We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Spengler considers a love of life to be an acquired taste:

The better one gets to know the Jews, the more peculiar they appear. “Remember us unto life, O King who delights in life,” they pray on the solemn occasion of their New Year, which this year fell on September 13. Unfeigned and spontaneous delight in life is uniquely Jewish; the standard Jewish toast states, “To life!” while the most characteristic Jewish gibe admonishes, “Get a life!” We are not dealing here with so-called lust for life that involves a pile of broken dishes and a hangover the next morning. Instead, the Jews evince a liking for life as such. That is not only unusual; it is almost unnatural.

Life as such is not that likable. As Mephistopheles taunted Faust in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragedy, life in its totality was fit only for a god, too hard a cracker for ordinary humans to digest. That seems to be the prevalent opinion across epochs and cultures. Socrates told us to despise life and instead to view death as the highest good. Buddhism teaches us to regard it as an illusion to inure ourselves from its attendant pain. From the Spartans to the Vikings, the martial cultures of the pagan world showed contempt for life, for they often fought to the death. Pagans aspired to a glorious death; I can think of not a single instance in the history of the Jews, whose wars of antiquity were frequent and ferocious, of the mention of a “glorious death”. The very notion is repulsive to Jewish sensibilities.

Christians die to this world to attain the Kingdom of Heaven; they aspire, that is, to a life that is abstracted from our travail in this vale of tears. Sigmund Freud warned that psychoanalysis offered no consolation, and at best could proceed from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness. The ubiquity of self-destructiveness led him to posit a death-wish as a fundamental human drive.

On the strength of the evidence, we would have to say that life at best seems an acquired taste. Most people dislike life, at least their own lives, judging from the cult of celebrity and the universal passion for spectator sports. The average man or woman rather would live vicariously through the glamour of actors or athletes than dwell upon the failure and humiliation of their own lives.

Even in their most abject moments of celebrity adulation, though, ordinary folk well know that the lives of the rich and famous are just as miserable as their own. That accounts for the universal fascination with the feckless Diana Spencer, who combined in one person the attraction of a fantasy princess with the repulsion of a horrible example. Goethe’s Mephisto knew all about this, of course. Unlike the biblical Satan of the Book of Job, who took from ancient man what he required, the up-to-date devil offers modern man what he desires - with just as deadly effect. The fantasy life of ordinary folk does not evince a liking for life as such, for even the life of celebrities is tainted.

He makes many good points, but I’m surprised that he never touches on the moral question: Yes, most people don’t love life, and many actively dislike it. But should they love life, or should they at least try? And if many people can’t be persuaded to love life, then can they at least be pressured to behave as if they love it? If you want your culture to survive over the long term, then it must have this love of life—or some facsimile.
Take abortion, for example. Rodney Stark, a respected sociologist of religion, pointed out in this interview that an important factor in the rise of the early Christianity was its prohibition on abortion and infanticide. It’s easy to think of abortion as a 1970’s phenomenon, but women have always found ways to kill their babies before or after birth. And consistent with Spengler’s observations, they have always been tempted to do so, because raising a child has always been a difficult and often thankless task. A society will not long survive if it does not encourage women to at least act as if they value the lives of their babies. From Stark’s interview:

You seem to argue that Christianity was an overwhelmingly good social force for women.

RS: It was! Christian women had tremendous advantages compared to the woman next door, who was like them in every way except that she was a pagan. First, when did you get married? Most pagan girls were married off around age 11, before puberty, and they had nothing to say about it, and they got married to some 35-year-old guy. Christian women had plenty of say in the matter and tended to marry around age 18.

Abortion was a huge killer of women in this period, but Christian women were spared that. And infanticide—pagans killed little girls left and right. We’ve unearthed sewers clogged with the bones of newborn girls. But Christians prohibited this. Consequently, the sex ratio changed and Christians didn’t have the enormous shortage of women that plagued the rest of the empire.

The West is dying because it has lost its love for life, and it is still struggling to dismantle many of the ancient rules that kept its behavior consistent with its continued survival, such as abortion, no-fault divorce, gay marriage, and euthanasia. But at least our enemies hate life even more than we do, so there will be no worldwide caliphate. The jihadis are full of ideas on how to destroy civilizations, but they have only a vague idea of how to build new ones.

This puts them ahead of our homegrown leftists, though. With the collapse of Communism, our leftists don’t even have a vague idea of how or why Utopia will spring forth from the ground once they’ve smashed evil capitalism. Their forebears at least had nice fairy tales about sharing everything equally, universal brotherhood of man, and scientific socialism. But with the modern leftists, I can’t even tell what fairy tale they claim to be fighting for.
The good news is that life’s requirements cannot be changed, not by any act of Congress, shift in public opinion, or act of mass destruction. Perhaps the world will burn, the streets will flow with blood, and millions will die. Perhaps. But none of it will last, because there’s no future in destruction. The future belongs to those who want to live, and who are willing to do what life requires.