Beyond All Telling
Like kudzu, our ponderous fixation on sex and sexuality overspreads and smothers the public square and moral discourse. Conservatives, progressives, centrists, Catholics, non-Catholics: we layer the world obsessively in sex-talk. Wisdom would take one step back, to marvel at the strangeness of the spectacle, its lack of proportion.
It is not my intent to bury the important truths of that little gem of an encyclical, Humanae vitae (HV), which was signed by Blessed Pope Paul VI on yesterday’s Feast of the Apostle James the Greater fifty years ago. (Nor is it my intent to obscure the achievement of the masterwork fashioned to amplify HV’s truths: Pope Saint John Paul’s theology of the body). My intent is to set the encyclical within larger contexts.
Humanae vitae against Technological Imperialism
In HV, Pope Paul made an urgent countercultural statement, as neo-Malthusianism had cordycepsed the elite, filling them with a toxic fear about the reproduction of the non-white majority of the world. Overpopulation was for them a planetary emergency, and population control an absolute necessity. They didn’t need an infinity gauntlet to work their imperialistic cleansing: they needed female hormonal contraception—the Pill. Racism and misogyny fed this oligarchic Thanos.
Racism, misogyny, and…technocratic hubris, advancing what the theologian Metz calls “evolutionism”—not the biological theory, but a commitment to social “progress” fueled by extraction from subject bodies and built upon their suppression, oblivious to the anguish of the victims. The discipline of the lower classes was to be injected straight into the female body through the Pill, with the added misogynistic benefit of its being a poison. (Combined estrogen-progestogen oral contraceptives are “carcinogenic to humans” [Group 1] according to the World Health Organization. Organic this, and organic that, but not where it matters most.) This was to be the glory of human rationality: the control of female fertility (marketed as the liberation of women), and the demographic throttling of the under-industrialized nations.
If we care about what actually happens concretely to the bodies and psyches and spirits of women and girls, then Humanae vitae must be celebrated as setting a kind of limit on misogyny.
Scapegoating the Sixties
That said, HV only set a limit. All the older misogyny, preceding the sexual revolution and preceding eugenic biopower, is still there, and it grinds women down as it ever has. It is perverse to whistle past, say, the perennially epidemic levels of domestic abuse, because we have convinced ourselves that the sixties did something unprecedented to the dignity of women. The Pill did not create the social control and exploitation of women. It did not create sexual predation (though it did, in fact, exacerbate male boorishness).
And before the Pill, indeed since the Fall, both women and men, have been inclined to sin by the desire to control, the libido dominandi. This is concupiscence, and it has increased in ferocity with the increase in technological power. Modern technology is a great good, but the machine-world tends to correlate with a cyberneticization of humanity, as Romano Guardini points out in Power and Responsibility. With that feedback problem, there arises the modern form of the tendency to impose one’s limited view of the truth in a way that does not respect the dignity of others. This is the technocratic temptation, and it bedevils each of us:
“The greater a man’s power, the stronger the temptation to take the shortcut of force: the temptation to nullify the individual and his freedom, to ignore both his creative originality and his personal truth; to achieve the desired end simply by force, dismissing what cannot be forced as not worthy of consideration—in other words, the temptation to erect a culture on rational and technical foundations alone.”
This temptation is upon us in the home, the workplace, the boardroom, the courtroom, the Church, the public square, politics, state bureaucracies. We all think we are simply right. We all need to be checked. (The liberal fragmentation of power must happen at every level. The case of Cardinal McCarrick shows that something must be done along these lines even within the Church. The charism of ecclesial office does not immunize against the corrupting tendencies of power: the filth in the hierarchy, the clerical betrayal of pastoral charity, cries out to heaven.) Concupiscence in our age tends towards a more and more successful autoerotic self-enclosure and self-assertion.
Foucault on the Artificiality of Our Sexuality
We have been lulled into accepting the huge process of technologized concupiscence as we accept the weather, mystified and misdirected in the last couple of centuries, especially since Freud, by our obsessive fixation on sexuality. The great social analyst Michel Foucault tried to wake us up to this ideological anaesthetic. In the introductory volume to The History of Sexuality, Foucault tries to expose the artifice in our conditioning, beginning with what we tell ourselves:
“It is through sex…that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility (seeing that it is both the hidden aspect and the generative principle of meaning), to the whole of his body (since it is a real and threatened part of it, while symbolically constituting the whole), to his identity (since it joins the force of a drive to the singularity of a history). Through a reversal that doubtless had its surreptitious beginning long ago—it was already making itself felt at the time of the Christian pastoral of the flesh [Foucault locates the beginning of modern sexuality in Counter-Reformation confessional practice]—we have arrived at the point where we expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many centuries thought of as madness; the plenitude of our body from what was long considered its stigma and likened to a wound; our identity from what was perceived as an obscure and nameless urge.
“…Perhaps one day people will wonder at this. They will not be able to understand how a civilization so intent on developing enormous instruments of production and destruction found the time and the infinite patience to inquire so anxiously concerning the actual state of sex; people will smile perhaps when they recall that here were men—meaning ourselves—who believed that therein resided a truth every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought; people will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went about pretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which everything—our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledges—was busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment. And people will ask themselves why we were so bent on ending the rule of silence regarding what was the noisiest of our preoccupations.”
World’s Mirror: Catholic Obsession with Sexuality
As we see, Foucault is very hard on sexual liberationism. But Catholics must draw the inevitable correlate: if we have made grappling with the sixties more or less our first priority, then the beast with two backs thus formed has subsumed us into the exact same deployment of sexuality Foucault criticizes. There is a false way of teaching the hard truth about the intrinsically defective nature of a husband and wife’s deliberately sterilizing sexual intercourse (indeed there is a falsifying way of presenting the theology of the body) that makes us mirror-images of the unsexy worldly obsession with sexuality. To exhaust oneself in dialectical opposition means that one’s position must be transcended.
Sex and sexuality are not strong enough to drive societies and marriages. They just aren’t. They are superstructure to power’s base. That is what Foucault is trying to get us to see. Indeed, sexual sins have always been understood in the theological tradition as the least weighty. Pride, envy, wrath are the heavy-hitters.
The fundamental dynamism of a marriage has to do with the currencies of power circulating within, and between, the husband and wife.
We must indeed speak of sex and sexuality, but we must not obsess over them. Marriages do not stand or fall by contraceptive use. There was a time I dutifully, and sincerely, retailed the line about how Natural Family Planning (NFP) “divorce-proofs” marriage. That has turned out to be something like a sick joke in my own life, whose putative marriage on the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of Humanae vitae (twenty years ago) has ended up deader than most dead things.
The forces inimical to true love must be overcome even in NFP marriages, and contraceptive use does not necessarily destroy the real selflessness to be found in any husband and wife who truly love each other. The threats to every marriage are much broader than contraception; contraception itself is a symptom of an affliction afflicting us all.
Contraceptive Jeremiads Nevertheless Necessary
Contraceptive use does make less what would be more. It is inherently defective. It can compromise the intimate intensity of a husband and wife’s love because it vitiates the act specifying the marital friendship as the kind of friendship it is. It cannot, as such, perfect that friendship.
Contraception most certainly is the deployment of biopower, making our desire (which we think most our own) the mystified product of a prior and alien decision. And the Pill, sold as female liberation, has proven itself another entrant in the endlessly adaptive pageant of woman-control.
One of the volumes Foucault was planning for his history of sexuality was The Malthusian Couple. Would to God that that had been written. We cannot speak of modern biopower (Foucault’s term for the way the bare life of entire populations is administered, especially by state bureaucracies) with any real seriousness without addressing how neo-Malthusianism, eugenics, and birth control have infested our most intimate selves.
The Power of Love
But marriage has not collapsed because of contraception. What kills love is the desire to dominate, a desire which has been greatly, and specifically, aggravated by modern technological power.
Some sex-talk is necessary: sexual difference matters; sexuality is a way of transcending what is the same, even unto the generation of otherness. But obsession is what it is, and what it is, is the opposite of sanity. We need a more sapiential vision instead, one that sees how power has shaped desire; how we fight not flesh, but the principalities and powers.
Having been liberated from a consumerist and commodified obsession over sexuality, we may perhaps glimpse a revived effulgence of the soul’s powers: the power of love—of eros, care, friendship, solidarity. The power needed to discipline power. The power of the Almighty God, Whose omnipotent love creates a Kingdom of ever-greater creativity.
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