The Autonomous Self Is a Coercive God

Who could have predicted that Jim Breuer and Dave Chappelle, co-stars in the 1998 stoner comedy Half Baked, would, more than twenty years later, be the new darlings of the Right for repudiating liberal shibboleths? Breuer, whose comedy routine ridicules transgenderism and pandemic mandates, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show in September to explain why he was cancelling shows that require proof of vaccination. Chappelle is basking in conservative praise because his special “The Closer” is being labeled “transphobic.”  As Brian, Breuer’s doper character in Half Baked, might say: “I’m not gonna do what everyone thinks I’m gonna do and . . . FLIP OUT, man . . . all I wanna know is . . . who’s coming with me? Who’s coming, man?”

A common thread unites Breuer’s and Chappelle’s tension with the liberal world of comedy and Hollywood: an independent streak that bristles at attempts to constrain their autonomy. In this sense, they represent what we Americans have long perceived as the everyday hero: free unto himself and respecting others’ freedom, expressing what he thinks and feels in a liberated marketplace of ideas.

It is also, I would argue, the manifestation of a wholly inadequate conception of modern humanity, which, in its never-ending quest for self-realization, inevitably descends into the very same coercive behaviors it claims to eschew. In Jacques Maritain’s Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau, the French philosopher provides a prescient blueprint for understanding how the emotivist elevation of the self, the division of one’s self from natural biology, and self-celebration can be traced to the reformers Martin Luther, René Descartes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Indeed, one can even say that LGBTQ+ activists in certain key respects are the intellectual heirs of these men who “dominate the modern world.”

Read here

[Editor’s note: I don’t think the author has got Luther, or the Reformation, quite right, but still, the article is worth reading…]