Why the story about the big-breasted tranny teacher matters

This is a follow-up to "Who's teaching YOUR kids?" (WWW, 21/9/22). Many of you will have been amused [perhaps even titillated, Ed.] by the video of the self-described transgendered teacher trying to keep her/his/its gynormous boobs our of the bandsaw. But the truth is there's not something but everything wrong with that picture. 

You may think such nonsense could only happen in Just In Trudeau's Canada, the wokest country on earth. Wrong. Such things happen all the time in the Progressive States of America. If you haven't seen photos like the one at left in your local news media, you haven't been watching.

The students of Oakville Trafalgar High School know that having such a whack-job teaching them is wrong. Not normal. They and their parents demonstrated in front of the school yesterday demanding that the teacher be fired. Yet their rulers -- the school board, the provincial government, the federal government, even the United Nations -- tell them the poor persecuted tranny has rights too.

Apparently the right to be queer trumps the right to not have propaganda for pro-queer wokeism shoved down their throats (or other orifices) in schools in which they are supposed to be learning how to live as normal people in a normal society. The trouble is that there is no normal society any more. Western society and its values have been turned upside down. 

David Brooks wrote about the diabolical disorientation of modern times in Bobos in Paradise, Simon & Schuster, 2000. Although leavened with loads of humour and peppered with scores of guffaw-inducing examples, Bobos in Paradise is actually a work of profound social criticism. Here are two excerpts, even more pertinent now than they were two decades ago. 

(p. 196) By the 1970s...people no longer knew where to draw the line between decency and indecency or whether there should be a line at all. The forces of emancipation recorded triumph after triumph. In some places children were encouraged to explore their sexuality as a means of self-discovery. 

Old taboos were falling. Old family structures began to seem passé. Old systems of etiquette seemed positively Neanderthal. Reticence seemed like hypocrisy. Sexual freedom, at least in the realm of public discourse, was on the march. 

In 1995 George Gilder wrote, "Bohemian values have come to prevail over bourgeois virtue in sexual morals and family roles, arts and letters, bureaucracies and universities, popular culture and public life. As a result, culture and family life are widely in chaos, cities seethe with venereal plagues, schools and colleges fall to obscurantism and propaganda, the courts are a carnival of pettifoggery.

In 1996 Robert Bork's bestseller, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, argued that the forces of the sixties have spread cultural rot across mainstream America. In 1999 William Bennett argued, "Our culture celebrates self-gratification, the crossing of all moral barriers, and now the breaking of all social taboos."

 ******** 

(p. 227) If you look around at the educated class today, you see a recognition that freedom and choice aren't everything. Free spirituality can lead to lazy spirituality, religiosity masquerading as religion, and finally to the narcissism of the New Age movement. The toppling of old authorities has not led to a glorious new dawn but instead to an alarming loss of faith in institutions and to spiritual confusion and social breakdown.

David Brooks wrote that in Y2K. He was still mildly optimistic, then, that educated Americans -- the "bobos" (bohemian bourgeoisie) to whom the title refers -- would pull back from the brink of madness, and use the new enlightenment and new freedoms to build a better society. I wonder what he thinks now. 

Further reading: The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, by Philip K. Howard. Warner Books, 1994. Available in like new condition from our sponsor.

What's wrong with our society? An answer... maybe...

In "What motivates mass murderers?", WWW 19/5/18, I said that I didn't understand what's wrong with Western society -- American society in particular -- that we produce a shockingly large number of psychotics who, for some reason or for no reason, go out and kill shockingly large numbers of innocent people. What's wrong with those people, I asked [rather indirectly. Ed.]. What motivates them? I just don't understand...

Thinking about it some more, I remembered an exchange with Agent 9, who educated me on the distinction between antinomianism (from the Greek: ἀντί, "against" + νόμος, "law"): any view which rejects laws or legalism and is against moral, religious, or social norms) and anomie: a condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.

I don't know if Nikolas Cruz and Dimitrios Pagourtzis are antinomians or not. I rather think not, as having a thought-out and thought-through view of anything implies having given the idea (whatever it is) some thought. But I do think both young men may have been affected by the anomie which has been prevalent in our society ever since the hippy-dippy 60s.

Anomie is the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community, resulting in fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values. The concept was described by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his 1897 book Suicide. (Early reports from Santa Fe suggest that Mr Pagourtzis wanted to commit suicide, chickening out and surrendering to the cops after he had killed ten people.)

Durkheim describes anomie as "derangement" -- craziness -- and "an insatiable will". Anomie, he wrote, arises from a mismatch between personal or group standards and wider social standards, or from the lack of a social ethic, which produces moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations.

Compare those words with this passage from Bobos in Paradise, by David Brooks (Simon & Schuster, 2000), sent to me yesterday by Agent 3:

In 1995 [actually 1994. Ed.] George Gilder wrote, "Bohemian values have come to prevail over bourgeois virtue in sexual morals and family roles, arts and letters, bureaucracies and universities, popular culture and public life. As a result, culture and family life are widely in chaos, cities seethe with venereal plagues, schools and colleges fall to obscurantism and propaganda, the courts are a carnival of pettifoggery."

In 1996, Robert Bork's bestseller Slouching Towards Gomorrah argued that the forces of the sixties have spread cultural rot across mainstream America. In 1999 William Bennett argued, "Our culture celebrates self-gratification, the crossing of all moral barriers, and now the breaking of all social taboos."

Aha! Lots of further reading there, and I think we may be close to an answer to my headline question. I have long maintained that the year in which the wheels started to come off our society can be pinpointed, based on empirical evidence, as 1964 -- 1965 at the latest. I'm off to the library to find whatever I can written by George Gilder, once described by Time as "male chauvinist pig of the year". Sounds like my kind of guy!

Are we liberal, conservative...or what?

Continuing with the theme of government intervention in our lives (see preceding post) let's turn to David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, July 19th.

Mr. Brooks poses the question of whether the politics of our time is predominantly liberal or conservative. His answer: neither. Read on.

When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.

This progressive era is being promulgated without much popular support. [My emphasis. Walt.] It’s being led by a large class of educated professionals, who have been trained to do technocratic analysis, who believe that more analysis and rule-writing is the solution to social breakdowns, and who have constructed ever-expanding networks of offices, schools and contracts.

Already this effort is generating a fierce, almost culture-war-style backlash. It is generating a backlash among people who do not have faith in Washington, who do not have faith that trained experts have superior abilities to organize society, who do not believe national rules can successfully contend with the intricacies of local contexts and cultures.

The "backlash" of which Mr. Brooks speaks is the Tea Party movement, which to my mind is nothing more or less than the latest expression of libertarianism.

Sadly, those who espouse and preach libertarianism are now demonized as being "anti-progressive". It is implied, if not stated outright, by the liberal media that we who would reduce the intrusion of government in our lives are hopeless curmudgeons.

We are intent, the enlightened and progressive "thinkers" say, on returning the West to the dark ages, before we had the benefits of globalization, multiculturalism, secular humanism and all the other universally accepted ideologies unleashed on us in the hippy-dippy 60s. (See Walt, passim.)

To all the libertarians and curmudgeons out there, Walt says, wear your epithet proudly and proclaim your contempt for "progress" loudly. I'm pullin' for ya.