Ghastly

I have been tempted to write about my fears that Western Civilization may have reached an inflection point.  No one wants to read Chicken Little analysis and there have always been signs of decadence to point to and they have always been overblown. Even when the West seemed to be on its heels as it was during the early days of WWII, it always was able to gather itself and mount a comeback.

I was fortunate to have William H. McNeill as a professor in college, one of the world's most preeminent historians, and author of The Rise of the West.  I was too young and too immature to fully grasp what a gift he was, but I absorbed enough to understand the miracle of Western Civilization and the victory of the Enlightenment, liberty and of the individual over the State and tyranny.  And with that victory, the superiority of the value of the individual human life over statist aims in all circumstances was established.  The obvious polar opposite was Nazi Germany where state aims grossly and horrifyingly took the lives of millions.

But a few news items recently caught my attention (but did not get much play in the mainstream media) to give me pause about the state of Western Civilization.

The first was the revelation that UK hospitals were using the remains of aborted fetuses to heat hospitals.  The issue of abortion is a difficult one....more difficult than the true believers on each side of the debate would have you believe.  I have flip flopped on that issue several times during my lifetime.  But treating these remains as fuel is ghastly and sick - even if you think a fetus is "pre-human."  It is something out of Soylent Green, demeaning to humans and too reminiscent of Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen to be tolerated in the West.

The second news item was the revelation that the US EPA has been conducting experiments humans and that subjects were not fully informed of the risks of certain pollutants.  The testing allowed researchers to pump "gaseous pollutants at precise concentrations" into enclosed chambers.  The State conducting experiments that risked the health of the subjects.  Move over, Dr. Mengele.  Again, this was barely mentioned in the mainstream media.

The third item was the murder conviction of Kermit Gosnell, who apparently hideously murdered live babies at his abortion clinic.  Of course, while he was convicted, there was no outcry for more regulation and more supervision at abortion clinics.  We have a State that regulates light bulbs, microwave ovens, toilet tanks, plastic bags, mortgages applications, gasoline content, ad infinitum.  If this "house of horrors" (prosecution's words) had occurred in any other context, there would be a hew and cry for an army of regulators and there would be an avalanche of new regulations and probably a new regulatory body.  But it is about abortion and we hear nary a peep.

Taken together, these three items are very troubling to me--troubling because of the paucity of press coverage they received; troubling because of the callousness with which life is being treated by the State and the press; troubling because they are acts that echo the acts of the most inhuman regime in modern history. And they are barely mentioned.

Are my fears that these things do not portend well for the West overblown?  Perhaps.  But these items give me a very queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.