I'm getting a little self-conscious about my incessant references to Ezra Klein, but he is quite remarkable for having his finger on what I see as the critical issues. This week he had on Michelle Goldberg, a woman I respect as a sensible Progressive and like for her intellectual honesty and personal authenticity. But she's a good example of this kind of intellectual with all the good will in the world, who I'm sure does not think of herself as a nihilist but whose presuppositions make it difficult for her to argue against ideas that deep down she knows are nonsense. From the podcast transcript:
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You know, I’m not sure that there is. I do think that there’s utopian thinking around gender, and this is probably a generational division. And I’m in some ways the wrong person to speak to. There’s someone I interviewed for the piece that I didn’t end up quoting for that bigger piece that we were talking about. I didn’t end up being able to work it in, where she was saying that the thing that really excites her now is the movement for trans rights and these new ways of thinking about and talking about gender.
And it’s not feminism per se, but the idea of making the gender binary, kind of irrelevant as a social organizing principle, I mean, that’s pretty utopian. We’ve never seen anything like that in, as far as I can tell, the history of the world. I mean, this is something that Margaret Mead the anthropologist wrote about, that every society organizes gender differently, assigns different roles to male and female. So those roles, there’s nothing really natural about them. And there’s also a ton of societies that have different iterations of like a third gender, or that allows some sort of flexibility.
Nevertheless basically every society is organized in some sense around the gender binary. You know, so I think there are younger people that have a vision of a society in which that is not true. And it might just be my own lack of vision or creativity that I find it hard to even envision. So I think that is where a lot of the utopian energy on the kind of part of the left that is really concerned about gender.
Utopian thinking is now about making the gender binary irrelevant as a social organizing principle?!?! Goldberg, a married heterosexual with two kids, is rather defensive about her normie status. Maybe, she says, she just doesn't have the vision or creativity of these younger people. Maybe she's just an old fogey now, as if the arrogance of youth gives them a special wisdom and their ideas a legitimacy their elders must bend a knee to. It's the classic conundrum for the contemporary cosmopolitan Liberal elite. The rationalist materialism into which she was acculturated gives her no tools with which to push back when a truly off-the-wall, disembodied Gnostic head trip like this is presented to her. She has to accept its fundamental validity as the next really cool new thing on the cutting edge even though it goes against what her common sense is telling her is nonsense. Margaret Meade is a straw she desperately grasps at to offer some legitimacy for her understandable negative reaction, but she can't seem otherwise to find a basis to explain it.
The problem here is that this so-called utopian project on the Cultural Left is one that can only be imagined in a society where people believe that humans are only what they are culturally conditioned to be. It's an historicist, anti-essentialist view of humanity, so to be human means whatever people want it to mean. So in the future, since there's no basis for understanding what a human is or what the human good is, whoever has the most power gets to define it. And so at some point, assuming the Cultural Left is running the government, it can decree that all children be acculturated in an AI-powered Skinner's Box where they will be molded into a society that has transcended the gender binary and whatever else the government thinks will make them happy, good citizens.
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And why would anyone resist? Everybody will be happily liberated from the constraints of gender. So in such an ideal world we'll all live happily in a transhuman polity where everyone is polymorphously perverse, and no one identifies as male or female, and babies are made in Skinner labs where they are cultivated to fit in a world where everyone is programmed to be like everyone else--happy, happy, happy.
Nobody wants this--not even the people on the cultural Left--but it's what the consequences of their unbalanced equality program lead to. Equality must always be held in tension with freedom, and freedom requires a metaphysical imaginary that is open to possibilities that transcend any particular social arrangement, no matter how utopian its proponents think it. All spirited human beings aspire to something more, something that requires risk and moral courage. The irony of the Cultural Left's project lies in that the "more" that it aspires to leads ultimately to less because its presuppositions shut out other, deeper human possibilities.
Real moral progress cannot come from a behavioral modification regime but by awakening dormant but expansive moral dimensions within people's souls. Such an idea has no resonance within the secular Cultural Left. People who are awakened like this will be respectful and kind to those who don't fit easily into the broader society's norms, but they will have common sense enough to realize that the norms, though stretchable, cannot be stretched beyond a breaking point. There's a way to make room for people who don't fit without destroying archetypal human norms.
Perhaps in another post I'll talk about how Jung says we're both male and female and St. Paul says we're neither male or female and why I think they're both right teleologically, but my focus here is about our current political situation. My objective here is not to develop an extended argument why this kind of thinking is wrong for us here and now. The gist of such an argument lies with what I've been saying for years now about the way in which Calvinism, Capitalism, and Science have deeply alienated us from any deeply felt connection with the Living Real.
This, I think, was Goldberg's dilemma. Goldberg feels the anomaly, but she can't articulate it in a way that maps to her presuppositions. So this goes to my point about how Liberals are in their own way incapable of thinking outside the norms-destroying frame shaped by Neoliberal and late capitalist presuppositions. These presuppositions certainly shape the ethos of the NY Times and news media in general--but other cultural institutions like universities, non-profits, film, literature, and the other arts. Are the people who work comfortably within these Liberal cultural institutions any more brainwashed than their less sophisticated opponents on the Right?
To the degree that their thinking is simply a reflection of the cultural milieu in which they swim, I'd say they are quite similar in their being unconsciously captured by their respective narrative frames. Are the two frames equally delusional? No, because the Liberal frame maps closer to the world that late capitalism has given us. Even if one is unconsciously captured by it, it aligns with what's there. The Right's narrative exists in a bubble that has only a tangential relationship to what's there. That's why history almost always proves them wrong sooner or later.
And so hard-right narratives are either naive or intellectually dishonest in a way that the Liberal narratives, for all their limitations, are not. Whatever positive step forward that comes next will develop not out of the Right's narrative frame but the Left's. That doesn't mean that we might have to live for a time in a world where the Right tries to jam its narrative down Liberals' throats. But I feel relatively certain that even if the Right enjoys some big short-term victories, it will not be able to sustain control of the critical institutions that shape American society in the long term. They seek to control forces that they simply don't understand.
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Most Americans accept gay marriages, and if you know any gay-parented families, they are as normal in every way as other American families except for their being two dads or two moms. The point here is that in gay marriage what has been the traditional norm stands; the norm just became flexible enough to accommodate same-sex relationships that before were not accepted as normal. They are broadly acceptable today precisely because while they stretch a norm, they don't seek to abolish or destroy it. Because gay marriage accepts the basic norm, it's easier for traditional normies to accept gay marriage.
Getting rid of the gender binary, on the other hand, is fundamentally different because such a project assumes that long-standing gender norms are arbitrary constructs whose primary function is to justify patriarchy. I think that's a rather simplistic, reductive way to account for gender. But for the social justice warriors for whom transcending the gender binary is desirable, it follows that it is just as oppressive as racial segregation because it was part of the same patriarchal social structure, and as such has no legitimacy. I have no desire to defend patriarchy, but if there's no idea here of justice as a transcendental, but only of a flattened idea of justice as the repeal of all oppressive taboos. But without any sense of the dignity of human beings as in some way deeply linked to transcendental moral aspiration, the secular cultural Left's taboo-cancelling project ends locking everyone up in some version of a Skinner's Box.
So there's a difference between stretching norms and destroying them. Insofar as Democrats and Liberals in the media become associated with ideas that are associated with destroying norms that normal Americans believe are central to their identity and to the operating of a healthy society, they will be rejected by most normie Americans. This is a real problem for Democrats insofar as they have allowed themselves to be perceived in the culture wars as associated with cultural energies that are norm destroying. And so it's a real problem for democracy because it depends on Democrats retaining power.
Democrats differ from Republicans for reasons I outlined yesterday because they are a diverse party of normal Americans who who value tolerance and compromise. However the Democrats as a party have become too identified with extremist activists in their coalition who do not represent the views of most rank-and-file Democrats. Democrats need to become the party of cultural normalcy that contrasts itself with the Republicans who have become the party of crackpot, anti-democracy extremists. To the degree that they can do that, i.e., to the degree that they can accommodate but not become identified the culture-war extremists in their coalition, they can establish a solid governing majority that could pass progressive legislation that will actually be popular.
Most Americans would find Democrats' programs attractive if they weren't proposed by Democrats. Too many normie Americans have come to perceive Democrats as captured by culture-war, norm-destroying activists within their coalition, and so don't trust them in other policy areas. Most rank-and-file Dems are normies, but to the degree that they come to feel that their normalcy is under attack by major constituencies in the Democrats' coalition, they will be pushed toward the Republicans. For Democrats to allow this to conintue in this critical moment would be political malpractice. Democrats need to do everything they can to win the culture war by presenting themselves as the party of normal American values, and if they do that, then they can win on left-of-center Progressive policies.
Every healthy society needs an avant-garde, but it belongs on the fringes. It stops being avant-garde when it demands to be at the center. Then it just becomes a new Jacobin establishment that will inevitably generate a backlash. So let the avant-garde play its role in challenging and stimulating the thinking and often the gradual evolution of normies, but don't let them push too hard. If they do, they will almost inevitably bring on a backlash that if successful will push them beyond the fringes to underground hidey holes to which they must flee to escape the wrath of the Right that wants payback for all its perceived slights.