What I find darkly amusing about the supposedly “modern” currents is that our society appears to rabidly be returning to ideas which are so old they are pre Christian and pagan. The ideal of a totalitarian statism in which children were wards of the state who may not even know their parentage was exemplified in the Spartan regime, purported to have created a societal model which lasted 500 year. The difference is that Sparta was geographically bounded, where our technology now allows us to integrate these evil
Ideas into a globe spanning system of total control. The myth of Babel reborn.
Of course, I'm sure already considered and in play, the piecemeal creation of human beings by intelligence or physical characteristic, to fill the needs of labor, the military, or low level bureaucratic management. The ongoing reduction of human beings to sterile "thingdom" is explicit in the indifferent DNC/Davos assumption that it is unnecessary to inform citizens of who is in command of the American Republic. The horror is bigger than the suggested lie. Add the euthanasia center as a back up, and wealth's problem of acquiring throw away labor and access to natural resources for unhampered exploitation is solved. At core, it is the convenient psychopathy of old fashioned amoral avarice. Or as some say, evil itself. The vampire psychology of malignant narcissism and the faux virtuosity of the ideological utopians who serve it holds allegiance to nothing. After the conflagration: "We were just following orders."
The template for isolating and destroying the human individuality that defines our Republic, was installed by the anti-male, anti-nuclear family sterility of lesbian Marxist feminism and quickly adopted by the countless sycophants, whose faux virtuosity has allowed them to seize questions of vital American social/political concern, and prevent the dialogue and vision necessary to solve them. All, while making careers and fortunes, as they feed on American tax largesse. Swept under the rug Biden Ukraine grift and graft or the billion dollar Harris/Mayorkas illegals trafficking enterprise are prime examples. Their moral angst has them crying crocodile tears all the way to Switzerland and their numbered account.
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 Matt Crawford) 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.
Great post. As our civilization has abandoned God, our Father, and Jesus, his Son, we no longer view suffering as redemptive. It's to be avoided at all costs, and science and progress will devise a quick fix. When it comes to human sexuality and the beautiful gift and miracle of creating life, the solution usually entails subduing nature (contraception), altering nature (IVF) or destroying nature (abortion). It's unnatural, it's anti-human, and it will always circle back to bite us in the ass.
This "chillingly anti-human future we already find ourselves inadvertently stumbling toward with exceptional speed" is indeed disturbing. This is a near-reality we are facing. In pregnany and birth we encounter a helpless love, we produce life through suffering, and we come into deep connection with creation and God. ART is concern is a central theme in Peco Gaskovski's novel Exogenesis https://ignatius.com/exogenesis-exp/ , which imagines a future where the birth process is completely removed from the body, and naturally birthing people are persecuted and forcibly sterilized by the technocratic government. Shafer's essay is a reminder that fiction is on its way to reality.
and as always they'll frame it as about love and and rights. "These are bad people, and risking birth defects, or bringing diseases into the population, that our machine babies are free of"
"In the coming years, as the birthing technologies come closer to reality, these fears will be exaggerated in media and social media, to the point that it will seem only natural that society welcomes the technologies with relief rather than horror.
...The EctoLife video is a slick production, pulsating with techno-music and passionate optimism, when the more likely reality will be a hellish future that turns babies into corporate products and parents into project managers and consumer narcissists."
It's staring us in the face, and to talk about it, or try to, is immediately rejected as some form of hate speech. Anti-feminism, women's rights, anti-science, whatever, when the simple fact is that it's an attempt to retain our humanity. That would be labeled extremism.
The "Progressive Paradise" is on offer and only Neanderthals would reject it. Or, idiots, troglidites, deplorables, etc. It won't be the machines that defeat us, it will be our own machine wielding experts. Progressives know this, why don't we?
On the occasion of the 2024 election, I believe that Donald Trump is at least somebody who calls bullshit on the managerial regime. Kamala, as she was fumbling one of the softball questions with a reporter answered that she will follow the law and then when pressed on the question, she repeated I will follow the law. She is a mindless cipher. Donald Trump is 80% with the elite program of ravenous self enrichment so his biggest contribution was mocking the regime.. He is not the change, but he is the harbinger of maybe something that needs to be done.. in western society the state is the enemy. At least Trump says that out loud. Kamala will follow the law. She is terrifying.
Powerful and important. Would-be parents are being turned into consumers, shoppers, and children into customized products on order.
But beware of overidealizing the natural family—one of the greatest sources of fate and suffering in our lives as well as of identity and love. Too often a site of abuse, rejection, gaslighting, and many subtle and unsubtle variations on physical and psychological torture as adults inflict their unconfronted frustrations on their children and children act out their own fallen, unsocialized nature. This is as often true in traditional contexts as in liberal modern ones. The family is the wellspring of human madness as well as of tenderness and generosity.
I'm NOT AT ALL saying the alternative is better! Nature and tradition, while cruel and imperfect, are time-tested and far wiser than our superficially clever modern minds. I'm just saying, making a good family and raising good kids might be the most difficult and important art there is, and will always be a work in progress. The simple recipe of a man, a woman, and their ancestors (ideally in a place, a community, a tradition) is not enough and risks fascist sentimentality.
This all seems to manifest from the 3rd wave feminist hive... a newly powerful and wealthy cabal that is determined to decouple themselves from the requirement of males asking them to the prom and giving them orgasms and children.
Break the traditions of gender, sex, families, children... all of it... and then redefine it using science and technology so that the feminist can own power without having any regrets that the real male warrior she craves in her bed reject her because she is... well... unattractive because she is really nearly insane.
I read that 3 in 10 females are involved in a lesbian relationship. I guess thank God for modern vibrator tech and Internet porn.
But, these new power females are not only marching toward a dystopia that will just increase the trajectory of their increasing depression and mental health issues... but it effs up the world for everyone else that just wants normal to stick around. I keep waiting for the lightbulb to come on in the heads of these upset and angry women that males are not responsible... it is just that they need a lot of therapy.
Great piece by Mary. Thought-provoking. You can mostly trace the logic behind it... that the biological function of gestation/reproduction is inconvenient to the feminist power movement so then what should be done to fix it?
It almost seems like this election is a capstone for the freaky feminists against the normies. What is weird to me is how many people outside of the freaky feminists support this attempted destruction of normal families.
Looking at that cohort providing the support, they are largely upper middle class educated people that have the privilege of being born into and raised by a traditional normal two-parent family situation. And this gets me to my final conclusion that the cohort that attacks the normal family situation is the same that supports offshoring of working class economic opportunity, perpetuation of crappy grade schools, perpetuation of dependency-making welfare and authoritarian rules that make it impossible to start and maintain a small business... does ALL of this simply to limit the competition to their perceived place on the human social dominance hierarchy.
It is all hair-raising... too much like the novel The Giver.
As it does with everything else, globalism makes deviations from the simple family norm much more subject to abuse.
However, such deviations have existed for a very long time. One example that requires no technology is adoption. This has been common throughout history and was probably necessary when mortality rates were much higher. Certain cultures like the Roman (e.g. Octavian) and the Japanese (e.g. Yamamoto) took it very seriously indeed. The practice was for a wealthy or powerful family to adopt a promising child to provide advantages. In more modern times, it has mostly been infants which has provided a boon to parents unable to have children, unwed mothers unable to care for them and the children themselves. A related topic is step parenthood. Again a feature of high mortality rates and mores that involved young women marrying older men who then died. Both Washington and Madison married young widows, had no children with them but adopted the birth children of the dead first husband. Adolescent mumps was Washington's problem. Not sure about Madison. If you are a believing Christian, you would have to consider the case of Jesus. In more modern times, this has been more a function of divorce than mortality but it is still common. Early kubbutzim self-consciously modeled themselves on Sparta and did everything communally except for conception itself.
Moving on to technology, the proposal to do IQ tests on embryos set off my scam detector. That aside, IVF strikes me as a boon for couples unable to have children in the traditional way of which there are many, for a variety of reasons some of which require sperm or egg donors. And there are women who prefer single motherhood to being childless cat ladies.
As for surrogacy, I am quite sure my own mother would have gone that route had the technology been available. She had no problem conceiving in the traditional way but her problem was producing babies that lived of which I am the only one. She desperately wanted more children and persisted beyond the point of threatening her health. It is not clear whether that was some genetic issue with her or my father, something that happened after I was born or just bad luck. The technology to diagnose the problem did not exist.
There are many reasons for the dysfunction of families. Culture and economics are probably at the top of the list. Technology is somewhere down the list. Abuses of technology, starting with fire, are common enough but the writer fails to make the case that they are central to the problem of families. Same for the abuses of the managerial state which are many and enhanced by globalism.
What I find darkly amusing about the supposedly “modern” currents is that our society appears to rabidly be returning to ideas which are so old they are pre Christian and pagan. The ideal of a totalitarian statism in which children were wards of the state who may not even know their parentage was exemplified in the Spartan regime, purported to have created a societal model which lasted 500 year. The difference is that Sparta was geographically bounded, where our technology now allows us to integrate these evil
Ideas into a globe spanning system of total control. The myth of Babel reborn.
Of course, I'm sure already considered and in play, the piecemeal creation of human beings by intelligence or physical characteristic, to fill the needs of labor, the military, or low level bureaucratic management. The ongoing reduction of human beings to sterile "thingdom" is explicit in the indifferent DNC/Davos assumption that it is unnecessary to inform citizens of who is in command of the American Republic. The horror is bigger than the suggested lie. Add the euthanasia center as a back up, and wealth's problem of acquiring throw away labor and access to natural resources for unhampered exploitation is solved. At core, it is the convenient psychopathy of old fashioned amoral avarice. Or as some say, evil itself. The vampire psychology of malignant narcissism and the faux virtuosity of the ideological utopians who serve it holds allegiance to nothing. After the conflagration: "We were just following orders."
The template for isolating and destroying the human individuality that defines our Republic, was installed by the anti-male, anti-nuclear family sterility of lesbian Marxist feminism and quickly adopted by the countless sycophants, whose faux virtuosity has allowed them to seize questions of vital American social/political concern, and prevent the dialogue and vision necessary to solve them. All, while making careers and fortunes, as they feed on American tax largesse. Swept under the rug Biden Ukraine grift and graft or the billion dollar Harris/Mayorkas illegals trafficking enterprise are prime examples. Their moral angst has them crying crocodile tears all the way to Switzerland and their numbered account.
Depart the psyop and live.
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 Matt Crawford) 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.
Great post. As our civilization has abandoned God, our Father, and Jesus, his Son, we no longer view suffering as redemptive. It's to be avoided at all costs, and science and progress will devise a quick fix. When it comes to human sexuality and the beautiful gift and miracle of creating life, the solution usually entails subduing nature (contraception), altering nature (IVF) or destroying nature (abortion). It's unnatural, it's anti-human, and it will always circle back to bite us in the ass.
Huxley had it right in Brave New World over 90 years ago.
This "chillingly anti-human future we already find ourselves inadvertently stumbling toward with exceptional speed" is indeed disturbing. This is a near-reality we are facing. In pregnany and birth we encounter a helpless love, we produce life through suffering, and we come into deep connection with creation and God. ART is concern is a central theme in Peco Gaskovski's novel Exogenesis https://ignatius.com/exogenesis-exp/ , which imagines a future where the birth process is completely removed from the body, and naturally birthing people are persecuted and forcibly sterilized by the technocratic government. Shafer's essay is a reminder that fiction is on its way to reality.
and as always they'll frame it as about love and and rights. "These are bad people, and risking birth defects, or bringing diseases into the population, that our machine babies are free of"
Yes, I just reshared a post my husband Peco wrote two years ago about "EctoLife" a company that proposes a chilling vision of our reproductive future with vibrant techno-hope (you can read his full post here https://pilgrimsinthemachine.substack.com/p/pod-babies-click-and-buy-a-fetus):
"In the coming years, as the birthing technologies come closer to reality, these fears will be exaggerated in media and social media, to the point that it will seem only natural that society welcomes the technologies with relief rather than horror.
...The EctoLife video is a slick production, pulsating with techno-music and passionate optimism, when the more likely reality will be a hellish future that turns babies into corporate products and parents into project managers and consumer narcissists."
It's staring us in the face, and to talk about it, or try to, is immediately rejected as some form of hate speech. Anti-feminism, women's rights, anti-science, whatever, when the simple fact is that it's an attempt to retain our humanity. That would be labeled extremism.
The "Progressive Paradise" is on offer and only Neanderthals would reject it. Or, idiots, troglidites, deplorables, etc. It won't be the machines that defeat us, it will be our own machine wielding experts. Progressives know this, why don't we?
The future is beginning to look more and more like the film Gattaca, except more bleak and without any of its redeemable qualities.
On the occasion of the 2024 election, I believe that Donald Trump is at least somebody who calls bullshit on the managerial regime. Kamala, as she was fumbling one of the softball questions with a reporter answered that she will follow the law and then when pressed on the question, she repeated I will follow the law. She is a mindless cipher. Donald Trump is 80% with the elite program of ravenous self enrichment so his biggest contribution was mocking the regime.. He is not the change, but he is the harbinger of maybe something that needs to be done.. in western society the state is the enemy. At least Trump says that out loud. Kamala will follow the law. She is terrifying.
Powerful and important. Would-be parents are being turned into consumers, shoppers, and children into customized products on order.
But beware of overidealizing the natural family—one of the greatest sources of fate and suffering in our lives as well as of identity and love. Too often a site of abuse, rejection, gaslighting, and many subtle and unsubtle variations on physical and psychological torture as adults inflict their unconfronted frustrations on their children and children act out their own fallen, unsocialized nature. This is as often true in traditional contexts as in liberal modern ones. The family is the wellspring of human madness as well as of tenderness and generosity.
I'm NOT AT ALL saying the alternative is better! Nature and tradition, while cruel and imperfect, are time-tested and far wiser than our superficially clever modern minds. I'm just saying, making a good family and raising good kids might be the most difficult and important art there is, and will always be a work in progress. The simple recipe of a man, a woman, and their ancestors (ideally in a place, a community, a tradition) is not enough and risks fascist sentimentality.
This all seems to manifest from the 3rd wave feminist hive... a newly powerful and wealthy cabal that is determined to decouple themselves from the requirement of males asking them to the prom and giving them orgasms and children.
Break the traditions of gender, sex, families, children... all of it... and then redefine it using science and technology so that the feminist can own power without having any regrets that the real male warrior she craves in her bed reject her because she is... well... unattractive because she is really nearly insane.
I read that 3 in 10 females are involved in a lesbian relationship. I guess thank God for modern vibrator tech and Internet porn.
But, these new power females are not only marching toward a dystopia that will just increase the trajectory of their increasing depression and mental health issues... but it effs up the world for everyone else that just wants normal to stick around. I keep waiting for the lightbulb to come on in the heads of these upset and angry women that males are not responsible... it is just that they need a lot of therapy.
Mary Harrington actually wrote about this. Well, not the vibrators I guess. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/01/return-of-the-cyborgs
Great piece by Mary. Thought-provoking. You can mostly trace the logic behind it... that the biological function of gestation/reproduction is inconvenient to the feminist power movement so then what should be done to fix it?
It almost seems like this election is a capstone for the freaky feminists against the normies. What is weird to me is how many people outside of the freaky feminists support this attempted destruction of normal families.
Looking at that cohort providing the support, they are largely upper middle class educated people that have the privilege of being born into and raised by a traditional normal two-parent family situation. And this gets me to my final conclusion that the cohort that attacks the normal family situation is the same that supports offshoring of working class economic opportunity, perpetuation of crappy grade schools, perpetuation of dependency-making welfare and authoritarian rules that make it impossible to start and maintain a small business... does ALL of this simply to limit the competition to their perceived place on the human social dominance hierarchy.
It is all hair-raising... too much like the novel The Giver.
Thank you for the reference.
On the quip about the battery powered man-replacing devices... my mother God rest her soul, would rightfully scold me for that!
As it does with everything else, globalism makes deviations from the simple family norm much more subject to abuse.
However, such deviations have existed for a very long time. One example that requires no technology is adoption. This has been common throughout history and was probably necessary when mortality rates were much higher. Certain cultures like the Roman (e.g. Octavian) and the Japanese (e.g. Yamamoto) took it very seriously indeed. The practice was for a wealthy or powerful family to adopt a promising child to provide advantages. In more modern times, it has mostly been infants which has provided a boon to parents unable to have children, unwed mothers unable to care for them and the children themselves. A related topic is step parenthood. Again a feature of high mortality rates and mores that involved young women marrying older men who then died. Both Washington and Madison married young widows, had no children with them but adopted the birth children of the dead first husband. Adolescent mumps was Washington's problem. Not sure about Madison. If you are a believing Christian, you would have to consider the case of Jesus. In more modern times, this has been more a function of divorce than mortality but it is still common. Early kubbutzim self-consciously modeled themselves on Sparta and did everything communally except for conception itself.
Moving on to technology, the proposal to do IQ tests on embryos set off my scam detector. That aside, IVF strikes me as a boon for couples unable to have children in the traditional way of which there are many, for a variety of reasons some of which require sperm or egg donors. And there are women who prefer single motherhood to being childless cat ladies.
As for surrogacy, I am quite sure my own mother would have gone that route had the technology been available. She had no problem conceiving in the traditional way but her problem was producing babies that lived of which I am the only one. She desperately wanted more children and persisted beyond the point of threatening her health. It is not clear whether that was some genetic issue with her or my father, something that happened after I was born or just bad luck. The technology to diagnose the problem did not exist.
There are many reasons for the dysfunction of families. Culture and economics are probably at the top of the list. Technology is somewhere down the list. Abuses of technology, starting with fire, are common enough but the writer fails to make the case that they are central to the problem of families. Same for the abuses of the managerial state which are many and enhanced by globalism.
Renounce, indeed.