Motus Mentis

Public opinion moves fast these days; stick your head out the Overton Window for a glimpse ahead, and you’re liable to get whacked in the back of the skull. A position that was publicly held by the President less than a year ago — a neutral position at that, namely mixed feelings about gay marriage — is now bigoted extremism. As Mark Steyn points out here:

Not having a strong feeling is no longer permitted. The Diversity Celebrators have their exquisitely sensitive antennae attuned for anything less than enthusiastic approval.

Mr. Steyn cites the example of Jeremy Irons, who was bastinadoed in the press merely for asking on what limiting principle we would refuse to let a father marry his son so as to avoid estate taxes. (It’s a perfectly reasonable question, but there you are.)

Similarly, when President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage a year ago, I suggested that there was no longer any principle anywhere in view upon which we might coherently object to polygamous marriage (or other polyamorous combinations). A commenter took an unpersuasive shot at finding such a principle, but I came away fully confident that as the Window moved ever leftward, we’d see calls for polygamy soon enough, and soon thereafter official sanction. After all, why not?

Right on cue, then, here we are, in the pages of Slate.

Meanwhile, for the sake of balance, here’s the traditional-conservative take, from Pat Buchanan. His opinion is that as religious sorts and others with deeply held traditional views are kicked more and more roughly to the curb, at some point they will decline to remain civil. He observes that the widening ideological rift between traditionalists and the fast-moving Left is “pulling the nation apart.”

Indeed it is. I’m fond of metaphors, so here’s one:

When a moon orbits a planet, or a planet a star, the pull of gravity is stronger on the near side than the far side, with a stretching effect. If the planet is elastic, it will be deformed into an oval shape. This is what causes our tides: the ocean deforms, and bulges toward the Moon, while the rigid Earth rotates under the bulge.

Gravitational force increases and decreases with the square of the distance between two bodies, so if a planet is far from its star the differential between the pull on the near and far sides is negligible. But when you get too close to a massive, compact object, these tidal forces can be enormous. In the most extreme case, a black hole, tidal forces will rip to pieces anything falling inward, long before it gets to the singularity at the core.

It seems to me that there is a sort of ideological “singularity”, somewhere not far off in the distance, that we are accelerating toward. That singularity would represent the Omega point of the concurrent, onrushing streams of liberal opinion; it would be characterized by absolute non-discrimination, and rejection or elimination of all human differences, as well as by the abrogation of all traditional values, and of belief in objective human truths, in favor of a radical subjectivity in which everyone creates his own self, and his own model of reality, entirely ex nihilo, with no higher aim than maximizing the carnal enjoyment of this brief flicker of life.

That singularity was a long way off, not so long ago. But as our world now begins to approach it more closely, the tidal pull between the side facing it and the side farthest away is becoming much stronger indeed, and very quickly. Before much longer the very ground we stand on will begin to break apart. You’ll see.

To extend the metaphor just a little further: the closer you get to a gravitational singularity — the deeper you go into the gravity well — the faster you have to be moving to fly back out. At some fixed distance from the center, this “escape velocity” exceeds the speed of light. Once you have crossed that point, there’s no turning back. No light escapes. Anything that passes this horizon is lost forever.