The Madness of the Gentiles

We Have Time, But Less Than Yesterday

We posted a piece yesterday about crucial questions every culture and civilisation must needs answer: who am I?  Why am I here and alive?  What are my duties and responsibilities?  The world of post-modernism--our world--is inevitably agnostic when faced with such questions.  Consequently our world descends into endless crises of identity.

This is not an exaggeration.  It is an inevitable result of a culture controlled and dominated by atheistic materialism.  There is no true Truth.  No absolutes (except this one).  There is merely the constant flux of being upon an ocean of chance.  And the results are becoming more and more entrenched in the institutions of our culture.  How entrenched?  More than ten years ago, that's for sure.  Consider this:

So, gender fluidity. It’s all the rage and its proponents are determined to make sure kids get indoctrinated early on, because as every good progressive knows, get ’em while they’re young!  Not content to let boys be boys and girls be girls, middle school students will be introduced to the idea that gender is not simply a male or female proposition:

Fairfax County Public Schools released a report recommending changes to their family life curriculum for grades 7 through 12. The changes, which critics call radical gender ideology, will be formally introduced next week.  One of the nation’s largest public school systems is preparing to include gender identity to its classroom curriculum, including lessons on sexual fluidity and spectrum – the idea that there’s no such thing as 100 percent boys or 100 percent girls.  …

The plan calls for teaching seventh graders about transgenderism and tenth graders about the concept that sexuality is a broader spectrum

The curriculum will focus on the following:

“Students will be provided definitions for sexual orientation terms heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality; and the gender identity term transgender,” the district’s recommendations state. “Emphasis will be placed on recognizing that everyone is experiencing changes and the role of respectful, inclusive language in promoting an environment free of bias and discrimination.” Eighth graders will be taught that individual identity “occurs over a lifetime and includes the component of sexual orientation and gender identity.”

“Individual identity will also be described as having four parts – biological gender, gender identity (includes transgender), gender role, and sexual orientation (includes heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual).”

The district will also introduce young teenagers to the “concept that sexuality is a broader spectrum.”

This is only the beginning. As students move into high school, building on the middle school foundation they will be taught that “one’s sexuality develops over a lifetime”…

Responding to the announced plan, Andrea Lafferty, president of Traditional Values Coalition, foresees a disturbing end result:

“At the end of this is the deconstruction of gender – absolutely. The majority of people pushing (this) are not saying that – but that clearly is the motivation.”

And with a straight face, School Board spokesman John Torre claimed the proposed curriculum changes have nothing to do with the board’s vote last week which made it permissible for boys who identify as girls to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice.
What a coincidence…

–Dana

OK--so goes Fairfax Country Public Schools.  Send Johnny or Jane off to school and they will return home as gender mugwumps. Lovely.  Post-modernism in action.  These are folk gnawed with doubt and riven with guilt.  Children of our age, lusting to raise the next generation after their own image, whilst consumed with doubt about who they really are, yet emphatic about how the process and stages of self-actualisation is the absolute reality. 

Here is another example of the modern zeitgeist.  Philosopher Adam Swift ruefully acknowledges that kids raised in a loving family have a distinct educational advantage over those who are not.  He grudgingly accepts that this is one reason for preserving the traditional family as a social institution.  But he is not a willing believer.  He realises that children born and reared in such families have an "unfair advantage".

Swift in particular has been conflicted for some time over the curious situation that arises when a parent wants to do the best for her child but in the process makes the playing field for others even more lopsided.  ‘I got interested in this question because I was interested in equality of opportunity,’ he says.  ‘I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families.’  

In other words, some families give their child the very best when it comes to equipping them for life.  What is he thinking of in particular?

‘The evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t—the difference in their life chances—is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,’ he says.  This devilish twist of evidence surely leads to a further conclusion—that perhaps in the interests of levelling the playing field, bedtime stories should also be restricted. In Swift’s mind this is where the evaluation of familial relationship goods goes up a notch.

‘You have to allow parents to engage in bedtime stories activities, in fact we encourage them because those are the kinds of interactions between parents and children that do indeed foster and produce these [desired] familial relationship goods.’  Swift makes it clear that although both elite schooling and bedtime stories might both skew the family game, restricting the former would not interfere with the creation of the special loving bond that families give rise to. Taking the books away is another story.

‘We could prevent elite private schooling without any real hit to healthy family relationships, whereas if we say that you can’t read bedtime stories to your kids because it’s not fair that some kids get them and others don’t, then that would be too big a hit at the core of family life.’  So should parents snuggling up for one last story before lights out be even a little concerned about the advantage they might be conferring?

‘I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,’ quips Swift.

So, the family has a power to equip children and provide a foundation for life which those who are not born into such families don't get.  Social egalitarianism thus takes a big hit--which makes Swift uncomfortable.   Nevertheless the evidence is clear.  Loving families where parents (amongst other things) read their children bedtime stories provide their children a clear advantage.  But we have to accept such inequity and inequality because it would be far too damaging to destroy family life.

That's the sucker punch.  Now comes the knockout.  Swift asks, but what is a family?  His answer (effectively) is, who knows? 

Then, does the child have a right to be parented by her biological parents? Swift has a ready answer.  ‘It’s true that in the societies in which we live, biological origins do tend to form an important part of people’s identities, but that is largely a social and cultural construction. So you could imagine societies in which the parent-child relationship could go really well even without there being this biological link.’

From this realisation arises another twist: two is not the only number.  ‘Nothing in our theory assumes two parents: there might be two, there might be three, and there might be four,’ says Swift.  It’s here that the traditional notions of what constitutes the family come apart. A necessary product of the Swift and Brighouse analytical defence is the calling into question of some rigid definitions.  ‘Politicians love to talk about family values, but meanwhile the family is in flux and so we wanted to go back to philosophical basics to work out what are families for and what’s so great about them and then we can start to figure out whether it matters whether you have two parents or three or one, or whether they’re heterosexual etcetera.’ [Emphasis, ours]

For traditionalists, though, Swift provides a small concession.  ‘We do want to defend the family against complete fragmentation and dissolution,’ he says. ‘If you start to think about a child having 10 parents, then that’s looking like a committee rearing a child; there aren’t any parents there at all.’  Although it’s controversial, it seems that Swift and Brighouse are philosophically inching their way to a novel accommodation for a weathered institution ever more in need of a rationale for existing. The bathwater might be going out, but they’re keen to hold on to the baby. [Joe Gelonesi, Is having a loving family an unfair advantage? ABC.  Emphasis, ours])

The outcome?  A world full of "who knows anything anymore".  As we  have often said, when a culture rebels against the yoke of the Lord Jesus Christ--as ours has--God is never mocked.  He graciously gives that culture sufficient rope with which to hang itself.  Where is the grace in that? some will ask.  During the process of feeding out the rope and the inevitable long slow suffocation as we collectively integrate into the void, there is time for all who see and regret what we have together become, to repent of it all and return to the Lord, lest we perish along with our generation.

When we begin to mourn over the madness of our culture it is one small step to commence mourning over the madness one has clutched and nurtured in one's own soul. Let us take His gentle and light yoke upon us, before the avalanche of nihilism sweeps us away.