a working thesis on what's wrong with Christian transhumanist Christology

The final chapter of Cyborg Selves is a briefly sketched foray into Christology, a sort of preliminary attempt to move out of the locus of theological anthropology into the systematic implications for Christology, focused on the notion of "cyborg Christ." As others have correctly pointed out in engaging with the text, this is the least developed chapter of the book. (It was however one of the most fun bits to write--I remember working on this chapter fondly, second only to the little section riff on cyborgs in the Garden. And for the record I super regret that I did not fight for the much better title Cyborgs in the Garden but I was much younger and unsure of myself and it was my first (to date, still only) book publication, and I had no idea what sort of things one could and could not advocate for. I was also busy with a preschooler and a 3 month old infant, so standing up for myself was basically last on every daily to-do list. Anyway, I digress, as is my right, here on this blog that is essentially just for me.)

So, anyhow: yes, this posthuman stuff has some systematic theological implications for Christology, and I have been aware of this all along, and participating in the recent Global Network for Digital Theology conference has had me thinking about this stuff again in between the advising meetings and orientation sessions and schedule-building that fill my summertime routine as academic advisor. 

This morning, as I was sitting on my porch sitting with the cat in my lap drinking my first cup of coffee, I realized that the right way to get at what is so entirely wrong with the attempt at Christian Transhumanism has to be gotten at through Christology, and that what I ought to be doing is working through, carefully, why and how cyborg Christ is a different Christological construct than the transhuman Christ. 

This is part of how that final chapter of Cyborg Selves deviates from the overall project of the book: what it does not do, at any point, is the work of contrasting a critical posthuman ctborg Christ with a transhumanist Christology. I suppose it didn't occur to me at the time, partly because, in my own mind, I was simply engaging in some constructive theological play, and also partly because there probably wasn't anything to engage with on this. The CTA did not yet exist as an organization, and transhumanism as a movement was basically profoundly uninterested in dialogue with religion and theologies of any sort. And, frankly, no one suggested it to me as a critical gap in the chapter. So--it's not there.

But now this gap is crucial. 

So maybe this is the next project. Ideally, this is a book and certainly it feels as if Cyborg Selves has set this up as the natural next step. (I would still love, someday, to write the book on birthing and gender and sexuality and reproductive technologies and critical posthumanism that I've been dreaming about doing, and the current Christotechnofascist regime makes this feel more urgent all the time, alhtough when I start thinking about that I really think what I ought to be doing is birth doula work or start certifying as a midwife. But without some sort of reconfiguration of my professional circumstances to make space for this I truly do not see how to make any sort of scholarship happen. It might be as simple as getting the workload whittled back down to a level that doesn't have me burnt out to the point that I spent most Saturdays simply sleeping all day as a means of physical recovery and mental escape from feeling like every single waking moment I am on the hook to answer everyone's requests about literally everything. Again, I digress. As is my right.)

My basic intuition on this is that kenosis is the right concept for articulating the contrast. Transhumanism is, in my judgment, an articulation of a desire for the endless expansion of the self, and (truly unfortunately) I do not see this basic desire eliminated or transformed in Christian transhumanism. Rather, what Christian transhumanism does is take this desire and map it back on to Christianity, providing a kind of moral justification and even a theological mandate for this desire. But this is jarringly inconsistent if kenosis is at the center of Christology--and so, the depiction of Christ is not a kenotic one, but the glorified, ascended, triumphant Christ, and it is this Christ we are invited to pattern ourselves and our desires after. Ultimately this means we aspire to that same glorified, ascendant, triumphant embodied and exemplified in Christ that is also our destiny--Christ is forerunner, Christ is foretaste of our destined glory, Christ is our future perfection personified. This is the Christ who has returned to fullness, and we are not dwelling on Christ who did not find all of this worth grasping on to, but emptied himself to take on--yes, exactly, y'all--a merely human existence in solidarity, in identity-with, us. 

But a cyborg Christology absolutely depends upon this moment, this decision, this identity-with. Otherwise there is nothing cyborg-y happening, at all. Or to put it a more theology-forward way, a kenotic Christology can be articulated through the cyborg figure.

This also connects back to Brent Waters' work on a theological notion of hospitality, as making room for the other. This is in direct tension with transhumanist desire for the endless expansion of self. And then is a great invitation to go back to his early work, of which I am highly critical in Cyborg Selves, and see what revisiting this might yield. I fully anticipate I still disagree with some of that articulation, but he has always been a fantastic interlocutor (and, in person, truly gracious and collegial). 

Once again I'm back to my basic sense that the problem with Christian transhumanism is that transhumanism amplifies the worst Christian theological mistakes.

Anyhow, this is a serious project and certainly would mean a return to the world of real systematic theology and y'all, it feels like it's been awhile. Mostly I think about other things now, and those things are mostly boring, institutional things like, "why don't we ever have enough BUS 101 seats for incoming Business majors?" and my confidence is shot. And time, time, I need time.

my therapist said, that sounds like trauma

Memory:

I'm 22 years old. I'm in Wuhan, China, sitting on a plasticky faux leather couch in my apartment on the campus of the teacher's college where I am a Foreign Teacher. I'm listening to a man in his 50's, a fellow American missionary, tell a girl of 16 or so why she isn't a Real Christian yet, while she cries but gamely tries to hold her own during his theological interrogation. I am seething. I try to interrupt, ask critical questions of my own, point out the inconsistencies and the absurd hermeneutics at work in his shoddy argumentation. I'm shut down, and finally, simply ignored. It's like my voice makes no sound. I invited this man. I let him into my apartment, and introduced my friend to him. He's now theologically terrorizing her in my living room. Later, after he has forced her, all of us, into submission, he will baptize her in a hotel swimming pool, laying his hands on her in a mockery of a sacred ritual. I stand by and witness. This is my fault.

When I described this event to my first therapist years ago, I wasn't trying to process feelings, I was just trying to convey what being from my church tradition was like. When she responded that this memory sounded like trauma, I laughed. That's just what it's like, I said. That's what I need you to understand.

new publication: "Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanism" chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Digital Theology

Over the next couple of days, I'm participating remotely in an online conference in part to celebrate/promote the publication of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Theology, to which I contributed a chapter titled "Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanism." Available for pre-order here!

In this chapter, I reiterate my now-familiar (well, familiar to anyone who has read anything I've ever published) that Transhumanism and critical posthumanism are not the same thing at all. I rehease briefly the different origins of these dicourses, their different underlying philosophical assumptions, and their different motivating concerns and goals. 

I then argue that the benefit of theological engagement with both discourses is that critical posthumanism, as a dialogue partner, is a resource for critical analysis of both H+ and Christian theology. Critical posthumanism helps us guard against bad theological constructions just as much as it helps reveal the impoverished philosophical and moral assumptions of H+. To be blunt (which I will be, here, because this is my blog and who cares), there are bad theological reasons to Just Say No to H+, and there are good ones, and critical posthumanism assists in articulating the good ones.

This claim, it now seems to me, requires taking an explicit stance against the formulation of "Christian Transhumanism." You can read my previous blog rant, born of frustration with Christian Transhumanism's apparently complete reticence to critique or distance itself at all from the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and their public alliance with fascism, white supremacy, and violence, here. As I mentioned in that post, for a long time I have existed on the fringe of this movement, as an intentional and critical lurker, and it seemed important to me back in the 2010's to be generous about potential engagements between theology and the subset of transhumanism variously labeled "democratic transhumanism" or"technoprogressivism." I am no longer inclined to be generous. 

So, let's make it official: I do not think that "Christian" Transhumanism is possible. If it's Christian, it's not Transhumanism. Not because of God-given "Human Nature" or natural limits as inherently good or immutable, or cautions against hubristic "playing God," or any of the reactionary bullshit theological objections that partake, just as much as H+ itself does, in assumptions of hierarchical ontological value. Rather, because the central motivating vision of transhumanism is endless individualistic self-expansion, and this is simply the opposite of anything Jesus ever taught or modeled. This is not WWJD. This is not What Jesus Would have us Do, either.

This isn't about attitudes toward technology as a category or technologies as specific applications! It has nothing at all to do with technology! This is why having critical posthumanism in the conversation is so important--it belies the claim that all theological rejections of transhumanism are somehow reactionary traditionalist Luddite mistakes (also: Luddites weren't simplistic anti-tech either anyhow). I want a Christian theology that embraces technology and even a posthuman ontology, and therefore I require technology to be anti-fascist and oriented toward the actual common good, for humans and nonhumans and posthumans of all sorts.

So, a great big emphatic NO to ChristoTechnoFascism from me. 

Cyborgs for a Liveable World.

Hail Mary: the Good Guy is a Teacher, and the Classroom has No Screens

 Just a brief observation.

The movie opens and tells us who the Good Guy is by showing us a teacher interacting with students in a open, conversational, vulnerable, authentic way. The teacher models curiosity. Students ask questions. The teacher answers them honestly.

The movie ends by showing us the Good Guy being a teacher, interacting with students, modeling curiosity and openness and vulnerability and authenticity.

There are no screens in those classrooms, although the classroom is not devoid of tech.

Knowledge is social; learning is relational. Tech is optional.

When will Christian Transhumanism get political?

When the Christian Transhumanism Association first became organized, I was invited to lurk on the fringes and even, for a brief period of time and very nominally, invited to be a theological presence in a kind of consultatory capacity. From the beginning, I was ambivalent about this, because I have always been very deeply unimpressed with transhumanism as a cultural and pseudo-philosophical movement, and nothing that has transpired since I first began researching transhumanism in earnest in about 2006 has shifted this impression. 

In 2012, I wrote that "democratic transhumanism," aka "technoprogressivism," seemed to me to be the least objectionable formulation of these ideas--at least, this group seemed to be attempting to hold on to democratic norms of distributive justice and the like. But even then, this generosity was less a matter of affirmation than an attempt at hopeful construction: an invitation, to the H+ corner that might be most receptive to it, to be serious and less insular and join other kinds of thinkers on a joint project to imagine a better world for everyone and to think through the impossiblities and injustices insisted upon by their more libertarian (and increasingly over time, frankly authoritarian) counterparts. These folks were the most willing to dialogue with religious thinkers and theologians, and it seemed like we might build enough common ground to be useful interlocutors for each other. And this seemed like the branch of transhumanism that the emerging CTA was most in dialogue with. 

So, when the CTA first organized, I was there at its inaugural conference, hosted at Lipscomb University in Nashville, TN, one of the flagship educational institutions of the Churches of Christ. I even chaired a panel as a favor, since I was there anyway for the Christian Scholar's Conference that same week--the weirdest and wildest moderating I've ever been tasked with.

Since then, I've been a name on the roster in the Facebook group although the number of times I've participated in a comment thread can't be more than half a dozen. I've been periodically tempted to leave over the years, but every time I've thought, well, this might be useful for research purposes?, and I've ended up deciding to continue to lurk on the fringe. In the past couple of years, I have seen an increase in posts there of the most wide-eyed, credulous sort: posts about ChatGPT theologizing (whuuuuuutttttttf) and all sorts of I-just-read-this-unvetted-hype-can-you-believe-what's-just-around-the-corner posts. There's very little actual theological work happening, and when there is, it seems to be sui generis blog posts, as if no previous serious theological work on transhumanism/posthumanism exists or can be found. (And there is plenty! Including, of course, mine. I mean, not to be petty, but as this is my blog I might as well acknowledge how very special that particular feeling of erasure is.)

All of this to say: I have always been dubious about the very idea of Christian Transhumanism, and ambivalent at best about the CTA as an organization.

But in the last year or so, I have become increasingly alarmed, not at the routine silliness of the posts and discussions in this space, although these continue to frustrate and baffle me, but at the absolute refusal of the CTA to say anything at all--anything at all--about the implications of the emergence of tech and transhumanism as political players on the side of the undeniably authoritarian Christotechnofascist Trump government. (Well, "government.") Not a single post. Nothing.

Nothing about Elon Musk's interference in the election with his giant pots of money and crazy stage stunts; nothing about his political downfall, meltdowns, racist chatbot, unethical business practices and repeated lies; nothing about Peter Thiel's influence over various members of the Trump entourage, including his orchestration of Vance's career (well, "career") and putative religious conversion, or Thiel's very weird "theology" lectures; nothing about the gleeful, reckless stuffing of "AI" into various government agencies as the replacement for all the people unlawfully fired by Musk and the DOGE-bros; nothing about the role of Palantir and surveillance tech; nothing about the gutting of scientific research, the insertion of literally anti-science kooks into leadership, or the coercion of universities on false pretences.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing about the H+ and H+ adjacent Tech Bros and their very public shift of political allegiances to far-right authoritarian extremism, for the simple reason that it works out just great for them.

So, guys. Look, this is a moment that calls for real theology. The kind of theology that produced principled dissent in the past, and resulted in documents like the Barmen Declaration. It calls for self-examination, and repentance. It calls for taking a good hard look at what has actually become your driving motivation, and therefore the determiner of who you're willing to ally with, what projects you're taking on, and how, and why. And if what really matters to you is some batshit H+ fantasy of life extension and neato gadgets--and that to get at that, you're willing to sit tight and keep silent while thousands of people are currently dying and thousands more will, because you traded your trust in actual science for self-serving H+ bullshit--well, then, Christian Transhumanism was just an early adopter of the whole Christotechnofascism thing all along, I guess, and I really misplaced my early ambivalent generosity.

So, I'm waiting. What will it take? One more war? One more murdered protestor? One more story of Palantir or Anthropic or Open AI aided government surveillance and kidnapping and concentration camp deaths? Will it take the installation of a Chat-GPT Trump as Forever President after Our Dear Leader finally shuffles off his mortal coil to ring the alarm bell that these guys are not the Good Guys? Is there anything that would prompt a public theologically and ethically grounded repudiation of these technologies that are obviously, explicitly, intentionally causing harm in order consolidate power and profit, from the CTA?

...?

 

the only way to follow Jesus is post-Christian

Look, I know there's a brand of spiritual-but-not-religious anti-institutional naive youthful rebelliousness out there, the kind that commits to an unexamined universalizing implicit assumption that "Religion" is to blame for ruining pure spirituality and therefore the only thing to do is to be bravely, individually, uniquely and eclectically spiritual. Build your own system of spiritual beliefs that work for you from the bits of your World Religions class that you happened to pay attention to, yadayada. Crystals, a bit of Stoicism, a favorite Hindu deity, meditation, Jesus is Just All Right, I don't pray but I believe in manifesting. 

That's not what I mean. I mean something like the Tillichian death of religious symbols is happening with the word "Christian." And this isn't a slow death of meaning from lack of use--the kind of thing (if I remember right) Tillich was originally positing. If anything, it's a death of meaning from semantic abuse and overuse. I think the label "Christian" is dead because it's been actively crucified by people who would, had they been there, happily crucified Jesus--that upstart subversive bleeding heart do-gooder with as much interest in upholding the reigning power structure as he had in directly politically disrupting it--and what these folks mean when they embrace the word "Christian" is a shambling zombie corpse of the religion they are daily crucifying.

So I don't think we need to take on the task of rehabilitating this word. Let it die. What do we need it for? Jesus wasn't a Christian. If what you're after is following that guy, what's this word got to do with it?

I am aware that this is complicated, that there are institutions affiliated with the word "Christian" in various ways that are engaging in active resistance to the criminal injustices of the Christotechnofascists who are currently murdering and kidnapping people in the streets, who are illegally perpetrating wars around the globe, who are plotting in plain sight to remain in power in ways that are "democratic" in the same sense that these guys are "Christian." And we need those institutions to resist, and to resist as institutions, not just collections of individuals. 

Even so: the project is not rehabbing the label. Let "Christianity" become a term of contempt. Let it be radioactively unusable for the next century, for perpetuity. Let's stop worrying about whether or not we can be "Christians" or whether we have to be content to continually post-pend it with "-but-not-that-kind-of-Christian." Let's accept the death of this symbol and move on because we've got better things to do than defend this word. Let the fascists have it. Let's bury them with it. 

our best defense against AI bullshit is engaged pedagogy

For years now, every semester, regardless of which class I'm teaching, I spend the first couple of class periods asking the students to collaborate together on syllabus policy for attendance, late work, and overall assignment weighting for final grade calculation. I've done this with intro-level Philosophy, First Year Seminar, gen ed courses, upper-level courses--doesn't matter. I love it. The immediate benefits are: 

1. students actually know what the policies are and don't pretend ignorance throughout the semester as their first excuse and get-out-of-jail-free card;
2. students generally don't ask me to just ignore or break our policy when they run afoul of it;
3. the policies themselves are better: clear, comprehensive, student-friendly, incentive-based rather than punitive, and oriented toward achieving the real objective;
4. the meta-understanding produced by forcing them to identify the real objective (learning together) and work to articulate a practical policy applications to achieve this (once they understand how hard it is to make these decisions, they respect the whole idea of a syllabus a whole lot more); 
5. this is an intentional invitation into scholarly community and a gesture of respect for their agency;
6. they have to talk to each other, learn names, and work together on a common project for mutual benefit literally from Day 1.

I run this by putting students into small groups and giving them about 15 minutes to craft a policy proposal. It works best if you ask them to start with the question, "what is this for/what are we trying to achieve?" For example, attendance: what do we really want? We want everyone to come to class. What kind of policy will achieve this? Students are often stuck in the default "three excused absences and then x% of your final grade" mentality. First round results yield a lot of unimaginative variations on this kind of scheme. It is a great pleasure to listen to these and then say, "Nope. Not doing it. Not doing anything like that. Here's why: this doesn't achieve the objective. Are these policies going to motivate you to come to class? Hell no. We can do better. Back to the drawing board, get creative." Over the years, students have come up with all kinds of effective incentives: stickers, favorite junk food prizes, bonus points on the final grade for "streaks" of perfect attendance, possible exemption from the final exam for perfect attendance, bonus points for days of collective 100% attendance. These work because they are identifying actual motivators and along the way, getting the message that attendance is a prerequisite for real learning.

When I first started this, I really thought that the increase in attendance and reduction in student complaints/weaseling attempts were the main benefits--and honestly, that would be enough to keep me doing it. But the longer I've done this, the more important the last two items in my list above have begun to seem.

This semester, I decided to add another day for this process--this means we spent Week 1 (Thursday) and all of Week 2 (Tuesday and Thursday) on syllabus negotiation--and, because it's Women in Philosophy, I combined this with an assigned reading for Week 2, the Intro and Chapter 1 of bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress. Their regular Reading Response and in-class Written Reflection for this reading asked them to connect the dots between our first two weeks and the engaged pedagogy hooks describes.

The rest of the course is designed around providing maximum engagement and agency for the students. We begin Tuesdays with 15 minutes of small group discussion on the reading, which I do not monitor or participate in and is graded solely through periodic self- and peer-evaluation throughout the semester. They decided on the weighting for this component of their final grade. Their Term Project is wide open: who do you want to learn about? what sort of end result do you want to produce and share with the rest of us? do you want to team up or go it alone? We'll have a week of shared learning about various figures not already featured in our syllabus, that includes a participatory game show, two short creative film projects, a video essay, a professional Business presentation, a mood board, a scrapbook, ...you get the idea. 

For the first time in about 3 years, I have zero anxiety about students cutting corners with AI.

These students didn't just sign up for the class, they have signed on. They're determined to get that 100% attendance because the bonus that motivates them is exemption from the final exam. They're excited about the Term Project because they designed it, and they want to do it, which means they won't be trying to cut the corners with a bullshit machine that undermines their learning process. They do the reading because they're curious, and because they're accountable to each other for showing up prepared for discussion. 

We can try to "AI-proof" our syllabus and assignments with in-class writing and Blue Books, and while that's necessary, I think, it fails to address the really pernicious problem that the advent of the Bullshit Machine has exacerbated. The really pernicious problem is the default adversarial starting point of the classroom. We already existed in a not-great transactional default setting--students think they're in college to get a degree in order to get a job in order to maintain an existential illustion of socioeconomic security. Faculty put up with it because there's no other way to do the bits of our jobs that we do enjoy (research, teaching the handful of students who do actually want to learn). But the Bullshit Machine moves us from default transactional to default adversarial. Students are looking for ways to get away with it all right, and faculty are on high alert to prevent them. We're on opposing teams from the start, and the mutual suspicion forecloses any possibility of real learning happening. Because learning is collaborative.

So we can't solve this through syllabus policy, or assignment design. We have to solve the real problem, the perception that the classroom is a bullshit contest to see who can get away with what and who can catch who's trying to get away with it. 

We have to learn how to trust our students to do the work, and students have to learn to trust their professor is asking them to do worthwhile work, and learn to trust themselves that they can in fact do it. And the only way to do that is make it as plain as possible that the work is the point, and that there's only one team in the classroom and we're all on it together.

That's what the syllabus policy negotiation does better than anything else, and making the theoretical underpinning of it explicit this semester cemented this for Women in Philosophy in a way I've not seen before. Would it work as well in a gen-ed class? Maybe not; but it can't hurt, and I think every classroom ought to be sending the message that we are taking the work seriously, taking students seriously, and intend to accomplish something worthwhile in our time together. 

pedagogy in the unfortunate age of so-called AI

 Maybe it's impossible to truly "AI proof" a course, but that's not gonna stop a girl from trying.

I don't like quizzes as accountability mechanisms, so in upper-level courses I use reading responses: questions, quote, commentary is my format. Questions related to the reading, a quote with a page number cited, and commentary capturing the initial thoughts in response to the reading. I told them I wanted it to pull back the veil on their brain-workings, and that's it. No polish. That their audience is not me, but their own selves, and ffs not to try to be impressive. I want this to be RAW. UGLY. BRUTAL. USEFUL. REAL.

So Day 1 of my upper-level elective Women in Philosophy course I showed the students an example of What Dr. Thweatt Does Not Want in a Reading Response.

What Dr. Thweatt Does Not Want in a Reading Response is a ChatGPT generated document following my exact instructions for Reading Responses. ChatGPT flawlessly followed the structure of the assignment, provided multiple bullshit fake-performative non-questions, a quote with a fake citation, and a bullsit commentary written in the first person.(As a bonus, at the end of generating this for me, it offered to write a full essay. That's SO GROSS.)

Anyhow, when I put this on the screen as an example of What Dr. Thweatt Does Not Want, I asked my students what was wrong with it.

First comment: "it seems like these questions...aren't real questions. Like, they sound like they're based on the text but it's not like they are questions someone would actually be asking, if they were trying to understand the reading"

Second comment: "This feels perfomative"

Good. GOOD. Yes, yes, my chickens, you are preceiving correctly. 

So then I said, that's right. These aren't real questions. When you try to answer them, you can tell that there's not an actual question there, because there's nothing you can actually say in reply. It's just words strung together in grammatically correct ways with a question mark at the end. Then I said, the other thing, of course, that is wrong with this, is that this is ChatGPT.

And 5 students immediately said in unison, "I knew it!" And I said, that's right. You did know it, because this stuff stinks. It stinks because it's bullshit, and we're all pretty good bullshit detectors. YOU KNOW IT. AND I KNOW IT. AND IT'S NOT HARD TO SEE IT. SO DON'T DO THIS.

Just don't do it. It's not what I'm asking for. ChatGPT can't do what I'm asking for. And I can spot the difference. So let's just establish this as baseline on Day 1, okay?

We'll see if this helps? But it's also true that these students are taking this as an elective--no one has to be in here--and it's mostly upper-level students who are pretty highly motivated. So this skews the results, proabably. But I'm (temporarily) heartened by the attitudes observed here--serious students, the ones who are actually interested in learning new skills and material and critical thinking, grasp that the bullshit-machine shortcut leads nowhere and they are not impressed. 

So: some of the kids, at least, are all right.

Obedience, the primary civic virtue under fascism.

When we walk with the Right

In the light of their might,

What a Glorious Gain they repay! 

While We do what They Will,

They Protect Us all still,

All of Us who will Trust and Obey.

Trust and Obey! For there's no other way

to live in this A-Mur'-ca, but to Trust and Obey.

Not a Burden We bear!
Not a Sorrow We share!
Those with Problems, must quickly away!

Not a Grief or a Loss,
Not a Frown or a Cross,

Not for Us! We will Trust and Obey!

Trust and Obey! For there's no other way

to live in this A-Mur'-ca, but to Trust and Obey.

But We never can Prove

Those We Blame should Remove--
Yet We cannot afford to Delay;

For the favor He shows

For the Blessings bestowed,
Are for Us, Who will Trust and Obey.

Trust and Obey! For there's no other way

to live in this A-Mur'-ca, but to Trust and Obey.

And Enthralled, ever sweet,
We will sit at His feet,
Or We'll Walk by His side All the Way;

What He says We will do,

Where He sends We will go;
Never question! Only Trust and Obey!

Trust and Obey! For there's no other way

to live in this A-Mur'-ca, but to Trust and Obey.

Original "Trust and Obey" lyrics by John H. Sammis. The above parody is mine. 

default stance: believe women

That's it. That's the whole post.

Just start with, believing women. Go from there. 

do you think other people are real

When Techbro asks Papa-Techbro this question in Mountainhead, it's played for laughs, as if we should receive this line as absurd caricature, like no one, not even Elon Musk, is really that delusional, I mean, can't be, right?

I think we ought to start asking people this question, regularly, in the increasingly unmoored conversations around "AI" carried on by befuddled people who don't understand what it is they're talking about but nonetheless want to opine about "inevitable futures" and "interesting possibilities." 

This is the way to cut through the bullshit and get right to the problem, when talking to someone who wants to claim that ChatGPT is a perfectly decent way to cope with loneliness, or a great solution to a shortage of available therapists, or that we can't tell people it's impossible to fall in love with the chatbot they named Erika and trained to sext.

Really? In love with Erika the sext-bot?

So there's not any difference at all between falling in love with a genuinely-different-from-you other, whose reciprocation of your desire for relationship and mutual understanding is wholly voluntary, and the funhouse-techno-mirror of your own masturbatory ego-needs? 

So do you think other people are real, at all, or...?

beset by religion

Below is the scripted version of my remarks at the campus event organized by our local chapter of SDS today. 

I'm speaking today as someone who--y'all may not know this about me--in a former life, was a preacher. So today, I'm gonna preach.

To the people in this crowd who are religious believers of some sort, and to people not among this crowd--maybe over there on the sidewalk somewhere--who identify as religious believers. And to people here who do not identify with any particular set of religious beliefs or tradition.

On the role of religion and religious belief, in the public square, in this political moment.

I saw a yikyak post last week (and yes, I repent), and it said something like: "don't y'all give up on religion just bc you've been wounded by bad religion in the past"

It's absolutely true that religion is often a tool wielded by oppressors.

And it's also true that in every place and every time where religion is being used to oppress and harm, we also find religion and religious belief present on the side of the oppressed.

The question is not whether 'religion' is itself good or bad but whether your religious beliefs are properly oriented to the good and y'all this is the thing that drove a Younger Me into the study of theology because as a devout, and I mean deeply devoted, preacher's kid from Middle Tennessee who'd spent her whole life in the church, in college I was haunted by the question, what if the gospel, the definitive "good news," what if the gospel...isn't good for people? What happens when the good news isn't good?

See, I was starting to see, now that I was in college--now that I was no longer a child, and like the Apostle Paul, could no longer continue to think like a child--now that I was in the world and growing up, I could see that the things I had been taught to believe (and taught to teach others to believe) were causing harm to people. Weren't good news. Were promoting condemnation and judgment, not care; were promoting indifference to suffering, not action; were promoting exclusion, not inclusion; ignorance, in the name of piety, not curiosity or truth-seeking or wisdom. I was taught to be concerned with being "correct," and with making sure other people were too. And I was beginning to see that this concern was the wrong concern; that this concern was harmful, not life-giving.

In this moment, in this political time and place, religion is on all sides. We are beset by religion. Self-identifying white evangelical Christians voted for the current President in overwhelming numbers. This is a statement of fact. In this moment, this political time and place, 'religion' is publicly and loudly allied with the oppressor.

And yet it is also true that in this moment, this political time and place, people of faith--self-identified Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Jains and Baha'i--are protesting and resisting and organizing and calling out the abuses and lawlessness and callousness and moral affronts of this government, not in spite of their beliefs but because of their beliefs, because their religious beliefs are properly oriented to the good.

So I want to say two more things: the first being, how do you know, if you're a religious person, whether you're the good kind or the bad kind? If your beliefs are truly good news, or bad news? How do you even know if you are wielding religion as an instrument of oppression? And the first thing to say in response to that is, well, are you even asking that question? Have you considered the possiblity that you might unwittingly be the bad guy, you might be the villain of the story? Or are you 100% convinced of your own righteousness? See that, right there, is your clue: You Might Be a Villain If... you are 100% convinced that of course not. The second thing I want to say in response is specifically Christian, from the book of James in the New Testament canon. James has a simple answer to this question. It's this: "religion that is pure and undefiled before god is this: visit the orphans and the widows in their affliction." And, "if you truly 'love your neighbor as yourself,'" then you're good but "if you show partiality"--to the rich over the poor, to your friends over you other neighbors, to the powerful over the helpless, to the citizens over the not-citizens--then, James says, "you sin." 

Y'all, it's just not that hard, it turns out. 

Are you loving your neighbor? Taking care of your neighbor? Or are you refusing to even recognize that person as a neighbor and instead calling them "illegal" and standing by while they get dragged by masked men into unmarked cars to be stuffed onto airplanes to be sent to countries they've never belonged to for crimes they never committed?

In that parable we call the "Good Samaritan," when Jesus was asked that famous follow-up evasive question--by a lawyer, naturally--attempting to find out the exact minimum of moral effort required of him to be properly neighborly, so he could do that and nothing more, Jesus flipped the script. He asked the lawyer instead, "who was the neighbor to" that man left for dead on the road. And the answer, grudgingly given, was "the one who cared for him."

Be the one who cares. That's how you know.

Finally, a word to those folks here who don't ascribe to religious beliefs of any particular sort: keep this space a big tent, keep this space a cyborg coalition, of every kind of believer and non-believer who has arrived, in their own way and for their own reasons, at the conclusion that this political moment, this time and place, demands their voice, their protest, their action, their care. Don't let's alienate each other over side quarrels when the moment demands joint action and solidarity. It is a mistake to think that you cannot ally for the common good with someone who's arrived at their understanding of the good from another path than yours. In the end, it's simple. The message is the same for the believer and the non-believer: just be the ones who care. Together, let's be the ones who care.

Weekend Review(s)

 Blob: A Love Story, by Maggie Su and Sinners, written, directed and produced by Ryan Coogler

So, this past weekend, I finally opened up a book lent to me by my colleague, whose description of it at our regular staff meeting a few weeks ago started with, "I have feelings about this book, but I don't know if I love it or I hate it, or maybe both. I need someone to read this so we can talk about it." Sold!

We (me + spouse, not aforementioned colleague) also finally achieved a date, although frankly, it was more effort than it should have been, but that's okay. So we managed (after a couple tries) to successfully get tickets to Sinners, at the newly renovated Epic Theatre in St. Augustine--which is very definitely much more swank than it used to be. Yippee!

What to talk about first??? Let's start with the book, since I finished it on the way to the theatre (I had about 20 pages left, and I just couldn't wait till bedtime).

My borrowed copy of Blob: A Love Story is now in the hands of to its next office recipient, because my initial comments about it intrigued her enough to snag it as I was returning it to its actual owner. So this review is going to be casual rather than careful, since I no longer have a copy for reference, and that's too bad, because Blob merits a careful review. For instance: I enjoyed it from about page 2, but I knew I was really in love (it is, after all, a love story) when I hit the sentence: "My parents, those level-headed mousekillers, would know what to do." That's a paraphrase, and I can't give you the page reference. But it's there, and it's...perfection.

Maggie Su can fucking write.

The main theme of Blob is the desperate, ugly, uncomfortable, inevitable stretch of time that all of us must--somehow--navigate in order to become, well, an actual person. For Bob (the eponymous Blob), this is literalized. For our narrator and protagonist, this is externalized in her efforts to make B(l)ob into a person; her failures, visible to her because externalized as this bizarre person-making project, eventually and finally make manifest her own necessary grappling with person-becoming-hood. I don't know how to say more without spoilers. 

Or you could say: Girl meets Blob, tries to make Blob into Ideal Boyfriend, fails, learns that Love isn't Coercion, and in Respecting the Other learns to respect herself.

Or, you could say: wow, that girl really just needed some competent academic advising. But perhaps that observation is a bit...particular to my specific locatedness in the world. 

Sinners.

I had no notion, really, of what we were walking into. I am late to the genre of scary movies (a deficit of growing up CofC), so I am not going to say anything insightful along these lines. And I don't know that I can avoid spoilers here, and I think I probably need a second viewing at least to really catch all the things. But a first viewing is enough to show you that something weird, interesting, complicated, historical and multi-faceted is going on with this story.

Mainly, what I want to capture here is a sense of the after-movie conversation we had in the car and walking around the grocery store on the way home. We started with the observation that the (spoiler) vampires in the movie appear at the door with a strange, insipidly harmonized and repetitive Irish-y folk song, and that Irish music (much more musically interesting and compelling) shows up again in the vampire gathering. This is a symmetrical contrast to the visually and musically stunning scene in the Juke, where the musical ancestral spirits are conjured by the talents of the human geniuses playing and communing. The contrast is of the celebration of multiplicity and diversity (humans in the Juke) to an assimilated univocality (vampires). But it would be a mistake to collapse vampirism onto white culture simpliciter (represented through the Irish). Instead: we ought to read the assimilation of Irish distinctiveness into the vampiric assimilative univocality as tragic, a commentary on the rootlessness and existential restlessness of an unmoored identity that finds its only definitive reference point as endless, insatiable desire for dominance. The vampires are code for Whiteness, absolutely, but a Whiteness that, as a void, erases Irishness along with erasing everything else. 

Further: this vampiric Whiteness is not just simple racism, as if the vampires are just the monster symbolic form of the Klan. Because the Klan is there too--as itself. Klan racism is battled straightforwardly in the last scene of the movie--vicious, brutal, direct racism is confronted directly. As a separate battle. So...the vampires aren't Klan. They're a different kind of racism. An assimiliative, inclusive, kind of racism. A tokenist, "fellowship of love," spiritual-rationalized kind of racism. Soft white supremacy, as contrasted with direct brutal violent white supremacy. Maybe, DEI-correct white supremacy.

Anyhow, these are first draft uncensored thoughts. I'd love to hear your responses to the movie when you see it!

rebirthing

My final blog posts on rude truth were meditations on the birth doula training I was finishing in 2015. So I thought I'd pick up where I left off (sort of), with the theme of rebirth. Welcome back to rude truth, again, nearly a decade later.

I might've gone with a new title altogether, since this is a new start and all. Plus, a year after I started the OG blog, Philip Roth used the phrase for his 2006 title and ever since I've felt a little odd about competing with a famous author person in google searches. But I still love it, goddammit, and the Emerson snippet that is its inspiration. (I assume this is also Roth's allusion but to be honest I have never actually read that book so I don't actually know. But surely it has to be.)

I also find the practice of speaking rude truth difficult, and always have, and it doesn't hurt to keep this in front of our eyeballs as an aspiration. Especially now.

Changes: well, I'm older, my kids are older, my back lowkey hurts a lot and perimenopause is a helluva constant companion, I've given up on the tenure-track thing but I'm lucky enough to have a job that keeps me in contact with academia and students, I've gotten divorced and remarried, and divorced, and astonishingly happily remarried, I haven't been to church but once since Covid, and don't really practice as a birth doula but use my DONA training in some way every single day. Rebirth has been a long and twisting negotiation through shifting circumstance, but I came through it okay. 

(I don't know if I'm the baby or the mother, there.)

A decade or so ago, I was still envisioning work within the Churches of Christ on gender justice as my life's project, and assuming that at some point I would find myself teaching theology in a Church of Christ school, or perhaps some other university, but still, orienting my scholarly work around contributing to the Church of Christ world in some significant way. I never actually intentionally "left" the CofC, as so many of my smart and principled friends have found it necessary to do. Instead I just gradually became aware that somewhere along the line, the CofC world had withdrawn from me, and I from it, and there was nothing much we had to say to one another that made any sense any more. It was a weird sort of break up, a very millenial ghosting type of thing. 

So I'm a theologian-at-large, and maybe even exile, who doesn't really do theology much anymore, but perhaps this is what blogs are really good for, yeah? The truth is, I don't know why I'm cranking up the old thing now. I don't have a coherent project in mind, unlike the old days. I'm not searching for one, either. 

But perhaps this is exactly parallel to the very beginning: in 2005, I didn't want an audience, and didn't have a project, other than my blog was a desperate reach for a mechanism to help recover the ability to speak aloud what I was thinking, when the competitive atmosphere of doctoral seminars had produced a kind of paralysis in me. It's difficult to speak the rude truth into any space, but when the spaces you're inhabiting make it much easier to keep quiet, you need a place to practice. That was the original point. And maybe that's all a blog is really meant to be.