The all-consuming self

Leisurely browsing the magazine racks of our local Waitrose yesterday, disposable cup of free capuccino in hand, my attention was caught by a National Geographic Special Issue on "The Shifting Landscape of Gender" entitled "Gender Revolution". The cover showed a group of young people where each person was arrayed in painstakingly chosen indie chic and ink, and each labelled with their preferred gender indentity. These young people are cool, the cover implies, they are the future: get used to it. In the tier behind this Special Issue was a "Special Publication" issue, also from National Geographic, with the title: "Jesus and the Origins of Christianity". That cover was an artist's rendition of the trial of Jesus ("Ecce Homo" by Antonio Ciseri), with the Saviour mournfully looking down and away from the baying crowd below as Pilate gesticulates towards them, those pesky Jews, asking what what to do with The Man. The unambiguous answer, as we know from elsewhere, was 'Crucify Him!'. Thus, two unrelated National Geographic covers, displayed at Headington Waitrose,  encapsulate the current state of the West. Jesus, the only sure proof against the ragings of the unchecked self, is now the only 'Other' the West does not want to know. We Westerners are now those pesky Jews yelling 'get rid of Him!'. Every other 'Other' is good and welcome, so long as it (or whatever pronoun) can shore up the self in the illusion of its own goodness. The true Other, who takes you out of your self and highlights every single flaw in your self, can go back to where He came from, thank you very much: over there, in that battle-hardened parcel of land called Israel. And frankly, He can disappear from there or thereabouts too. The origins of Christianity, and Christians, are being eliminated from the lands surrounding Israel and possibly now in Israel, and the West could care less. The irony of these juxtaposed magazines in the midst of supermarket consummables - including the disposable cup and the 'free' coffee - is that it shows up the current crop of 'rights' as fundamentally consumer-driven. Once you go beyond obvious, scientifically provable characteristics such as race and sex (i.e. male or female), everything becomes 'I want' rather than 'I am'. Gay marriage wants to consume the accoutrements of traditional marriage; transgender wants to consume the stuff aimed at the opposite sex; the make-it-up-as-you-go-along 'gender revolution' wants to pick and choose from everything and anything like there's no tomorrow. This is all behaviour, not fact (unlike race and sex). Now, 'to consume' might sound like a benign thing to do, but at root it isn't. Consumption involves destruction, is by definition destruction. Trees were destroyed to print those magazines. Fuel was burned up to deliver them, for example. That's fine, the world is a big place. Resources can be managed. The problem with 'I want' behaviour rights is that they consume society itself. In order to elevate the consumer choice of the individual to such nonsensical depths of nature, science and language as choosing your own gender identity, institutions must be laid low. Law, public order, Church, marriage, a consensus of morality - including the notion that childhood innocence is worth protecting, even a consensus on reality itself: all must feed this 'revolution'. Bizarrely, many of the institutions go along with this (like National Geographic). Or, like law, Church etc, they actively seek their own immolation out of misplaced excitement at what appears new and therefore, it is assumed, better. So what we have are right-on people who would be outraged at the destruction of a far-away habitat rejoicing in the destruction of the social and cultural habitat that made their own lives possible. Here is Merriam-Webster's entry on the verb 'to consume':

Synonyms

devour, eat (up)

Antonyms

renew, replace

Related Words

gut; deplete, drain, exhaust, expend, spend, use up; annihilate, decimate, demolish, desolate, devastate, do in, pulverize, raze, ruin, shatter, smash, tear down, waste, wreck; annihilate, blot out, eradicate, exterminate, extinguish, extirpate, obliterate, remove, rub out, stamp (out), wipe out

Near Antonyms

conserve, preserve, protect, save; build, construct, erect, put up, raise

Those Synonyms and Related Words are fearsome because they testify to the harsh reality of living in the Fallen world, the world as we know it. On the other hand, the "Antonyms" and "Near Antonyms" listed here testify to all the work that needs to be done - daily, consistently, gratefully - in order to offset the one-way direction of destruction. And those are beautiful words. The aggressive colonisation of daily life by made-up 'rights' requires there to be no tomorrow. Consumer identity gone rogue prevents the possibility of sufficient renewal and replacement to hand on a sane and healthy environment to our children. My browsing episode yesterday (much briefer than this post suggests) was capped by an unassuming publication lurking at the end of the magazine rack: the Dec 2016/Jan 2017 issue of something called "BBC World Histories". Its cover story: "Has the tide of history turned against the west?" Time will tell whether it has. Meanwhile, to change metaphors, there is a terrible concerted effort in throwing the West overboard.