Leaving your fly down is embarrassing for you, but, more importantly, it makes those around you uncomfortable …
Nobody wants to wander around with their fly open and you shouldn’t want to blunder through life with your privilege unchecked. But people aren’t perfect, and you will make mistakes. So how do you respond to being caught with you fly down or called out on your privilege?
Fix the problem. Your fly is down. Zip it up …
Thank them. When someone tells you that your fly is down; when someone calls you out on your privilege, they are doing you a kindness. No one wants the embarrassment of walking around all day with their fly open. No one should want the embarrassment of wandering through life alienating their friends and colleagues through unexamined privilege. Calling this stuff out is hard. It is emotionally draining and it is a constant uphill battle for those of less privilege. A simple thank you is the very least you can do.
(Andrew David Thaler, On being an ally and being called out on your privilege. H/T Slacktivist.)
I suspect that I identify “privilege” differently than does the Slactivist, though.
Thank you, Vladimir Putin.
With America clearly in mind, Putin declared, “In many countries today, moral and ethical norms are being reconsidered.”
“They’re now requiring not only the proper acknowledgment of freedom of conscience, political views and private life, but also the mandatory acknowledgment of the equality of good and evil.”
…
As the decisive struggle in the second half of the 20th century was vertical, East vs. West, the 21st century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.
And though America’s elite may be found at the epicenter of anti-conservatism and anti-traditionalism, the American people have never been more alienated or more divided culturally, socially and morally.
We are two countries now.
(Patrick J. Buchanan, Putin’s Paleoconservative Moment)
One of the lesser-remembered realities of our present liberationist age is how privileged are the values being imposed from the West (and within the West by the 1% on the 99%).
The January 2014 edition of First Things muses on that topic a great deal in the introductory pages, e.g.,:
Whatever one thinks of gay marriage, one has to admit that “the great civil rights issue of our time” addresses the needs of a very small number of people. The same goes for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. It concerns the world of the one percent and their navel-gazing about “sexual identity.”
Last summer the Supreme Court of the United States declared a key element of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. Jeffrey Toobin commented, “The Supreme Court’s embrace of gay rights last week had an almost serene majesty. The obvious correctness of the Court’s judgment, its curt dismissal of a monstrous injustice, had a grandeur that requires little elaboration.”
Monstrous injustice? The case was brought by Edith Windsor. She litigated to get relief from taxes on the estate of her partner, Thea Spyer, whom she married in Canada in 2007 …
By ordinary standards, Windsor and Spyer had a lot of money. It’s not surprising, therefore, that an admiring New Yorker profile of Windsor never leaves the world of the one percent. An apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, a vacation home in Southampton, many exotic foreign vacations over their long relationship. Her lawyer, also a lesbian, is a partner at a high-powered New York firm that sends them a courtesy limo to take a victory lap around Manhattan after the Court announced its decision. She has suffered. The rich are not exempt from the human condition. But her tribulations have been softened by wealth.
This elite self-absorption is not innocent….
Yet a very smart guy like Jeffrey Toobin (who not coincidentally was the winning lawyer in the Utah case that overturned key parts of a criminal bigamy statute – on behalf of rich and beautiful reality TV stars) can sit in his tower of ivy-covered ratiocination, fancying himself (from unacknowledged and novel premises) a Champion of the Downtrodden.
The truly downtrodden have far more urgent needs on their minds. As I’ve put it from time to time, a lot of the sexual revolution works well enough for elites, but is disastrous for the poor. Or, to put it in synechdoche, it’s swell that Madonna can afford nannies and au pairs for the pups she calculatedly whelped with the help of sires she thought were hot, but it doesn’t work out very well when her female fans emulate her. (The example of Madonna no doubt dates me. I have no reason, however, to intuit an outbreak of chastity among starlots since Madonna.)
But I said “imposed.” How is Madonna’s sluttiness imposed on anyone? Perhaps it’s not imposed, but the “democratic” values of her homeland are being imposed under crypto-imperialist rubrics like eradicating tyranny from the world. “Eradicating tyranny” means at least this: “you will buy our stuff, including our pornified entertainments, and you will sell us your stuff, and we shall grow individuated, fat, happy, sexually satiated and secular together.”
More from First Things:
Christopher Lasch would not have been surprised by the way in which so much of contemporary politics is now organized around the material and psychological needs of elites. In the aftermath of the 1960s he observed, “Cultural radicalism has become so fashionable, and so pernicious in the support it unwittingly provides for the status quo, that any critique of contemporary society that hopes to go beneath the surface has to criticize, at the same time, much of what currently goes under the name of radicalism.”
… [H]e’s a consistent source of perceptive insights that arise from his fundamental loyalty to working people and their communities.
He saw the obvious: “What does it profit the residents of the South Bronx to enforce speech codes at elite universities?” He also saw the less obvious: how working and lower-middle class communities have declined and new elites have ascended to an unprecedented position of predominance …
Gradually and then more rapidly, a meritocratic system came to define elite identity. By and large we see this as a gain—equal opportunity rather than silver spoons. Lasch did not dispute this moral judgment. But he thought through its implications. He had an intuition that the meritocratic engine driving our new elite contributes to the decline of working-class culture, political power, and well-being.
… This sense of entitlement is unappealing, but that’s not as corrosive as the atomized individualism the meritocratic system encourages. Lasch was a champion of “loving memories.” These are what Lincoln called the “mystic chords of memory,” communal loyalties and traditions that bind us together and create a spirit of sacrifice for the common good. The meritocracy severs those chords.
…
Lasch was an implacable enemy of this elite hauteur. He came to believe that cultural progressivism of the sort that wants to tear down existing forms of life to rebuild them in accord with new and supposedly better principles “boils down to a deep contempt for ordinary people.” Failed postwar urban planning provided one of his favorite examples. Were he alive today, redefining marriage might be another.
A democratic culture isn’t one in which we’re all guaranteed access to consumer goods, as if equality were a matter of everyone’s being satiated to the same degree. Nor is it one in which everyone enjoys equal access to a freedom to organize their personal lives as they wish. Democracy requires empowered citizens capable of self-government. Lasch’s insight was that this capacity depends on traditional knowledge adapted and reformed within actual communities of ordinary people trying to live with dignity in the modern world. That wisdom is imperfect, as is always the case. The communities animated by it are defective. Which aren’t? But without this traditional knowledge most of us become disoriented individuals with little capacity to resist the bureaucratic, therapeutic tyranny of the new meritocrats.
Part of my dilemma, reflected often if dimly in blogs, is what foreign policy to support when there really are scary and evil forces at work against my nation, but also plenty of contagion within it. I’ve just adumbrated some of that evil.
My isolationist tendencies, it occurs to me in a flash that at least briefly dispels the dimness, are as much a matter of self-quarantine as of smug satisfaction that “all is well here and we can do just fine in isolation while we let the rest of the world fend for itself.”
Sadly, the world might do better today listening to Putin than to the American academy, the American entertainment industry, or the voices of power within the beltway.
Buried in a block quote yesterday is something that caught my eye afresh as I read it again:
One doesn’t expect modern people to agree with the classical Christian way of thinking about sexuality and teleology. They don’t accept it for heterosexuals, certainly, and the main reason the taboo against homosexuality fell so quickly is because gays made straights confront the fact that all gays were asking for was a more consistent application of the post-Sexual Revolution standards to themselves.
(Rod Dreher, emphasis added)
I’d be lying if I denied that, despite the raging state of my hormones when it first was ascendant, I never was taken in at all by the Sexual Revolution. But by luck or providence, I was never taken in very far, and it has been a few decades now since I recognized, and heartily repented of, my complicity to any degree whatever.
Perhaps that is why I have proven immune to homophile appeals to more consistent application of sexual standards: more consistent application of my standards would exact greater chastity from “straights.” There’s more than one way to rectify a double standard.
But oughtn’t one prefer the putatively logical cure for a double standard? WWTD (What Would Toobin Do)? Or Kontorovich, for that matter?
Chesterton shows that trying to be logical in inappropriate places is a form of insanity.
“Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.”
It constricts ones world to something much smaller and less interesting. It also harms the intellect, by trying to do the impossible.
“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
Reason is a good instrument. However, it is only an instrument.
(Thoughts on Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Books, Culture and Life)
- …
- Losing political and religious idealism, and becoming both more cynical and more tolerant
- …
(Rod Dreher, Signs You May Be Middle-Aged) Yeah, that too. Though I do have trouble being tolerant of smug privilege.
Yes, guys who have time to write long, impassioned blogs regularly are not exactly oppressed. I get that. I can only aspire to be as true a friend to truth, not just logic.
* * * * *
“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 