At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter recounts an odd but revealing experience with a young progressive entity:
Image by Paul Jackson
Some years ago I was provided a fascinating psychological experience in the form of a young graduate student in the English literature program, whom I encountered because they (you heard me) was (God that’s grammatically awkward) married to a colleague. She (I’m not doing this anymore) specialized in the study of propaganda, by which of course she meant everything her backwards conservative parents in Nowhere, Nebrahoma believed, and not anything she believed. One evening, after enthusiastically explaining the symbolism of the inverted pentagram tattooed on her shoulder, she informed me with invincible confidence that not only was gender an arbitrary social construction, but that even the idea of biological sex was nothing more than convention. Her reasoning, which I presume she’d gleaned from a seminar on radically liberatory queer theory, was that testosterone levels fluctuated during the day, so “males” changed their degree of “maleness” all the time, and how can something that’s constantly changing be used as the basis for a hard binary distinction?
“But that’s not how biological sex is defined,” I replied. “Testosterone is just a hormone. It’s only present in vertebrates. Insects don’t have it, and neither do plants, but they still have biological sex. Sex is defined according to whether an organism produces mobile gametes or sessile gametes, which is basically universal across multicellular life forms.”
“I don’t understand what that means,” she chirped, still thinking we were playing language games. “Like I don’t know what a ‘sessile gamete’ is.”
“Oh,” I responded helpfully, “A gamete is just a reproductive cell. Sessile means it doesn’t move. So –”
The horrible reality of what I was saying dawned upon her. “I just realized that this isn’t a conversation I should be having,” she cut me off, and walked away.
It was remarkable. The mindworm parasitizing her consciousness had detected a threat to its structural integrity, and ordered its host to remove herself from the interaction before she consumed a malinformative infohazard. She didn’t even pretend that this wasn’t what she was doing. I’d never before seen something quite like it.
There’s a long-standing joke that liberals don’t know things, that their entire worldview seems to be formed by the ersatz experiences of visual entertainment. When they discuss the war in Ukraine, they express it in terms of Marvel comic book movies or Star Wars; when thinking of President Trump, in terms of Harry Potter. Black people are all wise and benevolent and great dancers because this is what Fresh Prince and Morgan Freeman told them; white men are all inbred stupid Klansmen because of Mississippi Burning and Roots; girls are just as strong as boys (stronger, actually) because Black Widow kicks butt; and so on. Even their favourite point of historical reference – World War Two, the Nazis, Hitler – seems to be almost entirely a palimpsest of Steven Spielberg movies like Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List.
It isn’t just that they use fictional references as metaphors or allusions. That’s a very human thing to do, and the right is certainly no stranger to Tolkien analogies. But liberals seem to do this a lot, with only the most tenuous connection back to reality. Their inner world is a series of self-referential fantasies. The right uses fictional references as metaphors to explain facts; the left substitutes fictional metaphors for facts, and then forgets that it does this.
The recent Netflix drama Adolescence is a striking case in point. It portrays the fictional story of a 13-year-old white boy who stabs a female classmate to death because his brain was twisted into a pretzel by exposure to the incel subculture over social media. Following its premier, the British government has been using it to gin up a moral panic, with calls to censor social media to tackle the urgent problem of toxic masculinity.
