In "The Desecration of Man" (First Things, January 2024), Carl Trueman identifies three characteristics of modernity: disenchantment: loss of the sense of the miraculous, the wonderful, the transcendent: fluidity: lack of any stability, permanence, durability, longevity; and desecration: absence of the "sacred" and the subsequent degradation of the human person. This is an accurate picture of our world. I would add another, that gripped our culture violently just over 50 years ago in the Sexual-Cultural Revolution: the sterilization of the person.
Two Meanings of Sterile
In our discourse, this word has two distinct, but related meanings. In medicine, of course, it refers to antiseptic cleanliness of bacteria and other hostile organisms as in the hospital and surgical protocols. It is a good thing. But the primary meaning, in ordinary conversation, is infertile, incapable of generating new life. This is a bad thing. Underlying both, however, is a singular image: barren, empty, lifeless.
In medicine antiseptic sterility is a miraculous practice of protection from lethal infections. What we have recently, unfortunately, in the broader culture is an exaggerated germ-phobia, an inordinate fear of contamination. This exploded, understandably, during the Covid pandemic, but it lingers still. It is an anxiety about the body in its close intercourse with nature, with other bodies, with nature, with invisible microcosms. It underestimates the resiliency and efficacy of the body's natural resources, especially the immune system. It overrates the potency and hostility of the invisible, microscopic world. It seeks protection in distance, chemical sanitation, masking. This is in sharpest contrast to the world of my youth: lots of children close together in homes, play, packed classrooms; sharing each others germs and bacteri (good and bad alike), and exercising vigorous immune systems within the "herd" context.
This fear of life, of the body, of the natural of course mirrors and reinforces the sterilization of sex.
- Reliance on technological intervention to isolate and thus "protect" the individual.
- Retreat from the natural, the intimate, the concrete, the physical.
- Anxiety related to the natural and the body; isolation; defensiveness.
- A paralyzing reluctance to engage life, and to give new life.
Contra-Conception Transformation
The birth control pill, perfected in the 1960s, in tearing sexuality from fecundity, was the most consequential, disastrous technological development in human history. Yes, more important than fire, printing, the internet; Yes, worse than gunpowder and the atom bomb! It refigured, distorted, perverted the human person, who was created male-female to reign over the earth in a sacred communion of fruitfulness, into a sterile, autonomous individual, lonely, isolated, hopeless. The sin of Onan, masturbation, became normative, wholesome sex, isolated with porn or together in contracepted or homosexual actions. The male/female person as partner with the Creator in the generosity-grandeur-dignity of creation was trivialized, mechanize, and sterilized.
Gen": To Give Life
Gender, generative, generous all come from the proto-European root "gene" meaning to beget, to give life. All created life comes from our Creator, but generously he has blessed us to participate in the giving of life, biological, spiritual, psychological, agricultural, cultural and all sorts of life. We do not do this as isolated monads, but in community, imaging the Eternal Three-in-One of our Creator, especially and prototypically in the union of man-and-woman.
Deconstruction of Gender
The liberalization of sexuality from marriage/children and the marginalization of fruitfulness immediately destroyed both femininity and masculinity as generous, generating forms. Maternity and paternity, no longer the foundation of the family and society, became optional hobbies, but marginal to the techno-bureaucratic economy operated by androgynous units of consumption/production. Our younger people do not "see" the form of masculinity/femininity, they only "see" the isolated, lonely individual, and therefore they see gay and trans identities as perfectly normal. By the logic of sterility, only an ignorant or hateful person would have a problem with trans-athletes or gay marriage.
Demographic Winter
Most of our world...the West, Russia, Japan, China, but not Africa and most of Islam...is undergoing a severe decline in population. We have lots of old people and not enough young people to take care of them. The extravagant benefits enjoyed by the now retiring American boomers will be paid for by our grandchildren. There really is, right now, a generational war, which no one (except Ross Douthat) talks about. Things are much worse across Europe and Russia. In the long term, Russia, notwithstanding its oil and aggression in the Ukraine, is demographically a weakling. The breathtaking failure of our current administration to control the border is partly due to an unacknowledged calculation that we need these workers.
Despair
If the birth of a child is always a sign of hope, than the decision for sterility...masturbation, contraception, abortion, gay or trans identity...is an expression of despair. The deliberately sterile life is isolated...as on an island...alone, disconnected from a past and tradition, detached from the Eternal, without hope in the future. It leads into indulgence, narcissism, resentment and despair. It is the suicide of the community.
Catholicism's Fourfold Response to Modernity
1. Disenchantment.re Creation, to the Catholic mind, is radiant, enchanted, and fascinating: a symphony of beauty-truth-goodness, the entirely gratuitous love of the Creator for his work, an eternal community of love, the miraculous, spiritual warfare of heaven and earth, the dramatic engagement of freedoms culminating in heaven and hell.
2. Fluidity The Eternal has taken flesh, become The Crucified/Risen Protagonist of history, in Jesus Christ and remains with us in this time and space, durationally, steadily, reliably, until the end of time, in the Eucharist, from which flows a stream of life and grace, extravagant and serendipitous, for every person, place and thing.
3. Desecration. Springing from the hand of the All-Holy-God, Creation is itself sacred, especially in the image of God, the human person, however little and powerless, including the generating-generous-gendered male-or-female body.
4. Sterility. The Ultra-Generosity of the Trinity resounds through Creation and history and quintessentially in the receptivity-gratitude-responsiveness-agency of the person-in-community.
The lifeless, anxious, threatened sterility of antiseptic germ-phobia and contraception is itself, I suggest, a counterfeit of genuine purity, as generous, fecund, beautiful. All primitive religions are obsessed with purification, with protection from contamination. Secular modernity is based upon rituals of protection from infestation, intimacy and fecundity. By contrast, purity as closeness with the Holy, as seen in Mary and the saints, is a genuine cleanliness springing from our salvation on Calvary, and brings with it freedom from fear, conjugal comfort in the body and with nature, an intensification and deepening of love as generous-romantic-charitable-erotic-fruitful.
Such purity-as-holiness-and-wholesomeness takes, within Catholic life, two forms: spousal love of man and wife in marriage, and the virginal and celibate surrender. Particularly striking, and entirely unintelligible to the secular, sterile modern, is the fecundity of virginity-as-maternity and celibacy-as-paternity. In each, intimacy with God...exclusive, free, faithful, fruitful...is an extravagant pouring forth of life, graces and blessings. This is a great blessing. The maternal-paternal nuptiality of the virgin and the celibate itself illuminates the interior form of marriage as chastity, loyalty, fertility, and attachment-within-detachment in tender reverence.
Conclusion
Within a world that is dying of sterility, self-abuse, futility and despair, we look with delight to the Church, the Bride of Christ, our Mother, steadfast and yet fluid, tender and reverent, chaste and fruitful, intimate and so fertile. Every family, friendship, endeavor, organization and community...even outside of the institutional boundaries of the Catholic Church...to the degree that they draw to the Eternal, enfleshed Body of Christ, in all its mystery...close, trustful, free of fear, loyal...share in that joyous, hopeful, thriving fecundity.
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