What Did You Do in the Woke Wars, Grampa?

This is another post I should have written long ago, but unfortunately it's still timely.

The derogatory use of "woke" in our public discourse shows no sign of abating, and Trump's victory probably ensures that it will be with us for a long time to come.  It's another depressing example of the Right's dexterity in seizing on liberal / left slogans and using them more effectively than their predecessors ever managed to do.

Remember "fake news"?  That one came from liberals and the Hillary Clinton campaign, and it was bogus at the time, for reasons the blogger emptywheel explained early on.  Used with some care, the concept might have had some use, but few people (especially in the media) use terms with any care, and it was really just an emotive slogan anyway.  The nominally liberal media that pushed it were in no position to cast the first stone.  Then Donald Trump and MAGA picked it up and ran with it, and here we are.

As for "woke," I always took it for another case of white hipsters adopting (or appropriating) African-American vernacular to feel cool.  When the Right adopted it, liberals and leftists delighted in showing that they couldn't define it, as if that mattered to the Right.  As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of anti-Semites (quoted here), the Right "know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words."  The fun part was that liberals and leftists couldn't define it either.  They differed widely on where it came from: this writer who dated it to a 2008 Erykah Badu track was typical, but it was soon established that it was a lot older than that.  

Even then, few if any noticed that two meanings of the word were being confused.  The older one, exemplified by the blue singer/songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, who in a 1938 song warned "of the dangers of a racially prejudiced justice system and conclude[d] ‘best stay woke’."  In context, he was close to the literal meaning of the word: you're in a dangerous place, so stay alert.  That sense quickly expanded to the more metaphorical one of "awakened" or "enlightened," as in the Guardian article I linked to before:

But woke is at its most powerful, and valuable, when it is lived and not mentioned. When it’s not viewed as a quality to be smug about. Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Biko and Angela Davis didn’t declare themselves activists – they didn’t have to, their actions defined them. Woke people know not to, and need not, describe themselves as woke.

I noticed that most quotations from people like King didn't use the vernacular "woke," but "awake," and that makes a difference.  If white progressives used "awake," they wouldn't be allusively tying themselves to the Civil Rights movement, which I presume is the reason they use "woke" instead.  No matter who uses it, I object to the stance that someone is awake or enlightened, because it postulates that once you've awakened, opened your eyes, etc., you don't need to learn or think any more, and nobody can make such a claim. Right-wingers are also fond of this conceit, by the way: many social-media posts begin with the exhortation to WAKE UP, AMERICA! regardless of the political position of the poster.

In a fair-to-middling essay on the pejorative use of "woke," Nathan Robinson wrote:

If we are to make progress in having sensible discussions about the problems with contemporary social justice activism, we’re not going to get there with an imprecise “boo word” like woke. That leads in the direction of absurdity, like Tucker Carlson’s condemnation of “woke M&M’s” and a Wall Street Journal columnist suggesting that Silicon Valley Bank had “gone woke” by having a Black board member. I cannot imagine any sensible discussion in which the pejorative use of woke plays any constructive role. 

I largely agree, but I would add that the positive use of "woke" doesn't play any constructive role in sensible discussions of important issues either.  It's demagogic in the way Patricia Miller-Roberts warned against: it postulates an Us/Them division between people, based on the assumption that We are enlightened and have the answers.  This sort of self-stroking gets a discussion off on the wrong foot from the beginning.  True, people have epiphanic experiences that affect how they see conflicts and controversies, but such experiences should mean the beginning of hard rethinking, rather than its end. To quote Sartre again:

The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; he never knows too well where he's going, he is "open," he may even appear hesitant But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth.  And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not suspect but the very form of the true -- that hinge of indefinite approximation.  It is as if their very existence were perpetually in suspension. They want to exist all at once and right away.  They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found, in which one never becomes other than what one originally was ...

Much of what passes for public discussion involves trying to "own" the other side: saying or writing something that definitively schools, owns, destroys, shuts down the opposition.  Owning makes for catchy memes, but it usually turns out that the opposition, like a monster in a horror movie, is not actually destroyed but, now that your back is turned, is on its feet for another shot at you. People are always surprised by that, for some reason.

A better way (not the best, I'm open to suggestions) to deal with accusations of wokeness is to ignore them and move on to addressing substance.  I try not to be too attached to particular words, especially slogan-words.  The trouble with Nathan Robinson's call to stop using "woke" as a pejorative is that he issued it in his own avowedly left-wing magazine, Current Affairs.  That's like denouncing atheism in the pages of Christianity Today.  True, some on the left use "woke" as a pejorative, but if they all stopped today, the Right (and not only the MAGA Right) would continue to use it, happily confident that they were owning the libs.  As I've said before, fussing about the Right's provocations only tells them that they've hit their target; it's worse than ineffective, it's encouragement.

P.S. For more on "woke," see this, written several days later.

You Have a Right to My Opinion

One of my right-wing Christian acquaintances posted this meme today.  I've noticed that a lot of right-wingers (which includes a lot of liberal Democrats, unfortunately) express this attitude, and it needs to be slapped down harshly.  (In fact, a liberal Dem FB friend also put a Like on this meme.)

The assumption seems to be that if they get pushback for posting viciously bigoted crap, as they love to do, it's because their critics don't "like" them.  Very often the pushback comes from family members who actually love them, but disagree with their opinions.  As Christians, they should be able to understand the difference -- "Hate the sin, love the sinner" is another of their cliches -- but they prefer to make it all about them.  It's an easy way of denying responsibility for their actions.

"Like" her?  I barely know her.  This woman went to the same high school I did, fifty-plus years ago.  All I know about her now is what she posts on Facebook.  If you post stuff urging your fellow Christians to lock yourselves indoors and pray so that God will spare you from COVID (hah!), while all the unbelievers outside get sick and die, of course I'm going to call you out on it.  If your grandkids call you out on it, of course I'll back them up.  Get used to it.  Bigotry and lies do an enormous amount of harm, and you and your buddies have gotten away with it for far too long.

I don't mind when others disagree with me, even forcefully.  Really, I don't.  That's another story.  Well-meaning liberal friends have told me that I shouldn't be surprised if people get angry when I disagree with them.  I'm not surprised at all.  The surprise seems to be all on the part of people who've never had to face disagreement from people they know.  They just throw tantrums and cast themselves as victims of Cancel Culture (or whatever it's called this week).  It's common to speak of Trumpies as if they were totally distinct from the rest of the population, but they aren't.  They're our neighbors, our coworkers, our parents and grandparents, they're people we went to school with.  Of course, if they are nasty enough, we may decide not to "like" them after all.  But that's a result, not a cause of the disagreement.

Another Facebook friend from the same school and of the same vintage replied to my remarks: "I am glad I read your explanation because as a recovering people pleaser I may have interpreted this differently until I read on."  I'm glad she replied, because I'd overlooked that aspect of the meme.  Many older women have expressed similar sentiments.  But the original poster and I have frequently clashed over the content of some of her posts, especially since the rise of Donald Trump.  Now older right-wing women have claimed the freedom and power to be bigoted scum - though in reality they always found ladylike ways to do it before.

But that's oversimple: as I indicated, the person who posted the meme loves to post stuff that's hostile to everyone outside her bubble -- for example, at the peak of the pandemic she was posting memes about Christians locking themselves in and praying while everyone outside died. (In the real world, it was just the opposite: those who locked themselves into their churches got sick and many died.  Maybe that's why I haven't seen those memes lately.) Like many right-wingers of both sexes, she alternates between kissyface-huggybear memes about God's Love for All and hateful memes about those who do not love God and America Donald Trump. 

Men learn to submit to more powerful men while dumping on those they think are safely below them.  Heterosexual women are on the same hierarchical scale, below their fathers and husbands and above their children and anyone else they can look down on.  Trump's women supporters are standing under the protection of his leathery wings, feeling free to bash all the subordinates they couldn't make to suffer enough before 2016.

The deeper problem is that most people have no idea what to do when someone disagrees with them. At best they think that debate means that I state my opinion and you state your opinion and it stops there, because Everybody Has a Right to Their Own Opinion. (In fact that's where debate begins.) At worst they think debate means the shouting matches they see on CNN or Fox News, which isn't debate either.
A lot of people say there's no point in debate because you'll never change the other person's mind, and they'll never change yours. That's usually true, but I'm not trying to change my opponent's mind. I hope that people watching/reading the exchange will see what the arguments are and judge for themselves. Most of the time most people don't even know that there is another side to a question.  The function of the corporate media is to limit acceptable alternatives in order to exclude any others.

For example, this news clip about an anti-Biden flag flown by a Phoenix homeowner begins with one of the anchors asking rhetorically, "Is it vulgarity or political free speech?"  This is the kind of false antithesis centrists love.  "Fuck Biden" is both "vulgarity" and "political free speech."  (In my day, "fuck" was an obscenity, not a vulgarity.  And it turns out that the flag in question doesn't spell out the obscenity anyway, though I gather other versions being flown around the country do.)  The comments under the clip are educational too, with Trump fans exulting that they've shown how much smarter they are than "libtards" who say "Fuck Trump" by ... adopting their tactics.

But that's an old story, and in many ways I'm grateful to the Right, who make acceptable subjects and discourse that the media would prefer to censor quietly.  Does anyone else remember Anita Bryant? Her antigay crusade in the late 1970s enabled the mainstream media to cover subjects they were too cowardly to cover before. Bryant said that the Bible forbids fellatio because semen "is the most concentrated form of blood." No radical gay activist could (or would) have said that on national TV, but a reactionary Christian woman could. Thanks to Bryant for opening the floodgates to Queer as Folk!

A Style of Rhetoric Common to That Subculture

Another placeholder post while I procrastinate.  But it's related to a bigger one I hope to get to soon.

I took the above photo of a notice on the door of a "gender-neutral," single-occupancy restroom in the dormitory where I work.  The point of interest is the comment, "Collins sucks titty milk."  (Collins is the name of the dorm.)  I think it's likely that the graffitist is male, and not a resident of the dorm, though that's not really important.  It's not a truly nasty, incendiary remark; it's just stupid.  But it's what passes for clever repartee, or even rational debate in some circles.

This Time for Sure: A Kinder, Gentler Bigotry

When bullies lose their edge, they often try to save the situation by presenting themselves as reasonable.  I once read about a gang of queerbashers, driven from their victim by a community self-defense group, who found that they couldn't get back to their car, and began negotiating by saying, "Hey man, we don't want no trouble."  Of course they wanted trouble, but only as long as they outnumbered their victim and could do to him whatever they wanted.

In the US, antigay bigotry has lost much of its social legitimacy, and the hard core of bigots, though still quite numerous, no longer can appeal to a general social consensus that homosexuality is abominable and homosexuals should be outcasts.  Some of them are therefore trying a different tack, trying for a superficially reasonable approach.  I happened on such a person in a year-old article at The Atlantic Monthly's website, after reading a eulogy for the late William F. Buckley as an exemplar of the supposedly moderate and sensible right-wing Republican racist/bigot.  I have no use for Buckley, who is seriously overrated as an intellectual, but he's not my topic today.  A sidebar recommended this equally fatuous piece on conservative evangelicals and homosexuality by the same writer, Emma Green.

In a new book, Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offers a third way: stand up and debate, even on issues that seem to be moving toward an ever-firmer cultural consensus. In some ways, Mohler neatly fits the stereotype of an evangelical leader who has taken up a stand against queerness. He’s white, he’s male, he’s Southern; he makes no apologies for his view that homosexuality is intertwined with sin. But he could also probably ace a Women and Gender Studies seminar. (He even once wrote an essay for The Atlantic on the Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown.) In his book, We Cannot Be Silent, he cites sociologists like Jürgen Habermas and discusses television shows like Modern Family. He explores the difference between gender and sex and transgender and intersex.

It’s a somewhat novel approach to being an evangelical in public life: engaging debates about sexuality on their own terms. As Mohler himself admits, this hasn’t always been the case. “While Christians were secure in a cultural consensus that was negative toward same-sex acts and same-sex relationships, we didn’t have to worry too much about understanding our neighbors,” he said. “We did horribly oversimplify the issue.” Now that norms around LGBT issues are changing, evangelicals can no longer afford that kind of glibness, but it’s tricky to balance civility with steadfastness. Mohler said he’s not “trying to launch Culture War II,” but he also doesn’t want evangelicals to back down on their beliefs. “Christians have not had to demonstrate patience, culturally speaking, in a very long time. The kind of work and witness we’re called to—it could take a very long time to show effects.”

"Fatuous" might be too mild a word.  Green is impressed, or wants her readers to be impressed, because Mohler cites Habermas and TV shows.  But Habermas is trendy among cultural conservatives, and allusions to popular culture are old hat among evangelicals hoping to show they're not hopeless old fogies.  (I see that one of Mohler's earlier books is called He Is Not Silent, which sounds like an allusion to the Presbyterian apologist and controversialist Francis Schaeffer, who had a lot of influence on the Reagan administration.  Schaeffer also referred to popular culture and philososophical heavyweights, usually inaccurately.)  That The Atlantic published an article by him means little, since they have given space before to bigoted cultural reactionaries.  The Atlantic regular Conor Friedersdorf has been hunting for non-bigoted antigay spokespeople for some time now, without success.  Could Mohler "ace a Women and Gender Studies Seminar"?  Going by her own superficial account of sex and gender a few paragraphs later, I don't think Green is qualified to say.  I'm in South Korea right now, but I'll try to get Mohler's book from the library when I return in November.  For now, I'll examine the quotations Green provides from him.

Notice that Mohler is president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  The Southern Baptist Convention, you may recall, split off from other American Baptists largely over the issue of slavery, which the Southern Baptists supported (as well they should have -- it's a biblical value, like polygamy).  Nor did they especially distinguish themselves on civil rights issues a century later.  I mention this not to harp on the past, but as a reminder that far from being moral leaders, conservative Christians have often been flat wrong, and have actively supported evil.  (Returning to Buckley for a moment, remember his famous definition of a "conservative" as "someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.")  The Southern Baptists have apologized for their previous support for slavery; I'd like to ask Mohler why I shouldn't anticipate another belated apology, to gay and trans people a century or so down the line.  The SBC has shown itself to be anything but a prophetic voice in the wilderness on moral issues.

Green stresses that Mohler is "white, he's male, he's Southern," without ever noticing in her article that it's possible and indeed not uncommon to be white, male, Southern, and gay.  The whole article puts "evangelical Christianity," which Green tends to confuse with Christianity as a whole, in opposition to "queerness," accepting the antigay Christian spin that only secularists are pushing for a change in Christian views of homosexuality (or of sexuality generally).  You'd never guess from Green's account that Christian churches have been debating these issues internally for decades, or that LGBT religious groups have been major parts of the movement since the 1960s.  This also is important, because Mohler and his ilk are not just tilting at secular society, but at a large number of their fellow Christians.  As with slavery and other embarrassments, why should I believe that Mohler is right this time?

The same goes for another of Mohler's complaints:

He laments that American teens are surrounded by a “peer culture more committed to tolerance than any other moral principle,” which highlights another fundamental tension: He believes self-derived morality is not sufficient, and that Christians have a moral obligation to guide the acts of others.

Maybe Americans are too tolerant.  Maybe religious groups that try to control ("guide"!) the lives of others should simply be squashed, as they were in old Europe.  The trouble is that they were squashed by other religious groups who wanted to control the lives of others.  That's why religious freedom and tolerance are founding, core principles of our government and our society.  They're not the only principles we have, but they're important ones.  Mohler should remember that before religious toleration was established, many Christians were as outraged by the idea that people with the wrong beliefs -- Baptists, for example -- should be allowed to run around loose, worshiping as they saw fit, and even proselytizing for their sects, as they later were about black men marrying their white daughters, or homosexuals recruiting their sons.

With that in mind, one realizes that what Mohler and his ilk present as a new problem for Christianity actually goes back to the founding of the United States, and the conflicts that led to the passage of the Bill of Rights.  Ironically but predictably, Green later paraphrases Mohler's concern that "Courts are facing new questions of how to balance LGBT rights with religious freedom," which are not new at all.  I see that a few months before this piece, Green published another piece, "Gay Rights May Come at the Cost of Religious Freedom."  I haven't read it yet, but the title says so much.  Not only the struggle for racial justice in this country but the struggle for religious freedom had its cost in the freedom of bigots to persecute other Christians on religious grounds.  But wait, there's good news:

In Utah, for example, lawmakers passed legislation prohibiting LGBT housing and employment discrimination while allowing certain exemptions for religious groups, the result of a collaboration between LGBT and faith organizations. As more cities and states consider this kind of statute, Utah could serve as a template.

Whatever those "certain exemptions" were in Utah, they are also nothing new in civil rights law generally.  I don't know whether it's Green or Mohler who's outrageously ignorant in this matter -- both, most likely, because statements like this are so common in the discourse -- but it shows just how low the level of debate is among evangelicals and their sympathizers.  "Conservative Christians, so long represented among advisors to presidents, and powerful public voices and those who readily embraced discrimination, might seem unlikely recipients of either compassion or intellectual generosity," Green opines.  Compassion should be extended to all, but you'd better do your homework if you want to be taken seriously on an intellectual level.  Green clearly hasn't, and it doesn't sound like Mohler has either.

But back to Mohler and his concern about "self-derived morality," which he evidently ascribes to youth "peer culture."  That seems to be a contradiction, and as far as I can tell, the "tolerance" Mohler objects to (for others, not for himself) is neither self-derived -- it's exercised in a framework that comes from outside the individual, from peers, from adults (including parents), from teachers and diversity managers in the universities --  or indiscriminately tolerant.  It's especially risible for Mohler and Green to natter on about excessive tolerance when the dominant view of young people nowadays is that they are brutally intolerant of dissent beyond the narrow ambit of their fanatical Political Correctness.  There is evidently more tolerance of various sexual and other life choices than there was a few decades ago, not just of homosexuality and gender-variance, not just heterosexual cohabitation and "hookups," but of divorce, single parenting, and interracial coupling -- again, sore spots for Southern Baptists.

When the article gets down to Mohler's views on sexuality and gender, he seems to have little to offer that is new or deserving of respect.  "'We must admit that Christians have sinned against transgender people and those struggling with such questions by simplistic explanations that do not take into account the deep spiritual and personal anguish of those who are in the struggle,' Mohler writes."  This is a familiar setup to anyone who remembers the Southern Baptists' mealy-mouthed and long overdue apologies for its heritage of racism.  If Mohler really means it, he needs to take an aggressive stance against the virulent falsehoods that evangelicals have spread about LGBT people; but it appears that he's more interested in spreading them farther.

A case in point: Green mentions "Leelah Alcorn, a transgender teen from Ohio who committed suicide this year, citing frustrations with the religious expectations of her parents."  She does not mention gay and trans kids and adults who've been murdered, beaten, thrown out of their homes.  As often as not their assailants got away with it.  I've often asked antigay bigots how they propose to counter bullying and gay-bashing.  They never have anything serious to offer.  The usual evangelical response to anti-bullying initiatives has been to oppose them, claiming that they would encourage homosexuality in some obscure fashion.  Unless Mohler not only distances himself from this stance but denounces it and makes some positive proposals of his own, he's part of the problem.

In what Green calls one of his "moments of tonal derision," Mohler "recommends using the term 'homosexual,' rather than 'gay,' because it 'has the advantage of speaking with sharp particularity to the actual issue at stake.'"  I can't be sure, but I strongly suspect that the "actual issue at stake" is buttsex; I imagine that Mohler likes "homosexual" because it contains the word "sex," and if so, he misunderstands it.  (No A in Gender Studies for Mohler, then, but then many gay people make the very same mistake about the word.)  I'm not greatly concerned about what word Mohler prefers, and I'm not one of those gay people who want to pretend that we don't have sex, we only Love.  But it's good to know where he's coming from.

In his book, Mohler suggests that people who continuously struggle with same-sex attraction should maintain lifelong celibacy, becoming a “eunuch for the kingdom.” That’s a huge personal decision, one that would radically define a person’s life. Even with all his answers, Mohler did not have straightforward advice for how churches should deal with a transgender person who wants to be saved in an evangelical church but has already undergone gender-reassignment surgery. (“Would surgery now be pastorally required or advisable in order to obey Christ? … Pastors and congregations should consider age, context, and even physical and physiological factors when determining a course of action,” he writes.)

Again, there's nothing new here.  Sexual abstinence for queers has been advocated for a century or more -- including some of the invert/Uranian writers -- and it's the official position of the Roman Catholic Church today.  I'll have to read Mohler's book to be certain, but at this remove his use of Matthew 19:12 is derisory, to put it far more kindly than he deserves.  What I mean is this: it's absurd -- no, make that "obscene" -- to tell homosexuals that we must choose celibacy if you're not going to make the same demand of heterosexuals, who have the option of a licit sexual outlet, in marriage.  It's also unbiblical, since in context, Matthew 19:12 is directed to heterosexuals.  Jesus' disciples conclude from Jesus' prohibition of divorce and remarriage, "If such is the case with a man with his wife, it is better not to marry" (19:10, NRSV).  To which Jesus responds by extolling those who become eunuchs for the kingdom.  Heterosexual marriage is not the New Testament ideal.  But it seems from Green's account that Mohler ignores this.

"Continuously struggle with same-sex attraction" is a giveaway; it's the language used by Christian hucksters to color themselves sympathetic to the people they're trying to scam.  What about people who don't struggle with same-sex attraction, but rather embrace and celebrate it as heterosexuals do theirs?  Don't forget, that includes Christians as well as unbelievers.  From Green's account it would seem that Mohler has nothing to say to any of us.  (His waffling on post-op transsexuals is no more helpful.)  If that's the case, he has a long way to go before he can expect to be taken seriously as a discussant on the role of conservative Christians in contemporary society.

But, Green says,

[Mohler] also recognizes—mildly, mildly—that there is wisdom to be drawn from questioning traditional norms of sexuality. Even though he firmly agrees that men and women should embrace the gender identity that matches their sex, "We do understand that a part of that is socially constructed," he said. "And not only that, in a fallen world, there can be exaggerations and corruptions of what it means to be a man and a woman. There are some very brutalistic corruptions of masculinity, and there are some very trivial and hyper-sexualized understandings of the female that the Bible would clearly reject."

"Mildly, mildly"?  Jesus might have had something to say about that.  However, "Mohler ... believes 'we find wholeness and resolution only in being the man or the woman that God meant us to be, or made us to be.'"

How nice; but how do we know what kind of man or woman God made us to be?  It sounds as if Mohler is ignorant about the Bible, which is a lot more complex about sexuality and gender than today's American Protestants believe.  He could begin by reading Jennifer Wright Knust's Unprotected Texts: The Bible's Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire, published by Harper Collins in 2011.  (He also doesn't know what 'socially constructed" means, though that doesn't distinguish him from most of his opponents.  So much for that A in Gender Studies.)  "Become eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven" is the least of it; even if Jesus only meant it figuratively, the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 shows that literal eunuchs could be accepted into the church.  (Think again of Mohler's equivocation about post-op transsexuals.  One might wonder why, in a story so full of miracles, Phillip didn't simply restore the eunuch's testicles.  Jesus said explicitly that his followers would have the power to move mountains.  He himself restored a withered hand and restored the dead to life; reparative healing of a eunuch should be doable.)  Look at Jesus' hostility to biological families, including his own, or his extolling of a young woman who left her household chores to listen to his teaching.  Look at the wildly varying views of marriage the Bible embraces, from brother-sister and first-cousin marriage, polygamy and concubinage, to abstinence and becoming a eunuch for the Kingdom.  Look at the depiction of Yahweh as a violently jealous and abusive husband with performance anxiety.  The Christian scholar James Barr wrote that the trouble with modern fundamentalist teaching about sex is not "pathological prurience" but that it is "childishly naïve in a pre-1914 schoolboy-idealistic manner" (Fundamentalism [Westminster Press, 1977], 331).  It looks to me like Albert Mohler is no exception.

Another example of Mohler's and Green's historical ignorance (or missionary dishonesty) is the claim that Mohler's doing something new.  His approach is really as traditional and familiar as Good Cop / Bad Cop.  Antigay bigots, secular as well as theocratic, have long claimed to be moved not by hatred of Sodomites, but by love and compassion for us.  The same goes for racism: back when Bob Jones University forbade interracial dating and declined to admit African-American students, Bob Jones III (quoted in this post) strenuously denied that he was racist, and claimed that "We love the Negro people. Some of the finest Christians I've ever known were Negroes. In fact, they put me to shame. And I have looked at several Negro Christians and wished to God I could be as Christlike as they are. And among Christian Negroes there is no strife between them and us -- we are brothers in the Lord."  But: " Until we have our redeemed, supernatural bodies in Heaven we're not going to be equal here, and there's no sense in trying to be. Here's what I say. The Negro -- and I'm not, it's not my own feeling -- but a Negro is best when he serves at the table, when he does that, he's doing what he knows how to do best."  The Bad Cop is always there, tazer at the ready, to put you back in your place.

I'm fully in favor of the debate Mohler calls for.  I think I'd enjoy taking him on myself.  But Green's article, and the sampling she gives of Mohler's ideas, remind me of something Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about the notion of a "conversation on race."

One of the problems with the idea that America needs a "Conversation On Race" is that it presumes that "America" has something intelligent to say about race. All you need do is look at how American history is taught in this country to realize that that is basically impossible.

The same, I submit, is true of the conversation Emma Green would like us to have on sexuality and gender: she presumes that America, and conservative Christians like Albert Mohler in particular, has something intelligent to say about those topics. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's impossible, but the wrong people are puffing themselves up and claiming they're qualified to tell the rest of America what is going on, how to think, what to believe, and how to live.  On top of that, they want everyone else to feel sorry for them, because they're in a dwindling minority and don't have the cultural clout they used to have.  They've also embraced the Culture of Therapy, with the idea that dissidents shouldn't be made to feel like outcasts -- though they've never adopted that attitude for others, including dissidents in their own ranks.  Yes, being at odds with the society you live in can be uncomfortable; I know that very well, from personal experience.  But aside from the fact that it's also part of the Christian heritage -- something else Mohler and Green want to forget -- being uncomfortable is not the worst thing that can happen to you.  Nowhere is it written that you (or I) must be comfortable. You cannot, in a free and pluralistic society, demand that your views be accepted uncritically, and others with different views be silenced, just so you won't feel bad.  You don't have to feel bad for being different in the first place, and Christians have always defined their difference as a sign that they had the Truth in the second.  Mohler's goal is the normalization (or rather, re-normalization) of bigotry.  Debate, by all means, but if Mohler wants evangelicals to be taken seriously in the discussion, he clearly has a lot of work to do first.

But Enough About You

The advice columnist Miss Manners made a curious and, I think, revealing misstep in answering a question on Sunday.  The questioner asked what to say on "learning that a friend has stage 4 cancer," if not "You will be in my prayers."  What if you're dealing with a selfish, unfeeling cancer patient who is "not of the same religious beliefs or is an atheist"?

Miss Manners suggested a good alternative -- "I am terribly sorry.  I'll be hoping for the best.  I hope you know how much I care for you" -- but framed it oddly.

There is the religious angle that you raise, though Miss Manners would think that a nonreligious person could appreciate a religious person's seeking the solace in which he or she believes.

I've read this and its context several times to try to be sure I understand it.  So, when a religious person's friend is terminally ill and the religious person promises to pray, it is for his or her own solace, not for the solace or benefit of the sick person?  I wouldn't be surprised, but I thought that there was usually at least a pretense that the prayer is offered on behalf of the other, not for oneself.  You learn something new every day!

Another of my Facebook friends and I have been disputing something related.  She's about my age, we went to the same high school, she's nominally liberal politically, she hates Trump and likes Hillary.  She likes to post feel-good memes, and last Saturday night she posted one that said "Do good and good will come to you."

We've had some exchanges about karma and related doctrines before.  I commented that I disagree. There are no payoffs, there is no karma. If you do good hoping to receive good in return, you'll soon be embittered. If you don't expect it, you'll often be pleasantly surprised. (And this leaves aside the very difficult question of what "good" is.)

My friend initially replied, "Oh, there IS karma, but you shouldnt liken karma with a fairy godmother.....it doesnt work that way, but there are times when there is such karma with others that its a delight to know about."  This was odd, because the whole point of the meme she'd posted is that karma (or whatever) is like a fairy godmother: do good, and you'll receive good.

We went back and forth a bit on whether "there IS karma," and a mutual FB friend admonished us that no one knows with 100% certainty what happens to us after death.  First, we weren't talking about what happens after death: the meme promises reward in this life.  Second, and more important, we do know with close to 100% certainty that bad things happen to good people and vice versa, because we can see it in the world around us.  That's what's known in philosophy as the Problem of Evil.  People have been grappling with it for thousands of years. To promise blandly "Do good and good will come to you" is to lie.  Even my friend recognizes this on some level, since she tried to backtrack a bit with the "fairy godmother" move.  But she continued to insist that karma is real, and that it works.  Maybe I should press her more to explain how karma works, if it's not a "fairy godmother," but I don't think she could articulate it; her idea of reasoned discussion is to report what a distinguished psychic told her.  Maybe I should press her on it anyway.  

After all, the Buddha is reported to have told a professional soldier who consulted him "that if the latter were to die on the battlefield he could expect to be 'reborn in a hell or as an animal' for his transgressions" (Brian Victoria, Zen War Stories, Routledge, 2003).  The Buddha took the safe path by threatening post-mortem punishment; Jesus of Nazareth, less cautiously, warned that "All who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52), which is as transparently false as "Do good and good will come to you."  Many professional soldiers have died in bed, and many if not most people who've been killed in war were non-combatants.  But both of these teachers presented karmic justice as a "fairy godmother," if a highly punitive one.

That good people do sometimes flourish and bad ones sometimes suffer isn't evidence for the meme's truth.  The distribution of good and bad fortune could just as easily be random.  I think it probably is, once you look beyond face-to-face personal relations, and even in that very restricted realm, there are no guarantees.  What this means is that pointing to "karma" or "You reap what you sow" (to which I'll return presently) or similar doctrines is not a fact about the world, but a person's interpretation and judgment about the world.  This is of course true of everything we say about the world, but I'm stressing it here because my friend, like so many people who share her attitude, loves to invoke karma when she's feeling Schadenfreude because someone she dislikes has taken a pratfall.

A few months ago while I was among a small group of people waiting for a bus, a young woman began talking to no one in particular about a former boss who'd treated her badly (I don't remember the details). After she left that job she saw in the newspaper that her former boss had been physically attacked for being Muslim. "I guess it was her karma," said the young woman complacently.  No one said anything.  I considered suggesting that working for that woman was her karma, but I chickened out.

Since then I've begun commenting when people on Facebook invoke karma in connection with other people's misfortunes.  None of them have done a good job of justifying their highly selective use of the concept; as with Christian belief in Hell, they don't seem to like to think about the possibility that bad karma might catch up with them, or with people they like, and they consider it very bad form to remind them of it.  Like Hell, karma is for other people, bad people, for Donald Trump -- not for good, nice people like them.

But if "there IS karma," it is no respecter of persons.  But as I've said before, it would be highly offensive to apply it to the drowned Syrian toddler who washed up on a Turkish beach last year.  Or to the victims of the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the morning after my friend posted her meme.  Which wouldn't mean that bad karma wasn't involved, only that people are often unwilling to follow their own logic to its unpleasant conclusion.  And there's nothing unusual about that.  I think that people talk about karma or "You reap what you sow" (and Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick did just that when he quoted Galatians 6:7 on his Twitter account on Sunday morning after the massacre) or other similar proverbial bullshit, less because they mean it than as a warding-off of the evil eye, to try to distract karma from their own doorsteps.  It's often women who sniff "What was she doing out alone at that hour anyway?" when a woman is raped, for example.  (The Stanford rape victim must have had bad karma too.  But then so did her rapist, whose apologists whine that his life is ruined by the notoriety he received and the judicial slap he was given on his lily-white wrist.)  My mother used to harumph, "Where are their parents?" when juvenile delinquency was reported on the evening news; if my brothers and I misbehaved, though, it wasn't her fault, she'd done her best with us, etc.

Magical thinking is something we fall back on in situations we can't control or make sense of, as Bronislaw Malinoswki found of Trobriand Islanders who had rigorous, practical, rational lore for sailing in the relatively safe inner lagoons, and magic for sailing on the more dangerous open sea.  But I think we must challenge magical thinking when it takes inhumane forms like belief in karma and "You reap what you sow."  I don't think that the Problem of Evil, insoluble though it is, is too complex for most people to understand.  Sometimes I feel a bit guilty for expecting my less-intellectual friends to inform themselves and learn to think about these matters.  Critical thinking is not just for academic elites; I once disputed with a nice liberal fellow who said that ordinary people don't need to learn to think critically.  Excuse me, I replied, but ordinary people are expected to vote, which requires critical thinking if it's to be done responsibly; just shopping at the supermarket, let alone for a car or a house, involves considering and weighing alternatives.  Ordinary citizens cultivate thinking skills in dealing with spectator sports; as Noam Chomsky has observed, they are often very well-informed and won't defer to the authority of coaches and team owners.  This is permitted because such knowledge and skill has no real social consequences, while thinking about politics and morality might lead to restiveness and rebellion against the legitimate rulers of society.  I don't know how well most people can learn to think critically, but I don't trust the elites who prefer that the proles leave the thinking to them.  After all, the elites have shown consistently that they aren't smart or rational either.

When Death Threats Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Make Death Threats

I haven't written about Gamergate here, because I didn't feel like sorting through the controversy and finding out what was really going on.  Plenty of other people who knew what they were talking about, and who love gaming, have written about Gamergate competently. I am not particularly interested in gaming myself, and I have nothing to add to their analyses.

What I am interested in are issues of civility (though maybe I should put that word in quotes), sexism, misogyny, anti-feminist backlash, homophobia, and freedom of speech.  So this post at Alas, a Blog about some reactions to journalist Anita Sarkeesian's testimony at the United Nations, gave me something to write about.  Here, courtesy of Ampersand, is the relevant portion:

Ampersand showed how certain of Sarkeesian's critics misrepresented her remarks (without actually quoting them explicitly, he says).  What interested me were the defenses of Gamergate by some commenters under that post, which eschewed the more typical frenzied misogynist rants in favor of mere condescension (referring to Sarkeesian as "Anita," for example) and superficially civil calls for freedom of speech and debate.

One commenter claimed that harassment must consist only of overtly hostile, threatening behavior.  But if someone were to call this guy up every night at 3 in the morning, say nothing for thirty seconds or so, and then hang up, I feel pretty sure he'd consider that harassment before the first week was over.  It wouldn't be necessary to tell him he was going to be raped anally with a fencepost or his nuts cut off and stuffed down his throat.  I think that if an anonymous caller merely said "Hi!" in a bright, friendly tone before hanging up over and over, he still would consider it harassment.

The most useful comment for my purposes was posted later in the thread, though.  It stated a notion that had been gestured toward by others, but stated it clearly and reasonably unambiguously.  Ampersand had linked to a sample of misogynist abuse of a feminist writer and asked if such stuff was "fair game."  The commenter replied:

None of those are in the vicinity of “you suck” or “you’re a liar” which is what she was complaining about, and which are valid responses to someone’s output.

We don’t think racist, sexist, homophobic, what-have-you insults are okay, even (especially?) when directed at public figures. But we do expect them to put up with generic insults, like “you suck”.

"You suck" is not a valid response to someone saying something one dislikes or disagrees with. If anything, it amounts to a confession that one has nothing valid to say in response to them. It doesn’t show rationality, finely-honed debating skills, superior knowledge about gaming or any other subject. Saying "you suck" shows that one is an inarticulate lump who has nothing of any interest or value to say about the subject about which one has gotten all hot and bothered.  This is not necessarily a bad thing -- some of my best friends are inarticulate lumps -- but it's not the same thing as being rational or articulate. The beauty of the internet, of course, as of free speech in general, is that no one has to be intelligent, or knowledgeable, or rational to share their opinions with the world. But no one is required to pretend that the equivalent of monkeys throwing feces is intelligent discourse. Yet I’ve noticed that these shit-throwing boys not only want to be taken for rational thinkers, but want respect and sympathy for themselves and their hurt feelings.  Much like bigots in general.

"You're a liar" has more promise, but only as a beginning.  It has to be followed, or accompanied, by some evidence for the claim it makes.  Not too surprisingly, that doesn't usually happen, and as in this case, when the attempt is made, the evidence is mostly or entirely false itself.

If you feel that you really and truly must say "You suck" to someone else, saying it once is enough.  You'll achieve nothing positive or constructive by saying it over and over, let alone escalating from there to dismemberment fantasies and threats.  (Bear in mind that the threats were not a response to escalating feminist criticism of gamer culture -- rather the opposite.  If their targets didn't respond in kind, they took that as license to come up with more baroque and vivid dismemberment and rape fantasies.)  And if you discover in yourself a certain ambition to be something more than an inarticulate lump, you can begin by seeing how many people have already told the offending person that he or she sucks.  You get zero points for originality after the first dozen or so.

The Gamergate notion that being a Gamer is an "identity" that must be defended at all costs was significant, I thought.  It ties into to the claim by another comment that Sarkeesian was not an innocent victim after all: she had criticized a subculture, and "many people from that subculture responded with attacks using a style of rhetoric common to that subculture."  This was intended to be a defense of the vitriolic attacks, by the way, though the commenter also claimed that they were the work of only "a few bad examples."  This kind of equivocation is common as a distractive tactic, I've noticed: first, the behavior was appropriate to the culture; second, it was not typical but the work of a few bad apples; third, criticizing those few bad apples strikes at the heart of the entire subculture.

Another thing about “subculture”: it’s one thing (though not above criticism and censure) for the members to engage in these antics among themselves, and quite another to direct them against those who didn’t ask, and don’t want to play. The funny thing is that the people who are here (and elsewhere) defending the monkeys are thereby inadvertently confirming everything derogatory anyone could say about boy-culture and gamer culture in particular.

The same commenter later accused me of misandry for comparing the more intemperate Gamergaters to feces-throwing simians.  I don't think so, though I'd pay attention to a rationally argued case for the accusation.  (Need I tell you that he didn't attempt one?)   But I think he missed something.  If I were to say that all human males are feces-throwing monkeys, and offered no compelling evidence to support the allegation, then yes, an accusation of misandry might well be called for.  But I didn't even compare all Gamergaters, or video-game players, to feces-throwing monkeys: I compared those whose total and mildest collective retort to criticism of the gamer subculture was "You suck" to feces-throwing monkeys.  I might have other characterizations of the scum who spammed their opponents with death threats.  Rabid feces-throwing monkeys, maybe.

There's an entertaining irony here that I've noticed before.  It's not I who am saying that the innate nature of human males is to screech "You suck" when someone criticizes (no matter how rationally) their little ways, it's the angry males who defend and justify their behavior by attributing it to male nature.   A friend told me that in a video of Jane Elliott's blue-eyes/brown eyes exercise, a white man expostulated that he didn't like being told he was ignorant because of the color of his eyes.  According to my friend, Elliott replied: "Oh no, sir -- your ignorance has nothing to do with the color of your eyes."  (There's a lot of feces-flinging in some responses to Elliott in this article from Smithsonian magazine.  From people of both sexes, by the way: it's not just a guy thing, only some guys claim that it is.) I myself have dealt with white people who claimed they were called racists simply because of the color of their skin; Christians who claimed they were called bigots merely because of their faith; heterosexuals who claimed they were called homophobes merely because of their sexual orientations; men who complained that they were called sexists just because they had a penis.  Oh no, sir -- your sexism has nothing to do with your penis.  At most it has to do with your conviction that having a penis (or a melanin deficiency, or an erotic fixation on the other sex, or you worship images of a crucified man) impels you to behave in certain ways, and should entitle you to certain privileges.

On the other hand, I doubt that the Gamergaters would have responded the same way to, Harvey Mansfield's association of violence with manliness, just as no conservatives accused Phyllis Schafly of hating men when she claimed that men wouldn't support their children unless the law made them do it.  As Callie Khouri, the writer of Thelma and Louise, pointed out, no one sees ultraviolent gangster or action or horror movies as defamatory of men.  What's unacceptable is to say that male violence is a bad thing, and even worse: merely to suggest that ultraviolence is not part of the essence of manhood, and that men don't have to be violent to be good men.  That's what sets off the flying feces.

Even when I speak of Boy Culture (I choose Boy to imply my belief that it's a construct of some immature males, not an expression of adult maleness), I cheerfully admit that not all males conform to it or support it -- indeed many are victimized by it -- and that many women also embrace and endorse it.  That's a big part of my point: that would-be alpha males are not only a small minority of men but that many or most men aren't interested in being at the top of a heap.  (As others have noticed, researchers have an unseemly tendency to focus on the cool kids and ignore the others who constitute the majority.)  The dominant (hegemonic, to use the jargon) model of manhood, like other dominant models, is often true of only a minority in a society, but it will be paid lip service as 'natural' or 'the way things are' by the majority.  That's a datum, but it doesn't make the dominant model true.

The most interesting response I got in the comments thread sought to catch me out in my own logic.

Would you ever apply this criticism to (using a group I identify with) gay activists who use intemperate, insulting language? Or do they get a pass because they never claimed superior rationality? I’m not actually a fan of people telling others “you suck” online, but I also don’t think it’s a particularly strong insult at all – consider the arguments about language changing above – and I think you’re articulating a double standard.

Hey, I identify with gay activists too!  I have been a gay activist myself, and may be one again (activist, that is; I’m still gay). And yes, I would criticize gay activists for using intemperate language, etc., though I'd have to see each case to evaluate. In fact I do criticize my fellow queers and our allies when they say “you suck” and “fuck you” and the like, because nothing says enlightenment and opposition to misogyny and homophobia like homophobic/misogynist language. Sometimes I tell people who say “fuck X person” that I’m glad they love Kim Davis (or Donald Trump, or whoever) and want to give her pleasure, but I don’t think that’s the message they are trying to convey. And yes, my people do like to present themselves as rational and enlightened compared to those stupid fundamentalist Bible thumpers who are fat and stupid. It’s painful to be reminded, constantly, that so many of my fellow gay people and liberals and leftists are stupid, bigoted swine. But I soldier on.

I’m not so much concerned with “insult” or how “strong” the insult is, in this case — I think he missed the point about that. I said that saying simply “You suck” to someone you disagree with is not a valid reponse to them. Yes, language changes, but “you suck” and “fuck you” still seem to me to convey the sense that being penetrated is debasing, and therefore throwing those words at another person effectively means to feminize and debase them. I’ve noticed some straight guys trying to argue that “faggot” isn’t really antigay, it’s a putdown of those who “bend the knee,” which is of course nonsense. And I must point out that the same excuse about changing language gets made for the kind of raving abuse that women like Sarkeesian are targeted with. They’re accused of being too sensitive, etc. One commenter on an article on Gamergate actually claimed that if he’s not allowed to make death threats online, all “our” freedom will have been stripped away by the feminazis.   (No permalink that I could find: see Atavax, 10/20/2014 9:00 PM EST.)

But leave that aside. It doesn’t really matter whether I’m right about the misogynist/homophobic punch of “You suck.” The important thing is that someone who says it is declaring his or her refusal to debate rationally. He or she is expressing his or her feelings, I suppose; but they’re not interested in anyone else’s. Over the years I’ve run into numerous homophobes online who’ve tried to discredit what I say by insinuating that I must be a homosexual, or by trying to “out” me. You can’t “out” someone who’s already out, and it drives them up the wall when homophobic shaming doesn’t work on me. If someone says “You suck” to me in such a situation, I’m likely to say, “Why yes, I do. What is your point?” I’m not interested in censoring them, but I am interested in censuring them, mocking them, deriding them, and withholding respect from them. That’s not a double standard; the double standard is held by people who want to hurl abuse at other people, threaten them online, etc., but panic and whine that they’re being persecuted when someone throws the abuse back at them. If they want me to tiptoe around their tender little feelings, they need to show the same consideration to others. And as I’m afraid even this relatively reasonable thread shows, there are many men who can’t see any discussion of sexism as anything but a call to castrate them, as shown by the misreadings of Sarkeesian that Ampersand has to keep correcting. Just as there are many whites who can’t see any discussion of racism as anything but a call to drive The White Race into the sea. And many heterosexuals who see the legalization of same-sex civil marriage as opposed and hostile to heterosexual marriage. I can sympathize with their irrationality and the pain that drives it, but I see no reason to call it “valid.” It’s not.

So no, I don't think I was articulating a double standard.  My interlocutor couldn't have known my history of criticizing my own side, of course, but it's significant that he chose to suppose that I don't do it.  I think he revealed a double standard of his own, however: that for ostensibly straight boys to attack their critics in these terms is at least understandable, but for gay activists to behave in the same way is not.

A curious thing, though, about that other commenter's claim that the frenzied response to Sarkeesian and other feminist critics of gamer culture was that the gamers used "a style of rhetoric common to that subculture."  It follows that Sarkeesian and her colleagues would have done better to use the same style of rhetoric in reply.  I doubt it would have worked.  I've occasionally experimented by responding to right-wing bigots with their own style of discourse.  They always attack me for incivility, irrationality, and dishonesty -- for sinking to their own level, in effect, though they're careful not to recognize their manner in the mirror.  The gamers conform to this pattern, though since their targets mostly do not respond in kind, they have to invent horrific feminist calls for the subjugation, castration, or elimination of all men.  Are they happy that women are learning to use the style of rhetoric common to the gaming subculture?  They are not; they are distraught that man-hating feminists are brutal misandrists.  Even the comparatively mild humorous trope about "male tears" is cast (see the comments) as a foreshadowing of the Androcide to come if feminists have their way, because of course women fear male violence, and males fear female laughter.  But isn't it misandrist to accuse feminists of sinking to men's level?

As Easy as Stepping on a Rake

I'm a firm believer in the usefulness of debate.  One of its uses is to help figure out what the issues are.  It's easy to become so obsessed with the formulation of a question that you develop tunnel vision and forget that the question can be asked in different ways, and that there are more than two sides in an important disagreement.  This is why the audience of a debate is at least as important as the debaters themselves.  As I've often said, the purpose of a debate is not for one of the debaters to persuade the other that his or her position is wrong, but to inform the spectators, so that they can better evaluate the controversy.

I had it in mind to apply this point to the current controversy over the Confederate battle flag, but then I read a post on same-sex marriage -- or rather, on marriage in general -- by Amanda Marcotte at Rawstory.  Marcotte tries to administer a dope-slap to reactionary opponents of same-sex marriage:

Basically, their real concern is that people are going to stop seeing marriage as a miserable duty to be endured and instead start thinking that love, happiness, and companionship should be what marriage is about. The marriage-for-love mentality is no doubt especially threatening to some of your more sexist men. There’s already a lot of fear that women prefer singleness to being with a man who isn’t loving and supportive. That’s what all that hand-wringing about single motherhood and singleness generally is about—anger that women might actually have standards and not just marry the first guy who will take them.

She then quotes Mike Huckabee speaking on CNN:

“Regardless, heterosexual marriage is largely in trouble today because people see it as a selfish means of pleasing self, rather than a committed relationship in which the focus is on meeting the needs of the partner,” he said. “That sense of selfishness and the redefinition of love as to something that is purely sentimental and emotional, has been destructive.”

Marcotte then denounces

this bleak view where marriage is about cosmic duty, not about being happy. In fact, there’s a suspicion of happiness underlying this, a belief that if you’re enjoying your relationship, you must be doing something wrong.

Jeez, where did Marcotte ever get the idea that marriage is about love and happiness?  She really should check out the century or more of feminist analysis and critique of marriage, and then all the research that found that the only people less unhappy than married women are unmarried men.  This research was cited by mostly male reactionaries to attack feminism (women totally owe it to men to sacrifice their happiness to propping up the male ego!), but that doesn't discredit the evidence.  This article sums up First Wave feminism's take on marriage, though it probably stereotypes Second-Wave feminism unfairly.  The best-known Second Wave critics of marriage are probably Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis.  The situation has changed slightly as married women gained more autonomy and have had their own outside-the-home jobs, and could control their own money -- which, perhaps oddly to this mindset, means that having a job makes you happier.

And then there's the "marriage equality" movement itself, which has made a big deal about all the zillions of "rights" that married people get.  Special rights, of course.  Right after the latest Supreme Court ruling I had an educational exchange on Facebook with a marriage-equality devotee who flatly angrily denied that the movement was about anything but Love!  Like, what part of "Love Wins" didn't I understand?

Marriage is not about equality: it's about inequality.  It privileges certain couples -- those who are registered with the State -- over other, unregistered couples, to say nothing of single people.  Marriage is, and always has been, about property, not about love, and certainly not happiness.  From what I see, most of my younger acquaintances, especially the gay ones, are really interested in having a wedding.  Preferably a big expensive spectacle of a wedding, like in the movies.  Preferably in a church, which is going to frustrate them when they learn that they can't force a church to be the soundstage for their spectacle.  How are they supposed to get a viral Youtube video and website out of their wedding if they can't have it in a church?

"We loved the T-Mobile advert spoof of Wills and Kate's wedding," [NIna, 28, the bride] said.

"Ever since I saw that I've always fancied giving it a go."

Back in the Seventies when I first began to realize that I preferred being single, I was bemused when to find that my coupled friends (mostly lesbians at the time) were saying that they needed to find me a nice boyfriend, so I'd be happy like they were.  When I replied that being in a couple hadn't made me happy, they would change their tune: Well, you're not supposed to be happy!  Being in a relationship is hard work!  You'll be miserable, but it's good for you! You're just selfish! ... and so on.  Bear in mind, they weren't talking about legal marriage (not available then to same-sex couples anywhere) or civil union or domestic partnership, but just about having a boyfriend.  Ironically, they succeeded in confirming my sense that being coupled was not for me.  For them, maybe, but not for me.  (A few years later, all those would-be matchmakers had broken up with their partners.  They found new ones, of course.)

Since then I've often observed that people to tend to stay in relationships long after after those relationships are making them miserable -- for fear of being thought a quitter, or immature, or selfish, or a failure -- or for fear of being alone.  Again, the propaganda that pervades the Culture of Therapy encourages those fears.  It isn't only old fundamentalist males who say this stuff.  And civil marriage makes getting out of a bad relationship even harder, as it's meant to.

Not only does marriage not equal love, love doesn't equal marriage.  I love many people; I'm not even theoretically interested in marrying most of them.  (My niece, my friends, my grandnephews, etc. -- but not my sex partners either.)  "Love" is a multivalent and confusing concept in many cultures, not just ours; often it's an outright euphemism for erotic desire or for copulation.  Equating love with marriage is propaganda, as is linking it to happiness.  One reason so many marriages fail is that people have unrealistic expectations about the institution -- again, it's not just old religious people who say this, it's a staple of the Culture of Therapy.   But what are realistic expectations?  Inflating the importance of marriage or even just of couplehood, making romantic love a prerequisite for happiness, is patriarchal propaganda.

But all this is the easy part, I think.  It's easy to mistake Amanda Marcotte for a radical: she's brassy, confrontational, and she talks dirty.  But confusing tone with content is usually a mistake. Her stated position here makes it explicit that she stands in the liberal tradition of the atomized individual.  "There is no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher infamously said, "there are individual men and women and there are families."  Obviously Thatcher drew different conclusions from that premise than Marcotte and many other liberals do: that doctrine can be used to rationalize a wide variety of positions.  Mike Huckabee would probably be shocked to learn that Christianity as represented in the New Testament is an individualistic (though not liberal) cult, as religions of salvation usually are.  Jesus' teaching focused on the safety of the individual, who must be prepared to break with and defy all the institutions of his society -- family, marriage, religion, state -- in order to get into the Kingdom of Heaven.  As the Confederates found with their doctrine of states' rights, the early Christians had to contain this doctrine immediately if they were to survive as an institution themselves: the apostle Paul's letters show him balancing the freedom of the individual against the rest of the community (conceptualized as the Body of Christ), under his authority as Christ's deputy.  But the early Christian communities could only be built by taking individuals away from already-existing communities.  It's worth remembering that although most early Christians probably married, Jesus' and Paul's exaltation of sexual abstinence encouraged and empowered many people to reject marriage -- especially women.

You can't have individuals without community, or a community without individuals, and social history can usefully be read as an account of the tension between those poles.  Propaganda for same-sex marriage has cited the importance of social recognition and acceptance of Our Relationships.  Which, ironically, confirms the complaint of many opponents of SSM that ratifying same-sex civil marriage forces not just them but everyone to endorse those relationships against their religious principles.  You can make an argument that this isn't so, but the proponents of SSM tend to flipflop after having done so, and demand social acceptance and support from everybody for their marriages.  Civil marriage isn't about individual happiness, it's a social and political construct, and it can enable or obstruct individual happiness.

Individual choices are not (necessarily) determined by social or cultural forces, but they are pressured and limited by them.  The choices we make are limited by the options available, the rewards for compliance and the penalties for noncompliance.  So the question still has be asked, quoting Ellen Willis quoting Rosalind Petchesky: Why do we choose what we choose? What would we choose if we had a real choice?  I agree with Marcotte's insistence that women have a right to choose their partners and relationships, to draw lines within their relationships to preserve their autonomy, and that men have no right to demand that women make all the concessions and provide all the service.  But she should consider the question whether (especially civil) marriage civil marriage, despite the reforms that have been enacted in parts of the West, is a gateway or an obstacle to personal happiness.

But, you know, if Firestone and Willis are too radical for you, there's always Nancy Polikoff's excellent and moderate Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage.  Simply negating the demands of the religious patriarchs isn't the only way to refute them, and such negation has a tendency to snap back and hit you in the face.

Longing for Community

Today at the library book sale I picked up a book called Confessions of the Critics, edited by H. Aram Veeser, published by Routledge in 1996.  Apparently it's a collection of writings by academic critics on the use of "autobiography" in academic criticism.  A number of people I like contributed, so I bought it.

I didn't even notice at first that Gerald Graff was one of the contributors.  I like Graff's work a lot, and I identify strongly with some of the things he wrote in "Self-Interview," like this:

Q. You became known as a polemicist in your early work, and now you're associated with the idea of "teaching the conflicts."  So would you say that combativeness is a deep personal motivation of your work?

A.  Partly but not entirely.  People think I must like conflict because I promote it as a pedagogical and curricular strategy.  In fact I dislike conflict as much as anybody.  In an odd way, my interest in conflict and polemics has always been tied to a longing for community.  I just don't think a democratic community can be sustained by papering over its divisions.  "Teaching the conflicts" for me is a way to get beyond the conflicts.  My assumption is that the more we avoid confronting conflicts the uglier they can only get [97].

Exactly: I could have written that myself.  I'd add that those who object to teaching the conflicts -- which is just another term for "critical thinking," which many people love to preach but not practice -- or who think I like to pick fights, love to see someone else get trashed.  It occurs to me that the difference is that I like to see debate, which ideally is a form of dialogue, while most people seem to prefer an unbalanced fight where a Good Guy (preferably from Our Side) beats a Bad Guy (from Their Side) into the ground.  This is something I ought perhaps to write about at more length someday, drawing on movies like Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, in which one character in an argument will deliver a line that in most movies would end the conversation -- but then the other character ripostes, putting the first character on the defensive, and they go back and forth for quite some time.  That's dialogue.

Later in "Self-Interview" Graff visits some of that same territory.

Q. Your call for community makes you sound at times like Jane Tompkins, who has been writing ... about the competitive individualism and lack of community in academic institutions.

A. Yes, and I share Tompkins' complaint up to a point.  But I'm not attracted to the kind of community Tompkins seems to want, which is emotional or physical rather than intellectual.  For Tompkins intellectuality -- argumentation, debate, analysis, reasoning -- seems to be inherently selfish, competitive, and antithetical to the emotions and the body, part of the problem rather than part of the solution.  For me the antidote to Damrosch's academic anticommunities lies in reconstruction rather than abandoning intellectual community, which need not and should not exclude emotion and the body.

Q. What about the view of some feminists that that model of aggressive argumentation is essentially male?

A.  It's interesting that those feminists don't hesitate to use aggressively "male" argumentation in asserting that view when it suits them.  Like Tompkins, such feminists (who do not speak for all feminists by any means) assume that community and intellectual argumentation are inherently incompatible.  As if to make the critiques of demagogues like Christina Hoff Sommers look respectable, this thinking produces touchy-feely classrooms in which students get in touch with their own "voices" instead of learning to analyze, criticize, or make an argument.  Teachers who practice this species of feminist pedagogy (which again must not be confused with feminist pedagogy as such) are in effect withholding from their students the cultural capital of argumentative discourse that they themselves command.

Q.  But haven't women's studies programs established alternative models of community to the isolation you attack?

A. They've made a start, to be sure.  But unless women's studies programs themselves are put into regular dialogue with other sectors of the university, they become another of Damrosch's anticommunities, closing themselves off from threatening outsiders.  It's unfair, however, to single out women's studies and other new "revisionist" fields for "separatism," since these new fields are merely copying the time-honored, respectable separatism of established academic departments, whose maxim has always been: consolidate your own turf and wall yourself off from anybody who might disagree with you.  In other words, my problem with the new politically oriented fields is not that they're acting like subversives but that they're acting like traditional academics [101-2].

He took the words right out of my mouth.

Shield of the Meek and Lowly

I was walking home from lunch yesterday, thinking about Tuesday's post.  I've sometimes wondered if trying to engage and address what other people say might be the wrong approach to handling disagreements, especially in contexts where paternalistic helping professionals are concerned with "protecting" the vulnerable from bad thoughts. Maybe I should adopt the same tactic? So I assumed a trembling voice and began with: "It really hurts me when you say these things.  I'm a survivor of gay-bashing and cultural homophobia, people have often tried to silence me when I tried to express my opinions.  I shouldn't have to deal with your hatred.  Your lack of concern for my feelings is really oppressive.  Your ignorance is killing me!"

I realized I could easily go on in that mode indefinitely, though some of the cliches took a bit of thought and I had to pause now and then to come up with them, but on the whole I was on automatic pilot.  A piece of cake.  My voice not only trembled, it summoned up a wounded soul on the verge of tears at the hurtful, hateful criticisms I've faced.  I craved healing.

I don't mean to imply that I doubt the sincerity of people who talk like this.  I'm sure they mean every word, even though they've been trained, either directly by professionals or indirectly by exposure to the culture-of-therapy mindset in affirmational memes, videos, and literature.  People internalize training, so what they're taught soon becomes authentically Them.  But honestly, I wasn't being entirely insincere either.  I was gay-bashed a couple of times, and though my injuries weren't life-threatening, the experience was scary and made me nervous for some time after the cuts and bruises healed.  I did grow up in a much more casually homophobic time, when there were almost no countervailing voices -- and none in the mainstream media -- to let me know I could see myself as other than a sick, solitary pervert with no future.  I have encountered bigotry outside the gay community as well as inside it, and some people in the community have tried to silence me in various ways.  Why shouldn't I drop one wing and run in circles when people disagree with me?  I've been wounded too.  (Hear that tearful tremor in my voice?  Does it come through the Intertoobz?)  I only mean to imply that sincerity isn't everything.

As the culture of therapy has spread into conservative Christian circles, some bigots have begun using its tactics and language to defend themselves, claiming but that they are victims of intolerance and persecution, but that they are wounded souls.  But the notion that some things should not be said where vulnerable people might hear it and be wounded by it is much older.  It's a traditional part of the culture of bigotry: innocents must be shielded from harmful ideas and people, such things aren't fit to be mentioned or discussed among Christians.  Often those who must be shielded are women and children, but if you listen for a while you'll probably notice that the straight men who are trying to silence discussion are themselves repulsed by sodomy, nudity, pornography, rape, copulation, lady parts.  You might suspect, as I do, that while they also want to keep women and children from hearing about such things, they're using them as a front: first and foremost, they want not to hear about these things themselves.  (A few years ago I read a book about the rise of gay Christianity in the British Isles. The author kept referring to those who tried to suppress discussion of homosexuality in the Church as "old ladies," "maiden aunts," and the like.  But I noticed that the people who were most vehemently repulsed by open discussion were usually middle-aged and elderly men.  That's not surprising when you consider who populates the upper levels of the church hierarchy, but it was interesting that a gay Christian author would casually use such misogynist rhetoric.)

As occupational barriers have come down, however, more and more women have come to occupy prominent places in the culture of therapy, so there are plenty of females (like my friend A, the library worker) who have taken on the burden of shielding the weak and lowly from exposure to any words or ideas that might upset them.  If you challenge their authority to do so, they will accuse you of approving of abuse, delighting in the suffering of children and weak women, even of being an abuser yourself.  (There was a lot of this during the Satanic-abuse witch hunt of the 1980s and 1990s: critics of the juggernaut were accused of being in league with the dark conspiracy of abusers, of approving of the destruction of innocence. and so on.  Critical reason was a tool of the abusers, as were Constitutional legal protections.  The panic has subsided, and few of its proponents want to be reminded of their roles in it, but its methods are still kept at hand until they're needed again.)

I still fantasize idly about turning these tactics around on people who use them, but I know it wouldn't work.  I've mentioned before the time I was on a gay panel speaking to a college class: one students asked whether it wasn't fair to take the children of gay parents away from them, if the community decided that they'd be better off with heterosexual parents.  When I asked her what she'd think if a community decided that fundamentalist Christian parents, or Roman Catholic parents were unfit, and took away their children, she became upset and accused me of religious intolerance.  The scary part was less her reaction, or the reaction of the other students who sided with her (not all did), but the instructor, who complained that I was being "combative."  I still wish I'd tried whining about their intolerance, how they were oppressing me, maybe shed a tear or two.  It would have been fun.  But would anyone have learned anything if I'd done so?  I don't think so.

It isn't easy to listen carefully to those who disagree with you.  It's unpleasant when they're particularly nasty in their rhetoric, though for me that's the least of my worries, especially when I can answer them to their faces.  It's scary to listen to their views for very long -- what if you're seduced into their world of error?  (I admit I felt some fear when I began studying Christian apologetics in the 1980s.  What if I realized they were right and I was wrong?  But I continued anyway.)  It gets easier, though, as you do more of it.  What concerns me is that trying to teach people to do it is so unpopular, and overwrought histrionics are considered more reasonable.  There's a lot of hostility, both inside the culture of therapy and outside it, to "victims."  But the trouble isn't victims, it's those who pretend to be victims in order to stifle disagreement and discussion: whatever may have been done to them in the past, such people want power over others, and too often they are getting it.