“We are always on the edge of catastrophe. It is the human condition.”
Nathaniel Philbrick, speaking on the central themes of
Moby-Dick, January, 2019, Newberry Library
Coronavirus has ravaged through markets more than the
population so far, but it has disrupted our lives and cast a pall of fear upon
us. It is almost certain to sweep
through the country and cause misery and death.
We just do not yet know just how bad it will be. Coronavirus is the 3rd horseman of
the apocalypse. 9/11 exposed the fragility
of our nation’s defenses. The Great
Recession exposed the fragility of our financial system. Coronavirus will expose the fragility of our
health care and financial systems. As
the great historian William H. McNeill chronicled in Plagues and Peoples,
microbes have the power to change the course of history and civilizations.
These disruptions and upheavals, caused in part, by the
rapid advancement of technology and globalization are putting forward some
fundamental challenges to what it means to be human, and how to think about
it. My generation (tail end of the baby
boomers) and later have largely been spared the wrenching and devastating
events of WWII and the Great Depression.
The long, relatively tranquil period permitted us to develop a more
casual attitude toward two of the most fundamental aspects of our
humanity—death and sex, and peel away some of their meaning. Now, more than ever, we need to think about
those parts of our humanity.
In part, because I have gotten older and have begun to lose
mentors and friends, I have begun to think about death and its meaning
more. Because we have been spared the
great catastrophes of large scale wars and pandemics, lifespans have increased
and child mortality has diminished, it
has become infrequent visitor. But that
is no longer guaranteed. Coronavirus has
stoked the fear that we will see death in widespread waves.
Death is part of our humanity. Yet we have attempted, somewhat successfully,
to expunge all forms of it from our consciousness. Even our recent wars have been so remote
that we do not see the results or the consequences. The slaughter of farm animals for food has
been replaced by a distant, mechanized process.
Caitlin Doughty and Thomas Lynch have been two of the few voices to
reacquaint us with death and its rituals. In her book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
talks of death, rituals, the process and our attempt to remove distance
ourselves from it in frank (and sometimes humorous) ways. She observes, “As late as the beginning of
the 20th century, more than 85 percent of Americans died at home.
The 1930’s brought what is known as the ‘medicalization’ of death. The rise of
the hospital removed from view all of the gruesome sights, smells, and sounds
of death.” We have tried to deny,
sanitize, and remove from our humanity.
Last week, psychologist Mary Pipher wrote a stunningly beautiful essay
on her acceptance of death as she inevitably creeps toward it. (_https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/opinion/mortality-death.html). With the grim prospect of widespread death to
be visited upon us, we will need to face it squarely, as Pipher did. We can deny it, but it will come looking for
us.
We have started to do the same thing with sex, another
aspect of our basic humanity, and in odd ways.
In some respects, we have pushed the boundaries of sexuality in
sometimes unhealthy ways, often under the guise of “equal rights” or correcting a social wrong. The LGTBQ
movement legitimized gay marriage (through the courts and not through a
democratic process) and immediately began pushing to get transgenders into
women’s bathrooms and stomping on women’s sports by pushing to allow biological
men to compete with them. The LGBTQ
movement also danced at the edge of normalizing pedophilia by pushing Drag
Queen Story Hour across the country at local libraries, and glamorizing cross
dressing 10 year old Desmond on Good Morning America. Teen Vogue put out “how to” articles on anal
sex. Pornography became ubiquitous and
more and more extreme and abusive. The
internet made it free and readily available for kids and teens. AI and robotics are combining to make sexbots
a reality in the near future, and will present another challenge to our humanness.
While fringe and heretofore banned sexual practices were
legitimized and glamorized, rigid rules were placed around the sexual behavior
of those of us that comprise 95 percent of the population. The MeToo movement began as a correction to
stop (mostly) men from sexually exploiting women in the workplace. Colleges shifted the definition and the
burden of proof on matters of “sexual
assault” and made demands on what “consent” meant, wrecking young men’s lives
without due process. Under the new
definitions, Jimmy Stewart committed at
least 3 acts of “sexual assault” against Donna Reed in his courtship of her in
It’s A Wonderful Life. The rigid rules
(written and adopted by who?) put a chill on all relationships between men and
women in the workplace and on campus. The
woke crowd was able to curtail normal pre-marital sexual relationships on
campus more successfully than the Evangelical Christians could ever do. Many, many long and happy marriages had their
inception at the office (I know a couple that were bank examiners together—how
erotic). Today, you simply don’t dare to make even the slightest comment that
suggests that someone appeals to you at work, or you will be hauled up to HR.
Sex is an essential aspect of our humanity. And we need to think about bringing it back
to its essential function in our society.
As many issues as I have with the Catholic Church, it had it partially
right. Catholic doctrine views sex as part
procreation and part human connection.
The problem it had is that it way overemphasized the procreation part
and had too many rules around the connection aspect. One woman wrote a beautifully worded letter
to the editor (which I wish that I had kept) in which she took umbrage at the
Church’s emphasis on procreation, while piling guilt and shame on the
connection and pleasure aspect. Her
sexual compatibility with her husband was so acute, the pleasure so fulfilling,
the connection so deep that it smoothed out the rough spots in their
relationship, and neither could bear the thought of not having that intimacy,
it was so sustaining. And it had nothing
to do with procreation.
As we confront this apocalyptic crisis, we would do well to
spend some time thinking of the things that are part of our basic humanity, what they mean for us and
where we have let them go off track. We
have shunned and denied death, but it threatens to now pay a visit in a large
way. We have normalized and freed up the
fringes of sexual expression and at the same time contained and placed rigid
rules around normal, heterosexual sexual expression.
It is time that we revisit some parts of the things that make us human.
No comments:
Post a Comment