On our kinder, gentler tyranny

Many people today deny nature, history, and the transcendent as guides to life, in favor of viewing the human world as a social construction that can be reconstructed at will. Judging by public statements, most influential journalists, educators, and government officials accept some variation of that view.

Transgenderism is an obvious example, critical race theory another. The latter is based on the belief that social benefits and detriments are assigned, rather than earned, or are even the result of chance. Good things are social privileges and bad are instances of oppression. In each case, it’s simply a matter of how society is treating the people involved.

But if such things are assigned unequally, equity seems to demand reassignment. That is now considered a obvious requirement of justice, and it is thought there is no excuse for failing to do what’s needed to comply with it. Whatever is necessary must be done to equalize social standing.

The implications are radical. For example, the terms “husband” and “wife,” and even “male” and “female,” are said to be oppressive, because they suggest there are two complementary sexes. That is thought to erase people who identify with neither sex, denying their humanity and exposing them to violence.

Similarly, opposition to drag events for children is treated by politicians and the press as a hateful attack on sexual minorities because it is an attack on theatrical displays of disordered sexuality. It suggests there is something wrong with giving children a sympathetic introduction to ways of living whose equal value and dignity are now considered fundamental points of social morality.

Many people, including numerous sincere Catholics, take a favorable view of tendencies behind such developments. After all, success and failure involve several factors, including undeserved advantages and disadvantages. Shouldn’t we try to even the odds between those with privilege and those without? And since it is difficult to determine equal odds except by equal results, why not just equalize outcomes?

That appears to make some sense, but only to a point. What determines success or failure is a combination of nature, nurture, effort, history, circumstances, and luck. Who can separate them or predict what their consequences will be? Life is a riddle, and success and failure are part of that riddle: “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the learned, nor favor to the skillful: but time and chance in all.”

Genghis Khan started off poor and marginalized, but conquered half the world; Richard II and Edward II were born to the English throne but ended up losing it, dying in prison when their successors found that convenient.

What applies to royalty applies to other mortals and even to groups of people. Who can say why Nobel Prize winners are a hundred times more common among Jews than among other people? Or why murder rates vary so wildly by time, place, and population? If we can’t explain such extreme examples of success and failure, it seems even harder to explain less extreme examples.

Even if such things could be explained, and the relative contribution of unearned advantage and disadvantage determined, the complexity, obscurity, and general recalcitrance of human life make any but crude and sometimes self-defeating attempts at redress impossible.

Yes, we should do what is reasonable to help people overcome disadvantages, but is it obvious that redress will always be a good thing? Wolfgang was born with talent and a musical father in a musical time and place. George was born into a family with a tradition of public service. And Mary’s parents stayed married, lived upright lives, loved each other and their children, valued education and good conduct, and lived in a community that shared those good qualities. Such backgrounds are unearned, but they affect how people’s lives turn out. Is that an injustice that must be rectified?

For my own part, I’m happy Mozart was able to do what he did, and I’m happy when government officials and other influential people come out of backgrounds that emphasize public service and good conduct generally. That means that some people are born with a better shot at success than others. But that’s life, and I don’t want to abolish life.

Such views aren’t what we hear from most people who present themselves as moral leaders. Instead, we hear—ever more directly and crudely—that good things are privileges conferred by the powerful. As such, they can and should be made equal, since society is a construction and there are no limits to what those who dominate it can bring about. Those who criticize such efforts are simply people who want to maintain a position of unjust privilege.

But privilege doesn’t go away. If you insist on assigning all goods equally, you have to control all aspects of life. Then people will have no effective agency and won’t bother to produce many goods. So the proposal leads directly to a sordid tyranny, which will, of course, be run by people with an extreme degree of privilege.

That is why woke progressivism has basic features in common with previous episodes of radical social constructivism, such as the Stalinist period in Russia and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Like people then, we now have a ruling theory that demands transformation of human life by political means. The theory is treated as unquestionable, supported (it is said) by scientific expertise, the demands of justice, and the arc of history. All social institutions must support it as basic to their mission.

If you reject the theory, you’re viewed as a bad person who must be done away with—canceled—at least socially. Since the theory is unquestionable, bad results show bad actors are at work and efforts must be redoubled. The bad actors are (it is thought) likely in league with foreign governments, or members of groups who are fighting to maintain or regain their privilege—landowners, cishet white males, kulaks, deplorables.

Good people must stop them. If that means violating usual legal standards, then the standards are shields of privilege that ought to be ignored.

But why the similarities when there are huge differences between America in 2023 and China in 1968, or Russia in 1937? There is no identifiable tyrant among us, or Central Committee to set the Party Line. Legality and individual rights are real, dissent is possible (though often imprudent), and the enforcement of orthodoxy is bloodless and often not even legally required. So, do comparisons make sense?

If iron filings are light and loose, it doesn’t take much to get them to line up: a weak magnetic field is enough. And American society is becoming rather like a collection of tiny iron filings. Social ties are weak—far weaker than in traditional Russia or China. We have long tended toward individualism, and whatever traditional connections once existed have been radically disrupted by industrial society, electronic mass media, mobility, demographic diversification, and state intervention into social relations.

Foreigners and domestic critics have long commented on how dependent Americans are on the opinion of others. The weakening of social ties, which makes it much harder for us individually to find our footing and stand our ground, has exacerbated that situation. It has also made career everything among the capable and energetic people who determine the direction of society.

Under such conditions, tyranny doesn’t require mass physical terror. A system of everyday rewards and punishments that arises step-by-step through cooperation among elites, who share common interests, can be enough. And the only possible response to such a tyranny, apart from waiting for it to collapse into chaos from inefficiency and corruption, is to reverse the condition of rootlessness that lies behind it.

When secular society is as disordered as it is today, that can only happen through religion. Hence the acute need for the Faith to form not only the lives of Catholics but the setting for public life. That prospect is becoming ever more distant, but it is the only prospect that offers real hope.

People say religion in public life is tyrannical. It is much more true that fundamental loyalties that transcend the secular are the only possible defense and escape from tyranny.