AGAINST NATURE

 

 

A British school teacher was recently caught on audiotape telling two female students that their view of sex and gender – that there were only two of each – was bigoted. ‘Bigotry’ is an unshakeable adherence to an idea or opinion, and you might be hard-pressed to find a better definition of nature.

You may throw nature out with a pitchfork, Horace famously wrote in the Epistles, but she will always come back. Nature is a reference grid, a matrix, a pantheistic yardstick, a preset calibration against which we can measure and compare such things as morphology and normative behaviour. Once you apply your pitchfork, Horace would say that it was just a matter of time before nature re-equilibriates, but there is a new generation of genuine influencers – not the worthless, low-IQ internet kind but the ones who teach children – who refuse to countenance this return.

This is a very strange time to be alive. State-sanctioned curation of the truth is not new, the Communists made a science out of it, but the sternest, most brutal despots never told their people that women could be men on a whim and must be respected as such on pain of punishment. Taking the fight to the epistemological is a new angle, and is of course the meaning of the torture scene at the end of 1984, In which it is not O’Brien’s aim to force Winston to say he sees five fingers where there are four, he is not after mere token acquiescence. He wants Winston actually to see five fingers.

What this new epistemological environment means for intelligent children is all too clear. Punished for expressing biological truths, they will soon learn that they cannot advance without agreeing to a whole new load of terms and conditions, ones that apply not to buying a phone but to life in general.

If you have no final arbiter for what is and is not true in the world, an epistemological guarantee, then you a in a weightless arena with nothing to grasp and ground yourself. Once one natural category is disregarded, the others are equally vulnerable.