“Is it time,” asks the New Scientist magazine, “for a more subtle view on the ultimate taboo: cannibalism?”
Unfortunately, no, this isn’t satire.
Loath as I am to contribute to the Left’s campaign to run the Babylon Bee out of business, the fact remains that it was the London-based New Scientist, which bills itself as “the world’s most popular” science magazine, that the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh exposed this week on X for promoting the “destigmatiz[ation]” of cannibalism. The publication has published two articles, plus a reader response, on the subject within the past month.
“Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer issues than you might imagine,” one article states. “If a body can be bequeathed with consent to medical science, why can’t it be left to feed the hungry?”
New Scientist seeks to deconstruct what it deems the West’s “culturally ingrained” opposition to cannibalism. Evidence suggests, the magazine claims, that “[o]ur human ancestors often ate each other” — not just “for sustenance” but “as funerary rituals to honour their dead.” That we now reject cannibalism as an animalistic act is thanks to the work of “early modern colonialism, when racist stereotypes of the cannibal were concocted to justify subjugation.” In other words, cannibalism is viewed as wrong only because white people wanted to enslave black people.
New Scientist has certainly achieved its self-proclaimed goal of “ask[ing] the big-picture questions about life … and what it means to be human.”
It’s old news that the Left’s ideology at every level diminishes the intrinsic value of the human person. As The American Spectator’s Doug Bandow so brilliantly describes in his latest column, we see this in leftists’ unrepentant celebration of Lenin today. We see it in their promotion of abortion, surrogacy, and transgenderism. The Left believes the body to be nothing but an empty shell, clay molded to fit the emotional spirit that supposedly dictates who each individual is. (READ THE PIECE: Leftists Blatantly Celebrate Lenin’s Legacy in New Book)
But we know, and most of our ancestors throughout history have known, that the body is fundamentally marked with the essence of the human person. That’s why all civilized peoples have respectfully honored the dead with rites and rituals. That’s why countries like Mexico each year celebrate their departed loved ones on el Día de los Muertos with traditions over 3,000 years old; why, famously, the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead so that their spirits would not be lost in the afterlife. To suggest that the custom of honoring the deceased is one rooted in colonialism, in white supremacy, is to indicate one’s own ignorance of history, tradition, and culture. It’s yet another example of the Left’s growingly blatant racism.
But this time, it may have gone too far. There are some things that simply should not be touched.
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