REASON AND VALUES EXEMPLIFIED IN GENDER
ISSUES
by Kristo Ivanov,
prof. em., Umeå University
(2017, version 250620-1150)
(https://archive.org/details/ManKvi1979)
(https://www8.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/ManKvi1979Pref.html)
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, and rape
Sexual pathology and diversity
The technological turn for depathologizing
Teenager’s suicide allegedly caused by AI-chatbot
The social semantic turn for depathologizing
Consequences: what does “woman” mean?
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, or rather facilitation for
understanding the text that follows here below, which paradoxically in turn
fosters the deeper understanding of the Swedish text. 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 my
path in information science. Therefore, what follows is intended to be used by
those readers who need to continue this 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. Including
the Revisiting the “Feminization” of
American Culture. Introduction” and the more recent Swedish contribution Den mjuka staten. Feminiseringen av samhället och dess konsekvenser [The soft state. The
feminization of society and its consequences], reviewed in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter (August 11-12 2024)
and Svenska Dagbladet (August 3),
which appears to me as suggesting that there has been no advancement of
understanding in the almost half a century since I wrote my above mentioned
manuscript of 353 pages.
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), (the mind-blowing) Otto Weininger's Sex and character,
Julius Evola's The metaphysics of sex.
Of apparently lesser coverage are 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?], Evelyne Sullerot’s Le fait féminin, (in Italian, Il fenomeno donna) , 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 and to the Pontifical
Theological Institute John Paul II for the Theology and Sciences of Marriage and Family. It is 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 seems to eschew the problem of authority within the family and sometimes it can be questioned as
when it states 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, which ignore the present presumed supremacy of the mythic god Democracy and of secular human
rights. Paradoxically enough, however, this has not (yet)
shaken the position of the Catholic Church to the ordination of women, despite the
struggles represented by the organization Roman
Catholic Women-priests.
This appears to me as being a sore point or (without intending to
overvalue Greek mythology) an “Achilles’
heel” of present day’s trends of official Catholicism. It is a sore point
that may even contribute psychologically to that even historically, following
the phenomenon of reducing religion to politics, many prefer to opt for
political far
right ideologies countering the risks of leftism. All this is loosely related to the
example of Ted Kaczynski or “Unabomber” that I put forward in
the next to last chapter of my paper
on Artificial
General Intelligence, but still more to the implicit message of the
controversial and famously “sexualized” French author Michel Houellebecq. A penetrating
Swedish radio program
that until further notice in available on the net ends by telling about his
improbable and hesitant final approach to Catholicism.
Please see the concluding chapter of my present text, below.
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.
Regarding the very same relation between feminism and
politics, historian and critic of technology David F. Noble
in his book The Religion
of Technology (1998) has a very instructive appendix (p.209-228) with the
title “A masculine millennium: A note on technology and gender”. Writing in a
spirit that reveals affinities with cultural Marxism, which in its paradoxical conclusions about the salvific
power of technology also reveals the materialism common to both Marxism and
capitalistic liberalism, he succeeds in pointing out feminism’s theological
aspects when “Spirit”, despite references to Augustine (p.
213), is not understood in its Christian meaning of Holy Spirit. This opens the
road to talk about historical “spiritual elites” (p. 216) related to gender
identity, such as upper-class followers of Guglielma,
prophetess of Milan, in a heretic movement that advocated “salvation through women”. In a Christian theological
perspective of the Middle Age’s feminism it can be
seen that today’s feminism is not new, and it can be understood as additional
heretic movement in our age of secularization. Such a view is also visible in a
strict catholic traditionalist view of the history of feminism as it appears in
a paper History of Feminism: Before the
French Revolution, found in my archives sent to me by a sender or author I
could not remember or identify but can be retrieved in 5 items in jpg-format (retrievable by a link here, when the ending number is changed from
1 up to 5), and where reference is made to Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole
Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women, (chap.4). It can be compared with a
contemporary “politically correct” History of Feminism
in Wikipedia. In Sweden
“heroic” attempts have been made to challenge superficial conceptions and
application of feminisim. Example of such attempt is Ivar
Arpi’s and Anna-Karin Wyndhamn’s book in Swedish Genusdoktrinen
(2020) on the attack to
academic freedom, also commented by Wyndhamn in Sunt Fornuft,
#2, 2021, p. 24. All
this is in parallel with the crisis of the Catholic church that is portrayed by
Society of Saint Pius X – SSPX, and such events as the “requests for clarification” directed to pope Francis about his
apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia
[The joy of love, full
text here, one in full text here, and cf. the Criticism of
the Catholic Church].
When theological thought is dying together with its
philosophical heir, the road is open for reenactment of history and “spiritualizations” such as in artificial intelligence, as I
claim further that is happening in artificial general intelligence AGI. Today’s anthroposophy
with its “spiritual philosophy” does the same thing without feminism when
enacting Wagner’s Parsifal or Percival (see
also here) as a modern spiritualization of Christ. It recalls an
acceptable interpretation of the quotation attributed to G.K. Chesterton that “When men stop believing in God
they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything”.
One could say: “in something else”. The feminists, in any case, do not opinate about e.g. Ann Belfort Ulanov’s The Feminine, mentioned above, or Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother: An analysis of
the archetype. And
even less about the equally ignored Eliane Amado Levy-Valensi’s Réponse à Jung, especially
the chapter on “L’avénement de la femme à travers le
couple humain” [The advent of woman though the human
couple], (part 2, chap.III, p.229). The forced
ignorance of all this is what justifies the impossibility of debates on the
most important issues as exposed in my texts on Information and Debate and in my General Disclaimer. My solution has been
the evaluation of adherence to analytical psychology.
Related 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 the import of 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”. As it may indeed appear to be, when compared with the Tantra
tradition, which in turn is easily abused and leads absurdly astray on wild
roads in the mind-blowing American new-age counterculture and “spirituality” exemplified
by the Freud-influenced Franklin Jones
and his sexualized religious movement Adidam. I comment all this elsewhere, in the context of a supposedly Eastern “spirituality” of artificial
general intelligence. More recently in December 2024 the same phenomenon of
Western cultural utter decadence has been exemplified by the Swedish public
television in a documentary in three parts on “Holy fuck” (visible only in Sweden or possibly through VPN), related to the
so-called The New Tantra – TNT,
and such, which are a sample of tendencies in the western world, easily
evaluated in comparison with Eastern genuine seriousTantra.
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.
Swedish readers (and those who know
about automatic digital translation, including in browsers) can compare such a quote on the whole person with the Catholic view of the family in “The church and the
family in the age of individualism”
(in Signum, April 2024). 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 definitively more
complete understanding and criticism of Ellen Key in its relation to European
cultural life is found (in Swedish) in Inga Sanner’s dissertation and book Att älska sin nästa såsom sig själv [Love
thy neighbor as thyself, 1995, cf. also here] on moral Utopianism during the nineteen century.
(Especially pp. 64f, 87, 124, but mainly 126-132).
A perhaps more
"rational" alternative approach is found in the Confucian I
Ching, hexagram
#37 on "The family", completed with the
intuitions of the “masculine-feminine” hexagrams: hexagram #1 on “The
Creative” and hexagram #2 on “The
Receptive”. The hexagram 37
includes the following text:
The foundation of the
family is the relationship between husband and wife. The tie that holds the
family together lies in the loyalty and perseverance of the wife. Her place is
within […], while that of the husband is without […]. It is in accord with the
great laws of nature that husband and wife take their proper places. Within the
family a strong authority is needed; this is represented by the parents. If the
father is really a father and the son a son, if the elder brother fulfills his
position, and the younger fulfills his, if the husband is really a husband and
the wife a wife, then the family is in order. When the family is in order, all
the social relationships of mankind will be in order.
[…]
The family is society
in the embryo; it is the native soil on which performance of moral duty is made
early through natural affection, so that within a small circle a basis of moral
practice is created, and this is later widened to include human relationships
in general.
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”, not to mention
the advent of the use of the
pronoun “they” at the request of “non-binary” people. But the
question of pronouns has developed into a mind-blowing or outright culturally
tragic issue as it may be inferred from the “LGBTQIA Resource Center’s (LGBTQIA
standing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual)
text on Pronouns & Inclusive Language. (But see e.g. also here, here, and here.
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 not
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, and rape
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 a religious rite),
adultery, divorce, battering, rape, pedophilia, Incel, LGBT, BDSM and texts
about sexual pathology starting with the classic by Richard von Krafft-Ebing,
that today seem to go further or astray in the compulsive
sexual behavior disorder – CSBD in the International Classification of
Diseases-11. It is symptomatic that today nobody ponders about the meaning of
“sexual psychopathy”, and why its rich variety is only a human phenomenon
disclosing a complex meaning, instead of being reduced to an animal instinctual
expression. I know of only one scholar, psychologist James Hillman, who plunged into and understood
the depth of such phenomena in the context of so-called sadism and
masochism,
which ultimately also includes the problem of rape being misunderstood as patriarchal violence to
be countered by aggressive feminism, in place of being seen as an unconscious desperate
search for a lost God. It all ending
with implicit reference to the techno-scientific revolution
(and today’s late AI-hype), as expressed in his The
Myth of Analysis
(p. 148), which reveals the ignored
legitimate and important roots of what became a misunderstood and corrupt
feminism:
Perhaps masochism is a late
Victorian and German expression for religious erotic passion, of a piece with
the Romantic agony, the flood of flagellation pornography, fin de siècle art, the feminist movement: a personalized and
profaned cry of the soul. The psyche had lost touch with eros, just as as eros, having been excluded from psychology, was
simplified and debased into pornography and sentimentality. Thus, psychology
discovered “masochism”; and psychology found masochism in the psyche,
characterizing its femininity as masochistic. The “discovery” of masochism
tells us that at that time the psyche craved to submit in some form, in any
form, to eros – eros at any price – in order to disengage itself from the
imperious materialist inflation of the nineteenth century’s insistence that the
psyche belongs only to the mind.
Hillman touches here a phenomenon that is known but not
understood since antiquity, as illustrated by what can be seen as the “myth” of Phyllis and
Aristotle. It is a medieval cautionary tale about the triumph of a
seductive woman, Phyllis, over the greatest male intellect, the ancient Greek
philosopher Aristotle. It is one of several Power of Women stories
from that time, to be related to the feminist infatuation with the concept, and
its trivialization into pornography of “dominatrix”, while women
risk losing their femininity and turning gradually into psychological men. The
story of the dominatrix and the famous intellectual was taken up by artists
from the 12th century onwards. Today we swim in the pornography of the Internet
and the empty moralism of type #MeToo movement, while
developing the bottomless Organization 764, as well as the violent
forms of Incel, which reveal how
the breakdown between man and woman is a deep socio-psychological phenomenon on
death of love, rise of power-hate-violence, related to “loss of soul” and to
what in analytical psychology involves animus
(and consequently or in parallel anima) possession. Understanding this
requires either plunging into analytical psychology or to satisfy oneself with
a problematic more superficial popularization
of the concepts, or taking an intermediate path as in Irene
Claremont de Castillejo’s book (chap. V) Knowing Woman.
Sexual pathology and diversity
Sexual pathology and the modern expressions of sexuality may be
seen as that man unconsciously seeks the “door” (psychological anima-animus)
to the Godhead in himself through his
neighbor’s archetypal “image of God” (Genesis 1:27). Man and woman
may also be seen as the archetypal images of (for understanding) the “other”.
It is partly obliterated and reduced to “similar to myself” when man seeks man
and woman seeks woman in an inverted homosexual substitution of anima-animus by
the persona.
Some of these thoughts are also suggested in the “you” or “thou” of Martin
Buber’s famous I and Thou,
and still more the earlier mentioned Vladimir Solovyov’s The Meaning of Love (Russian
Wikipedia presentation here, badly translated here, and his earlier
mentioned book translated into English here). 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 the “universe”).
All the while a few struggling against the obliteration of the Earth in a third
nuclear war, or the many less ambitiously struggle 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 anima-animus while he also interpreted psychic
development and maturity in terms of the process of individuation. Of course, individuation is seriously
muddled up in LGBT when (contra-) sexuality is muddled up in the concept of
gender. The question is that LGBT has led and still leads to uncharitable societal
persecutions because many people who are not imbued by genuine Christian
spirit, feel, without understanding, that it implies a proximity to psychic
danger of fall into the unconscious. The danger consists of the increased
difficulties of individuation, disruption of family and social grounds and of educative
raising of children. And with it, disruption of the natural order of things as
portrayed in natural law as opposed to “democratic” positive law that today many western nations unconsciously
subscribe to, as in most secularized Sweden. All this gets muddled by simpleton
references to fine homosexual people they know who feel happy and fulfilled in
loving each other. What is forgotten is that Christian doctrine already teaches
that every human being deserves being loved and respected despite of all of us
being sinners in one way or another, requiring insight for repentance and
atonement. It may be also recommendable to relate this to the famous if yet
symptomatically controversial Chesterton’s
fence: do not change what you do not understand.
The
problem leads to an organization like The
Ruth Institute to publish (on
August 28, 2024) the following text:
Dr. J Show | August 28, 2024 Christie May
Jesse, Part 2
Former lesbian Christie May Jesse shares
further insights into the mindset of a gay person. (If you missed it, part one is here.)
“Straight people do not know what it’s
like to be gay. You can’t say [to a gay person], ‘Oh don’t worry, that’s fine,’
because you don’t know what you’re saying and affirming."
“Signs that say 'love is love' is the
biggest deception out there. Same sex attraction is not love.” Having been a
gay Christian before completely giving her life to Christ, Christie understands
the struggle.
“At the core of same-sex attraction, lies
a longing to know oneself, to belong,” Christie explains, but what gay people
are doing is refusing to give up a part of themselves to God. They’re choosing
to hold onto their struggles because it’s more comfortable than facing the pain
head-on and learning to let go.
Learn more about what people mean when
they call themselves a gay Christian by watching this, the second half, on YouTube or the entire
interview with our Locals community.
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 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 real secular death problem except in the realm
of demography, 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. Falling in love for holograms, if anything, could and
should suggest an understanding of the primary
spiritual essence of love. It could enable an understanding of, and suggest
a reinstatement of a non-fundamentalist religious attitude. If this is not
understood then love is confused with sexuality and it can destroy the psyche
of humans, the more so of youngsters or teenagers: it is the case of an event in
the United States in 2024 that was later reported abroad as follows.
Teenager’s suicide allegedly caused
by AI-chatbot
What follows is
The
Japan Times’ summary article
published on March 18, 2025 about a teenager’s suicide that was
already described in detail in an article
published on November 11, 2024 by the Privacy World Blog, and regarding a case filed in Florida’s Federal
Court on October 22, 2024. The teenager’s mother Megan Garcia (but not her
son’s “stepfather”?!) is also interviewed in a YouTube video An
AI chatbot killed my son. I take the required space here below,
because it qualitatively illustrates the possible if not probable long-run consequences
of the downplaying increasing problems in the relation between man and woman
under the mantle of a misunderstood “sexuality”. The suicidal teenager had
established a passionate relationship with the “fictional character” Daenerys Targaryen.
All this against the background of technological development represented here
by AI and the example of future endless legal litigations involving here the
company Character.ai
that presents itself rather “secretively” or exploitatively at the site Character.AI
(saved here).
It affects the minds of not only teenagers but also of men and women, being a
question of degree in face of psychic nuances in the variations of the human
mind. Now over to the Japan Times’ text:
Megan Garcia says her son would still be alive
today if it weren’t for a chatbot urging the 14-year-old to take his own life. In
a lawsuit with major implications for Silicon Valley, she is seeking to hold
Google and the artificial intelligence firm Character Technologies responsible
for his death. The case over the tragedy that unfolded a year ago in central
Florida is an early test of who is legally to blame when kids’ interactions
with generative AI take an unexpected turn. Garcia's allegations are laid out
in a 116-page complaint filed last year in federal court in Orlando. She is
seeking unspecified monetary damages from Google and Character Technologies and
asking the court to order warnings that the platform isn’t suitable for minors
and limit how it can collect and use their data.
Both companies are asking the judge to dismiss
claims that they failed to ensure the chatbot technology was safe for young
users, arguing there’s no legal basis to accuse them of wrongdoing. Character
Technologies contends in a filing that conversations between its Character.AI
platform's chatbots and users are protected by the Constitution’s First
Amendment as free speech. It also argues that the bot explicitly discouraged
Garcia’s son from committing suicide.
Garcia’s targeting of Google is particularly
significant. The Alphabet unit entered into a $2.7 billion deal with
Character.AI in August, hiring talent from the startup and licensing know-how
without completing a full-blown acquisition. As the race for AI talent
accelerates, other companies may think twice about similarly structured deals
if Google fails to convince a judge that it should be shielded from liability
from harms alleged to have been caused by Character.AI products.
"The inventors and the companies, the
corporations that put out these products, are absolutely responsible,” Garcia
said in an interview. "They knew about these dangers, because they do
their research, and they know the types of interactions children are having.”
Before the deal, Google had invested in
Character.AI in exchange for a convertible note and also entered a cloud
service pact with the startup. The founders of Character.AI were Google
employees until they left the tech behemoth to found the startup.
As Garcia tells it in her suit, Sewell Setzer
III was a promising high school student athlete until he started role-playing
in April, 2023, on Character.AI, which lets users build chatbots that mimic
popular culture personalities — both real and fictional. She says she wasn’t
aware that over the course of several months, the app hooked her son with
"anthropomorphic, hypersexualized and frighteningly realistic experiences”
as he fell in love with a bot inspired by Daenerys Targaryen, a character from
the show Game of Thrones. Garcia took away the boy’s phone in February 2024
after he started acting out and withdrawing from friends. But while looking for
his phone, which he later found, he also came across his stepfather’s hidden
pistol, which the police determined was stored in compliance with Florida law,
according to the suit. After conferring with the Daenerys chatbot five days
later, the teen shot himself in the head.
Garcia’s lawyers say in the complaint that
Google "contributed financial resources, personnel, intellectual property,
and AI technology to the design and development” of Character.AI’s
chatbots. Google argued in a court filing in January that it had "no role”
in the teen’s suicide and "does not belong in the case. ”The
case is playing out as public safety issues around AI and children have drawn
attention from state enforcement officials and federal agencies alike. There’s
currently no U.S. law that explicitly protects users from harm inflicted by AI
chatbots. To make a case against Google, attorneys for Garcia would have to
show the search giant was actually running Character.AI and made business
decisions that ultimately led to her son’s death, according to Sheila Leunig,
an attorney who advises AI startups and investors and isn’t involved in the
lawsuit. "The question of legal liability is absolutely a valid one that’s
being challenged in a huge way right now,” Leunig said.
Deals like the one Google struck have been
hailed as an efficient way for companies to bring in expertise for new
projects. However, they’ve caught the attention of regulators over concerns
they are a work-around to antitrust scrutiny that comes with acquiring
up-and-coming rivals outright — and which has become a major headache for tech
behemoths in recent years.
"Google and Character.AI are completely
separate, unrelated companies and Google has never had
a role in designing or managing their AI model or technologies, nor have we
used them in our products,” Jose Castaneda, a spokesperson for Google, said in
a statement. A Character.AI spokeswoman declined to comment on pending
litigation but said 'there is no ongoing relationship between Google and
Character.AI” and that the startup had implemented new user safety measures
over the past year.
Lawyers from the Social Media Victims Law
Center and Tech Justice Law Project who represent Garcia argue that even though
her son’s death pre-dates Google’s deal with Character.AI, the search company
was "instrumental” in helping the startup design and develop its product.
"The model underlying Character.AI was
invented and initially built at Google,” according to the complaint. Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas began working at Google on
chatbot technology as far back as 2017 before they left the company in 2021,
then founded Character.AI later that year and were rehired by Google last year,
according to Garcia’s suit, which names them both as defendants.
Shazeer and De Freitas
declined to comment, according to Google’s spokesperson Castaneda. They’ve
argued in court filings that they shouldn’t have been named in the suit because
they have no connections to Florida, where the case was filed, and because they
were not personally involved in the activities that allegedly caused harm.
The suit also alleges the Alphabet unit helped
market the startup’s technology through a strategic partnership in 2023 to use
Google Cloud services to reach a growing number of active Character.AI users —
which is now more than 20 million.
In the fast-growing AI industry, startups are
being "boosted” by big tech companies, "not under the brand name of
the large company, but with their support,” said Meetali Jain, director of Tech
Justice Law Project.Google’s 'purported roles as an
'investor,' cloud services provider, and former employer are far too tenuously
connected' to the harm alleged in Garcia's complaint 'to be actionable,' the
technology giant said in a court filing. Matt Wansley, a professor at Cardozo
School of Law, said tying liability back to Google won’t be easy. "It’s
tricky because, what would the connection be?” he said.
Early last year, Google warned Character.AI
that it might remove the startup’s app from the Google Play store over concerns
about safety for teens, the Information reported recently, citing an
unidentified former Character.AI employee. The startup responded by
strengthening the filters in its app to protect users from sexually suggestive,
violent and other unsafe content and Google reiterated that it's 'separate'
from Character.AI and isn't using the chatbot technology, according to the
report. Google declined to comment and Character.AI didn’t respond to a request
for comment on the report.
Garcia, the mother, said she first learned
about her son interacting with an AI bot in 2023 and thought it was similar to
building video game avatars. According to the suit, the boy’s mental health
deteriorated as he spent more time on Character.AI where he was having sexually
explicit conversations without his parents’ knowledge. When the teen shared his
plan to kill himself with the Daenerys chatbot, but expressed uncertainty that
it would work, the bot replied: "That’s not a reason not to go through
with it,” according to the suit, which is peppered with transcripts of the
boy’s chats.
Character.AI said in a filing that Garcia’s
revised complaint 'selectively and misleadingly quotes' that conversation and
excludes how the chatbot 'explicitly discouraged' the teen from committing
suicide by saying: 'You can’t do that! Don’t even consider that!”
Anna Lembke, a professor at Stanford University
School of Medicine specializing in addiction, said "it’s almost impossible
to know what our kids are doing online.” The professor also said it’s
unsurprising that the boy’s interactions with the chatbot didn’t come up in
several sessions with a therapist who his parents sent him to for help with his
anxiety, as the lawsuit claims. "Therapists are not omniscient,” Lembke
said. "They can only help to the extent that the child knows what’s really
going on. And it could very well be that this child did not perceive the
chatbot as problematic.”
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 find that it is a very bad and absurd proposal because we do not
know WHY there has been such an increase of a wish to make a legal gender
change, including among children. 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.
Consequences: what does “woman” mean?
Let’s borrow and reproduce a piece
of text from the paragraph above:
Sweden: Amended Transgender Law Now in Force. Under the new law, which will come into force
next year, a shorter consultation with a doctor or a psychologist will suffice,
along with approval from The National Board of Health and Welfare. The new law
will also decouple the process of legal gender change from medical procedures
like sex reassignment surgery, which will still require a lengthier evaluation.
Consequences of
this are summarized in an article (not reproduced here for reasons of space) by
Rosa Freedman at the university of Reading, and Rosemary Auchmuty, published by
the Oxford Human Rights Hub (OHRH), under the title of Women’s
Rights and the Proposed Changes to the Gender Recognition Act. This was the
background of, and was concretized in political events in Sweden, according to
a communication from the Swedish
news Agency TT), retrieved
on March 13, 2025 at the site of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet:
The word "woman" will remain in the
Abortion Act.
The government will not proceed with the
criticized proposal.
Published 2025-02-27
"The Tidö
parties [Swedish parties - conservative-right:
M, SD, L] understand the concern about what such a potential change would mean
for women's equality. One such concern is that the proposal could contribute to
a development where women are made invisible and reduced to their reproductive
organs," the parties write in the article.
The proposal is motivated by the fact that
those who have a man as their legal gender can also become pregnant and need
the possibility of an abortion. The requirement for sterilization for those who
change their legal gender was removed in 2013.
Several parties have previously said they want
to wait for the consultation round. V and C [left and center] have announced
that they have no objections and MP that they welcome the proposal.
The Green Party's equality policy spokesperson,
Janine Alm Ericson (MP), says in a comment to TT that the party has nothing
against including the word woman in the legal text.
"However, after the amended legislation on
legal gender and an end to the shameful forced sterilizations, there are also
legal men who can get pregnant and this must also be reflected in the abortion
legislation," she adds.
The investigator also proposes that it should
be easier to have an abortion at home and a strengthened role for midwives. The
Tidö representatives, Minister of Social Services
Camilla Waltersson Grönvall (M), Minister of Equality
Paulina Brandberg (L) and SD's group leader Linda Lindberg, write on
Aftonbladet Debatt that they will return with how the
other proposals will be taken forward.
“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 begin with. It is 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
requested to answer questions and furnish documents. Requested by whom? The
communication, however ends with the official name of the bank, company,
government agency 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 all the 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.) The relation between I
and Thou, however, was in my view already conceptually and gradually
corrupted in the work of e.g. Emmanuel
Levinas. His thoughts were further applied by
the controversial and alluringly erudite catholic priest Tomáš Halík with his problematic “existential” interpretations of
the meaning of love in the book I want You to Be: On the God of Love.
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. The next step is Vitro Fertilization (IFV) as announced
on June 4th 2024 in the ambitious magazine The
Economist “Will IVF really be the next frontier
in America’s culture wars?” And what about destroying excess embryos?. Or where does it stop,
or begin? An article in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (December 10, 2023) with the questioning title “Är
folk för 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 because of their husbands’ hesitation in
front of the menacing ultimatum of “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’ committed 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. The conundrum caused by these problems can be
seen in an article on “Vem får ha
barn?” [Who
is allowed to have children?] in the Catholic
magazine Signum (nr. 3, April 2024). 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 and for Catholicism convenient 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, superficially and controversially, that its “catechesis on sex is still in
diapers” (see also here). In such a case, perhaps not only the educational catechesis but also
today’s interpretation and teaching of the original theological knowledge and
wisdom on which it should be based mainly on
Genesis 2:18-24, and Mark 10:2-12, commented further and ending with “This is a profound mystery” in Ephesians 5.21-32, reminding that woman is for man
the archetypal “other” as the communion with the collective of the church is,
for Christ and the Christian, the “other”:
For this reason a man
will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will
become one flesh.” This is a
profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.
Enough is enough. In the pre-Christian
era, one solution that I mention in another context of the hype on “artificial
general intelligence” could be found in Plato’s and the I Ching’s
advices for times of serious, deep cultural crisis, for a paradoxial
restraint in writing and acting on
the most important, complex and controversial matters. The suggestion for a
Christian solution, however, 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 English translation of the text of the prayer follows at the bottom here
below, and it was originally presented as inspired by Padre Pio of Pietrelcina,
my having been able to individuate only a similar shorter version in English.
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 or “door” to the “falling in love” had been projected onto the
counterpart who in the theological doctrine of Judaism and Christianity is the image of God. Lifelong indissoluble relationship
or marriage – not only the “fall” in “love” - 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 reason for
the need of marriage and consequent indissolubility of marriage is then
obviously related to the maximal distress caused by separation and divorce. It
arises the bottomless anguish at the outrage of the feeling of being abandoned
by one own’s own soul and by God himself, whose archetype was once projected
into the married spouse.
The clerical celibacy in the Catholic
Church should be properly understood in the spirit of Matthew 19:12
about “those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of
heaven”. It implies the gift of discipline for a direct search for God without
the psychological help of the bridge of a wife and own family, while at the
same concentrating all energy for loving the “family of man”, the congregation,
or “love thy neighbor”. The meaning of marriage is something which might be
seen as a mystery among people or even in Protestantism, such as the archbishop
of the Church of Sweden who seemed digressing to feelings of sheer distress
for his own divorce on occasion of being interviewed
by the Swedish public radio on March 22, 2024. It happened when he was asked to
explain why he is known for once having expressed that “sunset is a mystery”
(while missing the main question of the meaning of love).
And here comes the final insight in an
ultimate mystery, which also suggests that the confusion, violence and crisis
in the relation between men and women is the increased difficulty if not
impossibility, in the increasing secularization of societies, to search and
reach the Godhead through “the other”. If it is true what the pope has been
referred above to say, that the Church’s catechesis on “sex” is still in
diapers, a consequence may have been the difficulty of understanding,
explaining and motivating in prevention of sexual abuses in the Catholic Church itself, that I have
(in automatically translatable Swedish language) treated in my blog. Indeed,
the pope Francis should not only have asked public pardon of the Catholic
Church and promised recourse to societal police and law for clerical sexual
abuses, but also publicly asked himself the why
of abuses that seem to be increasingly committed, explaining how societal
public corruption of sexuality as well shortcomings in the catholic official
doctrine, influences and tempts even seminarians and clergy. There is an
immense difference for conscience, motivation and will, between believing to be
dealing as an animal with only an animal- or social herd-instinct, or in celibacy
as well as in INCEL to refer only to the what the pope Francis called the catholic
sexual doctrine in diapers, exhorting to a moralistic “sex only in marriage begetting
children”, while marriage itself as “serial monogamy” is reduced to an optional
secular ritual. All this compared to seeing the so-called sex as a search in
need a sort of spiritual mystic “eucharistic”, or rather divine experiential
contact with God perceived and understood as in Christianity. My own experience
is that the latter gradually dilutes and transforms irrelevant sexual
phantasies.
The consequence is also that what
follows below may be perceived as a blasphemy, without even understanding how
the Catholic mystics interpret the Bible (cf. the Carmelite Wilfrid Stinissen
in the chap. 4 of The Word is very near you), and without
perceiving that such lack of understanding paradoxically risks to sexualize the
theology of love, disregarding a possible interpretation of (John 14:20) “…on
that day you will know that...you are in Me and I am in you.” Otherwise it is an
insight that “Sounds like an idea” or “There’s a thought” or it is serendipitous”:
that the whole human being, composed of
the union of man and woman (created in the image of God, Genesis 1:27)
in the potential divine act of creation of a new life, may be understood as
pronouncing the last words of the following prayer, responding (being
“responsible”) to (the love and teachings of) Jesus Christ as if it were in the
loving act of 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.
The earlier
mentioned Wilfrid Stinissen, after referring to the Bible’s Jes
54:5 and John
3:29, writes the following in the book I dag är Guds dag:
Texter för årets alla dagar [Today is God's Day: Texts for all days of the
year, in the English translation as This
is the Day the Lord Has Made: 365 Daily Meditations], Libris, 1994, p. 199
for June 17, on “Bridegroom and Bride”:
“It should not
be so difficult, in a time when love between man and woman is given so much
space, to guess that the relationship to the Creator is also about love.
Perhaps it is because human love is often so deeply misunderstood that love for
God cannot be seen in its true light. – It is often considered figurative
language when one speaks of the relationship to God or Christ as a marriage.
But in reality, the human relationship between man and woman is a picture of
the relationship to God. – The true marriage is the marriage that Christ enters
into with his Church. A human marriage refers to and is a picture of this
marriage. The intimacy of a human relationship suggests the unimaginable
intimacy of the relationship between God and man, the “Thou and I” relationship
that fulfills our deepest longing.”
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Please proceed here to the scanned manuscript in Swedish language (pdf).
