I was on social media and, in a debate about transsexualism, saw the following comment:
It's an example of someone separating out sex and gender, which then allows the two to be set against each other. I responded with this comment:
The original poster then went for a Millian liberal response, along the lines of "everyone can do whatever they want as long as it does not harm anyone else":
In the past, this might have been a winning move. People who were brought up in the liberal frame might have accepted the premises of this argument and so have been influenced to accept a picture of society in which everyone simply stays neutral in terms of the human good and so tolerates whatever other people do.
I was happy to note that many of those who responded did not buy into this type of thinking. The Millian line was rejected, overwhelmingly, on the grounds that the supposed neutrality of liberalism is a fiction.
It was argued that, far from remaining neutral, a liberal culture forced people to accept and confirm the transsexual belief system, for instance, by threatening to remove children from parents; through the attempt to replace ordinary words so that, for instance, a biological woman is referred to as a "person with a uterus"; through forcing women to accept biological males in restrooms and change rooms; through pressure to adopt pronouns and so on.
There have been leftists who have argued, in principle, for this absence of real neutrality. Herbert Marcuse, a leading voice of the New Left in the 1960s, wrote a famous essay titled "Repressive Tolerance". In it, he argued that full tolerance should only be extended to those on the political left, who were agitating for socialist liberation and therefore against a "false consciousness". Marcuse was critical of,
the active, official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity I call this non-partisan tolerance 'abstract' or 'pure' inasmuch as it refrains from taking sides
This is the earliest example I know of where non-leftist speech is categorised and made illegitimate as representing "hate". Whether the term "hate speech" is derived directly from Marcuse or not I'm not sure, but the mindset here is clear enough: that neutrality is abandoned when it does not serve the leftist cause; and that non-leftist politics is to suffer intolerance on the grounds that it represents "hate".
Marcuse even set out the specific conditions in which non-leftist thought might or might not be tolerated. He used the term "indiscriminate tolerance" to describe where neutrality might be permissible:
Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; it is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private religion. But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.
Again, modern society has taken this type of Marcusian turn. It is generally understood that something you might say in a private "harmless" context could not be said in a more scrutinised public context. And the level of scrutiny is advancing over time.
The larger point, then, is that society is not neutral in terms of competing goods. I think it's a good thing that people are recognising this and not complacently accepting claims about neutrality.
I myself went for a different option. I don't think the vision of a community in which we are studiously indifferent to what everyone might choose to do can work in the longer run.
There were moral concepts employed in the West that reflected this need to hold things together in a self-disciplined way. To fail to do so was regarded negatively as being wanton (a lack of restraint or control), or abandoned, or incontinent, or dissolute, or dissipated, or licentious, or debauched. The more positive moral vocabulary was that of having integrity or being sound or, in more recent times, of being centred.
These words now sound old-fashioned, but they nonetheless are grounded in something accepted by popular science writers of today like Steven Pinker who writes,
The…ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.
Most people would be aware of this. If we just follow whatever inclinations or appetites happen to come to mind, then we gradually fall into self-destructive habits. We lose our integrity of being - our lives become increasingly disordered. And so we are all forced, to some degree, to make an effort - to apply energy - to maintain our health and our well-being.
If we care about our social bodies - the communities we belong to - then we will be concerned with upholding the integrity of these as well. This obviously has to be balanced with the good of individual freedoms. But it's not possible to have a society in which every individual acts in any direction and is indifferent to all other individuals, and expect this society to avoid the centrifugal effects of entropy - a drifting away into disorder and decay. There has to be a common commitment to upholding the larger integrity of the community.
The key to achieving this is to understand how much our own higher goods depend upon this life in common. It is difficult to sustain our own spiritual life, ourselves as embodied souls, without the particular loves and commitments that we find within our communal traditions. And so it makes sense for each individual to act purposefully and deliberately and meaningfully to uphold the integrity of these traditions and to encourage others to do the same.
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