‘The reality of transgender people is also a great natural and moral truth…’

As of sometime, what, two years ago, no?

I went to a talk addressed by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who wrote this really terrific book about our moral faculty. The big takeaway from the book (though there is much, much more in it than just this) is that our moral intuitions can be modeled in five dimensions: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation.

Listening to him, though, I felt a breath of chill wind.

The left-liberal outlook, with its scant regard for those last three dimensions, is completely dominant in the Western world. So will our concerns for loyalty, authority, and sanctity just fade away?

Humanity’s long aversion to homosexuality, for instance, is surely based on the notion that it’s degrading. Now that we are not allowed to think that, is our Sanctity/Degradation module weakened? Will it atrophy and die?

Or is our disgust just retargeted to something else—to homophobia, perhaps?

More from my site