Letter #19: Attack of the Cyborg Girl-Boys
Is Help On the Way?
Spongler,
Your last letter brought back fond memories of the good old days when Galileo would drop by the Vatican to do his hilarious “Who’s on First?” routine. His Holiness used to say, “That guy kills me. Rack him up and see if he’ll put the earth back at the center of the universe where it belongs.” Oh, how we laughed. Good times.
But I feel we’ve now asked all the right questions and need to move on and find some specific and actionable answers.
To push the conversation along, on Monday, I will post the second of our essays, the first to be written by only one of us. I go first because I’m the father. And also because at my age, I could be gone like that! So time is of the essence.
Here, in my view, is where we stand. We acknowledge that medical and technological advances could soon change what it means to be human. We acknowledge that some of these advances bring improvements — eyeglasses, pacemakers, medicines, etc. On the other hand, because scientistic materialism is the current cultural mindset, and because it gives us a false idea of what a human being is, we feel that add-ons intended to enhance our lives could destroy the essential nature of our humanity instead.
Some current examples. Anti-depressants. You’re sad; you take a pill; you’re not sad. Or are you? Maybe as one relative told me, “You’re still sad, you just can’t feel it anymore.” Experts say these pills have a salutary effect on some people born with a chemical imbalance. But I’ve met those who swallow the stuff and mumble, “I’m so much better now,” while staring at me with dead and glassy eyes. Meanwhile, depression has become epidemic. Likewise, Big Pharma’s greed. What are the guidelines to keep us from becoming drugged-up zombies?
Chemical birth control. Babies are the telos of manhood and womanhood. Yet from time immemorial, female fertility has been seen as a problem as well as a blessing. Sex is a momentary blast, but babies come to stay. They need fathers, who may have lost interest at the moment of conception. They’re expensive. They curtail your social life and career. Giving birth is dangerous. And so on.
The pill seems to solve all that. Or does it? Maybe, as Mary Harrington says, it merely turns women into sterile cyborgs. Maybe that drug-induced sterility so strips women of their essential gender identity they can be replaced by boys in skirts and no one will care.
These are urgent issues — and the companies that make bazillions of somolians by selling pills and gizmos can‘t be trusted to resolve them. Neither can the politicians those companies pay off.
So if Abbot and Costello can’t figure out who’s on first, who can — because he’s on first.
Or maybe it’s up to us.
Essay #2 drops Monday.
Love, Dad
I once was someone who believed the answer to life could be found in a magic pill. What I discovered was that the pills drove me further and further from the true answer. I slowly began to understand that it was okay to feel—to be sad, angry, confused and even, dare I say, melancholy. The answer wasn’t in shutting down these feelings but rather in understanding what I was feeling. As I shared in another post, my quest took three long years. The emotions remained, deepened but I steadfastly refused to dampen them down in “better living through chemistry.” The short answer I discovered was found in humility and that what I was truly feeling was an emptiness that no pill, no drink or donut, no intellectual pursuit, no temporary high could fill. As Pascal informs:
“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.” ~ Blaise Pascal, Pensées VII(425)
I know the “God shaped hole” explanation has become a trope, an overused, oversimplified answer but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It is one thing for the head to understand the truth of the Gospels but something entirely different when the heart understands and accepts their truth. I still feel all the same emotions but now, instead of shutting down or acting out I turn to the Cross and the only One who can see me through anything. Even this life because I know without a doubt that my Redeemer lives.
That’s an excellent point, Mr. The Klavan (that’s not a typo). Trans(so-called)women are basically telling real women, “Who needs you? We ARE you without the PMS or ‘come back in 7-10 days’ as Veda Sultenfuss put it.”
Fortunately for humanity, almost all of us knuckle-dragging, former cave-dwelling, toxic-masculinity types still need and WANT real women, even if we do have to wait 7-10 days.