Over the transom today:
It’s “ethically inappropriate’ for government and medical organizations to describe breastfeeding as “natural’ because the term enforces rigid notions about gender roles, claims a new study in Pediatrics.
“Coupling nature with motherhood”¦ can inadvertently support biologically deterministic arguments about the roles of men and women in the family (for example, that women should be the primary caretaker,’ the study says.
This would be a fine occasion for a rant about the postmodernist insanity of the modern Leftist religion, and about its willingness simply to deny the existence of any reality beyond that which the faithful may construct in their hallucinations. After all: if breastfeeding isn’t natural, then what explains lactation? How did such a thing come to pass? Is milk now a “social construct”? Is the long history of mammalian evolution explicable only by some sort of backward causality involving lattes?
I’ll let that go, however; we’re all used to this sort of thing by now. What jumps out at me in this item is the suggestion that a “study” can determine what is “ethically inappropriate”.
Why is this noteworthy? Because for decades the corrosive action of the Left has been to subjectivize what is objective: to deny the reality of sex, race, and innate characteristics and distinctions of every kind. In this, though, we see the other edge of the sword: the objectivization of the subjective.
9 Comments
You should not over look it. You’re giving up ground. The left wins by persistence in stupidity.
As soon as I saw this paper was written by PhDs and not MDs I breathed a little easier. The journal is probably not read by Doctors who don’t have the time to waste with paper-pushing gibberish.
AD,
Just a figure of speech, of course; as you can see I didn’t let it go. I wanted to get on to my second point.
But you’re right: we must push back always, and never let any of this just slide by, ever.
We are now actually being told it’s wrong to say (or think) that breastfeeding is “natural”?
The next question will be:
“How many fingers, Winston?”
A footnote… Even if we ignore all the other absurdities, it’s worth noting the irrationality of the following kind of (tacit) inference that we find in so many of these goodthink pieces:
1. For some difference D, D is not based in nature.
Therefore,
2. It’s wrong to accept D.
So if it isn’t human nature for females rather than males to be primary caregivers, for example, we have to overturn any practices or attitudes that might reflect or encourage or normalize this difference (“inequality”).
That’s stupid. Especially if we accept the left’s blank slate ideology. Suppose all humanoid entities are just interchangeable blobs. Well, someone has to the primary caregiver. Why not assign that job to the blobs with red hair, or the blobs with last names ending in “t”, or even all those we call “women”? What possible difference could it make which sub-class of hunanoids is typically assigned some particular role? In no possible world does every interchangeable blob get to actualize every good potentiality to the same degree. So why does it matter that, traditionally, this sub-class rather than some other one got to have a certain kind of life rather than some other kind?
Their position is not only inconsistent with the most obvious facts known to everyone forever, but also inconsistent with itself. Given their own beliefs, they can’t rationally care about what they care about.
Leftism is simply anti human and particularly anti natalism.
It tells us nearly all our natural dispositions — to treat our children as our own, to preference our in group, to preference heterosexual relations in our social structures, to own property and prosper, to categorize and judge, so on and so forth — are wrong.
Jacques,
The answer is that this sort of external assignment is seen as diminishing the most sacred freedom in our new religion: the freedom to subjectivize everything, including every aspect of oneself, and to impose one’s own subjectivity on every feature and category of the external world.
The real incoherence, I think, is in the imposition of one’s own subjectivity on others. If a a middle-aged white man from Gary, Indiana decides one day to identify as a bisexual Zulu woman, that’s his business, I guess — but the rub comes when the rest of us are expected to go along with it too. Our own subjective assessment — that this is, in fact, a middle-aged white male with a tragic mental disorder — is forbidden.
Hi Malcolm,
It’s incoherent in so many ways. I find it hard to decide what is the basic mistake or incoherence. One thing that occurs to me: It’s not clear that they really believe in a universal freedom to subjectivize everything.
My sense is that the sacred freedom to subjectivize depends on a person’s position in the victim hierarchy. Thus, a disabled transsexual black lesbian must be free to subjectivize any way she wants–and if the subjectivity of some vile cis-male white oppressor such as myself conflicts with zer subjectivity, I’m just objectively bad and wrong. Or if leftists feel “unsafe” in classrooms because non-leftist arguments are presented, they have the right to reorganize the whole university to protect their subjective feelings and judgments. Obviously, if a right-winger were to make similar complaints on the basis merely of feeling “threatened” or “unsafe” he’d be told that his feelings are irrelevant, that we’re here to rationally explore ideas even if they make us uncomfortable, etc.
So perhaps there is a kind of resolution to the second incoherence. The real principle is not that everyone gets to impose their subjectivity on the whole universe, but rather that everyone gets to do that to the degree that they are “oppressed”. The more oppressed you are, the more freedom you need, the more sacred your subjectivity, the more evil any conflicting subjectivity must be…
After all, they don’t think that patriarchy and white supremacy (etc) are merely subjective perceptions of some people. Those things are as real as climate change! They hold all of that nonsense to be objectively fixed beyond any rational discussion. Then the value of a given subject, and the appropriate range of her subjectivity, is measured against these supposedly objective facts.
But as I say I’m confused about all this. It does also seem true that, at some level, there is a kind of deranged Satanic drive for universal omnipotence or synchronized solipsism or something like that.
You’re right, Jacques; this is an important detail. It also, of course, is consistent with the subjectivization of everything, as I described above: the subject you describe gets to impose her subjective categorization even to the point of deciding, with perfect and capricious freedom, the ontological properties of other subjects! Once the choices have been made, and the knobs and dials set to the (subjectively) desired values, then the target is “frozen”, and the qualities imposed can now be regarded as fixed and objective.
Moreover, you are right that the freedom to do this is granted on the basis of a hierarchy of victim-ranking. Indeed, the term “hierarchy” is particularly apt here, in its original sense of “rank in the sacred order” (from the Greek hieros, “sacred”, and archon, a leader or ruler). In our secular religion, victims of oppression are now sacred objects.
So maybe a more precise formulation is that the most oppressed have the right to subjectivize everything–including any facts about the nature and implications of the subjective states of the less oppressed. And then problems only arise when equally oppressed subjects have conflicting wills or beliefs. Otherwise, conflicts are resolved by rank in the sacred order. E.g., the middle-aged white man who thinks he’s a Zulu woman can really be just that. And if you or I question ‘her’ identity claims, we’re just objectively wrong (and very bad people). Until a real Zulu lesbian with a cleft palate comes along and declares that he’s appropriating her identity. And at that point, he becomes a racist cis oppressor who just pretends to be something he’s not. I think that fits well with the epicycles of leftist judgment and panic that we observe. Objective reality exists: it’s constituted entirely by the reality of the sacred hierarchy of victims, which does not itself depend on anything, and everything else is constantly changing under the whims of the most oppressed.
It’s Nietzsche’s “slave morality” grafted onto deconstructionist post-modernism: a hideous chimera that happens to be our era’s hegemonic ideology.