Contraception and the Trivialization of Sex Part 3 of 4

That’s Preposterous!



The common usage meaning of the word “preposterous” refers to something that is contrary to nature, or absurd. Its etymology offers an important additional insight to this meaning. Derived from the Latin words prae (before) and posterius (after), it literally means putting before that which comes after. Preposterousness, then, has to do with a change in order. It is, so to speak, putting the cart before the horse, or bolting the barn door after the animals have escaped.
Preposterousness in the moral domain has a particularly important ramification. When something that should be first is placed second, that which should be first is not simply demeaned, but is in danger of being either lost or rejected. Placing man ahead of God initially demeans religion, but, as history has shown, leads to a rejection of God. A person who places money above honesty will soon become dishonest. If spouses do not subordinate themselves to each other (cf. Eph. 5:21), their marriage is heading for a separation or divorce.


The great problem in placing the secondary end of sexual intercourse first is the likelihood that procreation will be demeaned initially and subsequently rejected. But, in addition to this, the meaning of lovemaking would have to be reinvented. Such recreation would inevitably be arbitrary and therefore subject to a distorted and possibly even perverse interpretation.
The Russian existentialist Nikolai Berdyaev had some insight into this problem when he argued, “If there were no childbearing, sexual union would degenerate into debauchery.” In hindsight, one must acknowledge that these points are well taken. While many have welcomed the “freedom” that contraception offers spouses, they have also recognized a need to restore some measure of nobility and romanticism to the sexual act. As the surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, once told a Time reporter, “The only way to make love is as a sacrament.”


Contraception signals the separation of love-making from baby-making. One is left to wonder about the deeper levels of fragmentation that may result.


Man is a meaning-oriented creature far more than he is a pleasureseeker. There is no pleasure that man enjoys to which he will not ascribe some meaning. But the very notion of meaning implies a relationship or correspondence that goes beyond what a thing is in itself. For example, one is not satisfied in hearing a stream of words; one wants to know what meaning they convey. The activities within a baseball game are meaningful because they are subordinated to the goal of winning. It is the prospect of winning that gives the game its ultimate meaning, otherwise no one would bother to keep score.


Paul Tillich has pointed out that while the great anxiety of antiquity was death, and the chief anxiety of the Middle Ages was condemnation, the principal anxiety of the modern era is meaninglessness. This anxiety is a direct result of the fragmentation of the modern world and the preposterousness that results when the natural order of things is reversed. Unable to bear life in a meaningless world, people are compelled to invent meanings. Unfortunately, these fabricated meanings cannot offer real sustenance for human beings. They reduce everything to the status of a game. And while games can be refreshing diversions from the seriousness of life, they cannot nourish the inner spirit that seeks an answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” There is a hunger in all of us that inclines us to search for and be in love with wisdom. In his own self-indulgent way, Alex Comfort is right. The author of the mega-selling secular “bible” of sex, The Joy of Sex, holds that sex is the most important human sport. But Christopher Derrick is right when he says, “The case against Playboy and everything similar is that one’s attention is thereby fixed not upon sex, but upon sexual unreality.”


Fragmentation and preposterousness, therefore, lead to a flight from reality and a preoccupation with fantasy. Reality, of course, being the stronger force, will always be victorious when the two collide. On the dust jacket of a best-selling book that promotes the revolutionary potential of contraception, we find these words from a mortified young husband: “I married a lovely, sexy girl—then she turned into someone’s mother.”


People will age and die, beauty will fade, and children will continue to come into the world, planned or unplanned. That is the reality. With the advent of contraception, many actually believed that it would bring about a paradise on earth. In the words of influential feminist Shulamith Firestone, contraception and its kindred technologies “could undo Adam’s and Eve’s curse both, to reestablish the earthly Garden of Eden.”



http://www.cuf.org/LayWitness/online_view.asp?lwID=670