The Incoherence of the Modern World
Yesterday, my family attended mass at a parish that isn't our usual in order to be present for the first communion of a family friend. While we were walking through the parking lot, I noticed an apartment building in which one of the suites had a row of flags hanging from the balcony. The flags in question were the pride flag, the trans flag, and the Palestinian flag.
I've often been left astonished and perplexed by the way that many people will find some sort of alignment in causes that seem to be diametrically opposed. I remarked to my wife, that anyone flying a gay pride flag in militantly Islamic Palestine, would find themselves under serious threat of violence. So, how is it that more than a few people think these causes are somehow aligned? Stupidity might count for some of it, but considering how consistently these kinds of causes are endorsed side by side by the same groups of people, there must be more to it.
The only answer I can come up with is Marxism. Because Marxism interprets everything through a narrative of class conflict. And drawing the distinctions of class was easier to do in Marx's day, but in modern developed countries, where there are no explicitly defined classes, identifying the constituents of this conflict takes on a more criteria based interpretation, distinguished by identifying who are the oppressors and and who are the oppressed. Based on that, you can apply a perverse form of solidarity to determine who are those that need your advocacy and who are those that deserve your opposition and condemnation.
Through this lens, otherwise antithetical groups like Hamas and Gay Rights advocates can appear to be aligned. If you can convince yourself that Palestinians are merely oppressed and Israel is an oppressor, then you know who to signal your support for in order to be on the right side of history. The same goes for gay and trans people - although convincing yourself that they are some oppressed minority is becoming more and more untenable, but it has worked in the minds of leftists in the past, so they continue to operate under this paradigm.
Understanding this dynamic does two things for me. First, it demonstrates how absurd and unworkable the theory of Marxism is when applied to the real world. If any philosophy requires you to believe that Islamic Jihadists and Homosexuals are on the same team, then you've taken a seriously wrong logical turn somewhere. In the case of Marxism, it's right at the beginning.
The second thing is that it shows how incapable modern, educated, Westerners are at thinking logically and consistently - especially about moral and political questions. Instead of employing critical thinking, we immediately fall back on easy to understand but wildly inadequate slogans or interpretive mechanisms like those that are furnished by Marxism. And the result is: we become the kind of people who fly flags from our windows that represent creeds that are violently opposed to one another and we see no inconsistency in it.
