What is it about us that we in our age have surrendered? How did we move from relative calm to chaos so fast?

The Gaying of America

by Austin Ruse

In Making Gay Okay, Robert Reilly says the ascendancy of men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) started with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s victory over Aristotle and that once philosophy fell the triumphant march through the institutions was quick and maybe even inevitable.

Reilly explains that the debate centers on the question of what is natural and not, and how to distinguish between right and wrong. He describes how the Greeks fell in love with reality when they discovered nature and that the purpose of things was knowable and unchangeable even by the whim of gods.

The author writes, “A dog wagged his tail because that was the way of a dog. Egyptians painted their funeral caskets in bright colors because that was the way of Egyptians.” In the pre-philosophical world the word nature did not exist so it was not possible to distinguish between the nature of a dog and the custom of an Egyptian. Customs change. Nature never does. Aristotle “taught that the essence, or Nature, of a thing is what makes it what it is and not something else.”

This is, well, naturally constraining to many who would strain against their nature or who see such nature as imposed by society, the family, or the Church.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau “turned Aristotle’s notion of Nature on its head. Aristotle said that Nature defined not only what man is but what he should be. Rousseau countered that Nature is not an end—a telos—but a beginning: man’s end is his beginning, or, as Allan Bloom expressed it, “there are not ends, only possibilities.”

Rousseau had a particular hatred for that most constraining of institutions, the family that he considered artificially constructed. He called for the education of children to be taken from the family and given to the state. As Reilly puts it, “Once society is atomized, once the family ceases to interpose itself between the individual and the state, the state is free to transform the isolated individual by force into whatever version of ‘new man’ the revolutionary visionaries espouse.”

Reilly says the influence of Rousseau is all around us today, from the unusable unkempt forest near his home to the Obama campaign ads featuring “Julia” who from cradle to grave was nothing more than a ward of the state and the family is no where present, not even when she wants to have a baby.

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