Incomprehensible Word, Uncomprehending World: The Puzzle of Christmas

By N.T. Wright

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/

December 20, 2016

Bartolomé Esteban Perez Murillo - Adoration of the Shepherds (1668)

One of the greatest journalists of the last generation, Bernard Levin, described how, when he was a small boy, a great celebrity came to visit his school. The headmaster, perhaps wanting to impress, called the young Levin to the platform in front of the whole school.

The celebrity, perhaps wanting to be kind, asked the little boy what he'd had for breakfast. "Matzobrei," replied Levin.

A typical central European Jewish dish, Matzobrei is made of eggs fried with matzo wafers, brown sugar, and cinnamon. Levin's immigrant mother had continued to make it even after years of living in London. To him, it was a perfectly ordinary word for a perfectly ordinary meal.

But the celebrity, ignorant of such cuisine, thought he'd misheard. He repeated his question. Levin, now puzzled and anxious, gave the same answer. The celebrity looked concerned and glanced at the headmaster: What is this word he's saying?

The headmaster, adopting a "there-there-little-man" tone, asked Levin once more what he had had for breakfast. Dismayed, not knowing what he'd done wrong, and wanting to burst into tears, the boy said once more the only answer he could honestly give: "Matzobrei."

After an exchange of incredulous glances on the platform, the terrified little boy was sent back to his place. The incident was never referred to again, but to him it was a horrible ordeal.

A Jewish word spoken to an uncomprehending world; a child's word spoken to uncomprehending adults; a word for a food of which others were unaware - it all feels very Johannine. "In the beginning was the Word ... and the Word was made flesh" (John 1:1, 14). We are so used to that passage, the great cadences, the solemn but glad message of the Incarnation, that we risk skipping over the incomprehensibility, the oddness, the almost embarrassing strangeness of the Word:

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness didn't comprehend it; the world was made through him and the world didn't know him; he came to his own, and his own didn't receive him." (John 1:5, 10-11)

John is saying two things simultaneously in his prologue (two hundred things, actually, but I'll concentrate on two): first, that the Incarnation of the eternal Word was the event for which the whole of creation had been waiting all along; second, that creation and even the people God were quite unready for this event. Jew and Gentile alike, upon hearing of this strange Word, cast anxious glances at one another, like the celebrity and the headmaster hearing a little boy telling the truth in a language they didn't understand.

That is the puzzle of Christmas. John's prologue is designed to stay in the mind and heart throughout the subsequent story. Never again in the Gospel of John is Jesus referred to as "the Word," but we are meant to look at each scene - the call of the first disciples, the changing of water into wine, the confrontation with Pilate, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection - and think to ourselves: This is what it looks like when the Word becomes flesh. Or, if you like: Look at this man of flesh and learn to see the living God.

But watch what happens as it all plays out. He comes to his own, and his own don't receive him. The light shines in the darkness, and though the darkness can't overcome it, the darkness sure tries. He speaks the truth, the plain and simple words, like the little boy saying what he had for breakfast, and Caiaphas and Pilate, uncomprehending, can't decide whether he's mad or wicked or both.

Though Jesus is never again referred to as the Word of God, we find the theme transposed throughout the Gospel with endless variations. The Living Word speaks living words, and the reaction is the same. "This is a hard word," say his followers when he tells them that he is the bread come down from heaven (John 6:60). "What is this word?" asks the puzzled crowd in Jerusalem (John 7:36). "My word finds no place in you," says Jesus, "because you can't hear it" (John 8:37, 43). "The word I spoke will be their judge on the last day," he insists (John 12:48), as the crowds reject him.

When Pilate hears the word, says John, he is afraid, since the word in question is Jesus' reported claim to be the Son of God (John 19:8). Unless we recognize this strange, dark strand running through the Gospel, we will domesticate John's masterpiece (just as we're always in danger of domesticating Christmas) and think it's only about comfort and joy. In truth, it's also about incomprehension, rejection, darkness, denial, stopped ears and judgment.

Christmas is not about the living God coming to tell us everything's all right. John's Gospel isn't about Jesus speaking the truth and everyone saying "Of course! Why didn't we realize it before?" It is about God shining his clear, bright torch into the darkness of our world, our lives, our hearts, our imaginations - and the darkness not comprehending it. It's about God, God as a little child, speaking words of truth, and nobody knowing what he's talking about.

You may be aware of that puzzlement, that incomprehension, that sense of a word being spoken which seems like it ought to mean something but which remains opaque to you. If that's the point you are at, the Good News is that along with this theme of incomprehension and rejection is a parallel theme of people hearing and receiving Jesus's words, believing them and discovering, as he says, that they are spirit and life (John 6:63). "As many as received him, to them he gave the right to become God's children, who were born not of human will or flesh, but of God" (John 1:12). "If you abide in my words, you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32). "If anyone keeps my words, that person will never see death" (John 8:51). "You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you" (John 15:3).

Don't imagine that the world divides naturally into those who can understand what Jesus is saying and those who can't. By ourselves, none of us can. Jesus was born into a world where everyone was deaf and blind to him. But some, in fear and trembling, have allowed his words to challenge, rescue, heal and transform them. That is what's offered at Christmas, not a better-focused religion for those who already like that sort of thing, but a Word which is incomprehensible in our language but which, when we learn to hear, understand and believe it, will transform our whole selves with its judgment and mercy.

Out of the thousands of things that follow directly from this reading of John, I choose three as particularly urgent.

First, John's view of the Incarnation, of the Word becoming flesh, strikes at the very root of the liberal denial which characterized mainstream theology thirty years ago and whose long-term effects are still with us. I grew up hearing lectures and sermons declaring that the idea of God becoming human was a categorical error. No human being could be divine; Jesus must therefore have been simply a human being, albeit (here the headmaster pats the little boy on the head) a very brilliant one. Jesus points to God, but he isn't actually God.

A generation later, growing straight out of that school of thought, a clergyman wrote to me saying that the church doesn't know anything for certain. Remove the enfleshed and speaking Word from the centre of your theology, and gradually the whole thing unravels, until all you're left with is the theological equivalent of the grin on the Cheshire Cat: a relativism whose only moral principle is that there are no moral principles, no words of judgment (because nothing is really wrong, except saying that things are wrong), no words of mercy (because you're all right as you are, so all you need is affirmation).

That's where our society stands right now, and John's Christmas message issues a sharp and timely reminder to relearn the difference between mercy and affirmation, between a Jesus who both embodies and speaks God's word of judgment and grace and a homemade Jesus who gives us good advice about discovering who we really are. No wonder John's Gospel has been so unfashionable in many circles.

There is a fad in some quarters about a "theology of incarnation," meaning that our task is to discern what God is doing in the world and to do it with him. But that is only half the truth, and the wrong half to start with. John's theology of the Incarnation is about God's Word coming as light into darkness, as a hammer that breaks the rock into pieces, as a fresh word of judgment and mercy.

You might as well say that an incarnational missiology is about discovering what God is saying No to today and finding out how to say it with him. That was the lesson Barth and Bonhoeffer had to teach in Germany in the 1930s, and it's all too relevant as today's world becomes simultaneously more liberal and more totalitarian. This Christmas, get real, get Johannine, and listen again to the strange words spoken by the Word made flesh.

Second, John's prologue by its structure reaffirms the order of Creation at the point where it is being challenged today. John consciously echoes the first chapter of Genesis: "In the beginning God made heaven and earth; in the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1). When the Word becomes flesh, heaven and earth are joined together at last, as God always intended.

But the Creation story, which begins with the duality of heaven and earth, reaches its climax in the duality of male and female. When heaven and earth are joined together in Jesus Christ, the glorious intention for the whole of Creation is unveiled, reaffirming the creation of male and female in God's image. There is something about the enfleshment of the Word in John 1 that stands parallel to Genesis 1 and speaks of Creation fulfilled. We see what's going on: Jesus Christ has come as the Bridegroom, the one for whom the Bride has been waiting.

Not for nothing is Jesus's first sign to transform a wedding from disaster to triumph. Not for nothing do we find a man and a woman at the foot of the Cross. The same incipient gnosticism which says that true religion is about "discovering who we really are" is all too ready to say that who we really are may have nothing to do with being physically created as male or female. But the Christmas message is about the redemption of God's good world, his wonderful Creation, so that it can be the glorious thing it was made to be. This word is strange, even incomprehensible, in today's culture. But if you have ears to hear, then hear it.

Third, we return to the meal, the food whose name is strange, forbidding, even incomprehensible to those outside, but the most natural thing to those who know it. The little child comes and speaks to us of food that he offers: himself, his own body and blood. It is a hard saying, and those of us who know it well may need to remind ourselves just how hard it is, in case we have been dulled by familiarity into supposing that it's easy and undemanding. It isn't. It is the Word which judges the world and saves the world, the Word now turned into flesh, into matzo, Passover bread, the bread which is the flesh of the Christ child, given for the life of the world.

Listen, because the incomprehensible Word, the child, speaks to you. Don't patronize him; don't reject him; don't sentimentalize him. Learn the language within which he makes sense. And come to the table to enjoy the breakfast, the breakfast which is he himself, the Word made flesh, the Life which is our life, our light, our glory.

N.T. Wright is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity in the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He is one of the world's most distinguished and influential New Testament scholars. His most recent book is The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/12/19/4594929.htm

Obama’s Betrayal of Israel Is a Black Day for American Diplomacy

It is Islamist-leftist dogma that Israel’s millennia of attachment to its homeland count for nothing.

By Andrew C. McCarthy — December 24, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power attends the UN Security Council meeting on December 23, 2016, where the US voted to abstain on a UN Security Council resolution that demands Israel stop settlement activities on Palestinian territories. 

 Volkan Furuncu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Adding a final shameful chapter to a foreign-policy record that already runneth over with them, Barack Obama on Friday abandoned America’s commitment to Israel’s security, and to the vindication of democracy over sharia-supremacist aggression. In an act of cowardly venom, the president had the United States abstain from — and thereby effectively enact — a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemns Israeli settlement activity.

At least, that’s what the resolution ostensibly does. The reality is much more than that. The resolution undertakes to render our ally indefensible.

It was a black day in modern American diplomatic history, a flurry of sinister wheeling and dealing while the nation — exhausted by the election, anticipating a weekend of Christmas and Hanukkah celebration — was looking the other way.

To his great credit, Donald Trump was not. The president-elect asserted himself on Israel’s behalf, backing up his campaign promise that “America First” meant restoration of America’s reputation as a dependable friend and an enemy not to be trifled with. Under the pressure he generated, Egypt backed down, withdrawing its sponsorship of the resolution.

But such is the disdain in which Israel is openly held after eight Obama years of empowering Islamists that four other countries — Malaysia, Venezuela, Senegal, and, of all places, New Zealand — revived the resolution, knowing they had the State Department’s backing. With the U.S. abstention, it was easily approved.

It is a disgraceful legacy of Barack Obama that his obsession over settlements and antipathy toward Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — traits he shares with his old radical comrade, Rashid Khalidi — have made the already dim prospects for peace far more remote. At the root of the settlements controversy is the fiction that the territory at issue is “occupied Palestinian” land. In point of stubborn fact, no matter how tirelessly the vaunted “international community” evokes the scurrilous image of occupation, the territory is righteously disputed.

It is Islamist-leftist dogma that Israel’s millennia of attachment to its homeland count for nothing, and that the Jewish state owes its existence to a fit of remorse over Nazi barbarism — one of the reasons Holocaust denial is an Islamist pastime. Still, even under this skewed version of history, the occupation crowd has no case.

Israel’s foes claim that the settlements are illegitimate because Israel’s only lawful boundaries are the 1948 armistice lines. This is the so-called Green Line that was in effect right before Arab nations (including their Palestinian component, mainly in Jordan) commenced the invasion that began the 1967 Six-Day War.

I italicize “armistice lines” to highlight that the demarcations, even back in 1967, were not national boundaries. They were disputed even before the Arab war of aggression. The armistice lines merely reflect the position of Israeli and Arab forces when the cease-fire went into effect. They were not accepted as final boundaries by the affected countries. As we shall see, they could not be accepted as final boundaries by Israel.

Nevertheless, Israel did not set out to conquer the disputed territory. The Jewish state took it fair and square when they won the defensive war against enemies that sought Israel’s destruction. Thus the unending pattern that the United States and Western European powers cravenly refuse to address: Islamic factions and nations are free to reserve the right to eradicate Israel, but Israel must pretend the aggression never happened and the continuing threat does not exist.

Regardless of how many resolutions the rabidly anti-Semitic U.N. rolls out, territorial sovereignty, like other disputed issues, will not be settled unless the parties directly affected by it, Israel and the Palestinians, arrive at an understanding. Obama, however, has schemed to impose an outcome unilaterally by rendering as illegitimate Israel’s side of the argument — which, to the contrary, is as justifiable legally as it is essential for Israel’s security.

That, alas, is Obama’s real legacy: There are no good-faith disputes with him; you either agree with him or you are an outlaw.

The resolution adopted on Friday does so much more than merely condemn “settlement activities.” It says such activities must cease in “occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.” For good measure, it adds that the construction of settlements on territory that Palestinians covet — and that Israel righteously controls — has “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.”

See? The true purpose of the resolution is not to stop settlement construction. It is to dictate a final disposition. It puts the imprimatur of the Security Council — which, for transnational progressives, is our ultimate global ruler — on a decree that says: The disputed territory is actually Palestinian territory, and that this Palestinian territory includes East Jerusalem (i.e., the most sacred portion of the city Israel regards as its eternal capital — again, for millennia of valid historic reasons). For good measure, this patently political decree masquerades as objective legal analysis, pronouncing that its thumb on the scale is somehow dictated by international law.

Outrageous as this legal razzle-dazzle is, it is secondary to the resolution’s assault on Israeli security.

First, by giving the Palestinians everything and then some, the resolution removes any Palestinian incentive to negotiate for lasting peace. Indeed, by requiring no Palestinian concessions, it tells the Islamists and leftists who run Palestinian affairs that their jihadist campaign will continue to be rewarded and that the Security Council accepts — and effectively abets — their objective of eradicating the Jewish state (whether by terrorism, “democracy” activism, or both).

Second, it would make that eradication more probable. The 1948 armistice lines cannot be viable national borders for Israel because, as Obama, the Security Council, and Israel’s hostile neighbors well know, they are not defensible. Put aside that Israel is no larger than New Jersey and surrounded by existential threats. In the area just north of Tel Aviv, the center of the country is just nine miles wide (running east to west from the Green Line to the Mediterranean coastal town of Netanya).

As IDF Major General Yaakov Amidror explained in a 2005 study on the security requirements for lasting peace, the 1967 boundaries do not provide “defensive depth,” a longstanding principle of military doctrine holding that there must be an area sufficient for a defensive force to redeploy after being attacked, and for reserves to enter or counterattack — the territorial space between the battlefront and the strategic interior that any army must have in order to function. The boundaries the Security Council seeks to impose would be inadequate even if Palestinian leadership — including the Muslim Brotherhood’s terrorist branch, Hamas — were not committed to Israel’s destruction.

Obama knows all of this. He also knows that the campaign to destroy Israel is politically waged with U.N. resolutions every bit as much as Hamas wages it with rockets. It is therefore essential that our nation, as a reliable ally, uses our veto power to protect Israel’s security. That is why Obama would not have dared abstain from the vote on such a resolution before Election Day.

The only glimmer of hope on this dark day is President-elect Trump’s willingness to use what limited leverage he had in Israel’s defense. Perhaps more important was his vow, after the resolution was adopted, that things will be different come January 20 “as to the U.N.”

It seems the incoming president has identified the real problem.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

EDITORIAL: Obama’s Shameful Parting Shot at Israel

The Abolition Of Man (No, Really)

By ROD DREHER

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-abolition-of-man-no-really/

December 23, 2016

Adam Zaretsky

My libertarian friend Conor Friedersdorf has stared into the abyss, and has been jolted by what stared back. He writes about it in a must-read essay with the deceptively anodyne title “The Limits of Diversity”.

Conor begins by laying out his own openness to diverse experience. Then he imagines, as an intellectual exercise, someone who is totally closed to experiencing different things. He says that his “bubble may be thickest” precisely here: in trying to see the world through the eyes of those who are highly closed to diversity.

(Nota bene: the standard narrative in our culture is to stigmatized those who are closed to diversity, but that is the normative human experience. Besides which, as we often talk about on this blog, progressives who take pride in their supposed openness to diversity can be some of the most closed-minded people you’ll ever meet. They just draw their lines in different places.)

Conor says that listening to a recent podcast, he came hard up against the borders of what he would consider acceptable diversity. He writes:

Its main subject, bio-artist Adam Zaretsky, is not one of these authoritarians. Rather, he is a member of my tribe, a “libertarian,” Stenner’s term for those who prize individualism, diversity, and difference. And he is the first person to evoke in me a gut desire for enforced sameness and suppressed diversity––a visceral reaction I cannot recall having before.

That’s pretty strong. But read on, and it’s very easy to see why:

At the edge of science, researchers are using a newfound ability to edit any gene to work toward wonders: sustainable biofuels, ridding the world of malaria, seeking cures for genetic diseases. Trans-genesis, the process of taking a gene from one organism, cutting it out, and pasting it into another, has advanced radically, with new precision that will revolutionize medicine. It could give rise to genetically enhanced soldiers or astronauts; it may allow whole nations to increase their IQs.

Its aesthetic ramifications are less discussed. Consider the embryos that Adam Zaretsky has tweaked in the course of his bio-art projects and the art classes he teaches. “To call a developing embryo that’s been altered a sculpture is meant to cause a kind of double-bind in people’s minds,” he said. “They’re like, ‘It’s not a sculpture, it’s a being, or growing to be a being.’ What I’m trying to get across is that the making of transgenic humans, or non-humans, is a somewhat invasive act, but also based on a particular aesthetic, at a particular time, in a particular state of mind.”

Never mind curing Alzheimer’s or understanding the universe.

“I’m not here to cure anything or make knowledge. I’m here to make enigma,” he said. “I’m trying to problematize the concept and de-science it so people can see it for what it is.”

Let that sink in. He is not bringing new forms of human life into existence for aesthetic reasons; he’s working on animal embryos. But if you read the transcript of the podcast you’ll see that he’s looking forward to working on humans. Excerpt:

Transgenesis is taking one gene from one organism, cutting it out and pasting it into another organism. Now, we are reaching a point where we’re getting better at the potential for making transgenic humans, genetically modified humans, humans that are GMOs.

First of all, let me just say this – transgenic human embryos are already being made. They’re not necessarily being grown full-term, but this is something that’s possible. It’s been possible to do this since the ’70s, but people have been saying “I don’t know… No one would actually do that! That would be psychotic” because the technique that was how to target the genes into the human genome without them falling anywhere or everywhere, so it lands willy-nilly in the genome and can cause all kinds of problems, like cancer or death. But there’s a new way to get genes into the human genome that isn’t as disruptive as before. CRISPR/Cas9 has made the news as a technique that’s more refined, it’s more targeted, exactly where your gene is gonna land, so we could just use it to knock in or knock out problematic genes or ad genes, and so it won’t harm the rest of the organism.

It’s a fairly easy to use technology, and it’s available in do-it-yourself CRISPR kits already for yeast, for worms, but not necessarily on human cells. It’s not perfected yet, but on the world scene there are different laws in different nations, and I have to say this is one of those standard Pandora things – if you can do it and it’s been 50 years, it’s about to be released that people ARE doing it because they HAVE been doing it.

Later, he says:

It’s been a goal of mine for more than ten years to make transgenic humans. I do have problems with the process, I do have problems with the results, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t do it if I could.

Just so you know what kind of sick monster Adam Zaretsky is, here he is describing himself and his background:

I think I wanted to be a banker, a pornographer and a communist. It’s hard to mix all those three, but I’m on my way. I’m already a pornographer and a communist, so I think I just have to go to business school.

Somewhere between science fiction and sado-masochism is an aesthetic based on prurient interest. It’s alright. It’s alright. Sexuality shouldn’t just be about flowers and a glass of wine and some smooth music and some loving sex. I actually love dropping cotton balls on someone who’s tied up – that’s fine, but there’s something raw and rancorous, and there’s something camp, and there’s something trans, and there’s something transvestism, and there’s something transgenic. They’re all sort of flowing together under the aegis of basically queerness.

Let’s just face it, okay? I’m a child of Rocky Horror, I’m a child of Soft Cell. I really like luring disco dollies to a life of vice.

You guys are just uncovering every little thing about me, this is so nice. It’s nice to study myself like a specimen!

“All sort of flowing together under the aegis of basically queerness.” Do you understand what’s being said here, reader? He reminisces about being in New York as a young man, and seeing the performance artist Karen Finley do her infamous routine where she shoved yams up her rear end. He remembers being enthralled by Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait shoving a whip handle up his butt. More Zaretsky:

And some people refer to shock art in a way to dismiss it, when actually art that shocks is achieving an aesthetic goal. The goal is to make you revulsed; the goal is to make you dismiss or repress the art, but also the goal is to crack through your resistance, your screen, and show you what’s underneath. It’s not always pretty, but this idea that you’re allowed to bullshit-detect rational culture and go ahead and be honest without it being like a situation comedy that ends in a moral, happy ending… I felt a little freer, to go ahead and do the work of the negative. It actually matters.

Desensitizing people to the perverted, the radically abnormal, the … evil. This is what he’s into. More:

To call a developing embryo that’s been altered a sculpture is meant to cause a kind of double bind in people’s minds, where they’re like “Oh, it’s not a sculpture, it’s a being” or “It’s growing to be a being.” What I’m trying to get across is that the making of transgenic humans or transgenic non-humans is a somewhat invasive act, but is also based on a particular aesthetic at a particular state of time in a particular state of mind. I’m trying to problematize the process, and sort of de-science it a little bit so that people can see it for what it is.

He believes in creating mutants for the sake of art. Just because he can. As an expression of the artist’s will. Here’s the world Adam Zaretsky foresees:

I think that it’s important to make versions of transgenic human anatomy that are not based on idealism. I wanna make sure that there’s plaid kids, all the other queer anatomy out there to compete with the other add-ons that parents are gonna be paying for. To get bio-queer transgenic humans is going to save a lot of difference on the planet. It’s gonna stop us from monoculturing ourselves and it’s gonna also offer a real and possibly unacceptable face of the democratization of the human genome.
The idea is that you take a gene, say for pig noses, or ostrich anuses, or aardvark tongue, and you paste that into a human sperm, a human egg, a human zygote. A baby starts to form. Developmentally, the baby is mostly human, but it has an aardvark tongue, a pig nose and an ostrich anus. That makes for bodily difference and surely metabolic differences etc, but it also makes for a version of ourselves that’s based on collage. It’s literally gene collage.

What’s weird about it is that once you get that started, if it stabilizes, if you can find partners, if you’re still fertile, if you’re still into it, you go ahead and reproduce and you’ll have children born with ostrich anuses and aardvark tongues and pig noses.

Children born with ostrich anuses. That’s what this man dreams of. A sane society would forbid his work and throw him in prison if he got anywhere near a lab. But this mad scientist-artist is on the faculty at MIT, and teaches at has taught or been affiliated with other prestigious universities.

Adam Zaretsky freaked Conor Friedersdorf out. Drawing on the insights of Jonathan Haidt and Karen Stenner, he says:

The point here is not to evaluate sanctity as a moral intuition, never mind to defend every application of it. The point, rather, is to remember that sanctity is a powerful driver of moral intuition for many, and that lots of Americans who aren’t particularly prone to disgust would, when confronted with antlered, aardvark-tongued babies, agree with Leon Kass.

“Repugnance,” he once wrote, “revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity.”

Insofar as the power of those intuitions is forgotten or dismissed by liberals, or libertarians, or difference loving peoples, or transgressive artists understandably alarmed by the prospect of “perfect” designer babies, the result is as likely to be a horrific backlash against diversity and neophilia as a future in which they face no limits.

I will tell you this. I would eagerly vote for a leader who promised to put Adam Zaretsky and his kind in prison, and close their labs. These are lines that must not be crossed.

But I also tell you this: our society will never do this. If it is okay to manipulate human genes to protect someone from disease, why not to provide them with enhanced abilities? And, having established that there is nothing sacred about human genes, who’s to put a limit on what the Adam Zaretskys of the world choose to do with them?

If you convince people that we must tolerate Adam Zaretsky’s children with ostrich anuses for the sake of curing childhood disease, or helping them to have their dream baby, they’ll accept it. That’s how we are. We Americans figure out what we want, then come up with the rationalization later. Zaretsky is right that if the technology exists, people somewhere are going to do whatever they want to with it. I can’t argue with that. But if this evil is going to come into the world, let it not be through my country. That’s my belief. I would accept severe restrictions on liberty to stop that evil.

Also, notice how Zaretsky accurately points out the role transgressive art plays in desensitizing us and making us willing to accept ever more transgressive acts as normative. It’s true not just of transgressive art, but transgression itself. Look at this image of the two covers National Geographic ran this month:

The one on the left, featuring a nine-year-old transgender boy-girl, went to subscribers. The other was for newsstands. Apparently the magazine’s editors realize that there are still plenty of people who find the idea of a prepubescent child presenting as the opposite sex disturbing. The editor of the magazine described this child as “brave,” which gives you an idea of the editorial slant of its presentation of transgenderism.

You can hardly get more establishmentarian than National Geographic. This is the future. Adam Zaretsky is right: “everything is sort of flowing together under the aegis of basic queerness” (and by “queerness” he means most broadly the overturning of all values and distinctions). Many of the most intelligent and powerful people in this culture are deliberately destroying the categories of man and woman, and calling it virtue.

When I call the Benedict Option “a strategy for Christians in a post-Christian nation” (the subtitle of my forthcoming book), I’m not talking about preserving our political views. I’m talking most fundamentally about preserving basic humanity and sanity through this coming darkness.

I shake my head at my fellow conservative Christians who think the danger has passed because Donald Trump is president. One of Trump’s big backers is the Silicon Valley transhumanist Peter Thiel. If you think there’s anything within Donald Trump that will stand against the technological exploitation of human life, you’re dreaming. The Democratic Party won’t oppose it because they see Science as sacrosanct. Plus, the philosophical principles they accept to justify abortion lays the basic groundwork.

As for the Republicans, if you think the sanctity of life will cause them to stand against transhumanism, ask yourself how far a proposal to outlaw IVF would get in Congress. It’s a procedure which has created and continues to create millions of human embryos that have been, or will have to be, destroyed (here are the numbers for the UK; ours are certainly worse, given our larger population). Isn’t it wrong to compare IVF to Zaretsky’s evil folly? No. Once the principle is established that human life can be deliberately created, knowing it will be destroyed in embryo, we’re only talking about details.

Posted in Art & Architecture, Bioethics, Culture, Decline and Fall, Science. Tagged abortion, Adam Zaretsky, transgenesis.

Aleppo and American decline

By Charles Krauthammer

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/

December 22, 2016

Residents look for survivors at a damaged site after what activists said was a barrel bomb dropped by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the Al-Shaar neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria, September 17, 2015.ABDALRHMAN ISMAIL/REUTERS

The fall of Aleppo just weeks before Barack Obama leaves office is a fitting stamp on his Middle East policy of retreat and withdrawal. The pitiable pictures from the devastated city showed the true cost of Obama’s abdication. For which he seems to have few regrets, however. In his end-of-year news conference, Obama defended U.S. inaction with his familiar false choice: It was either stand aside or order a massive Iraq-style ground invasion.

This is a transparent fiction designed to stifle debate. At the beginning of the civil war, the popular uprising was ascendant. What kept a rough equilibrium was regime control of the skies. At that point, the United States, at little risk and cost, could have declared Syria a no-fly zone, much as it did Iraqi Kurdistan for a dozen years after the Gulf War of 1991.

The U.S. could easily have destroyed the regime’s planes and helicopters on the ground and so cratered its airfields as to make them unusable. That would have altered the strategic equation for the rest of the war.

And would have deterred the Russians from injecting their own air force — they would have had to challenge ours for air superiority. Facing no U.S. deterrent, Russia stepped in and decisively altered the balance, pounding the rebels in Aleppo to oblivion. The Russians were particularly adept at hitting hospitals and other civilian targets, leaving the rebels with the choice between annihilation and surrender.

They surrendered.

Obama has never appreciated that the role of a superpower in a local conflict is not necessarily to intervene on the ground, but to deter a rival global power from stepping in and altering the course of the war. That’s what we did during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Moscow threatened to send troops to support Egypt and President Nixon countered by raising America’s nuclear alert status to Defcon 3. Russia stood down.

Less dramatically but just as effectively, American threats of retaliation are what kept West Germany, South Korea and Taiwan free and independent through half a century of Cold War.

It’s called deterrence. Yet Obama never had the credibility to deter anything or anyone. In the end, the world’s greatest power was reduced to bitter speeches at the United Nations. “Are you truly incapable of shame?” thundered U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power at the butchers of Aleppo. As if we don’t know the answer. Indeed the shame is on us for terminal naivete, sending our secretary of state chasing the Russians to negotiate one humiliating pretend cease-fire after another.

Even now, however, the Syria debate is not encouraging. The tone is anguished and emotional, portrayed exclusively in moral terms. Much less appreciated is the cold strategic cost.

Assad was never a friend. But today he’s not even a free agent. He’s been effectively restored to his throne, but as the puppet of Iran and Russia. Syria is now a platform, a forward base, from which both these revisionist regimes can project power in the region.

Iran will use Syria to advance its drive to dominate the Arab Middle East. Russia will use its naval and air bases to bully the Sunni Arab states, and to shut out American influence.

It’s already happening. The foreign and defense ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey convened in Moscow this week to begin settling the fate of Syria. Notice who wasn’t there. For the first time in four decades, the United States, the once dominant power in the region, is an irrelevance.

With Aleppo gone and the rebels scattered, we have a long road ahead to rebuild the influence squandered over the past eight years. President-elect Donald Trump is talking about creating safe zones. He should tread carefully. It does no good to try to do now what we should have done five years ago. Conditions are much worse. Russia and Iran rule. Maintaining the safety of safe zones will be expensive and dangerous. It will require extensive ground deployments, and it risks military confrontation with Russia.

And why? Guilty conscience is not a good reason. Interventions that are purely humanitarian — from Somalia to Libya — tend to end badly. We may proclaim a “responsibility to protect,” but when no American interests are at stake, the engagement becomes impossible to sustain. At the first losses, we go home.

In Aleppo, the damage is done, the city destroyed, the inhabitants ethnically cleansed. For us, there is no post-facto option. If we are to regain the honor lost in Aleppo, it will have to be on a very different battlefield.

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Read more here:

Charles Krauthammer: The price of powerlessness

Leon Wieseltier: Aleppo’s fall is Obama’s failure

The Post’s View: The bloodbath in Aleppo will haunt humanity

Richard Cohen: Obama’s hallucinatory excuses on Syria

Mopping-Up Operation

By Mark Steyn

http://www.steynonline.com/

December 21, 2016

Despite an unfolding international manhunt the first pictures of Anis Amri released in Germany have his eyes deliberately covered, thought to be because of strict privacy laws there. (Via DailyMail.UK)

Following my column on the Christmas market slaughter, a reader writes:

Dear Mark, 

Spot on. It reminds me of the old joke about the procedure for separating the sane from the insane, back when there were "mental asylums" and society tried to keep crazy people inside them instead of running the country. 

The intake assessment involved giving each patient a mop and bucket, then locking them in a room and slowly flooding it with water. 

As the water level rose, the insane went to work with the mop and bucket. 

The sane located the valve and turned off the water. 

Merry Christmas to you and yours! 

Rick Darby

In fact, the lunatics running the asylum have effortlessly surpassed the old joke - in that even the droplets their mops pick up they manage to lose. Thus Berlin's mass murderer:

'Armed and dangerous' Christmas truck suspect is still at large as it's revealed he had been under surveillance for months and was arrested three times

And that's just the headline.

The 23-year-old, who has a 100,000 euro reward on his head, was under close surveillance of German intelligence for several months following his arrival in the country last year.

He was arrested three times this year and his asylum application was rejected, but deportation papers were never served and he disappeared.

The Tunisian radical was known to be a supporter of Islamic State and to have received weapons training. 

He tried to recruit an accomplice for a terror plot – which the authorities knew about – but still remained at large. 

Today his own father claimed he had served four years in an Italian jail after he set fire to a school. Tunisian security officials also revealed he was convicted in absentia for aggravated theft with violence in his home country... 

Meanwhile a European arrest warrant issued for Amri reveals the fugitive has used at least six different aliases under three different nationalities.

Wait, it gets better:

Anis arrived in Germany in July 2015 and was put on a danger list shortly after arriving - a sign authorities considered him prone to extreme violence. He was placed under surveillance but details remains unclear. 

In April this year he was given an immigration hearing and denied the right to asylum. He was due to be deported before the end of the year. 

But under a peculiarity of the German asylum system he was granted a 'Duldung' - or toleration papers - which allowed him to stay for unknown reasons.

Oh.

That's not a joke, incidentally: "Duldung" really does mean "toleration". There's not enough trees in Germany for all the "toleration papers" Mutti Merkel wants to issue.

But don't worry, they were monitoring his phone. So that's great. Unless, under some other "peculiarity", they turned off the monitoring for a few hours a day - just like, with the Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray jihadist, they switched off his electronic anklet each morning, round about Mass time, to give him a bit of privacy to decapitate Catholic priests. They take their privacy rights seriously in Europe:

Despite an unfolding international manhunt the first pictures of him released in Germany have his eyes deliberately covered, thought to be because of strict privacy laws there.

Heaven forbid that slaughtering a dozen people should infringe on one's privacy rights anymore than the court convictions, deportation order and intelligence surveillance appear to have done.

So, as I always say, the "lone wolf" turns out to be a known wolf. A few SteynOnline readers have complained about the way I always say "as I always say". But, as my friend Douglas Murray complains in The Spectator, it isn't easy writing the same column every week for 15 years because nothing ever changes: #JeSuisParis, #JeSuisBruxelles, #JeSuisNice, #JeSuisOrlando, #JeSuisBerlin, #JeSuis[YourTownHere]...

As recently as a quarter-century ago, Her Britannic Majesty's Government, in order to contain a domestic emergency, was willing to impose internal travel restrictions within the United Kingdom on those suspected of terrorist associations, in order to prevent some fellows from Newry or West Belfast flying to Manchester or Birmingham and blowing stuff up. Just to underline my point, that was adomestic emergency: the bombers were already within the nation's borders, and full citizens, so you're stuck with them. But today it would apparently be unreasonable to expect western governments to cease importing large numbers of foreigners who wish to murder the natives. Indeed, in an exquisite touch, the depraved Mrs Merkel was attending a self-flattering love-in called the "International Day of Migrants" at the precise moment the known wolf hit the gas and ploughed into his victims.

As I noted yesterday, my sometime warm-up act Jonathan Kay deplores all this "Mark Steyn-esque hysteria" about Islam. So it's important to emphasize that not every "refugee" wants to kill all the infidels. For example, this fellow just wants to make the Nativity play a wee bit more diverse and vibrant:

The Somali asylum seeker suddenly leapt on stage during the traditional depiction of the Christian story in the Austrian town of Oberndorf near Schwanenstadt in the state of Upper Austria, causing horror and upset amongst the children and parents. 

At first, no one had reacted when the asylum seeker came to the venue and stood next to the stage where children of nursery school age were performing.

The asylum seeker suddenly leapt on stage, took out a copy of the Koran from his rucksack and started preaching. 

The 24-year-old, who was wearing a white robe, was eventually overpowered by a number of men, including two brothers, while he was shouting "Allahu Akbar".

See? "Allahu Akbar" isn't necessarily the last words you'll ever hear just before the powder keg goes up. Sometimes it's just Arabic for "Happy Holidays!", a cheery greeting from one people of the book to another - as our youngsters will understand once we start teaching it in nursery school:

A witness said: "The children are totally anxious and petrified, we were terribly afraid for our children."

Oh, c'mon. Nobody died or was even injured, did they? So what's with the Steynesque hysteria?

As long as they keep issuing "toleration papers", the lunatics running the asylum are gonna need a lot more mops and buckets. Which means they'll need a lot more mop factories and bucket factories. Which means they'll need to import millions more refugees who can be trained to work in them. Except for the ones who can be hired to work in the department that issues "toleration papers". Mop, rinse and repeat...