Thomas Beatie and the things that are

The freakish Thomas Beatie, the person who is legally a man following surgical and legal procedures, but who retained female reproductive organs and is now pregnant via turkey baster, turned up on "Oprah" yesterday with his wife in tow. Here's the promo:

One thinks of this passage from John Paul II's encyclical Centesimus annus:

Equally worrying is the ecological question which accompanies the problem of consumerism and which is closely connected to it. In his desire to have and to enjoy rather than to be and to grow, man consumes the resources of the earth and his own life in an excessive and disordered way. At the root of the senseless destruction of the natural environment lies an anthropological error, which unfortunately is widespread in our day. Man, who discovers his capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through his own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of the things that are. Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray. Instead of carrying out his role as a co-operator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him.

The pope was talking about degrading and exploiting the environment for the sake of fulfilling consumerist desire, but the application in the appalling Beatie situation is obvious. Beatie wants to be a man, and sees no reason why he shouldn't be. Modern technology and modern legal mechanisms help him achieve that goal. But he also wants to be a mother. In the consumerist utopia that we've built and are building, the individual's desires are God. Nothing is more important in this world than what Thomas Beatie wants. Thomas Beatie creates his own reality, heedless of the things that are. And we bless this tyrannization of nature as liberation.

But consider this: the only way anyone has any philosophical grounds on which to criticize Beatie's actions is if one affirms that the phrase "the things that are" has meaning. Is there a such thing as a non-material reality, or does reality in this sense amount to nothing more than what we choose to call it? In other words: "What is truth?" Christianity is collapsing in the West -- Christianity as a meaningful guide to public laws, manners and mores -- and with it Christian anthropology. The decline of the cult inevitably means the decline of the culture it inspired. As goes the culture, so, in time, goes the civilization, betrayed by pride and rebellion.

Beatie and his-her unfortunate child are only among the most florid canaries to join the chorus in Western civilization's coal mine. What they represent is the "anthropological error" that has led to the refusal of mankind to live by any limits imposed by nature. Thomas Beatie and the polluting industrialist are on the same side. The left, in general, will accept few if any restraints on sexual expression (broadly speaking), and the right, in general, will accept few if any restraints on commercial activity. When reality fights back, it's not going to be pretty.