Abortion: The Colosseum for the Progressive Age

An age of hedonistic paganism, with its concomitant popular reverence for its one true god, Pleasure, is subject to a special moral blindness, namely the inclination — even the need — to pursue amusements that overwhelm natural empathy. Why? Perhaps because enjoying blood sports and their analogues demonstrates the hedonist’s pious devotion to Pleasure most fully, by elevating gratification above even life itself.

Hence the Roman Colosseum. — The emperor distracts and palliates an oppressed populace by normalizing the merciless pleasure of murderous spectacle, inuring men to the inhumane reality of dismemberment and death (gladiators, Christians and lions). He thereby stimulates the people to enthralling but dehumanizing emotional release, a catharsis devoid of the moral benefit Aristotle regarded as the essence of the proper cathartic effect of popular amusements.

Hence our progressive modernity. — An oppressed people distract and palliate themselves by normalizing and legislatively facilitating the materialistic pleasure of sexual license, inuring themselves to the inhumane reality of dismemberment and death (abortion on demand). They thereby stimulate themselves to enthralling but dehumanizing emotional release, a catharsis devoid of the moral benefit Aristotle regarded as the essence of the proper cathartic effect of popular amusements.

On the matter of inhumanity and public palliation through blood sport, the difference between progressive modernity and the Colosseum, morally, is merely that between an age that prefers to live on credit and one that prefers to earn its happiness through patient effort. The Romans, that is to say, sat in the Colosseum and watched the bloodletting as the means to their spirit-hardening gratification. We sensitive moderns prefer to defer the bloodletting until after the gratification. This simply proves that the Romans were more connected to their own lives, more willing to live in the concrete here and now, whereas we tend to live in benumbed abstraction from our own souls, hoping to experience the special joys of hedonistic paganism without having to face the full meaning of our choices so directly.

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