It has been 6 months since my last WExForce post. I am married, nearly 30, have a son whose poor skin itches him often, and hate the IRS. I don’t consider hating the IRS. For one, it’s justified. For two, it’s not a person. I can hate a bureaucracy, can’t I?
So BIG news: John Paul is a member of the body of Christ, having been baptized on Divine Mercy Sunday (last Sunday) at Holy Redeemer Church in Saint Louis, Missouri. You’ll recognize that name if you were at my wedding, because it’s the same Church where Angela was baptized, received first communion, and was married to me.
Okay, my battery is about to die on this thing, but I’ve bookmarked this “post new” page on my little tab above, so the hope is that I will renew my energies here.
Want to know what I get to do today? Studying. Driving. Changing a poop or two. Lathering a small squirming body with moisturizing cream. Writing another hate letter to the IRS. Pondering the mysteries of the universe…
Speaking of pondering the mysteries of the universe. I’ve been learning and thinking about something fascinating - technology’s role in God’s creation. I say “God’s creation” because the idea is that matter has meaning. That God designed a tree, and has a purpose in mind for the tree. God designed everything, and has a purpose for everything - even human bodies (hence the Church’s teaching on sex, marriage, etc). The interesting question, to me, is whether our technological society can use the world according to that design - by the very assumptions underlying our technology. The assumption is that matter is just clay to be used for whatever purpose we have in mind - subject to ethics of course, but still - it’s just clay.
This may be a false assumption. I may not be clear, so let me try to say it again another way.
We do place limits on our technology - ethical limits about how to use our technology. Or we try. Some of us. But I think that there is a hidden assumption that we all make in the modern world, an assumption that is pretty dangerous. The assumption is that the world is still clay. There might still be ethical limits to human action (and therefore human technology), but the world is still just a meaningless lump of clay to be molded to our benign purposes.
What if the world doesn’t want to be molded? What if the world isn’t meant to be molded?
Analogy:
You give a kid some Lincoln Logs. He gets a wood grinder, puts all the pieces in, gets a fine dust, adds some pieces of cut up carpet and a little bit of glue, and makes a nice kind of concrete paste. He uses that paste to make a really thin, but really high tower. Now, the Lincoln Logs are meant to build nice log cabins. They aren’t meant to be reduced to their elements and then re-synthesized to create towers!
Yet this seems to be what we do with nature, especially regarding plant and animal life. Humans used to domesticate things. We took nature, and harnessed it (literally). In the modern era, we reduce everything down to basic substances and then synthesize something completely man-made. I wonder what route modern science would take if it pursued biological domestication rather than material synthetics.
