22AR27-12

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AR 27:12 - Identity politics' “nation with the soul of a witch trial”

In this issue:

FEMINISM - an argument with 'flaws as systemic as the misogyny decried'

HINDUISM - Jesus, "an indisputably Indian religious figure"

POLITICS - "a virtuoso exercise in diagnostics"

Apologia Report 27:12 (1,565)
March 31, 2022

FEMINISM

"Toxic Femininity: The evils of male entitlement" is the title given to Spencer Case's review of Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, by Kate Manne <www.bit.ly/36mpLq9> - which is "Manne's follow-up to Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, <www.bit.ly/37FpH5A> which won the American Philosophical Association Book Prize in 2019." (Case <www.bit.ly/36KHEPR> is an international research fellow at the Wuhan University school of philosophy.)

"Down Girl held that misogyny is a systemic issue, not just a vice some people have. It also coined the term and asserted the harmfulness of 'himpathy,' a dubious kind of sympathy that people often have toward male perpetrators.

"These ideas are central to Entitled's thesis that 'an illegitimate sense of male entitlement gives rise to a wide range of misogynistic behavior.' ...

"Manne would have us believe that this fringe internet subculture is an especially toxic manifestation of the pervasive misogyny that explains many other evils.

"The best that can be said for Entitled is that Manne, a Cornell University philosophy professor, occasionally draws attention to important issues. For instance, she discusses a study showing that American police departments dispose of a large proportion of prosecutable rape cases through a procedure known as 'exceptional clearance,' which is rarely applied to murder cases. ...

"More often, though, Manne makes the facts fit her narrative instead of the other way around. Misogyny, she contends, explains why physicians give painkillers to women more sparely. ...

"Manne struggles to demonstrate the importance of 'himpathy,' defined as 'the disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy extended to a male perpetrator over his similarly or less privileged female targets or victims, in cases of sexual assault, harassment, and other misogynistic behavior.' Manne's exhibit A is the controversy that preceded Brett Kavanaugh's appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018. ...

"The way that Manne defines 'himpathy' makes the sex of the putative victim important. ...

"Entitled's discussion of the Kavanaugh controversy signals that Manne is writing for, and only for, readers who already agree with her. Her analysis of the pro-life movement makes it especially clear that she has no interest in even pretending to present opinions that she does not share in a way that people who hold those opinions would accept. ...

"Although Entitled occasionally points to issues worthy of further investigation, its flaws are as systemic as the misogyny it decries. The book is confirmation-bias candy for those who share Manne's dogmatic feminism, but will be unpersuasive, and maybe even risible, for all other readers." Claremont Review of Books, Spr '21, <www.bit.ly/36rleD0>

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HINDUISM

"Christ as Yogi: The Jesus of Vivekananda and Modern Hinduism" by David J. Neumann <www.bit.ly/3IQ1EOh> (Department of Education, California State Polytechnic University) -- the abstract reads: "Swami Vivekananda was the most influential pioneer of a Yogi Christ, illustrating well over a century ago how the life and teachings of Jesus might be incorporated within a larger Hindu worldview - and then presented back to Western audiences. Appropriation of Jesus, one of the central symbols of the West, might be viewed as the ultimate act of counter-Orientalism. This article begins by providing a brief biography of Vivekananda and the modern Hinduism that nurtured him and that he propagated. He articulated an inclusivist vision of Advaita Vedanta as the most compelling vision of universal religion. Next, the article turns to Vivekananda's views of Christianity, for which he had little affection, and the Bible, which he knew extraordinarily well. The article then systematically explores Vivekananda's engagement with the New Testament, revealing a clear hermeneutical preference for the Gospels, particularly John. Following the lead of biblical scholars, Vivekananda made a distinction between the Christ of the Gospels and the Jesus of history, offering sometimes contradictory conclusions about the historicity of elements associated with Jesus's life. Finally, the article provides a detailed articulation of Vivekananda's Jesus - a figure at once familiar to Christians but, in significant ways, uniquely accommodated to Hindu metaphysics. Vivekananda demonstrated a robust understanding and discriminating use of the Christian Bible that has not been properly recognized. He deployed this knowledge to launch an important and long-lived pattern: an attractive, fleshed out depiction of Jesus of Nazareth, transformed from the Christian savior into a Yogi model of self-realization. Through his efforts, Jesus became an indisputably Indian religious figure, no longer just a Christian one." Church History, 90:1 '21, (behind schedule), <www.bit.ly/3qeoBUE>

Neumann is also the author of "A Definitive but Unsatisfying Answer: The Evangelical Response to Gay Christians" (Religion and American Culture, 2022) <www.bit.ly/3MYq7nM>

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POLITICS

American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, by Joshua Mitchell <www.bit.ly/36vyQNz> -- reviewer Peter C. Myers <www.bit.ly/3uNq6uJ> (political science, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire; visiting graduate faculty member, Ashland University's Ashbrook Center) describes the subtitle’s afflictions as "strange gods," in this "virtuoso exercise in diagnostics." Myers begins by saying that a nation with "the soul of a church" (as America was described by G.K. Chesterton), once it "grows corrupt, its spiritual hunger does not vanish but instead seeks satisfaction in the service of other, likely angrier gods. In our latest great awakening, argues Georgetown professor of political theory Joshua Mitchell, we are becoming a nation with the soul of a witch trial."

Myers summarizes the book as "an elaborate and penetrating diagnosis of the present condition of the American soul. As Mitchell sees it, the country is beset by several interrelated afflictions: identity politics, bipolarity, and addiction [in which] identity politics is the most acute and virulent of the three.

"Mitchell, like many others, sees identitarian zeal as a new form of religious faith. ... Identity politics is best understood, Mitchell contends, as a heretical residue of a decayed Christianity - not as authentic Christianity's terminal phase. ... Identity politics is destructive of liberal republican government in both theory and practice.

"Identitarians politicize biblical categories by sorting people into two primary classes: transgressors and innocents. Transgressors - in their purest incarnation, white heterosexual males - are by intention or effect perpetrators of injustice....

"Identity politics is likewise hostile to natural liberty.... As his analysis reveals, identity politics fundamentally denies not only our possession of equal rights, but our basic competence to exercise those rights. In the Manichean world of identity politics, Mitchell remarks, 'oppressive social forces loom large and human freedom looms small.' ...

"Among the many Americans thus consigned to impotence, none are more scandalously betrayed than black citizens, whom identity politics 'needs to render ... as perennially innocent victims.' Yet blacks are not the only class reduced to victimhood by the emerging order. Nor is identity politics the exclusive cause of their and others' degradation. At first glance, more chronic afflictions, which Mitchell conceptualizes as 'bipolarity' and 'addiction,' may seem unrelated to identity politics. But he shows all three to be rooted in the same psychological malady.

"What Mitchell calls 'bipolarity' denominates a range of symptoms indicative of our republic's devolution into an oligarchy.... The bipolarity operates also within selfie man, who takes solace in the godlike technological powers at his fingertips....

"As Mitchell conceives of it, our swelling addiction problem consists in a habit of transforming 'supplements' into 'substitutes.' ... The diversions and palliations of selfie man ['a disdained, futureless, and inexorably demoralized class of commoners'], taken as substitutes for a well-lived life, are deadly to both spirit and body. ...

"Mitchell's analysis thus shows identitarians to be noisier and more aggressive counterparts of selfie man. ...

"One hallmark of bipolarity, addiction, and identity politics alike is 'personal fragility' - a psychic weakness....

"Why is this happening to us?" Myers points to "Alexis de Tocqueville's prophetic warning that democratic conditions tend to dissolve ties of community.... Another dimension is theological. Mitchell calls identity politics 'the latest outworking of Protestant Christianity,' and he singles out America as 'the land of the Puritan fixation on stain.' As the sea of faith recedes, that fixation remains and becomes a mania. A still further dimension is ideological, rooted in atheist variants of the Enlightenment that renounced Christianity's God while attempting to retain Christianity's egalitarian spirit. Identity politics, Mitchell remarks, is the 'predictable consequence of a civilization that has neither the courage nor the honesty to fully renounce its foundation and start over - or to fully return to that foundation for sustenance.'

"In Mitchell's Biblical anthropology, however, the deepest source of our afflictions lies further down. ... Deep down, it is a human evil. ... Here is the fundamental human choice: we can either accept the governance of God or rebel against it. ...

"Mitchell criticizes the Republican Party, 'transfixed ... on the twin threats of progressivism and Marxism,' for missing the emerging danger of identity politics. Fair enough, but he seems to share the reluctance of many Republicans to consider closely how the civil rights movement contributed to the advent of the identitarian regime ... personified by the martyred Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. ... like many on the Right, Mitchell is silent about the 'radical King,' as activist professor Cornel West admiringly describes him, the King who supplied fuel for identity politics by attacking Western civilization as morally bankrupt, calling for a 'radical revolution of values' in America, and comparing conservative Republicans to Nazis."

Meyers identifies a "question ... a disjunction between a healthy, first-phase civil rights movement that aimed at public color-blindness, and an unhealthy later phase that intensified and perpetuated race consciousness. ... 'Man,' remarks Mitchell, 'is a creature who always looks for shortcuts to [the] distant someday' of justice and peace ... illicit shortcuts to the desired outcomes, substitutes for the hard work of finding fruitful and judicious ways to exercise newly-won rights."

Nevertheless, Mitchell's "proposed remedies amount to an instructive blueprint for a renovated political order. The foundation for them all is an appealingly recharacterized liberalism, a mixture of agency and humility that Mitchell calls 'the politics of liberal competence.'

"Tacitly correcting generations of anti-liberal critics, Mitchell views true liberalism [as] a doctrine for builders in a broad and deep sense of the word - builders.... Mitchell's syncretic reading incorporates the wisdom not only of John Locke and Tocqueville but also of Athens and Jerusalem. He argues that unless we see ourselves as fundamentally equal in our humanity before a God who surpasses us all, we will continue to regard ourselves as more than kings or less than men - as gods or beasts.

"What we need most of all, therefore, is a profound moral and spiritual reorientation. ... Near his conclusion, Mitchell [adds that] he can only 'dimly imagine' an America thus reoriented. ...

"And yet in the book's Preface, Mitchell also declares himself 'hopeful - indeed expectant' that we are on the verge of recovery. ... Identity politics is an ideology of negation and destruction, not of governance. Evidence of its disastrous failure is even now accumulating in Blue states and cities. ... Those failings, rendered intelligible by works like American Awakening, may yet reopen American minds to the grand effort in civic education on which the fate of the republic depends." Claremont Review of Books, Sum '21, <www.bit.ly/3wiJYIw>

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