The book is organized into two chronologically ordered sections. The first, “How Businessmen Shaped Conservative Evangelicalism,” covers roughly the 1920s through 1960s, when capital supplied by both business and the state allowed conservative Evangelicals to create powerful and enduring social networks. Starting with Christian aluminum magnate Herbert J. Taylor’s leadership in local Rotary clubs, Grem explains how conservative Christian businessmen in the 1930s and ‘40s created organizations, like the Christian Businessmen’s Committee International (CBMCI), where they could share strategies for bringing faith to business without compromising the bottom-line. First activated by the tumult of Depression and later reacting to the perceived threat of New Deal-era social policies, these organizations ultimately took on an activist bent. Worried that a more liberal social order might threaten their religious autonomy and limit the productivity of their enterprises, organizations like Rotary and CBMCI crafted new political arguments that described Christianity and capitalism as mutually-dependent social goods, increasingly endangered by liberal policies at home and communism abroad.

In Chapter 2, “Corporate Convictions: Billy Graham, Big Business and the New Evangelicalism,” Grem focuses on famed Evangelist Billy Graham, who brought the association between conservative Evangelicalism and corporate capitalism to the American mainstream. A believer in the inherent interconnectedness of Christianity and free markets, and a singular orator to-boot, Graham popularized a form of conservative Christianity born in board room. Grem describes how Evangelical businessmen ensured Graham’s national platform by furnishing his mission with slick advertising and professional market research. The first section’s final chapter returns to LeTourneau, bringing the state into the picture. Here, we learn that despite his anti-statist rhetoric, LeTourneau’s earthmoving business was buoyed by World War II-era government contracts.

Closely following LeTourneau, Taylor, and Graham, Grem illuminates the machinations of the people too-often “hidden at the top,” and provides a trenchant rejoinder to the common assumption that conservative Evangelicals exist mostly on embattled social margins. To the contrary, he confidently maps the “monied infrastructure” that came to support a vast and varied culture of conservative Evangelicalism.

In Blessings of Business’s second section “How Conservative Evangelicalism Became Big Business,” which covers the 1960s to the 1990s, Graham, Taylor and LeTourneau’s world of tightly interconnected Christian business alliances gives way to a more-diffuse constellation of businesses and characters linked through association and affinity. Where the partnerships described in the book’s first section carved-out space for Evangelical interests in the national market, the Christian entrepreneurs we meet in the second section provided Christian consumers with alternatives to a national culture that they viewed as rife with immoral excess.

In Chapter 4, “Marketplace Missions: Chick-fil-A and Evangelical Business Sector,” Grem colorfully describes how Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy brought Christianity to the food court. Drawing on notions of “Christian managerialism” (innovated by the previous chapters’ generation of Christian businessmen) Cathy’s Sunday closures and fastidiously clean-cut employees made Chick-fil-A uniquely appealing to Christian customers, and pious parents looking for their teenager’s perfect first job. A similar dynamic is on display in Grem’s engaging chapter on televangelist Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Christian theme park, Heritage USA. Mimicking the idiom of Disneyland but adding a decisively Christian message, the Bakkers provided Christian vacationers with an opportunity to express their faith through their choice of destination. And nearly a century’s worth of association between business-building and conservative Christianity find their conclusion in a chapter on Zig Ziglar, the conservative Christian self-help mogul. Grem describes Ziglar’s message as “free market faith,” the belief that with perseverance and faith anyone could become a business elite. Starting with Graham and ending with Ziglar, Grem captures a shift from business-backed Evangelism, to Christian evangelizing for the promise of business.

Blessings of Business is one example of the generative “business turn” in histories of American religion. Such studies, including Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Created Christian America and Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, have provided a thorough account of Evangelical Christianity’s productive relationship with corporate business. What sets Grem’s study apart is the range of people and enterprises covered and the density of memorable historical apercu. Bringing such a broad array of actors into the same volume draws out exciting examples of both consistency and change-over-time. For example, thinking about Ziglar’s success across media platforms alongside LeTourneau’s state-of-the-art earthmovers and Cathy’s improved chicken fryer, Grem shows that business-minded Evangelicals were consistently aided by their interest in (and access to) the newest technologies. Beginning with responses to the Depression and New Deal and ending with late-twentieth century spectacles like Heritage USA shows how early attempts to influence national culture were often more successful in creating a robust counter-culture.

Moreover, Grem is careful to point out that all of these movements were enabled by social and economic privilege. Blessings of Business is populated almost exclusively by economically mobile white men. Grem artfully shows how these men fused conservative religion with corporate power to maintain their profit margin and acquire influence. This is a story told from the top. Blessings of Business is not especially attentive to the Americans who watched Billy Graham on television in the ‘50s or frequented Heritage USA in the ‘80s. With the exception of some suggestive allusions (for example, as Grem closes the book with Ronald Reagan’s election, he notes that child poverty rose every year between 1981 and 1989) the reader is left to hypothesize about the consequences of the political, economic and religious alliances that have built-up throughout the book.

Grem and others have convincingly demonstrated that “evangelicals successfully embedded born-again Christianity in the very institutions, businesses, organizations, and political networks that make up present-day corporate capitalism,” but this entrenchment of power is less-frequently brought into conversation with the social circumstances it has precipitated. From anti-unionism in the early twentieth century to the promises of televangelists forty years later, Blessings of Business would have been even more textured with occasional discussion of the responses and fall-out Grem’s businessmen incited. This presents an exciting space for future studies. Grem’s detailed and engaging business history of Evangelicalism provides a treasure trove of potential research projects. Students of American religious history will find inspiration in the minor characters and business ventures that make cameo appearances throughout the text, and in the interaction between these powerful personalities and the varied lives they influenced.

***

Eden Consenstein is a PhD student studying religion in the Americas at Princeton University. She holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto and an M.A. in Religious Studies from New York University. Eden is interested in connections between religion, information, media, business, and politics in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. Her dissertation will address these themes via the Time-Life corporation and its founder, Presbyterian media mogul Henry R. Luce.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Blessings of Business appeared first on The Revealer.

(John Moore/Getty Images)
‘I wanted to stop her crying’: The image of a migrant child that broke a photographer’s heart

So much is happening, and so much of it is extremely important. Keeping up, understanding what’s going on, looking for smart analysis, it’s overwhelming. And yet, there is just nowhere else to start, we have to talk  — and do something — about our government criminalizing and detaining thousands of people migrating to the US.

First, as evidenced above, this is yet another crucial moment for documentary photography. If you are a photographer whose work is about religion and migration, we strongly encourage you to apply for a new grant from the Magnum Foundation. 

We have had the pleasure of collaborating with the Magnum Foundation in the past (our special issue of work on religion was published this time last year) and of working with them on the new Photography in Collaboration: Migration and Religion Request for Proposals along with Laura McTighe. 

Magnum Foundation is accepting proposals for Photography in Collaboration: Migration and Religion, an initiative for photographers to expand upon their practice by working with creative partners from other disciplines. We will support up to five projects that further understanding of the politically significant and vastly complex intersections of migration and religion. Selected projects will receive project development support and production grants of up to $25,000.

Second, Listen to Children Who’ve Just Been Separated From Their Parents at the Border reported by Ginger Thompson at ProPublica

An audio recording obtained by ProPublica adds real-life sounds of suffering to a contentious policy debate that has so far been short on input from those with the most at stake: immigrant children. More than 2,300 of them have been separated from their parents since April, when the Trump administration launched its “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which calls for prosecuting all people who attempt to illegally enter the country and taking away the children they brought with them. More than 100 of those children are under the age of 4. The children are initially held in warehouses, tents or big box stores that have been converted into Border Patrol detention facilities.

After which, I recommend watching Becca Heller, director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, discusses her efforts to fight President Trump’s aggressive crackdown on immigrants and asylum seekers on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

And then reading Dahlia Lithwick‘s It’s All Too  Much, and We Still Have to Care for Slate

That we are finding ourselves unable to process or act or organize because the large-scale daily horrors are escalating and the news is overpowering is perfectly understandable. But we need to understand that and acknowledge it and then refuse it any purchase. Because to be overwhelmed and to do nothing are a choice.

Lithwick and Margo Schlanger also put together this guide: Here’s How You Can Help Fight Family Separation at the Border for Slate

Meanwhile Sessions cites Bible passage to defend slavery in defense of separating immigrant families by Julie Zauzmer and Keith McMillan for The Washington Post

“There are two dominant places in American history when Romans 13 is invoked,” said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. “One is during the American Revolution [when] it was invoked by loyalists, those who opposed the American Revolution.”

The other, Fea said, “is in the 1840s and 1850s, when Romans 13 is invoked by defenders of the South or defenders of slavery to ward off abolitionists who believed that slavery is wrong. I mean, this is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.

From an actual authority on the matter, Father James Martin: Separating kids from their parents is not biblical. Period.

Jesuit Priest and editor-at-large of “America” Magazine, Father James Martin, says that the use of the bible by some White House officials to defend the separation of parents and children at the border is “reprehensible”.

And Lincoln Mullen took a further look at The Fight to Define Romans 13 for The Atlantic

Where does Jeff Sessions fit in this brief history of Romans 13? Sessions, like so many other Americans throughout history, thinks he has the Bible on his side. The verses Sessions chose to cite, and the interpretation that he has given them, is part of the broader Trump administration strategy of playing to the fears and identities of American evangelicals, who have been bringing Romans 13 back into public discourse since the rise of law-and-order politics and the Christian Right. But the Bible is a text less often read than read into. As many of his “church friends” persist in pointing out, Sessions did not cite the verse later in Romans 13 where Paul writes that God’s laws “are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’” with the word “neighbor” echoing both parable of the Good Samaritan and the countless verses in the Law and the Prophets on treating the stranger and the immigrant with mercy. Sessions may claim the Bible’s contested authority, but what the attorney general actually has on his side is the thread of American history that justifies oppression and domination in the name of law and order.

A protest against a recent U.S. immigration policy of separating children from their families. Outside the Tornillo Tranit Centre, in Tornillo, Texas, U.S. June 17, 2018 (REUTERS/Monica Lozano)

Let’s all start planning how we, too, can “act a WHOLE DONKEY”: This Woman Had the Perfect Response When Border Patrol Boarded Her Greyhound Bus from Yvette Montoya for Hip Latina

The agents get on. Proceed to announce that they are about to start asking for “documentation” from people.

I Stand up and yell “I’m not showing you shit! I’m not driving this bus, so you have NO RIGHT to ask me for anything! And the rest of you guys don’t have to show them anything, either! This is harassment and racial profiling! Don’t show them a gotdamn thing! We are not within 100 miles of a border so they have NO LEGAL RIGHT or jurisdiction here! GOOGLE IT!”

The agents start to look exasperated, because they can see I’m willing to act a WHOLE DONKEY. One of them said “Fine. We can see that you’re a citizen because of your filthy mouth”. And then they just said “go ahead” to the bus driver and got off.

And lastly, a reminder that this is not just happening here: Italian Minister Moves to Count and Expel Roma, Drawing Outrage report Elisabetter Povoledo and Gaia Pianigiani for The New York Times

He has compared the European Union to the Titanic, accused the left of supporting immigration to supply slave labor, and insulted migrants using any number of disparaging epithets. But Italy’s new interior minister, Matteo Salvini, went too far even for his allies this week when he announced that he would conduct a census of Roma people in Italy, a prelude to expelling those without valid residence permits.

“And Italian Roma? Unfortunately, we have to keep them,” Mr. Salvini said on Monday during an interview on a regional television station.

This weekend, while you’re protesting and donating and volunteering, maybe also take some time to watch “Coco” and then read Jia Tolentino‘s superb  “Coco,” a Story About Borders and Love, Is a Definitive Movie for this Moment at The New Yorker

“Coco” is a movie about borders more than anything—the beauty in their porousness, the absolute pain produced when a border locks you away from your family. The conflict in the story comes from not being able to cross over; the resolution is that love pulls you through to the other side. The thesis of the movie is that families belong together. I watched it again this week, reading the news that Donald Trump is considering building an unregulated holding camp for migrant children, that ice showed up on the lawn of a legal permanent resident and initiated deportation procedures, that a four-month-old baby was torn away from her breast-feeding mother. If justice is what love looks like in public, then love has started to seem like the stuff of children’s movies, or maybe the stuff of this children’s movie—something that doesn’t make sense in the adult world, but should.

Coco

Anthony Bourdain loved Mexico (where “Coco” is set), and we, quite frankly, loved Anthony Bourdain and have been mourning him with these essays.

David Simon wrote a beautiful post about Bourdain on his blog The Audacity of Despair simply titled Tony

A lot of people will tell you that on meeting Tony – despite how extraordinary a being he was – they somehow felt as if they’d known him for years.  In part, this was the natural result of having so much of his wit and intellect bleed across our television screens. But just as elemental, I believe, was the man’s almost unlimited capacity for empathy, for feeling the lives and loves and hopes of others. He listened as few listen. And when he spoke, it was often to deliver some precise personal recollection that was an echo or simile on what was still in his ear. He abhorred a non sequitur; for him, human communication — much like his core ideas about food and travel and being – was about finding the sacred middle between people.

Helen Rosner wrote about Anthony Bourdain and the Power of Telling the Truth for The New Yorker

Bourdain’s fame wasn’t the distant, lacquered type of an actor or a musician, bundled and sold with a life-style newsletter. Bourdain felt like your brother, your rad uncle, your impossibly cool dad—your realest, smartest friend, who wandered outside after beers at the local one night and ended up in front of some TV cameras and decided to stay there. As a writer himself, he was always looking out for other writers, always saying yes, always available for interviews and comments. You had to fight through a wall of skeptical P.R. to get to someone like Guy Fieri, but Bourdain was right there, for everyone, in equal measure. He remembered names. He took every question seriously. He was twenty minutes early to every appointment, to the minute. Every newspaper, every magazine, every Web site that asked got its Bourdain quotes—and good ones, too! Not pre-scripted pablum but potent missiles of cultural commentary—bombastic wisdom, grand pronouncements, eviscerations of celebrities, flagrantly named names.

And you can watch Bourdain visit “a magical spiritual place” in this clip, Anthony Bourdain tries the Waffle House 

Meanwhile, for an example of the superficial, thoughtless, and offensive religion-as-metaphor writing hot take, you can read (or not) “The Cult of Anthony Bourdain” by Kyle Smith at The National Review.  Just don’t do this. Any of this.

But, if you want to read about why we’re so into cults, do read Kirsin Allio asking Why Are We So Fascinated by Cults? in The Paris Review

Wild Wild Country is a classic retelling of the American myth, refracted and distorted but nonetheless there. We recognize all the big themes: the cant of individualism versus the chant of egalitarianism. There is manifest destiny, hubris, the dogged pursuit of religious freedom, land use, the ironies of the Second Amendment.

Right, so, back to US politics.

Arun Venugopal explores the question: The American Flag: Symbol of Beauty or Intimidation at WNYC

Nationalism isn’t unique to America, but the way it’s embodied in the flag is. Marc Leepson, author of “Flag: An American Biography,” said the feelings of near-religious adoration that many Americans have for the flag is unlike anything in the rest of the world.

Jeff Sharlet annotates the “Blue Lives Matter” flag in A Flag for Trump’s America: The Power of Strength at Harper’s

3. The Blue Lives Matter movement, which began after the December 20, 2014, slaying of two New York City police officers, soon adopted the Thin Blue Line flag. The murders were the catalyst for what quickly became a rebuttal to Black Lives Matter, its insistence that we pay more attention to killer cops than to cops killed in the line of duty. And the flag symbolized an even deeper sense of peril among its admirers, those who mix Thin Blue Line memes with messages about fighting the Islamic State, “illegals,” and socialism, the “chaos” represented by the black bars below the blue line. Those stripes also recall media reports on police violence, in part because the media itself is increasingly seen as an enemy of law and order. The blue line poses the old question of organized labor—which side are you on?—as a loyalty test. Loyalty to what? Authority. Authority for authority’s sake, as seen in personal variations of the flag that soon proliferated: a Christian cross bisecting its stripes, bullets instead of stars. The flag began to appear alongside the other standards of lovers of the strong hand: the yellow snake of “Don’t Tread on Me,” the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy, and even—most notably at the August 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia—the swastika’s crooked cross.

And, in a magnificent example of subversive symbolism, a 26-Year-Old Wins Local Office in Georgia, Takes Her Oath of Office on Autobiography of Malcolm X reports Angela Helm for The Root.  More photos are here.

Since Tuesday’s elections held throughout the nation, an already iconic photo has been sweeping the internet—of 26-year-old Mariah Parker taking her oath of office as Athens-Clarke County, Ga., commissioner for District 2, with her mother holding, not the Bible or Quran, but another good book: Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Mariah Parker takes her oath of office for County Commissioner District 2 with her hand on the autobiography of Malcolm X and her mother Mattie Parker by her side on the steps of City Hall in downtown Athens, Ga., Tuesday, June 5, 2018. Parker filled the county commissioner seat vacated by Harry Sims who left his seat to run for mayor. She won the election for District 2 by 13 votes. [Joshua L. Jones/Athens Banner-Herald]

Speaking of what people should, and should not, be able to do with bibles, there was the Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court ruling. After which,Dahlia Lithwick‘s podcast Amicus  was about Religious Belief, Sincerely Held: Examining the narrow slicing of the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling and contemplating the role of faith in our laws

Lydia Macy, 17, left, and Mira Gottlieb, 16, both of Berkeley, Calif., rally outside of the Supreme Court which is hearing the ‘Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission’ today, Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2017, in Washington. (Jacquelyn Martin, AP)

Sarah Posner argued that The “Masterpiece Cakeshop” Decision Is Not As Harmless As You Think atThe Nation. 

What will be the evidence of such supposed animus in the next case? A question from a judge at oral arguments? Deposition questions by government attorneys? That is the crucial open question from Masterpiece—not whether the next case will be more winnable for a gay couple without Masterpiece’s specific facts, but how hard opponents of LGBTQ rights will work to convince the courts that similar specific facts exist in that case, too.

Today, the Court did not foreclose LGBTQ people from suing under anti-discrimination laws. But it did open the door for ADF to use one of its favored tropes—that the government is hostile to religion—to continue to chip away at those protections. And there is really no telling how that will turn out.

And Winnifred Fallers Sullivan asked  Is Masterpiece Cakeshop a church? in The Immanent Frame

Is the Masterpiece Cakeshop a church? It is a place where Mr. Phillips honors God. It is a place where Mr. Craig and Mr. Mullins sought to acquire a religious object. But these are not facts that the Court can notice. After disestablishment, law has no way of constitutionally locating religion. Over the last few decades, religion in law has been reduced to the attitudes of sincere persons described as devout about sex. By refusing to talk about religion beyond sex, law affirms the avoidance of serious public conversation about what God requires. In what public context today can one say back to Mr. Phillips that Jesus ate with sinners? Or that we are all sinners? Or “judge not that ye be not judged”? Or that hospitality and table fellowship have been virtues in many traditions? And listen to his response. If all we can do is isolate and segregate devout religious people and either vilify them or treat them with kid gloves, where will we be?

While  Patrick Blanchfield and Suzanne Schneider were guests on Ashley Ford‘s show “112BK” to discuss some other major issues in American culture,  Gun Violence & Masculinity

Also on the subject of guns and religion,  Amr Alfiky brings us ‘Make Sure Not to Talk Any Arabic’: American Muslims and Their Guns in The New York Times

They also cite another factor: fear of persecution, at a time when hate crimes against Muslims have soared to their highest levels since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But owning a gun is no assurance of security. Muslim gun owners are viewed with suspicion by gun stores, ranges and clubs, and occasionally met with harassment.

While we’re on the subject of American Islam, Brittany Friedman and Zachary Sommers wrote about Solitary confinement and the Nation of Islam for The Immanent Frame

Our research is comprised of archival, ethnographic, and statistical data, though this essay solely discusses the archival and statistical data in abbreviated form. Focusing on California, a supreme example of American hyper incarceration, we compiled a state-specific database of public and private archival material (over seven hundred documents) that reveals the construction of black militants as so-called social problems and the consequences of this construction for the prison social system—mainly, the increased use of solitary confinement. We found in particular that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) singled out the Nation of Islam as the first organization for systematic segregation from the general prisoner population. Our qualitative findings are supported by statistical analysis of a nationally representative survey, which reveals that correctional institutions with a Nation of Islam presence are almost fourteen times more likely to use solitary confinement.

Which brings us to more stories about race, racism, and the law.

First, A California church flirts with an unusual social experiment: to never call police again reports Jaweed Kaleem for the Los Angeles Times

They call it “divesting” from police. The church is part of a tiny but growing movement among liberal houses of worship around the nation making similar vows. They include another church in Oakland, one in San Jose and one in Iowa City, Iowa. It’s mostly white ministers and majority white congregations leading the efforts, which come as debates over racism, stereotypes and the role of law enforcement hit universities, businesses and neighborhood councils across the U.S.

Matthew J. Cressler tells us about  The “Black Catholic Movement” That Reinvigorated American Catholicism for Zócalo

The history of black Catholics and the Black Catholic Movement should put an end to an exclusive focus on the popular story of Catholics becoming mainstream Americans by the mid-1960s. Indeed, terms like “mainstream” and “American” mask true meaning, and render innocent a more complicated tale that also includes a whole host of other Catholic Americans of Latin American, African, Asian, and Native American descent. Moreover, the Church has still not fully reckoned with the consequences of Catholic missionaries who sought to “subdue” and “civilize” indigenous peoples in the Americas. And it has only begun to confront Catholic enslavement of families, whose labor and sale made Catholic institutions sustainable.

Also, Jelani Cobb wrote about Starbucks and the Issue of White Space for The New Yorker

Implicit bias disassociates racism from overt villainy and, as a consequence, engenders less defensiveness in the dialogue. A series of events in recent years sparked conversations about implicit bias among the police, but, as the Starbucks situation and others like it have demonstrated, there is a companion issue: the ways in which the police can serve as a vector of the biases of individual citizens. The question isn’t simply whether an officer displays bias in carrying out his official duty but whether the call that led to his presence in a given situation is itself the result of bias. The crucial aspect of the Starbucks story isn’t whether a company can, in a single training session, diminish bias among its employees. It’s the implied acknowledgment that such attitudes are so pervasive in America that a company has to shoulder the responsibility of mitigating them in its workforce.

While Doreen St. Félix shares How Alexandra Bell is Disrupting Racism in Journalism

“There are these subtle ways that racism works in the oldest of institutions,” she continues. One moment in the video shows Bell discussing the “Unite the Right” rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August. “I’m thirty-five. I’ve never seen a torch rally,” she says. She demurs that she suspected that the Times would screw up coverage of the event in some way. It ended up being the layout. Bell knows to anticipate soft bigotries even in elements like design. “The problem here was the layout,” she says. “It was a side-piece . . . The layout doesn’t speak to the severity of these issues.”

Katherine Fusco dissects  DIY Whiteness in the Age of Apocalypse for Avidly

Of course survivalist films like A Quiet Place are a lie. They imagine the effects of catastrophe as evenly distributed, which means survival is a matter of merit. These characters know that shop craft is soul craft and it’s why they get to live. As it turns out, taking hog butchering classes and making your own lavender eye pillows is the perfect training regime for global apocalypse. Didn’t make it? Perhaps you should have planted your rooftop garden before the aliens started fucking shit up. The ant and the grasshopper and all that.

And Jamelle Bouie argues that The Enlightenment’s Dark Side: How the Enlightenment created modern race thinking, and why we should confront it.

Today’s popular discourse on the Enlightenment ignores this contradiction and its modern manifestations, seen in the persistence of race hierarchy in the world’s oldest democracy. Some self-proclaimed defenders of Enlightenment ideals have even gone so far as to ridicule the idea of a connection between the Enlightenment and our modern ideas of race and racial hierarchy, as if the scholarship didn’t exist. This isn’t just unfortunate, it’s ironic—a betrayal of the higher principles of the Enlightenment, of the commitment to evidence, observation, reason, and deliberation. It’s also dangerous.

What else should you read this summer?

Well, how about Alan Burdick on Looking for Life on a Flat Earth in The New Yorker

The unsettling thing about spending two days at a convention of people who believe that Earth is flat isn’t the possibility that you, too, might come to accept their world view, although I did worry a little about that. Rather, it’s the very real likelihood that, after sitting through hours of presentations on “scientism,” lightning angels, and nasa’s many conspiracies—the moon-landing hoax, the International Fake Station, so-called satellites—and in chatting with I.T. specialists, cops, college students, and fashionably dressed families with young children, all of them unfailingly earnest and lovely, you will come to actually understand why a growing number of people are dead certain that Earth is flat. Because that truth is unnerving.

Which would do well alongside Kelly J. Baker‘s Hell is for Other People at The Baffler

Yet, as I watched Come Sunday, I became less and less convinced that the film is strictly about Pearson’s wrangling with faith or even the question of what happens if you stop believing in hell. Instead, it convinces the viewer to ponder another question, an important albeit harder one: What happens when you change your mind about something big—like what the world is and what comes after? And what happens to everyone near you in the shift?

Elif Batuman‘s stunningly multi-layered, multi-faceted essay on Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry for The New Yorker

Still, although it goes without saying that many aspects of the Japanese rental-relative business must be specific to Japan, it is also the case that people throughout human history have been paying strangers to fill roles that their kinsfolk performed for free. Hired mourners existed in ancient Greece, Rome, and China, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and in the early Islamic world; they were denounced by Solon, by St. Paul, and by St. John Chrysostom. They still exist in China, India, and, lately, England, where an Essex-based service, Rent A Mourner, has been operating since 2013. And what are babysitters, nurses, and cooks if not rental relatives, filling some of the roles traditionally performed by mothers, daughters, and wives?

Michael Pollan on My Adventures with the Trip Doctors: The Researchers and Renegades Bringing Psychedelic Drugs into the Mental Health Mainstream for The New York Times Magazine

It is sometimes said that in the last few decades psychiatry went from being brainless — relying on talk therapies oblivious to neurobiology — to being mindless — relying on drugs, with little attention to the contents of consciousness. If psychedelic-assisted therapy proves as effective as early trials suggest it might, it will be because it succeeds in rejoining the brain and the mind in a radical new therapeutic paradigm: using not just a chemical but the powerful mental experience it can occasion, given the proper support, to disrupt destructive patterns of thought and behavior.

Sam Kestenbaum reports on A Forgotten Religion Gets a Second Chance in Brooklyn for The New York Times

The Kosmon Temple wasn’t always like this. They once read from the standard King James Bible and called themselves Christians. But over the last two years, in a bid to revitalize dwindling membership, the small group underwent a dramatic makeover, adopting, en masse, a new and uncommon faith. The church’s transformation is a local revival of a nearly forgotten American religion. It’s also a symbolic homecoming for that group’s founder, a Manhattan dentist and would-be prophet who published what he said was a divinely inspired book, titled the Oahspe Bible, to local fascination in 1882.

The Oahspe bible, a mystical document said to be the divine inspiration of Dr. John Newbrough, a 19th-century Manhattan dentist.CreditDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times

Or maybe you’d like to read about a new religion? How do you feel about the blockchain? It’s pretty clear what  Drew Millard thinks. He exclaims (and then explains) Oh God, they’re putting religion on the blockchain at The Outline

Faith is about the only thing driving the cryptocurrency industry, which goes a long way towards explaining 0xΩ, a “blockchain religion” created by artist Avery Singer and Matt Liston, the ex-CEO of decentralized prediction market platform Augur. While the details of 0xΩ are a bit fuzzy, it’s basically meant as a platform where people can democratically design a belief system and use blockchain technology to exchange “sacred texts” and vote on the operations of said religion.

Okay, maybe it’s time to listen to something? We recommend Faye Ginsburg‘s appearance on the podcast Online Gods 

And with that, we’re going to leave you for the summer. Be well, read well, and fight hard. We’ll see you in September!

The post In the News: Borders & Beyond appeared first on The Revealer.

Hammams, bathhouses with rooms for heating, cooling and washing the body, have existed in much of the Middle East and North Africa since Roman times. After the advent and spread of Islam, the hammam, became something of a public resource, often built through charitable endowments by rulers or noblewomen in cities. It was – and remains – a place for people to bathe, get their hair cut, and achieve ritual purity according to the laws of Islam and Judaism.

Groupon image for a discount ticket to The Old Hammam and Spa in London

Bathhouses have been places of healing, gathering, and vulnerability for far longer than Groupon has been around. But, as many businesses continue to gentrify and whitewash the hammams for a new Euro-American clientele, this is a critical moment to step back and historicize them.

Most importantly, we should think about the norms and rules that have (explicitly and implicitly) governed bathhouse access and conduct. Those wishing to use these social, medical and religious spaces have been restricted – at different times and in different ways – based on gender, health, and sexuality. Thus, the bathhouse is a crucial site of sociality, and a key to understanding the shifting puzzles of power and culture over time.

The following vignettes take us through a range of notable moments in this long and complex history. From the concerns of Muslim jurists about forbidden erotic gazes and acts, to the imposition of French penal codes in the Middle East, to 20^th century police raids. Hopefully, learning about these moments may help us think more deeply about how and why we enjoy bathhouses today. What our presence in these places means, and how it affects others.

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Beginning in at least the 12^th century, Muslim jurists wrote about the hammam as a place to be avoided when possible, where someone was always sure to catch sight of something or someone they shouldn’t, as a den of (potential) sin.^[1]

The hammam in the Middle East was a place available to a broader public than most urban spaces, a place of work for many laborers with religious, medical and social functions. People visited the hammam for ritual baths after sex, menstruation, and birth, as well as for grooming, massages, routine bloodletting, or medically prescribed heating or cooling of the body. The jurists feared that the potential these uses presented for nudity and touching could incite the desire for sinful acts – between people of different genders and the same. But they also recognized that people needed a place where they could achieve the ritual purity necessary to perform their daily prayers. Thus, in their books, they made provisions for people of all genders (including those with nonbinary genders, khunthā) to enter the hammam, sometimes in groups or only at certain hours.

“Bath Scene from the Haft Awrang of Jami. Iran, Mid-16th Century (1556-65) 46. 12 FOL. 59. Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C.”

It is unclear if these jurists or their writings actually had much power to change the way that hammams were run, but we do have some evidence of ways that the government exerted its influence on hammams at the time. In one documented instance of the government attempting to regulate the behavior of hammam patrons from 18th century Aleppo, Ottoman officials attempted to ban Muslim and non-Muslim (dhimmī) women from bathing together. This attempt to exert control over their behavior and sexuality effectively rendered the Christian woman’s gaze upon Muslim women “male” – using pre-existing gendered distinctions to enforce religious distinctions. Such a division was clearly not common among users of bathhouses at that time, and as Elyse Semerdjian has observed, “the repetition of such policies also suggests that authorities may have had difficulty enforcing them.”^[2]

The books written about the hammam that survive from the medieval period give us a sense of the concerns of certain groups in society, and how they may have attempted to change the social realities of patrons. Desire, passionate and sexual, was seen as a real possibility between people of all ages, genders, and religious identities, and the hammam was one of the few places where all of these people could mix.

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The medieval jurists’ anxieties were not totally unfounded: within Islamicate^[3] poetry, and Persian poetry especially, there was a general idea of the hammam as a site of erotic desire between men. It was a rare public space where people of all ages and classes could meet, from kings to barbers.

Stories set in the hammam usually ended up with someone in love, someone dead, or both. A lesson on love from the famous Conference of the Birds by twelfth-century poet Farīd al-Dīn al-‘Aṭṭār includes the following story: A great king, heart heavy with worry, left his palace to wander one night, when he came upon a man stoking a hammam’s furnace. He entered the man’s smoky hovel, and the man rushed to bring the king some old bread he had kept aside for himself. The king told him of his worries, and the man’s words impressed him so much that he returned seven times. During his last visit, the king cried out, “Stop your shoveling! You have no need of this. I am the king; ask of me what you desire.” The man said, “I have no desire to leave this place, because this place brought you to me. Rather than riches, or a place in your palace, my sole desire is that you visit me here, again.” The man stoking the fire (intended to represent the lowest of the low in society) held a love so pure that he did not want to dilute the pleasure of his beloved traversing distances both literal and social to see him. The story is also meant to illustrate that spiritual elevation can exist among the lowest classes of society, that social location matters little — but it is no coincidence that this unlikely attachment was formed in the hammam. The hammam was a place where the heart, and perhaps also the moral compass, was vulnerable.

“A Bathhouse Keeper is Consumed by Passion for his Beloved”, Folio from a Khamsa (Quintet) of Amir Khusrau Dihlavi

A century later, Al-‘Aṭṭār’s story about the wandering king was reworked by a poet, Amīr Khusro, in his Khamsa. In it, a beautiful prince passed by a man stoking the hammam, and their eyes met: the man fell in love. The prince turned away, but something in the worker’s eyes drew him back. Day after day, he rode by again, and the man’s love grew. One day, when the prince passed by and locked eyes with him, he burst into flames. Unlike the story in al-‘Aṭṭār, the love of the worker for the nobleman is not held up as an ideal, but as a warning — yet in both poems, it is taken for granted that the love is between men, at the hammam.

As hinted at in the Persian poems, the potential for the mixing of social classes at the hammam created an idea of it as a space for transgression, which coexisted alongside the reality of its boring, daily functionality for those living in the region itself.

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Europeans coming into contact with the hammam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries focused on the erotic “homosociality” of the space and eroticized the image of the “harem” in the palace bathhouse. Though the average hammam in the Middle East was a place of work for many laborers, and a place with religious, medical and social functions, these hammams tended not to be the focus of European writers and painters. Rather, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, they were more interested in places where royal or noblewomen went to bathe. She wrote:

If the painter “Gervase” (jervas) could look upon the bath, it would have very much improv’d his art to see so many fine Women naked in different postures, some in conversation, some working, others drinking Coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their Cushions while their slaves (generally pritty Girls of 17 or 18) were employ’d in braiding their hair in several Fritty manners. In short, tis the Women’s coffee house, where the news of the Town is told, Scandal invented, etc.^[4]

Montagu felt that the homosociality of the scene, which she likened to the almost exclusively male “coffee houses” of Europe, was worth emphasizing — even more so because of the ease with which patrons (if not their slaves or attendants) existed together in the nude. She focused on these elements knowing that readers would be most interested in seeing a room full of naked women lounging and drinking. These patrons are passive and idle — a scene closer to the idea of the hammam as “relaxation” we see marketed by businesses today than to the social, medical, and religious reasons that most patrons actually visited hammams at the time.

“Le Bain Turc” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1862–63. Louvre, Paris

For hundreds of years, painter-adventurers depicted scenes inspired by passages like Montagu’s. Many painters, like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in his 1862 painting, “Le bain turc,” depicted his subjects with an erotic, voyeuristic and racializing male gaze. Things that usually appear in medieval paintings of the hammam are absent, like towels, pools of water, massages, haircuts and people washing themselves with buckets of water. Instead the women are all lounging totally or nearly nude, playing music, chatting or gazing into the distance. It is no wonder that Euro-American tourists today might find a neighborhood hammam, the kind used daily by people of all ages and body types, disappointing or unpleasant.

Orientalist depictions such as Montagu’s and Ingres’ tell us much more about what European travelers wanted from the hammam than they do about the bathhouses themselves. Yet it is these ideas that have gone on to shape the history invoked by businesses catering to Euro-Americans today. Thus, the hint at the erotic/exotic, offered by ancient massages in dim, steamy rooms is still tantalizing to their wealthy, cis-gendered target audience.

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In the last century and a half some of the most prominent institutions of public bathing in North America have been gay bathhouses: both institutions founded for the gay community as well as some older institutions that started out as community establishments, often in Jewish and Eastern European enclaves, and then became known as openly welcoming to gay men. Public bathhouses were frequented for many reasons, though some like the Palace Baths or Jack’s Baths in 1920-30s San Francisco were known as gay cruising grounds. Many public baths at this time made reference to Eastern European cultures of bathing, including the Jewish schvitz or the mikveh. One of the first institutions to cater specifically to a homosexual clientele was called the Club Turkish Baths, which opened in the 1950s, in San Francisco. Though bathhouses did not always make reference to the hammam or Turkish bath, I’m sure that connection merits further investigation. In the 50s and 60s many such institutions opened in major cities in the U.S. and Canada.

We have record of police raids and attempts to close bathhouses from the 1890s onward. However, during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 80s, the police, local governments, health departments, and citizens groups waged a large-scale homophobic campaign to close gay bathhouses. The gay bathhouse was transformed in academic discourse and public policy into an “epidemiological landmark for the transmission of HIV,” with recent public health literature debating whether they should be closed down or utilized as a site for HIV- and STD-prevention education. ^[5] Through the medicalized attention on these institutions, those few gay bathhouses that survive are now too-often sites of observation and regulation because of this history. And those bathhouses offering “treatments” or relaxation are shaped by this too – many make explicit in their rules that sexual activity is forbidden, and that patrons wear a specified amount of clothing during co-ed hours.

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The hammam gained its reputation as a place for the low, dispossessed and/or depraved of society in the mid-twentieth century, as the wealthy gained access to indoor plumbing and in the wake of Egyptian films such as “Hammam al-Malatily.”^[6] The film follows the moral and sexual corruption of a young Egyptian man from the countryside who comes to Cairo, and ends up living for free at a hammam with a sex worker and other supposedly disreputable characters. The idea of hammams as places of forbidden and socially threatening behavior remains relevant for those who still frequent them in the Middle East and North Africa today. Just a few years ago, police raided a hammam in Cairo and arrested 33 people, and the same year, 27 men were arrested at Agha Hammam in Beirut. In both cases, the police suspected the men of homosexual activity, which the colonial French legal codes established in both Egypt and Lebanon in the 19th and 20th centuries respectively had made illegal and punishable.

Hammam al-Malatily (1973)

So, now perhaps you can see now how odd it might be to come across a Groupon offering “traditional hammam luxury.” Histories of exoticizing and othering, of eroticism and repression, have joined (ironically) uncomfortable forces in bringing such open access to these spaces for only certain people here in New York, today.

The “deviant” all-male sociality of the bathhouse, had to be suppressed or replaced in mainstream institutions. This older, taboo reputation has been white-washed and commodified. Now it is a product of the wellness industry leveraging its “ancient and authentic” past. The longer history of the hammam has been stripped of its medieval poetic resonances and any association with Islamic ritual, and has been repackaged for popular consumption.

The use of promotional websites like Groupon have encouraged some to experience new cultures of bathing, as at the famed Korean Spa Castle, and have created a new clientele for an older set of establishments, even when the facilities have barely changed. But with the exception of some single-gender hours once a week, all of these places are open to men and women. The image of the bathhouse as a neighborhood hangout for older men or a cruising spot for gay men of many ages has been pushed, once more, out of sight.

Despite the shifting gender dynamics of bathhouses, trans people are not explicitly welcomed in the policies of most institutions. Trans folks may have to spend hours on the Internet reading reviews, in hopes of finding a place to heat, bathe and cool their bodies comfortably, without fear of being asked to leave. Even at places in gayborhoods which have policies inclusive of all women, like HotHouse in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, some trans women have been turned away. Those who remember the bathhouse’s LGBTQ history in North America may feel excluded from the way businesses today are marketing themselves to straight, middle-class urban customers. And, one can imagine, that perhaps the business owners fear trans customers, and thus, intentionally exclude them.

As I visited bathhouses myself for my research, I often have had the urge to educate and remind those sweating around me about the long history that led to their moment of relaxation. It is not a linear narrative of progress that has led to the proliferation of gorgeous, expensive hammams in New York and many cities in Europe and North America. Let us not forget that non-binary people were able to enter hammams historically in the Middle East and North Africa, on the authority of Muslim jurists. Let us not forget that poets frequently imagined the hammam as the site of homoerotic love, across social classes. And when we picture the hammam today, rather the young, light-skinned women usually depicted in advertisements, let us remember the many people of all ages, genders and races who have and continue to visit hammams in and outside the West. Many of these people are going to hang out with their friends, or have pious motivations, and are visiting in preparation for prayer or holy days. Remembering these histories destabilizes the hammam’s increasingly prominent form as an increasingly exclusive and expensive commodity predicated on the absence of LGBTQ people and others who a white middle-class customer base could view as a sexual threat. It prevents the normalization of these curated absences and inaccessibilities, and the whitewashing of yet another history.

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Author’s note: If you do support and enjoy modern bathhouses, then you should also consider supporting LGBTQ organizations that protect the vulnerable from being targeted in these spaces, both those in the Middle East like Helem, and those in North America.

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^[1] This was not true of all jurists, though. Al-Munāwī, a Muslim jurist who lived in Cairo at the turn of the seventeenth century, wanted to give the hammam a better image. Al-Munāwī thought that the hammam could be a place where Muslims strengthened their faith. He recommended that, when entering, visitors should let the heat remind them of the fires of hell, and the dim lighting of the darkness of the grave.

^[2] Elyse Semerdjian, “Naked Anxiety: Bathhouses, Nudity, and the Dhimmi Woman in 18th-Century Aleppo.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 4 (2013): 653.

^[3] Marshall Hodgson used this term in 1974 in his famous book, The Venture of Islam, to describe things within the social and cultural world in which Muslims are a majority and/or politically dominant, but which are not necessarily related to Islam as a religion. The term is best used here because Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims also wrote Arabic and Persian poetry featuring the hammam.

^[4] Srinivas Aravamudan. “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam: Masquerade, Womanliness, and Levantinization.” ELH, Vol. 62/1 (1995): 80-81.

^[5] William J. Woods, Daniel Tracy, and Diane Binson. “Number and Distribution of Gay Bathhouses in the United States and Canada.” Journal of Homosexuality 44, no. 3-4 (2003): 55-70.

^[6] See Mary Talmissany’s book on Cairene Hammams for more examples of the hammam in modern Arab cultural production.

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Shireen Hamza is a PhD student in the History of Science at Harvard University. She completed her undergraduate degrees in English, Cognitive Science and Middle Eastern Languages and Literature at Rutgers University, after spending five years at an Islamic seminary in Karachi. Shireen is interested in the social and intellectual history of medicine in the medieval Islamicate world. Particularly, she is focused on travel and medical exchange between the Middle East and South Asia after the eleventh century, in Arabic and Persian.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Hammams Then & Now: Changing Sites of Healing, Gathering, and Vulnerability appeared first on The Revealer.

Section of August Rodin’s “Gates of Hell.” Rodin thought particularly of Dante’s warning over the entrance of the Inferno, “Abandon every hope, ye who enter here.”

What prompts me to write is a certain mood I have been in, and which I believe many others have been sharing. The word I would offer to describe this mood would be: foreboding. A certain apprehensiveness, unease, disquiet, dread. A feeling that something is about to go really wrong, wrong in a way it hasn’t before for most of us, or in a way we thought no longer possible. Or worse: that it has already happened; that the thunder was subdued if ominous, but the next lightning strike will not be, that it will disrupt everything about our way of life and about the possibilities for the future. I’m not going to bother now to try to give the reasons, or the facts of recent history, why I or we might think it is legitimate to feel this way. It’s the mood I want to reflect on, and to reflect on it in the way I’ve been educated to, that is, “philosophically.”

I don’t think there is a philosophy of foreboding exactly, but in pursuit of the foundations for one, I’d like, instead, to offer a few remarks about two other moods—which have more bona fide philosophical credentials—namely hope and despair. Philosophy hasn’t usually treated hope and despair as moods exactly. Philosophers usually don’t feel very comfortable talking about things that can be seen as largely subjective and potentially idiosyncratic like that. Philosophy has for the most part treated them more like quasi-“objective states”, by which I mean something like cognitive attitudes which have a kind of normative status. They are treated like states you ought to be in, attitudes you ought to have, or not. States or attitudes you can present arguments in favor of or in opposition to. These arguments and debates then result in the formation of two great opposing positions—meta-worldviews, as it were—Optimism and Pessimism.

The sense of foreboding I mention presents itself to me as a kind of waiting room. It’s a state of suspension open to overtures or assurances from either camp. It can either “fall” into pessimism or “steel itself up” and insist on optimism in spite of itself. Either side can take the high ground, insist that it is the “courageous” or “sober” or warranted response. Most public officials and figures have opted lately, at least publicly, for the magnanimous cloak of optimism. Every day, you hear people publicly pronounce that they are optimistic in spite of it all, even sometimes adding “now more than ever!” Our former president is a prime instance of this, and in the final words of his final press conference, he tried to assure us by saying, “In my core, I think we’re going to be okay.”

In reflecting on this, I thought of one of my favorite quotes from a philosopher. It captures the sentiment of suspension remarkably well and precisely. It was spoken by the Frankfurt School critical theorist Max Horkheimer at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association in 1946. The title of the lecture was “Reason against itself: Some Remarks on Enlightenment.” It ends with the following words: “The hope of reason lies in the emancipation from our own fear of despair.”

The thought here is presented as a beautiful Chinese box. What frames the outermost layer is the Marxist desire for and insistence on the need for emancipation. What becomes available through emancipation, however, is not exactly true human flourishing or a return to our un-alienated “species-being,”[1] but rather hope. A certain stance or attitude becomes warranted, justified, or legitimate. Hope of a particular kind…“hope of reason.” The phrase may strike us as odd, unfamiliar, ambiguous: is it “reason” doing the hoping; “reason” that is shackled, in need of liberation so that it may come to hope when before it was unable [“hope of reason” as “reason’s ability to hope”]? Or is it rather us, not wholly rational creatures after all, who are shackled precisely because we find ourselves unable to place our trust in reason anymore, unable to hope for reason as a vehicle of emancipation. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, or amounts to the same thing.

What is most striking about the quoted sentiment to me is its identification of what is doing the shackling. It is not despair that is the agent of imprisonment, not despair that keeps us, (or reason), in a state of unfreedom in need of emancipation; but rather fear. The problem is not despair, but our being afraid to feel despair. In other words, it is not pessimism that is a challenge to the liberating effects of rational hope, but our fearful dismissal of it. It is optimism itself that keeps us from achieving what optimism hopes for. Optimism is its own worst enemy; it is self-destructive. This is a breathtaking and bewildering sentiment: what enables hope, uniquely, is acknowledging the possibility that despair is actually the proper response, the proper attitude. This may seem hopelessly paradoxical; maybe it is simply incoherent, or rhetorically seductive non-sense, but I cannot shake the intimation that maybe it is also correct.

“The Gates of Hell” Auguste Rodin, 1880-1917

To begin to try to erode the sense of straightforward contradiction here, note precisely what is being asserted. It is not exactly that the way to be optimistic is to be pessimistic. It is that the only thing that could properly validate optimism [that is, make it a reasonable position to hold] is actively and consciously working on breaking down any psychological barriers we may have put in the way of becoming pessimistic. This is more coherent: what prevents our optimism from being warranted is our overeager adoption of it. The idea here is that there is a component to our unfreedom that is psychological, a kind of paralyzing phobia: fear of despair. This phobia creates a compulsive response—in Horkheimer’s words: a “self-imposed obligation to arrive at a cheerful conclusion.” Horkheimer’s suggestion: “To free Reason from the fear of being called nihilistic might be one of the steps in its recovery.” What we are going after, the state that might just prove to be emancipatory or liberating, is a suspended, liminal state—a state that is not yet optimism or pessimism, but which is primed for the latter as possibly the only way to validate or earn us the right to the former.

Let me take a step back. Horkheimer’s idea is that optimism can be self-stultifying. But why optimism to begin with? Where does it come from, this self-imposed obligation, this “compulsive effort to arrive at the cheerful conclusion”: this assuredness “in our cores” that “we’re going to be okay”?

Optimism was the characteristic mood of the European Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment, Europeans tended to understand human beings fundamentally as “creatures of God” and human history as unfolding according to the Creator’s wise and providential plan. Such an omnipotent and benevolent Creator would guarantee that, at least for the “deserving”, everything would indeed be okay in the end. For the Enlightenment thinkers, it was humanity that was in charge of its own identity and destiny. Human beings controlled their own reality, and Reason was the instrument of control. This means: the power of Reason itself validated optimism, and made hope that the future will be better than the past the reasonable position to take. It legitimated the idea that human history itself was inevitably and ineluctably progressive. That human beings, through exercising their rational capacities for both moral and technological ends, were creating increasingly ordered, just, and peaceful societies where all human needs would be met and humans could be happy and flourish. The famous quote from Martin Luther King Jr. about the arc of the moral universe being long, but bending toward justice expresses this enlightenment confidence nicely.

So Enlightenment thought did not abandon or subvert the idea of Providence, so much as it rebuilt it on a different foundation. Providence at its core is the idea that everything happens for a reason, and moreover, that it happens for good reasons. There is a standpoint or perspective, indeed the most reasonable and clear-sighted and truthful standpoint or perspective, in which it makes very good sense for everything to happen just as it does, that it is for the best that it so happen. That it all must happen as it does precisely in order for everything to end up in the best possible way, or for all to be okay or right in the end. In other words, everything ought to happen just in the way it does. And Enlightenment does not give up on this, but rather doubles down on it.

In fact, one could argue that religion, or Christianity at least, got the idea from philosophy rather than the other way around. It’s really Plato’s idea. Many are familiar with Plato’s idea of Forms. Remember, though, that there is one Form that is “superior in rank and power” than the other Forms, indeed one Form on which all the other Forms depend for their very existence. Plato called this the Form of the Good, or Goodness itself, and grasping that was the true goal of philosophy.

If you remember the allegory of the cave in the Republic, the Form of the Good is represented by the sun outside the cave: the last and most difficult thing to be “seen” or grasped through reason. If the Forms represent the true nature of reality, the Form of Goodness is both the cause of and the way to grasp the true nature of reality. It provides the illumination that allows the other Forms to be seen or understood. So, beyond merely understanding the Forms of things, there is a final more complete understanding of them precisely in terms of their relation to the Good. In other words, complete understanding means understanding why things are the way they are, which means understanding why it is good that things are just that way and not otherwise. St. Augustine acknowledges Christianity’s debt to Platonism in a backhand way in the City of God. For Augustine, Plato’s Form of the Good essentially is the Christian God distorted through the lens of an incorrect theology. The shared idea is that the most rational, ultimate perspective on the world reveals precisely that the world is fundamentally good. Everything happens for very good reasons, so in the end, it’ll all be okay. Hope for the future is a very reasonable thing.

This is a core idea for one of the Enlightenment’s most prominent advocates and spokesmen, Immanuel Kant. He had very famously written that philosophy’s purpose was to answer three questions: What can I know? What should I do? and What may I hope for? Surprisingly, the question of the legitimacy of hope was right up there, as important, perhaps more important, to philosophy as the question of the legitimacy of our scientific and moral endeavors. Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, as Plato had done before in the Republic, considers the question in terms of justice. Justice is something that Reason demands or requires. When Kant talks about “reason”, he means—quite justifiably I think—not just our ability to calculate and deduce, but also the capacity to try to make sense of the whole or the totality of things and events. Reason, he says, is only satisfied with “completeness.” When we try to grasp the world rationally, what we are trying to do is make sense of it all, as a whole, trying to understand how it all hangs together and presents a significant and meaningful totality. And as with Plato, things make rational sense when we can come to be able to see them as good. Things make sense to us when we understand that they have to be that way because it is good that they are that way.

For Kant, what reason expects and requires more than anything else is for the world to live up to a certain standard of justice. The most rational order is a just order, where justice is understood in terms of desert, that is, as everyone getting what they deserve. What reason then considers the “highest good,” the absolute best state of affairs, is the perfect correspondence between happiness and “worthiness of being happy,” or in other words, virtue. Justice means that good and moral people are rewarded with happy and full lives, and immoral and vicious people end up miserable.

This is of course palpably not how things seem to go here in the empirical world. In fact, it’s easy to get the sense that there is just no justice of this kind forthcoming; that it is quite alien to the natural order of things. If so, this would mean that the world-order—and subsequently, world history—ultimately just doesn’t make any sense. And Kant allows this as a possibility. For him, the only thing that could assure us that the highest good—the harmonic system of happiness and virtue—is even possible, especially given its absence in actual experience, is a “higher reason.” This higher reason is, again, God understood as the moral author of the empirical world. But once we have properly subjected human reason to critique, and located its proper limits, we realize that human reason alone cannot assure us of this. Human Reason cannot prove that such a God exists, or that each of us has an immortal soul that lives on after our bodies die away and thus can survive to experience the final and complete justice of the last judgment. But, crucially, because such justice is what reason requires in order to fulfill its essential vocation of making the world make sense as a whole, to give up on the idea of justice is to give up on reason. And to give up on reason is to give up on ourselves. We may not be able to know that there is a God who will ultimately make everything right, but we must nevertheless have faith that there is. And, astoundingly—and this is really where Kant’s originality and ingenuity lie—such faith is precisely then rational; Kant speaks here of rational faith and rational hope, and in some sense the point of his philosophy is to dispel the illusion that such terms are oxymoronic.

“Despair” by Auguste Rodin, 1890

Let me consider one last example. Kierkegaard’s guiding thought is a version of Kant’s: the impossibility of hope without God. For Kierkegaard, the source of all despair is the failure, or worse, refusal, to positively acknowledge “the actual power that has established the self.” This is God. But there are many stages along life’s way, and true faith—complete and total submission to God and his will—is necessarily the last and the hardest. The goal is to eradicate despair through the hope only faith can bring, but in order to achieve it, Kierkegaard suggests not that we reason ourselves into a relation with God, or the idea of God—as Kant had done—but rather that we first simply give in to despair. “Despair!” is the advice Judge Vilhelm gives the unnamed aesthete in Either/Or. Any life that isn’t fundamentally lived in submission to God is a life lived in despair anyway, whether it is lived in pursuit of aesthetic enjoyment, or in pursuit of fundamental ethical commitments. The problem is that both sorts of life unavoidably must involve various kinds of mechanisms for covering over despair, of distracting us from it. But such mechanisms cannot succeed forever, and in fact the mechanisms usually only serve to make things worse. So the advice is just to cut to the chase, to choose hopelessness. Despair is the necessary step to God, so being openly in despair is better than trying to fool yourself that you’re actually not; and in this sense despair takes you closer to God and to genuine hope.

I end with this example because it bears a striking similarity with Horkheimer’s apparently paradoxical advice: one must first countenance despair in order to earn the right to hope. Legitimate optimism can only emerge, if at all, from despair, that is, a loss of hope. But for Kierkegaard, the move from despair to faithful hope requires ceasing to rely on reason at all. His assumption of faith, as opposed to Kant’s, is precisely no longer rational or rationally justifiable. Hope is only ultimately secured by abandoning reason altogether.

So where are we left? Speaking for myself, and I assume for many others, the route to faith, and thus hope—of either the Platonic-Christian, Kantian or Kierkegaardian kind—seems closed off. Or at least none of them proves enough to fend off the current sense of foreboding. But I think the impulse and compulsion to hope is real as well. There really does seem to be a kind of reflex to try to convince yourself that everything will be okay in the end; I find it in myself too. And if what I’ve suggested is true, philosophy can offer some insight into why that is, where it comes from. To reiterate: The source of the psychological aversion to and fear of despair which threatens the legitimacy of Reason’s hope lies in the nature of reason itself. But this just seems to leave us, to borrow American philosopher John McDowell’s turn of phrase, only with “an exculpation where we wanted a justification.” Reason can’t help itself, perhaps, but that doesn’t make it right.

We are, I think, then still left with Horkheimer’s paradox. So let me, out of desperation perhaps, try to loosen and untangle the entire Gordian knot by pulling the knot more tightly. If reason is turned against itself—its optimism sabotaging its own progress—then perhaps the only way to save reason—the only way ultimately to be on reason’s side—is to try to subvert reason in this very particular way, namely by refusing its basic impulse toward optimism. Maybe the only possible way for things to turn out okay is if we accept that they very well simply might not, and so our only hope is to give up on the hope that they will.

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Michael Stevenson is an historian of philosophy specializing in the German philosophical tradition from Kant to Heidegger, and is now a Core Faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.  Educated at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and Columbia University, he has previously taught at Barnard College and Hunter College, City University of New York. 

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Hope & Despair: Philosophical considerations for uncertain times appeared first on The Revealer.

A boy from Honduras watches a movie at a detention facility run by the U.S. Border Patrol on Sept. 8, 2014 in McAllen, Texas. The Border Patrol opened the holding center to temporarily house the children after tens of thousands of families and unaccompanied minors from Central America crossed the border into the United States during the spring and summer of 2014. (Photo: John Moore—Getty Images)

Writing in 1943, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz described the light-hearted atmosphere of a peaceful Warsaw plaza while the Jewish Ghetto burned across town. A sky-carousel turned “to the strains of a carnival tune.”

The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

The merrymaking of Poles and Germans proceeds apace, even as some 13,000 Jews are murdered and their quarter razed nearby. Their carefree self-indulgence seems – in the most charitable reading – psychotically disconnected from the monstrosity unfolding in front of them. But Miłosz seems to suggest that the proximity in fact charges their fun with a superadded liveliness, even an erotic frisson: a hot wind, fueled by the pyres, that bounces kites and lifts skirts. Visiting the town of Oświęcim (in German, Auschwitz) as a child, I recall being baffled by the existence of discotheque not far from the concentration camp. “How could people still dance there?” I naively wondered. Today, older, I realize how stupid this was. Of course people dance there now; people danced there even then.

A burning street in the Warsaw Ghetto, during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. (Photo: Yad Vashem Archive)

Here is what is happening right now in America. Thousands of immigrant children are being held in mass detention facilities overseen by Federal agencies. The practice of detaining children who arrive at the border unaccompanied is longstanding, and horrifying as is; new to the picture is a “zero tolerance” prosecution initiative, issued by the Trump administration, whereby children who arrive with family members are forcibly separated from them such that they can then, in an evil slight of bureaucratic hand, be declared “unaccompanied.” The adults are sent to trial for illegal border crossing (a misdemeanor), regardless of whether they actually sought to seek asylum (which is entirely legal). Meanwhile, the children are placed in detention facilities – incarcerated – with no clear mechanism for or prospect of reunification with their families; some parents have already been deported, their children left behind. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security denies the existence of this policy one day, and then defends it publicly the next. Meanwhile, President Trump blames the Democrats for his own policy – which he could change with the stroke of a pen – and then unsubtly uses the children in question as a bargaining chip in a bid to get Democrats to cosign funding for a Border Wall.

One parent – that we know of – has already committed suicide after being separated from his wife and child. As for the children themselves, some two thousand have already been separated from their families, joining nine thousand other immigrant children already in Federal custody; an official with the Department of Health and Human Services, which manages an array of already overcrowded detention facilities erected on military bases, warehouses, and at least one converted Walmart, estimates that 30,000 could be detained by August. The images and stories that have emerged from such places – that have been glimpsed on carefully managed facility tours or leaked – are horrifying. A 5-year-old from Honduras cries himself to sleep clutching a stick-figure drawing of his family. Children, including a Salvadoran six-year-old, scream for their parents while a Border Patrol Agent mocks their cries. Teens self-harm and threaten suicide while staff are instructed to prevent siblings from hugging.

These scenes, from the present moment, invite justifiable comparison with some of the darkest moments in American history – Japanese internment, the forced removal of Native American children from their parents and communities, the systematic separation of Black slave families. They also cry out for comparison to historic nightmares abroad. They resemble, to be sure, an American version of Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceaușescu’s mass orphanages, the so-called “slaughterhouses of souls” which inflicted trauma on hundreds of thousands of children.

But they are also something else: they are concentration camps. As the historian Andrea Pitzer explains in her authoritative global history of concentration camps, One Long Night, the idea of a concentration camp need not necessarily imply extermination. Pitzer writes,

For more than a century, countries have established refugee camps to coordinate food and shelter during crises. But where the camps exist predominantly to isolate refugees and relegate them to dangerous or inhospitable terrain, serve as de facto detention areas to discourage border crossing, or become permanent purgatory for detainees unable to return home, they begin to take on characteristics of concentration camps. With refugee populations, a clear line does not always mark the peripheries of concentration camp definitions.

This is precisely the territory in which we find ourselves today. As I write, the Trump administration is contemplating erecting mass “tent cities” to house even more child detainees. It is worth recalling that Trump recently pardoned Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who bragged about building tent cities for immigrant prisoners, which he proudly described as “concentration camps.” Now, it seems, we shall have these for children, and Pitzer herself has called these what they are.

We all know where this goes. Such facilities already are – and only will be more so – incubators for abuse, violence, and health epidemics, mental and physical. We already have an immigration system in which a Texas deputy can cover up “super aggravated sexual assault” of a 4-year-old immigrant child by blackmailing her mother into silence with threats of deportation. America’s prisons and juvenile facilities enshrine violence and sexual abuse as a feature, not a bug – there is no reason not to expect this here. Children will be raped, children will be brutalized, children will die. Meanwhile, the authorities, state media, and regime sycophants will minimize the suffering and dehumanize the victims. Laura Ingraham already tells us these facilities are “basically summer camps,” Ann Coulter says the children are “actors,” and the Secretary of Homeland Security herself warns Americans not to be taken in by the constructed suffering of immigrants “posing as families” to “abuse” our “generosity.” These disavowals, at once breathtakingly divorced from reality but also underwritten by a not-so-subterranean glee in cruelty, will only get more brazen once there are child bodies to count. And even when there are, Tucker Carlson will doubtless remind us that “the American family,” the only family that really matters, faces suffering that is “measurable and real.”

Central Processing Station in McAllen, Texas. (Photo: Center for Border Protection)

There are not many anti-Nazi jokes that survive from the pre-war era, a fact that testifies, not incidentally, to the thoroughgoing ruthlessness of the German police state. One such rare joke dates from the period when dissenting Germans would still be sent to concentration camps for “rehabilitation” and “reeducation” and then be returned to the general populace. It involves two Germans talking with each other (here adapted from a telling by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius):

Hans: Georg, you’re back from the KZ, how was it?

Georg: Wonderful! We did calisthenics, took naps, sang songs. There were buffets and lectures in art appreciation. It was a grand time.

Hans: I am surprised – Udo told everyone it was a nightmare of brutality and pain.

Georg: And that’s why he was sent back yesterday!

This joke gets at some key things: that everyday Germans did “know” what was going on; that the pressure to minimize and disavow reality was ubiquitous; and that that pressure came not from fear of security forces foremost – but from fear of one’s own neighbors, who worked as informers. We see very similar mechanisms operative now. The cages are not really cages, DHS says, even if yes, technically speaking, it admits that the phrase is “not inaccurate”; the appropriate phrase, per Fox’s Steve Doocy, is “walls [built] out of chain link fences.” Their staff are not camp guards, they are “Consequence Delivery Agents.”

In this nightmare factory we call America, where people sic armed, trigger-happy police on one another out of sheer racism, and where people routinely threaten deportation against neighbors whom they wish to tormentor exploit, the sense of mounting fear, and of joy in cruelty, lurking behind the jokes and circumlocution is palpable. But our pretenses of not-knowing are even flimsier than those of Germans living under Nazism. The photos of immigrants’ confiscated rosaries and clothes come in real time, our moment’s analogues to the piles of shoes and tallitot at Auschwitz. They are glimpses of a present incubating a future that only promises worse. Action is necessary – from acts of civil disobedience to support for activist groups to demands for the abolition of ICE, CBP, and DHS and more. And so too is an honest confrontation with the uncomfortable truth that these new horrors also represent a clear continuity with our all-too-recent past.

We have no excuses. All that is unfolding now is happening against the backdrop of a period of record stock market gains and unprecedented wealth. If we permit such things now, what do we license when – not if – things get worse? The hot winds are already blowing.

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Patrick Blanchfield was the 2016-2017 Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com and is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

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“I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world” — Matthew 13:35 and the epigraph to Jordan Peterson’s 1999 book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

On Friday, May 18 a 17 year old walked into his high school in Southeast Texas with a shotgun and a .38 revolver. He shot at least ten people dead, including his ex-girlfriend.

In April, a young man in Toronto drove his van into a crowd, killing ten people and wounding fourteen. Most of the dead were women, and the driver has been connected to an ideology that demeans women as less than human and advocates for forced sex as the right of males. The killer took his inspiration from another killer who shot and stabbed six people to death in Isla Vista, California, in 2014. Yet another young man killed twenty-six parishioners at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas last year. The killer wanted revenge on a spurning lover.

Easy gun access and a welling radicalization of disaffected and hate-filled young men is not a new phenomenon—but school shootings are. They are also a phenomenon with a strong foundation in U.S. culture.

When I began this column in October, 2013, the purpose was clear: to draw attention to the quote-unquote religious views weaponized (for political, social and plain old discriminatory reasons) to thwart by any means possible the full access and provision of health care to all Americans. Or the reverse: the use of medical science to confront and demean religious beliefs. (I’ve likely been more successful at the former than the latter.) With some few exceptions, this column has focused on the U.S. simply because of the research I was working on and the endless examples of where friction exists between religion and medicine.

The issues have been inexhaustible, from women’s reproductive rights to elders’ access to end of life care, from organ donation to drug regulation. The column has covered a wide range of issues—but continues, perhaps because of my own proclivities as much as the ongoing U.S. culture wars—to tend toward the subject of both overt and covert violence against women.

When this column began, some of us could blissfully take comfort in that old and noble saw, the arc of justice bending upwards. And then, of course, came President Trump and the license he gave to hatred, discrimination, and misogyny. It’s always been there, seething beneath our social fabric. But the mainstreaming of retrograde and gratuitous ideas that reinforce our spiral into violence against minority groups and women has had direct and horrifying results. What death and violence this mainstreaming has brought is supported by a growing and popular host of pseudo-intellectuals, lawmakers, and tastemakers who are willing to justify it. If there is an arc of justice, our current moment is left out of its long average.

Being a woman in the United States is dangerous to your health. Women have always been profoundly harmed by sexual violence at a greater rate than men, their bodies too long considered their rights and property. Coverture, the status of a married woman and all her possessions as the property of her husband, was common law for centuries. It is derived from the “legal fiction” that a man and wife were one entity: the husband. But the consideration of women’s bodies as the property of men didn’t end with coverture. As recently as seven years ago it was reported that a Virginia legislator, Dick Black, said that marital rape shouldn’t be a crime. In fact, marital rape wasn’t a crime until 1979.

Women’s sexuality has been used to justify white male violence for most of the nation’s history. The post-Civil War South employed ideas of (white) female sexual purity, national purity, and safety to justify slavery, lynchings, and white male violence. Even economic vitality was considered the reward for women’s sexual purity. As Ellen Ann Fentress recently wrote at The Baffler (where I’m web editor):

The myth of the threat of the black male rapist gave the white male an enhanced role as the necessary protector of white women and Southern society. He had a responsibility to make the community safe. An added plus was that the rape-threat claim was possibly the sole premise for deflection of Northern and British censure as the white South reestablished its power.

This violent history and treatment of women as male property has visceral ramifications for women today. Every minute, twenty people experience sexual violence, a vast majority of them women according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. One in five women have been raped. One in three women have been a victim of some form of violence. One in seven have been stalked. One hundred and forty two women were killed at work by an abuser between the years of 2003 and 2008. When you intersect this data with race, poverty, maternity, education, language barriers, and fear of deportation, the prevalence of violence is compounded.

But what is becoming clear in the endless horror that is our regular news cycle is that misogyny, defined by philosopher Kate Manne as “social systems or environments where women face hostility and hatred because they’re women in a man’s world — a historical patriarchy,” is a defining factor in these mass killings. They are most often committed by young white men who are compelled to punish women for challenging male dominance, men who feel they are vulnerable to women’s challenges. As Jared Keller writes (citing the work of sociologist Michael Kimmel), a “complicated tension between homophobia and the developing masculinity of adolescent American men” characterized school shootings in the country between 1982 and 2001. This male, he writes, is a “clinical category.”

Crosses stand in a field on the edge of town to honor the 26 victims killed at the First Baptist Church on November 6th, 2017, in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

There have been twenty-two school shootings since the beginning of 2018, for an average of more than one every week. After the May 18 shooting in Texas, Mark Allan Bovair posted on Twitter “The destabilization of the sexual marketplace has hit young men hard and any [attempt] to discuss the issue is labeled misogyny.” To men like this, female company and sex are considered a commodity that men are being cheated out of as women push for greater equality in society.

This subculture of male resentment has no shortage of adherents—and a new scion, Jordan Peterson, has recently achieved market saturation with the publication of a book that provides a pseudo-scientific, -intellectual, and -religious justification for anger among men and violence against women.

In a Nellie Bowles’ profile of Peterson in the New York Times, he encapsulated his ideology about the erosion of historical sexual norms and the inherent rights of men in a reference to the Toronto killer, saying, “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him. The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

The modern world, according to Peterson, is rife not just with gun violence but also its cause, social and cultural chaos. Traditional family structures have been upended, genders are no longer binary, freedom of speech is increasingly restricted, identity politics are marring governance and social order, the old hierarchies have been dismantled, and ethics has strayed from the ancient moral teachings of the Bible. “The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious,” Peterson further explained to the Times.

Peterson, a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto and a mega-best selling author, has a solution to this “chaos”: return to earlier times when women knew their place, teach young men to toughen up, violently restore the patriarchy, and things will settle down. Peterson’s worldview is clearly popular. His quotes are internet-clogging memes. Videos of his talks on YouTube have millions of views. His adherents wear T-shirts with lobsters on them, lobsters being Peterson’s impossible-to-follow “scientific” proof that hierarchies are very, very old and therefore good. He’s selling out five thousand seat auditoriums and has amassed a devoted and noted following. Malcolm Gladwell has hailed him as a brilliant psychologist. At the New York Times, columnist David Brooks has called him the new William F. Buckley, Jr. and Ross Douthat parroted Peterson-like ideas in a recent column that argued for “the redistribution of sex” as “entirely responsive to the logic of late-modern sexual life,” by which he means a time in which women have a tenuous enough equality to choose who to have sex with.

Jordan Peterson (Photograph: Phil Fisk for the Observer)

A combination of particular characteristics makes Peterson attractive to nostalgics in search of a great thinker. According to Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs, “Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say.” He’s vague and hard to follow but his work contains shreds of inherent truth. He’s commanding, somber and over-the-top confident. And he brooks no challenge; a class-A Alphamale doesn’t.

Lord knows the right needs a new intellectual foundation. And that’s precisely why Peterson appeals to adherents of a mythologized past, young men who can’t get laid, anti-feminists, nationalists, the religion-y folk who see the world in a hand basket, conservatives too eager to exercise their brutal “might makes right” cosmology.

Celebrated as a great mind that must be heeded, praised, believed, Peterson has found an audience in search of, not so much a new message, but a brazen, white, credentialed, aggressive male authority who will widely evangelize an old message: male dominance by any means necessary. Peterson’s popularity as an elite mind coarsely splays the right on its own anti-intellectual petard. As journalist Josh Marshall wrote in a series of tweets after Bowles’ Times profile of Peterson was published:

She captures in the lede the role as validator, all those things you felt were true. You were right all along. I’ve actually become fascinated by these Peterson types and their role in the backlash against gender equality in this case but other MAGAist revanchist in other cases. They place themselves as something akin to the bodhisattvas of inceldom, men who have achieved transcendence or alphadom but are so filled with compassion for incels trapped in the illusion of modernity and sexual liberation that they have remained behind to …help usher these rage filled virgins toward gorilla mindset enlightenment.

A smart man, after all, is the man one agrees with. In addition to a misogyny-sympathetic narrative and the posturing of an intellectual man’s man, Peterson employs various other tools of the authenticity-generating variety: science, history, and religion. “I’m a scientist but I’m also a religious person, I’m a deeply religious person,” Peterson has stated, “Genuine religious truth tells you how to act.” In this age-old construction, religion (however vaguely defined in Peterson’s case) helps justify violence toward others as a means of obtaining and maintaining an ordered, hierarchical and peaceful society. The sanctity and purity of the nation requires white men to define, police, and “protect” female sexuality. Physically and violently enforced monogamy is then the best means of maintaining a pure and ordered nation.

Peterson’s ideas, as Bowles writes, “stem from a gnawing anxiety around gender.” Despite speaking, teaching and writing in relative obscurity for decades, he burst on the media scene in 2016 by loudly opposing a Canadian bill that made it possible for students to use their preferred pronouns. Peterson claimed that the gender-neutral pronouns violated his academic freedom and free speech. In a video viewed by more than 3 million people, Peterson is shown engaging with transgendered young students. As recounted in an article by Tom Bartlett for The Chronicle of Higher Education, when one student asks Peterson what gives him “the authority to determine which pronouns he uses when referring to someone else,” Peterson angrily responds, “Why do I have the authority to determine what I say? What kind of question is that?” (A man shot and killed nearly 50 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida that same year.)

Such arguments, which assert the unquestionable rights of a privileged and exclusive subset of the population over others—and insist that this dominance is historically, scientifically, legally and religiously justifiable—are the parlance of the moment.

As well, these arguments, by Peterson and others, are made by a demographic of American society that fears the end of longstanding violent, nativist, and misogynist norms and laws that have kept them on top to the detriment of others. This movement has turned rights and freedoms language on its head, applying them to a narrowing subset of society. Our president is, after all, an admitted sexual aggressor, hell bent on demeaning, dehumanizing, torturing and deporting those he finds socially, sexually or economically expendable. He is abetted by a coterie of officials, leaders, and voters who are drunk on their own control and eager for violent opportunities to “defend” it. Women and particularly women of color continue to pay the price of their health, independence and lives for this drunken orgy of political male dominance.

This is a culture war and the young white men with weapons are the crusading heroes. Peterson’s endorsement of violence is proving to empower and radicalize followers who are armed and out to take revenge on the health and safety of the rest of us, particularly autonomous women.

School is out now. We can pray for a quiet season, after the year’s record number of shootings. As midterm elections approach and the country reassesses its losses, women have focused their attention on running for office, on uncovering sexual harassment, on becoming activists against deportations and human rights abuses. “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.” I close out this long run of columns with muted hope, but with a great deal of satisfaction in the subjects its many installments have allowed me to explore with you.

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Ann Neumann is author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon, 2016) and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU.

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This is the final installment of Ann Neumann’s column, “The Patient Body,” which began in October 2013 and has appeared in almost every issue of The Revealer since.  It has been an enormous pleasure to work with Ann each month — her insights and analysis have been vital to our work and we will miss her and them. But don’t fret, you can still see Ann’s wit and verve in full force over at The Baffler where she is now Web Editor. And if you’ve missed an installment of “The Patient Body” we invite you to check out the full archive, here. — Kali Handelman, Editor

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

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