Biden executor of the radical agenda, but this time identity politics infuriates feminists
One of the first measures of the new president Joe Biden has raised fierce protests from many American feminists, including some who have always been part of the most progressive and "radical" groups deployed to protect the rights of the fair sex. How is all this possible? the reader will ask. Perhaps the democratic politician already a supporter of the rights and promoter of the dignity of all people in some way socially and legally disadvantaged, obviously including women, has suddenly turned into a male-dominated president, capable of passing over without too much regard to the legitimate female grievances?
None of this. Indeed, we could say that the feminists' protests for the violation of those they rightly consider to be the fundamental rights of women derive precisely from President Biden's consistency with the principles of politically correct, a consistency carried to its extreme consequences. The explanation of this apparent paradox lies in an elementary principle of logic and even of mathematics, the one on the basis of which two negations affirm, a principle so stringent that despite all the almost "messianic" confidence in the dogmas that are so fashionable today that they require " do not discriminate "anyone, and despite all the propaganda, whether in the media or otherwise, in favor of the same one cannot avoid clashing with it, since inevitably two prohibitions on discriminating united together, if not harmonized with each other, lead to effective discrimination to the detriment of many people often in some respects worse than that which would occur if the both prohibitions did not exist.
But so that the speech does not seem too abstract, we come to Biden's measure. Among the first acts adopted after his entry into office, the president issued an "executive order", that is a kind of circular not having the force of law, but binding for all public structures dependent on the federal government of the United States, as well as suitable for condition the work of entities financed directly or indirectly by them (including many universities and associations that manage sports activities), which prohibits discrimination based on "gender" in sport. The provision itself is not as binding as a real law, but the feminists who have risen against it fear not wrongly that it leads in a "soft" way to a gradual admission to female competitions of physically male human beings who claim to consider themselves female, such as transsexuals or "transgenders" . With the easily predictable result that the latter would be the ones to win almost all of the competitions. Those who, like this writer, are now differently young will remember that at the turn of the 70s and 80s many women's Olympic competitions (especially in the swimming and track and field sectors) were dominated by competitors from the then Germany of the 'East, many of which, almost certainly stuffed with hormones and other forbidden substances, sported decidedly masculine bodies, so much so that some pure sportsmen ruled: "Just looking at them would be disqualified." Today, if President Biden's order were brought to its final consequences, hormones would no longer be needed: to stock up on medals and awards, in cash and otherwise (think of the system of university scholarships linked to sport, very much widespread in the United States), the muscles given to them by mother nature would be enough for transsexual and / or transgender competitors. Some feminists have argued, perhaps exaggerating a little (but not too much) that this will lead to the "end of women's sport."
The subject itself is apparently "light", and in another era dominated by different cultural principles, perhaps it would have even lent itself to being the subject for a humorous film. Now that, unfortunately, the sense of humor and comic jokes are increasingly replaced by sarcasm and the search for the best way to ridicule those who think differently, this path seems closed. In any case, in the opinion of the writer, Biden's provision itself should not be overestimated in its content: in a system such as the American one, the solution of the relationship between the different individual rights in conflict with each other is up to the judges, that is to say the operators. of law and not to the protagonists of politics. To single women who feel their rights to compete and more generally to play sports (think of the delicate problem of the use of common changing rooms) only together with people physically belonging to the same sex and university and / or sports institutions that they will want to uphold these principles there will certainly be no lack of opportunities or opportunities, thanks to the support of law firms, think tanks and other social structures, to assert their positions in court, and it will probably be the legal experience made up of decisions on individual cases to define the mutual limits of the rights of the various subjects (physically female persons and transsexual and / or transgender persons ).
Faced with the executive order of the president, however, the impression remains, let it be said with all due respect, of a choice contrary to the most elementary rules of logic, and above all contrary to common sense, that common sense which, as supported by the tradition of Scottish Enlightenment (from Adam Smith to Adam Ferguson) represents the fundamental touchstone in relation to which human choices must always be evaluated. One wonders how it is possible that a politician with long experience like Biden, considered after all a moderate within the Democratic Party, could have taken such a decision, and even more upstream how it is possible that his collaborators, including certainly there are scholars and experts of value, we have suggested or have in any case endorsed this choice. One explanation can be found in the ever-increasing diffusion among the Western ruling classes (including the political ones) of a mentality inclined to decline in a substantially negative sense a large part of ethical, social and political values, a mentality on the basis of which, for example, rather than guarantee the equality between people, differences must not be created between them, more than promoting the integration of immigrants, nobody should be rejected, more than protecting individual life choices, nothing should be imposed on anyone. This negative reversal of the values even of the noblest ones, in which there is a component that we can rightly define "nihilist", which aims to consider only the (inevitable) negative aspects of individual and social human reality, that is to say so to say only the empty part of the glass even when it is almost full to the brim represents perhaps one of the greatest dangers for the future development of Western civilization according to the liberal and democratic "guidelines" inherited from the Christian tradition.
What has just been said does not seem an exaggeration: the order of President Biden represents an alarm bell because the vision of society based on values declined in the negative, even if it aims to protect the subjective situation of each, ends up on the contrary to destroy individuals individuals as such because it piles them into a sort of growing scale of discrimination (a scale established by authority by groups of more or less "enlightened" subjects) where the protection of each one depends on the position occupied in the scale itself and where its rights and obligations do not belong to him as his own but are variable in relation to other groups, and to the position that the latter in turn occupy among the discriminated against (real or considered as such by the aforementioned "enlightened"). Thus, for example, on the basis of this view of things, women are protected towards men who consider themselves to be male, but not towards men who consider themselves transgender ; the latter are defended against people of Western culture but not against Islamic fundamentalists who, on the basis of their principles, would condemn them to infamous or even capital punishment; Black citizens may blame white citizens harshly for various reasons but they cannot criticize illegal immigrants in any way, and examples of this kind of negative relativism could continue. If this way of reasoning prevails, civil life would risk shattering into a series of human and social "niches" more or less protected by particular rules depending on the characteristics of the individual groups to which they belong, once again defined in negative terms (non-Western subjects , non-white subjects, non-sexually univocal subjects, non-male subjects, etc.) and these rules would end up replacing those that "positively" govern (certainly imperfectly, sometimes discriminatory and unjust, but the glass is far fuller that empty) relations between human beings.
The greatest cultural achievement in Western history has undoubtedly been the "invention" of the individual as such as a central figure of social relations and of the state as a political community of individuals, two realities that could not exist one without the other. : outside Western culture, almost always all aspects of the existence of individuals are subject to the mandatory rules of groups (family, tribal, religious and / or professional communities) to which human beings belong by birth and from which they cannot detach themselves if not under penalty of heavy sanctions and often of "civil death", and almost always the same groups manage public power (as well as the most important economic activities) as their own thing. The concept of the individual, which allows us to unite the needs of equality between human beings and that of respect for personal differences, was worked out with difficulty (despite many uncertainties, contradictions, backtracking and failures) first by the Western Christian tradition and then from modern liberal thought and has always been the flag of the supporters of the classic battles for civil rights, particularly in the United States: think of the "dream" of Martin Luther King jr. of a society where people are valued "for the content of their character".
Throwing overboard, in the name of the "negative" protection of the various "identity" groups, this whole tradition that leads to the enhancement of the human being as such precisely because the differences between people based on objective human and social realities are respected, it would end up causing enormous damage to everyone, including those who would like to protect themselves. President Biden's provision is worrying not so much for its content in itself as for the mentality of which it proves to be an expression, a mentality that can lead to dangerous results for Western societies, particularly if taken up in those countries (including ours) where there are no "strong" legal restrictions on the excesses of political power typical of Anglo-Saxon and American culture in particular.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/biden-esecutore-dellagenda-radicale-ma-stavolta-la-identity-politics-fa-infuriare-le-femministe/ on Mon, 08 Feb 2021 05:01:00 +0000.