Skip to main content

Identity Choice and Pronouns

Identity choice is nothing new.  Nor is the awkward insistence that others play along with the little game.  As Plutarch records about a 4th c. BC incident in Greece,

Damis [a Spartan], with reference to the instructions sent from Alexander [the Great] that they should pass a formal vote deifying him, said, ‘We concede to Alexander that, if he so wishes, he may be called a god' (Apophthegmata Laconica 25.1).

One can imagine Alexander insisting, 'You must call me by my divine pronouns: 'Thou, Thee, and Thy.'

Damis's reply is priceless, rejecting any idea that Alexander really was a god and treating Alexander as the pretender he was.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alasdair MacIntyre and Tradition Enquiry

Alasdair MacIntyre's subject is philosophical ethics, and he is best known for his critique of ethics understood as the application of general, universal principles.  He has reintroduced the importance of virtue ethics, along with the role of narrative and community in defining the virtues.  His focus on these things—narrative, community, virtue—combine to form an approach to enquiry which he calls ‘tradition enquiry.’ [1] MacIntyre characterises ethical thinking in the West in our day as ethics that has lost an understanding of the virtues, even if virtues like ‘justice’ are often under discussion.  Greek philosophical ethics, and ethics through to the Enlightenment, focussed ethics on virtue and began with questions of character: 'Who should we be?', rather than questions of action, 'What shall we do?'  Contemporary ethics has focused on the latter question alone, with the magisterial traditions of deontological ('What rules govern our actions?') and tel...
Post a Comment
Read more

The New Virtues of a Failing Culture

  An insanity has fallen upon the West, like a witch’s spell.   We have lived with it long enough to know it, understand it, but not long enough to resist it, to undo it.   The very stewards of the truth that would remove it have left their posts.   They have succumbed to its whispers, become its servants.   It has infected the very air and crept along the ground like a mist until it is within us and all about us.   We utter its precepts like schoolchildren taught their lines. Its power lies in its claims of virtuosity, distorted goodness.   If presented as the vices that they are, they would be rejected.   These virtues are proclaimed from the pulpits and painted on banners or made into flags.   They are established in our schools, colleges, universities, and seminaries.   They are the hallucinogen making our own cultural suicide bearable, even desirable.   They are virtues, but disordered, or they are the excess or deficiency of...
Post a Comment
Read more

James Talarico’s Confused Claims about Christian Convictions, and Europe’s Trans-Society

  Texas Democrat candidate for the senate, James Talarico, has ventured into theological territory meant to challenge orthodox views about God and human sexuality. [1]   Trying to challenge the Christian understanding of gender and sexuality, he alleged that God is ‘nonbinary’.   Clarifying his comment, he averred that God is ‘beyond gender’.   These are contradictory claims. To suggest that God is nonbinary is to locate Him in the created order.  When people claim to be ‘nonbinary’, they are making a claim about their sexuality.  Sex, as we should know but also can see from Genesis 1.26ff, has to do with procreation and multiplying the species on the earth.  Those claiming to be nonbinary are claiming sexuality, whatever ‘nonbinary’ sexual identity means to them. Talarico’s second statement is correct: God is beyond gender.  This is because He is beyond the created order.  God is not both male and female.  He has no sexual identity....
Post a Comment
Read more