The Respect Gambit Part 2: Dropping Our Guard

     When I wrote this piece, I was primarily concerned with what we might call the mathematics of social metastability. I’ve known for a while that certain deviances must be curbed early, lest their metastatic properties produce social cancers that would threaten the life of the host. However, it’s in the nature of Man that such deviances cannot be utterly eradicated. Their numbers can be held down; that is all. So it’s important for a polity / society / culture to have defenses against their expansion – and of course, against their celebration as something innovative and desirable.

     When I wrote this piece – golly gee, it seems like only yesterday! – I sought to address both the heightened aggressiveness of the practitioners of those deviances and the pressure to treat them publicly as above criticism. The causal connection “should” be “obvious” (he said entirely non-ironically), but a great many Americans have yet to detect it, mainly because only lunatics such as your humble Curmudgeon Emeritus are crazy enough to court public opprobrium by mentioning it.

     You’re welcome to your own opinion about whether deviances such as aggressive homosexuality, militant misandry, transgenderism, Islam in America, and the open practice of what Charles Murray has labeled “thug culture” can be tolerated, long term or short. But unless these things are curbed, they will continue to expand, for the simplest of all reasons: we dropped our guard against them.

     In essence, the promoters and practitioners of those deviances took note of the defenses American society had mounted against them, targeted them, and strove single-mindedly to dismantle them. Once the barriers were down, the deviants could surge forth from their closets to afflict the rest of us without pretense. What I’ve called “the respect gambit” was the lever they contrived to pry open America’s social door.

     If we don’t come immediately to grasp the nature of “the respect gambit” and do something to disarm it, American society is doomed. I know that’s a strong statement for 5:10 AM EDT, but the trends I see developing leave me no choice about it. Accordingly, here I am to describe the mechanism we must oppose and how to go about it.

     However, this excursion into human social order and what makes it coherent will be more extended than most, so first, a little more coffee.

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     “Hope has no police, no legislatures, and no man-made laws. Our rule is simplicity itself: ‘An it harm none, do as thou wilt.’” -- Alain Morelon

     The Spooner Federation books are a major component of what I hold to be my life’s true work. They explore, in fictional form, both the possibilities of anarchism among persons raised in it and committed to it, and some of the reasons why it’s no more stable than any form of government. I’ve received broadsides against the themes in those books, both from persons utterly committed to anarchism and from persons angry that I should have broached the possibility.

     There are a number of sociocultural motifs in the Spooner Federation series that can pass unnoted at first reading. One that almost no one has ever mentioned in correspondence with me is the universality of the bourgeois virtues. Everyone in the stories works at something. Yet some are less willing to work than others; consider Elizabeth Peterson in Which Art In Hope. Some become drunk with power and are enraged when they’re defied; consider Charisse Morelon in Freedom’s Scion. Some aspire to a status they can’t earn by their own efforts; consider Victor in Freedom’s Fury. And of course, there are those whose envy of more successful others leads them to some very bad decisions; consider Alex Dunbarton, again in Freedom’s Fury.

     Healthy, sustainable social orders institute barriers against the indulgence of sloth, power lust, greed, and envy. Though some such barriers are secular in nature, the most important one – the one that’s functioned more reliably than all others combined – is the Christian ethos, when coupled to a confident censoriousness toward those who deviate from its strictures.

     The Christian ethos can be most succinctly summed up as the practice of the four cardinal virtues:

• Prudence,
• Justice,
• Temperance,
• Fortitude.

     No one intelligent enough to read the effusions I post here at Liberty’s Torch will need to have those virtues explicated in detail. Their overriding importance in restraining explosions of sloth, power lust, greed, and envy cannot be overstated. Indeed, without them – and without a mated willingness among people generally to criticize to the point of ostracism those who disdain them – no society can endure. And there is this: they can only be sustained by faith: the conviction that they are good and necessary in themselves, requiring no elaborate “proof.”

     A healthy social order, in which deviances are kept within tolerable bounds, absolutely requires the cardinal virtues and the hostility of those who practice them toward those who don’t. But we’re not nearly done.

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     As I wrote here, tolerability is a matter of degree. A deviance that keeps itself to itself while observing the sociocultural norms in public can be tolerated: i.e. it can be permitted to exist in small numbers. However, if it offers its practitioners reinforcements that can exceed their ability to resist, as is the case with many vices, only public disapprobation tantamount to ostracism can keep it curbed. When disapprobation fails to be sufficient, the practice of the vice will expand.

     Some deviances have the power to evoke a fad. The current transgenderism fad is a perfect example. For the first time in my memory, we have persons openly proclaiming that the sex of one’s natal body has nothing to do with one’s “gender.” As there are always curious persons, especially among the young, about how it might feel to be the other sex, this has promoted a huge surge of “exploration” that’s already having deleterious social and commercial consequences. Some of those consequences will fall entirely upon the “explorers,” who will soon (if they haven’t already) discover that most employers are unwilling to condone such disruptive nonsense within their enterprises.

     Note that transgendered individuals have existed for a long time. The keys to attaining social acceptance were discretion and presentation. Discretion, in that the transgendered person would refrain from openly attacking the sociocultural norms; presentation, in that a man who wants to live and be taken as a woman – by far the majority of the transgendered are biological men who want to live as women – would impose upon himself whatever measures might be demanded of him to be generally accepted as such, from various elaborate personal preparations to relocation. Since those measures are indeed quite demanding, very few persons were strongly enough motivated to accept them.

     Clearly, conditions are different today.

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     Needless to say, the legal order has a part to play in this. Continuing with the example of transgenderism, among the steps required of a transgender to attain the status he seeks is acquiring the necessary documentation for that new status. Recent developments have made this loom very large...but that was not always the case.

     Time was, personal legal documentation was practically nonexistent. As recently as 1900, even legal birth certificates were unknown in these United States. Parents would note the birth of a child on the black leaves at the end of the family Bible. Births were otherwise recorded by neighborhood churches, if at all. Once again, conditions are different today.

     Think about all the government wastepaper you “need” today:

• A birth certificate;
• A Social Security card;
• If male, a Selective Service registration card;
• Depending upon locale, proof of legal residence in these United States;
• For drivers, a driver’s license;
• For travelers abroad, a passport;
• For about 1100 different occupations, an occupational license.

     Those are merely the items that come to mind at once. I have no doubt that there are others. To replace all of them, someone who wants to transition must have the cooperation of various levels of government in his efforts – and the willingness of governments to cooperate blasts a large hole in the barriers that once kept transgenderism confined to a tolerable few.

     But of course, in a nation as over-governed as ours, those bits of paper are required if one is to exercise a reasonable degree of personal latitude. Imagine what it would take to board a plane without them.

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     Another important element enters the mix with a change in governmental acceptance. By changing its attitude toward the deviance from outlawry (or non-recognition) to legal toleration, the State, which in our time is all too widely regarded as the ultimate arbiter of everything, has placed itself in implicit opposition to the sociocultural norms. That allows the deviant to represent himself as having been oppressed but now being liberated, with the corollary that private citizens’ disapproval should vanish as well.

     Needless to say, this is a complete non sequitur. Many things are and have been legal that others have disapproved to the point of exclusion. Conversely, many things in which private persons see no harm – in moderation, at least – have been outlawed. There is no necessary connection between the legal order and the norms of society. Yet deviants strive to conflate the two at every turn.

     In this regard, the most notable deviance is that of homosexuality. About sixty years ago, homosexual conduct was illegal throughout the United States. With the relaxation of the laws against it, homosexual activists were able to grab hold of the “oppression” banner and transmute it into a drive for general social acceptance. The “Gay Pride” phenomenon was born...and once again, allow me to note the absurdity of pride in something the sufferer claims was inborn. (It gets even more absurd when we note homosexuals’ hostility to the word homosexual, and to the availability of therapies that have succeeded in reversing the sexual orientations of some homosexuals.) Over time, waving the “oppression” banner sufficed to neutralize the social disapproval that had previously kept homosexuality within tolerable limits.

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     A deviance on the march will seldom be satisfied with toleration. The practitioners are aware that toleration can be a veneer over continued disapproval. As most deviances are anxious to expand their numbers – population having an emotional connection, if no other, with perceptions of acceptability – demands for respect are next to be heard. Without popular respect, the barriers to the expansion of the deviance will remain too firm for practitioners’ tastes.

     The first and possibly most important venue for mandatory “respect” is the verbal: what you may and must not say. I’ve ranted about this before, but the subject is evergreen. Once again, homosexuality is the best contemporary example. Today it can cost one’s job to express disapproval of homosexuality, much less the opinion that it’s not really inborn at all but rather a conscious choice. That hazard is gradually being extended to several other deviances. Human Resources departments seem eager to comply, with the implication that the increased power to regulate the lives of employees is their real priority.

     However, the delegitimization of verbal disapproval has institutional consequences. Consider in this connection the ongoing campaign against the Catholic Church. Several deviances are enlisted in this effort, most notably homosexuals and the promoters of abortion on demand. They cannot abide a large institution, whose allegiants deem it to possess moral authority, that openly condemns the behavior they cherish. Similarly, corporations whose executives are known to be opposed to various deviances are regularly targeted for economic damage, usually through boycotts, in the attempt to get the “offending” executives expunged.

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     This is a large subject; I don’t pretend to have produced anything but the barest outline of the problem in our place and time. It’s a critical factor in the acceleration and intensification of our social chaos, though it’s not the only one. It deserves to be studied in great depth.

     Bear in mind always that there are persons who attach themselves to a “cause” specifically to profit from it. The most visible “spokesmen” for some deviance are likely to be of that sort. Sincerity is not often found in the vicinity of profits to be made by aggravating a conflict. That doesn’t mean they can’t be effective. Indeed, a lack of conviction is often an asset to a demagogue; it allows him to bend with the winds.

     One final thought before I close for today: When a deviance bursts the bonds that have traditionally restrained it to a tolerable level, the prior social dynamic is often reversed. Ordinary persons who desire only to live according to their own convictions will find themselves threatened for nonconformance to the “new standard.” The intrusions can be of several kinds, including legal ones.

     There are always consequences for not having the courage of one’s convictions. Why else would fortitude be a virtue?