Devolution a la Mode

By Anthony Esolen
In the pilot episode of the old television show The Waltons, the six Walton children have gathered outdoors in the cold and the snow, where a lady from a religious charity is handing out Christmas presents to the littler ones. The presents have been donated by people better off than almost anybody in their mountain village. She gives a present in exchange for a Bible verse. Mary Ellen, the oldest of the Walton girls, knows a lot of verses, not because she is pious, but because Mrs. Walton makes her memorize them when she has misbehaved or talked back to her elders, which is often. She's the one to go to when you need a verse.
"That's too long!" says one of the local boys. "Give me a shorter one."
"Jesus wept," says Mary Ellen.
That earns the boy a gift, and a look of pious ecstasy from the charitable lady. But things are not all well. When the smallest Walton, Elizabeth, about five years old, opens her present, it's a porcelain baby doll with a crack and a large hole in the face.
"She's dead!" the little girl cries in horror and dismay. We are to feel the shame of it, and indignation, that someone would donate a dead baby doll for the poor. Not from malice, but from sheer thoughtlessness.
Fifty years later, the feminist claptrap called Barbie opens with a group of little girls playing with their baby dolls, when a goddess-like Barbie shows up, stylish and gigantic and as feminine as a mannequin in a couturier's shop. Then, to Richard Strauss's fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra, one of the girls, in awe, smashes her doll's head on a rock, and another throws hers up in the air, spinning in space, just like the bone one of the apes has tossed in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It becomes the sign: BARBIE.
So our "evolution" is from little girls playing with baby dolls, as the narrator tells us, to Barbie – or, as I'd put it, from something warm, natural, self-giving, and productive, to something cold, unnatural, self-worshiping, and sterile. Sure, I know, it's a joke. We're not to take it seriously. So goes the bait-and-switch.
Yet somehow, I cannot see the humor in a dead baby.
"Did you hear the one about the dead baby flying in the air?" said nobody at a bar, ever.
The odd thing about it, what the film's makers somehow managed to miss, is that without babies there is no evolution. That is the Darwinian imperative. In mammals, the mother must suckle the babies, and the longer the period of immaturity, the greater the dependence of the offspring on the parents. Without a strong maternal instinct, mammals do not survive.
We need not accept Darwin's account of the origin of species in order to admit this much. It is the inexorable logic of survival. You must play your cards most wisely to beat the house. Toss away your aces, and you die. Not immediately; but the house, Nature, has all the time in the world, and you do not.

Only the spiritually exhausted Western world would make a joke about little girls smashing their baby dolls. But the joke is on the West. We are contracepting and aborting ourselves to death.
Nor are we healthy apart from those obvious evils, since we have sown confusion in our children and suspicion and recrimination between the sexes, supposing even that we humble ourselves to acknowledge that there are two sexes. And only two. The dealer looks at your winnings and shrugs. The pile will dwindle to nothing. It must.
"I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing," says the aged Moses to the people. "Therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." (Deuteronomy 30:19) The terms are not ours, but God's. Man can no more create a moral law than he can summon a grain of sand into existence from nothing, or invent and impose a new law of gravitation.
And the people of Israel would have the choice of death right before them as they entered Canaan. Worship of the Canaanite god Moloch, accompanied by child-sacrifice as a quid pro quo, turns the public square int...