Source: Kevin Schmiesing via thepublicdiscourse.com
Reprinted with permission.
If sexual attraction is one powerful force that God built into the world to counteract the individual’s inclination to self-absorption, then the combination of technological and cultural assaults on this urge doesn’t threaten only the formation of families, the basic unit of society. It also threatens something even more foundational: the nature of the person as a social being.
“Civilization is, before all, the will to live in common. A man is uncivilized, barbarian, in the degree to which he does not take others into account.”
—José Ortega y Gasset
Robert Putnam’s sociological study Bowling Alone (2000) provoked an avalanche of reflection and debate on the importance and fragility of social capital. Even while many have questioned various theoretical and statistical elements of Putnam’s work, commentators still look to it as a lodestar in the effort to understand, document, and, to the extent necessary, challenge certain trends in contemporary American culture.
To many observers, the situation has continually worsened. Digital streaming, remote work, online education, and the proliferation of delivery services intensified the isolation that Putnam predicted. We are not only bowling alone; we are watching alone, learning alone, and eating alone–and the pandemic only aggravated the “loneliness epidemic” that the US surgeon general predicted back in 2017.
One deep human urge presses against these tendencies. Throughout history, the centripetal force of sexual attraction has induced people to form bonds—sometimes brief, often lasting. To satisfy our physical and emotional desires, we must come together. The socially interactive character of sexual union is reflected in the archaic terminology that has mostly fallen out of use, such as intercourse, commerce, and congress. Merriam-Webster still offers under the first definition of that third term: “a) the act or action of coming together and meeting; b) coitus.” This instinctive coming together is the natural foundation on which the Church built the sacrament of marriage. At the beginning of his treatise On the Good of Marriage, Saint Augustine wrote that “the first natural bond of human society is man and wife.”
But what if even this final line of defense against the march of social disconnection has been breached?
Technology and Isolation
The technological nudge toward isolation arguably began in the 1960s with the advent of widespread access to and use of birth control chemicals. Critics and celebrants alike widely recognize the revolutionary effect of contraception. “Modern contraception is not only a fact of our time,” Mary Eberstadt wrote in her incisive Adam and Eve after the Pill. “It may even be the central fact, in the sense that it is hard to think of any other whose demographic, social, behavioral, and personal fallout has been as profound.”
While the contraceptive sexual act preserves the essence of mating two people, it introduces a barrier between them by promoting limited rather than full giving of each to the other. Whether or not one accepts this particular argument—cogently made by John Paul II and the many admirers of his Theology of the Body—the evolution of technology has advanced the cause of separation far beyond what the pill made possible. The ability to decouple the fertilization of the egg from the act of intercourse attenuated not merely the tie between procreation and the sexual act but even the link between procreation and the cooperative action of two individuals. Creating new life no longer requires “sexual congress.” By this measure, some reproductive methods are more disintegrative than others. The use of a husband’s sperm to fertilize his wife’s ovum still brings a man and a woman together in a cooperative enterprise. Conversely, the indiscriminate purchase of sperm or eggs in the fertility marketplace more gravely depersonalizes and commercializes procreation, as it further separates the creation of life from the act of loving union between two persons.
Even in the latter case, though, the prospective mother depends on the cooperation of a father (or vice versa), no matter how far removed or unaware. Yet the logic of separating procreation from sex, once unleashed, has run amok. In fact, it is now reaching its ultimate conclusion in human cloning. In this technique, the sexual act and procreation are definitively severed. The laboratory replaces the bedroom and procreating alone becomes reality.
Crossing the Sexual Divide
Throughout human history, sexual attraction, in its normative expression, has drawn together persons on opposite sides of a fundamental human divide. Male and female persons are naturally complementary, but that complementarity is not always obvious or easily realized. The tendency of young boys and girls to make friends more readily with peers of the same sex is one indication of the difficulty of reaching across this divide. Discovering and realizing the benefits of this complementarity is a basic step in the maturation process. Sexual attraction, among its other roles in the history of the human species, spurs men and women to look beyond the sphere of same-sex companions and recognize the merits of the other.
This process, by drawing two people together, also draws us out of ourselves. The attraction of same-sex friendship lies in sameness; the attraction of the opposite sex lies in difference. The effort to appreciate the different gifts, desires, strengths, and weaknesses of a romantic companion leads to more realistic and humble assessments of our own. This phenomenon is most evident when sexual attraction is channeled in a way that is consistent with traditional Judeo-Christian morality. It occurs most effectively within the context of a chaste courtship and a monogamous marriage, and deviations from that ideal mitigate its positive effects. When the sexual relationship is embedded in a covenant that is total, exclusive, and permanent, then motivations are strong on both sides to listen, understand, and adjust. But even relationships that don’t measure up to this ideal require some measure of recognition of the reality of the other, thereby preserving to some degree the recognition of one’s own social orientation.
When the sexual relationship is embedded in a covenant that is total, exclusive, and permanent, then motivations are strong on both sides to listen, understand, and adjust. But even relationships that don’t measure up to this ideal require some measure of recognition of the reality of the other, thereby preserving to some degree the recognition of one’s own social orientation.
Asocial Sex
That nugget of truth is pulverized by the technological domination of reproduction. Cloning is but one example. As early as 2006, a poll of Canadian collegians found that 87 percent had engaged in some kind of virtual sex—sexual activity using text messaging or a webcam, without an embodied encounter. Without scrutinizing just how relatively corporeal these “virtual” activities might be, “sex” by these means severely degrades, if not totally eliminates, the mutual participation that sexual relations foster.
It does not take a theologian or philosopher to recognize the monumental implications of this shift. Even the nonjudgmental poll moderator observed: “One can almost say that there has been a technological sexual revolution.” Defenders of conventional sexual morality have been shouting for decades that sex is about more than two bodies coming together. In an ironic twist, it seems that they should now convert that message to emphasize the other side of that coin: that sex is—at least partly—about two bodies coming together.
Defenders of conventional sexual morality have been shouting for decades that sex is about more than two bodies coming together. In an ironic twist, it seems that they should now convert that message to emphasize the other side of that coin: that sex is—at least partly—about two bodies coming together.
Of course, the physical urge for sexual union has not been eradicated, and so bodies still come together. Increasingly, however, that physical union entails little beyond satisfying the physical urge. The widely acknowledged hookup culture of American college campuses is the most obvious manifestation. The brief, largely impersonal encounters that characterize this culture have led some—notably, Christine Emba and Louise Perry—to question the assumptions at the heart of the sexual revolution, which created the universe in which we now dwell. One notable marker of hookup culture’s utter failure to satisfy more than just the students’ physical needs was the creation and popularity of Boston College philosophy professor Kerry Cronin’s dating class (her story was told in the 2017 documentary The Dating Project).
Some studies suggest that the hookup culture in fact represents only a subset of young people, or that perhaps it is already in decline. A 2016 study found rates of sexual activity among Millennials to have decreased compared to Generation X, and the trend seems to have continued with Generation Z. But this development, from the perspective of social connection, is a mixed bag. If it means that more teenagers are preserving sex for marriage, then it is to be welcomed. But if it means that men and women are simply avoiding traditional relationships and retreating to tech sex or isolation, then it does not bode well. The data are hard to sort out, and researchers have drawn disparate conclusions. Considering the persistently high and rising age of first marriages and the declining overall marriage rate, however, there seems to be little indication that the most stable and beneficial arrangement for bringing men and women together is thriving.
Given the rapidity with which sexual norms have changed and the seemingly endless capacity for innovation in this area, it’s hazardous to suggest that any development, however shocking, is the nadir in the history of human relations. But surely the emergence of the practice of sologamy—“marrying” oneself—is a low-water mark. While reproduction seems not to be directly implicated in this trend, it does offer an extreme example of the broader social abandonment of the hard work of crossing the line of sexual difference to meet the other.
The decline of social capital has manifold dimensions, and its nature and treatment will keep social commentators busy for some time. Recent alarums about the decline of trust across our society are one indication of the harmful fallout. But it is one thing to underline the deplorable social effects of declining rates of participation in politics, fraternal organizations, and religious communities, and another to notice that the most elemental bit of social capital—one person’s capacity to relate to another—might be eroding. If sexual attraction is one powerful force that God built into the world to counteract the individual’s inclination to self-absorption, then the combination of technological and cultural assaults on this urge doesn’t threaten only the formation of families, the basic unit of society. It also threatens something even more foundational: the nature of the person as a social being.
About the Author: Kevin Schmiesing is research director at the Freedom and Virtue Institute and a research associate at the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life. He is widely published in the fields of religious and economic history and Christian social thought.
Header image: Photo by Ahmed Nishaath on Unsplash
