The Great Western Experiment of Self

 Introduction

 When God revealed Himself to Moses in the burning bush as ‘I AM WHO I AM’ (Exodus 3.4, ESV translation), He not only claimed eternal existence but also claimed that His existence defined His essence.  He did not claim the freedom to make Himself whatever He wished; He claimed that what He is is what He always has been and will be.  Thus, His Laws are eternal, for they express not simply His will but also His eternal identity.  The laws of nature are His laws of creation and are expressions of who He is.

 The great Western experiment is an experiment of playing God, of claiming what God claims for oneself.  It is an experiment of Self.  It is not a claim of eternal existence but simply existence that has the rights to choose and thereby define one’s very essence.  While it imitates God’s Self existence, it has to construct its own being out of choices: existence precedes essence.  One is free from God’s decrees, from the limitations of nature, from God’s purposes in creation, such that one may redefine existence and relationships.  While this experiment might take different forms, it has also been on a trajectory allowing one stage to prepare the way for the next.  I will offer an interpretation of this trajectory as a worship of the Self apart from God, whether this is an individual self that defines essence through choices and rights by socially constructed group identities conceived in terms of social justice.

 Women’s Rights

Women's rights began politically, with the push for suffrage. It continued with the necessity for women in employment due to men serving in the two World Wars.  Expressed in physical terms, women’s rights became 'my body, my choice'.  The choice was threefold: sexual freedom (outside marriage), control over pregnancy (especially with the pill, first approved by the Food and Drug Authority in 1960), and control over birth (abortion).  To get to an approval of abortion, society had to deny the humanity of the unborn, which came in the USA in 1973 through an imfamous 5-4 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade.

 The focus on women’s rights failed to be articulated with respect to the rights of others.  The conversation was one-sided, ignoring the rights of a husband and father.  The dynamic that allowed this was the notion in liberation arguments that relationships are defined by power and freedom, and those in power are to be opposed, undermined, and removed.  Contrast Roman times, when the man heading the home had authority over his wife and even had the right to kill his children.  A man could order his wife to put their child to death when it was born.  In today’s culture, the woman has this right: ‘my body, my choice’.

 Once women used 'rights' to make themselves equal to men in voting, jobs, sexuality, marriage, and abortion, the culture was left with an uncertain distinction between men and women.  An argument of ‘equality’ has the side-affect of questioning ‘difference’.  Once the distinction between men and women broke down, the question became, 'What is a woman?' 

 Nature and Rights

An answer to this question should at least be made biologically.  Yet decades of women’s rights advocacy in the interest of equality had focussed on non-biological definitions.  Moreover, ‘rights’ were not defined with reference to nature but in terms of civil rights.  Indeed, an appeal to nature could be used to limit civil rights.  An argument from nature was problematic for defining a ‘woman’.  On the contrary, the Roman jurist, Marcus Tullius Cicero, wrote in the 1^st c. BC, ‘nature herself is the foundation of justice’ (Laws XII) or ‘fountain of justice’ (XIII).  In other words, 'justice' is not to be defined socially, a civic justice, without rooting it in natural law.  The current cultural experiment in the West is also faced with the challenge of defining a man.  Philosophically, existentialism claimed that existence precedes essence: one simply exists undefined, a sort of nothingness, until one makes choices that bring one into a self-determined existence.

Power: Darwin or Marx?

Not only does this experiment reject nature, it also defines rights in terms of a power struggle between two groups, with one abusing its power and domination over the other, and the other being victims struggling for freedom.  The Nazis interpreted existentialism in a Nietzschean manner, championing the dominant individual and race’s use of power over others.  Its social Darwinianism and rejection of an ‘essence’, such as a definition of humanity, called for survival of the fittest.  The Marxist narrative, alternatively, championed the victims of power, the proletariat.  The individual’s existence was dissolved into the community’s needs.  Critical Theory rejects natural interpretations of humanity and promotes social definitions.  This simplistic perspective divides humanity into abusers and victims, and the individual is wholly defined in terms of one’s group: male/female, white/brown, rich/poor.  Social definitions have allowed men to identify themselves in the other group as women, white people to identify themselves in a ‘Black Lives Matter’ socialism, and even the rich to identify with other groups by funding programmes, even street violence in riotous protests of ‘social justice’.  Men and European 'whiteness' (a social category) had a long history of abuse in this reductionist and collectivist rendition the world.

 Postmodernity: the Construction of Being

 The next development was postmodernity, which rejected any notion of objective reality, such as biology, in favour of perceived realities.  This allowed men to claim to be women, or women men.  It also allowed people to invent other notions of gender, with the limits of one's imagination being the only restraint.  Some men might be attracted to claiming to be women simply because being a man was perceived negatively.  A boy abused by a man, like one's father, or neglected by him may well have shaped his perceived identity in childhood in such a way that he would prefer to be a woman.  With identity defined by the imagination, not biology, he could claim to be a woman.  Women, having removed the differences between men and women and cast men in a negative role, and having turned the definition of being a woman into a matter of social justice, were in the awkward position of having to accept biological men identifying as women.  Not to do so would be to reject the space of 'womanhood' as a matter of social justice--a safe space from maleness just as others sought a safe space from whiteness.  This ‘safe space’ became a justification to invade actual women’s real spaces, such as restrooms, locker rooms, and sports.

 The niggly bit in this political and social experiment remained biology, and this led some to press their imaginations to the extreme, claiming that men could get pregnant.  The rejection of realities in favour of identities required such an answer.  Thus, a woman playing the part of a man was now to be accepted as a man, and such a 'man' could become pregnant.  We are a society now close to being able to fertilise an egg using cells from the body that are not from a sperm, and this will allow a further confusion of gender based in biological reality.  The West’s Antinaturalism has not quite reached its zenith.

 The Deconstruction of Family and Marriage

 The notion of a family and of a marriage has been obfuscated through all this as well.  One result is the decline in birth rates in more developed countries throughout the world.  Family roles—husband, wife, children—and the very unit of a family is replaced by the mere ‘self’ moving in and out of chosen relationships.  ‘Marriage’ is merely a financial arrangement before the law and a romantic relationship in social terms, both of which might be contracted by persons of the same gender and cancelled when inconvenient. 

 The Man of Lawlessness

 If the 'Man of Lawlessness' (2 Thessalonians 2), who appears at the end of this age, is one who rejects Divine Law written in God's very creation, the last half century has seen a rapid progression towards his appearance.  We have seen any amount of evil of human injustice throughout history, but our day has seen a lawlessness against creation itself in a manner never seen before on so large a scale.  Lawlessness in our day is not only aimed at what we find written in Scripture, laws to do with justice, for example.  In our day, the unborn, gender, marriage, and family have been under direct and persistent attack.  The culture that rejects God’s creation also rejects God Himself, not by worshipping the idols of ancient civilisations but by worshipping the ‘self’, created ex nihilo simply through one’s choices, as long as one has been granted ‘rights’ to define and protect this self.  The Man of Lawlessness, says Paul, ‘opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God’ (2 Thessalonians 2.4).

 Conclusion

 The northern hemisphere and Australasia have already arrived at this end time stage socially.  There is yet no particular 'Man of Lawlessness’.  Will there be a literal such person, or is a social interpretation of Paul’s wording enough?  We shall see.  The southern hemisphere, for the most part, is not participating in this social experiment.  Its evils are otherwise, such as with HIV/AIDS, wars, political corruption, and the invasion of Islamic jihadists.  Will the global South, beginning in the cities, also join the West’s social experiment of self-definition and self-worship?  God only knows.