Whatever else may be said for or against, the idea that a person can completely self define against biology is a pretty hard rejection of just about every philosophical tradition I’ve ever heard of, including very much Enlightenment traditions. Even Romantics didn’t think that. Or Marxists.

And yet somehow religion is carrying all the weight of criticism.

But more to the point, part of how this worldview has won, at least for now, is getting itself normalized fast and hard and throwing the satire all the other way. A complete reversal in just a few years. Remarkable, except no one will ever discuss it in such an observational way in any published works.

And it has a bad side effect: laughing at previous generations instills a false sense of self-superiority, which leads to self-righteousness, which leads to beating people up for not sharing your views.

We are not better than our ancestors. We’re just bad in different ways.

And don’t talk to me about societal progress. That’s a mirage created by cherry picking the data and redefining terms in self-serving ways. It’s not progress, it’s just changing moral fashions. Reform is meaningless. It’s just churn.

(Technological progress is real, but satire contributes nothing to that. Besides, moralists tend to oppose technological progress.)

I think satire is still as vital and effective as it always was, it is just that the forms and the conventions have morphed around it. Compare “Young Frankenstein” to Swift, and neither looks very much alike, but… They are still send-ups of the same thing, human foolishness. Which is ever and eternally with us.

I don’t think satire is ever going to serve the uses Swift tried to put it to, which was to encourage reform. There’s a naive earnestness to it all, “A Modest Proposal” being the most obvious example, which simply does not work. Satire is at its most effective when it has been internalized and made a part of everyone’s mental furniture such that they find the satirized idea risible when it comes up. It’s subtle, and not all that effective, but that is its limitation. Only the knowing are affected by it, and you probably didn’t really need to point that out to those parties in the first place.

But the world is always inventing new ways of being viciously stupid. And I know no way to satirize vicious stupidity per se.

I used to love satire. Now I’m not sure it serves any great purpose beyond self-congratulation of the reader. It all seems facile to me. Satirists are too shallow, too focused on ephemera. They have no deep insights and no solutions.