Coincidentally, over this last week I've been engaged in a dialog with a good friend of mine about this topic, or a similar enough one--That Which Makes You Want To Scream. I think I will contribute my opening salvo in that conversation, although it is long, and feels like it might only be partially related to the conversation you are looking to have.
Warning: The following contains many ugly, unbecoming thoughts and feelings. I am not proud of the map it draws of my own mind and mental state. It focuses on anger, and mostly the anger I feel against a particular group of self-identified people; but my intention in writing it isn't so much to break down and examine the self-identity in question, but to break down and examine my anger, the reasons for it, and effect it is having on me and my politics and spirituality. Within this complicated nest of issues, I want to know: How much outrage is actually justified in situations like this? How far am I willing to go, to change my own thinking and values, just to be able to nurse a satisfying contempt? And can a spiritual and political evolution driven by contempt ever actually bring you to a more noble place than where you started?
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I’ve never said this where anyone could hear me before: I have a problem with how queer the left has gotten.
High-school-age-feminist me would be horrified to read such a thing written in my own hand. I was every kind of ally back in the day—although in my high school years, the only group really visible enough for a middle-class suburban teenager to ally with was gays and lesbians. Then, into my college years, as gay acceptance became pretty unquestionably mainstream, activist efforts shifted toward trans rights. I was still on board: How tragic, the excruciating mental illness afflicted upon a small, disproportionately oppressed segment of the population! Hated just for being different, based on arbitrary standards for what is right-and-wrong per the traditional roles of men and women! And no, admittedly, the stubbly 40-year-old wearing a skirt in the student center does not in any sense register to me as a woman, whatever “woman” even means—but I’m not threatened by that presentation. I just see a sad, confused person who deserves at very least the polite courtesy of being called “she” if that would make her happy.
Then sometime around 2016, trans activism expanded in the public eye to include non-binary people, and my heart and brain came to a screeching halt.
Excuse you? ”Non-binary?” Like you think you’re too good, too special and unique, to just be a man or a woman?
Fuck you. Absolutely fuck you. You fucking snowflake.
My negative reaction to the very concept is visceral, of-the-body. I can feel it in my pulse, a bit in my arms, definitely in my stomach: churning distaste, frustration, anger. The idea of “non-binary” as something which anyone could desire to be, which any third party could take seriously as a chosen identity, makes me feel trickling rage. I can’t even talk about this without it coming through in my voice; it goes so far as to have become personal for me—I assume that anyone who identifies as non-binary is certainly a mindless trend-follower, terminally-online, and overall insipid. It goes so far that I automatically think less of creators for so much as depicting non-binary-identified characters in their works, for bowing to this metastatic cultural creep, to the abyssal notion that a person can choose to be a genderless *nothing* if they just announce it to their friends, because modernity has taken out all the safeties that allow grown-ups to shut down the puerile whims of the anxiety-riddled shut-ins who learned to read from YouTube closed captioning.
It’s nasty. Oh my God, this thing inside me is poisonous. I recognize the rage: it’s the same anger I felt when I was a child, maybe 9 or 10 years old, dealing with my younger siblings who refused to just *sit down and shut up already.* It’s the rage that made me hit them, because I didn’t like how disordered they were in comparison to me, because they were kicking up a fuss when we could otherwise have been enjoying pleasant silence at our restaurant table. I had no patience for them and no temperance to keep myself from lashing out in retaliative anger. I’d forgotten that I used to be this way. I thought I’d grown out of it.
And it feels really fucking good. That’s the most dangerous part—I enjoy the hate, as much as it terrifies me. It feels good to have a someone, a group, an identity, to look down on, who reassures me that, sure, I might be an insufficient, broken woman, who doesn’t like babies or astrology or Instagram and can’t stand to wear a dress without lacquering her ego in seven layers of disassociation and would absolutely take the opportunity to turn into a man if I had three wishes from a genie... But at least I’m not so neurotic as to think any of that makes me not-a-woman. I’m not such a dysfunctional freakshow as to start identifying with the things that are wrong with me. I won’t lionize my own weaknesses.
In the process of unfolding this contempt inside myself, I’m backsliding. I can feel it. My sympathy toward binary trans people has dropped noticeably in the last few years; since virtually all the same arguments for the validity of their identities can also be applied to non-binaries, I would rather close off that avenue of understanding behind me than extend it further outward to the group which is the object of my ire. (Interestingly, this has had no effect on my feelings about gays, lesbians, or other non-hetero sexualities... except the ones which claim to be attracted to alt-genders). In the red light of all this anger, I’ve found myself ready to dismantle almost everything I thought I believed in, in the hopes of landing on a political or spiritual philosophy which allows me to sit easy in my contempt.
I guess I can’t be a social democrat or pop-socialist anymore, since the SocDems are totally gung-ho about validating every identity under the sun. But I’m not willing to go rightward either, because there lies blatantly dishonest rhetoric, climate denialism, racism, anti-abortion activism, and I’m not so upset by gender identity issues that I’m about to go full tradwife. The place I’ve found myself digging most deeply for answers is with the post-environmentalists, the green anarchists and left-libertarians and deep ecologists who broadly (mostly) seem to regard modern social justice as a war waged against industrial sicknesses, so their solution would be to dismantle or disconnect from industry. Not that any of the culture wars ultimately matter anyway, (they say,) since in fifty years we’re all going to be too busy fighting each other for fresh water to worry about anybody’s gender identity.
This worldview is legitimately more affirming to me than to just accept that it’s a valid identity for people to not want to be either men or women. I would rather greenpill myself and deal with the existential dread of not having the money and resources to invest in a homestead, than affirm the validity of a “they” or a “xir.”
I’ve tried very hard to come to rational accord with my anger, hoping to diagnose, treat, and eliminate it. Obviously, I myself have some discomfort around being expected to act particularly feminine. I am also the sort of person inclined to disdain the ephemeral, the soulful, the untouchable, in favor of the actual and material. “Self-identity” being important to anyone is, in my view, damned silly. The way you feel about yourself is of use to no one but you, and should be kept private for the sake of decorum. You can’t “identify” as a good person if you spend your days smashing bottles on strangers’ porches; self-identity ain't shit, what matters is how you manifest your self in the world, and your identity will be formed through the way you are considered by your family and community. (This probably relates to how I have no problems with androgynous/gender-non-conforming/genderbending presentation; drag queens and butch lesbians don’t identify on a soul-deep level as the opposite gender.) I perceive something poisonously individualistic about the identity-is-everything movement, and it seems to me that building self-identity and buying self-identity are almost indistinguishable, and equally odious, concepts.
But ultimately, this is an issue of values dissonance; and I was able to calm my tits about the enbies for a while, by labeling my anger an ego-defensive lashing-out against people who hold different values than I do, but pose no actual threat. I decided I needed to just work on whatever it was that made me feel like I was in danger, and keep on my merry way. But then I had a fairly major mental health crisis in the spring of this year, which is the first point at which I wound up far down the post-environmentalist rabbit hole, wherein not only did nobody’s identity have any particular validity, but the very framework of civilization which allows “identity” to be a meaningful concept is a devouring Machine, destined to extract profit from or choke out every thing on our once-beautiful planet.
Further, the deep ecology movement has a lot of overlap with the pagan and occult communities, which are another couple groups of people I’ve had perennial interest in since adolescence. Every time I delve back into the subject, I come away with a deeper understanding of just what it is that the mystical traditions want to accomplish: when I was in middle school, I wanted to be able to substantiate the base aesthetics of “witchiness”. In college, I wanted to be able to affect change to improve my life, to give off an aura of power and confidence without wearing a garish pentacle whose only magickal effect is to make women in black eye-shadow more likely to talk to you. Now I’m coming up on 30, and I’ve thus far lived a life free from divine revelation or unambiguous miracle, but I am finally starting to understand just how subversive true mysticism is. Defying societal order, using magick to disobey the edicts of the Machine, isn’t about wearing black clothes or snapping a chicken’s neck and divining its entrails. True investigation of the nature of reality involves the questioning that anything could be real to begin with, rejecting everything that made you comfortable, everything you thought you knew about yourself and the society that shaped you, in pursuit of something so unimaginably large that our whole universe could fit inside a pore on its hide. It involves breaking yourself down, digesting your own self and seeing what comes out in the excrement. It is painful to the most profound degree, but if you make it to the other side, you will understand that there was never anything to fear.
As in the highest occult traditions, the extremist environmental movement proposes that the concept of death is given too much power over human life and livelihood. They would answer the question of “How does a society without hospitals treat people with cancer?” with “It probably doesn’t. It is not worth the life of all living things in the world to maintain an industrial system which enables humans to live beyond their natural lifespans. Do what is possible for your loved ones using sustainable, available, local materials, and accept death if and when it comes. Letting go is part of life.”
I don’t know if I’m brave enough to fully embrace that as truth, but having encountered it, I’m not sure that I can step back from it fully, either. Not that that encounter has substantially changed my life so far—I’m not out meditating on mountaintops, am I? I still spend 8 hours a day sitting on a cushy office chair, then 4 after that sitting on a couch, and every once in a while I leave the house to hunt for mushrooms or say hi to my dad. But the sense of disquiet, of some kind of spiritual revolution that’s happening only inside of me, is there, and it’s not going away. I can keep it down enough to get along in everyday life just fine. But it’s still there, and it keeps asking: You know the world is ending. When the time comes, don’t you want to have cultivated the inner strength to rise above?
It’s seductive. It’s compelling. But I can’t forget that the way I got here was by following a path carved by contempt and frustration and hurt. I let my defensive ego define my politics, and I let my politics influence my spirituality, and now I’ve run up against a frightening proto-revelation which tempts me with painful truths I think are worth pursuing, but I still have to wonder: Is this all, ultimately, to justify the wave of revulsion I feel when I see someone list “he/them” pronouns in their Twitter bio?
Hunting for mushrooms. Magic. Paganism. The occult. I hope that you are playing with the tarot-which have a habit of showing a portrait of us to ourselves. I hope that you are looking at your natal horoscope for a glimpse of personality traits.
I am reminded of the horrible struggles of a mystic like Saint Francis of Assisi. Have you ever read the Little Flowers of Saint Francis? They are weird. They are difficult. They can be beautiful. And they can have an effect even on a skeptic like me.
Because this is a "pagan" thread, I would remind you that the Romans, Greeks, and the Japanese (even still) see gods everywhere. Japan is the land of eight million gods. In Italy, I can still feel the presence of gods and saints--like emanations from the Earth itself. (That deep ecology? Does it lead to the chthonic gods--to prophecy?)
Thinking paganly (if that's a word), what does binary or non-binary mean? Very little. Binary thinking tends to be radically dualistic--a way of decline and falsity.
The way I resolved my ideas about gender (at least for now) is to adopt the Native American idea of the two-spirits person. Just as the "nonbinary" person in the ancient world was a Hermaphrodite--a combination of the seductive gods Hermes and Aphrodite--so it is possible to be two spirits.
But "non-binary"? A reaction against two categories? So what?
So: I detect a mystic here (in you). Which gods and goddesses and other divinities are whispering in your ear? When you lay out a tarot spread, does The Fool keep coming up? Where are Mercury (Hermes), Venus (Aphrodite), and the Moon (full moon tomorrow!) in your natal chart?
As I sign off these days: Abbracci malgrado tutto.
I really enjoyed your rant :) It was fascinating and I do understand it on some level.
I was wondering if the annoying thing about the non-binary is maybe in the implication that everyone else, those who do not call themselves 'non-binary' must therefor be some sort of simplistic caricature of masculinity or feminity?
So that it almost feels as if the space of what it means means to be a 'woman' or 'man' is shrinking? So that it is not simply a factual description anymore but some sort personal statement including assumptions about your personality to be a 'woman' for example. Because that is what I used to feel.
These days I just somehow don't care so much anymore. This totally is an internat phenomenon. But I used to feel that.
I think my personal frustration with non-binariness is weirdly, perversely, based in empathy without sympathy. As mentioned, I have very little investment in the concept of "womanhood" as an unimpeachable or sacred thing; I'm very disconnected from my gender, especially insofar as its reproductive capacity is concerned. The idea of being a mother, perceived as a mother or expected to identify with "motherliness" as an ideal, wracks me with discomfort. Could I be seen by others as an aunt? Sure. A father? Bizarrely, that also would feel fine, at least in theory. But the concept of giving over my physical body to the gestation of another creature, and being defined by that process for the rest of my life, is horrible to me.
I empathize with the anxiety of knowing that you are perceived as [gender] in the eyes of others, and all the uncomfortable little extras that come along with that; but I have no sympathy for the subsequent reaction of one who takes on a non-binary identity: of internalizing the anxiety, edifying oneself with it, and coming to the conclusion that YOUR negative reaction to a thing makes the thing in question meaningless, oppressive, or unnecessary.
This is the part that makes me angry and prevents me from engaging with the idea of non-binary as a valid identity or concept. As invoked in the rant itself: It's like I'm playing out the dynamic I, the oldest sibling in my family, had with my younger brother and sister. "I grew up and figured out that life isn't fair, so why won't you shut up and accept it too?" And unfortunately, it's also bubbling up alongside the same kid of impatience and anger I felt as a child: the type that assumes being angry with someone means they are a bad person.
I hope it’s not out of line but it seems like you already recognize this. A therapist colleague of mine once suggested that we feel contempt toward others about things that we might have been shamed about in our own lives. So that piece about “yeah it sucks but I made peace with it and so should you” really resonates with me. Like I get on a visceral level how that is angering that they chose another way while also maybe having empathy for a shared experience.
I’ve wrestled on and off with the idea that non-binary may be an identity for me to claim. When I grew up I frequently experienced messages that told me I wasn’t and couldn’t ever really be a man for reasons; now as an adult I hear messages from queer folks that suggest I absolutely am a man with male privilege and have nothing relevant to say about a gender nonconforming experience. I think of non-binary as being like “none of these messages make a ton of sense to me and I don’t see their relationship to my genitalia” but also ironically I do just feel comfortable with my male body and masculine presentation now so I question whether I’m drawn to non-binary just to feel relevant or belong somewhere.
Hi Tony, no, it's not out of line, and I appreciate you mentioning the pieces of my emotional reasoning which resonate with you. It helps me to make sense of things.
In my nascent politics, it seems to me that it's a very insidious aspect of the identity movement that in the process of encouraging every person to dissect, brand, and label their psyche and personality, like insects on a pinboard, individuals wind up feeling more isolated. Every facet of of personhood and every societal role comes with unique baggage, so that instead of being feeling like part of a community, the identity-invested are directed to focus on the ways that their inherent traits oppress or disadvantage those around them. The only way for a straight white man to redeem his own existence is by dedicating to using his privilege in order to give voice to those more marginalized than himself, while offering no input of his own.
Given everything you've seen of my thoughts on the matter, it would be pretty disingenuous of me to now say, "but hey, ultimately it's not up to me to diagnose your identity crisis as artificially imposed on you by toxic politics." But I am sorry that you've been put in a position to feel so conflicted. That sucks. And in many ways, I'm right there with you. I hope the both of us can come to terms with whatever is really making us unhappy.
Lol it’s cool, I definitely feel some similar resonance in how we are feeling and navigating these things. And I agree. More isolation, less community, more gatekeeping to protect relative power. And it puts us in this situation of like “actually gender is bullshit for me too but you’ve told me I’m complicit in it unless I start using they pronouns?” I had the hardest time for a while seeing people who look just as cis male as I look but being non-binary and talking about how men are garbage as though they’re outside that category.
Your comment deserves a much longer reply than what I have time for at the moment (I’m headed out the door), but what you are feeling as someone already sympathetic to these general ideas is only a small portion of what’s being experienced by those who didn’t start out from the left.
Imagine the inevitable backlash to these extremes that is brewing in them....
I mean, I guess. But if those who care about social justice (not an entirely meaningless concept and designation, even now) capitulate to the inevitable backlash against their activism, we would never see civil rights progress.
I'm very rattled by the understanding that my feelings are probably identical to those felt by Alabamans who tuned in to watch Star Trek in 1967, and saw the famous Kirk and Uhura interracial kiss. It's probably the same feeling that homophobes fifteen years ago felt when gay couples first started showing up in mainstream media, too: a sense that the culture is starting to run up ahead of you, and it's clearly, obviously going the wrong direction. I doubt there's any productive conversation to be had with anyone who still thinks that the folks who expressed anger and distaste about those issues were on the right side of history.
I do think the identity movement is fundamentally different, and less worthy, than other forms of social justice. But having decades of hindsight to look back on, and being able to see the same patterns play out across history as reactionaries dig in their heels against reasonable and necessary reforms, I have to wonder: Am I the crabby reactionary now? I have to get to the root of my anger, before I can objectively assess the concept that's causing me so much upset.
I don't think that's actually what is happening, though. I know it's how they paint it, like we are all on a long march to final equality and those who are not fully on board are dinosaurs or reactionaries, but this isn't correct.
It's not correct because it erases all the moments of really bad ideas that were seen as part of liberation. For instance, as I referred to previously, the Kinderladens in the 60's. Children sexually exploring adults (teachers, parents, guardians) was argued as a way to free people from the sexual repression that led to fascism. This was the policy in many of these school programs in leftist communities in West Germany. Also, a rather famous leftist child psychologist put mentally ill children in the custody of known pedophiles to help the children be cared for better.
All of these things were done in the name of radical liberation, and now we look back in utter horror at this (if we even look at it all).
It's impossible to know what we will think of giving puberty blockers to 10 year olds a few decades from now, or of the startling waves of adolescent girls demanding breast removal surgery and the general support for such things from clinicians. Will we think of it as having liberated people? Or will we look back in sorrow and regret?
This really resonates with me on a number of levels. I’ve hesitated to respond because there’s no way an online forum like this can adequately nurture such a conversation – we ought to be sitting around a fire talking face to face, sensing each other’s body language, looking at each other to understand the nuances of the things we say and how we express them.
But an online forum is all we have.
Anyway. I’m not especially troubled by the “non-binary” set, though I think they’re kind of silly and transparently insecure and anxious. I always wonder if they had helicopter parents, or childhood trauma, or something to explain such a skewed sense of self. On the other hand, my hackles really rise when trans activists start preaching at me and telling me I don’t understand what a woman really is. It feels like I’m hearing every loud, pushy, self-entitled man I’ve ever known, makes me feel like I’m about to be shoved or punched or physically forced into something. It’s a very visceral reaction. And like you, I’ve asked myself whether this is just the response of a reactionary whose obsolete worldview is being threatened. Maybe it is – only time will tell, I guess.
I actually have thought about the root of my anger, though. And I think maybe it has something to do with identity theft, like someone is out there pretending to be me, creating a caricature of me, and forcing me to play along with the fraud. I mean, go ahead and wear whatever you want, call yourself whatever you want, be whatever sort of person you want to be if it makes you feel good and right, but don’t say you’re me. You may be beautiful, alluring and fabulous in all sorts of ways, but that doesn’t make you a woman, and why on earth would you want to call yourself a woman anyway? Why not just be the interesting and unique person that you are? The same holds for trans men: that way, we don’t get stuck in the ridiculous position of saying a “person who menstruates” or a “person with a uterus” instead of using the increasingly taboo word “woman.”
I have been hammered by trans activists for venturing to express even a fraction of the above. I’ve been called hateful, bigoted, transphobic, a TERF, and a lot more, and as I said before, preached at and lectured in the most condescending, mansplaining of ways. I’ve developed a pretty thick skin and I can hold my own, but I’m not going to engage with people like that on this forum. My whole intent in responding was to acknowledge and honor your willingness to speak such uncomfortable thoughts out loud.
One last thing: your description of the dynamic between you and your siblings reminds me of a conversation I overheard in a pizzeria years ago when Obama was trying to get the AHA passed. Three women were talking to a young man who was against the AHA, asking him to have some sympathy for those who suffered from a lack of affordable healthcare. His response: “No one ever cried for me, so I’m not crying for anyone now.” I don’t know if that offers anything helpful as you explore the root of your own anger.
First, my I'm-not-screaming-about-it evidence, which I hope to make germane to your posting. I don't want to make a mess, eh...
Someone on my FBk feed just posted a link to an article in American Theater magazine about talkbacks, which are a ritual in the U.S.A. As a playwright, I have done talkbacks.
Here is the assessment by the oh-so-whiny writer:
"They assume polite speakers and polite listeners. And we have to acknowledge that that structure—a binary opposition of talking and listening—is one that is inherently Western, colonialist, and patriarchal."
Really? Tell that to Japanese audiences or Arabic audiences... Tell that to playwrights, who tend to write in, errrrr, dialogue.
Note, though, the use of several degraded words: binary. opposition. Western. colonialist. patriarchal.
And we're talking about talkbacks, which are a chance for an artist to interact with an audience. But the idea that talking and listening to the other person and then talking in response is somehow binary and colonialist is simply daft.
This person, who works for a theater in NYC, really should not be in the arts. I'm sure, though, that she'll have a glorious career as an arts administrator.
I would like to see the word "binary" retired. It came out of computer programming and it can stay there. A human being isn't code or a light switch.
The questions: Why would someone writing for people in the theater think that this is helpful? Why would she use word salad as a signal of a certain elevated consciousness? No character written for the stage would talk like that. Why is high dudgeon considered an appropriate moral stance? Why is the culture of being offended taking up so much of our time?
The great value of the theater is that it is about sentimental education--we learn to have emotions. It is about the body--a place where we can watch others' physicality--and in some plays, physical suffering. Is that some of the problem with the woke--that cultivation of emotion and learning the fragility and wonders of the body are just too fraught for them?
This brings to mind a similar debate within education about whether certain types of learning environments and standards are "inherently white." This has led to the end of standardised testing in some places, since the belief is that only white people tend to do well on them and are thus given advantage over others.
Asian families have particularly objected to the end of such testing, but so to have many black families who feel like these moves are treating their children as if they are incapable of learning the same things that whites learn. That critique is an important one, because ultimately there is an unstated belief that the minds of black people are somehow wired differently than the minds of white people, which is really just race science all over again...
"there will always probably be a large gap between the academic theories around gender, race, consent, and justice and...REALITY." (fixed it for you;))
Critical Theory, applied postmodernism, "Social Justice", the mendacious poison of the two-headed monster Foucault/Derrida are the real dangerous viruses that have escaped from the govt-funded labs of academia and that are gradually chewing away at the brains and souls of anyone foolish enough to believe them, and that are currently working just as they were designed to: to poison relations between every person and group in society, to dissolve all of our standards, traditions, institutions, culture, and most crucially, any ability to tolerate dissent or even admit there may be something to be said for liberal democracy and Enlightenment values.
I guess that is one of the perils of being a successful guru/priest/prophet, I'm sure everyone from Jesus to Marx to Freud (amongst many others) would have been shocked and appalled at how their ideas were repurposed and wielded by subsequent generations.
Another irony is that Foucault was a libertine while his army of acolytes are puritanical scolds...
Ahh, History is always rich with delicious irony!
(Thanks for your work, is excellent and enjoyable, and apologies if my previous comment was a touch overheated, the morning coffee had just kicked in;))
This is kind of amusing, because I think that Foucault would be deconstructing these concepts as readily as he did "biopower." In fact this proliferation of identities comes with so many new social constraints and voluntary imposition of norms that I think he would find it all very fascinating. I have never even read Derrida so I have no real insight into what his approach might be, but certainly Foucault is a strange prophet of the left identitarians. In keeping with religious metaphors maybe Foucault is something akin to the historical John the Baptist, revamped and revised by the more crude modern successors to reshape him in their image, as a voice crying out of the wilderness in a more oppressive time.
Beyond his likely fascination, it occurs to me that this new mode in social justice is interested in the opposite of what Foucault thought was warranted. He seems to suggest, in his various works, that you can glean quite a bit about present day political problems from the past, and Isaiah Reed suggests he does this by posing a dystopian trajectory to critique the present, as opposed to constructing a utopia to critique it. But two points seem to diverge with Social Justice Inc: The latter is I think a hybrid of both utopian and dystopian templates being used to critique the present, and in that it is more Marxist than Foucault, certainly. But equally important is that it has a very confident view of the evils of the (Western Euro-American) past as an explanation for the mess we find ourselves in today. But it is certainly not going to look to Islamist discourse as a potential avenue for challenging Western modernity's flaws, as Foucault did with Iran. A new kind of religious sensibility has little need for a revitalized return to an older one.
But you are right. We can thank the original radical challengers to liberal democracy for their feeding us the contempt for liberal democracy that is now something that finds champions left, right and center. Nietzsche and Marx both hated it, and they taught their children very well.
I have to confess (and apologies to host if I am hijacking) but, as much as I try to be open and fair to all viewpoints, writers, ideas etc, I have a strong and implacable (and certainly somewhat irrational) bias against Foucault and his work and all of his academic acolytes and their effluvia.
I was an English major in the 80s so I had a front-row seat to the sudden Foucaultmania that swept through American lit depts and magazines, esp once I read somewhere that the real reason we love authors like Dickens or Tolstoy wasn't because of their wisdom or excellence, but because unseen hegemonic forces had brainwashed us with their power-knowledge (which I think is some mashup of Foucault and Crit Theory).
I did try to read him back then but the writing seemed intentionally obscure, the main thesis of Power as the unseen Satan controlling all our thoughts and decisions (an oversimplification, I admit) seemed a conspiracy theory, and really I don't think there's anything in Foucault that wasn't done better (and written so much more beautifully) by that brilliant and deranged genius and ultimate freigeist, Herr Nietzsche.
We've all heard of "shopper's regret." Now we must face the existence of "f*cker's regret." This was my reaction to a couple of books from within the Neopagan community whose author's bemoaned the sexual freedom of the 60s and 70s as practiced within the Pagan community, including their own behavior. Geez people, you were, in the sexist, ageist, racist parlance of yore "Free, white and 21." You did some things, and some people, that you now regret. That doesn't mean that you are a victim. If you no longer want the responsibility for your own mistakes that is part of the Pagan life view, go join or rejoin the Christians and lay your sins on Jesus. I understand being angry with oneself for enduring an abusive relationship. I remember telling a therapist "I'm angry because it makes me feel so STUPID." But don't mistake your subjective reactions to your own behavior for objective reality about the behavior of others. "I regret having sex with X" cannot be allowed to = "X raped me."
I still think retaining what’s valuable about the theory is important with regard to not ceding intellectual territory that could get picked up and used against us. I do think some of the “no one is saying this” is both unhelpful but also a kind of understandable defensiveness. Like it’s weird to have someone use an extreme position from a fringe person in your movement as a reason to invalidate a more nuanced perspective. But it’s also unhelpful as you’re saying to not acknowledge those positions because eventually a charismatic person will make them more mainstream or a person who has experienced the extreme position will be turned off by being told what they experienced isn’t real.
Like that article about “no white people should read tarot” months ago. A Roma friend followed up with “no one’s actually saying that” and I was like “that is a direct quote from this article.”
I don’t know how to stop the mission creep of useful theory when it hits popular discourse. I think a lot about the current popularity of folk diagnoses with mental illness. There’s a lot of good that’s come from people sharing their experiences and what helps. And also it reinforces this idea that our psychiatric categories are real and set in stone which is very premature in my opinion, and confusing when problems with executive function arise from multiple causes but anyone who has it and watches TikTok may decide they have adhd because it looks similar and may not pursue other avenues of care that could help. That’s more of a fear than something I’m sure is happening.
A few weeks ago I watched a popular (over one million views) video explaining how you are probably actually autistic and never knew it. After watching the whole thing, I realised I'm autistic.
And then I remembered the way online quizzes work, like which Harry Potter house are you or who is your true spirit animal. The best of them (and most popular) are written very similar to the way this video presented described autism, so broad as to account for everyone while at the same time feeling specific enough to make you feel special or that it is talking directly to you.
I seriously wonder how much this is happening in self-diagnoses for other psychiatric categories as well...
Bingo. But that’s the problem with every mental health diagnosis. It’s a running joke in graduate school that whatever quarter you study psychodiagnostics and read through the DSM you realize you have every mental illness. And it’s also probably true that autistic traits are more common than we think but don’t necessarily rise to a diagnostic level unless there are a lot of them happening all at once for a person. But mental illness is just having an experience that everyone has to some extent, but your symptoms are particularly exaggerated and inflexible. And they’re all defined by symptoms rather than underlying causes, because we still don’t understand the underlying causes. So it’s like, “you have a cough and a fever? Well you must have the flu” but those symptoms occur for a whole bunch of illnesses with very different causes and trying to treat an illness like the flu when it’s actually food poisoning or a necrotic organ is not the best medicine. But that’s where psychiatric research is at this point.
I honestly think big pharma is taking advantage of the idea that "we ought not question a person's lived experience" - if a person self-diagnoses with ADHD who are we to invalidate that? The amount of targeted ads I've been served on social media for ADHD medications "you may have ADHD, talk to a doctor online" while presenting symptoms that are consistent with simply being on social media too much (inability to focus, etc) makes me think there's going to be way more people on these meds than there needs to be, much like with SSRIs a decade or so ago.
I guess it depends on how you want to evaluate these ideas.
If you take these theories as religious map of the world, then one could privilege the original ideas and declare any excesses as heretical after the fact. I think that would naturally be the preference of the high priests.
In a social science sense, I don’t think you can draw any lines. These models theoretically describe the material world, but the purveyors seem to be resistant to feedback. If you’re non-responsive to evidence from the material world and the application of your model leads to fairly widespread incoherence, I think it’s inherent in the models and the rhetoric.
I think there is also another way of using a religious framework in which those lines stay undrawn. Religion already works this way: is the Christian who believes in guardian angels less a 'true christian' than her pastor who says they don't exist? They're both positions held by Christians, meaning that even though they contradict they are part of the same religious system.
This problem is after all what triggered both the Protestant revolution and Christian fundamentalism, the search for the "true" or "pure" Christianity untainted by pagan, Greek, or secular influences. But in the end it just meant there were more types of Christians after these moments of eruption than before, without ever settling the question of which beliefs were the correct ones.
I’m trying to grasp what is is you are asking. It seems to come down to some classical thought notions: practice and theory as well as (the same as, really) body and mind. On a social scale, which is inevitable, right?
So...
Is the idea to be privileged over how it is enacted? Well no, absolutely not. Ideas, whatever their form or intent, can be all sorts of marvelous, or seemingly so. It is not until an abstract notion is made tangible that we can see for sure what marvel it really holds, or doesn’t. With that being said, I do think there is popular tendency to be caught up in the abstract. We are not our minds. Our minds are very influential though, aren’t they? ‘Least it seems that way. I don’t know, really. But practice trumps theory.
Should we separate the politics from the theories? The two seem quite intertwined at this point. Are they even separable? If so, what would that mean? Something to do with keeping laws separate from identity? Does this tie into civil rights? Many would say yes, that’s the narrative that has developed. I’ll agree to uncertainty with it all. (Which makes me think of your essay on conspiracy theories, a favorite, which pointed to uncertainly and multiplicities of stories as an historical signifier of falling empire. 😉).
Room for fluidity. That’s important. Need for reductionism in who we are. I don’t think that’s doing anybody any good, in whatever form it takes. So should we try to separate the politics from the theory? No. At this point it’d be great to see them both retire. Is that an option? We’re in need of more internal reflection and tangible connection. As well as original thought and action that is free of the adopted language and approaches that have only been flipped and flopped and rebranded and sold back to us... I don’t know. That’s where I am with it at the moment. What’s real? What’s really real? Our direct experiences and those we share them with- so we need to mind (and body) those elements as best we can. Seemingly that will be best done without politics or “woke ideology”- just think of how holidays with family are better without these things, then think, “Why?”.
The other day a friend reposted a screen grab of some academic who tweeted that she wished folks would understand that equity is not something you do, it is something you are.
Utter nonsense. Equity is not even something that can be “done;” it’s a state of affairs.
But again with the woke all roads lead back to a new iteration of religious ideology, where things don’t have to make sense.
I think that you should have opened with the story of the first pansexual furry flying into space, courtesy of his ('scuse me, "their") venture capitalist father. I had to shake myself out of what I assumed was a fugue state or a bad Onion article. And then I remembered that no, sadly, it is still the Current Year.
I suspect that one of the difficulties with Social Justice Inc is not the academic theories per se, but the rather cavalier way that structural concepts are imposed on micro-level realities. For example, structural racism does not require intent, if only because it presents macro inequality as a racist outcome that is the product of at least historical racist policies that do not necessarily say much about present day racist actions on the ground so to speak. But that also means it is wholly improper to claim that racism as such does not require intent; one is conflating and/or confusing two radically different definitions with such a maneuver.
It also does not help that the intersecting projects of Social Justice Inc work at cross purposes. The same people who decry university handling of sexual assaults or the Brock Turner sentencing are completely blind to how their reforms (recalling a judge lenient on sentencing and rescinding due process protections in university proceedings) necessarily have a disproportionate impact on people who are comparatively disadvantaged. Similarly, I was quite amused to watch the Democratic Party engage in civil disobedience in order to ensure that the poor souls on our dubious terrorist watch list were denied the right to purchase firearms. I guess if you are Arab and/or Muslim you don't need to enjoy the same Second Amendment rights as your white neighbors...
Coincidentally, over this last week I've been engaged in a dialog with a good friend of mine about this topic, or a similar enough one--That Which Makes You Want To Scream. I think I will contribute my opening salvo in that conversation, although it is long, and feels like it might only be partially related to the conversation you are looking to have.
Warning: The following contains many ugly, unbecoming thoughts and feelings. I am not proud of the map it draws of my own mind and mental state. It focuses on anger, and mostly the anger I feel against a particular group of self-identified people; but my intention in writing it isn't so much to break down and examine the self-identity in question, but to break down and examine my anger, the reasons for it, and effect it is having on me and my politics and spirituality. Within this complicated nest of issues, I want to know: How much outrage is actually justified in situations like this? How far am I willing to go, to change my own thinking and values, just to be able to nurse a satisfying contempt? And can a spiritual and political evolution driven by contempt ever actually bring you to a more noble place than where you started?
--
I’ve never said this where anyone could hear me before: I have a problem with how queer the left has gotten.
High-school-age-feminist me would be horrified to read such a thing written in my own hand. I was every kind of ally back in the day—although in my high school years, the only group really visible enough for a middle-class suburban teenager to ally with was gays and lesbians. Then, into my college years, as gay acceptance became pretty unquestionably mainstream, activist efforts shifted toward trans rights. I was still on board: How tragic, the excruciating mental illness afflicted upon a small, disproportionately oppressed segment of the population! Hated just for being different, based on arbitrary standards for what is right-and-wrong per the traditional roles of men and women! And no, admittedly, the stubbly 40-year-old wearing a skirt in the student center does not in any sense register to me as a woman, whatever “woman” even means—but I’m not threatened by that presentation. I just see a sad, confused person who deserves at very least the polite courtesy of being called “she” if that would make her happy.
Then sometime around 2016, trans activism expanded in the public eye to include non-binary people, and my heart and brain came to a screeching halt.
Excuse you? ”Non-binary?” Like you think you’re too good, too special and unique, to just be a man or a woman?
Fuck you. Absolutely fuck you. You fucking snowflake.
My negative reaction to the very concept is visceral, of-the-body. I can feel it in my pulse, a bit in my arms, definitely in my stomach: churning distaste, frustration, anger. The idea of “non-binary” as something which anyone could desire to be, which any third party could take seriously as a chosen identity, makes me feel trickling rage. I can’t even talk about this without it coming through in my voice; it goes so far as to have become personal for me—I assume that anyone who identifies as non-binary is certainly a mindless trend-follower, terminally-online, and overall insipid. It goes so far that I automatically think less of creators for so much as depicting non-binary-identified characters in their works, for bowing to this metastatic cultural creep, to the abyssal notion that a person can choose to be a genderless *nothing* if they just announce it to their friends, because modernity has taken out all the safeties that allow grown-ups to shut down the puerile whims of the anxiety-riddled shut-ins who learned to read from YouTube closed captioning.
It’s nasty. Oh my God, this thing inside me is poisonous. I recognize the rage: it’s the same anger I felt when I was a child, maybe 9 or 10 years old, dealing with my younger siblings who refused to just *sit down and shut up already.* It’s the rage that made me hit them, because I didn’t like how disordered they were in comparison to me, because they were kicking up a fuss when we could otherwise have been enjoying pleasant silence at our restaurant table. I had no patience for them and no temperance to keep myself from lashing out in retaliative anger. I’d forgotten that I used to be this way. I thought I’d grown out of it.
And it feels really fucking good. That’s the most dangerous part—I enjoy the hate, as much as it terrifies me. It feels good to have a someone, a group, an identity, to look down on, who reassures me that, sure, I might be an insufficient, broken woman, who doesn’t like babies or astrology or Instagram and can’t stand to wear a dress without lacquering her ego in seven layers of disassociation and would absolutely take the opportunity to turn into a man if I had three wishes from a genie... But at least I’m not so neurotic as to think any of that makes me not-a-woman. I’m not such a dysfunctional freakshow as to start identifying with the things that are wrong with me. I won’t lionize my own weaknesses.
And that makes me *better* than all of them.
(cont'd)
In the process of unfolding this contempt inside myself, I’m backsliding. I can feel it. My sympathy toward binary trans people has dropped noticeably in the last few years; since virtually all the same arguments for the validity of their identities can also be applied to non-binaries, I would rather close off that avenue of understanding behind me than extend it further outward to the group which is the object of my ire. (Interestingly, this has had no effect on my feelings about gays, lesbians, or other non-hetero sexualities... except the ones which claim to be attracted to alt-genders). In the red light of all this anger, I’ve found myself ready to dismantle almost everything I thought I believed in, in the hopes of landing on a political or spiritual philosophy which allows me to sit easy in my contempt.
I guess I can’t be a social democrat or pop-socialist anymore, since the SocDems are totally gung-ho about validating every identity under the sun. But I’m not willing to go rightward either, because there lies blatantly dishonest rhetoric, climate denialism, racism, anti-abortion activism, and I’m not so upset by gender identity issues that I’m about to go full tradwife. The place I’ve found myself digging most deeply for answers is with the post-environmentalists, the green anarchists and left-libertarians and deep ecologists who broadly (mostly) seem to regard modern social justice as a war waged against industrial sicknesses, so their solution would be to dismantle or disconnect from industry. Not that any of the culture wars ultimately matter anyway, (they say,) since in fifty years we’re all going to be too busy fighting each other for fresh water to worry about anybody’s gender identity.
This worldview is legitimately more affirming to me than to just accept that it’s a valid identity for people to not want to be either men or women. I would rather greenpill myself and deal with the existential dread of not having the money and resources to invest in a homestead, than affirm the validity of a “they” or a “xir.”
I’ve tried very hard to come to rational accord with my anger, hoping to diagnose, treat, and eliminate it. Obviously, I myself have some discomfort around being expected to act particularly feminine. I am also the sort of person inclined to disdain the ephemeral, the soulful, the untouchable, in favor of the actual and material. “Self-identity” being important to anyone is, in my view, damned silly. The way you feel about yourself is of use to no one but you, and should be kept private for the sake of decorum. You can’t “identify” as a good person if you spend your days smashing bottles on strangers’ porches; self-identity ain't shit, what matters is how you manifest your self in the world, and your identity will be formed through the way you are considered by your family and community. (This probably relates to how I have no problems with androgynous/gender-non-conforming/genderbending presentation; drag queens and butch lesbians don’t identify on a soul-deep level as the opposite gender.) I perceive something poisonously individualistic about the identity-is-everything movement, and it seems to me that building self-identity and buying self-identity are almost indistinguishable, and equally odious, concepts.
But ultimately, this is an issue of values dissonance; and I was able to calm my tits about the enbies for a while, by labeling my anger an ego-defensive lashing-out against people who hold different values than I do, but pose no actual threat. I decided I needed to just work on whatever it was that made me feel like I was in danger, and keep on my merry way. But then I had a fairly major mental health crisis in the spring of this year, which is the first point at which I wound up far down the post-environmentalist rabbit hole, wherein not only did nobody’s identity have any particular validity, but the very framework of civilization which allows “identity” to be a meaningful concept is a devouring Machine, destined to extract profit from or choke out every thing on our once-beautiful planet.
Further, the deep ecology movement has a lot of overlap with the pagan and occult communities, which are another couple groups of people I’ve had perennial interest in since adolescence. Every time I delve back into the subject, I come away with a deeper understanding of just what it is that the mystical traditions want to accomplish: when I was in middle school, I wanted to be able to substantiate the base aesthetics of “witchiness”. In college, I wanted to be able to affect change to improve my life, to give off an aura of power and confidence without wearing a garish pentacle whose only magickal effect is to make women in black eye-shadow more likely to talk to you. Now I’m coming up on 30, and I’ve thus far lived a life free from divine revelation or unambiguous miracle, but I am finally starting to understand just how subversive true mysticism is. Defying societal order, using magick to disobey the edicts of the Machine, isn’t about wearing black clothes or snapping a chicken’s neck and divining its entrails. True investigation of the nature of reality involves the questioning that anything could be real to begin with, rejecting everything that made you comfortable, everything you thought you knew about yourself and the society that shaped you, in pursuit of something so unimaginably large that our whole universe could fit inside a pore on its hide. It involves breaking yourself down, digesting your own self and seeing what comes out in the excrement. It is painful to the most profound degree, but if you make it to the other side, you will understand that there was never anything to fear.
As in the highest occult traditions, the extremist environmental movement proposes that the concept of death is given too much power over human life and livelihood. They would answer the question of “How does a society without hospitals treat people with cancer?” with “It probably doesn’t. It is not worth the life of all living things in the world to maintain an industrial system which enables humans to live beyond their natural lifespans. Do what is possible for your loved ones using sustainable, available, local materials, and accept death if and when it comes. Letting go is part of life.”
I don’t know if I’m brave enough to fully embrace that as truth, but having encountered it, I’m not sure that I can step back from it fully, either. Not that that encounter has substantially changed my life so far—I’m not out meditating on mountaintops, am I? I still spend 8 hours a day sitting on a cushy office chair, then 4 after that sitting on a couch, and every once in a while I leave the house to hunt for mushrooms or say hi to my dad. But the sense of disquiet, of some kind of spiritual revolution that’s happening only inside of me, is there, and it’s not going away. I can keep it down enough to get along in everyday life just fine. But it’s still there, and it keeps asking: You know the world is ending. When the time comes, don’t you want to have cultivated the inner strength to rise above?
It’s seductive. It’s compelling. But I can’t forget that the way I got here was by following a path carved by contempt and frustration and hurt. I let my defensive ego define my politics, and I let my politics influence my spirituality, and now I’ve run up against a frightening proto-revelation which tempts me with painful truths I think are worth pursuing, but I still have to wonder: Is this all, ultimately, to justify the wave of revulsion I feel when I see someone list “he/them” pronouns in their Twitter bio?
That would be absurd, wouldn’t it?
Wow. It isn't contempt. Set contempt aside.
Hunting for mushrooms. Magic. Paganism. The occult. I hope that you are playing with the tarot-which have a habit of showing a portrait of us to ourselves. I hope that you are looking at your natal horoscope for a glimpse of personality traits.
I am reminded of the horrible struggles of a mystic like Saint Francis of Assisi. Have you ever read the Little Flowers of Saint Francis? They are weird. They are difficult. They can be beautiful. And they can have an effect even on a skeptic like me.
Because this is a "pagan" thread, I would remind you that the Romans, Greeks, and the Japanese (even still) see gods everywhere. Japan is the land of eight million gods. In Italy, I can still feel the presence of gods and saints--like emanations from the Earth itself. (That deep ecology? Does it lead to the chthonic gods--to prophecy?)
Thinking paganly (if that's a word), what does binary or non-binary mean? Very little. Binary thinking tends to be radically dualistic--a way of decline and falsity.
The way I resolved my ideas about gender (at least for now) is to adopt the Native American idea of the two-spirits person. Just as the "nonbinary" person in the ancient world was a Hermaphrodite--a combination of the seductive gods Hermes and Aphrodite--so it is possible to be two spirits.
But "non-binary"? A reaction against two categories? So what?
So: I detect a mystic here (in you). Which gods and goddesses and other divinities are whispering in your ear? When you lay out a tarot spread, does The Fool keep coming up? Where are Mercury (Hermes), Venus (Aphrodite), and the Moon (full moon tomorrow!) in your natal chart?
As I sign off these days: Abbracci malgrado tutto.
I really enjoyed your rant :) It was fascinating and I do understand it on some level.
I was wondering if the annoying thing about the non-binary is maybe in the implication that everyone else, those who do not call themselves 'non-binary' must therefor be some sort of simplistic caricature of masculinity or feminity?
So that it almost feels as if the space of what it means means to be a 'woman' or 'man' is shrinking? So that it is not simply a factual description anymore but some sort personal statement including assumptions about your personality to be a 'woman' for example. Because that is what I used to feel.
These days I just somehow don't care so much anymore. This totally is an internat phenomenon. But I used to feel that.
I think my personal frustration with non-binariness is weirdly, perversely, based in empathy without sympathy. As mentioned, I have very little investment in the concept of "womanhood" as an unimpeachable or sacred thing; I'm very disconnected from my gender, especially insofar as its reproductive capacity is concerned. The idea of being a mother, perceived as a mother or expected to identify with "motherliness" as an ideal, wracks me with discomfort. Could I be seen by others as an aunt? Sure. A father? Bizarrely, that also would feel fine, at least in theory. But the concept of giving over my physical body to the gestation of another creature, and being defined by that process for the rest of my life, is horrible to me.
I empathize with the anxiety of knowing that you are perceived as [gender] in the eyes of others, and all the uncomfortable little extras that come along with that; but I have no sympathy for the subsequent reaction of one who takes on a non-binary identity: of internalizing the anxiety, edifying oneself with it, and coming to the conclusion that YOUR negative reaction to a thing makes the thing in question meaningless, oppressive, or unnecessary.
This is the part that makes me angry and prevents me from engaging with the idea of non-binary as a valid identity or concept. As invoked in the rant itself: It's like I'm playing out the dynamic I, the oldest sibling in my family, had with my younger brother and sister. "I grew up and figured out that life isn't fair, so why won't you shut up and accept it too?" And unfortunately, it's also bubbling up alongside the same kid of impatience and anger I felt as a child: the type that assumes being angry with someone means they are a bad person.
I hope it’s not out of line but it seems like you already recognize this. A therapist colleague of mine once suggested that we feel contempt toward others about things that we might have been shamed about in our own lives. So that piece about “yeah it sucks but I made peace with it and so should you” really resonates with me. Like I get on a visceral level how that is angering that they chose another way while also maybe having empathy for a shared experience.
I’ve wrestled on and off with the idea that non-binary may be an identity for me to claim. When I grew up I frequently experienced messages that told me I wasn’t and couldn’t ever really be a man for reasons; now as an adult I hear messages from queer folks that suggest I absolutely am a man with male privilege and have nothing relevant to say about a gender nonconforming experience. I think of non-binary as being like “none of these messages make a ton of sense to me and I don’t see their relationship to my genitalia” but also ironically I do just feel comfortable with my male body and masculine presentation now so I question whether I’m drawn to non-binary just to feel relevant or belong somewhere.
Hi Tony, no, it's not out of line, and I appreciate you mentioning the pieces of my emotional reasoning which resonate with you. It helps me to make sense of things.
In my nascent politics, it seems to me that it's a very insidious aspect of the identity movement that in the process of encouraging every person to dissect, brand, and label their psyche and personality, like insects on a pinboard, individuals wind up feeling more isolated. Every facet of of personhood and every societal role comes with unique baggage, so that instead of being feeling like part of a community, the identity-invested are directed to focus on the ways that their inherent traits oppress or disadvantage those around them. The only way for a straight white man to redeem his own existence is by dedicating to using his privilege in order to give voice to those more marginalized than himself, while offering no input of his own.
Given everything you've seen of my thoughts on the matter, it would be pretty disingenuous of me to now say, "but hey, ultimately it's not up to me to diagnose your identity crisis as artificially imposed on you by toxic politics." But I am sorry that you've been put in a position to feel so conflicted. That sucks. And in many ways, I'm right there with you. I hope the both of us can come to terms with whatever is really making us unhappy.
Lol it’s cool, I definitely feel some similar resonance in how we are feeling and navigating these things. And I agree. More isolation, less community, more gatekeeping to protect relative power. And it puts us in this situation of like “actually gender is bullshit for me too but you’ve told me I’m complicit in it unless I start using they pronouns?” I had the hardest time for a while seeing people who look just as cis male as I look but being non-binary and talking about how men are garbage as though they’re outside that category.
Your comment deserves a much longer reply than what I have time for at the moment (I’m headed out the door), but what you are feeling as someone already sympathetic to these general ideas is only a small portion of what’s being experienced by those who didn’t start out from the left.
Imagine the inevitable backlash to these extremes that is brewing in them....
I mean, I guess. But if those who care about social justice (not an entirely meaningless concept and designation, even now) capitulate to the inevitable backlash against their activism, we would never see civil rights progress.
I'm very rattled by the understanding that my feelings are probably identical to those felt by Alabamans who tuned in to watch Star Trek in 1967, and saw the famous Kirk and Uhura interracial kiss. It's probably the same feeling that homophobes fifteen years ago felt when gay couples first started showing up in mainstream media, too: a sense that the culture is starting to run up ahead of you, and it's clearly, obviously going the wrong direction. I doubt there's any productive conversation to be had with anyone who still thinks that the folks who expressed anger and distaste about those issues were on the right side of history.
I do think the identity movement is fundamentally different, and less worthy, than other forms of social justice. But having decades of hindsight to look back on, and being able to see the same patterns play out across history as reactionaries dig in their heels against reasonable and necessary reforms, I have to wonder: Am I the crabby reactionary now? I have to get to the root of my anger, before I can objectively assess the concept that's causing me so much upset.
I don't think that's actually what is happening, though. I know it's how they paint it, like we are all on a long march to final equality and those who are not fully on board are dinosaurs or reactionaries, but this isn't correct.
It's not correct because it erases all the moments of really bad ideas that were seen as part of liberation. For instance, as I referred to previously, the Kinderladens in the 60's. Children sexually exploring adults (teachers, parents, guardians) was argued as a way to free people from the sexual repression that led to fascism. This was the policy in many of these school programs in leftist communities in West Germany. Also, a rather famous leftist child psychologist put mentally ill children in the custody of known pedophiles to help the children be cared for better.
All of these things were done in the name of radical liberation, and now we look back in utter horror at this (if we even look at it all).
It's impossible to know what we will think of giving puberty blockers to 10 year olds a few decades from now, or of the startling waves of adolescent girls demanding breast removal surgery and the general support for such things from clinicians. Will we think of it as having liberated people? Or will we look back in sorrow and regret?
This really resonates with me on a number of levels. I’ve hesitated to respond because there’s no way an online forum like this can adequately nurture such a conversation – we ought to be sitting around a fire talking face to face, sensing each other’s body language, looking at each other to understand the nuances of the things we say and how we express them.
But an online forum is all we have.
Anyway. I’m not especially troubled by the “non-binary” set, though I think they’re kind of silly and transparently insecure and anxious. I always wonder if they had helicopter parents, or childhood trauma, or something to explain such a skewed sense of self. On the other hand, my hackles really rise when trans activists start preaching at me and telling me I don’t understand what a woman really is. It feels like I’m hearing every loud, pushy, self-entitled man I’ve ever known, makes me feel like I’m about to be shoved or punched or physically forced into something. It’s a very visceral reaction. And like you, I’ve asked myself whether this is just the response of a reactionary whose obsolete worldview is being threatened. Maybe it is – only time will tell, I guess.
I actually have thought about the root of my anger, though. And I think maybe it has something to do with identity theft, like someone is out there pretending to be me, creating a caricature of me, and forcing me to play along with the fraud. I mean, go ahead and wear whatever you want, call yourself whatever you want, be whatever sort of person you want to be if it makes you feel good and right, but don’t say you’re me. You may be beautiful, alluring and fabulous in all sorts of ways, but that doesn’t make you a woman, and why on earth would you want to call yourself a woman anyway? Why not just be the interesting and unique person that you are? The same holds for trans men: that way, we don’t get stuck in the ridiculous position of saying a “person who menstruates” or a “person with a uterus” instead of using the increasingly taboo word “woman.”
I have been hammered by trans activists for venturing to express even a fraction of the above. I’ve been called hateful, bigoted, transphobic, a TERF, and a lot more, and as I said before, preached at and lectured in the most condescending, mansplaining of ways. I’ve developed a pretty thick skin and I can hold my own, but I’m not going to engage with people like that on this forum. My whole intent in responding was to acknowledge and honor your willingness to speak such uncomfortable thoughts out loud.
One last thing: your description of the dynamic between you and your siblings reminds me of a conversation I overheard in a pizzeria years ago when Obama was trying to get the AHA passed. Three women were talking to a young man who was against the AHA, asking him to have some sympathy for those who suffered from a lack of affordable healthcare. His response: “No one ever cried for me, so I’m not crying for anyone now.” I don’t know if that offers anything helpful as you explore the root of your own anger.
First, my I'm-not-screaming-about-it evidence, which I hope to make germane to your posting. I don't want to make a mess, eh...
Someone on my FBk feed just posted a link to an article in American Theater magazine about talkbacks, which are a ritual in the U.S.A. As a playwright, I have done talkbacks.
Here is the assessment by the oh-so-whiny writer:
"They assume polite speakers and polite listeners. And we have to acknowledge that that structure—a binary opposition of talking and listening—is one that is inherently Western, colonialist, and patriarchal."
Really? Tell that to Japanese audiences or Arabic audiences... Tell that to playwrights, who tend to write in, errrrr, dialogue.
Note, though, the use of several degraded words: binary. opposition. Western. colonialist. patriarchal.
And we're talking about talkbacks, which are a chance for an artist to interact with an audience. But the idea that talking and listening to the other person and then talking in response is somehow binary and colonialist is simply daft.
This person, who works for a theater in NYC, really should not be in the arts. I'm sure, though, that she'll have a glorious career as an arts administrator.
I would like to see the word "binary" retired. It came out of computer programming and it can stay there. A human being isn't code or a light switch.
The questions: Why would someone writing for people in the theater think that this is helpful? Why would she use word salad as a signal of a certain elevated consciousness? No character written for the stage would talk like that. Why is high dudgeon considered an appropriate moral stance? Why is the culture of being offended taking up so much of our time?
The great value of the theater is that it is about sentimental education--we learn to have emotions. It is about the body--a place where we can watch others' physicality--and in some plays, physical suffering. Is that some of the problem with the woke--that cultivation of emotion and learning the fragility and wonders of the body are just too fraught for them?
This brings to mind a similar debate within education about whether certain types of learning environments and standards are "inherently white." This has led to the end of standardised testing in some places, since the belief is that only white people tend to do well on them and are thus given advantage over others.
Asian families have particularly objected to the end of such testing, but so to have many black families who feel like these moves are treating their children as if they are incapable of learning the same things that whites learn. That critique is an important one, because ultimately there is an unstated belief that the minds of black people are somehow wired differently than the minds of white people, which is really just race science all over again...
"there will always probably be a large gap between the academic theories around gender, race, consent, and justice and...REALITY." (fixed it for you;))
Critical Theory, applied postmodernism, "Social Justice", the mendacious poison of the two-headed monster Foucault/Derrida are the real dangerous viruses that have escaped from the govt-funded labs of academia and that are gradually chewing away at the brains and souls of anyone foolish enough to believe them, and that are currently working just as they were designed to: to poison relations between every person and group in society, to dissolve all of our standards, traditions, institutions, culture, and most crucially, any ability to tolerate dissent or even admit there may be something to be said for liberal democracy and Enlightenment values.
Funny though, I think both Derrida and Foucault would be appalled to see how their ideas are being used now...
I guess that is one of the perils of being a successful guru/priest/prophet, I'm sure everyone from Jesus to Marx to Freud (amongst many others) would have been shocked and appalled at how their ideas were repurposed and wielded by subsequent generations.
Another irony is that Foucault was a libertine while his army of acolytes are puritanical scolds...
Ahh, History is always rich with delicious irony!
(Thanks for your work, is excellent and enjoyable, and apologies if my previous comment was a touch overheated, the morning coffee had just kicked in;))
This is kind of amusing, because I think that Foucault would be deconstructing these concepts as readily as he did "biopower." In fact this proliferation of identities comes with so many new social constraints and voluntary imposition of norms that I think he would find it all very fascinating. I have never even read Derrida so I have no real insight into what his approach might be, but certainly Foucault is a strange prophet of the left identitarians. In keeping with religious metaphors maybe Foucault is something akin to the historical John the Baptist, revamped and revised by the more crude modern successors to reshape him in their image, as a voice crying out of the wilderness in a more oppressive time.
Beyond his likely fascination, it occurs to me that this new mode in social justice is interested in the opposite of what Foucault thought was warranted. He seems to suggest, in his various works, that you can glean quite a bit about present day political problems from the past, and Isaiah Reed suggests he does this by posing a dystopian trajectory to critique the present, as opposed to constructing a utopia to critique it. But two points seem to diverge with Social Justice Inc: The latter is I think a hybrid of both utopian and dystopian templates being used to critique the present, and in that it is more Marxist than Foucault, certainly. But equally important is that it has a very confident view of the evils of the (Western Euro-American) past as an explanation for the mess we find ourselves in today. But it is certainly not going to look to Islamist discourse as a potential avenue for challenging Western modernity's flaws, as Foucault did with Iran. A new kind of religious sensibility has little need for a revitalized return to an older one.
But you are right. We can thank the original radical challengers to liberal democracy for their feeding us the contempt for liberal democracy that is now something that finds champions left, right and center. Nietzsche and Marx both hated it, and they taught their children very well.
I have to confess (and apologies to host if I am hijacking) but, as much as I try to be open and fair to all viewpoints, writers, ideas etc, I have a strong and implacable (and certainly somewhat irrational) bias against Foucault and his work and all of his academic acolytes and their effluvia.
I was an English major in the 80s so I had a front-row seat to the sudden Foucaultmania that swept through American lit depts and magazines, esp once I read somewhere that the real reason we love authors like Dickens or Tolstoy wasn't because of their wisdom or excellence, but because unseen hegemonic forces had brainwashed us with their power-knowledge (which I think is some mashup of Foucault and Crit Theory).
I did try to read him back then but the writing seemed intentionally obscure, the main thesis of Power as the unseen Satan controlling all our thoughts and decisions (an oversimplification, I admit) seemed a conspiracy theory, and really I don't think there's anything in Foucault that wasn't done better (and written so much more beautifully) by that brilliant and deranged genius and ultimate freigeist, Herr Nietzsche.
But, like I said, I'm biased!
We've all heard of "shopper's regret." Now we must face the existence of "f*cker's regret." This was my reaction to a couple of books from within the Neopagan community whose author's bemoaned the sexual freedom of the 60s and 70s as practiced within the Pagan community, including their own behavior. Geez people, you were, in the sexist, ageist, racist parlance of yore "Free, white and 21." You did some things, and some people, that you now regret. That doesn't mean that you are a victim. If you no longer want the responsibility for your own mistakes that is part of the Pagan life view, go join or rejoin the Christians and lay your sins on Jesus. I understand being angry with oneself for enduring an abusive relationship. I remember telling a therapist "I'm angry because it makes me feel so STUPID." But don't mistake your subjective reactions to your own behavior for objective reality about the behavior of others. "I regret having sex with X" cannot be allowed to = "X raped me."
I still think retaining what’s valuable about the theory is important with regard to not ceding intellectual territory that could get picked up and used against us. I do think some of the “no one is saying this” is both unhelpful but also a kind of understandable defensiveness. Like it’s weird to have someone use an extreme position from a fringe person in your movement as a reason to invalidate a more nuanced perspective. But it’s also unhelpful as you’re saying to not acknowledge those positions because eventually a charismatic person will make them more mainstream or a person who has experienced the extreme position will be turned off by being told what they experienced isn’t real.
Like that article about “no white people should read tarot” months ago. A Roma friend followed up with “no one’s actually saying that” and I was like “that is a direct quote from this article.”
I don’t know how to stop the mission creep of useful theory when it hits popular discourse. I think a lot about the current popularity of folk diagnoses with mental illness. There’s a lot of good that’s come from people sharing their experiences and what helps. And also it reinforces this idea that our psychiatric categories are real and set in stone which is very premature in my opinion, and confusing when problems with executive function arise from multiple causes but anyone who has it and watches TikTok may decide they have adhd because it looks similar and may not pursue other avenues of care that could help. That’s more of a fear than something I’m sure is happening.
A few weeks ago I watched a popular (over one million views) video explaining how you are probably actually autistic and never knew it. After watching the whole thing, I realised I'm autistic.
And then I remembered the way online quizzes work, like which Harry Potter house are you or who is your true spirit animal. The best of them (and most popular) are written very similar to the way this video presented described autism, so broad as to account for everyone while at the same time feeling specific enough to make you feel special or that it is talking directly to you.
I seriously wonder how much this is happening in self-diagnoses for other psychiatric categories as well...
Bingo. But that’s the problem with every mental health diagnosis. It’s a running joke in graduate school that whatever quarter you study psychodiagnostics and read through the DSM you realize you have every mental illness. And it’s also probably true that autistic traits are more common than we think but don’t necessarily rise to a diagnostic level unless there are a lot of them happening all at once for a person. But mental illness is just having an experience that everyone has to some extent, but your symptoms are particularly exaggerated and inflexible. And they’re all defined by symptoms rather than underlying causes, because we still don’t understand the underlying causes. So it’s like, “you have a cough and a fever? Well you must have the flu” but those symptoms occur for a whole bunch of illnesses with very different causes and trying to treat an illness like the flu when it’s actually food poisoning or a necrotic organ is not the best medicine. But that’s where psychiatric research is at this point.
I honestly think big pharma is taking advantage of the idea that "we ought not question a person's lived experience" - if a person self-diagnoses with ADHD who are we to invalidate that? The amount of targeted ads I've been served on social media for ADHD medications "you may have ADHD, talk to a doctor online" while presenting symptoms that are consistent with simply being on social media too much (inability to focus, etc) makes me think there's going to be way more people on these meds than there needs to be, much like with SSRIs a decade or so ago.
I guess it depends on how you want to evaluate these ideas.
If you take these theories as religious map of the world, then one could privilege the original ideas and declare any excesses as heretical after the fact. I think that would naturally be the preference of the high priests.
In a social science sense, I don’t think you can draw any lines. These models theoretically describe the material world, but the purveyors seem to be resistant to feedback. If you’re non-responsive to evidence from the material world and the application of your model leads to fairly widespread incoherence, I think it’s inherent in the models and the rhetoric.
I think there is also another way of using a religious framework in which those lines stay undrawn. Religion already works this way: is the Christian who believes in guardian angels less a 'true christian' than her pastor who says they don't exist? They're both positions held by Christians, meaning that even though they contradict they are part of the same religious system.
This problem is after all what triggered both the Protestant revolution and Christian fundamentalism, the search for the "true" or "pure" Christianity untainted by pagan, Greek, or secular influences. But in the end it just meant there were more types of Christians after these moments of eruption than before, without ever settling the question of which beliefs were the correct ones.
With the Woke there is no objective reality. No past, only the present. However you feel currently is exactly what happened. It's maddening.
I’m trying to grasp what is is you are asking. It seems to come down to some classical thought notions: practice and theory as well as (the same as, really) body and mind. On a social scale, which is inevitable, right?
So...
Is the idea to be privileged over how it is enacted? Well no, absolutely not. Ideas, whatever their form or intent, can be all sorts of marvelous, or seemingly so. It is not until an abstract notion is made tangible that we can see for sure what marvel it really holds, or doesn’t. With that being said, I do think there is popular tendency to be caught up in the abstract. We are not our minds. Our minds are very influential though, aren’t they? ‘Least it seems that way. I don’t know, really. But practice trumps theory.
Should we separate the politics from the theories? The two seem quite intertwined at this point. Are they even separable? If so, what would that mean? Something to do with keeping laws separate from identity? Does this tie into civil rights? Many would say yes, that’s the narrative that has developed. I’ll agree to uncertainty with it all. (Which makes me think of your essay on conspiracy theories, a favorite, which pointed to uncertainly and multiplicities of stories as an historical signifier of falling empire. 😉).
Room for fluidity. That’s important. Need for reductionism in who we are. I don’t think that’s doing anybody any good, in whatever form it takes. So should we try to separate the politics from the theory? No. At this point it’d be great to see them both retire. Is that an option? We’re in need of more internal reflection and tangible connection. As well as original thought and action that is free of the adopted language and approaches that have only been flipped and flopped and rebranded and sold back to us... I don’t know. That’s where I am with it at the moment. What’s real? What’s really real? Our direct experiences and those we share them with- so we need to mind (and body) those elements as best we can. Seemingly that will be best done without politics or “woke ideology”- just think of how holidays with family are better without these things, then think, “Why?”.
The other day a friend reposted a screen grab of some academic who tweeted that she wished folks would understand that equity is not something you do, it is something you are.
Utter nonsense. Equity is not even something that can be “done;” it’s a state of affairs.
But again with the woke all roads lead back to a new iteration of religious ideology, where things don’t have to make sense.
I think that you should have opened with the story of the first pansexual furry flying into space, courtesy of his ('scuse me, "their") venture capitalist father. I had to shake myself out of what I assumed was a fugue state or a bad Onion article. And then I remembered that no, sadly, it is still the Current Year.
I suspect that one of the difficulties with Social Justice Inc is not the academic theories per se, but the rather cavalier way that structural concepts are imposed on micro-level realities. For example, structural racism does not require intent, if only because it presents macro inequality as a racist outcome that is the product of at least historical racist policies that do not necessarily say much about present day racist actions on the ground so to speak. But that also means it is wholly improper to claim that racism as such does not require intent; one is conflating and/or confusing two radically different definitions with such a maneuver.
It also does not help that the intersecting projects of Social Justice Inc work at cross purposes. The same people who decry university handling of sexual assaults or the Brock Turner sentencing are completely blind to how their reforms (recalling a judge lenient on sentencing and rescinding due process protections in university proceedings) necessarily have a disproportionate impact on people who are comparatively disadvantaged. Similarly, I was quite amused to watch the Democratic Party engage in civil disobedience in order to ensure that the poor souls on our dubious terrorist watch list were denied the right to purchase firearms. I guess if you are Arab and/or Muslim you don't need to enjoy the same Second Amendment rights as your white neighbors...
And on it goes.