Just to warn you, this post is no less than 7,449 words long. You could think of this as a kind of book report post but, as I'm not Steve Camp, I'm not going to turn my book reports into songs. Let the reader understand (or not). So, here we go.
Saturday, April 29, 2023
the end of April 2023 book review post discussing books about powers & principalities in Pauline lit and interpretation; the history of Catholic and Anglican exorcism; books on the late Roger Scruton; Frank Burch Brown's case for aesthetic pluralism as Christian hospitality and liturgical obligation; and a recap of interesting new books on galant music and sonata forms
Brad Edwards writes at Mere Orthodoxy about Captain Hook, Peter Pan and fantasies of masculinity sold as masculinity in an era of crisis (of course) regarding masculinity
...The Right’s Pirate Kings and Vain-Glory
In a sermon entitled “Young Men and Their Strength” from September, 2020, Moscow ID pastor Douglas Wilson articulates an acute awareness of how cultural dynamics have intensified and sensitized men to shame:
Our culture has a real hostility to genuine masculinity and because of that, we don’t want to bring our additional contempt on masculinity… We’d only be pouring gasoline on these cultural fires if we bring along any additional contempt. (emphasis added)
Wilson plays “good cop” to culture’s “bad cop,” and effectively so. He positions himself and those who think similarly as a refuge for the persecuted and misunderstood male. This isn’t malicious. After all, Jesus offered refuge to many ostracized by impoverished culture or oppressed by legalistic religion. What could be more noble or biblical?
In the same sermon, Wilson defines “godly masculinity” as “the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility.” I’d prefer “glad acceptance” to reinforce that sacrificial responsibility is ordinarily bestowed by others (and God, ultimately), and is therefore entrusted and received rather than entitled or presumed. Still, that short definition offers shame-burdened men a genuinely worthwhile telos, an aspiration of real significance to men feeling trapped by shame both culturally- and self-imposed.
However, it is my hesitation at his use of “assumption” rather than “acceptance” that illustrates where Wilson’s masculinity goes astray: no aspiration is independent of its path, and no end is unshaped by its means. Wilson’s admirable and biblical aspiration of “sacrificial responsibility” is nevertheless corrupted by its means. [emphasis added by WtH] When masculine strength assumes responsibility it is not entrusted with it becomes functionally presumptive and entitled. Responsibility with presumption as its genesis can’t help but become self-serving and vain. Complementarian ends through patriarchal means is neither complementarian nor Christlike. At best, it is extremely difficult to arrive at a virtuous stewardship of masculine strength or agency. At its worst, “glad assumption” becomes a Trojan horse smuggling selfishness through the gate of “sacrificial responsibility,” reducing masculinity to performative means and counterfeit ends.
...
Could not those who admire Wilson suggest that complementarianism is just what people called patriarchalism with a politically correct gloss? Progressives and egalitarians have made that move themselves so frequently it "almost" doesn't need stating but it probably does need to be said. Brad Edwards points out that the "assumption" of responsibility is the problem. Many an egalitarian would likely agree.
Regular readers will not likely have forgotten I have had my doubts for years that Doug Wilson could play "good cop" to the "bad cop" of culture. One of the most obvious points of contention even within evangelicalism is whether Doug Wilson's idea of genuine masculinity is "the" standard for masculinity.
Now having finally finished the book, I have been struck, in the worst possible way, by how Jennifer McKinney couldn't be bothered to cite Doug Wilson directly in Making Christianity Manly Again. It can't be a reticence on the part of Oxford University Press because Crawford Gribben's OUP published book on survivalists and reconstructionists in the Pacific Northwest not only quoted Doug Wilson's materials extensively but also quoted kinists and compared and contrasted contemporary kinist views with Rushdooney's views. McKinney's book, by contrast, leans heavily on secondary or even tertiary literature. Doug Wilson quotes are mediated by Kristen Kobes du Mez or Beth Allison Barr works instead of being quoted from Doug Wilson's own sermons and works. Note that the author at Mere Orthodoxy jumps straight to the primary source.
Brad Edwards has labored to chart out a position in which the scripts of masculinity for contemporary Western culture (almost by default the United States) are not realistic, whether the progressive or conservative; egalitarian or patriarchal. Whether he has succeeded will depend in no small part on your perspective about a complementarian stance that distinguishes itself from patriarchal views. That Edwards has gone to the trouble of quoting Doug Wilson directly is, I'm afraid, more than can be said about Jennifer McKinney. McKinney quotes Driscoll, yes, but the actual citations are astonishingly sparse. Tell me that you quote from the Christians Gone Wild series and I'll have to ask where you got your audio files, what date you accessed them, from which site and whether you know about the extent to which that series was redacted and purged in the re:branded version Good News for Bad Christians. McKinney did none of the above. The contrast with Jessica Johnson's Biblical Porn on this issue is striking.
By way of background, when I read Biblical Porn I was struck by Johnson mentioning a sermon from the Genesis series in which Driscoll said he prayed that God would kill someone and that the prayer was answered. I had forgotten about that claim! But Johnson's citations were at least detailed enough that I was able to find the sermon and write a blog post about the claims a few years back.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/03/6-29-2005-mark-driscoll-but-i-still.html
Unfortunately actually finding Mars Hill era versions of Driscoll sermons is hard to do now. The marshill.se site is either down or not what it was. Ditto for other sites that hosted Mars Hill media. You can't find Wenatchee The Hatchet via Google search these days, not directly, and so if you're here it's because you know of the blog or looked for it and not necessarily via Google. It's a paradox, or an irony, that having used Blogger since 2006 SEO results have changed to such an extent that you can't find this blog using Google. The search engine has certainly changed, ,but I digress.
What I'm getting at is that maybe McKinney's book has been published at the worst possible time for being able to independently verify that any quotes from Mark Driscoll sermons actually came from Mark Driscoll sermons. It's not that I don't believe the man said X, Y or Z, it's that I realize that finding primary source materials has become harder for the Mars Hill era since the launch of The Trinity Church. It has also become harder to connect dots between Driscoll and Wilson from the Driscoll side, although you can find Wilson fans who are happy to connect the dots for you. Daniel Kleven seemed to find that out via his Twitter, I think.
Brad Edwards may well be right that the core problem with Doug Wilson's taxonomy of manliness is the "assumption" of responsibility rather than the "acceptance" of responsibility. If he's right the distinction between acceptance and assumption gets at a potential Achilles' heel in scripts of masculinity on offer. If you're not supposed to seize responsibility and you're not entrusted with responsibility are you a man? This is the question that by and large can't be answered, most likely because contemporary postulates about masculinity are so abstract as to be divorced from flesh and blood relationships. Honor father and mother does not seem to me the "salute the uniform" axiom that some people make it out to be--you have to figure out how to honor your father and mother even if they may have been genuinely bad people.
Since Mark Driscoll made no secret of being significantly influenced in his ideas about men, women, gender and sexuality by the writings of Doug Wilson I would have thought McKinney would have spent a single paragraph writing about the ways in which Driscoll built upon or diverged from Wilson's ideas. Nope. Nothing. Not one single paragraph. If you haven't read about this topic before I have a couple of posts that may be of use to you.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/on-seminal-and-continuing-thematic-link.html
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/08/some-more-thoughts-on-formative.html
Edwards came across as trying to articulate that if the blue state masculinity script is Peter Pan the red state masculinity script is Captain Hook and that, ultimately, the Doug Wilson and ideological descendant variations constitute a kind of Captain Hook Neverland masculinity that seems like an alternative to Peter Pan syndrome without being a real alternative.
Here we are in 2023 and it's as though within evangelical and socially conservative Protestant settings nothing has changed (surprise!) from the scene I considered in an old post from 2011, "Roy Baumeister, the disposability of men, and social meaning for the unattached male". Attempting to give today's men a script of glory will do nothing to change their inherent disposability within society. A Doug Wilson or a Mark Driscoll can strive to give men a "purpose" by giving them a set of responsibilities to assume but in days of yore men and women who were not cut out for those cultural scripts got sent to monasteries for all sorts of reasons. Even back before the Industrial Revolution it was known that not every man was ever going to get married, could afford to marry, or chose to get married. You'd never know Jesus said some men made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of God given the frequency with which the "epidemic of singleness" gets discussed.
Having scripts of adult masculinity and femininity and prescribing those scripts is not the same thing as people being able to live them out or live by them. One of the inescapable problems of scripts of masculinity in any culture (not just the culture of "late capitalism") is that men are disposable. The "boys who can shave" may have figured out that they are disposable and want nothing to do with taking on responsibilities they may not have been offered or may not feel are worth sacrificing for. Mark Driscoll's gimmick was predicated on the surmise that if you screamed enough you could shame some of those "boys who can shave" into deciding to take responsibilities upon themselves but the gimmick had nothing like good news for those who would not or could not assume responsibilities.
What I keep seeing over and over from progressive and conservative social commentary is that the scripts for masculinity and femininity either are or aren't the problem in and off themselves. That has not been the problem. The problem isn't even as simple as that "society" deigns to impose one or two scripts that people don't fit into. Gay activists and feminists can point to how there are a variety of scripts within and across cultures to which people can easily conform or not conform at all. Many times people content themselves with pronouncing the scripts themselves as the cause and source of the crises of a society.
Not having enough scripts to account for those who can't attain the prescribed scripts is, I am relatively sure, part of what's at issue. Having more scripts so that if a man or a woman fails to achieve the benchmarks of adult manhood or womanhood or whatever for A, B or C have options via D, E, F and so on. We have had no shortage of household codes in ethical instruction over the millennia. It may be that some of the tensions in contemporary society have to do with the possibility that among the scripts of adulthood on offer from both progressive and conservative punditry the only scripts on offer are the ones where you are supposed to be in charge. You are not supposed to reconcile yourself to being a replaceable cog in the capitalist machine (left) or to being someone who is less than a legendary patriarch (right) but I hope, perhaps, you can see that there is an underlying distinction without a difference.
What makes the scripts of adulthood from the socially conservative Christian side of things seem like an aporia (now there's a buzzword from Marxist theory for you) is that the prescribed scripts, if implemented as widely as social conservatives want, would preclude the kind of culture-making they want. If everyone is pairing off and making babies to be as fruitful and multiply as possible who's going to have time to "make culture"? Augustine had a son, yes, but had Augustine been busy living the new Calvinist best-life-now fulfillment of his masculine potential he would be so busy raising that kid he might not have had time to write City of God. If socially conservative pundits indulge in reductio ad absurdums I can be granted one or two, yes? Certainly J. S. Bach had many children and wrote a lot of music but partisans of mere Christendom may want to appeal to the exceptions among exceptions as the hoped for outcome of the rule.
The disconnect between what parents hope their kids can/may/should achieve as culture warriors and what they discover their capable of may be something evangelicals haven't delved into as a potential ground for a crisis of faith. Expressive individualism is easy to rip on when you're using it as a scapegoat dogma for "them" but what if it's so baked into the conservative side, too, it can't be recognized as a focus in hoped-for legacies of children? A guy like Mark Driscoll could remain a useful case study since he'd say from the pulpit he'd tell his kids "You're Driscolls." In other words, you don't get to be like all those other normal kids because you have a great generations long family legacy to think about because Mark Driscoll is your dad. No, that's not a cue for pop Lutheran bromides about Law because it's not like there have never been nepo-babies in the history of Lutheranism. Depending on how you parse it Johann Sebastian Bach was one of the nepo-babies of generations of composers and that the legacies of nepo-babies is even the overt and explicit point of cultural mandate ambitions parents have for their descendants in Protestant social teaching of the conservative kind.
I remain unconvinced the scripts of adulthood from the progressive/liberal side are better. If anything, per my old post on male disposability, the crisis of the incel seems to be firmly planted on both the progressive and reactionary sides. The man who can't get any is a distillation of the most toxic elements of contemporary society either by dint of toxic masculinity for progressives or the man-child who refuses to grow up for conservatives.
It was one of the things that stuck with me during my Mars Hill years, that the scripts of adult masculinity on offer didn't seem attainable and it didn't even seem desirable to waste time trying to attain them. Somehow I managed to find a place there for years and even had a variety of positive experiences despite being the single guy who never dated. But my experience overall has felt profoundly ambivalent and I have probably written more about Mars Hill than the average person. I didn't know while I was there the extent to which Doug Wilson's scripts of adulthood influenced Driscoll because I read one or two Wilson titles in my Mars Hill years, found them pretty "meh" and ignored Wilson. If I was never cut out to be married of what possible use could Doug Wilson's scripts of masculinity ever even remotely be?
I'm not sure what I think about Brad Edwards' essay overall, but what sticks with me is he brackets Doug Wilson's ideas into a kind of "Captain Hook" take on masculinity. It's a vivid example in its way that Jennifer McKinney's take on evangelical masculinity movements seems like a cardboard cut-out that has not engaged any primary source materials seriously. Mere Orthodoxy might be on course to become the National Review of new Calvinist cultural commentary (it's not my idea, I assure you, but the comparison was made in an off-blog conversation). If even Mere O has a history of regarding things Wilson and Driscoll as of doubtful value regarding scripts of masculinity McKinney's recently published book comes across as having failed, even pretty thoroughly, to make its case based on an engagement with a wide and deep range of primary sources.
It took me writing through this blog post to realize that is what has really stuck with me about Brad Edwards' post. It's not the point in itself so much as realizing that his point flies in the face of McKinney's simplistic take about how emblematic Mark Driscoll's views on masculinity are of conservative evangelicalism. Uh, no. I've been reading Mere Orthodoxy since 2005 and that sort of claim is just indefensible on its face. Sorry. Maybe the shades of gray resemble black but there is some gray in the socially conservative evangelical scene discussing gender and sexuality, as evidenced by intra-evangelical disagreements about the scripts of manhood on offer by the likes of Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll.
German Dzhaparidze: Prelude and Fugue in D minor performed by Esteban colucci
The D minor is up and is worth your time.
Reminds me that I've wanted to blog about/through this cycle for some time but IRL stuff has not been amenable to that in the last few years. But the cycle is easier and easier to hear lately and I really hope that someone, somewhere in publishing decides to get behind this cycle and publish the score.
Wednesday, April 26, 2023
Makoto Shinkai's gorgeous one-trick pony filmography via a review from Nicole Veneto at ArtsFuse
I really enjoyed Makoto Shinkai's film Your Name when it came out. I even saw it in theaters. The director, however, seems to continually do variations on the same core story of a disaster befalls the land and a space and time and sometimes star-crossed pair of love interests have to overcome themselves and connect so as to save lives. Yeah, that was okay in a mystical variation on what amounted to Freaky Friday but ... much as I enjoy Your Name ... the core plot mechanics are still Freaky Friday. I didn't see that the director was veering from from the template in Weathering With You and I haven't bothered to see the newest outing.
And seeing a review like this I'm not likely to get around to it.
The trope of the romantic trophy the hero or heroine secures as a reward for saving time and space has been sufficiently played out in, ahem, other genres here in the United States that I'm not chomping at the bit for anime variations. I have still, after all this time, not written my oft-intended rant "Legend of Entitlement" about what a narcissistic and violent entitled frat bro Korra is despite being female. Let the reader understand, "You kissed me back!" sounds like something a frat rat would say.
Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Noah A. McGee at The Root has a piece about a recent AI generated song that features black artists without any of their participation via voice simulation
The headline reads "AI-Generated Music Is Creating Black Art Without Black Input"
AI has been used to compose in Baroque styles and emulate the works of long-dead composers. AI has been used to replicate all sorts of things. What makes this recent case different is someone used AI to generate an entirely new song from scratch with simulations of the voices of Drake and The Weeknd without either artist having any actual participatory role in the process. As pop musical deep fakes go that does seem pretty extreme.
Being a hobbyist composer and musician myself I don't think I'd ever say the AI trends have been cute and dandy. Your voice is your voice. I don't doubt for a second other people would regard public figures in entertainment industries as public figures whose likenesses may be used to whatever purpose but in this recent case Universal Music Group disagrees.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)