http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/03/on-post-cold-war-deadlock-of-american.html
https://theamericanscholar.org/on-political-correctness/#.WM2ou5XHeUk
...
True diversity means true disagreement. Political correctness exists at public institutions, but it doesn’t dominate them. A friend of mine who went to Columbia and Yale now teaches at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. “When you meet someone at Hunter,” she told me, “you can’t assume they see the world the same way you do.” That’s about as pithy an expression of the problem at selective private colleges as I can imagine. When you meet someone at Columbia or Yale or Scripps or Whitman or any of scores of other institutions, you absolutely can assume they see the world the same way you do. And anyone who threatens to disrupt that cozy situation must be disinvited, reeducated, or silenced. It’s no surprise that the large majority of high-profile PC absurdities take place at elite private schools like Emory or Oberlin or Northwestern.
That same safe assumption, about the points of view of everyone around you, does not pervade selective private campuses alone, of course. It is equally the case among the liberal elite: at the Manhattan dinner party, the Silicon Valley startup, the Seattle coffee shop, the Brookline PTA. (That it is also the case in other realms of society, non-liberal and/or non-elite, is true. It is also no excuse, especially not for people who consider themselves so enlightened.) This is not an accident. Selective private colleges are the training grounds of the liberal elite, and the training in question involves not only formal education for professional success, but also initiation into the folkways of the tribe.
Which means that fancy private colleges have a mission public institutions don’t. People arrive at public schools from a wide range of social locations, and they return to a range that is nearly as wide. The institutional mission is to get them through and into the job market, not to turn them into any particular kind of person. But selective private colleges (which also tend to be a lot smaller than public schools) are in the business of creating a community and, beyond that, a class. “However much diversity Yale’s freshman classes may have,” as one of my students once put it, “its senior classes have far less.”
And this, I believe, is one of the sources of the new revolt among students of color at elite private colleges and universities. The expectation at those institutions has always been that the newcomers whom they deign to admit to the ranks of the blessed, be they Jews in the 1950s or African Americans today, will assimilate to the ways of the blessed. That they will become, as people say, “more white.” That bargain, as uncomfortable as it has always been, was more readily accepted in the past. For various reasons, it seems that it no longer is. Students of color are telling the whites who surround them, No, we aren’t like you, and what’s more, we don’t want to be like you. As very different as their outlook is from that of the white working class, their rejection of the liberal elite is not entirely dissimilar.
Over at Slate there's a piece called "There's Nothing Wrong with Stamping Out Bigoted Speech."
...
Trumpism’s present control of that machinery, as even the harshest critics of political correctness on campus must concede, offers more than a conjectural threat to liberalism’s animating principles, including the belief in the equality of all people before the law and in the eyes of others. But those principles, in truth, have always been threatened. Liberalism comes equipped with a very large self-destruct button. Under liberalism in its purest form, you are permitted to promote bigotry, to argue that certain kinds of people—black people, gay people, Muslims, Jews, women—should be seen as inferior or dangerous. You are free, even, to advocate for their mistreatment and oppression. This is part of the right to free speech and expression. This is also the open back door that Trump walked through, with the forces of a resurgent white nationalism close behind.
...
The notion that speech could be sensibly regulated was the central idea of one of the conservative movement’s ur-texts. God and Man at Yale, authored by the then 25-year-old William F. Buckley Jr., is little more than an extended plea for speech restrictions on campus. “Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect,” Buckley asked. “What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires ‘honest respect’ for any divergent conviction?”
These are sound questions, as much as a campus liberal today might find fault with the targets of his ire. Yale for Buckley was, among other things, insufficiently religious. Members of the faculty, he alleged, had been using “pernicious techniques to undermine the tenets of Christianity.” These “pernicious techniques” included the deployment of one-liners like, “All I can tell about heaven is that it must be awfully crowded there!” This is perhaps one of the earliest documented instances of students being triggered by a professor.
...
That is an interesting irony, as stated ... although maybe it's just a little too pat an observation for the internet. :)
I can't help being ever so slightly pedantic at this point, because liberalism may be distinct from what is sometimes called the libertarian theory of the press. To say that liberalism inherently invited Trump, so to speak, to emerge may not be a premise that all liberals agree with, or even all conservatives. If we're a bit more careful and propose that one particular aspect of the liberal tradition, the libertarian view of the press, made Trump's candidacy in the age of mass media more viable than the mainstream press imagined was possible that statement's much easier to agree with. Because for a liberal to propose that liberalism led to Trump might almost seem like an argument against liberalism, which just seems impossible to take as what's really been proposed by an author at Slate.
It might be apt to say that Buckley was concerned that a particular range of religious beliefs seemed unwelcome at Yale. Given that we "probably" know Buckley has been associated with political conservativism we might venture to propose that Buckley's religion was not merely a variant of Catholicism but perhaps also a variant of civic religion. The intellectual truce that may have been brokered ... or the temporary intellectual ceasefire that happened in the wake of the Thirty Years War may never have entirely ended.
It might seem like an epiphany to Andrew Sullivan that the collegiate scene has a kind of civic religion that he calls "intersectionality". It's not much of a surprise to me, but then I've spent the better part of a decade documenting the life and death of an explicitly religious movement here in the Puget Sound area. I doubt intersectionality is a religion of any kind but it "might" be a relatively observable manifestation of a kind of civic religion. For those unfamiliar with progressive/left criticisms of libertarian views it's possible to get condemned as a champion of neoliberalism and economic inequality in spite of being for marriage equality and any number of blue state causes that religiously conservative people oppose.
If Sullivan were to propose a problem with intersectionality it shouldn't be that it's a kind of religion, it should be something more like this--intersectionality may be a concession that at this point it's not enough to simply self-identify as someone in an oppressed or repressed demographic simply on the basis of a single category. That may have been more easily done in the past when implicit and explicit discrimination or harassment on the basis of sexuality or skin color was considered more socially acceptable to demonstrate in public. It no doubt still happens. Reading reports of as pike in hate crimes or hate speech in Oregon was a glum reminder that people who don't know the white supremacist history of the founding of the state need a primer. The Pacific Northwest has plenty of racism in it in spite of the true blue electoral patterns. If Sullivan wanted to make a case that there's a problem with intersetionality he could have proposed that the kinds of college students who embrace intersectionality may not fully understand that this ideological move permits them a way to differentiate themselves from a mainstream collegiate culture.
William Deresiewicz, quoted earlier, wrote: "... The expectation at those institutions has always been that the newcomers whom they deign to admit to the ranks of the blessed, be they Jews in the 1950s or African Americans today, will assimilate to the ways of the blessed. That they will become, as people say, “more white.” That bargain, as uncomfortable as it has always been, was more readily accepted in the past. For various reasons, it seems that it no longer is. Students of color are telling the whites who surround them, No, we aren’t like you, and what’s more, we don’t want to be like you. As very different as their outlook is from that of the white working class, their rejection of the liberal elite is not entirely dissimilar. ..."
But as I've been musing over the last year or so, what this can also serve to do is to exonerate college students from regarding themselves as dormant or latent participants in the ruling castes of the West.
Intersectionality could be the kind of manifestation of a faux-progressive civic religion in which a woman of color like Beyoncé can be "below" a white married man who works in a call center for a giant corporation and has family roots in a genteel city somewhere. Even if at the moment intersectionality may be an attempt to represent the ways that people can be outside the establishment now if such a thought-form persists in academia it could be mutated into a new set of criteria for membership in the elite. It's not as though elites in the past had any real trouble assimilating diversity into the elite systems. Orientalism was a thing in 19th century music and early2 0th century music, for instance. The kinds of college students who can talk about intersectionality and privilege have the privilege of being able to do so. If someone turned ou tto be the disabled child of a mixed race marriage who tends toward moderately conservative Christian views because Christianity was a common thread across a couple of family lines the trouble with intersectionality as the left and right seem to be seeing it is that the Christian part would be a knock against the disabled mixed race kid part.
The thing I've been wondering about with these civic religions is that the red state and blue state civic religions are not necessarily Christianity in any orthodox or historic form. There's no shortage of people who vote red and blue and self-identify as Christian who will insist otherwise but there's a long-form piece by Peter Beinart at The Atlantic lately on what the increasingly unchurched American populace may be up to these days.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/breaking-faith/517785/
... Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal. And it has contributed to the rise of both Donald Trump and the so-called alt-right movement, whose members see themselves as proponents of white nationalism. As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.
When pundits describe the Americans who sleep in on Sundays, they often conjure left-leaning hipsters. But religious attendance is down among Republicans, too. According to data assembled for me by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the percentage of white Republicans with no religious affiliation has nearly tripled since 1990. This shift helped Trump win the GOP nomination. During the campaign, commentators had a hard time reconciling Trump’s apparent ignorance of Christianity and his history of pro-choice and pro-gay-rights statements with his support from evangelicals. But as Notre Dame’s Geoffrey Layman noted, “Trump does best among evangelicals with one key trait: They don’t really go to church.” A Pew Research Center poll last March found that Trump trailed Ted Cruz by 15 points among Republicans who attended religious services every week. But he led Cruz by a whopping 27 points among those who did not.
One of Beinart's more in-passing comments is that within what's getting known as the alt-right there's more signs of secularism or even revived paganism. This is something I've sometimes come across when I've tried to get some reading in on what's described as the alt right. There are those who regard preserving the roots of, say, English society as not only needing to embrace traditional blood and soil stuff but to do so in ways that embrace the pre-Christian English culture, to try to recover even past millennia of nominal or sincere Christian piety the vestiges of a more purely pagan English past. As noted before at this blog the trouble with identity politics is that people of color can walk this path whether the color they are labeled as is black, brown, red or white. That's kind of a problem in as much as if one form of essentialist ethnic/racial narrative is a kind of hate speech why aren't the others? They could ALL be inherently racialist and racist at their core, after all. Liberalism in some key respects is parasitically dependent on a Judeo-Christian ethos and praxis. The risk of a fully secularized discourse is that the respective mythologies of the ethnic groups who can't see eye to eye won't have any mediating shared narrative or history. If science itself can be viewed as in the thrall of whatever companies are willing to pay for whatever results they want (let's not forget that the crises in the social sciences haven't exactly gone away)
The Civil Rights movement, as Beinart's article noted, was able to rely on a shared Christian understanding of the human condition.
...
Black Lives Matter activists sometimes accuse the black Church of sexism, homophobia, and complacency in the face of racial injustice. For instance, Patrisse Cullors, one of the movement’s founders, grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness but says she became alienated by the fact that the elders were “all men.” In a move that faintly echoes the way some in the alt-right have traded Christianity for religious traditions rooted in pagan Europe, Cullors has embraced the Nigerian religion of Ifa. To be sure, her motivations are diametrically opposed to the alt-right’s. Cullors wants a spiritual foundation on which to challenge white, male supremacy; the pagans of the alt-right are looking for a spiritual basis on which to fortify it. But both are seeking religions rooted in racial ancestry and disengaging from Christianity—which, although profoundly implicated in America’s apartheid history, has provided some common vocabulary across the color line. [emphasis added]
How effective is identifying Christianity with white male patriarchal power going to be in two generations if the alt right continues to have an ascendancy through which it also embraces an explicitly neo-pagan or anti-Christian civic religion? It's easy to scapegoat white evangelicals for having voted for Trump as if gerrymandering and other political moves made by the GOP didn't play a cumulative role in Trump gaining the Oval Office. The trouble with the scapegoating could be, besides the simple issue of the scapegoating itself, that it may turn out that the kinds of people who decided to back Trump may not be as evangelical as sometimes advertised. Lest this seem like a case of no true Scotsman, in the somewhat unusual case of coming across Trump voters in the Puget Sound they have cropped up in what, per Beinart's article, could be desdribed as dechurched or nominally evangelical types.
One of Jesus' parables was about the Good Samaritan and provided a sharp teaching on how you don't get to decide who your neighbor isn't. It's possible to be formally diametrically opposed to the alt right while embracing a religious path that could be exemplified by some of the alt right, that salvation is for those who have the same skin color you do.
More from Beinart's piece:
...
Black Lives Matter activists may be justified in spurning an insufficiently militant Church. But when you combine their post-Christian perspective with the post-Christian perspective growing inside the GOP, it’s easy to imagine American politics becoming more and more vicious.
In his book Twilight of the Elites, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes divides American politics between “institutionalists,” who believe in preserving and adapting the political and economic system, and “insurrectionists,” who believe it’s rotten to the core. The 2016 election represents an extraordinary shift in power from the former to the latter. The loss of manufacturing jobs has made Americans more insurrectionist. So have the Iraq War, the financial crisis, and a black president’s inability to stop the police from killing unarmed African Americans. And so has disengagement from organized religion.
Maybe it’s the values of hierarchy, authority, and tradition that churches instill. Maybe religion builds habits and networks that help people better weather national traumas, and thus retain their faith that the system works. For whatever reason, secularization isn’t easing political conflict. It’s making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum. [emphasis added]
Of course it will be even more convulsive and zero-sum. If there is no resurrection of the dead and this material life is all we will ever know then the more people realize what a zero-sum game is at stake in the human condition the more those who have will have to justify why they deserve it (and most likely do so in the West on the basis of liberal education as credentialing) and the more those who don't have will find it impossible to accept the prestige system as it is. When this pie is all there is it becomes all the more pressing why your slice of the pie is as big or as small as it is and whether or not, so far as you can tell, you've been given a piece of the pie at all. Why wouldn't things get more convulsive and zero-sum if we all accept as given that nobody exists on purpose, that everybody's going to die, and that there's no grander over-arching purpose to what we call life than whatever we manage to get ahold of while we live it?
Saturday, March 18, 2017
links for the weekend: The Atlantic muses on how American innovation might be complacency; Gopnik at the New Yorker briefly pretends liberalism might be on the wrong side of history; thoughts within the left on the gulf between the feminism off the 99 and the 1
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/did-american-complacency-lead-to-trump/518586/
Americans have fallen in love with the idea of their entrepreneurial spirit. Silicon Valley seems to have replaced New York City as the country’s metropolitan mascot of dynamism. Innovation is the unofficial buzzword of corporate America, and news organizations heap praise on the zillionaire startup heroes of the Millennial generation.
in the realm of effective clickbait, Washington Post notes a NY assemblymen has proposed a bill that could create an American "right to be forgotten" on internet search engines.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/15/n-y-bill-would-require-people-to-remove-inaccurate-irrelevant-inadequate-or-excessive-statements-about-others/?utm_term=.9c93b60e8f8f
http://nyassembly.gov/leg/?term=2017&bn=S04561
Seeing as one of the unique aspects of our freedom of speech culture, in legal terms, that makes us different from European legal precedents is that we don't have a "right to be forgotten" it'd be nice to keep that element. Alastair Roberts wrote a bit about the problems of viewing freedom of speech entirely in negative terms earlier so I don't feel like linking back to that just now, but regulars of this blog probably already knowI think the "right to be forgotten" precedent in European culture is not something the United States press and blogging culture needs. I spent some time at a church where a guy used to preach regularly about the importance of legacy. Part of the importance of legacy is not being forgotten so by extension no one who cares about legacy should WANT to be forgotten. :)
Also in a clickbait realm (it's all clickbait but not all clickbait is of the same flavor) Adam Gopnik has
"Is Liberalism on the Wrong Side of History?" Don't think liberalism as "blue state" but as the Western tradition of the last few centuries.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/are-liberals-on-the-wrong-side-of-history
...As in painting and drawing, manual dexterity counted for as much as deep thoughts—more, in truth, for everyone had the deep thoughts, and it took dexterity to make telescopes that really worked. Mokyr knows Asian history, and shows, in a truly humbling display of erudition, that in China the minds evolved but not the makers. The Chinese enlightenment happened, but it was strictly a thinker’s enlightenment, where Mandarins never talked much to the manufacturers. In this account, Voltaire and Rousseau are mere vapor, rising from a steam engine as it races forward. It was the perpetual conversation between technicians and thinkers that made the Enlightenment advance. TED talks are a licensed subject for satire, but in Mokyr’s view TED talks are, in effect, what separate modernity from antiquity and the West from the East. Guys who think big thoughts talking to guys who make cool machines—that’s where the leap happens.
So if we pivot from The New Yorker to The New Republic we get a proposal that if there's a problem in liberalism it's a problem that can be described in terms of privilege.
https://newrepublic.com/article/140985/perils-privilege-phoebe-maltz-bovy-book-excerpt
It was only in 2016 that politics went full privilege turn. The Democratic contest was all about “privilege,” with Bernie Sanders’s and Hillary Clinton’s supporters incessantly accusing the other side of supporting their candidate because of their (that is, the supporters’) unearned advantages. Privilege accusation, however, is by no means limited to intra-left battles. Conservatives regularly accuse liberals of unchecked privilege, and they have been doing so for years. The old “limousine liberal” cliché became the ideological underpinning of intellectual conservatism. In 2010, political scientist (and controversial The Bell Curve coauthor) Charles Murray wrote in The Washington Post that “the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them—which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege.” This insight led him, two years later, to produce a “bubble” quiz, which if anything anticipated the viral privilege-checklist phenomenon. It asked (and asks; a reissue appeared in 2016) well-educated white liberals to admit they had no idea what NASCAR was, and that they thus were too out of touch to know what’s good for the country. ...
A theme that could be extrapolated from this is that what passes for feminism in the contemporary American age may not be feminism for all women but a feminism for the one percent, to wit, the Clintons and Beyonces of the world.
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-case-against-contemporary-feminism?intcid=mod-latest
http://hyperallergic.com/364474/the-sculpture-of-a-fearless-girl-on-wall-street-is-fake-corporate-feminism/
https://newrepublic.com/article/141261/ariel-levys-infuriating-memoir-privilege-entitlement
...
As far as [Ariel] Levy is concerned, the fruits feminism owed her were a vibrant career, a marriage, and the ability to bear a child. The fact that one week she thought she had these things but the next week, she didn’t, is the book’s central action, the reality treated as both exemplary and instructive for readers who apparently would otherwise not believe that “we can’t have it all.” “It’s all so over-the-top,” she writes, referring to her divorce, the sale of her house, and the end of her pregnancy. “Am I in an Italian opera? A Greek tragedy?” While surely she suffered, nothing about the vehicles of that suffering is rare or unexpected. Millions of Americans have divorced; millions more than once. As many as ten million Americans lost their homes in the recession alone, and it’s estimated that up to a quarter of all pregnancies result in miscarriage. People in Greek tragedies kill their children, accidentally marry their mothers, and commit suicide; they don’t amicably separate from their partners before flying to South Africa on a self-devised writing assignment for their high-paying job.
...
In a phrase, Levy is a member of one of the ruling castes, to use the useful old left/Marxist way of putting things. The debates about what privilege is and who has it could be a lot of smoke or a lot of heat without light, but it could also highlight that in educational terms the sorts of people most likely to recognize privilege may be those who have ideological incentives to exonerate themselves of having the privilege they have.
I've been writing off and on about how the old coalitions on the Left and the Right have crumbled in the last thirty years. It can be too easy for those ensconced within either the bubble of the left or the bubble of the right to presume that the other team has a unified front, neither side seems to have a unified coalition any more. For want of a better way to describe things, being unified out of spite for whatever you think the other team stands for is not the same thing as sharing values in common. D. G. Hart had a little book about how the coalition on the right that Reagan held together briefly, so to speak, crumbled in the wake of the Cold War's end. A comparable alliance on the left seems to have, at length, also crumbled. Part of what that means is that the feminism that holds Clinton or Beyoncé as emblems of girl power or the sisterhood may discover that even from within the left, to say nothing of the right, women may come to regard the basking in the power and privilege of class will not suffice.
I'm not particularly liberal/left in my own tendencies, as regular readers will have worked out, but it's been fascinating to read across the political spectrum and get the impression that if a Trump appealed to angry white reactionaries on one side that Sanders could appeal to angry white radicals (and others) on the other. I do try to read across the span between Jacobin and The Weekly Standard as I can. That the DNC didn't let Sanders get the nomination by dint of late arrival makes sense at one level, but at another level the DNC's refusal to let a populist agitator hijack the game may signal that the DNC has been managed by a ruling elite that doesn't want a populist agitator to have influence. In other words, it's not a false equivalence to suggest that the DNC liberal/left may ultimately represent entrenched power preserving its own collective interests over against the public good within the blue machine as has been said of the red machine. It was easy last year for people within the blue scene to snort that the Republicans were stuck with Trump back when it seemed certain Trump couldn't possibly win, back when the assumption seemed to be that there was no way Trump was going to win the Electoral College system. And now who is stuck with Trump?
There may be those who regard the election of Trump as an apocalyptic event. There's two ways of understanding apocalyptic among many. Much of the time in American popular imagination, perhaps due to some strange mixture of dispensationalist/futurist thought or residual postmillennialism or something else, presents us with the apocalyptic as the end of all things. The world as we know it comes to an end when Skynet becomes self aware. Authors at local weeklies can talk about how in Trump's America it no longer feels safe to be a woman even though just ten months ago it may not have been any more safe to be a woman in the Seattle area than it has been since. But the apocalyptic imagination proposes that an era has changed, and often in popular imagination that era change is for the worse.
But the apocalyptic genre does not only ever deal with what Christians call eschatological topics, the things of the end. Apocalyptic can also be a kind of theological and political idiom that reveals the true nature of what things are. Cal P mentioned this over at a blog post earlier and it seems useful to mention now, the apocalyptic idiom having both an eschatological and a revelatory component that we should keep distinct may help us in an era of Trump. It's obviously not "the end" here, since people can read stuff on the internet. But at another level Trump may constitute an apocalyptic moment revealing to blue state America what the real nature of the political order has always been. But it seems that to go by debates and differences within the liberal/left scene there's room for debate as to whether the liberal/left has recognized its own role in this apocalyptic transition.
TO put it dryly, I've become jaded about the apocalyptic panic of red and blue partisans in the last twenty years. Obama did not replace the dollar with the amero. Christians did not get sent to FEMA camps. Conversely, George Bush 2 did not suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, appoint himself president for life and set out to invade Iran.
Hollywood may have sold us and itself a magical vision of what passes for journalism and truth-telling. During the years I was documenting the history of Mars Hill and tracking things it could seem as though there were people wanting a silver bullet, a single incontrovertible revelation of this or that that, once revealed, could bring the entire empire crumbling down. That's Hollywood fantasy, and it's ultimately a power fantasy of an egregious and deceptive nature. In the post-mortem of Driscoll's Seattle empire the observation was rightly made that it was no one thing that brought him down.
What seems missing in both the liberal reaction to Trump and the conservative reaction to Trump can seem like a crisis of core principles. Liberalism of .... what? Liberalism can be thought of as a tradition but also as a trend. What is being preserved? The puzzle is more or less comparable on the other side, conservatives are trying to conserve .... what, exactly? Despite the labels liberal and conservative or even radical and reactionary, it's as if everyone has gone into reactive reactionary mode since November. What are we trying to conserve and why? Are we sure it's worth conserving? One of my progressive friends told me that if, for instance, the global ecological crisis is what it seems to be is there really a point to a redistributive economic program if our global economy needs to shift away from being dependent on fossil fuels in the long run? That can seem like a fair point. Redistributing the economic pie in the post-industrial West could seem like a fool's errand if the global ecosphere will be harmed by a continual reliance on fossil fuels. And if that's true then what's the value in pushing for the kinds of socially progressive aims the Western left has been shooting for? Letting more post-industrial Westerners enjoy a higher standard of living that may be the doom of the global ecosphere? If that's the case then the worst thing to be is a asocial progressive in the contemporary Western style if the long-term goal is a more sustainable ecologically informed approach to social life. The priesthood of social progress and the arts could, in this kind of light, turn out to be the real bad guys regardless of red and blue concerns.
We've had years of Jon Stewart or other comedians providing political commentary being heroes to liberals and leftists and yet the signal aspect of that priesthood seems to have been that for the most part the priests and prophets stayed out of formal political power and stuck to the priesthood, so to speak. There might be exceptions like Al Franken, of course. Hollywood tradition seems to be that the priests don't seek the royal scepter but anoint those worthy of receiving it. Preferably a Kennedy or a Clinton, perhaps. You don't seize the scepter for yourself because it's unbecoming. Or at least that seems to be the blue state variant of civic religion. The red state variant of civic religion has shown us it has a different set of convictions. When a red state priest gains the level of brand recognition and popularity typical of a blue state priest it seems the conviction is that reaching for the royal scepter is almost a requirement.
It's hard to shake a general loathing of the two-party system at this point. These two civic religions will not be satisfied with compromise. Nor will the red and blue civic religions grant sustained internal criticism. This has nothing to do with the fact that substantial and sustained internal criticism has been happening within the left and right in small ways; it's more about how what we seem stuck with is the polarity of propaganda campaigns, how for the red and the blue the coherence and sustainability of the internal program is dependent on the assumption of the other team being already unified. It becomes the basis from which to ignore the possibility of internal criticism because the assumption is that if we don't all get on the same page NOW the enemy will win.
That mentality had a firm place in Mars Hill over the course of a decade. Once that viewpoint could be dropped internal criticism and division did happen. It needed to happen.
But a comparable internal critique of a gap between stated first principles and real-world behavior seems off the table for the left and right establishments in the US.
Americans have fallen in love with the idea of their entrepreneurial spirit. Silicon Valley seems to have replaced New York City as the country’s metropolitan mascot of dynamism. Innovation is the unofficial buzzword of corporate America, and news organizations heap praise on the zillionaire startup heroes of the Millennial generation.
But this is a mirage, according to the economist and popular writer Tyler Cowen, whose new book is The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. In fact, the nation's dynamism is in the dumps. Americans move less than they used to. They start fewer companies. Caught in the hypnotic undertow of TV and video games, they are less likely to go outside. Even the federal government itself has transformed from an investment vehicle, which once spent a large share of its money on infrastructure and research, to an insurance conglomerate, which spends more than half its money on health care and Social Security. A nation of risk-takers has become a nation of risk-mitigation experts.
...
The sign of a good book is that it helps readers see the world through a useful lens. Cowen’s book is a full of “huh, I hadn’t thought about it like that” moments, even on topics that I’ve spent years thinking about. For example, in the last few years, many people, like myself, have argued that the American Dream is dying in America, while it seems to be flourishing more in Canada and northern Europe. But Cowen argues persuasively that many international comparisons fail to account for the fact that lots of people are achieving the American Dream—they just weren’t born in America. “When there is mobility in the American labor market, it comes disproportionately from Mexicans and Mexican Americans,” he writes. “Denmark hasn’t elevated nearly as many immigrants, in either absolute or percentage terms, as America.” In other words, America didn’t completely lose the dream. Rather, the only dreamers left are immigrants.
...in the realm of effective clickbait, Washington Post notes a NY assemblymen has proposed a bill that could create an American "right to be forgotten" on internet search engines.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/15/n-y-bill-would-require-people-to-remove-inaccurate-irrelevant-inadequate-or-excessive-statements-about-others/?utm_term=.9c93b60e8f8f
http://nyassembly.gov/leg/?term=2017&bn=S04561
Seeing as one of the unique aspects of our freedom of speech culture, in legal terms, that makes us different from European legal precedents is that we don't have a "right to be forgotten" it'd be nice to keep that element. Alastair Roberts wrote a bit about the problems of viewing freedom of speech entirely in negative terms earlier so I don't feel like linking back to that just now, but regulars of this blog probably already knowI think the "right to be forgotten" precedent in European culture is not something the United States press and blogging culture needs. I spent some time at a church where a guy used to preach regularly about the importance of legacy. Part of the importance of legacy is not being forgotten so by extension no one who cares about legacy should WANT to be forgotten. :)
Also in a clickbait realm (it's all clickbait but not all clickbait is of the same flavor) Adam Gopnik has
"Is Liberalism on the Wrong Side of History?" Don't think liberalism as "blue state" but as the Western tradition of the last few centuries.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/are-liberals-on-the-wrong-side-of-history
...As in painting and drawing, manual dexterity counted for as much as deep thoughts—more, in truth, for everyone had the deep thoughts, and it took dexterity to make telescopes that really worked. Mokyr knows Asian history, and shows, in a truly humbling display of erudition, that in China the minds evolved but not the makers. The Chinese enlightenment happened, but it was strictly a thinker’s enlightenment, where Mandarins never talked much to the manufacturers. In this account, Voltaire and Rousseau are mere vapor, rising from a steam engine as it races forward. It was the perpetual conversation between technicians and thinkers that made the Enlightenment advance. TED talks are a licensed subject for satire, but in Mokyr’s view TED talks are, in effect, what separate modernity from antiquity and the West from the East. Guys who think big thoughts talking to guys who make cool machines—that’s where the leap happens.
The history that Mokyr details can be seen as a story of gradually decreased metaphysical illusion, with ineffable spirit being driven, by turns, out of the cosmos, the biological tree, and the human mind. In the final reduction, the idea of the “human” itself may vanish into algorithms and programs. The coolest machine of all thinks its big thoughts for itself.
This is the view of Yuval Noah Harari, a lecturer at the Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, and the author of “Sapiens,” a bracingly unsentimental history of humankind, which was praised by everyone from Jared Diamond to President Obama. “Homo Deus” extends Harari’s argument about man’s fate far into the future. The first fifty or so pages go by smoothly, with a confident, convincing account of the transformations that have made the world less treacherous than ever before. He reprises, in rosy if not Pinkerian hues, the long peace and our advance toward an era of declining violence; we moved from an age where divine authority sponsored our institutions and values to a human-centered age of liberal individualism, where values were self-generated. Then he announces his bald thesis: that “once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end, and a completely new process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend.”
...
A reader can’t help noting that anti-liberal polemics, today as in the lurid polemical pasts that Mishra revisits, always have more force and gusto than liberalism’s defenses have ever had. Best-sellers tend to have big pictures, secret histories, charismatic characters, guilty parties, plots discovered, occult secrets unlocked. Voltaire’s done it! The Singularity is upon us! The World is flat! Since scientific liberalism of the kind Mokyr details believes that history doesn’t have a preordained plot, and that the individual case, not the enveloping essence, is the only quantum that history provides, it is hard for it to dramatize itself in quite this way. The middle way is not the way of melodrama. (That’s why long novels are the classic liberal medium, and why the best one is called “Middlemarch.”)
Beneath all the anti-liberal rhetoric is an unquestioned insistence: that the way in which our societies seem to have gone wrong is evidence of a fatal flaw somewhere in the systems we’ve inherited. This is so quickly agreed on and so widely accepted that it seems perverse to dispute it. But do causes and effects work quite so neatly, or do we search for a cause because the effect is upon us? We can make a false idol of causality. Looking at the rise of Trump, the fall of Europe, one sees a handful of contingencies that, arriving in a slightly different way, would have broken a very different pane.
So if we pivot from The New Yorker to The New Republic we get a proposal that if there's a problem in liberalism it's a problem that can be described in terms of privilege.
https://newrepublic.com/article/140985/perils-privilege-phoebe-maltz-bovy-book-excerpt
It was only in 2016 that politics went full privilege turn. The Democratic contest was all about “privilege,” with Bernie Sanders’s and Hillary Clinton’s supporters incessantly accusing the other side of supporting their candidate because of their (that is, the supporters’) unearned advantages. Privilege accusation, however, is by no means limited to intra-left battles. Conservatives regularly accuse liberals of unchecked privilege, and they have been doing so for years. The old “limousine liberal” cliché became the ideological underpinning of intellectual conservatism. In 2010, political scientist (and controversial The Bell Curve coauthor) Charles Murray wrote in The Washington Post that “the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them—which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege.” This insight led him, two years later, to produce a “bubble” quiz, which if anything anticipated the viral privilege-checklist phenomenon. It asked (and asks; a reissue appeared in 2016) well-educated white liberals to admit they had no idea what NASCAR was, and that they thus were too out of touch to know what’s good for the country. ...
A theme that could be extrapolated from this is that what passes for feminism in the contemporary American age may not be feminism for all women but a feminism for the one percent, to wit, the Clintons and Beyonces of the world.
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-case-against-contemporary-feminism?intcid=mod-latest
http://hyperallergic.com/364474/the-sculpture-of-a-fearless-girl-on-wall-street-is-fake-corporate-feminism/
https://newrepublic.com/article/141261/ariel-levys-infuriating-memoir-privilege-entitlement
...
As far as [Ariel] Levy is concerned, the fruits feminism owed her were a vibrant career, a marriage, and the ability to bear a child. The fact that one week she thought she had these things but the next week, she didn’t, is the book’s central action, the reality treated as both exemplary and instructive for readers who apparently would otherwise not believe that “we can’t have it all.” “It’s all so over-the-top,” she writes, referring to her divorce, the sale of her house, and the end of her pregnancy. “Am I in an Italian opera? A Greek tragedy?” While surely she suffered, nothing about the vehicles of that suffering is rare or unexpected. Millions of Americans have divorced; millions more than once. As many as ten million Americans lost their homes in the recession alone, and it’s estimated that up to a quarter of all pregnancies result in miscarriage. People in Greek tragedies kill their children, accidentally marry their mothers, and commit suicide; they don’t amicably separate from their partners before flying to South Africa on a self-devised writing assignment for their high-paying job.
...
In a phrase, Levy is a member of one of the ruling castes, to use the useful old left/Marxist way of putting things. The debates about what privilege is and who has it could be a lot of smoke or a lot of heat without light, but it could also highlight that in educational terms the sorts of people most likely to recognize privilege may be those who have ideological incentives to exonerate themselves of having the privilege they have.
I've been writing off and on about how the old coalitions on the Left and the Right have crumbled in the last thirty years. It can be too easy for those ensconced within either the bubble of the left or the bubble of the right to presume that the other team has a unified front, neither side seems to have a unified coalition any more. For want of a better way to describe things, being unified out of spite for whatever you think the other team stands for is not the same thing as sharing values in common. D. G. Hart had a little book about how the coalition on the right that Reagan held together briefly, so to speak, crumbled in the wake of the Cold War's end. A comparable alliance on the left seems to have, at length, also crumbled. Part of what that means is that the feminism that holds Clinton or Beyoncé as emblems of girl power or the sisterhood may discover that even from within the left, to say nothing of the right, women may come to regard the basking in the power and privilege of class will not suffice.
I'm not particularly liberal/left in my own tendencies, as regular readers will have worked out, but it's been fascinating to read across the political spectrum and get the impression that if a Trump appealed to angry white reactionaries on one side that Sanders could appeal to angry white radicals (and others) on the other. I do try to read across the span between Jacobin and The Weekly Standard as I can. That the DNC didn't let Sanders get the nomination by dint of late arrival makes sense at one level, but at another level the DNC's refusal to let a populist agitator hijack the game may signal that the DNC has been managed by a ruling elite that doesn't want a populist agitator to have influence. In other words, it's not a false equivalence to suggest that the DNC liberal/left may ultimately represent entrenched power preserving its own collective interests over against the public good within the blue machine as has been said of the red machine. It was easy last year for people within the blue scene to snort that the Republicans were stuck with Trump back when it seemed certain Trump couldn't possibly win, back when the assumption seemed to be that there was no way Trump was going to win the Electoral College system. And now who is stuck with Trump?
There may be those who regard the election of Trump as an apocalyptic event. There's two ways of understanding apocalyptic among many. Much of the time in American popular imagination, perhaps due to some strange mixture of dispensationalist/futurist thought or residual postmillennialism or something else, presents us with the apocalyptic as the end of all things. The world as we know it comes to an end when Skynet becomes self aware. Authors at local weeklies can talk about how in Trump's America it no longer feels safe to be a woman even though just ten months ago it may not have been any more safe to be a woman in the Seattle area than it has been since. But the apocalyptic imagination proposes that an era has changed, and often in popular imagination that era change is for the worse.
But the apocalyptic genre does not only ever deal with what Christians call eschatological topics, the things of the end. Apocalyptic can also be a kind of theological and political idiom that reveals the true nature of what things are. Cal P mentioned this over at a blog post earlier and it seems useful to mention now, the apocalyptic idiom having both an eschatological and a revelatory component that we should keep distinct may help us in an era of Trump. It's obviously not "the end" here, since people can read stuff on the internet. But at another level Trump may constitute an apocalyptic moment revealing to blue state America what the real nature of the political order has always been. But it seems that to go by debates and differences within the liberal/left scene there's room for debate as to whether the liberal/left has recognized its own role in this apocalyptic transition.
TO put it dryly, I've become jaded about the apocalyptic panic of red and blue partisans in the last twenty years. Obama did not replace the dollar with the amero. Christians did not get sent to FEMA camps. Conversely, George Bush 2 did not suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, appoint himself president for life and set out to invade Iran.
Hollywood may have sold us and itself a magical vision of what passes for journalism and truth-telling. During the years I was documenting the history of Mars Hill and tracking things it could seem as though there were people wanting a silver bullet, a single incontrovertible revelation of this or that that, once revealed, could bring the entire empire crumbling down. That's Hollywood fantasy, and it's ultimately a power fantasy of an egregious and deceptive nature. In the post-mortem of Driscoll's Seattle empire the observation was rightly made that it was no one thing that brought him down.
What seems missing in both the liberal reaction to Trump and the conservative reaction to Trump can seem like a crisis of core principles. Liberalism of .... what? Liberalism can be thought of as a tradition but also as a trend. What is being preserved? The puzzle is more or less comparable on the other side, conservatives are trying to conserve .... what, exactly? Despite the labels liberal and conservative or even radical and reactionary, it's as if everyone has gone into reactive reactionary mode since November. What are we trying to conserve and why? Are we sure it's worth conserving? One of my progressive friends told me that if, for instance, the global ecological crisis is what it seems to be is there really a point to a redistributive economic program if our global economy needs to shift away from being dependent on fossil fuels in the long run? That can seem like a fair point. Redistributing the economic pie in the post-industrial West could seem like a fool's errand if the global ecosphere will be harmed by a continual reliance on fossil fuels. And if that's true then what's the value in pushing for the kinds of socially progressive aims the Western left has been shooting for? Letting more post-industrial Westerners enjoy a higher standard of living that may be the doom of the global ecosphere? If that's the case then the worst thing to be is a asocial progressive in the contemporary Western style if the long-term goal is a more sustainable ecologically informed approach to social life. The priesthood of social progress and the arts could, in this kind of light, turn out to be the real bad guys regardless of red and blue concerns.
We've had years of Jon Stewart or other comedians providing political commentary being heroes to liberals and leftists and yet the signal aspect of that priesthood seems to have been that for the most part the priests and prophets stayed out of formal political power and stuck to the priesthood, so to speak. There might be exceptions like Al Franken, of course. Hollywood tradition seems to be that the priests don't seek the royal scepter but anoint those worthy of receiving it. Preferably a Kennedy or a Clinton, perhaps. You don't seize the scepter for yourself because it's unbecoming. Or at least that seems to be the blue state variant of civic religion. The red state variant of civic religion has shown us it has a different set of convictions. When a red state priest gains the level of brand recognition and popularity typical of a blue state priest it seems the conviction is that reaching for the royal scepter is almost a requirement.
It's hard to shake a general loathing of the two-party system at this point. These two civic religions will not be satisfied with compromise. Nor will the red and blue civic religions grant sustained internal criticism. This has nothing to do with the fact that substantial and sustained internal criticism has been happening within the left and right in small ways; it's more about how what we seem stuck with is the polarity of propaganda campaigns, how for the red and the blue the coherence and sustainability of the internal program is dependent on the assumption of the other team being already unified. It becomes the basis from which to ignore the possibility of internal criticism because the assumption is that if we don't all get on the same page NOW the enemy will win.
That mentality had a firm place in Mars Hill over the course of a decade. Once that viewpoint could be dropped internal criticism and division did happen. It needed to happen.
But a comparable internal critique of a gap between stated first principles and real-world behavior seems off the table for the left and right establishments in the US.
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
links with a theme, the kleinmeister factories of Russian music in the late 19th century and French cinema here and now, plus the loss of classical music criticism in mainstream publications
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2007/01/the_kleinmeister_factory_then.html
...
Kleinmeisters: an early 21st-century typology of the term would be easy to delineate. Kleinmeisters are those composers who get dozens of orchestra commissions, especially for concertos, and hundreds of performances. Most of them, virtually all of them, are very nice people – naturally, since they’ve made careers out of their ability to accommodate. (The younger generation of kleinmeisters is astonishingly good-looking.) Because the major-paper critics are part of the system, the kleinmeisters get incredibly positive reviews in the top 15 or 20 newspapers and music magazines. They excel at two genres: the ten-minute concert opener with lots of brass and percussive momentum, and the concerto whose solo part is visibly at the limits of endurance. Their music thrills with its virtuosity, its patent sense of difficulty; it is neither remembered nor asked for afterward. Frequently their performances are greeted with a vindicating roar of applause that is taken to attest to its quality, but is really either intended for the poor soloist having survived his ordeal, or else a reflection of the piece’s noise.
What’s lacking with the kleinmeisters is any sense that their music is taken seriously. It is praised, usually in vague and unconsciously patronizing terms (“X really knows her way around an orchestra”), but it is not discussed. Its methods are not problematized. It may be considered thorny, but no one pretends it presents a new perceptual paradigm. Reviews most often cite as praiseworthy its orchestration – in other words, its professional clothing, not its content. Most of all, there is no buzz about the kleinmeisters among younger composers. Harbison, Chen Yi, Penderecki, Higdon, Zwilich, Sierra, Paulus, get to command vast musical resources, but no young composers heatedly argue the merits of their pieces. Their names don’t come up in internet discussions. No one acts as though they hold any key to the future. After all, these composers write in styles in which far more vivid music had already been written decades ago. The kleinmeisters of 19th-century Russia were ridiculed by the musical intelligentsia outside that circle, but today’s American kleinmeisters have a whole Potemkin music scene built to support them and protect them from reality – reality being that their music is drab, unoriginal, and cared about by no one, for good reason.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/a-documentary-that-explains-the-dearth-of-innovative-young-french-filmmakers
If the French Ministry of Culture were to hold hearings on why there are so few innovative young French filmmakers today, Claire Simon’s documentary “The Graduation” (“Le Concours,” better translated as “The Entrance Exam”) could be Exhibit A. (It played last fall in the DOC NYC series and this past weekend at the True/False Film Fest, which is where I saw it.) It’s entirely possible that France’s movie-doldrums are merely a passing chill and that there’s an underground current in the French film world that’s soon to burst forth with inventive energy. But, for the moment, it’s hard to avoid noticing that France hasn’t produced a historic director in three decades.
Many excellent French movies have been made in that time; many talented directors have arrived on the scene with noteworthy débuts—and most of them have become quickly less audacious after a first film or two. Some exceptional filmmakers have built unusual careers on the margins of the system; some have worked within the system to bring distinctive worlds to life; none have revolutionized the art. For the most part, France’s filmmakers get old while they’re still young, normalized and formatted by a rigid system of financing and production, which is embodied in the hurdle-hopping that Simon shows prospective film students enduring at France’s most prestigious film school, La Fémis.
...
The most original filmmaking is comprehensively original—as creative in terms of financing, administration, and methods of production and post-production as in directorial imagination. The ways of working, the inventiveness that creates a new mode of organization and new techniques behind the camera, are reflected in the originality of the film itself. The fuller the existing system that young filmmakers must slot themselves into, the thinner the scope of their attention, the narrower their spectrum of innovation, and the less likely that they’ll be able to innovate radically within it. Seeing, in Simon’s documentary, the directing candidates forced to analyze a scene, submit a dossier, step on a set and direct a dictated scene, is like watching the training of hired hands rather than original artists—people better suited to writing grant applications than scripts, better suited to following orders than creating new worlds, to playing the urbane part of a director in meetings and interviews than actually being one
I think Brody's crazy to think Susan Vernon was the hero of Love & Friendship. Even if she was the protagonist in that film there was no real room for doubt in Austen's tale or even in Stillman's adaptation of it that Lady Susan was an unusually nasty piece of work.
But then it seemed last year The New Yorker staff spent the whole year telling their readership to vote for Clinton and then spent months doing book-of-the-month blurbs about books that supposedly predicted the rise of Trump. For the mainstream fourth estate to have botched predicting an outcome so badly it can sometimes seem as though what we'll lose if we lose the freedom of the press will be sadly negligible. What if the critics themselves are susceptible to those vices of the life of the mind they regret to document in the artists of our era?
Sure, we're losing arts critics left and right ...
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-fate-of-the-critic-in-the-clickbait-age
...
Cultural criticism is a form of journalism—odd journalism, but journalism nonetheless. The Times film critic A. O. Scott mounted a vibrant defense of this sour science in his recent book “Better Living Through Criticism.” He writes, “As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged either toward the defensive group identity of fanhood or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism.” The role of the critic, Scott says, is to resist the manufactured consensus—to interrogate the successful, to exalt the unknown, to argue for ambiguity and complexity. Virgil Thomson immortally defined criticism as “the only antidote we have to paid publicity.”
But, bah. The role of the mainstream critic at an established publication is to manufacture the consensus.
Maybe people in the smaller-scale press have a chance at formulating counter-consensus or whatever you want to call that, but once you're writing for The New Yorker or a similarly large-scale prestige publication your work is what establishes the consensus in critical terms. Yes, yes, critics can dissent that Michael Bay's movies make so much money and that we're on a fifth Transformers film now. Sure, there can be requisite complaints about how Disney keeps raiding the vaults to remake stuff and who's going to complain that much that Emma Watson is Belle now? We've got ourselves a live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell coming along ... which I might end up watching out of curiosity in spite of the fact that I have thought since day one of the original anime release it was a seriously over-hyped film. There are good reasons Oshii is not as famous as Hayao Miyazaki is here in the West or even in Japan.
...
Besides, Thomson's bromide forgets that an antidote to paid publicity is exceptionally bad word-of-mouth.
...
Critics may tell themselves their role is to stand athwart popularity shouting "stop!" but that seems too self-aggrandizing an approach. I've been less than impressed by the A. O. Scott variation of criticism as the art of the voice stuff. I'm one of those dour Calvinist Presbyterian types so whether I'm reading a Presbyterian or a Marxist I do appreciate that both of these sorts of people care about what the content of the art work is. I might disagree utterly with Adorno on jazz but I don't begrudge Adorno's concern that whatever art proposes to address should have something to do with truth. Ironically Francis Schaeffer would have argued ore or less the same thing.
If anything its the critics who are most likely to be champions of a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. People who are purists about punk or rap or country or blues or mid-century jazz or Baroque music are not necessarily going to be demonstrating the kind of "shallow, half-ironic eclecticism" that could be easily displayed by a critic. I'm not necessarily suggesting Alex Ross has that kind of problem. Anybody who stumps for the sacred choral music of Frank Martin can't be all bad in my book. :) Frank Martin's Mass for double chorus is one of the gems of 20th century Christian liturgical music as far as I'm concerned. But in a way critics like Ross and Scott may still paradoxically exemplify the kind of problem they write about.
Maybe the theme here is that as with artists themselves so it may be with critics, that we may have an era of kleinmeister critics riffing on kleinmeister artists.
I know that Ross and Brody write for The New Yorker and all but ... when peeps at that magazine have moments of almost Spenglerian doubt about contemporary Western arts ...
...
Kleinmeisters: an early 21st-century typology of the term would be easy to delineate. Kleinmeisters are those composers who get dozens of orchestra commissions, especially for concertos, and hundreds of performances. Most of them, virtually all of them, are very nice people – naturally, since they’ve made careers out of their ability to accommodate. (The younger generation of kleinmeisters is astonishingly good-looking.) Because the major-paper critics are part of the system, the kleinmeisters get incredibly positive reviews in the top 15 or 20 newspapers and music magazines. They excel at two genres: the ten-minute concert opener with lots of brass and percussive momentum, and the concerto whose solo part is visibly at the limits of endurance. Their music thrills with its virtuosity, its patent sense of difficulty; it is neither remembered nor asked for afterward. Frequently their performances are greeted with a vindicating roar of applause that is taken to attest to its quality, but is really either intended for the poor soloist having survived his ordeal, or else a reflection of the piece’s noise.
What’s lacking with the kleinmeisters is any sense that their music is taken seriously. It is praised, usually in vague and unconsciously patronizing terms (“X really knows her way around an orchestra”), but it is not discussed. Its methods are not problematized. It may be considered thorny, but no one pretends it presents a new perceptual paradigm. Reviews most often cite as praiseworthy its orchestration – in other words, its professional clothing, not its content. Most of all, there is no buzz about the kleinmeisters among younger composers. Harbison, Chen Yi, Penderecki, Higdon, Zwilich, Sierra, Paulus, get to command vast musical resources, but no young composers heatedly argue the merits of their pieces. Their names don’t come up in internet discussions. No one acts as though they hold any key to the future. After all, these composers write in styles in which far more vivid music had already been written decades ago. The kleinmeisters of 19th-century Russia were ridiculed by the musical intelligentsia outside that circle, but today’s American kleinmeisters have a whole Potemkin music scene built to support them and protect them from reality – reality being that their music is drab, unoriginal, and cared about by no one, for good reason.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/a-documentary-that-explains-the-dearth-of-innovative-young-french-filmmakers
If the French Ministry of Culture were to hold hearings on why there are so few innovative young French filmmakers today, Claire Simon’s documentary “The Graduation” (“Le Concours,” better translated as “The Entrance Exam”) could be Exhibit A. (It played last fall in the DOC NYC series and this past weekend at the True/False Film Fest, which is where I saw it.) It’s entirely possible that France’s movie-doldrums are merely a passing chill and that there’s an underground current in the French film world that’s soon to burst forth with inventive energy. But, for the moment, it’s hard to avoid noticing that France hasn’t produced a historic director in three decades.
Many excellent French movies have been made in that time; many talented directors have arrived on the scene with noteworthy débuts—and most of them have become quickly less audacious after a first film or two. Some exceptional filmmakers have built unusual careers on the margins of the system; some have worked within the system to bring distinctive worlds to life; none have revolutionized the art. For the most part, France’s filmmakers get old while they’re still young, normalized and formatted by a rigid system of financing and production, which is embodied in the hurdle-hopping that Simon shows prospective film students enduring at France’s most prestigious film school, La Fémis.
...
The most original filmmaking is comprehensively original—as creative in terms of financing, administration, and methods of production and post-production as in directorial imagination. The ways of working, the inventiveness that creates a new mode of organization and new techniques behind the camera, are reflected in the originality of the film itself. The fuller the existing system that young filmmakers must slot themselves into, the thinner the scope of their attention, the narrower their spectrum of innovation, and the less likely that they’ll be able to innovate radically within it. Seeing, in Simon’s documentary, the directing candidates forced to analyze a scene, submit a dossier, step on a set and direct a dictated scene, is like watching the training of hired hands rather than original artists—people better suited to writing grant applications than scripts, better suited to following orders than creating new worlds, to playing the urbane part of a director in meetings and interviews than actually being one
I think Brody's crazy to think Susan Vernon was the hero of Love & Friendship. Even if she was the protagonist in that film there was no real room for doubt in Austen's tale or even in Stillman's adaptation of it that Lady Susan was an unusually nasty piece of work.
But then it seemed last year The New Yorker staff spent the whole year telling their readership to vote for Clinton and then spent months doing book-of-the-month blurbs about books that supposedly predicted the rise of Trump. For the mainstream fourth estate to have botched predicting an outcome so badly it can sometimes seem as though what we'll lose if we lose the freedom of the press will be sadly negligible. What if the critics themselves are susceptible to those vices of the life of the mind they regret to document in the artists of our era?
Sure, we're losing arts critics left and right ...
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-fate-of-the-critic-in-the-clickbait-age
...
Cultural criticism is a form of journalism—odd journalism, but journalism nonetheless. The Times film critic A. O. Scott mounted a vibrant defense of this sour science in his recent book “Better Living Through Criticism.” He writes, “As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged either toward the defensive group identity of fanhood or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism.” The role of the critic, Scott says, is to resist the manufactured consensus—to interrogate the successful, to exalt the unknown, to argue for ambiguity and complexity. Virgil Thomson immortally defined criticism as “the only antidote we have to paid publicity.”
But, bah. The role of the mainstream critic at an established publication is to manufacture the consensus.
Maybe people in the smaller-scale press have a chance at formulating counter-consensus or whatever you want to call that, but once you're writing for The New Yorker or a similarly large-scale prestige publication your work is what establishes the consensus in critical terms. Yes, yes, critics can dissent that Michael Bay's movies make so much money and that we're on a fifth Transformers film now. Sure, there can be requisite complaints about how Disney keeps raiding the vaults to remake stuff and who's going to complain that much that Emma Watson is Belle now? We've got ourselves a live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell coming along ... which I might end up watching out of curiosity in spite of the fact that I have thought since day one of the original anime release it was a seriously over-hyped film. There are good reasons Oshii is not as famous as Hayao Miyazaki is here in the West or even in Japan.
...
Besides, Thomson's bromide forgets that an antidote to paid publicity is exceptionally bad word-of-mouth.
...
Critics may tell themselves their role is to stand athwart popularity shouting "stop!" but that seems too self-aggrandizing an approach. I've been less than impressed by the A. O. Scott variation of criticism as the art of the voice stuff. I'm one of those dour Calvinist Presbyterian types so whether I'm reading a Presbyterian or a Marxist I do appreciate that both of these sorts of people care about what the content of the art work is. I might disagree utterly with Adorno on jazz but I don't begrudge Adorno's concern that whatever art proposes to address should have something to do with truth. Ironically Francis Schaeffer would have argued ore or less the same thing.
If anything its the critics who are most likely to be champions of a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. People who are purists about punk or rap or country or blues or mid-century jazz or Baroque music are not necessarily going to be demonstrating the kind of "shallow, half-ironic eclecticism" that could be easily displayed by a critic. I'm not necessarily suggesting Alex Ross has that kind of problem. Anybody who stumps for the sacred choral music of Frank Martin can't be all bad in my book. :) Frank Martin's Mass for double chorus is one of the gems of 20th century Christian liturgical music as far as I'm concerned. But in a way critics like Ross and Scott may still paradoxically exemplify the kind of problem they write about.
Maybe the theme here is that as with artists themselves so it may be with critics, that we may have an era of kleinmeister critics riffing on kleinmeister artists.
I know that Ross and Brody write for The New Yorker and all but ... when peeps at that magazine have moments of almost Spenglerian doubt about contemporary Western arts ...
feminisms formal and informal, Ethan Iverson interview sparks controversy, and a fearless girl statue gets called out as crass corporate pandering
For those who don't consistently read the blog of the jazz pianist Ethan Iverson ... the last week and a half unfolded with some probably fairly usual internet controversy in the wake of Iverson's interview with one named Glasper.
https://ethaniverson.com/interview-with-robert-glasper/
https://ethaniverson.com/2017/03/06/one-of-the-reasons-to-play/
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/03/09/519482385/sexism-from-two-leading-jazz-artists-draws-anger-and-presents-an-opportunity
https://ethaniverson.com/2017/03/10/in-every-generation-there-is-a-chosen-one/
http://sarahdeming.typepad.com/spiralstaircase/2017/03/my-husband-the-misogynist-ethan-iverson-robert-glasper-boxing-and-me.html
One of the implications in some (by no means all) of the back and forth on the Iverson interview is that the expectation is that misogyny is, more or less, entirely the purview of people on the right. Iverson's early self-defensive approach leaned on that a bit and then he understandably had second thoughts and misgivings about whether or not insisting on his progressive/feminist credentials necessarily mattered.
There are plenty of guys on the right who have low views of women ... but what if that trope is part of a problem on the left? Why would it be that everyone who is to the left of somebody like ... just pick somebody ... is by definition not a misogynist? It's not as though Christopher Hitchens convinced me when he asserted that women just aren't funny. Here we are in 2017 able to consider the bicentennial of the death of one of the great comedic genius of English literature, Jane Austen, and Hitchens isn't around for it. How much of Hitchens' work will or should be remembered two centuries from now?
People have highlighted how few women Iverson has interviewed. Now, sure, Higdon could potentially be interviewed. How about Joan Tower? As a guitarist I'd lean slightly more toward Annette Kruisbrink or Nadia Borislova--Kruisbrink has written superb chamber music for guitar and double-bass, for instance, and Borislova has written some fun chamber music for clarinet and guitar but neither is anywhere in the zone of the music Iverson seems into. So it goes. Perhaps in time we can get around to discussing those two guitarist composers here at this blog. The backlog of music and arts stuff I've meant to blog about got pretty big while I spent half a decade documenting the life and times of what was once Mars Hill.
Which reminds me, there's all sorts of ways in which it behooves folks on the liberal/left side to not congratulate themselves as automatically being exempt from misogyny because they're not like that guy. Driscoll and his fan base may be misogynists but they don't see themselves that way, and even if by some astonishing circumstance Driscoll could concede he'd said things that could be construed as misogynistic the defense would be that it's only insulting to compare MEN to women as if that were a negative thing because women being like women is how women should be.
But ... really ... there are other reasons even from within a left scene to not take the Iverson or Whedon style feminism as sufficient. Whedon has lamented recently that all the left seems to know how to do is attack itself. Well, depends on what gets defined as the left. There's neoliberalism, it seems. Then there's progressivism and then there's the Frankfurt scene and then there's old-school Marxists and communists and post-Marxists and ... surely by now you get the idea. As noted here a few times in the last year it'd be foolish to ignore the fact that the coalitions of the traditional left and right in the United States both crumbled in the post-Cold War period. One person's powerful feminist statement is another person's crass and opportunistic corporate crony capitalist ruse even if we're talking about just intra-left thought. The fearless girl statue seemed like crass opportunistic publicity shilling for something to me. Apparently you don't have to be on the actual left to regard that statue as a mercenary corporate shill.
http://hyperallergic.com/364474/the-sculpture-of-a-fearless-girl-on-wall-street-is-fake-corporate-feminism/
Last night, I spent half an hour with “Fearless Girl,” the bronze sculpture created by artist Kristen Visbal and installed by financial firm State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) on Wall Street for International Women’s Day. I watched people pose for photos with her in nonstop succession — young and old, male and female, literally everyone wanted their picture taken with “Fearless Girl.” I listened to a young man compare “Fearless Girl” to his sister. I got yelled at by a group of photo-takers for blocking the view of “Fearless Girl” confronting the “Charging Bull.” I heard a man who was shooting a long exposure of “Fearless Girl” strike up a conversation with a nearby woman about the sculpture. “It’s complex,” he said. “It IS complex!” she exclaimed. Another man joined the conversation and offered that “Fearless Girl” was “pretty profound.”
Having witnessed all of this firsthand, I do not think it’s a stretch to say “Fearless Girl” represents basically everything that’s wrong with our society.
Here is the narrative being spun about “Fearless Girl”: An advertising firm and a financial services firm got together to drop a “remarkable,” “guerrilla” sculpture of a young girl in front of Wall Street’s famous “Charging Bull” in the middle of the night. The girl is part of a campaign to encourage companies to increase the number of women on their boards. The girl “is a remarkable evolution for Wall Street.” The girl might even represent “the turning point of gender equality in corporate America.” The girl “celebrates all the people who resisted by staying in place.” If installed permanently, the girl would be “a constant source of strength” for women who work in the vicinity.
That’s fuzzy and inspiring and stuff, but here is the truth about “Fearless Girl”: It features a branded plaque at its base. The companies that installed it had a permit. They are advertising firm McCann New York — whose leadership team has only three women among 11 people, or 27% women — and asset manager SSGA — whose leadership team has five women among 28 people, or 18% women. SSGA is a division of State Street, which has a board of directors that includes only 27% women. SSGA is also, according to Wikipedia, the world’s third-largest asset manager, managing more than $2.4 trillion in assets in 2014. And, like any good capitalist behemoth, it has some shady dealings in its history — like the time the SEC charged State Street with misleading investors during the subprime mortgage crisis. Or the class-action lawsuit brought against it for mismanaging retirement funds. Or the over $64 million that the company agreed to pay in January to settle fraud charges brought by the government, as Nick Pinto pointed out in the Village Voice.
But don’t worry about those cheating Wall Streeters who can’t be bothered to take care with people’s investments and lives — “Fearless Girl” will stop them! She has, as a visitor commented last night, “no doubt” and “no fear”!
I spent International Women’s Day on strike and not looking very much at the news or my phone. When I heard about the stunt, sometime in the evening, I felt offense begin to bore a hole deep in my core. Could there possibly be anything more patronizing than two massive, male-dominated capitalist companies installing a branded statue of the most conceivably non-threatening version of womankind in supposed honor of a day devoted to women’s equality that was founded by the Socialist Party?
No, alas, I think there could not.
...
Ah, but that was written five days ago. Three days ago something happened that may or may not have been worse.
All the same, the point has been presented ,that what passes for feminism these days may not be good enough if it isn't socialist enough, or if it's turned out to be paid for by firms with a history of misconduct.
So in a way the point of the op-ed was anyone who fell for the fearless girl statue as a symbol of feminism isn't quite left enough. If Whedon's, say, a third generation screenwriter within the Hollywood scene there might be all sorts of reasons he wouldn't understand why his version of feminism couldn't possibly pass muster with more radical and less Hollywood elite versions of feminist thought.
And while Iverson's a consistently entertaining and readable blogger who often has stuff I like to read as a musician, Iverson seems to have realized his defense from earlier this month came off badly.
Much of the music I've played in the last fifteen years has been church music so Glasper's whole way of describing musical grooves would be something I would scrupulously avoid!
https://ethaniverson.com/interview-with-robert-glasper/
https://ethaniverson.com/2017/03/06/one-of-the-reasons-to-play/
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/03/09/519482385/sexism-from-two-leading-jazz-artists-draws-anger-and-presents-an-opportunity
https://ethaniverson.com/2017/03/10/in-every-generation-there-is-a-chosen-one/
http://sarahdeming.typepad.com/spiralstaircase/2017/03/my-husband-the-misogynist-ethan-iverson-robert-glasper-boxing-and-me.html
One of the implications in some (by no means all) of the back and forth on the Iverson interview is that the expectation is that misogyny is, more or less, entirely the purview of people on the right. Iverson's early self-defensive approach leaned on that a bit and then he understandably had second thoughts and misgivings about whether or not insisting on his progressive/feminist credentials necessarily mattered.
There are plenty of guys on the right who have low views of women ... but what if that trope is part of a problem on the left? Why would it be that everyone who is to the left of somebody like ... just pick somebody ... is by definition not a misogynist? It's not as though Christopher Hitchens convinced me when he asserted that women just aren't funny. Here we are in 2017 able to consider the bicentennial of the death of one of the great comedic genius of English literature, Jane Austen, and Hitchens isn't around for it. How much of Hitchens' work will or should be remembered two centuries from now?
People have highlighted how few women Iverson has interviewed. Now, sure, Higdon could potentially be interviewed. How about Joan Tower? As a guitarist I'd lean slightly more toward Annette Kruisbrink or Nadia Borislova--Kruisbrink has written superb chamber music for guitar and double-bass, for instance, and Borislova has written some fun chamber music for clarinet and guitar but neither is anywhere in the zone of the music Iverson seems into. So it goes. Perhaps in time we can get around to discussing those two guitarist composers here at this blog. The backlog of music and arts stuff I've meant to blog about got pretty big while I spent half a decade documenting the life and times of what was once Mars Hill.
Which reminds me, there's all sorts of ways in which it behooves folks on the liberal/left side to not congratulate themselves as automatically being exempt from misogyny because they're not like that guy. Driscoll and his fan base may be misogynists but they don't see themselves that way, and even if by some astonishing circumstance Driscoll could concede he'd said things that could be construed as misogynistic the defense would be that it's only insulting to compare MEN to women as if that were a negative thing because women being like women is how women should be.
But ... really ... there are other reasons even from within a left scene to not take the Iverson or Whedon style feminism as sufficient. Whedon has lamented recently that all the left seems to know how to do is attack itself. Well, depends on what gets defined as the left. There's neoliberalism, it seems. Then there's progressivism and then there's the Frankfurt scene and then there's old-school Marxists and communists and post-Marxists and ... surely by now you get the idea. As noted here a few times in the last year it'd be foolish to ignore the fact that the coalitions of the traditional left and right in the United States both crumbled in the post-Cold War period. One person's powerful feminist statement is another person's crass and opportunistic corporate crony capitalist ruse even if we're talking about just intra-left thought. The fearless girl statue seemed like crass opportunistic publicity shilling for something to me. Apparently you don't have to be on the actual left to regard that statue as a mercenary corporate shill.
http://hyperallergic.com/364474/the-sculpture-of-a-fearless-girl-on-wall-street-is-fake-corporate-feminism/
Last night, I spent half an hour with “Fearless Girl,” the bronze sculpture created by artist Kristen Visbal and installed by financial firm State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) on Wall Street for International Women’s Day. I watched people pose for photos with her in nonstop succession — young and old, male and female, literally everyone wanted their picture taken with “Fearless Girl.” I listened to a young man compare “Fearless Girl” to his sister. I got yelled at by a group of photo-takers for blocking the view of “Fearless Girl” confronting the “Charging Bull.” I heard a man who was shooting a long exposure of “Fearless Girl” strike up a conversation with a nearby woman about the sculpture. “It’s complex,” he said. “It IS complex!” she exclaimed. Another man joined the conversation and offered that “Fearless Girl” was “pretty profound.”
Having witnessed all of this firsthand, I do not think it’s a stretch to say “Fearless Girl” represents basically everything that’s wrong with our society.
Here is the narrative being spun about “Fearless Girl”: An advertising firm and a financial services firm got together to drop a “remarkable,” “guerrilla” sculpture of a young girl in front of Wall Street’s famous “Charging Bull” in the middle of the night. The girl is part of a campaign to encourage companies to increase the number of women on their boards. The girl “is a remarkable evolution for Wall Street.” The girl might even represent “the turning point of gender equality in corporate America.” The girl “celebrates all the people who resisted by staying in place.” If installed permanently, the girl would be “a constant source of strength” for women who work in the vicinity.
That’s fuzzy and inspiring and stuff, but here is the truth about “Fearless Girl”: It features a branded plaque at its base. The companies that installed it had a permit. They are advertising firm McCann New York — whose leadership team has only three women among 11 people, or 27% women — and asset manager SSGA — whose leadership team has five women among 28 people, or 18% women. SSGA is a division of State Street, which has a board of directors that includes only 27% women. SSGA is also, according to Wikipedia, the world’s third-largest asset manager, managing more than $2.4 trillion in assets in 2014. And, like any good capitalist behemoth, it has some shady dealings in its history — like the time the SEC charged State Street with misleading investors during the subprime mortgage crisis. Or the class-action lawsuit brought against it for mismanaging retirement funds. Or the over $64 million that the company agreed to pay in January to settle fraud charges brought by the government, as Nick Pinto pointed out in the Village Voice.
But don’t worry about those cheating Wall Streeters who can’t be bothered to take care with people’s investments and lives — “Fearless Girl” will stop them! She has, as a visitor commented last night, “no doubt” and “no fear”!
I spent International Women’s Day on strike and not looking very much at the news or my phone. When I heard about the stunt, sometime in the evening, I felt offense begin to bore a hole deep in my core. Could there possibly be anything more patronizing than two massive, male-dominated capitalist companies installing a branded statue of the most conceivably non-threatening version of womankind in supposed honor of a day devoted to women’s equality that was founded by the Socialist Party?
No, alas, I think there could not.
...
Ah, but that was written five days ago. Three days ago something happened that may or may not have been worse.
All the same, the point has been presented ,that what passes for feminism these days may not be good enough if it isn't socialist enough, or if it's turned out to be paid for by firms with a history of misconduct.
So in a way the point of the op-ed was anyone who fell for the fearless girl statue as a symbol of feminism isn't quite left enough. If Whedon's, say, a third generation screenwriter within the Hollywood scene there might be all sorts of reasons he wouldn't understand why his version of feminism couldn't possibly pass muster with more radical and less Hollywood elite versions of feminist thought.
And while Iverson's a consistently entertaining and readable blogger who often has stuff I like to read as a musician, Iverson seems to have realized his defense from earlier this month came off badly.
Much of the music I've played in the last fifteen years has been church music so Glasper's whole way of describing musical grooves would be something I would scrupulously avoid!
Monday, March 13, 2017
what can contributors to The New Criterion and The New Republic have in common? They probably don't feel bad about the new news about Jeff Koons
One of the very few things writers from the two magazines seemed to have agreed on was they couldn't stand Jeff Koons.
From The New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/article/82599/koons-balloon-dog-warhol-duchamp-perl-modern-art
https://newrepublic.com/article/110175/the-curse-warholism
From The New Criterion
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/What-Jeff-Koons-has-wrought-7950
which is now behind a paywall. Meh. Well, it didn't used to be.
http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/should-jeff-koons-be-worth-more-than-a-rembradt-4711
it's actually some kind of reprint/linkathon to this
http://nymag.com/news/features/45324/
So it's unlikely any of those authors feel bad for Koons now that it's been reported Koons has been convicted of plagiarism.
http://hyperallergic.com/364267/jeff-koons-convicted-of-plagiarizing-a-photo-of-naked-children/
It's also been reported a few other places but we'll stick with this one for now.
From The New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/article/82599/koons-balloon-dog-warhol-duchamp-perl-modern-art
https://newrepublic.com/article/110175/the-curse-warholism
From The New Criterion
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/What-Jeff-Koons-has-wrought-7950
which is now behind a paywall. Meh. Well, it didn't used to be.
http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/should-jeff-koons-be-worth-more-than-a-rembradt-4711
it's actually some kind of reprint/linkathon to this
http://nymag.com/news/features/45324/
So it's unlikely any of those authors feel bad for Koons now that it's been reported Koons has been convicted of plagiarism.
http://hyperallergic.com/364267/jeff-koons-convicted-of-plagiarizing-a-photo-of-naked-children/
It's also been reported a few other places but we'll stick with this one for now.
Friday, March 10, 2017
Buffy the Vampire Slayer at year 20
HT to Mockingbird in particular.
http://www.mbird.com/2017/03/another-week-ends-buffy-summers-joan-didion-progressive-comfort-zones-petrified-wood-hapless-patriots-and-silent-faith/
What's stranger to think about than the idea that Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer is now twenty years old is that, for some reason, I feel as though time has not been that kind to the series.
The basic premise of the show is a wry twist on a horror trope, that the ditzy blonde who is usually first to get killed off ends up being the victorious final girl. It's perhaps clever in an inversely proportional relationship to how seriously people attempt to read socio-political significance into it.
I kinda began to lose interest in the series starting in season 3. Once the characters graduated from high school it seemed like the conceit of the premise was in some ways played out. Cheeky riffs on how American high schools are rampant with a suffocating caste system and supernatural evil is funny and also able to be poignant but for me a lot of the charm of this premise depended on it staying within the insular confines of the American high school of the public school variety.
From season 4 onward it began to seem that Buffy Summers was no longer a playful quip-as-character about horror genre tropes. The characters grew and changed but there were things that were lost as well as gained. Buffy Summers is a super-heroine and I'm afraid that as her series mythology expanded to approach the mythic aspirations and proportions so endemic to superhero narratives these last twenty years Buffy became ... more routine.
I've also come around to the thought that Whedon gets a disproportionately large amount of credit for creating characters that would not be what they are if he wasn't so fortunate as to keep being able to work with actresses who are better than the dialogue he writes for them. That the writers for Buffy began to cater to and tailor lines to the strengths and interests of the cast could be normal television writing. Had Hannigan not been cast as Willow Rosenberg we would have gotten a completely, almost inconceivably different character than the one we got.
Now maybe back in the decade when Fukuyama could talk about "the end of history" the arch genre savvy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer could work in a way that it might not n the Bush 2 era of the War on Terror. Without having the patience to explain on a late Friday night post exactly how and why, Whedon's creation was paradoxically easier to enjoy when it didn't take itself seriously and the more seriously the people making the show took themselves as to "what" they were saying the less interest I had in the show. I didn't really follow it steadily after a few episodes in season 4. Apparently for loyalists the show took flight between seasons 3 and 5. Buffy died at the end of five but was brought back for two more seasons. The comics, it seems, have us in a season 10 of some kind.
So Buffy is Batman or Superman at this point.
The transformation from wry riff on horror tropes to self-serious superheroine seems to be complete. It's not that there aren't fun episodes along the way ... but Whedon now seems like a one-trick pony. It's a great trick more often than not but a super-powered vampire slayer in some ways set Whedon down an odd path.
I can't find any reason to like River Tam, for instance. It's not about an aversion to strong or compelling female characters. I enjoy novels by Jane Austen. Joan Didion's been one o my touchstones as a blogger. Rumiko Takahasi possesses what I regard as a gift for comedic genius. I love the Powerpuff Girls. Katara and Toph from The Last Airbender are wonderful characters. I plan to see Wonder Woman.
But Whedon deserves at least some, or even a lot, of blame for what's known as waif-fu. River Tam embodies the waif-fu trope in a way that is easier to see as a trope. Now tiny women wielding swords can work. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ran with the fiery beautiful waif with a blade causing trouble. But the minute she dealt with seasoned fighters she was as good as dead and the story drove this home. Jen's egotism and self-regarded led to the doom of the people she cared about and she took her own life as a kind of penance.
Yes, we've had Kate and Milla doing a kind of waif-fu but a vampire and a super-powered guinea pig can break the rules of physics. River Tam's a punchline about a 90 pound girl beating up a guy two to three times her weight that is not the Slayer but who is supposed to be able to kick ass just because.
Can she manipulate the earth itself? Nope? Can she bend the water in your body on a full moon night to make you do what she wants you to do? No. Can she generate electrical bursts that can blow holes in your abdomen or blow-torch your hand off with fire? No. Katura, Toph and Azula in The Last Airbender are tiny girls who wield huge amounts of power thanks to the magical abilities they have in their narrative world. But what they all do is manipulate the environment in ways that give them an advantage. It's not the same thing as grabbing a blade, talking about how nothing in the universe can stop you, and then just magically winning off-screen aka Serenity.
In comics fandom River has a collossal character shield. Buffy's invulnerability worked at two levels. She had magical super-powers for one, but at another level the joke that the blonde who would normally be killed off first can't be killed so easily sold the joke.
Buffy became a joke that wanted us to take it seriously. The question the series has not necessarily answered is "why?" Is there a feminist text or subtext that could give us a reason? Well ... yes ... but then there's how Whedon and company put female characters in refrigerators, so to speak. Whedon and company were reveling in torturing characters and killing them before they could get what they wanted before Martin's Game of Thrones became prestige TV.
At some point if you do that to female characters enough times shouldn't you ... say ... lose the empowered female card? If we step back and consider how many female characters got killed off by the writers throughout the series just for the feels it seems that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was in some crucial respects far more retrograde about women as agents than an earlier show from the same decade, The X-Files. Tropes abounded on that show, too, but The X-Files could send themselves up better than anyone else could.
What ultimately feels off about Joss Whedon's approach to story-telling is that insistence upon life-and-death stakes while simultaneously quipping away. Age of Ultron rolled out Arvo Part's Kyrie from the Berliner Mass and also gave us Hawkeye rambling in a trying-too-hard contrast between the epic destruction and his aspirations of domestic redecorating. Qucksilver's inevitable death might have carried more weight if we hadn't seen Elizabeth Olson's Scarlet Witch dutifully falling to her knees and screaming in trailers. As Honest Trailers put it last year (?) there's only so many times the villain's master plan can involve a beam of light with a halo of junk floating around it before the villain plots wear thin. You can make fairly small adjustments to the villain arc and have it work. Let's say the villain realizes that the heroes can't be defeated by the bad guys but you could try to get them to fight each other. Civil War, there you go. Or you could have a shadow form of an old villainous cabal infiltrate the team of the heroes and silently take over, Winter Soldier. Part of what has made the Captain America series hold up a little better than the other franchises in Marvel is the stories, though they may have issues, take seriously the idea that many a villain recognizes that a straight up fight with the powers of good is likely to fail. Why try to overpower when you can mislead?
So it's interesting that with two Avengers movies in a row Whedon's stories were all about power against power with the heroes winning. We're going to get Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet ... and Whedon's not going to be helming that project. Since my feeling about Marvel villains is that they are interesting in an inversely proportional relationship to how powerful they are I might skip Infinity War.
Nolan's films lack Whedon's witticisms but I admit to liking Nolan's Batman films more than I like the Avengers films (the first was fun and the second was frustrating). While Christopher Nolan's Batman films have been scorned in some quarters as too grim, too dark, too nasty and brutish we might want to forego making this judgment by way of comparison to Marvel films, often too drunk on their own sense of wit to take themselves seriously at the points they need to. Nolan's characters generally don't quip in the face of the death of innocent bystanders or their own potential demise. Agent Coulson was belittling Loki with his putatively dying words in The Avengers. That, too, would have had more pathos if not for bathos ... and since in Marvel there's this macabre joke that nobody stays dead except for maybe Uncle Ben ... death in the land of the super-powered isn't final.
Unless you're not a superhero and can die like anyone else.
But then Buffy got brought back from the dead. Much like Superman in the previous decade, Buffy Summers' death was undone in a fairly short period of time. By the end of the TV series Buffy had distributed the power of the Slayer to an army of slayers-in-training. The climax of the series involved Buffy questioning the foundational premise of the show. Now perhaps this was intended to be profound and ... maybe ... it was for some people. By the time I slogged through season 7 it seemed that straight up questioning the premise of the show could be taken as a sign that all the old rules that the early show's humor depended upon were being explicitly rejected. Whedon and company wanted us to take Buffy seriously in the midst of proposing that the rules changed. Okay, series finale ... and here we are years later with comics and Buffy joining the ranks of the super-powered ... .
I don't know. At this point I might just stick with Batman or read some old Wonder Woman comics. It's always the end of the world and the world is never really going to end. Even post-apocalyptic futures depend on the assumption that this world isn't really going to end. Maybe we could be mean and put it another way, we don't so much believe the world is going to end as much as we believe that a world without US in it is not a world worth living in. Buffy was more fun to watch when she didn't exactly want to save the world but did it anyway because then she could go to the dance or hang out with friends at The Bronze. When so much of the humor of a character comes from her demonstrable belief that she really has more fun and interesting things she'd like to be doing with her time than fighting the evil undead and saving the world can you really go all the way toward taking Buffy seriously as a character who faces shattering experiences when the foundational conceit of her character is regarding the apocalyptic as trivial and the trivial as apocalyptic?
Whedon's really gone much farther on the good graces of actresses better than the dialogue he writes for them than he may have deserved.
And yet Whedon's not necessarily to blame for a culture in which so much discourse has trafficked in the apocalyptic and in which in the political sphere people are described in terms applicable to superheroes and supervillains. We have not lost a capacity for apocalypticism in terms of surreal and exaggerated imagery but we may have lost the older sense of the apocalyptic as a revelation of what the world is really like. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was fun in the first three seasons when it leveraged the insularity of high school experience and the expectations of horror tropes by anchoring them in the limited perspective of its teenage protagonists. It was also a bit more charming when we had a Buffy who actively objected to and resisted all the weight and seriousness of the Slayer role Giles lectured her about. She made a sympathetic Chosen One because she couldn't hide her feeling that being a Chosen One was really just super lame.
By season four Buffy might as well have been Batman, even a Christopher Nolan style Batman.
But there was that loquacious cast constantly playing off each other. There were all the inside jokes, the pop culture references, the banter. Keeping that up on television season after season is no small feat. As 1990s geeky specialists in stories about insular self-regarding loquacious people go Joss Whedon came into his own at the end of the Clinton years while in cinema Whit Stillman was confecting three films about what he called the doomed bourgeois in love. It's a deliberately weird and impudent comparison to make, Joss Whedon's television aesthetic and Whit Stillman's stagey cinematic/literary aesthetic--but it might be a useful comparison to consider seeing as I've written for Mockingbird for years and Mockingbird has some love both Whedon and Stillman.
So I'm just going to throw this idea out--Joss Whedon takes characters seriously but not ideas. Whit Stillman takes ideas seriously but does not necessarily take his characters seriously. Maybe Whedon wants hope but it's hard to say on what basis he observes hope for humanity.
Maybe Whedon wants to run with this idea that everyone who made it through adolescence is a hero but who in their right mind can honestly believe that? Saying he wanted Buffy to be iconic is direct, but this gets me thinking about someone else who has been saying he wanted to create a potent mythology that would distill for a generation what friendship and honor and all that mean, George Lucas. Has Buffy the Vampire Slayer found a niche in television comparable to that of Star Wars for film? Apparently so, if the fan bases are any indicators.
So here we are at twenty years of Buffy. As super-powered girls from shows in the late 1990s go I'm finding that I like Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup now pretty much as much as I did back then. Buffy, it's weird that for a show I enthusiastically watched in the 1990s I haven't felt much interest in going back to it. It feels like Whedon had the advantage of being a third-generation screenwriter able to work with actresses who brought his ideas to life and while he might half-jokingly talk about how woke he is these days or fret about the narcissistic psychopath in the Oval Office, there's a sense in which generations of white male privilege were necessary preconditions for his brand. And the thing is, a bit weirdly as I mull it over this weekend, Whedon's vision of his achievement may have been blinkered by looking at his legacy in televised terms. Whedon's brand of progressivism seems to have been a precondition for the imputed greatness of his female-led action show.
And yet he tries to separate politics from art. Maybe that's a weakness rather than a strength. Stillman, since I bothered to compare Whedon to Stillman, comes off like he's kind of a conservative Episcopalian sort in both religion and politics but it may be his work benefits from that. Whedon's axiom of trying to keep his politics and his art distinct could explain why his second Avengers film felt like a slog. If he thought he was saying the Avengers were rich peole out of touch that didn't extend to himself, apparently. Which gets to the juxtaposition, Whit Stillman's whole cinematic career has been about lampooning just how extravagantly out of touch with the world rich kids are and Stillman's managed to do this while coming across like he's not a progressive about either politics or religion. That scene in Metropolitan where Audrey goes to Christmas mass didn't come off like the kind of scene that would have been written or filmed by a secularist.
So in a way I guess I stand by the proposal, that Whedon wants characters to be taken seriously but not ideas. If he did want ideas to be taken seriously he'd be as unashamed as Stillman to build entire movies out of debates about the merits and demerits of ideas. It might be, too, that Stillman recognizes his patrician stock in a way Whedon doesn't.
Well, in any case, I guess here's to twenty years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
http://www.mbird.com/2017/03/another-week-ends-buffy-summers-joan-didion-progressive-comfort-zones-petrified-wood-hapless-patriots-and-silent-faith/
What's stranger to think about than the idea that Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer is now twenty years old is that, for some reason, I feel as though time has not been that kind to the series.
The basic premise of the show is a wry twist on a horror trope, that the ditzy blonde who is usually first to get killed off ends up being the victorious final girl. It's perhaps clever in an inversely proportional relationship to how seriously people attempt to read socio-political significance into it.
I kinda began to lose interest in the series starting in season 3. Once the characters graduated from high school it seemed like the conceit of the premise was in some ways played out. Cheeky riffs on how American high schools are rampant with a suffocating caste system and supernatural evil is funny and also able to be poignant but for me a lot of the charm of this premise depended on it staying within the insular confines of the American high school of the public school variety.
From season 4 onward it began to seem that Buffy Summers was no longer a playful quip-as-character about horror genre tropes. The characters grew and changed but there were things that were lost as well as gained. Buffy Summers is a super-heroine and I'm afraid that as her series mythology expanded to approach the mythic aspirations and proportions so endemic to superhero narratives these last twenty years Buffy became ... more routine.
I've also come around to the thought that Whedon gets a disproportionately large amount of credit for creating characters that would not be what they are if he wasn't so fortunate as to keep being able to work with actresses who are better than the dialogue he writes for them. That the writers for Buffy began to cater to and tailor lines to the strengths and interests of the cast could be normal television writing. Had Hannigan not been cast as Willow Rosenberg we would have gotten a completely, almost inconceivably different character than the one we got.
Now maybe back in the decade when Fukuyama could talk about "the end of history" the arch genre savvy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer could work in a way that it might not n the Bush 2 era of the War on Terror. Without having the patience to explain on a late Friday night post exactly how and why, Whedon's creation was paradoxically easier to enjoy when it didn't take itself seriously and the more seriously the people making the show took themselves as to "what" they were saying the less interest I had in the show. I didn't really follow it steadily after a few episodes in season 4. Apparently for loyalists the show took flight between seasons 3 and 5. Buffy died at the end of five but was brought back for two more seasons. The comics, it seems, have us in a season 10 of some kind.
So Buffy is Batman or Superman at this point.
The transformation from wry riff on horror tropes to self-serious superheroine seems to be complete. It's not that there aren't fun episodes along the way ... but Whedon now seems like a one-trick pony. It's a great trick more often than not but a super-powered vampire slayer in some ways set Whedon down an odd path.
I can't find any reason to like River Tam, for instance. It's not about an aversion to strong or compelling female characters. I enjoy novels by Jane Austen. Joan Didion's been one o my touchstones as a blogger. Rumiko Takahasi possesses what I regard as a gift for comedic genius. I love the Powerpuff Girls. Katara and Toph from The Last Airbender are wonderful characters. I plan to see Wonder Woman.
But Whedon deserves at least some, or even a lot, of blame for what's known as waif-fu. River Tam embodies the waif-fu trope in a way that is easier to see as a trope. Now tiny women wielding swords can work. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ran with the fiery beautiful waif with a blade causing trouble. But the minute she dealt with seasoned fighters she was as good as dead and the story drove this home. Jen's egotism and self-regarded led to the doom of the people she cared about and she took her own life as a kind of penance.
Yes, we've had Kate and Milla doing a kind of waif-fu but a vampire and a super-powered guinea pig can break the rules of physics. River Tam's a punchline about a 90 pound girl beating up a guy two to three times her weight that is not the Slayer but who is supposed to be able to kick ass just because.
Can she manipulate the earth itself? Nope? Can she bend the water in your body on a full moon night to make you do what she wants you to do? No. Can she generate electrical bursts that can blow holes in your abdomen or blow-torch your hand off with fire? No. Katura, Toph and Azula in The Last Airbender are tiny girls who wield huge amounts of power thanks to the magical abilities they have in their narrative world. But what they all do is manipulate the environment in ways that give them an advantage. It's not the same thing as grabbing a blade, talking about how nothing in the universe can stop you, and then just magically winning off-screen aka Serenity.
In comics fandom River has a collossal character shield. Buffy's invulnerability worked at two levels. She had magical super-powers for one, but at another level the joke that the blonde who would normally be killed off first can't be killed so easily sold the joke.
Buffy became a joke that wanted us to take it seriously. The question the series has not necessarily answered is "why?" Is there a feminist text or subtext that could give us a reason? Well ... yes ... but then there's how Whedon and company put female characters in refrigerators, so to speak. Whedon and company were reveling in torturing characters and killing them before they could get what they wanted before Martin's Game of Thrones became prestige TV.
At some point if you do that to female characters enough times shouldn't you ... say ... lose the empowered female card? If we step back and consider how many female characters got killed off by the writers throughout the series just for the feels it seems that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was in some crucial respects far more retrograde about women as agents than an earlier show from the same decade, The X-Files. Tropes abounded on that show, too, but The X-Files could send themselves up better than anyone else could.
What ultimately feels off about Joss Whedon's approach to story-telling is that insistence upon life-and-death stakes while simultaneously quipping away. Age of Ultron rolled out Arvo Part's Kyrie from the Berliner Mass and also gave us Hawkeye rambling in a trying-too-hard contrast between the epic destruction and his aspirations of domestic redecorating. Qucksilver's inevitable death might have carried more weight if we hadn't seen Elizabeth Olson's Scarlet Witch dutifully falling to her knees and screaming in trailers. As Honest Trailers put it last year (?) there's only so many times the villain's master plan can involve a beam of light with a halo of junk floating around it before the villain plots wear thin. You can make fairly small adjustments to the villain arc and have it work. Let's say the villain realizes that the heroes can't be defeated by the bad guys but you could try to get them to fight each other. Civil War, there you go. Or you could have a shadow form of an old villainous cabal infiltrate the team of the heroes and silently take over, Winter Soldier. Part of what has made the Captain America series hold up a little better than the other franchises in Marvel is the stories, though they may have issues, take seriously the idea that many a villain recognizes that a straight up fight with the powers of good is likely to fail. Why try to overpower when you can mislead?
So it's interesting that with two Avengers movies in a row Whedon's stories were all about power against power with the heroes winning. We're going to get Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet ... and Whedon's not going to be helming that project. Since my feeling about Marvel villains is that they are interesting in an inversely proportional relationship to how powerful they are I might skip Infinity War.
Nolan's films lack Whedon's witticisms but I admit to liking Nolan's Batman films more than I like the Avengers films (the first was fun and the second was frustrating). While Christopher Nolan's Batman films have been scorned in some quarters as too grim, too dark, too nasty and brutish we might want to forego making this judgment by way of comparison to Marvel films, often too drunk on their own sense of wit to take themselves seriously at the points they need to. Nolan's characters generally don't quip in the face of the death of innocent bystanders or their own potential demise. Agent Coulson was belittling Loki with his putatively dying words in The Avengers. That, too, would have had more pathos if not for bathos ... and since in Marvel there's this macabre joke that nobody stays dead except for maybe Uncle Ben ... death in the land of the super-powered isn't final.
Unless you're not a superhero and can die like anyone else.
But then Buffy got brought back from the dead. Much like Superman in the previous decade, Buffy Summers' death was undone in a fairly short period of time. By the end of the TV series Buffy had distributed the power of the Slayer to an army of slayers-in-training. The climax of the series involved Buffy questioning the foundational premise of the show. Now perhaps this was intended to be profound and ... maybe ... it was for some people. By the time I slogged through season 7 it seemed that straight up questioning the premise of the show could be taken as a sign that all the old rules that the early show's humor depended upon were being explicitly rejected. Whedon and company wanted us to take Buffy seriously in the midst of proposing that the rules changed. Okay, series finale ... and here we are years later with comics and Buffy joining the ranks of the super-powered ... .
I don't know. At this point I might just stick with Batman or read some old Wonder Woman comics. It's always the end of the world and the world is never really going to end. Even post-apocalyptic futures depend on the assumption that this world isn't really going to end. Maybe we could be mean and put it another way, we don't so much believe the world is going to end as much as we believe that a world without US in it is not a world worth living in. Buffy was more fun to watch when she didn't exactly want to save the world but did it anyway because then she could go to the dance or hang out with friends at The Bronze. When so much of the humor of a character comes from her demonstrable belief that she really has more fun and interesting things she'd like to be doing with her time than fighting the evil undead and saving the world can you really go all the way toward taking Buffy seriously as a character who faces shattering experiences when the foundational conceit of her character is regarding the apocalyptic as trivial and the trivial as apocalyptic?
Whedon's really gone much farther on the good graces of actresses better than the dialogue he writes for them than he may have deserved.
And yet Whedon's not necessarily to blame for a culture in which so much discourse has trafficked in the apocalyptic and in which in the political sphere people are described in terms applicable to superheroes and supervillains. We have not lost a capacity for apocalypticism in terms of surreal and exaggerated imagery but we may have lost the older sense of the apocalyptic as a revelation of what the world is really like. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was fun in the first three seasons when it leveraged the insularity of high school experience and the expectations of horror tropes by anchoring them in the limited perspective of its teenage protagonists. It was also a bit more charming when we had a Buffy who actively objected to and resisted all the weight and seriousness of the Slayer role Giles lectured her about. She made a sympathetic Chosen One because she couldn't hide her feeling that being a Chosen One was really just super lame.
By season four Buffy might as well have been Batman, even a Christopher Nolan style Batman.
But there was that loquacious cast constantly playing off each other. There were all the inside jokes, the pop culture references, the banter. Keeping that up on television season after season is no small feat. As 1990s geeky specialists in stories about insular self-regarding loquacious people go Joss Whedon came into his own at the end of the Clinton years while in cinema Whit Stillman was confecting three films about what he called the doomed bourgeois in love. It's a deliberately weird and impudent comparison to make, Joss Whedon's television aesthetic and Whit Stillman's stagey cinematic/literary aesthetic--but it might be a useful comparison to consider seeing as I've written for Mockingbird for years and Mockingbird has some love both Whedon and Stillman.
So I'm just going to throw this idea out--Joss Whedon takes characters seriously but not ideas. Whit Stillman takes ideas seriously but does not necessarily take his characters seriously. Maybe Whedon wants hope but it's hard to say on what basis he observes hope for humanity.
Maybe Whedon wants to run with this idea that everyone who made it through adolescence is a hero but who in their right mind can honestly believe that? Saying he wanted Buffy to be iconic is direct, but this gets me thinking about someone else who has been saying he wanted to create a potent mythology that would distill for a generation what friendship and honor and all that mean, George Lucas. Has Buffy the Vampire Slayer found a niche in television comparable to that of Star Wars for film? Apparently so, if the fan bases are any indicators.
So here we are at twenty years of Buffy. As super-powered girls from shows in the late 1990s go I'm finding that I like Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup now pretty much as much as I did back then. Buffy, it's weird that for a show I enthusiastically watched in the 1990s I haven't felt much interest in going back to it. It feels like Whedon had the advantage of being a third-generation screenwriter able to work with actresses who brought his ideas to life and while he might half-jokingly talk about how woke he is these days or fret about the narcissistic psychopath in the Oval Office, there's a sense in which generations of white male privilege were necessary preconditions for his brand. And the thing is, a bit weirdly as I mull it over this weekend, Whedon's vision of his achievement may have been blinkered by looking at his legacy in televised terms. Whedon's brand of progressivism seems to have been a precondition for the imputed greatness of his female-led action show.
And yet he tries to separate politics from art. Maybe that's a weakness rather than a strength. Stillman, since I bothered to compare Whedon to Stillman, comes off like he's kind of a conservative Episcopalian sort in both religion and politics but it may be his work benefits from that. Whedon's axiom of trying to keep his politics and his art distinct could explain why his second Avengers film felt like a slog. If he thought he was saying the Avengers were rich peole out of touch that didn't extend to himself, apparently. Which gets to the juxtaposition, Whit Stillman's whole cinematic career has been about lampooning just how extravagantly out of touch with the world rich kids are and Stillman's managed to do this while coming across like he's not a progressive about either politics or religion. That scene in Metropolitan where Audrey goes to Christmas mass didn't come off like the kind of scene that would have been written or filmed by a secularist.
So in a way I guess I stand by the proposal, that Whedon wants characters to be taken seriously but not ideas. If he did want ideas to be taken seriously he'd be as unashamed as Stillman to build entire movies out of debates about the merits and demerits of ideas. It might be, too, that Stillman recognizes his patrician stock in a way Whedon doesn't.
Well, in any case, I guess here's to twenty years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Tuesday, March 07, 2017
Jen Smidt shares story with Pastor with no Answers on podcast
First, let's note that it was just slightly over five years ago this month that Mars Hill Church in Seattle, in response to escalated controversy surrounding the disciplinary procedures employed against some members, posted "A Call for Reconciliation". Since Mars Hill dissolved as a corporate entity at the end of last calendar year they don't necessarily have this up of themselves but there is an archival site that can be referenced if you don't already have a penchant for plugging things into The Wayback Machine.
http://marshill.se/marshill/2012/03/02/a-call-for-reconciliation
Seeing as Mark Driscoll's still on schedule to speak at The Stronger Man conference perhaps people who go to the conference can give a listen to this while they wait a month-ish to hear what Driscoll has to say.
While we're at it ... anyone who read the following post:
Mark Driscoll to be a guest speaker at Stronger Men conference April 28-29 2017, plenty of time to ask Eric Mason how he's set to speak at a conference alongside Driscoll after signing off on booting MH and MD from A29
might be interested to know that Eric Mason's been on a leave of absence from being on the Acts 29 board. So, technically, an Acts 29 board member is not, strictly speaking, speaking at an event where Driscoll's also a speaker. So ... perhaps at a woodenly literal level, nobody from Acts 29 executive leadership is speaking at an event in any Acts 29 capacity, which is handy, since the Acts 29 board removed Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll from membership in Acts 29 citing that Driscoll had demonstrated disqualifying behavior.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/08/two-years-ago-today-acts-29-removed.html
Or, at least, they did a few years ago. Good luck finding any signs of that without help from The Wayback Machine now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140810083820/http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/a-message-from-the-board-of-acts-29-concerning-mark-driscoll-and-mars-hill-church/
It's necessary to remind ourselves that a couple of years after the Acts 29 board, which included Darrin Patrick, expressed concern that Driscoll needed to step down from ministry and seek help, Patrick himself ended up out of ministry. This was the Patrick of whom Driscoll used to say "He's my pastor, you know?"
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/04/in-light-of-darrin-patrick-news-lets.html
The question of why Mason considered Driscoll fit to be sharing a podium or event with in spite of the Acts 29 statement from a few years ago that Mason signed off which strongly indicated (if taken literally or seriously) he felt Driscoll was unfit for ministry, could be asked by someone ... perhaps at some other time.
The social wreckage seems broad-ranging enough that it's not a surprise former leaders still feel like things need to be said. With that in mind, the podcast with Jen Smidt,which is slightly under 80 minutes long, more or less.
https://player.fm/series/pastor-with-no-answers/74-mars-hill-church-speaks-w-jen-smidt
Given the often prolix nature of this blog there's no promise that the ensuing comments will be brief.
One of the things Smidt mentioned was a story of how she said something to an executive elder and the next day her husband received a tongue-lashing and a warning that he needed to, basically, get his wife in line. That kind of story is not particularly surprising to hear or read about Mars Hill executive leadership. Smidt's comments about women seeming to have a marginal role in general but that she, paradoxically, had a significant writing and even teaching role within the history of Mars Hill is something you can hear in the podcast. What comes to mind, at the risk of still speaking too generally, is that one of the threads in the leadership culture could be described as a different set of standards for leaders and laity. This seems alluded to somewhat in Smidt's conversation, how once branded "leadership" people within Mars Hill treated leaders very differently than ordinary members.
Smidt's comments reminded me that in the Houston interview Grace Driscoll asserted that she never thought of her husband Mark as in any way misogynistic.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/04/revisiting-grace-driscolls-2015-ive.html
http://hillsongchurchwatch.com/2015/07/14/transcript-of-brian-houstons-nice-interview-with-mark-grace-driscoll-2/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSnqty0RUbU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5D9AQDfQHE
http://brianchouston.com/
Brian Houston: “So when in Australia your visits started to rise to the floor in secular Australia that word misogynistic. Uh, started being thrown around fairly liberally. I looked it up in the Oxford Dictionary and it says, “dislike of, contempt for, or engrained prejudice against women.” Are you, were you ever misogynist?” (35:35-36:55)
Mark Driscoll: “No, but because of things I have said foolishly, that impression is entirely my fault, and I have no one to blame but myself. That’s now how I feel, that’s not what I think, um, but for certain, have uh, allowed that to become an impression.” (36:56-37:15)
Brian Houston: “Sure, and those are things you said when you were in your late 20’s.” (37:16-37:18)
Mark Driscoll: “Yeah, and I have a heart to see, part of this Pastor Brian is, young men aren’t going to church, young men aren’t going to college, young men aren’t marrying women young, young men are not raising their children, and I have such a deep burden and passion to see men. You know, 1 Corinthians 13 when I was a child I thought like a child I spoke like a child I acted like a child, when I became a man I put childish ways behind me. I want to compel young men to grow up to take responsibility and sometimes in doing that I have communicated that in a way that demeans women and that’s not helpful and that’s not right and in the grace of God I need to repent and do better at that. But I still want, I mean no one would say that young men are in the western world highly impressive and we’re all encouraged. There’s a lot of work to be done. And so, I regret the times that I have not communicated in such a way trying to compel them and up and it seems I’m pushing the women down and that’s my fault.” (37:19-38:20)
Brian Houston: “That’s how you feel. You can change moving forward?” (38:21-38:23)
Mark Driscoll: “I hope to with the Grace of God yeah, absolutely.” (38:24-38:27)
Brian Houston: “Good.” (38:28)
Grace Driscoll: “I mean, I’ve never seen him as a misogynist, and never even thought that him of that at all. So, I’ve witnessed the opposite and so, and I’ve known him 27 years And so I can say yes there were methods that were wrong in the beginning but I knew his heart.” (38:29-38:46)
Here's the thing, Mark Driscoll's 2008 spiritual warfare instruction session was a leaders-only message, not instruction made available to the masses until years later. Now perhaps Grace Driscoll was not at that teaching session and didn't hear or otherwise come into contact with the following:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/11/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-2-part_70.html
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_the-devil_vodcast.m4v
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Part 2: The Devil
49:58
How about this one? Idle gossip and busybodying. 1 Timothy 5:11-15. THIS one is amazing. Ladies this one is especially for you. Some of you say, "Oh, it's not me." Yeah, it is. [emphasis added] 1 Timothy 5:11-15, "but refuse to enroll younger widows for when their passions draw them away from Christ they desire to marry and so incur condemnation for having abandoned their former faith. Besides that they learn to be idlers" Women learn how to make a lot of free time. Going about from house to house. Well now it would be from email to email and from phone call to phone call. Technology makes idle busybodying far more effective than ever.
And not only idlers but also gossips. They like to talk about people. How are you doing? What are you doing? And this isn't sisterly accountability, this is "I need to know what everybody's doing because I like to know what everybody's doing and then I can tell other people what other people are doing and then I can say, `Hey, you need to pray for so-and-so.' and I can make it sound spiritual so that when I'm gossiping and busy-bodying I'm doing so in a way that seems really Jesus-like." And busybodies, they need to know what everybody's doing. They need to know what everybody's doing, saying what they should not. So I would have younger widows marry, bear children and manage their household, right? Stay busy, and give the adversary (that's Satan) no occasion for slander. For some have already strayed after Satan. Hmm.
A woman who's a gossip and a busybody; a woman who has to put her nose in everybody's business and knows what everybody's going on; know what they're doing, she's working with Satan. Now I know most women would say: "No, no, no. I'm not Satanic, I'm concerned. I'm not Satanic, I'm an intercessor. I'm a prayer warrior. I'm not Satanic, I'm an accountability partner. I'm not Satanic, I'm a concerned friend." Okay, you're a Satanic intercessory prayer warrior accountability partner concerned friend but just start the whole list with "Satanic" so that we don't misunderstand your job description.
Now there's a difference between someone inviting you into their life and saying, "I want to be friends, I want to have an accountable relationship." and you pushing yourself into everyone's life, okay? I'll tell you, in the history of Mars Hill, I mean, I have had to put up a firewall, a moat, guard dogs, and a high wall with barbed wire on the top, and snipers behind it, around my wife. There are certain women who, they just need to know what Grace is doing and they are determined, they say things like, uh, "Hey, we need to have dinner with your family."
[slight chuckle] No you don't.
"Hey, we need to have coffee."
No you don't.
"Hey, phone number."
What? Nope.
"Email." Nope.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
"Oh, come on." Nope.
"But I thought you were our pastor."
I am and my first lesson is to tell you you're Satanic.
"Oh, come on, in our last church the pastor's wife [sob] she was my best friend and I got to talk to her all the time."
Well, she was Satanic, too. Give me her number, I'll call her and tell her. We'll help her out.
You ladies KNOW these women. Right? How many of you ladies know these women? They will try first with the hyper-spiritual, "Oh, praise the Lord! I'd love to pray for you. Let's get together. Let's do Christian community. Let's go to heart." If you decline, then they emotionally manipulate, [inhales, sobbing voice], "I thought we were friends, I thought you loved me. I don't have anybody to talk to." It's all manipulation. It's FEMALE manipulation. Some of you ladies, right now? You think, "I can't believe he said that." It's all true. It's Satanic, Satanic.
Paul says, "Don't be a busybody, stay busy." Right? Your husband, your kids, your family, your home, Jesus Christ. You got things to do.
Busybodies stay busy inserting themselves into everyone else's life. In some churches there are certain women, if you call them, they'll know everything that's going on because, somehow, they know everything. There's a difference between being a woman who is invited into someone's life for friendship, prayer and accountability, and a woman who emotionally manipulates and is pushy and is sometimes hyperspiritual and demanding and forces herself in because she's a drama queen and has to be at the center of all the drama. That is a Satanic woman.
You need to believe that and the worst thing you can do is accomodate her. Okay, we'll have you over for dinner once. And then, the next month, it's "Okay, buddy, we haven't been together in a month. We need to get together again. I'm sure a lot has happened in your life and I don't know what it is and I need to know because I need to know everything. I have a God complex of omniscience. I want to know everything about everybody." And what you find with these people, Paul says, they tend to be gossips, meaning you don't just talk to them, then they talk to other people. "Well, did you know their marriage is struggling? Did you know that she's depressed? Did you know that she's post-partum? Do you know that, sexually, her husband's impotent?" These are the conversations I've heard in this building. Really?
Sometimes womens' ministry is the cesspool that this kind of activity flourishes in. Some have asked, "Why don't you have womens' ministry?" The answer is we do, but it's, you have to be very careful, it's like juggling knives. You put the wrong women in charge of womens' ministry, the drama queen, the gossip mama, all of a sudden all the women come together, tell her everything, she becomes the pseudo-elder quasi-matriarch; she's got the dirt on everybody and sometimes the women all get together to just rip on their husbands in the name of prayer requests. Happens all the time. Happens all the time. [emphasis added] We have worked very hard so that the women who teach here are like Wendy Alsup who I really love and appreciate and respect. She's not like that. It is not that no woman should lead, that no woman should teach, that no woman should in a position of authority over other women under the authority of their husband, Jesus and the elders it's just that the wrong women tend to want it. The wrong women tend to want it and they tend to want it for the wrong reasons. And sometimes it's the humble woman, who isn't fighting to be the center of drama, control and power; who doesn't have to be up front; she's usually the one who is most capable and qualified.
And for you single men as well I would say be very, very careful because if you're on staff at Mars Hill (everything I say sounds terrible, this will just be added to the pile) there are certain women who will tell you, "I want to marry a pastor." Really? You should want to marry a Christian who loves Jesus, loves you, loves your kids should God give them to you. I've lectured enough Bible colleges and seminaries, the young women who come up and say, "I want to marry a pastor" my immediate default question is, "Are you a gossip? Are you a busybody? Are you a drama queen?" "No. No, I feel called to serve the Lord." Well, you can serve the Lord without being called to be a pastor's wife in fact, take it from me, it's easier to be a woman and serve the Lord than being married to a pastor. You single guys, you gotta be careful, man. There are some women, they want to marry the pastor so they can be the center of power, authority; they can be the first lady; everybody knows them, everybody wants to be their friend, everybody wants to tell them everything; and they can be the center of all the drama. Run for your life. Run for your life. Run for your life. It's Satanic.
See? I need you women to really search your own heart. Are you Satanic? Is this still part of your flesh, this sick desire in you to know everybody's business? I'm not saying you don't have friends but how much are you on the internet? How much time do you spend emailing? How much time do you spend crying and freaking out and knowing everybody's business and on the phone and having to meet with people because, "Did you know so-and-so did such-and-such and so-and-so is feeling this way and did you--?" Are you the center of LOTS of activity? Why? It's Satanic. It's Satanic. I think I've made my point.
So on the best of all possible days NOBODY could have construed ANY of that as even POTENTIALLY being misogynistic?
That Mark Driscoll regarded gossip as a uniquely or even singularly womanly vice seems simultaneously ironic and strange. It seems ironic because Mark Driscoll has been more than happy to share stories of things he's said in pastoral roles that would seem best left never said, let alone conveyed to hundreds or thousands for the sake of a punchline. Take the axiomatic observation that marriages improve when guys get more sex.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/mark-driscoll-in-2007-biblical-man-most.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0OWNJufdF4
The Biblical Man
2007
43:53ish...And most guys are just simply frustrated, that I have talked to, because they're not getting enough sex. I'll give you one story. Won't name his name, but I remember meeting with a--this is a lot of my marriage counseling. I don't think I'm a great marriage counselor but I do think I have one key insight that I'll share with you. Oftentimes I meet with couples and here's what I hear--the wife says, "I don't feel like we're connected. I don't feel like we're close. I feel like he's a little irritable." And then I ask, "How often are you having sex?" And she's, "What does that have to do with anything?" [slight chuckle] That effects everything. You know. Frequency is important. ...
"You guys have sex every day and then come see me again in a month and if there's still communication problems, he seems depressed, he's lethargic, THEN we'll talk because there's OBVIOUSLY a problem. But we're gonna start with what SEEMS to be the most obvious solution."
I'm telling ya, ninety-nine percent of the time they come back a month later she's like, "He's just totally a different guy. [emphasis added] ...
and there's always that Scotland sermon
Mark Driscoll | Sex: A Study of the Good Bits of Song of Solomon
Edinburgh, Scotland on November 18,2007about 23:05https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8sNVDyW-ws&feature=youtu.be
―Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest,‖ she says, ―is my lover among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade and his fruit is sweet to my taste.‖ What is she talking about? Oral sex on her husband. That as he stands, she likes to be beneath him and his taste is sweet. It is a euphemism for oral sex, in your Bible. The Jews wouldn‘t even let men read this until they were married or thirty. Now you know why. You‘ve got Jewish boys under the blankets at night with a candle. [Laughter from audience.] Men, I am glad to report to you that oral sex is biblical. Amen? [Minimal response from audience.] No, you can do better than that. [Laughter from audience] The wife performing oral sex on the husband is biblical. God‘s men said, Amen. Ladies, your husbands appreciate oral sex. They do. So, serve them, love them well. It‘s biblical. Right here. We have a verse. The fruit of her husband is sweet to her taste and she delights to be beneath
24:17
I'll tell you a story if you don't tell anyone else of a man who started attending our church because of oral sex. Right? So many women go to church. In your country it's sixty or seventy percent. "My husband won't come to church. He doesn't have any interest in the things of God. He doesn't understand why church would apply to him." We had a woman like that in our church. She became a Christian. Her husband was not a Christian. He hated the church, wanted nothing to do with the church. She kept browbeating him about Jesus. "You need to get saved. You're gonna burn in hell."
He had no interest in that.
And so, finally, I was teaching a class on sex and she said, "Oh, so oral sex on a husband is what a wife is supposed to do?" I said, "Yes." She said, "My husband's always wanted that but I've refused him." I went to 1 Peter 3. I said, "The Bible says that if your husband is not a Christian that you are to win him over with deeds of kindness." I said, "So go home and tell your husband that you were in a Bible study today and that God has convicted you of sin. And repent and go perform oral sex on your husband and tell him that Jesus, Jesus Christ commands you to do so." [emphasis added] The next week the man showed up at church. He came up to me, he said, "You know, this is a really good church." That handing out tracts on the street thing, there's a better way to see revival, I assure you of that.
28:29
--you say, "Won't that make me dirty?" No, it'll make you a good wife, and ladies, let me assure you of this, if you think you're being dirty he's pretty happy. [emphasis added]
So if you're a Christian wife and your pastor says the Bible says you should give your husband oral sex in spite of your reservations against it there's room to be concerned about that. It's a puzzle particularly since, as we've established from "Mark Driscoll vs the Puritans" that actual Puritans would regard such a thing from a man, let alone a pastor, as depraved. We can particularly turn to Richard Baxter on a very specific question:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/baxter/practical.i.v.ix.html
let's look at page 445 in a section where Baxter discusses the duties of wives to husbands and considers various grounds for legitimate possibility for divorce.
Quest. XI. Is not the case of sodomy or buggery a ground for warrantable divorce as well as
adultery?
Answ. Yes, and seemeth to be included in the very word itself in the text, Matt. v, 31,32,
which signifieth uncleanness; or at least is fully implied in the reason of it. See Grotius
ibid, also of this.
So Mark Driscoll can blather on all he want about how the Puritans are great and he loves them and how the Bible says oral sex is great and biblical. You can still note that Richard Baxter advised that sodomy and buggery were grounds for warrantable divorce just as adultery would be. Driscoll recommended ccel.org to Mars Hill members way back in 2001-2002 so it's not like he could never look up Baxter's Christian Directory.
Driscoll not only said he told a woman she should give her husband oral sex he regaled a crowd about how he did so and what biblical prooftexts he was willing to employ.
While progressive and secular writers tended to misconstrue and misquote this one let's not forget that back in 2006 Driscoll :
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/revisiting-that-2006-post-that.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20070106220656/http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits
http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits
•Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity [emphasis added], which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either.
A series of Driscoll's more memorable anecdotes and axioms on women, marriage and particularly about sex can be read over here.
All that is to say that Grace Driscoll is free to believe what she likes about her husband having no history of having said or done anything she would consider misogynistic. The rest of the world is free to suggest a different possibility.
There really is a lot that could be unpacked from what Smidt shared but one of a few things that her conversation reminded me of was something I considered a couple of years ago about the nature of shunning at Mars Hill.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/02/on-shunnings-and-social-status-proposal.html
The tl:dr version is this--shunning activity seemed to be calibrated to the level of formal authority people were regarded as having. This was probably most true about men and wives were only secondarily considered. The scant advantage that might have had for women was that wrath from above would tend to be mediated to the husband first on account of headship (retroactive sarcasm alert). The disadvantage would be that since women were expected to be under headship any concerns they had would be required to go up the chain of command. So a wife who had concerns about a leadership decision or a policy would have to mediate that concern through a husband who might or might not get heard or who might or might not accurately or adequately convey his wife's concerns.
But there's another thing that's come to mind lately hearing Smidt's story. If you've read this far notice how adamant Driscoll's denunciation of women as gossips was. It's like he was denouncing what he regarded as a saantic underground church leadership culture within a church leadership culture. Sure, Driscoll paradoxically embodied the kind of petty gossip-mongering mentality he claimed to find so loathsome in women as he talked about what stuff he heard; sure he managed to repeat and transmit the stuff he considered so shameful to other leaders in 2008 and then, again, to the entire inquiring world that may have downloaded the audio files later. But there's an additional layer to consider. The animus toward women regarded as gossips is the easiest thing to notice but there's a subtle and potentially divergent element within that concern.
What Driscoll may have been concerned about was the possibility of informal networks of influence. He may have, perhaps under the influence of covertly and overtly misogynistic biases, fixated on women as most embodying what he dreaded happening to Mars Hill, but there's nothing inherently womanly about a giant informal network of informal influence. If at times leaders of Mars Hill made it seem as though tech systems had been hacked this might have been what some of them wanted to believe. To go by the number of times (just a handful, really) WtH decided to stonewall leaders of Mars Hill it seemed that one of the conundrums Mars Hill leadership had was that they knew perfectly well who was able and willing to publish leaked content detailing policies and personalities in Mars Hill history. What they couldn't figure out was who was doing all the leaking and how they went about doing it. Who published what about Mars Hill is not that difficult to establish. It's easy to look up. Who conveyed what information in what way and at what time is another matter and may it remain opaque for a long time to come.
One of the heartening things to hear Smidt relay was how in the wake of the loss of formal status the informal network of relations and goodwill she and her husband had inspired people to raise money on their behalf. That may get to a point we should bear in mind about the power of informal connections, the informal power is dormant and not necessarily observable until a catalyzing incident or policy gets implemented. When Pharaoh decreed the Hebrew male babies be killed the midwives defied the policy. By broad analogy when Mars Hill formal leadership insisted on a rigid respect for formal chains of command as a way to obfuscate or dampen avenues of internal protest, this may have gone on long enough that it inspired people to vent their frustrations to the press or to bloggers or to all the above. That was, actually, one of the things I mentioned to a former MH pastor back around 2009 as being a likely outcome of the policies and precedents that were taking shape from the 2007-2009 period.
Where I differ a little bit with Smidt regarding Jamie Munson is on the extent to which Munson was a "buffer" between Driscoll and the church culture at large. Where the term she used is "buffer" the term I'd use is "insulation". Munson, and then later Turner, insulated Mark Driscoll from directly having to bear the animosity from the masses regarding policies and decisions in the normal or exceptional operation of governance. That's not a semantic distinction, obviously. Munson and those close to him may have felt he played the role of a buffer if the comparison point for Munson is Turner. But if there's no grading on a curve and Munson's tenure as president beginning with the termination and trials of Petry and Meyer on the one hand and, on the other hand , a closing year of being involved in the Result Source contract agreement is considered, Munson's tenure as legal president of Mars Hill may have been bookended by two or three of the more disastrous leadership decisions in the history of Mars Hill. By being the president of the organization Munson managed to bear the formal responsibility for decisions that were made that, in the long run, seemed to benefit Mark Driscoll more than others. Sometimes it can seem as if a person would have to interpret "buffer" as something like a bullet-proof vest. After all, Driscoll used to say that when you're in ministry people like to take shots at you. Perhaps, to extend Driscoll's analogy a bit, visionary leaders who know they are apt to get shot at invest in bullet-proof vests.
Sutton Turner had a leadership style that, to put it delicately, alienated a lot of people at Mars Hill. Smidt's conversation alludes to this. But it seems that there are people willing to go on record saying that Turner's leadership, though it had controversies, saved Mars Hill from the brink of fiscal ruin.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/11/reviewing-recommendations-of-mars-hill.html
http://suttonturner.com/recommendations/ (there are some new entries from former MH staff if you haven't read this page in a while)
The consensus among those willing to endorse Turner seems to be that Turner helped Mars Hill get through a situation that was nothing short of a crisis. If anyone were to contest the reliability of these accounts they would have to provide some evidence that Sutton Turner did not, in effect, salvage Mars Hill from fiscal ruin. Sure, ultimately since in the wake of Mark Driscoll's resignation the entity known as Mars Hill dissolved Turner couldn't save Mars Hill but at that point we're arguably discussing the blowback from policies that Turner implemented regarding things you've probably already read about if you're coming to this blog for any Mars Hill related anything.
In other words, whoever disagrees with the account that Sutton Turner saved Mars Hill from running over a fiscal cliff currently has no evidence whatsoever to provide a counter-narrative. It's also possible that both Munson AND Turner came to regard themselves as playing the role of buffer between Mark Driscoll as a leader and the rest of Mars Hill as a culture.
Something Smidt mentioned about reconciliation is worth noting, that it was conveyed to her that it was not possible for the Driscolls to reconcile with her on account of Phil Smidt's role in leveling formal charges against Mark Driscoll. It seems to be very easy for the Driscolls to recycle the bromides they introduced in Real Marriage over at their blog.
https://markdriscoll.org/how-to-have-a-godly-fight-with-your-spouse/
Sometimes the posts have content from Grace Driscoll, or at the very least Grace Driscoll is willing to sign off on the content
http://markdriscoll.org/what-is-a-godly-friend/
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/09/at-mark-driscoll-ministries-grace.html
Smidt shared in the podcast she went through a demon trial. I had to listen to the multi-hour 2008 spiritual warfare session because that was required of Theology Response Team volunteers. To keep an already sprawling blog post shorter than it could be, I became an ex-Pentecostal because I didn't like the volatile mixture of recovered memory tropes and soul tie stuff that seemed like a bad mixture of the worst pop psychology fads with inadequate scriptural interpretation. There's a long-form case to be made (and has been at this blog for those who want to trawl through it) that if Mark Driscoll's taxonomy of demonization were applied to what he's said about his own life it's an open question whether he's at some point been demonized himself.
But it's understandable why people would be reluctant to share if they had been subjects to demona trials as Mark Driscoll described them. Driscoll at this point might not be in a rush to describe conducting demon trials for a bit.
So those are the only sort of organized thoughts of the evening having heard the podcast. If you're a former Mars Hill member or leader it's worth giving the podcast a listen.
It doesn't sound like either Mark or Grace Driscoll have deigned to make any significant contact with Phil or Jen Smidt as yet, at least by Jen Smidt's account. Since Acts 29 leadership basically said Mark Driscoll had disqualified himself from ministry it seems like a live question why Christians would want Driscoll speaking at their conferences. There's a range of possible explanations for this but it's not suitable to elaborate on them in so long a post as this one already has become.
http://marshill.se/marshill/2012/03/02/a-call-for-reconciliation
Seeing as Mark Driscoll's still on schedule to speak at The Stronger Man conference perhaps people who go to the conference can give a listen to this while they wait a month-ish to hear what Driscoll has to say.
While we're at it ... anyone who read the following post:
Mark Driscoll to be a guest speaker at Stronger Men conference April 28-29 2017, plenty of time to ask Eric Mason how he's set to speak at a conference alongside Driscoll after signing off on booting MH and MD from A29
might be interested to know that Eric Mason's been on a leave of absence from being on the Acts 29 board. So, technically, an Acts 29 board member is not, strictly speaking, speaking at an event where Driscoll's also a speaker. So ... perhaps at a woodenly literal level, nobody from Acts 29 executive leadership is speaking at an event in any Acts 29 capacity, which is handy, since the Acts 29 board removed Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll from membership in Acts 29 citing that Driscoll had demonstrated disqualifying behavior.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/08/two-years-ago-today-acts-29-removed.html
Or, at least, they did a few years ago. Good luck finding any signs of that without help from The Wayback Machine now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140810083820/http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/a-message-from-the-board-of-acts-29-concerning-mark-driscoll-and-mars-hill-church/
It's necessary to remind ourselves that a couple of years after the Acts 29 board, which included Darrin Patrick, expressed concern that Driscoll needed to step down from ministry and seek help, Patrick himself ended up out of ministry. This was the Patrick of whom Driscoll used to say "He's my pastor, you know?"
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/04/in-light-of-darrin-patrick-news-lets.html
The question of why Mason considered Driscoll fit to be sharing a podium or event with in spite of the Acts 29 statement from a few years ago that Mason signed off which strongly indicated (if taken literally or seriously) he felt Driscoll was unfit for ministry, could be asked by someone ... perhaps at some other time.
The social wreckage seems broad-ranging enough that it's not a surprise former leaders still feel like things need to be said. With that in mind, the podcast with Jen Smidt,which is slightly under 80 minutes long, more or less.
https://player.fm/series/pastor-with-no-answers/74-mars-hill-church-speaks-w-jen-smidt
Given the often prolix nature of this blog there's no promise that the ensuing comments will be brief.
One of the things Smidt mentioned was a story of how she said something to an executive elder and the next day her husband received a tongue-lashing and a warning that he needed to, basically, get his wife in line. That kind of story is not particularly surprising to hear or read about Mars Hill executive leadership. Smidt's comments about women seeming to have a marginal role in general but that she, paradoxically, had a significant writing and even teaching role within the history of Mars Hill is something you can hear in the podcast. What comes to mind, at the risk of still speaking too generally, is that one of the threads in the leadership culture could be described as a different set of standards for leaders and laity. This seems alluded to somewhat in Smidt's conversation, how once branded "leadership" people within Mars Hill treated leaders very differently than ordinary members.
Smidt's comments reminded me that in the Houston interview Grace Driscoll asserted that she never thought of her husband Mark as in any way misogynistic.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/04/revisiting-grace-driscolls-2015-ive.html
http://hillsongchurchwatch.com/2015/07/14/transcript-of-brian-houstons-nice-interview-with-mark-grace-driscoll-2/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSnqty0RUbU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5D9AQDfQHE
http://brianchouston.com/
Brian Houston: “So when in Australia your visits started to rise to the floor in secular Australia that word misogynistic. Uh, started being thrown around fairly liberally. I looked it up in the Oxford Dictionary and it says, “dislike of, contempt for, or engrained prejudice against women.” Are you, were you ever misogynist?” (35:35-36:55)
Mark Driscoll: “No, but because of things I have said foolishly, that impression is entirely my fault, and I have no one to blame but myself. That’s now how I feel, that’s not what I think, um, but for certain, have uh, allowed that to become an impression.” (36:56-37:15)
Brian Houston: “Sure, and those are things you said when you were in your late 20’s.” (37:16-37:18)
Mark Driscoll: “Yeah, and I have a heart to see, part of this Pastor Brian is, young men aren’t going to church, young men aren’t going to college, young men aren’t marrying women young, young men are not raising their children, and I have such a deep burden and passion to see men. You know, 1 Corinthians 13 when I was a child I thought like a child I spoke like a child I acted like a child, when I became a man I put childish ways behind me. I want to compel young men to grow up to take responsibility and sometimes in doing that I have communicated that in a way that demeans women and that’s not helpful and that’s not right and in the grace of God I need to repent and do better at that. But I still want, I mean no one would say that young men are in the western world highly impressive and we’re all encouraged. There’s a lot of work to be done. And so, I regret the times that I have not communicated in such a way trying to compel them and up and it seems I’m pushing the women down and that’s my fault.” (37:19-38:20)
Brian Houston: “That’s how you feel. You can change moving forward?” (38:21-38:23)
Mark Driscoll: “I hope to with the Grace of God yeah, absolutely.” (38:24-38:27)
Brian Houston: “Good.” (38:28)
Grace Driscoll: “I mean, I’ve never seen him as a misogynist, and never even thought that him of that at all. So, I’ve witnessed the opposite and so, and I’ve known him 27 years And so I can say yes there were methods that were wrong in the beginning but I knew his heart.” (38:29-38:46)
Here's the thing, Mark Driscoll's 2008 spiritual warfare instruction session was a leaders-only message, not instruction made available to the masses until years later. Now perhaps Grace Driscoll was not at that teaching session and didn't hear or otherwise come into contact with the following:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/11/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-2-part_70.html
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_the-devil_vodcast.m4v
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Part 2: The Devil
49:58
How about this one? Idle gossip and busybodying. 1 Timothy 5:11-15. THIS one is amazing. Ladies this one is especially for you. Some of you say, "Oh, it's not me." Yeah, it is. [emphasis added] 1 Timothy 5:11-15, "but refuse to enroll younger widows for when their passions draw them away from Christ they desire to marry and so incur condemnation for having abandoned their former faith. Besides that they learn to be idlers" Women learn how to make a lot of free time. Going about from house to house. Well now it would be from email to email and from phone call to phone call. Technology makes idle busybodying far more effective than ever.
And not only idlers but also gossips. They like to talk about people. How are you doing? What are you doing? And this isn't sisterly accountability, this is "I need to know what everybody's doing because I like to know what everybody's doing and then I can tell other people what other people are doing and then I can say, `Hey, you need to pray for so-and-so.' and I can make it sound spiritual so that when I'm gossiping and busy-bodying I'm doing so in a way that seems really Jesus-like." And busybodies, they need to know what everybody's doing. They need to know what everybody's doing, saying what they should not. So I would have younger widows marry, bear children and manage their household, right? Stay busy, and give the adversary (that's Satan) no occasion for slander. For some have already strayed after Satan. Hmm.
A woman who's a gossip and a busybody; a woman who has to put her nose in everybody's business and knows what everybody's going on; know what they're doing, she's working with Satan. Now I know most women would say: "No, no, no. I'm not Satanic, I'm concerned. I'm not Satanic, I'm an intercessor. I'm a prayer warrior. I'm not Satanic, I'm an accountability partner. I'm not Satanic, I'm a concerned friend." Okay, you're a Satanic intercessory prayer warrior accountability partner concerned friend but just start the whole list with "Satanic" so that we don't misunderstand your job description.
Now there's a difference between someone inviting you into their life and saying, "I want to be friends, I want to have an accountable relationship." and you pushing yourself into everyone's life, okay? I'll tell you, in the history of Mars Hill, I mean, I have had to put up a firewall, a moat, guard dogs, and a high wall with barbed wire on the top, and snipers behind it, around my wife. There are certain women who, they just need to know what Grace is doing and they are determined, they say things like, uh, "Hey, we need to have dinner with your family."
[slight chuckle] No you don't.
"Hey, we need to have coffee."
No you don't.
"Hey, phone number."
What? Nope.
"Email." Nope.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
"Oh, come on." Nope.
"But I thought you were our pastor."
I am and my first lesson is to tell you you're Satanic.
"Oh, come on, in our last church the pastor's wife [sob] she was my best friend and I got to talk to her all the time."
Well, she was Satanic, too. Give me her number, I'll call her and tell her. We'll help her out.
You ladies KNOW these women. Right? How many of you ladies know these women? They will try first with the hyper-spiritual, "Oh, praise the Lord! I'd love to pray for you. Let's get together. Let's do Christian community. Let's go to heart." If you decline, then they emotionally manipulate, [inhales, sobbing voice], "I thought we were friends, I thought you loved me. I don't have anybody to talk to." It's all manipulation. It's FEMALE manipulation. Some of you ladies, right now? You think, "I can't believe he said that." It's all true. It's Satanic, Satanic.
Paul says, "Don't be a busybody, stay busy." Right? Your husband, your kids, your family, your home, Jesus Christ. You got things to do.
Busybodies stay busy inserting themselves into everyone else's life. In some churches there are certain women, if you call them, they'll know everything that's going on because, somehow, they know everything. There's a difference between being a woman who is invited into someone's life for friendship, prayer and accountability, and a woman who emotionally manipulates and is pushy and is sometimes hyperspiritual and demanding and forces herself in because she's a drama queen and has to be at the center of all the drama. That is a Satanic woman.
You need to believe that and the worst thing you can do is accomodate her. Okay, we'll have you over for dinner once. And then, the next month, it's "Okay, buddy, we haven't been together in a month. We need to get together again. I'm sure a lot has happened in your life and I don't know what it is and I need to know because I need to know everything. I have a God complex of omniscience. I want to know everything about everybody." And what you find with these people, Paul says, they tend to be gossips, meaning you don't just talk to them, then they talk to other people. "Well, did you know their marriage is struggling? Did you know that she's depressed? Did you know that she's post-partum? Do you know that, sexually, her husband's impotent?" These are the conversations I've heard in this building. Really?
Sometimes womens' ministry is the cesspool that this kind of activity flourishes in. Some have asked, "Why don't you have womens' ministry?" The answer is we do, but it's, you have to be very careful, it's like juggling knives. You put the wrong women in charge of womens' ministry, the drama queen, the gossip mama, all of a sudden all the women come together, tell her everything, she becomes the pseudo-elder quasi-matriarch; she's got the dirt on everybody and sometimes the women all get together to just rip on their husbands in the name of prayer requests. Happens all the time. Happens all the time. [emphasis added] We have worked very hard so that the women who teach here are like Wendy Alsup who I really love and appreciate and respect. She's not like that. It is not that no woman should lead, that no woman should teach, that no woman should in a position of authority over other women under the authority of their husband, Jesus and the elders it's just that the wrong women tend to want it. The wrong women tend to want it and they tend to want it for the wrong reasons. And sometimes it's the humble woman, who isn't fighting to be the center of drama, control and power; who doesn't have to be up front; she's usually the one who is most capable and qualified.
And for you single men as well I would say be very, very careful because if you're on staff at Mars Hill (everything I say sounds terrible, this will just be added to the pile) there are certain women who will tell you, "I want to marry a pastor." Really? You should want to marry a Christian who loves Jesus, loves you, loves your kids should God give them to you. I've lectured enough Bible colleges and seminaries, the young women who come up and say, "I want to marry a pastor" my immediate default question is, "Are you a gossip? Are you a busybody? Are you a drama queen?" "No. No, I feel called to serve the Lord." Well, you can serve the Lord without being called to be a pastor's wife in fact, take it from me, it's easier to be a woman and serve the Lord than being married to a pastor. You single guys, you gotta be careful, man. There are some women, they want to marry the pastor so they can be the center of power, authority; they can be the first lady; everybody knows them, everybody wants to be their friend, everybody wants to tell them everything; and they can be the center of all the drama. Run for your life. Run for your life. Run for your life. It's Satanic.
See? I need you women to really search your own heart. Are you Satanic? Is this still part of your flesh, this sick desire in you to know everybody's business? I'm not saying you don't have friends but how much are you on the internet? How much time do you spend emailing? How much time do you spend crying and freaking out and knowing everybody's business and on the phone and having to meet with people because, "Did you know so-and-so did such-and-such and so-and-so is feeling this way and did you--?" Are you the center of LOTS of activity? Why? It's Satanic. It's Satanic. I think I've made my point.
So on the best of all possible days NOBODY could have construed ANY of that as even POTENTIALLY being misogynistic?
That Mark Driscoll regarded gossip as a uniquely or even singularly womanly vice seems simultaneously ironic and strange. It seems ironic because Mark Driscoll has been more than happy to share stories of things he's said in pastoral roles that would seem best left never said, let alone conveyed to hundreds or thousands for the sake of a punchline. Take the axiomatic observation that marriages improve when guys get more sex.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/mark-driscoll-in-2007-biblical-man-most.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0OWNJufdF4
The Biblical Man
2007
43:53ish...And most guys are just simply frustrated, that I have talked to, because they're not getting enough sex. I'll give you one story. Won't name his name, but I remember meeting with a--this is a lot of my marriage counseling. I don't think I'm a great marriage counselor but I do think I have one key insight that I'll share with you. Oftentimes I meet with couples and here's what I hear--the wife says, "I don't feel like we're connected. I don't feel like we're close. I feel like he's a little irritable." And then I ask, "How often are you having sex?" And she's, "What does that have to do with anything?" [slight chuckle] That effects everything. You know. Frequency is important. ...
"You guys have sex every day and then come see me again in a month and if there's still communication problems, he seems depressed, he's lethargic, THEN we'll talk because there's OBVIOUSLY a problem. But we're gonna start with what SEEMS to be the most obvious solution."
I'm telling ya, ninety-nine percent of the time they come back a month later she's like, "He's just totally a different guy. [emphasis added] ...
and there's always that Scotland sermon
Mark Driscoll | Sex: A Study of the Good Bits of Song of Solomon
Edinburgh, Scotland on November 18,2007about 23:05https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8sNVDyW-ws&feature=youtu.be
―Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest,‖ she says, ―is my lover among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade and his fruit is sweet to my taste.‖ What is she talking about? Oral sex on her husband. That as he stands, she likes to be beneath him and his taste is sweet. It is a euphemism for oral sex, in your Bible. The Jews wouldn‘t even let men read this until they were married or thirty. Now you know why. You‘ve got Jewish boys under the blankets at night with a candle. [Laughter from audience.] Men, I am glad to report to you that oral sex is biblical. Amen? [Minimal response from audience.] No, you can do better than that. [Laughter from audience] The wife performing oral sex on the husband is biblical. God‘s men said, Amen. Ladies, your husbands appreciate oral sex. They do. So, serve them, love them well. It‘s biblical. Right here. We have a verse. The fruit of her husband is sweet to her taste and she delights to be beneath
24:17
I'll tell you a story if you don't tell anyone else of a man who started attending our church because of oral sex. Right? So many women go to church. In your country it's sixty or seventy percent. "My husband won't come to church. He doesn't have any interest in the things of God. He doesn't understand why church would apply to him." We had a woman like that in our church. She became a Christian. Her husband was not a Christian. He hated the church, wanted nothing to do with the church. She kept browbeating him about Jesus. "You need to get saved. You're gonna burn in hell."
He had no interest in that.
And so, finally, I was teaching a class on sex and she said, "Oh, so oral sex on a husband is what a wife is supposed to do?" I said, "Yes." She said, "My husband's always wanted that but I've refused him." I went to 1 Peter 3. I said, "The Bible says that if your husband is not a Christian that you are to win him over with deeds of kindness." I said, "So go home and tell your husband that you were in a Bible study today and that God has convicted you of sin. And repent and go perform oral sex on your husband and tell him that Jesus, Jesus Christ commands you to do so." [emphasis added] The next week the man showed up at church. He came up to me, he said, "You know, this is a really good church." That handing out tracts on the street thing, there's a better way to see revival, I assure you of that.
28:29
--you say, "Won't that make me dirty?" No, it'll make you a good wife, and ladies, let me assure you of this, if you think you're being dirty he's pretty happy. [emphasis added]
So if you're a Christian wife and your pastor says the Bible says you should give your husband oral sex in spite of your reservations against it there's room to be concerned about that. It's a puzzle particularly since, as we've established from "Mark Driscoll vs the Puritans" that actual Puritans would regard such a thing from a man, let alone a pastor, as depraved. We can particularly turn to Richard Baxter on a very specific question:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/baxter/practical.i.v.ix.html
let's look at page 445 in a section where Baxter discusses the duties of wives to husbands and considers various grounds for legitimate possibility for divorce.
Quest. XI. Is not the case of sodomy or buggery a ground for warrantable divorce as well as
adultery?
Answ. Yes, and seemeth to be included in the very word itself in the text, Matt. v, 31,32,
which signifieth uncleanness; or at least is fully implied in the reason of it. See Grotius
ibid, also of this.
So Mark Driscoll can blather on all he want about how the Puritans are great and he loves them and how the Bible says oral sex is great and biblical. You can still note that Richard Baxter advised that sodomy and buggery were grounds for warrantable divorce just as adultery would be. Driscoll recommended ccel.org to Mars Hill members way back in 2001-2002 so it's not like he could never look up Baxter's Christian Directory.
Driscoll not only said he told a woman she should give her husband oral sex he regaled a crowd about how he did so and what biblical prooftexts he was willing to employ.
While progressive and secular writers tended to misconstrue and misquote this one let's not forget that back in 2006 Driscoll :
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/revisiting-that-2006-post-that.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20070106220656/http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits
http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits
•Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity [emphasis added], which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either.
A series of Driscoll's more memorable anecdotes and axioms on women, marriage and particularly about sex can be read over here.
All that is to say that Grace Driscoll is free to believe what she likes about her husband having no history of having said or done anything she would consider misogynistic. The rest of the world is free to suggest a different possibility.
There really is a lot that could be unpacked from what Smidt shared but one of a few things that her conversation reminded me of was something I considered a couple of years ago about the nature of shunning at Mars Hill.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/02/on-shunnings-and-social-status-proposal.html
The tl:dr version is this--shunning activity seemed to be calibrated to the level of formal authority people were regarded as having. This was probably most true about men and wives were only secondarily considered. The scant advantage that might have had for women was that wrath from above would tend to be mediated to the husband first on account of headship (retroactive sarcasm alert). The disadvantage would be that since women were expected to be under headship any concerns they had would be required to go up the chain of command. So a wife who had concerns about a leadership decision or a policy would have to mediate that concern through a husband who might or might not get heard or who might or might not accurately or adequately convey his wife's concerns.
But there's another thing that's come to mind lately hearing Smidt's story. If you've read this far notice how adamant Driscoll's denunciation of women as gossips was. It's like he was denouncing what he regarded as a saantic underground church leadership culture within a church leadership culture. Sure, Driscoll paradoxically embodied the kind of petty gossip-mongering mentality he claimed to find so loathsome in women as he talked about what stuff he heard; sure he managed to repeat and transmit the stuff he considered so shameful to other leaders in 2008 and then, again, to the entire inquiring world that may have downloaded the audio files later. But there's an additional layer to consider. The animus toward women regarded as gossips is the easiest thing to notice but there's a subtle and potentially divergent element within that concern.
What Driscoll may have been concerned about was the possibility of informal networks of influence. He may have, perhaps under the influence of covertly and overtly misogynistic biases, fixated on women as most embodying what he dreaded happening to Mars Hill, but there's nothing inherently womanly about a giant informal network of informal influence. If at times leaders of Mars Hill made it seem as though tech systems had been hacked this might have been what some of them wanted to believe. To go by the number of times (just a handful, really) WtH decided to stonewall leaders of Mars Hill it seemed that one of the conundrums Mars Hill leadership had was that they knew perfectly well who was able and willing to publish leaked content detailing policies and personalities in Mars Hill history. What they couldn't figure out was who was doing all the leaking and how they went about doing it. Who published what about Mars Hill is not that difficult to establish. It's easy to look up. Who conveyed what information in what way and at what time is another matter and may it remain opaque for a long time to come.
One of the heartening things to hear Smidt relay was how in the wake of the loss of formal status the informal network of relations and goodwill she and her husband had inspired people to raise money on their behalf. That may get to a point we should bear in mind about the power of informal connections, the informal power is dormant and not necessarily observable until a catalyzing incident or policy gets implemented. When Pharaoh decreed the Hebrew male babies be killed the midwives defied the policy. By broad analogy when Mars Hill formal leadership insisted on a rigid respect for formal chains of command as a way to obfuscate or dampen avenues of internal protest, this may have gone on long enough that it inspired people to vent their frustrations to the press or to bloggers or to all the above. That was, actually, one of the things I mentioned to a former MH pastor back around 2009 as being a likely outcome of the policies and precedents that were taking shape from the 2007-2009 period.
Where I differ a little bit with Smidt regarding Jamie Munson is on the extent to which Munson was a "buffer" between Driscoll and the church culture at large. Where the term she used is "buffer" the term I'd use is "insulation". Munson, and then later Turner, insulated Mark Driscoll from directly having to bear the animosity from the masses regarding policies and decisions in the normal or exceptional operation of governance. That's not a semantic distinction, obviously. Munson and those close to him may have felt he played the role of a buffer if the comparison point for Munson is Turner. But if there's no grading on a curve and Munson's tenure as president beginning with the termination and trials of Petry and Meyer on the one hand and, on the other hand , a closing year of being involved in the Result Source contract agreement is considered, Munson's tenure as legal president of Mars Hill may have been bookended by two or three of the more disastrous leadership decisions in the history of Mars Hill. By being the president of the organization Munson managed to bear the formal responsibility for decisions that were made that, in the long run, seemed to benefit Mark Driscoll more than others. Sometimes it can seem as if a person would have to interpret "buffer" as something like a bullet-proof vest. After all, Driscoll used to say that when you're in ministry people like to take shots at you. Perhaps, to extend Driscoll's analogy a bit, visionary leaders who know they are apt to get shot at invest in bullet-proof vests.
Sutton Turner had a leadership style that, to put it delicately, alienated a lot of people at Mars Hill. Smidt's conversation alludes to this. But it seems that there are people willing to go on record saying that Turner's leadership, though it had controversies, saved Mars Hill from the brink of fiscal ruin.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/11/reviewing-recommendations-of-mars-hill.html
http://suttonturner.com/recommendations/ (there are some new entries from former MH staff if you haven't read this page in a while)
The consensus among those willing to endorse Turner seems to be that Turner helped Mars Hill get through a situation that was nothing short of a crisis. If anyone were to contest the reliability of these accounts they would have to provide some evidence that Sutton Turner did not, in effect, salvage Mars Hill from fiscal ruin. Sure, ultimately since in the wake of Mark Driscoll's resignation the entity known as Mars Hill dissolved Turner couldn't save Mars Hill but at that point we're arguably discussing the blowback from policies that Turner implemented regarding things you've probably already read about if you're coming to this blog for any Mars Hill related anything.
In other words, whoever disagrees with the account that Sutton Turner saved Mars Hill from running over a fiscal cliff currently has no evidence whatsoever to provide a counter-narrative. It's also possible that both Munson AND Turner came to regard themselves as playing the role of buffer between Mark Driscoll as a leader and the rest of Mars Hill as a culture.
Something Smidt mentioned about reconciliation is worth noting, that it was conveyed to her that it was not possible for the Driscolls to reconcile with her on account of Phil Smidt's role in leveling formal charges against Mark Driscoll. It seems to be very easy for the Driscolls to recycle the bromides they introduced in Real Marriage over at their blog.
https://markdriscoll.org/how-to-have-a-godly-fight-with-your-spouse/
Sometimes the posts have content from Grace Driscoll, or at the very least Grace Driscoll is willing to sign off on the content
http://markdriscoll.org/what-is-a-godly-friend/
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/09/at-mark-driscoll-ministries-grace.html
Smidt shared in the podcast she went through a demon trial. I had to listen to the multi-hour 2008 spiritual warfare session because that was required of Theology Response Team volunteers. To keep an already sprawling blog post shorter than it could be, I became an ex-Pentecostal because I didn't like the volatile mixture of recovered memory tropes and soul tie stuff that seemed like a bad mixture of the worst pop psychology fads with inadequate scriptural interpretation. There's a long-form case to be made (and has been at this blog for those who want to trawl through it) that if Mark Driscoll's taxonomy of demonization were applied to what he's said about his own life it's an open question whether he's at some point been demonized himself.
But it's understandable why people would be reluctant to share if they had been subjects to demona trials as Mark Driscoll described them. Driscoll at this point might not be in a rush to describe conducting demon trials for a bit.
So those are the only sort of organized thoughts of the evening having heard the podcast. If you're a former Mars Hill member or leader it's worth giving the podcast a listen.
It doesn't sound like either Mark or Grace Driscoll have deigned to make any significant contact with Phil or Jen Smidt as yet, at least by Jen Smidt's account. Since Acts 29 leadership basically said Mark Driscoll had disqualified himself from ministry it seems like a live question why Christians would want Driscoll speaking at their conferences. There's a range of possible explanations for this but it's not suitable to elaborate on them in so long a post as this one already has become.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)