Beach Body Feh

This is the fourth year in a row that something has happened to me to prevent me from working out in the early summertime. I have no idea what the universe is trying to tell me, but last year and three years ago I wrecked an ankle (different ankles), two years ago I got sick, and this year I'm fighting fucking pneumonia. Five years ago I was homebound caring for Omaha.

What the hell? It's like May hits, and suddenly I'm confined to bed and/or relative immobility. This is the fifth week in a row I've been sick in some way. It started as a headcold the second week of May, moved down into my lungs, and now is accompanied by all the grossness that comes with pneumonia.

I'm just so tired of paying for a gym membership, only to not be able to use it.

The Philosopher of Toxic Masculinity

I'm disappointed that Peter Lawler has passed away, because his last essay is a terrible mess of confused impulses that doesn't really touch on the issues he's trying to address. He starts out with a flurry of insults about young people— that they're atomized, separated from one another, incapable of deep emotional feeling or the fully human impulses of eros and thanos that philosophers love to discuss.

He's not wrong when he talks about how corporate advertising has tried to turn us against each other in a constant competition to be "better" than the other, to play us against each other in a constant war of all against all to be the best, the better to convince us of our unworthiness to compel us to buy more stuff as compensation. That part's not at all controversial.

Where it really flails though is toward the end, and the "revolt" against our technological ages; he heaps praise on the "populist movement" and the "anti-political correctness movement," calling it a "revolt against the weaponized niceness of the elite." He backhands safer sex as "detached from the bare act's natural function for an animal born to die."

Because treating people with respect, you see, leads to the dissolution. There must be war. The must be some group to look down on, to hate, to loathe.

Lawler ends with a wonderful paragraph:

Now’s the time to praise manliness, but only in the context of showing the road from anger, meaninglessness, and despair to a world once again full of ladies and gentlemen—people who know who they are and what they’re supposed to do as beings born to know, love, and die, and designed for more than merely biological existence.

I have a lot of sympathy for this quote, but when I look at the people he's praising, I just want to be ill.

Michael Sweeny's twitter rant about how progressive must understand and embraces masculinity showcases the kind of people Lawler is siding with. Men who are barely more than beasts; men who run people off the road to feel strong; men who would rather poison the air than risk being perceived as weak. Note that Sweeny identifies creativity as weak, compassion as weak, care as weak.

Lawler wanted to end "toxic masculinity." Well, so do progressives. You know who loves toxic masculinity? The sort of people who romanticize the "bare act" of sex, an act even Fox-fucking-news knows is rape. The sort of men who identify their truck with their cock. The sort of men who will die of stubborness, and they'd drag us all down with it.

Lawler was one of those people for whom there must always be someone against whom we must wage war. The adventure of space travel, the moral imperative to cure disease, the humanity of ending hunger, pale in comparison to the need to define one's self against a human "other." Lawler even sneers at the populists he admires, claiming (as Christians always have) that the Trumpist populists are "parasites on those who orient their relational lives by God, country, and family."

I have oriented my relational lives on my family, my community, my species, and my world, thank you very much. I'm not so insecure as to need to deface and poison my world to feel manly. I'm not so broken than I must deepen intimacy with the twin threats of unwanted pregnancy or potentially fatal infection; hugs, kisses, and love are highs that can be enjoyed. Loyalty to one another and the nobility of relating one to another can be glorified without narrowing our vision to one sect, one country, one skin color, one sex.

Sympathy for the Angels

Rowan Williams recently reviewed Dreher's The Benedict Option and sums up the book thusly:

The battle on the political field has largely been lost; there is no point in wasting energy on forming coalitions to challenge or change legislation. What is needed, instead, is to develop a more densely textured religious life, in which regular patterns of communal prayer and intellectual and spiritual development will keep alive the possibility of inhabiting a nourishing, morally rich tradition.

To which I respond, without cynicism or reserve, "Amen."

A while ago, I attended a series of lectures by several of the leading lights of the Pagan and Wiccan communities, and there were two questions I had for all of them that literally none of them could answer: "What is the basis of a pagan community?" and "What are the daily practices of paganism that keep people reminded of their place in the world and the substance of their reach?"

There are no routine pratices like that in Wicca. And there are no routine practices like that in Trumpism. As we are constantly reminded, the people who voted for Trump were very likely to identify as Christian, yet least likely to attend church regularly. As we've watched the growth of white supremacist movements on-line, we're reminded that the most common route for entrance into an extremist movement, be it white nationalism or religiously-tinted terrorism, is not through the practices of conscientious Christians or Muslims; it's through seduction by the extremists of some previously unloved or soul-injured part of the victim. Muslim terrorists aren't practicing Muslims; they're angry young men who've been told they've been denied a caliphate. White nationalists aren't Americans or Christians: they're angry young men who've been told their power is fading away into history.

Time and again I find myself feeling deeply sympathetic toward the impulses of people like Dreher. Some of my happiest memories were of the Palm Sunday week I spent at an Anglican monastery. I love Richard Beck's image that the world (especially now!) is one long, ongoing Nuremberg Rally, a constant assault of political news, social media, and advertising intended to whip us into a frenzy, when what we actually need is some peace and quiet, a daily setting aside, a time to think, to meditate, to contemplate our place in the world.

Over the years, I've adopted more and more of Epictetus' Stoic take on the world: that there is a conscious need every morning to contemplate your place in the world and the powers you have at hand to change it; that there are things out of your control and you must consciously know what they are and accept them; that you must be conscious of your limitations and act within them, evaluating the value of your actions within your resources to the best possible end; that you must consciously consider your friends and your enemies, and judge as if from afar how their actions impact you; that you must consciously recall your day, done, undone, or marred, and prepare again for tomorrow.

Note how much of that is sheer mindfulness, not the shallow Silicon Valley bullshit sort, but the real, daily praxis of trying to live a real life.

Every time I find myself drawn to one of these traditions, I get close enough to see the history, smell the bullshit of supernaturalism, feel the contigencies that result in the subjugation of women and the othering of those races who weren't present for a tradition's origin, and I run screaming for the hills.

Worse yet are the supposed rationalist movements that start with useful and beautiful tenents, yet inevitably get wedged in the worst sort of pernicious antihumanism. I can't begin to count the number of "rationalists" who take the "actual, historical causes of my beliefs" and twist it into a defense of white supremacy, ignoring completely the contingencies of time and space, or the moral dimensions of the notion of "supremacy."

I a man comfortable in my masculinity and my humanity; I don't need either of those ideologies to poison me further. Stocism is still the least poisonous tradition I've found, and I'll stick with it until something better comes along.