Revolution against Human Nature

I have read that in Latvia, children in elementary school (or was it kindergarten) had to take part in an ideological masquerade : boys had to put on skirts and girls – pants. It was done to avoid what the authors of such an initiative think is to neutralize the influence of what they call gender stereotypes. In their view, human gender is a social construct...

In the past, revolutions were mostly revolutions against social order, more or less radical protest movements of the underprivileged against the privileged. Nowadays in the West we can see a different kind of revolutionary movements gaining momentum and in some cases even succeeding in overturning previous policies. These movements are directed less against the existing social order than against what is called human nature. This is a common feature of such initiatives as prohibition of prostitution, prohibition of slapping children, prohibition of death penalty, gender feminism with similar ideologies (e.g. queer theory), multi-culturalism, opposition against hard learning (learning by heart), even flirting. Such initiatives are often accepted by legislature, although most people oppose such ideas. A proof of the influence of well-organized activists who often do not belong to the underprivileged, but are strongly motivated by ideologies. Here, we have an analogy with Communists who, representing a minority, were still able to achieve their aims and establish a type of government according to their views. I sometimes wonder whether the activists who try to overturn many traditional attitudes, can overcome the resistance of the silent majority, the « dark masses » and introduce their (sometimes extremist) ideas into practice. In their own way, they too want to educate people, to create a new human being, free of old beliefs and prejudices, as once the Bolsheviks. But I am very sceptical about the results of such a revolution. The human nature they ignored or negated finally triumphed against the attempts to change it, it will probably triumph agains the gender and queer theories whether we like it or not. Still, I feel sorry about all the waste of human resources in such dubious experiments with us and our children.

Much of what is called modern art can also be explained as a kind of revolt against human nature, against our inborn aesthetic criteria, our inborn sense of beauty. In fact, this attitude to art is an attempt to overturn this sense of beauty, a protest movement against beauty. Of course, the ultramodernists consider beauty also a social construct that has to be deconstructed in order to create a new human being, a new world. Once Fyodor Dostoyevski said that beauty will save the world. Now, some people seem to believe that the world will be saved if we succeed in doing away with this conservative bourgeois thing called beauty. 

I  would add to this list of neo-Bolshevist initiatives the so-called political correctness we could call linguistic or discourse revolution. And, what is possibly the most dangerous development -- the Western masochism, the tendency to overlook and justify inhuman practices, despotism, religious bigotry, ideologies glorifying terror and violence with the pretext that all this is an expression of the third world revolt against Western imperialism and colonialism. This is a kind of masochism I find hard to accept: I don't feel guilty of what has happened in Africa, India or Indonesia before I was born.

The fact that there are more black people in prisons in the US is explained by the liberal left as a proof that the blacks are underprivileged and discriminated against. Perhaps. But how to explain the ratio of men and women in prisons in Western countries? E.g. in the prison of Funchal on Madeira there are about two hundred male and twenty female inmates. Does it mean that in Western societies, men are underprivileged and discriminated against?