"A Truly Human Civilization" vs. the F-Word Culture

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P. A. Ritzer, Volume 33

Please see all twelve parts of “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It:” Part One: “One Big Family;” Part Two: “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” Part Three: “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” Part Four: “Nature, Control, and Sin;” Part Five: “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” Part Six: “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” Part Seven: “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” Part Eight: “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” Part Nine: “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” Part Ten: “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” Part Eleven: “Fear, Control, and Death;” and Part Twelve: “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control.”

Nevertheless, mechanistic ideology persists among those who benefit from mass formation and totalitarianism. And it is not just Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Pharmacy Benefit Managers that practice mechanistic thinking and want to intrude into your sexual intimacy. Humanae Vitae further presaged the evil that godless government could, with contraception, visit upon its population not that many years before the Chinese Communist Party’s One-Child Policy and all the population-control programs pushed upon developing nations:

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.^¹

Again, this was written just years before the CCP’s One-Child Policy. Humanae Vitae also points out the limits imposed upon mankind by the laws of nature and of nature’s God to safeguard the reverence due to “the whole human organism and its natural functions:”

Consequently, unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions, in the light of the principles We stated earlier, and in accordance with a correct understanding of the "principle of totality" enunciated by Our predecessor Pope Pius XII.(21)²

Humanae Vitae recognizes the Church’s responsibility to proclaim “the entire moral law” toward “contributing to the creation of a truly human civilization:”

It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching. There is too much clamorous outcry against the voice of the Church, and this is intensified by modern means of communication. But it comes as no surprise to the Church that she, no less than her divine Founder, is destined to be a “sign of contradiction.”(22) She does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on her of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical.

Since the Church did not make either of these laws, she cannot be their arbiter—only their guardian and interpreter. It could never be right for her to declare lawful what is in fact unlawful, since that, by its very nature, is always opposed to the true good of man.

In preserving intact the whole moral law of marriage, the Church is convinced that she is contributing to the creation of a truly human civilization. She urges man not to betray his personal responsibilities by putting all his faith in technical expedients. In this way she defends the dignity of husband and wife. This course of action shows that the Church, loyal to the example and teaching of the divine Savior, is sincere and unselfish in her regard for men whom she strives to help even now during this earthly pilgrimage “to share God's life as sons of the living God, the Father of all men.”(23)³

Given all of the above, I would encourage Ms. Barr, Mr. Cernovich, Mr. Carlson, and all of us for that matter, to eschew use of the f-word as a common-sense contribution to thwarting the culture of death. About the f-word I wrote in “The Devil’s Bargain Behind ‘Let’s Go Brandon:’”

The f-bomb prohibition fell within this same realm of respect. As Fr. Ganshert told my sister’s class when he went in to address wanton profanity, the word referred to the act by which their parents had brought them into the world. Pause on that. The act by which their parents had brought into the world those human beings endowed with the supernatural destiny of entering into God’s very self. That act was supposed to be beautiful, self-giving, life-giving, holy, sacramental, and private. The f-bomb pulled that act from sublimity to plunge it into filth.

And how well the f-bomb’s degradation fits our society today. Life-giving has been long stripped away by contraception to transform the act from one of self-gift to one of selfishness and rejection. Once so transformed there is justification for hooking up, cohabiting, adultery, pornography, untold perversities, and the vicious silent slaughter of any human beings conceived by the act so profaned. It continually descends from matrimony to the f-bomb.

But it is far worse than that. It is not enough that we have so degraded this act of life and beauty. The f-word weaponizes it, transforms it into an act of aggression with intent to do the receiver of it profound harm if not destruction. Is it any wonder that sexual abuse and assault in all their horrific forms infect our culture, from film studios to churches? That is not to say use of the word has done all this, though there may be a chicken-and-egg aspect to the whole thing, but that use of the word reflects the practice in the current culture of death.

What a piece of work. Imagine Satan rubbing his hands and chortling at such an accomplishment: the profoundly beautiful act in which man and woman give themselves to each other within a sacrament of the Church to join with God in the ecstasy of creating another human being with the supernatural destiny of living forever in the very life of God pulled down to the filthy, perverse, destructive depths of a profound act of aggressive destruction.

Nice trick. He gets conservatives to twist authentic justifiable outrage over the atrocities of the left—like abortion, impeachment hoaxes, violent destructive riots, rigged elections, the Afghanistan withdrawal catastrophe, and dangerous vaccine mandates—into an obscene perversion of the beautifully cosmic, unitive, procreative, sacramental act to pronounce their nullification of the demented man who is the face of the dehumanizing leftist Democrat machine. (And by the way, what kind of people would take a cognitively impaired elderly man, even one as corrupt as Joe Biden, and use him this way?) Why would conservatives cooperate with that?

Ah, well, they have been long prepared through manipulation by the very totalitarians by whom, you would think, they would be loath to be manipulated. Hollywood, to sum it up in one word, though it extends well beyond. Hollywood let the f-bomb drop in movies in 1967, and at around the same time, brought forth the first R rating. And then the culture was bombarded with the f-bomb and perversities that the average American had not been exposed to, at least not in anything like the quantity presented on the screen big and small. Previously, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Leave it to Beaver, and several other television programs of that era entertained and touched on subjects that mattered without the obscenity that has become so prevalent in our culture today. And they did so with real humor, not the joke-and-insult volleys of later shows.

On the big screen, John Wayne, Jean Arthur, Jimmy Stewart, Maureen O’Hara, Gary Cooper and their peers could fight wars, fall in love, engage in conflicts, evoke everything from tears to laughter and manage to do so creatively, brilliantly, even provocatively in films that would easily fit the requirements for what would eventually be a PG rating. Even then, people might object to some of their productions on a moral basis, but they could do so without having first been subjected to the graphic assault on decency launched by so many films of the last several decades.

Long ago I recognized that entertainment held a far more insidious potential to tear down virtue than the news. I saw the effect it had on our generation. The manly and womanly virtue of chastity would not have withered so detrimentally had it not been so commonly run down in films featuring the handsome and gorgeous discarding it without the consequences—pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, damaged psyches—suffered by those average Americans who emulated their “sophistication.” And then there was the whole genre of the anti-hero, outlaws and criminals pitched in high-end visually alluring productions that made us sympathetic to them and their crimes: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, anyone?⁴

It is interesting that our generation, raised in the 1960s and 70s, started out with television shows like Leave It to Beaver, The Andy Griffith Show, My Three Sons, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and the like, all of which depicted the goodness of the attraction between boys and girls, and men and women, and people dating. And all of those programs took for granted the virtue of chastity in relationships and how it resulted in respect between boys and girls, and men and women. But by the mid-1970s the popular “family show” Happy Days had reduced dating to “making out” with no clear boundaries indicated. Happy Days occupied the more “wholesome” end of the spectrum. Other offerings in the television and film media wreaked far greater havoc on chastity.

Humanae Vitae addressed this as well:

We take this opportunity to address those who are engaged in education and all those whose right and duty it is to provide for the common good of human society. We would call their attention to the need to create an atmosphere favorable to the growth of chastity so that true liberty may prevail over license and the norms of the moral law may be fully safeguarded.

Everything therefore in the modern means of social communication which arouses men’s baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously by all those who have at heart the advance of civilization and the safeguarding of the outstanding values of the human spirit. It is quite absurd to defend this kind of depravity in the name of art or culture(25) or by pleading the liberty which may be allowed in this field by the public authorities.⁵

Of course, a very different atmosphere was created. One may ask why. Why would the entertainment industry glamorize unchastity and seduce their consumers into such destructive behavior with all its consequences like the fall from grace, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, mental illness, and the general degrading of our culture? There are plenty of reasons, not least of which are hedonism and greed, but one truism that cannot be overlooked is: Misery loves company. If it is somewhat common for people in the entertainment industry—apparently often enough under duress—to have the beauty and wholesomeness of sexuality and childbirth and family stripped away for the momentary pleasure of sexual gratification, would it not also be common for them to justify their lifestyles by portraying them as normal and good. And would it not be common for them to, whether overtly or subconsciously, intend those portrayals to lure others into the deprivation of the truth, beauty, and goodness of the wholesome lifestyle they have forfeited or been deprived of? Would that not comport with our fallen human nature? “Ay, madam, it is common.”⁶

And that is where we will wrap up Part Ten. Part Eleven should follow shortly.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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©2025 P. A. Ritzer

1. Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Vatican: The Holy See, 25 July 1968), 17, accessed 31 December 2024, https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html.

2. Ibid (including endnote 21):

“(21) See Pius XII, Address to Association of Urology: AAS 45 (1953), 674-675; to leaders and members of Italian Association of Cornea Donors and Italian Association for the Blind: AAS 48 (1956), 461-462 [TPS III, 200-201].”

3. Ibid., 18 (including endnotes 22 and 23):

“(22) Lk 2. 34.”

“(23) See Paul Vl, encyc. letter Populorum progressio: AAS 59 (1967), 268 [TPS XII, 151].”

4. P. A. Ritzer, “The Devil’s Bargain Behind ‘Let’s God Brandon,’” P. A. Ritzer, Vol 2, Substack, 26 Nov 2021, paritzer.substack.com.

5. Humanae Vitae, 22 (including endnote 25):

“(25) See Second Vatican Council, Decree on the Media of Social Communication, nos. 6-7: AAS 56 (1964), 147 [TPS IX, 340-341].”

6. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Complete Signet Shakespeare (New York: Harcourt, 1972), 1.2.30.