{"id":186124,"date":"2019-04-02T07:22:56","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T07:22:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=186124"},"modified":"2019-04-06T06:55:23","modified_gmt":"2019-04-06T06:55:23","slug":"modern-family-will-hubris-call-down-nemesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=186124","title":{"rendered":"Modern Family. Will Hubris Call Down Nemesis?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rod Dreher \u2013 Strategic Culture March 31, 2019<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
News from the World of Progress<\/span>:<\/a><\/h5>\n
When Matthew Eledge\u00a0and his husband, Elliot Dougherty, told Matthew\u2019s mother, Cecile, that they were planning to start their family, Cecile thought fondly of her own parental journey. She\u2019d loved being pregnant decades earlier with her three now-grown children.<\/h5>\n
\u201cIf you want me to be the gestational carrier,\u201d she told Matthew, \u201cI\u2019d do it in a heartbeat.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Matthew, 32, and Elliot, 29, appreciated the gesture, but, they thought, let\u2019s be real \u2014 it\u2019s not like that would ever happen. A postmenopausal 61-year-old couldn\u2019t possibly be equipped to carry and give birth to a baby. Right?<\/h5>\n
Well, what do you think happened next? Right:<\/h5>\n
She got pregnant after her very first embryo transfer \u2014 using an egg donated by Elliot\u2019s sister Lea Yribe, who was 25 at the time, and fertilized with Matthew\u2019s sperm. And this past weekend, after more than two years of planning and preparation, at 6:06 a.m. on March 25, she gave birth (no C-section needed) to her first granddaughter, Uma Louise Dougherty-Eledge. Clocking in at 5 pounds, 13 ounces, Uma is a sweet and healthy baby girl.<\/h5>\n
Note well that this happened not in Manhattan or San Francisco, but in Omaha. The mother is the stay-at-home wife of a high school principal. Their child\/grandchild was born into a world of bigotry, the cost of which hits the wallet hard:<\/h5>\n
For now, Nebraska remains a tough place for a queer family to find their footing. And in Nebraska, as it is elsewhere around the country, the various procedures involved in IVF are often only partly covered by insurance plans, if they\u2019re covered at all. Matthew and Elliot weren\u2019t covered, and they estimate they spent about $40,000 on IVF alone.<\/h5>\n
\u201cAnd that\u2019s literally the cheapest it could have been,\u201d said Matthew. Each cycle of egg retrieval and transfer can cost about $12,000, which the family only had to pay once, since Cecile got pregnant on the first try. Plus, they didn\u2019t have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for donated eggs, since Elliot\u2019s sister, Lea, donated them for free. But in addition to the costs of IVF, they also had to cover all the expenses associated with Cecile carrying and birthing the baby; if she were giving birth to her own child, rather than her grandchild, insurance would have kicked in for some of those expenses. But as a surrogate, the family\u2019s insurance wouldn\u2019t cover any pregnancy-related fees. For a teacher and a hairdresser like Matthew and Elliot, these costs were exorbitant.<\/h5>\n
This detail is jaw-dropping:<\/h5>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s kind of embarrassing,\u201d Matthew said. \u201cMy mom and I are legally Uma\u2019s parents. Nebraska requires the sperm donor to be the father and the person who delivers the baby to be the \u2018mother,\u2019 even if she\u2019s not biologically related to the child. This looks really creepy for us. Let\u2019s just say we will NOT be framing and hanging up Uma\u2019s birth certificate. I thought Elliot could at least put his name on the birth certificate, at least symbolically, but they didn\u2019t even offer that. He now needs to go through an adoption process to get any legal rights. We plan on doing that, but let\u2019s pretend in the meantime, since this can be a tedious process, god forbid, I were to die: Elliot would have absolutely no legal custody for our daughter.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cWe have gay marriage, but we have an entire structure that hasn\u2019t caught up,\u201d he added.<\/h5>\n
Read the whole story<\/span>.<\/a>\u00a0It\u2019s really important, and I\u2019ll tell you why.<\/h5>\n
A woman gave birth to her son\u2019s child so he and his male spouse could be parents.This is a story about modernity and the future. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are instinctively horrified by this, and those who think it is a glorious thing what money, technology and a willingness to break taboos can bring about.<\/h5>\n
One key detail about the story is how much technology \u2014 expensive technology \u2014 was required to bring about this result. Another key detail: the natural limits and taboos that had to be denied for this to happen.<\/h5>\n
Before the 21st<\/sup> century, there was no such things as married gay couples (in 2001, the Netherlands became the first country to legalize it). Marriage emerged as a way to create a safe structure for the nurturing of children emerging from sexual union. But our civilization has come to believe that marriage no long has any intrinsic link to childbearing. If you had asked people around, say, 1960, what they thought about gay marriage, it would not have made sense to most people. That taboo was ground to dust a generation ago. I mention it here simply as a marker in how far the cultural revolution overturning fundamental customs, norms, and limits, in favor of the sovereignty of the Self, has come in such a short time.<\/h5>\n
The taboo against incest is ancient, and nearly universal. These people violated it multiple times, using technology \u2014 and no sex was involved. They mixed the egg of Dougherty\u2019s sister with his husband\u2019s sperm. In custom \u2014 \u201ccustom,\u201d ha ha! \u2014 Dougherty\u2019s sister is also considered to be the sister of his spouse, Eledge. Plus, the egg fertilized by Eledge and his sister-in-law was implanted into his mother, so that Eledge\u2019s mother could bear his child.<\/h5>\n
Now this has happened, and the response of the world \u2014 our world \u2014 is to celebrate it as a triumph of love.<\/h5>\n
The ancient Greeks knew what hubris like this would call down. You don\u2019t have to be a religious believer, or superstitious, to recognize that what has happened here is catastrophic. It\u2019s catastrophic in a particularly modern way.<\/h5>\n
As the contemporary historian Yuval Noah Hariri says, modernity can be reduced to a simple transaction:\u00a0we exchange meaning for power.\u00a0That is, in order to gain greater power over the natural world, we trade away belief that meaning inheres in the natural order, and that there are limits beyond which we cannot transgress. This transaction took place centuries ago, with Bacon and Hobbes, and the early moderns. What has happened in Omaha is only the most recent working-out of the principle.<\/h5>\n
In order to assert their power to gestate the child they wanted, the people involved in this affair \u2014 the gay couple, the egg donor sister, the surrogate grandmother \u2014 rendered so many fundamental concepts intrinsically meaningless. They would say that they\u2019ve simply changed the meaning of \u201cfamily,\u201d \u201cmother,\u201d and suchlike, in the same way that same-sex marriage changes the meaning of the word \u201chusband\u201d and \u201cwife.\u201d Well, yes, but it goes much deeper than that. What they\u2019ve done is to deny that there is any meaning in these concepts beyond that which we choose to give them. This is nominalism.<\/h5>\n
If you\u2019re a good modern, you don\u2019t see the problem with any of this. I get that. The heart wants what it wants. If we have the money and the technology to make things we desire happen, why shouldn\u2019t we do it? Cut the breasts off of healthy teenage girls, chemically castrate healthy boys, impregnate an old woman with an embryo created by her son\u2019s sperm, and change the moral order to affirm the goodness of these acts \u2014 yes sir, this must be paradise.<\/h5>\n
Where do we draw the lines, then \u2014 and on what basis? We have created a world in which the Self can have just about anything it wants, as long as it has the money to afford the technology to make it happen. We have created a world in which people don\u2019t understand saying\u00a0no\u00a0to any of this as anything but an arbitrary imposition of power.<\/h5>\n
In ancient Greek tragedy,\u00a0hubris\u00a0calls down\u00a0nemesis. Here\u2019s the\u00a0nemesis\u00a0I expect all this to bring down on us: mass forgetting. We will forget, collectively, elemental truths that make natural life possible. We have forgotten, we are forgetting, and our forgetting will be complete in another generation or two. We are creating chaos, and calling it civilization.\u00a0 When\u00a0the money runs out, or the technology fails, we will live with the consequences of our hubris.<\/h5>\n
A few years ago, in conversation with some professors at a conservative Christian college, one of them told me that he didn\u2019t expect that most of his students would ever be able to form stable families. This shocked me. It genuinely did. I wouldn\u2019t have expected to hear that from a professor at a secular school, much less at a conservative Christian one. But he said it, and there were nods all around the room. I asked him why not? Why wouldn\u2019t these students be able to form stable families?<\/h5>\n
\u201cBecause most of them have never seen one,\u201d he said.<\/h5>\n
Kids today are raised in a world in which words like \u201cfamily,\u201d \u201cmother,\u201d \u201cfather,\u201d \u201cwife,\u201d and \u201chusband\u201d \u2014 words that have had a fixed (but not rigid!) meaning for time immemorial \u2014 no longer signify anything permanent, and are no guideposts to help one get through life. The so-called conservative party has done little or nothing to conserve collective wisdom about the natural family (\u201cHowever you define family, that\u2019s what we mean by family values\u201d \u2014 Barbara Bush, 1992 GOP Convention). The collapse is just going to have to play itself out. It has too much momentum to stop now.<\/h5>\n
If you land at the airport in Venice, and take a water taxi into the city, you observe that what looks like open waters is actually marked in such a way as to allow the captains to navigate safely across the shallow lagoon, without crashing into each other. Our species has put down these guideposts for itself based on long experience \u2014 and we, in our ignorance, arrogance, and, yes,\u00a0hubris, cast them all off as nothing but hindrances to the will. This will end in shipwreck.<\/h5>\n
People think that\u00a0The Benedict Option<\/a><\/span>\u00a0is a reactionary political project, and they\u2019re not exactly wrong, but they\u2019re missing the main point. At its deepest level, it is about preserving collective memory of what the Christian faith is, what families are, and so forth, through a dark age of forced forgetting. Make no mistake, modern culture will do its best to make sure that nobody remembers what mothers and fathers and families were prior to Year Zero. That is how the revolution is becoming institutionalized.<\/h5>\n
The permanent things, T.S. Eliot\u2019s term for those enduring aspects of human nature and order, exist whether or not we can see them (which is why they are permanent). The forces dismantling our ability to perceive the permanent things are stronger than the ability of our institutions, which do not even recognize the threat, to withstand. As Eliot once wrote about political dissolution:<\/h5>\n
As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. The term \u201cdemocracy,\u201d as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike\u2014it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.<\/h5>\n
The same principle is at work today. The forces of disintegration do not outright deny the meaning of \u201cfather,\u201d \u201cmother,\u201d and \u201cfamily,\u201d but rather transform them so completely into\u00a0a counterfeit version<\/a><\/span>\u00a0that they might as well have done.<\/h5>\n
You will find very few churches meeting these transformative forces with any kind of meaningful counterforce in defense of the permanent things. They are either rushing to embrace the spirit of the age, or are living in feeble denial of the immensity of the cultural revolution. It\u2019s too frightening to them. And the next thing you know, the stay-at-home mom of the Midwestern town\u2019s high school principal is pregnant with her gay son\u2019s baby. Now what do you do?<\/h5>\n
This is a dark age, and it\u2019s going to be with us for a very long time. Eliot once wrote:<\/h5>\n
I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism.<\/h5>\n
As will we. Build the 21st<\/sup> century monasteries. Build them now. Preserve the memories and practices that will be the seeds of renewal.<\/h5>\n

Original source theamericanconservative.com<\/strong><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ancient Greeks knew what hubris like this would call down. You don\u2019t have to be a religious believer to recognize that what has happened here is catastrophic<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=186124"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186127,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186124\/revisions\/186127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=186124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=186124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=186124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}