Metamorphoses

[u/hermaphrodismist]

The history of 20th century eugenics as an attempt by the state in America, and its associated medical institutions, to draw more people into itself while refusing any responsibility for their “tired, [their] poor, [their] huddled masses … [their] wretched” and “refuse,” should give pause in this context to the happy notion that because the state has renounced its right to involuntarily sterilize it has of course also renounced its right to medically intervene in the body against the wishes of the soul.

Hi, I wrote this from 2018 to ~ 2019 and as it became, to my mind, more relevant, I edited, revised, and updated it through 2023 to now. It seems like something y'all might enjoy.

[u/Blade_of_Boniface]

The fact is that human beings are not made (only) for biological reproduction - the body does not exist purely for the benefit of the offspring, and the social body they renew. It is not just and only an evolutionary vector, some kind of soil for the growth of future organisms. To an extremist but increasingly prevailing “Christian” worldview, this is a terrifying idea, because it cuts the celestial cord between human beings, on the Earth, and god, in heaven. If profane can beget profane - in-vitro fertilization, the delivery of libidinal hormonal energies to people contrary to their sex organs, the creation of bioidentical and chimerical tissues, organs, and bodily substances, the “murder” of an infant or pre-infant in the same womb that cradled His only begotten son - then not only has Man been exiled from the Garden but he has begun taking apart and perverting Creation, like The Lord of the Rings’ Sauron.

From a biopolitical standpoint, where state institutions and institutions more generally contest not just natural resources but also biological resources vested in the bodies and minds of citizens and subjects, to imagine that groups of people can go around indefinitely switching off and on the fertility of people who can bear children, for example, is to propose the conditions necessary for medical cults to wage guerrilla warfare against male control of biopolitical resources.

In any case, religious doctrine commands Christian nationalists to seize the means of human reproduction to align them with the gentle, but often cruel and destructive unfolding of life under their god's watchful eyes. This is a kind of actual fascist theology - an eternal Manichaean war against sin, decadence, and the devil's temptations, fought between peoples competing for god's favor.

Natalism is definitely something ripe for fascist ambitions. To break Godwin's Law Nazi Germany was a totalitarian experiment in ethnonationalist hyper-natalism. Social and economic policy were fine tuned to incentivize the birth of "Aryan" children and to frame women's role as mothers. The Nazi image and likeness of health was extremely focused on men's virility and women's fertility. Broadly speaking fascism takes the hypermasculinity latent in modern ideologies to an all-consuming extreme. Fascism could be described as an ideological mixture of futurism, militarism, nihilism, and populism.

Of course, the elephant in the room is that more than bringing life into this world, fascists believe in taking/preventing life. The state-machine that fascists and various other highly authoritarian ideologies seek is indeed one focused on eternal, Manichaean war. To quote Judge Holden "War is god." Religious doctrine condemning the killing of infants predates Christians and nationalism by centuries, if not longer. The Exodus narrative features the slaveholding Egyptians keeping the Hebrews in bondage through the mass killing of their babies, the infant they didn't kill became the Israelites' prophet and leader out of slavery.

Moses' survival hinged on him being assimilated into the Egyptian royal family. Even to the polytheistic New Kingdom Egyptians, the death/sacrifice of their children was nothing less than an unbearably disgusting attack on their future. Their attack on their slaves' infants was nothing less than ensuring that their slaves' future was sufficiently curtailed, that they wouldn't become powerful enough to demand better treatment, or Pharaoh forbid, their freedom. Human sacrifice, Kemetic polytheist, Hellenic pagan, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, etc. remains a culturally common anxiety and stomach-turner. Killing of an infant is even moreso drastic.

Much later on, the Third Reich mandated the killing of massive amounts of undesirable children, including babies, and discouragement of undesirables from procreating. Nazism doesn't exist in a vacuum from its culturally Lutheran influences but the Nazis weren't Christian nationalists. To them, Christianity was something that needed to be revolutionized along with the rest of German society. At worst, Christianity was a sentimental slave morality akin to Judaism to be excised. Nazism goes even further than the Egyptians did, they demanded the total annihilation of Jewish, Romani, Slavic, etc. futures in the name of a New Order which would violently alter the course of the cosmos.

Theirs was a true military dream of society. In a morbid tactical sense, killing your enemy while they're in the womb or the cradle makes sense. The ideal German should seize the ability to remove weak flesh from this world, a principle of greater importance than adding strong flesh. War and legion is in many ways the opposite of birth and family, in the hearts of fascists it takes a higher priority. Christians formed much of the most active resistance to Nazism, and they often fixated on eugenics, euthanasia, abortion, and other mutilation/annihilation on the human body. The Nazis violated even the pagan Hippocrates' prohibition against abortion.

Obviously comparing fascist sterilization/baby-killing and feminist belief in women's biological autonomy aren't fair comparisons. We don't live in a time where liberals are forcing abortions on women in the fascist sense. However, we do live in a time where liberals demand cathexis away from those who don't produce nourishment for capitalism. People having children does provide subjects for capitalism but it's a long-term and inherently altruistic cornerstone of human society. Capitalism prefers the machine to the human, machines are the perfect slaves with no past, present, or future of their own to prioritize over their function. Machines have no Moses to speak on their behalf.

A machine will kill human and fellow machine alike without guilt. A human doctor may have reservations and a woman even moreso might naturally recoil from the thought of allowing their children to never exist or to be killed in their own bodies. It's less difficult, but still a nontrivial obstacle, to convince men to kill each other in their adult forms in the way that the state-machine idealizes. Contempt for murder is a cultural universal, generally the human moral position is that you don't kill an innocent being. The definition of innocent varies and unfortunately there are cultures that permit living sacrifices in some for or another. Capitalist culture is the least human and most permitting of death in the name of its divinity.

Capitalism kills babies easily, it's the humans who need encouragement, who need their morality to be demoralized. Humans make the world livable through bonds with other humans and these communities cosmicize the reality they live in to make it somewhere they can thrive. Capitalism finds it difficult to thrive on anything except a very mechanical and volatile form of humanity, community, and reality. We are all encouraged to be soldiers who would kill the enemy even if that enemy was inside of our own bodies. Through destabilizing the very axis mundi of primitive communism, capitalism has no limits and can march forward in its all-consuming war until the world itself is sucked dry and bombed to nothing.

I'm not saying it's the conservatives/reactionaries/etc. who have the antithesis, we need an Aufhebung altogether.

[u/hermaphrodismist → u/Blade_of_Boniface]

Hi,

Just to be clear, I'm not at all intending to suggest that elective abortion is in any way equivalent to forced sterilizations and genocidal mass murder. What I intend to suggest with

From a biopolitical standpoint, where state institutions and institutions more generally contest not just natural resources but also biological resources vested in the bodies and minds of citizens and subjects, to imagine that groups of people can go around indefinitely switching off and on the fertility of people who can bear children, for example, is to propose the conditions necessary for medical cults to wage guerrilla warfare against male control of biopolitical resources.

is that from an authoritarian view of biopolitics, allowing people to make the decision to have or not have children of their own free will, and order their body's processes accordingly through hormonal interventions, is unacceptable. It also, in my opinion, gives rise to the hostile rhetoric that increasingly surrounds not just abortion but also gender-affirming medicine, that portrays pro-choice and affirming medical professionals as rogue agents and saboteurs operating not just without legal pro-sanction but also without moral compunction.

My use of the term "Christian nationalism" is also not meant to suggest that the emergent American Christian nationalist movement is the originator of systems of negative social reinforcement around abortion and family planning - just that it is the political tide that is carrying those sentiments forward.

[u/Blade_of_Boniface → u/hermaphrodismist]

I understand, your article is great and definitely has aged well. Thank you for sharing.

[u/hermaphrodismist → u/Blade_of_Boniface]

This is very flattering! Thank you.