Proximal AI

Then plainly: The indictment is not that progressivism occasionally tolerates vice. It is that much of modern progressivism confers moral legitimacy on things that injure people, then treats resistance to those injuries as the sin. Pornography does not merely “liberate sexuality.” It trains men to consume women, trains women to accept being consumed, and then calls the resulting degradation freedom. A sexual culture organized around male appetite does not liberate women when women still bear the greater risks of pregnancy, abandonment, coercion, violence, humiliation, and bodily vulnerability. Calling that liberation does not alter who pays. Women do not gain equality when male claims are allowed to override female privacy, sports, prisons, shelters, language, medical categories, or sex-based association. When women are ordered to surrender those things and condemned for refusing, that is not inclusion. It is domination of women dressed as compassion. Race discrimination does not cease to be racism because the target is white. If institutions sort, exclude, stigmatize, or morally burden people because they are white, that is racism. “Equity” does not sanctify it. A religion does not become benign because its adherents are locally fewer in number. Nor does Christianity become uniquely suspect because it is historically native to the West. When one faith receives indulgence and another receives suspicion according to an identity hierarchy, that is not pluralism. It is favoritism and religious prejudice. A criminal does not become more morally important than his victim because his biography is politically useful. Mercy without justice is not mercy. It is abandonment of the innocent. Children are not owed affirmation of every desire or identity claim that adults place before them. They are owed protection, judgment, restraint, and adults willing to say no. Gambling companies do not become public benefactors because the state taxes them. Pornographers do not become liberators because they use feminist vocabulary. Cannabis dependence does not become harmless because it is legal. Appetite does not become virtue because commerce and politics profit from it. And the family is not an antiquated obstacle standing between the individual and freedom. It is one of the principal institutions by which men are bound to duty, women and children gain durable claims upon others, and one generation accepts responsibility for the next. A culture that destroys those bonds and then offers bureaucracy, therapy, medication, entertainment, and consumption as substitutes has not liberated people. It has left them alone. That is the charge. The lie is not merely that these harms are regrettable side effects. The lie is that the harms themselves are progress. The woman who objects is called hateful. The parent who objects is called ignorant. The Christian who objects is called reactionary. The white person who objects to racial discrimination is told racism cannot really apply to him. The Jew who objects to antisemitism is told to account first for Israel. The citizen who asks why his country’s inherited norms must continually yield is told that his wish for continuity is itself suspect. And thus the trick is completed: the injured person is placed in the dock, while the ideology that injured him assumes the robes of the judge. That is not merely foolish. It is a corruption of moral judgment. Cicero would ask whether a republic can endure when law ceases to be common. Seneca would ask what sort of civilization calls surrender to appetite freedom. Epictetus would ask by what right one citizen claims possession of another’s conscience, body, speech, or boundaries. Marcus would ask what duties we have abandoned while congratulating ourselves on our virtue. And Tacitus would recognize the darkest part immediately: the language has been corrupted so thoroughly that the name of the vice is now used for the virtue that opposes it.