A Quadrant Article
The Folly of Going Too Far
Comments (5)Declan Mansfield
The Promised Land is a symbolic dream and nothing more. Its satisfactions are beyond the reach of both individuals and society, irrespective of whether the tools used to attain happiness are politics, religion, science, economics, or philosophy. The supreme, contemporary irony, though, is that, while we’re living in an overtly moral age, it’s a fundamental, but often overlooked side of human nature to disturb our own and other people’s peace.
All of us, to our shame, are guilty of naively or even deliberately choosing the wrong path. We do it continually throughout our lives. Dostoevsky said that if all human desire was indulged, we would still, through a quirk of psychology, destroy everything that makes our lives happy and meaningful. Eden, Jannah, Nirvana, the prelapsarian state of nature, the perfect world of the future, the false gods and snake oil of communism, feminism, socialism, fascism or environmentalism, (our wildest, febrile imaginings, in other words) are permanently outside — except in brief moments of pleasure or contentment — the horizon of tangible, durable and concrete human experience. Like Moses, then, we see the Promised Land, but it always remains tantalisingly beyond our reach. In the end, we take, if we’re wise and humble, the simple joys, and are grateful.
What, you say, does the above deep and perhaps meaningless passage have to do with anything? Apart from a general observation, not much. But it does refer obliquely to the most monumental strategic blunder of modern times, which will probably take decades to undo. After centuries of stigmatisation and discrimination, homosexual people, or, in broader terms, the non-heterosexual minority, had not only seen the Promised Land from a distance, but had walked through its shady bowers, sunlit mountains and watered oases. A rejected community had reached their desired destination and were enjoying the fruits of both their exhaustive labours and their most pristine dreams. Everyone, or at least most people in Western liberal democracies, were happy. Suddenly nobody cared about other people’s sexuality.
And then, like Icarus flying too close to the sun, extremists within the movement pushed everything too far. It wasn’t enough for gay marriage to be normalised, or for good-natured tolerance of different lifestyle choices to be accepted. A suite of radical claims was put before a confused public and no debate or dissent was allowed. Men were now women and women were men, and not in the ‘let us be kind to John or Jane type of way – sure what harm could it do?’ No, a man with an actual penis and testicles and the full physiology of an adult male was now a woman with all the rights and privileges traditionally reserved for females, and any argument to the contrary was ‘transphobia’, a sin for which the only just response was to be cast into the deepest realms of hell; either that, or have your life destroyed by being cancelled socially or professionally. In other words, the purest form of bullying behaviour, a prima facie example that would sit easily in even the most enlightened psychological textbook, was being weaponised to further an ideological agenda, and by the people who shout the loudest about ‘being kind’.
The amount of anti-free speech, anti- democratic, anti-live-and-let-live ideological impositions on everyday people’s lives is extraordinary – and just as chilling in their implications. No institution has been left unmolested by what is a fusion of postmodernism, critical theory, feminism, the myth of the Noble Savage, Cultural Marxism and Queer Theory, and it’s presented to an ignorant and easily fooled public as simply being nice. It is now considered ‘hate speech’ to practice any form of religion that does not celebrate the idea that there are seventy-two genders. Science, the most accurate way of measuring the world, is being destroyed because its results often don’t conform to transgender ideology. Politics, long an arena in liberal democracies of civilised disagreement and discussion, has been co-opted into a simplistic site of black-and-white thinking, where morality, hence scapegoating, around transgender issues is the norm. Academia, and education in general, is no longer concerned with a search for truth or where intellectual gadflies have a home: conform to the ideology or forget about your career. The media, once proud of its role as the Fourth Estate, is now the official arm of an ideology that brooks no dissent. David Hume’s distinction of what is and what ought to be has been utterly extinguished. We live in a world of establishment-sponsored propaganda, and woe betide anyone who dissents from its strictures.
It didn’t need to be this way. Most people have ideas about themselves and opinions of other people that would, if they were relentlessly articulated, cause society to frown in consternation at their peculiarities. We overlook each other’s idiosyncrasies because we’re all guilty of wrongthink to some extent. What we have not done, until now, at least in liberal democracies, is force people to recognise other people’s opinions, truth claims, or psychological views of the world as absolutely sound. Disagreement has traditionally been encouraged because humility in the face of the complexity of the world is a more rational response than strict adherence to any ideology. In other words, you do your thing and I’ll do mine. And once we’re not physically harming one another or stealing property, then everything is allowed, including passionate disagreement.
This humane quintessence of civilisation is now under threat, and the danger of this situation is that the entire edifice of gay rights is also under threat. This is the disastrous outcome of not accepting reality, but instead searching for Utopia, and, like Procrustes and his bed, making society conform to an ideological vision of the world. As Newton said, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This dictum is as true in relation to social norms as it is to physics. Islamic fundamentalism, chauvinistic nationalism, and, to put it bluntly, the less intellectually developed regions of the world are inherently anti-homosexual and don’t need any encouragement to return to benighted forms of anti-gay discrimination. There are hundreds of millions of people with these attitudes. The only thing that’s stopping their worldwide negative encroachment into the lives of gay people is the political, economic and military power of the liberal democratic West – and the only thing holding the West’s political values together is an adherence to political liberty. Break this bond and everything, no matter how dreadful, is possible. This is exactly what is happening now with the imposition of transgender ideology across the institutions of free and open democracies. People are prepared to accept other people’s idiosyncrasies only when the courtesy is reciprocal; and this openness to other people’s idiosyncrasies has been broken by the extremists of the transgender movement, with the support of a whole raft of LGBTQ+ organisations. Never has the idea of playing with fire been more apposite, and the consequences more potentially lethal.
The leaders of gay rights organisations around the world need to become less ideological and more practical in their approach to what can be achieved politically and socially in relation to homosexual rights. Do not push transgender ideology so far that the tolerant majority, who are happy their gay brothers and sisters are now living dignified and socially accepted lives in open relationships, become disenchanted because their own beliefs have been proscribed by an intolerant minority. The Promised Land, remember, is almost always an illusion, or, to say it in more prosaic terms, utopias can never live up to the hype. Don’t kill the golden goose for an ideological chimera. Or, to continue the mythological, fairytale and biblical allusions, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Bismarck said that ‘politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the next best’. This wisdom is something everyone should know. Transgender ideology is incoherent as a philosophy, and impossible, over the long term, as politics. Another quotation, this time from Rochefoucauld, which should be the slogan of every human rights movement: ‘don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good’. You’ve walked through a less than perfect Promised Land. That should be enough. It is the daily reality, in myriad ways, for everybody.
