We seem to know that goals make us miserable. But we keep setting them anyway, like clockwork—because we don’t know how to live without them. Jenny Craig is counting on that.
FX’s hit series The Bear helpfully illustrates why we are not wrong to think that goals are the literalization of our passions, and that our passions are the sources of our misery. Passion makes us miserable because it immunizes us against receiving (the touch of) O/others.
But The Bear also reveals something else: maternal love—unexpected, unconditional—can free us from passion’s grip.
In season 3, episode 9 of The Bear, Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) makes a distinction between passions and goals (You can watch the entire scene here):
Well, dreams are a son of a bitch, aren’t they? I went to this lecture series, U of Chicago. . . . Anyway, dreams, they always. . . start from a place of passion, right?
And, by the way, when I say dreams, I mean goals, not like when you’re, you know, asleep and you’re stuck at the bottom of a swimming pool, and your fucking teeth keep floating up out of your head. And you look down, and you have a fucking tattoo of a bulldog on your cock.
Anyway, so I’m at this lecture, and it’s called The Day Tomorrow Began, right? It’s all about these breakthroughs in, like, science and fucking culture and whatever . . . . Crazy fucking shit, let me tell you. Like carbon dating . . . . It’s inspiring, really.
Because it’s kind of like, if you really nurture these dreams, these goals, no matter how batshit crazy they sound—and trust me. There are, like, 15 more of these breakthroughs—positively fucking idiotic, right?
But you can make an impact, right? You can actually change the fucking world, as long as you have a place like the university to, you know, take care of you, to let you do your thing, let you drive, right?
And, uh, keep you financed. I just remember the whole time thinking, “Whew, not everything can be that. . . .”
Jimmy’s lecture mirrors a dream of floating teeth and bulldog-tatted cocks, but its warning about passion is clear enough.
Dreams, “like when you’re, you know, asleep,” are “a place of passion.” Goals “start from a place of passion,” from your dreams. Your dreams (re)surface your passions. In your dreams, your “teeth” come out of your head to speak your mind, and your “dog” is free to sniff out a place to piss on the world.
Goals (i.e., teeth and bulldogs) are forms of passion. And they ain’t pleasant. They’re “a son of a bitch,” “crazy fucking shit,” and “positively fucking idiotic.”
The idiotic—or passionate—person hasn’t lost their mind. Their teeth are speaking it. What they’ve lost is their head—their, I say, pleasure.
Passion blocks your pleasure by immunizing you against the reception of O/others—for example, the university you need to “take care of you,” the investors you need to “keep you financed,” the business partner, family members, and/or girlfriend you need to run a successful restaurant and experience something like a good life.
Your goals get realized—if they do—in spite of you. More importantly, goals immunize you against yourself.
Season 4 Spoiler Alert! “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
In season 4 of The Bear, we learn that being a world-class chef is more than Carm (Jeremy Allen White) can bear (You can watch the final scene of season 4 here and here):
I—I think I have put a lot of stuff in the way, of not dealing with other stuff. . . . And I think I’m trying to run into that. All right. So, I’m not blocked by it anymore. I’m not scared of it anymore. I’m not sprinting from it anymore.
. . . .
I don’t know what I’m like, Richie. . . . Like, outside of the kitchen.
We know what Carm is like inside the kitchen. He is like his mother inside the kitchen (I only recently completed watching season 2 of The Bear because episode 6, “Ma Does Seven Fishes,” caused me so much anxiety that I could not bear to finish watching it).
Carm’s curiosity about what he’s like outside the kitchen is also inspired by his mother, who is now in a similar position. Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) offers her apology for years of parental neglect just outside of their family home’s kitchen (You can watch the scene here):
I’m trying to make things better. And I am–I’m here asking if I can be part of your life again because I miss you. And I– I know I never said it enough–I know I didn’t–but I love you, Carmen.
You’re my baby bear. I know. And I love you. And I’m so sorry. I just didn’t say it enough. I just didn’t.
Donna’s unexpected apology—her unexpected expression of sincere maternal love—somehow moves Carm to think about his pleasure, about who he may be outside of the kitchen.
Maternal love redeems us from our passions, and it opens us to ourselves. Lots of love to you, dear reader, in 2026.
AI-generated image depicting Genesis 27, emphasizing vv 16-17, inscribed on the skin of a goat.
“Vegetarianism is an act of the imagination. It reflects an ability to imagine alternatives to the texts of meat.” (Adams 2024 [1990], 180).
How Should Vegetarians Use the Bible?
New Testament scholar Stephen Moore draws our attention to a “notable interfacing” of postcolonial, poststructuralist, and biblical readings in Homi Bhabha’s essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders” (2005, 81). This “is one essay in which Bhabha is more than usually emphatic,” Moore observes, “that the colonized are engaged in active subversion of the colonizer’s discourse, in this case, the colonizer’s Scripture” (2005, 90).
Moore explains that in “Signs Taken for Wonders,” Bhabha describes a gathering in May 1817 of “some 500 souls, men, women, and children, seated in the shade of trees [outside Delhi] and engaged in scripture reading and debate” (2005, 86). The souls gathered in the shade are taught by an Indian missionary, who tells them, “These books . . . teach the religion of the European Sahibs. It is THEIR book; and they have printed it in our language, for our use.” Hearing this, someone replies, “Ah! no, that cannot be, for they eat flesh” (2005, 91, italics added).
The 500 agree to be baptized, but they refuse to receive the Eucharist “because the Europeans eat cow’s flesh, and this will never do for us” (Moore 2005, 91). They decline to complete the Catholic initiation process by receiving the vegetarian Meal of meals, the Eucharist, because Europeans eat meat, especially cow’s flesh.
But what do the Indian people, who believe cows are sacred, do with the Bible of the European meat-eaters? A second missionary observes that “[every Indian] would gladly receive a Bible. Why? That he may store it up with curiosity; sell it for a few pice, or use it for waste paper” (Moore 2005, 92)
For “every Indian,” the Bible of the Western meat-eaters is a collector’s item, a cheap commodity, or toilet paper. Moore describes such uses of biblical literature as forms of “resistant reading of the colonial Bible” (Moore 2005, 92, emphasis original)
Such resistant reading practices, “ones that resist by refusing to read,” hover over the surfaces of the Bible. They enable resistance “by remaining at the level of the material signifier, the papery substance itself—wondrously thin, almost transparent, yet wholly tangible . . .” (Moore 2005, 92).
The nearly 175-year-old example of 500 Indian Christian vegetarians, including children, might shock modern Western vegetarian readers of biblical literature into the realization that the Bible can be used in surprising ways, but it isn’t edible. While the contemporary Bible is plant-based, at least in its printed forms, papyrus is not the material condition of the Bible. The Bible is meatier than it first appears, at least to its modern readers.
As we will soon discover, the intuition of the 500 Indian Christian souls—that the Bible’s meatiness is inside-out—is more than confirmed by the texts that make up biblical literature. In fact, biblical literature is structurally wedded to a predator-prey dynamic. This presents a serious problem for the Bible’s Western vegetarian and vegan readers.
In what follows, I attend to the Bible’s material condition, to the reason for its textual survival—namely, dead animals. I then make the predator-prey logic that runs through biblical literature visible. Finally, through a (re)reading of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse” and 2 Samuel 6, I propose a queer vegetarian hermeneutics that refuses the “common sense” of (divine) predation and intervenes in it, letting fall through the meaty “sheet” of the Western Book of books queer possibilities for anti-predatory (non)human animal relations.
This essay is seeking a home in an academic journal; so, the rest of it has been omitted while the essay is under consideration for publication elsewhere. I hope you enjoyed this small preview of its theme and argument!
WORKS CITED
Adams, Carol. J. 2024. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Original work published in 1990.
Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. 2007. “Crisis in Verse.” In Divagations. Translated by Barbara Johnson, 201-211. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press. Original work published in 1897.
Moore, Stephen. D. 2005. Questions of Biblical Ambivalence and Authority Under A Tree Outside Delhi; Or, The Postcolonial And The Postmodern. In Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections. Edited by Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia, 79-96. London and New York: T & T Clark International.
The following is a sermon based on Ephesians 4:15, entitled Speaking of Unity. I offered it at an annual gathering of pastors and other church leaders.
Ephesians 4:14-15:
We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Messiah.
Organizing Idea: Forsaking anger, we speak the truth in love, and so draw closer together, preserving God’s will: the unity of the body of Messiah Jesus.
I.
Picture this scene: We fall in love.
I’m a bit proper, and intimate chat—you know, what the young folks these days call “spicy” talk—that makes me uncomfortable.
I don’t know how to handle love-talk, so as we walk through your garden, you whisper “sweet nothings” to the roses.
I laugh as you tell the roses how much you love them.
But there’s one problem: We fall in love during a war.
You leave to fight in the war, leaving me with instructions on how to care for the roses.
I do my best to keep the roses alive until you return.
There’s one more problem: one thing you told me to do I won’t do—and that is talkto the roses.
Why not? Well, that’s ridiculous!
Honestly, I won’t talk to the roses because I miss you.
In the letter I send to you, I share that the roses are surviving—but they are not thriving. The roses are alive, but they are not living because they are not getting the conversation they need.
Why did we fall in love in the middle of a war? What a silly thing for anyone to do.
II.
What you just pictured is a scene from the new, fabulous Broadway musicalOperation Mincemeat.
Jak Malone won the Tony Award for his performance as Hester Leggatt, who sings about falling in love during World War II and caring for the roses while her lover, Tom, is away fighting the war.
For reasons you’ll need to figure out yourself, the song is called “Dear Bill.”
III.
Roses are, of course, a cliché for love.
Teenagers at prom. Honeymoon suites. Romance novels.
But in Hester’s song, the roses are more than cliché.
They’re a revelation.
The roses in Hester’s song reveal what it means to speak of unity.
Ephesians repeatedly emphasizes that God’s will is to unite everything and everyone (1:10). In fact, God, through the cross of Jesus the Messiah and the ongoing advocacy of the Spirit, has completed that goal.
Unity is not something we create.
Our pastors, leaders, youth, members, or visitors can’t command or create unity.
God gives unity to the body of Messiah, to the church. Unity is grace.
That’s why Ephesians urges us to “accept each other with love, and make an effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit with the peace that ties you together” (4:2-3).
Preserving unity, the unity that God gives us through the weakness of the Messiah, in the Spirit—that is our work.
Planting, growing, and watering the roses–that’s God’s work.
Our task is tending to them, giving the roses the conversation they need to thrive.
But there’s one issue: we are living in wartime.
IV.
We are in the middle of a serious culture war. One that too often successfully pulls us out of the garden, almost guaranteeing that the roses won’t get the conversation they need to thrive.
Military helicopters are descending on Chicago, targeting communities of color—and ICE, armed like Roman soldiers, are kicking in the doors of citizens and their children, hauling them into the streets.
Rome’s agents ruthlessly round up our fellow human beings without papers—the vast majority of whom are, like all of us, trying to build a good and decent life.
Across this divided land, killers strike our fellow citizens in their homes, on campuses, and as they walk to lunch—and yet we only recognize some victims as saints.
Today, our government is shut down because we refuse to agree that our neighbors deserve affordable healthcare.
V.
We are in the middle of a war, so all the chatter I am hearing in my circles, from both sides of the partisan divide—and everything in between—about buying guns is not so surprising.
Even Ephesians encourages believers in the Messiah to arm themselves. We are to put on the belt of truth, take up the shield of faith, wear the helmet of salvation, and wield the sword of the Spirit (6:13-17).
The author of Ephesians encourages us to dress up like Roman soldiers.
That’s no small thing. Fashion moves us.
Remember that time you finally fit into those tight jeans or that expensive dress you never thought you would fit into… and then immediately booked a flight to New York to walk the runway during Fashion Week? Or, remember the time that you got a great haircut, and you seriously thought, “I could be a rockstar with this hair.”
Playing dress up as a Roman soldier is not as innocent as it seems.
And before you think I am overthinking this, consider that the author of Ephesians, just a few verses earlier, explicitly commands us to adopt a Roman lifestyle.
Just before asking us to dress up like Roman soldiers, he commands wives to submit to their husbands, and slaves to obey their masters.
If it’s any consolation, he does request that husbands and masters, masters and husbands, treat their property with kindness (5:21-6:9).
That’s so cringe. I know.
It’s also very, very Roman lifestyle advice.
But like every text written in wartime—Ephesians is all about a clash of cultures—it resists simplicity.
VI.
Earlier in the letter, the author of Ephesians declares, “I’m telling you this, and I insist on it in the Lord: you shouldn’t live your life like the [the Romans] anymore. . .” (4:17). [unstated exegetical note: It is because the author moves in this direction that I emphasize the Roman cultural connections rather than the Jewish ones. The author of Ephesians was likely Jewish. See Daniel Boyarin’s excellent study,Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (1999), for an analysis of the overlap between Jewish and Roman cultures, along with its main theme: how Judaism and Christianity eventually became distinguishable religions].
But in the middle of his musical, let’s call it, The Roman Family Musical, the author offers some Roman advice that is actually sound: he tells us to avoid anger. [Underlying source: see Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice(2016) for a sophisticated and careful analysis of the character of anger.]
The Romans, and the Greeks before them, believed that anger was a female thing. They thought males were rational and disciplined, and females were childish and prone to excess.
One thing is certain: when you lack control over your own body, anger does feel empowering.
Even so, avoiding anger is good Roman advice because human anger is always an injustice.
Anger always works against God’s will to bring everything and everyone together.
Please don’t take my word for it, the truth is as close to you as your own family.
The author of Ephesians commands children to obey their parents (6:1-4). But this time, there is good reason to comply with his command:
The commandment to love your parents is the only one that comes with a promise: We should listen to our parents so that everything may go well for us and that we may live a long life.
That’s promising!
And parents, if you want to command your children’s respect and ensure everything goes well for them, avoid provoking them to anger.
That sounds promising, too!
I confess, I am surprised; I never took Ephesians for a letter with much promise.
In fact, I typically feel like this dude is a prude.
No drinking. No cussing. No joking. No rock, pop, or blues music. No good sex (it’s all missionary style for him).
But this time, I thought: maybe the perils of anger explain his social conservatism.
VII.
Nowadays, anger is a respectable thing to feel, especially if you are a male.
The fruits of male anger are predictable—a terrible tale as old as time: males drink, males boast, males covet the spouses of other males.
Outrage follows. Men die. And women and children are the collateral damage of male anger.
Here is a new thing about anger: it’s especially powerful on social media.
Rage-baiting is all the rage. Why? We love it. We like it. We comment on it.
The algorithm gives us more and more of it. Influencers and social media platforms profit from it.
There is a reason we describe getting angry as “going nuclear.” It is the most potent weapon in our culture war arsenal.
Anger always goes viral.
Here’s why: Anger is a feeling that is always—and I say again—always related to the pleasures of retribution, of punishment, of revenge, of domination—of really sticking it to someone who stuck it to you.
The logic of anger is devilishly simple: if I can wound the one who wounded me, I will be made whole again.
Anger is always a form of magical thinking: the thought that revenge will right a wrong.
It won’t.
Anger is always a verb. It is always about getting even.
That’s why we should avoid provoking our children to anger and getting angry ourselves.
“Get angry,” we are told, “but don’t sin” (4:26-27).
In other words, don’t get angry, because anger is always related to sin; it is always opposed to God’s will, to unity and its preservation in the church.
Speaking of unity, I remember visiting family in northern Idaho.
I was in my mid-twenties, sitting with my brother and uncle in a bar called the Six Devils.
After I enjoyed about six devils, I decided it was time to share some angry thoughts. The result was predictable: more anger.
My brother, a huge, muscular guy (the opposite of me), stormed out of the bar—and my uncle did too, after he started to cry.
What I said damaged our relationship; it certainly did not bring us closer together.
That’s why the author of Ephesians urges us to forsake anger and begs us to adopt a different lifestyle, one characterized by speaking the truth.
That’s one word in Greek—it means to speak the truth continuously.
Like anger, speaking the truth is a verb. But it’s not angry speech. It is not permission to say the nastiest things imaginable about people while smiling.
Well, bless your hearts.
Speaking the truth–quite unlike anger–is always a matter of love-talk, and love-talk is always talk that inspires–indeed is–the preservation of unity in the body of Messiah Jesus.
VIII.
Now, with that in mind, let’s re-imagine what speaking of unity—what giving the roses the conversation they need–looks like.
Picture this scene: We are back in the garden; the roses are there between us. I start talking to them because I know you don’t like it when I talk too directly about love. Here’s what I say to the roses:
I was asked to preach at the Church of Christ, but I was told there was one topic I could not mention in my sermon.
So, I angrily left the garden to fight on the Western front of the culture war.
Walking to the battlefield, I was reminded of a time I asked a layperson to avoid a topic. I asked them not to disparage members of the church I was serving from the pulpit.
One member was barely back on his feet after being disowned by his entire family. Another member was coming back to church after she had stayed away for years, fearing abuse from the pulpit. Yet another member had just lost his husband.
Please, I asked, preserve the unity of the Spirit in peace.
This layperson had somehow learned to say yes when he meant no, and he offered a condescending and damaging message that drove people–including me–away from one another and that congregation. His comments severed our unity.
As I marched to war, I considered what it meant to be prohibited, in the name of unity, from preaching a message of extravagant welcome.
I also started to feel sad. I learned, again, that Rev. Kay Ray was right when he observed that I was excited about ministry because I hadn’t been doing it.
I thought despairingly: If being the United Church of Christ means that one church can degrade and exclude people like me, my family, and our friends, while another church can boldly fight racism, preserving the grace of unity is surely impossible.
The feeling only worsened when I remembered the times that even our leadership expressed the view that folks like me in the church are a “controversial” issue.
They think it is a sign of faithfulness not to take a position on such a “controversial” issue.
Here is what should be controversial:
Rome’s Supreme Court empowers conservative parents to pull their kids out of public-school lessons that entail “controversial” themes and even to send their “controversial” children to conversion therapy. Yet, it denies caring parents of those same children the power to make their healthcare decisions.
“Controversial” adults in North Carolina now have to hand over their false birth certificates, the ones they received at birth, along with their real ones, whenever they require a passport, other necessary documentation, or for identity verification purposes.
What should be controversial is our historical ignorance.
Did you know that the Greeks thought that males and females were different species? A similar idea, Ibraham Kendi reminds us, enabled some white folks to justify the institution of slavery.
The Romans got rid of the idea of the sexes. Male and females represented points on a sliding scale—the only difference being that some genitals stuck out while others turned inward . . . .
What sticks out asserts reproductive power; what turns inward submits to reproductive power. Rome privileged and empowered what asserted itself on women and on both male and female slaves and other non-citizens.
There is no such thing as “biological truth.” But too many Christians seem to be sticking with Rome. Some of y’all are too Roman for my liking.
My anger was further enflamed when I remembered times that our leadership couldn’t even celebrate the good that the Southern Conference had done, like our fight in 2015, because they couldn’t bring themselves to name it, to mention it explicitly.
Rome’s Court is—once again—looking for an opportunity to make some of us sit at the back of the bus.
And some of our leaders are uncomfortable even discussing their own desires, fearing they may cause controversy.
Family, unity should not come at the expense of diversity in the church.
We should not be cutting off toes to fit into a Roman sandal.
If unity comes at the cost of the dignity of other parts of the body, it’s just not worth it.
In fact, it just not unity.
It’s not a just unity.
It’s hostility.
And it is contrary to God’s will.
Yes, I was feeling some kind of way when I received your letter. Something about it made me drop my weapons and walk away from war.
Honestly, I missed being together with our roses.
As I walked back to our garden, I did feel like a motherless child.
I felt like a kid who had grown up without a good enough mother, tossed to and fro because his caregiver was not reliable—except in their efforts to provoke him to anger.
But something about your letter also made me feel like I no longer had to be an angry soldier out fighting the culture war of rage.
Your letter, your hymn, inspired me to think that speaking of unity—giving the roses the conversation they need to thrive, to really live—is an infinitely more pleasurable use of our time.
Your Psalm reminded me:
It’s good and pleasant when we live together in unity!
Unity feels like precious oil on the head, running down over the collars of robes.
It’s like the smell of morning dew.
It’s like the simple beauty of water droplets gliding across rose petals.
Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024) and Matt Richtel’s How We Grow Up (2025) are stories about adolescence. I will be talking through each book in the next episode of the New Thoughts Podcast, but here are a few, quick thoughts (subject to significant future revision) about adolescence—as it is narrated by Haidt and Richtel.
Haidt and Richtel likely experienced happy childhoods. If they didn’t, they have become the type of adults capable of imagining such a childhood (a huge achievement either way!). Their growing up stories are about evolution, cells, hormones, social media, mental health, adventure, play, and (mostly) second chances (tragically, not everyone survives growing up).
At least two substantive threads link the books together: biological determinism (by which I mean that they seem to think that, if left undisturbed, a genetic process will unfold, a second birth, making us who we are) and social media. They both agree that adolescence is a fraught period of time when our genetic composition unfolds in surprising and obviously highly consequential ways.
Haidt and Ritchel (and the best existing evidence) agree: social media fucks up our unfolding. The solution, Haidt argues, is two-fold: much, much less social media, holding off exposure to it (ideally) until we are 18—or (more realistically) until we are 16—combined with opportunities for risky, less adult rule-based play.
Richtel’s narrative is appealing because he starts out with a philosophical question: What is adolescence? He then introduces us to the history of adolescence (not a thing until the 18th-century) and to the history of adolescent studies, beginning with Stanley Hall (1904).
Tracing the development of adolescent studies from Hall to modern neuroscience, Richtel further introduces what he considers the “outdated” theories of psychoanalysis. He cites Anna Freud’s description of how this momentous time feels to tweens and teens:
I take it that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner . . . to fight his [sic] impulses and to accept them; to ward them off successfully and to be overrun by them; to love his parents and to hate them; to revolt against them and to be dependent on them; to be deeply ashamed to acknowledge his mother before others and, unexpectedly, to desire heart-to-heart talks with her; to thrive on imitation of and identification with others while searching unceasingly for his own identity . . . (How We Grow Up, 39, emphasis added).
Haidt’s narrative is mostly about Gen Z. They are the first to go through puberty with the smartphone and social media apps like Facebook and Instagram.
Haidt focuses on the mental health decline of adolescents caused by social media—especially the devastating impact of Instagram on tween and teen girl mental health (tween and teen boys have not fared better, but for different reasons)—from 2010 onward. His story is historically rich and complicated, starting out in the 1980s with rise of “safetyism” in parenting.
It’s an important development, as the parental imposition of the phantasm of danger on the real world traps kids inside the home, or under the eye, if you will, of their parents. And thereby fucking up their genetic unfolding.
With the advent of the smartphone in 2007, further developed in 2008 to download social media apps, the virtual world breaks into the inner lives of increasingly real world averse kids. In 2009, Facebook and Twitter evolve to include the “like” (FB) and “retweet” (Twitter) buttons, making these apps nearly irresistible to developing young minds.
The real world, however, is also turbulent with change. Physical strength, for example, has become less relevant in the real world. Nowadays, the information complex real world requires skills like emotional regulation, negotiation, and empathy.
Brains kill the villain (Musical trivia! In what musical does a sensitive prince found in a book teach this?). Girls are doing much better in the real world.
Boys find a type of “salvation” in the virtual world of video games and porn. The evidence is clear: more and more boys are failing to castaway (Richtel) or to launch (Haidt) into the world as competent adult males, lovers, and citizens.
One real world way to solve for failure to launch is, according to Haidt’s story, more male mentors for boys. Research suggests that boys need male teachers in their extended family, neighborhoods, and in their schools to help them castaway or to launch, to discover their unique adult male voices.
Normative or traditional psychoanalytic theory supports the idea that “normal” development, leaving home, for boys entails identifying with their fathers. The point is: only a male can save males.
From 2010 on, boys and girls arrive at the same, hellish spot—though by different pathways. The X is revealed in certain empty emergency rooms (an overstatement, of course).
Less risky play (i.e., minimally supervised play in the world with other tweens and teens) means fewer thrilling experiences the brain needs to develop well—and fewer broken bones. Interestingly, Richtel points out that between 900-1500 C.E., broken bones = the experience of growing up—and, until very recently, such injuries were common, especially for boys.
Real world averse, boys are ending up in a place traditionally more populated by girls: the world of internalized discontent (boys have more traditionally acted out). Social media apps are causing skyrocketing rates of sadness, anxiety, and loneliness among both tween and teen boys and girls. Emergency rooms are filling up as a consequence of internalized or mental health wounds.
All that makes sense to me—and while the situation is bleak, especially for cis straight white boys from lower-income households (a social fact backed by a bunch of data)—it is well within the reach of our collective power to co-create a world in which all our kids can thrive.
One way to redeem the hellscape of contemporary tween and teen mental health is not mentioned (but there is still hope, as I have not yet finished Richtel’s book): non-exclusionary feminism for tweens and teens.
While Richtel cites Anna Freud’s description of how adolescence feels—he makes nothing , so far, of what Freud identifies as the longing of (male?) tweens and teens to have “heart-to-heart talks” with the maternal figure(s) in their lives. Freud’s idea does not seem “outdated” to me.
In fact, given that women are finding success in a rapidly changing real world—a world that is often actually harmful to them—does it not make sense to create social pathways by which both girls and boys can learn from inclusionary feminists—and perhaps even learn to identify with various maternal figures with whom they can fashion “heart-to-heart talks”?
God is thought. What constitutes thought is the interpretation of (authoritative) text (e.g., the Bible). AI (e.g., ChatGPT) is transitioning us into a “post-literate” (and so “post-legal”) society. Thus, AI will kill the God of monotheisms: the God of letters, of text and law. The moral of the story is that only a proper hermeneutics can save God from the murderous rage of AI.
What authoritative text and what proper method of textual interpretation will compete with AI and heroically save God from it? The Bible is one obvious answer, but we are told that the Bible contains content even worse than what AI produces. And the proper method is? Unquestionably, it is what the cleric claims it to be.
Long before AI (or Trump) threatened God, the cleric killed the Truth of God by successfully reducing theology to hermeneutics.
Briefly: The most revolutionary characteristic of the Reformation was an insistence on translating the Bible (and liturgy) into the vernacular of the people. Reformation = the democratization of authoritative text, an event made possible by the invention of a radically new technology, the printing press.
The underlying value of the drive to translate was that the Truth of God belongs to everyone. Hence, the importance of learning to read. The literate person could know God apart from authority or the authorities, namely, the literate cleric.
Yet, the vast majority of Christians became (and remain) entirely dependent on translations of the Bible. They are mesmerized by what the learned cleric projects on the page for them to read and buy into or believe.
Consider the witness of Fastrada from the musical Pippin:
I know the parables told in the holy book I keep close [or closed?] on my shelf God’s wisdom teaches me when I help others, I’m Really helping myself And if we all could spread a little sunshine All could lend a helping hand We all would be a little closer To the promised land. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo (emphasis added).
Nearly all of the history of Christianity can be summed up as a battle for control over the interpretation of letters. It is only through a proper hermeneutics/methodology that we can know God and thus be saved by God. An obsession with method/hermeneutics long ago killed the Truth of God.
In my view, the quasi-theological critiques of AI are nothing more than outbursts of jealous rage. The learned human cleric does not want to give up their prestige to a rival, digital cleric, namely, AI. Is there nothing new under the sun?
What makes any cleric attractive is our drive for satisfaction, meaning, coherence, and a sense of authority. It is the cleric who attempts to tempt us to look away from the Truth of God and find salvation in method itself.
The cleric desires to be our ágalma.
“In Greek,” Lacan scholar Bruce Fink reminds us, “[ágalma means] shine and brilliancy: ágalma is something admirable or charming . . . it is a trap for gods – it draws their eyes . . . it is an uncanny object or charm – the Trojan horse, for example, is referred to as ágalma” (191).
The cleric’s charm is literally all too alluring. I take that to be the point of David Hammons’s Old Testament. Open it up, and you find The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, by Arturo Schwartz. The question is: What appears when we look beyond the wisdom of the cleric?
The lure of the cleric remains all too alluring because theology has lost its way. Theology has become the shitty version of any number of other disciplines, especially hermeneutics.
Theology has forgotten itself. It has lost sight of its singular task: to seize the Truth of God, the Truth that is truths—and so cannot be method: permanently located, situated, placed. God is Truth that is always revealed in truths, in the act of Truth’s dis-appearance from reality or what is entirely realizable in this world, here and now.
Following Badiou, whose thinking, especially in Conditions, makes this writing possible, I define Truth as the void or the hole in (common) sense. Theology, as the discipline of seizing of the Truth of God, makes holes in the sense of God.
The radical claim of what goes by the name of Christian theology is that the Truth of God became flesh in Jesus the Messiah, not in the cleric. The theologian’s task is “to draw from this observation the most joyous consequences” (Badiou, 48; Badiou is thinking about poetry). Theology does not interpret or circumscribe the Truth of God. That is the cleric’s task.
In its loyalty to the Truth that is not One or Whole, theology makes it possible for us to recognize the impossible, surprise, or the miracle in this world. The Truth of God as the truths of Jesus the Messiah does not require interpretation but rather conceptualization. Or, as Paul of Tarsus would affirm, it does not require any clerical authority.
Christian theology conspires with the Truth of God as the truths of Jesus Messiah, trapping our attention and thereby disrupting the reproduction of meaning, of (common) sense, and to the end of seeing what is new in the world. Thus, theology can only oppose the normal and established norms. Theology is necessarily the critique of religion (i.e., norms) and so of politics (i.e., the incarnation of norms).
Nonetheless, there is no theology without the cleric. If the cleric is the enemy of theology, theology must love them with all its heart, mind, and soul. Otherwise, the Truth of God will literally die.
And that’s why I’m just not too literal. I just can’t be too literal.
Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett of Pod Save America recently interviewed the inimitable Representative Sarah McBride (D-Delaware). Among McBride’s interesting insights and arguments is the idea that the two major U.S. political parties are gendered. Republicans are gendered masculine (or identified in terms of fatherhood). Democrats are gendered feminine (or identified in terms of motherhood).
Here’s their conversation (if you prefer to watch, jump in at 12:44):
Rep. McBride: I’ve been thinking about how do you fight back against Trump in a smart way . . . because we are so susceptible to sort of this Trump derangement syndrome dynamic. We’ve been screaming about democracy. . . rights and the rule of law for so long—and clearly, this country voted for someone who incited an insurrection. . . .
The Democratic party is the woman of politics and the Republican party is the man of politics. It’s why Donald Trump can scream and yell and people see him as strong—and why when [Democrats] scream and yell we’re seen as hysterical and shrill. It’s why Donald Trump can hate and insult more than half of this country—because we tolerate deadbeat dads, but Democrats can’t say anything about any voters that [impugn] their motives and their good faith—because a mom has to love every single one of her children. So, I’ve been thinking about how do you grapple with that reality that is a real double standard. . . .
Lovett: Let’s test this new way of talking . . . . You’re trying to make people understand how dangerous it is that Donald Trump is coming after basic academic freedom, but you’re worried it’s not going to resonate with people. How do you talk about it?
Rep. McBride: With all of these actions that we’re seeing against immigrants, against institutions, [the Trump Administration is] picking on the most unpopular, the most vulnerable. They’re picking on people who are easy targets. I do think . . . you have to go back to what we were talking about before, which is that if they can do it [to them], they can do it to you . . . . They can do it to my constituents . . . . I think we can do a better job by making the main character [of our story] our constituents.
Changing our political situation requires, McBride claims, recognizing how political party affiliation is gendered. For example, Republicans can get away with being angry, but Democrats must always be empathetic. “[A] mom,” McBride says, “has to love every single one of her children.”
Motherhood is often the object of politics because the public sphere, the sphere of politics, is gendered masculine. The traditional story is that politics is for men; the management of the home is for women. For McBride, motherhood is the subject of political action.
But what is maternal politics, exactly? In her response to Lovett’s question about how to discuss maternal politics in the context of education, McBride attempts to clarify the character of partisan gendered politics. Her answer, namely that the mother protects “easy targets” of public abuse, isn’t specific enough–so it can’t inspire serious Democratic political action.
In what follows, I ask a revised version of Lovett’s question to McBride: How do you talk about maternal politics in the context of early childhood public education? To answer the question well, we need a definition of maternal politics that is specific enough to avoid confusion (e.g., terrorist organizations like Moms for Liberty claim to love all children) and to provoke serious liberal and/or progressive public action. I propose the following definition:
Maternal politics = public action(s) to secure and defend a boy’s rightto become a man who desires like a woman/mother.
Why a boy’s right to desire like a woman/mother? Consider recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States regarding an opt-out option for religious conservatives who do not want their children exposed to readings that mention/feature same-sex desire in the public school classroom. It was a book about male same-sex marriage that caught the attention of conservative Associate Justice Samuel Alito.
Conservatives are manifestly not as passionate or concerned about a girl’s public education. What they care about is the reproduction of traditional or normative masculinity. Hence their focus on male same-sex desire. Conservatives think that male homosexuality is especially threatening to the future of straight maleness.
I think my definition of maternal politics helps explain the recurring outbursts of straight anxiety about male homosexuality and the “indoctrination” of boys in our public elementary school. Furthermore, the specificity of my definition of maternal politics (one of many possible proposals) allows us to form a more direct and beneficially partisan answer to (the revised version of) Lovett’s question about gender politics and academic freedom in Trump’s U.S.
Here is the take I will explain and defend below: Conservatives have used the public school system to indoctrinate boys, and we have generally failed to resist it because we (unconsciously) agree with the “obvious” meaning of the conservative premise: boys should be boys. Instead, we should reform early childhood public education by securing and defending a boy’s right to desire like a woman/mother.
A traditional public school education entails learning skills, especially (though it is never explicitly acknowledged) the skill (and appreciation) of straight maleness (i.e., normative masculinity). Between the ages of 5 and 6, boys are forced by law to leave the sphere of maternal power (i.e., the home/family) and enter the public school system. It is in the public school classroom that they begin to learn, formally (i.e., curriculum) and informally (i.e., socially), to desire “proper” manhood or straight maleness.
The irony is that the reproduction of “proper” manhood necessarily requires/inspires homoerotic desire. Boys must be motivated to undertake an education in normative masculinity. Thus, they are taught to want men/manhood.
You may argue that what boys are taught is the protocols of normative masculinity rather than to desire adult males–but the foundation of straight logic is that sex, gender, and sexuality are inextricably linked. Male/penis > masculine > heterosexual. In other words, a boy can’t want masculinity without also wanting men.
A second irony: the propagation of masculinity requires a boy to desire like a woman/mother. The transmission of normative masculinity from one generation to the next requires, at least initially, the misalignment of sex, gender, and desire (i.e., male/penis desiring man/masculine). It is at this early stage that normative masculinist logic shows its ass (= its vulnerability).
The vulnerability of normative masculinity is its unnaturalness. In other words, “proper” maleness does not inevitably proceed from being born with a penis. “Proper” maleness must be taught.
The fact that straight maleness is taught is not exactly the problem. The way normative masculinity is taught is the source of its tyranny.“Normal” masculinity is presented uncritically, and it requires uncritical acceptance to be mistaken for normal (i.e., natural) or, as the Trump Administration prefers, for “biological truth.”
Traditionally, this is why the acknowledgment of (male) homosexuality in public schools has been a source of straight panic. It exposes the hole of straight maleness: straight masculinity is not natural. It is optional.
Nowadays, homosexuality is not as often considered inherently opposed to straight masculinity. It’s an interesting development. Today, dudes sucking dick (homie head, brojob, etc.) is just another way for boys to be boys.
Straight ideology is flexible, and gay identity politics is clever. It’s a win-win situation: straight masculinity remains (if not natural) inherently desirable, and male homosexuals are welcome to enjoy its privileges–well, at least if they are good students, willing to learn/embody the protocols of “proper” masculinity.
So, recent arguments before the Supreme Court about readings in public schools that mention same-sex desire may be read as a form of social progress. Before books that acknowledge the reality of happy adult male homosexual relationships (happiness being what I think Justice Alito means by the “subtle” moral message of the book that offends religious conservatives) defiled God’s male children, the biggest threat to the “proper” education of our male children was the gay male English teacher. And before the English teacher became sus, the “gay” male philosopher was considered the corrupter of male youth.
“In a famous passage in The Divine Comedy,” writes David M. Halperin in “Deviant Teaching” (2007, 146-167), Dante represents himself as encountering, in the course of his journey through Hell, the soul of [philosopher] Brunetto Latini . . .” (146). Why did Dante put poor Brunetto in Hell? “His sin is tellingly not named in Canto 15, but other passages in Inferno remove any doubts about its identity. Brunetto is damned for sodomy” (146).
When Dante asks him about his companions in Hell, Brunetto answers that “all were clerks and great men of letters, in the world defined by one [and the] same sin” (148). “Sodomy,” Halperin declares, “is evidently a sin to which literary scholars, critics, and writers (such as Dante himself) are particularly prone” (148).
Halperin, a public university English professor trained as a classicist–and no stranger to controversy–reminds us of “how ancient is the association between teaching and sodomy, between paedagogy and paederasty” (149). “[T]he abolition of any clear or firm distinction between the relation of teacher and student and the relation of lover and beloved is,” Halperin writes, “one of the most notorious consequences of Plato’s metaphysical theory of erotic desire” (149). Teaching “has an extended history of association with deviance and has long figured as a deviant practice” (151).
If gender were a “biological truth,” as the Trump Administration claims it is, then straight anxiety inspired by the fantasy of homosexual indoctrination in public schools would be a genuine absurdity. The reality of old school straight anxiety exposes a glitch in the code of masculinist transmission: gender is a social–not a biological–reality. It must be taught and learned.
For a boy to become a man, he must leave the maternal sphere, the home. He must also leave his father’s side. A boy’s father “is too closely tied to the boy by blood and domesticity . . . so they cannot fully . . . incarnate the cultural ideal of male identity . . . ” (151).
“Every proper boy,” Halperin writes, “has to have at least two daddies” (151, emphasis original). Boys learn to become traditional or “proper” men in the public sphere (e.g., schools, sports teams, etc.).
The glitch in the heteronormative educational regime is further exposed by how it represents the social transmission of masculinity (154-155). Consider how the Sambia of Papua New Guinea ritualize the reproduction of strong warrior men.
Elder males take boys ages 8-9 off into the forest where they are forced to perform oral sex on adolescent males. Halperin observes that the young boys are taught to think of “cock-sucking as a kind of breast-feeding” (155).
Ingesting semen, the boys receive the nourishment they require to grow “into real men who will be strong warriors” (155). They continue to ingest semen until they turn 15, at which point they become “the breast” for younger boys.
Listening to social and religious conservatives today, one would never know that third and fourth grade boys in the U.S. are not being taught to suck cock in public schools. What they are being taught, and in ways not entirely different from how the Sambia “represent to themselves symbolically the means by which they reproduce themselves socially,” is how to become proper Western men (156, emphasis original).
Halperin considers the 1953 Western movie Shane an example of a Western form of masculine transmission. The movie’s focus on the mechanics of masculine reproduction makes it a standout Western (157).
Shane is about how a 9-year-old boy, Joey, is made into a man (i.e., taught how to shoot a gun and fight) by a mysterious stranger, “a gunfighter and a killer” (i.e., a social deviant), a cowboy named Shane (158). Joey’s father cannot teach Joey how to become a man because he is too busy managing and defending the family farm. For obvious reasons, Joey’s mother can’t possibly teach him how to become a man.
Halperin compares Shane to the Holy Ghost. “It is only when Shane’s potent shadow falls across the holy American family that the family succeeds in . . . reproducing masculinity . . . and ensuring its own futurity” (159–for my reading of the Holy Ghost, go here). And “[g]unfighting in Shane is,” Halperin observes, “like cock-sucking among the Sambia: both are cultural practices connected with initiation into the symbolic order of masculinity and heavily laden with phallic meaning” (160).
The relationship between Shane and Joey mirrors the relationship between Shane and Joey’s mother, Marian. It is not sexual, but it is erotic. Marian wants to play with Shane’s pistol, too.
Like his mother, Joey feels some kind of way about Shane. In desiring him, Joey gives Shane the “charismatic power necessary to enable those enamored of him (Joey and male viewers) to accede to manhood by means of identification, emulation, and endless, unfulfilled desire for him” (160).
Moreover, Joey’s desire for Shane is no accident. Like Socrates, Shane has a way with his young male students (160-161). Shane makes his manhood hot to both Marian and Joey (= it’s object a). He inspires Joey (and male viewers) to observe his gunobsessively. Masculinity is transmitted “ocularly” in Shane (162).
In seeing/receiving Shane’s manhood, the male viewers “make the supposedly identity-affirming, gender-consolidating experience of masculine identification coincide, as if nothing could be more normal, with the urgent and inescapable solicitation of homoerotic desire” (162).
Question: Did Shane indoctrinate Joey? Did Shane require Joey to accept his warrior manhood uncritically to begin becoming a “real” man? No. Joey wanted the manhood Shane offered him.
Masculine indoctrination requires boys to accept Shane’s manhood as “biological truth.” In that way, Shane becomes the “proper” man, the kind of man boys must become to be considered real men, the type of man women must desire and whose prerogatives they must support to be identified as pious/conservative/real women.
Shane’s “Republican manhood,” if you will, undoubtedly continues to appeal to women/mothers and their boys. I accept that, and I am prepared to secure and defend a boy’s right to want Shane and to become a man who either desires women/mothers or other men who desire men like Shane.
There is nothing inherently wrong with conservative masculinity. That is, I think, a liberal (if not progressive) position to hold–and it is consistent with McBride’s–and my own–definition of maternal politics. “[A] mom has love every single one of her children.”
Apparently, dads have a choice in the matter.
What I reject is the fascist spirit that often animates a traditional education in straight maleness. Republican manhood is manifestly not appealing to every boy. It is not even appealing to every boy’s parents, and there is no reason to believe it will appeal to all who will enter a boy’s life as an adult male.
Moreover, it is an offense to common sense and reason (and I, as a biblical Christian theologian, think it is an offense to the gospel of Jesus Christ) to enforce, as a matter of (unacknowledged) policy or law, Republican manhood. If “biological truth” requires the enforcement of norms and/or the sword of law, just how biological–or true–is it?
The assertion of the biological truth of gender reveals that social and religious conservatives have, like a God, forgotten themselves:
For with the old Gods things came to an end long ago–and verily they had a good and joyful Gods’ end! Theirs was no mere “twilight” death–that is a lie!
Rather: one day they–laughed themselves to death!
This happened when the most godless words issued from a God himself–the words: “There is one God! Thou shalt have no other God before me!” . . . a God, most jealous, forgot himself thus:
And thereupon all the Gods laughed and rocked their chairs and shouted: “Is just this not Godliness, that there are Gods but no God?”
In a gloss on this passage, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes, “God, in Nietzsche’s fabulation, forgot Himself, and even His own name; He thought he was God, THE God, when He was simply one among many others (inner superiority means we are on the wrong track, it means we are too intimidated) (Unforbidden Pleasures [2015], 42).
In another text–but in a similar context–Halperin describes how the “inner superiority” of straight maleness may work out in the context of sexuality and gender, nowadays:
If homophobia sometimes functions less to oppress homosexuals than to police the behavior of heterosexuals and to strong-arm them into keeping one another strictly in line with the requirements of proper sex and gender norms, for fear of appearing queer [remember: declaring “no homo” after receiving, e.g., homie head will protect you from appearing (too) queer] it may be that one of the functions of transphobia is to police the behavior of lesbians and gay men and to terrorize them into conforming to the gender style deemed appropriate to their respective sexes (How To Be Gay [2012], 307, italics mine).
As we discovered earlier, the propagation of straight maleness can accommodate a disconnect between sex and sexuality. Nowadays, being a homosexual doesn’t necessarily make you a sus male (i.e., gaaaaaay).
The chronic misalignment of sex/penis (male) and normative gender style (straight maleness) does, however, remain socially problematic. At some point, one must put childish ways behind them.
At this point, straightness has shown a lot of ass. It concedes that heterosexuality is not natural. No one (bi, lesbian, gay, straight, none) knows what determines one’s sexuality (or lack thereof). It also concedes that straight maleness (i.e., normative masculinity) is not natural: it does not proceed naturally from having a penis. It must be taught (and even enforced).
And given that gender does not proceed naturally from sex or depend on one’s sexuality, it follows that anyone, of whatever sex or sexuality, can, if they so desire, learn a specific gender style. Women can, at least in principle, learn to embody normative masculinity.
What all this means is that the claim of straightness to have no other Gods before it is laughable. But the Gods before it need not laugh themselves to death! Instead, they can get on with baptizing newly persuaded converts.
The epigraph of How To Be Gay, a description of gay male masculinity, or masculinity that is gendered feminine because it is resistant to straight maleness, reads: “Let the pagans beget and the Christians baptize” (see also How To Be Gay, 532-533).
The epigraph of How To Be Gay echoes the central argument of Halperin’s essay, “Deviant Teaching”: The “introduction . . . to [non-sexual methods of instruction in maleness,] to non-standard ways of seeing, to distinctive ethical and aesthetic modes of relating to the surrounding culture, to a unique set of sensibilities, and to dissident ways of reading cultural objects (movies, opera, Broadway musicals, emblems of fashion and styles, embodiments of masculinity) [is] what I have been calling deviant teaching,” and what, in How To be Gay, is called gay male subculture (“Deviant Teaching,” 165).
Gay male subculture, as a deviant form of masculine propagation (i.e., it resists the allure of straight maleness), is similar to straight maleness in that it does not depend on either one’s sex or sexuality. It is a style that anyone who finds persuasive may learn to embody.
Gay maleness is among the gods a boy may reasonably desire. Accordingly, maternal politics entails defending and securing a boy’s right to become a man who desires women/mothers or other men who desire gayness.
As a non-normative gender style, a lifestyle misaligned with one’s sex, gayness is a form of Trans*ness (I use the * to indicate gender nonconformity in addition to sex nonconformity). However, Trans*ness moves us well beyond gender misalignment to sexual misalignment.
In her interview on Pod Save America, McBride addresses one of the challenges of Trans* politics (42 minutes in):
I think one of the challenges that we have in conversations around Trans identities that’s different than conversations around gay rights is that most people who are straight can understand what it feels like to love and to lust –and so they’re able to enter into conversations around sexual orientation with an analogous experience. People who aren’t Trans don’t know what it feels like to be Trans–and for me the closest thing that I can compare it to is a constant feeling of homesickness, just this unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that would only go away when I could be seen and affirmed and live as myself . . . .
I imagine one reality that Rep. McBride is expressing here is that her body initially provoked a conversation: Is this you? She answered either “No” or “Not exactly.” I am guessing (because I am unfamiliar with the details of her experience) that McBride desired a new alignment of sex and gender–and one made possible by a radically new understanding of sex: sex, like gender, is not a natural fact. Sex is an opportunity for conversation rather than indoctrination.
Although Evangelical men really want women to have penises, male to female Trans* experience constitutes an upheaval of normative thought. It inspires intense—and, unfortunately, intensely irrational—emotions.
The animus directed toward Trans* women is a fruit of the fascist spirit that often underlies the commitment to the reproduction of Republican manhood–and one that more than a few fruits enjoy. We have only to think of Andrew Sullivan.
Sullivan is usually an interesting and nuanced public intellectual, but his screeds against “big trans” are becoming increasingly overdetermined (i.e., inspired by irrational forces). On a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Sullivan comments:
I love the idea that Democrats should get back into building things, into making things happen, into deregulating, into supercharging the economy. I just think that until the Democrats address some of the core issues, they seem not to want to control immigration. They have extremist views about race. They think that boys should compete with girls in sports, and that children should be… have their sex reassigned. Until they grapple with that. . . .
We have not taught civics in this country. They’re too busy learning that America is white supremacist without learning that there are three branches of government. They’re all separate. They’re kept apart so that we can be freer than other countries. Why are we teaching that? We should be teaching that (italics mine).
The claim that Democrats “think . . . that children should be . . . have their sex reassigned” is blatantly false. I am curious, though, about the Levitical themes of Sullivan’s commentary: separation and purity.
Sullivan seems to think biological males should not be separated from their penises–even when they desire to be so separated. In his view, effeminate gay boys are being misled by “big trans” into thinking they are Trans* women rather than gay males. “Big trans,” again in Sullivan’s view, is “transing away the gay.”
The second of Sullivan’s falsehoods, related, I think, to the first, is: “We have not taught civics in this country.” Sullivan seems to believe that “we” have not learned anything about the separation of powers–and too much about the separation of racial groups enforced by those same powers for several centuries.
Is his argument that “we” would become less preoccupied with white supremacy if “we” were taught the philosophy of “separate but equal”? If I am not mistaken, “we” were taught in school that Sullivan’s approach is not unique in history. Hence the focus on white supremacy.
I don’t think it’s uncharitable to read the argument of the unruly forces underlying Sullivan’s Leviticus-like political theology this way: In a good society, penises should remain attached to their original bodies; races, like the branches of the U.S. government (like the sexes?), should be separate but equal.
Maternal politics, at least as I understand it, entirely rejects Sullivan’s (unconscious) definition of a “good” society. Instead, it defends and secures a biological male’s right to discern who they are, really–including a woman/mother who desires women and/or men who desire a new alignment of sex and gender.
Maternal politics, as I understand it, is a form of deviant politics. Securing and defending the right of boys to become (wo)men who desire like women/mothers takes us into scandalous and fraught territory.
How do we talk about maternal politics across a range of issues that are important to our fellow citizens? In other words, how do we make it an electorally desirable politics? If we allow ourselves to have a real conversation about the political body, what is our answer to the question, Is this us?
If maternal politics appeals to us, it could be defined more broadly as taking public action(s) to secure and defend everyone’s right to have complicated conversations about the political body, especially now. Among the lessons Trump has (unknowingly) taught us is that we require a genuine upheaval of political thought.
