“You keep using that word…”
If this is any indication, “the Benedict Option” now means so many different things it effectively means nothing at all, and has nothing further to do but die out. There’s nothing I hate more than Alasdair MacIntyre’s implicit (and sometimes explicit) totalitarianism, so I’m delighted!
Some ridiculous ideological cant, well exposed. Keep working and keep submitting, whoever you are, if you’ve got the goods!
Gabbert has effectively done away with imagination. She has reduced art to dressed-up autobiography. That’s why “colonization” is an omnipresent danger. Since all art is predicated on personal history, a white male in Minneapolis should not write about an Afro-Cuban lesbian in Havana; doing so steals from Afro-Cuban, Havanan lesbians their stories.
But the whole point of imagination is that it is borderless.
…
Gabbert’s view of art destroys art’s universality — what Aristotle called “general truths,” which are the stuff of the poet, as opposed to the “particular facts” in which the historian traffics. For this reason, said Aristotle, poetry is more philosophical than history.
(source: Elisa Gabbert: Blunt Instrument Column—Advice for White Males)
Further thoughts – with bigger spoilers this time! – on the new Avengers movie, adding to my previous thoughts about Romantic individualism and technocracy. I saw the movie again, and this time what stood out was Families Versus Monsters:
In one corner we have Tony Stark, the Romantic individualist. With clear echoes of the Frankenstein myth, he seduces Banner away from loyalty to the group, seduces him into creating a “monster.” He even says to Banner “we’re monsters” and urges him to embrace that identity…
In the other corner we have, not Steve Rogers this time, but Natasha Romanov. She tries to seduce him as well, to seduce him away from loyalty to the group, but in this case toward the creation of a marriage…And the family, of course, is the great foundation of human nature.
(source: Democratic vs. Republican occupations)
Carl Trueman pens a worthy response to a vapid article:
“If it is good for me, it must be good for society” is dangerous enough as a principle of social ethics. To replace that with “If it cures my boredom, it must be good for society” is lunacy. And who will pay the interest—financial and social—on this sexual ponzi scheme? Everyone, from the poor and the children of broken homes to generations yet unborn.
The other disturbing element is the reductionist view of freedom. The rhetoric of liberation pervades the article from the title onwards, and yet in what does this woman’s freedom consist? Her freedom and thus her personhood have been reduced to nothing more than the ability to have a series of loosely connected orgasms, unencumbered by any relational responsibility, as a means of punctuating the tedium of life.
(source: Freedom Is . . . a Sexual Ponzi Scheme? | Carl R. Trueman | First Things)