The rock of reality

On Jan. 20, 2025, the White House announced that President Trump had signed an executive order “Protecting Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Future historians may well wonder why biological truth needed to be restored to the federal government in 2025. However, to us who live in the late, modern West it is no mystery. We have been told that there are 11 or 263 or an unlimited number of genders. We have been assured by “experts” that gender is so fluid it cannot be pinned down. A person’s gender tomorrow may be different than it was yesterday. How can it be doubted? The experts said so.

But Donald J. Trump begs to differ, and the vast majority of Americans apparently agree with him.

We live in postmodern times when everything once thought solid is now liquid. Individual choice and personal autonomy are of supreme value. Consent is the only limit. Be who you really are. In these heady days of self-invention even our gender is up for grabs. Cultural and moral relativism are established dogmas. The beckoning frontier is transhumanism and cyborgs. In the pursuit of immortality, we seek to merge with the machine and evolve.

If naturalistic evolution can turn chemicals into living cells and if all life on planet earth can evolve from single-celled organism in the iconic warm pond of our Darwinian imaginations, why can humans not turn themselves into little gods? Well, if non-life can become life, why cannot mortal life become immortal? Compared to that idea, is not a man becoming a woman a rather minor step?

For most of the history of Western civilization philosophers and lawyers have believed and debated natural law as integral to a just legal system. Positive law must be based on natural law to have legitimacy. Natural law provides a basis for challenging positive laws deemed unjust. If you can prove a law contradicts the natural law, you have a case for challenging it.

But now, in liquid postmodernity, it seems that nobody takes natural law seriously anymore. For centuries our ancestors took it seriously because they saw nature as created with a purpose by a personal God. When you start from that premise, natural law seems to be an obvious implication. But what happens when you start from nature as the product of accidental evolution? What if the way things are is just random, rather than designed? What if nature is not finished evolving? What if we currently occupy a waystation on a long and winding road to immortal cyborgs?

Is natural law relevant under current cultural assumptions? Should we even try to convince our fellow citizens that there are only two sexes and that humans flourish by recognizing and adapting to that biological and psychological reality? Or is it hopeless?

This, I think, is a profound question with which very few people are grappling today. Is there any reason for hope that society will come around to recognizing natural law and moral truth again?

Perhaps it may surprise you to learn that I believe that we can know with absolute certainty that society inevitably will embrace natural law in general, and the fact of two sexes in particular. What makes me so sure?

Natural law is based on reality. Reality just is. It does not change because you will it to do so or because you took a vote on it. It just is. A society that twists it too far finds that it breaks and things collapse. Humans are flexible and adaptable, but not infinitely malleable. If we go too far with our fantasies, we crash into the rock of reality, and it hurts. A society that refuses to do business with reality will crash and burn. Many cultures throughout human history have already done so and more will do so in the future.

Human nature remains constant. Sinful human nature can be meliorated up to certain limits. But delusions of Utopia or the perfectibility of human nature inevitably turn out to be dystopian, destructive, or both.

For human beings, existing in two sexes is part of the permanent, unchanging truth about human nature. A society that pretends otherwise will eventually become so dysfunctional that it will fall apart and be replaced by one that recognizes biological and psychological reality. Just look around! That is why I can be so certain.

The only issue to be decided is whether our society will be wise enough to recognize its need to bow to reality before it is too late. Will we dash ourselves on the rocks and sink the ship of state or will we drop anchor in the sea of ancient wisdom in time? We shall see.