A Reflection on Human Dignity and the Modern World

Fertility and sex. The pleasures of eating cannot wholly be disconnected from issues of nourishment and health. The potential joys of sex, analogously, cannot be wholly disconnected from the issues surrounding fertility. Nature will have its say in both. The glutton can become addicted to the pleasures of the table, and his health will suffer. He will make himself sick through his addiction to the pleasures of (usually bad, addicting) food. The pleasures of eating should never be reduced to nourishment; but nourishment should not be seen as disconnected from health. Likewise, the purely natural purpose of sex is babies. Likewise, the joys of sex – respectful sex, full of mutual attraction, care, at best love – can be spiritual joys involving the self-giving of one body-soul to another. Sex cannot be reduced to having children. The (spiritual) goodness of loving (or at least respectful) sex remains if the lovers are through misfortune infertile. I think it is present in homosexual lovers who truly love (or at least care about) one another. Nevertheless, to radically sever the cord between the joys of sex and its natural function is to court sexual addition, reduction – lust in the worst sense of that word.

       Technology often cuts the ties between man and nature. In the case of sex, birth control technologies fueled a cultural change in our attitudes toward sex. Not in reality, but under a psychic-cultural illusion we cut the tie between sex and fertility, and felt free to seek its pleasures for their own sake. The present culture of sexual addiction and pornography is largely the result. As greed is good for capitalists, lust is good for those ‘progressive’ folk who see the severing of the tie between sex and fertility as a good thing, another example of man’s conquest of nature – freeing ourselves from nature and community through technology for the sake of pure pleasure: that’s a standard capitalist intrusion.

      Our alleged freedom from fertility, from nature, is an illusion. It is a freedom from responsibility. The joys of sex can't be separated from its dangers. It is not safe. Sex is wild, can't be mined or controlled without terrible consequences. Not just fertility but the emotional power of it. Trying to control it capitalistically, technologically, destroys the meaning of sex within a responsible family and community life. Like with any addiction, sexual addicts are not happy. This supposed liberation has chained them and mines a great power – sex – for facile pleasure at each other’s expense. This culture based on an illusory liberation from nature demeans sex and people. It is significantly responsible for the destruction of the family security so needed by children through divorce. It is responsible for the culture of abortion, for the technologies are not perfect and abortion is the necessary consequence of cutting the ties between nature, sex, and love. It is a way of cutting the ties between sex, responsibility, and joy. If you say A, you must say B, as a German saying goes.

       To put it bluntly: you should never have sex with someone you are not willing to be parents with, unless no chance of pregnancy exists. That sounds like blasphemy today, but I stand by it. The alternative is abortion, a culture of sex predicated on the normalcy of abortion as birth control. Which is of course what we have from our capitalist culture. (I am not referring to difficult cases like rape, incest, health dangers, and the like. I am not referring to the legal right to abortion, which I think has to exist because the state can’t or shouldn’t force a woman to bear a child – our world depends on private, intimate decisions to affirm life and there is no way to change that without doing violence. A woman has a right to chose and with the father should chose to affirm life (all things being equal).  I am referring to cases where the illusion that technology has made sex “safe” enables people for whatever private reasons to adopt promiscuous lifestyles knowing that abortion is always there in the background. Which is crazy because abortion is not safe, neither physically nor spiritually nor mentally.)

 

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Today these moral-cultural issues have to take a back seat. The task now is to save the possibility of democracy and an open society. Real-existing liberal (i.e. capitalist) democracies are profoundly flawed – some more than others – due largely to the power of corporations and their technologies, their culture industries and dumb-down-devices. “The economy” creates a social structure and corresponding culture that is inimical to true democracy. But Lord, they are a thousand times better at their worse than living in some pop-fascist regime like Trump would have in which all these debasing forces would be unleashed on a society that unhinged the “base” from reality by scripting it for them (with their consent) and criminalizing anything that pushed back.  I deplore the decision of so-called religious people and institutions – both the Pope-hating right-wing Catholics and the fundamentalist protestants – to embrace this dystopian fantasy as a means to silence the secular folks they hate so deeply. I have no problem aligning myself with anyone of any belief system willing to embrace toleration and rational forms of expressing disagreement to save the chance for a free society.

    But if we do ever have a political community again, a public space where we can discuss these issues using our hearts and rational minds, then I think we need to discuss how the corporate-capitalist culture we are all in threatens the very idea of human dignity. The whole culture of abortion, for example, starting with the idea that my body is my property and I have a “right” to use my property as I see fit, undermines the idea of plurality: that every person is unique, has a soul, has a series of stories unique to their life, has a biography unlike any other.

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What disturbs me as well about the way the abortion debate is framed is what it means for "human dignity" - the sense, emotional and intellectual, that every person is somehow a limit to my will; that remorse would be an intelligible response to wronging anyone; that someone might intelligibly grieve their death; the belief that everyone has someone in them that makes it intelligible to see them in the light of some form of love, if even only pity. Or using a religious picture, that we are created in the image of God, who created us in love and loves us still. It is not crazy to see the unborn as belonging to the category of human creature that cannot intelligibly have any value in Aristotle's way of thinking: like the severely retarded or the incurably insane. There are no worldly categories to keep the unborn among us. 

    Imagine an American woman who is grieving over the loss of a child. Imagine that woman watching TV and observing the "grief behavior" of a Palestinian mother who has lost her child in a bombing raid. The American woman is briefly tempted to commiserate as she is also a grieving mother, then stops and says: "It is different with them. They can always have more." This is a familiar racist attitude. Our grief is genuine because our lives have the kind of meaning that can only come from feeling - more a matter of feeling than intellect - that each one of us is an individual in a special way. Sometimes we speak of a "soul" to capture this difference. 

      Animals are not individuals in this way. They are more tightly bound to their species-character. They can't love and be loved as a soul. You don't tell stories or write biographies about mice. And their lives - the Palestinians - can't mean what ours do for the meaning-blind. "They can always have more" means that they lack the kind of individuality, the kind of meaning that we have. They display grief behavior but it will pass; it doesn't go deep. We love and grieve; they can only "love" and "grieve." I think we all recognize this familiar racist way of seeing other people. "They can always have more." 

   Presumably it would mean something different if one of us - remaining in this racist world - had an abortion and one of them did. Well, the we-group have lives that matter, feelings that go deep (disclose the reality of the kind of individuality we mean with abstract concepts like "dignity"). But in the world of those who feel abortion is morally unproblematic, who believe that the unborn child is not a limit to our will in the way a newborn baby is, who believe it is purely an individual decision whether the unborn child is seen as an intelligible object of love or raw material for the pharmacy industry - in that world no unborn child is part of us, except by decision of the mother. No unborn human being has inborn dignity. At that stage, any mother can always have more. 

    Well, bodies are property, and we are sovereign over our own property, can do with it what we want. Property -whether a car, slave, or unborn child - by definition does not make claims on us to exist, does not limit our will. Who can be a person is not given by nature, is not a question of what is real; we define who can be and who cannot be a person, as long as we have the power to do so, of course. The unborn are completely powerless, like the rest of nature we dispose over. And the aborted fetus is generally raw material, given to the industries profiting from genetic technologies. Stem cells are worth quite a lot on the market. 

   The attitude I am focusing on here, I submit, is based on feelings that do not know of human dignity, feelings and thoughts which see the unborn as the racist sees the demeaned other. When we come to feel that we can always have more, when this attitude becomes the taken-for-granted cultural norm, then we have lost the conceptual space for "human dignity." This is what is at stake, culturally. I have known a woman who, after an abortion, took the body of the fetus and in grief solemnly buried her - having given her a name - in a quiet woods. No putting the stem cells on the market. When our culture can only see that as an act of pure sentimentality, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   If you think of yourself as a limit to others' wills, if you think of yourself as more than just an exemplar of an original model, a variation of the same species-theme, then it seems obvious that you were just that particular unborn child at one stage of your life. Had your mother decided to abort you and have more, someone else and not you would have existed. If it doesn't matter, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   I have know mothers and fathers who loved their unborn child. Who named the child, talked to it, anticipated its advent, seeing all the changes in the woman's body in loving ways. When our culture can only see that as an act of pure sentimentality, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   And when our culture uniformly believes that we or the state, not reality, defines which lives have meaning and which do not, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. We can always change our definitions. 

  Abortion is the perfect expression of the worldview of capitalist-industrialism, of science-engineering-technology. Whoever of us has the power become the lords and masters of nature, the conquers of nature. The contempt the capitalist feels for the forest they want to log, many of us - feminists included - feel for the body. To see the body as "my property" and thus the unborn child as my property is to be blind to the reality of the body and the unborn child, a reality that only discloses itself in the language of love. This kind of feminism is one of the saddest things I know, for I cannot but see it as a form of extreme contempt for women and their bodies. That many women see capitalism-science-technology as a liberation from nature only reinforces this. 

That is what I will say if I live to see a world free of the toxins that are killing it today.