“Laudate Deum”: A Strange Citation

Paragraph number 66 of the exhortation says: “God has united us with all his creatures. However, the technocratic paradigm isolates us from what surrounds us and deceives us into forgetting that the entire world is a ‘contact zone.’” The obscurity of the text is aggravated by the footnote which refers to a book by Donna J. Haraway: When Species Meet.

Who is Donna J. Haraway?

Few people know Donna J. Haraway, who rose to fame in the 1990s. The writer and philosopher is considered to be the leader of a school of thought that has called itself “cyber-feminism,” “ecofeminism, ” or yet “post-human feminism,” or even “post-genderism.”

The hallmark of her work – a scathing attack on anthropocentrism – is extending gender theory to technological issues (such as the modification of the human body) and, beyond, to the animal kingdom. A zoologist and philosopher, she studied at Yale, where she was honored as a great alumna. It is worth mentioning that she grew up with a Catholic mother and was educated by the Loretto religious sisters in Colorado. It is also worth mentioning that she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to travel to Paris to study the evolutionary philosophy at the Teilhard de Chardin Foundation.

Cyberfeminism

The popularity of the American thinker began in 1985, when she published in the Socialist Review her “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s,” which later became simply the Cyborg Manifesto (published in France in 2002).

This essay is considered to be a landmark for the new feminism, which ultimately denies women's identity and opposes old feminism. Haraway advocates overcoming social and biological dualisms: she criticizes the binary structure of Western culture which has generated divisions between categories such as man/woman and natural/artificial.

These dualisms, Haraway asserts, “have all been systematic in the logic and practice of the domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals…all constituted as others.” The concept of the cyborg is then presented as a liberating synthesis, an entity that represents a fusion of the organic and the technological, transcending traditional distinctions of gender and nature.

The cyborg challenges the idea of immutable human nature, as more and more people use technology to expand their capabilities: prosthetics, surgical bypasses, hearing aids, and even dentures can indicate that the human-machine is already a reality. The concept of the cyborg represents a rejection of rigid boundaries, particularly those that separate “human” from “animal” and “human” from “machine.”

“The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the Oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust,” Haraway writes in her Manifesto.

Anti-Speciesism and Birth Rates

In her two 1990s books Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1990) and Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Haraway returns to the cyborg metaphor to explain how the fundamental contradictions of feminist theory and identity should be joined, rather than resolved, in a manner similar to the fusion of machine and the organism in cyborgs.

In this text, Haraway criticizes capitalism by revealing how men have exploited women's “reproductive labor” so that they would fail to achieve full equality in the labor market. Giving birth to a child therefore poses a great threat to the life of a career woman.

The philosopher insisted on this point in a more recent text entitled Making Kin not Population: Reconceiving Generations with five other feminists. The essence of the argument is that we must not have children – a polluting act, which generates other problems – but reorganize in a “familial” sense with people who already exist.

Something between the re-tribalization of society and the attempt to create substitutes for the family, as is the case of those who, instead of children, have dogs and cats or even objects. This theme of “companion animals” beyond species differences recurs in the very book cited by the Pope.

Cthulhucene

The culmination of Haraway's thinking is found in the 2016 book Cthulhucene. For the uninitiated, Cthulhu is the monstrous tentacled deity of H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories, who waits in the abyss to return to earth to exterminate man. For Haraway, it will be necessary to go through such a phase (the Cthulhucene) to save ourselves from the disaster of the Anthropocene (i.e., literally “the age of man”), marked by overpopulation.

“What will happen when humanity, having irremediably modified the balance of planet Earth, ceases to be the center of the world? And in the midst of the ecological crisis, what relationships can be restored not only between human individuals, but also between all species that inhabit the planet?”

The answer, according to Haraway, is to implement “tentacular” thinking on this infected planet, a paradigm shift where, as explained above, instead of fathering children, “kinship bonds” are created through “intimate and personal decisions aimed at creating flourishing and generous lives without bringing children into the world.”

At this point, it is appropriate to seriously ask how such an author can be considered a point of reference for an apostolic exhortation? Indeed, she is one of only three authors cited, excluding Pope Francis (or the various synods echoing his thoughts), Paul VI, and the United Nations.

It seems obvious that such a “magisterium” no longer has any link with Tradition and pursues a goal totally foreign to Christianity, leading modernism to its truest and deepest consequences: the revival in toto of the world’s dominant thought, even the most openly anti-Christian.