Judith Butler's Phantasms

To the best of my discernment Tyler Cowen is a serious economist. Thanks to the Lord, I am not qualified to judge the seriousness of his thoughts about matters economical.

But, yesterday, Cowen opined about one Judith Butler, an intrepid proponent of gender dysphoria and a warrior against what she sees as the advent of worldwide fascism.

If the word crackpot means anything, Judith Butler qualifies. And yet, Cowen takes it all oh so seriously. On his Marginal Revolution blog he writes this:

And yet — when it comes to the grounds of theory I think Butler is more right than wrong.  This is a very good book, and in some critical ways a very libertarian book (again to be clear I think Butler is wrong about most other things).  But on this issue — why so insist on such a rigid male-female set of binary categories?  Why be so afraid of alternative, more flexible approaches?  Why restrict our conceptual freedoms and ultimately our life practical freedoms in such a manner?  Especially when a minority of people — admittedly a small minority but also much larger than the mere category of “trans” — will suffer greatly from such attitudes and such practices?

Of course, all human societies, from the dawn of time, have insisted on binary categories. Has Cowen ever heard of Claude Levi-Strauss’s book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship?

Serious thinkers do not take Judith Butler seriously. She is a symptom of the degeneration of academic thinking in America.

Katha Pollitt in The Atlantic and Andrew Sullivan on his Substack take her apart without working up a sweat.

As Katha Pollitt points out, Butler’s enemy is vast indeed. She is at war against fascism, which she imagines, in her phantasms, to be a clear and present danger.

It is worth paying some attention to this war against fascism, against Hitler and his Nazis, against the radical and non-so-radical right, against the capitalist patriarchy. For someone like Butler, who has never learned to think, these are all the same.

Now, it is worth noting, even if just in passing, that, once upon a time, the European continent was awash in outright fascists and Nazis. For most of the time that fascists did their dirty deeds in that place, the American political leadership, beginning with the great Franklin Roosevelt, basically did nothing.

Intrepid fascist fighters that liberal Democrats are, their great hero sat on his hands for eight years of European fascism, to say nothing of Hitler. As it happens, the liberal intelligentsia has not lived down this dereliction.

And one ought to mention, if only in passing, that the track record of the extreme political left was nothing to admire or extol. After all, Communism produced over 100 millions corpses, most of whom died of starvation. See The Black Book of Communism. 

And let’s not ignore the fact that Nazism was a shorthand for National Socialism. If you think that radical socialism is going to save us, think again. If you believe that fascism is the sum of all evils, what’s left for communism.

Katha Pollitt finds something disquieting in Butler’s constant harping on the dangers of fascism:

Fascism is a word that Butler admits is not perfect but then goes on to use repeatedly. I’m sure I’ve used it myself as a shorthand when I’m writing quickly, but it’s a bit manipulative. As used by Butler and much of the left, it covers way too many different issues and suggests that if you aren’t on board with the Butlerian worldview on every single one of them, a brown shirt must surely be hanging in your closet. As they define it—“fascist passions or political trends are those which seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live”—most societies for most of history have been fascist, including, for long stretches, our own. That definition is so broad and so vague as to be useless. You might even say that “fascism” functions as a kind of phantasm, frightening people into accepting views wholesale without examining them individually. It’s a kind of guilt by association—like comparing critics of your prose to Nixon.

Evidently, we are not dealing with serious thinking. Butler seems to like to keep trotting out the word “phantasm” which means something like phantom.

When you have taken your leave from reality you are left with phantoms, fictional beings that defy reality.

Then Pollitt makes a salient point, one that other commentators seem to have ignored. If gender is a social construction, why would we not believe that transgender identities are socially constructed. 

It does seem odd that Butler, for whom everything about the body is socially produced, would be so uninterested in exploring the ways that trans identity is itself socially produced, at least in part—by, for example, homophobia and misogyny and the hypersexualization of young girls, by social media and online life, by the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery, by the libertarian-individualist presumption that you can be whatever you want. Butler seems to suggest that being trans is being your authentic self, but what is authenticity? In every other context, Butler works to demolish the idea of the eternal human—everything is contingent—except for when it comes to being transgender. There, the individual, and only the individual, knows themself.

And then there is Andrew Sullivan, who takes Judith Butler to school and has the good sense not to use her illiterate pronouns. Apparently, Butler systematically denies realities that do not conform to her mindless beliefs:

For Butler, in matters of sex and the body, nothing is as it appears, the individual has no independent existence or capacity for reason outside social and cultural forces, and even the basics of anatomy, like a penis, are just socially constructed all the way down. There is no independent, stable variable like nature or biology or evolution that can help us understand our bodies, and our sex. Everything is in our heads, and our heads are entirely created by others in the past and present:

He continues:

This is Blank Slatism in its ultimate form, a denial of any independent biological influence on human nature or behavior. The fact that we are a species of mammal, organized around a binary reproductive strategy for millions of years, in which we are divided almost exactly into male and female, and in which there are only two types of gametes, eggs and sperm — and no “speggs” — is, for Butler, irrelevant. It is not even a fact. The sex binary is, rather, a human invention — specifically, a product of American “white supremacy.”

Blaming it on white supremacy is just plain stupid. Sullivan corrects Butler:

 But of all the things you could call “socially constructed,” the sex binary is the least plausible. It existed in our species before we even achieved the intelligence to call it a sex binary. It existed before humans even evolved into the separate and mostly distinct genetic clusters we now call race. How’s that for pre-cultural! It is in countless species that have no access to an array of “practices, discourses, and technologies.” It structures our entire existence. Not a single cell in the body is unaffected by our sex. Our entire reproductive strategy as a mammal is rooted in it. If you can turn even this into a human invention — malleable and indeterminate and a “spectrum” — there is nothing real outside us at all.

So, down with Judith Butler. Cease relying on phantasms. Up with reality.

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