"You will get your mind right" is a road to nowhere, but tyranny always is

 I'm not saying it's easy. Speaking out against the glaringly fallacious assumptions that permeate all aspects of post-American life requires courage. It entails professional and social risks that most people, understandably, aren't willing to take on.

Not only do the risks include getting fired, losing friends and family estrangement, there is the matter of perceptions of the risk-taker being mistaken. Because so many who do choose to speak out take up the shield of - what shall we call it? Neo-Trumpism? The New Right? - if one is decidedly not in that camp, it can be hard to mount one's defense.

But years of saying little, or sticking one's neck out in some particular instance, only to get burned and then retreat to relative silence, has allowed the dismantling of what we knew to be true about the universe we inhabit to metastasize to the point that it leaves nothing unaffected. 

I'm going to leave the global-climate discussion for another time, because that would be one too many rabbit holes to bring into the present argument. I will just say that the intimidation and defamation going on on that front has worsened every bit as much as it has in the two areas I do want to discuss. If you assert that the global climate is not in a state of crisis requiring humankind to abandon its advancement, your presence in polite company is brought into question.

But my focus here is identity politics militancy. 

The plain fact is that the individual human being's race and/or sexuality has been made the most important thing about him or her. It was not always thus. As I've discussed elsewhere, Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Carl R. Trueman has written an entire book on the centuries-long process by which humankind has convinced itself that people could invent themselves. Prior to that, it was assumed, certainly by both Judea-Christian teaching as well as Greek philosophy, that human nature was fixed and that people needed to look outside themselves to determine what made for a well-lived life.

But the insistence on being able to declare that we are whatever we say we are, and having that respected by others, has now been codified into decree. One cannot insist to the contrary without getting into official trouble. 

The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (or, as our acronym-enamored age has deemed it, DEI) movement has left no institution beyond its reach.

The U.S. State Department has made the embrace of it a requirement for career advancement, and it's not the only federal-government entity to make it unavoidable to people working within it. 

The K-12 education establishment has found a way to work around the stigma that has begun to attach to the term Critical Race Theory by talking up "Ethnic Studies" - actually more than just talking up. Taking an ethnic-studies course is a requirement for graduation in California. 

But the two concepts are intertwined:

“CRP” [culturally relevant pedagogy] is a concept pioneered by Gloria Ladson-Billings, the academic who introduced Critical Race Theory to K-12 education. In Critical Race Theory in Education: A Scholar’s Journey Ladson-Billings defines the core tenets of CRP as a “focus on student learning, development of cultural competence, and promotion of a sociopolitical consciousness.”

As parents have seen, CRT spreads through slippery language games. “Cultural competence” sounds like it should mean “getting along well with people from other backgrounds.” Maybe sometimes it does. But other times, it is defined as antonym for “color-blindness,” i.e., for treating people without regard to the color of their skin. Similarly, “sociopolitical consciousness” could mean “civic knowledge and spirit.” Or it could mean a very particular kind of politicized spirit.

In general, Ethnic Studies can take one of two forms: (1) Multicultural Ethnic Studies, which focuses on the positive historical contributions of minority groups; or (2) Liberated Ethnic Studies, which leverages race to push partisan political arguments about “identity,” “power,” and “social justice” rooted in Critical Race Theory ideology.

The codification of DEI into an imposition of rules and even laws is not confined to coastal areas or the federal level of government. 

There is a city, with a manufacturing-based economy (that is, it's not some insular bubble of egghead-ism), in the heart of an ostensibly rock-ribbed red state in which local government, the local community college, the local K-12 school district, hospital, newspaper, major employers and religious coalition have banded together to coordinate efforts to impose DEI on all aspects of daily life. 

The message is clear: You will be made to put your fellow human being's demographic classification front and center in your dealings with him or her. 

And what exactly is the end product of this way of interacting with each other supposed to be? As Glenn Loury and John McWhorter point out, economics, or natural sciences, including mathematics, are objectivity-based modes of inquiry. To speak of a "black economics" or "black math" is to spew an absurdity. Or, to address the cultural level, after we've celebrated the music, foods and modes of dress of other nationalities and ethnicities, we're faced with the same old question of how all those various peoples are going to address the human condition.

Then there's sexuality. I've gotten myself into some rabbit holes lately with articles I've written, as well as my chimings-in on comment threads and Twitter threads with my use of the term "basic architecture of the universe." There is one, and I've asserted, and am doing so again right here, that we've spent the last ten years, thirty at the outside, obliterating it. 

If one asserts that there are two sexes comprising the human race - and the preponderance of plant and animal species, actually - and that they were designed - that's right, designed - to get together to make more of that species, one must be prepared to wade into the weeds with recitations of statistics about chromosomal outliers that are somehow supposed to have as much weight as the plain fact of duality the air before our eyes. 

You know, "male and female He created them," and all that. Ah, but if one brings even a hint of Judeo-Christian substantiation into the conversation, something else becomes clear: a pervasive attitude along the lines of "oh, come on, you're not going to drag outmoded doctrine into this, are you?"

Well, you see, it's the Judeo-Christian angle that elevates the discussion above the biological facts about procreation. Love and the centrality of family to a heathy society are part of the equation. A damn important part, I'd say.

I'll conclude with the point that I always arrive at. I reiterate it here, because it's chilling to really take in and reflect on.

We're stepping onto completely uncharted terrain. Since we've tossed away the guideposts, there's no telling what the lay of the land looks like down this road.