A great and truly disturbing essay. If they read it. I’m sure my adult children, in their late 20s and 30s, would just shrug and say, “It is what it is.” I’m speculating, but my hunch tells me that the metaphysical horror and human tragedy about which Jeff Shafer (and you and NS Lyons) are warning us is inevitable.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fact that Christianity describes God’s essence in relational terms. God is a relational being comprised of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The ancient Apostle’s Creed devotes precious verbal real estate to declaring that Jesus Christ “was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary”—and says nothing else about his earthly career except that he “suffered under Pontius Pilate, died, and on the third day rose again from the dead.” Similarly, the Mass specifies that Jesus Christ is “the only begotten son of God, begotten before all worlds” and that the “Holy Spirit proceeds from the father and the son.” For two thousand years the core focus of the Church has been on the relationality of God—and of humanity’s relationship to God. The great symbol and archetype of the divine:human relationship is marriage, with God as husband and humanity as bride.
The emerging legal framework described by Jeff Shafer severs all relational elements from human ontology and identity and connects it to the top of a hierarchy of disaggregated parental functions, with the commercial rights privileged above all others in the seriatum: whoever initiated the process of conception, gestation and birth and funded the events is the “parent” in the new legal ART framework. By definition, that’s the human with the least biological / genetic connection to the baby.
Only the phrase “Horror vacui” can describe our visceral horror at the denatured and radically lonely and anonymous plight being imposed on these new human beings by the circumstances of their conception and birth. As Jeff Shafer warns, the concomitant legal maneuver is to strip all natural parents of any legal status. This is truly an anti-human nightmare unfolding in our time and our world.
I think you're on to something deep here, Chris. As it happens, Shafer and I talked about this at the deli in Margaretville and he later send me an artile by Joseph Ratzinger, "Concerning the notion of person in theology." It begins thus: "Relativity toward the other constitutes the human person." Further, "The concept of person, as well as the idea that stands behind this concept, is a product of Christian theology."
That’s fascinating—thank you Matt for making those quotes more widely known. I’ll look up the article and read it! Really appreciate it.
Pope John Paul II’s great book “The Theology of the Body” (with which I’ll bet Shafer is thoroughly familiar) is full of insights into the cosmic significance of the nuptial sexual union between man and woman that is at the very core of Judaism and Christianity.
On the same theme as Ratzinger’s quotes Sarah Ruden has written a great book with a terrible title called “Paul Among the People.” Apparently, until Sarah classics scholars didn’t read the New Testament and theologians didn’t know anything about classical literature.
Sarah approached the New Testament as a classics scholar and feminist leftie and she was astonished to discover how groundbreakingly humane and transformational Paul’s ideas were about women, slavery and sexuality. As you know, Paul is regularly pilloried as a misogynist authoritarian by feminists and by many others who have no understanding of the cultural context in which Paul wrote his epistles.
Sarah brilliantly fixes that! She’s now a huge admirer of Paul. Her position is fully in accord with Shafer’s quotes from Ratzinger and her detailed analysis is fascinating and totally surprising.
Thanks for this, Chris. The perspective of someone surprised, as you say Ruden is, often helps us see a text (in this case, Paul) through fresh eyes ourselves.
Many thanks to you, Matt, and NS Lyons for publishing Jeff's speech. There are so many issues to deal with currently and commodification and transhumanism are biggies. What to do about them first requires an understanding of the problem and this goes a long way in raising awareness. Hopefully a coalition at various levels could be developed to slow down at least the worst aspects. Here in Australia there are few liberals, progressives and others who would show interest except perhaps some conservatives and indigenous peoples who want to conserve their culture, family, and the environment.
The timing of this piece is nearly miraculous. I spent the majority of yesterday evening discussing with someone close to me that my main issue in this election cycle is resisting the notion that humans are autonomous rootless beings – whose identity is self-derived, and whose fulfillment relies on the arbitrary expression of their will – and opposing the political forces trying to codify this notion into official policy and law. I see this as a subtle revolution, yet the response of a normal, well-adjusted person whose only fault is the virtue of being more interested in daily life, is a bewildered, “huh?” I opened my email this morning and read this with an excitement bordering on glee, not due to the solemn subject matter, but due to its potential to alert one more person to the deep changes we’re sleepwalking through.
My complaint is that I wish the author had connected the dots a little bit more between the lofty philosophical shifts and the details of this legal development. One can argue that sure, kids born in this unique and broken circumstance will have a hard going of it and will require a new regime of family law, but that regime will remain the exception, without overturning the centuries of precedent of family law. And even if the law does go too far down this road, before long normal people will notice, overwhelmingly oppose it, and it will be reversed. This is an obvious and very reasonable argument, and I think will cause many people to dismiss an essay like this as fear mongering. My response would be: First, this is not a fluke, but an example of a long, steady march in a certain direction. We should not be confident that this inversion of family law, even if made more explicit, would be strongly opposed. Second, even if it is opposed, we don’t know how much damage it will cause before it is rolled back, even if it is rolled back. There is no reason to give this harmful anthropology a foothold on the basis that “we should not worry, it is only a foothold.”
I think you're right. The law is rightly said to have an educative effect -- it doesn't simply enact some moral consensus, but shapes it. The record of legal/political novelties overturning centuries of settled human practices is impressive! Especially in our own time of an ever-accelerating dissolution of "natural kinds" that make up the heterogeneity of the world. In Rod Dreher's new book, he quotes an Orthodox convert who tells him, "The distinction between men and women, and the metaphysical implications of correct relationship between masculinity and femininity, are key to correct theological understanding. Destroy this boundary and many others will follow, such as the boundaries between human and animal, and human and technology. If one of these foundational distinctions can be made to seem arbitrary, do we expect the others to hold?"
I've always been unable to see anything in life in isolation, as if there's a giant web in my brain with everything interconnected. I see a blob moving through this web to disconnect us from each other, making each of us an isolated and lonely Eleanor Rigby. The blob is attacking another part of the web by working to disconnect American citizens from their citizenry through illegal immigration. If anyone can enter at any time, then citizenship is meaningless, and we owe nothing to each other as fellow citizens, similar to those abandoned infants in Ukraine. The blob has ensured those infants have no claim to be protected by parents. The goal is the disintegration of all human connection.
"A specter is haunting Europe and the world. It is replacism, the tendency to replace everything with its normalized, standardized interchangeable double: the original by its copy, the authentic by its imitation, the true by the false, mothers by surrogate mothers,... knowledge by diplomas, the countryside and city by the universal suburb, the native by the non-native... men by women, men and women by robots, peoples by other peoples, humanity by a savage, undifferentiated, standardized, infinitely interchangeable posthumanity."
Writing from Italy, I'm very much invested in the matter.
In Italy surrogacy has been a crime since many years. Recently, the Parliament has approved a law making Italians who have surrogacy abroad prosecutable.
Naturally enough, the NYT[1] had an hissy fit and the high heels-wearing, lipsticked hunks in Foggy Bottom expressed their concern that the law might affect US citizens (the babies bought by Italian couples in the US) [2].
A very interesting thing is that, when drafting the 1948 Constitution, both Catholics and Communists, who fiercely hated and feared each other, agreed upon a Natural Law definition of family, which is enshrined in Article 29:
"The Republic recognizes the rights of the family as a natural society founded upon marriage[...]"
This is the reason why the Constitutional Court didn't acknowledge marriage equality as and gay adoption as rights.
This Natural Law approach to marriage and family is endangered by transhumanist forces, and I'm afraid that, currently, the US Govt. and its transactional understanding of human life, with its hard and soft power, is the main threat to this understanding.
Indeed, disturbing. I'm reading "The Age of AI: And Our Human Future" by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher and together with this essay, it has me, well, fairly freaked out. What the hell kind of future are my grandkids facing? And what can a smurf like me do about it? As father to three adopted children (I actually hate the term "adopted" -- as if how they became part of our family and I became their "pops" has anything to do with them but there are times when I just growl and use it for the sake of expediency) this post has me thinking once again about "family" and how silent our culture is about adoption. It isn't mentioned or talked about much. Plenty of fury and opinions about abortion, birth control, IVF, and so on but adoption seems to get overlooked. Perhaps a good thing. It avoids some of the bullshit surrounding these topics. But let me just note that my children are wonderful ... they may not be the children of my blood, but they are something much more precious, the children of my heart. Ditto from my wife. Our infertility turned out to be part of God's plan for us and our family. And if you're a Christian, you're adopted...
A great and truly disturbing essay. If they read it. I’m sure my adult children, in their late 20s and 30s, would just shrug and say, “It is what it is.” I’m speculating, but my hunch tells me that the metaphysical horror and human tragedy about which Jeff Shafer (and you and NS Lyons) are warning us is inevitable.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fact that Christianity describes God’s essence in relational terms. God is a relational being comprised of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The ancient Apostle’s Creed devotes precious verbal real estate to declaring that Jesus Christ “was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary”—and says nothing else about his earthly career except that he “suffered under Pontius Pilate, died, and on the third day rose again from the dead.” Similarly, the Mass specifies that Jesus Christ is “the only begotten son of God, begotten before all worlds” and that the “Holy Spirit proceeds from the father and the son.” For two thousand years the core focus of the Church has been on the relationality of God—and of humanity’s relationship to God. The great symbol and archetype of the divine:human relationship is marriage, with God as husband and humanity as bride.
The emerging legal framework described by Jeff Shafer severs all relational elements from human ontology and identity and connects it to the top of a hierarchy of disaggregated parental functions, with the commercial rights privileged above all others in the seriatum: whoever initiated the process of conception, gestation and birth and funded the events is the “parent” in the new legal ART framework. By definition, that’s the human with the least biological / genetic connection to the baby.
Only the phrase “Horror vacui” can describe our visceral horror at the denatured and radically lonely and anonymous plight being imposed on these new human beings by the circumstances of their conception and birth. As Jeff Shafer warns, the concomitant legal maneuver is to strip all natural parents of any legal status. This is truly an anti-human nightmare unfolding in our time and our world.
I think you're on to something deep here, Chris. As it happens, Shafer and I talked about this at the deli in Margaretville and he later send me an artile by Joseph Ratzinger, "Concerning the notion of person in theology." It begins thus: "Relativity toward the other constitutes the human person." Further, "The concept of person, as well as the idea that stands behind this concept, is a product of Christian theology."
That’s fascinating—thank you Matt for making those quotes more widely known. I’ll look up the article and read it! Really appreciate it.
Pope John Paul II’s great book “The Theology of the Body” (with which I’ll bet Shafer is thoroughly familiar) is full of insights into the cosmic significance of the nuptial sexual union between man and woman that is at the very core of Judaism and Christianity.
On the same theme as Ratzinger’s quotes Sarah Ruden has written a great book with a terrible title called “Paul Among the People.” Apparently, until Sarah classics scholars didn’t read the New Testament and theologians didn’t know anything about classical literature.
Sarah approached the New Testament as a classics scholar and feminist leftie and she was astonished to discover how groundbreakingly humane and transformational Paul’s ideas were about women, slavery and sexuality. As you know, Paul is regularly pilloried as a misogynist authoritarian by feminists and by many others who have no understanding of the cultural context in which Paul wrote his epistles.
Sarah brilliantly fixes that! She’s now a huge admirer of Paul. Her position is fully in accord with Shafer’s quotes from Ratzinger and her detailed analysis is fascinating and totally surprising.
Thanks for this, Chris. The perspective of someone surprised, as you say Ruden is, often helps us see a text (in this case, Paul) through fresh eyes ourselves.
Many thanks to you, Matt, and NS Lyons for publishing Jeff's speech. There are so many issues to deal with currently and commodification and transhumanism are biggies. What to do about them first requires an understanding of the problem and this goes a long way in raising awareness. Hopefully a coalition at various levels could be developed to slow down at least the worst aspects. Here in Australia there are few liberals, progressives and others who would show interest except perhaps some conservatives and indigenous peoples who want to conserve their culture, family, and the environment.
The timing of this piece is nearly miraculous. I spent the majority of yesterday evening discussing with someone close to me that my main issue in this election cycle is resisting the notion that humans are autonomous rootless beings – whose identity is self-derived, and whose fulfillment relies on the arbitrary expression of their will – and opposing the political forces trying to codify this notion into official policy and law. I see this as a subtle revolution, yet the response of a normal, well-adjusted person whose only fault is the virtue of being more interested in daily life, is a bewildered, “huh?” I opened my email this morning and read this with an excitement bordering on glee, not due to the solemn subject matter, but due to its potential to alert one more person to the deep changes we’re sleepwalking through.
My complaint is that I wish the author had connected the dots a little bit more between the lofty philosophical shifts and the details of this legal development. One can argue that sure, kids born in this unique and broken circumstance will have a hard going of it and will require a new regime of family law, but that regime will remain the exception, without overturning the centuries of precedent of family law. And even if the law does go too far down this road, before long normal people will notice, overwhelmingly oppose it, and it will be reversed. This is an obvious and very reasonable argument, and I think will cause many people to dismiss an essay like this as fear mongering. My response would be: First, this is not a fluke, but an example of a long, steady march in a certain direction. We should not be confident that this inversion of family law, even if made more explicit, would be strongly opposed. Second, even if it is opposed, we don’t know how much damage it will cause before it is rolled back, even if it is rolled back. There is no reason to give this harmful anthropology a foothold on the basis that “we should not worry, it is only a foothold.”
I think you're right. The law is rightly said to have an educative effect -- it doesn't simply enact some moral consensus, but shapes it. The record of legal/political novelties overturning centuries of settled human practices is impressive! Especially in our own time of an ever-accelerating dissolution of "natural kinds" that make up the heterogeneity of the world. In Rod Dreher's new book, he quotes an Orthodox convert who tells him, "The distinction between men and women, and the metaphysical implications of correct relationship between masculinity and femininity, are key to correct theological understanding. Destroy this boundary and many others will follow, such as the boundaries between human and animal, and human and technology. If one of these foundational distinctions can be made to seem arbitrary, do we expect the others to hold?"
I've always been unable to see anything in life in isolation, as if there's a giant web in my brain with everything interconnected. I see a blob moving through this web to disconnect us from each other, making each of us an isolated and lonely Eleanor Rigby. The blob is attacking another part of the web by working to disconnect American citizens from their citizenry through illegal immigration. If anyone can enter at any time, then citizenship is meaningless, and we owe nothing to each other as fellow citizens, similar to those abandoned infants in Ukraine. The blob has ensured those infants have no claim to be protected by parents. The goal is the disintegration of all human connection.
"A specter is haunting Europe and the world. It is replacism, the tendency to replace everything with its normalized, standardized interchangeable double: the original by its copy, the authentic by its imitation, the true by the false, mothers by surrogate mothers,... knowledge by diplomas, the countryside and city by the universal suburb, the native by the non-native... men by women, men and women by robots, peoples by other peoples, humanity by a savage, undifferentiated, standardized, infinitely interchangeable posthumanity."
-- Renaud Camus
I'm in a global tech conference right now, and you don't know how much that is true.
God bless you, Matt, for writing/posting things like these--and for hosting conversations like these.
Archedelia really is, in its own way, a showing forth of the Arche.
Warmly,
Adrian
Writing from Italy, I'm very much invested in the matter.
In Italy surrogacy has been a crime since many years. Recently, the Parliament has approved a law making Italians who have surrogacy abroad prosecutable.
Naturally enough, the NYT[1] had an hissy fit and the high heels-wearing, lipsticked hunks in Foggy Bottom expressed their concern that the law might affect US citizens (the babies bought by Italian couples in the US) [2].
A very interesting thing is that, when drafting the 1948 Constitution, both Catholics and Communists, who fiercely hated and feared each other, agreed upon a Natural Law definition of family, which is enshrined in Article 29:
"The Republic recognizes the rights of the family as a natural society founded upon marriage[...]"
This is the reason why the Constitutional Court didn't acknowledge marriage equality as and gay adoption as rights.
This Natural Law approach to marriage and family is endangered by transhumanist forces, and I'm afraid that, currently, the US Govt. and its transactional understanding of human life, with its hard and soft power, is the main threat to this understanding.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/world/europe/italy-surrogacy-law.html
[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/united-states-italy-giorgia-meloni-surrogacy-ban/
Indeed, disturbing. I'm reading "The Age of AI: And Our Human Future" by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher and together with this essay, it has me, well, fairly freaked out. What the hell kind of future are my grandkids facing? And what can a smurf like me do about it? As father to three adopted children (I actually hate the term "adopted" -- as if how they became part of our family and I became their "pops" has anything to do with them but there are times when I just growl and use it for the sake of expediency) this post has me thinking once again about "family" and how silent our culture is about adoption. It isn't mentioned or talked about much. Plenty of fury and opinions about abortion, birth control, IVF, and so on but adoption seems to get overlooked. Perhaps a good thing. It avoids some of the bullshit surrounding these topics. But let me just note that my children are wonderful ... they may not be the children of my blood, but they are something much more precious, the children of my heart. Ditto from my wife. Our infertility turned out to be part of God's plan for us and our family. And if you're a Christian, you're adopted...
It is presumptuous to suggest, but as mentioned in Revelation, is God's "cup of wrath" becoming full?
my mom and her mom and her grandmom etc., would have no doubt: to Jesus.