What’s needed at this juncture in our cultural evolution is a rebirth of healthy modesty about human being and human fate, a realization that we are imperfect and imperfectible, particular and embodied, with all our warts and blemishes, but for that very reason valuable beyond measure.
Infinitude is an appealing concept to many, not mathematically, but culturally. It has come to play a dominant role in the pursuit of happiness as that is understood today in the United States. But our cultural understanding of the concept of infinitude is incomplete, or corrupt, because it is no longer limited or constrained by any meaningful coordinate concept of finitude. It has therefore become a free radical careening through our corporate blood stream, causing untold damage to the body politic and resulting in a kind of soul sickness in individuals.
As a cultural value, infinitude makes two distinct claims, one allegedly factual and one ethical. First, it claims that there are few limits, physical or otherwise, on individual self-actualization. For example, if one who was born a biological male chooses to be a female (or vice versa), there is no reason why he or she cannot do so. To make this freedom possible, gender theory has invented a distinction between biological sex and gender. This invention is intended to separate identity from biology, thus allowing individuals to simply ignore their actual biological sex, which is a physical, objective reality, but purportedly not one that is significant in the formation of identity. Rejecting any such limitation on identity formation, gender theory thus opens a whole new world of unlimited self-actualization, in which one can choose either gender, both genders, all genders, or no gender. One becomes completely self-constitutive. The fact that no physical or other alteration in one’s body morphology or personal identity can alter the chromosomal makeup of each of the trillions of human cells in one’s body is simply irrelevant, a fact conveniently elided into non-existence.
The culture of Infinitude also makes an implicit ethical claim, that there should be no limit on individual freedom to self-create. It asserts that freedom cannot be both a good and limited in any way. In other words, if something is a good in itself, it would be immoral to impose any limit on it. However, the culture of infinitude does not seem to be aware of this implicit claim, and therefore nowhere examines or supports it. It is a crucial but assumed premise.
There are numerous problems that arise from this view of unencumbered freedom. First, it is incoherent and inherently self-contradictory. Consider this simple vignette. When I volunteered at a free trade gift shop, I was asked to wear a name tag indicating my “preferred pronouns,” in order to demonstrate sensitivity towards “the truth” of those who choose not to identify their gender with their biological sex. However, this directive ignored “my truth,” which is that biological sex and gender are synonymous, and that people cannot simply change who they are. The directive to wear a pronoun-defining name tag implies that I have consciously chosen the pronouns it announces, when in fact I deny that possibility. It is simply impossible to demonstrate sensitivity to the inherent integrity of every individual’s “truth,” when individuals are free to invent any truth they choose, leading to inevitable conflicts between such truths. The inability of the culture of infinitude to resolve these conflicts leads it ironically towards intellectual coercion, as at the free trade gift shop, and on a larger, political scale even to totalitarianism in the name of freedom.
Second, an unlimited concept of freedom, unencumbered by any notion of objective or ethical constraint, violates the integrity of the notion of truth. Thus we have arrived in a world that no longer speaks of truth per se, but of “my truth” and “your truth.” In particular, this relativity undermines the validity of science when it is deployed in the service of the culture of infinitude. Consider again gender theory, with its insistence on the existence of gender as a category of reality separate from biological sex. Insisting upon this without objective support, but only via “theoretical” analysis of “social constructs,” gender theory raises profound questions about the integrity and neutrality of science. The discovery of gender does not result from the appropriate application of the scientific method but proceeds from pre-existing ideological commitments. Is then the scientific method a relic of a now discarded concept of objective reality? Moreover, the discovery of gender does not conform to the norm of epistemic modesty, namely the notion that science should not posit the existence of anything that is not absolutely necessary to explain the natural world. It is of course true that there are gender norms, and that many individuals do not wish or are not naturally inclined to conform to them. However, recognizing that does not require the invention of a completely new category of reality that identifies that non-conformity with a gender identity that is ontologically separated from biological sex. It makes far more sense to state simply that such individuals do not or cannot conform to the gender roles that society unfairly imposes upon them. Putting it that way does not in any way dishonor or morally judge non-conforming individuals. In fact, it honors them by empathizing with the predicament of their particular humanness. The yard-sign bromide that we should “just follow science” ignores the troubling fact that science, which is after all a social activity, is increasingly contaminated by cultural agendas. In the context of pseudo-social science such as gender theory there is no clear distinction between science and faith.
The biggest problem with the culture of infinitude is that it erases any meaningful concept of the individual at all. How can there be a meaningful definition of the individual if there is no concept of the individual as a particular, embodied person with inherent capabilities and limitations, embedded in a particular context? Without this, the individual has no defining boundaries or substance that permit one to identify him or her in a meaningful way. The human being becomes a free-floating abstraction. But humanness implies predicament; it is the predicament of each individual that defines him or her as unique and truly irreplaceable. It is not the possibility of unlimited self-invention and re-invention. Fixed, objective limitations are essential to the very notions of personhood and individuality.
This problem has profound moral consequences. For example, without a meaningful notion of finitude or limitation, what principled basis is there for placing limits on the manipulation of DNA to achieve any desired result? How can we distinguish between the need to alter DNA to alleviate or eliminate disease, and the desire to alter DNA in order to have perfect, designer children? In the culture of infinitude, the latter can be justified as a form of parental self-actualization. There is little moral difference between this and a formal program of eugenics, since both involve the manipulation of DNA to achieve an end result that is desired for merely personal or cultural reasons. Or to cite another looming moral dilemma: on what principled basis can we place any meaningful limit on the implantation of computer chips in individuals to make them superhumans? Without a limiting principle of finitude, there can be no objection to enhancing or embellishing our natural powers, and it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish between people and machines. How will we evaluate the moral claims of beings whose organic and inorganic components become increasingly mixed and difficult to separate? Will it remain tenable to favor beings who claim some organic substance over those who do not? Or will we ultimately be called upon to free machines from slavery? Moreover, if we treat machines like people, could we also come to treat people like machines? The promotion of machines could ironically lead to the coordinate demotion of unencumbered and free-floating human beings since they will no longer be viewed as morally unique. None of these problems are fanciful or fevered imaginings, and the real danger is that by the time this dystopian future arrives the culture of infinitude will have destroyed our ability to even see, much less to address them.
The intellectual bankruptcy of the culture of infinitude is embedded in the fact that it is ideologically driven, rather than philosophically or religiously anchored. This leads to reasoning that is improvisational and opportunistic, rather than principled. For example, why does contemporary “woke” ideology insist that sexual orientation is fixed and immutable, despite lack of any scientific evidence of genetic causation, but gender is fluid and a matter of personal choice, despite the obvious physiological fact of biological sex? This contradiction is required by ideological commitments to both the LGBT and “trans” communities. Ideologues want to endorse freedom to choose gender. But at the same time they do not want to acknowledge that sexual orientation could be a matter of choice in order to avoid moral judgment of orientation, even though denying a biological basis to sexual orientation does not necessarily imply that it is a matter of choice, and despite the fact that the possibility that it is a matter of choice does not entail moral judgment. Be that as it may, the vicissitudes of their ideological agenda lead to contradiction. Why shouldn’t individuals be empowered to choose their sexual orientation, if they are empowered to choose everything else about themselves? Why is gender a “social construct,” but not sexual orientation? Why shouldn’t race also be a matter of choice? After all, race too is a social construct since skin tone is not biologically significant. Instrumental thinking leads inevitably to contradictory assertions. And this, in turn, leads to contortions of logic, such as simultaneous insistence that gender is fluid, but race and sexuality are not.
It is important to note that the culture of infinitude does have a concept of finitude, but it is arbitrary and superficial. Most importantly, it employs a concept of limitation that is not anchored to individual characteristics at all. Therefore, it provides no real limiting force to the concept of individuality. This concept of finitude is nothing more than an ideologically reductivist catalogue of ever-changing identity categories that locate one somewhere on a grid of supposedly meaningful, and therefore limiting, characteristics. One is “cisgender” or “transgender,” or possibly non-gendered or multi-gendered, one has a particular racial definition (and race categories themselves continually mutate and change in accordance with ideological necessity), one is oppressor or victim, and so on. These traits map one to the all-important grid, but do not actually identify any genuine individual traits that characterize one’s finiteness and particularity. They provide no help in addressing the types of moral questions outlined above, because they do not contemplate or tolerate the notion of finitude as having any genuinely limiting effect on personal choice.
The erasure of meaningful finitude leads to tremendous personal and societal anxiety. Self-assertion becomes a matter of projecting a completely subjective, re-constructed view of reality onto the world as a kind of personal overlay. This is self-defeating. Why are so many people unhappy with aspects of their identity? It is because they understand the things making up their identity to be as ephemeral as hair color, to be altered on a whim with a dye. But understood as being completely a matter of choice, these identifying markers cannot have their desired effect when individuals in fact consciously choose them. They don’t truly identify precisely because they are ephemeral, just so much water slipping through one’s fingers. When the dye fails to genuinely alter hair color, the culture of infinitude fails to deliver the desired self-fulfillment it promises. The practitioner’s first move is simply to lie (look, my hair is red), then to endorse a completely subjective notion of truth (my hair is red if I say it is), then inevitably to deny that there is any truth at all (the concept of red has no meaning), which is of course self-defeating for those wishing to create their “truth” as red heads. The culture of infinitude places pressure on hapless individuals to attempt futilely to self-create rather than to accept and work with the clay of their actual being. In short, the bedrock of identity comes ultimately from precisely that which one cannot alter about oneself, and only a society that has made a virtue of solipsism could forget this.
The culture of infinitude is derived from an unconstrained cultural libertarianism that recognizes no principled limits on the scope of individual self-creation. Thus, individualism has increasingly become a form of self-valorizing, narcissistic subjectivity masquerading as “authenticity,” in which, from a religious standpoint, the subject substitutes himself or herself for God at the center of the universe. At the same time, the culture of post-modernism has promoted the idea that there is no objective truth, only politically and culturally motivated ideology. (Which of course is self-denying since it thus defines itself as self-serving ideology.) The two fallacies are interrelated, in that the conviction that there is no truth justifies the retreat into subjectivity.
What’s needed at this juncture in our cultural evolution is a rebirth of healthy modesty about human being and human fate, a realization that we are imperfect and imperfectible, particular and embodied, with all our warts and blemishes, but for that very reason valuable beyond measure. We need to reimagine healthy human agency as a struggle to accept and value our particularity, acknowledging that there are things we cannot change. This is not an act of succumbing or resignation; it is the only route to true self-empowerment and meaningful self-transcendence.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.
