By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, June 26, 2022
It is a myth about the Spartans and babies.
You can blame Frank Miller’s 300 — or,
if you are a more literary type, you can blame Plutarch — but the legend of
Spartans’ killing sickly or deformed newborns by throwing them off a cliff or
abandoning them to die alone in the wilderness doesn’t seem to be true. A spot
once thought to be the place where unwanted children were thrown to their
deaths did turn out to be full of human bones, but these were mostly the bones
of adult men, and the site seems to have been a place of execution for
criminals and prisoners of war. Another site was indeed found to be full of the
bones of children, some of them newborns and some of them many months or a few
years old, a discovery that is horrifyingly consistent with what we know and
what we can guess about infant and childhood mortality in the ancient world,
when as many as half of the children born died before reaching puberty.
Perhaps the Spartans were not quite as savage as we have
been led to believe. But ours is a savage world, and it always has been.
In The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer explored the subject
of human sacrifice at great length in paragraphs such as this one:
The Indians of Guayaquil, in
Ecuador, used to sacrifice human blood and the hearts of men when they sowed
their fields. The people of Cañar (now Cuenca in Ecuador) used to sacrifice a
hundred children annually at harvest. The kings of Quito, the Incas of Peru,
and for a long time the Spaniards were unable to suppress the bloody rite. At a
Mexican harvest-festival, when the first-fruits of the season were offered to
the sun, a criminal was placed between two immense stones, balanced opposite
each other, and was crushed by them as they fell together. His remains were
buried, and a feast and dance followed. This sacrifice was known as “the
meeting of the stones.” We have seen that the ancient Mexicans also sacrificed
human beings at all the various stages in the growth of the maize, the age of
the victims corresponding to the age of the corn; for they sacrificed new-born
babes at sowing, older children when the grain had sprouted, and so on till it
was fully ripe, when they sacrificed old men.
Frazer’s main interest was in the rites of prehistoric
Europe, which largely were focused on fertility: the rites of human fertility,
the rites of spring, and, later, the rites associated with agriculture. The
animating idea of these rites was “homeopathic” or imitative magic, the idea
that one can achieve a desired result in the real world by performing the act,
or an analogous act, in a ritual setting. (Think of the voodoo doll, an effigy
of an enemy to which violence is done in order to torment the victim
represented.) Hence the practice of orgies at planting time and the cutting
down of sacrificial victims at the harvest.
We moderns — we modern Americans, anyway — execute our
criminals much as the Spartans did. Like the ancients Frazer documented, we
sacrifice the young when it suits some perceived social purpose, and we
increasingly are prone to follow the example of our European cousins in
sacrificing the elderly and the sick for the same reasons of convenience. The
Nazis, among other 20th-century eugenicists, cited the Spartan example of exterminating
those whose lives might be considered a drain on the state, rhetoric which
echoes even down into our own time, when abortion-rights advocates demand to
know who is going to foot the bill for all those unwanted children, as though
lack of financial resources was what ails these United States of America. The
law in the United Kingdom permits abortion up to 24 weeks into the pregnancy in
most cases — but it permits abortion up until the moment of birth for babies
with Down syndrome. Heidi Crowter, a British woman with Down syndrome, lost an
effort to have that practice ended on the grounds that it is discriminatory and
a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. There has been some
debate in the United Kingdom in recent years over the meaning of the word
“European,” but I had not thought that the words “convention,” “human,” or
“rights” were so mysterious.
The hard eugenicists of the 1930s and the soft
eugenicists of the 2020s would argue that they are different from their
superstitious antecedents in that their purposes are social and economic,
matters of public health and the public good. But the hatchet-bearing priests
who practiced human sacrifice in the darkness of our ancestral shadows also
believed themselves to be seeking economic, political, and social ends, and to
be acting in a self-evidently rational way. The great lesson of Frazer’s work
is that we ought not sneer at the primitive ways of our forebears, who were
making the best inferences they could from the knowledge and understanding they
possessed — in the tragic human way, they were in the very earliest stages of
fumbling toward science.
Evolutionarily speaking, we have not advanced much at all
from those ancestors. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens have
been walking the Earth for something like 300,000 years, meaning that 98
percent of the human experience is what we now call “prehistoric,” while the
years in which we have had the benefit of electric lights represent about 0.04
percent of the human era. Of course we are savages — the
miracle is that we are not so much worse than we are.
We are still sacrificing the young and the old, the weak,
the disabled, the sick, the prisoners — the unwanted. We are, in fact, doing so
on a scale that probably would have shocked the ancient Spartans, who never
would have dreamed of putting to death 65 million mostly healthy and viable
babies in one man’s lifetime, Plutarch’s libel notwithstanding. If we seem to
ourselves any less bloody, it is because we have co-opted and perverted the
medical profession, which does our killing for us, in a sterile clinical
setting, when it comes to babies and prisoners both.
Homeopathic magic is still very much with us, too: A
generation ago, young women who wished to eliminate their secondary sexual
characteristics and prevent menstruation did so by starving themselves nearly
to death. Anorexia was, for a few years, positively fashionable,
and it was invested with religious significance; today, the same ends are served by
different means, more efficiently medicalized, under the name of “transgenderism,”
a phenomenon that recapitulates many of the practices of ancient mystery cults:
the taking of a new name and, sometimes, a new birthday associated with the
emergence of one’s “true” mystical identity, ritually prescribed changes in
dress, ritual mutilation, etc. As always, this functions in some part through
social contagion, as Frazer observed:
While the flutes played, the drums
beat, and the eunuch priests slashed themselves with knives, the religious
excitement gradually spread like a wave among the crowd of onlookers, and many
a one did that which he little thought to do when he came as a holiday
spectator to the festival. For man after man, his veins throbbing with the
music, his eyes fascinated by the sight of the streaming blood, flung his
garments from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords
which stood ready for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot. Then he ran
through the city, holding the bloody pieces in his hand, till he threw them
into one of the houses which he passed in his mad career. The household thus
honoured had to furnish him with a suit of female attire and female ornaments,
which he wore for the rest of his life.
The Dobbs decision overturning the
savage ruling in Roe v. Wade is not the end of the
abortion debate in the United States, or the beginning of the end, but the end
of the beginning. And abortion is not about what everybody pretends it is
about. There are many ways of achieving bodily and sexual autonomy without the
willful extermination of human life. There are ways of treating the medical
conditions that arise from troubled pregnancies — which is why such situations
account for a vanishingly small share of the abortions performed in this
country every year. And there are at any given time something on the order of
100 or more families looking to adopt for each child voluntarily relinquished
by a mother each year. The purpose of abortion is to put children to death in
the false belief that this will somehow mitigate social, economic, or spiritual
problems — something we human beings have been doing for a very long time.
The Dobbs decision will not end abortion
in the United States; it will give Americans the opportunity to vote on the
question. We should understand what it is we are voting on, which is the
enduring question of whether we are to be savages, albeit high-tech savages, or
if we have it in us to be something else.
Eros, too, is a jealous god.
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