Believe me, a lot of us notice. Ordinary people who have never had a thought about theory in their lives see the world they took as normal, as stable, as comprehensible, disappearing in front of their eyes, driven by forces they cannot understand, much less control. Some of the more thoughtful conservatives see the deeper problems at issue.
Here’s theologian Carl Trueman on the new mandated LGBT history standards in California schools:
Yuval Levin has written recently that the ethic of modern America is that of expressive individualism. Herein lies the problem: Taken absolutely, expressive individualism has no specific content and thus is subject to those identities which society considers authentic and to which it has thus granted legitimacy. But who decides which identities are authentic? Have you ever wondered why some minorities make it and others do not? Why, say, LGBTQers have pride of place on the California curriculum but foot fetishists, redheads, and people with allergies to latex do not? It is because the latter currently lack the cultural cachet that comes with the imprimatur of the entertainment industry, with the public sympathy arising from publicized marginalization and victimhood, and with the influence of organized lobby groups.
Thus, the California curriculum is a symptomatic codification of the aesthetic preferences of the current political culture. As such, it raises question far beyond whether schools rather than parents should teach children sexual morality. For years, the in-house question for historians has been whether history can survive as a discipline despite the proliferation of micro-narratives and the collapse of the possibility of grand theory. But now that academic question has more immediate real-world consequences: Can the nation state, or maybe society in general in the democratic form with which we are familiar, survive in anything like its current shape, when history—which is vital to the nation-state’s legitimation—is fracturing into the myriad identities to which expressive individualism is ultimately vulnerable? When you add to this the other forces militating against social unity—immigration, globalization, etc.—the institutions and processes built on a deep sense of social unity and cohesion look profoundly vulnerable.
The action of the State of California may well be driven by the trendy politics of the day, but it represents a phenomenon of comprehensive social and political importance, not just the ascendancy of a particular political stance. The new curriculum represents the confusion that lies at the very heart of modern Western identity; it is far more significant than merely putting the name of Harvey Milk into the minds of the young. It is part of an ongoing and perhaps largely unwitting challenge to what it means to be human, and thus to the way the world is currently organized. But, as George Orwell once commented, “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” Indeed it is. And we may all be about to be burned.
It’s about
identity. And it goes even deeper than that,
as Trueman explains in a subsequent post:
The Civil Rights movement was built on the egalitarian assumption that African Americans shared with those of European ancestry a common humanity which transcended and ultimately undermined racial categories; by contrast, LGBTQ politics assumes that self-determined individual sexual identity trumps everything. It is thus built not on the foundation of a common humanity but on the priority of the individual’s will.
This is not a stance unique to LGBTQ activists. In fact, it is one of the major assumptions in the contemporary political climate. Much of modern politics—right and left—operates with an impoverished, solipsistic definition of selfhood. The result is that we have lost the classic liberal balance between the constraints rooted in the concept of a shared humanity and the rights of the individual. The late modern self would seem to be understood primarily as a self-determining agent whose desires are curbed only by the principle of consent when brought into relationship with the desires of another self-determining agent.
The idea here is that there is no such thing as a shared human nature, that human beings are defined not by nature, but by their own wills. More:
This demolition of the concept of human nature started centuries ago and is now firmly ensconced in art, in literature, in social and material relations, and in legal and political institutions and the standard news and entertainment media narratives. It thus has tremendous momentum. Anyone wishing to defend the unborn or traditional marriage has a much greater task on their hands than that faced by those who oppose them on these issues.
Assuming that he is a conservative, the man sitting across from me in the coffee shop where I’m writing this post probably wouldn’t be able to discuss the culture war as a fight over human nature itself.
But it is, and however inarticulate he may be, even in explaining this to himself, he dimly senses that this is what is happening.
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