Sacrifice and Modernity

can we be humans without sacrifice?

Down the ages, we humans have worshipped women as the fountain of life.

For most of human history, women were seen as the givers of life, the preservers of continuity, the transmitters of culture, guardians of children as well as the mediators of both memory and tenderness.

Greek chappie Spyridon Andrews worries that we are in a “Death Spiral” with feminism.

Modern feminism preaches that women become women through the negation of life, through denial of empathy, and through rage rather than rational and pacific strength.

Traditional masculinity has celebrated the man who sacrificed to protect women and children.

Women become women today through negating their primal spirit and can only achieve fulfillment through imitating a gross caricature of the male… [Yet] Men who are small-minded and selfish have never been celebrated…

[W]hy we are living in a culture now that celebrates sterility, fragmentation, the rejection of inherited meaning, and hostility toward family and especially motherhood.

And there is individualism. We have

a culture that celebrates radical individualism at the expense of others[.]

I pondered this question in my heart, and then came up with the answer.

In our modern society we don’t have as much need for sacrifice as in the olden time. To go all the way back to chimpanzees, according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, the males did nothing but protect the troop territory from males in other troops, no doubt often giving their lives to protect their troop’s food-growing territory.

And women also gave their all. Back in 1800 as many as one woman in twenty died in childbirth.

And then it came to me. The extraordinary improvement in human prosperity and health means that there is much less need for sacrifice in modern society, in the sense of men giving their all to protect the women and women giving their all to make and to raise babies.

And so we have the space and the time to develop and worship ourselves as individuals. Creativity is celebrated today not in the communal creation and protection of human life but in the individual creations of artists and intellectuals.

Now I have a theory of sacrifice. Back in the day, humans sacrificed their first-born sons.

Because the firstborn was considered to belong to God, many civilizations practiced physical child sacrifice to express gratitude and devotion.

But later on, not so much.

Remember the sacrifice of Isaac? God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his first-born son, but then relented and let him sacrifice a ram instead.

You think that maybe Abraham wasn’t about to sacrifice his first-born son and cheated?

And then we come to Jesus Christ. Here, God sacrificed his Son so that humans didn’t need to. So now sacrifice has become symbolic.

Are humans cheating? Or are we reducing the salience of sacrifice from actual humans to domestic animals to religious symbols?

Whatabout the First Feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft?

Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men but appeared to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

Reason and Individualism. But Wollstonecraft had two affairs and one child without marriage. Why? Because, in the 18th century, women lived not just as part of a family, but also in society at large as individuals. Society had become rich enough to allow such stupidity.

Notice that I say that human society has reduced its faith and worship of sacrifice, and has promoted the idea of humans as individuals that are not called upon to sacrifice except in a general way through their taxes and to help save the climate.

Because it can afford to.

Do you think we humans will return to the worship of sacrifice, even if only symbolically, like the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, because sacrifice is a basic characteristic of human society?

Stay tuned.