REASON AND VALUES EXEMPLIFIED IN GENDER ISSUES
by Kristo Ivanov, prof. em.,
Umeå University (2017, version 240419-1655)
PREFACE
[Preliminary note: In later years the references in my writing have been
made by means of a profusion of links in my text, for the purpose of further research as explained in my general
disclaimer.]
CONTENTS
Prerequisite for reading this
text
Returning
to the Catholic view
Sexual pathology and diversity
The technological turn for depathologizing
The social semantic turn for depathologizing
Man and Woman -- Final corruption
Prerequisite for reading this text
This is a long introduction or preface to the enclosed
scanned manuscript (353 pages, in Swedish) written between 1977 and 1979 prior
to my appointment as full professor of informatics, with pressing obligations
and scarcity of time that stopped this kind of research. It aimed at an
analysis of the difference between a supposedly "masculine"
techno-logical thought as embodied in computers and technology, and a
corresponding "feminine" thought. In such a context the whole is loosely
related to another paper of mine on Reason and evaluative emotion published
in 2014 and written 1980-1981. Having been published in 2017 but authored in
1977-1979, this present paper is listed on my research
page among the works up to the year of
retirement 2002.
It portrays my route towards the need and application
of details of analytical psychology that I was studying at the time in the
complete works of Carl
Jung. It enabled me
to understand the rest here below. I estimate that the reading or previous knowledge
of the Swedish text (that is, the 353 pages) is a pre-requisite for
understanding the text that follows. For those who do not read Swedish, the
knowledge of the required knowledge of the Swedish text corresponds to and can
be obtained from the reading of the about 300 pages of the volume 7 of Jung’s Collected Works with the title Two Essays on Analytical Psychology that can be purchased, for instance, here.
This preface is an
already too long and rather unstructured concentrate of what I would have
elaborated in longer texts if I had continued my research along the same main
path of this essay on "Reason and Gender", instead of what became the
path of information science. Therefore: what follows is intended to be used by
those readers who need to continue the research, and the extensive references are
given below in the spirit explained – I repeat -- in my general disclaimer
already mentioned above.
My effort aimed initially at understanding the
relation between technology, logic, mathematics, and their use with emphasis on informatics, as exposed in my later research up to Information
and psychology, and Computers as embodied mathematics and logic. In literary, less academic context, I applied my insights in the
review of Organizational
ethics and political correctness and blog-texts on the SCUM-manifest, and the #MeToo-movement. All together this, supplemented by what
follows below, also works as an introduction to a cultural understanding
of LGBT-problems including gender bender and drag race, up to the confused and controversial
complexities of Gay parenting (which
is typically countered by those who do not perceive the need
of collegial conversation instead of logical soccer and bickering).
Historical background of the problematization
of the issue, beyond present canons of women's and gender studies, which may be
seen as historically pioneered by, among others in the classic study by Simone
de Beauvoir. It is contrasted by the later, by now also “classic” Judith Butler, plus more and less controversial works that should be culturally more
grounded than Satanic feminism, The feminization of American culture, Society without the father, The Myth of male power, the earlier Modern woman: the lost sex, or
the computer technology-oriented Epistemological pluralism and revaluation of the
concrete.
Examples of culturally more grounded,
and more or less controversial works are Franz von Baader's Filosofia Erotica (selection and Italian translation from
his Sämtliche Werke), Otto Weininger's Sex and character, Julius Evola's The metaphysics of sex, Karl-Olov Arnstberg's PK-Samhället [The
Politically Correct Society] esp. pp. 375-443, and (in French) Olivier
Rey's Que faire des différences? [What
to make of the differences?], as well as Homme-femme: heureuse différence
ou guerre des sexes?
[Man-woman: happy differences or war of the sexes? Conference video.]
The latter two relate to the
official Catholic view On
the collaboration of men and women, matched by a Christian overview in Stephen B. Cklark's Man
and Woman in Christ (Servant Books, Ann
Arbor, 1980, ISBN 0-89283-084-0), and Christian-Noël Bouwé’s
(in French) L’union
conjugale et le sense du sacré [The marital union and the
sense of the sacred; partial Swedish trans. in Katolska
Utskottet för Äktenskap och Familj,
skrift nr. 12, ISBN
978-91-639-5931-8]. Other works that relate Carl Jung’s analytical psychology
to Christian Theology is Ann Belford Ulanov’s The Feminine: in Jungian psychology and in
Christian theology, who also offers a
psychological interpretation of the Russian philosopher and theologian Vladimir
Solovyov’s The meaning of love, a work that was also noticed by Ermine Huntress Lantero’s in her pamphlet Feminine aspects of divinity (also here). This is also the place to name Martin D’Arcy whom I consider in my essay on Belief and Reason, and whose major
work as mentioned in Wikipedia is The Mind and Heart of Love, published by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber in 1945,
which explores theological
relation of eros love and agape love.
Regarding Catholic views: in an
address to the World Union of Catholic Women’s organizations (WUCWO) in April
2023 Pope Francis expressed the basically important observation
of to find inspiration in their
mission by looking to the example of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Nevertheless, I have not heard of the Pope
developing the question of authority in the family as related to the mutual
duties in the interaction between the sexes. On the contrary, on other
occasions such as in March 2023 the Pope apparently adopts mainstream
feministic thoughts such as More Women's Leadership
for a Better World, divorced from the
reference to Virgin Mary, as he diplomatically also does during his visit to
South Sudan in February 2023 under the banner of Protect, advance women for a better South Sudan.
The latter text was also diffused in the world by the news
agency Reuters, obviously without the reference to
Virgin Mary, as it appeared in the weekly Spanish weekly church booklet Diócesis Málaga, 26 Feb. 2023, p.7 “El respeto a la mujer”, i.e. respect
for the woman. There are no references neither to the Virgin Mary nor to her
relation to the Holy Spirit, nor to any
holy or doctrinaire Christian text beyond including the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, the
latter does not seem to clarify the relation between duties and authority
within the family (cf. §§ 1659ff, 1918ff, 2247ff; esp. 1605, 1897f, 1919),
except for establishing filial respect (§ 2251). In particular it is said that
“Every human community needs an authority to govern
it” (§ 1898) but nothing else is said about authority in the family.
In fact, the Catechism eschews the
problem of authority within the
family and sometimes the Catechism can be questioned as when stating that “A
human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience”, since it
must be qualified as presupposing what is adduced in my introduction to Conscience and Truth. But the Bible’s Isaiah 3:4 to 4:4
dares to says it all, including the today “blasphemous” (3:12) of “Youths oppress my people, women rule over them”. It is further definitively
qualified in the Ephesians 5:21-33, and seemingly ignored in the Catechism: they are verses that feminists
were reported in the press to having wished to purge out of the Bible’s
modernized translations, or to be qualified by a particular note saying that it
refers only to obsolete old societal structures (that ignore the assumed
supremacy of the mythic god Democracy).
Going further, beyond Catholic views: a summary on the gender question
is further in cross-cultural social and traditional personality psychology is
David P. Schmitt's "The truth about sex differences"
in Psychology Today (November
2017), completed with the insight that the are “Sex
differences in the brain and the mind”.
The message is consistent with Jordan Peterson's video on Differences
between men and women and his other videos
related to the issue as referred to in The monster
behind gender theory. A
dictionary-summary is found in Wkipedia's Sex and gender distinction. A complex historical-cultural background in secular terms is provided by
Richard Stivers' The illusion of freedom and equality, and Eric
J. Leed in Violence, Death and Masculinity (Vietnam Generation, Vol.1,
No.3, 1989) further developed in The Mind of the Traveler (1991,
pp. 28, 37, 49, 87, 120ff, 86ff, 91, 224ff, 288, or passim).
When discussing the gap between the
Christian Catholic view and the other views, it is interesting to note Wikipedia’s
article on Satanism. It recalls its relation to gender
studies and in particular to feministic theology in its remark on the
historical case of Maria
de Naglowska,
for whom “the Holy Spirit of the
classic Christian trinity is recognized as the divine feminine”. As
I quote Wikipedia on Naglowska in a paper on Logic as Rape: “the Holy Spirit of the classic Christian trinity is
recognized as the divine feminine" suggesting analogy with some unique
themes and ideas found in Buddhist Tantras (“revaluation of the role of women and female deities”). We have here a relation to feminism and politics,
as I introduce in an analysis of the Nobel Peace Prize of the year 2023, in a
section of my essay on the Russia-NATO-Ukraine Information
Crisis.
Such themes and ideas are generally found in
Buddhism and Theosophy, as explained in Hedda Janson’s Swedish doctoral
dissertation on Ellen Key: Buddhism and Theosophy in Ellen Key’s life faith. (English
abstract here and my
theological review here). It refers to
the union of the masculine and feminine revealing the spiritually
transformative power of sex. E.g. on p. 158 of the dissertation there is an
apotheosis of “ethical atheism” in the form of “life faith”. We find that love,
for Key is of an almost divine nature, and constitutes the highest value of
life. It is a means to realize life (to reach the divine), as well as a
replacement for religion that has been lost, and a remedy for existential
loneliness. Love is, if you will, the power of God, which gives morality and
holiness, and the lovers are religious "mystics". Key goes ultimately
astray in a similar way as Pope Francis seems to go
astray in a letter on Sex is divine as commented in
the American Magazine on February 14,
2024, the more so for the risk of misunderstanding his reported statement that the Catholic Church “is still at a very early stage” when it comes
to its teaching on sexuality, adding that its “catechesis on sex is still in
diapers.
But it all offers deep insights, motivating my
references to her in my essay. The best example may be Key’s quotation in her
(in Swedish) Women’s psychology and women’s logic (in Swedish, p. 114-115):
The man is one half; the woman is one half; the father
and mother with their child are one whole person.
Key’s quote is from Erik
Gustaf Geijer’s, “Marriage: Need and Lust”
(in Scattered notes , included in Geijer’s Collected
Writings, Vol. 7, p.176f., Norstedt & Söner, 1854). For the quote Geijer
himself refers to an “ancient Indian legislator” (unknown who, and there are a
few of them), commenting Goethe’s dramas
Hermann and Dorothea, and The Natural Daughter that are understood as dealing with the core meaning
of love and marriage, and including the value of the solitaries.
Some complications derived from such conceptions, usually
gathered under the abusive use of the word “spirituality” that also colors
Key’s Hedda Janson’s account, where an undefined spirit, that later runs amok in later German philosophy and in Rudolf Steiner, Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger and the like, and is never related to the Holy Spirit, as exposed in my text on A feminist parenthesis on quantum mechanics. A perhaps more
"rational" alternative approach is found in the Confucian I Ching, hexagram 37 on "The family", completed with the intuitions of the hexagram 1 on “The Creative” and hexagram 2 on “The Receptive”. Today, the union of the masculine and feminine
tends to disappear in the shadow of involutary celibate Incel and LGBT movements, reflecting Western culture’s
loss of the meaning of Christianism, eventually leading to the eruption of
strong feelings about the abuses of feminism, as in Bettina Arndt’s Feminism was never about equality. It leads also to otherwise unexplainable strange
phenomena such as difficulties reported in The Economist (October
2, 2021) in the mere use of the
word “woman”.
In the steps of feminism there has been also an
increase of “Gender Wars” with involvement in international politics. The
latest expression is Sabine Fischer’s book
Die chauvinistische Bedrohung: Russlands Kriege
und Europas Antworten
[The
chauvinistic threat: Russia’s war and Europe’s answer], reviewed in the Swedish
newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (30
December 2023). In the book Fischer presents and “unites” the three dimensions
of Chauvinism as being:
aggressive nationalism, masculine sexism and autocratic authoritarianism. They
are in turn related to Vladimir Putin, Silvio Berlusconi, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Trump, as well to
the general political “Right” even when represented by Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni. No explanations
are given on why, as reported in Swedish political opinion surveys, women tend
to the political Left while men to the Right, since this would require deep
socio-psychological, if nor also philosophical inquiries allied to an
understanding of what I repeatedly refer as The Myth of Democracy, which I refer
to in my own essay on the Russia-Nato-Ukraine conflict, and it related to my suggestions in my text of
which this is an introductory commentary for future research.
Returning to the Catholic view
Returning to the Christian
Catholic view, a meaningful wonderment is the theological suggestion (cf. John,
15:4) of sacred union of man and
woman (“in Christ”, Ephesians
5). It is expressed at the end of
the text of prayer quoted below at the end of this introduction, in accord with
the Christian Solovyov’s conception of the meaning of love, and in contrast
with the satanist
and other conceptions mentioned above. It suggests that sexual unrest
and gender movements may be basically seen as a substitute for religious
conversion in general and for Christianism in particular. It is a suggestion
that speculatively, in the deep legitimate meaning of speculative reason and sensemaking it is the Christian interpretation of the tantric idea that
reciprocity in the union with God also allows for matter’s generation of life,
leading further to speculation on the mysteries of quantum physics or relation
between matter
and spirit, possibly including the riddle
of quantum
entanglement. It allows an intuition of the
tragedy in the process of individuation that is implied by the meaning of pornography (theologically
substitute for religion), adultery, divorce,
battering, rape, pedophilia, Incel, LGBT, BDSM and
texts about sexual pathology starting with the classic by
Richard von Krafft-Ebing.
Sexual pathology and diversity
Sexual pathology and the modern
expressions of sexuality may be seen as that man unconsciously seeks the Godhead in himself through his neighbor’s as also suggested in the “you”
or “thou” of Martin Buber’s famous I
and Thou. It may be then the case that the
manipulation of the definition of (one own’s) gender as in LGBT, gender-dysphoria,
and gender transition and detransition implies that the psychic Ego as conceived in analytical psychology tries to appropriate what
should or may be a divine control of biological and cultural identity. It may
be a case of Ego-inflation in the phantasy of being a god with divine powers
over reality as it already happens in some of the power-pretensions of modern
science and technology. It can sink down to the trivialization of “sexual
medicine” and the meaning of today’s common
understanding of sheer “sexuality”, as illustrated in a message of September
13, 2023 from Medscape, with the title “Don’t Call
Them “Private Parts”, and related to a site clitoris.io nested in a “domain hack” [.io]..
Not only biology (creation of
life) is trivialized but also nature as in the constructed complexity of quantum
physics’ rape of matter, and in space science’s
dream of colonizing moon, planets and universe. All the while struggling with
climate warming: “Fat science proclaiming it will save the world while
odoriferously defecates in public” (James Hillman, quoted in The Design of Inquiring Systems, p. 203). Wikipedia’s attempt to popularize the concept of ego inflation in analytical
psychology expresses it as “Shadow
integration leads to a numinous experience; anchoring to the numinosum effect without reality
testing can lead
to ego
inflation (cf. archetypal possession). Christian religion incorporates archetypal
processes for those who are just common humans and cannot afford to care for psychological
and psycho-social subtleties that are necessarily politically controversial.
Depathologizing
Homosexuality: A case study
What
today is included or related to the “LGBT” term can be seen as having been
formalized in Western culture by a decision to “depathologize
homosexuality”, as it is surveyed in an article by Jack Drescher in the journal
Behavioral Science (2015, vol. 4, No.
4, pp. 565-575) with the title Out of DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual]:
Depathologizing Homosexuality, re-published and
endorsed also officially by the National
Institutes of Health, primary agency of the United States
government. It is important to note the name of the journal, referring of behavior as contrasted to psyche, as a reminder of the historical
controversy about behaviorism.
Starting
with a cursory reference to Plato, the author goes on with references from
about the middle of the 19th century, and ending with a mention of a
“democratic” referendum by the Board of Trustees (BOT) of the American
Psychological Association (APA) to accept the recommendation of its
Nomenclature Committee and remove homosexuality
from the DSM. I put “democracy” in quotation marks because it will remind us of
the often avoided controversies illustrated by The Myth of Democracy that I comment
in other essays (mainly here). The
democratic issue is also highlighted in Philip Boffey’s
well known The Brain Bank of America (esp. chaps. 2-5,
and 11) focusing APA’s “big brother” The National Academy of Sciences. The
problem is hinted in the article at
[O]pponents of the 1973 removal have repeatedly tried to
discredit the referendum’s outcome by declaring, “science cannot be decided by
a vote” [58]. However they usually neglect to
mention that those favoring retention of the diagnosis were the ones who
petitioned for a vote in the first place.
And the gradual “rationalization” of the issue,
deleting cultural aspects that include most “cultures…fundamentalists,
religious communities…religions” is illustrated by the following excerpts from
the same article:
[M]ost cultures
traditionally insisted that every individual be assigned to the category of
either man or woman at birth
[…]
Rigid gender beliefs usually flourish in
fundamentalist, religious communities where any information or alternative
explanations that might challenge implicit and explicit assumptions are
unwelcome.
[…]
For much
of Western history, official pronouncements on the meanings of same-sex
behaviors were primarily the province of religions, many of which deemed
homosexuality to be morally “bad” [36]. However, as 19th century Western culture shifted power
from religious to secular authority, same-sex behaviors, like other “sins,”
received increased scrutiny from the law, medicine, psychiatry, sexology, and
human rights activism.
[…]
Karl
Heinrich Ulrichs [21]. Trained in law, theology, and history, he might be
considered an early gay rights advocate who wrote a series of political tracts
criticizing German laws criminalizing same sex relationships between men. He
hypothesized that some men were born with a woman’s spirit trapped in their
bodies and that these men constituted a third
sex he named urnings.He also defined a woman who we would today call a lesbian as urningin, a man’s spirit trapped in the body of a woman.
[…]
Instead, Freud saw expressions of adult
homosexual behavior as caused by “arrested” psychosexual development, a theory
of immaturity.
Notably, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) talks about men with a
woman’s spirit trapped in their
bodies, and what we (politically correctly?) “would today call a lesbian”
having a man’s spirit trapped in the body of a woman”. But what is a trapped
“spirit”? In any case it could be consistent with a trapping being caused by
“arrested” psychosexual (why not “spiritual”?) development, which in turn would
also be consistent with Carl Jung’s further conception of contrasexual, while he also
interpreted psychic development and maturity in terms of the process of individuation. Nevertheless,
of course, all this is forgotten because, as it is written, 19th century Western culture shifted power from religious to secular
authority, same-sex behaviors, like other “sins,” received increased scrutiny
from the law, medicine, psychiatry, sexology, and human rights activism.
Period. The shifted power also would invalidate painstaking efforts by to apply
psychoanalytic theory to the issue of homosexuality, such as in the
Pulitzer-prized famous book by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973, pp. 98, 137-139, 231-233). There is no
death problem in the realm of secular authority.
The above-mentioned
shift is a shift of “power” because culture (including religion) is no more
seen except in terms of power, whatever power is or should be
conceived as beyond physical power, and obviously also beyond spiritual and
cultural power, when nobody cares about what spirit and spiritual is.
But it is mentioned as secular, and
confounded with (also spiritual?) authority, whatever
it is or should be understood to be, in oblivion of the historian of science Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth . (See
further The Royal Society, the making
of “science” and the social history of truth.)
Because all of this, because of the “shift of
power from religious to secular culture” and the effacement of “sin”, a new
secular faith opened definitively the way to the latest if not last “technological
turn” and to a subsequent authority that is not confounded with power. The
development is illustrated in the Swedish public television network SVT, in a
series Studio 65 dedicated to senior
citizens after the official age 65 for retirement, with the title Att åldras som HBTQ person
[Ageing
as LGBT person], published 7 February 2024, with interviews and a discussion
between the program presenter, three invited people committed to HBTQ-problems,
and professor Ingmar Skoog
specialist on the topic of older people and ageing. They finally unanimously
agreed that the depathologizing of homosexuality may
need to be completed by a pathologizing of homophobia at
least in the sense that homophobes may need to be cured of their phobia. And
all this irrespective the fact the in analytical psychology there has been a
problematization of the concept of sexuality
itself (e.g. Expressions of homosexuality and the
perspective of analytical psychology), seen a
decoupling from ethical-social historic dimensions, and a reduction of love to
a particular sort of emotionally loaded sport and gymnastics,
described in Wikipedia as “providing enjoyment to participants and, in some
cases, entertainment to
spectators”.
The technological turn for depathologizing
The technological turn is in fact
a “techno-scientific” turn. For thousands of years humanity has lived with knowledge
of the basic disctinction between man and woman. K. Ashley Brandt, however, an obstetrician/gynecologist and one of the first formal
fellowship trained gender affirming
surgeons in the country, and living in Lancaster City (Pennsylvania) with her
fiancée, who is a midwife, explains in a commentary on The multiple meanings of sex (part 1, and 2, my emphasis in bold type) in Medscape
on 16 November 2023:
Chromosomal sex refers to the genetic
makeup of a human, typically XX or XY chromosomes. There are also variations
within this seemingly binary system. Embryos can have an extra sex chromosome,
as seen in Klinefelter syndrome,
which is characterized by XXY karyotype. Embryos can also be devoid of a sex
chromosome, as observed in Turner’s syndrome, which is characterized by an XO
karyotype. These variations can impact fertility and expression of secondary
sexual characteristics as the type of sex chromosomes present results in
primary sex determination, or the
development of gonads.
Most often, individuals with a
chromosomal makeup of XX are considered female and will subsequently develop
ovaries that produce oocytes (eggs). Individuals with XY chromosomes are deemed
male and will go on to develop testes, which are responsible for
spermatogenesis (sperm production).
Gonadal
sex is the presence of either testes or ovaries. The primary function of
testes is to produce sperm for reproduction and to secrete testosterone,
the primary male sex hormone. Similarly, ovaries produce oocytes and secrete estrogen as the primary female sex hormone.
Gonads can be surgically removed either via orchiectomy (the removal of
testes), or oophorectomy(the
removal of ovaries) for a variety of reasons. There is no current medical
technology that can replace the function of these structures, although patients
can be placed on hormone replacement to counter the negative physiologic
consequences resulting from their removal.
Secondary
sex determination, or sexual differentiation,
is the development of external genitalia and internal genital tracts because of
the hormones produced from the gonads. At puberty, further differentiation
occurs with the development of pubic and axillary hair and breast growth. This
process determines phenotypic sex– the visible distinction
between male and female. […]
When opponents of gender affirming
care state that individuals cannot change sex, are they correct or false? The
answer to this question is entirely dependent on which definition of sex they
are using. Chromosomal? Gonadal? Phenotypic? It is an immutable fact that
humans cannot change chromosomal sex. No one in the transgender community,
either provider or patient, would dispute this. However, we can remove gonadal structures
and alter phenotypic sex. […]
Circling back to the debate about
whether we can “assign sex at birth,” it all depends on what definition of sex
you are referencing. At birth, obstetrician/gynecologists most often look at
the phenotypic sex and make assumptions about the genetic and gonadal sex based
on the secondary sexual characteristics. So yes, we can, and we do assign sex
at birth. However, in the case of intersex individuals, these physical
characteristics may not align with their gonadal and chromosomal composition.
This is an example of the
techno-scientific influence on modern man’s understanding and feelings about
sex in the longing (“feeling in another body”) for taking over, gender affirming, what had been accepted
as given by nature and God. It is an analog phenomenon to what I describe
elsewhere as A feminist parenthesis on quantum mechanics. All this while man also seeks the balance between
“masculine-feminine” power of justice “and/versus” love, as earlier found in
the Christian view of the meaning of
human suffering. All this while the
modern technological mindset can be envisaged as promoting the deconstruction
or destruction of the (cf. Martin Buber) “you-thou” by reducing it to a divinized
capitalized “It” as in the hyped “dialogue” of humans with a ChatGPT using Large Language
Model tools – LLMs. It is the kind of chat
that produces instances
in Japan where individuals are reported to have fallen in love or having
developed so-called romantic feelings for (holograms of) contrasexual (cf. LGBT), virtual or fictional
characters, sometimes referred to as "2D lovers" or "waifu
culture"
(commented in depth by The
New York Times, July 26, 2009). It all to be related to the
concepts of “3D lovers” and Real Doll. This phenomenon gained some
attention in the media, particularly with the emergence of vocaloid characters like Hatsune
Miku in a perhaps more permissive Japanese culture permeated by Shintoism. More information about the topic can be obtained in
connection with the Nijikon and Hentai phenomena as well as fictosexuality and pansexuality, which paradoxically indicate the
deep gender-psychological and thereby theological implications of human-computer interaction. They suggest a reinstatement of a
non-fundamentalist religious attitude.
The social semantic turn for depathologizing
The law was passed after remarkable
political turmoil and division between allied political parties that was
reported in the world press (here, here, here, here), including titles such as “Swedish PM, majority shaken by
gender identity law”. This all with remarkably vague
strong motivations, the more so in view of Reuter’s reported recent poll
commissioned by the Swedish television TV4 television network, where 59% of Swedes say it is a bad or very bad proposal, while 22%
think it is a good one. And so do I, because we do not
know WHY there has been such an increase, including among children, of a wish
to make (until further notice!) a legal gender change. For instance, as France24 had reported: Sweden has seen a sharp rise in gender dysphoria cases. The trend is
particularly visible among 13- to 17-year-olds born female, with an until
further notice unexplained increase of 1.500 (one thousand and five hundred) percent
since 2008, according to the Board of Health and Welfare.
And so, this disregarding pure
administrative manipulations that have already been reported, such as to gain
admittance to positions that favorize a specific gender, such as an education
or employment. For the rest, most requests for legal gender change can
logically be seen as an implicit declaration of homosexuality, because they may
be assumed to express an implicit wish for a sexual relation with a partner of
the same gender as one’s own, while wishing to be officially and openly not identified as a homosexual. It would
amount to a social tool for an implicit further depathologizing
of homosexuality that is reduced to a sort of “transgender administration”. All
this besides the Swedish government’s efforts as summarized in Equal rights and opportunities for LGBT persons in
Sweden, not forgetting the government
agency’s “education/information” (plus here) of refugees immigrants.
“Man and Woman”—Toward the final
corruption
Such
detours of so-called human “sexuality”, later exemplified further in the
controversies related to the American on-line film What is a Woman?
(2022), together with the irruption
of technology and computerization, stand at the basis of the undermining of the
fundamental “I – You” relation whose “archetype” is the gender relation between
humans represented by man and woman. This undermining implies also the
undermining of communication,
which is not the often assumed “transmission
of information” while not knowing what information is to being with, but the
creation of meaning through the achieving of commonality as basis for “love thy neighbor”. The undermining is the
sliding of the You into an It and a consequent confusion of
pronouns that are illustrated by what happens lately in the computer field of human-computer interaction or HCI with the appearance of the device ChatGPT mentioned
above. In fact, when I inputted into the machine the question “Please explain which are the basic databanks, whether
including the whole Internet, which are used in order to find and elaborate the
answers in ChatGPT”, I initiated my question with a
“please” felt to be directed to those They
(or a He or She?!) who are (or
were?!) “responsible” for its
operation. But I got the following answer from an I that could have been a We but was an It, as follows (my emphasis):
As an AI language model, my responses are generated based on a mixture of licensed data,
data created by human trainers, and publicly available data. I don't have direct access to databases or retrieve information
from specific sources in real-time. I have
been trained on a diverse range of data, including books, websites, and other
texts, to develop a broad understanding of human language. My purpose is to assist and provide information to the best of my
abilities, regardless of the specific sources of my training data.
In my own digital interactions with banks and organizations,
interactions that often require previous digital legitimation in order to
testify that I am myself, sometimes I have been “friendly” addressed by my
first name (as it has become regular in Sweden’ dropping of titles and Mr. and
Mrs.) and even required to answer questions and furnish documents. By whom? The
communication, however ends with the official name of the bank, company or
whatever. In the best case with only a first name but no last family name. This
happens along the same “philosophy” that I explain in my essay on The meaning of human-computer interaction, where
often it is not allowed to put questions but only to answer them, or to use
certain words, question marks or alphabetic characters. The “who” question and
the dialog is corrupt in the shadow of what becomes a logic of
power-relationships, and these things tinge and reflect the communications in
the whole society, resumed in, and beginning in the divorce between “I and
Thou” of man and woman. A sociological and philosophical understanding of this
I and Thou could be obtained by understanding a, for me, most difficult book by
the German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality and Love (1984, translated from fragments written between about 1890 and 1923).
Despite my leaning toward analytical psychology for the ultimate source of the
problems, I consider that a serious analysis of reason and gender requires an in depth understanding, even if no
acceptance of the all thoughts in Simmel’s book. It covers important
continental and many German views on gender, eroticism, feminism, morality and
Christianity, including references to the I
and Thou question (e.g. pp. 29, 43, 149-153, 164, 185ff.)
For us here this is, of course, the problem of responsibility in human interaction that is today exasperated also
in the introduction of the “autonomous” technology represented by the ramblings
of so-called artificial general intelligence AGI where no longer is questioned what intelligence and
communication is or should be. The artistic field complicates further the
confusion as when an artistic product is produced by an “I” and a “you” (or
“thou”) consisting of an AI machine, as in the musical project of Me/Machine, or as expressed in The
Economist’s article (Nov 9th 2023) on the deal that ended
the Hollywood actors’ strike reflecting impact of AI technology that I treat in
an essay on Artificial General Intelligence and ChatGPT:
[…] fears that artificial intelligence (AI) will soon
be writing scripts or even bagging roles. “You go for a job and they scan you,” said a background
actress, who worried that her face will be used over and over in crowd scenes.
The technology is “disgusting”, said another, who considered its use “an
infringement of yourself, of your career”. The deal actors struck on November
8th to end their strike included protections from their artificial rivals.
Nevertheless, there is a suggestion of the forgotten Christian solution
for responsibility, far from if not opposite to the tragic realities of surrogacy and sperm
donation with its social and legal implications, not to speak of initial suggestions in a report (June 30,
2023) about aims To Trick Nature With Artificial Womb: “Although it is an exciting development, the artificial placenta is
not intended to replace a natural placenta”. But, as the African Roman playwright
Terence expressed it: I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me, and in fact, a liberal member of the Swedish Parliament’s, committee
of foreign affairs, proposes in his Twitter account on October 20, 2023 research
effort on artificial wombs, for women to avoid pregnancies. Not really for women, as he expresses it, referring to the notice in
the daily newspaper GP, Göteborgs-Posten, (my trans.
and italics):
Natural
pregnancy is one of the most dangerous things that uterine carriers can be exposed to. Civilizational progress demands
that progress be made in the direction of relieving humans of this natural but
hopelessly obsolete burden. GP writes about my motion to the Parliament!
It does not stop here. An article in the Swedish newspaper Svenska
Dagbladet (December 10,
2023) with the questioning
title “Är folk själviska för att skaffa barn?” [Are people too selfish to have children?] starts spelling the latest
national statistics that the birth rate has decreased at its lowest in the
latest 50 years: 1,5 children per woman, less than the population reproduction
rate, compared with about 2,1 for European nations, and the world’s lowest for South
Korea, about 0,8. After considering and rejecting the
hypothesis that it depends upon economic limitations it suggests that the cause
may lie in the lack of a “longing for” children giving the example of a woman
who despite of the man’s unwillingness of being a father has to follow her
innermost burning wish to have the child, “the drive to reproduce, perhaps the
deepest, most fundamental part of the human being”. She gives example from the
platform X (former Twitter) where an
American woman being DINKS (double
income, no kids) tells about the her and her man’s advantages of being able to
invest all their money on themselves. But even parenting can be selfish with
the help of surrogate mothers and in vitro fertilization
(IFV). The case is reported of the case of
the homosexual Swedish event and party
organizer Micael Bindefeld
who was interviewed in a television program about his and his partner’s
commissioning of a child from a surrogate mother with a long list of
specifications. Wikipedia’s
Swedish version explains that (my trans.):
Mr Bindefeld has a son born in 2016, who was born through
surrogacy. In an interview, he and Sigurdsson [his partner] said that they paid
an American woman to give birth to the child, but that they bought the egg from
another woman and chose the gender and eye colour. Bindefeld said that "We explicitly searched for a
donor of Jewish origin because Nicklas and I agreed that we wanted to give our
future child a Jewish upbringing" but that when the woman suffered from
herpes they changed the egg donor. The report was widely criticised
by feminists who argued that Bindefeld had engaged in
human trafficking.
It may be claimed that the problem is not human trafficking but,
rather, the breakdown of humanity (and/or humanness?), starting with the
archetypal primary relation between man and woman, a breakdown that also
appears in the official Swedish statistics available in year 2023 that 25% of
all Swedish children have parents who separate, if not also divorce. I have
personal knowledge of two cases of divorce requested by women after their
husbands’ hesitation in front of the ultimatum to “inseminate me, or else”. In
fact, my own emotional life, including my parents’ story, has been colored by
the question of the meaning of wanting to have children if they are not a
living symbol of their parents’ reciprocal love. All this related to the
increasing frequency of single mothers, lesbian or not, and more rarely
fathers, gay or not, who report in mass media about having wanted “own”
children, which makes men feel the competition by insemination in sperm banks that
rely on anonymous sperm donators. Not to mention the increased number of news
and reports about the hype of LGBT, often kept unrelated to the parenting of
children. It all seems to end in a complete breakdown of “binary thought” that
can be seen as represented by a general social acceptance of, or indifference
to “anything”, as in “artistic” expressions such as represented by Xenofeminism
[sic], or Del Lagrace Volcano
who “interrogates the performance of gender on several
levels, especially the performance of masculinity and femininity”. The Catholic Church, that I believe should see of this as a
revolt against the “orders of creation” (see also natural law and
natural theology) and as an exploitation
of nature, tries to cover the most serious developments in a particular Instruction on Respect for Human Life and its Origin and on
the Dignity of Procreation
, in the middle of controversies with dissident organizations such as SSPX and
others. A failure of this “particular
instruction” could induce credence to, but not easy interpretation of pope
Francis’ reported statement mentioned above, that the Catholic Church “is still at a very early stage” when it comes
to its teaching on sexuality, adding that its “catechesis on sex is still in
diapers”. And perhaps not only the educational catechesis but also the original
knowledge and wisdom on which it must be based.
Enough is enough. The suggestion for a Christian solution appears at the end of the text of a prayer on
the computer screen during the sacrament of Eucharist in the live transmission of Catholic mass at the St. Eugenia Church in Stockholm,
starting during the COVID-19
pandemic. The text of the prayer follows at the
bottom here below. Putting together what woman and man could tell to each other
at the creative apex of divine love that creates a new life as fruit and symbol
of the parents’ reciprocal love, in an indissoluble union that can be called
marriage and is a prerequisite for withdrawal of psychic projections in a
process of individuation, the text of the prayer recalls the main interpretation of the Bible’s Song of Songs (esp. 6:3). The spouses, the classic denomination of those today are
symptomatically equated to “partners”, search for the Godhead
in each other’s “images
of God”, and re-appropriate their souls whose contrasexual interface in the “falling in love” had been projected onto the
counterpart. Lifelong indissoluble relationship or marriage implies then a more
demanding search for integrity or individuation, which follows from the decreased temptation and risk of leaving non re-appropriated
pieces of one own’s psyche projected unto a series of partners. The meaning of
marriage is something which might be seen as a mystery that even the archbishop
of the Church
of Sweden does not seem to grasp when expressing
his feelings of distress for his divorce on
occasion of being interviewed by the Swedish
public radio on March 22, 2024, in contrast to being also asked to explain why
he is known for having expressed that “sunset is a mystery”.
And here comes the final insight in an ultimate mystery, an insight that
“Sounds like an idea” or “There’s a thought” or “Is serendipitous”: that the whole human being,
composed of the union of man and woman in the potential divine act of creation
of a new life, may be understood as pronouncing the following prayer,
responding (being “responsible”) to (the teachings of) Jesus Christ in the loving act of
the Eucharist:
Jesus, I seek you
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you
like a barren and parched land.
Although I cannot receive
your body and your blood,
still satisfy my hunger
with your presence
you who alone can fill my emptiness,
and let the people I meet today notice
that you are in me and I am in you.
Please proceed here to the scanned
manuscript in Swedish language (pdf)