What comes after transgender? Surely no gender at all, but only the lone self, wandering trapped in a labyrinth of endlessly binary forking paths, by which it is more controlled than it can ever be controlling. With gender vanishes sex, save for self-pleasuring, and with both sex and gender vanishes the most fundamental mode of eros and relationality: that between man and woman. Most non-tyrannical human self-government has been built on male-female relationality, as Ivan Illich showed. It also provides the metaphors on which most of religion is founded, from Hinduism to the Wisdom literature of the Bible.
The populist voter insurgencies of 2016 are complex, but one important aspect of them is the rejection of a seamless liberal order and worldview. Despite its unbearable claims to be the only possible worldview, liberalism has been rejected because it does not work for the majority of people. And just as liberal economics are now being questioned, so are liberalism’s cultural and ethical assumptions – in a way that the highly intelligent liberal Richard Rorty prophesied 20 years ago.
The backlash against liberalism
Liberals have too casually spoken as if being white, male and heterosexual were in itself a cause for suspicion, rather than a condition that white heterosexual males cannot help. So liberals should not be surprised if they now face a backlash from ordinary, not very successful WHMs who have dangerously started to think of themselves as a threatened “identity”.
This “whitelash” may well sometimes take on unpleasant forms of racial prejudice, misogyny, dislike of all Muslims, nationalism, even anti-semitism and so forth. But more commonly it is a reaction to liberals’ tendency to obsess over their favourite issues to the neglect of what the majority needs: family, community and work security along with a sense of cultural identity. (An identity that is all the more precious to the less-privileged, and often the key to their survival.) Too often liberals can sound not just as if they do not care about these things, but even as if they should be disparaged.
What is more, it is possible that liberals have too easily assumed that there exists a new consensus over abortion rights, euthanasia rights, gay marriage, transgender issues and positive discrimination (as opposed to formal equal access) for women and racial minorities. In reality, it may well be that a large number of people either reject or have doubts about these things, but feel that it is no longer acceptable to say so. Their real views perhaps emerged anonymously as one aspect of the votes for Brexit and for Trump.
In the face of all this, one can well feel a divided reaction. On the one hand, a fear of mass tyranny and new reasons to feel hesitant about the undiluted virtues of pure democracy. (See my new book The Politics of Virtue, co-written with Adrian Pabst). On the other hand, a certain sense that the voters have grasped several truths. Last year’s votes showed an inchoate popular recognition that liberalism has become a violent and elitist global tyranny, that economic and cultural liberalism are really at one (Blair, the Clintons, Cameron) and that we may have modified or abandoned ultimately Christian norms about sex and gender all too casually and with no serious debate. These popular instincts may all be far more intellectually cogent than the vapid conclusions of a thousand postmodern academic seminars.
This point was for me well illustrated by a recent radio phone-in programme where an academic rightly said that “race” was a mere European ideological construction, but a listener then asked why, in that case, the academic wanted to validate “black history” and “black studies” in isolation? Would that not just reinforce the ideological delusion? she naively but perceptively asked. The academic had no serious answer, illustrating the dialectical illiteracy of so many supposed intellectuals today.
Gender assumptions
In what follows I am not denying that there are some people with confused bodies who deserve our every help towards a viable individual solution. Nor that there are others with unfathomable psychological conditions estranging them from their own corporeal manifestation. Perhaps, in extremis, surgery is the only solution for them.
But many people rightly sense that the liberal obsession with the transgender issue has gone beyond merely wanting to help this minority. It has become a whole movement to change our notions of gender. And its preoccupations come across as irrelevant to most people, unjustified in its conclusions, and apparently condemnatory of the normal with which most people identify.
As with the new post-liberalism in general (in both nasty and wise variants), the point is not “conservatism” versus “progressivism”. It is rather a question of essentially liberal novelties tied to an individualist, positivist philosophy which recognises only “facts” and “choice” as real. To reject this philosophy does not make you a reactionary.
The contemporary liberal worldview, influenced especially by Judith Butler, sharply divides the mere “fact” of given bodily sex from the “chosen” cultural construction of gender. Bodily appearances of engenderment are no longer seen as manifestations of a psychic-bodily unity, but as meaningless physical circumstances. Real gender is seen as something that our culture has collectively fantasised.
However, more sophisticated exponents of cultural theory, including many feminists, have asked whether nature and culture can be so easily divided. And in reality, liberals cannot sustain an account which denies so much of our experience. Instead, they end up shamelessly muddling nature and culture. Exceptions to the gendered and heterosexual norm are at one moment deemed to be non-negotiably “given” as natural, even biological facts (nature), and at the next deemed to be valid individual preferences (culture).
Why liberalism hurts the poor
Liberalism, then, drives the attempt to displace the heterosexual norm – which leads to the (shockingly illiberal) criminalisation of those who do not endorse either gay practice or gay marriage. But liberalism includes capitalism: in the end, liberalism defines people as simply property-owners, narcissistic self-owners, choosers and consumers. Aquinas thought that our natural orientation to something outside ourselves was fundamental to our being. Liberalism, by contrast, denies the importance of relationships. Thereby it encourages the undoing of community, locality and beauty – and also marriage and the family.
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