Thomas Byrne Edsall is a columnist for the NYTimes who seems to have specialized in recent years in gathering information from the academy regarding some newsworthy issue, and reporting on his findings (in a fairly ramshackle way, letting us see the multiple voices) in the paper. Sometimes, especially around race and ethnicity, I find his framing and discussion of the topics annoyingly evasive. But he’s always worth reading because he seriously pays attention—well, more than almost anyone else—to what scholars have been thinking, sometimes over several decades.

This piece is a really interesting example of the work he’s done. It is rich with multiple voices, from scholarship and beyond. Some quotes are used as analytic tools, some as historical evidence. I suppose I’m mentioning it here because I think it’s really rich, and also because for all of the attention we give these days to race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality are just as much touchpoints of cultural and political neuralgia as are race.

There’s so much to say on this, too much for a blog post, but I will say, quickly and perhaps somewhat gnomically, this: the movement over the past half-millennium to create “one humanity” and the consequent “moral revolution” that this has begun (and revolutions are bloody and contested and don’t always end well, remember) has many fronts, and we are living during wartime on all of them. (I’d say I’ve changed my hairstyles so many times now, but the truth is that wouldn’t work for me.) The turbulence of our world is not escapable.

More than that, I’d just suggest that this piece reveals a disappointingly simplistic picture of human psychology on the part of a number of the scholars quoted. Many of them seem to me committed to a fairly reductionist and monocausal account of human motivation, around sex and morality. The academics seem to see this, by and large, as a matter of strategic or instrumental means-ends reasoning, seeking material ends. Interestingly, the conservative activists quoted also seem to see things in a narrowly strategic way. I’d like to argue for a richer psychology, with people having multiple motivations that sometimes overlap and sometimes conflict, and without necessarily being reducible to one another. I’ve been arguing about this ever since I was friends with a bunch of Economics grad students at the University of Chicago in the early 1990s. (The work of thinkers like Jon Elster and George Ainslie and Amartya Sen and the “behavioral economists” helped me, in different ways, generate a vocabulary for expressing my resistance to the regnant reductionisms of the day. So did a number of philosophers.) I had thought that such reductionisms were in retreat in the academy. Reading this piece, I’m not so sure. It’s a depressing thought to start your day.