It’s a good question. I was just sitting here drinking whiskey (until it’s all light and happiness on here, don’t trust me when I say I’m going to stop; what pattern interrupted me tonight was this whole Syrian thing; my own boundaries, my ability to not care about what happens half a world away, are insufficiently developed), listening the wonderful voice of the lead singer of Hem (Sally Ellyson: I looked it up) and was thinking about these people who are OUTRAGED that most of the world still believes in gender stereotypes. They want to be free from the assumption that you can believe ANYTHING reliably about someone about whom you only know she is a “woman” or a “man”. They want freedom, freedom, freedom.
But this is freedom from. What is it freedom to? To act how you like? Have women not been free to be castrating bitches since time immemorial? Have men not been free, at least in certain classes, to behave effeminately? Do you think American Indians or Australian Aborigines did not have occasional people who truly were “born that way”? Not knowing otherwise, I assume the whole range of reactions was deployed, from full acceptance to exile or even death. But in loosely bound societies cruelty is likely rarely practiced. So I suppose, perhaps wrongly.
You cannot have a negative morality. You cannot have something worthy of the name which consists entirely in the things you cannot say, and the things–judge–that you cannot do. A negative morality is a cage, and only the wingless can truly find a home there.
My conception of Goodness is positive. The more happy you can be on your own, and the more pleasure you can take from the successes and happiness of others, the “gooder” you are. It is progressive, but in a way which is built on feeling, and concrete accomplishment. It is a HUGE accomplishment being able to be happy with little, and alone. It is a HUGE accomplishment taking as much or more pleasure in the success of others–particularly strangers–as in your own.
These PC police: they are mean and sad, and only distract themselves from it with the ostensible passion of their cause, sex, drugs, music, and that most powerful anti-anxiolytic: actual emotional detachment through convoluted intellectualism.