Greg often likes to make excellent points about the way businesses can serve as culture-makers. This example is really, really not the sort I am familiar with and understand very well, but it was surprising and seems noteworthy:
(source: Dolce & Gabbana’s beautiful tribute to mothers at Milan Fashion Week – Telegraph)
All the more remarkable are the remarks that accompanied the show, remarks that have predictably proved an incitement to the torches-and-pitchfork crowd.
One is not accustomed to hearing the fashion industry having this sort of debate. From another quarter, though, this is a useful moment to remember that every child has a right to a mother and a father, as one popular but hardly “fashionable” pontiff has it:
“Marriage and family are in crisis,” he said, with the “culture of the temporary” dissuading people from making the “public commitment” of marriage.
“This revolution in manners and morals has often flown the flag of freedom, but in fact it has brought spiritual and material devastation to countless human beings, especially the poorest and most vulnerable.”
Pope Francis noted the evidence pointing to the correlation between “the decline of marriage culture” and the increase of poverty and other “social ills”. It is women, children, and elderly persons who suffer the most from this crisis, he said.
The Pope likened the crisis in the family to threats against the environment. Although there has been a growing awareness of ecological concerns, mankind has “been slower to recognize that our fragile social environments are under threat as well, slower in our culture, and also in our Catholic Church.”
“We must foster a new human ecology,” he said.
(source: Pope Francis: Children have right to a mother and father :: Catholic News Agency)
You don’t have to be the Pope to understand this. Or, for that matter, even Christian, or conservative, or “straight.” You just have to know the difference between your feelings, the fact of marriage, and the good of children.
Yes, yes, but on the other hand the dehumanization of children conceived with the assistance of technology – “synthetic children,” etc. – is unacceptable. These are human beings. The practice of demeaning them in hopes that this will help prevent the creation of more like them had better be nipped in the bud.
Reminds me of an article by James Q. Wilson many moons ago, when cloning was the hot topic, in which he pointed out that cloning would pose few if any serious ethical difficulties if the law treated all human beings as persons with rights to protection and proper care and upbringing. It’s the people who have dehumanized the embryo who now find themselves tied up in knots trying to find something, anything, that can distance them from Brave New World.
Yes, I had run across some comments that sounded like they were negative about children, which is why I deflected the conversation toward the positive celebration and toward someone who knows what he’s talking about–assuming, though trying to be nice about it, that a fashion-industry conversation about this was likely to have a very high posturing-to-understanding ratio.
In one way, though, I do think that it is a regrettable imprecision, but not *wholly* wrong, to speak of the “synthetic” character of certain births as negative. The challenge is to stigmatize the parenting practice without stigmatizing the innocent. In this sense, it is the same as the problem of “legitimate” parenting.
When we say, as we must, that a child has a right to a mother and a father, and a claim against that mother and father for food, clothing, shelter, nurture, religious education, and basic/trade education, we establish claims of some individuals against others, and those claims must be adjudicable. To say that a child has a claim against *anyone* who can help is not to say that a child has *the same claim* against just anyone that the child has against the people responsible for parenting that child. It is necessary to be able to distinguish the legitimate claims of children on parents (and therefore parents on each other, and of the community on parents regarding their children) from other, more extraordinary, claims.
To bring a child into the world as a product for customers is wicked, and violates that child’s basic trust before it has even been established. Everything after that is just remediation.
So I think a measure of hostility toward the process is warranted. HOWEVER, I quite agree (emphatically and pre-emptively, in fact):
That’s part of why I posted [ http://www.hangtogetherblog.com/2015/03/14/born-with-dignity-called-to-holiness/ ] boldly before I posted the above more tentatively.
What I think this really points to is that in the end, it’s going to have to be Christians who figure out how to do this. We have to do it in a way that others can follow, but it’s not going to be done right until the Christians figure out how to do it and show some leadership. When the pagans affirm marriage or anything else we want to affirm, often the very inhumanity of their humanity just makes you cringe. (I’m thinking of Charles Murray on how to get young men to work – calling them “bums” is not going to help.)
Stigma is not going to work at this historical juncture. Stigma only works when it takes place within a social context of supportive plausibility structures. We need to focus on rebuilding those structures – and that process is not going to involve stigma until after the structures are most of the way to being up and running.
‘in the end, it’s going to have to be Christians who figure out how to do this. […] When the pagans affirm marriage or anything else we want to affirm, often the very inhumanity of their humanity just makes you cringe.’
I quite agree.
Also, although I think the “torches and pitchforks crowd” is real and obvious enough (see http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/03/who-is-paying-sam-singer for starters), I do want to hold open the possibility that the roughly paternal indignation of Elton John may not be, by itself, its signature: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/415457/twitchys-criticism-elton-john-undeserved-josh-gelernter
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