Jacinta Allan is currently the Premier of the Australian state of Victoria. She was asked by a journalist about Donald Trump's executive order declaring that only two genders would be recognised, male and female.
Her response included the following:
Every Victorian should have the right to practise their faith, whatever that faith may be...and to love who they love and to be who they are....we've got to focus on supporting people to be who they are, to love who they want to love, and to practise their faith, whatever their faith may be.
Jacinta Allan is a Labor politician, and therefore a social democrat. Nonetheless, what she is saying here is foundational to a liberalism that goes back hundreds of years. It is the type of thinking that is shared by all kinds of liberals, both of the right and the left. It is a deeply flawed way of looking at things.
In the late 1500s and early 1600s, Europe was devastated by religious wars that had no clear winner. This led ultimately to a focus on religious tolerance, but it also helped to usher in a new metaphysics, devised by men like Thomas Hobbes.
In this metaphysics, there are only individual desires and aversions. Something becomes the good because we desire it, evil because we are averse to it. Each one of us is determined differently, and so we have different subjective goods that are known only to ourselves. We are self-interested in the pursuit of our own individual goods. Freedom is not so much freedom of will to choose between different goods, but a freedom of will to pursue, without external constraint, the particular subjective good determined for us. The good exists at the individual level: we only contract to form associations and governments so that our peaceful and secure individual existence might be upheld.
Once you adopt this metaphysics, certain things follow. For instance, there is no longer an "essence" to different types of creatures. There is, in other words, no longer a certain quality given to us as part of our created nature that we might develop along and try to perfect. Nor is there a "telos" or a "final cause" - there are no common ends or purposes to life that we have been created for. Nor do we need to cooperate with others to fulfil aspects of our own nature: we do not need to contribute to a common good in order to realise our own individual good. There is only our own individual good upheld via individual rights or via our contract with the state.
So when Jacinta Allan says that we have a right to "be who we are", she is adopting the mental framework of the Hobbesian metaphysics. We are supposed to assume, in accepting her comment, that there are no qualitative differences in what we might be. One thing is as good as another. Nothing is more, nothing is less. Nothing is higher, nothing is lower. Nothing is more meaningful, nothings is less meaningful. We are just individually determined to be....whatever. And who can say what we are? Well, it is known only to ourselves, so my declaration that "I am x" settles the matter.
There is a passage from St Paul that I think is relevant here. He wrote "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." (Romans 7:15). Paul attributed this inability to do what he really wanted to do to the presence within him of sin. It is a recognition that it is easy for the human personality to be disordered by uncontrolled desires or impulses - by our vices - so that we do not really live up to being or doing what we know we really should do or be.
So it is glib to say that people should just be who they are. This does not recognise that what we are in practice can be disordered by our own inability to be virtuous and to live up to the standard of the good, or even just to standards that we set for ourselves. And there is a danger that, in being told to be "who we are", we collapse into our own disordered self and begin to identify with our own vices.
Nor is it the case that "who we are" is something arbitrary and unknowable to others. We have a created nature as men and women which gives us what used to be called a "quiddity" - qualities that make us distinct in our being, an inherent nature. These are now usually termed essences. As I mentioned earlier, modern metaphysics tends to deny the existence of these essences. The classic articulation of this is from Judith Butler, who denied that the masculine or the feminine were real qualities within male and female nature:
... gender is a performance ... Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction...
And yet we do, in our everyday lives, recognise a feminine quality in women and a masculine quality in men. And we do want to admire feminine qualities in women and masculine qualities in men: in fact, when we are young and romantically minded we are likely to idealise and love the more attractive expressions of these qualities, and actively seek them out in a spouse. They are real to us in a way that matters, and they can even inspire in us a sense of a transcendent good that ennobles human life.
It is true that such essences are likely to be expressed a little differently according to our individual personalities. But they are not infinitely elastic. There is a limit where we might say of a woman "she is acting mannishly" or of a man "that is coming across as effeminate". There is a range, but also a point at which the quality is lost or diminished.
So if we have this given nature, one part of our telos in life is to develop it so that we might express our own potential being more fully and so that we might embody an aspect of a transcendent good in who we are.
Who we are and what we do might also be guided by our understanding of objective moral goods. If there are standards of what is morally right or wrong, then our actions and how we identify ourselves should ideally conform to these. A Hobbesian mindset is blind to this because it rests upon the idea that there are only subjective goods, so that when we desire a thing, that thing then becomes the good. So someone with a Hobbesian mindset can blandly assert that a person should just be whatever it is that they happen to be at a particular moment in time, but someone with a sense of objective moral goods would want that person to continue to develop toward a better self that is more in line with moral goods - in part, because this is how we grow to be more fully ourselves.
We might also aim in a positive way toward a certain understanding of purity. By this I do not mean abstaining from any sexual experience. What I am referring to is that as well as developing along the givens of our nature, so that we more fully express our higher potential, that we also have the task of maintaining intact aspects of our original form. The point here is to retain our integrity in what we choose to be or to do, rather than damaging or degrading or making something lower of ourselves. It can sometimes be difficult to get back what we have lost. Again, people need encouragement in this task, rather than the false reassurance that they should just be whatever.
Finally, Jacinta Allan's approach also fails because it does not recognise that many of the more important things we want to be or to do can only be achieved at a supra-individual level. I might want to be a loving husband, respected within my family. I cannot achieve that alone at a purely individual level. I need a quality wife for this to be realised, and my chances of meeting such a woman will depend, in part, on what happens within the culture, which is itself the product of the choices of many thousands of individuals.
The message of just be whatever is not going to help me much here. If we all just follow our own individual desires, seeking our own subjective goods, without much concern for our significant social roles, or our impact on the wider society, or of what is required of us to uphold our role in creating a good society, then we will operate within a lower trust society in which it becomes more difficult than it needs to be to realise the goods that are most important to us.
We exist as part of larger social bodies; our well-being depends on the functioning of these bodies; part of our identity and sense of belonging derives from these bodies; and therefore it is right that we cultivate qualities that allow us to successfully and loyally discharge our duties to these bodies. We need to be more than "whatever".
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