Is Nothing Sacred? Looking into the abyss?

Some reflections on the sublime to the ridiculous, on Nietzsche to Bob Dylan to Gahan Wilson

So, there I was — over on Dr. Kari Janz’s estimable Substack

The Dirty Realist

(angels with dirty faces, indeed) — gazing into the abyss of Nietzsche’s essays on “Self and Self-Fashioning” in the context of the somewhat risible “debate” over “gender identity” — which is more often a case of Lilliputian civil wars and Rapes of the Lock (part deux) than not. But that was largely as a result of some “discussions” on various aspects of that idea on the Substack

gender:hacked by Eliza Mondegreen

, notably the rabbit holes it creates. No doubt that Eliza and many in her tribe are certainly justified in throwing stones at the odious consequences of “gender ideology” — in particular, the “de-sexing” of children as

Rukhsana Sukhan

put it recently, turning them into sexless eunuchs, even if many apparently think, some somewhat hypocritically, that that phrase qualifies as

Speaking the Ineffable

. However, methinks that she and many others are rather too quick to throw the baby out with the bath water, rather too unwilling to take the bull by the horns and actually define their terms.

But the rather insightful observations on and summaries of Nietzsche’s psychology by the lads and lassies of Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy [SEP] reminded me of Bob Dylan’s classic “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”. Talk about the “words of the prophets written on subway walls and tenement halls”. But of particular note and relevance to both Nietzsche, Gahan Wilson, and gender-identity are these verses:

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something they invest in

Moot exactly what might really be considered sacred, there being so many false prophets, charlatans, and grifters contending for the throne, but Nietzsche’s take on the self seems to carry some weight and may provide some illumination on the murky if not toxic concept of gender-identity:

Still, despite widespread appreciation of Nietzsche’s psychological acumen—and despite the centrality of psychology to his philosophical method, core questions, and evaluative aims—even the most basic outlines of his substantive psychology remain a matter of controversy. Debate begins with the object of psychology itself, the psyche, self, or soul.

One might reasonably wonder how the “soul” figures into discussions of gender identity, but “medical anthropologist” Sahar Sadjadi provides some insights into how that has transpired in an essay in the Journal of Cultural Anthropology (my emphasis for the most part):

The story exemplifies the popularity and intelligibility of the interior origin of self and identity, which reverberated among the adults and youth I met during my research on clinical approaches to childhood gender variance in the United States. …. Moreover, the magico-spiritual undertone of the conversations I witnessed was striking, perhaps lending testimony to how mysterious these children who transgressed one of the most entrenched rules of their culture appeared. …. As a physician and anthropologist of medicine, I had begun this project as a critical study of a cutting-edge clinical field; I was perplexed by this merging of science, magic, and religion in explaining children’s gender transition. ….

This use of soul as interchangeable with the brain in the clinical literature is remarkable. It raises important questions about the contemporary scientific understanding of the brain, as well as the relation between the body and personhood that underpins the clinical practices surrounding gender-nonconforming and transgender children.

Moot also to what extent, if any, we might be said to have souls, immortal or otherwise. However, it is hard not to conclude — with Nietzsche — that the “existence of a cognitive self that stands back from particular drives and affects, and so has ‘the ability to control one’s Pro and Con and dispose of them’ in support of the larger cognitive project” is of paramount importance. Seems reasonable to argue that we are all rather more than just something we invest in as Dylan put it, more than just “a play thing of the gods”, more than the biology we’ve inherited, more than the social factors constraining if not straitjacketing us. No doubt that both “nature” and “nurture” contribute to our psyches if not our souls, but some reason to at least hope that we can stand astride those two “horses”; that we are, to some extent, autonomous individuals; that we are our own “first causes”, at least to some limited degree.

But where the wicket gets rather sticky, and probably the crux of the problem with gender identity, is in “thinking” that “the self is the only existing reality and that all other realities, including the external world and other persons, are representations of that self, and have no independent existence” — solipsism in a word, or at least one manifestation of it. Methinks that way madness lies. And I rather doubt we are doing dysphoric children any favours at all by abandoning them to that fate, not to mention throwing them to the wolves in the process.

No, as much as we may wish to flatter our vanities, to indulge the envies and delusions of the transgendered with anything smacking of “the self alone”, the task of properly raising children — which may well take a village or three — seems to depend crucially on impressing upon them the existence of others, of other “souls”, of various social obligations of one sort or another to other members of the community. As Eleanor Roosevelt once put it in a metaphor that warms the cockles of my heart, not least because the governor of Watt’s steam engine is an exemplar for the whole field of cybernetics:

“...our children must learn...to face full responsibility for their actions, to make their own choices and cope with the results...the whole democratic system...depends upon it. For our system is founded on self-government, which is untenable if the individuals who make up the system are unable to govern themselves.”

Moot exactly how children are to be taught that, and certainly a question I have very little experience with. However, there seems to be ample reasons to argue that that is contingent on nurturing something in the way of “ordered souls”, on some training in and appreciation of reason and logic, of logos (λόγος):

For Aristotle, logos is something more refined than the capacity to make private feelings public: it enables the human being to perform as no other animal can; it makes it possible for him to perceive and make clear to others through reasoned discourse the difference between what is advantageous and what is harmful, between what is just and what is unjust, and between what is good and what is evil.

However, much of what we are “teaching” children about gender is largely incoherent twaddle and quite antiscientific claptrap riven with risible contradictions from square one. One is reminded of Ignatius Loyola’s Rules for Thinking with the Church:

"That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity[...], if [the Church] shall have defined anything to be black which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black.

No wonder then Leonard Cohen’s:

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it's overturned
The order of the soul

How can there be order — in our souls or our societies — if we start off with contradictions? From contradictions anything follows: ex falso [sequitur] quodlibet. No wonder then so many “disordered souls” as far as the eye can see, all being mass produced by our “educational systems”. But that is basically what we doing — telling impressionable children that black is white, that sex is the same thing as gender, that they can magically change sex because they happen to exhibit some personality traits typical of the other sex. Which is why there is some merit in arguing — as I have done in many places, and as many others do, from the British Medical Journal, to the late Justice Scalia, to various more or less sane feminists — that “gender” is, at best, just a rough synonym for feminine and masculine personalities and personality types. Though many supposedly on the right side of history — like

Jesse Singal

— seem rather reluctant to even consider that argument.

But from that point and taking our cue from SEP’s article on personal identity, we might argue that “gender identity”:

… refers to feminine and masculine personality traits to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. My gender identity in this sense consists of those feminine and masculine properties I take to 'define me as a person' or ‘make me the person I am’.

As I put it in another comment on Eliza’s Substack (crickets …), it seems that the crux of the matter is how children, how we all develop our senses of self, and how that process can go off the rails and into the weeds in so many ways. An absolutely awesome responsibility to shepherd kids into a more or less functional adulthood, and in several ways: the hand that rocks the cradle rules the nation. Which is maybe some reason to argue that too many "parents" have fallen down on the job or never showed up for it in first place.

But in any case, some reason — in fact, many reasons — to argue that gender identity, at least at its worst, may be somewhat akin to the imaginary friends that many have argued presaged, that were and are the harbingers of both religion and consciousness itself. For example, see “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.

Something of a delicate operation to tenderly nurture that first spark. But it seems rather unwise and counterproductive to achieving that objective to be trying to force children into shapes that are wildly at odds with their true “natures”. And often in what is little more than “conversion therapy” of one stripe or another — either denying atypical personality traits, or taking them as “evidence” justifying “sex change” operations. And often based on quite unscientific claptrap, on the rather dogmatic insistence that sex and gender are synonymous:

For in the Market-place, one Dusk of Day,
I watch'd the Potter thumping his wet Clay: 
And with its all obliterated Tongue
It murmur'd—"Gently, Brother, gently, pray!"

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam