The following is a US Supreme Court ruling from 1872, regarding a woman who had been denied a license to practice law in the state of Illinois on account of her being a married woman (Bradwell vs. The State [of Illinois]):

“…the civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman, adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband. So firmly fixed was this sentiment in the founders of the common law that it became a maxim of that system of jurisprudence that a woman had no legal existence separate from her husband, who was regarded as her head and representative in the social state; and, notwithstanding some recent modifications of this civil status, many of the special rules of law flowing from and dependent upon this cardinal principle still exist in full force in most States. One of these is, that a married woman is incapable, without her husband’s consent, of making contracts which shall be binding on her or him. This very incapacity was one circumstance which the Supreme Court of Illinois deemed important in rendering a married, woman incompetent fully to perform the duties and trusts that belong to the office of an attorney and counsellor.” (Page 141)

150 years later, here we are, witnessing a Supreme Court Justice—somehow the first black woman—telling us that she cannot define what a woman is.

What exactly happened? And how did it happen?

Some would respond, saying we’re just that much more evolved now, as we continue upon this path that has been set out for us since around the Enlightenment onwards.

We’ve discussed, many, many times on this site how liberalism and the versions of democracy practiced in the West these days are ultimately harmful to society and humanity. Not only are these systems corrupted due to their becoming plutocracies but also because they allow base desires to trump any lasting truth. We can constantly redefine words and therefore concepts such as “marriage.”

That is in part possible because base desires have become claims for legitimacy. It’s your right to have sex without any consequences (i.e., it’s your right to abort your baby), it’s your right to ingest anything you want, it’s your right to sleep with whomever (and increasingly whatever) you want.

And from those claims for legitimacy, the intellectualizing flows. Sex is really just an expression of power, so repressing it is authoritarianism and expressing it is the pinnacle of human liberation…you know, the woke stuff.

RELATED: How “Sexual Revolution” Gave Rise to Nazism

How and Why Rules Change

Here is a proposed basic formula for how rules (and by “rules” I mean generally-accepted rules of morality) change:

(Base Desire – Religion) + Intellectual Gymnastics + Technology (which has been covered)

Some of you may disagree, and please do feel free to propose your own formula.

I’ll now present my reasoning behind the formula proposed above.

Minds change all the time. You can grow to like things you once hated and hate things you once liked—food, colors, cars, whatever. Sometimes changes in a person’s likings—or discoveries of what he/she likes—goes beyond what’s generally accepted. Some people discover that they like child pornography (a‘udhu billah); some people discover that they like the same sex. Even in Islam, we acknowledge that people can have wrong desires (i.e., the concept of homosexuality exists, but that doesn’t mean you go and act on it).

However, what happens when you want to act on those desires? This either requires a person to either:

a) be OK with doing something wrong; or

b) persuade themself that this wrong activity is actually perfectly fine.

Option B typically requires a great deal of mental gymnastics. If you spent any time at a liberal arts college in the past say, two decades, you may have been exposed to this, let’s call it contemporary mental gymnastics, though it might have gone by another name—postmodernism.

Postmodernism

Unfortunately, in order to deal with this, we need to turn to one of the most famous degenerates-cum-intellectuals (he proudly occupied some of his time in all kinds of sexual deviance¹) whom many academics often revere (and love to reference in an attempt to try and sound clever). I am referring, of course, to Michel Foucault (1926-1984).

As a leader in postmodernism (a ‘school’ of thought that is a crock of you-know-what), Foucault argued (among other ideas that you can try to understand in his verbose texts) that morals are all relative.

Here’s an bit from the famous 1971 Foucault-Chomsky debate which demonstrates this:

Foucault: If you like, I will be a little bit Nietzschean about this; in other words, it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power. But it seems to me that, in any case, the notion of justice itself functions within a society of classes as a claim made by the oppressed class and as justification for it.

Chomsky: I don’t agree with that.

Foucault: And in a classless society, I am not sure that we would still use this notion of justice.

Chomsky: Well, here I really disagree. I think there is some sort of an absolute basis–if you press me too hard I’ll be in trouble, because I can’t sketch it out-ultimately residing in fundamental human qualities, in terms of which a “real” notion of justice is grounded…

Decades later, when asked why he disagreed with Foucault in relation to moral relativism, Chomsky said:

“There are no moral relativists. There are people who profess it, who can discuss it abstractly, but it doesn’t exist in ordinary life. And to sharpen the discussion a little, we should recognize that the concept, moral relativism, ranges over quite a broad spectrum. So there’s a form of moral relativism which is totally uncontroversial. Of course it’s true. There are, to quote this [questioner], ‘ethical norms that vary widely over space and time.’ That’s just an observation of fact. Nobody denies that. Similarly, every other aspect of humans varies quite widely. So for example, human visual systems can vary quite widely in the way they function, depending on early experience…you can change them radically just by early experience…On the other hand, you can’t turn a human visual system into an insect visual system as you change experience” (see from 1:57-3:54)

Here Chomsky uses the human visual system to demonstrate that although morals can vary, they do so within a certain framework, on a spectrum that is not infinite. Just as the human visual system can change based on exposure, so can people’s perceptions of morals, based on experience and exposure. But, just as humans cannot see like insects, their perceptions of right and wrong also have limits.

Chomsky goes on to say that the notion that “moral values can range indefinitely” is “incoherent” (like postmodernism). He explains that this proposal assumes that morals are just acquired from one’s culture, but this ignores an underlying point, begging the question: how a can a person acquire a culture in the first place?

RELATED: The “Source of Morality” Argument in Muslim Debates: Does It Work?

Without any “fixed basis” for culture and morals—we would describe this as the fitrah, i.e., the innate human disposition—Chomsky explains how you could never acquire them. The act itself is limited to what one observes and then replicates. He concludes, then, that the so-called moral relativists are actually universalists.

I must make it very clear that some of what Chomsky goes on to say about morality and how it has evolved—in a way that he describes as penetrating “more deeply into our actual, real normative values”—does not align with Islam. Nonetheless, his basic point—that if humans had no innate sense of morality, they would not be able to acquire any morals—makes sense. What he is not able to answer is where this innate sense of right and wrong comes from. May Allah guide him to Islam. Amin.

Boredom, Hype and the Pull of Base Desires

Are people really just being their authentic selves now, or are they simply numb to life and overcome with suggestions on how to make things and themselves seem interesting?

As Muslims, we know that we are all born with a sound fitrah; we know that what we see so often these days is variations on a theme of people moving away from their fitrah.

All of a sudden, Disney execs have ‘pansexual’ children; your childhood friend went from being a woman that is attracted to men, to a woman that is attracted to women, to a trans non-binary ‘person’; your neighbors with a small child unexpectedly divorced and the mother ran off with a non-binary ‘person.’ They all document and display this for the world (and their bosses and cool friends) to see, on various social media platforms.

Giving in to base desires and intellectualizing it seems to be a way for people to allow themselves to act contrary to their fitrah (Allah knows best). One man’s bizarre fetish of dressing up like a woman somehow suddenly becomes a revolutionary act; a woman’s desire to have sex without consequences becomes “her body her rights”; a person’s desire to be highly promiscuous becomes some kind of praiseworthy act in defiance of societal oppression. These are all simply ways to justify wrong behavior and make it seem like clever counter-culture.

Like these phony revolutionaries, Foucault intellectualized sex to a nauseating degree, trying to hypnotize his readers into thinking that sex holds some kind of ineffable key to understanding all of life.

“Sex and its effects are perhaps not so easily deciphered; on the other hand, their repression, thus reconstructed, is easily analyzed. And the sexual cause—the demand for sexual freedom but also for the knowledge to be gained from sex and the right to speak about it—becomes legitimately associated with the honor of a political cause: sex, too, is placed on the agenda for the future.”²

It seems like no coincidence then, that the very man who wrote that “sex is worth dying for” eventually died of AIDS, after numerous trips to bathhouses in San Francisco.³ Sorry to seem crass, but that appears to be what happened.

RELATED: Sexual Immorality and New Diseases: A Powerful Prophecy of Islam

Foucault associated sex with power and therefore held sexual repression to be a way to subjugate society. In his world, prostitutes and their pimps and their likes are the real heroes who live authentically.

It doesn’t take much to see how these ideas have gradually trickled down from the ivory towers and polluted our society. It’s become the norm now.

Technology

Technology has made changes easier and more justifiable. Machines plus no adherence to religion and little need to control base desire makes, say, watching other people fornicate, that much less of a big deal. You’re not spying on the neighbors after all. You’re just watching two consenting adults, who were possibly paid to perform, on your laptop screen. With your titillating act, you’re undoing decades of societal oppression and repression of individuals.

By watching porn and supporting these performers, you’re undoing the very power structures that have, for so long, weighed down society. It’s really very impressive and all very nuanced you see (the titillation is just a bonus).

See how this works?

Add in some pretension in there; some pontification; some sesquipedalian terms, and you’ve got critical theory; academic cred; and eventually street cred (e.g., Woke ideology).

What Are Rules Anyways?

People want to do what they want to do, and they feel compelled to reinvent the wheel each time they want to do so. It’s the reason why Wokeism and secularism are a kind of new religion.

That being said, there are some who, subhan Allah, are able to recognize that what they are doing is wrong, and they try to change. Just consider the story of this child pornography addict. He makes no attempt to intellectualize what he did; he simply realized it was wrong, acknowledged it, and remarkably, tried to fight against his urges.

More recently, Foucault has been accused of having sexually abused children while working as an academic in Tunisia during the ’60s. No one can provide much proof for this. There is, as far as I know, only one associate of his who claims to have seen it and regrets never speaking against it. If true and if he were to have been confronted about it, one can only imagine the amount of intellectualization that would have taken place there.

I wanted to bring light to a comment that one of you (someone with the display name, “akh”) made on this post. It encapsulates the general problem with over-intellectualizing everything (something that Brother Bheria also discussed not too long ago):

“Philosophers like [Jordan] Peterson deal in abstractions, they are far removed from everyday real life. Practical people like Tate deal in observable reality, not in fancy ideas. Common folk engage with reality on a daily basis which gives them an almost instinctive ability to see what is right and wrong i.e. they are closer to their fitrah. And exactly because they are closer to their fitrah they can more easily recognise the righteousness of Islam.”

These types of ideas are as dangerous as they are absurd. They lead people to construct (or deconstruct, according to the postmodernists) their ‘morals’ around them and to ultimately make decisions that harm them and society.

We hope, in sha Allah, many of them are guided and come to see the wrongness of their ways.

May Allah keep our fitrah pure and may we not allow it to become corrupted. Amin.

فَإِن لَّمْ يَسْتَجِيبُوا۟ لَكَ فَٱعْلَمْ أَنَّمَا يَتَّبِعُونَ أَهْوَآءَهُمْ ۚ وَمَنْ أَضَلُّ مِمَّنِ ٱتَّبَعَ هَوَىٰهُ بِغَيْرِ هُدًۭى مِّنَ ٱللَّهِ ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَا يَهْدِى ٱلْقَوْمَ ٱلظَّـٰلِمِينَ

Thus if they do not respond to you, then know that they, in fact, follow nothing but their [own] whims. And who could be further astray [from the truth] than one who follows his [mere] whims without any guidance from Allah? Indeed, Allah does not guide the wrongdoing people [who are godless in heart]. (Qur’an, 28:50)

Notes

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