Sohrab Ahmari snippets

We need to wake up to twenty-first-century reality. In many dimensions of human life, the loss of barriers has dehumanized the Western experience and sapped its freedom and vitality.

The sexual revolution is an example. We are much less disciplined by moral regulations and cultural norms today than we were a few decades ago. But relaxing modesty norms and other taboos hasn’t ­yielded sexual equality. Rather, it has empowered caddish men and invited backlashes, most recently #MeToo. The backlashes have wrought rigid new norms, now explicitly legal, often applied retrospectively and without regard for such niceties as due process. We are much less culturally regulated in intimate matters today—but we are subject to minute regulation by political correctness.

… The mainstream right and left have merged. The left emphasizes moral autonomy, while the right emphasizes market freedoms. For both, the highest end of politics is the pursuit of autonomy and care for the procedures that maximize autonomy.

… [O]ne can imagine a heated debate over sex robots in the not-too-distant future. Conservative liberals will urge individual states to enact pro-business tax cuts to help attract sex robot–manufacturing jobs to economically depressed regions, while progressive liberals will publish op-eds lamenting the fact that the robots themselves don’t reflect the full spectrum of the nation’s diversity (along lines of race, gender, disability status, etc.). And so on ad infinitum.

Some of Sohrab Ahmari’s better paragraphs here.