I know next to nothing about online feminism, Louise Perry
and Mary Harrington, but I found their wide-ranging discussion on The Maiden
Mother Matriarch podcast 84 ‘The Trouble with Modernity’
interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6qDj_YyVoc
We might say that modern people tend to be a
bit like ancient magicians. They think they can master the world by technology.
They do not welcome the world as it is with all its givens. They try to control
and tame it.
But birth and death alike are things that
happen to us. They are done to us and we must receive and endure them. We do
not do them.
This seems intolerable to the modern person. We
medicate our pain and eliminate it. We do not think that suffering is
compatible with human dignity. So we choose when and how to give birth, and
increasingly in the modern West we choose not to. And we say we must choose
when and how to die, and be assisted if our suffering is too great.
(All this got me thinking about the cross too:
voluntarily chosen suffering which is both a death and a birth).
Perhaps this is a fundamental difference
between left and right, progressive and conservatives. Do we think there are
natural givens which we must accept, or is everything (life, death and the in-between)
open to revolution? Do we receive the world on its own terms, or do we use it
aggressively, seeking to master, control, change and tame it for our own ends?
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