All rise and salute The Self!

Catholic writer Elizabeth Scalia is a treasure.  She is the antidote to the tiresome, pointless exchange of soundbite-sized volleys and counter-volleys, the snark, vitriol and ad hominem attacks that characterize social-media battles.  She's one of those minds / hearts that demonstrate why one can't hope to win games of Corner-the-Rightie-and-Make-Him-Concede-His-Intellectual-Inconsistency.  The worldview of the three-pillared conservative - the worldview in which a morality rooted in the West's Judeo-Christian foundation is the most essential of the three pillars - cannot be reduced to two-sentence defenses of particular positions into which one has been boxed.

At Patheos today, she looks at the biggest-picture significance of the tumble of transabledness, transgenderism, and the strange case of Rachel Dolezal that has belched up from the sewer of fundamental transformation to flood the streets of post-American public life.  The essay is called "Objective Truth and Self-Marginalization."  Read it in its entirety, but here is one of the money paragraphs:

The most interesting and ironic thing about the End of Objective Truth is that it has been brought about (and celebrated) largely by people who have proudly, for some decades, eschewed the idea of faith and “bronze age oogedy boogedy”, for the world of hard facts and science. Often they will tell you that they do not believe in God because they live in a world buttressed by the (Catholic-invented) Scientific Method, and full of measurable, verifiable and quantitative data.

Now, it seems, Science is to be thrown into the dumpster, along with God. A life of faith, is for the naifs. Heaven is the safe-haven of the gullible, the under-educated, the unenlightened, and the narrow-minded, who are incapable of seeing a man as a woman, a healthy body as disabled and a white woman as a victimized black woman. And a life of Science, insisting that male-chromosomes, untamed by drugs, remain male chromosomes, that healthy bodies are in fact healthy, and that German-Swedish DNA is neither Nigerian nor Ethiopean, is just a life of bigoted mean-ness, a life that has no compassion for the reality of the human mind.

“Reality,” Robin Williams once mused, “what a concept.”

Mark it down, people. June 2015 is when the human animal declared “who the hell are God and Science to dare tell us what the truth is, anyway?” Faith in one’s feelings trumps both. Individual feelings are become a personal truth, and personal truth is absolute and unassailable reality.

“Only a Sith thinks in absolutes”, said Obi-Wan, and only mean people think in terms of Objective Truth. “I know what I know, and it’s the truth”; subjectivity is The New Absolute. The New Absolute is the Almighty Me, and what I AM.

I begin to understand why Tom McDonald worries that all of this trendy-transism will ultimately lead us to transhumanism: the ultimate marginalization away from boring humanity as we become like as gods.

And take the time to read her 2011 essay, to which she links in the course of her argument, entitled "The Soft Tyranny of Sentimentalism."  It may be even more essential.  It certainly has become more timely with the passage of the past four years.