning was lost; but ours is the first where ancient learning was lost not due to the collapse of civilization, but deliberately, willingly, purposefully, as if to bring about collapse.

Those who oppose this darkness and seek to preserve the sinking wreck of civilization, or even, by heaven’s aid, to float it again, the men of logic and reason, we are their enemies, and they hate us with an extravagant, absurd hatred and contempt. Meanwhile they are busily drilling holes in the deck in hopes of letting the water drain out.

And I suddenly realized why the soulless ones never stop drilling holes in the Titanic, no matter how clear it is that the ice-choked water means death for us all. They have nothing else.

I will not impose upon the patience of the reader by listing everything that fell into place once this key thought unlocked the pattern to me. I will mention but the three discussions that provoked the thought in me.

First Discussion: Why are we still discussing this?

The first conversation concerned that never-ending favorite topic among modern writers, how to write strong female characters.

Anyone unwise enough to be reading my essays is weary and over-weary of my opinions on this boring topic, which I have flogged to death. I will repeat them one more time here, just out of a sheer sense of impish perversity: I think female characters should be realistic and interesting if you are writing a realistic story, should be unrealistic and interesting if you are writing an unrealistic story, but in both cases should be interesting, because no one wants an uninteresting story.

By ‘realistic’ I mean feminine female characters; by ‘unrealistic’ I mean superheroine characters.

The conversation in this case was even more boring, because, as it turns out, the solution of making women characters willing and able to drink beer, kick ass, and blow up the Death Star as gallantly as a male character has fallen into disfavor as a type of tokenism.

The Progressives have been given strong female characters in every genre from detective novels to horror movies to space opera, but, to no one’s surprise but their own, this is not satisfactory. Now they want realistic superheroines, who are feminine but not feminine; the superheroines must be equal to men but not different from men and at the same time different from men, ever keeping in mind that all differences are signs of inequality.

So the female character, to satisfy the demands of modern politics, cannot be a realistic heroine as Antigone, Penelope, Deborah, Vasilisa the Wise, Juliet Capulet, or Natasha Rostova; nor be an unrealistic superheroine as Buffy or Ripley or Supergirl.

The conversation then suggested that real feminist icons should be characters like Oracle, aka Batgirl, after she is paralyzed and consigned to a wheelchair. Or Buffy’s Mom who dies of a heart attack.

So a cripple and a dead single mom are the new icons of true womanhood. This, from persons who alleged themselves to be supporters of womankind.

The conversation about how to put strong female characters in stories is boring because it is a conversation, beneath its mask, about how to use stories not to serve virtue, truth, and beauty, or even how to serve a well-crafted entertainment to a paying customer, but how to disguise propaganda to advance Progressive causes, that is, to advance the abolition of man.

The complaint was that making heroines too masculine suppressed the femininity of the heroines, and that THIS was now, suddenly, a sign of patriarchal oppression; whereas last season, making the heroines feminine was a sign of patriarchal oppression.

But the conversation turned an interesting corner, and asked why it was that the conversation on this topic is never-ending. I mentioned only that the conversation was never-ending because what was being asked of writers was logically absurd, due to the natural tendency of women toward femininity and the natural tendency of men toward masculinity, not to mention the natural tendency of the readers to admire and love manly men and womanly women as characters.

At this point, I was corrected, not as if I had offered an alternate opinion, but as if I had uttered an inexplicable and inexcusable mistake of certain and uncontested scientific fact, as socially awkward as believing the earth was flat. With a note of honest surprise, I was informed in a peremptory fashion that masculinity is cultural.

I do not think I laughed aloud, but I did call it nonsense.

Also, as if a flashbulb had ignited in my brain, I suddenly saw the source of the bitterness and discontent of the modern world.

The conversation on how to portray women can never come to an end as long as the modern idea of womanhood is unnatural. The feminists can never get what they want, because what they want is as impossible as a circular triangle.

By ‘feminine’ I mean all the characteristics of female genius feminists hate, namely, temperance, justice, prudence, fortitude, but also compassion, insight, loyalty, maidenly modesty and matronly dignity. Femininity means taking an indirect rather than a direct approach, being neither a braggart nor a whiner, being a support and sustenance, a healing and an inspiration. The female approach is to get you not only to do your chores but to want to do your chores; it is more concerned with motives than results. Femininity is a genius that turns children into adults and savage and shaggy bachelors into civilized and domesticated men. Femininity is delicate and fine. It means being damned sexy, which means being nubile, fertile, and fecund; and it means being romantic.

Feminists, at least as represented by their spokesmonsters, prefer women be aggressive, manly, boastful, foul-mouthed, ruthless, crude, cruel, whorish, shameless, sterile, selfish, and alone.

Feminists want women not only to be childless, but to kill their own helpless children in the womb with a bloodthirsty infanticidal mania difficult to understand and impossible to overestimate. Feminists feel about the unborn the way Nazis felt about Jews. They blame the unborn for everything and promise that the Final Solution of Planned Non-Parenthood will solve everything. It seems more like a brain disease than a sober philosophical or political posture.

To those who object that feminism is nothing more than the proposal that women should be equal to men, I reply that since the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 and the Nineteenth Amendment of 1915, women have been equal in the eyes of the law to men. Few or none number the feminists who speak against the misogynistic inequality of Islam, or speak against the adultery of Bill Clinton, because so-called feminists these days are merely apparatchiks of the Democrat Party. When women’s rights clash with Progressive strategic or tactical goals, the modern feminist lifts no hand in defense of women’s rights, utters no word.

Whatever it may have been at one time, feminism is no longer the proposal that women should be equal to men. It is now the proposal that men are evil and women are helpless victims locked in a remorseless death-struggle for supremacy, and the only hope for women to prevail is totalitarianism in government, socialism in economics, political correctness in speech and thought, and the abolition of man.

But, of course, the abolition of man means the abolition of woman as well.

There are the same four steps involved. First is the Worldly philosophy, where the attempt of the suffragette begins as the perfectly reasonable and perfectly just demand that they be granted the vote.

Second, the Worldly feminist becomes an Ideologue. Feminism becomes a paranoid neurosis once the idea takes root that any source of difference between men and women is a lurking threat to equality, or a potential excuse to rob women of their rights. All differences are abolished and unisex is the order of the day.

Third, a retreat into Mystical feminism, from paranoia to extreme gullibility, where women are told that full expressions of their womanhood include sexual liberation, including sex with strangers; and at the same time, all gallantry is sexual harassment, all men are rapists.

Finally, the paranoid neurosis and gullible neurosis falls into full blown screaming psychosis once the self-contradiction involved becomes clear, (namely, the self-contradiction of making women homogenous with men while preserving their unique feminine differences which make them women).

The only thing left to do, once women are told BOTH to act like women and never to act like women, is to revise the view of women into pure victims: hence the turn of the conversation toward cripples and victims and dead mothers. And this final stage is Nihilism, where the only thing to admire about women is nothing.

When I was told by someone who, again, I admire and to whom I mean no disrespect, that masculinity and femininity
OF COURSE!
were nothing but cultural artifacts, not based in nature, the first of three tumblers clicked into place in my mind.

Of course they do not believe in nature. Of course they think man is infinitely malleable, can be turned from anything into anything else. If man cannot be trained to be unisex, and if women cannot be trained to be happy, then man by his own efforts cannot break the curse of human nature, nor can women be free of their unfortunate, (unfortunate from the point of view of the Nihilist), desire to serve and suffer for the men in their lives, to be loving and giving, to submit to the leadership of their bridegroom.

Once one accepts the premise that all differences are inequalities, there is no such thing as two complementary sexes. If either differs from the other, then one is superior, (ergo a sadistic oppressor bent on exploitation and destruction on the second), and one is inferior, (ergo a victim whose only hope of freedom is the destruction of the first). Therefore if all differences cannot be removed by social engineering, by changing laws and customs, by peaceful education or forced injections of hormones, why, then, no peace between the sexes is possible, and all dreams of women’s freedom from the horrific bondage of being a woman are dashed, and the ecstatic vision of unisex utopia fades like a mirage. Horrors!

If they did not think mankind endlessly open to endless improvements, then the endless improvements needed to cure all the ills and sorrows of the human condition are out of reach forever.