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You don’t hear much about the Shakers anymore. Sure, you can sing The Simple Gifts (think Copland’s Appalachian Spring ), collect some fine baskets, or acquire some superb furniture. But the Shakers are extinct. Why? They practiced celibacy on a grand scale. They eschewed reproductive sex. So in order to survive, the Shakers needed to attract new members from the world outside of their own ever-shrinking sphere.
Today, we live in a culture, poisoned by the ruminations of toxic intellectuals, like Paul Ehrlich, who decry the natural human impulse to procreate and perpetuate, not only the human species, but human cultures. These cultures are not merely the Western European cultures; Japan, through the practice of birth control, is experiencing a demographic collapse. China has a bleak future, brought on by the Maoist “One Child Policy”. As college students in the Seventies, we were constantly advised to adopt Zero Population Growth as a cultural value. Having more than two children per family was, at the very least, bad form, morally irresponsible, at the worst. Men became little more than human drones (“sperm donors”). Women, in the name of feminism, rejected what defined them as women. And for anyone, man or woman, to state this, is to invite anger, fury, and scorn. A child became The Ultimate Pet. About 35 years ago, in the mid-1980’s, I noticed more and more people refer to their dogs and cats, their pets, as their “babies”. Again, many of you will minimize or ridicule this observation.
The culture has rejected its own survival, guaranteeing its decay. Thanks to wide availability of artificial contraception, and the cultural value of sex as little more than primal recreation, we are dying out, much like the Shakers.
Except there will be a remnant who will survive at first, then ultimately flourish. Much as a forest regenerates itself after a calamitous fire, those who reject the contraceptive paradigm will preserve Western, Judeo-Christian, Catholic Civilization, where both males and females will be valued. And these humans will be valued from conception til natural death.
