The famous case of Lydia Fairchild apparently challenges one of the key discoveries of this blog that there is a fundamental social difference between men and women, in that women always know who their children are and men must trust women.
Obviously neonates could get swapped in the hospital, as indeed happened to someone I know. But even then the mother knew something was wrong: the child just didn't look familiar. But of course a swap is possible.
Lydia Fairchild is even more extraordinary she knew who her children were, but failed the DNA test because her ovaries belonged to someone else namely her "conjoined" twin sister.
This is a shot across the bows of the vessel named "mine." We have 3 different ideas of "my" children here.
There is:
(1) "my" child that a woman leaves the maternity ward with.
(2) "my" child who I gave birth to.
(3) "my" child who is genetically related to me.
A woman may have the infant swapped and so take home a different child to which she gave birth to. She may take home the one she gave birth to, but was effectively a surrogate for eggs from someone else, even ovaries within her from someone else.
(4) Then there are conscious "my" that occur with adoption, where we take over care of someone elses child in the full knowledge they are someone elses, but they become "mine" in the sense that a parent-child bond forms.
Now some argue that all of this is irrelevant. The parent-child bond is all that is important.
But true a child is happy with a parent, yet when a child finds out they were surrogated or adopted I believe there is a mystery that emerges over who their biological parent is. It may not be important to the child: the love of the actual parent is what counts, but in a Blade Runner type sense there is a curiosity over who "made" you and where you came from. In other words the "biological" does play an existential role.
I've been arguing across the web for this biological understanding not being lost in the tsunami of social attitudes to sex and relationships. At end of day the biological is this extraordinary process that links us to reality and underpins the nature of our existence. Without appreciating the biological we spin off into a mental world of ego and desires and think we are spirits divorced from reality: just ethereal shopping and voting entities floating around in the metaverse. People have died at games consoles because being so absorbed into playing, and with Just Eat food deliveries meaning they only need leave the console to answer the door and visit the loo, they can ignore the biological. Eventually they die as they ignore the fundamental truth of their existence.
So its true we need love, and a loving parent is the truth. But we are also created biological entities and the process by which we were created is a fundamental part of us. It also mirrors our fate in death and being reconciled with birth is also the reconciled with death. As Buddha realised and being reconciled with that great arc of existence also reconciles us with other fundamental features like aging, illness and in fact all the vagaries of life. We lose touch of these things and we lose touch with life.
So whose child it is does have a biological component that should not be rubbed out. Its a fact, although exactly how important is not so clear.
This blog believes that the fundamental structures of sexual relationships: the trust, the faithfulness, the marriage, the vows are all linked to this biological root. After all without this biological root then there are no bodies and no sex anyway. And its the fundamental biological question of "whose" children are they that underpins a traditional marriage. It is also why the there is this thing that feminists call "patriarchy." If men do not trust women to be faithful then they cannot let them out of their sight. A woman going to work may very well return with someone else's child. Therefore a man who does not trust cannot let a woman out of the house. Its not all one sides, a woman is also concerned that a man will divide his resources with children in other households. She wants him to invest in her children.
There are many ways to do this. In the Dunnock, a bird like a sparrow, they famously have multi-male, multi-female polygamy. This means that males divide their attention between multiple nests, but to make up for this females have multiple partners visiting her nest. Apparently it all works out and young Dunnocks get all the attention they need to fledge.
So humans do not need to be monogamous, other strategies exist. Famously on Polynesian islands it was like the Dunnock where because everyone lived and worked together children were raised by the group, and so naturally there was no concern about whose child it was. They also had no STDs which meant that free-love did not result in people getting ill. One thing noted in animals is those with high levels of STDs are more likely to be monogamous. I believe Capitalism also plays a part in Monogamy as private ownership and the huge amounts humans invest in children means that they are more likely to focus on definites.
However the actual point of this blog is not the restate the argument of the biological in sex and relationships but to note once this is done it reveals a very uncertain concept of "mine." In the case of Lydia Fairchild just giving birth to them was not enough to completely claim the children. By the DNA evidence they were not hers. According to the DNA the children belonged to a twin sister she never even knew existed, of which the only part that remained were the ovaries.
Socially minded will argue well this is just proof we ignore the biological. But as argued above it will not go away as it underpins the whole nature of our existence.
But where perhaps the conservative traditionalists go wrong is that the biological is not a certain world. Concept like "me" and "mine" do not fit well with biological reality. Our bodies as argued elsewhere in the blog are made of parts and the "self" does not fit well into these parts. We try and put the self in the "brain" but this is as weak as any attempts to "house" the self and previous posts have blown this apart.
Again the Social theorists will just say well there you go the physical and the biological are just tyrannical and oppressive expressions of a fixed mindset, and we should liberate our self from them to be truly free. Well this is only partly correct. If you want to "liberate" yourself from the body and the biological then just die that is easy. This is not liberation. Liberation is learning the lessons of the body so that we can go beyond it. The "body" and the "biological" is a step that we must climb up onto. And the fact that "me" and "mine" do not work well with the body and the biological points as one of the things we must learn. Doggedly insisting that these children are "mine" despite all sorts of problems with the idea of "mine" is not the path to liberation.
No comments:
Post a Comment