Saturday, March 28, 2015

Is human nature an endangered species?

There are certain things that we all used to take for granted. There were no debates about them because almost no one disagreed about them.

Up until about 15 years ago, no one would have thought that marriage was anything but a relationship between a man and a woman—not even gays. This was a time when the biological sex you were born into the world with was actually considered an indication of your gender.

And you wouldn't have to go back even that far to find yourself in a time when everyone expected that boys would use the boy's bathroom and girls the girl's bathroom.

But today, on issue after issue, the traditional view of human sexuality is being challenged. No longer are we allowed to believe what everyone in every culture in every era of human history has believed until just a few years ago.

The new view of human sexuality now being imposed on us declares that men and woman are interchangeable: that there is no meaningful difference between the two. The distinction between males and females, we are told, is arbitrary and socially constructed, and to believe anything else is discriminatory.

The reigning philosophy behind this new view of gender is called "constructivism." Constructivism is the view that the things which we have always assumed are basic to our nature—such as gender—are the result not of anything intrinsic to us, but purely the result of the environment we grow up in.

Boys are boys because, when they were growing up, they were taught to play with trucks and girls are girls because they were taught to play with dolls: Had we switched the trucks and the dolls, boys would be girls and girls would be boys.

If you think this sounds preposterous, just go down to your local university sociology department. There are people who actually believe this. In fact, it is the reigning academic paradigm in the social sciences today: There is no such thing as "human nature." Who and what we are—including (perhaps especially) our gender—is purely a product of our culture. Had our culture been different, we would have been different.

And though this sounds preposterous to those of us who believe in a God-given and perennial human nature—or plain biology for that matter, it is the view that lies behind the same-sex marriage movement, the transgender rights movement, and numerous other and more exotic beliefs championed by the "LGBT" movement.

You can now "self-identify" as any gender you like. And the thing about it is that you are no longer limited to just two genders. Facebook, for example, now offers 52 different gender categories for its users.

Indeed the number of gender categories seems to be limited only by the inventiveness of the human imagination.

No word yet from Facebook or anyone else whether we can arbitrarily choose a "racial identity" and decide which one we want to "self-identify" as. Just imagine what would happen if a White person decided to "self-identify" as an African-American.

"But wait," you say. "I thought gay rights groups thought that sexual orientation was inborn?" And that's true. Except on Tuesdays. Tuesday is the day that it becomes politically inconvenient to be a constructivist. It is the day when the political benefits of saying that gender is inborn exceed the benefits of saying exactly the opposite—like in court cases where saying that people are born gay helps you qualify for designation as a "suspect class" in anti-discrimination laws.

No one ever said consistency was a strong suit of the Cultural Revolutionaries.

Of course if you question any of this, you will be called a bigot. If you point out the inconsistencies you called hateful. And if you point out there is no good science to support it, you will have your sanity questioned. Under these circumstances, who is there brave enough to point out that the emperor has no clothes?

But this is the way ideology works; it is how cultural radicalism manifests itself. But this too shall pass away.

The gender ideology that currently dominates government, academia, and the media is having its day, but, like all such fads it will eventually be eclipsed by something else, hopefully better. That is the way of the world.

History has a way of correcting for nonsense, and human nature can't be wished away and will eventually reassert itself. In the meantime, we just have to keep articulating the simple and obvious truths about human beings. There will come a time when when they will be recognized as simple and obvious once again.

2 comments:

gentlemind said...

Long-time lurker, first-time commenter. Firstly, thank you for so frequently blogging about this thing called Gender.

Secondly, to offer an answer to the question in the title, there is a difference between knowledge, nature and kind. Mankind's knowledge of himself has never been as poor as it is right now. With that comes the danger of Man 'forgetting' his own nature, thereby becoming susceptible to (further) deception. Beyond that lies the possibility of Mankind's (auto) extinction.

I blog almost exclusively about Gender nowadays. I am putting forward an approach which is different from everybody else's.

Daniel

Anonymous said...

Thinking on the image you used of the bathroom sign, how many women today associate a skirt/dress with being a woman? It USED to be that everyone did and wasn't questioned but sadly, our society changed that and so far, it isn't a fad that has faded but rather, it has morphed into greater confusion; that of gender identity.

What used to be disturbing years ago to me, was coming behind someone and thinking they were a man (pants/cut hair) and then SHE turns around. Nowadays, who knows what gender they "identify" with.

Normal conversation now when meeting someone, falls along the lines of - "So, have you lived in California all your life?" Fast forward 10 years from now, will it be - "So, have you always been a female."

If only we could go back to women being women and men being men and wearing the garments pertaining to each. I would have to say that most men would want that but it would be hard to find that majority on the woman's side. Of course you would be labeled legalist by those who want genderless-garments. There needs to be a feminine and a masculine and I've noticed this with homosexuals I've encountered - one always seem to be the soft one and the other the "man."

I was in a pregnancy forum and a woman was berated because she posted that she was having a "gender-reveal" party. The critics said that she didn't have the right to decide the baby's gender because the child would decide that, probably around age 10, and it was abusive to decide beforehand.

Just some of my scattered thoughts...

I hope you are right in that this is a fad but I see a falling civilization.