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With a brief, starry-eyed idealistic suggestion of what to do about it.

Those who come to this blog seeking clear ideas based entirely on rationalism may be disappointed. Those who come to this blog expecting me to share their basic assumptions and values will be disappointed. Those who come to this blog wondering what this haughty outsider has to say about them will be intrigued. But enough with the pleasantries. The time has finally come for me to define reconstructionism, and to do that I must define deconstructionism, that which it reacts against.

Deconstructionism is… vaguely defined, for the time being, and probably refers to a cluster of ideas and intellectual movements rather than an individual one. But so is the way of all words.

It’s become a truisim in recent days that humanity is both more varied and more prone to variation than anybody can imagine. The old ideas of a single set of ideals has fallen, and one cannot assume that the mores of one’s own society or of the extant world as a whole have any centrality. A huddle of curious huts, houses and flats have appeared around the two ancient stone towers of gender, and someone has built a rickety and hazardous rope-bridge between them, and while culture tells us they have stood from time immemorial, historians have done the blasphemy of determining their age. 

The builders of the rope bridge, the scientists who discovered the roots of gender, the philosophers and psychologists who found just how much thought universal was an ethnography of Europe, are not deconstructionists, and I have only respect for them. I suspect that some of them faced the difficult truth with honor and bravery.

An extremely important consequence of these de-centering discoveries is the vindication of the masses who for a long time could not live well with the mores we had. Nearly a tenth of the populace is gay and heterosexual marriage holds no promise for them. Many people, even those with no innate difference from the norm, have no interest in conformity and would better be happy outside the shimmering city than unhappy inside it. The huts and the rope bridge were constructed by and for that half-percent for whom the two towers are cruel prisons rather than mundane houses or palatial mansions. I argued their plight at the Congress of Hierarchs, and after much scandal, intrigue, and controversy, much of it between my faction and those ig-nobles who had not read or not believed the discoveries of the noncentralness of the world. 

It is the deconstructors of culture which I oppose. They make three critical errors. First, they often have the attitude that everything anyone does must stand up to some absolute standard of purity of intention, in which nobody’s desires are influenced by any outside party. Given that these people often come from or are the advocates of classes which have suffered from horrific degrees of very destructive adverse influence that did terrible damage to their mental health, this error is understandable. It is still an error. Even that desire to be free came from somewhere, and there never was an uninfluenced person. In any case culture should be judged by whether influences are constructive or destructive.

Second, they tend to see present culture as well as economic  political, etc. structures as fragile, and imagine that what is to be put in place after they smash the present system to pieces is not a massively important question, significantly more difficult than the process of overthrowing the present system. I blame them for failing to fully realize the broadness of possible cultures. People of this sort have been responsible for the deaths of millions.

Third, many of them try to attack the entire culture even when it would seem easier to attack only the parts that directly oppress them, and would reduce the amount and desperation of opposition they face. Currently, there is a conflict between the faction that favors the institution of gay marriage, and the faction that opposes them for favoring only those who desire assimilation and feels nothing for marriage. Unfortunately, the latter sometimes fancy themselves the cavalry riding to the rescue of the huddled, married masses. Were they riding to the rescue of the huddled, married, Muslim masses, they would be criticized harshly (and correctly, although they might still be on the whole beneficial).

Quasi-deconstructionist, quasi-libertarian thinkers such as the extremely intelligent Ozy Frantz usually understand a problem with this approach to minority rights and improving society: That it does no one any good to dynamite the Tower of Female when there is stone in the quarry and ready labor to build a solid skybridge and a hundred surrounding fortresses of the gender-nonconforming. “If I cannot have the culture I would prefer, then nobody can” is selfish and ineffectual for a true underdog. All that must be done for society to defeat the dynamiters is for it to accept their differences ahead of them- and here I criticize harshly the reactionary elements of the world, and the lamentable fact that it is only they who routinely oppose the dynamiters. 

Yet I would take it further, and into realms more cultural (and thus vaguer). I have spoken in favor of criticizing culture, and now I speak against letting oneself absorb the notion, and especially against holding the notion out to others, that it one should be cynical and analyzing forever, that life and happiness rest upon our ability not to resist a specific imposition, but to, in general, ‘subvert and de-center privileged narratives’. I speak against the idea that a social norm is something you transgress. I speak against the idea that the only thing that unites people is diversity, that unity though sameness or  hierarchical control is meaningless. I speak against the narrative of the future as a rebellious fist opposing a tyrannical boot forever. 

Sociology  cultural criticism, and cultural science should lead us to accept differences, to be aware of what differences exist, and to make the way for their own obsolescence as culture is reconstructed so that it will satisfy all. This is the reconstruction I hope for: A culture that does not trip up on conflicts, a just recognition of the dignity of all ideas, an elite that knows their limits; masses that do not treat the elite as useless Eloi, cultural defaults that can lead the conformist of us to strength through unity, and space for the nonconformists, two gilt stone towers for the ‘two genders’ and a shimmering city for the true broadness of gender. Destroy neither material things with force nor destroy grandeur with words — reactionaries will do that for you. Render unto Europe what is Europe’s – and no more than that. The reconstructionist project is to modify society so it remains recognizable and palatable to those yet living – more palatable even, and encouraging of joy and romance – and but in a form that excludes or quarantines past horrors and oppresses no-one. 

I will close by quoting two passages from the ur-deconstructionist magazine ‘n+1″.

“There were certain aesthetic practices — classical music, for example — that cut through distinctions and could be appreciated by people — Bolivian peasants, in one instance — as long as they weren’t told that they were listening to “Western Classical High-Bourgeois Music.” There is still, in other words, a space where the aesthetic may be encountered immediately and give pleasure and joy uninhibited by surrounding frameworks and networks of rules and class habits.” – from ‘Too Much Sociology’

“[after the modern day collapse of norms] The only sexual expectation left to conform to is that love will guide us toward the life we want to live. What if love fails us? Sexual freedom has now extended to people who never wanted to shake off the old institutions, except to the extent of showing solidarity with friends who did. I have not sought so much choice for myself, and when I found myself with no possibilities except total sexual freedom, I was unhappy. I understood that the San Franciscans’ focus on intention—the pornographers were there by choice—marked the difference between my nihilism and their utopianism. When your life does not conform to an idea, and this failure makes you feel bad, throwing away the idea can make you feel better.” – from What Do You Desire, a tour-de-force of BDSM pornographers, “stuff white people like” bohemian-bourgeoisie, sexual frustration, sexual freedom frustration, and god knows what else.