The abnormal is the new normal

This especially is true when it comes to sex. Why?

In Sartre: Ideologue of Our Time the Hungarian Catholic philosopher Thomas Molnar follows the path of Sartre’s ethical neutrality and exaltation of freedom and individual choice to one of its major destinations: the valorization of sexual exotica per se.

Freedom [in Sartre’s analysis] is a dreadful possibility before which we [as bourgeois people] recoil; in self-protection we set up taboos, collective guidelines, so as to avoid making free choices. We prefer to act comfortably, within what society permits with our own tacit approval. Yet there are those not afraid of their freedom and its consequences. Society chooses to call them criminals, as if they had injured an absolute good when in reality they acted outside and against the prevailing taboos. If society did not define a certain evil, their acts would have no ethical connotation, they would even be sources of value. The myth of evil was forged by the so-called respectable people (gens de bien) who deprive human freedom of its positive power and give it a negative interpretation. They call a free man an evil man; and once he is so labeled, whatever he does as a free agent will be called harmful.

Sartre thus pushes with metaphysical determination for a de-neuroticization of society. Such a society would be purified of such dishonest, self-serving bourgeois oppression and denial of freedom. Molnar writes:

The de-neuroticised society is the one which knows no good and evil, whose only criterion is freedom. But the problem arising here, ignored by Sartre, is that this kind of freedom invariably begins and ends with the approval of certain acts (called evil in the language of conventional morality) and the condemnation of other acts (called good in that language). It other words, the “de-neuroticised” society does not look neutrally at man’s conduct; it does not abolish, but merely reverses, the meaning of good and evil: It gives the first term a negative, the second term a positive, sign. Hence it is not difficult to see in Sartre’s analysis of the Genet case history the desire to indulge in absolute license in a world to which his own imagination alone sets limits. Theoretically, this would not have to lead to the abolition of all restraint and ultimately to sexual frenzy. But there is a logic of human nature at work here as was shown by the Marquis de Sade in La Philosophie dans le boudoir. Welcoming the Revolution, the divine marquis exhorted his compatriots not to stop halfway but to push toward the ultimate freedom, the abolition of all institutions as man-made, and the institutionalization of the satisfaction of instincts, made by nature. The basic instinct is, of course, the sexual one, so true freedom for Sade consists in license for all, men and women, young and old, to satisfy their sexual urge in any way and with whomever desired. A frenetical sexuality was, thus, the goal of mankind, the last and best thing freedom could offer. A singular restriction of the infinite number of choices permitted by the theoreticians of freedom!

Why object?

A teacher I had in high school whom I respected was dismayed to find me taking shots at opinion columnists whom he apparently agrees with and sees as supporting the moral and sensible viewpoint. We had an email exchange, a lot of it toxic, in which I tried to establish that the right-minded writers I chase after are doing good work. That didn’t take with my former teacher, though. “Why play the right-wing hack?” he ended up saying in effect. “Why not do something closer to the pursuit of truth?”

He’s right, in part. Fuming buys nothing and comes across as amateurish and uncultivated. You can complain and criticize, but eventually you have face bigger questions and say where it’s all headed. If you just fume, eventually you lose the ability to say what it’s all about.

Saying you should just pursue truth has its own problems, though. Such pursuits don’t occur in a vacuum—they happen in a particular setting that favors certain understandings, attitudes, and views over others. If you like the favored views and think they sum things up well then you can just go ahead. If you have objections, though, you’ll need a way to gracefully refrain from going with the flow.

Getting mad at Connie Schultz might not be the solution, ultimately. Rejecting things like multiculturalism, universalism, egalitarianism, and propositional nationhood is the solution to some degree and at some level, though. There are people who make that case intelligently and who deserve to have their arguments given some due. Instead they are kept out of the public view.

What's happening?

There’s a piece in the Harrisburg Patriot-News today by Anthony Infanti, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh. He writes in support of a pending state anti-discrimination bill that would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

He focuses on what he says are the economic benefits the legislation will bring by making the state more welcoming to LGBT people. Professor Infanti doesn’t much develop the logic of anti-discrimination, which makes sense, since that logic is increasingly taken as given across our culture, and in our social, religious, and political institutions. Why spend time defending something that a lot of people will take at face value, at least in the public square?

Anti-discrimination, though, isn’t a habit of mind that occurs to everyone naturally. Until recently in human history it didn’t occur to anyone at all, practically. Affairs were conducted on a basis that was less than fully egalitarian, and it seemed natural for people to live in a setting in which different individuals with different identities would be placed on different footings. While not all of our past attitudes are to be invoked as things worth restoring—impossible, anyways, since attitudes that differed from time to time often contradict each other—at some level we should be surprised to find that justice and basic decency now require us to replace our inherited public understandings with a single self-contained principle of equality that is to override all other considerations. That seems to be what is happening, though, even though some continue to object and complain.

Jim Kalb

I’m young and novice, so naturally I’m heavily indebted to people who have been experiencing, thinking, and articulating longer and more seriously than I have. One of those people is Jim Kalb, an independent writer who keeps a website here, and whose recent book has been fairly described as “a blockbuster that belongs on the shelves of any thinking conservative who wants to understand where we are today, and where we are going.”

In his writing he focuses on overall tendencies, general trends, and basic issues, instead of emphasizing particulars. That seems to leave a lot of room for people to adapt their answers to particular questions in ways that suit their circumstances. To that degree you might say there’s a level of agnosticism to his approach. Still, he favors the Catholic Church as the institution best fitted overall for housing civilization’s renewal.

Among those with whom he’s made some sort of common cause, in writing, analyzing, and pointing toward ways out of the current crisis, not all share his Catholic bent. That’s not really alarming—things in general are highly fragmented, and people with a variety of loyalties and inclinations are going to reach a variety of conclusions on central questions, even when they’re pulling in the same right-wing sort of direction. I wonder, though, if that point of diversion is something Jim has had occasion to deal with directly. I wonder what he would say are the strongest criticisms he’s seen on this point, and how he would respond to them, and how much he thinks the question matters in the scheme of things.

Update: Jim follows up with remarks about his approach.

Prejudice versus exotica

An article in the New York Times suggests that sexual exotica is growing more open in Iraq, as a result of conditions created by Western invasion. The authors of the article can’t call homosexuality “exotic,” but the view comes across anyways, in the quotations from Iraqis and their officials, and in the apparent effort by Iraqis themselves to brutally stamp out homosexual habits, even and especially among family members. The authors say that a spate of violence against openly gay men shows that “Iraq remains religious, conservative — and still violent.”

On that view it’s the regular, “heteronormative” habits and attitudes of Iraqis that are the problem and the source of violence and tension. A traditionalist might ask, why not the other way around? Why doesn’t the effort to normalize anti-traditional modes of behavior attract blame as being the root of the problem? It might be seen that way by evangelical Christians, but their handling of basic issues always seems amateurish and superficial to me—at least, that’s my unstudied view.

If traditional attitudes and prejudices are merely aberrant and arbitrary, then there shouldn’t be any fundamental difficulty with reconfiguring things to get rid of them and obtain satisfaction and social peace. That sort of project is now typical in the West. But that’s not what traditional attitudes are, and that’s not how dealing with them works.

Update: Razib Khan's observations in response to mine are, I think, correct. I probably abused the terms "homosexual" and "gay" a little by mixing them, but I hope my overall point doesn't contradict Khan's remarks, which are sound. He writes:

An addendum to Evan McLaren’s comment on The New York Times piece, Iraq’s Newly Open Gays Face Scorn and Murder. I generally think that the semantic quibbles of anthropological types who caution against comparing societies as if terms are equivalent is a rather useless exercise, but in this case I believe some clarification is warranted. It seemed implicit in The New York Times piece that there is a distinction between homosexual behavior, and an open gay subculture. Whether it is taboo or not, homosexual behavior exists in many human societies. In fact because of sex segregation in much of the Islamic world homosexual behavior flourishes.* See this piece from The Atlantic about homosexuality in Saudi Arabia. But it is likely that most men who have engaged in homosexual behavior in Saudi Arabia are as gay as most prisoners who have engaged in homosexual behavior; not very. The point is that the violent reaction to gay subculture in Iraq from traditionalists is less about homosexual behavior per se, as opposed to the emergence of a gay subculture which seems to be modeled on its Western variants. In fact some scholars, such as Camille Paglia, have argued that the gay culture as we understand it in the West is a relatively new phenomenon which is qualitatively distinct from variants of homosexuality which are extant in the historical record, from ancient Greece down to Tokugawa Japan. The rise of the gayness internationally, and the subsequent backlash, can therefore be viewed as simply another clash between Western values and non-Western values.

* The Sultan of Oman seems likely to be exclusively homosexual in his preferences.

The Devalued Prime Minister of a Devalued Government

Apparently there are still some decent politicians in Britain: