by Theodore Dalrymple –
There are several wider cultural trends discernible in the current agitation over transsexualism, or whatever name one wishes to give it. (“Words are wise men’s counters,” said Hobbes, “they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools.” It is only fair to add that, with inflation, money could soon become the money of fools.)
1. Accept No Limitations, Satisfy All Desires, Death Acceptable
The first cultural trend is an increasing reluctance to accept any limitation whatsoever to the satisfaction of one’s desires that are placed by circumstances beyond one’s control, that is to say an exaggerated or exacerbated Prometheanism: You can be anything you want, without limitation, and therefore you do not have to accept anything you were born with as ineluctable. In such a culture, death itself becomes unacceptable, an insult to our desired omnipotence; it is not any particular kind of death that we reject or fight against, often with success, but death itself.
2. Magical Thinking
The second trend is to magical thinking, despite the supposed rationality of our age and its vaunted defeat of superstition. We believe that we can change reality by means of mere verbal incantations. If we alter our language enough, reality itself will change. Some element of this belief can be found in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, though he was probably more in tune with the future trend than creator of it. Thus, if we go on saying long enough that women who take male hormones are men, and outlaw the opposite proposition, such women will become men.
3. Worship of Power
The third trend is the worship of power. The object of deliberate language change is not to improve the state of the world, or even anyone’s state of mind, but the exertion and consolidation of power for its own sake. One glaring example of this was Ataturk’s language reform in Turkey: In a matter of a few years, an entire people was cut off from all of its past and history and had therefore no option but to cleave to the new dispensation, which even Erdogan has not been able to change in many respects, notwithstanding a little Busby Berkeley-style choreography and costume-dressing.
4. Transgender Fringe Lunatics in Charge
The fourth trend is centralization of the marginal; that is to say, a marginal phenomenon such as transsexualism comes to occupy the center of intellectual attention. To employ a different metaphor, the tail wags the dog.
5. Spinelessness of Intelligentsia
The fifth trend is to the increasing spinelessness or cowardice of much of the intelligentsia, who in this case have proved themselves astonishingly easy to intimidate, a pack of intellectual Neville Chamberlains (but Chamberlain had more excuse, for he had lived through the horror of the First World War, which he did not want to repeat). Nothing has proved too absurd for this intelligentsia to swallow; indeed, the swallowing of absurdity is easier for the intelligentsia than others, for rationalization is their métier. There is no point in being an intellectual if you think only what everyone else thinks.
The most important question is, What next?—for there will be a next, because transgressive reform is what gives meaning to life in the absence of any other meaning. My money is on incest, against which there is no rational argument these days, given the availability of birth control and abortion and the moral authority of mutual consent.
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Excerpts from: First Slowly, Then Quickly. (Additional headers added by blog editors to improve readability.)
