Moral Progress turns hostile against Technological Progress
Headline: Cure for deafness a reality as scientists make animals hear again… and promise first human patients will be treated in a “few years”
First commenter:
Am flabbergasted! How does the power of media continue to conjure such nonsense passive ideologies to raise money for further research sickens me – anyone even the stone deaf can feel or even SEE the lorry approaching! (It’s not that small!) These monies should and can be better invested in the global recession and life threatening illness. Dr Ralph Holme of the RNID has no concept of being deaf so does not represent us all. We should all embrace the universal benefits of being deaf such as sign language which brings us all together in many aspects. Please stop using us to pave your paid role. Being deaf enriches my life so stop selling us short with lame cites such as it “eroding my quality of life” – you have no right at all. Nothing about us without us.
habitableworlds.wordpress.com 
It’s funny in a way. The right often criticizes leftist multi-culturalism as eroding the sense and strength of group identity necessary to support a cohesive and coherent community with a common culture and shared values. More the point, it tends to undermine the ability of a society to generate, educate, and acculturate individuals to be loyal or patriotic, or be willing to make noble sacrifices for the group as a whole because you see all your compatriots as ‘entended kin’.
And this is all true. But in the absence of such common identity, the progressives are unbelievably skillful in filling the vacuum with unlimited kinds of alternative sub-group identities that are all, in at least one way, opposed to some Platonic Archetype Nietzschean Hero (which, in a Gnostic touch, is equal to the Progressive Demon). Basically “The Judge” from Blood Meridian but also Christian.
Our Archetype is a White, Healthy, Tall, Fit, Smart, Heterosexual Christian Male who is also Patriarchal, Colonialist, Capitalist, etc, etc.
Anyone who veers from this ‘unspeakable taboo ideal’ in any way, and who is not allowed by multiculturalism to feel themselves primarily ‘An American’, will search out for alternative versions of subgroup identity. But only progressivism is able to reframe classic deficiencies as pole-attractors for alternative subgroup identity.
So you have the deaf, the fat, the handicapped, etc. Who primarily view themselves as being ‘a deaf person’ entitles to respect on that basis, and with a hair-trigger provokability to being offended by anything which challenges the legitimacy of the identity qua identity instead of deficiency worthy of pity, sympathy, or even technological repair.
In a progressive culture, no one is supposed to feel like they are judged to be inferior. So there has to be a transvaluation of all values. inferiorities must be deemed to not exist ideologically – things outside the Archetype must only have a neutral or positive valence as an ideological matter, and the Archetype must be negative. Everyone must be equal, so inferiorities are merely inconsequential immutable differences which cannot have importance in the culture because that would be an invitation to draw intolerable distinctions.
So you cannot do anything which even threatens to undermine a my-deficiency-is-not-a-deficiency-but-instead-is-my-identity psychology. Fix deafness? You bigot!
What other hypothetical fixes might run afoul of this phenomenon?
November 7, 2013 at 8:22 pm
This might give us some insight into the fine structure of the Cathedral.
For example, why has “deaf rights” found so little traction with the left, while gay rights have essentially claimed total victory?
Fat acceptance, for example, is still quite weak and eye-roll-inducing, but I wouldn’t underestimate them. They are making inroads and are not going away.
Vox Day recently commented on the impeding clash between pro-choice feminists and the gay lobby should genetic markers for homosexuality be discovered.
I’m guessing that, as you state, the embrace of a particular sub-group identity by the Left is directionly proportional to its usefulness as a weapon against the Western architypical straight Christian male. The Deaf “community” tries to map it’s grievances onto the gay/minority template, but unfortunately for them, no one else cares, as their fight is irrelevant to the Left’s greater goals.
November 7, 2013 at 10:06 pm
Say more about this “impending clash” between pro-choice feminists and the gay lobby. I don’t follow.
November 8, 2013 at 3:02 am
Scharlach: The gay lobby won’t like the idea of babies being aborted because they have gay genetic markers, but the pro-choice lobby won’t like the idea of abortions being restricted at all.
Remember the flap a few years ago about banning sex-selective abortions (it pitted feminists against pro-choicers)? Like that.
November 8, 2013 at 3:19 am
Got it. Makes sense now.
November 8, 2013 at 3:22 am
“This might give us some insight into the fine structure of the Cathedral.”
Probably not if your looking for information on Cathedrals. Def.=”…Although the word “cathedral” is sometimes loosely applied, churches with the function of “cathedral” occur specifically and only in those denominations with an episcopal hierarchy, such as the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, and some Lutheran and Methodist churches…”
“The Cathedral” is a propagandist tool phrase not to illuminate but to confuse. The correct phase, because everyone likes something new, is #Neo-Synagogue. Using this term may indeed help to illuminate the subject. It’s a much closer fit. If you want to learn something about cows you wouldn’t talk all day about bulldozers. It would be helpful to use terms that illuminate instead of obfuscate.
November 9, 2013 at 4:01 am
Yes, all brilliantly put, Handle. For all its pretense toward universalism, the Left has in reality done nothing more but smash the old, natural group identities and constructed new ones out of their ruins. I am almost sure that the average LGBT activist at my university identifies with Tribe Queer more than she identifies with Tribe America or even her own family’s tribe.
Your comparison of the Left’s Demonic Archetype with McCarrthy’s Judge is brilliant, and worth exploring further.
As to your final question . . . I think see where Grotto was going with the comment about genetic markers for homosexuality. I do hope I live to see the day when scientists can confirm unequivocally what causes teh gay. And, I mean, obviously you see it even in defenses of black ghetto culture. I’ll try to find the cite, but there’s an anthropologist whose name I’m forgetting, but whose entire research program was about describing urban ghetto culture in a way that made it seem normal and describing the wider culture as the dysfunctional culture.
November 8, 2013 at 3:11 am
The “cure” for gayness—or even hoping there might be one— is Polonium-crusted Hate Thought.
November 8, 2013 at 1:51 pm
To be administered anally three times daily?
November 8, 2013 at 1:59 pm
So, as usual, Auster got there first. He mentioned that in the Liberal society one must be tolerant of everything with a recursive exception.
Tolerant of Everything except Extremely Intolerant of (Any position that is not consistent with the position of this statement)
So choices that demonstrate counter-liberal intolerances (gender, or sexual-orientation selective births or abortions), or any choice toward the Archetype Hero and away from the Progressive Anti-Stereotype Anti-Hero are themselves not to be tolerated.
They can only be temporarily endured / ignored if they are done by some other anti-hero identity group (Foreigners, Asians, Muslims), and even then, it’s only a cease-fire until these blameless but backward victims of the Hero either catch-up and converge to our morality or we have the opportunity and to nudge them into compliance.
So, I have to suspect the gays will win this one in the end by shaming people who express any desire for it, or doctors or companies who provide it. Probably, and despite the huge profit opportunity, people will be deterred from even inquiring into conducting the R&D. At least in the West, probably the Chinese will happily eat our lunch and pick up that $100 bill on the ground when we walk past it.
A few years ago I read about some progress in womb-environment-hormonal-stabilization research, which was thought to possibly make gays go extinct in a generation, but do you imagine that something like that would ever get FDA approval?
November 8, 2013 at 3:10 pm
Watching the vitriol between radical feminists and “trans” gendered people is also instructive in the same way. Rad-fems reject trans “women” (i.e. men who dress up like ladies and self-mutilate) because they say they are still men and therefore beneficiaries of the Patriarchy. The trans folks accuse rad-fems of discriminating against them. It amuses me to no end.
November 17, 2013 at 8:43 pm
Also, see what this does to the “I’m an X, who happens to be Y” construct. (Of course, Carlin did a classic routine based on this ‘Colin Powell is Openly White who Happens to be Black’)
The ‘who happens to be’ phrase was meant to signal that someone thought ‘Y’ was a feature that was irrelevant in the context and probably unimportant in general except in a few specific, but negligible instances.
But people can think of themselves this way, with the ‘happens to be’ emphasizing that Y is a mere characteristic, and not a primary element around which the individual builds his mulch-faceted venn-diagram identity. This is what I am, but That is just some feature which I happen to have. ‘I am an American who happens to be black’, ‘I am a lawyer, who happens to be deaf’, ‘I am an actor, who happens to be very tall’ – ‘I am an Englishman, who happens to be Catholic’ – ‘I am a Marine, who happens to be gay’ (that’s a new one if you add the ‘openly’).
Right Common-Local-Culturism (part of Multi-Zionism), emphasizes the significance of the common X and minimizes the import of the Y (so long as it doesn’t conflict with the ideal form of X). Of course, the ‘common X’ is inextricable from the Archetypal Hero, who represents the ideal personified manifestation of his group’s attributes.
But Progressivism does the opposite. It takes the ‘happens to be’ Y and makes that the prime identifier, and it either subordinates, or destroys the common X. ‘I am a deaf person, entitled to unquestioning and unlimited acceptance and accommodation as a deaf person, who happens to live in America.’
And to replace the Right-commonality, it provides two ideological meta-identifiers. ‘I am a Progressive, who believes in Universalism, who happens to be … etc.’ And of course one could equally say, “I am a Christian who happens to be …”
So it’s like Nietzsche said, one either aspires towards Heroism, or one opposes the Hero with an anti-hero ethos (or ‘slave morality’).
Since it is the nature of humanity and statistics for a majority of the population to fall far below the heroic ideal, it is always numerically easy to spread an anti-hero meme which salves the inferiority and justifies the urge for rebellion against heroic-authority within the masses.
So both systems provide their own coordination mechanisms. The Right gives his society a common image of the hero to aspire towards and rally around. A Superman King.
The Left gives the same image, but as a common enemy. Everyone self-defines in terms of a subculture constructed around their own distinct shortcoming (gay, deaf, etc.), but in general meta-identity of being a ‘progressive’ which defines the alliance of all sub-heroes against the hero.
November 8, 2013 at 7:03 pm
Oh, one more thing (I can’t resist)
Check out this old Moldbug comment at Auster’s place:
Just replace ‘Protestant’ with ‘Progressive’
In America we have all kinds of Progressives. Progressive Progressives, Deaf Progressives, Fat Progressives, Gay Progressives, Black Progressives, etc.
‘Progressive Progressives’ are successful SWPLs. That is, they actually resemble the Archetype Hero is most respects, and by claiming to reject the Hero that they personify in reality, they are the truest of all Progressives, natural leaders of all the defective anti-heroes who deny their own leadership status.
Like intelligentsia trying to overthrow the established elite in a pretense of organizing a revolution of the oppressed proletariat. Of course, they take the throne themselves, but pretend to merely be administering it for the benefit of the poor proles.
November 9, 2013 at 12:28 am
Indeed. “I need everyone to see me as Y first and foremost!” Where would victim identities be without narcissism as a psychological anchor?
November 16, 2013 at 8:51 pm