Don’t Fall for the New Morality
An essay I don't want you to miss!
Dear readers,
I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you about an essay I had published earlier this month on Colin Wright’s fantastic Substack, Reality’s Last Stand. It’s called “Don’t Fall for the New Morality” and I won’t lie that it is probably my favorite piece I have ever written. It is the culmination of almost a year spent thinking about C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, which I have previously provided a brief overview of.
In the essay, I connect Lewis’ warnings about the drift away from objective morality with modern oppression hierarchy to show that it is a manifestation of exactly the sort of view he saw coming. Here is a little excerpt:
Oppression stack-based morality is why trans rights activists feel entitled to call for violence, rape, and death against so-called “transphobes” who disagree with them, and why they receive no real pushback from within their communities. It’s why they feel emboldened enough to hold up signs that say “decapitate TERFs” and to show up at women’s rights events with fake guillotines. It’s why they regularly jump to the defense of male pedophiles, rapists, and murderers who seek transfer to women’s prisons. Critics of such transfers are often accused of bigotry and “misgendering.”
No matter what, the “trans” person in any scenario is viewed as inherently oppressed and incapable of wrongdoing, especially against those deemed as oppressors.
Anyway, if you usually enjoy my writing and ideas, please check it out because I think you might enjoy this too!
Wow, CS Lewis is really the man of the hour. Saying as he did "that certain attitudes toward the world are really true and good, "
I would be remiss if I did not comment here as I did on "Reality's Last Stand."
As a gay man, I become uneasy when I come across passages such as the following:
"In 1943, C.S. Lewis . . . warned about the erosion of moral values and the rise of relativism, which he believed would lead to humanity’s ruin. "
"Today, I believe society has reached . . . an era of subjectivism where concepts of “right” and “wrong” have lost their objective anchor and are instead dictated by personal whims and desires."
In the West, gay people have been stigmatized since at least Old Testament times for our supposed immorality. In the words of the Catholic catechism: "Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.' " '[1]
It is therefore very easy for those on the Christian right and homophobic philosophy bros to misrepresent the activism and victories of the gay civil rights movement (especially marriage equality) and the growing tolerance of gay people as a prime example of an "erosion in moral values." Since our foes strip us of every element of our humanity except our sexuality, and because they equate sex outside of their sectarian vision of marriage (especially gay sex) with capitulation to one's base canal desires, reactionaries hold gay people out as an example of what happens when humans abandon morality for the emotional pursuit of sexual gratification. For good measure they'll kick John Stuart Mill around for having caused everything to go to Hell and long for the day when everyone comported themselves in accordance with the dictates of natural law.
[1] https://www.usccb.org/sites/default/files/flipbooks/catechism/568/