Last winter I had the opportunity to see R&B artist and neo-soul embodiment D’Angelo share with the audience his comeback album, the first released after 14 years of silence. Alain de Botton has once suggested that in our post-religious world it’s imperative to keep some of the values that religion has instilled in us, and instead base them on secular grounds. To this end, he says, we should cultivate experiences that “reawaken our sense of awe”. It would be fair to say that D’Angelo’s performance was one such experience.

As many artists and thinkers have pointed out, music is a special kind of art. The most abstract, as Agnes Martin called it, and yet the most moving; appealing to our innermost sensitivity, it is capable of unearthing emotions we didn’t even know we had. D’Angelo’s music has all of these qualities, but his performance did more: it created a connection so powerful with the audience that it made me rethink the relation between an artist, their work and the public.

As I was standing there in the middle of an overjoyed crowd, one question wouldn’t leave my mind: how can I repay this? The intensity of what was happening on stage, the strength of the music and the deep place it was coming from — it all lead to this one haunting thought. How can I give this ‘back’? Despite having paid a considerable amount of money, to me this was more than a performance. It was an act of altruism. An offering of oneself. A gift, par excellence.

In 1983, cultural critic and essayist Lewis Hyde wrote a book that Margaret Atwood said was ‘about the core nature of what it is that artists do’. It was entitled “The Gift”. Blending philosophy with poetry and anthropology, the book speaks about the various ways in which a gift may manifest itself, from socio-economic glue to artistic inspiration and then an artwork itself. However it shows itself, ‘the gift’s’ main quality remains: it is immensely transformative, for both the giver and the receiver’.

What made D’Angelo’s presence on stage so unique was precisely this reciprocity. Rather than being a unilateral expression of adulation, what I witnessed was one of the rarest, most beautiful relationships between an artist and their audience, made truly wonderful by the palpable feeling that it was just as moving for the artist as it was for us. And maybe it truly had been.

We know the man D’Angelo (a.k.a. Michael Eugene Archer) has certainly gone through some transformations, with his music suffering changes as well, or sometimes just suffering. In the early 2000s, he released Voodoo, an album almost unanimously hailed as a masterpiece of neo-classic soul blended with jazz and R&B. He soon after reached the peak of his stardom, largely as a consequence of the sexually infused music video for the track Untitled (How Does It Feel).

Since then, D’Angelo went through substance abuse, obesity, rehab and conflicts with the law. He hadn’t released another album in 14 years, in what many referred to as one of the longest creative dry spells in the history of soul music. But at the end of 2014, D’Angelo broke that spell with a genre progressing, soul, R&B, funk, jazz and rock epitome of a comeback album, Black Messiah, released shortly after controversial decisions to do with race in America around the Ferguson and Eric Garner events.

Could it be that the seemingly self-destructive detours D’Angelo has taken in his convoluted career were just transformations of the self, necessary for creating art? And if so, has D’Angelo now managed to produce a true, artistic ‘gift’?

The Creative Labor

In a beautiful piece written 3 years ago, journalist Amy Wallace introduced us to the creative travail that was going on behind what would later be called Black Messiah. Over the years it took to finish it, enough announcements of the new album’s release had been made to justify ‘A History of D’Angelo Album Promises’ as the title of a lengthy article. Despite the industry’s efforts to push the album’s release for 2012, producers and label managers soon found out about the so-called ‘D-time . . . a pace so slow that it could test even the most patient saint. . . . In [D‘Angelo’s] world’, Wallace wrote, ‘nothing happens quickly.’ D-time seemed so implacable that even the president of giant music label RCA had let go of the idea of a deadline. In 2012, when asked when the new album would be released, he replied ‘This year would be nice.’ As we now know, it took D’Angelo another two years and a half.

It seems that ‘D-time’ couldn’t be bogged down by the alarm clock. Perhaps D-time was a special kind of time, not the same time that buses arrive at, or the time when people have to be at work – perhaps it was the rhythm of creative labor.

‘Work’, we are told in The Gift,

‘is what we do by the hour. It begins and ends at a specific time and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus—these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace.’

Labor is more difficult to quantify, because during it ‘the soul undergoes a period of travail, a change that draws energy. Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms’ these are, in Hyde’s account, labors.

While we can rush the rhythm of plain work, because it is clearly intended and can be willed into accomplishment, the internal movement of labor, bound as it is with feeling and creative intimacy, seems to flow at its own rate. ‘A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that,’ writes Hyde, ‘labor has its own schedule.’ ‘D-time’ too seems to have been impossible to rush. D’Angelo’s music engineer, as well as his longtime artistic partner and legendary musician Questlove, both confirm the same thing: ‘Once [D’Angelo] gets into the studio, he gets in his own zone’. D-time ‘speeds up for no man’.

If this is true, do the deadlines and pressures of the music industry stifle the creative impulse? Or are they there to transform one’s labor into consumer-oriented ‘art’? ‘The music business’ said D’Angelo in a recent interview, ‘is a crazy game, especially for somebody like me who is really a purist about the art. Trying to balance the pressures of commercialism [is] a tightrope. It’s a fine line between sticking to your guns and insanity.’ Once, a music video for an older song on D’Angelo’s Voodoo was once not played in rotation by MTV as punishment for the artist having missed the deadline for the album.

But, writes Hyde, the fruits of our labor cannot be predicted. In fact we can’t even know if we’ll ever finish. When things do get done however, it often seems like they’ve completed themselves. ‘Everything hinges on D letting the music go’ music journalist Amy Wallace wrote 3 years ago. Her inspired wording expressed D’Angelo’s greatest challenge: not standing in the way of his own gift.

This proved to be hard. The sultry image that D’Angelo tied himself to in 2000 seemed to have ossified into an insurmountable obstacle. The music video for Untitled made everything about the man, creating so much interest around his physical image that it overshadowed his art. ‘The narcissist’, writes Hyde, ‘works to display himself, not to suffer change.’ D’Angelo must have been well aware of the threatening spectre of narcissism, as he retells the story of beautiful Lucifer with seemingly stark lucidity in his interview with Wallace: ‘Every angel has their specialty, and his was praise. They say that he could play every instrument with one finger and that the music was just awesome. And he was exceptionally beautiful’, D’Angelo reckons, ‘as an angel.’

Most of us can hardly imagine what it’s like to be thrown into the pool of vanity that our celebrity culture so openly encourages. Despite being constantly objectified, captured in photographs, praised and ridiculed, analysed and deconstructed, the artist is expected—and has—to remain intact. Their integrity, both figurative and literal, is constantly under threat. To carry on with strong and decided focus, unfalteringly, pushing away every shred of self-doubt that’s trying to penetrate from outside within — is at once essential to being a creative artist, and an almost impossible effort.

Hyde explains that for creation to take place, the ego must temporarily disappear. Art is a virtue, and as with any virtue, practising it means effacing the mean, greedy part of ourselves. The true artist, therefore, ‘is not self-aggrandizing, self-assertive, or self-conscious, he is, rather, self-squandering, self-abnegating, self-forgetful.’

The R&B icon’s 14 years of silence, devoid of creativity, filled with substance abuse and weight gain were deplored by critics everywhere – but I suggest it was a process of self-abnegation indispensable to artistic creation. His overly-fetishised image had to be killed, the self-consciousness fame had brought had to be discarded if any more music was to flow.

The annihilation of the ego is not dictated by moral reasons. The artistic gift simply cannot come forward if encumbered by self-scrutiny. We seem to have known this through the ages. Hyde’s explanation is interspersed with numerous folk tales, and they all amount to the same conclusion: as soon as an artist starts reflecting on their gift, they cannot use it anymore. Magical, neverending supplies of craftsmanship or talent all seem to end in scarcity the moment the protagonist wants to know their origin and the inner workings of the creative process (at least during the act itself). In art you become self-forgetful, but fame makes you self-aware. Knowing people watch you makes you watch yourself. Much like a fleeting climax, the gift is lost as soon as you think about it.

As we’ve seen, sometimes it can take as much as 14 years before it shows itself again. Many have wished ardently for D’Angelo’s creative freeze to end, ‘not just for the artist’s sake, but for the culture’s.’ Long-time friend and drummer legend Questlove has accused D’Angelo of ‘holding the oxygen supply that music lovers breathe,’ calling him selfish for not sharing his gift with the ‘starving’ public. D’Angelo’s reasons for holding off may have been personal, but the responsibility he has as a gift-receiving and gift-giving artist is universal, for ‘the creative spirit moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person.’ Whether it’s tradition, community, history or race, works of art are drawn from a territory much greater than one’s self. The duty of the receiver becomes to give the gift further. Not hoarding or capitalising it, but disbursing it and dispersing its seeds is what nourishes the communal, rich soil of artistic inspiration. This is how gifts are kept in motion, their greatness sustained by generosity.

Many artists speak of how much of their creativity comes from a source they do not control, or sometimes even comprehend. For many artists, this is simply God. Lewis Hyde calls it ‘the creative spirit’, the Maori tribespeople of New Zealand call it the nourishing spirit ‘hau’. Atheists would maybe point to psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary ‘by-products’ that explain the process by which the experience comes about. An ardent religious believer, D’Angelo has spoken on many occasions of good and evil, demons and angels that play a part in his work. Nothing seems to fill him with as much (spiritual) reverence as two African-American icons: Marvin Gaye and J Dilla.

Marvin Gaye’s death reportedly had a strong impact on Michael as a child. His mother had to seek specialised help for him, and the soul legend has been constantly reappearing in his dreams since the day he was shot. Later on, J Dilla’s death is what prompted D’Angelo’s decision to make an artistic comeback in the first place, reconnecting him with his own gift.

Before him, poets like Ezra Pound, Whitman or Pablo Neruda were all shown to have been haunted by gift-givers of their own, those they felt indebted to, whether they were personal heroes, tradition or a sense of brotherhood – these quintessential artists have dedicated a large part of their work ‘to the renewal of their spirits’, in a labor of gratitude.

Of Ezra Pound, Lewis Hyde writes:

‘For Pound, I think, what gifts we have come ultimately from the gods, but a “live tradition” is the storehouse in which the wealth of that endowment is preserved. Pound speaks certain names over and over again—Homer, Confucius, Dante, Cavalcanti—the lineage of gifted souls whose works had informed his own.’

D’Angelo confesses that he’s driven by the masters that came before him, and he and Questlove have a name for them: the Yodas. The music behemoths that have informed D’Angelo’s work are his own ‘lineage of gifted souls’.

New creation, in an attitude of humility and generosity — is often the only possible way of showing one’s gratitude. Generosity means to generate. ‘The return gift is, then, the fertilizer that assures the fertility of the source.’ After his Voodoo album in 2000, D’Angelo went through a creative freeze. ‘The talent which is not in use is lost or atrophies’, and letting that happen is the greatest sign of ingratitude. Everyone was wondering if he would be able to honour his own ‘lineage of gifted souls’. Would the lavishly imparted talent and untimely deaths of the Yodas make him reach his true potential?

The Labor of Gratitude

On that exceptionally warm winter evening, I saw D’Angelo perform as part of his 2015 comeback tour, in Berlin. His performance reminded me of a particularly beautiful passage from ‘The Gift’’:

‘Sometimes, then, if we are awake, if the artist really was gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives.’

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that D’Angelo’s performance induced such a sense of borderline religious togetherness. His new album is flawless, and his live energy difficult to describe. It felt as if the stage was eerily taken over by Otis Redding, James Brown, or Marvin Gaye himself.

What made the performance unique though was a palpable feeling of mutual transformation and enrichment between him and the audience, rather than the one-way transmission all-too-familiar in music gigs. The performance was so intense that it made me think this was an act of altruism more than anything else. We, music-lovers, were no longer starving. We got back our oxygen supply. D’Angelo was repaying his gift, and in doing so, he has finally earned it.

The concert ended with Untitled. However, the song had little of the raw sexuality it was once infused with; instead, after 14 years, this version was subtle and soft, melancholic perhaps, emanating a fragile but strong, beautiful intimacy between him and the fans. The closeness felt rare for an artist of such stature. The gratitude was overwhelming. It was probably a moment of grace.

Suddenly, money felt inappropriate. Even the 70 euros I paid for the ticket – a considerable sum of money for an average, middle-class person, didn’t seem to be ‘enough’. But 100 euros wouldn’t have been enough either. Or 500. Or a beach house in Malibu.

The question is not how much money we should pay, but whether money is an adequate payment.

The essence of the artistic gift is that it transforms. Gratitude cannot be shown before the transformation has taken place, as the two are interlinked. The best way to show gratitude is by creating, and then giving, something of one’s own, but we only truly create when something inside us has been moved. D’Angelo’s gift was stirred by his Yodas, and in turn, some in his audience were moved to tears. Art, in this light, is a cycle.

As Hyde puts it,

‘The charging of fees for service tends to cut off the motivating force of gratitude. . . . Gratitude requires an unpaid debt, and we will be motivated to proceed only so long as the debt is felt. If we stop feeling indebted we quit, and rightly so. To sell a transformative gift therefore falsifies the relationship; it implies that the return gift has been made when in fact it can’t be made until the transformation is finished. A prepaid fee suspends the weight of the gift and depotentiates it as an agent of change.’

Money seems an inadequate form of payment, but we cannot repay art with obsessive adoration or by fetishising fame either. Everybody’s genius, like Socrates’ inner daimon, is a private matter: when people found out about it, his demise ensued. When the world obsesses over an artist’s persona, they force the artist to obsess over themselves and the flow of creativity is cut short.

After experiencing ‘gifts’, in our little moments of appreciative lucidity, we can (and should) contemplate the idea that some things deserve a more complex, long-term form of payment. In striving to do this, we might become, in turn, creators. An intense artistic experience could make us wonder–what can I give back? We have received a gift, and it’s up to us what we do with it.

Our labor of gratitude begins now.

there is nothing inherently virtuous about getting up early for work

“Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.” This is the beginning of ‘On Lying in Bed’, a lighthearted, yet no less substantial essay on the creative and moral benefits of idleness, written in 1909. In it, G.K. Chesterton praises the virtues of idleness, while deploring the fixed working routine imposed by society.

There is nothing inherently virtuous about getting up early for work in the morning but on the contrary, having carefree time to think is what strengthens our moral principles. ‘Misers get up early in the morning’ he quips, ‘and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle.’

More than a century later, neuroscience gives flesh to Chesterton’s metaphors, as it turns out that a state of idleness indeed benefits the creative abilities of our brain, as well as potentially improving our moral judgement. In his book “Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing”, author Andrew Smart explains how the areas of our brain responsible for connecting seemingly disparate ideas & creating new ones are in fact more active when your brain doesn’t do anything than when it does.

when we don’t worry about work, these areas connected with creativity, introspection and abstract thought flare up

The so-called default mode network (responsible for ‘idle’, introspective thought), the central executive network (the brain system that solves math problems and cognitive tasks) and the salience network (responsible for switching between the two) have been shown on an fMRI to be more active when we don’t have to solve a specific problem. When we’re not trying to carry out cognitive tasks, or when we don’t worry about work, these areas connected with creativity, introspection and abstract thought flare up.

As a consequence, there seems to be a connection between the ‘incubation period’ of a creative idea and our brain’s default mode processing, or ‘idle’ state. The ‘incubation’ period is a stage in the development of creative insight, the second of a set of four key stages in the creative process, where the unconscious rearranges random thoughts that we’ve had consciously at one previous point in time. It results in new, original ideas at a later point, and precedes that ‘a-ha!’ moment, which usually takes place in the shower, when taking a walk, or when you’re staring at the ceiling, drawing colourful lines with an imaginary pencil.

As another study explains, in our ‘idle’ state, our brain is involved in “self-awareness and reflection, recalling personal memories, imagining the future, feeling emotions about the psychological impact of social situations on other people, and constructing moral judgments.” This idle state seems to be, in short, responsible for making us better, happier, more creative human beings.

Happiness, however, seems highly underrated in our current times. We seem to focus on work and productivity now more than ever, and work often gets in the way of happiness, with anecdotal evidence ranking ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’ as the second most popular regret among the dying.

this idle state seems to be, in short, responsible for making us better, happier, more creative human beings

As another 19th century essayist puts it, the only thing we need to learn is what makes us happy, as “there is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” In his ‘Apology for Idlers’, R. L. Stevenson commends skiving, laziness, the virtues of truancy, and warns against the perils of wasting one’s life in search of career goals and other overly delayed gratifications. “If you look back on your own education”, he writes, “I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods in the class”.

If idleness is so good for us, then why do we work so much? The answer comes from none other than Bertrand Russell, philosopher and idleness enthusiast. In 1932 he wrote an essay making the case for a 20 hour work week. ‘A great deal of harm’, he writes, ‘is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work . . . the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.’

This prosperity, as we have seen, means not only personal happiness, but also a stronger chance that we behave morally towards each other, as our brain’s default mode processes inter-personal relations and the socio-emotional impact of our actions. However, religious thinking has sometimes had us believe the opposite. Russell himself was brought up on the saying ‘Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do’, only to reject it in his writings as an adult. To this day, the saying encapsulates the protestant work ethic that still pervades much of the English-speaking world.

our brain’s default mode processes inter-personal relations and the socio-emotional impact of our actions

Decades later, British writer Will Self makes this ethos responsible for what he calls a ‘taboo against thinking’ in England. If people have time to think, they might come up with ideas that challenge the established order.

The world of work is, after all, divided into those that do, and those who tell others what to do, as Russell writes. Historically, those who have extolled the virtues of work (e.g. clerics) have never been in the former category, but the latter. Practising the opposite of what they preach, the idle class keep the others into submission through a rhetoric that sanctifies work and demonises idleness. The oppressed work for the oppressor in the faint hope of a future reward, which grows forever more distant.

This practice is a historical relic that must be done away with immediately, for “the morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery . . . to this day, 99 per cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working man.” Russell’s ‘day’ was of course 1932, but his observations hold true in 2015.

Another observation that proves perplexing for our 21st century, (post) social-media minds is this. “Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community.’’ Russell was referring of course to the Industrial Revolution and the technological advancements of early 20th century.

the world of work is, after all, divided into those that do, and those who tell others what to do

More than 80 years later, after 8 decades of ever developing ‘technique’, we still cannot say that leisure is ‘evenly distributed’. Google and Amazon are investing billions in robotics, and yet in some countries (paradoxically, some of the most developed ones) more than two thirds of the working population hate their jobs.

Russell was confident that ‘if the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment’. In 1930, economist J.M Keynes predicted that by the start of the 21st century, we would work only 15 to 21 hours a week, and our greatest challenge would be how to use our freedom from economic cares. Later, in the 70s, futurist and philosopher Buckminster Fuller famously put forth the idea that ‘one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest’ and thus urged us to do away with the ‘absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living’. A report in 2011 put the UK average working week at 42.7 hours compared with 41.6 across the EU.

How is it possible, Russell was asking, that when given the wonderful opportunity of producing twice as much in the same number of hours with the help of modern machinery, instead of deciding to work half the time, we’ve decided to work just as hard, overproduce and thus devalue our own work? In his thought experiment:

“Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?”

The argument of course echoes a similar marxist line of thinking, and some of Russell’s comments even seem to be a precursor to later anarchist trends. For instance, having divided work into two categories, Russell says of the latter (telling other people what to do) that “it is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given.”

instead of deciding to work half the time, we’ve decided to work just as hard, overproduce and thus devalue our own work

Thinker & activist David Graeber spoke of the similar ‘phenomenon of bullshit jobs’. ‘In technological terms’, Graeber says, ‘we are quite capable of [a 15 to 21 hour work week]. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary.” How many of us in large corporations haven’t had managers of managers who don’t appear to be doing much or whose role isn’t quite clear? This situation is profoundly damaging, says Graeber, on both a “moral and spiritual” level.

So, can we work less? Regardless of our political affiliations, we might easily agree that shorter working hours will benefit us on a human level. It might seem easy (and easily justifiable) to demand lower hours and higher pay, or casually denounce the greedy nature of capitalism and extol the fundamental sameness of all human beings. The real challenge however lies in providing the right practical framework for its implementation, without repeating the mistakes of the past. The question ‘can we work less?’ cannot be divorced from the social-economic framework that would provide it with a positive answer, or from the political worldview that would turn it into a reality. These are challenges that can form the subject of entire treatises, and cannot be disregarded as mere details.

the 40-hour work week should not be accepted as an inevitable status quo

The New Economics Foundation has so far been the only organisation to come up with a real plan of action. NEF insists that the 40-hour work week should not be accepted as an inevitable status quo, and the self-titled ‘think-and-do tank’ has opened a discussion on the possibility of reducing the working week, by inviting a panel of experts to weigh in on their Time on Our Side project. NEF have also come up with a strategy for gradually introducing the 21 hour work week. The full report on how this can be practically achieved is available here.

Until we figure out how to create the economic & political conditions for having more idleness and less work in our lives, it might be worth remembering that at least from a moral perspective, there is nothing particularly virtuous about work, nor anything ‘natural or inevitable‘.

When it comes to gender equality there’s an emerging technology that might be the key to many of our social dilemmas

Kantian ethics tells us never to treat another person as means to an end, yet women have it inscribed in their biology to serve as means towards another human being. We all know childbearing involves sacrifices, but we rarely contemplate just how secondary a woman’s self becomes. For 9 months, women turn into fragile vessels whose purpose is to carry another human being, and by having their bodies, habits, and emotions fundamentally altered—they give up a lot of their very personhood for someone else’s sake. There’s a reason why mothers keep telling us how much they’ve sacrificed to have us.

We’ve never questioned the morality or fairness of this fact of life. As if to disguise its agonising pains and life-stopping inconveniences, we’ve glorified and exalted pregnancy to an almost religious degree. The ‘miracle‘ of giving birth is supposed to be the best thing that ever happened to a woman. In that one moment when you hold your baby for the first time, your life is said to finally gain meaning.

Conversely, of course, we’ve criticised women who are afraid of giving birth, choose not to have children, or just dare speak of pregnancy as anything short of awe-inspiring.

Technology often creates moral issues rather than solving them, but when it comes to gender equality there’s an emerging technology that might be the key to many of our social dilemmas: artificial wombs.

The technology of artificial wombs would allow for ectogenesis to take place. Ectogenesis is a somewhat cold, clinical name for the wonderful possibility of having a baby grow outside one’s body. This could well be the ultimate step in women’s liberation. By removing this biological, fundamental impediment, women might finally function in and for themselves, as autonomous individuals just as focussed on their own personal fulfillment as men have always been.

It’s understandable that people would form an ‘un-natural’, Brave New World-ish picture in their minds and resist it. With any futuristic technology, there’s always the danger of mishandling it terribly once it becomes a reality. But as I hope to show, many of the arguments against ectogenesis (including those of some renowned feminists) are factually unsustainable or have more to do with prejudice and fear.

What is ectogenesis & how is it possible?

In short, ectogenesis is the possibility of birth (genesis, in Greek) outside (ecto) of one’s body. It has been the focus of at least two scientists:  Yoshinori Kuwabara, chairman of the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Department at Juntendo University, and Dr. Helen Liu, a researcher at Cornell University’s Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility. Kuwabara’s focus was saving premature babies, and in the process he’s grown a goat fetus inside an incubator that reproduced the uterus and placenta, together with amniotic fluid and blood supply. The goat fetus developed for 21 days, and although it had to be stopped due to some technical faults, the baby goat was successfully ‘delivered’ four days shy of full term. Equally impressive is Dr. Liu’s achievement of growing a human embryo for 10 days in a wholly artificial womb.

By removing this biological, fundamental impediment, women might finally function in and for themselves

Dr. Liu pioneered a technique called ‘co-culture’, where she grew an embryo and uterine tissue together, and developed an artificial human uterus using endometrial cells grown over a uterus-shaped scaffolding. She had to cease the experiments because of the 14-day regulation on human embryo research, but she carried on experimenting with mice, which she too carried in a fully artificial womb 4 days before a full term. Dr. Liu unapologetically makes developing an embryo and then a human being in an artificial womb ―her “final goal“. In her own words, “I want to see whether I can develop an actual external device with this endometrium cell and then probably with a computer system simulate the feed in medium, feed out medium . . . and also have a chip controlling the hormone level.”

For a more detailed overview of the technicalities involved in building an artificial uterus, here’s a very informative read.

The fears

Probably the most pervasive counter-argument is this: artificial wombs would sever the connection between mother and fetus, thus compromising the future baby’s physical health and/or psychological wellbeing.

As prominent ethicists Peter Singer and Deane Wells argue, we’re confronted with the same issue that IVF technology faced in its beginnings. The success of animal experiments were the only and sufficient reason why IVF was okayed for humans. If baby cattle were healthy, there was no reason to suspect human babies wouldn’t be as well. With ectogenesis, if a baby goat was successfully delivered and continued to live healthily, shouldn’t we accept the idea that human babies would be healthy as well?

Of course, even if we were certain that an ectogenetic child would be physically healthy, we still couldn’t be sure it will develop normally from a psychological viewpoint as well. Animal studies, unfortunately, aren’t of much help here. We simply cannot know with certainty, and experimenting with someone’s psychological wellness is unethical.

Does not knowing for sure mean we shouldn’t try to find out? If we need to be certain before we make any further experiments, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of experimenting? Singer and Wells suggest we break this circle by doing a sort of ‘gradual’ experimenting. We have already started to save premature babies by incubating them at a gradually earlier stage. We need to back this up with mental and psychological testing of the prematurely born babies at a relevant age – perhaps 6 years. If these tests turn out fine, we can move the incubating time even earlier in the pregnancy, and so on. This way we avoid unethical experimentation and we might have achieved full ectogenesis in a few decades.

The mother-child bond

While it’s true that a healthy, loving connection with one’s child is crucial for their mental and emotional development, we should also be aware that we’ve idealised the mother-child bond and formed a mental picture of motherhood that’s ridden with gender stereotypes. We need to make sure our biases don’t stand in the way of critical enquiry and moral progress.

The Internet is rife with advice and imperatives telling expecting mothers what they’re supposed to feel for their baby and what they can do to fix whatever’s wrong with them if they fall short of the expectations.

In reality, a good 20% of women do not feel any emotional connection with their baby. This means to one in five women their baby feels like a complete stranger. And that’s when they hold it in their arms and it looks like a human being; books like What to Expect insist you should feel immense love and great familiarity even since before your baby is born. (For a poignant and honest account of some of the less happy thoughts a pregnant woman can experience, this blog post is a reassuring read.)

The mother-child bond is a far less ‘natural’ feeling than what our social constructs would have us believe, in the sense that it’s not nearly as effortless or instantaneous. As one mother puts it, for some women the love they later develop for their children “doesn’t happen in the womb, no matter what any Fertility Goddess friends or exuberant pregnancy books say about the bond between a pregnant woman and the unborn or newborn child.”

Most of what has been written on the almost mythical subject of mother-child connection regards, in fact, the post-natal care the baby receives. The affectionate parent-child communication, the face-to-face interaction, touching, lullaby singing & storytelling – all shape the future adult’s sense of security, their ability to cope with stress, anxiety and generally how they’ll manage relationships and attachment. This period of bonding happens however after birth, with an established body of research defining it from the first minutes of an infant’s birth and continuing throughout their first week of life (Klaus and Kennel 1976, Feldman 1978). Other research acknowledges this period as starting around birth and continuing for up to two months in the child’s development as the most significant (Leckman et al. 1999).

As for the pre-natal period, there are indeed studies that suggest elements of the intrauterine environment might influence an infant’s later development. However, these elements were studied in conjunction with the post-natal environment, and their precise nature or how they influence behaviour is still to be determined. But this obviously goes for real wombs too. Shouldn’t we let mothers carry babies anymore because, well, we don’t know precisely how their intrauterine environment affects the fetus?

Perhaps we shouldn’t. Given women’s (still precarious) emancipation, a lot of mothers-to-be work until their water breaks. If the child’s optimum psychological wellbeing is our ultimate goal, then surely we should be concerned with the wide range of stressors a fetus is subjected to when inside a working woman’s womb.

We’re subjecting technology to much harsher, scrutinising looks, because it’s not ‘natural’. Technology is man-made and humans are prone to error. Though it’s reasonable to be wary of human fallibility, we must remember that nature is not “perfect” either. The pain women are subjected to when giving birth is just one of countless examples of nature’s imperfections.

External wombs would help parents love their children for ‘their own sake’

Pregnancy in its entirety is far from a perfect process. Stress, of course, is not only caused by deadlines and excel reports, it can also come from a mother’s general emotional state, if she’s unhappy or worried or feels emotionally neglected, there’s a strong chance high levels of cortisol will impact the baby, and that’s far from ideal. These are, evidently, some of the reasons we’ve treated women differently in the first place. But rather than perceiving women as frail creatures and denying them access to work or a normal lifestyle, wouldn’t it be better to liberate them from the burden of pregnancy altogether? As for the baby, wouldn’t it be better for it to develop in a supervised, caring environment, freed of day-to-day stress and optimised for its maximum wellbeing?

 Mothers, anxiety, and a-wombs

In 1956, D.W. Winnicott came up with the concept of “primary maternal preoccupations”. It was used to describe a state of alertness and hyper-sensitivity that a woman experiences throughout and especially towards the end of her pregnancy. Winnicott referred to this state as almost an illness, in fact he literally wrote it would be considered an illness ‘were it not for the fact of pregnancy’. However he still recognises the evolutionary value of such a state, the mother’s acute sensitivity to her baby’s needs allowing her to create the perfect environment for her offspring’s development.

Whether such a syndrome in fact exists is as disputable as any other psychiatric claim, but many would argue that it’s in the nature of motherhood to be hyper-alert to their child’s every movement. Many mothers continue to feel this way throughout their child’s teenage and even adult years. Many of us have had the experience of overbearing mothers, who still want to protect us by controlling our actions even as adults.

Feminists such as Shulamith Firestone wrote about this, and embraced artificial wombs more than 40 years ago. To her, external wombs were the solution for what she considered to be possessive mothering. “A mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort ‘belongs’ to her (To think of what I went through to have you!).” Firestone believed that external wombs would help parents love their children for ‘their own sake’.

As many feminists have pointed out, there’s a lot of social pressure on the mother to be close to the child, and this is likely to impact a mother’s mental wellbeing. In the words of R. Kukla, “over-valuing proximity produces an unbalanced insistence that women stay near their children and induces guilt in them when they do not.” In this regard, external wombs might bring some beneficial distance.

I think the ability to have children with fewer sacrifices can only bring health and balance to the parent-child relationship. Coupled with the possibility to plan a child much later in life, ectogenesis could drastically lower feelings of frustration otherwise widely reported by new parents.

Artificial wombs and feminism

Firestone is a feminist who embraced artificial wombs well before goat fetuses or human embryo experiments. But ‘feminists’, on the whole, are far from being unanimously in favour of it. Andrea Dworkin, Robyn Rowland or Janice Raymond think ectogenesis will lead to the complete obliteration of women. The womb is women’s main “currency” for these theorists, and embracing this technology would mean giving away their unique privilege. Even in the most woman-hating cultures, the argument goes, women are at least spared in the promise that they will give birth to a son.

By reasoning this way however, the only thing we’re achieving is to adopt the oppressor’s way of thinking. I suggest that this logic perpetuates the very women-hating culture it vows to eradicate.

We could replace ‘the privilege of pregnancy’ with the ‘privilege’ of being seen as a sex object. If oppressive tyrants wouldn’t kill women simply for the fact that they enjoy their sexual favours, certainly we wouldn’t deduce that being treated as a sex object is okay.

Gestation should not be women’s ultimate privilege, it should not be the sole thing that makes them valuable – in fact, it should not make them valuable at all. Gestation is nothing more than a biological function, it doesn’t make us better or worse people. Pregnancy just happens, a lot of the times against our will, and although we can aid it in various ways, it’s rarely a chance for the mothers to showcase their unique abilities, talents or skills. Unlike parenting, pregnancy, in itself, cannot be an art.

Despite its numerous dissenting nuances, feminism, at its core, has been fighting for women to be recognised as human beings, to give them back autonomy, dignity, and the fundamental human right to pursue their happiness without impediments. However, many mothers still don’t find it easy to build a self-sufficient identity separate from their infant. ‘Social pressures on pregnant women and new mothers undermine their sense of agency altogether, preventing them from having any interests of their own.’

Men are routinely discriminated against in custody matters; external wombs could mean the chance to split parenthood equally

By rejecting a technology that could liberate women from this, on the grounds that there are cultures where women are only considered valuable as means towards another (usually male) human being – we’re essentially saying we can keep oppressing women because society oppresses women. We’re saying we shouldn’t change the appalling status quo because the status quo is appalling. This circular bit of logic seems to put stagnancy where progress should be, and feminists who support it adamantly cling to the status of woman as victim rather than choosing to be active, dynamic agents of change.

I don’t intend, by any means, to diminish the complex political issues a-wombs will raise. We should definitely be concerned with who will get their hands on this extremely powerful instrument, and whether they will use it as a tool for liberation or oppression. As Soraya Chemaly argues, we still live in a man’s world, and we must make sure that those in power will empathise with women’s concerns, so that a Handmaide’s Tale scenario is successfully dodged. But I’d also like to point out ectogenesis could be a unique opportunity for equality and cooperation between genders.

Sexism and heteronormativity hurt straight fathers, gay couples and transgender people as much as women. As a result of the toxic, biology-infused moral half-judgement that mothers are essential to child rearing whereas fathers are disposable, men are routinely discriminated against in custody matters. External wombs could mean the chance to split parenthood equally, from both a practical and legal perspective. The wombs might at first be found in dedicated medical units, but it’s easy to imagine a near future where wombs are kept at home, equally tended to by men and women, cisgender or of a non-binary gender, either in heterosexual or gay relationships.

A-wombs might be the opportunity to finally eradicate the toxic myth that women are inseparable from their babies—which is why they should stay at home and renounce their own ambitions—while fathers are useless when it comes to loving and caring for another being, which is why they can orbit vagrantly around the household, with providing financially as their sole duty.

Despite my overt enthusiasm for artificial wombs, it’s difficult to flatly say they will be ‘good for women’. ‘Women’ are not uniform, and neither will be the distribution of new technology. As long as there are gaps between poor women and rich women, racially discriminated women and white privileged women, straight, gay or transgender women—there will be disparity in the way a-wombs are owned and administered.

These, however, are not reasons for rejecting artificial wombs, but for having a discussion about them before they become a reality.

In lieu of a conclusion

We need to make sure we’ve started a debate. We’re evidently free to reject ectogenesis, but we need to make sure that we’re not doing so on the wrong grounds; that we’re not passing up an auspicious moment for gender equality because of half-baked ethical judgements, moral superstitions, ancient myths of hubris, or internalised oppression. External wombs could be liberating, but freedom can be frightening, so it’s completely understandable to view this novelty with apprehension, and desirable to treat it with caution. But we need not, and should not, just passively accept our limits, be they social or biological. That’s simply not how progress is made.