The role that hubris plays

As much as I like to envision myself as a rebel chipping away at the edifice of popular beliefs, I too am a child of my culture and times. I entered high school in 1969, a pivotal year for America. I was impressionable and readily absorbed all the conventions of the period. Central to the culture at the time was the belief that casual sex was all right. In fact, it was thought to be more than all right. It was thought to be the birthright of everyone after the sexual revolution of the ‘60s.

However, I struggled with the notion that if sex were to be treated casually then the product of those unions should likewise be treated in a cavalier manner. I could never fully get onboard with that way of thinking. If the woman became pregnant, sex suddenly seemed to me to be very serious business. I was not inclined to dismiss feelings for my unborn child. In the aftermath of the sexual revolution, unwanted, aborted babies were treated as collateral damage, a necessary act to preserve our libertine lifestyle. It became the central pillar of both the feminist revolution and the individualist lifestyle enabled by the sexual revolution. In retrospect, I am glad that I went with my gut feeling and rejected society’s notion of a “woman’s right to choose”, a euphemism that only thinly masks the barbarity of the act of abortion. Our ancestors would have referred to modern human behavior as hubris, the act of playing God.

Recently, I have been observing another moral dilemma play out. Technology has again thrust humans into the role of playing God. In the past, miscarriages for women were an accepted risk with any pregnancy with nothing much that could be done. Now, modern technology provides much greater understanding and ability to intervene.  As a result, babies are being sustained outside the womb at premature stages that only a few years ago would have seemed like science fiction. Moreover, there has emerged a better understanding amongst professionals that miscarriages are often a result of an imperfection, genetic or otherwise, that manifests at a very early developmental stage.

Here is where the mores of our society stand in sharp contrast. On the one hand, we live in a society where healthy viable fetuses are routinely aborted, while genetically deformed unviable fetuses are given the utmost attention. My wife, being a neonatologist, is exposed to this reality every day. Often, she will have to explain to a mother that her newborn baby has some severe genetic or developmental flaw that seriously impairs its ability to survive. The response from the mother is almost universal. She asks my wife to employ all procedures and incur any expense to keep the baby alive. Very quickly, tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars can be expended on this baby with ultimately little prospect that it will survive and thrive. I should also mention that most of the mothers are ignorant of the costs that private insurance or Medicaid incur in the process.

So, we come back to the fundamental question of my earlier years. What degree of hubris are we asserting with our actions? The legend of Icarus encapsulates the tragedy of our current age. In a bid to escape imprisonment on the island of Crete, Daedalus fashioned wings of feathers and wax for himself and his son, Icarus. Icarus, overcome by the excitement of flight, disregarded his father’s warnings and soared too high, bringing him closer to the sun. The wax melted, plunging him to his death in the sea. Like Icarus, we are enthralled with individual freedom. Anything that stands in the way of self-actualization is bad. Lost in the exhilaration of flight, we have normalized actions that no other society in history have condoned and like Icarus and his father, we are paying a price for it.

AI” src=”https://images.americanthinker.com/9h/9herzcr6e9wkxo7cszsp_640.jpg” />

Image generated by AI.