Must we harden our hearts? An analogy

I wonder if a useful analogy to those of us who, as Christians, are bound to love the marginalized that cultural liberalism seeks to help, but cannot get on board with cultural program of left liberalism would be the situation of those who sympathized with the plight of the poor in the late nineteenth century but refused to become socials or communists (esp. the Church). I suspect they were similarly denounced as heartless (and, in fact, in some places, it's still the case that anyone who doesn't get on board with radicalism is denounced as being anti-poor.)

The analogy may fail (in the case of the Church, at least) because the nineteenth century poor were seen as victims of capitalism, and the Church vigorously denounced the capitalism behind that development as much, if not more, than socialism.

But maybe the analogy does work--or it would if we could more clearly frame the isolation of the marginalized as a symptom of the broader breakdown of society--families (nuclear and extended), communities, etc.--and, within the Church, the celibate vocation. In other words, gay marriage is a radical solution like socialism that we must reject, but it arises because our society is atomized and has subverted the meaning of family and sexuality. The solution isn't more individualism and false liberation, but a return to a thicker, religious, society that doesn't make sexual fulfillment the highest good and companionate marriage the only permanent relationship.

Of course, it was easier to triangulate against capitalism and socialism because the Church was seen more a regressive obstacle--the opiate of the masses--rather than the source of oppression itself. In the case of gays at least, the Church is seen as the prime oppressor, and the left doesn't really identify social atomization as the enemy. (Or it equates society with the state, so when it opposes individualism, what it advocates is a larger, more invasive state rather than a thick society where people are directly responsible for their neighbors.)

So, not a perfect analogy. In the end, the Church's rejection of radicalism was vindicated when communism invariably led to oppression, starvation and mass murder. Communism openly advocated violent revolution from the beginning, so it's an exaggeration to compare the cultural left to it in that regard--whatever totalitarian tendencies it may have, it's not advocating violence. (Of course, being in control of the state, which has further consolidated its monopoly on violence in the last century, they don't really have to.)

The totalitarian logic of liberalism

Step One: Identify a shared common-sense understanding that guides social relations (E.g., "Human beings are born male or female as determined by their genetics and anatomy.")
 
Step Two: Identify a minority group that falls outside that understanding. (E.g., "There's a handful of people that don’t identify as the same sex as their anatomy would indicate.")
 
Step Three: Destroy the shared common understand by characterizing it as mere bigotry--causing grievous harm to the affected minority and having no positive social value in itself. (E.g., "Assuming that everyone belongs to one sex or another as determined by their genetics and anatomy is just cis-normativity. It hurts the transgendered and distorts social reality.")
 
Step Four: Propose an expansion of managerial liberalism as the only way of keeping social peace in the absence of the shared common-sense understanding. (E.g., "Sexual identification is now determined by each individual for him or herself--children included. Programs, policies and protections must be put in place in all institutions and inculcated into everyone to ensure that self-identification is always respected. No one who accepts the common-sense understanding as meaningful can be entrusted with any kind of authority.")
 
Repeat.

Referring to north as "up" and south as "down" is probably racist.

Must we harden our hearts?

I am not sure if my cynicism is more a cause of my conservatism or a defense mechanism I've developed to withstand the sentimentalism employed by liberalism to shame its opponents, but it runs deep.

As a Christian, I think this is a spiritual problem. The universalism and concern for the poor and marginalized that characterize left liberalism are features it inherited from Christianity. The conservative Christian would say that liberalism exaggerates and distorts these features, having taken them out of context, but he cannot deny they are a part of his religion, too. Thus, he must both maintain enough objectivity to critique liberalism's claim to be the only morally upright response to the poor and marginalized, yet not actually let his heart be hardened against them.

It is not easy to do--particularly when you generally agree with liberals that the thing they're campaigning against is bad, and you don't have your own easy alternative solutions on hand. So, for instance, I agree that the modern market is creating great disparities in wealth and power and that this a problem for society. I largely agree that racial and sexual minorities often have it rough (though I don't entirely agree with them about the causes of this). And I don't really buy the official conservative rationalizations or solutions for these problems. Getting the government out of the way so that personal liberty and market economics can work their magic won't solve much of anything. The result is that my politics are largely negative--engaged in bursting the moral pretensions of the left, but without offering much of substance to replace it.

I would like to think that, fundamentally, this view of the world is not so much cynical as it is tragic. There are certain evils that cannot be eradicated from the human heart or human society because what is good and what is wicked in man are so tightly involved in each other that we cannot stamp out what is wicked without also crushing what is best in man. The wheat and the tares cannot be sorted out until the end.

So, I view the lot of the poor and the marginalized as, in some ways, built into the structure of reality, and I oppose efforts to alleviate their suffering that deny reality because these can only end by constructing an order that is fundamentally inhuman and insane. This means, sometimes, we have to say, "no". We do have duties to the poor and marginalized. Our hearts should be open to them, but their claims (or the claims of those who advocate on their behalf) cannot be unlimited. They have to evaluated critically and weighed against the claims of other goods.

In theory, that is not the same as indifference. In practice, it is hard to keep it distinct. This is particularly so in the face of the unending onslaught of guilt trips emanating from the moralistic zealots who speak on their behalf. Saying "no" in the face of a guilt trip takes some spine and maybe even a certain kind of callousness--or whatever it is that parents develop to avoid being manipulated by their children.

In parents, this callousness is (usually) countered and kept in check by a deeper natural sympathy--in fact, the callousness is usually in service to the deeper love. Most of us don't have that kind of natural sympathy for the poor and marginalized--so saying "no" without slipping into indifference (or worse) is a moral challenge.

Gender is complicated

"Gender is complicated" isn't argument. Yes, gender is complicated. (Though, 99% of the time, it's not, really.) So what? Why should the conscious subject's sense of its gender be more relevant than chromosomes or sex organs or the sex that society assigns it? We're social beings, and society "assigns" us roles and tells us how to act all the time.

If society has no right to tell Caitlyn that she's a man, then society has no right to tell me that Bruce is a woman.

Back to the office, mom! Motherhood is socialist.

Fred Schwarz at NRO reports that European laws and customs discourage employment of mothers. I guess  this is supposed to be bad because it's Europe and "socialist", while America is good for being ruthlessly capitalist and putting moms right to work.

Granted, the damper that generous maternal leave puts on employment of mothers and expectant mothers may be an unintended consequence of policies with good feminist intentions and ignorance of how people actually make hiring decisions. Nonetheless, it seems like this isn't an uncommon European phenomenon--laws that are "socialist" in theory but, in effect, actually preserve social customs and economic ways of life that American capitalism has long since torn to shreds.

Europe is killing itself by other means, of course, so probably neither approach is ultimately sustainable, but it's a commentary on the stupidity of our politics that a conservative site agrees with feminists that stigmas that encourage mothers to be parents instead of wage slaves are bad things.

Is sex magic?

Contemporary arguments about sexual morality generally assume utilitarianism (or consequentialism) and nominalism. Consequentialism holds that the morality of an act is purely determined by the goodness or badness of its consequences; utilitarianism further specifies that this is to be evaluated in terms of net pleasure/suffering brought to society as a whole. Nominalism says that there are no universals. Universals are just convenient fictions of language allowing us to name groups of similar things, but there is no actual nature or essence shared by things named by the same universal. Thus, arguments about the meaning of "male", "female", and "marriage" have no meaning from which we can derive moral conclusions. There are only individual things which we classify as "male, "female", or "marriage" for convenience.

This combination has been used as a sledgehammer against traditional definitions of marriage and prohibitions against homosexual acts. Arguments that marriage or the conjugal act are different "kinds" of things, with inherent purposes are met with scoffing and reductio ad absurdum arguments: "If marriage is about procreation, why do we let infertile couples marry?"

This is just one instance of the broader movement to demystify sex. Sex has no essence, no nature, no meaning or purpose beyond the subjective meaning and purpose attributed to it by the participants. Sex is not magic. In itself, sex can't be distinguished morally from other kinds of physical activity, and different sex acts cannot have different moral meanings apart from the moral meaning attributed to them by the participants. So, for instance, there can be no inherent difference between the act upon which the continuation of the species depends and "an unnatural act of the Oscar Wilde type". To say otherwise is to be superstitious and bigoted.

The problem is that this proves too much. (And here comes my reductio ad absurdum.)

We're already seeing in some boundary-pushing publications that this approach to sexual morality can't really make a coherent argument against bestiality. Provided that no physical harm is done to the beast, the only arguments to be made would be that it is somehow "unnatural" or that it debases the human participant. But these all rely on bigoted essentialism. If the participant doesn't find it debasing, then it isn't debasing. (Maybe an animal rights advocate would make an argument based on consent, but this just shows that the idea of attributing rights to animals is absurd.)

Similarly with (consensual) incest. Again, arguments that it confuses relationships in a way that is "unnatural" depend on essentialism--taking seriously kinds of relationships and sex as a particular kind of act, regardless of how that act or those relationships are viewed by the participants. People will bring out arguments about the genetic risks of inbreeding, but this can no longer determine the question. For one thing, procreation can be easily avoided, and genetic screening and abortion could be used as a backup. Anyway, arguments about gay sex and parenting have already determined that such risks of general social harm don't count for much against individual desires. For example, the social cost of the AIDS epidemic and its causal connection to male homosexual buggery is about as clear as it gets, but any suggestion that take measures to limit this activity is denounced as bigoted. Arguments based on psychology can be similarly put aside--if there are no essential kinds of relationships and acts, there can be no clear cause and effect in psychology--or at least, nothing clear enough to rule out relationships and acts that are consensual and otherwise appear "healthy".

Ultimately, it is hard for me to see even how liberals can consistently uphold the age of consent and strictures against pedophilia, if they consistently evaluate sexual morals by this withering standard. Society has bunkered these strictures in the language and logic of consent, which makes them less vulnerable to the reductionist logic. Within liberalism, consent is the one remaining absolute when it comes to sex, and kids can't offer meaningful sexual consent to adults. Still though, this only makes sense if you presume that sex is magic--different in kind from other kinds of acts. Children can consent to giving handshakes and high fives and playing board games, can't they? So what sets sex apart? Or, for that matter, what sets sex between teenagers apart from sex between a teenager and an adult? If minors can't give consent to adults, how can they do so to each other? Ultimately, our arguments still rely on the belief that sex is something different in kind from other acts, and the age of consent protects the innocence of minors from being violated, even though, we've otherwise discarded the concepts of "innocence" and "violation". The backup argument would be claims of psychological harm, but, again, is the causal link strong enough to be proven definitively and distinguished from the harm caused by social stigma? Homosexuals and transgendered folks have all kinds of psychological problems, but if you argue that these are related to their sexual proclivities rather than caused by social stigma, you are a bigot.

I'm not arguing in favor of these disgusting acts, nor am I saying that the advocates of the acceptability of gay sex are actually advocating these things. I am only arguing that the rightful disgust we feel at these acts only makes sense within a thicker moral framework for sex than the reductionism that is brought out against traditional arguments against homosexuality. That reductionism is being used selectively and inconsistently. When applied consistently, it cuts at the logical foundations of sexual limits that most liberals still hold to.

Despite what we say when we want to justify certain acts, we still implicitly treat sex as if it were magic and inherently meaningful prior to the intentions of the participants. We still believe in innocence (in some form) and understand that some kinds of sex can violate it. We're only dismissive of those ideas when it suits us for the purpose of justifying our own actions or those of a sympathetic minority.