Author: Robert Mariani

Send me a tweet: @robert_mariani Email me: rjmariani0 AT gmail DOT com

Religion as anti-socialization

I agree with the hippies: when society is wrong, people can choose to be right. The religions of the world, for all their differences, tend to say the same sort of thing. Jesus proclaimed, “My kingdom is not of this world.” The lotus is a symbol of Buddhism because it is a flower that remains a pristine white amidst muddy waters, representing unsullied enlightenment in spite of the world’s dirt. This might ring more or less true depending on where you live. I happen to live in Washington, D.C., a city where it’s positively embarrassing to talk about God.

When I lived in Maryland, there was a food co-op that functioned as the neighborhood grocery store. It had mostly organic fare, and that the staff were hippies of all ages was made apparent by a bumper sticker that read, “They’re not hot flashes – they’re POWER SURGES!” on a manager’s desk. More interesting than that was the white Sikh man who worked there; besides his light skin and blue eyes, he looked like any other Sikh, complete with beard and distinctive keski turban. I can only imagine what kind of social pressures pushed him towards the path of least resistance – that is, looking and acting just like everybody else. But what, if not the defiance of socialization, makes great and unexpected things happen? And what else besides religion will give us the conviction to be not only a weirdo, but a weirdo who does the right thing? 

I am a Catholic, and I am keenly aware that Catholicism isn’t hip. It will never be hip. It’s been passé for the better part of a millennium, and I don’t see it becoming anything but anti-cool to the celebrities, or whoever, anytime soon. Any desperately trendy Redditor will be the first one to mention this.

I mean, get with the times man! Do you really believe in a sky fairy because it’s mentioned in some old book? A book that doesn’t even support the latest rad things like intersectionality?

Thanks for the wake up call, WeedGoku420, but that isn’t a bug – it’s a feature. If there is transcendent truth out there, it doesn’t change to keep up with the latest clickbait listicles. Cultural change isn’t a bad thing, but neither are unchanging universals that refuse to be compromised. In fact, I think they are two sides of the same coin. There’s enough space in our society for both the fashionable and and the eternal. (more…)

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Terrorists and hate speech at the Daily Caller

Over at the Daily Caller I got a piece published about the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. Take a look:

This use of violence to silence “offensive” speech is structurally identical to hate speech laws, the only difference is that it was vigilantes that executed “justice” this time. I’m not calling supporters of hate speech laws insensitive and I’m not saying that they support terrorism. I am saying that their goals are identical to those of the men in who committed this atrocity. Those goals are to suppress “offensive” or “harmful” or “hateful” speech through coercion and government action is inherently coercive. Progressives seem to only want to make this violent suppression more systematic through the use of the legal system.

Thanks a lot to the wise and handsome opinion editor over there.

Sorry to hear that, but let’s remember that I’m the real victim here

Words are useful insofar as they have publicly agreed upon definitions. From definitions, we can have discourse that leads to some sort of useful truth. But what happens when the meat and potatoes of a discourse is made up of terms that have a powerful connotation, but no precise definition? You get people talking past each other in a fog of emotion and cognitive bias.

Slate Star Codex started the new year with a very long but very important post on the a specific expression of feminism’s contempt for nerdy men. It concerns an MIT professor, Scott Aaronson, opening up about being tormented throughout his adolescence by crippling self-hatred issues.

(sigh) Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.

Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.

Aaronson goes on to explain that he was so tormented that he’s tried to castrate and kill himself. So what useful truth to feminists have for him? It’s made clear that he needs to recognize that his misery is necessarily of a lower grade than what women feel. Women are oppressed and men are not, so no matter how bad he feels, it’s never oppression-grade bad, whatever that means. Secondly, we are to believe that his own assessment that feminism made him feel the way he did is wrong, and that It’s actually the patriarchy. For whatever reason, whenever gender is part of the story, the focus has to be on women.

The best example of this is an article posted on the New Statesman. Laurie Penny wrote an article explaining Aaronson’s folly for him, titled “On Nerd Entitlement.” Jesus Christ, we’re off to a bad start. I am going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that the tears shed for him were not of the Crocodile variety, but they sort of look that way. She is, intentionally or not, using one man’s heartfelt expression of suffering to make it about her. His painful collision with the diktats of a powerful cultural force was made into a passion play about about how that very same cultural force is the medicine that he needs to learn to learn to like. The problem I have with this way of approaching the issue isn’t that it’s mean, it’s that it presumes that all of society has taken certain vague concepts as gospel.

By using the loaded terms “patriarchy” and “oppression,” feminists are begging the question that these things actually exist in line with their definition. The fact is that those are both controversial and non-falsifiable concepts. There’s a few things that, if they are actually interested in a discourse, feminists need to establish.

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Gamergate revisited

A piece I wrote on Gamergate back in September went viral. It called the defeat of Gamergate inevitable because of the forces of cultural inertia stacked against it. The actual outcome was in some ways predictable, but otherwise quite surprising.

Gamergate didn’t win – but it didn’t lose

I attributed Gamergate losing to a phenomenon that in fact did come to pass. The groovy media intelligentsia did everything in its power to paint Gamergate as a simultaneously laughable yet dangerous hate movement that exposed male geeks as crypto-Nazis. To any normally socialized and status-conscious type of person, the media gambit would have led to the spiral of silence that I foresaw. The important factor here is that geeks, by definition, are not normally socialized and status-conscious people. This is particularly true when speaking ex cathedra from their identity as geeks; the threat of looking uncool doesn’t work because they are already uncool. They are already pariahs with ‘lame’ hobbies. Media elites and uncool nerds are two fundamentally different types of people.

Every single dominant cultural institution was stacked against Gamergate. Nobody had the intellectual bravery to side with a movement that was apparently just bitter nerds being prejudiced. Gamergate was rapidly becoming a dirty word in the mouths of anyone concerned with looking sensitive and enlightened. Thousands upon thousands, armed with roughly zero information on the controversy, were tripping over each other to signal their righteous “socially aware” status. “Misogynerds” were in the crosshairs.

And to their credit, the geeks came out pretty unscathed. Only through their tenacity and lack of concern with their image did Gamergate not get nuked from the chic heights of media that stooped to notice it. The desperately fashionable media displayed its contempt for nerds for “not being with the program.” The problem is that they only had a little less contempt before this fiasco. This is just another example of the people in media, entertainment and academia having a values dissonance with pretty much everyone else. That’s what a cultural elite is – a set of people with values not necessarily shared by the general public, but with a near-monopoly on cultural soapboxes to promulgate their ideas.

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The latest satanic panic — rape

Fredrik deBoer gainsays Adam Kotsko‘s assertion that the left‘s response to the right‘s outrage against Lena Dunham‘s supposed molestation of her sister is a symptom of an irresolvable intra-progressive problem. Here’s what deBoer quoted from Kotsko:

I have started to notice how often politically-charged online memes open out onto a “no-win vortex.” Take the example of the cat-calling video. On the one hand, it calls attention to street harrassment, which is a very real problem. On the other hand, it was edited in a racist way in the service of a gentrification campaign. How does one respond? It seems that no matter which direction you go, someone loses — you either wind up downplaying the destructiveness of racism and gentrification or dismissing the seriousness of the atmosphere of harrassment that women have to navigate.

The same goes for the Lena Dunham affair. On the one hand, I’m shocked that anyone on the left would buy into the framing of a right-wing smear campaign that is structurally identical to the “moral panics” that legitimate homophobia (and, even worse, that trivializes real child sexual abuse). On the other hand, though, I don’t want to dismiss black women’s very justified critique of white feminists who claim to speak for all women while ignoring black women’s very existence. They may be jumping on this because they previously disliked and distrusted Lena Dunham — but we can’t ignore that they had excellent, indisputable reasons to dislike and distrust her. And much of what they’ve said about how Dunham gets the benefit of the doubt while a black child would be painted as a monster is sadly true. Simply responding that no child should be painted as a monster seems a little too easy.

I have genuine progressive sympathies. It’s pretty easy to miss – progressivism is hip and I love playing the devil’s advocate. Just like progressives, I want to live in a more just, more inclusive world where less people get hurt and more  people see a rise in quality of life. The distinction between myself and progressives is the is a distinction between things that lead to good results, the truth, and things that sound good, the narrative.

Being a white male sends deBoer into that kind of nebbish, sweaty hand-wringing. He points out the folly of white male social justice types:

But we also have the hammer, and it’s pretty much the only one people like Kotsko have to wield: my opponents are White Dudes! Now, the shrewd type might point out that, contrary to the cultural expectation in the Grand Progressive Mutual Admiration Society in the Cloud, saying “you don’t have the credibility to argue that” is not actually an example of rebutting that argument. And a really observant soul might notice that Kotsko himself is a White Dude. (I would actually increase the number of capitals for Kotsko, like, WhItE DUde, personally.) Ah, but you see, when Kotsko critiques White Dudeism, he does so from the premise that he is exempt from that critique. He is writing about Those Other White Dudes. Actually, it goes further than that: he is critiquing white dudes precisely because, in so doing, he sets himself outside of that group. It’s an act of pure preemption. The same old question applies: if engaging in these political discourses didn’t end up with you positioned as the righteous exception to the immoral rule, would you bother? If your arguments didn’t amount to a wriggling out of the very critique that you’re making, would you still make them?

Seems about right. There is bound to be endemic grandstanding in the circle that is the confluence of radical chic, academia, and Hollywood. With no apparent self-awareness, deBoer, who just spent one thousand words slamming Kotsko for playing that tired progressive signaling game, is now doing the exact same thing. He uses the term “white dude” in various ways, all of which are supposed to appear endearing, so as to signal that he is higher in the progressive pecking order because of just how savvy he is of the “white dudeness” of others and himself. Where normally the best move would be stating a good progressive opinion, the winning move here is to not play. By recusing himself from weighing in on certain issues that white dudes shouldn’t be allowed to weigh in on, he separates himself from Those Other White Dudes that don’t know when to shut the hell up. Winning points has nothing to do with dialogue. It has everything to do with the shutting down of dialogue.

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The casual, everyday Marxism that is all too often ignored

The Daily Caller was good enough to let me publish a piece on why #Shirtstorm is a symptom of fashionable neo-Marxism in our culture. Here’s an excerpt:

The Verge, a tech site that tipped its hand as unethical and agenda-pushing during GamerGate, ran a headline reading, “I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing.” They are literally convinced that fashion, in both the clothing and radical chic senses, is so important that they don’t even care about forward leaps in science. Think I am mischaracterizing them? The subtitle reads “That’s one small step for man, three steps back for humankind.” Wearing a shirt that the groovy people at The Verge don’t like is three times as bad as making a breakthrough in space exploration is good.

The feminism that we have making noise right now isn’t the feminism that fought for equality and against discrimination. Rather than being based in enlightenment values of humanism and equality under the law, it is grounded in neo-Marxist theory of power and oppression. You know when people say that only women can be victims of sexism because of some non-falsifiable, abstract, aggregate definition of power? You were hearing neo-Marxist critical theory.

Escalating this kind of outrage is a pretty dangerous gambit, I think. As with all anti-rationalist narratives, this bizarre campaign is eventually going to buckle under the weight of its own accumulated contradictions.