Is the exclusionary ever a good thing?
In a democracy, not really.
The exclusionary is always a bad thing.
Philosophers champion “freedom” to make the choice to be exclusionary an important value, a good thing. But if the result is exclusionary, it is always bad, because the exclusionary result is always bad in a free, and open, and friendly society. We want to give people “choices,” the freedom to be exclusionary—but in vain. And here lies the crux of all political disagreement, and war, and tyranny. In a just society, the exclusionary must be excluded.
Yet the exclusionary sentiment has been creeping into vital aspects of modern life since the modern as an aesthetic brand became synonymous with the progressive.
And the modern (in art) and the progressive (in politics)—in terms of every kind of intellectual validation—are, we are told, without question, good things and breed good people, who love, without reservation, democracy. This is not to say the modern in art cannot be strange, but it is always strange in the inclusive, not the exclusive, sense. The progressive makes war on the exclusionary.
When the anti-exclusionary virtues of the Modern and the Progressive are questioned—in works such as Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter, or Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, the antibodies move, the professors leap from their chairs, and the warrior ants swarm, to protect the Modern Progressive Queen.
We do not intend to champion, or condemn, the works just mentioned, and works like them: the reader will be mistaken if they think this is our intent; we merely note an intellectual phenomenon of contemporary life. We are merely exploring a principle, the principle of exclusion.
The exclusionary is chiefly seen in how we exclude those who do not think as we do. The progressives see fit to exclude conservatives. And why? Because conservatives are exclusionary. Thus the irony.
Progressives say: we exclude only those who are exclusionary.
But everyone is exclusionary—aren’t we?—and so progressives exclude more than they at first realize.
Paradise is not so easily attained, even in our own calculations in our own bedrooms. Progressive inclusivity steers us, by a simple twist of fate, into this, our present time, our present day: an exclusionary, estranged, lonely, culturally crass, icily-techno, nightmare: an old, sick, aging population without poetry, without beauty, drowning in ugly commercialism, puritanical political correctness, and non-fat yogurt.
Progressives, who are the loudest, are also the most unhappy, tripped up by a logic they hardly understand.
Mozart-hating progressives cannot tolerate those who only love classical music—since ‘only loving classical music’ is an exclusionary position, and it doesn’t matter if it is a matter of taste—and taste cannot be judged. The anti-exclusionary trumps even in matters of taste.
For the smart, progressive, post-modern individual, there is but one evil: the exclusionary. Embrace everybody and every taste (except the exclusionary) or you are a scumbag. This is the implicit mantra of the cool person.
To criminalize is to exclude, and the progressive does not like to criminalize, does not like to judge, and will exclude only those who, it is deemed, themselves too sternly exclude.
Do not judge the traitor—the country, not the traitor, is wrong.
Do not judge the woman who has an abortion—the judgement, not the woman, is wrong.
Do not judge the thief—the circumstances, not the theft, is wrong.
Do not judge the moment—the future, tied to old-fashioned considerations, is wrong.
Do not judge the adulterer—the marriage, not the person, is wrong.
Judge only restrictive judgement—the only thing that is truly wrong.
If we are to properly and fairly judge, we will pronounce only against those who judge too strongly.
As one can see, the whole formula is simple, and it is intellectually easy to be included in this far-reaching and politically influential club—which ISIS, and every rightwing fanatic under the sun, will come after, and kill.
The mental ease of belonging to the non-exclusionary club is the secret to its popularity, and since judgement is dour, one is not only welcomed lovingly, but one assumes a happier visage automatically; and since morals exist for the happiness of all, happiness is properly combined with its moral, non-exclusionary agenda, as well.
So, all is good?
Yes!
The snake in the garden is simply the selfish one who opposes democracy, who opposes happiness for all:
The rich person who wants to keep others down, the priest who wants others to feel guilty, the cop who wants to stifle his fear by making others fear, the man who wants to boss a woman, the bully who bullies simply because they can do so, picking on animals, the weak, the planet.
How wonderful life would be, if not for those meanies who deceptively sweeten power and mean behavior!
Isn’t it obvious to all what is good?
Well, no—because of that deceptive sweetening.
But it is good, then, all this self-congratulatory non-judgement.
Good to know what the good is, and to know that you are good.
But you are not good. You just say you are.
The progressive’s dream is an idle dream.
Your “good” is a baseless fantasy.
You, the modern progressive, belong to your “group” only to belong. You belong to ‘the glue’ and nothing else. You are—glue. You belong to the political faction as a political faction, and for no philosophical basis, or truth. Your mind has been captured and put in a dark room. As George Harrison put it in “While My Guitar Gently Weeps:”
I don’t know why nobody told you how to unfold your love.
I don’t know how someone controlled you, they bought and sold you.
I don’t know why you were diverted, you were perverted, too.
I don’t know how you were inverted, no one alerted you.
Those who oppose gay marriage are called exclusionary.
Why?
That’s easy. Because only marriage between a man and a woman count for them.
When it comes to marriage, what is exclusionary?
By the simplest rules of natural logic, the only non-exclusionary match is the following:
Man/Woman
This is easy. It excludes neither man, nor woman.
Black/White is always better than Black/Black or White/White. Always.
Black/White is less exclusionary—and calls us into the progressive future.
As in the black/white example, all other marriage arrangements are exclusionary, and for immediately obvious reasons:
Man/Man
Excludes woman.
Woman/Woman
Excludes man.
In precisely the same way White/White and Black/Black excludes.
Woman/Woman/Woman/Woman/Man
This example might be more difficult to discern, but Woman/Woman/Woman/Man is highly exclusionary, as well.
Woman/Man/Woman/Man is also exclusionary, simply because any longer list allows for exclusionary combinations.
I guess we could call this fifty shades of gay.
The only combination which is not exclusionary is Man/Woman.
Now we might object vigorously in the following manner: A society which defines marriage as Man/Woman must be more exclusionary than a society which defines marriage as Man/Woman and Man/Man and Woman/Woman. This may seem correct, but it is not, simply because the unit Man/Woman is not exclusionary, while the unit Man/Man is, and therefore any society which has more of the latter must be a more exclusionary society, since it contains more exclusionary units.
The freedom in which Man travels across space and time to link up with Woman or Man merely deceives us that the “choice” is a non-exclusionary counter to the exclusionary result of Man/Man. The result is what finally matters to progressives—not imaginary “freedoms.” Freedom is the chimera of the right wing.
The logic here (as old-fashioned and exclusionary as it may appear) is inescapable.
Man/Woman is the only unit which does not exclude.
Except if we posit the notion that man excludes woman and woman excludes man, and therefore gender itself is wrong because it is exclusionary.
Is gender itself wrong?
Is nature wrong?
Some would go so far as to say to be human is to know nature as a wrong.
It is tricky to question nature, and our essay’s scope will not us allow to pursue this question.
We will only say that humans are tricky, and our place in and against nature measures everything that we are.
In our strict mathematical logic, then, the only way to embrace homosexuality in a non-exclusionary way, the only way to embrace exclusionary gender combinations, is if we posit that gender itself is exclusionary—which it is.
Yet we are trapped by this logic, since homosexuality is acutely aware of gender—it not only chooses based on gender, it exists because of gender.
Is homosexuality, then, democratic? No, it is not.
Homosexuality is either exclusionary, or cancels itself out.
Yet the exclusionary may be the way human evolution is heading.
Freedom may be too much to resist.
