Retortion is a beautiful thing.
A correspondent of our fellow orthospherean blogger and valued commenter Joseph of Arimathea has noticed that if latter-day feminism is correct in its assertion that sex is nothing but a social construct, like language – this being why feminists like to call it by the linguistic term, “gender,” rather than the proper biological term, “sex” – then *the female sex does not actually exist.* All appearances to the contrary, there is no such thing, really, as a female.
Feminism per se is therefore a huge category error. By its own account, it is founded on a delusory notion of what is real. If there is no such thing as females, then it follows irresistibly that there can be no such thing as feminism, either. There is nothing for scholars in the field of “Women’s Studies” to study.
If there is no such thing as women, then neither can there be any such thing as men. It follows that there can be no such thing as patriarchy, or therefore any reason – or even any way – to object thereto. If there are no women or men, then it is absurd to suggest that men could oppress women. All that talk about the disparities of earned income between men and women in the same occupations? It’s a fantasy, a grotesque misapprehension: you can’t have an actual disparity between two inactualities. More women in the boardroom? Can’t be done, if there are no women anywhere to be found. We might as well try to get more unicorns in the boardroom.
Furthermore, if there are no men or women, then there is no way to consummate a sexual act between them. If there are no sexes, then there can’t be such a thing as sex. So it is silly to worry about the opposite sex, and one’s attractiveness thereto: fashion, make up, Game, all of it is a gigantic waste of time. If you want someone to rub against, just go and start rubbing. Your doing so cannot possibly be a real problem, because if there is no such thing as sex, there can be no such thing as rape, or sexual abuse, or paederasty. “Homosexual” and “heterosexual” are both nonsense terms, referring to nothing real. Thought you were attracted to the “opposite sex”? Hah! There’s no such thing!
Now, if there is no sex, then neither can there be mothers, or fathers; or, therefore, children; or marriages; or families. No wives or husbands, no brothers or sisters; no kin at all. No irksome in-laws! No devilish black sheep, no such thing as wastrel cousins or aged, infirm parents!
We never have to worry about our kids, ever again, because they are not really either kids, or ours, to begin with. Worrying about one’s children is rather like worrying about the hobbits, or the recent dearth of new releases from Elvis. If we don’t have to worry about our kids, why then we don’t need to worry about earning a livelihood so as to support them. They aren’t ours; what have we therefore to do with them?
Not only do I have no kids, but no one else does, either. No one is really anyone’s kid. Ditto for parents. Those people you thought were your parents? They are neither yours, nor parents. No need to worry about honoring father and mother if there is no such thing.
Finally, this: if something as basic to our character as our sex is nothing but a social construct, it is very hard to see how there could be anything else about us that was more than a social construct. Those parents and kids? Not only are they neither parents, nor kids, but they don’t actually exist, at all. Their persons are nothing but a social construct. There is no such thing, really, as people. The things people seem to do, or to have done? People had nothing to do with them, really, because there are no people.
If there are no people, then there is no you, either.
If sex disappears into mere language, and language does not truly refer, then likewise everything else disappears into language. Nothing, then, is ultimately real. Including language.
By gosh, it’s a tremendous liberation! Life is so much simpler when you don’t need to care about anyone in particular, or anything, including yourself, on account of the fact that they don’t really exist.
The Orthosphere 
I think that when feminists say “gender is a construct” they don’t mean to dismiss it completely as a total fantasy, they intend to dismiss it as a fixed and concrete barrier to believing whatever they want about themselves. In other words, their logic leads to reconstructing gender as opposed to dismissing gender. They want to redefine everything so that they can get certain advantages and avoid certain disadvantages. They want to bring in some kind of utopia through social evolution. So there will still be mothers, fathers, sexists, victims, oppressors, etc. They also readily admit that both the Bible and modern law are social constructs. All they care about are social constructs. Social construction is their god, their idol, their tower of Babel.
To be sure. They want to say that everything is a social construct “except for me and the things that I care about.” It’s the archetypal unprincipled exception.
I can’t bring myself to characterizing their reconstruction of gender as logical. Logically, the notion of gender as a social construct devours itself.
“… There is nothing for scholars in the field of “Women’s Studies” to study.”
There is not a single known instance of ‘exobiology’, but that doesn’t stop the ‘Science!‘ fetishists from treating “Exobiology” as a *real* scholarly-and-scientific field. Why should “Women’s Studies” be any different?
The exobiologists don’t insist that extraterrestrial life is *nothing but* a social construct. Whether or not the subject of their studies really exists, at least they are not ruling out the possibility of its existence ab initio.
Latter-day deconstructivist feminists, on the other hand, insist vehemently that sex is nothing but a social construct – that it has no real existence. They insist that the subject of their discipline *does not actually exist at all.*
Kristor, you wrote: “If sex disappears into mere language, and language does not truly refer, then likewise everything else disappears into language. Nothing, then, is ultimately real. Including language.” That is the exact argument (supposing that it really is an argument) made by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology, one of the Korans of postmodernism. I can image your throwing those two sentences that I have quoted at one or another postmodernist, and I can imagine the postmodernist responding with blithe agreement, as if to say, what’s to argue. And yet…
And yet, that same hypothetical postmodernist will in the next moment righteously affirm all the tenets of whatever -ism constitutes his bailiwick. And he will register not the slightest cognitive discomfort.
Quite so. If language and its logic disappear into language along with everything else, the postmodernist is relieved of any obligation to make sense. “Making sense” is just a social construct, after all.
He will by the same token have to admit that he can muster no principled objection to your disagreement with his favored ism – or for that matter to your killing him and taking his stuff. If making sense can’t really be done, then he needn’t make sense, but nor need – nor can – anyone else. Any expectation on his part that your acts toward him will make sense is just inapposite to reality. Sure, he can *resist* your killing and taking, but he can’t argue that you ought not to do it; or rather, he can, but you can reply that his argument is meaningless noise, that has vanished into language.
So, when a postmodernist makes the argument that x is a social construct, it is interesting to suggest that you would therefore like to take his x away from him, and expect that he will have no objections to your doing so. If, e.g., his language is a social construct, what would be the problem with ripping out his larynx? If his sex is a social construct, what would be the problem with slicing it off? After all, by his own account he would lose nothing real by such deletions; his pain is nothing but a social construct.
In the postmodern economy, the only currency is power. Postmodernists are generally physiologically frail specimens, and averse to weapons. I.e., relatively weak and powerless. To aver postmodern deconstruction is to say, “There’s no reason not to kill me and take my stuff.”
I wager that few postmoderns have the courage of their convictions. Few of them would agree that it is meaningless, and therefore immaterial, and therefore OK, for them to say, “Kill me and take my stuff.”
Yes — under the premise of nihilism the only possible activity is the will to power. And that explains the entirety of our hellish situation.
When you get down to it, people can’t stare into the abyss, they always blink. They can’t go all the way, it’s too horrifying. Nietzsche lost his mind, didn’t he?
I think losing your mind is the only way to deal with it*. Doesn’t it seem like society has plunged into madness?
* repentance is an option, of course.
Yes. Look at what’s going on in Britain right now, as she struggles with accommodating ancient laws of all sorts to the inverted logic of gay marriage. It’s insane.
Once you open Pandora’s box, things devolve very rapidly indeed. The logic of the devolution is inverted, but it is a logic nonetheless. Being a logic, it is relentless.
How ironic: the rejection of logic provides no escape from it. All that happens is you suffer more. There’s the Christian moral proposal, right there.
And brings to mind that in the beginning, was the Word.
Lady McBeth asks to be “unsexed” in Act 1, Scene 5 of McBeth:
A consistent feminist (oxymoron alert!) would argue that she can’t be unsexed, because in reality she has no sex to begin with. So, she should just go ahead and do as she pleases. Or rather, it should just go ahead and do as it pleases.
Sex in this passage is not something you do; it is something you have. To wish to be unsexed is demonic.
To be sure; and Lady Macbeth is indeed praying to demons, and her prayer is demonic: to be unsexed is to be unmade, at least in part. But the reason she asks to be unsexed, to be thus rendered inhuman, is so that she may do evil without compunction.
Ha ha ha, this was very nice humor. Well-done.
Of course, just to be accurate, though, this:
I don’t think they quite assert that. I’ve been studying feminist
idiocytheory for a while now out of morbid fascination, and what they actually assert, insofar as they assert anything as one coherent group (which they hardly do), is that there is genetic sex (XX, XY, and a few other genetic aberrations) resulting in two general sorts of phenotypes that can be called “biological sex” (But don’t forget there can be intersex phenotypes!) but that the expression of our biological sex – gender – is a social construct.So they would acknowledge that I am XX and phenotypically female and you are XY and phenotypically male, but they would say that the only reason we might prefer different activities or behave differently from one another is because we’ve been socialized to do so based on our biological sex. And for some reason, the fact that males and females are socialized to behave differently is wrong and bad and must be stopped.
Unless of course you are XY and phenotypically male but want to prance about in a ball gown and high heels; then of course you are expressing something innate and inborn and unchangeable and sacred.
Hah! Good! Yes, agreed: that’s just what they would say. But that’s only because they haven’t yet thought through their doctrine, all the way to the bitter, radical end. If the *only reason* we prefer different activities is our different socialization, then our phenotypes and genotypes *don’t matter at all.* The *only* thing that matters is the socialization. That we even notice the phenotypical difference between XX and XY genotypes in the first place – that you are ever even conscious of a man’s beard, or I of a woman’s breasts – is nothing but an artifact of our socialization. It has nothing to do, really, with our genotypes.
What can’t make a material difference to things, what cannot affect them, has no effectual existence. What does nothing, is nothing. So, there is no sex; there is only gender.
As Joseph’s commenter noticed, that the feminists think that gender socialization has anything to do with phenotypes is a grotesque category error, a defect of their doctrine, generated by a stubborn residuum in their mental economy of patriarchal ways of thinking.
After all, if our socialization did in fact have anything at all to do with our phenotypes, then feminism might possibly be *false.* And that notion can’t be tolerated!
We have to deconstruct more efficiently…
In order for a “thing” to be called “feminism,” this “thing” MUST HAVE a least a scintilla of femininity within “it” and not just merely comprised of females. A strictly female movement could not truthfully call itself femininism. Only a female movement that spread forth femininity could truthfully call itself femininism.
What we have now is a devout dyke movement that uses euphemistic deception to destroy the heterosexual white female AND ATTEMPT to stunt her growth into womanhood.
The continued use of “feminism” to refer to obscure devout dyke movement is a grave mistake and terrible injustice to our daughters and sons.
How did I never realize that feminism was self-refuting? It still seems too easy…
Feminists, like most continental philosophers, will do anything but submit to the cruel rod of clarity. Press them to define a term like, say, “socially constructed”, and you’ll only get more ambiguity. Can anyone here summarize that murky concept?
I was going to stay out of this, but since you asked…
To say that some concept is socially constructed just means that it is a created by humans, rather than an inherent property of the universe. Often the observation that concepts vary across different human cultures is taken for evidence of this. I learned recently that many cultures, including Japan, don՚t have separate words for blue and green – so color categories are a good example of something that is socially constructed, despite also being deeply rooted in biology. Presumably us and the Japanese have the same color receptors in our eyes, but we make different uses of them.
Similarly for gender. It՚s easy to find nonsense written about the social construction of gender, but it is also obvious (or should be) that there is a very simple and clear and sensible meaning for it. The biology of sex is not socially constructed – people have chromosomes and the attendant concavities and convexities that they are born with, not that they choose. And differences in the brain as well. But the social roles we define for men and women are not so simple. Like color, they have biological roots, but vary across cultures. Here, eg, the women dress up to impress the men who typically have much more restrained and drab clothing, but in the Wodaabe culture, the men dress up and parade in front of beauty pageants judged by the women.
Thus gender roles are at least partly a social construction, and thus there is the possibility that they can be changed.
(I don՚t want to argue about this particularly , I՚m just trying to explain what the issue is. There has been a lot of ink spilled on where the line between innate and cultural characteristics truly lies.)
A.morphous, you are a reasonable man, and with such we may hold converse.
This is as much as to say that you are not a doctrinaire third wave feminist or queer theorist. You and your ilk would say (with me and, I suppose, most Traditionalists) that there is an essential, biologically given, thus normal, and therefore at least somewhat normative, sexual order, that is (fortunately for the future of the species) ultimately inescapable and ineluctable, and with which we must perforce reckon, but which allows for local variations. Such as they want to argue that there is no such thing, really, as disordered sexuality (sure, they want to make an exception for things like paederasty, and say that it is disordered; but their principles won’t allow it). Their problem – which I admit that few of them, perhaps, may yet have recognized – is that to be able to say that there is no such thing as a sexual disorder, you have to say first, or else admit at the last, that there is no such thing as a sexual order to begin with. None at all. And this is just what many of them do indeed say.
Such was the point of departure for the post.
I don’t think he’s reasonable. He seems basically civil, but he refuses to acknowledge the basic order that we see, which means that he inhabits a different universe from us. Until he wakes up and smells the Order of Being, he’ll always be an antagonist, albeit a relatively civil one.
This seems basically right to me, but incomplete. The fact that cultures are various, for example, does not imply that they are a Chinese menu—it does not imply that we can change our choice in column B while keeping our choices in the other columns the same. This distinction tends to be very vigorously not noticed by social constructivists.
Along similar lines, the fact that cultures are various does not imply that each possible cultural configuration is “just as good as” each other possible cultural configuration: a distinction which social constructivists have a strong tendency to equivocate on, grasping that other cultures can be better than traditional western culture but refusing to grasp that traditional western culture can be better than other cultures.
Finally “we define” in the discussion above is potentially tendentious. Patterns can be emergent rather than chosen. Choices can be forced rather than voluntary. In no meaningful way do we choose to throw spears pointy-end-first. We throw them that way because that’s the way they work.
Bill, your metaphor of the spear is apt. A culture whose warriors use their spears backwards – who insist that there’s no such thing as “backward,” or therefore “forward” – will vanish when it encounters a culture whose warriors use their spears properly.
In the end, the only way that a culture can have any capacity for social construction of anything at the margins is to order its bases in agreement with reality. To experiment with social forms, a society must first manage to exist. And this it cannot do if it mucks about with the social forms that are given by reality, such as the shape of spears.
Order is nice. Let՚s consider two different ways to achieve it: First, some particular way of being is declared a social norm and the authoritarian powers of church and state are deployed to enforce it. People whose natural proclivities are in conflict with this norm either conform (and thus make themselves miserable, along with others) or are punished.
Or, you recognize that order takes different forms and permit and encourage individuals to seek it in whatever manner suits them, as long as they don՚t trouble other people too much.
The latter path is not without its problems, but it՚s the American way, it՚s right there in the Declaration of Independence.
I am not sure why people like you guys prefer the former, but I am guessing that it is a fear of complexity. The world would be a lot simpler if men were men and women were women and there was only heterosexual attraction. The fear of complexity is in some sense a justified fear; the world is difficult to navigate and understand with all this unchecked diversity in it; it becomes harder to rely on everyday intuition and convention. Nonetheless it seems to a better form of order than the older top-down authoritarian model. Better and stronger, which is why it is winning.
Fear of complexity. That’s pretty funny, given how often conservatives and traditionalists argue that liberals and nominalists are oversimplifying, that their reductionist notions are inadequate to reality. “Nobody knows the truth” and “truth is relative” are much simpler notions, much easier to take on board (because doing so entails complete relief from any duty to think) than “there is a truth, you must figure it out and conform your life thereto.” It is liberalism that is simplistic, not conservatism.
You know, Auster repeatedly and rightly warned that we must treat our philosophical adversaries as men who believed what they said because they thought it to be the truth, rather than because it somehow served their interests to think or say it. A.morphous, we don’t say and believe what we say and believe because we are a bunch of chickens, or because we are full of hate, or anything of the sort. We say and believe it because we think it true. If you want us to change our minds you are going to have to win the argument on the merits. You are going to have to convince us that we err.
The challenge you face in so doing is that it is just false to say that, e.g., homosexuality, is not disordered. If homosexuality were the proper way to run a sex life, then it would not be the case that such a sex life is inherently sterile, and social reproduction could proceed without problem in a completely homosexual society. It can’t. Homosexuality *prevents* genetic success. It is *literally* ass-backward. It is as wrong, as false to reality, as the notion that we can use a knife perfectly well by grasping the blade.
Now that’s ironic, because what is happening now in the West is, precisely, that the valorization of homosexuality is being declared a social norm, and the authoritarian power of the state – and, in some denominations, of the church – is being deployed to enforce it, so that people whose natural proclivities are at odds with the embrace of homosexuality must now either conform or be punished. That procedure of authoritarian enforcement is already completed with the precepts of feminism.
Let’s face it, if you’re going to have any social norms at all, you are going to find that the authorities are deployed to normalize them. That’s just the way societies work. The question is not whether there is going to be an authoritarian imposition of a social norm – there is, always – but what that norm should be. We argue that the norm should be the true norm; that spears should be thrown head first, and swords grasped by their hilts – while the left argues that we should praise men who hold their spears bass-ackward, and grasp their swords by the blade.
This is a good point, especially given the natural law line Kristor and I are taking. There is no doubt that it is winning. The question is whether it is winning the way, say, a healthy immune system wins against cancer or whether it is winning the way cancer wins against a failing immune system.
In the former case, the healthy immune system creates the conditions for its continued thriving—a healthy body. In the latter case, the cancer cells create the conditions for their own death—a dead body.
Liberalism has only been standing atop the West unchallenged for a century or so, and it is only in the last half century that it has killed almost every vestige of its former foe. Given how demented it currently looks, I’m not all that confident that it will be in charge a century or two hence.
Another superb metaphor from Bill. As vulnerable at every turn to the argument from retortion, liberalism is revealed as essentially autophagic. The stronger it grows, the weaker is its host, and the worse its prospects.
If you say so. You seem to have trouble dealing with some of the very basic facts of human existence.
Good for you. The question of why you believe certain things to be true and I believe other things remains to be explained. I՚ve read here that liberals believe what they do just because they get a kick out of sinning, which is dumb, but I believe you believe it.
Why should there be exactly one “proper” way to run a sex life? And why is it your job to define it for other people?
True enough. But so what? We have evolution to weed out unadaptive genetic traits, we don՚t need moral enforcers.
There՚s some truth to that. That՚s why I am a liberal rather than a libertarian, I don՚t have a problem with the federal gov sending in the national guard to integrate lunch counters and schools, for example. We have a norm of tolerance, which is sort of a minimal norm, a meta-norm. If that means a Mormon caterer might have to serve a gay customer, I can live with it.
I wish you could explain to me why you are so obsessed with other people’s sex acts. There are lots of people who enjoy things that I find distasteful, like eating fish-head and tripe soup (there’s a large Asian community around here). But I content myself with not eating it, I don’t feel a need to condemn my neighbors for eating in the wrong way.
Mr. Morphous lacks a certain faculty of the mind, which causes him to think that we’re “obsessed with other people’s sex acts.” He cannot intuit the order of the world, so he thinks we’re petty, tyrant-wannabes.
Generally, the reason that leftists imagine that everyone else is a “petty, tyrant-wannabe” is because they are.
At the same time, many of you self-proclaimed traditionalists are actually leftists … which is to say, “petty, tyrant-wannabes.”
On the contrary, I find them easy to deal with: I call disordered what is obviously disordered, false what is false, and so forth. It’s not that I find reality hard to deal with, it’s that you don’t like the way that I deal with it.
In the long run we are all dead. Does that mean we might as well all just kill ourselves right now?
Kristor: “Homosexuality *prevents* genetic success.”
a.morphous “True enough. But so what? We have evolution to weed out unadaptive genetic traits, we don’t need moral enforcers.”
Ah! So, clearly, and on multiple counts, we don’t need the moral enforcers of leftism stirring up trouble in society by using governmental force and violence to suppress and/or persecute “homophobes” and privilege “homophiles” above all others.
Mr. Morphous: “Why should there be exactly one “proper” way to run a sex life? And why is it your job to define it for other people?”
There is exactly one proper (no scare quotes) way to order a sex life because God has ordained that proper way. Notice that we are not the ones defining proper, while in every leftist scheme, it is always man who defines proper, meaning that leftist “proper” is conditional, and subject to the whim of the moment.
Mr. Morphous: “There are lots of people who enjoy things that I find distasteful, like eating fish-head and tripe soup (there’s a large Asian community around here). But I content myself with not eating it, I don’t feel a need to condemn my neighbors for eating in the wrong way.”
What an extraordinarily inapt analogy!
Eating soup is, in nearly all circumstances, a morally neutral act. Sex, on the other hand, is never morally neutral: it is either moral (husband and wife) or immoral (everything else).
Just as the left seeks to impose its beliefs on others “for their own good,” so, too, do we seek our brothers’ good. However, there is a significant difference between leftist goods and traditionalist goods, as well as methods used to achieve them.
The disorder caused by the sexual revolution ought to be obvious: increases in bastardy, venereal diseases, divorce, homosexual behavior, fornication, child molestation, sexual activity among teens and pre-teens, pornography, and the like have caused great harm to both victims and perpetrators, as well as to society in general. The left seeks to increase the harm; we seek its reduction.
Catholic priests and nuns also take themselves out of the gene pool. Are you suggesting we should force them to reproduce for the good of the species?
This conversation is deteriorating, don’t think there is much to be learned. Assertion that x is objectively disordered and God said y cut no ice with me. As I said, I just wanted to explain to whoever it was what social construction meant.
a.morphous “Catholic priests and nuns also take themselves out of the gene pool. Are you suggesting we should force them to reproduce for the good of the species?”
What is it about leftists — and, well, pretty much anyone determined to continue pushing a false belief or invalid line of reasoning — that compels them to misrepresent their opposition, and to do so in such a blindingly inept manner?
@Ilion – don’t be stupid. I’m sure you don’t want priests to procreate; I’m pointing out that Kristor’s argument that gays are somehow immoral because they don’t reproduce is inconsistent with that. Apparently you need to have it spelled out for you.
Your other recent comment also displays a lack of ability to follow an argument.
a.morphous: “@Ilion – don’t be stupid. I’m sure you don’t want priests to procreate; I’m pointing out that Kristor’s argument that gays are somehow immoral because they don’t reproduce is inconsistent with that. Apparently you need to have it spelled out for you.
Your other recent comment also display a lack of ability to follow an argument.”
But, of course, Kristor said *nothing* even remotely like that. And, thus, this leftist didn’t point out any inconsistency in what Kristor had said.
And so, we’re back again, from “Ilíon, you’re just so stupid!”, to “What is it about leftists that seems to compel them to misrepresent that/those which they oppose, and to do so so ineptly, at that?”
==========
Kristor: “A.morphous, you are a reasonable man, and with such we may hold converse. …”
Alan Roebuck: “I don’t think he’s reasonable. He seems basically civil, but he refuses to acknowledge the basic order that we see, which means that he inhabits a different universe from us. Until he wakes up and smells the Order of Being, he’ll always be an antagonist, albeit a relatively civil one.”
Mr Roebuck is closer to the truth of the matter … it’s his “relatively” that allows his assessment to be essentially sound.
Mr Morphous, like most leftists and/or Marxists and ‘atheists’ and DarwinDefenders, is *not* a reasonable man. And, again like most in that list, his “basically civil” presentation is relative to the very uncivil manner in which most of them conduct themselves.
This is one of the things — sins, actually — about so many Christians and/or conservatives: they are so eager to get a pat on the head from who wish only to destroy them, that they constantly lie to themselves — and often, try to compel others to lie likewise — about the behavior of these various enemies of the Truth.
Is there really a substantive difference between the fellow who misrepresents you, and on the basis of that misrepresentation calls you ignorant or stupid or dishonest, or all three simultaneously, only once a week, and the fellow who does it with every breath?
More wisdom from Mr. Morphous, in response to Ilion:
“I’m pointing out that Kristor’s argument that gays are somehow immoral because they don’t reproduce is inconsistent with that. Apparently you need to have it spelled out for you.
“Your other recent comment also displays a lack of ability to follow an argument.” (emphasis original)
This isn’t even the pot calling the kettle black; it’s the pot calling the shining copper bowl black.
Homosexual behavior is not immoral because it does not lead to reproduction; it is immoral because it is not husband-and-wife coupling. (The myriad dysfunctions that are part of many homosexuals’ lives are further evidence that their behavior is disordered.) We are called on to be chaste always, and celibate outside of marriage. Failing to uphold that is immoral, not a failure to reproduce. By your “reasoning,” infertile married couples are immoral.
Jesus was celibate; so was Paul. So were other apostles, as well as many saints through the ages. No Christian would ever make the argument that a failure to reproduce is immoral, and no one who knew the first thing about Christianity would make that claim, either (see 1 Corinthians 7 for more on the Christian view of marriage and celibacy).
Mr. Morphous, your posts have a certain value, as they are a window on to the left. However, you might want to avoid embarrassing yourself in the future by learning the basics of Christianity before commenting on it.
Wm. Lewis says:
Homosexual behavior is not immoral because it does not lead to reproduction; it is immoral because it is not husband-and-wife coupling. (The myriad dysfunctions that are part of many homosexuals’ lives are further evidence that their behavior is disordered.) We are called on to be chaste always, and celibate outside of marriage.
I suspect a.morphous finds this a bit frustrating. Kristor is arguing from natural law to the conclusion that homosexuality is immoral. Wm Lewis is arguing from divine command theory to the conclusion that homosexuality is immoral. Both styles of argument get it right, of course, but they are different.
Wm.Lewis: “Homosexual behavior is not immoral because it does not lead to reproduction; it is immoral because it is not husband-and-wife coupling. (The myriad dysfunctions that are part of many homosexuals’ lives are further evidence that their behavior is disordered.) We are called on to be chaste always, and celibate outside of marriage.”
DrBill: “I suspect a.morphous finds this a bit frustrating. Kristor is arguing from natural law to the conclusion that homosexuality is immoral. Wm Lewis is arguing from divine command theory to the conclusion that homosexuality is immoral. Both styles of argument get it right, of course, but they are different.”
It doesn’t help Mr Morphous to get it right, I mean pretending that he has been trying to get it right, when even ostensive conservatives persist in using leftist language or leftists corrupts of clear speaking/thinking.
‘Homosexual behavior’ and ‘homosexuality’ are two different things: a behavior-set is not a condition, albeit that a given condition may make some behavior-set(s) more enticing to those with the condition.
Both Kristor and Wm.Lewis are talking about behavior, not conditions. A.Morphous – as is common with leftists and ‘atheists’ and “liberal” “Christians” – persists in trying to equate a certain condition with a certain widely-recognized array of sinful, and personally and socially destructive, behaviors.
Mr. Morphous:
Then let’s look at it from the point of societal outcomes, shall we?
Pick any year in the 20th century before the Sexual and Cultural Revolutions, and look at the rates of out-of-wedlock births, divorce rates, marriage rates, average age of first sexual activity, prevalence of venereal disease, child molestation, production & consumption of pornography, and similar phenomena. Now look at how those rates have changed since then, and look at the increase in misery brought about as a result.
Even from a purely financial, cost-benefit analysis point of view, the current order is clearly worse than the previous. Billions of dollars have been thrown at these problems and their side effects, and millions of lives have been shattered, even ended, because of them.
Has the increase in personal “freedom,” has the acceptance of radical personal autonomy, really been worth it? Do the benefits really outweigh the harm?
@ a.morphous: There’s no inconsistency between arguing that religious celibacy is properly ordered and homosexual acts are not. To suggest that there is any such inconsistency would be like arguing that a vow of silence is inconsistent with insistence on proper grammar.
If you are going to use a knife, better grasp it by the hilt. If you are going to have a sex life, better do it heterosexually. Celibate religious are not engaged in having a sex life. They aren’t picking up the knife in the first place.
@ Dr Bill: Wm. Lewis argues from divine command theory, I from natural law. No doubt this is frustrating for a.morphous; but then, the natural law *just is* the divine command. Orthosphereans have no trouble seeing this, but such as a.morphous, who believe there is neither a natural moral law or a divine command, might find it confusing, I suppose.
To make matters worse for a.morphous, both Wm. Lewis and I have adduced the pernicious consequences of libertinism as inditia of its wickedness. A.morphous takes us to be advancing consequentialist or utilitarian arguments, as is only natural for moral nominalists such as he. We are not. Libertinism is not vicious because it has pernicious effects, it has pernicious effects because it is vicious.
Kristor said:
Celibacy also prevents genetic success, and unless you want to play linguistic games is also “a way to run a sex life”.
I think I’m done. You guys go on believing whatever you like.
Whenever conservatives try to be clear on terms, and thus on thought, liberals accuse us of playing word games. It’s been going on since 1300.
I promised to leave this thread alone, but ran across this post on the anti-christian roots of right wing politics and thought of you guys. Particularly this:
Why are you obsessing over our sins of political incorrectness, instead of working on your own?
“Here are the passages in which Jesus tells his followers that they aren’t supposed to obsess about other people’s sins, but should leave that to God, and attend to their own moral failings instead:”
When people set out to force their sins on us (or on others), it is our duty “to obsess about [those] other people’s sins”.
What do you think I’m doing here?
Not to brag of my virtue, but I don’t care much about your political sins. I care about the state of my own thoughts, I want them to be correct, not in the sense of politically correct, but accurate, powerful, adapted to reality, lively. So I like to test them against alternatives.
There certainly are ideologs on the left, as elsewhere, who like to enforce particular belief systems. Generally they hang out with others of the same ilk and reinforce each other and the party line, they don’t stroll over to right wing blogs to have a dialog.
Good; commendable. No wonder you strike me as fundamentally reasonable – albeit, in some ways, blind to the order of being – perhaps it’s that huge great beam in your eye! ; )
Last year I attended a conference where the Society for Women’s Studies in my country was announced to be renamed as “Society for Gender Studies”. The study of “women” from the Constructivist perspective is very much a thing of the past. So I can easily subscribe to this.
Regarding the recent exchange between Kristor and a.morphous, I am confident that all the scriptures quoted by a.morphous are quite familiar to Kristor and the other contributors to this blog.
The following is not an exhaustive list, but clearly illustrates that a call to repentance is integral and central to the gospel: Matt. 3:2, 3:8, 4:17, 9:13, 11:20-21, Mark 1:15, 6:12, Luke 3:8, 10:13, 11:32, 13:3-5, 15:7, 16:30, 17:3-4, Acts 2:38, 3:19, 8:22, 11:18, 17:30, 26:20, 2 Pet. 3:9, Rev. 2:21, 3:19.
If you care about your thoughts and want them to be correct, accurate, powerful, adapted to reality, and lively, you need to repent. All men, everywhere, need to repent (see Acts 17:30 above).
I know. Isn’t it just the most amusing thing that anti-Christians imagine they can quote Scripture to serious Christians?
It’s expected when one approaches Scripture as a butcher would approach a pig.
Anti-Christians tend to quote Scripture to other anti-Christians, so aren’t prepared for a knowledgeable response.
For example, during the recent Duck Dynasty foofarah, I saw a picture of the patriarch of the clan holding a crawdad, with the text of Leviticus 11:10 at the bottom. “Oh, look,” say the smug ones, “he’s a hypocrite, because he believes the part of the Bible that tells him to hate homosexuals,* but he doesn’t believe the part of the Bible that tells him not to eat crawdads!” The smug ones know enough of the Bible (secondhand, of course) to engage in these “gotchas,” but not enough to know that the Old Testament dietary restrictions were lifted in the New Testament (Matthew 15:11; Mark 7:15; Acts 10-11).
The smug ones imagine themselves so all-knowing that it never occurs to them to take the advice of the old adage, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
* Yes, of course I know that the Bible does not tell us to hate homosexuals, but that’s what the smug ones imagine it says.
Well, I’m pretty sure I did just quote scripture to you, I don’t think I imagined it.
A. Morpheus notes a theme that does exist and is growing, but his link does not really point to a serious example of it.
There is a growing segment of the principled Right that is beginning to blame Christianity for the fall of civilization, at least the Western version. How? Certainly A. Morpheus’ and the Druid’s disordered ethical notions may be traced from Christianity, ironically enough. As such, there is a growing Right wing that takes their interpretation as correct, and look to older thought for good and evil. Alain de Benoist taking up from Julius Evola.
Amusingly, the Druid link’s essay assumes away perhaps the most interesting of questions–the ethical unity of homo sapiens. Perhaps, he should go back and analyze this, while assuredly citing to the Good Samaritan as authority for his position.
I am not sure why A. Morpheus believes that he does not represent the authoritarian, top-down version of norms. Surely that is a mistake.
Imposition of a single standard whereby persons are permitted to engage with one another is at the heat of Liberal ethics: Every person must treat every other person–and formally respect every other person–as an end unto himself.
I am confident that they would not do so naturally.
Absent an imposition of an abstract equality command, people would treat each other in a myriad of ways. Eventually, different communities of norms (layered, overlapping, and separate) would form–and yes, each one would be relatively intolerant of those who did not conform to those norms. Each would have a different “charism,” or end of persons.
In the traditional world, command comes at the end (de Maistre).
In the Liberal world it comes at the beginning (Kant, Rawls).
99% of human existence was in organic communities (tribal or village) life, where things worked as you say, more or less. That that doesn’t work is the fault of modernism (or, going back further, the first authoritarian agricultural civilizations in the middle east). Civilized forms of social organizations throw different kinds of people together and yes, impose some rules for how they interact. The liberalism that you insult is a response to that. If it seems unduly authoritarian to you, maybe you can go live in the hills or jungle somewhere outside of the reach of the state. Given that you are almost certainly not going to do that, you will be under the scope of some set of rules, and the liberal rules (treat people equally) are a nice minimal set, that is, the best we can do.
“Treat people equally.” Hah! That’s a good one! The current regime makes a point of treating people unequally. Christian? You’re almost a non-person; your faith shall be denigrated and you shall not be allowed to express your faith without persecution. White? You need to abase yourself before your brown, black, and red brothers (not so much the yellow ones, though). Man? Make way for the wymyn who will rule over you.
Improvident? Step on up and help yourself to the largess that we’ve taken from the productive! Illegal alien? We’ll do everything we can to make it easy for you here—please don’t go! Criminal? We’ll slap you on the wrist and blame society for your misdeeds. Moslem? We’ll install special facilities for you—when we can get away with it—and make sure that no one ever blames your religion for your inability to behave like civilized people.
And on and on.
“the best we can do” kind of begs the question. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Eastern Roman Empire were diverse, cosmopolitan, and run on explicitly Christian principles. The latter lasted for 1000 years.
A. Morpheus left what I would not call exactly ad hominem, but it did not move in the polemical direction. It is kind of moving the ball a bit to assert “authoritarianism!” against one’s opponents, then–upon being pointed up an inconsistency–to countermarch and say, “well, you rate authoritarian treatment!”
Moreover, I question his sincerity a little bit when he suggests traditionalists go off and live in their own communities up in the hills. This point is only highlighted by the fact that it is really a case of traditionalism defending the forum from the savages outside, an outside that demands to be let in.
It is really a question of discriminations. The fact that A. Morpheus lives and has a community of E. Pluralist Inc. is no skin off my nose. However, the fact that an orthodox, exclusive polis exists anywhere–this is what cannot be tolerated by the intolerant tolerators.
Finally, assuming blind human equality of consideration and treatment, as a default, begs the very question proffered. The idea that equal treatment suffices, even in a minimal way, that this is all that one has a right for which to demand; is self-evident rigging. [I have heard it most recently used by animal rights activists, to very great effect.]
Better an order of some kind than none at all.
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