Identity politics in one quote

"Everyone knows how much I care about and value equality for all... I have it tattooed on me!"

That's from somebody called Willow Faith. She seems to be some sort of social media celebrity. It showed up in my Facebook feed as a sponsored item. The ellipsis is in the original, which is to say she uses it as a caesura and not to indicate that something has been left out.

The problem with identity politics should now be obvious. If everyone really knew how much she cared it wouldn't be necessary for her to tattoo it on herself. The tattoo, the identity, is just an attempt to find a shortcut to virtue.

That's the charitable reading ...

"The situation looks bleak indeed"

Here's a sentiment we've seen before.

Yet for someone like me – a 32-year-old single Catholic – the situation looks bleak indeed.

I can talk to any young woman in my social circle and they will, one and all, say the same thing: there just aren’t any men. What we mean by this is there is a frightening scarcity of men aged 25-35 who are church-going, single and worldly-wise.

Most men I meet have two out of three of these qualities, with the latter often lacking. If they’re single church-goers, they’re usually awkward and in want of basic social awareness (a big turn-off for most women). If they’re more worldly, they’re generally not single or not religious. Even if they’re not religious, most young Australian men hold views and values that are left of centre and utterly opposed to our own.

 I'm not sure exactly when I first heard this sort of talk but it was a while ago now. It was sometime in the mid 1980s, which is to say before Anna Hitchings, who wrote the above, was born. I suspect the talk actually went back further than that. The mid-1980s was the time I hit twenty-five and, consequently, was the time some women in my cohort started talking that way.

It's not nice to bring that issue up, age I mean. That said, reality has no scruples about bringing up what the rest of us are too polite to say.

What I find interesting is the way the unhitched Ms. Hitchings immediately locates the problem outside of herself. We've seen this before. Eight years ago I commented on an article by British journalist Anna Pasternak who had written,

... when I look around at my girlfriends - bright, attractive, successful, fabulous women in their 40s who are single — I sincerely begin to wonder: Is there even one solvent, kind, desirable, heterosexual single man in his 40s left in Britain?

Notice how similar that is to,

I can talk to any young woman in my social circle and they will, one and all, say the same thing: there just aren’t any men. What we mean by this is there is a frightening scarcity of men aged 25-35 who are church-going, single and worldly-wise.

The two Annas express the same sentiment: there aren't any single men worthy of women like them. The possibility that maybe the women who find themselves still single might not be as special as they imagine themselves to be is never raised.

Hitchings raises another question: What of the church for she too is having a hard time attracting men? Again, as she sees it, the problem is not with the church but with men. Indeed, Hitchings worries that women desperate to find men will relax their unimpeachable moral standards.

The fear of being alone seems to be driving women of faith to abandon everything they believe to secure a ring on their finger. I don’t want to be single for the rest of my life any more than the next girl, but that certainly doesn’t mean I think a man is worth overthrowing all I hold dear; everything that gives me hope and meaning and purpose in life.

Note the catastrophizing going on here. Hitchings is locked in a struggle against evil.

Consequently, she has no trouble deciding that the lack of men in the church and the lack of men she would consider suitable marriage partners is the same problem.

Do we need more young men on the path to truth and goodness? Of course we do! I’m deeply grateful for the influence figures like Dr Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are having on so many men, young and old.

We should be doing all we can to help steer men in the right direction and find truth and meaning in their lives. Men who are guided by good principles, who have purpose and direction in life, are not only deeply attractive to women, they are invaluable assets to society. Yet many women I see and talk to feel as if their chance is never going to come.

Because it couldn't be that the notions of "truth and goodness"  are the problem?

"My truth"

I ran into an old girlfriend at the Elmdale Tavern* a few years ago. I asked her how she was. She responded by talking for five minutes about why her marriage failed. It was an inappropriate response. She may have realized this or she may have not. What was plain that she felt compelled to tell me.

I get it. I feel the same compulsion. It's especially intense when we meet someone we used to be in a relationship with. There is a sense that if we can get the facts out there it will preclude the judgment we dread.

The expression "my truth" seems to come with a heavy dose of self-righteousness. It's either the self-righteous declaration of the person who uses it or it is a self-righteous condemnation of the expression by some person who feels called to defend something they call "the truth" or, even worse, "the objective truth". I don't believe it's worth getting heated up about the matter either way. As a communication strategy, however, "my truth" is useless.

The first thing to notice is that the truth can and will take care of itself. If it's really true that Noah is has treated Alyson abysmally, then it really is true . If it isn't true, then it isn't. Her declaring it to be true doesn't change a thing. Her convincing someone else that it's true also doesn't change anything. The truth is the thing that doesn't change.

As I note above, there is a sense we all have that if we can get our story out there we will prevail. It's a natural enough response as anyone who deals with children can tell you. Often times all that is needed to make a crying child feel better is to let her tell her story. She's hurt and she wants someone to listen. That same tactic works on adults too. "Works" here means that it will pacify them. But does it work for the adult?

Whether or not we use the expression "my truth" to describe what we are doing, telling your truth is a pushy thing to do. What's our justification for this? "I'm hurting and someone should be listening to me!" Ah yes, entitled victimhood, that will win them over. They don't want to hear this. They'd rather be talking about themselves but here we come and force them to listen to us talk about ourselves. That's a bad way to start.

And it only gets worse.

And think of what that does for our image in their eyes. Do we really want other people thinking of us as victims? If we're in a classroom and there is a teacher, or at home and their is a mother, then being the victim has a certain advantage. The teacher might, repeat might, step in and make things better. That's where we learn this strategy. Of course, most kids also figure out that adults can be fooled.

A few kids (and adults) might notice something else: pity isn't love. Pity is one side of a coin whose other face is contempt. Pity is more charitable than contempt but, and this is crucial, it says something about the person who feels it and not the person who it is felt for. No matter how much I pity you, my pity entails a judgment that there is something wrong with you. I expect nothing from those I pity not out of the goodness of my heart but out of hard-nosed realism. There is no point in expecting anything from such a person because they aren't capable of anything.

We can miss this because good people will listen sympathetically. They'll even respond provided it doesn't cost them too much to do so. But there is always that judgment. It doesn't have to be explicitly made. Often the person making the judgment isn't even aware they are doing it. They, like everyone else, think about themselves. They're thinking they are a good person because they are listening and caring. But the judgment is entailed.

And think what that judgment is! Really, look into the Nietzschean abyss. It's not very pretty is it? The complete judgment the sympathetic listener makes is us will be something on the lines of, "I'm a good and caring person because I'm listening to this sad person tell a story that others don't have time for." And little wonder they don't have time for it because it's rather boring. There isn't anything new or interesting about victimhood. It's the same as everyone else's story. Including me, now that I think of it, I faced similar challenges and dealt with them and didn't make a pathetic spectacle out of myself the way she is. Aren't I good!

(You may be thinking you'd rather be pitied than held in contempt. But, again, think of it from their perspective. Which attitude lets them get on with their life? It's pity. Contempt lingers, lives rent free in your brain, pity is gone the second you leave the person you pity.)

And it gets worse.

It gets worse because our truth doesn't ring true. There is a lie built into it. Our truth is deeply meaningful to us but it's not new or meaningful to anyone else. We are demanding attention: you should listen to my truth! Well, why? There are millions of people in the world and they all have a sad story. What makes us so special? The answer to that question is nothing makes us so special.

Watch any five-year-old in action and you'll see what happens next. The story gets amplified. "I felt threatened," becomes "I was threatened." If that doesn't work, then I was just threatened, I was actually attacked. I know, none of us thinks of ourselves as liars. And, hey, we wouldn't actually make up stories about being victims of crimes. Maybe. But we would exaggerate, improve on the truth. It's the sort of lie that feels like the truth: the listener isn't reacting as they should so we say something that will get the right reaction. The desired reaction is something we deserve so it doesn't matter if the "truth" we tell isn't quite true.

Again, think of how this feels for the listener. They're feeling pity, which, we should remind ourselves, is a way of feeling superior. We, on the other hand, are wrapped up in ourselves and in our vain quest to get validation. We're going to slip. Even if we don't consciously lie, we're going to be less attentive to the truth than we should be. And some not-quite-true or slightly improved "fact" that comes out of our mouth will inspire doubt in our listener. If the listener is a friend it will be more than doubt; we will say something they know not to be true. They'll do their best to hide that they've noticed it. That's what the sort of people who pity others do. But they will notice and that will affirm the judgment they're making about us.

Look into the abyss again. Think of someone who has told you their truth, their story of what happened to them and how it hurt them.  Did you think of them as capable of changing their situation? Of course not. That's why they're telling you; they can't do anything about themselves. They're that crying five-year-old. Only they're supposed to be an adult now.

If, as I said at the top, the truth is the thing that doesn't change, then what can change?


* It occurs to me that the name "Elmdale Tavern" conjures up a deceptive image of a rough, working-class tavern. It was that once upon a time but it's now in the very heart of hipster Ottawa.

Feminist cognitive dissonance?

First a caveat: there is more than one kind of feminism so this shouldn't be taken as a blanket condemnation of all feminism.

The article is in Harper's Bazaar and it's called, "Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden". It's been savagely mocked all over the place and deserves every bit of it. That said, there is something right about it. I keep meeting young men who have no male friends. Further, it's easy to see why they have none for they have no skills for making friends. There is a real problem here. But the writer, Melanie Hamlett,  contradicts herself at every step and, consequently, leaves us with no hint of where the problem might be.

Let's start with the opening sentence. "Kylie-Anne Kelly can’t remember the exact moment she became her boyfriend’s one and only, his what would I do without you, but she does remember neglecting her own needs to the point of hospitalization." See the problem? More to the point, see who actually has a problem in this set-up? Yes, it's Kylie-Anne. She neglected her own needs to the point of hospitalization and she thinks that is some one else's fault!

(Guys, can we have a word in private: If the woman in your life is so bad at managing her feelings that she ends up in hospital and if she reasons about why this happened the way Kylie-Anne Kelly does, you need to get out now. Don't argue, don't explain. Tell her she's right and that you're the problem but get out of that relationship right now!)

I think the problem is rooted in a fundamental cognitive dissonance. Millennial men are poor at making friends. They build their entire lives around relationships with women with whom they discuss their feelings. And it's not working out. Why is that causing dissonance? Because that is exactly what second-wave feminists a generation ago said they wanted men to do.

Roll back to 1982 and this article would have been complaining about men who build their lives around work, like to take part in exclusively male activities too much and never talked about their feelings with women.

Now we have a generation who were raised by women to do exactly those things and women are hating it.

Watch what you wish for.

And while we're at it, could women maybe learn to take care of themselves? If you neglect your needs to the point of hospitalization, it's your fault. It's a sign there is something seriously wrong with you.

Magic in the Moonlight

I have put up a series of posts about Woody Allen lately but not revealed why. The reason why is that I saw Magic in the Moonlight recently. I saw it three times. I loved it.

I loved it even though I saw some of the usual problems. The main character is depressed at the thought of living in a godless universe where he is doomed to death. He is desperately seeking transcendence and unable to find it until, surprise! surprise!, he finds magic in a sexual relationship with a much younger woman. It's Manhattan all over again only disguised.

In Manhattan, Isaac Davis is 25 years older than 17-year-old Tracy. We're never told how old the characters Stanley Crawford or Sophie Baker are but the actor playing Stanley, Colin Firth, is 28 years older than Emma Stone who plays Sophie. That said, Emma was 26 when the film was made and there is a world of difference between man in his fifties having a sexual relationship with a woman in her twenties and a man in his forties having such a relationship with a 17-year-old. That said, why the huge age gap?

If we can can get beyond that, and I can, there still is a problem in thinking that romantic love is a substitute for transcendence. It's trite, rather than offensive, to believe such a thing.

All that said, I love the movie. I've watched it three times and I suspect I'll watch it again. I think a big part of its charm is that it is set in the 1920s. It also works like an opera. That's a commonplace remark about film that I won't elaborate on for now. What I will say now is that I think it's true. Realism, paradoxically, doesn't work in film.

Creeping Victorianism?

We don't hear much about it anymore but just a few years ago "benevolent sexism" was a hot topic. The claim was that activities such as holding doors open for women or allowing them to get on a bus first may appear kind-hearted but are actually sexist. One argument was that men who did such things tended to see women as more fragile and therefore were sexist.

I recently had dealings with a strongly committed Social Justice Warrior. She insisted that she be treated with special respect because she was fragile. It wasn't terribly difficult to meet her requirements. She was clear about what she wanted. What struck me, though, was the coincidence of the attack on "chivalry" as benevolent sexism being accompanied by a sudden concern with trigger warnings.

No doubt this feels like a victory to the people pushing it. They'd argue that trigger warnings are not sex specific whereas chivalry was. Unfortunately, a few months on a university campus will rapidly disabuse you of this notion. While the people who insist on special treatment because of their triggers are not all women the overwhelmingly majority are.

All of this, I should add, only concerns a minority of students. SJWs are a small minority. I'd be surprised if they made up even five percent of the total student population. Other students go along; buy in because it costs them nothing. I did exactly that myself when this woman started asking me to make special allowances for her. I found her likeable and easy to talk to and her requirements not onerous. They were no harder to meet than lots of other requirements I make for all sorts of other people and have done so all my life.

I did wonder, though, whether it was good for her. As she talked about her "triggers" I found myself thinking that what she was describing sounds exactly like anxiety. Anxiety is a well-understood and treatable phenomenon. One thing we know beyond a doubt is that avoidance makes anxiety worse. It may be the only choice sometimes; if I have a crippling anxiety attack at a shopping mall, I should leave. When this happens, however, I need to get back on that horse again. Deciding instead that I will never go to public places again will make my condition steadily worse. And that is exactly what being concerned with being triggered does.

I think we might be bringing back the very worst aspects of Victorianism. We hide this from ourselves because it seems like what we are doing is progressive and caring. But that is exactly what drove the Victorians. They also thought they were being progressive and caring too.

So-called "benevolent sexism" on the other hand seems harmless. Indeed, both men and women are happier because of it. Every SJW I've ever met, on the other hand, seems fragile and sad.

Franfurt School: Approaches to Religion

What is criticism good for?

I'm doing a summer seminar on the Frankfurt School. We've had a first lecture and, before we get into the real meat of the course, I wanted to set down some of the basic questions I have going in.

Marx famously contrasted describing the world with changing it. Is criticism merely a form of description? That would be problematic for pretty much everything Marx actually did could be called criticism.
 What the Frankfurt School did from the beginning could be called a challenge to Marx's description of the world. In saying that philosophers had described the world, Marx was issuing a challenge and a praise. The challenge was "lets get on with it." But underlying that was praise: an implicit claim that the Hegelians of the Left had described the world adequately. And the specific philosopher that Marx was responding to when he wrote that famous line about changing the world was Feuerbach. Significantly, the piece that inspired Marx's Theses on Feuerbach was a critique of the Christian religion.

We have three terms: 1. Describing, 2. Criticizing, 3. Changing. Marx only speaks of describing and changing. But he himself criticizes and he labels some of his writings as "critiques." By implication, it seems that Marx takes criticism to be something valuable. And the Frankfurt School implicitly agree with him as everything they do is also criticism. Indeed, it is a commonplace charge on the left that the members of the school just dilly dally in criticism rather than engaging in revolutionary action.

Not surprisingly, defenders of the school point at the failure of 1968 to bring about revolution as proof that more criticism is necessary. But who is this criticism for? What is it supposed to do? Members of the school are presumably already convinced that the world needs to be changed. The answer is that criticism will produce widespread change in attitudes towards capitalism that will create the social conditions that will make revolution possible. We might say that criticism replaces class consciousness.

What do I mean by that? One way of looking at Marx is to say he made a conditional prediction. He said that if three things happen there will be revolution: 1. If the conditions of the working class continue to deteriorate, 2. If capitalism continues to suffer serious crises, 3. If the working class come to see themselves as members of a common class with shared interests. In 1923, when the Frankfurt School was founded, it was no longer possible to believe that economic state of the working class was deteriorating. Appearances might be saved, however, by shifting from the absolute conditions of the working class and talking about relative wealth of rich and poor. That's not a very good argument but it's an argument. The second was only all too easy to believe in Frankfurt given the post-war hyperinflation that Germany had suffered. That leaves us with the third and that was problematic to say the least. Nothing even vaguely resembling class consciousness had come to pass. Worse, the very notion of a working class was starting to disappear; today, many workers own vast amounts of capital through pension plans and virtually everyone we call middle class earns most of their income by selling their labor. The question then becomes, how is it that the vast majority of workers, many of whom are university-educated people who buy tickets for the local symphony orchestra and who attend art museums unable to see that it is in their interest to bring about a revolution?

(A question I am going to pursue is whether it really would be in their interest? I leave it aside for now for it is a question the members of the Frankfurt School never seriously entertained.)

To return to criticism, we might say that the members of the Frankfurt School began to doubt Marx's description of the world. They doubted that economics really was the bedrock that underlay politics and morality. What they didn't question, however, was the value of criticism. And that's the primary question that interests me going into this course. Criticism seems like a worthwhile thing to do but there doesn't seem to be any necessary connection between criticism and the viability of the forms of life that criticism is directed at. Marx's relentless criticism of capitalism convinced him and his many adherents that capitalism's internal tensions would eventually tear it apart. Alas, the rumours of its death were greatly exaggerated. Of socialism, on the other hand, it is the rumours of its birth that keep proving false.

One way to approach the question is to ask, as the kids say, if criticism is a thing. It certainly sounds like a thing. There is a word for it! But is it just one thing. There is a school of biblical criticism that calls itself the Historical-Critical Method. So what exactly is this method? Well, that's easy. Right? We just research the historical situation that led to the creation of scripture and then we ... criticize, whatever that means. In practice, what it has tended to mean was that people brought a series of criteria derived from some purpose and applied it. The problem is that different people had different purposes and that led to there being a number of different sets of criteria being used by a number of different people. Historical criticism was full of promise but produced little consensus because it wasn't one thing but a whole lot of different things. If the criteria used in criticism are determined by the interests of the person doing the critique, then it will always be a matter of criticisms; there is so such thing as criticism in the singular.

Periodization

 "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language." Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Marxists are fond of the expression "late capitalism". That term derives from what is a popular form of bloodletting among historians: the naming and defining of periods. Again, just because we can give a name to something doesn't make it a thing. And "late capitalism" implies not only that it is a thing but that it is a thing that has been going on a while and that is far from self evident.

Consider that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was meant to describe something new. Capitalism was not the reigning economic system when the book was published in 1776. Mercantilism was the prevailing system and capitalism was emerging. When capitalism can be said to start is a bit of a stretch but, no matter how we date it, to speak of "late capitalism" sounds more like wishful thinking than serious criticism to me.

Another way to look at it is to ask when does the Medieval period end? Many historians like to refer to the period from 1500-1800 as the Early Modern Period. Again, the term makes it seem like a thing. On the other hand, some Medieval historians argue that the middle ages don't really end until the 18th century. The basis of that argument is that the social, political and economic forms that defined the middle ages continue to dominate. There are many challenges and we can see the emerging forms of social, political and economic arrangements that will define the modern period beginning to emerge but it is not until the end of the 18th century that they begin to be firmly established. That seems plausible to me. An historical period might end with a bang but it seems more likely that it would be with a whimper. For a long time, it was argued that the Antique world ended with the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. Lately, however, this view has been largely replaced with a countering view that says there was an extended decline that can be called Late Antiquity and that the middle ages cannot be said to have ended until the form of life of Antiquity were effectively replaced by the new forms of government and agriculture that defined the middle ages and that took another 300 years after 410.

If we accept that argument, and I do, then we have to apply the same criteria to determining the end of Middle Ages. Although it is clearly the case that the forms of life associated with the middle ages were in decline from 1500 to 1800 I don't think it can be credible argued that they began to be effectively replaced before the 18th century. If we start thinking that way, then we might start to think of René Descartes as a late medieval thinker, as playing a role similar to what Augustine did. That is to say that while Augustine was immensely influential for the middle ages, he was still a figure from the antique world. Likewise, I would say that while Descartes has been immensely influential to the modern era, he was still a figure from the middle ages. (Descartes most famous argument has clear Augustinian roots.)

All this matters for the philosophical issues that concern me in this course for it seems that a society can survive even in the face of inner tensions. What Hobbes called the ghost of the Old Roman Empire had a very long life. Criticism in the post-Enlightenment sense has consisted at pointing at internal tensions in a form of life and asserting that we can do better. It seems, however, that internal tensions are not fatal to forms of life. For all we know, they may thrive under this tension the same way the human body tends to under training. Physical training, lifting weights, is the deliberate imposition of trauma to the muscles. Done the right way, it causes growth. There is a vast amount of evidence that says the same is true of psychological trauma. Why wouldn't it also be true of social trauma?

Depending on how we answer this question, we will define "modern" philosophy differently. We might say, and I would, that modern philosophy begins not with Descartes but with David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith. That last is a bit controversial. Even those who might accept the first two will bristle at Smith. They will do so because if Smith is a foundational philosopher of the modern period, then capitalism is a foundational form of life of the modern period.

Others might question whether Hume belongs with Kant. Kant, they will argue, is surely the giant figure and Hume deserves the still significant but lesser honour of being the catalyst who inspired Kant's more significant work. There is a lot that would have to be said but the outline of my argument would go as follows: Kant rightly saw that there are percepts and precepts but just as Galileo falsely assumed that orbits must be circular so too, Kant falsely assumed that precepts are universal. I agree with Charles Saunders Peirce in believing that the advent of Non-Euclidean geometry put paid to that notion. Thus, I would would argue that Hume's realization that notions like causality are not extracted from reality so much as applied to it should count as the beginning of modern thought. To put it in Peircean terms, organizing concepts mathematics and geometry were not abstracted from reality, they were not discovered but invented.