UN MENSAJE OPORTUNO

[Hay que profundizar en lo que la familia es y en lo que la familia representa para cada persona. Decía G. K. Chesterton —hace ahora un siglo, más o menos— que quienes hablan contra la familia no saben lo que hacen, porque no saben lo que deshacen.

Y añadía con su argumentación brillante y lúcida: Entre las instituciones atacadas así, de manera nada inteligente, está la creación humana fundamental: la familia. Y es atacada no porque la gente la entienda, sino porque no la entiende en absoluto. Le dan golpes a ciegas, sin pensar un momento por qué fue levantada. (...) Claro que en toda familia hay problemas, pero los problemas no se disuelven cuando se disuelve la familia. En realidad, se agrandan. (...) Además, [la familia] es el origen de toda sociedad, que se constituye siempre por un conjunto de reinos pequeños en los que un hombre y una mujer se convierten en rey y reina, y en los que ejercen una autoridad razonable, sujeta al sentido común de la comunidad, hasta que quienes están bajo su cuidado crecen y son capaces de fundar reinos similares. Ésta es la estructura social de la humanidad, mucho más vieja que toda su documentación histórica, y más universal que cualquiera de sus religiones. Por eso, todos los intentos de alterarla son engaño y estupidez. Para saber más del pensamiento de Chesterton sobre la familia, recomendamos vivamente un libro que acaba de ser publicado "La mujer y la familia" (Ed. Styria; edición a cargo de José Ramón Ayllón, que es también el autor del prólogo).

La batalla contra la familia persiste en la sociedad actual, con amenazas y ataques más fuertes que nunca. Como ha escrito Jaime Nubiola en relación al Encuentro Mundial de las Familias: Ahora en su visita a Valencia el Papa Benedicto XVI, con toda la autoridad moral e histórica que le ha sido conferida, desea presentarnos la verdad sobre la familia porque en nuestra sociedad contemporánea se encuentra amenazada por muy diversos factores. La familia es una realidad que supera nuestro pensamiento sobre ella y por esta razón debe quedar por encima de nuestras diferencias políticas.

De todo esto también ha hablado con mucha claridad Mons. Fernando Sebastián. Reproducimos un artículo suyo que acaba de publicar el Diario de Navarra (20-VII-2006), en el que hace unos interesantes comentarios sobre la familia y sobre el mensaje de esperanza que el Papa ha lanzado desde Valencia al mundo entero.]


#330 Hogar Categoria-Matrimonio y Familia

por Mons. Fernando Sebastián, arzobispo de Pamplona y obispo de Tudela

________________________

Un mensaje oportuno. Es lo menos que se puede decir de las intervenciones del Papa Benedicto en su reciente viaje a Valencia. Vino a clausurar el Vº Encuentro mundial de la Familia. Quiso lanzar desde Valencia un mensaje de esperanza a todas las familias del mundo y lo hizo con su estilo personal, hecho de sencillez, claridad, amabilidad y firmeza.

Lo que el Papa dijo nos sirve, por supuesto, a los católicos, iluminará a quienes se encuentren en el terreno movedizo de la duda y hasta puede hacer reflexionar a alguno de los que piensan que el cristianismo ha quedado superado por el viejo laicismo repristinado que ahora parece dominar y querer transformar nuestra sociedad. El Papa comienza diciendo que la Iglesia valora y proclama la verdad de la familia, fundada sobre el matrimonio indisoluble entre hombre y mujer, entendido como un compromiso de amor fiel, estable, irrevocable, generoso y fecundo. El matrimonio entre varón y mujer es una realidad natural, querida por Dios, rescatada y santificada por la redención de Cristo. En la realidad matrimonial y familiar se manifiesta la vocación del hombre para el amor, pues estamos hechos a imagen y semejanza de Dios que es Él mismo familia y amor infinitos.

La familia manifiesta y desarrolla la naturaleza relacional y social de la persona. Es el primer núcleo de la sociedad. Lo que daña a la familia daña a las personas y a la sociedad entera. La familia es un bien insustituible para los hijos, un bien necesario para los pueblos. El amor entre el padre y la madre ofrece a los hijos una gran seguridad y les enseña a conocer y vivir el amor verdadero. En la familia se aprende a amar y a ser amado. Por eso la familia es el lugar adecuado para nacer, crecer y vivir en la verdad del amor. Sin una familia estable las personas, como la sociedad, pierden la confianza y la alegría de vivir. El ser humano, sin la experiencia básica de una familia bien construida en un amor verdadero, queda herido para siempre.

En la familia, con la vida corporal, recibimos el patrimonio espiritual de la cultura y con ella lo más valioso de nuestra tradición espiritual que es la fe cristiana. Los hijos tienen derecho a ser bien educados por sus padres, y los padres tienen el derecho y la obligación de educar y guiar la vida cultural y espiritual de sus hijos. Los padres transmiten la fe a sus hijos cuando rezan con ellos, cuando les acompañan en la iniciación sacramental y eclesial, cuando en la vida diaria del hogar se manifiesta la relación filial con Dios, con Jesucristo y con la Iglesia. La tarea más grande de las familias es la transmisión de la fe a los hijos y la formación de personas libres y responsables. En la familia, gracias al ejemplo de los padres, los hijos descubren el gozo de vivir en la verdad y en el amor, esta experiencia les ayudará a vencer los obstáculos que luego ellos han de encontrar en su vida. Los hijos tienen derecho a nacer y vivir en un hogar que les dé la experiencia de amor que necesitan para descubrir y cultivar su propia humanidad. Los padres son los primeros educadores de sus hijos y los primeros anunciadores de la fe para ellos. Los abuelos amplían la experiencia del amor y así enriquecen la vida familiar. En un mundo tan disgregador como es el nuestro, las familias no pueden estar solas. La Iglesia tiene que ofrecerles la posibilidad de unirse y de ayudarse en el recorrido de su camino humano y espiritual, social y apostólico. Las parroquias y los movimientos o asociaciones familiares tienen que salir a su encuentro.

Actualmente, con frecuencia se pretende organizar la sociedad contando sólo con los individuos aislados, sin tener en cuenta la realidad intermedia de la familia. Ahora bien, prescindir de la familia conduce a una cultura del egoísmo, a una vida sin amor ni generosidad, a una vida sin alegría. La familia nos proporciona las experiencias más profundas de amor, de libertad y de responsabilidad. Sin esta educación no puede haber buenos ciudadanos ni puede haber tampoco sociedades sanas y estables. Ante la presión de una cultura del egoísmo que amenaza la humanidad del hombre, la familia tiene que ser reconocida y apoyada como la gran escuela del amor, de la libertad, de la tolerancia, de la justicia y de la solidaridad.

Anunciando y defendiendo la verdad del matrimonio y de la familia, la Iglesia y los cristianos hacemos un gran servicio al bien común, al bien de la sociedad entera. Los gobernantes tendrían que pensar en esto y sacar las consecuencias, al margen de cualquier ideología. La Iglesia y las instituciones civiles tendríamos que ir de acuerdo y complementarnos en el servicio a las familias normales, estables, generosas y fecundas. Ellas forman el entramado básico de la sociedad y de la Iglesia.

LAS PALABRAS Y LAS COSAS: A PROPÓSITO DE BENEDICTO XVI Y LA FAMILIA

[Juan José García-Noblejas es Profesor Ordinario de Poetica e Iconología y de Sceneggiatura Audiovisiva en la Pontificia Universidad de la Santa Cruz en Roma. En el artículo que ahora reproducimos -que fue publicado en su blog, Scriptor.org- hace una interesante comparación en el modo de titular las intervenciones del Papa en el EMF de Valencia en los distintos medios y, en concreto, la coincidencia en decir que Benedicto XVI ha defendido la 'familia tradicional'.

En otros blogs se ha tratado también sobre la unanimidad en esta adjetivación de la familia que se ha extendido de un medio a otro, a través de la red, como si de una epidemia se tratase. Así, en Análisis digital se dice, entre otras cosas: Con extraña unanimidad los medios de comunicación han titulado las intervenciones del Papa en Valencia como defensa de la “familia tradicional”. Adjetivar de tradicional a la familia defendida por el Papa me causa la impresión de que esconde una aviesa intención: la de considerarla anticuada y obsoleta y oponerla a otros tipos de familia que no son tradicionales sino “modernos, actuales, progres”.Pero sería necesario ver si esas nuevas familias cumplen con más eficacia que la tradicional las funciones que tal institución tiene atribuidas.

Y en Caraacara: La mayor parte de los medios no han parado de decir que el Papa y la Iglesia apuestan por la familia tradicional. Oiga, de que tradición, de la judía, la del derecho romano, la indú de las castas y los karmas? La familia basada en el compromiso irrevocable de varón y mujer entre sí, abierta a la vida y la transmisión de los valores y de la Fe. Los legisladores deberían promover leyes justas y rectas para ayudar a lo que más se valora. Otros tipos de familia son más bien cuasi familia, cercanas pero no el ideal. Ah y que gran papel el de los abuelos, que ayudan a los nietos a entender la vida y la muerte.

A continuación se publica el artículo de scriptor.com]

#329 Hogar Categoria-Matrimonio y Familia





por Juan José García-Noblejas

__________________

Es patente que el presidente del gobierno español es muy libre de no ir o de ir a la misa celebrada por el Papa. Como ha dicho el portavoz vaticano Navarro-Valls, “a misa va quien quiere”. Siendo la misa lo que es, y no lo que a alguno se ocurra inventar o decidir por votación.

Parece que algo semejante está en el aire del viaje de Benedicto XVI a España, cuando se trata de hablar de la familia. A la familia -cabría decir- va quien quiere. Siendo la familia lo que es, y no lo que a cada uno se le ocurra inventar, o a muchos decidir por votación, o por campaña de comunicación.

Perdón por parecer tautológico, pero sucede que la familia es lo que es, y supone lo que supone, por mucho que las leyes de un país determinado, en un momento determinado llamen “familia” o “matrimonio” a cosas que realmente no lo son. Lo que sea la familia no lo decide, por ejemplo, la voluntad de un gobierno o -ya puestos- la ONU o así.

Digo esto porque he podido comprobar que hay no poca tendencia a llamar "familia" a cualquier cosa, en plan relativista. Y he podido comprobar que –fruto de esta petulante ignorancia (sobre todo ignorancia)- dos de los grandes periódicos españoles, políticamente rivales entre sí, coinciden sin embargo en hablar de lo que llaman “familia tradicional”, para referirse a la familia en boca de Benedicto XVI.

Cuando El Mundo dice que “El Papa defiende en España el ‘valor’ de la familia tradicional”, coincide con El País, que dice “Benedicto XVI defiende la familia tradicional en su primera visita a España”.

En este caso, el diario ABC destaca del pelotón gracias al artículo de Juan Manuel De Prada, “Pollos y conejos”, en el que la fina ironía de su pluma se detiene en glosar levemente el pleonasmo que supone decir “familia tradicional”:

• SIEMPRE se me ha antojado entre redundante y rocambolesco que a la familia se la moteje de «tradicional». No me causaría mayor asombro si mañana entrara en un restaurante y, tras solicitar al camarero un guiso de conejo, éste me respondiese: «Perdone el señor, ¿se refiere a un conejo tradicional? Porque también podemos ofrecerle un conejo bípedo». (…)

• (…) salvo que juguemos al cinismo, hemos de reconocer que familia no existe más que una. Cuando decimos «familia tradicional» estamos formulando en realidad un pleonasmo, tan grotesco e hilarante como si dijéramos que después de comer nos gusta dar un «paseo pedestre». Pues «tradicional» viene del latín «traditio», que significa entrega, transmisión. No existe familia sin transmisión de vida, sin entrega de una generación a otra; y esa «traditio» se realiza mediante la unión permanente y fecunda de un hombre y una mujer que proyectan su fe en el futuro sobre una vida que los prolonga. Podemos jugar a torcer el lenguaje cuanto deseemos, podemos marear las palabras y someterlas a centrifugados y travestismos pintorescos; pero, por mucho que nos empeñemos, un pollo seguirá siendo un pollo, aunque lo envolvamos con una piel de conejo.

Inteligente sentido común, al relacionar las palabras y las cosas.

BENEDICTO XVI, EN VALENCIA

[La ciudad de Valencia ha recuperado ya su estado normal después del V Encuentro Mundial de las Familias (EMF).

Benedicto XVI permaneció 26 horas en tierras valencianas, desde su llegada el sábado 8 al aeropuerto de Manises, a las 11:22 minutos, hasta las 13 horas del domingo 9, en que regresó a Roma.

Para los que valoran las cifras, la magnitud de este EMF se puede ver reflejado en algunos datos significativos, entresacados entre otros muchos:

• Más de 8.000 policías velaron por la seguridad del Papa, autoridades y peregrinos durante el EMF.
• 200 miembros de las fuerzas armadas y 10.000 voluntarios de distintas procedencias colaboraron también en la seguridad.
• Más de 4.000 periodistas fueron acreditados por la Organización para cubrir este acontecimiento.
• Se instalaron 50 pantallas gigantes, desde el Paseo de la Alameda hasta la Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias.
• El "presbiterio" donde Benedicto XVI celebró la Misa tenía una superficie de 2.700 metros cuadrados .
• Más de 50 cardenales, 450 obispos y 3.000 sacerdotes de los cinco continentes, participaron en la multitudinaria Misa.
• Más de un millón de fieles de todo el mundo asistieron en esa Misa celebrada por el Papa el domingo 9 de julio.
• Más de 1.000 personas, entre médicos, enfermeros y voluntarios, participaron en el dispositivo sanitario.
• Más de 2.000 grifos de agua ayudaron a los peregrinos a combatir el fuerte calor.

Pero vayamos a aspectos más de fondo. ¿Por qué tantas familias, allí en Valencia y en todo el mundo, estaban pendientes de las palabras del Santo Padre? Porque son conscientes de la importancia que la institución familiar tiene para la sociedad y observan con preocupación el maltrato y la persecución que el matrimonio y la familia reciben en nuestros días por parte del gobierno socialista.

Quien no acierte a verlo así, quizá sea porque carezca de las suficientes luces intelectuales y éticas como para valorar rectamente una cuestión de tanta trascendencia antropológica y sociológica. Cuando uno habla, por ejemplo, del peligro ecológico y del daño que hace al mundo el agujero de ozono, a nadie se le ocurre gritar diciendo que es intolerante por defender el mundo y la atmósfera; ni tampoco le dice que se calle, porque la libertad prevalece por encima de todo y uno quema un bosque si así le viene en gana... ¡Faltaría más: no se le ocurra tocar el bosque! Pues algo parecido pasa con la "gripe aviar" y pasa también con el "agujero familiar" del que estamos hablando: nada tienen que ver ni con la tolerancia, ni con la libertad, sino que son peligros evidentes que afectan gravemente —de distinto modo y en diverso grado— a la entera sociedad humana.

Como se dice en un reciente documento del Consejo Pontificio de la Familia —«Familia y procreación humana»— que fue presentado el pasado 6 de junio: "(...) hoy el hombre se ha vuelto un gran enigma para sí mismo y vive la crisis más aguda de toda la historia en su dimensión familiar: la familia es objeto de ataques como nunca en el pasado; los nuevos modelos de familia la destruyen; las técnicas de procreación arrojan por la ventana el amor humano; las políticas del control de natalidad conducen al actual 'invierno demográfico' ".

Hace unos días el Cardenal Herranz respondía a la pregunta ¿quién inventó la familia?. Entresacamos lo más sustancioso de lo que dijo:

• ... el Cristianismo no ha creado la familia. La familia la encontramos en todos los pueblos y culturas de todos los tiempos.
  

• La familia, unión del hombre y la mujer en matrimonio con la consiguiente procreación y educación de los hijos, está inscrita en la naturaleza humana y por ello es común a toda la humanidad. La familia es pues una institución natural.
  

• ... en la familia está ya en germen la sociedad, y ésta se fundamenta sobre la familia. (...) Es su propia naturaleza la que lleva al hombre a vivir en familia, y en familia a constituir sociedades.

• ... la familia es el lugar insustituible para la transmisión de la vida, futuro de los pueblos: el hecho es que sólo es fecunda la unión del hombre y la mujer.

• La unión de hombre y mujer en orden a la procreación de nuevas personas, necesita la estabilidad de un hogar para el bien de los hijos. Los niños, en efecto, tienen el derecho de nacer y ser educados con la referencia segura de un padre y una madre comprometidos entre sí para siempre por el matrimonio.

• ... la fe que profesamos los cristianos nos lleva ciertamente a defender pública y privadamente la familia; también porque sabemos que cada fiel cristiano puede hacer mucho en favor de la familia, y que ninguno debe quedarse cruzado de brazos. Menos aun en países democráticos que tienen el deber de poner en el centro de sus sistemas jurídicos los verdaderos protagonistas: la persona humana, con su dignidad inviolable, y la familia, con su verdadera identidad antropológica.

S.S. Benedicto XVI ha hablado muy claro en Valencia recordando lo que es el matrimonio y la familia. Entresacamos a continuación las principales ideas de los dicursos y homilías del Papa.

Si desean descargar los textos íntegros del Papa , pueden hacerlo aquí en los formatos PDF o PDB (para Palm o Pocket).]

#328 Hogar Categoria-Matrimonio y Familia

por S.S. Benedicto XVI
_____________________

• Sabéis que sigo de cerca y con mucho interés los acontecimientos de la Iglesia en vuestro País, de profunda raigambre cristiana y que tanto ha aportado y está llamada a aportar al testimonio de la fe y a su difusión en otras muchas partes del mundo. Mantened vivo y vigoroso este espíritu, que ha acompañado la vida de los españoles en su historia, para que siga nutriendo y dando vitalidad al alma de vuestro pueblo. [1]

• Seguid, pues, proclamando sin desánimo que prescindir de Dios, actuar como si no existiera o relegar la fe al ámbito meramente privado, socava la verdad del hombre e hipoteca el futuro de la cultura y de la sociedad. [1]

• Movidos por vuestra solicitud pastoral y el espíritu de plena comunión en el anuncio del Evangelio, habéis orientado la conciencia cristiana de vuestros fieles sobre diversos aspectos de la realidad ante la cual se encuentran y que en ocasiones perturban la vida eclesial y la fe de los sencillos. [1]

• La familia es el ámbito privilegiado donde cada persona aprende a dar y recibir amor. Por eso la Iglesia manifiesta constantemente su solicitud pastoral por este espacio fundamental para la persona humana. [2]

• La familia es una institución intermedia entre el individuo y la sociedad, y nada la puede suplir totalmente. Ella misma se apoya sobre todo en una profunda relación interpersonal entre el esposo y la esposa, sostenida por el afecto y comprensión mutua. Para ello recibe la abundante ayuda de Dios en el sacramento del matrimonio, que comporta verdadera vocación a la santidad. [2]

• La familia es un bien necesario para los pueblos, un fundamento indispensable para la sociedad y un gran tesoro de los esposos durante toda su vida. Es un bien insustituible para los hijos, que han de ser fruto del amor, de la donación total y generosa de los padres. Proclamar la verdad integral de la familia, fundada en el matrimonio como Iglesia doméstica y santuario de la vida, es una gran responsabilidad de todos. [2]

• El padre y la madre se han dicho un "sí" total ante de Dios, lo cual constituye la base del sacramento que les une; asimismo, para que la relación interna de la familia sea completa, es necesario que digan también un "sí" de aceptación a sus hijos, a los que han engendrado o adoptado y que tienen su propia personalidad y carácter. [2]

• Junto con la transmisión de la fe y del amor del Señor, una de las tareas más grandes de la familia es la de formar personas libres y responsables. Por ello los padres han de ir devolviendo a sus hijos la libertad, de la cual durante algún tiempo son tutores. Si éstos ven que sus padres -y en general los adultos que les rodean- viven la vida con alegría y entusiasmo, incluso a pesar de las dificultades, crecerá en ellos más fácilmente ese gozo profundo de vivir que les ayudará a superar con acierto los posibles obstáculos y contrariedades que conlleva la vida humana. [2]

• Transmitir la fe a los hijos, con la ayuda de otras personas e instituciones como la parroquia, la escuela o las asociaciones católicas, es una responsabilidad que los padres no pueden olvidar, descuidar o delegar totalmente. [2]

• Este encuentro da nuevo aliento para seguir anunciando el Evangelio de la familia, reafirmar su vigencia e identidad basada en el matrimonio abierto al don generoso de la vida, y donde se acompaña a los hijos en su crecimiento corporal y espiritual. De este modo se contrarresta un hedonismo muy difundido, que banaliza las relaciones humanas y las vacía de su genuino valor y belleza. [2]

• Invito, pues, a los gobernantes y legisladores a reflexionar sobre el bien evidente que los hogares en paz y en armonía aseguran al hombre, a la familia, centro neurálgico de la sociedad, como recuerda la Santa Sede en la Carta de los Derechos de la Familia. El objeto de las leyes es el bien integral del hombre, la respuesta a sus necesidades y aspiraciones. [2]

• La criatura concebida ha de ser educada en la fe, amada y protegida. Los hijos, con el fundamental derecho a nacer y ser educados en la fe, tienen derecho a un hogar que tenga como modelo el de Nazaret y sean preservados de toda clase de insidias y amenazas. [2]

• Deseo referirme ahora a los abuelos, tan importantes en las familias. Ellos pueden ser -y son tantas veces- los garantes del afecto y la ternura que todo ser humano necesita dar y recibir. Ellos dan a los pequeños la perspectiva del tiempo, son memoria y riqueza de las familias. Ojalá que, bajo ningún concepto, sean excluidos del círculo familiar. Son un tesoro que no podemos arrebatarles a las nuevas generaciones, sobre todo cuando dan testimonio de fe ante la cercanía de la muerte. [2]

• Ningún hombre se ha dado el ser a sí mismo ni ha adquirido por sí solo los conocimientos elementales para la vida. Todos hemos recibido de otros la vida y las verdades básicas para la misma, y estamos llamados a alcanzar la perfección en relación y comunión amorosa con los demás. La familia, fundada en el matrimonio indisoluble entre un hombre y una mujer, expresa esta dimensión relacional, filial y comunitaria, y es el ámbito donde el hombre puede nacer con dignidad, crecer y desarrollarse de un modo integral. [3]

• Cuando un niño nace, a través de la relación con sus padres empieza a formar parte de una tradición familiar, que tiene raíces aún más antiguas. Con el don de la vida recibe todo un patrimonio de experiencia. A este respecto, los padres tienen el derecho y el deber inalienable de transmitirlo a los hijos: educarlos en el descubrimiento de su identidad, iniciarlos en la vida social, en el ejercicio responsable de su libertad moral y de su capacidad de amar a través de la experiencia de ser amados y, sobre todo, en el encuentro con Dios. Los hijos crecen y maduran humanamente en la medida en que acogen con confianza ese patrimonio y esa educación que van asumiendo progresivamente. De este modo son capaces de elaborar una síntesis personal entre lo recibido y lo nuevo, y que cada uno y cada generación está llamado a realizar. [3]

• En el origen de todo hombre y, por tanto, en toda paternidad y maternidad humana está presente Dios Creador. Por eso los esposos deben acoger al niño que les nace como hijo no sólo suyo, sino también de Dios, que lo ama por sí mismo y lo llama a la filiación divina. Más aún: toda generación, toda paternidad y maternidad, toda familia tiene su principio en Dios, que es Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo. [3]

• Venimos ciertamente de nuestros padres y somos sus hijos, pero también venimos de Dios, que nos ha creado a su imagen y nos ha llamado a ser sus hijos. Por eso, en el origen de todo ser humano no existe el azar o la casualidad, sino un proyecto del amor de Dios. Es lo que nos ha revelado Jesucristo, verdadero Hijo de Dios y hombre perfecto. Él conocía de quién venía y de quién venimos todos: del amor de su Padre y Padre nuestro. [3]

• La fe no es, pues, una mera herencia cultural, sino una acción continua de la gracia de Dios que llama y de la libertad humana que puede o no adherirse a esa llamada. Aunque nadie responde por otro, sin embargo los padres cristianos están llamados a dar un testimonio creíble de su fe y esperanza cristiana. [3]

• Con el pasar de los años, este don de Dios que los padres han contribuido a poner ante los ojos de los pequeños necesitará también ser cultivado con sabiduría y dulzura, haciendo crecer en ellos la capacidad de discernimiento. De este modo, con el testimonio constante del amor conyugal de los padres, vivido e impregnado de la fe, y con el acompañamiento entrañable de la comunidad cristiana, se favorecerá que los hijos hagan suyo el don mismo de la fe, descubran con ella el sentido profundo de la propia existencia y se sientan gozosos y agradecidos por ello. [3]

• La familia cristiana transmite la fe cuando los padres enseñan a sus hijos a rezar y rezan con ellos (cf. Familiaris consortio, 60); cuando los acercan a los sacramentos y los van introduciendo en la vida de la Iglesia; cuando todos se reúnen para leer la Biblia, iluminando la vida familiar a la luz de la fe y alabando a Dios como Padre. [3]

• La Iglesia no cesa de recordar que la verdadera libertad del ser humano proviene de haber sido creado a imagen y semejanza de Dios. Por ello, la educación cristiana es educación de la libertad y para la libertad. [3]

• Para avanzar en ese camino de madurez humana, la Iglesia nos enseña a respetar y promover la maravillosa realidad del matrimonio indisoluble entre un hombre y una mujer, que es, además, el origen de la familia. Por eso, reconocer y ayudar a esta institución es uno de los mayores servicios que se pueden prestar hoy día al bien común y al verdadero desarrollo de los hombres y de las sociedades, así como la mejor garantía para asegurar la dignidad, la igualdad y la verdadera libertad de la persona humana. [3]

________________

Referencias:

[1] Del mensaje a los obispos españoles, Valencia, 8-VII-2006

[2] Del discurso en la clausura del V EMF, Valencia, 8-VII-2006

[3] De la homilía en la Santa Misa, Valencia, 9-VII-2006

BRAVE NEW BIOLOGY: THE CHALLENGE FOR HUMAN DIGNITY

[León R. Kass, titular de la Cátedra Addie Clark Harding de Pensamiento Social en la Universidad de Chicago, es licenciado en Ciencias Biológicas y en Medicina. Completó su formación científica con la presentación de una tesis doctoral en Bioquímica en la Universidad de Harvard en 1967. Tras ejercer durante varios años como investigador de biología molecular en el Instituto Nacional de Salud y en el Servicio de Salud Pública de los EE.UU., cambió la orientación y el enfoque de su trabajo hacia el estudio de las cuestiones éticas, políticas, religiosas y culturales que surgen a partir de los avances biomédicos. Gran parte de su acierto –y de su éxito– se debe al tratamiento multidisciplinar e integral que ha dispensado a estos problemas.

En 1969, Kass fundó el Centro Hastings, el primer instituto dedicado a la investigación bioética en el mundo. A continuación fue nombrado Secretario Ejecutivo del Comité de las Ciencias de la Vida y de la Política Social de la Academia Nacional de las Ciencias. Fruto de su trabajo en dicho Comité fue el documento “Assessing Biomedical Technologies”, un estudio pionero sobre los conflictos éticos y sociales que provoca la utilización de las nuevas tecnologías de la vida. Entre 2001 y 2005 fue Director del Consejo de Bioética del presidente George W. Bush.

Sus numerosas obras incluyen “Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs” (1985), “The Ethics of Human Cloning” (1998) y “Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness” (2003). Además, junto con la profesora Amy A. Kass, su esposa desde hace más de 40 años, preparó “Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying” (2000), una antología de textos para un curso sobre la ética de la vida cotidiana.

El texto que ahora publicamos en inglés es la 3ª lección conmemorativa de la Cátedra Rafael Escolá de Ética Profesional que Leon R. Kass pronunció en TECNUN (San Sebastián), el pasado 17 de marzo.]

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[Dr. Kass researches bioethics, ethics, philosophy, marriage, family, and social mores. He was chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, which has released Human Cloning and Human Dignity (2002) and Beyond Therapy (2003).

Professional Experience:

• Chairman, President's Council on Bioethics, 2001- 2005.

• W. H. Brady, Jr., Distinguished Fellow, American Enterprise Institute, 1991-1992, 1998-1999.

• Senior fellow, MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, The University of Chicago, 1991-2001.

• Senior fellow and associate director, John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy, The University of Chicago, 1986-2001.

• Member, vice-chairman, and committee chairman, National Council on the Humanities/National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984-1991.

• Professor, The College and the Committee on Social Thought, The University of Chicago, 1976-2001.

• Research professor in bioethics, The Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, 1974-1976.

• Tutor, St. John's College, 1972-1976.

• Executive secretary, Committee on the Life Sciences and Social Policy, National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, 1970-1972.

• Staff fellow, Laboratory of Molecular Biology, National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, National Institutes of Health, 1967-1970.

• Surgeon, United States Public Health Service, 1967-1969.

• Intern, Beth Israel Hospital, 1962-1963.

Education:

• Ph.D, biochemistry, Harvard University.

• M.D., honors, University of Chicago.

• B.S., biology, honors, University of Chicago.

With the aim of perpetuating the ideals espoused and work carried out by the engineer Dr. Rafael Escola so that professionals could do their job with technical competence and ethical inspiration, the Rafael Escola Foundation has signed an agreement with the School of Engineering of the University of Navarra, TECNUN, in order to create the Rafael Escola Chair of Ethics.

The Chair provides an adequate framework for the promotion of all kinds of education and research initiatives in the field of engineering. Through these initiatives the Chair will bolster the teaching of ethics at the schools of engineering and give ethical advice to businesses.]


#327 Varios Categoria-Varios: Etica y Antropologia

by Leon R. Kass

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The urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century and the new global struggle against terrorism and fanaticism seems to have blinded many people to a deep truth about the present age: nearly all contemporary societies, East as well as West, are traveling briskly in the same utopian direction. Nearly all are wedded to the modern technological project; all march eagerly to the drums of progress and fly proudly the banner of modern science; all sing loudly the Baconian anthem, “Conquer nature, relieve man's estate.” Leading the triumphal procession is modern medicine, which is daily becoming ever more powerful in its battle against disease, decay, and death, thanks especially to astonishing achievements in biomedical science and technology -achievements for which we must surely be grateful.

Yet contemplating present and projected advances in genetic and reproductive technologies, in neuroscience and psychopharmacology, in the development of artificial organs and computer-chip implants for human brains, and in research to control biological aging, we now clearly recognize new uses for biotechnical power that soar beyond the traditional medical goals of healing disease and relieving suffering. We are promised new and effective routes to better children, superior performance, ageless bodies, and happy souls [1].

According to some enthusiasts, human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and neuro-psychic “enhancement,” for wholesale re-design. In leading laboratories, academic and industrial, new creators are confidently amassing their powers and quietly honing their skills, while on the street their evangelists are zealously prophesying a post-human future. For anyone who cares about preserving our humanity, the time has come to pay attention.

Some transforming powers are already here. The Pill. In vitro fertilization. Bottled embryos. Surrogate wombs. Cloning. Genetic screening. Genetic manipulation. Organ harvesting. Mechanical spare parts. Chimeras. Brain implants. Deep brain stimulation. Ritalin for the young, Viagra for the old, Prozac for everyone. And, to leave this vale of tears, a little extra morphine accompanied by Muzak.

Years ago Aldous Huxley saw it coming. In his charming but disturbing novel, Brave New World (it appeared in 1932 and is more powerful on each re-reading), he made its meaning visible for all to see. Huxley shows us a dystopia that goes with, rather than against, the human grain, animated indeed by our own most humane and progressive aspirations. Following those aspirations to their ultimate realization, Huxley enables us to recognize those less obvious but often more pernicious evils that are inextricably linked to the successful attainment of the things we most often pursue.

Huxley depicts human life seven centuries hence, living under the gentle hand of humanitarianism rendered fully competent by genetic manipulation, psychoactive drugs, hypnopaedia, and high-tech amusements. At long last, mankind has succeeded in eliminating disease, aggression, war, anxiety, suffering, guilt, envy, and grief. But this victory comes at the heavy price of homogenization, mediocrity, trivial pursuits, shallow attachments, debased tastes, spurious contentment, and souls without loves or longings. The Brave New World has achieved prosperity, community, stability, and nigh-universal contentment, only to be peopled by creatures of human shape but stunted humanity. They consume, fornicate, take “soma,” enjoy “centrifugal bumble-puppy” and other technological distractions, and operate the machinery that makes it all possible. They do not read, write, think, love, or govern themselves. Art and science, virtue and religion, family and friendship are all passe. What matters most is bodily health and immediate gratification. No one aspires to anything higher: Brave New Man is so dehumanized that he does not even recognize what has been lost.

Brave New World is, of course, science fiction. Our Prozac is not yet Huxley's “soma”; cloning by nuclear transfer is not exactly “Bokanovskification”; video games and virtual-reality parlors are not quite the “feelies”; and our current safe and consequenceless sexual practices are not universally as loveless or as empty as those in the novel. But the kinships are disquieting, all the more so since our technologies of bio-psycho-engineering are still in their infancy, yet they vividly reveal what they might look like in their full maturity. Moreover, the cultural changes that technology has already wrought among us should make us even more worried than Huxley would have had us be when he saw us coming.

In Huxley's novel, everything proceeds under the direction of an omnipotent, albeit benevolent, world state. Yet the dehumanization that he depicts does not really require despotism or external control. To the contrary, precisely because the society of the future that we are striving to create will deliver exactly what we most want -health, safety, comfort, plenty, pleasure, peace of mind and length of days- we can reach the same humanly debased condition solely on the basis of free human choice. No need for World Controllers. Just give us the technological imperative, liberal democratic society, compassionate humanitarianism, moral pluralism, and free markets, and we can take ourselves to a Brave New World all by ourselves -and without even deliberately deciding to go. In case you had not noticed, the train has already left the station and is gathering speed, although there appear to be no human hands on the throttle.

Some among us are delighted, of course, by this state of affairs: a few scientists and biotechnologists, their entrepreneurial backers, and a cheering claque of science fiction enthusiasts, futurologists, “immortalists,” and libertarians. There are dreams to be realized, powers to be exercised, honors to be won, and money -big money-to be made. But many of us are worried, and not, as the proponents of the revolution self-servingly claim, because we are either ignorant of science or afraid of the unknown. To the contrary, we can see all too clearly where the train is headed, and we do not like the destination. No friend of humanity cheers for a post-human future.

Truth be told, it will not be easy for us to do much about it. For there are many features of modern life -perhaps especially in the United States, but also in the West more generally- that conspire to frustrate efforts aimed at the human control of the biomedical project.

• First, we believe in technological automatism: where we do not foolishly believe that all innovation is progress, we fatalistically believe that it is inevitable. (“If it can be done, it will be done, like it or not.”)
  

• Second, we believe in freedom: the freedom of scientists to inquire, the freedom of technologists to develop, the freedom of entrepreneurs to invest and to profit, the freedom of private citizens to make use of existing technologies to satisfy any and all personal desires.
  

• Third, the biomedical enterprise occupies the moral high ground of compassionate humanitarianism, upholding the supreme values of modern life -cure disease, prolong life, relieve suffering- in competition with which other moral goods rarely stand a chance. (“What the public wants is not to be sick,” says Nobel laureate James Watson, “and if we help them not to be sick, they'll be on our side.”)
  

• Fourth, our cultural pluralism and easygoing relativism make it difficult to reach consensus on what we should embrace and what we should oppose; and serious moral objections to this or that biomedical practice are often facilely dismissed as religious or sectarian.
  

• Fifth, it also does not help that the biomedical project is now deeply entangled with commerce: there are increasingly powerful economic interests in favor of going full steam ahead, and no economic interests in favor of going cautiously and slow.
  

• Sixth, since we live in a democracy, moreover, we face political difficulties in gaining a consensus to direct our future, and we have almost no political experience in trying to curtail or even slow down the development of any new biomedical technology.
  

• Finally, and perhaps most troubling, our views of the meaning of our humanity have been so transformed by the scientific-technological approach to the world and to life that we are in danger of forgetting what we have to lose, humanly speaking.

It is this last matter of self-misunderstanding to which I wish to devote the remainder of this lecture. For we shall have little chance of protecting ourselves against the dangers of runaway biotechnology if we do not adequately understand what is at stake, if we do not recognize which human goods are in danger and worth defending. The first thing needful is a correction and deepening of our thinking.

To be fair, judging from my own students' reactions to Huxley's Brave New World, Americans are not yet so degraded or so cynical as to fail to be revolted by the society he depicts. But it is instructive to notice the nature of their objections. Sensitive egalitarians, they are first bothered by the rigid class structure of the cognitively stratified society, which is divided impermeably into alphas, betas, gammas, deltas, and epsilons, each class with its distinctive employments and pastimes. Yet they fail to notice that, thanks to effective childhood conditioning, members of each group are utterly and equally content with their lot, and class envy and rivalry are non-existent. What's more, it turns out that there is in the end precious little difference between the kinds of existence enjoyed -if that is the right word- by alphas and deltas. Everyone's needs and wants are perfectly met, everyone is equally healthy. Regardless of class, work is utterly routine, amusements are trivial, human relations are sterile, and life's most intense satisfactions come from the pharmacist. Indeed, one could make the case that, despite the strict distinctions of class instituted to perform the differing levels of needed technical and economic activity, the Brave New World is a more egalitarian society than our own or -let me be provocative- than any society the world has known or is likely to know. The seemingly blatant inequality goes little deeper than the variously colored uniforms assigned to the different classes.

Because we are partisans of liberty as well as equality, our second complaint about the Brave New World is its lack of freedom. Everyone's endowments are predetermined through genetic engineering, all beliefs are conditioned, and conformity is obligatory. Using high-powered psychological and chemical techniques of behavior control, the World Controllers see to it that nothing disturbs the peace or social stability, and all deviants and misfits who think for themselves are whisked away to an island to live among their kind [2] .

Yet the lack of freedom, while serious, is not the central defect. People with freedom are capable, entirely of their own volition, of embracing the same shallow relationships and trivial pursuits as the denizens of Brave New World. If you require a monument, just look around. To be sure, freedom is a great desideratum, but its presence is no proof against willing self-degradation and debasement. Everything will depend, finally, not just on the presence of choice, but on what is chosen. What is most repulsive about Brave New World is not inequality or lack of freedom, but dehumanization and degradation. To the extent that we too cannot recognize the presence of dehumanization, we are already more than halfway there.

Consider some of recent bioethical debates in the United States. First, embryonic stem cell research, where the question is argued almost entirely in terms of the goods of life and health. Those in favor insist that regenerative medicine using stem cells will eventually save countless lives and eliminate crushing incapacity; those opposed insist that, in the meantime, lives would be sacrificed in the process, the lives of human embryos now stored in the freezers of in vitro fertilization clinics. Few people paid attention to the meaning of using the seeds of the next generation as a tool for saving the lives of the present one. Fewer people yet worried about the effects not on the embryos but on our embryo-using society of coming to look upon nascent human life as a natural resource to be mined, exploited, and commodified. The little embryos are merely destroyed, but we -their users- are corrupted, desensitized and denatured by a coarsening of sensibility that comes to regard these practices are natural, ordinary, and fully unproblematic. People who can hold nascent human life in their hands unblinkingly and experiment on it without awe have deadened something in their souls.

Or take human cloning. President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission, in its 1997 report Cloning Human Beings, and the National Academies of Science, in their 2002 report Scientific and Medical Aspects of Human Reproductive Cloning, could agree only that human cloning is for now unethical, because it is, for now, unsafe -an important objection, to be sure, but-note well-not an objection to cloning itself [3].

Against this view stand the libertarians, who insist that all judgments regarded cloning or other novel forms of baby-making should be regarded solely as matters of private reproductive choice: it's a free country, people have a right to reproduce, by whatever means they wish, and regardless of who thinks otherwise. The professional bioethicists, whether libertarian, egalitarian, or humanitarian, are by and large unconcerned with the positive good of keeping human procreation human, of upholding the difference between procreation and manufacture, between begetting and making. Few of them ponder what it will mean for the relation between the generations if children no longer arise from the coupling of two but from the replication of one. Few seem to care about what it means for a society increasingly to regard a child not as a mysterious stranger given to be cherished as someone to take our place, but rather as a product of our will, to be molded and perfected by design and to satisfy our wants and our desires for our own self-fulfillment.

Or take allowing commerce in organs for transplantation, a prospect now making a comeback in the United States after almost two decades of legal proscription. Once again, the battle is between the patrons of life and the patrons of justice: one the one hand, financial incentives will increase the supply of organs, hence fewer will die; on the other hand, financial incentives will lead to the exploitation of the desperately poor, compounding the injustice of their already unjust condition in the world. No one seems to be concerned about the meaning of regarding the human body as alienable property or what all this trading of body parts bodes for ideas of human selfhood, identity, and personal dignity.

Or take the coming knowledge of the human genome and the prospect of universal genetic screening and genetic engineering, including perhaps some day so-called germline modifications that will directly and deliberately affect future generations. In the United States the dominant ethical discussions are about genetic discrimination in insurance or employment and the matter of “genetic privacy.” No one talks much about the hazards to living humanly from knowing too much about your genetic future. No one talks much about the meaning of acquiring godlike powers of deciding which genetic sins are capital offenses against the holy ghost of Health. No one talks very much about the dangers of eugenics. No one talks anything at all about the hubris of believing that we are now, or can ever be, wise enough to use these powers to engineer “improvements” in the next generation.

Finally, take the use of drugs to enhance performance -in sports, at school, or in the current replacement for what used to be called courtship. Some people are concerned about taking unfair advantage of an athletic rival (steroids and “blood doping”) or an attractive female (“Ecstasy”), and others worry about coercive pacification by authorities (the misuse of Ritalin in schools). But there is little attention to what it means to begin to change the character and deep structure of human activity, severing performance from effort or, in other cases, pleasure from the activity that ordinarily is its foundation. We worry about addiction to powerful drugs and the bodily harm it causes or the crimes that are related to the fact that they are illegal. But we have yet to recognize the transformation in our humanity that would come from disturbing, through drugs or brain implants, our fundamental ways of encountering, enjoying, and acting in and on the world, and from becoming the creatures of bioengineers and bioenhancers.

In a word, we are quick to notice dangers to life, threats to freedom, risks of discrimination or exploitation of the poor, and interference with anyone's pursuit of pleasure and happiness. But we are slow to recognize threats to human dignity, to the ways of doing and feeling and being in the world that make human life rich, deep, and fulfilling.

That this is so should come as no surprise, given who we are. We come by this outlook honestly for we are liberals and we are democrats (both lower case). Americans are the privileged descendants of wise Founders who, in declaring independence from the mother country, defined themselves (and us, their descendants) as a people by holding as self-evidently true that all men are created equal, equally endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and, further, that governments exist among men essentially to secure these rights against the depredations of princes, prelates, and their minions, or anyone else who might seek to deny them.

It is impossible to exaggerate the debt we Americans and the world at large owe to the political triumph of these liberal democratic principles. Thanks to liberal democracy, and its fruitful contract with modern science and technology, many ordinary human beings today live healthier, longer, freer, safer, and more prosperous lives than did most dukes and princes in pre-modern times. Yet, though it may appear ungrateful to do so, especially when modern liberal societies have so recently come under lethal attack from religious zealots, we must acknowledge that these liberal principles are by themselves inadequate for dealing with the threats of the brave new biology. For one thing, they neglect other worthy human goods without which human life will not remain human. For another, they are easily corrupted into debased coinage, even contributing to the forces that make a brave new world seem attractive and render its arrival more likely.

Even a little thought shows how life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are perfectly compatible with a slide toward our dehumanization. A preoccupation with supporting life embraces all innovations that will push back mortality, no matter what the moral cost. A preoccupation with preserving liberty is no defense against freely made choices that would contribute, wittingly or not, to our degradation. And a preoccupation with attaining happiness understood as contentment would find little reason to object to shaping our moods or gaining our pleasures through drugs obtained from the pharmacist. In a word, the freedom to pursue happiness -that is, to practice happiness understood as living one's life as one sees fit- is perfectly compatible with utter self-indulgence, mindless pursuits, and the factitious gratifications of high-tech amusements and drug induced euphoria. Brave New World? Why not.

What is missing from the liberal pantheon of goods? What goods besides life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness do we seek to defend? What has been lost when we discern degradation, debasement, and de-humanization? The obvious candidate is “human dignity.” Yet if “human dignity” is to be more than an empty slogan, we need to articulate its meaning, and in ways accessible and persuasive to our fellow liberal democrats. This is no easy matter.

The first trouble with “dignity” is that it is an abstraction, and a soft one at that. The harm of a broken bone, a burned-down house, or a stolen purse are concrete and easily recognized; assaults on human dignity -especially those that are self-inflicted- are much harder to notice. Second, not everyone agrees about what human dignity means. Third, dignity is, at least to begin with, undemocratic. It is an aristocratic idea, tied to excellence or virtue. It virtually all of it original meanings, dignity is not something which, like a nose or a navel, is to be expected or found in every human being. Fourth, insofar as philosophers do talk today about human dignity in some more universal sense, they tie it to “personhood,” and personhood they define in terms of autonomy -mankind's rational will and its capacity for moral choice.

Though they did not have the term, dignity as honor linked to excellence or virtue would certainly be the view of the ancient Greeks. In the heroic world of Homer and the tragic poets, the true or full human being, the he-man who drew honor and prizes as his dignity, displayed his worthiness in noble and glorious deeds. Supreme was the virtue was courage: the willingness to face death in battle, armed only with your own prowess, going forth against an equally worthy opponent who, like you, sought a victory not only over the adversary but, as it were, over death itself. This heroic dignity -think Achilles and Hector-is poles apart from the bourgeois fear of death and love of medicine, though, paradoxically, it honored the human body as a thing of beauty to a degree unsurpassed in human history. Later, following the Socratic turn, heroic excellence was supplanted in Greek philosophy by the virtue of wisdom; the new hero was not the glorious warrior but the philosopher, a man singularly devoted to wisdom, living close to death not on the field of battle but by a single-minded quest for knowledge eternal.

Attractive though these candidates are (we can still read about Achilles and Socrates with admiration), and right though these views of human dignity may be, the Greek exemplars are of little practical use in democratic times. Moreover, the problem with brave new world is not primarily that it lacks glorious warriors or outstanding philosophers (or artists or scientists or statesmen) -though the fact that they are not appreciated in such a world is telling. The basic problem is the absence of a kind of human dignity more abundantly found and universally shared.

In the western philosophical tradition, the most high-minded attempt to supply a teaching of universal human dignity belongs to Immanuel Kant, with his doctrine of respect for persons. Persons, all persons or rational beings, are deserving of respect not because of some realized excellence of achievement but because of a universally shared participation in morality and the ability to live under the moral law. It is the moral life that gives to rational creatures -and only to rational creatures- their special dignity. However we may finally judge it, there is something highly dignified in Kant's project. For he strained every nerve to find and preserve a place for human freedom and dignity in the face of the Newtonian world view, a mechanized account of nature that captured even the human being, omitting only his rational will. And, in its content, there is something austerely dignified in the Kantian refusal to confuse reason with rationalization, duty with inclination, and the right and the good with happiness (pleasure). “Personhood,” understood as genuine moral agency, would indeed be threatened by powers to engineer our genetic makeup and to fiddle around with human appetites through psychoactive drugs or implanting computer chips in brains. We are not wrong to seek to protect it.

Yet Kant's view of human dignity is finally very inadequate, not because it is undemocratic but because it is, in an important respect, inhuman. Precisely because it dualistically sets up the concept of personhood in opposition to nature and the body, it fails to do justice to the concrete reality of our embodied lives, lives of begetting and belonging no less than of willing and thinking. Precisely because it is universalistically rational, it denies the importance of life's concrete particularity, lived always locally, corporeally, and in a unique trajectory from zygote in the womb to body in the coffin. Precisely because “personhood” is distinct from our lives as embodied, rooted, connected, and aspiring beings, the dignity of rational choice pays no respect at all to the dignity we have through our loves and longings -central aspects of human life understood as a grown togetherness of body and soul. Not all of human dignity consists in thinking or choosing. Human dignity embraces more than thinking and willing.

It is easy to see why Kant's notion of “personal dignity” is of but limited value in meeting the challenges of bioethics. True, a bioethics stressing personhood and rational choice is very useful in defending respect for autonomy against violations of the human will, including failures to gain informed consent in the use of human subjects in research or excessively paternalistic behavior by physicians and other experts. But this moral teaching offers us very little in our battle against the dehumanizing hazards of a brave new world. For Kantian dignity is, in fact, perfectly compatible with fetus farming, surrogate motherhood, cloning, the sale of organs, the us of performance-enhancing drugs, or even extra-corporeal gestation, because these peculiar treatments of the body or uses of our embodiments are no harm to that homunculus of personhood that resides somewhere happily in a morally disembodied place. Pace Kant, the answer to the threat to human dignity arising from sacrificing the high to the urgent, the needs of the soul to the cares of the body, is not a teaching of human dignity that severs mind from body, that ignores the urgent, or that denies dignity to human bodily life as lived. The defense of what is humanly high requires, as I will shortly suggest, am equal defense of what is seemingly “low.”

The account of human dignity we seek goes beyond the said dignity of rational persons, to reflect and embrace the worthiness of embodied human life, and therewith of our natural desires and passions, our natural origins and attachments, sentiments and repugnances, loves and longings. What we need is a defense of the dignity of what Tolstoy called “real life,” life as ordinarily lived, everyday life in its concreteness. It is a life lived always with and against necessity, struggling to meet it, not to eliminate it. Like the downward pull of gravity without which the dancer cannot dance, the downward pull of bodily necessity and our mortal fate in fact makes possible the dignified journey of a truly human life. It is a life that will use our awareness of need, limitation, and mortality to craft a way of being that has engagement, depth, beauty, virtue, and meaning -not despite our embodiment but because of it. Human aspiration depends absolutely on our being creatures self-conscious of our need and finitude, and hence being creatures capable of lofty longings and deep attachments.

Most of our contemporaries will have a hard time with such a suggestion. What, they may well ask, is so dignified about our embodiment? What is inherently dignified about, say, human procreation? What is so dignified in the fact that we rise from the union of egg and sperm, grow as an embryo and fetus in the darkness of a womb, or enter the world through the birth canal -all rather messy matters, truth to tell- rather than, say, as a result of being designed perfectly in the light and tidy laboratory? What is so dignified about being the product of chance rather than of human design? Of natural sex rather than of human artfulness? What, for example, would be wrong with cloning or any other sex-less form of making babies?

To start to answer these questions, we must begin not with laboratory technique and questions of safety, or with questions of reproductive freedom. We must consider the deep anthropology -both natural and social- of sexual reproduction. We need to understand deeply what it means to be a sexual being and what that fact contributes to human dignity. Permit me to remind you of the basic “facts of life,” told non-reductively, and some of the things that follow from them.

Sexual reproduction -by which I mean the generation of new life from (exactly) two complementary elements, one female, one male, usually through coitus- is established (if that is the right term) not by human decision, culture, or tradition, but by nature; it is the natural way of all mammalian reproduction. By nature, each child has two complementary biological progenitors. Each child thus stems from and unites exactly two lineages. In natural generation, moreover, the precise genetic constitution of the resulting offspring is determined by a combination of nature and chance, not by human design: each human child shares the common natural human species genotype, each child is genetically (equally) kin to each (both) parent(s), yet each child is also genetically unique.

These biological truths about our origins foretell deep truths about our identity and about our human condition altogether. Every one of us is at once equally human, equally enmeshed in a particular familial nexus of origin, and equally individuated in our trajectory from birth to death -and, if all goes well, equally capable (despite our mortality) of participating, with a complementary other, in the very same renewal of such human possibility through procreation. Though less momentous than our common humanity, our genetic individuality is not humanly trivial. It shows itself forth in our distinctive appearance through which we are everywhere recognized; it is revealed in our “signature” marks of fingerprints and our self-recognizing immune system; it both symbolizes and foreshadows exactly the unique, never-to-be repeated character of each human life.

Human societies virtually everywhere have structured child-rearing responsibilities and systems of identity and relationship on the bases of these deep natural facts of begetting. The mysterious yet ubiquitous natural “love of one's own” is everywhere culturally exploited, to make sure that children are not just produced but well-cared for and to create for everyone clear ties of meaning, belonging, and obligation. But it is wrong to treat such naturally rooted social practices as mere cultural constructs (like left- or right-driving, or like the difference between burying and cremating the dead), that we can alter with little human cost. For what would kinship be without its clear natural grounding? And what would identity be without kinship? We must resist those who have begun to refer to sexual reproduction as the “traditional method” of reproduction, who would have us regard as merely traditional, and by implication arbitrary, what is in truth not only natural but most certainly profound.

Let me test my claim of the profundity of the natural way by taking up a challenge posed to me by a friend. What if the given natural human way of reproduction were asexual -that is, if we were sexless beings that naturally reproduced by something like budding or cloning; and what if we now had to deal with a new technological innovation -artificially induced sexual dimorphism (males and females) and the fusing of complementary gametes (sperm and egg)- whose inventors argued cogently that sexual reproduction promised all sorts of advantages, including hybrid vigor and the creation of greatly increased individuality? Would one then be forced to defend natural asexuality because it was natural? Could one claim that it carried deep human meaning?

The response to this challenge broaches the ontological meaning of sexual reproduction. For it is, I submit, impossible for there to have been human life -or even higher forms of animal life- in the absence of sexuality and sexual reproduction. We find asexual reproduction -natural cloning- only in the lowest forms of life: bacteria, algae, fungi, and some lower invertebrates. Sexuality brings with it a new and enriched relationship to the world. Only sexual animals can seek and find complementary others with whom to pursue a goal that transcends their own existence. For a sexual being, the world is no longer an indifferent and largely homogeneous otherness, in part edible, in part dangerous. It also contains some very special and related and complementary beings, of the same kind but of opposite sex, toward whom one reaches out with special interest and intensity. In higher birds and mammals, the outward gaze keeps a lookout not only for food and predators, but also for prospective mates; the beholding of the many-splendored world is suffused with desire for union, the animal antecedent of human eros and the germ of sociality. Not by accident is the human animal both the sexiest animal -one whose females do not go into heat but are receptive throughout the estrous cycle and whose males must therefore have greater sexual appetite and energy in order to reproduce successfully-and also the most aspiring, the most social, and the most open and the most intelligent animal.

The soul-elevating power of sexuality is, at bottom, rooted in its strange connection to mortality, which it simultaneously accepts and tries to overcome. Asexual reproduction may be seen as a continuation of the activity of self-preservation. When one organism buds or divides to become two, the original being is (doubly) preserved, and nothing dies. In contrast, sexuality as such means perishability and serves replacement; the two that come together to generate one soon will die. Sexual desire, in human beings as in animals, thus serves an end that is partly hidden from, and finally at odds with, the self-serving individual. Whether we know it or not, when we are sexually active we are voting with our genitalia for our own demise. The salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die tell the universal story: sex is bound up with death, to which it holds a partial answer in procreation. Rightly understood, there is no such thing as “safe sex.” However physically undignified the sex act or the deed of childbirth, there is something deeply noble in the self-sacrifice that is the inner meaning of sexuality itself.

The salmon and the other animals evince this truth blindly. Only the human being can understand what it means. As we learn so powerfully from the story of the Garden of Eden, our humanization is coincident with sexual self-consciousness, with the recognition of our sexual nakedness and all that it implies: shame at our needy incompleteness, unruly self-division, and finitude; awe before the eternal; hope in the self-transcending possibilities of children and a relationship to the divine [4]. In the sexually self-conscious animal, sexual desire can become eros, lust can become love. Sexual desire humanly regarded is thus sublimated into erotic longing for wholeness, completion, and immortality, a longing which drives us knowingly into the embrace and its generative fruit -as well as into all the higher human possibilities of deed, speech, and song.

Through children, a good common to both husband and wife, male and female achieve some genuine unification (beyond the mere sexual “union” that fails to do so). The two become one through sharing generous (not needy) love for this third being as good. Flesh of their flesh, the child is the parents' own commingled being externalized, and given a separate and persisting existence. Unification is enhanced also by their commingled work of rearing. Providing an opening to the future beyond the grave, carrying not only our seed but also our names, our ways, and our hopes that they will surpass us in goodness and happiness, children are a testament to the possibility of transcendence. Gender duality and sexual desire, which first draw our love upward and outside of ourselves, finally provide for the partial overcoming of the confinement and limitation of perishable embodiment altogether.

Human procreation, in sum, is not simply an activity of our rational wills. It is a more complete activity precisely because it engages us bodily, erotically, and even spiritually, as well as rationally. There is wisdom in the mystery of nature that has joined the pleasure of sex, the inarticulate longing for union, the communication of the loving embrace, and the deep-seated and only partly articulate desire for children in the very activity by which we continue the chain of human existence and participate in the renewal of human possibility. Whether we know it or not -and in the world of recreational sex and assisted reproduction, we are already well on the way to forgetting it- the severing of procreation from sex, love, and intimacy (or, conversely, of sex from love, intimacy, and procreation) is inherently dehumanizing, no matter how good the product.

It was not an accident that Aldous Huxley introduced us to the Brave New World by inviting us into the fertilizing room of the Central London Hatchery, where new human life is produced to order outside the body and cloning is routine. It was not an accident that “birth” and “mother” are regarded in that society as smutty notions, or that sexual activity is regarded as “no big deal.” For there is a deep connection between these perversions of our bodily beginnings and attachments and the degraded flatness of soul that characterizes the entire society Huxley depicts. Why? Because to say 'yes' to cloning baby manufacture is to say 'no' all natural human relations, is to say 'no' also to the deepest meaning of human sexual coupling, namely, human erotic longing. For human eros is the fruit of the peculiar conjunction of and competition between two competing aspirations conjoined in a single living body, the impulse to self-preservation and the urge to reproduce. The impulse to self-preservation is a self-regarding concern for our own personal permanence and satisfaction; the urge to reproduce is a self-denying aspiration for something that transcends our own finite existence, and for the sake of which we spend and even give our lives. Nothing humanly fine, let alone great, will come out of a society that has crushed the source of human aspiration, the germ of which is to be found in the meaning of the sexually complementary “two” that seek unity, wholeness and holiness, and willingly devote themselves to the well-being of their offspring. Nothing humanly fine, let alone great, will come out of a society that is willing to sacrifice all other goods (including the seeds of the next generation) to keep the present generation alive and intact. Nothing humanly fine, let alone great, will come from the desire to pursue bodily immortality for ourselves.

Finding our way to such insights is, I admit, an increasingly difficult task in modern America. A culture that offers endless remedies to prolong the lives of the living is less likely to be a culture devoted to or interested in procreation. A society, when it does procreate, that sees its children as projects rather than as gifts is unlikely even to be open to the question of the meaning and dignity of procreation. And a culture instructed about life by a biology that sees whole organisms mainly in terms of parts or, what's worse, as mere instruments for the perpetuation of genes -“A chicken is just a gene's way of making more genes”- will reject the question of meaning altogether, because it believes that it already has the answer.

Here at last we have come to the bottom of our troubles. It turns out that the most fundamental challenge for bioethics posed by the brave new biology comes not from the biotechnologies it spawns, but from the underlying scientific thought. In order effectively to serve the needs of human life, modern biology reconceived the nature of the organic body, representing it not as something animated, purposive and striving, but as dead matter-in-motion. This reductive science has given us enormous power, but it offers us no standards to guide its use. Worse, it challenges our self-understanding as creatures of dignity, rendering us incapable of recognizing dangers of our humanity that arise from the very triumphs derived from the brave new biology. What is urgently needed is a richer, more natural biology and anthropology, one that does full justice to the meaning of our peculiarly human union of soul and body in which are concretely joined low neediness and divine-seeking aspiration. In our search for such an account, we can get help from pre-modern sources, both philosophical and biblical. We can learn, for example, from Aristotle an account of soul that is not a ghost in the machine, but the empowered form of a naturally organic body. We can learn from thinking about Genesis what it means that the earth's most god-like creature is a concretion combining ruddy earth and rosying breath; why it is not good for the man to be alone; why the remedy for man's aloneness is a sexual counterpart, not a dialectic partner (Eve, not Socrates); why in the shame-filled discovery of sexual nakedness is humanity's first awe-filled awareness of the divine; and why respect for a being created in God's image means respecting everything about him, not just his freedom or his reason but also his embodiment and his blood.

Exploring these possibilities is for another day. For now it is sufficient if we have seen the need for both a new bioethics and a new biology, a richer ethic of bios tied to a richer logos of bios, an ethical account of human flourishing based on a biological account of human life as lived, not just physically, but psychically, socially, and spiritually. In the absence of such an account we shall not be able to meet the dehumanizing challenges of the Brave New Biology.
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Notas:

[1] For an evaluation of the moral significance of precisely these four prospects, see Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, a report from the President's Council on Bioethics, 2003.

[2] Huxley himself apparently regarded the lack of freedom as the central problem of his dystopia. The epigraph he selected for the novel is a passage from Nicholas Berdiaeff predicting that the world's elite will soon turn its back on the march to utopia, calling instead for a society “less 'perfect,' and more free.”

[3] This limitation was overcome in the report of our President's Council on Bioethics, Human Cloning and Human Dignity, 2002. The Council unanimously called for a legislative ban on cloning-to-produce-children, based on a wide variety of moral concerns. By a vote of 10-7, we also called for a legislative moratorium on cloning-for-biomedical research. As of this writing, the United States still has no national anti-cloning legislation.

[4] “And their eyes were opened and they saw that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves girdles. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden.” Genesis 3: 7-8.