FREASON AND VALUES EXEMPLIFIED IN GENDER ISSUES
by Kristo Ivanov, prof. em.,
Umeå University (2017, version 241215-1040)
(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
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. 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), 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 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 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). Paradoxically enough, however, this has not 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 this
sense, feminism, in a Christian theological perspective, can be seen that the
Middle Age’s feminism is not new, and it can be understood as additional
heretic movement in our age of secularization. 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 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):
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.
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.
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, is
anything, could suggest an understanding of the spiritual essence of love, It could enable an understanding of, and 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 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 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. 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” in 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 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, when asked to explain why he is known for once having
expressed that “sunset is a mystery” (and 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 minimizing its sexual
abuse cases that I have also treated
in my blog. The consequence is also that the
following may be perceived as a blasphemy, disregarding (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 “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 last words in the following
prayer, responding (being “responsible”) to (the love and teachings of) Jesus
Christ as 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)