Recently, I read an excellent essay by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright called Losing the Sexual Revolution. She's a woman in despair, looking at the fallen Jenga tower of modern romance and relationships. Here's a tidbit.
It is finally official. We have lost the sexual revolution...
Watching all the peoples, around the globe, who bought into Feminism and Free Love stop reproducing is one of the greatest proofs of the existence of the Powers of Darkness I have ever seen.
I look at the result, the lack of support for men, the misery of women, the unhappiness of children, and I throw up my hands and admit defeat.
I surrender.
But I find myself left wondering, what now?
How do we go back to a society that honors chastity and marriage?
How do we go forward to a society that honors these things and has respect for both sexes? ...
I remember the outrage and arrogance with which all of we college women objected to the very idea that we could not make up our own minds, that we did not have the “freedom” to carry on with a professor or whomever we wanted.
We believed we had total what is now called agency.
What the sexual revolution did was treat sex as if it were separable from the rest of our lives. By blowing up traditional mores, it forced each person to develop a theory of life on their own, from scratch. It was a materialist revolution, one that thought that our physical nature, which includes orgasms, was all there was.
I also finished an excellent book, How to Save the West by Spencer Klavan recently. I listened to it on Audible and it was so good, I bought the hardbound version so I could go back and read certain passages and mull them over. The pertinent one for this post is given at the bottom of the blog post, but here is the payoff bit.
So the materialists are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. We do not have fears and desires and loves only because our bodies produce certain chemicals. It is just as true, and more essential, to say that our bodies produce those chemicals because their natural purpose is to live a conscious life. "If the eye were an animal, its soul would be sight," wrote Aristotle. "The eye is the matter of sight; if it loses its sight, then it is no longer an eye.... So too an animal is the soul and the body," and thus "the soul is not separable from the body."
Orgasms, as wonderful as they are, are produced by the body for a purpose. They aren't simply there. When the connection between matter, soul and purpose was blown up, all kinds of downstream effects got started, one of which was the birth dearth.
Countries all over the developed world are now experiencing birthrates well below replacement rates. The US now has a birth rate of 1.65 or so where replacement is about 2.05. Japan, Korea and China have already begun to see their populations fall.
All over the world, governments are panicking about the effect this will have on social programs. Lots of old people getting benefits with few young people paying taxes spell disaster for government budgets. As a result, plenty of countries have tinkered with their tax codes and benefits trying to get more babies. None of it has worked because none of them are addressing the real problem.
When we discarded a holistic view of the world where the things we did had purpose and objective moral value, we made having babies a strictly material decision. The sexual revolution and it's allied materialistic worldview blew up the idea that continuing your family line was important. It also destroyed the connection between sex and relationships. The collapse in our birth rates is due to purposelessness, not tax codes.
Materialists cannot provide the general population with either purpose or a system of values. All they can do is what they did - atomize society. As a result we now have young women lamenting the loss of romantic love and family.
If only someone had told us there was a purpose to our bodies and the ways men and women relate through sex.
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| BOOM. "I'll just leave this little pamphlet here describing my Theology of the Body. You may read it at your leisure ..." |
Full Quote From Spencer
I gave only the payoff above, but here's a longer selection that does a better job spelling out what I'm trying to say.
It is not that Aristotle denied the existence of realities which are more than physical. Rather, he rejected the notion that such realities are in any sense "out there." He believed there was no special plane where the good, the true, and the beautiful floated in pure perfection. The world into which Socrates gazed was not some realm beyond, where Plotinus might hope to escape and leave his body behind. For Aristotle there is only this world, in which, though everything is made of matter, there are certain truths about matter that are not material.
Take, for instance, a circle: we may draw a circle in ink, or carve one out of bronze. It is a circle just the same—the shape exists independently of its material. But you have never seen, nor can you even imagine, an immaterial circle--a circle made of nothing. When you try to picture one, you may find yourself visualizing a plain black circle against a white background. But then all you have done is picture one version of a circle by drawing it in black ink on imaginary paper in your head. "Thoughts are not images, but they never take place without images," writes Aristotle in his study of the soul. Things like circles are not bound by space and time, but neither are they beyond space and time. They are distinct from matter, but they exist within matter wherever we find or think of them.
Take this idea further. Imagine a sculptor who carves two sculptures of the same man: one out of bronze, and another out of marble. The matter—in Greek the hule, or "stuff"—is different. But the shape—the morphe—is the same. This is what forms were like for Aristotle: less "ideas" with independent existence in a far-off world than "shapes" into which stuff is carved.
From there Aristotle worked out a system of four "causes" (aitiai), or ways of explaining why things are what they are. The "stuff" itself is one cause: the material cause. Without a hunk of bronze or marble there could be no sculpture. But there could be no sculpture without a plan for its shape, either. This is the formal cause: the bronze is molded in a particular way, and no other way, because of the outline the sculptor has in his mind for it. That means the sculptor's art itself is another kind of cause—the efficient cause, the force that acts on the stuff to shape it into a form. But why does the sculptor choose to do so at all? That is the last cause, the "final" cause. The sculpture is being made for a reason—to decorate a temple or to celebrate the glory of man. This is its telos, its purpose or reason for being.
Speaking very roughly, we are also like that sculpture. We are neither a lump of inert stuff, nor a magical ghost floating through space inside a meat sack. We are blood and bone and sinew, given shape by an organizing principle; we are matter arranged in just such a way that it is self-aware. That consciousness, what Jerome called the divine spark, is neither accidental by-product of our physical existence nor a dreamlike self which deigns to operate a body of which it has no need. Instead, consciousness is the very thing that our bodies exist to do.
So the materialists are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. We do not have fears and desires and loves only because our bodies produce certain chemicals. It is just as true, and more essential, to say that our bodies produce those chemicals because their natural purpose is to live a conscious life. "If the eye were an animal, its soul would be sight," wrote Aristotle. "The eye is the matter of sight; if it loses its sight, then it is no longer an eye.... So too an animal is the soul and the body," and thus "the soul is not separable from the body."
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