A blast from the past

I'm just about to finish for a two-week staycation. Until the dying embers of Friday afternoon, however, I will be hard at it, trying to finish an important stage of my current project. One of the texts I recently came across in my necessarily voracious reading was Daniel-Rops's Le monde sans âme (1932). Daniel-Rops became better known as a Church historian, notably for his book Palestine in the Time of Jesus, but the 1932 work was written while he was trying to make a name for himself in the literary and critical circles of 1930s Paris. It is not, however, a literary work, so much as a political, social and philosophical one, making the case that France and indeed the wider world was now given over to a cultural project that excluded transcendence and pursued the fullest, fiercest realisation of a consumer system. I nearly used the word 'paradise' then but the point is that it can only be a paradise for those with lots of disposable income. The lower orders either must do without, or must pursue their ends with significant debt.

The connection of this analysis to my own interests is that technology becomes the lynch pin in a system driven by an essentially hedonist motive. Daniel-Rops sums up the machinery of this system in terms that roughly translate as follows:

Do not go looking for anything other than the physical joy of living, of buying things, of delighting in appearances as technology refreshes the horizon for us every six months. There is the order you are looking for: the perfect adaptation of production to consumption, solid stock market performance with five percent gains, and an increase in well-being and the pleasure of living.

I'm still reeling from how contemporary this kind of prospect sounds. With a few adjustments, it could have been said by just about any of the last six British Prime Ministers, and probably quite a few more before that. All of which suggests that ever since Daniel-Rops's time, the world has moved on little. He had not quite seen how much of a 'throw-away' culture such principles would encourage, but his contemporary Georges Duhamel had, describing in his book Querelle de famille (1932), published the same year, the masses of household detritus left by the roadside in country villages, soiling the green vistas of a fast-technologising France.

Of course, today we would have to add in the pseudo-causes that help sustain this consumerist culture: identity politics, Gaia-style eco-politics, etc, etc. But we are all consumers now, whether we like it or not.

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Something in the appalling logic of consumption and throwing-away has led to my recent interest in the World Down Syndrome Day event, held annually on 21st March. It came to my attention a couple of years ago when its Youtube clip "Dear Future Mum" was judged to have breached advertising standards in France - ostensibly because it was not selling anything, but fundamentally because its contents were likely to upset women who had had abortions to avoid bearing DS children. Jean-Marie Le Mené, president of the Jerome Lejeune Foundation, has written about these children as the first victims of transhumanism. That seems to be rather too complimentary towards a project that involves eradicating individuals who have DS. It is no more than the rebirth of old-fashioned eugenics under the cover of the contemporary cult of individual choice.

There is the lie that DS can be eradicated in this manner: it cannot of course. What is eradicated are the individuals with an extra chromosome. What makes their eradication all the more gruesome, however, is that the decision to abort such children seems to be predicated on the most impoverished account of what life is. Here is where Daniel-Rops is again prophetic. The reconciliation of 'well-being' with the choice to abort the DS foetus tells you everything you need to know about 'well-being' in the 21st century. Towards the end of his book, Daniel-Rops points firmly to the origins of this culture:

The Enemy will not come to impose his reign on earth, a winged figure of might, appearing through terrible cloud formations. He will rise up among us discretely, looking like one of us, dressed soberly. He will not stand for negativity or the passionate rejection of truth; he will be indifference, a kind of gap, the sum of forces that tether man to matter and force him to betrayal. He will be that soiled form of renunciation: forgetfulness.

If this is so, perhaps one of the challenges of our time is not to forget, not to let the accelerating passage of events and consumer objects blot from our memories the coordinates of truth, the burden of our past faults, and the actions of those who betray us. Forgive and forget in the sense of harbouring no grudges? Yes! Forgive and forget in the sense of becoming naive again? That is not what charity requires.

Meanwhile, love remains very much the answer, as it always has been. That is one reason why, in spite of it all, the World Down Sydrome Day phenomenon surprises me. It seems like a heresy against the pursuit of 'well-being', a defiance thrown in the faces of the 'choice' brigade. This year's video celebrated it with a cheesy pop song, but I find myself drawn in by the words, so much do they contradict the murderous intent that pursues the lives of our most vulnerable brothers and sisters. Annihilation, let us not forget, is a crime against being.

I have died every day waiting for you,
Darling, don't be afraid I have loved you
For a thousand years,
I'll love you for a thousand more.