RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Justin Trudeau: Why Can’t He Be Our President?” asks the cover of the latest edition of Rolling Stone. Well, the Constitution. But let’s assume Canada’s prime minister was born an American citizen: On the strength of the slavering, feverish, we’re-in-heat-and-we-don’t-care-who-knows-it Rolling Stone profile, Trudeau couldn’t even get the nomination of the Democratic party.

Trudeau’s idyllic northern paradise is actually the world’s seventh-largest oil producer, and even Boy Band Angela Merkel doesn’t seem particularly eager to destroy the country’s fossil-fuel industry. Sensibly enough, he’s a big proponent of the Keystone Pipeline and Canada’s Kinder Morgan pipeline, which transports hydrocarbons between the oil sands of Alberta (which are “pockmarked,” RS gravely informs us, “like a B-52 bombing range”) and British Columbia. Sensibly enough, he notes that carbon-based fuel will be with us for quite some time: “One of the things that we have to realize is we cannot get off gas, we cannot get off oil, fossil fuels tomorrow — it’s going to take a few decades,” he tells RS. “Maybe we can shorten it, but there’s going to have to be a transition time.”

A few more decades of bowing and scraping to Big Carbon? Try selling that to American Democratic-party primary voters. Doesn’t Trudeau realize that climate change is an imminent existential threat, that fossil fuels are the ticking time bomb that will blow up the world? Trudeau lacks the necessary climate hysteria to be an American Democrat.

Yet Rolling Stone largely gives Trudeau a pass on his sheik-like affection for black gold and hurries on to other topics. Hey, Justin snowboards! He’s handsome! He loves diversity! RS is more interested in the fact that Trudeau’s defense minister is a member of a minority gruop: Harjit Sajjan was born in Punjab, India, wears a turban, and served in the Canadian military in Afghanistan. Women and minorities make up more than half his cabinet.

So here’s Rolling Stone’s politics: We’ll forgive you for turning Earth into a coal-black cinder as long as you keep cheering for identity politics in these final moments of suffering we share together. But if you really do want to live in a country led by Justin Trudeau, given that people not born American can’t actually be president of the United States, why not do what Rolling Stone writer Stephen Rodrick suggests in the kicker of his piece: “At this moment, Justin Trudeau’s Canada looks like a beautiful place to ride out an American storm.” Why won’t Justin’s American acolytes do what they keep promising to do and take off to the Great White North?

Editor’s note: The poor child featured in this story is referred to below by masculine pronouns – not because we have information as to his gender, but as a grammatical convention called the gender-neutral “he,” sometimes used outside insane liberal enclaves for gender-ambiguous singular nouns like “someone” and “everyone.”

The tired, inaccurate, and overused dismissal hurled at theists by the liberal elite is “there is no God because science.” The hilarious irony is the inconsistency they utilize in weighing their own beliefs and decisions against “science.” So long as they can use “science” to absolve themselves from accountability to absolutes (read: God), it is their friend, but shame on anyone who challenges any of their more radical beliefs on scientific grounds.

Those medical experts who claim that gender is binary? Well, they are nothing more than bigots trying to hinder human flourishing. Science is useful only when it serves the purpose of silencing those outdated enough to oppose “progress.”

Marching at the head of the Progress Parade is a Canadian creature who goes by the name of Kori Doty. And the creature has just given birth to the future – a child who, after a brief dispute, is the first to have a “U” on his birth certificate where others have been confined to the outdated norm of “F” and “M.” The “U,” of course, is for “unassigned” or “undetermined.”

At War with Gravity

In other words, when people asked Kori (who is a tertium quid, identifying as neither male nor female), “Do you know if you’re having a girl or a boy?” the response was, “I’m waiting until it is old enough to decide for itself.”

The real head-scratcher is why Kori would allow “themself” (the pronoun of choice for those at war with, among other things, the outdated norms of binary genders, hereafter avoided) to be so closed-minded and limited. Has she not thought through the ramifications of labeling her offspring a person? Why is she limiting the generation that will inherit the future to the category of human?

Why not label her child a creature? Or better yet, a “being”? What if he grows up and decides he wants to identify as a yeti or a demogorgon, or some other fictitious creature? Who is Kori to tell her child that he must be human? Why stop there? So long as we’re freeing ourselves from the limitations of reality, what if the child decides he wants to be an inanimate object, like a slab of stone or the lost Ark of the Covenant?

I know, I know: this is too radical. The world is not ready for this type of progress quite yet. By proposing these outlandish ideas, I’m likely to get stoned. Let’s start off small and try to wrap our heads around Doty’s small step toward “progress.” Her aim: to remove gender from birth certificates, or at the very least give a third option.

As for me, it might be a while before I can legally identify as rubber. But as soon as I can, watch out, world, ’cause every stone you throw at me will bounce right back at you!

The Fight for Freedom to Be “Other”

Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think this sort of silliness is better left to the world of science fiction. The true victim here is Kori’s poor child, who gets the pleasure of being the subject of a ridiculous social experiment.

Doty is seeking to make history by fighting for the right to free our children from the outdated norms of being labeled male or female at birth. It is a difficult and unnecessary process, Doty argues, to attempt to change one’s gender at a later time in life. Then again, the denial of reality is always a difficult process. The man who identifies as a butterfly finds that out every time he jumps from the roof of his garage only to land on the cold, hard, familiar blacktop once again. Reality is so unforgiving to those who wish to live a fairy tale.

Kori is trying to remove any reference to gender from her own birth certificate as well. Should Kori fail, she’ll sleep better at night knowing that if not for her, at least her child and the next generation will be freed from the constraints of having to identify as a male or female (so long as he can avoid the pesky reminder between his legs).

Doty reminds us that it is discriminatory to assume that because someone has a penis or a vagina, that person is either a male or a female. Gender is a figment of the imagination to those who live in reality, and they must not assault those who live in alternate realities with their bigotries.

Lulled by the charms of rational nationalism, which include the growth and global spread of prosperity, the progressive mind fails to spot its twin in the shadows, irrational nationalism. The besetting sin is ignorance of the dark side, a weakness that catches liberals asleep at the wheel every time.

Battle over the idea of progress has been long-running, depending on how you want to see it, since the Enlightenment, or in recent forms since 1923, when J.B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress appeared. This seminal book summed up progress as an optimistic function of secularism, rationalism and science. It became a new religion on the Continent during the eighteenth century and—delayed by Napoleon’s wars—in England during the nineteenth century. Fortune, however, proved fickle. World wars and depression in the first half of the twentieth century destroyed the belief, replacing it with the tragic sense of life. Angst eased during the “trente glorieuses” only to mount again as those years ended ingloriously amid stagflation, unemployment, unsavoury dictators and underground torture.

The twentieth century, however, was a game of two halves. Rising liberal capitalist prosperity transformed decisively, if unevenly, home, hearth and workshop around the globe, not to mention its face, seen today by billions in comfort from forty thousand feet up. Most non-capitalist countries rushed to join in the game, as Marx predicted. The very prosperous again saw need to rebel against their oppression by the poor, a development foreseen by Aristotle long before Thomas Piketty.1 So are further optimistic cannonades in the progress wars now due? Some recent writers think so, among them Joel Mokyr, an economics and technology historian, in A Culture of Growth, and Matt Ridley, an evolutionist, in The Evolution of Everything. On the side of sceptics, and perhaps populist politicians, John Gray’s Soul of the Marionette weighs in with counter-punches.2 Who is right, or at least headed in the right direction?

Mokyr’s Culture of Growth makes a pleasant change from the tsunami of books on globalisation, for or against. He steps back in time, albeit with modernity in view, and undertakes to explain “why” and “how” what happened in Europe from 1500 to 1700 led to growth through scientific and technological progress, perhaps deeper background to David Landes’s work on the period after 1750, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. 3 Mokyr’s central idea is that writers and thinkers in Europe developed a preference for what Bacon called “useful knowledge”, rebelling against subservience to traditions of authority that Mokyr thinks characterised Europe till that point, much as it did other world cultures. To explain the unique European break-out, Mokyr tries to apply systems drawn from evolutionary and economic studies to the development of ideas by thinkers, both well-known and less well-known. Along the way he gives good accounts of influences prevailing among them. And in a separate article dealing with his leading exemplar, Descartes, he concludes, like Churchill, or perhaps Maurice Chevalier, that belief in progress is “better than the alternative”.4

But how much of this is true? Amiel maintained that “a belief is not true because it is useful”. And Bacon, a courtier high up the slippery pole of authority, thought he saw that “a man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true”. What does belief mean? What are the alternatives? Faith? Hope? Charity? Fate? The Deity? Which is better? And how can describing the factual “evolution” of any of these give rise to any judgment of value?

Few nowadays will refuse importance to the idea that knowledge should be useful to human life in the here and now rather than in the life to come, if any. This was a leading idea of the Renaissance and Reformation in major European countries in general, together with secular ideas about linear time—as opposed to classical circularity—and the value of the individual (both concepts invented by the Church and adopted by secular thinkers).5 These ideas have long been noted—although Mokyr does not note them—as crucial to the rise of new liberal ideas in social, economic and political thought as well as in arts, medicine, science and technology. Altered worldviews resulted, about history, geography and “Nature” as well as about humanity’s place in the scheme of things. Bacon’s own career illustrates this. Slipping back down the pole—he accepted so many bribes he threatened the official system of bribery—he turned to writing essays, essentially tips for apprentice courtiers, and scientific utopias. Nevertheless, the idea of revolt against authority may seem newer than it actually is. Bury mentioned it in his book, but it had short shelf life and has been soft-pedalled in subsequent skirmishes for good reason. It is wrong.

Before what today are called secular issues moved outside the Church, they were fully and usually violently discussed inside it, as the reign of Frederick II showed in Italy or Henry VIII in England. Paradoxically, the first lay people were French Protestants. Twelfth-century Albigensians and Waldensians, repressed as heretics and denied sacraments by the authorities, were forced into secular occupations as merchants, bankers, medical men and weavers. These were travelling jobs so their ideas survived and spread in extensive, if repressed networks. (Medicine and weaving were the locus of innovation, if not revolution, in scientific, technological and political affairs, much as merchants and bankers were in commerce, and possibly still are.) As happens under all repressions, the ideas eventually resurfaced with renewed energy and fanaticism, in this case, in Huguenot and Calvinist forms. When persecutions (briefly) eased during the Huguenot wars, the first secular discussions were held between Catholics and Huguenots—in the salon of one Madame Des Loges. An achievement of Renaissance and Reformation—although it may be too soon to know if it is an achievement—was to extend to anyone the critical spirit that spiritual and secular rulers never denied themselves nor allowed to others.

One almost has to admire Iran’s chutzpah. On Wednesday after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill, 419-3, which would impose sanctions on Iran’s ballistic-missile program, its foreign ministry called the legislation “illegal and insulting.” On Thursday Iran made a scheduled launch of a huge missile, which it says will put 550-pound satellites into orbit.

The only people who should feel surprised or insulted by this are Barack Obama and John Kerry, who midwifed the 2015 nuclear-weapons agreement with the untrustworthy Iranians. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert rightly called the missile launch a violation of the spirit of that agreement.

That is as far as she can take it because Iran’s ballistic-missile program wasn’t formally in the nuclear agreement, despite Mr. Kerry’s statements of concern during negotiations. In the end he wanted a deal more than limits on those missiles. We assume Iran’s missile engineers are at least as competent as those in North Korea, which is approaching the ability to deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Advocates of the nuclear deal persist in arguing that Iran is in compliance with its provisions. It takes considerable credulousness to believe that over the course of this agreement the Iranian military won’t adapt technical knowledge gained about launch and guidance from projects like its “satellite missile” program. With or without compliance, Iran is making progress as a strategic threat.