Crazy Love: My Lenten reading project
How does oppressed people, say women, get into the revolution in the first place? Well, the most likely thing is actually rising expectations. If, for example, women gain some freedoms and hopes that they never had before, they will fight for more. That is the way, historically speaking, feminism actually came about. It is why feminism sprung up in precisely the countries where women already had some freedoms and not in countries such as Iran where it would seem most logical and is certainly most needed.
Marx never saw this. Marx thought that revolutions came out of greater and greater suffering. That was why he liked capitalism. Capitalism, thought Marx, was going to make the workers poorer than they had ever been before and the workers would therefore rise up and revolt. He also thought that capitalism, and this is important, removed all the romance from life. In capitalism, Marx argued, all relationships tended to get reduced to purely economic relationships.
Churches especially irked Marx. He thought they covered up what were really hard economic facts with a lot of incense and ritual. He liked capitalism because he thought it would replace church with something much harsher and cruder. Which it might well do yet. But Marx's bet was that this harsh and crude thing would be so horrible that the oppressed people would be forced to see the problem and rise up.
He was wrong and the entire history of the left ever since has been a struggle with that problem. There has, as a consequence, always been a tendency on the left to trash talk capitalism. Over and over again, our leftist betters keep telling us that we don't really like all the comforts and conveniences that capitalism has given us.
There has always been a similar tendency in feminism. One of the most visible things girls and young women have done with their freedom is to embrace erotic love like never before: there she is, waxed and trussed up in her lingerie, short skirt and low cut top, cheering along as Taylor Swift sings about love. For romantic, erotic love is like the church of sex and marriage and anyone who likes to look at young women can tell you that there are more young women who are true believers in this religion than any other.
Not surprisingly, feminism has always been suspicious of love at best and some feminists have felt the need to trash talk love. For them, love is the thing that keeps us from seeing these relationships as purely about power and personal gain. For it does them no good to tell women that men often exploit women sexually (which is perfectly true, as is the reverse that women often exploit men sexually) so long as people still believe love is possible. It does no good to tell people that there are lots of bad marriages, that there is often violence and betrayal in marriage so long as people believe that love is possible.
In her memoir about being at the barricades during the heady days of radical feminism, Susan Brownmiller recounts having her bona fides challenged because she lived with man. How could she be a feminist, she was asked, when every night she went home and sucked ____? More recently, Laura Kipnis has written a book that she describes as a polemic against love. Here is the teaser she gives at her website:
And let's give them their due. Erotic love is a huge problem for Christianity. For erotic love is a lot like a religious commitment with the added pay off of having sex with it.
And so we have a long, long history of Christian writers from Augustine to CS Lewis trash talking erotic love.
So who speaks for love? Kipnis, above, implies that lots of people do, but actual defenders of love are actually pretty thin on the ground. There are people who speak for sex but they are even keener to diminish erotic love than the feminists and the Christians. And there are people keen to speak of commitment and mutual support but they are rather shy about connecting this to actual, you know, luuuvvvv.
There was an odd little book that came out last year by Cristina Nehring called A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance in the Twenty-First Century. It got a lot of reaction and then disappeared. Her website, for example, is now just a shell. When the book first came out it was full of stuff. It now has the look of something that is just a placeholder.
The reason for this is, in one sense, obvious. There was something embarrassing about the book. It was embarrassing to read, embarrassing to write about and embarrassing to think about. It's always embarrassing to write about love and that is one of the puzzling things about it. So I'm going to read it for Lent.
My blogging will start Monday. I will assume that few people reading here will actually read the book so the remarks I may will be set out such that they do not need any additional context. OTOH, it's an interesting book. It's not a great book so I can't recommend it as unreservedly as I recommended Brideshead Revisited (which is also a defence of erotic love) but I like it warts and all.
The next entry in this series will be here.
How does oppressed people, say women, get into the revolution in the first place? Well, the most likely thing is actually rising expectations. If, for example, women gain some freedoms and hopes that they never had before, they will fight for more. That is the way, historically speaking, feminism actually came about. It is why feminism sprung up in precisely the countries where women already had some freedoms and not in countries such as Iran where it would seem most logical and is certainly most needed.
Marx never saw this. Marx thought that revolutions came out of greater and greater suffering. That was why he liked capitalism. Capitalism, thought Marx, was going to make the workers poorer than they had ever been before and the workers would therefore rise up and revolt. He also thought that capitalism, and this is important, removed all the romance from life. In capitalism, Marx argued, all relationships tended to get reduced to purely economic relationships.
Churches especially irked Marx. He thought they covered up what were really hard economic facts with a lot of incense and ritual. He liked capitalism because he thought it would replace church with something much harsher and cruder. Which it might well do yet. But Marx's bet was that this harsh and crude thing would be so horrible that the oppressed people would be forced to see the problem and rise up.
He was wrong and the entire history of the left ever since has been a struggle with that problem. There has, as a consequence, always been a tendency on the left to trash talk capitalism. Over and over again, our leftist betters keep telling us that we don't really like all the comforts and conveniences that capitalism has given us.
There has always been a similar tendency in feminism. One of the most visible things girls and young women have done with their freedom is to embrace erotic love like never before: there she is, waxed and trussed up in her lingerie, short skirt and low cut top, cheering along as Taylor Swift sings about love. For romantic, erotic love is like the church of sex and marriage and anyone who likes to look at young women can tell you that there are more young women who are true believers in this religion than any other.
Not surprisingly, feminism has always been suspicious of love at best and some feminists have felt the need to trash talk love. For them, love is the thing that keeps us from seeing these relationships as purely about power and personal gain. For it does them no good to tell women that men often exploit women sexually (which is perfectly true, as is the reverse that women often exploit men sexually) so long as people still believe love is possible. It does no good to tell people that there are lots of bad marriages, that there is often violence and betrayal in marriage so long as people believe that love is possible.
In her memoir about being at the barricades during the heady days of radical feminism, Susan Brownmiller recounts having her bona fides challenged because she lived with man. How could she be a feminist, she was asked, when every night she went home and sucked ____? More recently, Laura Kipnis has written a book that she describes as a polemic against love. Here is the teaser she gives at her website:
Who would dream of being against love? No one.But you know, this is one of those interesting areas where feminism lines up with a certain censorious strain in Christianity. Saint Paul is relatively blameless in this, although he is often recruited to the cause. Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine, on the other hand, were right in there.
Love is, as everyone knows, a mysterious and all-controlling force, with vast power over our thoughts and life decisions.
But is there something a bit worrisome about all this uniformity of opinion? Is this the one subject about which no disagreement will be entertained, about which one truth alone is permissible? Consider that the most powerful organized religions produce the occasional heretic; every ideology has its apostates; even sacred cows find their butchers. Except for love.
Hence the necessity for a polemic against it. A polemic is designed to be the prose equivalent of a small explosive device placed under your E-Z-Boy lounger. It won’t injure you (well not severely); it’s just supposed to shake things up and rattle a few convictions.
And let's give them their due. Erotic love is a huge problem for Christianity. For erotic love is a lot like a religious commitment with the added pay off of having sex with it.
And so we have a long, long history of Christian writers from Augustine to CS Lewis trash talking erotic love.
So who speaks for love? Kipnis, above, implies that lots of people do, but actual defenders of love are actually pretty thin on the ground. There are people who speak for sex but they are even keener to diminish erotic love than the feminists and the Christians. And there are people keen to speak of commitment and mutual support but they are rather shy about connecting this to actual, you know, luuuvvvv.
There was an odd little book that came out last year by Cristina Nehring called A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance in the Twenty-First Century. It got a lot of reaction and then disappeared. Her website, for example, is now just a shell. When the book first came out it was full of stuff. It now has the look of something that is just a placeholder.
The reason for this is, in one sense, obvious. There was something embarrassing about the book. It was embarrassing to read, embarrassing to write about and embarrassing to think about. It's always embarrassing to write about love and that is one of the puzzling things about it. So I'm going to read it for Lent.
My blogging will start Monday. I will assume that few people reading here will actually read the book so the remarks I may will be set out such that they do not need any additional context. OTOH, it's an interesting book. It's not a great book so I can't recommend it as unreservedly as I recommended Brideshead Revisited (which is also a defence of erotic love) but I like it warts and all.
The next entry in this series will be here.
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