'There is always more wilderness to tame, more territories to be colonised, more attempts to plant the Stars and Stripes on Alpha Centuari as well as Mars.' Credit: Alex Brandon/Getty.
Politics involves a subtle balance of optimism and pessimism. Hence the two faces of Donald Trump: the grim-faced mug shot from the courtroom, with the frown of an elderly gorilla being taunted by his keepers, and the smiley-faced demagogue whose every third word is “beautiful”. If you’re in opposition, you need to portray the state of the nation as pretty dire, but not to the point where you create widespread disillusion, which might weaken the will to do anything about it. If the nation is in terminal decline, where would it find the resources to climb back up again? If political society isn’t in much of a mess, there’s no call for your reformist agenda, but if it’s in too much of a mess there’s not much chance that it will do any good.
Disillusion gives birth to demoralisation, and a demoralised public is a potentially disaffected one. This is one reason why almost every English novel before Thomas Hardy ends on an affirmative note, even if this runs counter to what it has actually shown about the world. Art must edify as well as entertain. It must raise our spirits as well as feed our curiosity about our fellow humans, show things as they are but also as they might be in some more just, compassionate parallel universe. Fiction makes up for the deficiencies of reality.
Even so, it’s important that optimism isn’t overdone. This is partly because people are quick enough to see through hollow promises and bogus superlatives. But it’s also because, while our rulers may be idealistic, prating of a new Golden Age of peace and prosperity, the populace is spontaneously materialist, more interested in the price of eggs than the advent of Utopia. The bankers and CEOs are materialists as well, though they’re aware that one needs the odd burst of piety and patriotic rhetoric to mask the naked self-interest of their actual activities. Ruling classes are not always fooled by their own ideology. This is why it’s a futile pursuit to speak truth to power, since power usually knows the truth anyway. Power understands that one occasionally needs to invoke God, the greatness of the nation and the spirit of selflessness without allowing it to interrupt the daily business of screwing one’s competitors. As the wit remarked, it’s when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it’s time to give it up.
The orgy of collective self-congratulation and sham religiosity which was Trump’s inauguration showed all this well enough. The man himself was in Messianic mode, sent by God to save the nation: as though the Almighty’s first attempt at this task, by sending a close family member, hadn’t quite come off. Looking around the world, one feels bound to agree. Trump was in a performative mood as well, which may require some explaining. For philosophers of language, performative statements are the kind of utterance that gets something done. Promising, cursing, blessing, welcoming, instructing, forgiving, forbidding: these are examples of language as action, doing something by saying something, not describing the world but bringing some new state of affairs into existence through the power of the word.
It was in this spirit that Trump decreed on being elected that there were now only two genders in the United States. It was as though all other genders vanished into thin air as the words were spoken, which is to say that performative language is a kind of magic. You can transform the world with a movement of the lips. You can even conjure new geographical features into existence, such as Mount McKinley or the Gulf of America. The same goes for Trump’s declaration that “The Golden Age of America begins right now”, which is less an observation like “What a fine library!” than a creative act like “I declare this library open”. Idealism in the sense of a positive vision of the world begins to merge into idealism in its more philosophical sense, meaning the power of the mind to create reality in its own image. If the truth is inconvenient, you can replace it by legislating an alternative truth into being.
This is all the more acceptable if you live in a world in which everything is in flux. Change and fluidity are hallmarks of postmodern culture, which means that no statement about reality can be definitive. It all depends on who says it, for what reason, at what place and time. There is no single truth about anything. The world exists in a whole spectrum of different ways at any given time, so that almost any description of it is likely to be true from some standpoint or other. Being true to the way things are means acknowledging that things are in no way particular. Hence the emergence of post-truth civilisation, in which Trump is a wronged innocent. Since you can’t make an objective judgement between this and the belief that he is a crook and a liar, reason becomes pointless and the two opinions simply have to fight it out. Post-truth leads to violence.
The mental power that transforms the world is traditionally known as the will, and in American culture the will is infinite. Madonna attributed her recovery from a serious illness to the fact that she “didn’t believe in limitations”. She may be in for a nasty surprise in 20 or 30 years time. What obstructs the will is the flesh, with all of its flaws and constraints, so that the only true freedom would be to de-materialise yourself, escaping from the body altogether. It’s this, not just a prudishness about sexuality, which lies at the root of the Puritan hatred of the body. To be a body is to be finite, and to be finite is to be plunged into permanent conflict with one’s true self, which is the infinite power of God within you. If you were to shuck off the body entirely, however, you would be nothing, so that the ultimate freedom is pure negativity. To act is to shape the world according to your wishes; but it is also to be a prisoner of what you create, since whatever you create is fated to be finite, and finitude is a scandal to the infinity which is the life of God in his creatures.
This is why there can never be an American utopia. The nation is doomed to remain divided — not just between George Clooney and the Proud Boys, but between the flesh and the spirit, which is to say between its actual achievements and the eternally unappeased desire which will always find them lacking. There is always more wilderness to tame, more territories to be colonised, more attempts to plant the Stars and Stripes on Alpha Centuari as well as Mars. All one’s ideals succeed in doing is showing how far reality has fallen short of them. You can call this state of affairs permanent progress or chronic unhappiness. Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that it was both. The only future it can’t deal with is the one we are all forced to confront: death.
Because of their different history, the British are nothing like as idealist as the Americans. A prime minister who claimed that God saved his life, so that he could save the country, would probably be ridiculed rather than applauded. A long heritage of empiricism means that the contemporary British believe in what they can touch and taste, whatever the imperial fantasises of their ancestors and the chauvinism of the far-Right. Rather than stamping your identity on the world, you allow the world to shape your identity. The past is to be broken with in some respects, but conformed to in others. Gratitude for God’s special interest in the nation is largely confined to the last night of the Proms. Pessimism rather than bright-eyed enterprise sets the cultural tone. Alexis de Tocqueville remarks in his Democracy in America that Americans discourage negative comments about the weather. In Britain, they are well-nigh compulsory.
Optimism and pessimism, however, are for the most part mere temperamental affairs, without much moral substance. It’s no credit to smile at adversity if this comes to you as naturally as sneezing. This is where optimism differs from hope. Trump’s vision of a prosperous United States, supreme among the nations, may sound like hope but is actually just small-boy bragging. Much of what he says about America is really about himself. Genuine hope has to be based on realism rather than fantasy. The frail, tentative hope that sometimes emerges as the final note of a tragic drama is worth attending to because it has been dearly bought. Optimism, by contrast, is for the most part hope bought on the cheap. In the end, the only positive vision that counts is one that has faced the worst: yet still manages to affirm. Donald Trump gives the impression of a man who has never faced anything worse than an overdone cheeseburger.
Performative declarations don’t really work when it comes to culture. You can pardon a convict with a stroke of the pen, but most cultural change moves more like a glacier than a mountain stream. Culture in the sense of everyday customs and allegiances has its roots in a whole complex history. It represents what one might call the collective unconscious, and tends to resist being engineered into or out of existence. It is the stuff of which identities are made, which means that it’s a lot harder to change than your shoes or even your accent. Dismissing certain genders as null and void is like trying to will your hair to change colour. The narcissist insists that the world must be pliant to his touch, raging like an infant when it resists his desires. He would rather destroy material reality than allow it to frustrate his schemes. And Trump has his finger on the nuclear button.
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SubscribeSounds like a bunch of nonsensical rambling from someone having a mental breakdown. I mean look at this line.
“Donald Trump gives the impression of a man who has never faced anything worse than an overdone cheeseburger.”
Say what you will about the guy but he has literally taken a bullet, gone through three grueling presidential campaigns, survived multiple prosecutions, and been on the receiving end of over a decade of hostile press and pop culture. Trump’s mental philosophy is “I am going to win no matter what comes at me” and that attitude more than comes across. Love him or hate him, that is who he is.
Terry’s ranting about a whole alternative reality and acting like Americans should care about what he has to say for some reason.
Edit: He also pretends Americans are idealists out of touch with reality. Turns out we are actually pretty suspicious, cantankerous, and cynical by nature. We know when crime is up, inflation is high, and the border is open no matter what talking heads on TV tell us.
Indeed. The author also criticizes Trump for, it seems, willing a range of identities out of existence. But he doesn’t address the fact that the Left spent the last decade (or more) willing these identities into existence.
For me, the most significant part of this essay is, “Culture in the sense of everyday customs and allegiances has its roots in a whole complex history. It represents what one might call the collective unconscious, and tends to resist being engineered into or out of existence.”
The Democratic party lost, in large part, because it ignored, or actively tried to undermine, our “whole complex history” in order to impose its own version of history on us. Perhaps Trump’s greatest virtue is his instinctive, if not intellectual, awareness of American culture and the bedrock beliefs, even intuitions, of most Americans.
There’s something wrong with a web site when most posts offer greater wisdom than the main article, like this one does.
I must admit that I sometimes get halfway down the post and skip to comments as they’re often of higher quality. I don’t think we can blame unherd for that, though. To misquote Oscar Wilde, unherd is the auctioneer – equally and impartially admiring all schools of thought.
Actually I went straight for the comments as the Authors views are of little interest to me.
Same here. More often than not, read the headline, skip the article and go straight to the comments. I find it much more insightful in analysis and opinion all round.
..not really; all you find, indeed all you seek, is confirmation of your own, narrow-minded, right-wing bias.. In the words of the great Oliver Cromwell (whom we, the Irish despise of course, with very good reason too):
“I beseach thee (your highness) consider the possibility, however remote, you maybe mistaken” which was Ollie’s way of suggesting to his narcissistic king that there are other viewpoints that may be valid!
I came to the comments first because i knew it was the only way to attempt to make sense of his verbage. I do the same with Anil’s articles. Translation.of.gobbledygook is one of Unherd readership’s superpowers. Decency, Champagne Socialst to.one side, is another. .
..only to verify your own narrow-minded, right-wing point of view.. try broadening your mind.. you never know; you might learn something!
..afraid you might learn something new? Perhaps even an alternative point of view? OMG how would you survive that?
I come for the comments…
..only to verify your own narrow-minded, right-wing point of view.. try broadening your mind.. you never know; you might learn something!
I am finding that more and more frequently I pay less and less attention to the articles and more and more to the readers comments.
..only to verify your own narrow-minded, right-wing point of view.. try broadening your mind.. you never know; you might learn something!
I beg to differ anc believe you are being sycophantic..
It brings to mind Gandhi’s take on America: “The only country to move from primitive to decadent without the customary period of civilisation in between” ..or was it Mark Twain? ..maybe someone will enlighten me?
Exactly, Matt. I’ve developed enormously in my mental toughness, humor, confidence, and so on, since seeing and taking Donald Trump as a personal example for personal growth. He’s served as a true inspiration to so many, and I and so many others will forever be thankful to him for his good works.
You sir, are one sick, deranged human
And you Sir have obviously had a sense of humour bypass. Bad luck!
I’m a South African, so I have to ask: is this an example of ironic British humour?
The author means ‘hardship’. Trump started with money, continued with money and is finishing with money. His enjoyment of burger based products is well documented. He is obese too.
You’re confusing politics with celebrity culture. I think you’re about to find out they’re not the same thing at all.
Eagleton’s writing simply reflects the terror of the graduate class ‘left’ that the regime they have imposed on the rest of us since the nineties and which has left the entire West on life support, is coming to an end.
You can smell the fear.
Eagleton is here for 2 reasons. 1) to provide balance 2) to enhance “engagement”, which in this case ia universal opprobrium!
And I’m glad you’re here, Terry. But sooner or later you will have to accept that the graduate ‘left’ created Trump by waging a brutal 30-year class war against blue collar people in the US and Europe. If you were less self-righteous your analysis would have more traction.
Balance, in the fanatical mind of the Leftist, is simply a rigid, either/or proposition with no room for nuance, degree, concession, compromise, or free inquiry. It’s not balance in its true sense. It’s deliberately, purposely, and strategically polarizing and contrarian, with no room for middle-ground. As acknowledged by Marx and Engels themselves. Based as it was on religious zeal. It’s why you think an article that is 100% anti-Trump, anti-Right, anti-anything-not-Marxist-Left-and-approved-by-Terry is balance
We are open to Left-Wing voices. But the sad fact is today’s Left adhere so tightly to ‘I’m 100% right, the otherside 100% wrong” (and not just wrong, but bad, evil, racist, and every other deplorable human trait), that it comes across in everything they do. In the headline, the first paragraph, everything. So much so, that most people are like me, they don’t read these articles further as they come from the hive mind we come here to get away from. They all have the same assumptions, the same enemies, the same beliefs, the same vile supremacist arrogance oozing through every word; they’re identical from one to the next. It’s freaks me out everytime, watching the captive human mind unable to think outside of the brainwashing laid down by the originators of their thinking (in this case Marx and all the true believers that came in his name) and, yet, truly believing they’re thinking for themselves
We know these types of articles are going to be dripping with disdain and patronizing in the extreme and written by some moron with an absolutely cringeworthy lack of self-awareness and of the audience here, so skip to the comments.
And even more galling, is these Left-Wing nutbags in their 99% Left-Wing academic echo chambers, where they deplatform all opposing views, are not right on things in the big picture, and have long been carried away and gone way past the point of balance, and offer none at all worthy of consideration. They are not on the right side of history. They’ve just swallowed whole the indoctrination that Red Rudy openly called for in his long-march through the institutions decree to go forth and sow the seeds for the Marxist revolution from the inside out. Through infiltrating the institutions and taking them over and pumping out Marxist dogma in a way as if its inherently the only plausible way to think.
It’s evident, also, in the petty, spiteful retorts from the people that gives thumbs down to the intelligent comments that get far more likes than them. The calibre of the dissenting comments are nothing more than resentful remarks and sarcasm that display the rigid you’re right/we’re wrong tone, and the audience here being too stupid or being a ‘herd’ themselves. So much so that you take it as a given you’re already right, and don’t ever bother giving arguments or reasoning that has any merit. Just smearing comments acting like people who don’t want to listen to ‘balance’ from people like Terry, who’s well intentioned and just trying to create ‘engagement’. No, Terry’s an odious, obnoxious Marxist ideologue who thinks his politics and secular religion will lead to a real utopia and revolution for all the working class and marginalized people, and that America is worthy of nothing by disdain for their silly false optimism he knows is doomed to failure, solely because it’s not aligned to his world-view, the vile buffoon. A proper see you next Tuesday. And the thinkers here are far more sophisticated than to fall for his drivel. His article is nothing to do with balance. It’s ‘he’s right. Anyone with any acknowledge of the clear and obvious good Trump is doing stupid beyond belief’, as 98% of everything that comes from this revolting ruling ‘elite’ is today.
If you changed the record, became humble, genuinely, thoughtful, truly balanced and skilled thinkers with valid criticisms, open to other ideas, tolerant of all different views, willing to admit decency and intelligence are not contigent on whether people are on the your side of the dividem we’d all listen. But you’re the opposite. And the majority are sick of it to the core, rightly, and by the destruction caused by an establishment of jumped up, precious narcissist authoritarians enforcing their ridiculous, foolish, ruinous, discredited ideology on the rest of us.
Why do you people think you’re right, anyway? Just because you don’t think for yourselfs and, like sheep, follow the dominant establishment ideology that has been forced on you based on the Left-Wing deviants claiming if you don’t subscribe to the ideology they’ve told you to, you’re racist Nazi?
Left-Wing dogma is not the only true, intelligent, valid way to think for Christ’s sake. Far from it. How absurd. Dogmatically ideologues are dangerous. How can you possibly believe such a way of thinking makes you superior? Really? How? I’d love to get an earnest answer, but never will.
..if I may sum up your very longwinded diatribe in one sentence (mostly your own!):
“We are open to Left-Wing voices, BUT… in reality our minds are so closed we’re not really!
I might add, the negative comments attributed to the Left, much better fit the Right in the opinion of this Leftie..
You know when crime is up? Funny that as it has come down, despite Trump’s lies about it! Look at the actual stats if you don’t believe me.
“Survived multiple prosecutions” – indeed he has survived them, despite being found guilty in some and evaded the rest through time-wasting and a very dubious ruling by his very own supreme court. Was he actually found innocent in any?
The American electorate passed judgement on all that a short while ago.
Now, you may think they’re wrong, but ain’t that just tough!
I wasn’t commenting on the election, just trying to put the comment into perspective which some facts – sorry if you find them unpalatable!
And these facts are?
Crime was DOWN under Biden, and Trump may have ‘survived’ prosecutions but was either guilty or had them kicked into touch.
But Biden was a warmongering, genocidal, Arab hating monster too.. maybe that played a part? I know Trump is most of those things as well but many voted in hope of his being a peacemaker.. I know, that’s hilarious.. but Amerucals are so propagandused, suckers for promises, naïve in the extreme and remember, hope springs eternal..
Pleass remind us of who cut the deal with the Taliban in 2020.
The American electorate was fed a can of lying delusions, and just more than 51 percent bought it
If there’s one thing more stupid than the American electorate, it’s the army of armchair critics telling us how stupid the American electorate are. They always insult and blame the voters – like Hillary did. “Always the victims, never their fault”.
In fact, they aren’t stupid at all. They just have different values and priorities and base their decisions on different assumptions and experiences from us. Perhaps you haven’t spent enough time in the US to recognise this.
In fact, Trump’s vote share was a tiny fraction under 50% and not 51%.
In 2024 Trump won the popular vote. I wish he hadn’t, but it’s a fact that he did.
Having different values and being stupid are not mutually exclusive.. I believe you are both correct.
Correct!
The American electorate aren’t wrong.. they’re just mindbendingly stupid, voting for someone who clearly will rob them to greatly enrich the already obscenely rich 1% like himself: and secondly to continue the genocide in Gaza but there was no realistic choice there I’ll admit, unless they voted for Stein or West, who, for some crazy reason, think peace is a good thing and life is sacred; I know all you colonially minded supremacists will think that would be a crazy thing to do!
Look at the actual stats if you don’t believe me
I don’t believe you – please provide some links.
Besides, if you decriminalise pretty well everything short of mass murder then it stands to reason crime stats will come down.
Yes- totally moronic
I don’t get it. Unherd started to give vent to cerebral/intellectual and sophisticated commentary from vantage points that just don’t get into the MSM. The last year they seem to have decided that they need to pivot to the centre – and scoop up Guardian readers. The roster increasingly turns me off. Not because it’s stuff I disagree with. Just because it’s superficial and repetitive, and regurgitates talking points that I can get from BBC or NYT. I haven’t renewed this year. I’m increasingly turning to Substack.
He’s also been bust a fair few times and managed to resurrect his business-say what you will but the guy is a force of nature and just won’t lie down-obviously none of this is as arduous as being a ” critic, literary theorist, and UnHerd columnist.”
It is common for narcissists to be ‘a force of nature’. However, that force is almost always directed to where it brings in the most money and accolades from other narcissists to that (mentally deranged) narcussist; and adulation from gullible, naïve, propagandised voters.. and indeed, that is the case with the lunatic Trump..
I couldn’ get past the first few paragraphs of it without being completely covered in smug. It seems obvious to me that some of these people write what they think the people at the social gatherings they go to will like them for saying.
Like others, I simply skipped to the comments and cleaned my mind off with a whole lot of common sense…
It’s also possible he writes stuff that, while being unpalatable to narrow-minded, rigid right-wingers, is also true, and interesting to those with broader minds, and possibly even a few that might be interested in broadening their narrow minds? We l8ve in hope..
The bottom line is that people all across the West are desperate for positive change; maybe even some real forward movement. Trump might or might not be just the right guy, but he was the choice we were handed. For G*d’s sake, think of the alternative.
And on top if that, he’s funny. That’s a rare blessing these days.
Obviously the concept of a peacemaking, decent, highly intelligent, socially-minded Stein or West would have been a crazy choice, right?
Have pity on him he’s an ageing marxist diehard, one of an almost extinct species, thank God!
Your take and Terry’s are NOT mutually exclusive.. the difference is: yours in purely materialistic while his is philosophical and psychological..
Sir Terry the Materialist- As an American Christian suffering from “False Consciousness” I have to confess to my revelation. Last night, I watched Lee Greenwood’s Trump montage at 100 volume before bed. In my dream, I was zoomed back to 1881 where I visited with St Marx and Bishop Engels at the Church of Scientific Socialism.
They revealed to me a great chart outlining the Surplus Value that Workplace Democracy and Perpetual Revolution would bring to the world. They spoke of two spheres of influence. In the Eastern sphere where Communism was implemented through triumphant Revolution, free expression reigned and the State had withered away. In the backwards Western World, scarcity forced people into breadlines until a Vanguard implemented a One-Party State that controlled all aspects of life.
As I awoke, I realized the pointlessness of all existence and constructed a monument to the Holy Base and Superstructure. I vowed never again to forget the imperative of worker control over the means of economic production. Silly things like culture don’t frame society! The true basis of man as a Social Being is material! I kneeled in prayer to the Material Cosmos and their vast alchemical powers and found true strength in Collective Struggle. I then spoke the prayer “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
Just kidding. USA USA USA!
Glorious. USA indeed. People like Terry make me deeply ashamed to be British and of what is has become. So many of the sneering middle-class think they’re somehow more sophisticated and above Americans. I cringe so badly when they do.
Trump represents something uniquely American, something unrestrained by negativity or defeatism, free-spirited, resilient, optimistic, positive, confident, transcendent, pioneering, proud, decisive, inclusive, representing the highest ideals that humanity has ever created (let alone actually realized, as the USA has within just 250 years odd in creating the most incredibly wealthy, prosperous, advanced, free, principled society the world will ever see).
He represents something that pathetic European dinosaurs like Terry, clinging to a (near) 200 year failed ideology that represents everything foul, resentful, bitter, covetous in the human soul, and living on a rapidly self-immolating continent that will be ran by Islam in the UK, France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, and 6-7 more countries within 200 years, cannot even hope to ever enjoy. Just a sad, pathetic middle-class dickhead from a once great nation that is no longer in any place to lecture the US.
It’s the mark of these most odious and narcissistically deranged people that the truly believe they have some better way and try to do that anyway. A totalitarian German Marxist way totally anathema to everything that made America great, and yet one they think can be a 180 improvement on what the settlers and pioneers built by making it more woke,diverse and getting rid of ‘whiteness’, getting more women and minorities in, more non-binary people in the military. And that’s it’s their duty to try to implement that better way at all costs, impose it in a blanket, doctrinaire way, like a slow kid trying to constantly to fit a triangle shape into the round hole over and over. No matter the consequence and no matter how destructive their infantile, racist, self-hating ideological lunacy has proven to be.
You can’t be any more warped and divorced from reality than these people. They chill my blood. They are not good people. At all.
Trump represents “the highest ideals that humanity has ever created”. Wow – he also has a complete disregard for the rule of law, as shown by his actions in the first week.
He represents the spirit of the US, the one that made it what it is. The anything is possible spirit. Try and tell me there’s a more successful, wealthy, accomplished nation.
You people are the most hate-filled, spiteful, resentful, nasty souls. Fools with a delusional sense of your own intellectual superior. Do disgusting.
“You people” – not usually a phrase associated with logical discourse! Why am I hate-filled for pointing out that Trump has disregarded the law in serious ways with his pronouncements, and his imperial territorial ambitions are hardly ‘the highest ideals’.
Unfortunately, John’s post reflects the UK’s current Labour government. Here’s an example, with 13:00 to the end describing their VAT (value added tax) on school fees:
https://youtu.be/G4i00tffIuY
They are Fabians, not revolutionary like the Marxists, but just the same with more patience.
It is hoped by the ‘just managing middle-class’
that the current government will reduce the number of ‘sneering middle-class’ to such an extent that the Legacy Parties will be wiped out at the next general election, and that this will occur before everything falls apart.
Good point. Starmer is a full-on Woke, ”look at me, I took the knee, aren’t I amazing?”, Culturally Marxist Lefty. But he’s sneaky enough to pretend to hide behind a more pragmatic, reality-based method of governance, like you say, to quell any opposition by attempting to get the right people on-side.
Just like on the EU. ”We’re not rejoining, we’re only going to strenghten ties”. And all the other lies, this deceitful regime have told us and then reneged on.
Exactly, and what a pity we let the place go in 1783 and didn’t bother to retake it in 1814.
Additional I don’t think I would describe our left as marxist as most of them wouldn’t have a clue who ‘he‘ was.
Personally I prefer Liberal Bigots or LBs for short.
That was a fine piece of satire.
“ Trump decreed on being elected that there were now only two genders in the United States. It was as though all other genders vanished into thin air”
There you go, you are such a Wally.
Ya. This was utter nonsense.
No it wasn’t.. it was enlightening to those with an interest in philosophy and psychology, like me;and I’m sure many others.. We already knew all the materialistic stuff.. no point in regurgitating that.. it’s been and continues to be done to death! This was a refreshingly different take, by no means contradicting the simplistic stuff Unherd’s simplistic commentators love so much.. you know, the ‘bring back flogging’ crowd!
This is why it would have been preferable if Trump had said ‘sex’; ‘There are only 2 sexes’.
Somewhat harder to lament disappearance of all the other sexes.
Sex and gender have always meant the same thing; that is until the nut jobs hijacked one term and built a ludicrous ideology around it.
that’s not entirely true. Afaiu gender was used up the 1970s as a polite way of describing sex, still a word that many blanche at, but through the advent of materialist feminism in the 1970s, gender became increasingly used as a word to describe how sex is displayed etc, so clothes, roles, accpeted behaviours, and thus gender-criticism as a key element of feminism in deny that women MUST behave and dress in certin ascribed ways.
It is the gender ideologists who have developed the ideas of transgenderism etc who have once more conflated gender and sex.
When I grew up, ‘gender’ was simply a polite way to describe ‘sex’ in order to accommodate the easily offended.
Not exactly correct though, is it? One may have a male and/or female side to a greater or lesser degree.. Also the issue can be looked at in different ways, eg physically, psychologically, philosophically, emotionally and spiritually..with quite different takes in each.. Just like this piece, which I enjoyed..
MY roommate in college insisted he was “trisexual.” He would try anything.
Something that never existed cannot be said to vanish
However we know that is nonsense – some people really are born somewhere between the two – it might not be many but wishing that away doesn’t make it so. Really that is a fact – and what happens to those poor people whose genitalia is so unusual that that are mis-gendered on their birth certificate? The ruling suggests that they really are stuffed for life.
Sex is not determined by genitalia.
It refers to the biological characteristics of a whole organism.
Sex-specific traits are present throughout the entire body, not just in the reproductive organs. They influence innumerable physiological functions at the cellular, tissue, and organ level across the entire organism.
It is late in the day on this topic to be unaware of this material fact.
These cases are biological abnormalities; either developmental(usually due to non-functioning genes involved in sexual development) or chromosomal.
It is correct that there are a very small people who are truly intersex but most of these are assigned as male or female and remain so.
The present issue is with a far larger number of people who are undoubtedly m/f but FEEL that they are the opposite. They should be treated kindly, but not encouraged because it is a difficult path and surgical change is often regretted. To allow people with male genetics in womenssports is ludicrous. Ditto changing rooms and prisons.
Trump is restoring sanity. Wish any of the 5 Tory PMs had managed the same. Don’t even expect it from TTK.
I am not hostile to transexuals. Decades ago in London I knew April Ashley who virtually invented it and where I am now a boy neighbour is now a young woman.
Intersex conditions have developmental abnormalities, not different sexes – the sufferer is still either male or female.
As all the other genders were simply conjured out of thin air, it would make perfect sense that they return there.
There are people born with ‘confused’ gender problems which the medical profession has always recognised; and surgically altered to conform to one or other of the two genders.. So we can say three.. the 3rd being ‘uncertain’..
I think Trump is fulfilling this instruction very well.
“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.” — JESUS CHRIST
So true …
Luke 16, v10
https://biblehub.com/luke/16-10.htm
I wondered whether it was worth the trouble to respond to an article with which I had so much disagreement. I had to remind myself who Eagleton was and found that he is a Marxist. (Good grief!) I suppose no one would expect a Texan to agree much with a Marxist. (Thankfully it’s illegal to run as a Communist in Texas.)
We who support Trump do so for policy reasons. (I didn’t vote for BFF.) Staunch the flow of illegal immigrants. Unleash American industry. Get rid of the absurd woke blather and assert the obvious truth (yes, truth) that there are two sexes. Shrink the size of government and get it out of our way as much as possible.
Will this be a Golden Age? It already feels like it after years of Leftist bs. No, we don’t want a military headed by transvestites or transexuals.
Yes, part of our strength is in our optimism, and we have much to be optimistic about, not least a repudiation of the bankruptcy of the Left. We are winning.
You know who is losing? Marxists.
We are unlike Britain because we did not evolve from a series of kingships and fiefdoms into a conglomerate weighed down by the past, but sprung fully formed by the most brilliant collection of intellects in human history with the most inspirational and optimistic charter ever imagined. That is what makes America unique and continues to inspire Americans and the millions who long to be Americans.
I believe Milton’s Satan held the same high opinion of his own new polity in Pandaemonium.
“We know no time when we were not as now; Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised By our own quick’ning power”
The ones who said “All men are born equal” but not women or Blacks?
Where did they say not women or blacks? There is no qualification to that phrase in the original document other than “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”.
Ughh. These people really are unbearable.
Well said Donald! America always was great (at boasting, too.)
Easy to say, just after an election that sets forth a new (and better) future.
After Blair, Britain had the Heir to Blair, aka Call-Me-Dave (Cameron) and the One Nation Tories, most of whom still wants to rejoin the EU! Even Now!
But, for the patriots, to implement a credible plan, Labour had to be the main target, in the same way that, just as there were RINOs, the Dems had to be the main target. It wasn’t by accident that it happened that way.
The two countries are at different stages, with Britain having first to exit the EU (at least legally, if not in policy). And we have voted for that, before Trump’s first election victory. Now that Trump has had a second victory (or is it the third 🙂 ) and is now installed in the WH, his administration will be able to deal with DC.
Absolutely! Academia are in denial about the realities of the world. They should get out of their ‘ivory towers’ and do a bit of graft in the blue collar sector.
That’s all as maybe and displays the typical American hubris and arrogance that Eagleton is, describing, to an extent. Your frontier mentality has been bullshit for decades. private industry has been constantly bailed out by the state for decades or sustained my military spending.
Your government is not large by the standards of most countries, and note those countries usually have better standards of living and above all health and happiness.
A country without a decent health system like the USA is both an absurdity and an anachronism in the 21stC
Ultimately for all it’s faults Eagleton is right. The USA is deeply, and always will be split between those who still think they are fighting the Red Indians – today their Hondurans and Mexicans – or latter day Carnegies. The reality is at least half of the USA just wants a decent job, decent housing and decent health care and wants a government who will provide that, and knows that only government, local or national, not private enterprise can provide that for all.
Is that you, Mrs Eagleton?
Unfortunately, for the ‘at least half of the USA just wants a decent job’, it’s just not enough! And it’s true in most of the West.
They assume there’s an efficient state structure that allows them to ‘just to do their job’ and ignores everything else, like managing the functions that the State does best. They don’t need to manage it themselves, but they do need to make the right choices as to what policies need to be implemented, and get their representatives in office!
In the meantime time, the remnants, those that cannot see the point of working when there’s ‘rich pickings’ available for very little effort, populate this state structure, aka The Public Sector, and then encroaches on what the Private Sector does best. This destroys markets, where individuals make informed choices, and idiocy follows, and worse! That’s what Trump, and every national saviour, needs to correct, with making a clear distinction between citizens/subjects and foreigners and dismantling NET Zero policies at the top of the list.
But Eagleton doesn’t live in a Private Sector friendly world, where individuals take responsibility to make their own choices, so writes a ‘bunch of nonsensical rambling’.
Robinhood was created as entertainment. It wasn’t meant to be taken literally. That some portion of the population will always feel entitled to things earned by another part of the population is not unique. What is unique is the “modern wisdom” that doesn’t discern between working class people and people that call themselves working class regardless of whether they work.
Your mentality is completely unable to distinguish because in the Socialist dialectics its really all is just a struggle between the 1% and the 99%. That is a false binary.
Most Americans don’t tend to look to Government for jobs and housing and such. It’s just a different, learned attitude, something you pick up as a kid.
For instance we like to think that the police would help us if needed. But most families keep a baseball bat handy, just in case.
“The reality is at least half of the USA just wants a decent job, decent housing and decent health care and wants a government who will provide that, and knows that only government, local or national, not private enterprise can provide that for all.”
The reality is at least half of the USA just wants a decent job, decent housing and decent health care and wants a government that will stop the corruption and unnecessary meddling in private enterprise that creates the needless hardships for Americans providing for themselves.
What the government provides, the government can retract.
I’m not sure quoting ‘Braveheart’ strengthens your case, but otherwise well said Sir!
Oh well. It seemed a good reference at the time.
What wonderful insight, thank you. It is a fundamentally narcissistic culture.
This article highlights a lot
About the author and his belief systems. Not much to discuss, ultimately, certainly nothing interesting.
Wish I could read a nuanced coherent Maga critique, here, or elsewhere.
A performative essay, nothing of any substance whatsoever (like virtually all of Terry’s articles).
Does saying “Transwomen are women” over and over again make it a reality? Does saying the nation state is a myth, make it so? No.
Utopia does not exist because paradoxes do, so why are the postmodern left trying to wish it into existence
The Left has been trying to wish Utopia into existence at least since Karl Marx. When their wishes don’t come true, they use violence.
The article is a drivel.
“It was as though all other genders vanished into thin air as the words were spoken,”
Sex and gender are the same thing. There are only two sexes, ergo there are only two genders. This really isn’t difficult to understand unless for are a Harris supporter.
There really are not just ‘only two sexes’ – some people are born genetically somewhere in-between, yes really not many but wishing it were so does not make them go away!
Name a third sex, describe the type of gamete it produces and explain its role in reproduction.
Intersex. Wiki answers the rest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
Nope, everyone is born with either XX or XY chromosomes. Everything else is gaslighting or delusion.
You do get XYY men. A small number, but they exist.
Years ago, when I studied what was then called “Law of Husband and Wife”, now known as “Family Law”, there was a case involving “a gonadal intersex”.
So these things aren’t always as cut and dried as one might like to think.
A technical point is that X0 (Turner’s Syndrome) and other chromosomal configurations are viable; e.g. XXY, XYY, and produce living adults. They are abnormalities and cannot produce viable gametes(reproductive cells; i.e. sperm or eggs).
The presence of an X chromosome in the sex-determining pair is necessary for life.
Careful, they don’t want facts here!
Birth defects don’t change the fundamentals of the species. Some people are born with four or six fingers on a hand, yet we state “Humans have five fingers on each hand”. We don’t qualify it.
Those who give it some thought would say that ‘most’ humans are … You might not qualify it but others would.
Small gamettes, large gamettes. That’s yer lot.
Some people have unusual cromosomes or misdeveloped secondary sexy characteristics. Some people wish they were the opposite sex. We can treat such people with compassiona and respect but let’s not pretend that the world is flat
Terry Eagleton’s utopia certainly doesn’t exist. And we are doomed to be served his drivel for eternity.
Oh, the irony of one of the Left’s arch-Utopians complaining about others supposedly indulging that same fallacy.
Incoherent, disjointed, ramblings of post-modern nonsense. None of it particularly accurate or compelling.
An old socialist who just can’t forgive America for its success.
So the Cheeseburger eating draft dodger Trump bans Trans from service and sets in train a vibe shift that eulogises convicted Police beaters. It may seem fun for subscribers to the TV prog that is the Court of Mar-a-Lago where all that King Donald says has fawning hurrahs. That is until Act 2 when reality bites. Then the Courtiers shuffle off to the side disavowing their prior support. It’s coming.
There is a reason we all know the truism that ‘pride comes before a fall’. And when you are the Chief Narcissist you lack the anchors that might avoid it.
Trump exists because the idiocy of postmodernism exists, they created him.
Postmodernists are the ultimate in narcissism.
You ought at least to accept that the change that is coming is a direct consequence of the abject failure of your politics to make life better for anyone outside your class. You got too greedy.
Aah – JW what is your ‘class’? This chap seems to know! Did you get ‘too greedy’?
JW served in the Royal Navy for twenty years as I recall, so he can’t be all bad.
Did you not see any Leftists losing it videos? I’m livid reading the smarmy abuse from TDS people here. Livid because we have to content with people of such low intellect, character, and likeability factor who are so revoltingly xenophobic, ignorant, and stupid they think they’re 100% and are perfectly comfortable comming here looking to bait, belittle, and mock the audience base. And yes, the obvious mental illness that comes with it, and if you’d had any intelligence or decency you would have been so disgusted with your own side you would have started to reassess your position, but no. You’ve never even seen a Lefty losing it compilation. You’re still fixated on the sane group of people that rejected kow towing to truly mentally deranged far-Left monster and psychiatric cases. We have to live with the fact that revolting people that hate humanity actively want to sabotage Trump and hate half the Western world and unrepentently and unashamedly bunkering down. Nothing we say gets through or peirces the deranged, psychotic stupor of brainwashed people.
You’re ruining these comments. You have nothing but put downs and smears. I forsaw this years ago. One day we’d get to a stage where the brainwashed people had no idea what came before woke Marxist dogma. The time when you had to give proper empirical arguments and reasoning, evidence and data for your position, or anything credible beyond base human emotion and deplorable, depressed, unhinged emotion. A time where you didn’t engage in every logical fallacy and actually had some academic rigour and standards that led you to have a good grasp on reality and skillful critical thinking abilities.
It’s alien. You’ve been conditioned and to not even tolerate opposing views. And it’s created genuine braindamage. Scores of ideological zombies that can’t think. I didn’t get carried away with Trump. I know you lot are going to be working against decent humanity for a long time yet, attempting to inflict your obnoxious, toxic cult on the rest of us at every chance you get.
Biden’s American Utopia didn’t exist either – and many people ended up wanting to challenge that idea.
Mr Eagleton could have saved us the time and the expenditure of mental energy in trying to grace all this clotted nonsense with reason and précised these assessments of Trump’s USA as the Marilyn Monroe doctrine and Milky Way bars.
More gibberish from the Marxist Master of Gibberish.
Unherd, why do you continue to publish this click bait nonsense?
It’s instructive – of what needs to be overcome here in the UK for us to become a successful nation again. It therefore fulfils a purpose.
But many of us already know! :). or is it 🙁
I agree the article is gibberish, but I’m actually glad Unherd continues to publish him. Provides an opportunity to formulate coherent rebuttals to woke nonsense, and also provides grounds for optimism. If Terry is the best the woke Left can come up with, then they’re sunk. Terry makes the mistake of actually writing in clear prose, which makes the task of pointing out where he’s wrong so much easier. Judith Butler and other woke academics are probably wishing he’d shut up so they can continue to intimidate policy-makers with their turgid, incomprehensible bullshit.
How can any country be united when people like Mr Eagleton exist whose raison d’etre is to sow dissent and division
That is a question to remember!
And use!
…two sexes, ok. Which sex is someone born with a p***s and ovaries? Perhaps they are somewhere on a line that runs between male at one end and female at the other? Trump is not saying that they can choose to adopt one end or the other. He is saying that the Govt has decided that they shall be the sex the doctor first saw at the moment of their birth. …and he is saying that God saved him from a bullet so he could make ghat decision.
… and doctors sometimes get it wrong – may God save the souls of those poor folk as Trump has decreed that what is given at birth shall be theirs until death with no reprise.
There is no continuum. Sex is binary. Even the unfortunates – almost always with chromosomal aberrations – who are “intersex” are inter between male and female, nothing else. Further, sex is not determined by “what the doctor saw.” It is determined by X and Y chromosomes at conception – a full nine months prior to the doctor’s seeing anything.
Chromosomally-normal individuals who think they were “born in the wrong body” have a mental disorder, not a physical one, and not since frontal leucotomies were abandoned has anyone foolishly tried to treat mental disease surgically. At least not until recently, which raises the question as to which end of the scalpel the disease lies ….
You don’t actually go far enough here. So-called “intersex” people aren’t even “between” male and female; they are either male or female. Tell me what specific disorder of sexual development they suffer from and I’ll tell you whether they’re male or female, with 100% reliability.
And yes, gender dysphoria is a mental disorder.
Indeed, biological sex is not determined by a doctor, but the official record of it is, and that can be wrong!
It can be wrong, but the correct answer is still going to be either male or female, because sex is binary.
Further reading: http://www.thisisintersex.org/basis/do-chromosomes-determine-your-sex/
Have you been watching ‘Conclave’ may I ask?
’
As someone who enjoys Mr Eagleton’s writing, musings and ideas I keep wondering why he writes for Unherd and why Unherd insists on publishing him. Obviously, the site has a majority of right-wing /conservative readership who dislike Mr Eagleton’s ideas, who loathe to read his articles but do so to then take self-righteous pleasure in deriding him. I guess that generates traffic and clicks for Unherd. But I wonder what Mr Eagleton’s motives are for contributing here. I thoroughly agreed with most things in this post but I guess my motives for reading the comments below it are purely entertainment based. Maybe the same holds true for Mr Eagleton!?
As Daryl Davis said “keep the conversation going”.
I wonder who has a majority holding in self-righteousness? I always assumed the majority shareholders were the Good people.
??
Indeed I rather enjoyed this article which I took as a reasonable comparison of the American psyche with that of the British (a divergence which is usually well acknowledged), but almost all the commentators have read it with one eye and bring in a non-existent leftish tinge which just isn’t there.
I like to read articles that challenge my preconceptions – I hope to learn something or learn counter arguments (mostly from the comments). Unfortunately Mr Eagleton is pretty much a one-idea writer, scrabbling for a different way to say the same thing.
You people don’t belong here. You have no idea what free thinking or enlightment values are. It’s pitiful and absolutely stomach turning to deal with people that label everyone who thinks for themselves as ‘right-wing’. Some of these hideously brainwashed people cannot fathom that anything exists out of the hyper-politicized false dichomy that psychopathic Marxist radicals have deliberately enforced on society, in a us/them divisive way. Genuinely mental sickness.
Not that the editorial team will read or care, but look what you are doing to your readership. Taking their money and then totally reneging on what you said you’d deliver. Posting a bunch of Left-Wing psychos is attracting the Comment Is Free brigade. They confuse free thinking with being ‘right’ or ‘conservative’ because in their heads all that is exists is ‘Left (angelic) and Right (demonic). They are religion types who think just because they went to Uni and they’re clever. They are hopeless servile and indoctrinated, and cannot hope to think for themselves as an individual anymore and display their own innate morality. It’s been conditioned out of them because they blindly believe whatever authority figures told them growing up, which was nothing by woke dogshit.
What the actual f**k? They’re ruining this place here. Read anyone of them comments. It’s a bitchy, snide, sneering put downs of people here simply because they’re not woke Left-Wing. Nothing more.
Observe not one of them has an empirical argument that show they’re right, that what they say has gravitas. Or is based on reason, or their own free thinking and unique perspective. It’s all based on a religious held belief that the garbage they’ve been force feed and manipulated to believe is actually the only correct way of looking at things.
It’s blows their mind that other people don’t agree. These people are the intellectual casualties of the Woke infiltration of our schools and unis, and all organs of state.
I realize the NHS is in shambles but please Mr. Eagleton get help.
” As the wit remarked, it’s when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it’s time to give it up.”
I think that should read, “as the half-wit remarked”.
Not entirely surprising from someone, Eagleton, who is a self-professed Marxist; worse, he’s verbose with a writing style entirely lacking in any appeal.
I have just read through most of the comments on this article and there seems to be a broadly uniform opinion that it is dross and that the author is completely uninteresting.
The Editors might take note of reader’s comments.
LOLOL but yet he got so many comments – the editors love that! Rage bait!
The nation was already divided under the progressive jackbooted approach to their utopia. Progressive fear of removal of almighty governmental centralization juggernaut is the “crisis.” What a load of trash here. But, you get to post it. Put it up on X. Doubt you would as freedom of speech, good or bad, is allowed. “Nuclear button”
“It was as though all other genders vanished into thin air as the words were spoken”
But that’s the whole point, Terry. There aren’t any other genders.
Prof Eagleton’s last three articles on this running theme are entitled –
“Trump’s American Utopia doesn’t exist”
“The myth of Cultural Unity”
“English Nationalism is built on a Lie”
Its all lies, myths and delusions we are told ad nauseam. Unless it is Palestine, of course, or Gender, or The Working Class. They are real.
This is a very tired party trick by now.
There has only ever been two genders on the whole planet; EVER. Why does it take Trump to state it as a truism? No other genders have ever existed so they didn’t ‘vanish into thin air’ by declaration of Donald trump. He has stated a biological fact which any sane, rational person believes.
And people wonder why the Democrats lost!!!
This article is so very illustrative of the kind of snotty cynicism that separates European thinking from American. The U.S. is so very far from perfect, but the difference is that we freely acknowledge it and always have hope that through blood, sweat, toil, and tears – as a Brit might say – we believe that we can make it better.
No idea what this article saying, it is vague and tiresome to read. I gather he doesn’t like Trump and tries to elevate this dislike to some sort of oracular wisdom with grandiose words and sentences and pompous assertions like “Performative declarations don’t really work when it comes to culture”.
Yeah umm, whatever
I should add that blasphemy is also performative – at least to those that believe in God.
Exhausting and rather pitiable. Eagelton will be a complete unknown in a generation
Can’t say I’d heard of him before this.
That long?
“The orgy of collective self-congratulation and sham religiosity which was Trump’s inauguration showed all this well enough.”
And that didn’t happen at all when Obama was elected did it?
The disconnected ramblings of a leftist who has unmoored himself from reality, hope, and facts. Terry seems like the kind of “critic” who could look at a pile of fresh road apples and declare it “beautiful,” then look at Michaelangelo’s David and declare it “racist.”
Terry seems more afraid that America may actually improve than of any other outcome.
“Dismissing certain genders as null and void is like trying to will your hair to change colour. The narcissist insists that the world must be pliant to his touch, raging like an infant when it resists his desires.“
Eagleson is absolutely right in his pronouncement and dead wrong at whom he directs it. Look no further than the alphabet community to find the raging infant who’ll brook no challenge to their claim that DNA-determined sex, like DNA-determined hair color, is mutable. Any change in either is merely cosmetic.
I’ve enjoyed some of Eagleton’s stuff in the past, but this article is just beyond ridiculous.
For one thing, their optimism was dearly bought. Americans, especially those who are even remotely socially conservative, have been dragged through hell by the radical left this past ~10 years. They’ve had their values and beliefs trampled on. They’ve seen their quality of life degrade in real economic terms. And they’ve witnessed an unprecedented slip in life expectancy due to deaths of despair and a public health crisis. For those with a shred of affection for their nation, the last decade of American culture was a tragedy. The election outcome was clear proof of that. Why give him a mandate if they were anything but tragically unhappy with what the Democrats had offered them?
“Donald Trump gives the impression of a man who has never faced anything worse than an overdone cheeseburger.”? He literally got shot in the head. And dragged through the courts for years for less than what every Democratic senator and congressperson routinely does.
“Performative declarations don’t really work when it comes to culture.” This has to take the cake. Ever heard of #metoo? Ever seen pronouns in someone’s online bio, in their email signature, on their resume? What are pronouns other than performative declarations–that swept the culture? And this change wasn’t glacial, it was practically overnight. Transexual culture, same thing. Based on performative declaration and flipped the culture rapidly. This is literally at the heart of the culture war and has been for over a decade. Get a grip.
You’re old, Terry. Go home and hang up your hat.
Another great post that makes me wince at the fact the Left never care what we say. A good person would read that and admit they’re wrong and being willing concede their caricature was ridiculous. But the Left don’t even read anything from opponents and miss great posts like that. They are going to do everything to sabotage Trump and his team.
Thoughts and prayers at this difficult time Terry, you absolute lunatic.
‘Dismissing certain genders as null and void is like trying to will your hair to change colour.’
So what would you say about conjuring non-existent genders out of thin air? Declaring yourself to be a woman when you are in fact a man is very closely analogous to willing your hair to change colour. (And at least you can dye your hair!)
I hope Eagleton had a satisfying conclusion to all this verbal masturbation.
I’m all for happy endings.
Terry is desperate. A bundle of tropes and contradictions. This is exactly why there’s a Trump restoring reality by decree as we speak. This was BlueAnon: “ If the truth is inconvenient, you can replace it by legislating an alternative truth into being.” It’s called DEI and it is the religion that interferes with your everyday life. We gave it up. Trump is the edifying fiction.
Never in the field of human journalism was so much ink expended to such little effect.
Perhaps the deeper question Terry is whether there actually is free will beyond a sense of the conscious choices that arise from every movement we make.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/basics/free-will
Is the material continuum of cause and effect beyond our grasp to breach so that we are left with a pandemonium of events, over which we have no control other than to bear conscious witness?
Or can we as a spontaneous cause arising from nothing, alter the course of history to dramatic wondrous effect?
Probably the truth is somewhere in-between where different chains of cause and effect mingle and affect one another, like the dizzying rotations of electrons around a neutron star. So which chain is more influential than the other considering the quantum probability of spontaneous collapse.
One minute we have one corporate demagogue in power, the next we have another and then another. But what then of the preservation of knowledge. Do we simply forget the preceding events after the collapse has occurred thus ending the absoluteness of events so that as one temporal chain of cause and effect vanishes, within the scope of our conscious imagination, another one newly emerges to begin the hand wringing all over again.
Of course, if one subscribes to the many worlds interpretation, so rather than spontaneous collapse we have a perspectival continuum, wherein the outcome of an election for example, depends on the observer’s perspective. That is to say, collapse never really occurs objectively and instead the chain of cause and effect remains alive and well in the immaterial subjectivity of the observer until such time it materialises again.
Of course, if everyone in principle agrees that an election was won by one party and lost by another, then the idea of many worlds creating a relativistic subjectivism in which noone ever truly agrees about the truth, becomes the anarchic norm. This anarchic world would of course be defined by dynamical separability in which absolute objectivity can never exist.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-theorys-measurement-problem-may-be-a-poison-pill-for-objective-reality/
However we don’t live in such a world except perhaps in our own subjective imaginations, which implies dynamical nonseparability. In other words, a quantum world of One that underlies the infinite chains of cause and effect.
This means, at a quantum level, we are all entangled with one another with each cause and effect affecting every other. So Trump wasn’t only voted in by the decisions of Trump voters but voted in by the decisions of anti-Trump voters since for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
How can then, the thesis and the antithesis be measured accurately and objectively in order to arrive at the truth.
One possible solution is to give each person one subjective unit of candidate measurement and count each of them up to determine which candidate has the most after collectively deciding that each subjective vote counts as absolute objectivity even if the votes themselves were based on subjective measurements about each candidates intent and probable actions.
In this regard, Trump including all his personality traits was given democratic legitimacy by the quantum system as a whole, such is the life of dynamical nonseparabilty.
So the cause and effect question that naturally arises is why?
Terry, mate… it’s over. Woke is dead. Your lot have a good run, you’ve inflicted your insane dogma on most of the western world for two decades, against the will of the majority of the people who actually believe that common sense trumps ideology (pun intended). Now please return to your academic rat-hole, never to darken our door again.
Say what you want Mr. Eagleton, but utopia for me is the return of common sense in government, deportations of criminal aliens and a reduction in the tens of billion$ spent on absolutely ridiculous projects that have virtually no impact on 99% of the citizenry.
Not to mention the reduction in the monetary rape of our country by a myriad of NGO’s and foreign entities funded by our tax dollars and tax breaks.
Not to mention that it is now safe to call a biological male, who dresses as a woman, a man, and tell him he is not allowed to enter a woman’s only space!
Not to mention a return to meritocracy, where someone’s knowledge and character matter more than his/her skin color or sexual preference!
Not to mention an effort to ensure our military’s purpose returns to war fighting vs. being a social experiment.
Not to mention an effort to confront why 35% of our children are obese and on their way to diabetes and a lifetime of drugs.
Not to mention the return to sanity when it comes to the realization that wind and sunlight can certainly provide a portion of our energy needs sometimes, but the transition needs to make some sense before we mandate the elimination of fossil fuels.
Not to mention the return of free speech!
And finally, the absolute joy achieved by returning to democracy, whereby our elected leaders carry out the will of the people vs. the other way round.
Reading this makes me sad. Sad knowing that the Left have a clear mental defect that kicks in whenever they are confronted with views that run counter to their own. They have an automatic signal-jammer in their brain that scrambles any non-ideologically aligned communication from outside and prevents it even entering their brain for analysis, making it all just white noise to them (in the form of ‘racism’, ‘fascism’ or similar) that they can never take on board and which they dismiss without understanding.
That set of principles there should be applauded by all decent people, Left or Right, if they are ‘good faith actors’. They can still not like Trump as a personality basis, but a good person can see those things are good things and considers more than themselves in the scheme of things
The Left don’t even compute those great points. Terry, for example, would not have read one comment here. He’s onto his next assignment, pumping the same shite, and getting his pay-off of feeling important and getting to be self-indulgent. It’s his living.
I’ve said it for years, these people are not healthy, normal, decent human beings with genuinely goodness and love for humanity. If they grew up in Nazi Germany, they’d be Nazis. In the middle-ages they’d be burning heretics at the stake. In Saudi, they’d be chopping the heads of infidels, kuffar, apostates, and gays. Ideologies, and enforcing them, are a proxy of their inner-need to feel superior and dominate others, and a means to do that.
There are always narcissists, control freaks, fanatics, zealots, ideologues, pious authoritarians that use whatever they can to gain some kind of personal pay-off, and always will be. And the modern woke Left have tore the arse out of it for the pay off of getting to abuse others while either playing the victim, or pretending to champion ‘victims’ and oppose oppresors.
They truly don’t care about things that effect us all, like those areas you mentioned. There’s nothing in it for them.
They may not be getting on board with the incredible renewal of American greatness, but at least they tactics are no longer fooling people outside of them pitiful, unhinged, unwell little echo-chamber, and the Trump admin are taking care of business.
Great post.
It is common sense to divide newborn babies into boys and girls.
Yes, there are some babies born with ambiguous genitalia but the frequency of that is really very low, somewhere around 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 50,000 live births. Yes, it is a problem for those kids and their families, but not a reason to reorganize society around the patently false notion that sexual identity is fluid or a continuum. Parents may feel confused when it happens, but healthy parents accept those babies and raise them to be healthy children.
There are ways for society to help those children adapt to adult life and that is important, just as it is important for society to support other exceptional children as they mature.
It also happens sometimes that babies are born without arms or legs. That is unfortunate but many of them adapt and thrive and have rich, full lives. And we do not take it to mean that hands and feet are fluid concepts or exist on a continuum. In general, you either have them or you don’t.
The National Instute of Health (UK) says 1:4,500. Ambiguous genitalia at birth. Cleveland Clinic (US) says range is 1 in 1000 – 4500. UN says 1.7% of population have intersex traits.
3.6m live births in a year in the US.
Should any of them be allowed to reassign their gender? And if they do, should the Govt recognise the change?
Where are all the comments I read on the tube an hour ago. Did UnHerd wipe them off because they were too critical?
I usually skip Terry E’s, all I can say, ever since Trump got inaugurated, I can’t stop smiling, as his flurry of exec.orders also caused havoc here in Europe. It seems that there is finally movement in the migrant crisis, Green Hoax doesn’t get an easy ride anymore and people are finally wake up looking at the behemoth of the Brussels Bureaucracy. Oh joy!
One can certainly disagree with the writer, especially if one feels personally enraged with his psychological profile of the new man in office. Nevertheless, it is true that Trump’s inauguration was self-congratulatory and his speech full of performative statements. Was this evidence of hope, optimism, or simply the language of a narcissistic populist? Taking a step back from one’s own views, I found this article thought-provoking on a philosophical level.
The article did serve a purpose, it annoyed the delusional Trump tribe. So many Americans will be disappointed, just wait 2 years.
Look at your malicious, vile contributions compared to the thought out criticisms from people that disagree with the author but do so on reason and intelligence. It’s not about Trump. Only the Left ad hom everyone and think if they don’t personally like someone that person has no other qualities.
Everyone else is mature enough to be able to see that the areas Trump is focused on are areas worth fixing. And can see past infantile, petty hatred, even if you people can’t.
Not one of you can make any credible, intelligent arguments to the contrary, that empirically show Trump is doing something disastrous, like you claim. All you do, as fitting to people with the worse human character, is thumb down people and make caustic little remarks. All you have are feelings.
People are delighted because Trump is an antidote to the weak, castrated, ineffectual, spiteful, resentful, malicious, small minded, and deeply odious Left-Wing freaks and loons who don’t have any arguments. They got where the did using Marxist tactics of demonizing all descent, making malicious claims and lies about the character of opposition, deplatforming people at every opportunity, not listening to anyone, manipulating people. And it’s not working on the masses anymore.
If I was in your shoes, and I’d go through every reason and thought of the pro-Trump people here to properly understand their psychology and see where I’m going wrong, or where the opposition are. To you people, such a concept of actually taking on board other human beings reasoning and actual thought-processes is alien. You’re have issues that make your character so weak that any disagreeing or seeing things different is too much for you people to bare. It’s so unspeakably loathsome and cretinous.
You have no power to destroy the US for the next four-five years. Any sane, good hearted human being unblighted by the collective mental illness TDS sufferers like you have, is ecstatic based on that alone.
Why are you people so unlikeable and unpleasant? So odious in nature? What is you issue. Why not outline all the reasons you are intellectual and moral superior and know more than we do.
You wouldn’t dare. You haven’t got any anyway. You just have self-loathing that you got that bit about to take responsibility for, and project it all onto others.
Mr. Eagleton’s definition of America divided only makes sense if one accepts that the division is based upon 1% of the populace throwing temper tantrums because the other 99% don’t buy into their shared delusions.
Despite all efforts to the contrary on the part of an elite leadership out of touch with the actual working, productive citizens of the United States, the old girl still has quite a bit of life left in her.
I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Winston Churchill about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others. To borrow the theme, I think President Trump may be the worst possible president, except for all the other choices.
I’m perfectly content to let all this play out in order to see where it leads.
And, meanwhile, God bless America.
I just subscribed to Unherd this weekend. I’m wondering whether that was wise after reading this. And that’s apart from having to negotiate scores of squares looking for traffic lights or crossings before I had the opportunity to log in.
Inflicting tiresome Marxist dinosaurs still clinging to a debunked ‘revolutionary ideology’ because they want to constantly relive their youth, or who still believe despite all that came of Marxist was twenty times the death count of Nazism, really shows they’ve taken us for ride, the editorial team. It truly did look like a place for free thinking people to read good articles that break from the vile state ideology that has been forced on us for decades. A place where people could be exposed to lots of different trains of thought that have nothing to do with the cretinous Left V Right battle the Left have waged in every sphere of society. At least not in the woke group-think intellectual conformity sense that claims Woke is the only position to take and represents everything good, and anyone disagreeing a white supremacist demon.
It does seem like a charade, the whole UnHerd thing. Obviously money is coming in and priorities have changed. Staying true to the ethos and vision, is no longer a concern for the editorial team.
These articles are not credible voices that offer level-headed, credible opposition that can serve to temper any excesses of the Trump team that might be harmful and need to considered. They are nothing more than unhinged screeds and patronizing mockery from partisan fanatics that can’t stand that people have rejected their BS, and seen beyond personally emotion based on whether they personally like Trump or not to the bigger picture. It’s invariably hatefilled drivel from people that think they have answers when in fact they’re so divorced from reality it’s untrue.
Clearly the editorial move in ‘elitist circles’ and can’t allow themselves to break from their own Herd in which Trump is the ‘big Orange man’ figure of ridicule from infantile Lefty knobs..
Fortunately most of the writers on Unherd are of better quality then Eagleton. As another poster has said, he’s only published here as clickbait for comments. As the resident fossilised Marxist, he certainly fulfills that function.
With one or two notable exceptions (Mary Harrington, Aris Roussinos), I generally learn more from the comment than the articles on Unherd. I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done about the traffic lights and crossings – a chemin de croix for seekers after truth.