Reflections on sex and human civilization
Humans have a tendency to quickly find a way of living and thinking that works "well enough", and stick with it. This tendency to "stick to what we know" is efficient, in the sense that it means we can spend more of our time focusing on what's in front of us rather than constantly reflecting on our worldview. But if history has anything to teach us, it is that when people and systems gets too entrenched on a single way of thinking and being, the negative consequences begin to accumulate.
Apart from a catastrophic pileup of these consequences, or a sudden unforeseen event, one of the main ways that a human being seems to change is to have repeated, necessary (i.e. forced) interactions with people who are different than he is. For example, being in school fundamentally changed me since I was made to sit in a class with a room full of children from different backgrounds, temperaments, and outlooks than I had. These small repeated interactions, in contrast to the huge singular life events, make small course-modifications to our life trajectory. We need healthy and safe interactions with people who are very different from us to give us continued opportunity to learn, grow, and change.
The problem is that being around people who are very different from me is, well, uncomfortable. It's much easier to get along with people who generally agree with how I approach things, share the same assumptions and worldview, etc. Over time, and as people age, they tend to cluster around other like-minded people who are comfortable to be around but also do not offer much resistance or alternative perspectives.
One of the few, striking ways that we are forced to interact with people different from us is through our sexuality. Sex binds two people together profoundly, a "knitting of souls", in a way that is remarkable. Since sexual attraction easily crosses racial and cultural lines (to the chagrin of some), there are opportunities for truly novel, sustained connections between very different pairs of people. For example, in my Indian family, one of my cousins married a man from Afghanistan, another cousin married a man of Cuban descent, and a third married a Caucasian! But even in the most restricted case, where two people from the same cultural background and ethnicity marry eachother, they are still very different people who have an enormous amount of differences, regardless of whatever they may have in common.
Not only does sex itself connect people who can be very different in a deep and lasting way, but the process of reproduction itself is a kind of genetic randomizer, in which two siblings with the same parents can be very different people (just ask me and my brother!!). Then these strikingly different people all have to learn how to get along with eachother for life, in the lovely and frustrating structures we call "families".
Sex simply limits the ability for individuals to splinter off into their own tiny echo chambers indefinitely. Eventually, we are driven by our need to connect sexually, and not only will that connection inevitably be with someone very different from us, but it will typically give rise to offspring who are also very different than we are. From the view of society as a whole, sex is a kind of small-scale mixing and bonding effect (can you tell I was a physicist?) that has a powerfully revitalizing and stabilizing effect on the larger human network. Imagine how much more splintered our world would be if humans reproduced by producing exact clonal copies of themselves; no one would ever be forced to connect deeply with people who were different than themselves. After generations of this, the various ways of life, thought systems, assumptions, resentments, etc. would probably become extremely entrenched with no easy way of finding a common shared humanity, or stepping outside of one's own perspective.
God, thank you for the good gift of sex. May we enjoy it to the fullest, and use this powerful gift well for the service and care of ourselves, others, and the world.