SEX IS NATURE'S LAST STAND
I’m reading up on the work of investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek. As with all things that either fit ‘the narrative’ or deviate from it, the first thing to do is to ascertain the facts, and gather as many facts as you can before forming a judgement. This is what she claims to have done. The second thing to do, then, is to check and corroborate the facts. That’s work for others, I have work of my own to do. But I shall continue to monitor.
Bilek’s investigations caught my eye for the reason it dovetails neatly into two crucial aspects of my own work: essentialism and the critique of the corporate form.
To take essentialism first, essentialism holds that a thing is something essentially and essentially something, a substance with a nature and a potential that takes realised healthy form in order to flourish. It’s an ancient notion, dating back to Aristotle, and is considered outmoded in this day and age. Given the insanities and inanities of the current age, I don’t take that criticism to be decisive, quite the opposite. The common picture of essences as things that are timeless and fixed is a caricature that bears no relation to how they exist in the thought of Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx. That’s a debate for another place. Suffice to say here that the essentialism which plays a central role in my thought is not a biologism. It doesn’t assert a fixed and unchanging human nature, but does argue that there is such a thing as a human nature, which is unfolded creatively throughout historically specific and ever changing social relations. There is, therefore, no sense of naturalising what is properly socialised and historicised, effectively identifying aspects of human nature with specific social relations and roles (‘a woman’s place is in the home’ to take an obvious example). The problem is that the assault on false fixities such as these has been so generalised as to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The result, as Kathleen Stock and others are now acknowledging, is that biology and the reality of biological sex is threatened. Feminists like Stock are concerned with the implications of this with respect to women’s rights. The point to be made with reference to my own work is this: whilst essentialism is not biologism, it does incorporate and defend biological reality to present a normative understanding of human flourishing which is premised in a historically and socially unfolded human nature. The destabilisation and subversion of sexuality and, with it, women’s rights, has been made possible by the metaphysical disarmament that the rejection of a normative essentialism involves. To put the point simply, natural science requires metaphysics for its very possibility. It’s not an intellectually fashionable view, but just see how difficult it has become to defend biological reality against those who would subvert it.
Determining the identity of these subversives brings me to the second aspect of my work: the corporate form. This is where things get ‘interesting.’ Some would say ‘conspiratorial.’ Which is why I premised these comments on a commitment to ascertain and corroborate the facts of the matter. My critique of the corporate form is based on my participation on the economics masters at Keele University in 1995. I published two volumes of my researches from that time, entitled Europe and the Corporate Restructuring of the Global Political Economy.’ My thesis was steeped in an extensive reading of the literature. I don’t know how many books, papers, and articles are contained in the bibliography, but that bibliography amounts to some 14,000 words.
To put the point directly, when we look at the crisis being engineered with respect to sex and gender, we can be sure that there is big money and power behind it. In my thesis of 1995, I argued that the old political clash between capitalism and socialism, between free markets, private property, and individual liberty on the one hand and state control, social ownership, cooperation and the socialised individual on the other would be eclipsed by the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form. Involving much more than the transnational corporations and corporate power, the corporate form describes an entire social formation, rerigging norms of governance, the functioning of polities, the nature and scope of law, media, the division of labour, identities, the nature of the family and so on. In my thesis of 1995 I wrote on refashioning culture and society to bring about the ‘post-society,’ the fabrication of new identities, and the corporatisation of public life and private business.
It has come to pass. The interesting - and worrying - thing is how many are oblivious to the corporate push for a totalising control over bodies, as part of an attempt to achieve the final enclosure of the global commons, falling for the ideological covering of human rights. Sex and biology are being moved over to the tech. sector as a matter of deliberate strategy, and many are cheering it on as an advance in human rights. As more and more people come to be absorbed into a war between competing and rival rights, the final enclosure and commodification of nature under the corporate form proceeds apace. At the end of the process lies the corporate control of nature within and without. Where, I ask, are the Foucauldians of Academia. All through the seventies and eighties much was made of Michel Foucault’s warning of a biopolitics. Now that it is here, the Foucauldians have all gone suspiciously quiet. I, as an essentialist, supposedly eclipsed by Foucault, am still standing and am raising my voice loud and clear. It seems I was right all along: essences are our best defence against totalitarian tyranny.
What is most remarkable is how very few people have expressed the slightest scepticism as the gay rights movement has exploded from being a small, persecuted group on the margins of society into becoming a powerful force at the heart of the establishment, sponsored and promoted by every major institution and given enormous public prominence. That’s quite the political triumph, something quite unique in the history of Leftist and radical political movements. And it all happened with a rapidity that cannot but have us asking where this huge triumph has come from and why. And, more to the point, who or what lies behind it? A righteous cause? I’ve been involved in a few, and still remain on the margins of the dominant culture. There is clearly some significant political influence and financial muscle behind such a movement, explaining its huge influence in politics, media, education, and business.
How else? The justness of the cause? If only it were true. I support many just causes. No just cause ever triumphs so spectacularly so easily without money and power behind. Those who see this as a human rights movement advancing the cause of the marginalised are not looking deeply enough. They are engaging in wishful thinking. They are so happy to see a cause they favour succeeding that they don’t care to seek the reasons why – the reasons why the advances they celebrate will be snatched from them once the job of destabilisation is done. This is a technocratic corporate strategy to capture, colonise, and commodify human sexuality, eliminating the natural sex binary to place human reproduction under the control of the tech. sector.
Outlandish?
If my analysis of the corporate form in 1995 is correct, then it could come as no surprise that the refashioning of society, culture, and identity would come to incorporate sexuality. We should also associate the extension of the corporate form with the intellectual fashions of the age. In the 1980s Frederic Jameson described postmodernism as ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism.’ That logic is fundamentally anti-realist: it is the logic of the corporate form. We are witnessing an attempt at the final enclosure of the global commons, something that has been in the capital system’s DNA since its incipience. There is no economic system in history that is more transgressive of nature than the capital system. In After Theory, Marxist Terry Eagleton writes:
No way of life in history has been more in love with transgression and transformation, more enamoured of the hybrid and pluralistic, than capitalism. In its ruthlessly instrumental logic, it has no time for the idea of nature. (Eagleton 2003, pp.118-119).
I make a point of identifying Eagleton as a Marxist here (and Frederic Jameson, mentioned earlier, too), for the reason that even to raise these issues in the current cultural climate is to invite charges of being ‘far right.’ Marx would most certainly be identified as ‘far right’ on account of his essentialist metaphysics. There is something badly off here, and the fact that supposed Leftists and radicals can’t smell it might be the most worrying thing of all. They’ve been manacled by their own dreams and desires. Captured by corporate elites.
We now have corporations, banks, law firms, educational institutions, and billionaire philanthropists promoting the idea that the sex binary doesn’t exist and that we are all located on a sex spectrum.
Behind this deconstruction of the sex binary stand large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Intel, Salesforce, Amazon and others. How else could this narrative have come to be have driven so deeply, so relentlessly, into our culture, running through every social institution. People have been coerced into compliance. Human beings are social beings and find it comfortable being excluded, ostracised, and marginalised. Many will go along just to get along, and enough will do so for the strategy of asserting that 2 + 2 = 5 will be carried through to the end of insanity. Pushed to its illogical conclusion, human production will no longer proceed through copulation and gestation, but through technology owned by powerful corporate interests. When one hand is always being waved provocatively in your face, may it a rule to find out what the other hand is doing. The public spectacle of the LGBT political apparatus has diverted attention from the very permissive forces opening every door to ensure those on the margins a short while ago are now in the centre ground. That apparatus has been coopted and so have all those who support it, through the understandable belief that the principal driver is the concern for human rights. A lot of that support is passive, to the extent that people will express agreement with things that cost them nothing and make them look good. Such support is easily coopted to become something cowardly and complicit when the inevitable clashes between rival rights come. Note well the complete silence such people when it comes to transgressions on women’s sports and spaces. This is where the human rights cover comes to be blown. Jon Stryker of the Arcus Foundation - an international charitable foundation focused on issues related to LGBT rights, social justice, ape conservation, and environmental preservation - is heir to the Stryker Medical Corporation, which is worth $133 billion. The Arcus Foundation is the largest LGBT NGO in the world. The second largest is the Gill Foundation. Its founder, Tim Gill, founder also of Quark, Inc. is a tech. entrepreneur who is also a philanthropist and LGBTQ rights activist. There are others. These people are driving the narrative that the sex binary is not real and that sex exists on a spectrum.
The only thing to consider is whether this is no more than powerful interests supporting a popular cause to curry public favour or whether these powerful interests are engineering that ‘popularity’ in the first place. Looking at how extensive and how entrenched in every social institution this narrative has become, we are surely entitled to believe that this has all occurred as a matter of corporate design. Or is it just organic, spontaneous, ‘society’ waking up one day and deciding to indulge the odds on the margins. Or some of the ‘odds,’ anyway. I’ve yet to be indulged in anything like a similar fashion, quite the opposite. As for ‘ordinary’ folk who have fought for equality and democracy and decent wages and conditions for centuries, forget it. Working class men and women are, as ever, on the receiving end of the scorn and vitriol of the dominant culture. The people who work hardest for the least return are still treated with contempt. This should cause us to pause and ask some very political questions. Questions of political economy.
The idea that the corporations, like the general public, are just offering passive support, associating themselves with a popular cause, is fanciful. The superrich are never so passive and always have an agenda – that’s how they make and keep their billions. This is where the corporate form enters the picture. At the heart of the narrative is the transhumanist paradigm that proposes a merging of human beings and technology. The corporations are in on this, so, too, the banks. The human species is being removed from its biological matrix through an ever greater fusion with technology until in the end no nature exists. This is transhumanism as an inhumanism, and people are inclined to support its public face on account of believing it to be about securing the human rights of the marginalised. It is not, but embracing that illusion is so much more comforting than confronting the monstrous reality that lies behind it. There is substantial research being done into the possibility of ‘growing’ children outside of women’s bodies. This, along with surrogacy, is predicted to become a billion-dollar industry in the very near future. If we are shocked, we shouldn’t be remotely surprised – the enclosure and commodification of nature, including human nature, has been on the cards since the great disembedding beginning in the sixteenth century and accelerating in the seventeenth century. As Roger Kingdon writes in Self-Made Man and His Undoing:
We too have set out on a lemming path… Drawn further and further out of our biological matrix we have become more and more dependent on an all-embracing but loveless technology to see us through. Under this impassive influence we have become orphans of our own technology.
This is, indeed, the ‘undoing’ of the human species. And the principal agency of this undoing is not a generalised ‘we’ but very specific forces within the global political economy. ‘We’ the people are being undone. And enough of us are cheering it on at level of public imagery as to make ultimate self-destruction more than likely, if not inevitable. ‘We’ can still turn back. I recall sociologist Max Weber writing somewhere that sex is nature’s last gasp. I can’t quite remember his argument, but that sentiment rings all too true. Winston, the principal character of George Orwell’s 1984, understood well the revolutionary po1984tential of sex and sexuality, seeing the efforts the Party made in the attempt to suppress a natural instinct. The Party is anti-sex because suppressed sexual energy can be transferred into marches and rallies, those machines on legs: ‘The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.’ The age is premised on an anti-realism in philosophy, an anti-humanism in politics, and an anti-sexuality in practice.
Why do people go along with this? ‘We’ the people still on nodding terms with our natures are acquiescing as a few billionaires engineering the corporate control of the world are declaring the end of nature, the end of nature within as well as without. Again, we may be shocked, but shouldn’t be surprised. As I argued at length in my book Of Gods and Gaia: Men as Gods Gambling with Gaia (2011), men – and here I do mean men - have always sought to master nature, and have developed technologies to that end. Jennifer Bilek comments here: ‘they think they are creating God with technology.’ They think they are becoming as gods through their technology. Stewart Brand opens his book Whole Earth Discipline with the quote: ‘We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.’ Mark Lynas entitles his book The God Species. I feel there is no need to add any further comment here. Dismantling and dissolving binary sex patterns, fusing with technology, and growing babies outside of women’s bodies is deemed ‘progressive. And it will be imposed on society and normalised by way of relentless propaganda and pressure. Are these people mad? Are you mad? The information is out there. If you can’t join the dots, just follow the money and power, and ask ‘who benefits.’
The many activists who are out there chanting about human rights are human rights are tools and fools. There is a rights industry led by a political apparatus, and this is being used as a battering ram to enter public life, to be colonised and transformed within.
War is being waged on truth, reality, and a basic decency that was once common to all and, we hope, may still be. The universal standards of truth and justice are being dissolved in favour of a differential pragmatics, paving the way for a preferential hierarchy. A common humanity is being sliced and diced according to groups and identities, with each being turned against others in such a way as to weaken all. It shouldn't have to take the time and talent of so many people to have to assert basic facts we learned as toddlers, but that is what is happening as we are increasingly drawn into a war of attrition against those who are systematically denying basic truth.
There is something else at work here, behind the public noise, something even more ugly and sinister than the controversy itself. If your aim is to unglue society and collapse it, what better way is there to that end than to create such unjust divisions and resentment? And what, we need to ask, is the end of that ungluing?
Rather than exchanging facts for lies in an endless public exchange, we need to ask who is pushing these lies, enabling the most iniquitous of practices, and ask why. It is a waste of time calling it out as nonsense – the people pushing the agenda are out to destroy the very standards your truth-claims appeal to. The strategists of money and power don't care for statements of fact, still less for morality, fairness, and decency. Biology is being dismantled and commodified, moved to the tech. sector. When you see nonsense being repeated on a systematic basis, capturing the institutional and cultural fabric, ask who is pushing and enabling it and ask why. This is not happening by accident. It is persistent and consistent, indicating a deliberate and organised plan of action. Somebody somewhere wants it for some reason. If you want to know who and why, a good place to start looking is money and power. Many things - biology in this instance - are dismantled in order to be moved to the corporate tech. sector. This is business and politics, money and power: and such things are immune to statements of fact.
Follow the money and power: ask where the resources fuelling the movement are coming from and ask why. In researching the question, make a point of finding out what other investments the key protagonists are also involved in. And as you start to see the connections, you start to draw the right conclusions. The research for these transhuman – post-biological - technologies are already underway. Technological reproduction over against sexual reproduction stands poised to become a multi-billion dollar industry, surrogacy, too. Reproductive sex is being dismantled in order to remove reproduction to the tech sector. Children are being taught that they are mere compartmentalized parts, not merely machines that can be put together in various ways, but commodities that can be bought and sold on the market. The idea of whole and properly functioning biological systems, the bedrock of any normative essentialism that points in the direction of human flourishing, is being systematically extinguished.
And female sexuality – women’s rights and spaces, women’s whole sexual identity – is in the front line for destruction, with the rights of marginalised groups used as a cover and battering ram. Who can deny the claims of each and all, especially the marginalised, to have human rights? These events are not happening organically, they are being engineered by certain people with certain ends in view.
My work on ‘rational freedom’ sought to return politics to its original, ancient, conception as a concern with realising and maintaining the human good. The eudaimonistic notions of happiness as flourishing are grounded in a philosophical anthropology that holds that there is such a thing as human nature, and that nature comes with healthy potentials that are to be actualised. That view holds that human rights are more than mere political constructs, reducing to power, but are natural rights, possessions of each and all, grounded in natural law. Natural rights and natural law give us a transcendent standard to appeal to when challenging power and demanding justice in the public realm. When metaphysical assumptions are discarded, rights become mere functions of political power, to be conferred by the state, and withheld or withdrawn just as easily. In the natural law tradition, the creation of human rights structures is designed to enhance and orient human biological reality in a normative sense. This is central to the view of a ‘rational’ freedom and happiness. To create a human rights structure in denial of the reality of human biology is irrational from this standpoint. But not from the perspective of corporate interests. Once we understand this it becomes clear why the corporate world would come to enable and support (for now) what five minutes ago most people would have seen as perversion and fetishism. The idea that the corporate behemoths astride the world are suddenly part of the rainbow connection would appear to be too fanciful even for the most incredulous. But that’s the situation we find ourselves in.
We live in a virtual reality as an unreality pocket. Society has been subjected to the hard marketing and psychic force of a political apparatus for the best part of a decade, and large areas of public life and culture, including law, media, and social institutions, have been captured. It’s too soon to say that the population’s mind has also been captured. Here, it is more accurate to say that a constant coercion, hectoring, and bullying is forcing compliance, with people keeping their heads down in the hope that the storm will blow away one day. It won’t.
Reality will one day be restored. But reality in what form? The reality of nature and innate human essences? Or the reality of money and power? A new world is being engineered, and is to be presented as a de facto reality beyond challenge, intervention, and alteration. In seeking an answer to those questions, one cannot but be discouraged by the ability of ostensibly intelligent people to rationalize realities away or, more often than not, turn them on their head. Karl Marx is quoted as comparing the actions of phoney rebels as akin to slapping your grandmother in the face. An age of activism against soft targets that can’t or won’t fight back has enabled them to do it daily, keeping up a war of attrition against … against who? The establishment is so permissive that it is hard to distinguish between constant protest and constant celebration? The public, certainly. Specific members of the public, specific targets. The rebels risk nothing; they are attacking targets that are already destroyed. A true rebel risks something of themselves, including, often, the life, liberty, and happiness of their entire person. It takes courage to denounce injustice and tyranny. When you are applauded by political leaders, praised by the press, and sponsored by the corporations, you are not rebels fighting the establishment: you are the establishment. These are the most subsidised rebels in history, supported from every purse, public and private, supported by every major organisation. Their rebellion is an official rebellion – targeted against those groups and institutions who stand in the way of complete control. When being subversive is the norm, there is nothing left to subvert. The problem with the endless transgression of boundaries is that the day will come when there are no boundaries left to transgress – and transgression loses all its meaning. That’s possibly overly pessimistic. Old boundaries tend to be replaced by new. It would be a mistake to see the organised spectacles of the West as irreligious. In truth, they symbolise the ascendancy of a new religion, one that is big on sin, demands public obedience, as well as public contrition, but with the excommunication of cancellation in the place of mercy and forgiveness. There are no redemptive qualities here, the constant public declarations of universal love and inclusivity being only for the chosen ones – those who rank higher of the hierarchy of preferred identities.
What we see in public display is a dramatic rendering of a sustained trend: the usurping of ‘traditional’ moral standards by the dispiriting belief system of the corporate elite. Indeed, if you want to be cancelled today, forget mocking Christianity, try referring to a ‘transwoman’ as ‘he’, and try protesting the encroachment of males in women’s sports and spaces. If its blasphemy that people want, against targets that fight back with the full force of the state, then try saying transwomen are men, drag queens should stay out of schools, and offer myriad more challenges to the new orthodoxy besides. The target is wide, and yet none of the daily rebels seeks to hit it. They seem not even to see it. Where are the Voltaires of today? Being tame and cowardly attacking Voltaires long dead enemies of old. They are on the right side of the political discourse; they perform the remarkable psychological feat of presenting themselves as plucky outsiders fighting an overbearing establishment when they are the establishment. They won’t be going to prison; instead, they’ll be sending others to prison, and thinking themselves rebellious free-thinkers as they do.
Biology, like most everything else, is being modified and commodified, turned into mere material for making money. The surprise is that anyone is surprised. The capital system knows no limits and respects no boundaries, turning all that is solid into something malleable, manipulable, and exploitable.
The capital system is an organised disembedding, presented as a ‘liberation’ – a liberation of human beings as discrete individuals from tradition, the community, from social ties and bonds, customs, polity, religion – all of which are condemned as constraints upon and obstacles standing in the way of freedom. The freedom of the discrete individual pursuing self-interest.
‘Transhumanist science will free women from their biological clocks,’ reads the headline in Quartz. We could reverse this to read: ‘transhumanist science will free reproduction from women,’ and free money and power from biological reality. In 2012 I wrote the book Of Gods and Gaia, the subtitle of which is ‘men as gods gambling with Gaia.’ Technology is the instrument of self-deification. The conquest of nature will end in the end of nature. The end of biological nature is the end of humanity.
Nature and human nature are being removed from the hands of ‘Mother Nature’ and placed in the hands of corporations and their technologies. This is evolution in the sense that it is in keeping with the basic drive of the capital system to expropriate and use all things within the global commons, people included. But it is an engineered rather than organic evolution, a development that contradicts and impairs inherent and natural potentials.
To conclude: biological sex is not a spectrum, there are only two sexes in humans.
Assertions otherwise are a matter of culture and technics, reality of another order.
Sex is nature’s last stand.
And you can take that as my general statement on the systematic and coordinated effort to 'deconstruct' and destroy all stable markers across social and cultural life. People are wasting their time and energy protesting each and every infraction of established norms and practices. I have no intention of repeating myself. It is a deliberate attempt to wear people down and demoralise them in a war of attrition. It is much better to avoid the lesser battles and fight the entire war itself, by rooting out the real enemy and not its servants and proxies. With every deliberate violation of norms and standards, respond not merely by expressing outrage and stating facts, but by tracing the violation of truth, reality, and morality to source - and joining with others to expose the instigators. Ask 'who benefits?' and follow the money and power.
I posted on the push for 'assisted dying' on social media, making my protests clear, and was met with the almost complete silence of 'progressive' friends. I think many are genuinely lost, mired in their own delusions. But some choose to be lost, closing their eyes to awkward facts that contradict their benign self-image. The poor, the weak, the vulnerable will be targeted, but 'progressives' have long since turned their back on the great public, openly mocking them for their lack of education. They express scorn for people who are not like them. I locate it in the loss of a genuine metaphysics grounded in God, a metaphysics which affirms the equality in union of each and all. This is being supplanted by a differential pragmatics, academese for preferential treatment in a hierarchy of identities. That hierarchy will prevail in the short term before it, too, its destructive job done, is discarded. Throughout history, those aiming at power have used 'mobs' of various kinds to undermine and uproot resistance from established groups. Once the work of destruction is done, the 'mobs' are swept from the stage, leaving us face to face with tyranny. Once God goes, so too does humanity. Everything reduces to power. It is remarkable - and worrying - seeing people who think themselves kind and enlightened complicit in a blatant inhumanism, which fits a technocratic corporate nihilism like a glove. What we are seeing here are the consequences of the neo-paganisation of our culture. Infanticide and euthanasia were common practices in the pagan world. They are returning with a vengeance in these times of technocratic gods.
A final comment on feminists who defend females only in the most partial of ways to end with.
Where are these feminists when little girls are getting their breasts chopped off for political and ideological purposes, by people who are shoving this gender ideology down their throats, without ever considering they may be temporarily depressed or permanently lesbian or autistic? Where are these feminists when girls and women are being forced to compete against boys and men in a range of sports, losing awards, losing places on teams, to the point where they wind up partially paralysed with permanent nerve damage? The only time you see them here is when they are condemning the bigotry of those who do stand up for girls and women, or when they dismiss sport as a mere leisure activity of no particular importance in the wider scale of things. These feminists have other priorities, priorities which are allied to a political cause, and only very partially and preferentially related to the female sex. They are tools and fools. A good rule of thumb is to set all issues and controversies within their political economy, and trace the links and connections that lead to money and power.
You can find me and my work on Being and Place on my "Writing Voice" Author Page. I invite readers to visit the site and 'like.'
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