Modern Age * Winter 2018 T. S. Eliot warned that the administrative class and its contempt for tradition spelled the doom of culture With regard to gender, the argument made by the LGBTQ coalition could only emerge in a social order that has been radically shaped by a democratic leveling ethos, one that leads individuals to nod at the assertion that I can remake myself at will. Tocqueville would have understood this in terms of an individualism that refuses to recognize any standards of virtue that might direct the democratic will. This volitional understanding of freedom pulsates among the Americans who, Tocqueville says, everywhere emulate Descartes's philosophy without having actually read his words. Members of a democratic society find in the very exercise of their will proof of its veracity, merely because it's their own. Identity and dignity are both at stake in the claims made on behalf of gender and its unlimited manifestations. But does liberty rest in what amounts to Cartesianism on crack, a liberty unable to make sense of the body save for its instrumental uses to the inner, autonomous, willing agent? Give me dignity or give me death, progressives say; but I'll settle for the embodied human 106 modernagejournal.comhttp://www.modernagejournal.com