Every society needs moral norms and behavioral codes. Without them we would all be in Hobbes's state of nature. The culture war that is tearing the country apart right now is about who gets to define what those codes are. The main combatants are the Left and Right wings of our Calvinist heritage--the priggish Neo Victorians on the Right and the equally priggish Neo Abolitionist Identitarianss on the Left. The Right is wrong because the old social order was unjust in its repressiveness of women and minorities; the Left is wrong because its basis for abolition is not 'justice' but 'desire'. The cultural Left seeks to abolish taboos that impede desire understood in a postmodern Freudian sense, and they find a way to do it that is insufferably moralistic.
The intellectual vanguard on the cultural Left, at least for now, does not believe in transcendentals. For them Truth and Justice are just stuff we make up for the sake of convenience to navigate in a world that at root makes no sense. Justice is just a name for whatever is the cause of the day, which is usually what is trending in elite academic circles. For this faction on the Left, the idea that Justice is a transcendental ideal that calls a society to become its best possibility is an impossibility. But without justice as a grounding principle, it must find something else, and it draws on forms of postmodern Freudian theory like that of Lacan, Zizek, Deleuze, and Guattari to find it--and all they's got is 'desire', which in the American context is conflated with the 'pursuit of happiness' and the freedom to determine for oneself what that happiness might be. Any attempt to argue that some desires are better than others and some may be destructively narcissistic is rejected except when it involves violence.
So to boil the postmodern Freudian doctrine down to essentials, humans are all victims of the Oedipus complex, which is the cultural download we each receive when we are weaned and learn that we are not the center of the universe and must learn to play our role in society. These roles are cultural constructs and are by definition repressive and as such the greatest impediment to our pursuit of happiness, and so they must be deconstructed and abolished when they are obstacles to any individual's pursuit of happiness however that might be construed.
These roles are social constructs and as such are in flux over time, but they trace back to our premodern cultural heritage, so, for instance, the vast majority of children who are born biologically male and female must learn to play the roles of men and women, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, etc. Daddy insists on it, and so does Mommy, perhaps even more vehemently. Those roles for men and women are different in different societies, but one gets assigned a role and one must fit into it whether one likes it or not, and mostly we humans don't like it.
I accept that humans are born polymorphously perverse, and that as a result no matter what the gender or sexual role assigned to us, it's a constraint. And so the Oedipal desire to kill the Father is not personal; it's about the child's resentment at being constrained when she or he loses the Mother as his or her exclusive object of desire. The people who fail to make the Oedipal transition become primal narcissists--people like the fictional King Lear or the all too real Donald Trump--people whose driving force is to become once again the center of the universe as they were in the pre-Oedipal state where their wish was their desire. So what is this desire about except to restore our polymorphous perversity, which means a longing to return to a state of primal narcissism?
So all of us at that early age and continuing through life resent the constraints that were forced on us with our acculturation, some more than others depending on the configuration of the tribal codes and the roles they assign. But the resentment is always there, and so if we have not learned to own and manage these resentments, they lie festering in the soul. And when someone completely unrepressed and infantile like Donald Trump comes along, he gives permission to many for all that unmanaged, festering resentment to express itself in deeply destructive ways. And so here we are wallowing in a culture of narcissists, the Left not being much better than the Right in that regard.
So the resentment is a problem for the powerless post-Oedipal child, and he must repress it and seek the Father's approva--or else. There's a fundamental slavishness to it as the child becomes rather like a dog seeking the approval of his master, and spirited human beings rebel in adolescence in different ways. But its why, especially in more straitlaced, repressive societies, the repressed admire the rebels among us insofar as they seek to break the taboos and assert their individuality over against the regime imposed by the symbolic Father. We all go through this in adolescence, but it's a phase for most of us that we pass through if we become successful adults. Adults understand that there are positive and negative constraints. Negative constraints keep us trapped insofar as they remain unconscious and unexamined; positive constraints become a path to liberation if chosen and worked with.
So, for instance, It's one thing to have a parent who forces his child to play a sport or a musical instrument so he can live through his child vicariously; it's another if the parent imbues a love of the sport or music in his child that inspires him to want to be the best he can be. To become the best you can be requires discipline and constraint. To give your life a shape, you have to constrain desires that if indulged would lead to shapelessness. To become an adult means to have chosen to give a shape to one's life. A man-child is either trapped by his fear of displeasing the Father or trapped in a resentful need to rebel against him. The Right tends toward the first kind of childishness; the Left toward the second.
The adult has become of aware of his resentments and desires, has learned to own and manage them and to integrate them into a bigger, richer, shapelier possibility for becoming a full human being. So you can look at constraints as a problem or you can come to understand them as what gives a good life its shape in a life-long process of auto-poiesis and self-transcendence. In Neoplatonism, the more form a being has, the more densely real it is. So in Neoplatonic terms, true freedom is exercised in a continuous, dynamic trading in one set of constraints for another in an ongoing auto-poetic process of becoming more densely, humanly real. Another word for this intensity of form is 'virtue', and at the end of the process is what Aristotle called eudaemonia, which is the only happiness that is worthy of our desire. This sense of the word 'virtue' must be retrieved. In a society in which Calvinistic moralism is so dominant, we hear the word only in the sense of what Big Daddy wants.
We must have constraints, but we must develop some wisdom about which constraints are healthful and which are not; we are children to the extent that we live passively with the constraints that were imposed on us children. We become adults to the degree that we come to understand those constraints and find ways to transcend them by adopting other constraints that are auto-poetic. This was the Nietzschean project, but as I'll argue below, it was in a deeper way the Socratic project. I respect those among our cultural elites who see Nietzsche as a model of self-transcendence in this mature sense. The argument that I've been making here over the years is that we have to move beyond Nietzsche to retrieve Socrates understood in the right way.
***
Every society has constraints, aka taboos, and every society always will, and the culture war in this country right how is about who gets to define what those taboos are for our children. But the deeper, really important question is how do you decide which constraints are healthy and which are not? And the answer depends on how you define what it means to live a full human life, and about that we clearly have no consensus. And so, as suggested above, an important part of living a full human life is to develop the capacity to transcend the constraints of our acculturation, but not in a way that is completely shapeless.
My critique of the the Cultural Left is that while it's right about transcending oppressive cultural constraints, it's wrong insofar as it leads to social shapelessness and forms of narcissisim. We humans both need constraints and we need to transcend them, but transcendence for the sake of transcendence, the Nietzschean option, is not a foundation on which you can build a healthy society. The Socratic option is to transcend one's cultural constraints but in such a way that one comes into a deeper relationship and alignmnet with Reality. This is not a possibility on the Cultural Left because it cannot believe that there is any such thing as Reality in the Platonic-realist sense of the word.
So instead the Cultural Left, insofar as it is in thrall to the postmodern Freudians, is obsessed with sexual desire. But do we really believe sex and sex drives are what most deeply defines us? Don't we all deep down recognize that the cult of Sex Positivity takes something that's partially true and pushes it into something that's unbalanced and distorting and fundamentally empty?
So, from my pov, the moral program proposed on the Left, insofar as it makes an idol of Desire in the post-Freudian sense, is reductive and as such offers no genuinely 'desirable' alternative to the program of the Right. And quite possibly the Left is endorsing a program that is harmful for people in the throes of ontological dizziness insofar as it endorses metaphysical meaninglessness and shapelessness at a time when we need to feel that there's something firm underfoot upon which we can take a stand.
Using 'desire' as a criterion for defining the 'good life' is not the problem; defining what is most deeply worthy of our desire is. Desire, like the intentionality of consciousness, is always 'about' something. The most important question we need to ask ourselves is what is our desire about? In other words, what is worthy of or deepest aspirations? What kind of society might there be that would help people to shape their lives inspired by such aspirations? To make it so much about sex is shooting too low at best, and at worst promoting a narcissistically regressive infantilizaton.
But if sex is not the main thing, what ought to be the object of our desire--on what ends, individually and as a society, should we focus our attention and energies as worthy of our deepest aspirations? Is it possible that we could come to some consensus about that? I genuinly believe that we can because in the final analysis Socrates was correct--what we all desire is the Good, and if we knew it, we would choose it. (See Note 1) I believe this deep desire for the Good is innate in all human beings, even the worst of us. We just live in a society that has no memory anymore about what that Good is as something to guide our collective cultural aspirations.
But the taboos can only be transcended in a healthy way if there's agreement that such transcendence is in the service of the Good. If there is no mutually shared idea of the Good as a transcendental aspiration, then all you've got is desire, and one man's desire to grab a woman in the genitals because he wants to and can is equal to another's to give up her life to save someone else's. To argue otherwise is implicitly to acknowledge that there's a hierarchy, i.e., some desires are higher and more worthy than others, and that only makes sense if there is some transcendental standard that defines what is more or less worthy, more or less truthful, more or less Good, more or less Just. We all deep down recognize this. None of us are moral relativists. We just don't know how to talk anymore about what it means to be truly a moral agent, which involves the capacity for self-correction and self-transcendence. We perform instead what we think others expect of us as moral behavior--whatever the Daddies and Mommies of the Left or Right demand--rather than to be inspired by what is truly, deeply transformatively Good.
----------
Note 1. What Socrates means to "know the Good" is another question. We mostly have opinions about what the right thing to do is that derive from our programming by to prevailing cultural conventions, which is quite different from 'knowing' the good. According to Plato/Socrates, it's possible to have right opinion, i.e., when your opinion about what is good happens to correspond with what the Good is, but that is different from knowing the Good. Knowing the Good comes from a deeper kind of disclosure that transcends convention. And because such disclosures are a possibility, convention is always vulnerable to challenge. In the Neoplatonic tradition, there are degrees of knowledge--from inklings to satori-like theophanies. But inklings are where most of us start.
A healthy society has norms that derive from right opinion about the Good. It passes onto its children habits and attitudes that will make it easier for them aspire to the Good and to be open to its disclosures--in other words easier for them to become free adults. The segregated societies in the South clearly did not have norms that were aligned with the Good, and most people of good will recognized that. Clearly, there are other things about southern society and its customary culture that are aligned with the Good, but if it were a healthy society, it would have recognized that slavery and segregation was just wrong, and not looked for all manner of sophistical arguments to justify it.
It's in this sense that southern society has trapped too many of its citizens in such a way as to make it harder for them to become free adults. They are trapped by their resentments and find themselves incapable of transcending them. This, as suggested above, is why they have embraced an infantile nihilist like Trump. He has legitimized their resentments of the Liberal Big Daddy that shames any behaviors that are not P.C or woke, and encourages their acting these resentments out. Before Trump those resentments festered. He blew the lid off whatever contained them, and bizarre, delusional, clownishly ineptly childish events like J6 were the result.
But societies that have mostly right opinion about the Good are not good enough unless they encourage its children to become free adults. In Calvinist societies we think of Virtue as a cage. If we lived in a Neoplatonic society, we would think of it as a trellis. That used to be the goal of a liberal education. All spirited human beings want to overcome illusion and ignorance; they want to develop a deeper and richer relatiohship with Reality. They are not satisfied to live in a shadow realm but want to live in a world where the deep Real lives and shines. And the project for Socrates was to play the role of midwife for his interlocutors, that his he sought to bring their innate capacity for recognizing the living, shining Good into awareness.
Socrates agreed with the Sophists that most people's thinking was shaped by social conventions, and insofar as they were, they were living in a world of shadows. He disagreed with the Sophists that shadow thinking was the the only kind possible.The postmodern Freudians, like the Sophists, would argue that there are only the conventions, and our freedom--if we have any freedom at all--lies primarily in transgressing conventional constraints, i.e., saying No to Big Daddy. Is there really any more to it than that, and is there anything truly morally serious about that for anyone older than 17?
The naivete, if not the absurdity, of the postmodern Freudians, I hope, is apparent to most readers. It's sophisticated nonsense. Their position leads to regression toward Hobbes's state of nature which forces the social contract that creates the Leviathan--which is for Hobbesians, most of our cultural elite, a closed system in which transcendence is an impossibility. To this extent Freud was correct in Civilization and Its Discontents. Being in society creates constraints, and those constraints are the source of our resentment and violence and discontent and we long to break out.
None of us want to live in a closed, repressive system. But we can't live in one that is completely without constraints. We want to live in a system where self-transcendence and auto-poeisis is a real possibility, but transcendence toward what? Making our Selves into what? Anything we want? But is anything we want the Good? I don't think so, and neither can anybody who thinks about it for a minute. We all deep down know there is a "Good". Why are we so afraid to acknowledge it and build a society around a collective aspiration toward it?