Month: February 2019

In The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges’ character is called, rather famously, The Dude. As a bumbling, mostly passive, but ultimately decent figure, he is an ideal protagonist for the Coen Brothers’ parody of sun-soaked LA noir. In the opening voiceover, Sam Elliot’s cowboy character says that dude is “a name no one would self-apply where I come from,” alluding to the original meaning of the word: city-slickers or dandies who wanted to participate in the Wild West but weren’t man enough for the real thing. That’s what the term “Dude Ranch” insinuates, and it’s why in the first episode of Deadwood, Al Swearengen refers to the fatally in-over-his-head Brom Garret as “the New York dude.” In any case, Jeff Lebowski’s nickname is central to his personality and captures everything that differentiates him from his mirror, the titular “Big” Lebowski. This latter figure is an avatar for all things un-dude-like: wealth, power, conservatism, The Establishment.

Now think about how people use the word dude on the internet these days. This article from Deadspin is a good example. It’s a jeremiad against the “rich white dudes” who run the country and their puppet-jurist, Brett Kavanaugh. According to this usage, it is the Big Lebowski who is a “dude.” What the hell? Where does that leave The Dude?

You see this phenomenon more and more. While I think that the shift in usage has seismic implications, usually when I bring it up, people shrug and point out that bro is a much more popular dysphemism (I use this word reluctantly, but “slur” or even “epithet” would be awfully gratuitous) for straight white men. And the two concepts — the dude and the bro as manifestations of sexism and privilege — certainly did emerge onto the national Discourse from the same milieu, that being online feminism, before being amplified during the 2016 Democratic primary contest and finally mainstreamed by the Me Too movement.

But what about the collapse in distinctions between dudes and bros, as captured in the unfortunate portmanteau dudebro? To my mind, it was the bros who played lacrosse, worked in law and finance, and dominated our political class. Dudes were, for the most part, surfers and stoners from Southern California. Now I know, people use both words prolifically in their form as direct address, and dude is even effectively gender neutral in this function. It’s not quite right to say that they refer to entirely different modes of masculinity. Nonetheless, they carry significantly different associations, or at least they used to.

I’ve been wondering whether there’s some deeper meaning to us dudes becoming rich and powerful. You could say we’ve been gentrified. Does this linguistic microtrend have any social value, or at least impact on The Discourse?  A professor in one of my grad-school seminars might have asked — What kind of work does it do? The historical transformations of the word suggest that it has been central to American ideas of masculinity for over a century. And these days, when you see people talking about the subject of “Men,” it is usually a conversation about wrongdoing: toxic masculinity, arguing about the appropriateness of social penalties of sexual miscreants, backlash against the idea of toxic masculinity, male tears, paranoia about false accusations of sexual assault, etc. One of the main contributions of internet feminism, in my opinion, has been to show that all sorts of men can be bad, not just the sort of men you picture when you think of bad men. This process has taken many forms, for example the rising awareness that the elite can also be abusers, or the idea that “nerds” are not just shy, nice guys, but can engage in toxic masculinity as well.

Seen in this light, the collapse of distinction between dudes and bros, the hippies and elites, makes more sense. As we have seen just this week, in the Ryan Adams revelations, dudes can be monsters as well. There is still more to say about the process itself — for example, I think that the concept “Bernie Bros,” a group that was actually made of of dudes, was a critical inflection point in the story. I’m still not clear on exactly how it became acceptable to refer to the likes of the Koch brothers as dudes, and I’m not sure that it is entirely beneficial to think of masculinity as something that articulates itself in the same way regardless of class or other factors. I can accept, nonetheless, that this shift in usage has had some benefit to The Discourse. Still, I think we can all agree that dudebro has got to go.

I was glad to see Max Read’s essay today in New York Magazine, which suggests that the “manosphere” sees the world in essentially gnostic terms. I’ve entertained the same idea myself, and like Read I came to it because of the clearly gnostic symbolism of the “red pill” concept, which the manosphere lifted from The Matrix. I suggest that everyone read it.

As I think Read realizes, however, the relationship between gnosticism, the internet, and our current political dilemma is a huge topic, which he could not hope to cover fully in the space he was allotted. Since he has already explained the framework for why online anti-feminism could be seen as a kind of gnosticism I’d simply like to add some of my thoughts in list form. (Please note that I am NOT writing an essay with numbered paragraphs. I hate those.)

1. Gnosticism is a way of seeing the world which has emerged occasionally in history. As Hans Blumenberg has discussed, gnosticism arose as a challenge to orthodoxy in the first centuries of the Christian era, and then again during the middle ages, this time in the form of scholarly nominalism in addition to heresies like Catharism. Gnosticism, unlike orthodox Christianity (or, as is the case now, mainstream liberalism), is a worldview based on intense feelings of alienation. Thus, it thrives in historical circumstances which are alienating. And who is a more quintessentially alienated subject than an economically and sexually frustrated young man who spends all his time on the internet? I think it’s important to consider both the phenomenology of internet use as well as the conditions of late capitalism when we look at this most recent eruption of gnosticism.
2. One complicating factor is that for gnostics, the material world was created by an evil god, while a higher spiritual or intellectual realm was created first by a good god. The purpose of gnosticism was to escape this lower realm we have been cast into and return to our original home in the spiritual realm through the acquisition of sacred knowledge (“gnosis”). For the gnostics, the immaterial realm of ideas was more real than the material world, which was an illusion. The Matrix’s red pill symbolism inverts this, as does the manosphere’s notion that feminism, an ideology, perverted a well-functioning world governed by natural hierarchies and evolutionary psychology. Nonetheless, we still do see this kind of thinking in those circles, especially in the case of Jordan Peterson, whose Maps of Meaning made the gnostic argument that archetypal ideas decisively shape our material reality.
3. Speaking of Peterson, gnostic cults often formed around sages who offered access to salvific knowledge. This is quite obviously the case in the manosphere as well, and Peterson himself can be seen as a kind of modern heresiarch. Another trend in gnostic cults was spiritual hierarchy, with more advanced practitioners served by a larger lower class of followers, who could not hope for ultimate salvation. We can see this type of thought, for example, in the false “alpha-beta” dichotomy Red Pillers rely on so heavily in their understanding of masculinity.
4. There’s a huge body of literature on gnosticism, which portrays them positively, almost as proto-hippies. There’s another critical corpus of work on gnostics by Christians, who catalog their various outrages. I’m not familiar enough with either tradition to say which is correct, but I do want to highlight something that the orthodox Christians have pointed out: that gnostic cults tended to extremes of either asceticism or hedonism. This was because of their denigration of the material realm, which suggested to some that all worldly things should be rejected, and to others that laws and norms restricting our behavior were pointless. We see this dichotomy reflected in the manosphere, with pickup artists indulging in as much casual sex as possible, and “Men Going Their Own Way” opting for “monk mode” in the service of achieving a stoic indifference to women.
5. Read points out the connection to nihilism, which is symbolized by the “Black Pill.” The black pill is usually some kind of information that tells you there’s no escaping, for example, being involuntarily celibate. You have the jawline of a beta male, so no Red Pill is going to teach you how to get laid. The connection between gnosticism and nihilism is something that Hans Jonas noticed, and wrote about in an essay attached to his foundational 1958 text The Gnostic Religion. In the essay, he points out similarities between the gnostic outlook and German philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger. What I find important here is that gnostic expectations, when dashed, can lead to nihilistic despair, which should be a cause for concern.
6. Many critics of the left, most notably Eric Voegelin, have described Marxism as a form of gnosticism. Today, we often see online leftists indulging in gnostic-seeming ideas, most significantly that this world is hell. The notion that Marxist or leftist thought offers an interpretive key which makes sense of our alienation, unlocking the secrets of existence, and moreover suggests a route to a solution, is all recognizably gnostic. It is also very seductive. This suggests that gnosticism may be a heresy, but it’s not completely useless. It’s just a matter of avoiding some of the downfalls listed above (particularly nihilism, and elitism).

Any of these thoughts could be developed further, and I’m curious to hear what others think. All in all, I’m hoping that Read’s essay sparks a trend in comparing modern experience to late-antique religious phenomena, because that’s one of my favorite things to do.

The question of whether politicians are racist is all over the news these days, and not just in the case of the Governor of Virginia. Several Democratic candidates for President have been asked whether they believe Donald Trump is a racist. Meanwhile, in the realm of celebrity, Liam Neeson admitted to entertaining fantasies of racial violence while denying that he was a racist himself. All of this has raised, once again, a question which has vexed Americans for some time now: how do we adjudicate whether or not someone is racist? I am certainly not the person to answer this question, but I have some thoughts on why the confusion exists, and it has to do with the political vocabularies.

Rather than relying on a spectrum or any other abstracted spatial metaphor, I find it most useful to organize political ideas into three broad yet easily distinguishable traditions: the conservative, the liberal, and the radical. These three streams of thought have accounted for most of the significant political concepts of the past few centuries, and it is often illustrative to look at how each, in a general sense, approaches certain political problems. For example, as Alan Kahan has written, the three traditions had very different ideas about how to determine who could participate in politics during the 19^th century. Conservatives thought that suffrage was a hereditary property, not to be diluted by expansion. Radicals argued that it was a universal right, and liberals suggested that a limited but gradually expanding franchise should be delineated by “capacity,” or the ability to behave as a good political subject.

Now, think of how different Americans tend to talk about race and racism. We will set aside, for now, those Americans who are openly racist—the vast majority agree that it is bad to be a racist. The confusion lies in how they define racism. What follows is a very rough sketch of how the three major political traditions discuss racism in American society. It is important to remember that people can use the vocabulary of more than one tradition at different times. I’m merely trying to point out some general tendencies.

Conservatives use religious vocabulary and frameworks in talking about cases of racism. To be a racist is a kind of political or social sin. That is, it is an individual fault, and its cause is some defect in the individual’s heart, or soul. The criterion for “being a racist” is an open profession of an interior belief that one race is superior to another, similar to Christian professions of doctrinal beliefs. It is critical that the individuals inner beliefs and outward statements or acts are in alignment. Therefore, renouncement of personal racist beliefs (“I don’t have a racist bone in my body”) is often enough for conservatives to acquit an accused racist, just as the renouncement of heretical beliefs was often sufficient to demonstrate one’s allegiance to orthodox Christianity. In the rare case that person actually confesses to holding racist beliefs (and furthermore accepts that they are reprehensible), the only requirement for readmission into polite society is honest repentance, or simply the passage of time.

As with other social ills, when liberals talk about racism they rely on a system of medical metaphors: pathology, trauma, therapy, etc. Racism is conceived of as a disorder corrupting social relations within the body politic, which ought to be harmonious. It exists perhaps because of specific malignant agents or structures within the whole, or maybe without an intentional cause at all — it can be a kind of social neuroses, an imbalance that can develop on its own or represent an inheritance from earlier generations. The solution to the problem of racism is therefore limited therapeutic interventions by expert actors. This can mean the government, but also includes nonprofits, NGOs, specialized activists, and even private businesses. Occasionally a mass movement is necessary, but this is usually in the service of winning some specific policy reform that is meant to provide for healthier race relations. On an individual level, racists can be rehabilitated through education, psychological treatment, or even travel and culinary experimentation, all of which fall under the general rubric of “self-improvement.”

For liberals, racism and other bigotries are things that prevent the social system from functioning as it should. To radicals, on the other hand, racism is a feature, not a bug. It is one of the many structures of power that allow the ruling class to dominate and exploit the great majority of people. It exists not only in structures, such as the criminal justice system, but also in individuals as an ideology which buttresses the dominant position of the ruling class. Whereas liberals see prejudice as irrational, to radicals racism makes perfect sense, because it justifies unequal social relations after the fact. Thus, the solution to the problem of racism is to topple oppressive structures through mass movements and to confront racist ideology head-on, using force if necessary.

Once again, these are all rough tendencies, and oftentimes people are not consistently in one camp or the other. For example, the putatively liberal news media does rely on a liberal vocabulary when discussing racism in general, but when it comes to adjudicating whether or not individuals are racist, they often fall back on the more stringent conservative criteria. (I would even suggest that this is a big reason why no one is particularly pleased with the state of the discourse on race.) In any case, I merely offer this sketch as an explanation for some of the confusion — why, for example, conservatives insist that black prejudice against white people is just as big a problem as white supremacy. Sure, it’s partly self-interested hypocrisy, but it’s also justified by a much broader set of concepts that inform how they see the world. It’s useless, in my opinion, to point out their hypocrisy and accuse them of “bad faith:” my sense is that they genuinely view the issue like they say they do.

More interesting than the attenuated and self-serving conservative view, however, are the differences between radicals and liberals. The distinction I draw here can of course be applied to a variety of other topics: wealth inequality, climate change, imperialism, etc. In a political environment where left-wing activists are called “very liberal,” I think it’s worthwhile to continue to articulate what makes them different, even if any eventual solution to our deeply-seated racism problem (not to mention our current political crisis) will require some synthesis of the two traditions.