I've Been Thinking (Again)

I just finished reading Nancy Gibbs’ article in the current issue of TIME, The Pill at 50: Sex, Freedom and Paradox. It revived in me sentiments of just what a remarkable time we live in. While it is true of any point in history that the current moment is unlike any before it, I am convinced that the 20th Century was uniquely transformational. The pace of change is ever on the increase. That, combined with the corresponding deluge of information technology, has placed the human mind in an unprecedented position of having to think through matters that were unimaginable to those living hundreds or thousands of years ago. For millennia the acceptable purpose of sex was procreation. Yet today science has enabled enlightened minds to conceive (didn’t mean for that to be a pun) of sex as something more, or less. Just as did the atomic bomb, the pill raised a whole new set of questions about what it means to be human, about how to encourage or prevent new life from coming into our world, and about how it becomes a moral dilemma to give or take life on a massive scale. Of this one thing I am relatively sure: the continuing advancement of science without equal progress in morality to accompany it probably does spell eventual doom.