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| Protesters try to block statement on gender in Boston |
British-American writer Andrew Sullivan's Weekly Dish column at the weekend has particularly sharp insights on why transgender activists are pushing society in the wrong direction. He shows the same anxiety as I do over the cultural changes promoted under the broad woke agenda where personal rights and minority stances must be accepted by all under pain of social cancellation.
The case that drew Sullivan's astute commentary is Lia Thomas's rise in the US to be the women's national title holder in college swimming. Lia Thomas is biologically a male but identifies as a woman. Needless to say, Thomas's competitors cried foul given the physical advantage, as shown in the photo below.
Sullivan, who is a homosexual, writes in his column:
Lia Thomas’ triumphs at the NCAA swimming finals are never going to be treated as completely fair by most people. Inclusion is important and trans athletes need to be treated with dignity. But the core biological differences between men and women simply cannot be wished away, and when we’re talking about high-level competition, the unfairness is simply unmissable. Yelling TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN! will not persuade anyone [...]
[...] activists need to understand that demanding people not believe what is in front of their ears and eyes is a mark not of a civil rights movement, but a form of authoritarianism.
It bears repeating, as Sullivan puts it: Inclusion is important and trans athletes need to be treated with dignity. That is certainly my view, and fact that both Sullivan and myself are Christians gives weight to our avowal of respect to all those who identify differently from their biological status. The issue is that the rest of society is being forced to accept a position on sexuality and gender that has been generally accepted only by the elites in society, namely in academia, the mainstream news media, and in leftist politics.
The elites may accept the trans agenda as intellectually accurate, or do so in response of the cultural tide that silences dissent with the slogans of "hate speech", and "harm" or "aggression", but ordinary people know reality too well, and have their children to defend from the advocates of self-invention.
Sullivan produces the following statistics:
There’s also been some new polling on the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law just passed in Florida, and for those in the woke bubble, it is sobering news. Most people [...] don’t think kindergartners or second- or third-graders should be introduced to the concepts of critical gender and queer theory. They believe that the issues of homosexuality and transgender experience should be taught in a way that is “age-appropriate.”
Here’s the Morning Consult poll, which finds 51 - 35 percent majority for not teaching K-3 about trans or gay identity; and a 52 - 33 percent majority in favor of “age-appropriate” teaching thereafter. In what I take as a hopeful sign, though, a 44 - 40 percent plurality oppose the ability of parents to sue teachers — which is also part of the law.
A Daily Wire poll provided the actual wording:
“Below is a passage from a new state education law. Please indicate whether you support or oppose it. ‘Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through third grade or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
That passage had a 64 - 21 percent majority support.
He also cited another poll which had findings opposite the above, but it did not present its questions with the context that the polls above did so its results would not be as reliable indicators of opinion.
This is Sullivan's assessment of the poll results:
What to make of all this? I’d say simply: people don’t want to ban teachers from doing their job, but they’re leery of indoctrination of the very young. And the context for this leeriness is a revolution in the teaching of these topics to incorporate critical queer and gender theory — that relegates biology to an afterthought, describes sex as a “spectrum”, and conflates sex with gender.
There’s an obvious sane compromise on this — age-appropriate sex ed in the most neutral manner possible after elementary school — but the radicalism of the critical queer and gender theory left and the moral panic of the religious right precludes it. Yes, the bill is too vague and encourages chilling lawsuits, which is why I’m against it. But yes, too, telling 5 year olds that boys can have periods and girls can have penises is completely inappropriate. It’s bewildering and, more to the point, untrue.
He finds the rhetoric disturbing:
The [LGBT+] alphabet movement calls any restrictions on teaching sex ed to elementary school kids a form of “hate” and argues that the law “will kill kids”. How’s that for crude emotional blackmail?
His conclusion:
The good news is that most Americans support equality for trans and gay people (and, in terms of civil rights, we already have it); they’re just leery of the extreme forms that queer ideology is taking, and certainly don’t want their young children caught in the crossfire. If we start from that premise, there are places we can go and compromises we can reach. If we don’t, it’s culture war all the way down.
Speaking of culture war, the urgency over the need for society to stand up against the constant demands of the "progressives" is becoming ever clearer.
British academic Eric Kaufmann identifies the nature of the ugly clash of cultures under way:
Today’s culture wars pit advocates of equal outcomes and special protection for identity groups against defenders of due process, equal treatment, scientific reason, and free speech. Our political map is taking shape around this new divide between what I will call cultural socialism and cultural liberalism.
Cultural socialism, which values equal results and harm prevention for identity groups over individual rights, has inspired race-based pedagogies and harsh punishments for controversial speech. Rooted in the idea that historically marginalized groups are sacred, this view is no passing fad. Letters, associations, universities, and media defending free speech notwithstanding, the young adherents of cultural socialism are steadily overturning the liberal ethos of the adult world.
Kaufmann's resdarch has found that young are supportive of controlling behaviour and speech, even if it affects themselves by way of access to a job or in not being "allowed" to say what they think to be right or true.
Survey data from my new Manhattan Institute report, “The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary America,” show the scale of the challenge. While the American public leans two-to-one in favor of cultural liberalism, a majority of Americans under 30 incline toward cultural socialism. For instance, while 65 percent of Americans over 55 oppose Google’s decision to fire James Damore for having questioned the firm’s training on gender equity, those under 30 support the firing by a 59–41 margin.
On the use of critical race theory in school, a similar divide emerges. Eight in ten people over age 55 oppose teaching schoolchildren that the United States was founded on racism and remains systemically racist, or that the country and their homes were built on stolen land. A slight majority of young people support teaching these notions.
By a 48–27 margin, respondents under 30 agree that “My fear of losing my job or reputation due to something I said or posted online is a justified price to pay to protect historically disadvantaged groups.” Those over 50, by contrast, disagree by a 51–17 margin. Younger age brackets are both more fearful of cancel culture and more supportive of it than are older age groups.
He concludes:
America still has two cultural liberals for every cultural socialist. Questions of cancel culture and CRT split Democrats and unite Republicans, putting pressure on both parties to resist cultural socialism. Twenty percent of Democrats, one-third of independents, and nearly half of Republican voters now rank culture-war issues as a top concern, my survey finds. The classical liberal inheritance that underpins our legal system does not live in the hearts of younger generations because it has not been brought to life in stories, film, or education. We urgently need to revive this lost tradition—but the hour is late.
Read more about Kaufmann's conclusions flowing from his research in author Rod Dreher's report of a conference in Hungary that focused on the dark clouds of culture war.
The seriousness of the threat of wokeness was highlighted both by Kaufmann and by another speaker who impressed Dreher, James Orr, a lecturer at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Dreher writes:
[Orr] told the audience that conservatives should not make the mistake of thinking that wokeness is shallow. No, he said, it’s deep, and it’s a very serious threat to the free society. Only the State is strong enough to regulate all this and to defend liberty and sanity. Conservatives would be foolish to think that we can get by with modest responses to this threat.
Orr added that conservative attempts to reform existing institutions have generally come to naught. We need to create counter-institutions and networks, so our ideas can thrive.
Read Dreher's column for more ideas on how to build defences against the woke tide that, without a sustained effort, is sure to overwhelm society more assuredly than it has at present. He provides this update:
Should have mentioned the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, and its Republican legislature, for going to war against the ghouls of the transgender industry. Here’s an article about how the state Attorney General ruled that transitioning children is a form of child abuse, as it certainly is. And here’s a story from the Texas Tribune about Jeff Younger, a father who lost a famous child custody battle, and whose son is now being medically transformed into a pseudo-female; Younger’s case helped move the Texas legislature to go after clinics that transition children. The Tribune, a liberal paper, writes of Younger and his GOP supporters as a villain, but you still get the idea that it was the grassroots that compelled Texas GOP politicians to act.
This holy war is utterly modern
But this matter of the culture war that is raging in the West, and globally by means of social media and the media generally, is set in the context of the poorly recognised East-West culture war that added fuel to President Putin's push to preserve for the Russian people the "holy ground" of Ukraine.
International analyst and broadcaster Stan Grant relates how the head of Russian Orthodoxy, Patriarch Kirill, had long ago joined forces with Putin in reviving the concept of a "Russian World". Grant quotes political scientist Lena Surzhko Harned as describing as a joint mission of church and state, "of making Russia a spiritual, cultural and political centre of civilisation to counter the liberal, secular ideology of the West".
It's true that the godless nature of much of life in the West has transformed the 'free society" ideology that blossomed after World War II from a vibrant forest tree into a desiccated desert shrub that increasingly relies on intolerance and social division to achieve its goals. Christian principles of forgiveness, charity towards those with opposing ideas, and community rather than individualistic autonomy, are absent from a large part of social discourse.
Grant quotes others with an understanding of the Russian mentality to explain why Putin made his history-shattering move:
Vladimir Putin believes the West is decadent. He believes the West has turned away from God and he is a defender of the faith.
Is Putin truly a believer? That's not the question. This is not personal, it is political. This holy war is not medieval, it is utterly modern.
It is about identity in a world in flux. Where faith is turned inward and apart from symbolism or ritual is increasingly pushed out of public debate.
Religion and politics scholar Jocelyne Cesari has traced the evolution of secular modernity in her book, We God's People. We have now reached a point in Western Europe, she says, where "this world is all there is".
There is a division between the immanent and the transcendent — between what is Caesar's and what is God's. The immanent is the realm of politics.
Believers, Cesari says, "are expected to keep the transcendent to themselves". She says the nation is now "the superior collective identification" overtaking "religious allegiances".
In his book, A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor says: "Modern civilisation cannot but bring about a death of God."
Taylor says we have seen the rise of an "exclusive humanism". We have swapped God for a "culture of authenticity, or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfilment, 'do their own thing'."
German philosopher Max Scheler also wrote about this — how we risk becoming alienated from one another, isolated from the world "degraded and depersonalised".
We struggle to deal with faith in our public discourse. When it arises it usually centres around scandal in the church, or abusive priests, or questions of morality and discrimination.
We miss the deeper questions of how faith can still shape our world and — when misused or exploited — can have devastating consequences.
Cesari says religion survives in the nation state. [...] Religion can be used as the "foundation of identity". She cites political Islam as an example of how faith can emerge as "a modern technique of governmentality". The Islamic world has adopted — or had forced upon them — Western notions of the modern state but faith remains critical to public life and identity.
Radical Islam takes it even further, striking back at the West. Osama bin Laden's September 11,2001, terrorist attacks on the United States shook the West from its complacency that the world had moved on from wars of religion.
Putin in his own way is not so different to Osama bin Laden, someone for whom faith was a weapon. As bin Laden cited the 11th century Crusades and Putin seeks a return to the 10th century idea of holy Russia, both have reacted to a modern world. Both products of it, both seeking to remake it.
The West provoked Putin into making war because it refused to be sensitive to the cultural and spiritual repulsion felt by Russians - and Ukrainians, too, since they are more conservative on social and moral issues than Western Europeans, meaning they have held firm to the life-affirming Christian way of life of their ancestors.
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