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Ancient Pagans were more forward-thinking than Modern Leftists
Consider the Astarte Figurine. Found in the thousands in Ancient Israel, these amulets were commonly worn by women to connect them to the core function of women: sexual reproduction and nurturing new life. Note the placement of the hands. These ancient idol worshippers worshipped nature itself (and so they missed the importance of relationships beyond physical requirements), but they at least understood the value of reproduction and new life.
Today’s leftist women prefer tramp stamps: they make it clear that pleasure without consequences or responsibility of any kind is their goal. Indeed, these women go to great lengths to limit or eliminate their very ability to procreate, from birth control to abortion. Who needs men? The vast majority of American women own the mechanical means to satisfy their animal urges, no icky man required. Indeed, many boast about it!
Leftists want to enjoy the moment, and they’ll do so by abandoning the future. Conservatives, ironically, are invested in the future! That is why conservatives view sex as a way to bond a man and a woman, with a key benefit of having children and then in turn growing and preserving bonds between the generations. We took the ancient pagan obsession with fecundity, and altered it to make it much more about the underlying relationships, in both physical and spiritual forms.
In the ancient world, pagan or monotheistic, children were all-important. Fecundity was the measure of a woman, just as masculinity was the measure of a man. Children were also support for the parents in their old age, when several generations of families lived together. Judaism altered this understanding, seeing children as more than merely economically useful presently and in old age. For anti-pagan pioneers like Avraham, children were meant to carry on his legacy, keepers of the ideological flame. But for everyone, children were understood to be essential. Hence, the Astarte amulets.
But that was when families were units, and children were assumed to belong to their families, a continuation of their parents.
But today, children no longer are products of their parents or family. All children are instead components of Hillary Clinton’s Village. The State. Nobody owns them. Joe Biden can claim “There is no such thing as someone else’s child.”
That is certainly the belief of those who wish to use our children to satisfy their own sexual peccadilloes. And it helps explain why women today are told to not have children, and why abortion is so central to Leftist platforms. For socialism and the Village to succeed, the family must be undermined and ultimately replaced. Your children are our children.
The family is the biggest threat to Leftism, which is why it has been undermined for decades. Leftism seeks instead to preserve the status quo (no children, and a culture of narcissistic hedonism). The fertility sought by women in the ancient world was, in a way, at least a hat-tip to the idea of change and investment in the future, in the value of populating the earth. Today’s leftist wants to depopulate the earth! They crave a mass orgy of licentiousness as a blaze of self-immolating glory before the lights go out on all of Western Civilization.
This is a core irony of the modern world. Fundamentalist Torah Jews (like myself) end up being obsessed by relationships (which are always in flux): marriage, children, and grandchildren. We are always trying to grow and change ourselves and the world around us. Which is pretty funny, because we are, in many respects as “conservative” as they come!
But secular leftists do the opposite! Modern progressives want to stop progress! This is even at the heart of their earth-worship: environmentalism seeks to preserve the status quo by stopping development of all kinds, by erasing the mark people make on the earth.
My interest in growth and change (both my own, and that of all those I come into contact with), is in direct opposition to the Leftist and pagan trope that people are essentially defined by their DNA and the group and culture in which they are raised. This innate racism comes from a common self-fulfilling belief: that we are only ever the product of our nature and nurture, and never the product of our conscious choices, acting through our free will.
That assumption feeds the self-fulfilling prophecy that we cannot grow, that we cannot change. On the contrary! We conservatives want to change ourselves: our own circumstances, our families, our relationships, our own behavior). Leftists reject the need to change themselves, insisting instead on making others conform to their wishes, their pronouns, their whims. In so doing, they seal their own eventual doom by demographics: no sane person wants to marry, let alone have children with, a selfish pig.
Leftists are the modern Shakers. They sell out the future to create a utopia today, much as unions erect walls around their profession and pull up the ladder. So they have no interest in the next generation except as playthings for their own pleasures. If it wrecks someone else’s family, so much the better.
The ancient pagans got a lot wrong. There is a reason the Torah forbids idols like Astarte Figurines. But those pagans at least understood that there was still a basic and fundamental value to be found in creating, nurturing, and growing new life.
[an @iwe, @eliyahumasinter and @kidcoder work]
Published in General
Ancient societies of any stripe lived much closer to the bone than we do now. Any philosophy or system of belief and way of living did have to actually work — for the most part, we do not hear of “spiteful mutant” societies embedded within larger successful societies capable of keeping the sewage away from the food and the invaders away from the women.
We needed Progress in order for that level of stupidity to flourish.
The essentially evil, anti-life sentiment the progressive movement and now our government has embraced leaves me speechless. They go on, doing things that will kill people and claim it is to save the Earth.
Years ago, in college, I read something that said “and movements that we know are evil, like environmentalism..” I admit I only remember that fragment. At the time, I thought the sentiment was absurd. Now I know it is truth. What we need is to preserve the world for the benefit and procreation of all mankind.
And net zero is just evil. If imposed (I am hopeful it will not), it will kill millions if not billions.
Just so. Hunter-gatherers didn’t have a lot of job opportunities but for those two, while agrarian societies knew where their bread was buttered and that was on the farm.
Now we have incredibly complex systems that offer jobs that are so far from the soil that people don’t really even believe in food production as something fundamental.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first divorce from reality, or words to that effect.
You make a solid and consistent point. But I think:
True. The “modern progressive” argument is that they are newer than the established system, and thus better, more advanced, and improved. And they are even named “progressive”, so of course it’s progress.
The Bidens have perfected the hunter-gathering skills.
I think that the bigger problem today is not the communitarianism suggested by Hillary’s “Village,” but rather the individualist view. In the extreme individualist view, children are considered autonomous actors, with no duties to family, community, or state, and no connection to our history and traditions.
There is a glaring inconsistency in what we typically call the Left, in their mixture of communitarianism and individualism. What they generally seem to want, though, is individualism — with someone else paying for it. They don’t value genuine community.
However, a similar inconsistency exists among conservatives, inside what we typically call the Right. There is a divide between the traditional conservatives, who value family, community, and state, and the libertarians, who do not.
In fairness, some of the libertarians claim to value family in their private lives, but they view the state and community as having little or no important role in society. I think that this is a mistake.
iWe, I wonder if you’re a fan of Yoram Hazony. I listened to an interview of Hazony yesterday by the Telegraph (YouTube link here), in which he discussed this issue. Hazony claimed, as I have, that Buckley’s “fusionism” was a mistake. He described it as a coalition between conservatives (meaning something like Burkean, traditional conservatives) and the anti-communist Liberals (something like the libertarians). The result was a movement that advocated traditional values in private, but not in public.
Hazony’s observation, if I understood him correctly, was that this did not work. That is my impression, as well. He pointed out that at the “end of history” at the collapse of Communism, conservatism had been destroyed by “fusionism.” All that was left were the Liberals.
By this, I think that he meant that only Liberalism was ascendant in the intellectual and media class, with very few traditionalists. There were still many people who were traditional conservatives, but they lacked a spokesman or political voice. This explains both the Brexit and Trump phenomena.
I know, it remains bizarre to me that Donald Trump, of all people, ended up being the spokesman for the traditionalists. He hasn’t lived like one himself. But he seems to either have many of those values, or to have identified an underserved political market and positioned himself to take advantage of it.
To be a wee bit contrarian, I think the Leftist philosophy and lifestyle attracts people who are basically troubled and do not love themselves.
Few people realize the extent of the number of people who come from troubled , dysfunctional families- it’s now well over half the population. And aside from some very strong individuals, most children raised in these troubled, dysfunctional become emotionally wounded and troubled themselves.
So often among these emotionally wounded and troubled is this trndency to be angry at those who are enjoying life , living stable and fulfilling lives and not enduring the emotional pain they are. It’s s kind of “why me?” Victimhood. These troubled with this kind of victimhood self feeling have a sense that it is just not fair that they are enduring all this pain and these well adjusted are not, so they, the troubled have all these urges to lash out and inflict pain on others as so as to mete out sort of cosmic Justice on those who are not as troubled as they are.
The other tendency of the troubled is a very strong need to control situations and other people which comes from a childhood need to control and make right the horrible dysfunctions they endured as a child.
So if you accept these two concepts and extrapolate them to the population at large where there is this ideology that has a preference for controlling and punishing people unlike them all in the name of compassion or some other “helping” rot, you likely will find millions who find a kinship in that ideology and who will be strongly drawn to this ideology because it fulfills what they think are their psychological needs.
This an important and poignant point, well-stated.
I can’t tell, iWe, if you are being serious or sarcastic. You paint with too broad of a brush and you end up with a cartoonish vision of the world rather than any model that is helpful.
Yes, the “progressives” have it exactly backwards. Earth was created for humans to come here and live and procreate and learn and teach and form families. We are not the invaders of the system. This system was made for us. As I grow older (some of my grandchildren are in college…) I realize that our children and our grandchildren are the things we most cherish! They are the most important thing of all.
Many years ago, I was frustrated with one of our children and upset that this person was in a phase where church was being rejected. I wanted to insist on attendance. But my wise husband (who had been a rebellious young person) said to me, “If you force it right now, then it will become a negative memory. Someday, [the offspring] might really need church, and you don’t want it to be that. Let it go right now so that it will be something recalled with a good feeling.” Wow. That was very powerful. This child has become an adult that still loves and trusts us and is an important part of our family—not someone alienated by my insistence.
Yes, intimate relationships can be pleasurable…and even more pleasurable with someone that loves and cherishes you and wants to build their life with you. It can create a bond that moves past the physical into a spiritual type of closeness. You two, those children, your lives…it’s all planned to be that way by our loving Father in Heaven. Thank you for writing this!