OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I take it you've read The Player of Games, and I like that one as a case study, actually. The Player of Games is probably the most straightforwardly pro-Culture Culture novel, and yet even then, I think it portrays the Culture as kind of being bastards? They lie and blackmail Gurgeh into doing this mission for them, even though it is clearly doing Gurgeh considerable psychic harm. Moreover, the Culture's action against Azad is indisputably a case of unprovoked aggression. Azad have done absolutely nothing to the Culture. Azad aren't even able to do anything to the Culture. The Culture move in to destroy Azad purely because they find Azad's existence to be offensive to their enlightened liberal sensibilities. Azad is a repressive, autocratic caste system, and the Culture don't like that, so they intervene. It is pure aggression.
Now, we see enough of Azad to make that society look truly loathsome, but here is where I have to note that the novel is narrated to us by Flere-Imsaho, and Flere-Imsaho is pretty firmly established to be a manipulative liar. Flere-Imsaho is himself a rather repulsive and arrogant character. (I remember a part discussing alien genders where he writes "the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated" - he smugly implies that civilisations he doesn't approve of aren't really civilisations at all.) Gurgeh's expedition into the seedy depths of Azadian society is in fact orchestrated by Flere-Imsaho in order to convince him that Azad needs to be destroyed, so even if we take the narration is reliable, the situations it describes are curated to try to make the moral case against Azad. But why would we take the narration as reliable? After all, the novel ends with the words:
Let me recapitulate.
This is a true story. I was there. When I wasn't, and when I didn't know exactly what was going on - inside Gurgeh's mind, for example - I admit that I have not hesitated to make it up.
But it's still a true story.
Would I lie to you?
This is the most pro-Culture Culture novel. The most! And it's one with an unreliable, manipulative narrator who lies to and blackmails the hero and is clearly trying to prosecute the case against Azad as fiercely as possible, and even then, there's no disguising the fact that the Culture arranged a coup and violent revolution in a neighbouring nation simply because they found that nation's culture repulsive. Moreover, this was engineered by Special Circumstances, who are not democratically ratified or accountable in any way - most of the Culture had no idea this was going on. So actually a small group of super-empowered elites just... went around and wrecked a nation because they didn't like it.
If The Player of Games hadn't been published in 1988, I'd snark something about the Iraq War, or democracy promotion more generally.
You might still say this is all fine. Even if Azad is only 50% as bad as Flere says it is, that's still bad enough to be worth overthrowing, and the planned revolution had to be carried out by native Azadians anyway - it's not as if the existing Azadian regime had massive popular support. And what does democracy really count for in a society run by god-like superintelligences anyway? Am I really going to support the existence of a government as awful as Azad on woolly procedural grounds?
I don't know. Maybe I am.
Because, well, I've also read Consider Phlebas, and Look to Windward, and Excession, and I know that the Culture only gets dodgier from here. Consider Phlebas ended with its primary Culture character putting herself into cold storage until the Culture can mathematically 'prove' the war was justified, at which point she commits suicide as a kind of protest. I think part of what Banks is doing is contriving a situation that satisfies most people's utilitarian calculus - the Culture is king of QALYs - and yet something about it, something difficult to define but nonetheless there, feels wrong. That itching sense of wrongness is the point, it seems to me. Even if we struggle to define it, something here isn't right.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
And when they encounter outsiders who resist, normally its just a matter of identifying which of the leaders are 'irrationally' opposed to joining the culture, and supplanting them through various means. In short, the culture has mathematically proven that the only reason someone would resist the culture is they're 'mistaken' in some way, and once you correct them, the conflict evaporates.
Or so that's my take on the philosophical underpinnings of the books.
I'd argue that while this - or something close enough - is what the Culture believes, the books themselves and their narrative voices are more skeptical. The Culture tells a lot of stories about itself, but in most of the Culture novels I've read, those stories are questioned or deconstructed by the end, usually in a way that leaves us wondering to what extent the Culture is self-deluding. I don't think the goodness of the Culture is as obvious as some readers seem to think. The Culture is so materially prosperous as to be effectively utopian, and its libertarian-except-for-anything-that-harms-others ethic may seem hard to argue with, but Banks does not stop trying.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
What is the utility of 'naming the beast'?
The pages linked in the top-level post openly use words like 'socialist', and denounce 'capitalism' without a moment's hesitation. They don't seem to be hiding their agenda. What is revealed about them by using an alternative name?
I think remzem's point holds up - if you or we want to combat them, they need to make a substantive cae against socialism as such, and a substantive case for capitalism (or better yet, for capitalism as a component of some more integrated political vision). If you got everyone to call all left-wing politics Marxism, then people are just going to shrug and say, "Okay, I like Marxism". There's no substitute for actually convincing people.
Would you expect American Communists, or indeed communists generally, to not support BLM?
I expect there to be a range, actually. The far-left in America, as I understand it, is pretty diverse. For instance, CPUSA seems pretty pro-BLM, but meanwhile, WSWS denounces BLM as capitalist stooges, and sees it as a ruling class ploy to divide workers.
My overall sense is that this is probably a relatively low ebb for the link between communism and black politics in the US. The Black Panthers were explicitly Marxist-Leninist - BLM indulge in anarchist rhetoric sometimes (abolish the police etc.), but aren't as directly ideological.
If you were persuaded that hammers and sickles were a common addition to BLM-riot graffiti, would this be weak evidence of a connection between the two movements?
Yes, that seems reasonable enough.
My current read at the moment is that the George Floyd protests and aftermath were quite incoherent, ideologically. Apart from a general sense that something is wrong, there wasn't a clear platform or idea, and what we saw after the protests and riots was a wide range of competing actors trying to capture the energy of the moment. I wouldn't say that any wholly succeeded.
More generally, do you think the examples linked in this comment are likewise lacking a "developed political platform"? Are those people Marxists, in your view?
Yep, those seem pretty Marxist, or at least, Marxist-influenced. I could probably pick some nits if I really wanted - Marxism is one specific school of socialism, socialist thought is broader than just that, anti-capitalism is not synonymous with Marxism - but I think no one could deny that, at the very least, those writers are familiar with Marxism and it has influenced their thought. A couple of them strike me as more intersectional (this one, for instance, strikes me as an all-of-the-above approach to critique), but I'm not going to argue that much.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I also very much prefer the forum format - Reddit's thread structure feels more like a comment section, to me. It makes it easier for comments to be lost, and much harder to search for past posts as well.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I think that someone who paints hammers and sickles and 'CPUSA' on to a block is almost certainly a communist. That imagery is pretty unambiguous.
(You can't see the BLM in that image, but the reverse of the block shows it.)
But all that proves is at least one person supports both communism and BLM. My priors on the kinds of people who go around spray-painting slogans on skate parks make me think it's quite likely that the person is an idiotic, edgy teenager with no developed political platform. At any rate, I do not draw conclusions about the ideologies of entire movements supported by millions of people from individual graffitos.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I didn't say that it's a strawman conspiracy theory, so, well, good?
I think that 'cultural Marxism' is not a helpful label or one that illuminates the political trend that we're criticising, and I think that the widespread use of the term has more to do with a need to associate the trend in question with a historical villain than anything else (that is, what I termed 'a bugaboo' - 'Marxism' is a spooky word).
I like to use 'social justice politics' or 'progressivism' when I need to be more neutral, and I'm not above just using 'wokeness' when I think that word's not going to alienate my audience, and that seems to work fine for me. 'Cultural Marxism' just introduces too many inaccurate or confusing associations for my liking.
Now that said, yes, there were people who identified as 'cultural Marxists', and I'm happy to call them cultural Marxists. But those people are not who we mean when we talk about cultural Marxism/wokeness/SJ politics, so I don't find them that relevant to the use of the term today.
For what it's worth I am also quite happy to discard the term 'neoliberal'. I absolutely roll my eyes at and downgrade the reliability of any activists who start talking about 'ascendant neoliberalism' and the like. So let's just throw both of them out. The worthlessness of 'neoliberal' as a term doesn't rescue 'cultural Marxism'.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I would not, no.
I'm aware of that time a couple of its founders identified as Marxists, but I don't think that makes the movement Marxist.
BLM is amorphous enough that it's difficult to nail down any specific principles, but some are outlined here, and I don't think they're Marxist. Based on that page alone I think there's a clear anarchist influence on BLM, with a heavy emphasis on the abolition of punishment, end of coercion, and mutual aid, but I think that to be Marxist specifically, there would need to be something about the ownership and distribution of capital.
So, anarchist or at least anarchist-adjacent, yes, but Marxist, no.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Oh, I'll happily grant that the term 'cultural Marxism' has referents. When someone like Joy Pullmann says 'the cultural Marxists', I know who she means and what they believe.
I don't think it's quite the same as the Mormon case, because Mormons do claim to be Christians. I don't think Mormons are Christians, but if I say that where a Mormon can hear me, I know they will disagree. So I and a Mormon will have a debate about whether 'Christianity' is the right word to use for what Mormons believe.
By contrast, most of the people identified as cultural Marxists don't claim to be cultural Marxists. In fact, they mostly decry the term and claim that it's a conspiracy theory. Some claim to be (generic) Marxists, but most do not. We might still have a debate about whether 'cultural Marxist' is an appropriate word for what they believe, but the direction of that debate will be different.
If those debates happened, I'd insist on the Mormon/Christian distinction because as a Christian I feel I have an interest in policing the boundaries of orthodoxy - essentially I want to clarify that Mormons aren't affiliated with me and I lend no support to their beliefs, which I consider wrong. I would not, I think, insist on 'cultural Marxist' as a label because it's not a label that achieves any of my goals re: the discussion of social justice or wokist politics. In fact I think it muddies the waters by confusing wokist beliefs with Marxist beliefs, and another term would be more clear.
They would probably then also disagree with being called 'wokists' or 'SJers' or whatever other term I came up with, but we have to use some label, so, well, that Freddie post. You know how this goes.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I think this is largely correct, yes. We're dealing with a problem of shifting labels - some small number of people have used the term 'cultural Marxism' to self-identify, but almost none do today, the term 'cultural Marxism' today is used extremely broadly to identify ideas or movements with nothing or almost nothing in common with classical Marxism, and ultimately I think it's become a term that obfuscates rather than illuminates. The term 'cultural Marxism' does not reveal anything useful about the people it is applied to.
I don't think I quite agree with the debate about Mormonism and Christianity, because that usually is couched in specific claims about what 'Christianity' means, and what's required for something to be meaningfully 'Christian'. The facts about Mormonism aren't particularly in dispute - Mormons sincerely claim to be followers of Jesus, but they are outside what all historical Christian creeds would have regarded as the bounds of orthodoxy. The issue at hand is simply whether or not one accepts those historical creeds as authoritative.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Realistically, I think it's just because to conservatives of a certain generation, 'Marxism' is the scariest and most evil word available, so calling everything they don't like Marxist is just a habit. It's equivalent to the way people on the left call everything 'fascism'.
Marxism definitely exists, just as fascism exists, but once the word comes to mean 'the polar opposite of everything I believe, i.e. everything good and right', the temptation to deploy it to describe everything under the sun quickly becomes irresistible.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Not in the way it is used in the top-level comment here, though - and in my judgement, not in the way that it is casually used in right-wing discourse.
Let's take some specific examples. The Federalist has a whole category for cultural Marxism. The currently most recent article is about a day care in Wisconsin. So let's have a look - despite being tagged 'cultural Marxism', the article itself does not mention Marxism once. It describes a training programme that repeats the clichés of the social justice left, but nothing specific about Marxism.
The second-most recent article is the same story. Next. The third-most recent is a piece criticising Tim Walz. This one does use the word 'Marxist' in the article itself. The story here is that Minnesota teachers will be required to 'affirm' a range of protected identities, including LGBT identities. The article frames this as 'banning Christians from teaching', which doesn't seem like the most sober approach, but never mind. Where does Marxism come in? It offhandedly describes "race, sexual orientation, [and] gender identity" as "cultural Marxist categories", and describes department standards regarding race and cultural sensitivity as "race Marxism", but no further explanation is offered. It is not clear how any of the programmes described are Marxist. (For what it's worth, I think the programmes these articles describe are genuinely bad, even though The Federalist's descriptions of them strike me as histrionic to the point of undermining their credibility.)
Skipping down a bit more, let's try to find one that explains what it means by 'cultural Marxism'. Perhaps this story on Bari Weiss and cultural Marxism might help. Let's see what we learn here. It describes 'intersectionalism' as a doctrine of cultural Marxism, and then... we don't see a lot sense. Apparently Marxism denigrates men? Unfortunately there's still no explanation of what it actually is. These are all by one author, Joy Pullmann, and it seems to me that for Pullmann, 'cultural Marxism' or 'Marxism' just serve as a shorthand for culturally progressive politics in general.
Well, enough of The Federalist. Let's try another relatively mainstream conservative publication.
National Review tackles the question of whether cultural Marxism exists by linking to another article. This looks promising! Allen Mendenhall, the author, even traces its genealogy. There is definitely a robust argument here. There are elements I quibble (in particular I'd have liked a clearer sense not only of the genealogy, but of the ideas transmitted themselves, and how they evolved and changed; and also the recognition that many of the later thinkers he describes would not necessarily have called themselves Marxists), but Mendenhall does admit that he is giving only a "simplified, approximate version of a much larger and more complex story", which is limited to his specific field of literary studies. So I would be interested to hear more from Mendenhall. I note that Mendenhall's assertion does not justify the rhetoric of authors like Joy Pullmann - he may be using the term responsibly even though she is not.
Maybe we can get even more mainstream. The first non-video content I found for cultural Marxism from Fox News was this article about a book by Ted Cruz. The summary of the book tells us that Cruz sees an evolution from 'classical Marxism', which recommends a violent revolution by the working class to seize and redistribute wealth (a bit of a simplification, but all right), to 'cultural Marxism', which 'transitioned into critical legal studies'. Cruz describes cultural Marxism as "a method of saying the never ending struggle between victims, and oppressors can only be corrected through force by the government punishing the oppressors and rewarding the victims". (I feel conflicted about that definition - I feel it identifies a real and dangerous trend in American politics, something like Greer's Title-IX-ification of American politics, but I think 'cultural Marxism' is a misleading label for it.)
I think what frustrates me about this kind of piece is a kind of strawmanning or oversimplification of even just classical Marxism, long before we start talking about cultural Marxism. It's the idea that 'Marxism' is just the idea that the poor need to revolt against the rich, or that we need redistribution, or something about violent revolution to create justice. It's true that Marxist rhetoric has included elements like that, but to boil Marxism as a school of thought down to just that by itself is to miss its essential nature.
It's not precisely that I expect Fox News to start explaining the labour theory of value or commodity fetishism to its readers, but I can't help but read a sentence like like "Karl Marx's perspective of an inevitable conflict between the wealthy and the less privileged" without grinding my teeth and thinking that actually the conflict posited by Marx is between bourgeoisie and proletariat, or that is to say, between capitalists and labour, and those are not quite the same thing as 'wealthy' and 'poor'.
Seen in that light 'cultural Marxism' is frustrating for me because what it usually seems to denote, to me, is schools of thought that, while perhaps historically influenced by Marxism in such-and-such ways, ignore or skip over entirely the fundamental principles of Marxism. If you remove all the economic parts from Marxism, there's, well, nothing left. You can't take away all the pillars of Marxism and still be a Marxist, or so it seems to me.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
The top-level comment is plainly not doing that, though. It cites a 14th century peasant leader as an example of 'economic Marxism', even though, bluntly, there is no way to regard John Ball as a Marxist except by redefining 'Marxism' so broadly as to be practically meaningless. If John Ball is meaningfully a Marxist, then George Washington or Thomas Jefferson are even more Marxist.
Definitions can't be wrong, so if you want, you technically can define 'Marxism' as broadly as 'the analysis of oppressed and oppressor classes'. But that definition is so broad as to be useless. If that's how you define Marxism - if any analyst who identifies a class of oppressors is a Marxist - then everybody's a Marxist and the term is useless.
I would argue that, in order to be useful, 'Marxism' should mean the broad school or schools of thought historically derived from Marx's ideas.
Are there forms of 'cultural Marxism' that fit that definition! Sure! Entirely possible!
But I think there's a motte and bailey here. Is Martha E. Gimenez a Marxist? Sounds like, yes. Is any analysis of oppressor-oppressed relations Marxism? No.
Thus in the top-level comment here - there's no reason to think that any of the (fictional) examples of 'cultural Marxism' are Marxist at all. It's not Marxist to be LGBT or socially progressive in the Deep South. It's not Marxist to think that your family are annoying, or that people shouldn't fly the Confederate flag. If Marxism means anything at all, it means something more than that.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I think what's missing here, for me, is the history or genealogy of these posited tendencies? One of your examples of 'economic Marxism' is from many centuries before Marx - it seems undeniable to me that whatever John Ball was thinking, it wasn't Marxism, i.e. it was not using the same ideas, analyses, etc., as Marx.
You can, I suppose, redefine 'Marxism' to mean something like 'any sensibility that can be roughly characterised as egalitarian, or opposed to existing hierarchies', and I think I see something like that in your post here. But that doesn't seem like a decent general understanding of it.
If we understand 'Marxism' instead as involving, well, Marx's thought specifically, and then the thought of followers or disciples of Marx influenced him - the wider Marxist tradition, as it were - then I think that forces us to be more precise in our analysis. Thus, say, Jacobs' criticism of 'cultural Marxism' - that the word 'Marxism' functions as a mere bugaboo, associating any roughly egalitarian movement with the spectre of communism.
I am not asserting that there is no way to draw a genealogy that would get you to a 'cultural Marxism'. That's probably there, even if I think the most enthusiastic, even promiscuous, users of the term don't respect that genealogy much. But just as far as it goes, I think the historical connection or tradition matters.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Well, I'm a Christian, which I was quite open about. But I'd rather this discussion not be some kind of referendum on the existence of God. My point is just that - regardless of where you are on the God question - sexual behaviour can and should be limited in certain circumstances, and the idea of going without sex, whether temporarily or over the long term, is not so ridiculous as to be dismissed out of hand.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
See above. I'm not asserting that celibacy is a superior state to marriage. Sex is pleasurable and there's nothing wrong with pleasurable experiences. I'm asserting that sexual self-control is both possible and necessary.
(I do think there are other conditions that apply to sexual morality - I'm pretty negative on casual sex, for instance - but you can just take as read that I have a Christian sexual morality. That's not necessary for my general point. Even if you have a much more robustly progressive sexual ethic, I think self-control remains a necessary virtue not only in one's sexual life but in all of life. If your ethics have any concept of illicit or inappropriate sex at all, you'll need some kind of guardrail or discipline between you and doing it.)
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Of course. Lots of people do and have done that.
I'm not sure what the point is?
Obviously I'm not arguing "it's possible to live without sex, therefore it is good to live without sex". I'm not asserting the superiority of celibacy as a state. I'm saying that living a good life requires some measure of self-control around sex in the same way that it requires self-control around food, or alcohol, or anything else. Whether necessity or luxury, self-control is an important virtue. Food is necessary, but we still expect people to exercise judgement and prudence around what to eat, where, when, and so on. Alcohol is not necessary but can be pleasant; we then expect people to show judgement and responsibility when indulging.
Likewise for sex, I would say. There's nothing wrong with desiring sex in itself, but of course judgement, discipline, etc., need to be applied to the choice we make around that desire. Thus the entire field of sexual morality.
As such, I submit that there are times, perhaps even extended periods of time, where "just don't have sex" is a viable course of action. You can just not, and depending on the circumstances, it may be prudent for you to just not.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I read them both during the big racial politics dust-up of 2020 and 2021, and my feeling was basically:
White Fragility is pretty much nonsense. There's very little in it that constitutes any form of argument. Most of it is accounts of DiAngelo's training sessions interleved with radical assertions. I have very little to say about it. What's most striking about it to me is how non-constructive it is. It contains zero actual proposals for how to combat racism, or fight for equality, or improve society - there is no praxis or theory of action. There isn't even any discernible interest in those questions. There's a single passage where she describes responding to someone who asked her "what to do about racism and white fragility?", and her answer is to suggest that the problem is that the questioner doesn't already know, and to exhort the questioner to "take the initiative and find out on your own". DiAngelo passes the buck! White Fragility is not a book interested in solutions. It is a book interested in deepening one's sense that there is a problem, but that's all.
How to be an Anti-Racist, on the other hand, is a book with exactly one idea. That idea is roughly: all races are equal, any inequities or differences in outcome between racial groups are therefore the products of racist policies, and as such any inequities or differences in outcome between racial groups must be remediated by anti-racist policies. There's a bit more to this than I would quibble (in particular his definition of race, "a power construct of collected or merged difference that lives socially", is far too broad; by Kendi's definition, genders are races, civic nationalities are races, being a member of a golf club is a race!), but that's the core idea. Different outcomes between racial groups is definitionally racist. Anti-racism is equalising outcomes between racial groups. Then the rest of HtbaAR is extraordinarily padded - a combination of Kendi describing his own (not very interesting) life story, and then Kendi repeating his definition over and over in increasingly tedious ways (biological racism, behavioural racism, colourism, class racism, space racism, gended racism, queer racism, etc.). His definition of racism is "a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalises racial inequities", and then he just replays it over and over.
(I don't think his definition is circular, for what it's worth. The above definitions of 'race' and 'racist' make that clear. A 'race' is "a power construct of collected or merged difference that lives socially", a 'racist policy' is "any measure that produces or sustains inequity between racial groups", and a 'racist idea' is "any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another in any way". 'Racism' is adequately defined in these terms. The problematic definition is that of 'race' itself, which as noted I think is way too broad. In practice Kendi states that there are six races in the US - Latinx, Asian, African/Black, European/White, Indigenous, and Middle Eastern - and never considers that his definition might apply to more than these groups, or that you could slice the pie in many other ways.)
The frustrating thing about HtbaAR for me was the way that this idea is only ever asserted, never really discussed or argued for. Kendi never, for instance, says, "Some people might be doubtful of this definition, but here's why I think this definition best captures what we mean by racism and is the best basis for further work to produce justice in society." There are any number of obvious questions we might ask about his definition (have overachieving groups done some kind of injustice? if so, how? if racist policies are those that increase inequities between groups and anti-racist policies decrease inequities, doesn't that mean that it might often be impossible to judge whether a policy is racist or anti-racist before implementing it? if intent is irrelevant, does it mean that a benevolently-intended policy might be racist, and a malevolently-intended policy might be anti-racist?), but he never attempts to answer any such question, even the most obvious.
Ultimately I think my take is that DiAngelo is an opportunistic grifter, and Kendi is a well-meaning but unfortunately not very clever academic. If I were a professor and Kendi were one of my undergraduates, I'd commend his passion but tell him he has a lot more work to do to precisify his thinking.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I don't know how I'd even go about testing my level of testosterone, and to be honest I find the idea of doing so pretty weird. I know there are people who are, from my perspective, strangely invested in their hormone level, but I don't think that's a very wise approach to take to life. I eat well, exercise, and feel energetic and healthy. That's enough for me.
I'm aware that I have a lower libido than some (I once knew a friend who admitted to masturbating daily, which sounds very uncomfortable to me), but it's definitely not non-existent. I do get attracted to people in daily life, have idle sexual fantasies, and so on.
In any case, as far needing sex goes, well, I confidently predict that if you were trapped on a desert island with a supply of food and yet no sexual partners, you would survive more than a week. You may strongly desire sex once a week or more, but I think you could go without it. It's not like food or water.
For the last point - I don't see where I said that I want anybody to suffer? I said that I think self-discipline is a good thing, to the point of being able to make yourself do unpleasant things, or resist pleasant things, but that shouldn't be taken to mean that I think unpleasant experiences are to be desired. I don't think it means that I want people to suffer if I think that people should be able to make themselves do hard yard work, or refrain from pigging out on an entire chocolate cake. I'd argue that this kind of self-control is actually essential for having a happy life overall.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
If you bring up the fact that there's only one way to make a baby (sex) and suggest abstinence and/or sexual discipline, you aren't looked at as extreme, but as childishly out of touch. What, go without sex? Yes. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. No one has ever died from not fucking. In the most dishonest and illegitimate response to that idea, there are people who will say that practicing and preaching abstinence is actually some sort of reverse sexual-slavery that dehumanizes specifically women.
This is something I've always found odd, both from personal experience and more generally.
As far as personal experience goes, I am a single Christian who observes traditional Christian teaching on sexual morality, which is to say that I don't engage in it outside of marriage. As such I am functionally and voluntarily celibate, and have been for a long time. As far as I can tell my quality of life has not suffered significantly from this. Sex is not required for a fulfilling, satisfied life. It is not! Yes, you can go without sex. It is not difficult. Unless I'm some kind of bizarre mutant who feels sexual attraction much less intensely than most people (I definitely experience it), I take my own experience as evidence that it is possible. You can just not have sex! It's just one instance of the much wider principle that any good life will require some exercise of personal discipline, no different to avoiding overeating, or making yourself get enough exercise, or forcing yourself to roll out of bed and go to work even when your head is screaming that you'd rather sleep more. Life is a long exercise of self-disciplining. Why should sexual urges be any different to other urges?
Of course, it probably isn't just sex. Anecdotally I'd argue that the whole concept of discipline or self-control is suffering. I think of how Tanner Greer described the temperance movement, and how much voluntary self-control, in the form of things like pledges, was significant. Either making yourself do something unpleasant, or making yourself refrain from doing something pleasant, is a skill that you can practice and learn. But, not to sound too much like a grouchy old man, I feel like that's less the case now, and we have more focus on immediate, rapid gratification.
Now on the broader scale...
I feel obliged to note that in the wider culture, sex is decreasing in frequency, primarily among younger generations. It would appear that just having less sex is viable, because people are having less sex, to the point that conservatives worry about the sex recession (yes, The Atlantic, but Wilcox and Stone are both on the conservative side). If anything, we're probably having too little sex, collectively. So the idea that it's just impossible to avoid sex seems counter-intuitive. People aren't going outside and suffocating in constant opportunities for sex - rather, sex is happening less frequently than in supposedly more puritanical times.
Historically, I'd argue that the idea that abstaining from sex is dehumanising seems rather absurd - the counter-example to come to my mind is the liberatory effect of vowed celibacy or virginity for Christian women in the Roman Empire. Under the crushing weight of social expectation, renouncing sexual and family life in favour of pure devotion to God could be very attractive. Moreover, today, if you feel that marriage is an oppressive patriarchal institution that dehumanises women by reducing them to the role of baby factories or housebound servants, then the idea of renouncing sex might indeed appear liberatory on similar grounds? We might compare something like Korea's 4B movement. I'm not saying all those things are equally good (I think there's obviously a huge difference between voluntary Christian celibacy as commitment to God, and radical feminist celibacy as secession from patriarchal society); just that they seem like cases where deliberate abstinence from sex is experienced as humanising.
So I find the two implied arguments here - that abstention from sex is impossible, and that abstention from sex is oppressive - to be implausible.
Now I will grant that there are specific circumstances in which abstention from sex might be practically impossible or oppressive. If it were demanded of a married couple for an unlimited time, it may well be destructive to that relationship to the point where I would say it's not reasonably possible. Likewise abstention can be enforced or imposed externally in unreasonable ways - someone whose vocation is to marry might be forced into religious life inappropriately, for instance. But the fact of abstention by itself is not enough to conclude oppression or harm or anything unhealthy.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
The pro-Palestinian protester on the other side doesn't seem to be Palestinian either. People are allowed to care about issues in different countries, or which involve people of different ethnic or religious identities to them.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I think you have to distinguish between 'accepting' and approving or condoning any given activity. The church accepts sinners. That is its entire purpose. But that does not imply any acceptance of sinful actions.
I'd step back a bit from the idea of homosexuality specifically, and in particular I want to rid of any identity claims here. 'Gay people' as an identity are irrelevant. Rather, we should abstract back a bit and consider that what we're talking about is sexual morality broadly construed.
Now it seems pretty clear that Jesus, the Bible, God, etc., disapprove of sexual immorality. This is called porneia and it is condemned pretty much everywhere. Porneia covers categories as diverse as adultery, rape, incest, bestiality, prostitution, and more. Nobody seems to think that either being an adulterer/rapist/frequenter-of-prostitutes/whatever, or merely being tempted to any of those activities, means that a person is categorically excluded from the church or from the love of God. A person who has committed any of those actions would be expected to repent, seek forgiveness, do penance as appropriate, and so on, but given that, they are welcome in the Christian community. A person merely tempted to any of those things is, of course, totally welcome - the church is a community that encourages and supports people as they try to live a holy life, which naturally means being aware of and fighting against temptations like that.
The issue at hand is whether or not same-gender sexual activity falls into the category of porneia or not. That's it.
I think this framing is helpful because it lets us get away from toxic disputes about identity. It's not about 'gay people' or about 'homosexuality' or any posited intrinsic trait or categorisation. Those are beside the point theologically. It's only about actions.
So with that in mind, what are the lines around sexual morality that we seem to receive from scripture and tradition?
There's a much longer discussion than I want to have in this post right now, but the short version is that I think that, taking scripture as a whole and putting its treatment of sexual matters into context, it's possible to discern the overall shape of God's intention for human sexuality - that it be monogamous (cf. Jesus on divorce), faithful (cf. any time adultery ever comes up), fertile (cf. OT fertility miracles, Gn 1:28), loving and joyful (cf. Song of Songs), male-female (cf. Gn 1:27 and its use in Mk 10:6-7, Mt 19:4-6), supportive (cf. Prov 31), and so on. There's a visible thread that runs through scripture and which we also see explored in the tradition of the church, though I'm not going to go into that for now. There are other concerns about sexual morality we also see in the Bible (I'd argue there are some to do with honour, violence, and equality, for instance), but you get the idea. There is, I think, a discernible pattern, and I don't see how you can revise it to include same-gender sexual activity without not only contradicting what scripture says pretty plainly, but also doing harm to the overall pattern itself.
You do find some progressive Christian thought on this issue (e.g. David P. Gushee) arguing that they're in favour of this whole pattern, this whole biblical vision of marriage, and they support same-sex marriage because they want to extend its fruits to gay people (notice the identity framing again), on exactly the same terms as with opposite-sex couples. But I don't think that can ultimately work, because these principles are all interconnected. You can't remove one part of the structure without weakening the whole house.
There's a secular argument you can have as well, in terms of some of the fruits of same-sex marriage, or the other social trends that it either encourages or detracts from, but I'd rather leave that to others.
On a final note, I'd like to clarify that I mean absolutely none of this as an attack, personal or otherwise, against Christians who support same-sex marriage, or Christians who may identify as LGBT. (Nor non-Christians either, but this is an intra-Christian discussion.) I want to disagree in a respectful, compassionate way, all the more so because I used to be on the other side of this issue, and it is far, far too common for people to be very bullying about it.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Out of curiosity, as a third Christian, and one who in the spirit of the topic counts gay marriage as something I was wrong about (i.e. I was in favour of it as a teenager, and have since come around to thinking that the traditionalists were probably right all along), do you not encounter many Christians on a day-to-day basis who oppose it? There's often a question of church communities here, it seems to me.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Plus we aren't 'demanding access' to Christianity - Christianity is not an exclusive club, and enthusiastically welcomes believers of every possible race or culture without distinction. The whole question of 'access' to it is silly.
This may be one of the reasons why people like SS don't like Christianity. If you're focused on race and racial identity politics, the resolutely non-racial and universal Christianity can't help but seem an obstacle.
Tophattingson is a single issue anti-lockdowner.
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