The recent barrage of executive orders has put some conservatives in a triumphalist frame of mind.  From reverse racism, to gender madness, to the cancerous growth of the administrative state, to the arrest of pro-lifers and the intimidation of people of faith, I keep hearing “The election changed all that.  It’s all coming to an end.”

No, it isn't.  Exhilaration is good, hope is necessary, but triumphalism is naïve.

Don’t misunderstand me:  The new executive orders ameliorate some of the most grievous excesses of the previous administration, and I have been delighted to see them.  They are also being rolled out with great cleverness.  The generals seem to realize that there is no need to begin with new legislation, because so many of the odious things the agencies do are not backed by any law whatsoever.  First, carefully strip the agencies of all these unauthorized functions; this builds a constituency for further change.  Then repeal or amend the law itself, something much more difficult and time consuming.  I might wish that our legislature weren’t so feckless, but it is.  If it weren’t, the agencies couldn’t have got away with all these things in the first place.

This is obviously a well-planned war.

But unless there is a change in how people think about these matters, the next administration could reverse the reversal.  Even now, too many people either don’t grasp what has been going on, or remain in denial.  Keep in mind that many of these executive orders merely reverse lunatic executive actions of so-called progressive administrations.  In another four years, conservative shock and awe could be succeeded by new shock and awe waged by yet another wave of lunatic progressives.

After all, promoters of the various lunacies are deeply entrenched.  Many of those who remain in the federal bureaucracies will quietly resist.  Those who do leave federal government will find plenty of other opportunities to go on doing what they do, whether in state government or the vast ecosystem of non-governmental organizations and pressure groups.  The craziest people continue to be attracted disproportionately to the places in which they can do the most harm, including the public schools, and they still dominate most of our other opinion-forming institutions.  And everything could be derailed by the courts.

In the meantime, the lunacies themselves persist, and this is especially true of gender, sexual, and identity lunacies.  Rampant sexual dysphoria among adolescents and young adults is fueled more by social media than by federal policy.  An executive order declaring that there are only two sexes won’t end “What are your pronouns?” exercises in local public schools.  If you are waiting for the media to stop calling surgical mutilation of young people "gender-affirming care," don’t hold your breath.

The reasons why these lunacies persist have to do less with politics than with profound shifts in how we think about right and wrong, life and death, truth and falsehood -- about God and man, men and women, adults and children – and about the nature of our bonds with each other.

These shifts have been going on for a long, long time, and the dirty secret is this:  Milder versions of the lunacies of which progressives are so fond are widely accepted among conservatives too.  They want to embrace lunatic premises, without coming to lunatic conclusions.  They want the poison apple, without the worm.

The culture wars didn’t begin overnight, and they won’t end overnight.  The lunatics are in for the long haul, and those who don’t fancy lunacy had better be in for it too.

Good afternoon, everyone.  I’ve just posted links to two new essays of mine to the Articles page.

“How Happiness Studies Lets Us Down,” which appeared yesterday in the online edition of First Things.

”Why Is There Something and Not Rather Nothing? Hey, Whatever,” which appeared yesterday in the Cambridge blog Fifteen Eighty Four.

Coming up in Monday’s post:  “Triumphalism.”  Keep your eyes peeled.

An interesting article by my friend Michael Cook, editor of the fine Australian journal Mercator, suggests that “Sooner or Later, Babies Will Be Too Precious to Abort.”  Using U.N. statistics, he points out that abortion is not only the leading cause of mortality worldwide, but outnumbers all the other causes combined.  Asking “Is this just a debating point?”, he answers “No, it’s the reason why abortion will eventually be banned everywhere in the world.”  Birth rates are dropping so rapidly all over the world that “Sooner or later, people will compare the decline in population to the number of abortions and conclude that this makes no sense at all.”

That may well be true.  I fervently hope that it is.  But I can see other possibilities.  Support for abortion is a facet of a whole cluster of disordered attitudes toward sex, marriage, love, fertility, natural law, and the preciousness of human life in general.  Demographic collapse may make it easier to challenge these attitudes – that is the hope.  But it won’t make these attitudes disappear by itself.  In fact, unless we do challenge them, they will condition our very response to demographic collapse, so that we become more disordered still.

Consider.  To our rulers, the most alarming thing about the decline in the birth rate is that populations age:  There are too few young people to pay for the care of all the old ones.  So, yes, the people who make the laws may call for having more little ones, but instead -- or in addition -- they may call for having fewer old ones.  Those who are now gung-ho for aborting the unwanted young might become determined to euthanize the unwanted aged.

Other people, who agree that we need more babies but don’t want to have any themselves, will ask, “Why do we need parents to have babies?”  Already, IVF separates the conception of the child from the loving embrace of his mother and father, so why not go further?  O brave new world!  We can manufacture sperm and eggs from ordinary cells, and gestate babies in womb tanks.  How many do you need?  Thirty million?  Fifty?  Eighty?  Coming right up.

Biologists are already investigating such possibilities.  If you talk with young people, you will find that a good many take for granted that this is our future.  Fatalistically, they assume that anything that can be done, will be done. 

Well, here is something that can be done!  Let us recover our awe for the preciousness of life.  Let us restore our lost reverence for its natural order.  Let us look forward to getting married and becoming moms and dads.

Gender ideology has caused enormous confusion in the courts of many countries.  Several years ago, I was invited to give a lecture on the topic at a Polish scientific conference.  If you would like to read the talk, titled “Transsexualism as Transhumanism,” you can find the English version here and the Polish version here, or you can just go to the Articles page.

The conference was “Adjudications of Courts in Cases Relating the Sexual and Gender Minority vs. Human Good.”  The sponsor was The Institute of Justice in Warsaw.  All of the conference papers have been published in a book, edited by Przemysław Ostojski and Mark Regnerus, which I recommend to anyone who wants to dig in:  Contemporary Problems of Protection of Marriage and Identity of the Person in the Light of American and European Case Law: An Interdisciplinary Approach.

Sometimes I collect and log thoughts I don’t want to discuss at full length.  So you may consider today’s post a sheaf of promissory notes.

Loving One’s Enemies.  After the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, the victorious Allies embarked on the Marshall Plan to help their former enemies rebuild their economies and institutions.  I have sometimes wondered a victorious Israel might be able to accomplish something like that in Gaza.  Of course such a plan could work only if Hamas were entirely uprooted and eradicated, for if permitted a hand in rebuilding, those currently in power in Gaza would rebuild nothing but the capacity for more terror.  Unfortunately, it now looks as though Israel will not be permitted to finish the job, so my speculations are probably moot.  A Marshall Plan for Gaza might have been impossible anyway, for it is much easier for the people of a territory to accept help from those who merely put an end to their campaign of extermination, as happened in Europe, than to accept it from the very people they had tried unsuccessfully to exterminate.  But one may dream.

The Administrative State.  I carelessly remarked to someone the other day that the administrative state is out of control.  What made the remark fatuous is that the administrative state is designed to be out of control -- to be as autonomous, as free from checks and balances, as anything in government can be.  Elected officials pass by like rain showers; bureaucrats endure like glaciers.  Laws are highly visible; regulations are too numerous to keep track of.  Theoretically, legislators can override administrative decisions; in reality, they like having someone else to take the heat for them.  Voters mutter against big government; but the agencies generate their own constituencies, which are much more highly focused and committed.  So of course the administrative state is out of control.  What else should anyone have expected?  That it will one day collapse is a certainty.  Whether it can be cut down to size before that happens is a much harder question.

The Limits of Law.  All law is premised consciously or unconsciously on moral judgments.  Yet as Prohibition taught us, or should have taught us, law cannot punish every sin or suppress every vice, and attempting the impossible may make matters worse.  Sometimes, when I make such observations, people draw the strange conclusion that even certain forms of murder should be legal.  No, allowing people to kill the very young, the very sick, and the very weak isn’t like allowing people to drink more than is good for them.  If we refuse even to protect innocent life, we may as well give up having any laws at all.  In the case of abortion, a sounder deduction from the fact that law cannot punish every sin would be that only the practitioners of this grisly trade should be punished, not their dreadfully misguided clients.  Leave the women to the judgment and mercy of God.  As pro-lifers have always maintained.

A Strange but Common Combination.  Not long ago a young woman lambasted me for defending the Israeli effort to eradicate Hamas, declaring that I was championing murder.  She insisted that all humans are naturally loving and peaceful – and yet at the same time, defended the rape and murder spree of the terrorists themselves, not to mention their other attacks and atrocities over the years.  Am I alone in finding it difficult to reconcile these two views?  She said I am a poor excuse for a Christian.  No doubt I am.  But I don’t think that’s why.

Ears Too Pure to Hear Unwokeness.  There is nothing surprising in the fact that people don’t like hearing views with which they disagree.  The surprising thing is how difficult some folk find it to hear such views at all, even when their ears seem undamaged.  For example, if I remark that men tend to be more aggressive and women to be more nurturing, I can expect to be told that I consider women inferior.  No.  In some ways they are superior.  But I refuse to judge women by the standards of men – and to do that, I think, really is to consider them inferior.

You aren’t indoctrinating me enough.  Over the years, the distribution of my teaching evaluations has always been bipolar.  I receive both strong praise and strong criticism, and not a lot in between.  That hasn’t changed, and in most ways, neither has my teaching.  What’s new is the character of some of the complaints.  They used to focus on things like my grading, my assignments, or my lecture style.  In recent years, though, I have sometimes been told that I’m a poor teacher because I’ve expressed skepticism about one or another conventional progressive dogma.  One student, who didn’t even take my course, complained to my dean because he had hunted down my blog and didn’t like it.

Parasitism.  Deism is parasitic on Christianity.  When people in a Christian culture lose their faith, they become Deists.  But as Christianity loses cultural influence, people do not become Deists; they repaganize.  That is, they no longer merely deny biblical faith -- they reject the natural law, place other gods in God’s place, and deny their need for His grace.  It may seem strange that it is even possible to deny something like the natural law.  Isn’t it a human universal?  Yes, but our fallen condition produces two universals, not one.  One is the law written on the heart, which is ultimately impossible to erase.  The other is the desire to erase it, which is equally inexorable, for we are at war with ourselves.  The best of the old pagan philosophers clearly recognized the first universal, but they were only dimly conscious of the second.  They seemed to think that the problem was merely that some people aren’t virtuous enough.