Breaking the Curse
The lie of a life free of children and work
Satan never comes to us with pointy ears carrying a pitchfork and boasting a long slithery tail. He manifests as an angel of light - promising us treasures, freedom and dominion. He is the one who whispers in each of our ears, urging all of humanity to trade their birthright as adopted children of their Heavenly Father for vanishing material gain of no eternal consequence.
Genesis tells us that in the beginning, humanity had a perfect relationship with God. All we had to do to maintain that relationship was to maintain the proper relationship with Him, trusting in His Providence, and following his plan, being receptive to Him. In short - we had to recognize that He was the Creator, and we were His creation. Throughout recorded history, we see the ebb and flow of the embracing and rejection of God’s plan, first in the nation of Israel, and eventually in all of Mankind.
We all know the story of the fall. Satan seduced Eve with the power to overcome her nature as a creature and to become like God. She fell pray to the lie, and Adam soon followed. In the prideful actions of the garden, our first parents rejected that receptive attitude and relationship with God. It is this deformed relationship which we inherit and must ultimately overcome to be reunited with God.
With the fall came a twofold curse - “To the woman he said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” To Adam he said ‘Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.” (Gen. 3:16-17)
The consequence of the fall was that the two ways in which we image the Creator most closely - bringing new life into the world, and creating through our own efforts - became difficult, painful, and full of toil. Throughout history, man has been in a constant state of struggle, fighting the forces of nature, laboring to bring forth and support new life, and trying to find our way back to God.
We are in treacherous times. The serpent in the garden wants us to give up the fight. He has promised to liberate us from the curse of the garden - not by reconciling ourselves to our Creator, but by avoiding birth and hard work altogether. He has no power to break the curse - the curse was broken in the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Our Lord, and will be fulfilled in the Eschaton. To the Father of Lies, of course, his inability to deliver on his promises is irrelevant.
He started, as he did in the garden, with the women first. While Paul tells us that “women will be saved through childbearing,” (I Tim 3:15) the Evil One tells women they ought to simply avoid it. Don’t want the pain of birth? Don’t want the inconvenience of your fertility? Well he has a pill, a device, or even a surgery to solve that problem. And women are buying that lie in ever increasing numbers.
What started with the pill being available for married women has evolved into hormonal birth control available at no cost from the government to women and girls of any age, and even over the counter, without a doctor’s prescription in many places. Sterilization, once reserved for women who had already given birth, is now seen as a right and offered to women as young as 18 with little discussion about the gift of fertility they are rejecting. “Child free” is seen as liberation. The societal rejection of our reproductive capacity and the way in which women most closely reflect divine action has become normative.
This rejection has led to societal collapse. We are not replacing ourselves. Demographic winter and its terrible consequence loom on the horizon. We have fallen prey to a satanic inversion. In rejecting our reproductive capacity, we have rejected one of the primary means of participating in our own redemption, of breaking the curse, and finding our way back to God.
Just like in the garden, the Serpent has not attacked only women, but men as well. Having fostered an attitude of disgust, avoidance, and even violence against bringing new life into the world, the evil one now turns his attention to the remaining creative capacity of humanity. “Forget about hard work,” he says, “Toil is a thing of the past. Physical toil, intellectual toil…we’re advancing past that. We are smarter than that. Who needs human intelligence and innovation?” Artificial Intelligence is being proposed not simply as a tool, but as a substitute for the human creative capacity.
As Pope John Paul II reminds us, “sweat and toil, which work necessarily involves in the present condition of the human race, present the Christian and everyone who is called to follow Christ with the possibility of sharing lovingly in the work that Christ came to do. This work of salvation came through suffering and death on a cross. By enduring the toil of work in union with Christ crucified for us, man in a way collaborates with the son of God for the redemption of humanity. He shows himself a true disciple of Christ by carrying the cross in his turn every day in the activity that his is called upon to perform.” (Laborem Exercens, 27)
When Elon Musk gushes about the bright future of humanity which doesn’t need to work and has a Universal High Income - he thinks he is describing paradise, but I hear in his description a hellish trap. Cut off from our means of participating in the redemption, we would find ourselves increasingly selfish, devoid of meaning, and utterly depressed. Man was made to work.
Work and childbearing are the principal human activities in which we participate in the Divine work. In both human innovation and bringing forth new human life, we see the Divine spark. Artificial intelligence might be able to mash together a pleasing image or musical composition; science (God forbid), might one day be able to genetically alter a human being, or artificially incubate a human embryo. But we are created for active and personal participation in both work and reproduction, and find in both a way to the Creator.
As we approach the looming demographic winter, some recognize the horrible price humanity is paying for the uncoupling of sex and procreation. If increased reliance on artificial intelligence for creative endeavors continues, one day we will see an even more terrible cost for our abdication of our creative power, as society becomes more banal, mediocre, impersonal, and deformed.
There may not be much we can do to prevent society at large from believing that the curse of the garden can be broken without a cost, but those of us who know the truth must continue to live our lives to the fullest - having babies, making art, writing our own emails, living in the real world with other humans.
The final product of the Sexual Revolution is a hopeless world, where human beings are graded and culled in IVF, women are used as gestational carriers in surrogacy, children are treated like commodities, and men and women are degraded. Were Artificial Intelligence to gain wide acceptance as a substitute for human creativity, man would become extraneous to most functions, and the world might become more efficient, but it will most certainly become more average, dull, and lifeless. In a world without work, and without babies, we have no way to find our way home to the Creator, because we have refused to participate in the redemptive action of Christ crucified.
Each of us has a choice. Do we accept the creative gifts of work and reproduction and participate in them on our way back to God, or do we accept the twisted lie of the creature who offers to break the curse of humanity without sacrifice and without a savior? In this decision lies the future of humanity. Choose wisely.