Saving humanity with Pope Benedict and the Irish Times…

It’s 2009, the world has changed, changed utterly. Er no… for in one small portion of our media nothing ever really changes. The comment section of the Irish Times on Saturday last was a masterclass in the sheer oddness of that paper in the contemporary period. For we were served the delight of Breda O’Brien arguing that Pope Benedict far from being insulting when suggesting that ‘saving humanity from homosexual or transexual behaviour was more important than saving the rainforest from destruction’ but was actually… well, read on.

ACCORDING TO international news agency Reuters, Pope Benedict XVI said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. The Italian media somehow missed this entirely, and instead focused on the pope allegedly saying he was not a rock star. Both approaches managed to miss the point. While the “I am not a rock star” angle merely smacked of the blindingly obvious, the Reuters report resulted in a great deal of international commentary, most outraged.

Had the pope actually said saving humanity from homosexual behaviour was as important as saving the rainforest, the hurt and outrage would have been justified. He didn’t.

So what did he say?

The pope’s talk is a meditation on how the Church carries out its mission in the world and the role of the Holy Spirit. It contains a robust defence of World Youth Day. This is significant, given that it was widely assumed that as Cardinal Ratzinger, the current pontiff was not enthused about Pope John Paul II’s innovative gathering of millions of young people every two years.

Yes, I’m sure it is. As an aside can I point to the futility of Vaticanology as much as Kremlinology in its day – well I remember those earnest tomes printed in the 1980s by US and UK based think tanks who should really have known better breathlessly reporting the position and every utterance, however gnomic, of the gerontocrats appearing at Red Square each May Day. And a lot of good it did them when the whole edifice crumbled into dust a few years later.

On the contrary, the pope defends World Youth Day from the allegation it is some kind of Catholic rock festival and essentially meaningless aside from the “feelgood” factor it generates. Instead, he says World Youth Day is the fruit of intense preparation, and that the joy that it generates is an important means of communicating the Christian message. With that kind of dry intellectual wit that characterises him, the pope enlists Nietzche in explaining what he means.

Well thanks a bunch Breda. Good to know that aspects of the cultural life of many of us are essentially ‘meaningless’, or that ‘feelgood’ is per definition a negative. And wonderful to see Nietzche recruited to support the pontiffs ‘dry wit’.

“Friedrich Nietzsche once said: ‘Success does not lie in organising a party, but in finding people capable of drawing joy from it.’

What a wag he was. Or they are. And Benedict being so witty as to include the quote. The humanity!

According to Scripture, joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit (Gal 5:22), and this fruit was absolutely palpable during those days in Sydney.” The “rock star” headlines were generated by the pope saying he is not the focus of World Youth Day, much less the star. (He never uses the term “rock star”.) Instead, he is there only to point to Christ.

Anyway onto the main issue.

Later in his speech, the pope goes on to affirm that creation is not just random but has an intrinsic order and energy, born from the goodness of God.

Some pretty big assumptions there, but nothing too troubling.

His address assumes that protection of creation is a vital part of being a Christian. As human beings, we are part of creation, and therefore also need “a human ecology”, a way of living that is in tune with our deepest nature.

Okay.

The pope used the English word “gender” in his address. “That which is often expressed and understood by the term ‘gender’, in the end amounts to the self-emancipation of the human person from creation and from the Creator. Human beings want to do everything by themselves, and to have exclusive control of everything regarding themselves. But, in this way, the human person lives in denial of the truth, in conflict with the Creator Spirit.”

Hmmmm… what is he getting at here?

Gender theory states that the biological sexual differences between males and females account for a relatively small part of the actual differences between men and women.

It declares most of these differences are matters not of sex but of gender which, unlike sex, is socially formed and cultivated. A subtext is that these socially determined roles are used to oppress women and minorities.

Someone’s been hitting wikipedia pretty hard. It might of course be fairer to say that some gender theories, for it is not a seamless and undifferentiated approach, hold the above viewpoints. Or, to put it another way, the term ‘gender theory’ becomes a catch-all for ‘stuff we don’t really know that much about but are sure we dislike’, much as post-structuralism is used in other contexts. But to allow for any sort of complexity would be problematic for O’Brien’s thesis. Although in truth Breda can’t really disagree with her own proposed definition of gender theory since it’s so blindingly self-evidently correct in many areas… or as she says:

Obviously, it is true, to some degree, gender roles are socially constructed, in the sense they have changed throughout history. For millennia, women were seen as inferior and incapable of holding power. However, to extrapolate from that historic injustice that the biological basis of some gender differences is minimal leads to damaging distortions.

Yes, of course, but the problem then becomes which gender differences? After all, Breda may, and I have no reason to think otherwise, believe that women are not inferior or incapable of holding power (political I presume). But she might believe that women can’t, to pluck an example at random, be priests and hold theological ‘power’. Or what about lesbian and gay couples who seek marriage? She doesn’t go there, for the obvious reason that to do so would be to open a can of worms. Instead she moves off in a somewhat different direction…

In medicine, there is a growing recognition that men and women are different even in the way they experience disease. Women, for example, get different heart attack symptoms from men, which can lead to women ignoring vital warning signs that could save their lives.

Truth is that the symptoms of heart attack are only very slightly different. Go to the Mayo Clinic and you’ll find an interesting piece about this very topic, but as can be seen the divergences are pretty minor… and it’s worth noting that the differences such as they exist are easily explainable (and may, if I read this correctly, be subject to change as height, body mass and weight differentials between the sexes change).

The most common symptom of a heart attack in both men and women is some type of pain, pressure or discomfort in the chest. But it’s not always severe or even the most prominent symptom, particularly in women. Women are more likely than men to have signs and symptoms unrelated to chest pain, such as:

* Neck, shoulder, upper back or abdominal discomfort
* Shortness of breath
* Nausea or vomiting
* Sweating
* Lightheadedness or dizziness
* Unusual fatigue

These signs and symptoms are more subtle than the obvious crushing chest pain often associated with heart attacks. This may be due to the smaller arteries involved or because in men, the bulky, unstable plaques tend to burst open whereas in women, plaques erode, exposing the inner layers of the artery.

Also worth noting that women tend to have heart attacks at a later age than men and often after very high blood pressure. Now I’m obviously being tooth-grindingly pedantic here, but are such relatively minimal differences in physiology, and/or physiological symptoms, indicative of very much at all in terms of broader gender differences (and one could justifiably ask would O’Brien be scouring medical texts to consider differences in medical conditions say between African Americans and Caucasians in order to propose some ‘essential’ changes between the two groups – hardly)? O’Brien would appear to believe so because she jumps straight to the heart, or rather the brain…

Other writers, such as Louann Brizendine in the Female Brain, show there are significant biological differences in male and female brains that influence behaviour. For example, the male brain has 2½ times more space dedicated to sexuality, as well as larger centres for action and aggression.

Brizendine is a neuropsychiatrist but her work in the Female Brain is far from uncontested. An excoriating review in Nature, available as a PDF here, argues that:

Like other popular books on the biology of human nature, The Female Brain has a rigid plot line: the foil of ‘political correctness’ against which the author wages a struggle for truth. We are told that the media, feminists, pointy-headed intellectuals and a vaguely specified ‘culture’ dogmatically insist that gender or racial differences in personality and behaviour are entirely cultural, an observation that is hard to reconcile with the volume and tone of media attention to the biology of gender and sexuality. Such assertions require empirical support. This genre loves to dwell on childhood toy preferences: little girls cradle inanimate, ‘boy-coded’ objects as if they were baby dolls (here, as is often the case, it’s a fire engine); and little boys turn harmless objects into weapons (our favourite is the boy who bites his toast into a gun in Deborah Blum’s Sex on the Brain (Allen Lane, 1997)). The emphasis on myth-busting turns into a vehicle for dressing the myth up in new clothes — such as Simon Baron-Cohen’s recent hypothesis that the ‘male brain’ is hard-wired for ‘systematizing’, and the ‘female brain’ is hard-wired for ‘empathizing’ — there is no shortage of pseudo-scientific ways of saying ‘thinkers’ and ‘feelers’. The problem with such explanations of sex differences is not that they are overly biological, but that they are fundamentally non-biological and explain nothing.

Oh dear. It concludes that:

Ultimately, this book, like others in its genre, is a melodrama. Common beliefs are recast as imperilled and then saved. Stark, predictable protagonists (an initial “cast of neuro-hormone characters” that reads like a guide to astrological signs) interact linearly with foreseeable results. The melodrama obscures how biology matters; neither hormones nor brains are pink or blue. Our attempts to understand the biology of human behaviour cannot move forward until we try to explain things as they are, not as we would like them to be.

Oh dear, oh dear.

Now let it be noted that I don’t blindly accept the analysis of the reviewers in Nature, but… nor do I put up information that is contested without at least mentioning that fact.

Perhaps it was the fact that the pope reiterated the church’s support for traditional marriage that led the Reuters reporter to see his comments on gender as an attack on homosexuality. However, it is a frankly bizarre reading of a complex address.

Actually it isn’t. It really isn’t. Gender and traditional marriage. In the same speech? The linkage is obvious. The readings made, considering that this is a time where arguments around marriage tend to devolve to parsing the sexual orientation of those involved and that the present Pope is fairly exercised by such matters, are quite reasonable [incidentally, and as an aside, has anyone else noticed the knots some sections of the libertarian right are getting tied up in over gay and lesbian marriage and how it somehow shouldn’t be pushed due to something or another about statism?].

In context, his comments on gender read as an examination of hubris, the idea that we can ignore our physical realities and shape ourselves in whatever way that we wish, as though we were merely minds and had no bodies. It is the same hubris that leads us to act as if we are independent from the rest of creation, and can therefore treat the environment in any way that we wish without incurring drastic consequences.

But the obvious riposte is that the Pope, and the Catholic Church, are continually ignoring ‘physical realities’, perpetually arguing as if we lacked physical selves, and where they see fit trying to suggest that physical reality isn’t malleable, or as David Adams writes on the same page in a somewhat less wordy piece, but none the worse for it:

At a stretch then (admittedly, a very big stretch), if you follow the same logic as the pope, it is possible to see why homosexuality might be a threat to the future of humankind.

But only if you believe that homosexuality is a dangerously attractive lifestyle choice, and that the use of condoms should not be permitted under any circumstances.

Which just goes to prove that, no matter how intelligent you are, if you begin from completely the wrong premise, pure logic can take you off on a tangent and into the realms of absurdity.

Yet read Brenda and you come oddly close to the notion that homosexuality is simply a choice, as in the following paragraph…

In fact, the idea that biological differences matter is probably of more relevance to heterosexuals. Our culture has embarked on an extraordinary cultural change, where women are supposed to be able to act like single males even when they have family commitments. At the same time, they are supposed to be hypersexualised parodies of women, always available for sex. These conflicting messages lead to unbelievable levels of stress for women.

Now it is true that the Pope doesn’t mention homosexuality directly. But it is impossible to talk about gender without consideration of these issues. And impossible too to read his words without seeing them as implicitly arguing for – and this is hardly a surprise – traditional gender roles. And ally that to the Catholic Church’s less than generous approach to this matter and it’s not hard to join the dots.

Actually putting the homosexuality issue to one side methinks she doth protest too much – even if I didn’t find the notion that somehow a woman (married one presumes if we’re looking at it from O Briens perspective, but perhaps not) with ‘family commitments’ is somehow forced into acting like a single male intrinsically offensive. I mean, what is she getting at? What sort of single male? How many women? And so on. And then she continues:

Similarly, men are constantly being urged to be more like women. For example, we are told that suicide rates would drop if men would only talk about their problems.

Men are being urged to be more like women? Are they really? I’ve never been ‘urged’ to be more like a women, and as for expressing my feelings, sure I’ve been doing that since the 1960s – in one way or another, initially – no doubt – by… er… crying. And it is of course dangerous to argue from personal experience or anecdote. But it’s the reductionism of all this which is so irksome. To be a woman is to ‘talk about your problems’. (Jesus, one wonders does she know any men?). Well, actually, yes, she does believe that ‘women’ can be reduced to such stuff…

However, research is beginning to show that men communicate in entirely different ways, and are flooded by deeply unpleasant emotions if they attempt to relate in the way that women do.

What research, one wonders, is that? Well, she isn’t saying, but as best I can judge it’s a mash-up of this sort of thinking, prevalent on “Christian Mommies” (sadly off line, at least when I tried to access it, but available as a cache here ) and perhaps very very tangentially work by Dr. John Gottman in the US on marital relationships (for it is he who coined the term ‘flooding’. Just from flicking through his site I see no evidence he’d support such an odd reading of his work).

The first suggests that:

I’ve come up against male anger when there might have been other emotions expressed by a woman. When a man gets hurt, he gets angry. When he’s sad, he gets angry. When he’s frustrated he gets angry. When he’s hungry he gets angry. Sometimes instead of tenderness, he expresses something that looks like anger. Anger . it’s been called the all-purpose male emotion. And by “get angry,” I mean evidencing behaviors, expressions, gestures and symptoms that we recognize as those of anger.

We know that anger is especially detrimental to men’s health, leading to heart attacks, among other things. Men are particularly prone to what’s called “flooding”; getting so overtaken by this all-purpose emotion they can’t function, speak or relate. Or they misfire, for instance, hitting someone they love; reacting instead of responding.

You’ve probably experienced this when you’re trying to have a discussion about some important relationship point, and all of a sudden he’s flipped into a space where you can’t reach him. Men tend to stonewall – it’s so unpleasant to them to experience this rush of emotion, they shut down. Meanwhile their blood pressure is rising, their heart is pounding, and they’re heading for a coronary. Anger kills. It’s especially hard on men.

A near-apologia for the worst human behaviour. Great. And if the counter charge is made that I’m being unreasonable in selecting this quote, well, go look for yourselves and see what there is about such matters.

So answer comes there none. For it in this bait and switch as regards the Pope’s comments we are told (with recourse to a science which all too often she chooses to ignore when it doesn’t suit her worldview) that…

In the context of what science is beginning to show us about male-female differences, a call for a “human ecology” that takes our nature and differences into account begins to look not incendiary, but imperative.

So, it doesn’t matter if a statement is potentially or actually offensive, if it’s right – as Breda reads it – then that’s okay.

How do we deal with those who want to have their cake and eat it on these matters? Those who argue on the one hand that there is a starkly essential aspect human existence (as regards gender distinctions) and then when presented with evidence that these matters might be a little bit more blurred than their thesis suggests, attempt to project the idea that distinctions that appear to be fairly fundamental (say as regards homosexuality) don’t really exist and are actually constructs. The logic of Pope Benedict’s position (and sotto voce Breda O’Brien) is that anyone can be homosexual but that gender distinctions are so deeply innate that they cannot, no – must not, be amended. In a way it’s a brilliant thesis. For everyone then is at ‘risk’ (I use the word entirely advisedly) from not conforming to their supposedly pre-determined course. And who to police that risk? Why the Church of course, and its outriders.

As it happens I do believe that sexuality is malleable, but not quite in the way I’ll bet Benedict and O’Brien seem to believe. In other words the scale they place male and female upon is in actuality a spectrum which blurs as all spectra do. And that there is movement along that spectrum. In all directions. But look, one moment in the real world of people would confirm that notion, that sexuality is a profoundly difficult, exhilarating, messy, not so messy, whatever sort of business. Some would argue that’s exactly what it should be, that it is what it is whatever that may be. And to try to argue – as O’Brien and Benedict do implicitly – that all must conform for no real reason other than a single partisan religious view (despite trying to lace that view with supposedly scientific data) is a mugs game. And a dull one too. What a world they live in. What a world they want us to live in.