The idea of the victim is without moral agency is noxious. It removes the humanity from others. Such lives are fungible: others must do what is best for them. Gans notes with disapproval the troll logic that leads to this. .

I should add that though many Gramscian socialists are Jews, not all Jews are Gramscians. The religious know that salvation is for all, and so is moral agency. As son one said yesterday, the greatest gift we have is free will.

I would add we should not worship it.

The simpler the culture, the more crudely this is done. Calling people “racists” or “white supremacists” need only be demonstrated by the disparate impact of our income distribution; it is unconcerned with the roles these people play in the socio-economic order. Whence the spectacle of Harvard students—recently declared the most privileged college students of all by the WSJ—preparing for lucrative careers in the economy by holding up signs denouncing White Supremacy while Betsy DeVos was speaking in support of charter schools in poor neighborhoods.

Which is why I insist on the Gallicism victimary to describe the current program of the Left. The Left has always been victimary in the most general sense, since it sees the less fortunate as victims of firstness, but it has jettisoned the Marxist doctrine of the class struggle based on a structural theory of the “capitalist” economy for the binary Nazi-Jew model of difference-as-oppression. The details of the system of production are unimportant. Victims by definition have no agency; once the label has been affixed, their sufferings, defined simply by disparate impact, are “our” fault, the fault of white privilege.

Religions (and responsible political philosophies) have never accepted this kind of reasoning. The “Calvinism” noted in the previous Chronicle, if it were a truly religious doctrine, would apply to all, not just to “whites.” The ironic phrase, “soft racism of low expectations” describes the real racism that classifies victimary groups as ontologically inferior to the “privileged,” as so to speak too damaged to have a soul.

But this is not the case. All of us have moral agency. Bad things will happen to most of us: the mortality rate of our race remains 100 percent. We were made from dust, and to dust we would return. The gnostic idea that we can separate ourselves from our bodies and redefine our gender and sexuality and society is a lie: believing lies have consequences.

We are either all victims or there are no victims. And since I am a Calvinist, I would say we are all victims of the fall, and all broken. However, my theology is not accepted by the narrative: the fact they deny moral agency would mean that — by their definition of victims as sainted subhumans — there are no victims.

But maybe the two problems, as Gans seems to intuit, are one. In an overtly hierarchical order, the victimary, which depends upon the liberal’s sense that there’s always some unnoticed inequality he’s about to be called out for, would be impossible. In such an order, it would also be possible to ask, explicitly, what is the best way for humans to live, and how can we provide such a way? For example, what form of property ownership would promote self-sufficiency and authority in men, and devotion to family in women? Perhaps a return to homesteading would be best for some, and a case could be made for this on aesthetic as well as health grounds—a revival of craftsmanship and homegrown and hunted food. Maybe it’s hard for some to resist a smirk here, because homesteading as a “lifestyle choice” seems affected and “postmodern”—real homesteaders did it to survive, whereas this would have something of the Disney park to it. But if enough people turn to it, that would mean it is a question of survival, cultural and maybe physical, if the cities and suburbs become unlivable, or unaffordable for many. Maybe it will become the best way for those who are not rich to prevent obesity. Immigration can be essentially eliminated, and technological developments can be slowed down or even stopped or reversed for some purposes, in some areas—once we habituate ourselves to the sense that technology is a series of decisions, rather than an inexorable force, many things might be possible. There’s no reason to stand in a stupor and stare vacantly as millions of people are displaced by technology. Some as yet unanticipated technological and economic developments may take up some of the slack, but there’s no law saying how much.

A simpler way is to judge such by the consequences. The neo=traditionalists — the orthodox Jews, the Orthodox Christians, the Amish, the Latin Rite Catholics, the Hard Shell Baptists and the Muslims — breed. They grow families. The liberals are parasites aiming to corrupt our youth.

For they deny the mystery that is two genders, marriage, and motherhood.

The Mysteries Remain

The mysteries remain,
I keep the same
cycle of seed-time
and of sun and rain;
Demeter in the grass,
I multiply,
renew and bless
Bacchus in the vine;
I hold the law,
I keep the mysteries true,
the first of these
to name the living, dead;
I am the wine and bread.
I keep the law,
I hold the mysteries true,
I am the vine,
the branches, you
and you.

Hilda Doolittle

Do not be them. Do not be like them.