We’re going to get into some icky and uncomfortable topics here. I’m sorry, but we need to. I hold what I’m saying here to be moderate.
The people who have always resorted to the “trust the science” argument are in for a very rude awakening as “the science” begins to vindicate right-wing viewpoints about almost everything. This has already started. The idea that Gettr was thinking about collecting sperm is probably the Chinese trying to get their hands on the genetic material of Americans. How much information on American conservatives has China gained through that company? What exactly is Jason Miller’s problem?
There’s that crypto project out in Silicon Valley, that uses iris scans for identity verification. That’s about building a database of irises to track people. On whose behalf, it’s hard to say, but it’s probably not America’s.
In a similar way, Charlie Javice’s project, for which she may go to prison, is about gathering data on young Americans. It takes five minutes to fill out a FAFSA, a company that does it for you is exactly the sort of picayune garbage that doesn’t constitute real innovation, which has become insanely common in our low interest-rate environment. Silicon Valley is full of this stuff, and a lot of it is a national security risk. Especially when they’re gathering data on our children.
Time will tell whether the genetics problem is, like many other things, Schmittian, and the only way to counter the foreign collection of genetic material is to build an American genetic database. I don’t especially want to live in a world defined by the logic of Carl Schmitt, but it does in fact seem like that’s where we are. We’ve lived in a Schmittian state of exception my entire adult life, thanks to the Bush administration.
Even if you look at the liberal arts, like history, the major methodological revolutions of the past few decades have been surname analysis, genetics, and the analysis of business records. A lot of resources in the history profession have been poured into using these methods to study the history of American slavery. But baked into these methods are assumptions about the world that are, well, not exactly left-wing. (We’re going to cover soon a book that applies a very illiberal method of history writing—the dynastic history—to America, because I think this is probably a better way.)
This could be applied to a reparations scheme that actually makes sense. How fine-grained do you want to get? A recent Nigerian immigrant has no claim on reparations, and they don’t need them—Nigerians prosper in America even more than Indians do (and they’re pretty conservative, as most Africans are). But you could genetically test descendants of American slaves, and even compensate them according to their proportion of slave ancestry, thereby writing into American law all those categories it’s offensive to even say today—the “quadroon,” and so forth. We very much have the knowledge and technical ability to do this. I guess I have to ask, do you really want to go there?
All of this is going to call into question a lot of fundamental assumptions about liberal society, the biggest one of which is ultimately Christian—the Imago Dei, the idea that every human is made in the image of God. I believe that, and the whole concept of equal rights flows from it. If you lose the Imago Dei, you ultimately lose equal rights too, which is where the left is finding itself today. I don’t think it will do to pretend this is going to be easy, or to try to preserve it through bare assertion. This stuff is hard.
I’ve told a few Catholic friends that the pro-life movement has, for the last half-century, been in the business of fighting the pro-abortion left. In the future, the Church will find itself increasingly at odds with pro-natalist secularists, some of whom are right-wing. There are ways that pro-natalism can fall afoul of Christian teaching just as abortion does.
You can see this beginning in Silicon Valley, as Elon Musk encourages all his smart friends to have as many children as possible. There are new pro-natalist organizations popping up.
The Chinese are also very interested in eugenics. And of course they are. As an institution the CCP has no commitment to Christian morality, and according to some studies, average Chinese IQ since the one-child policy was implemented has dropped by several points. They see that as a problem.
Then there are the gays. Is there a “gay gene”? No, probably not. But there probably is a complex of heritable traits that tend that way. The older gays are quite aware of the risks this poses to their movement—the possibility of breeding it out. Surrogacy, on the other hand, offers the prospect of—I’m putting it strongly to make you think—breeding gays as a class. Which is maybe what they have to do, now that “grooming” has arrived in the lexicon. The prospect of, not Gattaca but Gayttaca, as a friend has joked. There are some awfully Machiavellian gays in right-of-center politics who might try to push this, and they’ll push it under a pro-family banner. We don’t want to stigmatize the children of unnatural births, because that isn’t fair to them, but I do think the Church would say unnatural births are to be discouraged.
There is, in other words, what you might call a eugenic nexus between Silicon Valley, China, and the gays, all of whom are interested in things like IVF and surrogacy. Catholics especially should probably be a little wary of this.
The gays know they have a problem because identity discourse has gotten way out of hand and has sort of lost the hearts of the American people, and a lot of them are moving to the suburbs. The way the identity politics problem is being solved is to flood the zone with different identities, iterate even very strange ones, and make each one think of themselves as members of a civil rights movement. Eventually fractures appear and the whole thing falls apart. This is pure counterinsurgency tactics. It’s becoming very clear to everyone that identity politics doesn’t work because it’s too divisive, like lots of people said a long time ago. At the same time, conservatives should at least think about how, in this case, liquid modernity is on their side.
I’m not going to pronounce on morals because I’m a layperson, but we may need to recognize a cultural distinction between renting a woman for an hour and renting her for a whole nine months, even if both are sinful. I’m certainly not interested in any talk about a free market in wombs. That’s a distinction, I think, some of the gays would be happy to blur, which is not to the benefit of the Catholic faith or a stable political equilibrium. Thomas Aquinas even suggested prostitution wasn’t as bad as onanism, which is relevant to the pornography issue. The “sex work is work” thing is libertarian—no Marxist would recognize prostitution that way, because they aren’t producing anything. But it has always been with us. There’s hardly a firm distinction between a lot of modern dating and prostitution anyway.
In l’affaire Gaetz, one of these women was a marijuana lobbyist, had a no-show job in Florida local government, and was escorting on the side. Under what auspices did they meet—what hat was she wearing at the time? Who knows!
There’s a rules versus discretion problem for the prostitution issue as there is with drugs. Marijuana legalization has proceeded apace, but it remains Schedule 1 with the DEA. The reason for that is the state needs to be able to step in when the big organized crime players move into the legal marijuana market, as they have in Florida and elsewhere, otherwise they’ll dominate it—free-market ideology applied here means a cartel takeover of the United States.
Think about it this way. The Bronfmans got their start smuggling rot-gut Canadian whiskey over Lake Erie during Prohibition—when that market shifted immediately from black to white, it preserved their fortune in a way that ensured we’re still dealing with that clan’s mischief a century later. One day there’s a sword over their heads, the next it’s simply gone. It’s a very bad idea to do that with a Mexican drug cartel.
Small players in the cannabis business know this perfectly well. That’s what the concern for “racial equity” in the cannabis business is really about—if we’re going to legalize, it’s much better for black-owned small businesses to be doing it than the cartels.
In a similar way, because of the blackmail risks that come along with prostitution, they have to ply their trade with a sword over their heads. The sex trafficking thing is about busting all the pimps, and if that leaves us with what we might call the yeoman hooker, well, I suppose there are worse things. As John T. Flynn said, markets must be governed—even these ones, perhaps especially these ones. There are all these weird double games in the anti-sex-trafficking PR machine, which you can see in fraudsters like Eliza Bleu.
It’s not all bad though, honestly we’re one linguistic shift from the Byzantium the RETVRNers love. Take a post-op trans woman away from the Big Pharma hormone drip and you got a eunuch, who will no doubt make a fine imperial administrator, immune to the desires of the flesh. “Sex workers” are courtesans. Buddyro, it’s all coming back.