Approximately 2500 years ago, Socrates declared himself to be neither an Athenian nor a Greek, but a Citizen of the World. He was in essence validating the universal human qualities that bind us all together, repudiating the idea that the specifics of one’s existential condition in any way exonerate one of the obligation to pursue the Truth honestly and to act upon it with Integrity. He was in fact repudiating the superficial criteria of Identity Politics, i.e., the notion that one’s race, the color of one’s skin, one’s gender or sexual orientation, in any way reflects one’s level of moral/intellectual worth. As “conservatives” like to point out, it is a truth that Martin Luther King famously embraced decades ago. While I may seem to be invoking it simply to disparage the woke Left’s inane compulsion to always support the views of their “oppressed minorities,” no matter how self-indulgent they may be, it is a principle that applies equally to the so-called “privileged” who are of course also capable of the vilest behavior in the service their venal self-interest.
This Traditional, Western, Humanist perspective, which informs contemporary “conservatism,” is rooted in the assumption that as Man is blessed with intelligence and the capacity for free will, he is more than just another animal responding reflexively to the dictates of his environment. We are each, that is, responsible for the integrity of our behavior, whatever the injustices to which we have been submitted. This common sense approach to the human condition, of course, implicitly exposes the absurdity of the neo-Marxist narrative that informs the Left, a narrative that removes Intelligence, Self-Awareness and Achievement from its ethos in favor of one based exclusively on Power, those who have it always being evil, those who don’t, always the innocent victims of oppression.
Thus do we live in a world where a 200 lb. individual with a penis who claims to be a woman is now allowed to pommel girls in various athletic competitions because biological females comprise 50% of the species while transgenders are but members of an “oppressed” minority. Such is the logic of our “woke” era, one in which an adolescent sentimentality has come to replace the dictates of an intelligent, moral, civilized perspective.