Homophobia, Islamophobia and Other Perversions of the Left

The greatest task on the right, therefore, is to rescue the language of politics: to put within our grasp what has been forcibly removed from it by jargon. It is only when we have found again the language that is natural to us that we can answer the great accusations that are constantly thrown at our world from the left.  And it is only when we have found that language that we can move on from the one-dimensional left/ right, with us/ against us, progressive/ reactionary dichotomies that have so often made rational discussion impossible. (Scruton, Roger (2015-10-08). Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Kindle Locations 6036-6039). Bloomsbury Publishing.  Kindle Edition.)

The current language of dichotomized politics, as the eminent philosopher Roger Scruton states above, demands a great deal of “rescue” work. We must aggressively dispute the use of the jargon that the left has insinuated into our political conversations and polemics, words that both distort reality and give the ideologues on the left undue power to manipulate, worse, to dominate the discussion of issues of great moral, political and social import.  With their jargon they exert their pernicious influence and constantly aim to impugn the motives of those who disagree with them.  Built into the language of the left is the ammunition for an insidious, sustained and long term campaign of nullification and character assassination.

Let us begin our rescue of political language with a repudiation of two of the most odious and egregious pieces of jargon now foisted on us (“thrown at our world from the left”) on a daily basis – “homophobia” and “Islamophobia.”

What in today’s common parlance is a homophobe?  For the polemicists and their censorious patrons on the left a homophobe is anyone and everyone who voices disapproval of homosexual activity and disputes the concept and legitimacy of homosexual marriage.  This disapproval often has religious grounds and, of course, because it is argued from sources and convictions of religious belief, authority or scripture it is considered by the secularist oriented Left as beneath serious moral and political consideration. Certain kinds of moral concepts are off-the-table, so to speak. Religious traditions, practices and values, that have for millennia shaped and informed our morals and social practices now with a with a snap-snap of a finger from these nouveau Jacobins are supposed to be discarded as we suddenly realize how unenlightened we’ve been, how virtuous they are and how much better the world will be with them in charge. 

The neologism “homophobe” was coined to make it sound objective and “clinical”, the sort of jargon used by psychologists and various “experts” to show that they have penetrated the fog and demystified the prevailing superstitions. They understand what the rest of us may at some later time hope to comprehend.  Thus, those unfortunate enough to be in the grasp of homophobia are, well, sick, sick in the sense of psychological aberration or derangement. Phobias are by their nature irrational, unfounded in reality, overreactions to fear, insecurity or anxiety. 

Phobia:  a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation in which the sufferer commits to great lengths in avoiding, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognized as irrational. 

There you have it: this is pretty much a common understanding of what a phobia is – in more parochial terms, phobic people are crazy. You don’t reason with crazy people.  Only trained professionals take what crazy people say seriously but only as it is symptomatic of mental aberration.  You do not have rational conversation and respectful exchange with a homophobic individual about homosexuality because he has no standing as a normal, thoughtful person. He is immersed in bigotry or “hatred” as the left prefers to describe the disapproval of behavior they condone. 

Where, however, is the phobia to be found in the so called typical homophobe? What is asserted does not match reality. They neither fear nor hate homosexuals and they don’t wish to interfere in their lives and punish them. Their aversion to homosexuality is not irrational: it is philosophical and theological. “Homophobia” is not a description of anything real: it is a label contrived to smear those who disagree: it is nothing more than an ad hominem argument in shorthand posing as received social science wisdom.

Homophobes, however, are not just sick: they are “intolerant”. Here is a word kidnapped by left and given a completely distorted meaning, that being: toleration = approval.  So, if you don’t approve of something, ergo, you must be intolerant. But if one considers the logic that should apply to the use of “tolerant” it follows that one can be only be tolerant of what one disapproves of: if you already approve of a behavior, creed or habit, you don’t need to tolerate it. There is considerable irony with all of this because the left disapproves of (despises and excoriates, actually) conservatives, right-wingers, and traditionally religious people (“bitter clingers” as Barack Obama refers to them) but regard themselves as the most open minded and tolerant people around. 

The fact that the “gay lifestyle” has been normalized in our increasingly secularized culture and that homosexuals live openly and prosperously, in some places proudly as “gay” would suggest that toleration is at least moderately in place and relatively widespread. However, the left, despite what they say, do not want toleration of homosexuality: they demand, and are intent on coercing, approval of it. Their dishonest and coercive strategy is to place anyone who does not embrace the complete normalization of homosexuality as a “lifestyle” outside the moral and political boundaries of American life. In our diverse multi-cultural society, since when, it seems fair to ask, does someone have the right to coerce someone else into approving of their morals?

Toleration is giving moral and physical space to someone you disagree with. “You leave me alone (with respect to our differences); I’ll leave you alone, and we’ll agree to disagree and go about our separate business.” The huge advantage of real toleration is the buffer of time that it offers.  Over time, toleration with its norm of respectful live-let-live disagreement helps to soften people on all sides and make them more understanding of each other. The gradual development of the norm of toleration beginning in 17^th century Europe over time enabled initially very hostile Christian sects to reduce their hostility and accept, though not necessarily approve of their differences. But of course for the left, if you disagree, you are to remain silent while your intelligence and character are impugned and your religious freedoms are extinguished. 

In moving from homophobia to Islamophobia similar ideological motives are masked by the use of language that, again, as Roger Scruton notes, attempts “to change reality by changing the way we describe and therefore the way we perceive it.” (Scruton, Roger. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Kindle Locations 4916-4917).

“Islamophobia” deserves a great deal of scrutiny as it is an attempt to change reality by the way we describe it.  The term has a short history, probably not more that 20 or 25 years.  Did Islamophobes suddenly come into existence a couple of decades ago?  If not, what were they and where were they before?  If so, what suddenly gave rise to yet another phobia the left loves to lecture us about? And, in light of what the militant followers of Islam have been about in the last few years, perhaps the fear that they have generated of Islam is not completely irrational.  Is it mere coincidence that Islamophobia emerged about the time followers of Islam, in the name of Islam, were engaged in horrific acts of terrorism all across the globe – the U.S., Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia. Is it also coincidental that during this time we have no record of Buddhists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Mormons or Mennonites crashing airliners into sky scrapers, mass kidnapping and force-marrying young girls, making You Tube videos of beheadings and immolations and establishing by conquest a theocratic state? There are reasons why the word “Islamophobia” has been invented and not “Christanophobia”, “Mormonophobia” or “Buddhophobia” which have nothing to do with what those who coined and use this word want us to believe.

Just who are these Islamophobes who suddenly have sprung into being? Here is how the folks who know all about these things at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender explain it:

Islamophobia is a contrived fear or prejudice fomented by the existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure.  It is directed at a perceived or real Muslim threat through the maintenance and extension of existing disparities in economic, political, social and cultural relations, while rationalizing the necessity to deploy violence as a tool to achieve "civilizational rehab" of the target communities (Muslim or otherwise).  Islamophobia reintroduces and reaffirms a global racial structure through which resource distribution disparities are maintained and extended.  (http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia/defining-islamophobia)

So, this particular phobia is the product of a “global power structure”, which of course makes it all crystal clear if you are content with sheer vacuity.  And, what kind of a global power structure?  The “existing Eurocentric and Orientalist” one, which I guess is more menacing than one that doesn’t exist.  This is stated as if we are all supposed to know what precise meanings to attach to “Eurocentric” and “Orientalist” but these terms, like “Islamophobia”, are recent constructs, only intelligible to the ideologues who invented them and like the way they sound. They are vague terms of disapprobation rather than description. One can discover almost any kind of global power structure that readily fits one’s imagination and will bare the blame for the world’s many disparities – International Jewish bankers, the Tri-Lateral Commission, etc. The Berkeley “experts” are sloganeers, and here above is a medley of tropes that fill the left’s lexicon of agitprop designed to arouse those already indoctrinated. Nothing concrete, real or identifiable is doing the “fomenting” of fear and prejudice.  Even more preposterous is the claim that Islamophobia “reintroduces and affirms a “global racial structure …” etc.  How does an abstraction like Islamophobia bring a “global racial structure” into being? (Note the contrived parallelism of vacuous phrases: “global power structure” – “global racial structure”) What IS a “global racial structure, and what does Islam have to do with race?  It is a religion!

Any one of any race can be a Muslim.  This purported definition is a masterpiece of verbal smog and incoherence.  

      

“[T]he first concern of revolutionary movements on the left,” again to quote Roger Scruton, “has been to capture the language, to change reality by changing the way we describe and therefore the way we perceive it. Revolution begins from an act of falsification, exemplified equally in the French and the Russian Revolutions, as in the cultural revolutions of the contemporary campus.” (Scruton, Roger (2015-10-08). Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Kindle Locations 4916-4917).

“Homophobia” and “Islamophobia” are not words that accurately describe people or capture any of their distinctive attributes or conditions.  They are perversions, means of falsification, as Scruton notes, language designed not to reflect reality and speak the truth, but to serve ideological purposes and the acquisition of power.  Anyone who wishes to participate in an intelligent, serious conversation on homosexuality and contemporary Islam should vigorously resist the efforts of anyone who uses these words as if they are anything other than the vehicles of their ad hominem attacks and obfuscation in the service of cultural revolution.   

Why the Left Hates Guns

                                                            

“President Obama says the biggest frustration of his tenure is the lack of new gun control laws.”

                              USA Today, July 24^th, 2015

Unlike most of the President Obama’s declarations – “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”, for example – this one, above, was true.  You could believe him for once. Obama always hated guns and if it had been in his power he would have confiscated every firearm in the country down to the last BB gun, except for those carried by the Secret Service detail that continues to protect him and his family.

Obama is a man of the left and the left hates guns more than almost anything else they remotely associate with the despised right, more than gas guzzlers, home school families, coal companies, confederate flags or pro-life protestors. Just the mention of the NRA will trigger spasms of fury and outpourings of disgust from a leftist. The NRA for them is evil incarnate. No other organization is likely more detested.

What is it about guns that make people on the left hate them so much and harbor so much contempt for those people – not so much the criminals who use them, but the ordinary, law-abiding people who insist on owning them?

Begin with the basics:  a gun is an amazing instrument of power. A ninety pound woman physically confronted by a two hundred pound man with a BMI of 25 has little power to resist his assault or aggression.  A gun in her hand completely changes the power equation.  Sans gun by virtue of his superior size and relative strength, the man can seriously injure or even kill the woman.  It happens. With the gun she can easily kill him if he attempts to harm her. This does not happen often enough. The right person in this scenario takes the ride to the morgue. His advantage-conveying, extra 110 pounds and bigger bones and muscles are nullified by the discharge from her 25 ounce Ruger.

Guns enforce power-relations which is why police and soldiers carry them. Guns also can change power-relations which is why so many people want them both for reasons legitimate and some not so much. The left wants to take away guns (primarily those of the “bitter clingers”) so as to render them powerless.

The left would love to confiscate all the guns in this country claiming that it would end gun violence. This is idiotic on the face of it. Criminalize the possession of something in high demand and relatively easy to produce and you will see a dramatic spike in its price because of the seller’s criminal risk. High prices attract high-risk entrepreneurs (aggressive young men usually) into the marketplace who form powerful, sophisticated crime syndicates that are (a) very competitive and hence extremely violent and (b) cater successfully to vast markets for their illegal product. The massive infusion of drugs into the U.S. with the accompanying violence dramatically illustrates how the unintended consequences of firearm confiscation, if attempted, would unfold.  Government confiscation of guns would drastically increase (criminalized) gun ownership and vastly increase gun violence, not to mention the exhaustion of law enforcement resources and the complete political alienation of large numbers of American citizens. 

The loathing of the left for guns in part comes from their jealousy of power. Guns are highly-charged symbols as well as practical instruments of power, and power, they believe, belongs exclusively to them. This is not just about what guns can do.  It is about what they symbolize – individualism, independence and self-sufficiency – for the collectivist, regulation-loving, control-obsessed left, anathemas.  

The thinking on the left goes something like this: because we are compassionate, smart, right-thinking and destined by the progressive march of history to eradicate – pick your evil – racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, global warming, we and we alone deserve power.  If not us, who?  And, whatever we must do to get it and keep it is fine because above all else we are well-intentioned and virtuous and if we are not in charge, then it’s, well, “the other”, the corrupt and morally benighted people who oppose us  – racist, bigoted, greedy, stupid, indifferent to the plight of the poor and unfortunate.  Leftists neither practice nor believe in loyal opposition: for the opposition they have only contempt.

Gun ownership confers power and thus just the suggestion that people might legitimately arm themselves constitutes an encroachment on the left’s perceived prerogative and arouses their jealousy and outrage.  People, they groan, do not neeeeeed guns! They know what people need and don’t need and are clearly annoyed that the unenlightened rubes who live outside of the civilized regions of Manhattan, San Francisco, Washington, DC and Madison, Wisconsin cannot grasp this obvious truth.  

Self-defense, they sneeringly dismiss as a legitimate reason to own a gun – that is what the State is for.  Try not to choke on the hypocrisy.  They are protected 24x7 by armed secret service personnel (Obama and his family) or live in safe, posh suburbs with expensive, sophisticated security systems and reliable, predicable police protection. But for those “folks” for whom they have so much compassion and about whom they know so little, those folks who have to worry about the muggers, rapists, wife-batterers, drug peddlers and strung out junkies who populate their neighborhoods? Well, they are supposed to cherish how virtuous they will feel without those awful guns they don’t need and hope a cop might show up before someone in the family gets raped or murdered. We all know that there are large sections of some of the cities in the U.S. (governed by anti-gun Democrat politicians) where the police reluctantly go. The State is quite selective in the protection it provides for its citizens. The “State” for the “ruled-over” is a useless abstraction and the pervasive cynicism and skepticism now aimed at those who operate it are completely justified.  These “public servants” enjoy all of the perks of their offices that the rest of us only envy. (“Last Friday, [Hillary] Clinton flew to Bergdorf Goodman in New York, where the stylist at the salon gives $600 haircuts. The department store was locked down for her.” http://thehill.com/opinion/ab-stoddard/249734-ab-stoddard-clinton-must-be-joking) Our political class betters make onerous rules for their inferiors to live under, but not for themselves. At election time these vultures descend from their comfortable, lofty perches to perform tedious rituals of pretending to care when what they really want is just more power and the advantages and privileges that come with it.

The animosity of the left for guns is also about the special kind of snobbery they indulge that relates to the work they do and the way they live. They tend to work in the realm of ideas and at activities intended to influence the thinking and actions of others.  They teach in schools and universities, run media outlets and newspapers, manage and administer organizations, market and sell products, process paper in government offices. Some of them are “grievance specialists” at universities and other organizations, professional busybodies and scolds who operate under the rubric of “diversity”, a code word that permits them to hector and bully whomever they please. These types don’t change the oil in their own cars, fix things they own when they break down, make or grow anything they use or consume.  They pay “other people” to do things like this, and they mostly look down on them.  These “other people” tend to like guns. They live and think conservatively and work at jobs such as policemen, firemen, mechanics, truck drivers, construction workers and run small businesses. They hunt, fish, bowl, fix their own cars, go to church, take care of their grandparents, join the military and do many other things that offend the sensibilities of the left.  For the Prius-driving, inequality-obsessed Sociology professor who campaigned for Obama, the gun-toting policeman he loathes and execrates in his 101 classes could not respond quickly enough to his summons when he thinks a burglar might be near.    

The left will never relinquish their hostility toward gun owners and never abandon their efforts at gun control.  “Gun control” is a euphemism, an essential piece of the larger picture that defines the essence of the left and what they aspire to, complete control of others. Because they believe themselves to be uniquely entitled to order and manage the lives of everybody, they observe no restraints of honesty or fair play. Be assured, they will relentlessly intrude themselves into every corner of our lives so as to make the rest of us into what they think we should be, pale, inferior imitations of themselves.  Guns are a huge obstacle to this goal. Viva the cold dead fingers!

     

Of Vice and Victimhood*

“The essential feature of Conduct Disorder is a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior in which the basic rights of others or major age-appropriate societal norms or rules are violated..... The behavior pattern is usually present in a variety of settings such as the home, school, or the community.”

From: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association.

A remarkable and near complete metamorphosis of our basic understanding of moral character and personal responsibility—vice into sickness; virtue into health—has been under way for a long time and has moved at a highly accelerated pace in the last twenty years. The shifting preference for health over virtue as a conceptual framework for judging and sanctioning human conduct derives from two sources.

 The first is the cultural ascendance of the Left and the wide un-reflecting embrace of its view of individual human beings as disaggregated units of warring, conflicting groups as expressed in its program of identity politics. These conflicts, so the argument goes, are the ultimate source of all existing social evils, both the losers and the winners distinctively marked.  The winners are privileged exploiters, dehumanized by their own aggressive exploitation: the losers are impoverished and particularly vulnerable to social “pathologies,” e.g., drug addiction, criminality, and the like. Poverty, crime, drug abuse are all the result of the exploitation and domination exerted by the winners over the losers. “Pathology” in this explanatory framework no longer works as a metaphor – vice is now disease caused by a broken social system.  Disease gives way to knowledge and technique as discovered and determined by experts who require power to fix the broken system.       

The second and related source is the late nineteenth-century expansion of confidence in the capacity of science to explain, and ultimately produce the technology to manipulate and control everything, including human behavior. The ugly, seamy, corrupt sides of the human personality and the vice produced, regarded by our ancestors as the unfortunate elements of human imperfection, have come to be seen not as perennial manifestations of weaknesses or limitations inherent in human nature, but as technical problems that can be eliminated with the application of the right kind of technical knowledge. Vice has been, considered a perennial human propensity to be tamped down, but now as disease it becomes a “social problem” for which “cures” can be discovered and applied by technicians. Perhaps no better articulation of this “social problem” view of vice—curable by enlightened, empowered, informed expertise— is the following, written in the 1980s by Berkeley sociologist Neil Smelser.

[A]nother necessary part of what defines a social problem is that we believe we can do something about it.  It has to be something at which we can successfully throw resources; something we can ease by getting people to shape up; something that can be cured through social policy legislation and decisions and the application of knowledge; something that can be ameliorated. Otherwise it is seen as one of those ineradicable scars on the social body that we have to live with, a necessary evil, one of those inevitable frailties of human nature.**

Smelser’s summary of the perspective is superb—succinct but complete—not only in content but in style as well. The opening sentence puts up the Straw Man as if everyone before the author had given up on trying to make the world better.  Though Smelser’s academic residence is in the Sociology department, he fancies himself as an engineer – “shaping people up,” applying expensive tools (“successfully throwing resources”) and “the application of knowledge” to solve technical problems, otherwise known as “social problems". These social problems—he cites as examples crime, violence, alcohol, and drug abuse—are manifestations of human behavior that can either be viewed as an inevitable consequence of limitations of human nature (“frailties”) or as failures of social functions remedied with the enlightened application of “resources.” Smelser does not want to believe that there is something like “human nature” with moral and social limitations that we should recognize and work with. Containment or correction is unacceptable when the problems can, in his words, “be cured.” The medical metaphor of the “cure” he invokes, with all of its positive, healthful connotations, however, quickly gives way to the more literally-expressed means of practical application, which is political action and legal coercion, that is, “social policy and legislation.” The cure, in effect, for social problems is the right dosage of social policy: the real cure will be the direct result of incorporating social science research into law, a translation of social science theory into public policy. Coercion is to play a large part in the “cures.”  

*Excerpted from Stephen Paul Foster, Desolation's March: the Rise of Personalism and the Reign of Amusement in 21st-America, Bethesda, Md. Academica Press, 2003.
 Complete electronic copy free on demand.

**Neil J. Smelser, “Self-Esteem and Social Problems: An Introduction,” The Social Importance of Self-esteem, Andrew M. Mecca, Neil J. Smelser, and John Vasconcellos, editors, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, 4.