Architects of the Culture of Death

Benjamin D Wiker | 2004

Introduction: Defining the Culture of Death

Every enduring human culture is structured upon an original design conceived by its architects.

While Christian culture is built upon the central guiding image of God become man, which establishes the infinite worth of every human soul, thereby mandating a Culture of Life, the Culture of Death represents a radical rejection of this foundation.

The architects of the Culture of Death consciously built a new culture within the existing framework of Christianity, seeking its destruction and displacement. This new structure rests upon a Materialist cosmology, rejecting human beings as persons made in the image of God.

Instead, humanity is perceived as purely material creatures cast into existence by indifferent nature and forced to define salvation for themselves.

The core tenets of this new Paganism include a common rejection of human beings as persons—rational creatures who are a unity of immortal, rational soul and body. Modernity is defined by the ongoing depersonalization of humanity, reducing individuals to the subhuman, or to mere fortuitous chemical combinations.

This process is paradoxically accompanied by a Promethean exaltation of human beings as self-made gods, where the rejection of the Divine Will leads directly to the divinization of the human will. This is described as a sad vicious circle, an eclipse of the true sense of God and man.

Five general themes recur throughout the study of these architects: militant Atheism, the isolation of the will from the consequences of its choices, an absolutization of freedom, an obsession with sex, and a loss of a sense of human dignity.

The Will Worshippers

This group of architects contributed to the Culture of Death by elevating the will above reason, initiating the act of rebellion against God.

##### [[Arthur Schopenhauer]]

Schopenhauer’s metaphysical vision asserted that reality is fundamentally malignant, defined by Will—a raging, blind, naked, suffocating, godless force completely dissociated from reason. This Will, the primordial source of all activity, is found everywhere, manifesting itself as Nature.

Existence is an error, and life is inherently evil, since evil is precisely that which is positive and palpable. Death, being larger than life, releases humanity from suffering and madness. Schopenhauer’s legacy is known as Vitalistic Irrationality, and his dissociation of reason from will is inestimable.

##### Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche, who was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer, named the instinctive force of life the Will to Power. He rejected Christianity as a will to deny life, a secret instinct of destruction and a reductive agent. Nietzsche named his adopted deity Dionysus, the god of instinct and adventure.

He urged his followers to live dangerously and court death, believing life is never more lively than when it is on the brink of death. Philosophy, in his view, is the voluntary quest of the repulsive and atrocious aspects of existence. By declaring the death of God and exalting the human will, Nietzsche provided a passionate antiphilosophy justifying whatever the isolated self desires.

##### [[Ayn Rand]]

Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, dictates that altruism is radically immoral and leads to death, while individualism (selfishness) is the only path to life. The individual alone is real and the true foundation for ethics. The source of man’s rights is the law of identity (Man is Man), not divine or congressional law. A man’s existence must stay in existence, and nonexistence is the result of altruism. For Rand, making sacrifices for family members constitutes a form of slavery. Her philosophy is fundamentally flawed because it is based on the false anthropology of the human being as a mere individual.

The Eugenic Evolutionists

This group contributed by asserting that human nature is not created by God but is an accidental product of nature, subject to purging, pruning, and transformation by human effort.

##### [[Charles Darwin]]

Darwin's theories provided the "scientific" support for racism, eugenics, and the undermining of the Christian natural law. He argued that in the near future, the civilised races (the Caucasian) will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races (Negro or Australian Aborigine).

Civilised men foolishly "check the process of elimination" by caring for the weak members of society—the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick—which is highly injurious to the race of man. Darwin suggested that if society is to avoid evolutionary backsliding, it must remain subject to a severe struggle. To avoid degeneration, both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if inferior in body or mind.

##### Francis Galton

Galton, Darwin’s cousin, coined the term eugenics to express the science of improving stock, or producing a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages. He was impatient with the notion of natural equality, believing that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance under the same limitations as the physical features of the whole organic world. Galton’s program dictated that, after artificial selection, the non-gifted would begin to decay out of the land, treated with kindness only if they complied with enforced celibacy. Eugenics was determined to be a new religion that would ensure humanity is represented by the fittest races.

##### Ernst Haeckel

Haeckel, a tireless promoter of Darwinism, subsumed all science under Darwinian principles, creating a religious natural philosophy he called Monism. Monism was dedicated to the extirpation of Christian dualism.

Haeckel drew out the full implications of Darwinism, candidly supporting eugenics, racial extermination, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. He claimed that human beings are just one more animal on the evolutionary spectrum, and their whole psychic life differs from related mammals only in degree. Haeckel argued that Christian charity, by protecting the weak, caused body and character weakness to be perpetually increasing.

The "destruction of newborn infants" who are unfit or inferior should be considered a practice of advantage both to the infants destroyed and to the community. The lower races, such as the Australian Negroes, are psychologically nearer to the apes and dogs than to civilized Europeans, thus necessitating a totally different value assigned to their lives.

The Secular Utopianists

The Secular Utopianists focused on the attempt to set up an earthly paradise through force, redefining morality and law to serve an arbitrary social vision.

##### [[Karl Marx]]

Marx, an Atheist, envisioned a forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions, leading to a classless society. He offered Communism as a substitute religion, absolving the proletariat of personal sin or guilt by absorbing the individual person into the collective.

Marxism, like Nazism, which absorbed the person into a race, leads to dehumanization and ultimately death. The most deadly aspect of his program is the denial of man's spiritual dimension, without which he cannot be whole.

##### Auguste Comte

Comte, an atheist, was troubled by social disorder and sought to replace Christianity with the Religion of Humanity. His goal was the complete secularisation of Catholicism, stripping it of supernatural beliefs but retaining its institutions and authoritative structure, with positivist clergy in charge.

He taught that the Christian faith was radically immoral because it focused on individual sanctity rather than the social good. Comte aimed to accustom young disciples to look on the triumph of sociability over personality as the grand object of man. His system, sociolatry, inevitably leads to tyranny and dictatorship.

##### Judith Jarvis Thomson

Thomson’s defense of Abortion is the most widely reprinted essay on the subject in contemporary philosophy. She asserts that a newly fertilised ovum is no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree. She argues that the right to life does not include the right to occupy another person’s body, using the analogy of a kidnapped victim plugged into a violinist.

Her approach involves taking flight into the realm of the phantasmagoric (such as people-seeds rooting in carpets) and reducing the mother-child relationship to a social contract. Her focus on individual rights, to the exclusion of love and generosity, represents a path to the Culture of Death.

The Atheistic Existentialists

This group denied that human existence has any God-intended meaning.

##### [[Jean Paul Sartre]]

Sartre’s Atheism mandates that existence precedes essence, meaning there is no predetermined human nature, and humanity is radically free. His view removes the basis on which crimes against humanity can be denounced, as the most atrocious situations in war and the worst tortures do not create an inhuman state of affairs.

His philosophy is misogynist, depicting Being-in-itself (nature/woman) as antagonistic to Being-for-itself (consciousness/freedom). He concluded that conflict is the fundamental mode of all human relationships, asserting, "Hell is other people".

##### [[Simone de Beauvoir]]

De Beauvoir followed Sartrean existentialism, relating transcendence (freedom) to men and immanence (constraints) to women. Her writing is fundamentally a protest against being feminine. She claimed that maternity is one feminine function almost impossible to perform in complete liberty, causing nausea and discomfort. She was a tireless advocate for abortion and asserted that no woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children, as too many would make that choice.

##### Elisabeth Badinter

Badinter extended de Beauvoir’s work by substituting evolutionary optimism for historical pessimism and replacing opposition between sexes with "resemblance".

She argues that contraception and Abortion, which she considers an emancipation from biology, shatter the "millennarian equation 'woman = mother'". She contends that women now have *"the right of life and death over the child,"* and the twentieth century has decreed that an existent individual takes priority over a potential human being.

Badinter pushes for gender erasure through technologies such as extracorporeal gestation and male pregnancy. Her ultimate goal is the absolutization of the Ego, where self-love becomes a code of ethics and all morality shifts away from the Other to the Self.

The Pleasure Seekers

This group contributed by redefining the meaning of human life entirely in terms of sexual pleasure.

##### [[Sigmund Freud]]

Sigmund Freud, who defined his philosophy as scientific materialism, claimed that religion is nothing but an obsessive-compulsive neurosis. He reduced Free Will to instinctive drives and real guilt to mere "guilt feelings," thus losing sight of moral responsibility. He defined the Id (instinct) as inherently irrational and claimed that the aim of all life is death, arguing that the life instinct is a tendency in animate things to return to the inanimate. He saw himself as a secular messiah, a new Moses, who brought a law dedicated to personal psychological liberty.

##### [[Wilhelm Reich]]

Reich was a Freudian-Marxist revolutionary who aimed to strip away all cultural repression to allow the human being's primary biological impulses to emerge. He rejected the family as the chief source of repression and viewed conscience as the first tyranny. He claimed that the fundamental erotic impulse was a hitherto unknown energy he called "orgone," the basic life-stuff of the universe. His revolutionary attempt to liberate man from repression led to the repression of personality and love.

##### Helen Gurley Brown

Brown provided a popular and deadly modern reincarnation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. She inverted vices, championing lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, redefined as sex, money, and success. She tirelessly promoted the notion that sex is one of the three best things there is. Her philosophy is a glorification of passion and self-will, suitable for popular consumption.

The Sex Planners

This category encompasses those who engineered grand projects to redefine and manipulate sexuality and the family through government coercion and technological advancement.

##### [[Margaret Mead]]

Mead, an anthropologist, portrayed Samoa in her writings as a sexual paradise free from the oppressive restrictions of the West, advocating for the liberation of sexual behaviour. She claimed that rigid heterosexuality is a perversion of nature. She advocated for the repeal of all restrictive Abortion laws and suggested a legally sanctioned "two-step" marriage (childless contract first).

##### [[Alfred Kinsey]]

Kinsey became the most influential twentieth-century *"sexologist"* by adopting a scientific facade to push a sexual revolution. He collected and manipulated data to normalize all forms of deviancy, arguing that because socially taboo items occur frequently, they cannot be considered abnormal, unnatural, or bad. He concluded that pedophilia and bestiality were natural variations of sexual expression, with any harm stemming only from society’s negative reactions.

##### Margaret Sanger

Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, used the cause of birth control to pursue both sexual liberation and eugenic goals. She believed birth control was necessary to eliminate *"the dead weight of human waste"* and to build a race of *thoroughbreds*. She advocated for the forceful segregation and immediate sterilization of the feebleminded to prevent the transmission of imbecility.

##### Clarence Gamble

Gamble, a physician and philanthropist, co-wrote a pamphlet on Human Sterilisation, driven by the belief that the fit were breeding too little and the unfit too much. He advocated for sterilisation as the only clear-cut expedient to limit the totally unfit and thereby heighten the quality of citizens. He was crucial in developing and disseminating contraceptives globally, often encountering hostility from non-White populations who suspected his motives were aimed at extermination.

##### Alan Guttmacher

Guttmacher, a leading obstetrician and president of Planned Parenthood, embraced a purely evolutionary view of sexuality, believing that promiscuity and rape are natural tendencies in human beings. He argued that the legal denial of contraception and Abortion should be repealed to allow for unrestricted copulation without fear of pregnancy.

He was a strong proponent of eugenic abortion and systematically bent existing law by interpreting "therapeutic" abortion to include psychiatric and eugenic reasons. He ultimately advocated for abortion on request, removing it from the penal code entirely.

The Death Peddlers

This final group works to define the limits of meaningful life and the time and terms of death.

##### Derek Humphry

Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society, promoted euthanasia and wrote the best-selling manual Final Exit, subtitled The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying. He treats death as if it were something positive and makes suicide appear as a rational choice, akin to selecting a dessert. Humphry claims that hundreds have used his information to kill themselves, including individuals who were not terminally ill.

##### Jack Kevorkian

Kevorkian, known as Dr. Death, asserted that his specialty is death. He devised a suicide machine (mercitron) and advocated "obitoria" (professional venues for death). He assisted in the deaths of approximately 130 people, most of whom were not terminally ill. Kevorkian openly stated that relieving suffering is a minor benefit of euthanasia; the major benefit is making the patient's bodily organs available for donation, thereby making the death "definitely positive".

##### Peter Singer

Singer, a renowned bioethicist, announced the collapse of the traditional Western ethic founded on the sanctity of life, replacing it with a "quality-of-life" ethic. He rejects notions of sanctity and dignity as spurious.

He argues against "speciesism," claiming that nonhuman animals have capacity to suffer and must be protected. Singer asserts that human babies are not persons, lacking the requisite consciousness, and therefore their lives are no more worthy of protection than a fetus's life. He proposes that where a baby has Down syndrome, parents should be free to kill the child within twenty-eight days after birth. He logically concludes that the life of a disabled infant should be sacrificed if killing it leads to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life.

Conclusion: Depersonalisation and the Culture of Life

The architects of the Culture of Death are united by their Atheism and individualism, severing themselves from God and alienating themselves from humanity. The pervasive theme is the depersonalisation of humanity, the attempt to reduce human beings to the subhuman. Their philosophy poisons action with *"nothingness,"* infecting being with nonbeing and death.

The essential antidote to this calamitous process is the regeneration of the proper understanding of human beings as persons. Personalism, as exemplified by Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), focuses on the human being as a synthesis of individual uniqueness and communal participation, affirming the person’s inherent dignity and distinctiveness.

This understanding requires the recognition that the person's nature is not primarily to be self-centred, but to be self-giving. The choice confronting humanity is between alienation and loving participation in each other's lives, confirming the imperative to choose life over death.