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What escapes me about all this: where does the moral certainty of the progressive "Modern Puritan" come from/what's it grounded in? What faith are they even evangelizing? To recall a recent topic around here, what's their answer to Nietzsche?
Most charitably we could credit them with a form of liberal humanism -- "we believe in self-actualization, and in the righteousness of removing all the oppressive obstacles to the self-actualization of others". But that seems like weak gruel for the Puritan soul. How to make an orthodoxy of human freedom? How do fanatics whip themselves into frenzies of 'you do you'? Isn't it paradoxical, even more paradoxical than a good religion needs to be?
Not to get all TLP here, but I think we can see the core progressive aesthetic as a fetishization of the self-actualizing process, a kind of social BDSM. The process is understandably more easily fetishized when it manifests in a YA novel trope of a special individual's picturesque struggle against the constraints of societal expectations than when it manifests in a more opaque internal process of self-cultivation. We're seeing now that it's also possible to fetishize an individual's righteous struggle for freedom against the constraints of personal biological reality.
It's the visible struggle against outward restraint that arouses the moral energy, and which draws focus away from the oppressed individual's goal in the struggle. The actual human victim's personal hopes and dreams -- tawdry or outright distasteful as they might be if laid out for sober scrutiny -- can be set aside during the ecstatic spectacle of liberation. But then, the goal achieved, the ropes untied, the scene completed, the post-nut clarity setting in, the unsettling condition of being reasserts after the spasm of vicarious becoming. What will the liberated do now with liberty (ever so exquisitely attained)? Do we really want to know? What, indeed, will we do with ours?
The answer, of course, is clear. Find a new character who can reenact the performance. The emptiness of freedom compels the search for fresh veins of righteous struggle. Better hope oppression is a renewable resource, or sooner or later we'll all have to stand around looking at each other's naked flabby souls in the cold light of full luxury automated gay space communism.
Of course, the best way to make your "righteous struggle" eternal is to make it against reality itself. Oppression is indeed a renewable resource when you're being "oppressed" by the very laws of physics themselves.
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