Ersatz paradise

As technology continues to advance, we have the increasing ability to turn our fallen world into a simulacrum of long-lost Eden. Through landscape engineering, we can turn a desert into a tropical paradise. Through plastic surgery, cosmetic surgery, cosmetic dentistry, and “Follicular Unit Extraction,” we can not only birth defects, but make ordinary men and women look like fashion models.

It wasn’t always so. Look at artwork from the past. Look at Da Vinci’s drawings of men and women with various deformities.

It the past, it wasn’t uncommon for someone to have buckteeth or bat ears, a big nose or hairlip.

My point is not to complaint about these developments. Technology can be a blessing.

But I suspect that our modern obsession with physical perfection and the illusory pursuit of perpetual youth is fostering social intolerance for the inevitable effects of the fall. Intolerance for the elderly and the disabled. Intolerance for men, women, and babies who commit the unforgivable sin of physical imperfection.

Why are most babies with Down Syndrome routinely aborted? Is it just because of their substandard IQ? Or is it simply their appearance? Because many parents are ashamed to have abnormal looking kids? The social stigma of physical imperfection.

A corollary to this simulacrum of long-lost Eden is the studied avoidance of those “soul-building” virtues which loom large in Christian sanctification. We avoid personal suffering. And, by the same token, we avoid the suffering of others. We don’t want to be around them.

Therefore, we don’t cultivate the sanctified virtues which are seeded by adversity and watered by grace.

In a combat situation, you want to have a comrade who will watch your back. A comrade who, if you were wounded, won’t leave you behind.

In the past, a measure of self-sacrifice was only to be expected. Many people suffered from incurable illnesses. There were no painkillers. Suffering was a normal part of life. The strong cared for the weak. The weak cared for the weaker.

That was underwritten in part by faith in the future. Heavenly-mindedness. The hope of better things to come.

But the loss of heavenliness mindedness makes people stingy. If this life is all there is, then they can’t waste precious time on the weak and needy. They can’t afford to take a personal-risk. Instead of building character, we rebuild bodies and engineer resort communities.

But as we perfect our physical environment, we hollow out the soul. Handsome on the outside, ugly on the inside. Strong bodies clothing sick souls.