DANIEL S. writes:

Thomas Fleming has a very good article on the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and his prophetic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which was later adapted into the film Blade Runner). The antagonists in the story are androids who appear as humans in every way but one, they lack the ability for empathy. As Fleming points out, what difference is there now between these heartless, artificially created androids of science fiction and the technologically-enslaved modern man who has no compassion for even his unborn offspring?

When C.S. Lewis predicted, in The Abolition of Man, that the human race as we know it would be altered or even eliminated by a combination of genetic engineering and mass education, he failed to persuade some readers that humankind would put up with such a nightmare. But Lewis was writing before the computer revolution, and which has prepared the human race to accept the proposition that it can be systematically reprogrammed by mass media, computer technology, and social networking to lose much of their connection with humanity. They have sex without love, copulation without babies, and if a mistake is made, it is flushed down the drain or tossed in a dumpster.

Dick knew where we were headed. When Roe v. Wade gave American mothers the legal right to kill the children they had conceived, he wrote a story “The Pre-persons,” in which humans could be terminated until they reached the point of full personhood, at which they understood algebra. Many of the hip and avant-garde people who had professed to admire his work turned against the writer, and some feminists, he claimed, threatened him with death. Of the many things Phil Dick had to apologize for, this story, he said, was not one of them.

Are the sorts of females who lashed out at Dick really human women or only clones of [android] Rachel Rosen? Are their metrosexual male playmates actually men or only androids who have learned to feign compassion for whales and baby seals but are utterly without empathy for their own offspring? Perhaps it is cruel to speculate.

One can readily observe the android-like qualities of modern man, which Fleming mentioned in brief. Surely it would take a brilliant, though highly schizophrenic, mind like that possessed by Philip K. Dick, who Fleming describes as one “insane enough to tell the truth in a world that lives on lies,” to predict not only man’s abandonment of genuine, human empathy but that would lead him to seek sanction for infanticide (and probably beyond) to exterminate his own unwanted offspring.

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Jeff W. writes:

There is a sharp contrast between the kind of compassion that modern people feel when they impose taxes in order to fund welfare programs and the compassion that Christ requires.

When an expert in Hebrew law asked Christ, “Who is my neighbor?” he replied with the parable of the good Samaritan. In that story, the Samaritan saw an injured man, half-dead on the road, and the emotion he felt for him is described by the Greek word splagchnizomai. That word means to be emotionally moved in one’s bowels. The root of the word comes from the Greek word for intestines or guts. The love for one’s neighbor that Christ commands is thus a love that we feel deep in our guts and that motivates us to immediate action on behalf of another human being.

In the modern world of cradle-to-grave government welfare, people have lost the occasion for that kind of love, and it seems clear that people have gradually become colder and less loving.

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