BY SEAN WALSH
Why are “puberty blockers” morally obscene? Aquinas would have the answer. We need to remind ourselves that the potential is as real as the actual.
I’m not going to waste much time defending the self-evident truth that it is obscene to perform medical experiments on children. I mean no disrespect to the eugenicists who think otherwise, but these people are in need of therapy and not argument, and this is not a service I am qualified to provide. As my PhD supervisor used to say, some people are “beyond syllogism”.
Transgenderism is less a system of thought than it is an ideology, concerned more with enforcement than with persuasion. And the thing with ideologies is that they are set up to help people feel quite smug about doing very evil things.
So the most I can reasonably offer these trustees of Dr Mengele’s legacy is the spiritual shock therapy of intervention-by-prayer and to let God decide what to do assuming He wants to involve Himself at all.
These children of Nietzsche have acquired a fetish, one which follows the now familiar post-modern quasi-scientific playbook: invent a condition, medicalise it, offer a solution (always pharmaceutical) and then market that solution using the most suitable utilitarian adaptation which here seems to mean banging on about safety through trials.
(There is no Zeitgeist so revolting that the utilitarians will refuse a slice of it.)
Thinking about it, though, the Enemy is not proposing experimentation so much as interference.
A child’s body is not some collection of cells handily available for the convenience of the chemists or biologists. It is a dynamic system ordered to its own teleology of natural development, which is shaped either by evolution, God, or (and this is my view FWIW) evolution instrumentalised by God. Any analysis of the processes instantiated by human biology must be teleological through-and-through or it will risk a desacralised and incomplete account of the human form.
The point generalises. We could immunise ourselves against most if not all of the ambient moral and cultural catastrophes by remembering the following Scholastic principle (“borrowed” from Aristotle): the potential is as real as the actual.
This used to be the way the cleverest people thought about the universe: that causal explanations look forwards as well as backwards – that they are stories about purpose as much as descriptions of mechanism. The essence of an acorn includes the potential to become an oak; an unborn child is essentially a potential adult. These potentialities are part of a true ontology and only God is pure act.
These categories and arguments come together most influentially in the Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, a distillation and repurposing of Aristotelian metaphysics so impressive that God himself is said to have complimented Thomas for writing so well of Him. No surprise then that as the “Enlightenment” inadequacies become increasingly apparent in post-modern miserabilism, Thomistic metaphysics is once again niche.
When you think about things in this way it becomes impossible, for example, to defend the killing of an unborn child on the grounds that it is just a potential person, because the potential to become an actual person is real in its own right.
And it becomes impossible also to avoid the suspicion that “trialling” puberty blockers in children is an unholy, prideful, and dangerous intrusion into mysteries which are beyond the competences of mechanistic science.
The transgressive character of abortion and child experimentation, absent in the utilitarian worldview, are coruscatingly present in the Scholastic one.
But why choose it? Why prefer the old supernaturalism over the new reductionism?
Maybe the best reason is that the specialised sciences make either explicit or implied references to those older categories. In molecular biology the galactically complex architecture of a single living cell seems to suggest more than mechanism is at work.
In the brain sciences the reduction of phenomenology to chemistry or neural functionality seems impossible without the retention of purposive (what philosophers of mind call intentional) mental categories. Even the atheist philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett conceded that we must proceed as if human consciousness possesses a teleology that is irreducible to the mechanical operations of the brain, a so-called useful fiction which he never quite managed to magic away, despite many decades of trying.
In quantum mechanics there is the inescapable sense that God has written his indecipherable signature into the base elements of matter itself.
The more detailed and impressive and, indeed, newer the science the more resurgent and essential the concept of teleology seems to become.
I glossed over the deeper dysfunction of the transgender ideology. I’ll correct that now. It is a species of voluntarism, the mistaken idea that we get to choose what we are. To put it another way, it is to make the intellect subservient to the will – which is the wrong order of things. When science becomes ideological it stops being reasonable.
You cannot justify puberty blockers on scientific grounds because the motivating ideology is already against reason and therefore is anti-science.
The teleology of a child’s body is a window into the Divine Mind. We could do with a new metanoia, a renewal of the Scholastic insight that the universe is rinsed in purpose.
Given such a conversion of thought would make everything less shit, perhaps we could persuade the Mengele people to give it a go on utilitarian grounds?
Republished from Associate Editor Sean Walsh’s SubStack which can be found here. Sean’s X account can be found @Sean_Walsh_1967