March 30, 2006
 
MANN TALK: The Yank on the Womb
 
By Perry Mann
 
Hinton, WV (Special to HNN) – A woman columnist advocating motherhood quotes a reformed feminist: “Motherhood is about deciding not to fight that ancient and biological yank on the womb, that natural order of the soul that says you should be there. I am a committed feminist, and there’s nothing more powerful to me than refusing to abandon motherhood.”
 
The yank of biology is not just on the womb of women, it is upon the seeds of men and upon all the other organs and cells of women and men and upon the animals and plants and on all the building blocks of the universe; and it is a yank that can be ignored only at the cost of discontent of spirit, malaise of soul and diseases of body and mind of all mankind.
 
The premise that God hammered out on a heavenly anvil man and woman specially in his image and breathed an eternal soul into them, created all else in six work days, fashioned Eden as the depository of his labors, endowed man and woman with free will, who straight away disobeyed Him, and thus lost all, is a fiction, a fiction of little consequence had not man accepted it as absolute truth and proceeded to build a civilization upon that fiction.
 
Too late, it appears, Darwin comes along and discovers that man and woman are animals with a long history of evolution during which they and all else were hammered out on nature’s anvil not in six work days but over billions of years, that he and she are species of a balanced biological whole created from the inorganic, that they are programmed to perpetuate themselves and that they are subject to the laws of gravity, physics and chemistry and all other laws that govern the galaxy, stars and planets. And the womb.
 
Too late, I say, because man, in his egocentrism, his belief in his semi-divinity and in his rebellion against God, has turned his back on his natural home and way; built the city-fortress, in which he thinks he is master of his fate and captain of his destiny; and in the process of building, he has raped, ransacked, wrecked, polluted, pillaged , vandalized his natural habitat and squandered his natural legacy for the trivial, for possessions and power, for gelt and gilt, and to devise marvelous remedies to mitigate the exactions of the Verities and the inexorable consequences of his infidelities to his Creator and the natural order. And he has left and is leaving to his progeny, to his children and his children’s children, a mess of things relative to what is really needed for them to live fully, naturally, and wholesomely.
 
Man’s first error was leaving the land, where no man was unemployed, where every child had a place from birth, where men, women and children and ox and horse and all the other domesticated animals comprised a unity of survival, in which they worked together, played together, rejoiced together and sorrowed together; and where they lived under sky and sun, labored in fields and meadows, watched the seasons come and go, stored up in summer against winter, sowed in spring to harvest in fall, honored mother and father and sat at the feet of aged, on and on from generation to generation, knowing in their hearts that even if heaven were a fiction they had known the fullness of living.
 
The next mistake was the city. It was built to defy God’s eviction of Adam and Eve from Eden and to subvert and negate the decree that after the Disobedience man must earn bread by the sweat of his brow, and it was built primarily by those who dreamed of schemes to expropriate bread by cunning from those who had by sweat produced it. The city preyed and still preys on the countryside in every way, attracting the unwary and naive to exploit and to corrupt them; offering in museum and galleries vicariously scenes and vistas known first hand to the peasantry immemorially; employing workers only when employers could profit from their labor; proliferating enticements designed to appeal to the basest of desires; polluting air and water and all of the residue of nature in its jurisdiction and beyond; and forever profiting from the hinterland by selling dearly inferior and superfluous stuff and buying cheaply that without which the city could not persist for a week.
 
Jacques Ellul in his book The Meaning of the City writes an appropriate malediction of it: “The city, then, cannot function except as a parasite; it needs constant contributions from the outside. One might be tempted to speak of exchange, but the city has nothing to exchange. What the city produces is for her own use. Notwithstanding tractors, electricity, and fertilizer, what the city can produce for the country is absurd and ridiculous compared with what she receives. As for her spiritual worth, her ferment of ideas will be of use nowhere but in the city. On the other hand, she spoils peasant values with remarkable virtuosity. Such values are disappearing under urban influence because they are the ‘defects’ of urban values. The very character of the city, in the economic field or in the intellectual, artistic, or humanitarian, is to receive from the outside, to consume, and to produce things without value or meaning, usable only inside the city and to her gain.”
 
Man has produced an urban environment that is antithetical to nature’s. His environment is one in which peasant values and peasants themselves are scorned. Peasants taught and lived and practiced frugality, pay-as-you-go, providence, work, sacrifice, neighborliness, fidelity, familial priority, and environmental stewardship. In man’s city, his substitute for nature, none of the above are taught, lived or practiced except by a few eccentrics.
 
The credit card has seduced him to live and practice extravagance and obscene consumption. Any job that requires sweat is unspeakable. Sacrifice is out; fulfillment is in. Fidelity is a laugh. Degradation of the earth is proper so long as the benefits accrue to the deserving, namely, the human elite. And although sex is queen and breasts and pecs are enhanced and exhibited ad nauseam, every means designed by scientists and passed down by the tales of old wives are used to make coitus sterile and the womb a place of recreation instead of generation.
 
Man’s environment is at war with nature’s environment, a war man cannot hope to win even though he may prevail in a battle or two. For him even to hope to win exhibits an arrogance and hubris beyond understanding , beyond reason, beyond faith, beyond all evidence. More men and women need to stand on hilltops at night and look into the heavens and then ask how can man in all this wonderment standing on this speck of it think that he can in his finiteness recreate earth more to his profit and less to his cost than whatever infinite power put together all of this in the first place.
 
The feminist that feels the yank on her womb and the need to be there is listening to what every human should listen to, nay, must listen to. It is the voice of sanity, speaking the words of salvation and urging one to comply with the natural order of the soul, and it is the voice that man has listened to the better part of his existence but that is now weakly heard, if at all, under the din of the preachments of false prophet and the triumphant chorus of scientists probing nature’s secrets with patents in mind.
 
Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a regular columnist for the Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville. Born in Charleston, WV, in 1921, he lives in Hinton. The portrait accompanying this column is by Robert Shetterley from his book “Americans Who Tell The Truth.”