Category Archives: Jordan Peterson

In response to the stifling atmosphere of many American universities, a group of academics, journalists, artists, philanthropists, and public intellectuals recently united to found a new institution: The University of Austin. This experiment in higher education is intended to foster an environment of open debate and the fearless pursuit of truth.

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In June, UATX offered its inaugural Forbidden Courses, a noncredit summer program intended to cultivate spirited discussion about provocative questions. It featured instructors and workshop leaders including author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, historian Niall Ferguson, economist Deirdre McCloskey, playwright and filmmaker David Mamet, as well as others who object to the increasingly censorious culture in higher education.

I was selected to be an instructor for this program, because of my own unusual background and experience in higher education.

I was born into poverty and grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles and all around California. At 17, I fled, enlisting in the military right after high school. In 2015, I entered Yale on the GI Bill, and discovered that college was much different than what Id anticipated. Hundreds of campus demonstrators demanded that two professors, Erika and Nicholas Christakis, be fired for defending freedom of expression. Maybe, I thought, that was just a one-off incident. But then I arrived at Cambridge University as a PhD student, and, in 2019, observed as protesters succeeded in disinviting Jordan Peterson as a visiting fellow from the university.

I described these experiences to my class at UATX, and several students slowly nodded their heads in recognition of the prevailing campus culture. I then asked the 10 students: How many of you have withheld a social or political opinion at your campus for fear of ostracism or retribution? Nine raised their hands.

It was apparent that, like me, these young students desired an academic environment that prioritizes freedom of expression and open inquiry. The course I taught centered on social class and the role of money, education, and culture in Americas status system. I tried to foster the kind of environment I wished Id had as an undergraduate.

During a discussion about social class, I posed a simple question to my students that I would never have uttered at Yale or Cambridge: Do some poor people deserve to be poor? This sparked immediate pushback from students, who replied that nobody deserves deprivation.

I then rephrased by asking, Are some people more responsible for their own economic misfortunes than others? Even this I would not ask students during a seminar in an elite college.

I asked this question about responsibility to my students whose home institutions included Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Columbia, among others to help them understand their role as future leaders. Research indicates that graduates of such colleges are the most responsible for shaping politics and culture and customs. As Pano Kanelos, the president of UATX, has written, Universities are places where society does its thinking, where the habits and mores of our citizens are shaped.

I explained to my class that if those who sit at or near the apex of society ignore the importance of individual agency, then this undercuts the dignity of people in deprived and dysfunctional environments who are trying to improve their lives.

One student responded, What about people who try to desperately improve their lives but are arrested for it, like drug dealers?

An excellent question. I explained that the majority of poor people do not commit crimes and are never arrested. I was disheartened to see that the students were surprised by this fact. The students and I spoke about how the people who influence culture and shape policies oftentimes come from elite educational backgrounds and seldom have contact with people who dont attend selective colleges like themselves.

We discussed how, oftentimes, the only impoverished individuals who educated people are exposed to are those who break the law, whether in the media or in pop culture. TV shows often expose affluent viewers to low-income people who turn to crime, because that makes for a more interesting story than characters who work steady jobs to take care of their loved ones, which is how most poor and working class people live. One student observed that those who write and portray lawbreaking characters tend to come from relatively affluent backgrounds.

My goal in asking this provocative question wasnt to pressure students to agree with me. It was to get them thinking critically about a point of view they might not ordinarily encounter. In the end, they might come to a different conclusion than I have and that would be perfectly fine.

Id never seen a class so intellectually engaged in a conversation before. At the end of the program, one student stated, Our discussions didnt get heated, in the emotional sense. They were very critical, in the best possible way. We were genuinely engaging with each others ideas even while disagreeing.

For a fledgling university, testimonials dont get much better than that. Eager to obtain intellectual nourishment, those involved in UATX most notably its students have already begun to cultivate the atmosphere of truth-seeking that older institutions promised. After years of self-censoring at Yale and Cambridge, I have renewed hope for the future of higher education.

Rob Henderson is a founding faculty fellow at the University of Austin and a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Follow him on Twitter @robkhenderson.

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A welcome alternative to the lack of academic freedom on college campuses - The Boston Globe

Heres my prediction. The Tories will lose the next election. There will be an almighty battle for the soul of the Conservative party. Kemi Badenoch will win. Hows that for an opening paragraph?

To take a few steps back, this leadership campaign is a dud. The broadcast media calls it bitter and personal, but its neither: its polite, its dull, it features two competent administrators who disagree over one, albeit profound, point about taxes. Rishi would balance the books, then cut taxes; Liz would cut them now, unleashing growth that balances the books down the road. Im with her, but its hardly Hillary v Trump, is it?

The broadcasters talk about blue on blue warfare because it gets ratings, but also because they dont understand Tories, who they assume are Neanderthals. The phrase, its up to the Conservative Party to decide, is delivered in a tone that suggests our next PM will be chosen by a grand council of the Ku Klux Klan.

Meanwhile, much of Westminster is apathetic. Some MPs suspect Boris will be missed; others are furious at the treatment of Penny Mordaunt, the only candidate whose character was truly assassinated. Government has largely stopped functioning: Putin could ring ahead to say hes about to invade and hed get an answer phone.

Tories are asking themselves what theyve actually achieved in office (inflation, welfare and immigration are out of control) and theres a widespread expectation that theyre going to lose to Labour - hence intelligences greater than our own are already trying to figure out who will make the biggest splash in opposition. Theres probably greater interest in the men and women who *lost* the leadership election than for the brave kids who made the final round. Weve our eye on one in particular.

The names Badenoch, Kemi Badenoch. Thats Bay-denock, by the way, not Bad-ee-nock as I keep hearing on TV (Barack and Kamala had to be pronounced correctly, but no one bothers when the subject is a Tory).

Look, if Special K goes all the way to leader of the Tories, itll be because of her ideas and her talent for putting them across. But she is a black woman and, of course, there are going to be a billion think pieces written about it. All Ill say for now is what she has said: she is proudly Nigerian; growing up in an unstable country for 16 years can make you appreciate what weve built in Britain; and Nigerians tend to be, contrary to what the Left presumes, quite right-wing.

Millennial conservatives are comfortably globalised; they are also into truth-telling. Badenochs voice rings with the impatience of a cohort that has fallen so far behind that it doesnt have time to waste on lying, so expect the Tory Party of the future to say that you cant spend what you dont earn, that the Lefts obsession with race is divisive and that a trans-woman is not a woman.

Moreover, the coming conservatism will be aggressively civilisational. Rishi and Liz are the last gasp of Thatcher; the goal of their politics is to help people make more money, to live independently.

The new conservatives dislike taxes, too, but they sense that the Right has been wrong to shy away from cultural issues on the false assumption that they are a fringe debate. In reality, if youre not fighting the culture war, youre losing it, and you cant have a good economy if your society is decadent. The way that lockdown has transformed popular attitudes towards work risks becoming a case in point.

If you dont make a compelling case for markets, family, church or nation, support for all these will die and the West will weaken - while other systems, Russian or Chinese, dominate the globe.

Kemi Badenoch speaks for conservatives who think Britain is in serious danger of cracking up. They read Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson; they watch Thomas Sowell on YouTube. I like to bench-press to Malcolm Muggeridge, which is the most right-wing thing youll read all day.

The belief that the culture war is not incidental but central is going to be resisted by party elites, which is why I imagine the battle for opposition leader will be far more interesting than this contest, for there will be those who will argue that a confrontational style of conservatism isnt conservative at all. Is it not the Tory mission to build consensus? they will ask. And a lot of MPs simply wont like being told they are wrong.

Last week, Michael Gove, explaining his support for Badenoch, said that working with her: I had the experience that I must imagine that cabinet ministers had in the early 1980s, in finding that some of the verities that they had held dear were being taken apart brick by brick by a young woman who was easily their intellectual superior.

Thats quite an endorsement. Its also a warning. Just as the wets had to give way to Thatcherism, anyone who wants to be on the Badenoch bus, or compete with her, has to embrace a more muscular politics.

For myself, I rather enjoyed Boriss style of government, lazy and arch, the Roger Moore-era of Toryism. But the Kemites would have us put down our Martinis and cigars, saying that if we want to keep em, well have to fight for them; lose some weight, punch below the belt. Its all about to go a bit Daniel Craig in the world of conservatism.

Originally posted here:

Kemi Badenoch is the future of conservatism - The Telegraph

I was lined up in a mall outside a jungle gym, braving the closed-circuit plumes of COVID to tire out my kids on a glorified cat scratch tower, when I heard the child behind us ask, Daddy, why do those kids have masks? Do I need one?

The child was talking about my kids.

Oh, no sweetie, the father said, masks dont do anything, some people just wear them to feel good about themselves.

He pointed the dickish remark at my back, at my tatty leggings, my halo of unfoiled roots, but also at my children, running in circles, the only victims of the Liberal Mask Agenda in the whole place.

Adrienne Rich, among others, impelled me to turn around. The man wore his toddler about his shoulders like a pelt, the spoils of war. Also cargo shorts.

Whats your problem with masks, man? I asked as calmly as I could in my mask.

I dont have a problem, youre the ones making it a thing, he replied.

You brought it up, buddy. Im just standing in line for a jungle gym.

Here, the mass paused, gripping the shins of the child on his shoulders, then shouted, You dont have permission to talk to me! He turned toward his wife, who was holding the shopping bags, and fixed his gaze over her head, waiting for me to turn back around.

As I fumed and prepared to drop $50 on entry and specialized socks, I listened to him jostling his son behind me. I can do what I want with you, youre mine, he said in a kind of joking tone, certain once again that he was king of the place at the mall with the giant bumblebee mascot.

So often in literature, parenthood appears on the male as a kind of pelt thrown over like a prize. Something has been given to the fathersome knowledge or form of powerbut he has trouble decoding it, except maybe as an author.

Paul, the divorced intellectual Park Slope dad at the center of Teddy Waynes The Great Man Theory, has long wanted to teach his daughter something. When Mabel was small, he read to her: Often she fell asleep as he read, and the moment she succumbed, curled up on him like a shrimp, had always made him feel most like a parent. She has clearly come into her own, but he continues to see her as an extension of his own ego: Mabel is his little baby girl whose vulnerability had given him a sense of mission beyond himself.

Paul is an academic, if one demoted from staff to adjunct in the opening pages of the novel, and his daughter, now a tween, has begun to distance herself from her clueless dad who is soon living with his own mother in the Bronx. Paul tries to muscle through the disconnect with his powers of analysis, casting back to her birth: When Mabel was delivered and thrust into his unpracticed arms, he supposed he felt something, thought it was more an acknowledgement of the moments historical import rather than overwhelming love for this wizened homunculus of a stranger who was about to upend his heretofore streamlined life. You can see how great Paul might have been to have around in the difficult early days of parenting.

Ten years later, his ex-wife Jane has a new partner (she has also betrayed their values by getting Botox), and his daughter spends weekends with Paul, for whom the raw magic of her existence hadnt faded. Parenthood had opened up his frigid soul, creating a Mabel-sized space in his heart, an unexpected warm spot in an ice-cold lake. And she continued to give him a reason, in his newly destitute adjunct state, to make something of himself, so he redoubles his efforts on his book, The Luddite Manifesto; something that will disrupt the status quo in ailing Americait will rail against anti-intellectual cable pap, against Trump, and against the dumbing down of children by social mediaand something, like 99 percent of manifestos, that no one wants to read. It will be published by a university press.

Wayne specializes in this kind of alienated, troubling man. In Loner, his unreliable narrator, a smart, awkward Harvard undergraduate, took just a few chapters to go from social miscues to incel predation (Loner came out the year before Cat Person). The Love Song of Johnny Valentine followed an over-managed Bieberesque child star doomed by his industry and was published the year before Biebers entitlement culminated in his being hoisted up the Great Wall of China on his bodygurds shoulders.

The Great Man Theory leaps ahead of the parenting discourse, lets call it, to ask what dads are bringing to the table, and to explore the undercurrent of panic about the End of Men. Paul is smart enough to know men are a problem, and sensate enough to get a whiff of toxic masculinity, but convinced that he, center of the universe, is the only person who can fix it: He is a man writing to ward off global and personal crises; he needed to prove to his family that he had the stability and gravity of a sun.

The psychology professor Jordan Shapiro observed in his book Father Figure: How To Be A Feminist Dad that men are brought up to see themselves as the dominant narrative in a household; protagonists on a heros journey, as in popular man-texts like Robert Blys Iron John: A Book About Men and the work of Jordan Peterson.

As parables attempting to explain our existence go, Iron John is cuckoo bananas. The base story (Im paraphrasing) is that all men have in them a child who must steal a golden key from under his mothers pillow, unlock a cage containing a wild, hairy man to retrieve a golden ball, then journey out into the jungle where he can become a warrior and awaken his inner Wild Manthe missing piece of himself that will trigger healing from the absent father and give him Zeus energy. Think men howling around campfires in the mid-90s.

Bly, part of the mythopoetic movementthe New Age but just for menbelieved that separation from the mother is a key rite of passage for boys, though something moms get in the way of under our current societal structure: A clean break from the mother is crucial, but its simply not happening. Bly warns of female tripod rage and of the she-wolves a boy may encounter in the woods, and takes some strange turns in issuing warnings about the mother-child relationship:

A mans moustache may stand for his pubic hair. A friend once grew a moustache when he was around thirty. The next time he visited his mother, she looked into the corners of the room as she talked to him, and would not look at his face, no matter what they talked about. Hair, then, can represent sexual energy.

Still, Blys ideas were a stepping stone from the patriarchal alpha prototype to something better, and a response to Feminism; he believed that men had female and male energy inside of them, and made a case for the expressive mens movement. Had Paul been a Park Slope dad in the 90s, you could see Iron John appealing to his intellectual sensibilities.

From the distance of an additional quarter century, though, a new kind of fragility runs through manhood: a fear of cancel culture, to extinguish the men who mess things up. And Paul is quite far from unleashing his Wild Manhis 80-something mother is having more sex than he, and Paul finds himself mopping someone elses semen out of the backseat of her car that he uses for his work as a rideshare driver. The key is back under the mothers pillow.

Paul is painted as an Encino Man dug up from an earlier age when mens ideas were deemed important and their place in society unshakeable. You do feel a bit bad for him, just barely grasping the most rudimentary shapes of a typical parents existential awakening: His baby. Strange that after thirty-five years of independent selfhood, with relatives reaching backward in fixed history, he was now permanently linked with a human hurtling toward an undefined future.

Needless to say, mothers are light years ahead in charting this territory. I have created a death, chimes Samantha Hunt, whose ghost story and journey through the woods Mr. Splitfoot is profoundly successful where Iron John is mostly confusing. How can I become a god? the hero of Rachel Yoders Nightbitch asks, skipping to the heart of the matter. For Nightbitch, birth and motherhood bring a terrifying and complicated shift in power: She had that freedom when she gave birth, had screamed and shat and sworn and would have killed had she needed to.

How can men compete with that?

Just before The Great Man Theory came Raising Raffi, Keith Gessens memoir of early parenthood. There were quite a few moments that leapt out at me, including this recollection of his wifes (the writer Emily Gould) home birth: At one point, when Emily was on the bed, just before the babys head started coming out, a geyser of blood shot out from her vagina.

In this, I do indeed see a case for men as witnesses to birth, with access to an angle women cant see, unless, I regret, with a hand mirror. Gessen has written an examination of the fatherhood condition, plumbing his own aggression and impotence, revising coarser Jungian ideas about the father-child situation as he goes:

Raffi did not want to kill me and marry Emily. It was more complicated and difficult than that. What he wanted was all her attention even as he also wanted to be his own person. He wanted to re-create the relationship theyd once had, when he was smaller, but in a way that it could no longer be re-created.

It is a proper reckoning. Understanding that the breastfeeding dyad can be hard for a dad to crack, he works to occupy a larger and more positive role as Raffi reaches toddlerdom, and grapples with his own eventual uselessness: I think now that there is no tragedy like the tragedy of parenthood, writes Gessen. There is no other thing you do in life only so that the person you do it for can leave you. Here, he hits on what I understand as key themes of writing about motherhood: the figurative death that takes place, the invisible work of care, the confrontation with your own shadow in your childs personality, the knowledge that you arent writing the story in the end. Gessen is welcome at my witchy mom bonfire anytime.

When I otherwise think of the literature of good fathers, it often concerns surrogate fathers (Goodnight Mr. Tom, Heidi, The Box Car Children), or grief for a lost father (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the wonderful H Is For Hawk). All of Shakespeares dads are terrible, likewise those of Steinbeck and Woolf. I guess we have Doctor Manette and Atticus Finch, proto-Brooklyn dad (whose outsized presence covered for the absence of Harper Lees abusive mother), Jaysons Greenes Once More We Saw Stars, and the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard and for good and wrenching and complicated dad thoughts. There are also a slew of dad manifestosBetween The World and Me, Dreams From My Fatherwhich nevertheless get us back to dad as author.

If Paul doesnt, in fact, have anything particularly worthwhile to say as an academic, or as a dad granted a cosmic glimpse of himself as a speck in the wider universe of humanity, you have to ask yourself what the point of him is. How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didnt know what to do with theirs? asked Rachel Yoder. How easyhow wrong but easy nonethelessit would be to walk away from it all, thinks the hero of Lydia Kieslings Golden State, who is trying to help her Turkish partner gain access to the U.S., but otherwise spends the novel with their child Honey, traversing the state of motherhood:

a warren of beautiful rooms, something like Topkap, something like the Alhambra on a winter morning, some well-trod but magnificent place youre allowed to sit in for a minute and snap a photo before you are ushered out and youll never remember every individual jewel of a room but if youre lucky you go through another and another and another and another until they turn out the lights.

The sadness of Pauls irrelevance comes late in the book when he, touchingly, delivers the terrarium he has built and tended with Mabel to Mabels stepdad Steve, a seemingly great dad, the kind you or I might know:

Contained in his arms was the small world theyd created over the years: new bugs, new worms, new soil, but the same pebbles that theyd first collected together in the park when Mabel was a little girl.

Its better off with you, he told Steve, and handed over the tank.

Lauren, the cable news producer he is seeing, informs him that she will be having a child by donor, but is happy to date in the meantime. By this point he has been fully cut loose from the university, after a female student reported him for being a creep.

After he carries out his last bad idea, his ex-wife and daughter will find it quite easyif wrongto walk away from him, and thats the real tragedy, one he might not even understand.

Link:

A Great Man Is Hard to Find: On the Literature of Contemporary Fatherhood - Literary Hub

Jordan Peterson has reportedly been suspended from Twitter following a post about transgender actor Elliot Page that violated the platforms rules against hateful conduct.

Screenshots posted online show the tweet in question from the Canadian clinical psychologists account, which reads: Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.

Page came out as transgender in 2020, announcing he would now be known as Elliot. Peterson, 60, is guilty of deadnaming the 25-year-old Umbrella Academy star, a source close to the Oscar-nominated actor told The Post.

Peterson, who joined the staff of conservative podcast outlet Daily Wire on Thursday, is infamous for his anti-trans stance. He once claimed on Joe Rogans podcast that being transgender is a result of a contagion and similar to satanic ritual abuse.

Conservative political commentator Dave Rubin posted screenshots of the removed tweet online, writing, The insanity continues at Twitter, and claiming that Peterson just told me he will never delete the tweet. Paging @elonmusk.

Petersons daughter, Mikhaila, also posted screenshots of the tweets online, taking aim at Twitter and Elon Musk, who has been working to acquire the social media platform.

Wow. @jordanbpeterson got a twitter strike. No more twitter until he deletes the tweet. Definitely not a free speech platform at the moment @elonmusk, she wrote.

The Post has reached out to Twitter reps for comment.

This is the latest in a string of beefs the 60-year-old has had with the little blue bird social media platform. In May, Peterson boldly announced he was quitting the platform after he was called out for shamingSports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue model Yumi Nu, writing of the plus-size posers cover debut: Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.

Meanwhile, Twitter has a history of booting individuals and evenentire organizations, including the Babylon Bee, off the platformfor not respecting trans peoples identities, Fox News reported.

A majority of Americans believe a persons gender cannot be changed, according to a new poll released this week, which underscores the publics complicated view oftransgender issues.

The Pew Research Centersurvey found that 60% of adults say a persons gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth. Thats a four-point increase from the previous year 56% in 2021 and a six-point spike from 54% in 2017.

No single demographic group is driving this change, and patterns in who is more likely to say this is similar to what they were in past years, according to the research team.

The poll also found that 86% of Republicans and those leaning right believe gender is determined by the sex assigned at birth, compared to 38% of Democrats and those leaning more left.

However, the survey stated that 64 percent of respondents would support legislation to protect transgender people fromdiscrimination in jobs, housing, and public spaces. And it noted that roughly eight-in-ten U.S. adults say there is at least some discrimination against transgender people in our society.

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Twitter suspends Jordan Peterson for Elliot Page trans tweet

With every passing year, traditional religious belief continues its trend of steady decline in the United States. According to the latest Gallup Values and Beliefs poll, a record low of 81 percent of American adults believe in God. Thats a slip of 6 percentage points since 2017, the last time Gallup conducted the poll, which found 87 percent of respondents affirming belief in God. As traditional beliefs wane and a new generation increasingly makes its way in the world without them, a new American religious landscape is becoming visibleand it has features both familiar and unexpected.

What is changing profoundly is the decline of traditional, denominational religious organizations, especially among young adults, Notre Dame sociologist and author Christian Smith wrote in an email about the poll results. Within Christianity, the decline affects both liberal and conservative denominations. Scholars, journalists, and sociologists of religion have offered a range of explanations for the drop. While simple demographics account for part of the changeas young Nones come of age, they are beginning to have children of their own, whereas religious couples are having fewer children than their parents and grandparents didpolitics have also played a role, especially for those on the left. According to Gallups report, Democrats have seen the sharpest decline in belief in God while Republican rates of belief remain extremely high:

The groups with the largest declines are also the groups that are currently least likely to believe in God, including liberals (62%), young adults (68%) and Democrats (72%). Belief in God is highest among political conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%), reflecting that religiosity is a major determinant of political divisions in the U.S.

David Campbell, coauthor of Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics, says that Many Americansespecially young peoplesee religion as bound up with political conservatism, and the Republican party specifically. . . . Young people are especially allergic to the perception that manybut by no means allAmerican religions are hostile to LGBTQ rights.

But while the Religious Right has played a role in the waning of traditional Christianity in the United States, the disillusioned young scions of conservative Catholic and Protestant families arent emptying the pews at home to fill them in more progressive church spaces. Liberal Christians traditions are in a faster freefall than conservative ones.

Notwithstanding the Episcopal Churchs progressive stances on a number of issues that align with the mores of liberal young Americansthe denomination ordains trans people, blesses same-sex marriages, and supports abortion rightsits membership and Sunday attendance have plummeted. Far from picking up large numbers of disaffected post-evangelicals during the Trump years, the church experienced a net loss of almost 170,000 members between 2016 and 2020. These numbers reflect a decades-long trend: In October 2020, the denominations own news service reported that membership is down 17.4 [percent] over the last 10 years. The average age of the average Episcopalian and the lack of generational replacement have contributed to an overall picture that prompted one scholar to say, The Episcopal Church will be dead in the next 20 years. (He later wrote to clarify and mildly soften his position: They will very likely be on life support.) Its been a steep slope: The denomination has produced more American presidents than any other, a reminder of the prestige and power it enjoyed as recently as one or two generations ago.

The story of decline is consistent across denominations with similarly liberal theological views on gender and sexuality, such as the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Church of Christ. Likewise, liberal seminaries and divinity schools across the country have also faced tough times, with some shutting down and others downsizing or even merging to avoid closure.

Progressive social stances and liberal beliefs do not appear to have helped these churches to attract younger people with similar convictions to join them in significant numbers. In attempting to explain the mainlines troubles with declining membership, economist Laurence Iannaccone arguedin 1994, when the longer trend had already been apparent for many yearsthat part of the problem for the liberal churches is low expectations for members: They require little in the way of time, resources, and support, and are hesitant to place strong moral expectations or theological boundaries on them. In Iannaccones view, Strictness makes organizations stronger and more attractive because it reduces free riding. It screens out members who lack commitment and stimulates participation among those who remain. Likewise, more conservative critics have long argued that the key problem for liberal churches is that they lack a religious reason for [their] own existence; combining this feature with their emphasis on social causes leaves them looking nigh-indistinguishable from any other advocacy group, let alone one another.

The urgency with which mainline churches pursue social justice does not extend to traditional missionary work, which could be another factor in their waning memberships. In his study of early twentieth-century foreign missionaries and their children, UC Berkeleys David Hollinger writes that one of the unintended consequences of liberal Protestantisms embrace of multiculturalism was a concomitant abandonment of proselytizing. In his view, the religious tolerance of the mainline advanced the larger process of religious liberalization and the attendant growth of post-Protestant secularism. It could be said that the commitment to inclusivity with respect to other faiths, traditions, and points of view became so total within the mainline that it resulted in a final self-abnegation.

Younger Americans are leaving their churches at a faster rate than has been recorded in similar polls previouslybut the question of where theyre ending up is complicated.

The U.S. is not undergoing secularization of a type that leads to hard-core rationalist, materialist, disenchanted atheism, at least in the near term, Smith, the Notre Dame sociologist, wrote. If anything, the broader culture has become re-enchanted. Everybody and their cousin now wants to be spiritual and to practice mindfulness.

Polls of American religiosity give unaffiliated participants more options than simply Atheist and Agnostic. On the question of religious preference, Pew offers Nothing in particular, and Gallups question about religious affiliation includes the option of selecting Nonethe negation that gave rise to a new sociological category.

But Nones are not simply agnostics or atheists by another name. A growing subsection of Americans positively identifies as spiritual but not religious, a catch-all of personal religious orientations that can entail anything from cultivating private Christian faith apart from an ecclesial tradition to an open agnosticism inflected with principles derived from the practice of yogaand much more besides. So although explicit atheism has made modest gains among Americans in recent years, it is not the philosophical upshot for most Americans who are leaving their churches, and its wrong to assume that a person who identifies as a None is a person bereft of religious conviction.

The decline into irreligion of a nation of natural believers has a strange and unpredictable character. In fact, some observers have argued that what we are witnessing is not the decline of American religion at all, but rather a remix.

Tara Isabella Burton, in her book Strange Rites, argues that the decline of confessional Christianity in America has been taken to imply the waning of religion in the country more generally. But religion is as strong as ever, in Burtons view; you just wont find it in church. Rather, comic book conventions, yoga studios, cyberspace, and a myriad of similar destinations have become the essential sites of a new American religious culture. Carrying forward some of the ideas of nineteenth-century French sociological thinker mile Durkheim, Burton takes religion to be less about creeds and dogma than community and meaning making. This religiosity finds its expression through the collective energy of its adherents, a process [Durkheim] calls collective effervescence, a shared intoxication participants experience when they join together in a symbolically significant, socially cohesive action.

Burton cites Harry Potter as a paradigmatic example of this collective effervescence. Children born to Potter fans are being christened Albus and Hermione in honor of Rowlings characters; their Hogwarts-tattoo-sleeved parents derive moral teachings, ethical notions, and a larger message from the books, which amount to a foundational text for their livesjust as scripture may have been to their own parents. This quasi-religious devotion to the imaginative universe of Harry Potter helps explain the otherwise unaccountable ferocity of the backlash to J.K. Rowling: Her controversial public statements about trans women have elicited something akin to a crisis of faith among devotees who may have first learned about the importance of inclusion and acceptance in the Potter novels. Fans of the fantasy series are not unique in the degree to which they give themselves over to their enthusiasm. Yale religion scholar Kathryn Lofton has long argued that the obsessive fervor generated by celebrities like Oprah, Britney Spears, and BTS has elements of organization and function that appear far more similar to those of religious communities than of more pedestrian fandoms.

But these tendencies offer a brief glimpse of a much larger emerging religious landscape. Thanks to TikTok, Instagram, and the pandemic that kept everyone inside and on their phones, astrology has made a significant apparent comeback with Millennials and Zoomers. Promising a more authentic and spiritually attuned feminism, Wicca and Neopaganism have grown from 134,000 [adherents] in 2001 to nearly 2 million [in 2021]. Young men, some of them nervous about any kind of feminism, have elevated Canadian psychologist and self-help writer Jordan Peterson to the status of a mystical guru. There is the cult of Peloton, known for its collective affirmations and liturgical calls to fitness. Followers of QAnon could be described as initiates because of the relationship they develop to an esoteric body of beliefs. The Disney community treats a visit to Disney World as a secular pilgrimage. And the dominant contemporary form of progressive social consciousnesswokeness, as critics call ithas features that resemble Burtons notion of remixed religion. From calls to atone for unearned privilege (original sin, if you squint), to chants and kneeling as forms of protest, to the targeting of dissenting opinions for conveying heretical forms of thought, the parallels with elements of Christian history, theology, and practice are suggestive. Columbia University linguist John McWhorter is a well-known proponent of this view, arguing that an anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.

The predominance of remixed religion, religion-substitutes, religion-alternatives, and spiritualized hobbies among younger Americans attests to a basic truth about our countrys culture: We are natural believers. While scholars may debate the meaning and significance of any of these examplesand deeper questions about what constitutes religion as a unique form of social lifethe durably high level of spiritual enthusiasm is a feature of the culture of the United States that sets it apart from that of secular Europe. In its many new forms, American religion may very well turn out to be with us always, even unto the end of the age.

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America, Land of Unbelieving Believers - The Bulwark

The corn fields adjacent to John Deere headquarters in Silvis, Illinois, typically are knee-high by the 4th of July. Thats how Webb Simpson remembers them as he returns to this northwestern corner of the Land of Lincoln for the first time in a dozen years to play at TPC Deere Run in the PGA Tours John Deere Classic, which is celebrating its 50th edition.

Simpson, winner of the 2012 U.S. Open among his seven Tour titles, is back in Americas Heartland to pay a debt of gratitude to longtime tournament director Clair Peterson, who is retiring this year, and gave him a sponsors exemption in 2008.

I was elated because theres so many uncertainties when you turn pro as a young player, said Simpson, who graduate from Wake Forest that summer. You dont know which tour youre going to be playing on, if any tour.

The John Deere Classic grew in meaning to Simpson when he returned to the Quad Cities to compete a year later as a rookie and proposed to his wife, Dowd, the mother of his five children, the night before the final round.

She knew the question was coming in the next few months, so I thought Im going to get her when she least expects it, he said. Decided right by the rivers a beautiful area, I can take her to dinner, I can surprise her.

Simpsons caddie secured the ring and he dropped to one knee on a dock along the Mississippi River, which divides Bettencourt and Davenport, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois.

I was more nervous about dropping it than her saying yes, said Simpson, who claimed to be 99 percent sure she would say yes.

Fast forward to March at the Valspar Championship and Simpson told Peterson to count him in for his farewell tournament. With the pre-tournament withdrawal of Daniel Berger due to injury, Simpson, at No. 58 in the Official World Golf Ranking, represents the highest-ranked player in the field, but he downplayed any talk that he should be the favorite.

A hundred guys could win this week, Simpson said. Just because the field isnt as strong as other weeks its still going to take a really low number(to win).

John Deere: Thursday tee times, TV info | PGA Tour on ESPN+ | Best bets

With the tournament going up against the second event of LIV Golf, the upstart league that has wooed the likes of Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson and former JDC champion Bryson DeChambeau, and scheduled between the U.S. Open and British Open, Peterson knew his event would be a tough draw.

How many major winners do you have here compared to John Deere? Its not even close, said Pat Perez, a defector to the renegade LIV Golf. The Tour wants to keep talking about strength of field and all that kind of stuff, the strength of field is here.

To make matters worse for Peterson and the John Deere, several of the biggest stars in the game are heading next week to the Genesis Scottish Open, an event co-sanctioned between the PGA Tour and DP World Tour for the first time, which certainly had a detrimental effect, too. But none of this is new for an event that has rolled with the punches.

Ilike to say we hit for the cycle, Peterson said. Weve been opposite the British Open, weve been opposite the Olympics, weve been opposite the Ryder Cup and weve been opposite the Presidents Cup. So, our history is not always to have the top-10 players in the world here.

What Peterson has excelled at is finding the stars of tomorrow and offering them sponsor exemptions into the field.

Ive kind of compared it, I guess, to an IPO, where theres an initial public offering of this new product and theres no promise that theres going to be success, Peterson said, but you try to do your homework and identify guys in this case that were going to be successful as athletes, but quite honestly we also were really focused on young men that we liked and respected and had a lot of regard for.

Among those who benefited from a JDC invite include defending champion Lucas Glover, Jon Rahm and DeChambeau, who all later won U.S. Opens; past champ Jordan Spieth (three majors in all), Zach Johnson (two majors) and Patrick Reed, who all won green jackets; Justin Thomas, who just won his second PGA Championship, and Jason Day, who also won the Wanamaker, and is in the field this week.

We gave him a spot as a 17-year old. He made his first check here, Peterson said of Day, who returned five times. Then he becomes No. 1 in the world. And its tough, once youre getting into all the majors and the World Golf Championships, you can play all over the world, its tough to build a schedule and include our eventBut here he is this year to come back and recognize that we gave him a spot, its exciting to have him here and thats the value of the relationships, I think. Theres no expiration date on em.

Peterson pointed out that for all his success with sponsor invites, his record isnt perfect.

Im going to give you a true confession right now, because people have said, Oh, wow, you know, you do a great job picking exemptions. I said no to Scottie Scheffler, OK? So dont give me too much credit. Thats one that really kind of was a whiff. But I think hes going to do OK.

This year the list of those Peterson awarded golden tickets to includes Chris Gotterup, the Haskins Award winner as mens college golfer of the year, fellow newly minted-pro Quinn Riley, a 21-year-old graduate of Duke, and Patrick Flavin, an Illinois native who grew up attending the tournament.

Its a dream come true, Flavin said. The John Deere Classic to me was always a major. It was a really big deal. Watching guys like Zach Johnson and Steve Stricker win, guys from the Midwest who arent overpowering people and Im kind of a small guy, it was really inspiring to me.

So is the local support for the tournament and the charity dollars it has raised $145 million.

To me thats a success, Peterson said.You cant judge the success of the tournament just by the strength of the field.

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Jordan Spieth, Bryson DeChambeau, Zach Johnson all made a name for themselves at John Deere Classic. How one tournament director wooed top young...

A photo of Roddy Ricch in the desert.

Social media has been a mixed bag since it came on the scene; it has been a force for immense good and a home for some of the most harmful interactions.

Process exposure refers to social media activities where influencers and users consistently reveal the creative process behind their successes and outcomes to their audience.

Social media has frequently been used by millions of influencers and celebrities as a way to show off the good life and flaunt their successes. While celebrities flaunted their Grammys and Oscars, their followers were usually left with an insatiable hunger for the same results without understanding the process behind it.

This gross lack of process exposure has tainted the legacy of the biggest social media platforms and made them a purveyor of insecurities rather than a powerful tool for education and inspiration. However, a lot of positive change has gone unnoticed.

Since 2011, when YouTube introduced its live streaming function, Live video has exploded on the scene and become the favorite content consumed by most social media users. Statistics show that people spend three times longer watching a live social video than a prerecorded one.

The unintentional effect of this shift towards live video has been a drastic increase in process exposure. Going live as opposed to creating videos has dramatically increased the ability of content creators, influencers, and celebrities to bring their viewers along through every step of the journey. It has become the reality TV of social media.

Grammy Award-winning, and Forbes 30 Under 30, artist, Roddy Ricch, has not just observed this shift towards live video; he has also observed the craving among the average social media user for more process-inclined content in general.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 26: Roddy Ricch (R) and guest attend the 62nd Annual GRAMMY Awards ... [+] at Staples Center on January 26, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images)

After making his mark in the music industry with his multiple awards ranging from the Grammys, BET, and the American Music Awards, amongst others, Ricch decided to venture into the tech space and build his brand portfolio. Ricchs search for the next big tech disruptor has led him to the team at Roll, a new digital platform that promises a new and unique connection experience between celebrities and their followers.

Ricch explained why he instantly saw the potential in the Roll project; "Being invited to be part of the creative process of developing the Roll app, was a big eureka moment for me, because it put in action, what I have been feeling for so long; people are tired of watching the outcome of all our hard work on social media, they want to see all the steps that led us there. This is the only way people can leave educated and inspired.

There have been far too many aspiring artist who thought they could just jump, pick up a mic, and start rapping because they were inspired by one of my songs, they didn't know the process behind the outcome. That's what Roll is showing".

The digital platform is designed to allow artists, creators and celebrities to share an inside look at their personal lives as well as the process of creating content and music with their fans and followers. With Roll, users can access the insights of making an album, from the late nights to the early mornings, building beats, laying verses, and the music video shoot. Roll's vision speaks to the larger benefits of process exposure.

Ricch is adamant that process-oriented content is the future of social media content. According to Ricch, process exposure will turn followers into leaders by providing direction, education, and inspiration.

Direction

Today's youth are heavily inspired by social media creators, celebrities, and influencers, sometimes more than other influences. However, loving a person or art does not automatically translate to possessing the ability to replicate the person's art or results. As process exposure becomes mainstream, young people will likely make more informed decisions after being exposed to the processes behind what they admire.

Education

From academics like Jordan Peterson to athletes like LeBron James, today's social media users are exposed to a wide gamut of solid influences.As process-inclined videos and content continue to explode, users can gain more step-by-step education in many areas of interest.

CAMBRIDGE, CAMBRIDGESHIRE - NOVEMBER 02: Jordan Peterson addresses students at The Cambridge Union ... [+] on November 02, 2018 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. (Photo by Chris Williamson/Getty Images)

The number of Americans choosing to go to college is steadily declining; perhaps process-inclined content can become a source of quality informal education.

Inspiration

Ricch stated, the most significant impact of the Roll app is its inspirational value. In his words, "It is one thing to know if you should do it, it is another thing to know how to do it, but inspiration is the most powerful part of what we are doing. Exposing an audience to both the highs and the lows of process inspires them to know that the best of men are just men at best and that if anyone can do it, certainly they can too."

It may be impossible to lower the internet's amount of unprofitable content being released, but the gradual push for more process exposure does hold some promise. Perhaps, social media might finally fulfill its true potential.

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How Roddy Ricch Is Impacting The Tech Landscape - Forbes

Dear June,

This November, my son turns 18. For the past 15 years, I have not been in his life due to the choices I made. My most fervent prayer is to be allowed in his life one day.

Over the years, I have tried to initiate communication many times and have not heard a peep. He is living with his mother, and I highly doubt she encourages any contact with me. She has emailed photos of my son to my father.

Of course, there is a lifetime of issues behind all of this. I lived with my mother until I was 6, then with my father until I was 13. To this day, my father and I have a very strained relationship.

I am wondering if I should pay a private investigator to find him when he turns 18? I know it is my fault that I havent been in his life. Can you give me any advice?

An Estranged Father

Dear Estranged Father,

It is very admirable that you want to be in your sons life after so long. Yes, I think you should do everything in your power to reconnect with him. It will be life-changing, strengthening, even healing for both of you.

Once your son is an adult, you have the legal as well as moral right to establish communication. Im sure a good private investigator could do the job, but I wonder if perhaps communication could be established through the family? This way might accomplish more for yourself and your son. Let me explain.

Since you have had almost no contact with your son since he was less than 3 years old, you will be building a relationship almost from scratch. Now it may be that this relationship comes easilylike building a sandcastle, but it also may not be easylike building a medieval fortress. So I think a preparation step is important because you wont be able to build a fortress without some know-how.

It is a truth that when a child doesnt have a father present they are left with questions about how worthy they really are.

Pediatrician and author Meg Meeker says that deep in a childs heart, they need both parents to answer three basic questions about themselves:

Parents also answer these questions with tone and body language.

In a TEDx talk,Meeker said that people who dont have these questions answered by their fathers live in chaos.

Our prisons are filled with men whose spirits are crushed because they never had those questions answered by their dads.

Even successful men struggle if they havent had a father. Meeker said she also works with professional athletes, teaching them how to be fathers and they too struggle with chaos in their souls becausethough they may have achieved the epitome of fame and glory in the worldthey dont know the answer to these questions in a deep part of their hearts. The same is also true for elites in any realm.

You mention that your relationship with your own father is strained, so perhaps its helpful to consider how he answered those questions for you. Possibly he didnt do the best job. If this is the case, if he didnt believe in your potential, in your inherent worth, and didnt tell you so, then this may have set you on a path toward your mistakes.

But, of course, you cant blame him nowhe was probably beaten down by life in some way. The best way forward now is to acknowledge any wounds still unhealed in you, accept that your father had faults, and forgive him for them. I would guess he was doing his best with the hand he was dealtmost of us are.

Your desire to be a present in your sons lifedespite all this timereally speaks to a nobility and strength in you. In my experience, parenting requires a lot of strength because, since we love and care so much for our children, they can bring up deep fears. In those moments when Ive been really challenged by my son, I think back to how I felt when he was a newbornhow I knew he had amazing potential and that I would do and sacrifice so much for him, and this gives me the strength to overcome in myself what is challenging our relationship.

I mention this because it may be that when you meet your son, he might not the person you hoped he would be, or he may have a very distorted view of you (we have no idea what his mother has been telling him) and you may have to prove to him that you are still worthy of being his dad.

Put another way, I think your search for your son is an actual heros quest, and thus you will meet with setbacks, perhaps rejection, perhaps disrespect, and there will be moments in which you will doubt yourself. But its the nature of the quest to be hard.

So as to your question about how to contact him, you could hire a private investigator, but what if you take the path of first easing some of the strain in your relationship with your own father? Then what about your sons mother? Could you become on cordial terms with her? The benefit is that you will start to reweave family bonds around your son, which might naturally lead to a connection with him, and importantly, through this process you gain strength and wisdom.

I think if you reflect, you will know how best to proceed.

My other suggestion would be to consider reading, to help bring you perspective, courage, and wisdom; some works to consider might be hero tales such as Hercules or biographies of great men like George Washington.

Further suggestions for reading and watching would be books or videos by Dr. Meg Meeker, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Dr. Jordan Peterson, which has general principles for keeping on top of life; It Didnt Start With You, by Mark Wolynn, which is about how to heal generational trauma; and Man of Steel and Velvet, by Aubrey Andelin, which is an old-fashioned how-to guide for men on manhood.

You could also reach out to the Fatherless Generation Foundation, a Georgia-based nonprofit that specializes in helping families reunite and will have advice and resources for you.

Sincerely,

June

________

Do you have a family or relationship question for our advice columnist,Dear June? Send it toDearJune@EpochTimes.comor Attn: Dear June, The Epoch Times, 5 Penn Plaza, 8th Fl. New York, NY, 10001

June Kellum is a married mother of three and longtime Epoch Times journalist covering family, relationships, and health topics.

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Dear June: Father Seeks to Reconnect With Teenage Son - The Epoch Times

University of Ottawa law and epidemiology professor Amir Attaran is facing international backlash for shaming a maskless United Airlines flight attendant on social media.

On Saturday, Attaran posted a picture of a flight attendant on a United flight from Ottawa to Chicago and accused the airline of breaking the law because masks are required on all flights out of Canada.

Transport Canada says masks are mandatory on all flights to and from Canada, a policy that has created confusion given that masking is not required on planes in America.

Canada is not the USA, you f***ers, said Attaran, who added that United should be banned from operating flights to Canada for not following the Trudeau governments mask mandates.

Attarans online conduct was quickly criticized by Canadian and international figures from all sides of the political spectrum.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spokesperson Christina Pushaw called the University of Ottawa professors actions creepy, and suggested he should not fly if he cant handle seeing someones face.

Pushaw also called out Uniteds response to Attaran and accused the airline of throwing its employees under the bus. United had thanked Attaran for bringing the issue to their attention.

Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld and BlazeTv podcast host Elijah Schaffer also reacted to Attarans tweets.

Progressive personalities including Huffington Post contributor Yashar Ali and former The Young Turks correspondent Emma Vigeland also criticized Attarans actions.

Meanwhile, former University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson reacted to Attarans tweets by calling him a pathetic ranfink and a horrible piece of work.

Attaran responded to Petersons criticism by claiming he was a baby. He also challenged him to a public debate in Ottawa.

This is not the first time that the University of Ottawa professor has caused controversy for his conduct on social media.

Attaran, whose Twitter bio states that he wrecks grifters, anti-vaxxers & scientific illiterates, has also come under fire for comments he made about unvaccinated people.

Attaran previously called those who do not believe in Covid vaccinations racist, low life trash, losers, stupid, villiage idiots, homophobic and anti-Semetic.

Were asking readers, like you, to make a contribution in support of True Norths fact-based, independent journalism.

Unlike the mainstream media, True North isnt getting a government bailout. Instead, we depend on the generosity of Canadians like you.

How can a media outlet be trusted to remain neutral and fair if theyre beneficiaries of a government handout? We dont think they can.

This is why independent media in Canada is more important than ever. If youre able, please make a tax-deductible donation to True North today. Thank you so much.

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University of Ottawa professor faces international backlash for shaming maskless flight attendant | The - The Paradise News

There is much at stake in the shift from the present to the past and so it is with Timothy Brennans recent Chronicle essay, What Was Deconstruction? In the headlines formulation, the end of deconstruction is a starting point, and it is from this safe distance that Brennan works through what he takes deconstruction to have been. Brennan begins his essay with an account of an exchange he witnessed between Derrida and Ernesto Laclau after a Laclau lecture on Antonio Gramsci. Brennan tells us he understood frustratingly little which, retrospectively, he took to reveal the vacuity of deconstruction or Derrida or both.

But anecdotes are fickle, and I could counter with my own experience attending Derridas lectures at the University of California at Irvine and seminars where I found him to be a generous and informed teacher. He carefully and patiently guided me to a better understanding of a Dostoevsky story via a discussion of Kierkegaard. Derrida, with his quizzical eyes and faint smile (as Brennan puts it) helped me to understand a lot. But what do either of these anecdotes reveal about what deconstruction was or is?

Brennans piece is ostensibly a review of Gregory Jones-Katzs excellent work of intellectual history, Deconstruction: An American Institution (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and if Brennans use of the past tense were restricted to Jones-Katzs account of the history of deconstruction in America it would be warranted. But Brennans essay is not really a book review. It is a new iteration of four oft-repeated broadsides against deconstruction that moves beyond the purview of Jones-Katzs historical analysis. These critiques are not new but they are persistent, and variants of each have been enlisted recently across the political spectrum from Deconstruction Goes Mainstream in the right-leaning National Review in 2020 to the Marxist scholar Gabriel Rockhills The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left in a Los Angeles Review of Books subchannel in 2017. They have also been employed by Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, and Jordan Peterson in their respective critiques of postmodernism. Brennans piece is exemplary, however, insofar as it mobilizes all four critiques at once.

In broad strokes, these are the four critiques: First, that deconstruction is undefinable and obscure, in Brennans words, a style of thought more complained about than understood, less outrageous than deliberately elusive. Second, that deconstruction is pernicious because it leads to radical skepticism, relativism, and ultimately post-truth: There are no answers, no origins, no past, no perpetrators. Third, that deconstruction neutralizes activist politics in the service of the status quo (Deconstruction seems most American in giving repressive tolerance philosophical dignity.) And fourth and finally, that deconstruction is right-wing thought disguised as progressive philosophy: Deconstruction won credence for the left by enlisting the European philosophical right.

The last two of these critiques can be traced back as far as 1969 when the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Fayes Le Camarade Mallarm" attacked the structuralist journal Tel Quel and the work of Derrida published in it as enemies of the French left. The brunt of the attack was the allegation that Tel Quel had facilitated the introduction of a language derived from Germanys extreme-right which had been displaced, unknown to all, and introduced into the Parisian left. For Faye, Derrida was indicative of le malheur Heideggerien, the Heideggerian misfortune, which is the appropriation of a right-wing (ultimately National Socialist) philosophy by an ostensibly left-wing philosopher. According to Faye, despite its pronounced support for left-leaning political action and affiliation with the French Communist Party, Tel Quel through the work of Derrida was surreptitiously leading French youth toward right-wing extremism.

Fredric Jamesons Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism offered a variation on this theme in New Left Review in 1984, and in 1994, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob appropriated the same critique in their book Telling the Truth About History. In this version, deconstruction was deemed inappropriate for the study of history because it ostensibly leads to relativism but also because Derrida and deconstruction were influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger who both made notoriously antidemocratic, anti-Western, and antihumanist pronouncements and were associated sometimes fairly, sometimes not, with anti-Semitism. The authors are then quick to point out that Hitler cited Nietzsche in support of his racial ideology, and Heidegger himself joined the Nazi Party. As with Faye and Jameson, the association with Heidegger is sufficient to stop the analysis.

Brennan himself echoed Fayes argument in a 2006 Chronicle article:

Brennan more recently argues that,

In doing so, he links Fayes argument about deconstructions right-wing DNA (Critique 4) to a separate dismissal based on the idea that deconstruction leads to radical skepticism and total relativism (Critique 2). This latter argument also appears in the Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob book; in Bruno Latours famous 2004 essay Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?, and in Rita Felskis 2015 The Limits of Critique. These are each slippery slope arguments: The critical apparatus of deconstruction, they hold, necessarily slides into a realm of endless critique that blurs the lines between fact and fiction, good and bad, or right and wrong. Works of deconstruction are like Trojan horses: Open Derridas Of Grammatology and watch out! little Nazis will come hopping out. On this line of argument, scholars who work with deconstruction are aiding and abetting the enemy and ultimately enabling authoritarianism. What is neglected in such attacks and dismissals is of course any discussion of deconstruction itself as mode of discourse or interpretative approach.

GRARD RONDEAU, REDUX

Jones-Katzs book does not tackle this issue directly but it does offer a powerful and convincing historical narrative about how deconstruction took root in America as well as accounts of the intellectual figures and institutions that allowed it to do so. Brennan tethers his dismissal of deconstruction to the institutions and charismatic figures discussed in the book and by doing so he avoids the question he sets out to answer: What, indeed, was deconstruction? Instead, he decries the damage deconstruction is doing to this day as a conduit for right-wing thought that undermines credibility while deactivating emancipatory politics. The accusation is bolstered by descriptions of actual academics culled from Jones-Katzs book but ultimately serves as justification for not engaging with works of deconstruction by Derrida or Paul de Man or current scholars.

Counterintuitively, in addition to deconstruction being a dangerous philosophy, its critics also tell us it is a silly one because it remains a style of thought more complained about than understood, less outrageous than deliberately elusive (Critique 1). The rhetorical trick of this dismissal is that it allows those making it to avoid defining deconstruction by asserting that it is impossible to define. To be sure, deconstruction, like much philosophy, is difficult and requires study but does this make it deliberately elusive? What is deconstruction? To me it is quite clear.

The deconstructive strategy is to approach a text as a site of contestation and struggle where one tendency in that text asserts itself as the source of order and thus establishes a hierarchy of meaning. The hierarchy is constructed in an oppositional binary that is presented as neutral and thus conceals the organizing principle (good and evil is a simple one). The intention of the author is rendered irrelevant for the deconstruction because the construction of the text may very well lie on unconscious, unquestioned, naturalized, or implicit assumptions that are at work in the ordering process. The deconstruction exposes the binary construct and arbitrary nature of the hierarchy by revealing an exchange of properties between the two tendencies. Whats more, much can be gleaned by what is left out of the text, and this, too, can be used to unsettle authoritative pronouncements. I should also note that each of these goals and practices is accepted under different guises by all the critics of deconstruction.

In my book Haunting History (Stanford University Press, 2017) I argue for the utility of deconstruction as an approach to the past, and in Emmanuel Levinass Talmudic Turn (Stanford, 2022) I applied that approach. Far from Brennans assertion that deconstruction holds an aversion toward situating the movement in its time and place, I contend that deconstruction allows one to grapple with the ways that ideas and concepts drift over time and place leaving traces behind that we later take as original. Deconstruction reveals the moment of decision when the story or argument is structured according to a hierarchical ordering that privileges certain possibilities and discounts others (clear/evasive, stable/relative, modern/postmodern).

In this way, deconstruction reveals the legitimizing strategies of the author while upsetting the authority of any one particular telling. Deconstruction is not itself evasive but it enables us to recognize that much of what we know and even are is. Deconstruction is not the source of post-truth but it is a powerful tool to recognize and analyze the instability of truth regimes. This includes the very real possibility that the current conception of truth and facts as secured by the credibility and unquestioned authority of the expert, the scientist, the historian, has waned such that the epistemic fabric which held this conception of truths and facts firm in relation to the authority of science has become loose, or even undone. In this light, Brennan and other critics of deconstruction are blaming the messenger while doing nothing to address the crisis they ascribe to it. By exposing instability, deconstruction opens the possibility for a response, be it through revision, re-interpretation, or re-evaluation.

Deconstruction is not a circumscribed period of time or grouping of thinkers, even though a history of deconstruction such as Jones-Katzs can tell a story of deconstruction in that way. Instead, I see deconstruction as a perpetually futural gesture toward what comes after our now. It is a strategy of looking forward and beyond where we are that does not disregard the past but neither does it fetishize it or finalize it as a what was. The fiction of a stable past is the fiction of a stable present. If we shift our gaze toward the future, and accept the unstable nature of the present, we see that the deconstructive approach equips us to engage our current climate in a way that looks forward instead of back.

Yes, this entails the decentering of the subject as the locus of stable meaning, but it opens up fields of scholarship and politics to actors (human and nonhuman) who/which had previously been excluded because they did not match the criteria of what a subject should be or how a subject should look. Because the subject is decentered, the hierarchy of subject position cannot be simply inverted (which could replicate the initial logic of exclusion). The sober recognition that truth and facts are socially constructed, thus historically and culturally contingent, likewise forces scholars to consider the way systems of knowledge change or differ across space and time and thus are not cast in stone. The diagnosis of systems of power and the role they play in determining which subjects, truths, and facts are privileged and which are not, likewise provides an entrance into analysis, critique, resistance, or support.

In each case scholars are no longer able to rest on naturalized suppositions of what counts (as subject, fact, truth, authority) based on what was but are forced to construct arguments in defense of such assertions that are sufficiently convincing to counter competing claims by looking to what is. Yes, these arguments too can be deconstructed, but therein lies the possibility of dialogue even at the cost of recognizing instability and questioning credibility.

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Deconstruction Isn't Dead - The Chronicle of Higher Education