I
Further to the essay I wrote on TRANSLOGIC some time ago, I now want to consider not the logic but the causes of the current disarray in our marital law, identity politics and sexual behaviour.
The short argument, here, is that our current disarray is the long consequence of a SEXUAL FEEDBACK LOOP. For at least a century we have sought to achieve sexual freedom. Against the old marital morality, we have tried to do whatever we want with whomever is agreeable as long as this is qualified by consent. This experiment has been premissed on the idea that it is about freedom of activity. But the experiment has not been controlled and limited to activity. By an elaborate feedback loop our tendency to greater sexual experimentation has come back in a great arc to undermine our sense of our own original sexual nature.
In the article on TRANSLOGIC I suggested that there are three logics, which accompany three stages of sexual history.
The first logic is that I am a man, you are a woman, we commit ourselves to each other ‘until death us do part’, and we have children, where we can.
The second is that I am a man (say, or a woman), and I am free to engage in what we call sexual activity (redefined so it is not simply sexual commerce in the old sense but any activity between any of us which involves our sexual organs) with anyone (man or woman, men or women), as long as they are sexually mature, consenting to this activity, and that no harm (also redefined so it is no longer intrinsic harm but consequential harm) comes to any of the consenting adults.
The third is that I am whatever I want to be, be it a man or a woman, or even what is now called ‘two-spirit’ (with both a male and female soul), and am free to ‘identify’ myself in my chosen manner, but also insist that I should be ‘identified’ by others in this way: any sexual activity is secondary to this.
Now, what I want to observe about this is that there is very likely a causal relation between the second and third stages.
We broke the old imperatives: about living in harmony and commitment, about fulfilling our sexual natures in committed sexual relations, about taking responsibility for the consequences of those sexual relations, and about building our institutions around the virtues of the relations as sanctified by care of children.
The second stage, I now think, depended on the assumption that every one of us is whatever we were supposed to be in the first stage: a man or a woman. But then it is assumed that we could do whatever we wanted. The particular claim I want to make here is I think that it is very likely that this freedom to do whatever ‘I’ want dissolved my certainty about who the ‘I’ was who possessed this freedom. Our free sexual activity was not simply free activity: the freedom was a corrosive agent which acted upon our nature – or what we formerly supposed, but now were inclined to doubt, was our nature. In a word, sexual possibility (concerning what we could do) fed back into sexual identity (concerning what we are).
This is the sexual feedback loop.
The result has been chaos: the chaos of LGBT, and now of Trudeau’s 2SLGBTQ+. There is, as critical commentators frequently suggest, no limit to the conveyor belt of initial letters of this contemporary set of movements. But, in terms of my argument, what I want to say is that L and G and B were originally meant to be terms about what we do. They then became terms for what we are, accompanied by T and the rest: where ‘what we are’ is our nature, that is, our chosen nature, that is, our artificial self-representation.
II
The root cause of this was uncovered 150 years ago. In the second half of the 19th Century, the historian J.R. Seeley wrote an astonishing piece called ‘The English Revolution of the Nineteenth Century’. In it he claimed that the fundamental principle of all new politics was the abolition of monopolies. One of the significant monopolies which was in the process of being abolished was what Seeley in 1870 called the ‘male monopoly’ (and what is now called ‘patriarchy’). The monopoly was broken by an unbuttoning of culture associated particularly with the recognition of homosexuality and the rise of feminism, but also, importantly, with the liberation from nature made possible by technology, and of course the opportunities these offered to both men and women. What were the consequences of this abolition of the male monopoly?
First we achieved freedom of activity. Then we achieved freedom of identity.
By the first step we lost the asymmetries which used to steer everyone into marriage: and so we saw the relaxation of marital law, up to and including the passing of the laws which recognised ‘civil unions’ and then ‘same-sex marriages’ as equally acceptable to traditional marriage. This state sanctioning of sexual freedom – through contraception, divorce and abortion to same-sex marriage – was originally premissed on the view that we know who we are and know what we want.
But, now, as a consequence of the second step we increasingly do not know who we are or what we want. The breakdown of traditional marriage has been accompanied by the breakdown of male responsibility and the breakdown of female instinct, both of which have gone into chaos: as men are torn between the old inclination to take a woman and bear the consequences and the new inclination to enjoy whatever they can without consequence (as well as the new cultural encouragement to show empathy, be a ‘feminist’, ‘raise the kids’, etc.), and as women are torn between the old inclination to take a man and bear the consequences and the new inclination to see enjoyment without consequence as legitimate (as well as the new cultural encouragement to be ambitious and adventurous, ‘kick ass’, etc.). Women are discovering the Old Adam, and men are trying to compensate by trying to adopt a bit of the Old Eve. (There’s quite a worm in that apple.) Plus there are now a lot of belligerent, censorious and sententious New Evams and Adeves.
This confusion (which I see Genevieve Gluck in Spiked claims has been magnified by pornography) has arguably led us into marital affray, mental disorder, substance addiction, perpetual depression, social irresponsibility, and medical tortures, all now sanctified by the ideologies of the diversity movements which declare that one should be proud of being confused and that individual confusion is in fact not confusion but membership of a proud community. By the second step we have seen the concretisation of this confusion – through inversion – from something negative into something positive: a movement which is now come to convert everyone to its exotic and unnatural and inclusive totalitarian creed.
III
At the moment in the West there are three ‘communities’.
- The first community supports the entire LGBT+ canon. They advocate the new ‘liberal’ [sic] position: the Woke position, the New Enlightened Position, the Nice Totalitarian position.
- The second community declares, “Thus far, and no further.” Figures like Douglas Murray, Brendan O’Neill and probably Piers Morgan defend freedom, including sexual freedom, but excoriate the consequences of the recent ‘Trans’ movement. This was the standard (old) liberal position: dominant between 1968 and 2008. It should be a bore, but it has suddenly become interesting because of the advent of the first community. It is still just about legitimate to argue from this position in our mainstream culture.
- The third community is composed of Christians, and pagans whose instincts are, if not Christian, then traditional in the sense of concerned with faithful or old-fashioned marriage. This is the conservative position, now, though it was anything but a conservative position for, let’s say, a thousand years at least. It is now becoming almost impossible to articulate this position in public: especially if it comes armed with condemnations of or cautions about all irregular sexual activity and now irregular sexual identity.
The whole debate has an air of unreality about it, since it is a game of tennis played between the first and second communities, with the third community silent. The debate has gone so far to the left that the third community, ironically, has to depend on homosexuals, lesbians and their liberal ‘allies’ to defend whatever vestiges of respectability and good order still remain in our society.
The point of the argument here is to make people like Douglas Murray and Brendan O’Neill think again. For the root of the problem is not what they think it is. It is not ‘Trans’. It is, in a word, ‘Gay’. The root of the problem is the abolition of the male monopoly associated with homosexuality, and, of course, feminism. Now, I am not condemning or blaming homosexuality as a set of dispositions, proclivities, indulgences, activities or interests. These have always existed in some form, along with other forms of libidinism and libertinism. Feminism is, in part, unobjectionable. But obviously ‘Homosexuality’ as an institutionalised ideology is a different matter. So is ‘Feminism’ as an institutionalised ideology. The cause of our malaise is not any particular behaviour. It is the public sanction of this behaviour, and the institutional establishment of it. If I am right – and I may not be (one makes an argument but, as a sceptic, one also shrugs one’s shoulders at it) – then this has caused the confusion that has recently thrown up the strangely corporation-ready ideology of paradoxically diversitarian sexual totalitarianism.
We have added ‘experiments in being’ to John Stuart Mill’s ‘experiments in living’. There has been too much experimenting in the last century.
Some liberals are caught in a bind because at the moment they want to approve of ‘Feminism’ and ‘Homosexuality’ but disapprove of ‘Trans’. This may seem to be a coherent position, and certainly for the moment it is a politically acceptable one, because the liberals are saying that although they are on board with equality, freedom, consent etc., they are not on board with novel sorts of harm. But I would say that this position is ultimately incoherent. It is a transitional position. The liberals will eventually find out – if it is not yet obvious to them – that the very freedom they think they want has generated the consequences they now want to deny.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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I note that her apology is in regards to her bone-headed comments regarding the Jewish community. However this is only one part of the letter that is both racist and offensive. Her ignorance of the Barbary Slave Trade and the appalling privations suffered by white Europeans held as slaves of the Ottoman Empire in the middle east are equally bad if not worse. This organised slave trade continued substantially after the Atlantic Slave Trade was ended, and conditions for its victims where equally unpleasant.
I also find it disappointing but not especially surprising that this is completely ignored by the entire MSM.
You forgot to mention the castrations, which is why you don’t see to many descendants of Africans held as slaves back then running around the middle east
Bigoted, hypocritical, pig-ignorant … and a Labour MP for 35 years. And there are plenty more just like her on the Labour benches.
Well done.
Absolutely needed to be said. Thirty five years an MP and still as thick as the day she was born. A loathsome woman who has never been anything but an utter disgrace to this country. Amongst a den of thieves, layabouts, incompetents and inadequates she reigns supreme.
Not quite never – she opposed the medical mandate!
This blundering buffon had to be gotten rid of one way or another before the next election. Starmer may be a beady eyed incompetent, but at least he realises you cannot win elections with blithering idiots like this in your party.
Racism, gender, vax status, climate etc etc. These are all ‘contentious’ issues fostered and fuelled by the powers that be. In this way, people waste their energies squabbling amongst themselves. The privileged get away without scrutiny, feathering their nests and tightening their control.
I take it that Traveller is a modern euphemism for Romany gypsies, who have distinct racial characteristics, rather than tinkers, commuters, sales reps and holiday makers.
I would also be interested to hear what special racial characteristics apply to the Irish (who included he late Phil Lynott), as opposed to any other Western European national.
Plenty of Romany died along side Jews in Hitler’s death camps and have suffered because of their race in Eastern Europe.
Parliament debated the WHO pandemic treaty last week which will open the door to full global dictatorship. DEFRA are making quiet Danish style plans to destroy the UK farming industry, our energy security is hanging by a mosquito’s ball bag and extraordinary numbers of people are dying with ’cause of death unknown’.
And what do we have in the MSM? A racist in a race baiting panto, a government bullying soap opera, claims that increasing trace gas plant food ruins baseball matches and an article musing on the type of technology potentially needed to shrink bingo wings.
Musk come on man, we need that spaceship.
She’s an idiot, has always been an idiot and always will be an idiot. However this is the Daily Sceptic associated with the Free Speech Union. I defend her right to say what she said. The world should be free to hear her words without censorship or misrepresentation so we can judge for ourselves just what we think. And in all honesty, I think context has been lost and she made a legitimate point. What she actually said is not how it is being reported. I may be right wing and I may hate identity politics, but even I can appreciate her point that being black is an ever present fact that can lead to more exposure to racism (from the few racists that are out there – my point not hers). If you are Jewish, it is much of the time, for most Jews, not evident to the racists who are potentially going to be hostile that you are Jewish. Of course that she is being hit by the kind of misrepresentation tactics she has so often deployed against others has a delicious irony. But that doesn’t change the fact I deplore it when she and her leftist ilk do it, so deplore others doing it now.
Do you really think that’s the point she’s making? It’s possible to read that into it, but not obvious, at least to me. I think you might be projecting your own logic onto what she wrote.
She seems to draw a distinction between “racism” and “prejudice” which I struggle to follow. Isn’t “racism” just “prejudice based on race”? Is she saying that the other groups are not separate “races”?
I don’t think anyone here thinks she should be censored or stopped from saying these things. Whether she should keep her job in the Labour Party is a matter for them – most likely a tricky decision for them.
I agree it’s true that discussing anything to do with Jews or Israel seems to be impossible to do calmly, but I don’t think her remarks are part of that general area of discussion, though of course she is entitled to her view that blacks are a “special case”.
Overall I think it’s great that the woke left seem inclined to eat each other from time to time, and this represents one of the few hopes I have that their ideas will in the eyes of the public at large be discredited.
I’m very literal. She doesn’t say Jews are merely subject to “red head“ prejudice. In fact everything she has said, sentence by sentence is factually correct. Granted you can easily believe her to be be implying the same point as she makes about redheads applies to the groups she identifies later in the paragraph, but that is an assumption on your part. I’m pretty sure everyone commenting on here will have argued a case the other way with exactly this reasoning I am giving, when that person is a part of their political tribe. Pretty sure Boris and Jeremy Clarkson provided quite a few pertinent examples in their writing and the subsequent furore when something “controversial” is said.
She talks about various “white” groups including Jews that “undoubtedly experience prejudice” which is “similar to racism”.
Sure you can interpret it that way, but I think the far more important point is, sheesh, that the culture war leads to thin skinned offence taking IS the problem. No let me rephrase that, because isn’t the point here, if we are being honest, that people are feigning taking offence just to inauthentically use it as a political weapon? I mean, honest question, are you honestly offended by what she said, or do you see it more as an opportunity to make counter comments? I’m not criticising you here on a personal level, because I know I can certainly enjoy some comment jousting and anyway we are on the same side. But isn’t that honestly more the point?
I am not at all “offended” by what she said. Perhaps I would be if I were Jewish or whatever. Let her speak – never interrupt a fool!
I think her arguments are weak. She cherry picks instances of racism taken to extremes to which only blacks have been subjected and uses them to conclude that other groups she refers to do not suffer racism, only something similar.
This we can certainly both agree on!
It was the left that weaponised the concept of “offence”. I’m more than happy to turn it back on the left, at any time of the day or night.
I don’t accept that there is a race called “Jews”: Simon Schama and Jeff Goldblum clearly don’t belong to the same ethnic group.
I thought there were clear differences in bits of their DNA but of course there has been a lot of mixing.
That’s because of the level of inbreeding – they have a number of very common genetic disorders as a result (in much the same way as islam).
Excellent comment tof.
The backlash against her letter has been extraordinary. I don’t like her, and she is not an asset to the Labour party, but it seems all nuance is lost when it comes to discussion about race.
I can sort of see what she is driving at, while at no time defending anti-Semitism. Unless they open their mouths and speak, I would be unable to pick out an Irish person or a ‘traveller’ or Roma in a crowd, whereas a black person is more obvious. (One of my children is ginger so I tend to warm to this group…)
She has got many facts wrong, as the article points out, and she was unwise to poke this particular ants nest, but the rush to condemn her articulating an unfashionable view shows that society at large is as cowardly and prone to herd-mentality as ever.
In a crowd, the Roma is the one saying “Beeg Ishooo”
I don’t see why it’s extraordinary. She’s trying to pull rank in the “victims of racism” stakes, and any victim group that she says she or her people outrank are probably going to feel pretty pissed off by that. I’m not offended personally, just think she is talking rubbish. Different races and nationalities have been victimised in different ways since time immemorial – arguably some races have suffered more than others overall, but that’s not really what she’s arguing.
The difficulties surrounding any discussion regarding Jewish people, Israel, anti-Semitism etc are IMO a different matter. I agree that it seems impossible for anyone to discuss it rationally without it descending into name-calling, but I don’t think that’s really the issue here (though obviously the usual suspects have been wheeled out to use the “anti-semitic” card which I am not sure applies in this case). A big part of the problem isn’t history, it’s where we are today and the relative levels of success enjoyed by different groups and the countries they populate.
I think it’s your latter point that has struck me the most: the way the critics of DA have leapt onto the antisemitism bandwagon, no doubt owing to her association with the Corbyn Labour party.
I don’t detect anything particularly anti Semitic in what she said, but that hasn’t stopped all the offence-takers hitting the nuclear button thereby shutting down discussion.
She’s still a pain in the neck.
I agree that belittling the suffering from racism of Jews isn’t anti-semitic, just daft/inaccurate. I might be offended by it, were I Jewish, but that’s not the same as anti-Semitism. The professional victim brigade have a bit of a problem in this area though; hopefully it will be their undoing.
It’s a case of over-compensation. See l we are not bigots and don’t just censor people on the Right, we are ‘fair’ and believe in ‘equality’.
Its just Panto complete with comical, grotesque dame.
The moment I open my mouth, people realize that I’m a foreigner. The more educated ones recognize my German accents, others tend to think that I must be Polish. I’ve been asked Are you Polish? with this characteristic, latent aggression in the voice of the speaker for more times than I can remember and contempt for foreigners, especially foreigners believed to be Polish, is by no means uncommon in England.
Isn’t Diane Wrong shoes suppose to be an Oxford grad?
The fact that she chose to air her ignorant and extremely distasteful views in a national newspaper shows these are her true beliefs. The guff about it being an early draft is laughable. Thankfully we still have a semblance of free speech and the Observer published her letter, showing her up for what she really is, a hypocritical race baiting bigot. She is not fit to be an MP.
Diane Abbott – “I misspoke.” Whoops caught lying.
“It was an early draft.” Whoops, I dropped a right firkin clanger but I didn’t mean it. Honest.
Diane Abbott – never been known to leave home without the race card in her handbag.
She has been know to leave home with two left shoes.
Oh yes. Brilliant.
She needs to stay, purely for the comedy value.
Lammy can fill that slot quite well.
It’s truly excellent that she has outed herself as the racist bigot that she clearly is, in a national newspaper, The Observer no less. You couldn’t make it up.
Haha.. you just have to laugh.. Diane Abbot of all people caught out by the racist card.
She obviously wasn’t aware of old Voltaire’s wise perception all those years ago.. “If you want to really know who rules over you, just look who you’re not allowed to criticise”. A quote now being denied by every fact checker on planet earth.. proving without doubt its authenticity.. haha
I’ve zero time for any politician of any political persuasion, they’ve proven themselves to be bought and paid for charlatans time and time again. However, I am surprised by Abbot, who being a loyal Corbyn supporter, surely must have know who brought him down with the same smears of anti-semitism.. and of course who they put in his place.. the self confessed, kneeling, zionist friend of Israel.. Career Starmer.. You couldn’t make it up.. could you????
The Apology of Death…
What is a ‘white-seeming’ person? How does one ‘seem’ to be white?
She is all the more stupid because that Whoopi creature in the US made the same observation about the Jews a few months back and ordure was heaped on her from a great height from all quarters.
‘And at the height of slavery,’
When was slavery at its height exactly? During Greek times, Roman times, Persian times? Or how about the island of Britain pre-Roman, during the Roman occupation and after colonisation by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes up to the Norman Conquest?
What about the slaving raids by the Irish on the West Coast of Britain and Viking raids?
What about English people transported to the colonies to serve their sentence as indentured slaves?
Until the early 19th century, all maritime powers around the Mediterranean operated fleets of galleys rowed by galley slaves manacled to their benches. Slavery was a fixture during antiquity and probably reached its height in the times of the Roman Empire. It still existed in England in the middle ages. The old testaments already contains laws regarding the treatment of slaves. And none of this was about black people from Africa.
The problem with identify politics is that it’s done by Amercians who know preciously little, if anything, about the world and its history outside of the USA and who couldn’t care less about it. They’re apparently thinking an attitude like “Yo, world, suck it up! You’re much below us, anway!” is sufficient with respect to that. Instead of discussing how many structurally oppressed people can dance on the head of a pin, ie, what is or isn’t proper racsim, a much better reaction would F***k off back to the motherland, ignorant dumbasses, and take the likes of Diane Abbot with you.
Indeed, and it’s telling that despite the article to which she is responding talking explicitly about Britain, she quotes examples from pre-Civil Rights USA, as if they applied equally here.
“Whatever the source of these ideas, though, they are clearly factually dubious and likely to exacerbate racial divisions rather than heal them.”
Not sure her aim is to heal racial divisions.
Those who earn a living from stoking racism and finding it wherever they look are not interested in healing divisions. There is no money in it.
Harmony doesn’t pay.
Indeed – no money, no votes and no power.
Still, at least she went against her party to oppose the medical mandate!
True. Labour were more covidian than the tories but there were some patchy rebellions towards the end
I repeat, my ancestor Sir Cloudesley Shovell played a part in the redemption of English slaves from Africa in 1675. And some English people in the 19th Century endured slave like conditions in England. Seriously, what do they teach in these schools?
What a glorious name!
I’m Jewish and I agree with Dianne Abbott’s original comments.
For a start, Judaism is a religion, a creed, not a race, so you can’t be racist towards or about Jews; what you can be is prejudiced, which is what she said. Although now lapsed, I’m from an orthodox family and as a kid you would have seen me walking to shul on Saturday mornings with the rest of the congregation looking distinctly Jewish! So how many times was I or anyone I knew subjected to so-called racism in working class Leeds. That’s right, none. Don’t remember any of it. I simply don’t believe British Jews walk in fear. I don’t think black people walk in fear any more either, but if we were to go back a decade or two this might have been true for black and asian members of the population. Certainly Pakistanis were the victims of appalling racism, literal racism, where I’m from as recently as the 90s.
Of course none of this is has got anything to do with any genuine regard or concern about the plight of the UKs minorities. It’s a divide and conquer tactic meant to fracture and weaken society and embed the idea that we are a nation of bigots who need top down control, censorship and surveillance. I wish Diane Abbott had said that instead of her nauseating apology.
Finally, and very controversially, Jews need to stop feeding into this nonsense and playing victim. It’s not a good look. I’m in Vietnam, a country that was bombed, burnt, poisoned, raped and otherwise razed to the ground just a few generations ago. You do NOT see Vietnamese playing victim. They rebuild, remember – yes, forgive, and move on. My erstwhile homies could learn a thing or two from them.
Good to hear from you CG. Great post.
Diane Abbott opens her mouth to change her feet. Hardly a shocking revelation to compare with the classic “Man bites dog”!