Butker Dumbs Down the Discourse at Benedictine
and other updates
Updates
So Stephen went on the COMPACT pod with
to discuss his article on police reforms in Newark and rediscovering black radicalism.You may also want to check out his interview with Nicolette Polek in Interview Magazine (possibly one of the most unironic Christian interviews in there ever…I’m sure we made Andy Warhol very proud), his piece in The Critic on how it’s not cool to feel bad for Armenians (and healing from generational trauma), and his review of Carlos Eire’s book They Flew on levitating saints.
Get ready for more deets about the zine vol. ii drop next week.
BC fiasco
We’ve been asked to offer our hot takes on Harrison Butker’s commencement address at Benedictine College. And we’re glad to inform you, we have none.
(We should acknowledge that we have many friends at BC, and that the institution itself doesn’t deserve to be trashed.)
Before reading on, we strongly suggest you check out Emilia Tanu’s essay on being an unironic tradwife, which eerily addressed Butker’s assertions 5 days before he even made them, as well as
’s classic piece about the difference between being a Christian dad and being a manosphere influencer.The only hot take worth offering is that the whole media firestorm this has engendered is emblematic of how powerful a hold that abstract, technocratic institutions of power have over “the discourse.”
The fact that people are regurgitating seemingly algorithmically generated reactions to the speech—from those who think he was sexist and not truly Christian, to those who think he’s a courageous defender of the truth—seem to not realize that both the content of his speech and the nature of their reactions stem from simplistic, prefabricated discourses that are designed to (1) remove both the imperative and the capacity to formulate, nuanced, original, and insightful ideas and (2) to divide the masses, to make them bicker over idiotic “issues” while the real power players continue to run the show—often to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of the everyday people, who day by day are being robbed more and more of their agency—behind the scenes.
In our piece on the corporatization of universities, we cited the prophetic dialogue between Luigi Giussani and Giovanni Testori (recently published in English), in which they express their concern over the increasing sway held by “abstract powers” which have the capacity to dehumanize us and leave us feeling alienated and disillusioned with existence.
The curse is truly this: that the cells of man, trying to take themselves away from the One from whom it is impossible to take oneself away, have become an abstraction—therefore, they generate a continual abstraction. Even in the great powers, power always coincides less with the face of the one who nominally holds it: the face of Carter, the face of Brezhnev. It is no longer like it was some ten years ago. You could still see Kennedy; you could still see Stalin. They were what they were, but they still had their faces.
Today we proceed to powers that no longer have physical faces, faces in which the memory of man can recognize itself, however distorted or disfigured. Having wanted to take away the reality of being children— and therefore the presence, the seal, the imprint of the Father—the political powers have also become machines— monstrosities, abstractions.
Such sophomoric debates in the public sphere serve to further distract us from what’s at hand, and exemplifies how the real “enemy” remains abstract, “occult”—hidden from public view.
It’s worth emphasizing how much (especially in the US) Christian’s seem to forget that their main mission—other than spreading the Truth (which is quite distinct from an ideology—for us Truth is a Person, not an idea)—is to be agents of unity…to foster the unity between God and (wo)man , and man and his neighbor. God desires “mercy not sacrifice.” He is more interested in you attempting to build bridges with your neighbor than distinguishing yourself from them because they hold the wrong ideology. By all means correct them…but you should be more focused on expending your energy on seeking the Truth in unity with them—even if in only the most miniscule way (thus, mercy).
This imperative to foster unity is in part ontological and moral—we are by our nature designed for this ideal. But it’s also strategic: In the face of evil and the power it holds over us (especially in its abstract forms during our technocratic neoliberal era), the unity of the masses is one of our strongest defenses against said evil and abuses of power (thus, subsidiarity). In the words of Ms. Lauryn Hill, we should be more invested in being righteous than being right.
That being said, as much as I value orthodoxy on a moral and spiritual level, I’m very open to engaging with heterodox ideas on an intellectual level. I’m open to engaging with hard gender essentialists and radical non-essentialists—but I’m extremely hesitant when such ideas are espoused by people who are mimetically regurgitating an algorithmically formulated idea, rather than by someone who has arrived at said idea through their own critical inquiry, with attention to nuances and pitfalls of said idea, as well as acknowledging the strengths of other people’s ideas. I’ll engage with a Glenn Loury or Sister Teresa Forcades, but rather not with Ben Shapiro or Robin D’Angelo.
The new zine revolves around these themes of going meta, flying above the drabness and stupidity of the discourse, and resisting the polemical, divisive spirit than only exacerbates the normalization of stupidity and the current bureaucratic hegemony.
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