The Grand Illusion
“Compromise” is not a nasty word. In fact, compromise is the basis of a free society, yet far too many people fail to understand this.
A truly “free” society is one where one’s freedom to act is maximized within the law. In a free society, laws provide the guardrails so that someone else’s freedom doesn’t minimize or destroy yours.
The greatest problem facing any society is drawing the line between individual rights and maintaining the order necessary for society to function. As Alexander Hamilton pointed out, “without order, there is no liberty.”
Theodore Roosevelt had a similar view when he said, “Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.”
Because people have different views about how the order necessary for a working society should be structured and maintained and the degree of personal freedom optimal for that society, effective government requires compromise.
Yet today, both the far left and the far right seem to have forgotten this, each side wishing to impose through force of law its vision for society, even though some of those beliefs impose constraints on others that are not necessary to maintain order and public safety and legal imposition of some beliefs can result in physical harm to others.
A good example of such extremism are laws that prohibit abortion in all circumstances as well as any procedure that might conceivably result in abortion or miscarriage. As a result, both women and their unborn children are dying at record numbers in states like Texas.
Another is requiring Christian theology be taught and actively practiced in schools and other public, when roughly one-third of all Americans are not Christians. What’s ironic about this is that many of those insisting that Christian theology be more publicly imposed are violently opposed to the Islamic practice of Sharia, which would impose Muslim beliefs as law.
On the left, the attempt to require institutions mandate which pronouns are used by whom is nothing more than speech police. While I understand and respect people’s desires to maintain and announce their own gender preference, that should be a personal preference, not a government requirement. Requiring everyone to announce their gender identity by specific pronouns goes too far and attacks the right to personal privacy.
Unfortunately, the apparent simplicity of absolutism in government and religion can be so seductive that common sense – and compromise – are all too often swept away.
Refusing to use people’s own preferred mode of address is a form of disrespect for them, different only in degree from using derogatory terms for (eg) people of colour. Refusing people healthcare so that they at serious risk of death isn’t quite on the same page.
Yeah, the pronoun issue is actually simpler than a lot of the fault-line problems, at least to me.
To use an analogy, people don’t get to refer to me as “boy” (I’m white), because I know I’m an adult, and I *will* be treated like one. So, similarly, if someone views themselves as non-binary or not the gender their X and Y chromosomes say they are, who am I to refer to them in some other way.
I mean, if everyone took the Trumpists at their word, and started to refer to their leader as “she,” do you think they might see the point of letting people decide for themselves how they’ll be referred to?
The pronoun issue seems a matter of good manners. Someone indicates a pronoun preference, its rude to argue or ignore it.
Me. Modesitt, your “even-handedness” in pointing out that the far right AND the far left can’t compromise, completely misses the point.
For more than four decades, the Republican party has largely denied compromise in legislation. When in the majority, the Republican party has governed as if Democratic constituents don’t exist.
And then comparing pronoun guidance to pseudo-Christian theology in school (and in hospitals, bars, and bedrooms)? The sad thing is that the reliable Republican voter thinks that pronouns are an outrage.
Please don’t support the outrage machine with false equivalences.
Whether Christian theology in schools or mandating pronoun use, the problem is government mandating or forcing people to do something with which they disagree. The right doesn’t like non-traditional use of pronouns and the left dislikes religion in public spaces. Agreeing with a position does not make it any less coercive.
I’m not supporting the outrage machine. So long as the left persists in insisting that they’re so good compared to the admittedly terrible shit being perpetrated by Trump and the Republicans, they’re going to lose and things will continue to deteriorate. The polls show this clearly. People HATE the language police and the purity patrol, and unfair and inequitable as it is that the left is being crucified by a reaction to something far less dangerous than what the Republicans are doing, until the Democrats understand this, they’ll continue lose overall.
I understand your point, Mr. Modesitt, and I believe that the Democratic leadership does as well.
If you have any wisdom about how Democrats can reach out to the Republican voters, I’d love to hear it. The Republican base has been groomed over decades with tribal and cult level blind belief. This distrust includes the mechanisms of government, so even Top O’Neil’s old adage about filling potholes won’t move the Republican base.
There are a handful of Democratic governors that have broken through- that’s the best hope for the national Democratic party, as far as I can see.
You say “Requiring everyone to announce their gender identity by specific pronouns goes too far and attacks the right to personal privacy.”
I have never seen any proposed legislation that would force people to honestly announce their pronouns everywhere. The farthest-reaching proposal seems to be a rule that, on official business, government employees should address people by their chosen pronouns, which does seem more like an ‘adhere to courtesy’ rule, rather than an assault on someone’s privacy.
In what way do you consider this equivalent to denying people healthcare or employment on an ideological basis, or forcing a specific theology on non-believers?
I keep hearing about pronoun rules as a serious threat to personal liberty, and I’m sorry but I’m not seeing any credible threat, unless you consider enormously overblown slippery-slope arguments from opponents as realistic.
Over the past five years, I know personally of at least three instances where educators were fired for failing to use the “proper” pronouns. In no case did any of the three “wrong-gender” someone. They simply used someone’s name rather than use “they.” One got an injunction and has so far retained his position. While this isn’t a “law,” it’s definitely having an effect, if not on quite the scale of right-wing legal discrimination, and it’s also why the far right has managed to weaponize “wokeness.”
Wow, that really is an extreme overreaction, to fire a teacher for using someone’s name!
I find it hard to believe that could be a legal reason for firing an employee, but with the lax US laws regarding fire-at-will contracts I suppose any faint excuse will do if they want to get rid of someone…
Thank you for your answer, I now understand a bit better the anger this would trigger.
Until every under-educated white person has a nice, cushy job, the Gross Outrage Party will continue on making up grievances. So there’s not much point in worrying about giving them ammunition. Makes no difference.
I suspect that the purpose of announcing personal pronouns is because of some sort of opening-up of traditional gender and sexual norms. The norms have traditionally been in place in order to ensure a level of order regarding the passing of property from father to son. In some sense, as the method of property inheritance is slowly changed and morphs over time because of the crisis of the 18th and 19th centuries (Capital spreading across the world to open markets wherever possible), as well as the triumph of I guess what the Marxists might call “bourgeois” feminism, or liberal feminism, the old methods of ensuring that property is handed down correctly are no longer strictly necessary.
Therefore, it follows that over time, these methods (strict gender norms) erode. However, the ideological, religious, social etc. justifications used to uphold them are also eroding at about the same rate. This is why people are so hostile to the simple idea of using the pronouns a person prefers rather than using pronouns established by a higher authority. People are simply too emotionally attached to the old ways to all let go of them at once, even though some day, assuming we make it through the century, it’s quite possible that there will be less need for such distinctions. After all, women don’t all wear dresses anymore, now, do they? Used to be, it was improper for a woman to not wear certain kinds of clothing. Now the visual markers are somewhat eroded. Women can own property, administer their own bank accounts, draw lines of credit, work, drive, etc. all independently of men. That was only made possible in the 1970s in the United States! There’s women alive right now who had to deal with that crap, and men alive who would have really preferred that women couldn’t have a bank account without a man’s permission.
Now, I’ve also got a lot of criticisms of liberal – or I suppose left-wing neoliberal – identity politics. They essentially (ha-ha) prefigure market economics as functionally eternal (which is kind of bunk IMO) and therefore the only form of analysis of oppression is through a basically bioessentialist lens. The other end of neoliberal politics – the far right wing of it – also views things through a bioessentialist lens. It’s the only semi-coherent way of viewing an allegedly classless society outside of class-as-level-of-income which is utterly worthless to me.