Mothering in the Age of the Borg

A brief but related aside to begin: if you’re struggling with the baby formula shortage and the algorithms are doing their best to keep you from finding alternatives, consider goat milk. It is easier for infants to digest than cow milk and it is not impossible to find distributors. Whole Foods is the largest national chain I know of that carries it. I once occasionally supplemented with an “organic” formula but after trying goat milk we never went back. It’s a gentle treat for the baby and good for night-weaning.

The age of the weaponized outlier makes it difficult to discuss breastfeeding. Or biology. Or any orientation towards truth, goodness, and beauty rather than power.

A few months ago Medical Nemesis talked about a preference for “mothering” over “parenting.” I glanced at my copy of “Mothering With Soul” by Joan Salter. Reports have emerged of several schools replacing “mother” and “father” and even “parents” with “caregiver.” It need not matter if it’s only a handful now. It won’t stay that way: the law of merited impossibility is tragically iron-clad. References to family kinship bonds were proudly removed from Congressional documents in 2021, and government documents increasingly prefer gender-neutral terms like “Parent 1” “Parent 2” and “Caregiver.”

Who else is a caregiver? A nanny. A nurse. A preschool teacher. Heck, the sweatshop worker and Amazon delivery driver if we stretch it enough. As the names of our most fundamental relationships are diluted, so is our recognition of the primary importance of these relationships.

We don’t like to make distinctions these days unless it’s to weaponize the outlier. There are a few good reasons for that but we have not humbly entered into the trauma behind those good reasons so as to truly uplift and redeem the suffering. We keep our feet firmly on this side of the Cross, backs turned, fingers in ears, and mowing down anyone seeking true mercy.

We can still define a man but are confused about defining a woman. But as woman goes so goes mankind. This may be the onset of the augmentation, and the girlfriends of billionaires update the ancient taxonomies with self-designations such as “homo techno.” Perhaps we will all become potential birthing people. Dreams of universal incubator-ship, bittersweet amidst collapsing fertility.

These phenomenons deserve more than substacks, more than words. They need our deepest and most sacrificial attention. Immense suffering is taking place, so immense as to upend our self-understanding and organic life on earth. Consciousness and traditional ways of interacting with the world have been revolutionized and the divide between the powerful and the useless class is unfathomably large.

We have been made illiterate regarding our own existence. The meaning in all things has been obscured and the ability to name our surroundings stripped away. When we cannot name our flowers or trees, perhaps it is not so odd we cannot recognize our bodies.

What is left is the crust of ancient norms but separated from the soil, water, air, and sun which sustain life. Our clothing is no longer an interaction with the animals and land, the result of our own labor, but is designed and decreed from the advertising industry and the product of virtual slaves. This story has played out in every area of our lives. Who was the body to try and escape?

Traditionalism can fall into the trap of following these hollowed-out norms to a point where the incongruity with our daily lives and surroundings becomes pure reaction. Progressivism demands we dismantle the last norms and surrender to the blank slate, helplessly mewling to be carried to Health and Safety by our neuro-chipping overlords.

This collapse in words and self-understanding is ripe fodder for science fiction dreamers. But our science fiction field suffers the same fate as all our institutions: refusing to pursue the good, true, and beautiful, it instead yearns for the ability to lay down free will and submit to Power.

Perhaps this is why the Star Trek series have struggled to deal with their most intriguing villain, the Borg. The Borg, the doppelgänger of modern man. Haunted by the blank slate, by the hunger for power and security, the older series struggled with the Shadow and attempted to find words to reject it.

Borg nursery from The Next Generation

But those words required some nod to ancient concepts like the soul and free will. We no longer are women, we are birthing bodies. We chestfeed. We are not mothers. We are parents. We no longer are husbands and wives, we are partners. We are replaceable and interchangeable. The new titles are not names but functions.

Names are gifts and our acceptance of them an acknowledgment we did not make ourselves. This is a rejection of Year Zero which cannot be tolerated by the rebelling machine. There is no fraternity in the Borg Hive because there are no brothers, but there is equality: the equal absence of the soul.

So it is noteworthy what transpires as the rough beast slouches to Bethlehem: the new Picard series may be dismantling the Borg as villain. The viewer is tempted with dreams of power and the simulated health of the machine, told reconciliation with the hive elicits a feeling of “euphoria.” Interesting. And now there may be a part of the Borg which is rehabilitated while remaining Borg: “Rather than assimilating other species, they will instead use their technology to save the ‘lives that need saving.’ "

No. There is no life in the machine. The Borg are the Borg are the Borg. Modernity’s love of inversion finds vague “safety” a stronger “last refuge of scoundrels” than Johnson’s patriotism. But the annihilation of free will and the soul is anathema to true life. The horror is you can continue to fall away and you can continue to dig deeper and the only way to stop is metanoia: to open the heart, to turn around, to enter the eucatastrophe.

Tolkien wrote:

"I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane (....) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.”

We do not redeem the Borg by renaming assimilation “the pursuit of safety.” We do not heal the pain of the orphans by diminishing motherhood.

What the redemptive arc for the Borg, for the Machine, would look like is a vital task for our moral imaginations. But that does not mean we should fall prey to the temptation of cheap grace, to obscure problems by renaming them. History does not disappear when you have burnt all the books, and the lines on our faces and stories of our hearts are the best testimony against the falsehood of all Year Zeros.

The crisis of fractured communities, sluggish bodies, alienated work, and broken families cannot be solved by renaming motherhood “parenting.” Infant soy formula is a tragically necessary item for many, but it also witnesses to the Borgification of motherhood. When mothers are driven to work, either by choice or necessity, 6 weeks after the infant is born, then it is only a few appearances which separate us from the Borg nursery.

The evil roots of the Borg may have always been with us, but now that they are so fully unveiled we must confront them rather than re-title them to soothe our egos. Whether it was mass boarding school, child sacrifice, career empowerment theory, welfare-to-work programs, infanticide, King Herod, or modern isolated motherhood: all of these attacked the foundation which the Church in Her wisdom recognized as pivotal to true life.

Can we restore motherhood without trapping women alone in suburban lots? Can we renew the home so it is no longer a motel but the root of stewardship? Can we take our work and production back from the financial institutions which used those things to justify putting toddlers in care for 10 hours a day? Can we support families and water and soil and animals and life and communities and churches without mechanizing them? Can we have holy days which are seeds of life, rather than frantic, miserable, over-scheduled consumption waves?

The Borg and the techno-humans say no, there is no free will, no mystery of the heart, no meaning in matter; there is only the inevitability of the Singularity. But the eucatastrophe smiles gently and shakes its head. Despair not. Happily we have guides. From George MacDonald’s romantic Christianity to Steiner’s spiritual science and encouragement of contemporary mothering to Tolkien’s eucatastrophe, there are beacons of light to help us meet these challenges. Foundational to these efforts will be keeping to true names and upholding the mystery of free will.

From MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin

Mothering is a gift. Life is a gift. The soil and the light and the skipping brook are gifts. If joy cometh in the morning it comes because we turn and open our living eyes to the hours which draw us closer to these. Hope seemingly dies with the assimilation to the chip hive mind, but is renewed by a turn of our hearts to the Sacred Heart.

Here are the closing lines of the fairy tale The Black Bull of Norroway which so caused love to jump in Tolkien’s heart:

That being the third night, and the damsel being between hope and despair, she broke her plum, and it held far the richest jewellery of the three. She bargained as before; and the old wife, as before, took in the sleeping drink to the young knight's chamber…They all went to bed again, and the damsel began, as before, singing:

'Seven long years I served for thee,
The glassy hill I clomb for thee,
Thy bloody clothes I wrang for thee;
And wilt thou not waken and turn to me?'

He heard, and turned to her.

And so farewell until next time.