The Surprise of Human Adulthood

In recent years I've from time to time heard the lament that the adults aren't in charge anymore, as they were for example in the middle of last century. Along the same lines it's been said of a good person in an otherwise irresponsible organization that he or she is "the adult in the room." Certainly there does seem to be of late a dearth of people willing to put aside their own peculiar interests for the greater good.¹

This conception of adulthood stands opposed to adulthood in the broader animal kingdom. Adulthood for most animals is primarily about sexual maturity. Indeed being ready for sexual reproduction is so essential to adulthood that the adult form of some insects cannot even consume food, but can only really move about and mate.

The irony is that the monomaniacal obsession with mating is precisely what keeps many humans from behaving like "an adult", in the human social sense of being responsible.

Humans are unusual that way. Reaching adulthood means the ability to set aside the activity that our bodies have sexual matured to engage in. There's a sense in which being an adult requires being able to reach back to that freedom from concern with mating that is characteristic of the juvenile stage of life.² I think that's why preserving the sexual innocence of children is important: it gives freedom to the subsequent adult.

An additional point to be made concerns the irony of celebate Christian priests being called "father", when their celebacy is precisely what prevents them from being fathers in the primary sense. Such men are fathers because their celebacy frees them (or should) from the constraints of physiological parenthood, and allows them to act in a detached way for the greater community. They are fathers because fatherhood itself is not about mating (despite in its primary sense usually being a consequence of mating), but is most essentially a posture of care over others from a position of emotional detachment.³

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Notes

1. Critical theories are no help in this regard, because they claim (self-contradictorily) that it's impossible for anyone to rise above their peculiar interests.

2. This is also true just in physiological terms. Human form is relatively unspecialized and undifferentiated compared to other animals (we don't have fur, claws, fangs, etc). So human bodies retain characteristics of earlier, undifferentiated stages of morphogenesis.

3. Spiritual motherhood is similar, but detachment is more characteristic of fatherhood in its various senses.

What Price

If you could experience a period of elevated creativity and fruitfulness along with unparalleled emptiness and suffering, would you do it? What if both aspects of that period were necessary for the continuation of the world, or its redemption from descent into chaos?

There's a saying that's been going around in a meme:

Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.¹

The Hollywood heresy (its principal heresy anyway) is that any effort that is momentous or significant is readily appreciated as such by the public at large and probably also emotionally invigorating to those engaged in it.² The reason for the current cultural corruption is that too many people believe that heresy. But any worthwhile effort has a price to pay.

It's been said before. The problem with the present age is that the people in charge are not adults. Adults put aside their own wants and desires for the good of others, even the common good. They pay the price.

Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. (Phil 2:5-8)

Notes

1. Attributed to G. Michael Hopf, in his 2016 novel Those Who Remain. But decades ago, Professor Kreeft said something similar in a talk. To my inquiry he noted that the similar phrase he likely used ("Hard times produce saints, and saints are for hard times") is a common sentiment.

2. This principle is another example of the principle that the medium is the message, or at least a close neighbor. The entertainment industry's view of the world is basically its business model. My recent viewing of Free Guy brought this to mind, but it's a common enough trope on screen for the hero to save the world to instantaneous and unanimous applause of the masses.

Mamma Borg

I recently caught up with some episodes of Star Trek I hadn't seen before. Among these episodes were those of Voyager in which "Seven of Nine" first appears and then joins the the crew, and then when her (Borg) cortical implant starts to malfunction, endangering her life. Let me tell you why I found these episodes disappointing.

Anyone who has seen the show can tell you that Seven is a healthy specimen of womanhood. And it's more than clear why the people who run the show chose an actress with a good figure: ratings. But the question remains: in the context of the show's fiction, why would the Borg allow an assimilated organism to devote its metabolism to the development of such inefficient structures as large breasts and wide hips? They take up space, and wide hips are inefficient for running. And that's not to mention the way anatomical irregularities make the resultant drone hard to fit within the uniformity of the collective.

I can think of no reason. It's not as if Borg females need to gestate babies, give birth, or suckle infants. And even if they were to do so, a Caesarian section and smaller breasts would do the job well enough for the intervention-happy Borg.

In actuality, the Borg would be much more likely control the hormones of their drones to channel their metabolism to "necessary" structures, like bones and muscles, or at least amputate the breasts and remove the uterus. The resultant drone would be even more efficient and terrifying than what we see on screen now, and certainly much less viewer friendly.

And then there were the couple episodes in which Seven's cortical implant begins to malfunction. They had Tuvok, Torres, and Janeway all allowing themselves to be assimilated to acquire a new implant and then being rescued by Voyager and returned their natural state, apparently without any permanent damage of significance.¹ It was all too easy. And after that there was an episode with "Borg children"—rescued on Voyager. Ugh.

The reason I found this all so disappointing is that all these developments soften the Borg and present them as less terrifying than they should be. The original genius of imagining this "race" (for lack of a better word) is that they are the major dark attractor toward which human development is in our very non-fictional world being drawn: completely anti-human and opposed to the ideals represented by the Federation and the Star Trek franchise itself. To soften or "nerf" them is to compromise the humanistic (dare I say "prophetic") witness of the show.

But of course, making such a statement about hormone blockers would hit far too close to home these days for many in the audience, at least now if not back in the day when the episodes were first aired. The simple truth is that the dominant culture of the developed world has, at present, set a course to turn mankind into the Borg.²

Huxley's Brave New World is far too cheery in imagining humanity will find contentment in its humanity, in the norms of its nature, to any recognizable extent. But as in that tale, the dystopia is far more likely to come about through the sum of individual choices than through imposition of a dictatorship through some 1984-style extrinsic power.³ Thanks to James Cameron and others, the popular notion of the post-human world portrays it as being initiated by newly intelligent machines; in reality machines will only trouble to take notice of and work against humans at the behest of other humans for the latter's peculiar gain. Thus has it always been that man's greatest enemy is man. Similarly it will not be the machines who turn the humans into machines, but the humans who dehumanize themselves. And I daresay it will be individual humans who will choose to dehumanize themselves, at least initially, before gaining enough strength to force that transformation onto others.

The people pushing for this future are "transhumanists," though this word has become associated in the popular press solely with the folks who want to "upload" our minds into computers, whatever that means. The dominant culture of Western modernity has no resources to oppose their core notion that man is really God and should have his power: because that notion is in fact at the heart of modernity. The only thing that can challenge their ideas is a spiritual power. In the West, the spiritual power is Christianity, which gave rise to it and imparted what strength it has, but in which the West has sadly lost all faith.

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As I was finishing this post up, this review by Michael Gerson of Yuval Noah Harari's book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow came to my attention: "Humans reach for godhood — and leave their humanity behind." The review illustrates the crisis of belief in the West and how it leaves us powerless to oppose the coming storm.

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Notes

1. One of the perils of watching TV episodes in syndication is their presentation is discontinuous and likely incomplete. If I'm wrong about this or any show detail, please let me know in the comments.

2. The original navigators were Bacon and Descartes.

3. In this discussion we're not considering "principalities and powers"

The God Gene and Other Powers

Even though New Atheists seem to have shouted themselves hoarse some time ago, Deo gratias, I still remember them fondly. One of the sillier ideas of that age was the idea of a genetic pre-disposition to belief in God. For some reason it doesn't seem to have cross their minds that such a "God gene" is just as likely (according to their naturalistic lights) a good thing—a positive ability—as a handicap. One of their hobby horses, after all, is the denunciation of "the naturalistic fallacy," the idea that nature contains norms, or as more commonly enunciated: that you can "get an 'is' from an 'ought.'"

Of course the reality is that they are the unfortunate blind, unable to see the sun, puffing out their chests for their disability.¹ This realization made me aware that this sort of handicap pride, so to speak, is part of a larger societal trend. These days it's the fashion for all sorts of unfortunates to come out of the woodwork, band together, and to announce that their impairment is an actual superpower. At the apex of the power-pyramid at the moment seems to be a group of people who can't manage to synchronize their minds with the configuration of their bodies. Our society's elites are flexing their muscles by molding our institutions around the delusions of these poor people. But every child has to get a trophy.

In so many ways, we're letting the inmates run the asylum. But if you think about it a little, thus has it always been, although in far less obvious ways.

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Notes

1. I say "are," but poor Hitchens, may he rest in peace, has passed on and been cured of his atheism.

The Long-overdue Death of Embryonic Stem Cell Hype

The Hype over Embryonic Stem Cell Research Dies Not with a Bang but a Whimper

Science and scientists are subject to hype just like everyone else.

Climate Science and Its Discontents

A few interesting links on the purportedly man-made climate change:

• France’s top weatherman says he was placed 'on leave' for stance on climate change
• When You Need Courts to Settle Science, Then Science Isn't on Your Side
• What I Learned about Climate Change: The Science is not Settled

The first two aren't about the "science" so much as the behavior of its proponents that might make you wonder how strong the case is. The last one looks to be a very thoughtful consideration of the science, told from the perspective of a proponent of environmental regulation.

Modesty Is Simply Thoughtfulness

Huffington Post is promoting a story about Mark Frauenfelder's daughter being told by a TSA agent to cover up. According to Frauenfelder, the agent said,

"You're only 15, cover yourself!"

The latter link includes the single public photo of how she was dressed. Of course it was unprofessional of the agent to remark on anything personal. But except for that, it's about time someone says something to young women who dress revealingly. Even in that one photo in which she's "covered up," it's clear that the leggings don't leave much of the shape of the girl's lower half to the imagination. We also might suspect that the photo is not exactly what the agent saw: it's clear that the top is the kind that tends to ride up revealing the navel, and we can't see (Deo gratias) how revealing the top might be close-up despite its apparent thickness here. So we shouldn't rush to judge the remark based on a single photo.

Of course, the subsequent reaction is typical of our times: that the agent's remark was creepy, that it's up to a woman how she dresses, that they want to force women to wear burkhas, etc.

A while ago, a friend posted a story about women protesting rape and sexual harassment. Any civilized person has to agree wholeheartedly: men are fully responsible for their actions and need to control themselves, regardless of the context. But then the photo showed the women dressed scantily, immodestly. Clearly these women weren't getting a deeper point.

People these days forget that we dress not only for ourselves, but also for others, to ease our common life together: we dress decently to make others comfortable. Men are naturally attracted to women's bodies; more visibility means more attraction. That this was something that could only be controlled with effort used to be a fact widely understood. It's just in the nature of men and women, how we're put together. (In fact we owe our continued existence as a species to this aspect of our nature.)

In saner days women dressed modestly to make life easier for men. But no more. I think our modern attitude comes from two ideas that stand in tension with each other:

1. We think of ourselves as entirely rational, autonomous agents, transcending the gross corporeal world.
2. We identify ourselves with our inclinations and desires (and fail to acknowledge that we can resist our desires, and that some should be resisted).

From these two sides of Enlightenment mind-body dualism, we conclude by divinizing our desires and choices, placing them above doubt or question. Women tend to think that there's nothing wrong with using their sexuality to manipulate men; that they can dress however they wish, the rest of the world be damned. Men tend to think that satisfying their base desires is necessarily good; that getting what we 'want' is victory, the rest of the world be damned. Clearly the actions of men here, being direct violations of another person, are more condemnable, but both selfish tendencies, unchecked, add up to a war between the sexes and the splintering of society. But peace won't come from answering power with power, but from answering power with peace.

The irony is that Mark Frauenfelder presents himself (as do his supporters) as socially conscious. In actuality, by failing to teach his daughter about the social implications of dress, he is contributing to the impoverishment of community. In a world so individualistic that it's off-limits to comment on another's dress, if the parents don't teach their children about such things, who will?