Humanae Vitae and a Revolution of Nihilism
The twenty-fifth Anniversary of Humanae Vitae marks a terrible worsening of our political, social and personal fortunes. Humanae Vitae could only exhort and instruct, but its very instruction suggested such a tragic outcome for a society taken over by the sexual revolution. We are suffering the shocks of just such a revolution which is part of the great war for the soul of America. This is the second American revolution which is a revolution of Nihilism, a tearing down of all the old icons and ideals that built up our country. The first American revolution affirmed God. family, and human dignity. These were claimed by our founders because they fixed their cause to Divine Providence. Their "sacred honor" was rooted in the principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The second American revolution, pulled mightily by the sexual one. is a negation of these ideals. It has destroyed the family, extinguished authentic education, thwarted economic justice and loosened all restraints against the common violence of mankind. Most telling here is the terrible cheapening of human life, especially in the extremes of fetal life and old age. in all the social spaces of impoverishment and, now, with a quickening pace the devaluation youth place on their own lives. This is the heavy price we are paying for the denial of all absolutes, including the absolute right to life. Our debt is a currency of blood and violence, disease and death for the "thirty pieces of silver" which purchased the ultimate indignity against God, the "right." to arbitrate on human life!
The death culture is the final expression of Nihilism which has followed that most illiberal of all freedoms, the freedom to "choose." This simply turns out to be either one man's power over another man's life or the chaotic choices of a man with no power over himself. Even so, our revolution of Nihilism is more seductive than other such revolutions (I mean the totalitarian revolutions), precisely because it is built on an irresistible appeal to humanism, a grandiose mythology of progress, "rights" and freedom. This, in turn, thrives on the subtle manipulation of our fear of those twin demons: death and suffering. Humanism promised freedom from these by science, social engineering and radical "control" of one's body. Alas. humanism already shows itself a lie. Secular humanism becomes an ideology which vanquishes the individual, its "rights" become the agency of self-destruction.
Our brand of Nihilism shows its dark side most unambiguously in the sexual revolution. Here, it is clear. unrestrained or biologically invalid sexual license and life-style have brought horrible disease, mounting mortality and rupture of family. Now we find ourselves on the brink of social disintegration with all kinds of new "families" and parental definitions announcing themselves.
REJECTION OF TRUE HUMAN SEXUALITY
How did this come about? First of all, we find that the sexual revolution is a convergence of trends which reject the truth that human sexuality is a profound psychological and spiritual power for procreation and love—together. Human sexuality cannot be practiced specifically and exclusively for gratification of the physical self, but must be practiced with full regard to natural ends (telos). I mean natural in its clear sense. what is conformable to the dictates of right reason as well as conformable to "sexual justice" which simply says "there are no objects." Here we see that contraception is a primary vehicle of the Nihilistic fallout from the sexual revolution and this for three reasons:
1) it frustrates Natural ends (telos):
2) it turns sex into a force for the breakdown of marriage and family;
3) it promotes perverse and unnatural sex practices.
All of this is seen in the alienating character of sex on demand provided by contraception and the implicit emphasis on self-gratification. Contraception denies God's place in human sexuality to allow for new life— the miracle of creation which is much more than the conceptus of sexual union. Contraception also unambiguously announces that our sexuality is meant to maximize all of our capacities and fantasies for the greatest physical tension, a risk for alienation of sexual partners and a sure road to perversion.
RESULT #1
The most obvious result of this revolution is that contraception "theory" and condom instruction is a class everyone has failed and not because they were not tried. The fact is that contraception feeds sexual idolatries. and this promotes a hyper-stimulated and pleasure-obsessed sex culture indifferent to pregnancy. disease and death. How do we know this? We know this by the empirical test: teenage pregnancy rates are higher than ever, and all of the sexually transmitted diseases from gonorrhea to AIDS are way up. Even cervical cancer is on the rise—a cancer with close correlation to promiscuity. AIDS is now the number one killer if you are 15-35. The other point here is the increase of other diseases as well. such as hepatitis and tuberculosis, not of themselves sexually transmitted but diseases for which all of us are at risk. By the empirical test then, the frightening medical and social cost of living in the contraceptive age is also the absolute scientific refutation of sex and condom education and the "joy of sex." This is all a formula for disaster, a deadly one!
RESULT #2
Another consequence of contraceptive practice, after it destroys natural ends, is the impoverishment of the emotional and psychological life of its practitioners. It is a powerful element in "alienation of affection" by fixing the sexual act on pleasure and performance which grows increasingly into self-absorption. Here contraception is the setting which begets widespread sexual boredom, that terrible ennui where sex is a burden or cold mechanism where all genuine desire is gone because all desires were met. This is the cause for many infidelities and divorces, issuing, not from sexual incompatibilities, "fear" of pregnancy, or other psychological elements, but simply because emotional life died from depersonalized sex. This, of course, is the setting for the genesis of many perversions as well.
RESULT #3
Equally pernicious but little noted is the nexus between contraception and child abuse. St. Augustine puts it clearly that the use of an "evil appliance" announces the couple's intention against the child, "they expose their children as born against their will . . . the inflicted cruelty on those so reluctantly begotten . . . unmasks the sin practiced in darkness." When one measures contraceptive use against the explosion in child abuse Augustine's words that. "the open cruelty reproves the concealed sin" seems irrefutable. With equal earnestness we note the physical abuse within marriage today especially where, due to contraception, sexual ennui, sexual obsession or other psychological tensions build. Though not strictly "sex driven," all of these vitiate conjugal love through the idolization of sex and pleasure which turns into manipulation and punishment.
RESULT #4
There are explosive social consequences to this as well. The sexual revolution, built on contraception, introduces an all pervasive and irresistible mythology of pleasure and self-will into the culture. Now all kinds of psychosexual violence and deviations are spilling out. Here infantile, obsessive and compulsive characterologic types fuse their sexual drives with fantasies of power, violence and death, stimulated by the hypersexual culture surrounding them. These types can no longer keep their dark sexual secrets, and sexual crimes break out all over. Rapists, sex killers, torturers, necrophiliacs, sex stalkers and sex obsessives are in the news every day now.
Contraception, you see, is the tool of all the forces working to hedonize completely modern culture, and the pathologic types we read about are greatly enhanced, and many created, by this idolatry. Since the "flesh is of death," the horrible consequences of such idolatry have to follow.
RESULT #5: THE FINAL SOLUTION
Now the orgies of death and violence announce the inevitable conclusion to population control and contraceptive thinking which we are now suffering. We find, of course, that in this scheme abortion is the fail-safe instrument for personal and societal "quality of life" goals. These goals most often operate in concert with economic determinism, the economic best outcome for an individual family or the society, a calculus based on the number of live births to be permitted. This is the essential logic behind the social myth of secular humanism, it requires that some lives be forfeited. The myth is fed by the noble enough ideal that, "no child which is not a wanted child:" but this soon evolves into rational choice, "no child not planned," and finally threatens here with mandated abortion hidden in the Freedom of Choice Act, "no child who is not permitted." All options, therapeutic and social, will be for abortion and against birth, therein the "mandate."
Contraception, then, has a sociological life far beyond individual practice in all the ways outlined. It is also a main element of social engineering which always ends in abortion because contraception either fails or is practiced insufficiently for "social efficacy." The irony here is that as abortion is widespread contraception is less practiced because abortion is now legal. By any analysis, then, abortion is the "final solution" in any contraceptive society to the problems of poverty, family size, and standard of living.
RESULT #6: ARTIFICIAL REPRODUCTION
Other elements of the sexual revolution have become widespread and moved way beyond any prior consideration, these elements are the social detritus, the collective chaos bought by the indifferent practices of millions. Contraception allowed an entirely new mindset to establish itself, and this for the total manipulation of human sexuality in ways once unthinkable. Here we see the chaos that swirls around the introduction of reproductive technologies which are increasingly remote from sex and more akin to aseptic laboratory experiments. This is the doublemindness of the sexual revolution writ large: millions of unborn lives claimed while costly and complex technologies provide babies for "couples" who could have no valid biological connection with those (surrogates, homosexuals or lesbians) who contract for these babies. Now contract itself is a legal mess as no law-giver, no Solomon himself, could truly and justly arbitrate property, contract or custody in the legal and moral free sense for all brought about by the use of these asexual technologies. We have babies brought into the world (and embryos (living beings] held in cold storage) bereft of their one and first entitlement. by natural justice, the right to be authentically born of a mother and a father known to them. This right needs no further explanation but rests in the order of nature, an entitlement no society has ever abrogated before our own!
Humanae Vitae shows profound coherence here by emphasizing the indissoluble link between sexuality and procreation for all of the usual "Catholic" and Natural law reasons. When the Roman Catholic Church emphasized the procreation arm of that binary truth it was vilified. Today we have something more radical going on and once again the Church is vilified, now for standing firm with its internally coherent formula linking sex and procreation. This lime the Church is defender of the sexuality arm of the formula, over and against conception technologies which exclude the human being and his authentic and rightful sexuality.
HUMANAE VITAE, CHAMPION OF HUMANITY
I might add another point regarding Humanae Vitae and the Church's position on human sexuality in the natural law sense. The teaching is always pointing toward sexuality in marriage which is faithful, biologically valid and monogamous—all as the anthropological truth about man. The teaching befits us and serves us. In this teaching is a natural moral law which protects and sustains us physically in the right and just expressions of our sexuality. To break out of this is to risk falling victim to all that "flesh is heir to," sexually transmitted disease, sterility, sexual dysfunctions and now deadly AIDS.
There is a simple instruction here, about sex, contraception. disease and God's law. AIDS is a germ. yes, but AIDS is much more than the old contagion, it is a powerful argument for nature and nomos (law). AIDS, you see, tells us that there is a physiological integrity that saves. This is not breached by a germ but by imprudence, for the true and useful barrier here is prudence. If we are provident of nomos, it will not destroy us. Even those unfortunate victims who received AIDS passively should know that their affliction took its origin, formally, in acts against the natural biological order. I do not mean that sexually transmitted diseases comprise a retributive pathology, rather their incidence tells us that if we violate bios and nomos, we intimately enter the phenomenology of disease. We may choose to live in a manner conformable to the natural moral order as right and proper for us, or do otherwise and risk bringing the law to its own fulfillment.
The evidence here all unmistakenly supports the powerful insight and prescience of Humanae Vitae. It also confirms the incalculable potential for destruction hidden in human sexuality when it breaks out of marriage and natural practice. Nowhere is the biblical warning "sow the wind, reap the whirlwind" more clear than here. This is not a scientific principle of course, nonetheless, it has complete empirical validation in our own lives and in culture. Humanae Vitae reinforces the natural law logic in the Church's teaching that human sexuality be met authentically in marriage. Here the proper psychosocial fulfillment of our sexual life is found. It is by and through the family both as the place of love and as the goal of love that this is realized, this accord with reason and all of the collective experience and wisdom of mankind.
We conclude then, with some thoughts from St. Augustine on love, sex and marriage. He sees these in relation to concupiscence, sin, and will, where the will is the active principle and concupiscence is our conditional weakness and proclivity not yet willed. His principle, I think, reveals the sure progression of malignant will in all of the various manifestations. Here "weakness of will, darkness of mind" is a fearsome formula but a brilliant truth. It echoes throughout Humanae Vitae and calls us back to sexual life and love anchored in authentic personhood, where the will is subject to reason, the viceroy of God's law, and to wisdom, the attendant at His throne.
Joseph Mauceri, a practicing physician in Kingston. NY. authored the pamphlet. Medical ideology—Social Chaos published by SJR in July 1993.
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