It's in the Code ep 180: “Freedom and Constraint”

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to the series. It's in the Code, part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought. Glad, as always, to be with you, and as always, this series — more than I think probably anything else we do on Straight White American Jesus — depends upon you. And so I invite you to please let me know what you think about this episode, ideas for other topics, ideas for other themes, ideas for other series.

Daniel Miller, SWAJ — danielmillerswaj@gmail.com — is the most direct way to reach me. And as I've been saying, we are still in Josh Hawley's book on masculinity, but we're looking beyond that to a series on questions I was not supposed to ask in church, or questions I couldn't ask in church, or maybe even questions I was afraid to ask in church. You get the idea. Please, if you've got thoughts about that — the kinds of questions that got you shut down, the kinds of questions that got you in trouble, the kind of questions that led you to leave high-control religion, whatever it might be — email those to me. Let me know what they are. I'm putting that together. Put in your subject heading "questions I was not supposed to ask," or something like that. That'll alert me that that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking to build that out.

And I'm just going to dive in here this week. As I mentioned a minute ago, we are still looking at Josh Hawley's book Manhood. We're looking at that to explore contemporary right-wing conceptions of masculinity and masculine virtue, as you know, hot topics in American society, as they are elaborated by the U.S. Senator Josh Hawley. And we've been looking at his chapter on fatherhood. Again, he identifies a number of roles that men are called to play — he would say are uniquely called to play — in which they both exercise and cultivate masculine virtue. We're on the chapter on fatherhood. That's what we're looking at.

And what I want to talk about today is a thing we've seen throughout, which is that Hawley isn't content to just present his vision of masculinity and masculine virtue. It's not enough for him to just say, here's what it is to be a man and here's what masculine virtue is. And I think part of the reason is because I think his arguments are not very good — his vision is not all that compelling to me. I acknowledge I could just be biased, but I don't think that I am. But at any rate, to make his position stronger, he routinely contrasts it with imagined opponents. And I describe them as imagined because they really are a caricature. They're a kind of construct of what I think he imagines those who disagree with him might think. They don't line up with reality. And as I've noted before, in other chapters and throughout — it'll come up again — they go by various names in his book, whether that's liberals or progressives or what have you. But I think his emerging favorite is what he calls the "modern-day Epicureans."

And again, earlier in the book — and we talked about this a little bit — he links them to the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, whom he also presents in a kind of caricature. I think maybe he misunderstands what Epicureanism was. But everybody he disagrees with, he calls the modern-day Epicureans. And that's his favorite epithet to level against his opponents. And his Epicureans are not real. That's why he never identifies any or cites them. I mean, he does — when he wants to make Bible arguments, he'll cite lots of conservative biblical scholars. When he wants to support what he's saying, there are times when he'll cite social science research and things like that. The thing he never cites is when he says "the modern-day Epicureans say whatever." Then it's just — we've just got Josh Hawley for it. He never cites anybody. And I think the reason is that they don't exist. I don't think he could find anybody to say the things that he says modern-day Epicureans typically think. They only exist to advance patently absurd positions — positions that are silly and easy to critique — and the reason they're presented by Hawley is to make his position seem more compelling than it is.

But I think this caricature still matters. Somebody could say, if they're not real, if he's not describing what people really think, if he's just presenting a caricature — why spend time worrying about it? Why not just move on? The reason is because Josh Hawley is presenting a view that's not real, but he's also saying that most Americans are the modern-day Epicureans. He also does that when he talks about culture, or the elite, or Hollywood, or whatever — these broad swaths of the American public. Basically, the "modern-day Epicureans" is a catch-all for anyone who doesn't hold the values of MAGA world, who's not a MAGA American. Which is most Americans. So it may be a caricature, and it may do the work that it does, but he is calling most of us the modern-day Epicureans. He's fitting most of us into that caricature. He is suggesting that most Americans are this evil, malcontent, misaligned group of people he calls the Epicureans.

So I think that's part of what makes this significant, and I think that process of caricaturing others is what drives the demonization of everyone who isn't like them, and is a defining feature of the MAGA movement and MAGA discourse. I recognize I'll get a few emails about this. I recognize that MAGA-aligned people are not the only ones who can demonize others. They are not the only ones who can caricature — sure, fair, I understand that. But it is a defining feature of the MAGA movement, and is part of what allows for the active demonization of anybody who doesn't agree with them.

So what I want to do in this episode — the reason I'm talking about this so much — is I want to tackle one of Hawley's specific caricatures about the Epicureans, one of the specific claims he makes about what we — and I'll just switch to the first person — what we, the modern-day Epicureans, think. And I'm not picking this at random. We could tackle what he says about the Epicureans every episode. I know I've talked about different parts, a lot of different themes. But I've chosen this because it gets at a really significant, I think, false conception that drives the discourse that Hawley has, and everybody like him.

What I want to look at is his statement. It comes in a section of the book — and I'll actually read from the book. It's Josh Hawley story time here. It's a section called "A Work of Sacrifice." And the idea here is the idea that men as fathers are called to sacrifice for someone else — presumably children, he talks about children, though this is one of those places where he doesn't actually seem to limit it to that. This opens up the topic that came up last episode: he says that these are the virtues of a father, but then he sort of opens them up beyond fathers. Whatever — "a work of sacrifice."

And what he wants to do here is set up a contrast between the idea of what he's calling sacrifice and the position of the modern-day Epicureans. Here's part of what he has to say. For those who want to keep score, this is page 92. He says this:

"According to our modern-day Epicureans, you are really only an individual if you throw off constraints and choose your own life path. Discard whatever holds you back — family, religion, tradition — and do as you please, satisfy yourself. That's the Epicurean way, at the heart of modern liberalism, and, by extension, modern culture."

I want to pause there. Note the linkages: the modern-day Epicureans, and then he links that with liberalism, and he links that with modern culture. So everything, all of culture, is defined by this. Again, that's going to be most of us. And then he says this:

"What it amounts to, in practice, is choosing to live for yourself, or for a very peculiar version of yourself. It is a version of you divorced from your history, your family, your home and traditions — in short, from the things that help us make selves to begin with."

Okay, that's his vision of the modern-day Epicureans. They throw off all constraint. They throw off all appeal to tradition, to everything that has ever shaped them, to their origins, in this process of self-invention and self-aggrandizement or what have you. He kind of presents it as this "anything goes, choose your own adventure" idea of selfhood.

And then he contrasts it with his view, with his supposedly non-Epicurean understanding. Here's what he says to contrast it. He says:

"But what are any of us when we put away our family stories and the obligations that come with them, the places we grew up in, the ways they shaped us, and the thousand and one other things we didn't choose at all, which together make us who we uniquely are? We are no persons at all. It is impossible to imagine yourself without these things — just try it — because they are the very components of personhood, and they are virtually all unchosen. The problem with the liberal Epicurean idea of being an individual is it refuses to acknowledge the things that make us individuals, the things that give us foundations for what we believe and what we prioritize. Instead, modern liberals pretend the world can be made entirely around our unfettered personal choice."

Notice — just by the way — there's nothing about sacrifice or fatherhood in those couple of paragraphs. That's what he's supposed to be talking about. Here's what he's really doing.

In these two visions — contrasting what he calls the modern-day Epicureans with his own perspective — what he's really talking about is individual identity formation: the formation of who we are as individuals in relation to group identity, and more broadly, just socialization, family, background, culture, what have you. And what he offers is a stark either-or choice between two understandings of how we come to be the people we are.

The position he dismisses — what he calls the modern-day Epicureans — I'm going to call it a model of libertarian selfhood. It's the idea that we are radically unconstrained in our ability to invent ourselves and to essentially define who or what we are. He even says that we live in a way that is unconstrained, any way we please. And this is what Hawley describes by this idea that we can simply throw off our history, our family, our home and traditions. He names those. He also says a thousand and one other things we can throw off to be whoever or whatever we want to be.

Now, Hawley is right that that's not possible. I don't agree with Hawley on much, but I'll go with him on this. And there are people who seem to articulate or talk about selfhood this way. The language of authenticity — I'm not trying to dump all over people who talk about being their authentic selves — but the language of authenticity can move in that direction. The language of self-actualization can move in this direction, giving us this idea that we're just throwing off everything. And Hawley would be correct to suggest that this is a simplistic conception of selfhood, and that it invariably overlooks all kinds of things that affect who we are, often in ways of which we are completely unaware. All of that would be correct. And we could add to that list of history and family and homes and traditions — religion, language, culture, genetics — any number of different things. And again, there are people who kind of talk that way. So Hawley would have a point there.

But that's not what he says. He doesn't stop with a reasoned response to an unreasonable and very naive position. No, he has to do what Hawley does, and he has to set up an impossible contrast. He can't just say, here's a vision of selfhood that's problematic. He has to advance a position that is the opposite of that, and that is every bit as ridiculous as the one he critiques.

So his position, when he articulates it in that second quotation I read, is a position that's essentially what I would call social determinism. It is completely reductive. As he articulates it, we are only our histories and families and homes and traditions. That's all we are. He says we are no persons at all. He says they're all unchosen. He says that without them, you are nothing — you are not a person. Without those things. It's reductive. When he says that it is impossible to imagine yourself without these things — just try it — I think that's what he's trying to say. If you take them away, there's nothing left.

And I'm going to say, folks, this is also a ridiculous position. This notion that we are just our histories and our traditions and our families and the religions we grew up in — put all those together and you have us, period. Who we are just reduces to that list of factors. It's a ridiculous position.

And I'm going to say that Josh Hawley, deep down, I think he already knows that. Whether he recognizes it or not, he actually acknowledges it. We've seen this a few times in his book, where he'll make these statements that are silly and whatever, and then he'll go on to say something else that actually undermines what he said. I don't know if he catches it or not, but he certainly doesn't acknowledge it.

So a few pages later in the book, he describes what I would call a fail moment he had as both a husband and a father. I'm not trying to be too harsh here — I can come up with plenty of my own parenting fail, spousal fail, sibling fail, child fail moments in my life. But what he describes is a heated argument he had with his wife. And he gets into it, and it's this thing we've probably all been there — where he's just defending a position to defend it. And he kind of looks up and his kids are watching, he says wide-eyed, staring at him. And he has this moment of clarity and realizes that they've been watching this argument. And this is what he says — this is on page 96:

"I saw in a flash what a fool I had been. I was focused on winning an argument that didn't matter, irritating my wife, which did matter, and making a spectacle of myself before our children in the process."

I think a lot of us have been there. I'm with him so far. He continues:

"I remember thinking to myself, this is the kind of thing I said as a child I would never do. How could I have been so stupid?"

Here's the point. I want to read that one line again — it's actually italicized in his book: "This is the kind of thing I said as a child I would never do."

Now, I admit I'm reading between the lines just a little here, but here's what I hear in that. I hear somebody who has also been the child in this account. I hear somebody who has walked in and seen their parents having a heated argument, seeing them not being kind to each other. It sounds like a kid who walked in and saw that and said to himself, when I grow up, I'm not going to do that. It suggests that this is the kind of thing he has witnessed. It's part of his story. Maybe it's part of his family, maybe it's part of his background. And he swore he would do something different: this is the kind of thing I said I would never do.

And it informs his behavior moving forward. It sounds like it's a thing that stuck with him, something that he tries not to do.

Okay, what's the point? What he's describing here is a break from his upbringing. He is looking back on something that he might have seen in some parent or friend or somebody important in his life, something that he saw that he didn't like, that didn't feel good, that he said he wasn't going to do moving forward. It is a move away from his upbringing. It is taking a lesson from his upbringing about what not to do as a father and a husband.

What does that mean? What he's telling us, in a really basic way with one simple example, is: hey, Josh Hawley, you are not just your past. You are not just what you saw your parents do. You are not just your family or your upbringing or whatever. He's taking a lesson from what his past was and moving in a different direction. What he's illustrating is that not even he actually believes that we are only our family and upbringing and history and so forth — or he would not have gone in a different direction. He could not have gone in a different direction. If that's all we are, then making a change would be impossible. It's that simple. When people make statements like "we are only this," it means you cannot be something else. People do other things. Therefore, it is false to say that it all reduces to family and history and background and so forth.

So what's the point? The point is that Hawley himself, once again, sets up a false alternative — this time between what I'm calling libertarian selfhood and social determinism. A false alternative that he himself doesn't even believe.

What he's doing — and this is the point, not just what he says or the digging into specific pages, but what he's doing in this book — in true conservative culture-war fashion, he reduces social reality to an either-or option. He presents a false choice. You are either holding this libertarian conception of the self, or the socially determined conception of the self. He presents one to make it seem so ridiculous that the other must be true. But then he undermines it himself.

And what that shows is the reality of who we are as individuals. I'm going to get kind of philosophical or theoretical here for a few minutes, but here's my understanding. The reality is that the relationship between who we are as individuals and our histories and our backgrounds and our families and our cultures and all that — it is more complex than Hawley allows. And this is something that's really important to me. It's something I think about a lot, so much so that I actually have a tattoo that illustrates this. It's a chain wrapped around my wrist, and the ends of the chain connect at a final link, but the final link is not closed — so the chain is connected, but not closed.

Here's what it represents for me. It represents something directly related to this. And this is a theme that I teach when I work with my coaching clients at the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery. It is my conviction that our lives and identities, our individuality, who we are — it takes shape in the interplay of freedom and constraint, those two things together. The chain represents constraint. The open link represents the possibility of freedom. We could free ourselves of those constraints, but sometimes we do and sometimes we don't. Sometimes that's easy, sometimes that's hard. Sometimes it's possible, sometimes it's not. It's an interplay.

And what I would say is: we are never absolutely free. I reject that libertarian model that Hawley has. We are never absolutely free to radically invent ourselves any way that we might wish. I would love to be a professional NFL player — never going to happen. Even when I was young and more physically capable than I am now, it was never going to happen. I didn't have the right mix of skill and coaching and any other number of different things. We all tell our kids, "you can be anything you want when you grow up," but we know that for myriad reasons, it's not really that open. We are not absolutely unconstrained.

But we are also never absolutely constrained. We are never completely determined by our histories and our past and our families and our cultures and our backgrounds and so forth. We do have things that we choose to do differently. Anybody who has spent time in counseling or therapy, working on something in their life — we know the work that goes into that, but we also know that it's possible. Josh Hawley tells a simple story of saying, you know, when I was a kid I saw this thing happen, and I thought, I'm not going to do that someday when I'm a parent. And he uses that to motivate moving in a different direction — imperfectly, but movement nonetheless.

People do develop different beliefs and different values. They do come to accept different cultural norms. They do behave in different ways. They raise their kids in different ways. They express their sexuality or their gender in different ways than what they grew up with. It happens all the time. So it's not an either-or choice of libertarian self-selection of your own selfhood, or absolute determinism. It's a continuum, and those might be the ends on the continuum, but nobody exists at one end or the other. We all exist somewhere in the middle.

And we've all known people who are closer to one end or another. We've known the people who cling so tightly to the past, or let it determine them so much, that it's like they never break free from it or the habits or the problems that they carry from it. We also know the people who don't acknowledge or recognize the way that they have been shaped by their past or their background. We know that. But we know that most of us — all of us — live somewhere on that continuum, in that interplay between freedom and constraint. Things that we can't change. Things that may continue to influence us, even if we wish that they didn't. Things that influence us that we may not even be aware of. Maybe it takes somebody else — a loved one, a partner, a trauma experienced in life, therapy, whatever it is — some kind of external perspective to bring it into view. But we're aware that those things are there.

And I think all of us are also aware of times we have chosen to move in a different direction, or we have fought against the determining force of those kinds of background things. Who we are, who we become, is always the result of a complex and continuous interplay of, on the one hand, creativity and freedom, and on the other hand, constraint. We never simply throw off the constraints — Hawley's right about that. But we are never just the sum of our background, as he suggests. So Hawley here is fundamentally misrepresenting — I think, misunderstanding — the nature of selfhood and individuality.

Why does it matter? Why am I talking about this? Why am I geeking out on conceptions of individual selfhood? Here's why. Hawley's move here isn't just his failure to understand how self-identity works. This is not just an empty philosophical question or a point of interest — what is the individual, how do we become selves, this kind of abstract question. That's not what this is. It's significant because what he's doing is typical of the worldview of conservatism generally, and the MAGA right in particular.

The first element of this — we've talked about this a lot, I referenced it earlier — is the oversimplification of social reality. Social reality is complex and convoluted, and it doesn't move in straight lines. A typical conservative move — and I think this becomes more pronounced the further to the right you go — is to deny that complexity and reduce social reality to a series of either-or, black-and-white, true-or-false choices. That's the first piece.

The second piece is this, and this is what I think really connects with this passage from Hawley: it's the idealization of the past. Conservatism, broadly termed, is fundamentally defined by the view that the past tells us how things should be — that if we want to know where we're going and where we should be going, how things should be, we look to some point in the past. We seek to, if you like, conserve that. And MAGA just takes that ideology and pumps up the volume. It appeals to the past as a golden age, insisting that any departure from it represents a loss of identity.

That's why, for somebody like Donald Trump and MAGA, the meaning of MAGA — Make America Great Again. What does the "again" tell us? There was a time in the past when we saw what America should be, and we have dropped away from that. It's about a return to the past. The past tells us where to go.

But — and please don't hear me say there's nothing for the past to teach us, because there's all kinds of things the past can teach us — the trick is, and this is what Hawley does, in that discourse they disavow anything from the past that doesn't fit into that narrative. Anything that wasn't positive, or anything that they are rejecting from the past, they simply disavow. That's why they panic anytime somebody wants to talk about something bad from the past. That's why you have a movement that is now based on simply erasing the past: prohibiting the teaching of particular topics, getting rid of entire majors at colleges and universities, changing what can be taught in K-through-12 curriculum, banning books, removing monuments, scrubbing government websites, and on and on and on.

What is that? It's about appealing to the past — creating this false choice that the past is the only way forward — but then scrubbing it, getting rid of anything that challenges its authority. So what they do is they appeal to the past, just like Hawley does, but it's a carefully created past that willfully ignores all the ways in which the present is not simply a repetition of the past.

It's the same way that Josh Hawley will tell us these nostalgic stories about his grandfather, or these other things. He elevates farmers and land and all of this kind of stuff as quintessentially American, masculine. And the reason he's telling the grandfather stories is because it's not what he did. The quiet part that he's not explicitly saying out loud is: I've got to talk about grandpa doing that because I didn't. His past did not determine who he was and what he looked like. But we get this very carefully curated articulation of the past. That's how conservatism works, and that's what we see in Hawley.

This just drives me nuts — this appeal to the past that leaves out all kinds of things, or masks all the ways in which our existence in the present is always creative, always innovative, always a complex mix of continuity and discontinuity with what has come before. That's what he wants to mask us from seeing, because his entire discourse is about us and them: masculine versus non-masculine, Christian versus non-Christian, what have you.

So Hawley has a lot to say about the modern-day Epicureans throughout the book. But here I wanted to highlight this one, because I think this particular contrast to the Epicureans really cuts to the heart of how Hawley understands himself and the rest of the MAGA world. His statements about individuality and individual identity — how it works in its relation to the past — I think they provide a window into the broader worldview that informs his position. And I think it reveals the ways in which what he is saying is very much a product of the contemporary American right, no matter how much he's going to appeal to the Bible or to other cultural examples from the past. He is very much a product of the present, as is conservatism generally, as is the MAGA movement, no matter how much they want to present themselves as the return of some bygone golden age.

More to say about this, I think, next episode. We're going to finish up on the chapter on fatherhood. As we're finding out, sometimes in these chapters he talks about these topics and kind of leaves out the thing he's supposed to be talking about. I want to look a little bit more at what he says about fatherhood in particular — this whole notion of sacrifice, fatherhood as sacrifice. I've got lots of issues with that, and I've got issues with the way that he continues to contrast fatherhood, as he understands it, with the modern-day Epicureans. We'll dive into all of that next episode.

For now, I want to say — as I always do — thank you for listening. You're taking the time, doing this, listening, watching, however you're consuming this. You could be doing something else, and so thank you so much. To our subscribers: thank you. We can't do what we do without you. We're continuing to put out new content, to increase what we do, and we need your help to do that. If you're not a subscriber but you've supported us financially in the past — one-time gifts, what have you — thank you so much. And for everybody listening: I understand that if we all subscribed to everything we could subscribe to, none of us would have anything left. I understand that we're all in a complex and tight place economically. Not everybody can subscribe. So if you're listening, thank you for listening. If you're sitting through the ads, thank you for sitting through the ads and helping us keep doing what we're doing. Please tell other people about us, like us, favorite us, choose us, put us in the playlist — do all of those things. Those all help us do what we're doing.

Thank you so much. Thank you for your time. Thank you for listening. Please — danielmiller.swaj@gmail.com — keep the insights coming. Let me know what you think, let me know your thoughts, new ideas always welcome. Thank you so much. Be well until we get a chance to talk again.