I was reading the Catholic Standard & Times last week when I came across an interesting article by Father J. Brian Bransfield entitled Sexual difference and the defense of marriage. I have to confess that by now I have read about sexuality and complementarity numerous times, and since I already agree with what they say, sometimes I skim over the argument that I've read so many times now. But this article made me sit up and take notice, because in the middle there was a section about how our concept of people has changed over the last 200 years.
I had thought about typing it out on here, but it turns out a similar version of this article is available online (and I think as a pdf if I did this link right?). Once I realized I could simply copy/paste, I decided it was fate that I should blog about this :) So here you have it, the section I found really interesting (italics his, bold mine):
The attack we face today is based in the crisis of the identity of the human person inherited from yesterday. A misunderstanding of the nature of the human person has been advancing for centuries in prestigious universities and in seemingly mundane sociological trends.
The Industrial Revolution of the late 1800’s, while positive in many ways, also had detrimental effects. Before the Industrial Revolution all economies were local. In the agrarian or mercantile society, the father was always relatively close to home, and the children interacted with their father regularly throughout the day. In such a setting the person was understood in terms of the relation to his or her family. The industrial society dragged the father away from the home to the factory. The long hours and demanding schedule led to a conception of the person as one who produced, acquired, and consumed things.
Sixty years later, the Sexual Revolution again changed the notion of the person. Ironically, women sought liberation in taking the exact same route men had taken only a few short years: Away from the home. This move was not any more liberating for women than it was for men. Many women now find themselves struggling to balance a full-time career with the full-time demands of raising a family.
With the advent of so called free-love, the pornography industry, the contraceptive pill, and no-fault divorce, the Sexual Revolution separated marriage from sexuality, and sexuality from love. The human person was understood as someone whose meaning came not just from acquiring things, but from acquiring pleasure. Commitment, especially that of marriage, was seen as the enemy of pleasure.
Forty years after the Sexual Revolution along came the Technological Revolution. With computers, cell phones, iPods, and instant messaging, the notion of personal identity again changed. Now, being a person meant not only that one acquired pleasure, but that one did so quickly.
To sum up, the Industrial, Sexual, and Technological Revolutions altered the popular understanding of identity of the human person. Instead of being grounded in marriage and family, the person’s identity is grounded in acquiring pleasure quickly. One result is the popular misconception that the human person consists simply of “consciousness”: A person is his or her internal, individual, subjective, rational and emotional consciousness. The emphasis on the inner psyche has led to a de-emphasis of the meaning of the body: the body is dismissed as an incidental and unimportant reality which surrounds the real self. The fact that human nature includes either male or female persons is deemed unimportant, and is even a restriction to be overcome.
The crisis we face today has deep roots. Abortion, divorce, euthanasia, human embryonic stem cell research, fatherlessness and same-sex “unions” all emerge out of the notion that being a person means acquiring pleasure quickly. This distortion of what it is to be human is tragic and devastating for individuals and society.