Open Thread, January
And updates
Hey there.
Winter’s kind of hard sometimes, yeah?
The cold here has been quite intense. The last few days, the hills of these villages were covered in a freezing fog, so thick as to make seeing more than 100 meters impossible and icing over the tips of tree branches.
It fit my mood, though, which has been sombre because of my grandmother’s death. Regardless the cold, I’ve biked quite a few times through it to go to the gym, somehow conjuring enough energy for that.
Through the holidays, my partner and I (well, mostly him) remodeled several rooms in the house. This year, a project he’s been working on for almost a decade finally manifests, so this was the last bit of time he had to work on things he prefers to do rather than things he’s paid to do.
Here’s a few photos of what he manifested:
The man’s really brilliant. I’ll write more about him sometime, but as his job is extremely public and he’s often in the media in this country, it’s nice to give him a bit of anonymity. When he comes home he’s just himself, which is perfect for us both.
Anyway, now that the year’s turned, I’m focusing primarily on the manuscript on the woke, and on gym work, and not much else. However, I will be offering my course based on my book—Being Pagan—again. That starts 6 March, so if you’re interested, here’s the link for more information on it.
Speaking of the manuscript, I ran across someone’s writing today in which they described gender theory as “an esoteric mystery cult.’ While I don’t think the writer meant much more than a mere jab on the subject, he nevertheless hit on something quite profound.
Tracing the way that humans have thought about themselves and each other can be really mind-bending sometimes, and gender is no exception. It’s a very, very new idea, actually, newer than industrialisation and capitalism.
Before the late 1800’s, gender didn’t exist, and the transition from thinking about people as sexed (physical/biological traits) to people as gendered (social traits) was actually an unintended result of American moral standards. “Gender” came to replace the word “sex” in texts and speech to avoid listeners or readers potentially thinking about the sex act.
Yeah. We started talking about gender so people wouldn’t have dirty thoughts.
Anyway, the “esoteric mystery cult” idea applies very well not just to gender but also to the entire social logic of wokeness. Intersectionality, in particular, has become a floating concept, full of shifting meaning without reference to its original denotation. So, too, adjectives like “systemic” and “structural,” both of which have become as slippery as the word “green" slapped onto a product. That is, they have a pull to them and feel meaningful, but there is actually nothing contained within.
Those words still evoke something, though, or rather invoke. People scream and fight over these recently manufactured concepts, and also cling to them as liberation, so though they’re completely hollowed out they continue to haunt as if fully alive.
All that said, I’m curious to hear what you think about this ‘esoteric mystery cult’ idea, or about the way these concepts seem to inhabit people despite not really having any content or relationship to the physical world any longer. Or you could also tell me how your winter’s been (those of you in the northern hemisphere, anyway).
The winter here has been cold and miserable too, and we were under a freezing fog for over a week at the end of December. But I conjured up the energy to join the choir for practice this evening and now I'm glowing with the joy of sharing song in person with others. There's something extremely grounding about an in-person discussion with a some Yorkshire pensioners (I'm the youngest person in the choir by some years!); it shows up the frenzied nature of a lot of online discourse.
What you say about concepts losing their attachment to real things reminds me of an old essay by Freddie deBoer where he refers to this (in the specific context of criticisms, and what we'd now call cancelling) as "critique drift." I like that phrase because I think the word "drift" emphasizes how it's a thing that happens while you're not paying too much attention. You can intuitively start saying "but what about this argument" and "but that's white men stuff," and eventually you just habitually say it without thinking as precisely about why you're saying it. And if you get approval every time, the drift happens even more easily.
In my opinion, a lot of people are aware somehow in their bones that the drift is happening... they're somehow feeling discomfort about it, about their lack of confidence in the things they're saying. They say things and no longer feel in touch with the meaning of what they're saying, and that doesn't feel good. But the way they respond to that discomfort, in my opinion, is to turn it outward and tell other people that they are doing things wrong.