The school year hasn’t even started and there is already controversy surrounding a new subject, History and the Present. There is heated debate about this textbook. Professor Wojciech Roszkowski, a well-known historian authored the work and is now the subject of an online hate campaign.

I do not wish to comment on the substance of the contents of the book. Naturally, I have to study the content thoroughly, and to criticise any errors it contains. The weight of these mistakes may indeed be varied but the details are no reason for any alarm bells.

What interests me more is the online campaign waged against the author, one which is ideologically and philosophically motivated. The pretext is the section on bioethical questions, where we can read about the effects of the sexual revolution in the West in the 1960s.

Professor Roszkowski draws attention to the social changes: “divorce and co-habitation without responsibility has become the order of the day”. He writes. We read further on “Together with medical progress and the gender ideology offensive , the 21st century has brough about the further decay of the institution of the family. The launch of the ‘inclusive’ family model leads to the creation in its stead of voluntary groups of people, often of the same sex who would bring children into the world, detached from the natural union of men and women: often through the laboratory. The more refined methods of separating sex from love and reproduction lead to treating sex as a recreation and reproduction as a people factory , one can say no more than a breeding farm”.

Roszkowski continues and maintains that this order of things leads us to pose a fundamental question “Who will love the children produced in this way? Will the state, take responsibility for this kind of ‘production’? Parental love was and will continue to be the foundation of everyone’s identity and the lack of this is the reason for the abomination of human nature. How many times do we hear of people, derailed in life say ‘I wasn’t loved as a child, no one gave me anything so I had to take it all myself.’”

These words aroused fury in those circles in which the sexual revolution is seen as a triumph of modernity and progress. Criticism was laid at Roszkowski’s door including accusations that he was criticising in vitro children and their parents. One individual started a public collection for a lawsuit against the historian.

It is worthwhile to note that not once in the textbook, History and the Present can we read the phrase in vitro. Professor Roszkowski does not generally refer to in vitro treatment that are acts of reproductive desperation beyond natural relations. This is obviously about couples who are unable to conceive naturally.

The matter is somewhat delicate. Childless couples or individuals conceived in vitro, or by artificial insemination deserve empathy and respect. We have to watch our words. But does this mean that questions concerning the moral aspects of artificial reproduction should be taboo?

    SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE 
  The phenomena about which Professor Roszkowski writes chiefly concerns single-sex couples and not infertile couples striving for conception by natural means. We can see situations at the moment, the example of a man who is a sperm donor to a surrogate mother. This is the drama of those children that Professor Roszkowski draws attention to.

Are we not on the horns of a moral dilemma? Is the child born from a surrogate for a homosexual couple the fruit of a loving relationship, or is it , sorry to say merely a product of someone’s caprices?

Professor Roszkowski answers these questions and precisely outlines the reason for the problem. It not he who is harming children but those who reach for the technological means to reproduce, convinced that they have the egoistical right to that conceived happiness.

One of the consequences of the sexual revolution is the denigration of natural family ties. So in the current narrative of the New Left, which was reared on the fundamentals of this revolution, the traditional family model is treated as potentially authoritarian, a hierarchical structure with the patriarch at its head in the role of a toxic tyrant.

But the person, liberated from natural family ties is being deprived of their identity. Relations with the parents , mother and father, shape these ties which are often difficult. We see those people who as adults look for their biological parents: whose identities that had been unaware of . These examples merely tell us not to underestimate the questions of genealogy.

A critic could say that the questions posed by Professor Roszkowski, coming from a Polish perspective, are marginal and that we should not take them too seriously, in particular within secondary schools. They have a limited cultural significance too. But they are well within a mass scale. The sexual revolution has after all been transmitted via popular culture.

Professor Roszkowski’s critics hate him for being a conservative, who is behind the times. But warning against conservatives, who have benefitted from research and technological breakthroughs has not been just the domain of the Left. We could add Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It’s a gloomy and horrifying vision of the world in which procreation is done artificially; motherhood and fatherhood are seen as indecent.

Huxley is a hippy guru and one of those patrons of the counterculture of the 1960s. But he was not a conservative by any means. However, he broached the subject that Roszkowski is getting criticised for. We only have to wait for them to call for the censorship of Brave New World itself.

It’s less about conducting a debate on bioethics. Asking questions on ethics, and bioethics, is painful because they touch on existence. Setting the border between good and evil is painful. So this is why in the narrative of the New Left, parents, and in particular the father, are the villains of the piece as those who have traumatised their children by disciplining them.

A measure of moral maturity is the consciousness of the border between good and evil. There are those who prefer to dwell in a state of moral narcosis. Critics of Professor Roszkowski belong to this category, one could see.

–Filip Memches

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

  –Translated by Jan Darasz