Jan 24, 2025
In early 2017, I asked the “secular humanist chaplain” at the University of Southern California, where I studied, how I could set myself up for a good life in college and beyond. How could I be happy? How could I find a vocation or a calling? How could I be a good person? The chaplain told me to look around and identify the people who had lives I wanted to live, and ask myself what their values were. I quickly realized those moral exemplars were not in the secular student group I’d joined, which had become increasingly morally vacant, pseudo-rationalist and eccentric, drawn to effective altruism and convinced by Sam Harris that murder was merely a social construct. To say nothing of love: more and more of my female friends at the time were embracing polyamory as a way to grandfather in situationships or infidelities, while being told in special seminars that monogamy was a colonial construct and should be discarded anyway. As a child of divorce, as a young woman, my primary concern was having models for healthy relationships — not resisting colonialism in my dating life. I had no interest in subverting things — monogamy, moral norms, courtship, the nuclear family, faith, a classical education — that I’d never had or known in the first place. I wanted a serious boyfriend.
A telling read, via @ayjay.