High-School Pregnancy Pact

Susan Reimer's article "Babies as something fun" appears today's Baltimore Sun's Sunday Ideas section. It comes in response to recent news stories about a "pregnancy pact" at a Gloucester, Mass., high school: a number of girls under 16 years of age set out to all become pregnant at the same time and raise their babies together. At least 18 of them have succeeded in getting pregnant.

This comes on the heels of the much ballyhooed pregnancy of unmarried 17-year-old "tween" idol Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney's younger sister.

Even worse, Reimer writes, "declines in teen sex and improvements in contraceptive use have leveled off and ... the teen birth rate is on the rise for the first time in 15 years."

In view of some pretty liberal things I have said in earlier Sex and Spirit posts to this blog, including The End of Traditional Sexual Ethics, I feel I need to acknowledge that much of today's sexual behavior can be truly scary.

The TIME Magazine reporter who broke the high-school pregnancy pact story, Kathleen Kingsbury, offered this explanation of the girls' bizarre behavior: "They didn't have anyone really instructing them on how to create a life plan ... . Some of them decided that this was going to be their life plan, that they were going to be mothers, and by being mothers, they would be someone."

Not being instructed on "how to create a life plan" strikes me as something that never used to be a problem. In the good old, bad old days, young men and women were instead initiated into a traditional "life plan" that read: remain chaste until marriage, finish school, get married under the auspices of your church or congregation, surrender your virginity on your wedding night, stay married 'til death do you part, remain one-hundred percent faithful to your spouse, have plenty of children together, and bring them all up in the same way.

This "plan" was part and parcel of the teachings of your church or congregation or holy scripture. If you were Jewish, the plan was the same as if you were Christian, owing to the fact that Christianity is rooted in Judaism and shares Judaism's basic axioms regarding sex, marriage, and procreation. You may not have been taught the theology of human sexuality in any direct form, but you had no doubt that God was on the side of purity, fidelity, and chastity. There was no question but that your life plan needed to be, reproduction-wise, equally pure, faithful, and chaste.

In the good old, bad old days, in other words, your sexuality was held in check by your spirituality. What we need today is to get that back.

A tall order, that. I see the recovery of a spirituality which reins in our sexuality as part of the topic I first broached in Reinventing the Sacred, Part 1.

In that post I talked about Stuart A. Kauffman's new book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. Kauffman is a scientist who has been in the forefront of complexity theory, the discipline which investigates how living and lifelike systems "self-organize." As they evolve, these systems produce stunning "order for free." The wondrous diversity of life on earth — the complexity of the "biosphere" — comes from the way in which nature's self-invention complements Darwin's basics of evolution: heritable variation culled by natural selection, in a world with too few resources for all organisms that are born to survive, thrive, and reproduce.

In his new book, Kauffman extends self-organization into the more general realm of "emergence." The diversity we see all around us, whether biological, cultural, technological, or economic, sprouts forth from the workings of the laws of physics without that sprouting process being prestatable or predictable. New categories of being/actuality simply emerge all over the place.

A simple example Kauffman gives is the "chirality" of many of the protein molecules produced by the body. There are "left-handed" proteins, for instance, which preponderantly "break symmetry" by twisting in one direction and not the other (or "right-handed") direction. Nothing in physics accounts for this non-random chirality or "handedness" choice made by the preponderance of protein molecules, or, indeed, for the fact that entities in the universe break symmetry at all. Chirality is wholly emergent, as are the entities which display it.

By extending the notion of emergence to ever more abstract levels of being, Kauffman shows that agency, functional causality, human will and consciousness, and the values, purposes, and meanings we attribute to the world around us are all emergent categories of being. As entities that help compose the "furniture of the world," they are as real as the fundamental particles and forces of physics, as real as molecular chirality, as real as you or I. They arise in ways that do not break the laws of physics. Yet their emergence is only partly lawful, since emergence qua emergence is ultimately ungovernable and spontaneous, incapable of being prestated and predicted, and outside the bounds of accurate pre-modeling in computer simulations.

But human free agency, human causality, human will and consciousness, and human values, purposes, and meanings are the stuff of all human spirituality, morality, and religious thought. Scientific reductionism — which holds that all such categories are fundamentally illusory, in that nothing is truly real but the tiny building blocks which physics studies — tends to undermine spirituality's power to rein in our sexuality and the other aspects of our moral lives.

This, Kauffman would have it, is the upshot of the fact that scientific reductionism has tended to produce all sorts of schisms in our understanding of the world and our place in it. The reductionist project in modern science drives a wedge between faith and reason, spirituality and science, the humanities and the "practical" disciplines, values-meanings-purposes and brute facts, human progress and religious tradition.

I would extend Kauffman's thinking on this matter to include the wedge driven between our sex lives and the rest of our "life plan." Sex has been denatured and has become a minefield of such horrors as pregnancy pacts, surgical hymenoplasty to "restore" virginity, and the media's sexualization of very young girls, M. Gigi Durham's topic in The Lolita Effect.

What needs to be restored is spirituality's power to rein in our sexuality and have it serve our lives, not ruin them.

There are two possible paths to so re-empowering spirituality. One is to restore our culture's deep faith in the basic axioms regarding sex, marriage, and procreation that have been the cornerstones of religious understanding in what Stuart Kauffman calls the Abrahamic faiths in a Creator God referred to as Yahweh, as represented by Judaism and Christianity.

The other possible path is the one Kauffman favors: reinventing the sacred as the worship of the sheer ungoverned fecundity of nature, giving rise as it does, all on its own, to all the diverse "furniture" of reality we find in the universe — including agency, life, meaning, purpose, and value as the prerequisites of human morality, sexual or otherwise.

I support Kauffman in his efforts to reinvent the sacred in this way, in part because (as I detailed in The Anti-Defilement Covenant and other previous posts) I see no intellectually honest way to fully harmonize the Abrahamic faiths — though I count myself a Catholic! — with such ideas as a woman's right to choose an abortion, gay rights, and using artificial means of contraception. Indeed, I see ideas about male "ownership" of female fecundity as the mainspring of monotheism, no matter how deeply these ancient ideas have been buried in modern expressions of belief in God.

Still, I don't feel it necessary to insist on giving up standard monotheist worship. If it gives you the spiritual grounding you need to keep your sexuality in check, fine. But for those who, like me, are looking for a different spiritual basis for sexual and other forms of morality, I can recommend Stuart Kauffman's ideas about reinventing the sacred.