Their Spindly Tower of Temerity

I want to point out two things related to our society’s “evolution” on same sex mirage. The first is that — how shall I put it — the whole thing is being conducted with a certain measure of chutzpah, brass, gall, audacity, arrogance, presumptuousness, cheek, crust, effrontery, insoucience, nutmeg, and bay leaves.

The second is that this spindly tower of temerity is being held up, or so they maintain, with the flying buttresses of evolutionary inevitability. When it comes to historical inevitability, these guys are as dogmatic as Hegel on one of his grouchy mornings.

This is what they do. Remember that when Obama changed his mind (he didn’t really, but work with me), he didn’t say he changed his mind. He evolved. That’s just another word for changing your mind, isn’t it? No, it is not. Quite different, at least in the current system. When you change your mind, the next morning your friends might come over and explain that painting your bass fishing boat pink was less of a good idea than was thought earlier, and more like the beer talking. You then say something like “oh,” and change your mind back again. Changing your mind is something people do, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad. “Evolving” is something that history does — at least if you are a soft commie, which all of these people are.

How can you turn back Evolution? Remember that evolution is formally directionless, and without a designed destination, and so that pretense has to be kept up as long as creationists are watching. But let the creationists look away for ten minutes and they are all “nature figured out” and “nature determined” and “nature saw to it that.” Nature has places to go and people to see.

Evolution is ostensibly a mechanism that simply accounts for change over time, and that mechanism is acknowledged. But unacknowledged and powerfully present is the evolutionary telos, the evolutionary eschatology. This is all going somewhere, and when we arrive at each plateau, there is absolutely no going back. This is what makes Evolution a religious faith, as consumed with the End Times as an old guard Bullingerite.

They are consumed with the task of getting there, and cannot admit that there is a “there” there to get to. The whole thing reminds me of the first two verses of C.S. Lewis’s wonderful Evolutionary Hymn:

Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future’s endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,
In the present what are they
while there’s always jam-tomorrow,
While we tread the onward way?
Never knowing where we’re going,
We can never go astray.

But the glory of this ultramontane approach to evolutionary progress is found in this. Once the president has “evolved” on it, there remains no excuse for the knuckledraggers who refuse to come along. The president has just climbed down from the trees, and the vast savannahs are in front of him, back lit with a rising sun, and maybe some aliens from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Focus on the Family is still up in the very tops of the trees, chattering their petty hatreds.

And by the way, please allow me a brief little anticipatory excursus. Before somebody goes off like a bottle rocket, accusing me of racism because I said that the president just climbed down from the trees, I would offer a two-fold rejoinder. First, it is evolutionary theory that has his ancestor doing that, not my view of things. I think that Adam and Eve were the color of a Starbucks mocha, and that white people came into being because some dim bulb great grandson of Japheth got lost and wound up on the wrong side of the Alps.

And second, knowing that it is impossible for some of our friends not to argue “because, racism,” I cleverly thwarted that accusation in my illustration by leaving Focus on the Family up in the trees. They are fine people, but in the aggregate they are probably whiter than February’s knees.

So, back to the question of how these thugs enforce their eschatological pronouncements. Six years ago, Brendan Eich gave money to the California ballot measure defining marriage properly. One of the reasons that some liberals are defending him is that his position at that time was formally identical to Obama’s, just as his position now is also formally identical to Obama’s. He was opposed at that time to same sex mirage, and now he supports it — just like Obama. There are people defending him now because at that time the signal that it was okay to evolve had not yet been given by the Dear Leader. But, these thought-fascists argue, once the Dear Leader has evolved, it is absolutely okay to whack anyone for opposing same sex mirage.

Two thoughts in concluding. One is that the myth of inevitability does not take much to deflate it. Reagan  took out the myth of communist inevitability with a very small operation in Grenada. The thing that I find encouraging in all this is that, in their lust to conquer — delayed gratification is not their strong suit — they have forgotten their incrementalism. They are clearly going for it, and they are doing it in a way that is guaranteed to establish a permanent opposition. This was the great tactical blunder they fell into with Roe v. Wade — by resorting to coercion across the board, they discredited themselves. Their goals were already reprehensible, and so they lined up their methods to match. They are doing the same thing now.

The second thought is this. As they repeat their Roe v. Wade mistake, we must take care not to repeat ours. Many of the laws that are being introduced in defense of life today should have been introduced decades ago. Conservatives who have been fighting their impositions need to take care not to fall back too quickly. A lot of this is bluster and show. Conservative leaders who accommodate themselves too quickly are looking for a respected place in the “loyal opposition” in any future arrangements. But our real task is to ensure that there are no settled future arrangements like this.

So when they accuse me of Jim Crow bigotries, I will simply chuckle. When they say that we have evolved, I will reply that I didn’t, actually. When they say that I am on the wrong side of history, I will laugh out loud. I am a postmillennialist, and not their millennium either. Their eschatology has one glaring deficiency, that of not being true.