So, Planned Parenthood, a respectable organization in our society, funded by governments, beloved by everyone with the right opinions, harvests flesh from the unborn children it kills for scientific research so we can have medical advances that will give us a better life.
In short, we're living the plot of Soylent Green.
But Soylent Green isn't the shocking secret ingredient in the cure for our starvation in a post-apocalyptic wasteland; it's a ho-hum part of the economic and technological machine extending our comfort in the most prosperous society in history.
The resulting situation for us would-be Charlton Hestons is eloquently described by Brandon McGinley at First Things. It seems like madness to say that our culture is morally rotten when our life is so pleasant. Rod Dreher expands on this. It's not just the barbarism of Planned Parenthood itself but the lack of reaction to that barbarism from our popular culture that exemplifies the moral insanity of our culture. We no longer have the means to condemn cannibalism. Cannibalism is "gross", but so is surgery. Our disgust instinct has no rational basis. It is simply an obstacle to be overcome so that we're free to manipulate the meat world for the satisfaction of our desired.
(Heck, even in the moral theology class I took in a Catholic college, the professor--an exponent of the standard "liberal" Catholic consequentialism--couldn't condemn anthropophagy, at least in cultures where it was a sign of respect for the dead rather than humiliation of an enemy. Maybe some day the Church will be enlightened enough to embrace ritualized cannibalism as part of an inculturated liturgy!)
When we can't agree on cannibalism--when we can't agree on the harvesting the bodies of our young for medical research--where do we start?
As MacIntyre has accurately described it, the Enlightenment project to base morality on a universal, rational basis is a failure--and, worse than that, it has destroyed what it tried to replace: the shared moral life based in practice of the virtues that is a necessary precondition for any kind of meaningful moral discourse. At this point, it is nothing more than a kind of zombie virus which only serves to infest and consume what remains of meaningful moral communities by providing arguments that allow individuals to opportunistically reject particular traditional moral strictures as oppressive.
When meaningful dialogue is impossible, the only possible response (aside from violence) is a kind of prophetic rebuke.
But if that witness is to be carried on, if a meaningful moral life is to be carried on, then what is most imperative is building of communities that are resistant to the virus.
