What? “Man”? Have I committed a faux pas? Have I exposed my hidden longing for male hegemony?
“Man” in the title was meant to refer to “humankind”, not the archaic meaning fraught with all kinds of triggers for today’s amped-up sensitivities of some college millennials. No need to run for the couches and crayons. Please disband the tantrum mob. No harm was intended. The title merely rolls off the tongue easier without too many words and syllables. I preemptively apologize to the easily offended.
What I really mean to ask is, have we made ourselves God?
Now, with the pronoun battle put to rest (or maybe not), the campaign to invent new sexes – the waste product of divorcing sex, gender, whatever, from genitalia and chromosomes – has made a hash of our language. Confusion reigns and the hyper-sensitive are on patrol.
No such confusion, however, exists among the mostly urban sophisticates about the reasons for the boy/girl behavioral differences that would be apparent to anyone who happened upon a playground. While grudgingly having to accept some role for biology – genetic discoveries are too profound to completely ignore – in the nature/nurture battle, it’s really nurture now, nurture all the time, and nurture everywhere. Social circumstances occupy the pride of place for academic and big media drivel on the subject, the first step in the deification of the person.
The upshot of it all is the psycho-motor reflex among Progressive types to embark on the project to socially engineer away the differences, or to make our boys more like our girls and our girls more like our boys. To wit, make “man” – or “person-kind” if you will – the protagonist and prime mover in the Genesis story.
After all, it is asserted, we contrived the social surroundings and, therefore, must be willing to recontrive them more to the zeitgeist of today’s cultural nomenklatura. The endgame has no end, but is a perpetual crusade to blur distinctions, crown the person as the determiner of all reality, and disembowel institutions and anything old that confer responsibility and restraint.
The passion for the nurture thing lends itself to social fabrication. It is engineering with human beings as the raw material. God is no longer the clock-maker of all things. We are.
National Geographic magazine might be a bellwether of some cosmopolitan thinking on the subject. In the cover story “Genius” for its May issue, the author, Claudia Kalb, much expounds on the importance of social influences in the production of geniuses.
Really, really smart people, she proclaims, have abetting “social networks”. Those without, as in all our popularly-identified oppressed classes, suffer the lot of the forgotten. Women and the poor are two favorites. As Kalb writes,
“Throughout history women have been denied formal education, deterred from advancing professionally, and under-recognized for their achievements …. People born into poverty or oppression don’t get a shot at working toward anything other than staying alive.” (1)
The point has just enough of a kernel of truth to be dangerous. The call for coddling social networks is a blank check for all sorts of interventions to even the score. If women are handcuffed by the world, then spousal roles must be made to change, divorce made easier, the public treasury thrown open, paychecks additionally garnished, and volumes added to the tax and regulatory codes. The entertainment industry, the courts, and public schools are enlisted for the cause. Little goes unaffected.
Add a splash of science to the social ingredients and you can also relegate the baggage of moral restraint to the trash heap. Restraint was implanted by dad’s deadly glare, mom’s firm hand, and a pulpit’s fiery sermons. From there, it is embedded in the frontal lobes of the brain. Genius is correlated to creativity and creativity is generated by ignoring those frontal lobes, in Kalb’s rendering (2). I’m not so sure about Kalb’s causal train of thought but it does relegate the conscience to simply being an impediment to personal self-fulfillment, or “genius”. Once again, we have more fuel for more social fabrication to blast furnace away objective limits.
Nihilism becomes a factor of social production, or, more accurately, it’s about the annihilation of predetermined forms in favor of a freewheeling rejiggering of reality to match momentary fads of thought. Old time religion, the nagging voice of the old morality, marriage, and the dictionary must either face social expulsion or be contorted out of all recognition. As one scholar put it, the scorched earth is in the service of modern Progressivism’s ultimate goal: “the emancipation of the uninhibited self” (3).
The “uninhibited self” knows no restraint. Even chromosomes are no barrier to any thought, wish, or belief about ourselves. Don’t worry about science saying otherwise. The tent of science, faux or otherwise, is big enough to include people willing to wrap an aura of scientific truth around any self-conception. The gender revolution is born.
It’s a coup d’etat of the mind over the body. It’s a matter of a person convincing “ze-self” of being something in spite of their body saying otherwise. What’s next? Will transgender lead to trans-species?
Progressivism is an ally in the “emancipation of the uninhibited self”. After all, what is Progressivism? In a nutshell, it is the rosy belief in the power of the state to actualize every person’s highest potential. The “highest potential” need have no reference to a deity. The “uninhibited self” is the new deity, and the referee of first and last resort of all things.
Even the limits of the economic principle of scarcity has no relevance in this universe. The state’s efforts at a takeover of healthcare, for instance, are about leashing the nation’s medical providers to the crusade. If you have a son living under your roof at age 26, the state will command your medical insurance provider to keep covering him. And for all those without insurance, the state will deconstruct the whole industry and throw open the public purse to further the fantasy that people have healthcare if they possess a piece of paper with “insurance” printed at the top. Actually, they have something with as much value as 1923 German marks ($1 =4,210,500,000,000 German marks) . What good is it if nobody will take it?
What government is waiting to do for medical care it has done to schooling, motor vehicle management, and the ghetto. The cost of the “emancipation of the uninhibited self” comes in the form of destroyed lives, wrecked neighborhoods, and classrooms as incubators of good little Democrats and knowers of not much else.
Government can’t be the agent for liberating the self. The task is too gargantuan and the goal too pernicious. And there ain’t enough money. Maybe Dirty Harry of Clint Eastwood fame said it best:
“A Man’s Got to Know his Limitations” – regarding “man”, that includes the 2 God-created genders as well as the other 24 recently-discovered permutations.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
1. “Genius”, Claudia Kalb, National Geographic, May 2017, p. 48-49.
2. Ibid, p. 44.
3. The point was raised in an interview of Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, by Hugh Hewitt on July 4, 2016. The full conversation can be obtained at http://www.hughhewitt.com/dr-larry-arnn-4th-july-reflection-declaration-lincoln-dr-harry-jaffa/ .