[As a special Spring Break treat, like yesterday, I’m making this post free for everyone. Normally my paid posts go up on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but everyone sometimes deserves a party and a good time. That said, I’m so grateful to all you paid subscribers! Thank you for supporting Demotivations!]
The kids—at least five of them—are on Spring Break this week, which has me all discombobulated. I probably knew this was going to happen, but I didn’t know it was going to be this week. I feel this must be the explanation for why I haven’t been able to get my act together. My house, for example, is a disaster, I’ve lost some important items, and there’s no food in the cupboard.
The worst thing is that I have written several posts that were so bad, I could not possibly put them on the Internet, which is saying a lot, as there is so much out there that cannot be considered “good” by any measure. So instead of those that I have thrown away, in the spirit of a light and momentary week of dissipation, I have some disparate thoughts about the way things are going.
The first is this terrible clip of Judith Butler being fatuous. The production value is high, but the content is terrible. The destruction of those Israelis on October 7th, while anguishing for her, of course, Butler explains, was actually not “terrorism” because Hamas was practicing an “Uprising” involving “Armed Resistance” the relative merits of which is something that should be “debated” amongst reasonable people, as long as those people, it might be fair to assume, are on the leftist/progressive side of the equation. Israeli “armed resistance” is disqualified from moral justification, on account of the many historic wrongs done to Hamas.
My how she’s aged, was my thought, watching her make this speech. She came to give a series of lectures at Cornell when I was puttering through my BA coursework in the late 90s. Instead of Shakespeare and Milton, I had somehow gotten sucked into Literary and Critical Theory and was reading Helen Cixous. I remember huddling in the back of the lecture hall, thoroughly enjoying how Butler, who talked fast and incomprehensibly, nevertheless eviscerated an annoying young freshman in the front row during the question and answer time who was trying to sound more intelligent than he was. He wanted to impress her, and she wasn’t having any of it. But that brief moment of sunshine was all there was. Afterward, I had to go and slog through a series of her articles and felt bad for that poor guy because she had been talking complete nonsense and no one should have had to feel like they needed her approval. And yet here she is, still, surrounded by adoring people who don’t know their right hands from their left hands. Isn’t it funny how she is able to make herself understood when she’s talking about how what was done to some people, including women and children, because they are part of the wrong group, probably did deserve it because of all the *historic wrongs* done to Hamas? What price women’s bodies now?
Honestly, I feel bad for her. The world she helped deconstruct is turning out to be violent, brutish, and wretched. Instead of peace and love, instead of self-actualization and flourishing, instead of a genderless deconstructed utopia, she is reduced to trying to justify grotesque murder and rape as some kind of moral good.
The second thing is this thing over at the Anxious Bench by someone who claims to have, heretofore, read a lot of Rosaria Butterfield and enjoyed her, but now wonders “what happened” to Butterfield’s previously winsome tone in this latest book. This was my favorite part of the whole piece, which, honestly, seemed unbearably clueless:
I found the section on Lie #3: “Feminism is Good for the World and the Church ” particularly upsetting given Butterfield’s background and training in women’s studies. I looked up some of her previous work, including a deep reading of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping in which she (then Rosaria Champagne) discusses “the claims that cultural hegemonies have over women’s bodies,” how women must be “conquered and raped in order to claim one’s ‘rightful place’ within culture.” (Champagne, Rosario. “Women’s History and Housekeeping: Memory, Representation and Re-inscription.” Women’s Studies 20. 3-4 (1992): 321-29). To then read in Five Lies that “A godly woman’s best defense against a potentially abusive husband [in submission] is church membership in a biblically faithful church where she is a member in good standing” is wild. Butterfield knows better than most how gender and power works. Which isn’t to say that she’d necessarily have to change her conclusions. I have no doubt she could make an informed, complex case for her position. Instead, that chapter cites no theory, no scientific studies, but rather: a 1668 treatise on repentance, Calvin, a psalter, the catechism, Kevin DeYoung, a podcast, and a long poem written by two missionary women. Unsurprisingly, one of the few works of history she notes is Kristin DuMez’s Jesus and John Wayne which she misreads at length and dismisses as a “bad idea,” even a “false interpretation.”
Again, I feel bad for the writer of this piece, someone who, clearly, doesn’t know what time it is, nor where we are in the course of human events and thought. The whole world of “cultural hegemonies” and women’s studies is passing away. The real world of power, unmediated by the peaceable and kindly effects of the Gospel, is at our throats. It is not something that anyone is going to enjoy, no matter how much the Butlers of the world might cope and seethe. It’s time to get with it and see that ideas have consequences. The psalter and the catechism will take you the full distance in this world of real tribulations. “Memory, Representation, and Re-inscription,” which I’m sure Butterfield would be the first to point out, is a play-acted world, an exercise in spiritual make-believe.
Personally, I’m grateful that some of those who helped construct that deconstructed world have the gumption and intelligence to speak so clearly about what’s wrong with it. How could anyone have read any of Butterfield’s Christian books—including The Gospel Comes With a Housekey—and think that there remains any room for women’s studies? Does this person lack reading comprehension skills? Or is Jonathon Culler still clouding her intelligence?
I guess I do have one bonus thought. I was transfixed yesterday by those pictures of Victoria Nuland going around—the sort of ‘How It Started’ and ‘How It’s Going’ meme. As a younger person, Nuland looked fresh-faced and eager. Now that she’s resigned, after decades of work in the American government, she looks bitter and angry. It’s not that she’s aged, of course we all do, it’s that the traces of compromise and entitlement are etched into her face. She, in the spirit of the age, rose to the top of power, determined to get what she could along the way, under the guise that if only women could rule, the world would be covered with peace and security. What a lie that was. Turns out women are human, just the same as men, which means that they do bad things, that they believe bad ideas, that their bodies are full of sinful frailty and age, and that if you lie enough, eventually you sound stupid.
Thanks be to God, though, that he took on mortal flesh, offering himself up as a sacrifice for our salvation, both inwardly in our souls and outwardly in our bodies, that we may be bound to him, rescued eternally from the wreckage of human wisdom.
Have a nice day!
I really love this quote about Judith Butler:
“Honestly, I feel bad for her. The world she helped deconstruct is turning out to be violent, brutish, and wretched. Instead of peace and love, instead of self-actualization and flourishing, instead of a genderless deconstructed utopia, she is reduced to trying to justify grotesque murder and rape as some kind of moral good.”
From the Anxious Bench piece: "While I didn’t love that she felt she had to abandon her professorship at Syracuse, her scholarship in women’s studies and literature, and her feminism to quickly marry a man..." That phrase, "marry a man" occurs twice in the piece and, tho I can't analyze why exactly, it lands with such a melancholy thud. I'd rather go with C. S. Lewis's take on the meaning of marriage, and if he was wrong, (I don't think for a second he was) I'd rather go down in that ship. End of _That Hideous Strength_ : "Jane went out of the big house...past the seesaw and the greenhouse and the piggeries, going down all the time, down to the lodge, descending the ladder of humility. First she thought of the Director and then she thought of Maleldil. Then she thought of her obedience and the setting of each foot before the other became a kind of sacrificial ceremony. And she thought of children, and of pain and death. And now she was halfway to the lodge..."