ah well I don't think I'll ever write an essay directly addressing that, and these days am not really reading anything from either of those piles of literature, but I do make the connections across a number of earlier essays.
So for example in these ones I talk about how the 'anti-social' line of queer theory articulated by Lee Edelman and Joseph Litvak can be compared to Straussian notions of the 'philosophical life' lived at an ironic distance from social norms:
And here I compare late Foucault and Straussian takes on the ironies of calls to 'think for yourself', and the ways in which imperatives to critique, or the project of Enlightenment, can be understood as modes of subjection and 'noble lies':
And in the essay on Sedgwick I'm placing her work in the context of her learning from Allan Bloom, and showing how they both take up common problems out of Nietzsche:
Overall I found that there's basically no public interest in the sort of work I was doing though, and nowadays I'm rather more interested in stuff on the relation between literature and politics (the essays on Foote, Sontag, Kramer, Kristeva) and gay history, so I don't see myself having more to say along this line!
That’s understandable, it is pretty niche-even the discourse of people getting mad at you (myself occasionally included) is niche! Might be more appropriate to have to piece together the thesis from a bunch of disparate essays anyway. Your work in the last few months has been incredible, keep it up!
Yeah I mean the most Straussian and queerest thing is surely to have to half intuited a non verbalizable totality out of fragments of dialogical writing... in that sense I'm putting my shoulder to the wheel. And thanks! At times I feel rather bleak/blank about there being any audience for such stuff but for y'all happy few... 🙏
Isn't there some significance to the age difference between college students and K12 students? You conflate them here, as if students are students, but some students are legal minors and others are adults. There's no "grooming" a 20 year-old, at least not in the paranoid rightwing pedos-are-everywhere sense.
The other challenge that the age of majority raises is that the "truly liberal sexual education" you propose that would be so comprehensive as to allow children to "articulate their own views on such matters, in consciousness of there being a number of alternatives" is difficult if not impossible, given that most children do not and cannot actually have sex, and even adolescents don't have a free choice of sexual partners, being constrained not only by the supervision of their parents but also by the limits of the law. Can anyone articulate their own views on sexuality in a critically reflective way with zero experience of the activity? In a lot of realms, this is surely possible b/c the knowledge in question is mainly academic or second-hand experience is an effective guide. This is probably true of much of politics, for example - you can understand voting pretty well without having to personally cast a vote, you can understand different regimes broadly without being a citizen of all of them, etc. Is it true of sexuality?
there is surely some significance (not least in terms of the law) to differences of age! I'm not sure there's no grooming an undergraduate--whether in the sense of indoctrinating them into cultish views, or in the sense of getting them into unwise sexual relationships... which isn't saying anything about what I think the age of consent or the legality of student-teacher relationships should be, just that I think indeed there is indeed some truth to the idea that students are vulnerable and dumb... this doesn't mean they can't consent to X or Y, but for a lot of things I suppose being vulnerable, dumb, and at risk of being 'groomed' by others (that is, manipulated by someone else into actions that will make us different kinds of people, in an irreversible and harmful sense) is often just the condition of being able to consent/choose at all...
Children certainly do all sorts of sexual things, although most of them probably don't 'have sex'... but like, over the course even of the last 100 years or so we've had big debates and changes about what the acceptable limit of childhood sexual play and expression should be, from giving them surgeries to stop them masturbating, to promoting pedophilia as healthy--or again from telling them hardly anything about the facts of life, to encouraging them that it'd be a fine idea to medically transition or think of themselves as nonbinary--all things I'm not in favor of! I think, regardless of what they're doing with their own or each other's bodies, young people are having sexualities and adults are having to convey messages and rules about sex/uality to them, in view of some notion of what a proper adult life, including sex/uality, is (however vague or contradictory the notion might be).
As to whether something like the liberal humanist autonomist self-reflexive ideal I sketched, maybe very off-handedly, is a good one--one that could be measured up to by anyone ever, or one that could be lived out by someone who hasn't yet 'had sex' (although again I'd say that sexuality is having us long before and beyond our inserting or receiving any particular organ into or from someone else)--well that'd be a longer essay, or rather a conversation... I'm not sure for instance about the analogy with politics (because like, well, if I were really thinking about what I think is true about political wisdom rather than what I think is expedient within the horizon of our own society, I'm not sure I'd be letting more than a few people vote... or at least I wouldn't take voting as having anything to do with knowledge!)... and there is something in fact troubling, or weird, about people's ability to consent to things that they can't possibly understand, in any meaningful way, the consequences of! which is a position that I think most of us are in much of the time about many matters political and sexual....
Of course part of liberal education is allowing young people to have sort of play-opinions as if they understood what they were talking about, with a certain kind of encouraging condescension (and if this is the stance that we take towards people who opine about matters they have no proper experience of, then I suppose it's also the right attitude by which liberals should respond to the sexual morality taught by Catholic clergy...)--I'm hardly sure what I think about how we help people to become self-reflexive, and indeed I've suggested elsewhere that encouraging people to think for themselves is an illusion by which supposed liberal enlighteners beguile and rule us (and I suggested it's a good thing, too!): https://im1776.com/2021/02/19/foucault-through-strauss/#:~:text=Foucault%20is%20not%20usually%20read,the%20shaping%20of%20public%20opinion
"You are capable of thinking for yourself" and "You are thinking for yourself" may much of the time be such ruses, the political equivalent of saying that an inappropriately young lover is "very mature for his/her age"!
Well, sure, there are some people who remain vulnerable and susceptible to strong personalities and/or questionable forms of seduction for much of their lives, but we can't define teaching as predation for their sake. Or b/c by its nature, teaching is practiced on more or less ignorant recipients. That's like the "power imbalance = rape" discourse that seeks as a prerequisite for sex an equality so complete that the only practicable solution is universal celibacy. The whole concept of an age of majority at which we become reasonable and "autonomous" deciders is of course a formalistic fiction; people become reasonable at different points, and many, probably most, never do so at all. Yet, as Locke says, we "suppose" them to be so at a uniform, universal point. We can't do otherwise, b/c individual evaluations would invite state tyranny (ie, the government says, "Sorry Blake, we continue to deem you insufficiently mature for citizenship. Reapply in 5 yrs."). But age of majority, before which is a period of rightless minority, is a basic premise of liberalism, so we have to take it seriously as a social structure even though it's obviously not individually precise.
There is an argument in Rawlsian liberal theory that, in order to educate children adequately for democratic citizenship, their schooling should consist in practicing the forms of democratic citizenship. So they should exercise free speech rights, due process rights, make group decisions about procedural matters (but not the curriculum, though it's not clear why not), and of course go out and protest for causes like gun control and climate change, etc. This seems completely wrong, because citizenship is not learned this way at all (although a certain posture of perpetual grievance can be habituated this way). There are certain experiences and skills that schools teach - how to persuade people, how to work with them, etc. that eventually translate into civic skills, but they are not taught *AS* civic skills or even taught explicitly at all. And of course there is the basic historical/political knowledge that schools convey about the Constitution, the three branches, etc. But mostly, we become citizens by growing up in the US, which indirectly teaches us 95% of what is politically desirable and undesirable.
My intuition is the same about sex ed. Schools can't teach it and should not try. They can teach you about the mechanics of the reproductive system, sure, or how STDs get spread. But they can't teach you how to be in love, how to be in a relationship, how to be a good spouse, how to approach or enjoy sex, how to decide whom to engage in it with, etc. And when they try, I can tell you from experience, it is horrific cringe. Nothing worse and less educative than your 8th grade algebra teacher playing Alanis Morissette's "Head Over Feet" to exemplify a "healthy relationship" and then telling you all about her courtship with your 7th grade biology teacher and how they now share a beautiful mutual affection and friendship and...well, let's just stop there. This is what you learn by watching and doing in a totally social and nonacademic way, and it's a kind of technocratic illusion to hope that we can build an educational institution to inculcate the "right" teachings about it.
Of course, you're right that schools convey all sorts of norms and mores about sexuality in inexplicit ways, but in that sense, heterosexual monogamous marriage and family seems unwise to dislodge (we need more babies!) as the background norm. That is, most of the literature you're going to read in English class is going to feature this, or the people you encounter in history class will live like this, without dwelling on either the particular excellence of this way of life (which no one sane does anyway, there is no "Let us pause for a moment to note that Romeo and Juliet are CIS-MALE AND FEMALE") or dilating on the excluded alternatives ("Let us pause for a moment to note that they could be ANY GENDER"). Can't children's sexual exploration continue to be something that occurs outside of school, and the individual working out of reflexive views about sexuality as well? In what ways can schools even ideally can do a better job than our individual fumblings via watching family, friends, and trashy TV/movies/social media?
I'm not sure that we're disagreeing about anything, or at least anything that I have a clear idea about, since it's not like I have a particular thought about say, how sex education should work, or what either K-12 or college curricula should be... both of the essays for the Chronicle were more thinking about the contradictory wishes I take it we all have in regards to students, whom we want to be 'free' and also to turn out, whatever this means for us, right...
I probably more or less agree with your last paragraph, in that class, at any level, is more about supplying students with a kind of cultural background material that's not explicitly thematized as being about sex, morality, how to live etc--and about modeling a better unstated ethic of how to be interested in such material--than it ought to be about giving explicit sermons, norms, etc... (I have very vivid awful memories of teachers telling us, via the Song of Solomon, how great sex with your spouse can be!)... and likewise I don't have much sympathy (although I've never thought much about it) for classroom democracy--as I said in my review of your book back in the day, I think education for liberal public adult life is probably necessarily illiberal, and indeed many of our most important adult relationships also have a distinct non-liberal character (in the spheres of family, romantic/erotic, religious, educational etc life--even, in some senses, among friends, I doubt that what's happening can be adequately characterized in terms of reciprocal respect for autonomy between two equal contracting subjects...), a point that Foucault, for instance, makes in his late work...
It's true, I'm not responding at all to your contentions about the ambivalence of mentoring and university education, but you know I basically agree there. I just want to draw a sharper line between minors and adults, and to draw it right before university rather than after it, b/c that is my preoccupation - that our politics is increasingly adultifying children while infantilizing adults. The precise line between them is blurry, but that doesn't excuse a complete reversal in the wrong direction.
Cite your sources, man. Especially if you're going to give questionable summaries of them.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/call-them-groomers/
There's a link in the Chronicle version...
Excellent writing. Incidentally I’m eagerly waiting on that “Straussianism is like queer theory” take you teased a while back!
ah well I don't think I'll ever write an essay directly addressing that, and these days am not really reading anything from either of those piles of literature, but I do make the connections across a number of earlier essays.
So for example in these ones I talk about how the 'anti-social' line of queer theory articulated by Lee Edelman and Joseph Litvak can be compared to Straussian notions of the 'philosophical life' lived at an ironic distance from social norms:
https://tocqueville21.com/le-club/democracys-future-philosophy-and-queerness-as-ways-of-death/
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-best-education-is-a-bad-education
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/mccarthyism-wokeness-huac-blacklist
And here I compare late Foucault and Straussian takes on the ironies of calls to 'think for yourself', and the ways in which imperatives to critique, or the project of Enlightenment, can be understood as modes of subjection and 'noble lies':
https://im1776.com/2021/02/19/foucault-through-strauss/
And in the essay on Sedgwick I'm placing her work in the context of her learning from Allan Bloom, and showing how they both take up common problems out of Nietzsche:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/eve-sedgwick-non-binary-mistake
Overall I found that there's basically no public interest in the sort of work I was doing though, and nowadays I'm rather more interested in stuff on the relation between literature and politics (the essays on Foote, Sontag, Kramer, Kristeva) and gay history, so I don't see myself having more to say along this line!
That’s understandable, it is pretty niche-even the discourse of people getting mad at you (myself occasionally included) is niche! Might be more appropriate to have to piece together the thesis from a bunch of disparate essays anyway. Your work in the last few months has been incredible, keep it up!
Yeah I mean the most Straussian and queerest thing is surely to have to half intuited a non verbalizable totality out of fragments of dialogical writing... in that sense I'm putting my shoulder to the wheel. And thanks! At times I feel rather bleak/blank about there being any audience for such stuff but for y'all happy few... 🙏
Isn't there some significance to the age difference between college students and K12 students? You conflate them here, as if students are students, but some students are legal minors and others are adults. There's no "grooming" a 20 year-old, at least not in the paranoid rightwing pedos-are-everywhere sense.
The other challenge that the age of majority raises is that the "truly liberal sexual education" you propose that would be so comprehensive as to allow children to "articulate their own views on such matters, in consciousness of there being a number of alternatives" is difficult if not impossible, given that most children do not and cannot actually have sex, and even adolescents don't have a free choice of sexual partners, being constrained not only by the supervision of their parents but also by the limits of the law. Can anyone articulate their own views on sexuality in a critically reflective way with zero experience of the activity? In a lot of realms, this is surely possible b/c the knowledge in question is mainly academic or second-hand experience is an effective guide. This is probably true of much of politics, for example - you can understand voting pretty well without having to personally cast a vote, you can understand different regimes broadly without being a citizen of all of them, etc. Is it true of sexuality?
there is surely some significance (not least in terms of the law) to differences of age! I'm not sure there's no grooming an undergraduate--whether in the sense of indoctrinating them into cultish views, or in the sense of getting them into unwise sexual relationships... which isn't saying anything about what I think the age of consent or the legality of student-teacher relationships should be, just that I think indeed there is indeed some truth to the idea that students are vulnerable and dumb... this doesn't mean they can't consent to X or Y, but for a lot of things I suppose being vulnerable, dumb, and at risk of being 'groomed' by others (that is, manipulated by someone else into actions that will make us different kinds of people, in an irreversible and harmful sense) is often just the condition of being able to consent/choose at all...
Children certainly do all sorts of sexual things, although most of them probably don't 'have sex'... but like, over the course even of the last 100 years or so we've had big debates and changes about what the acceptable limit of childhood sexual play and expression should be, from giving them surgeries to stop them masturbating, to promoting pedophilia as healthy--or again from telling them hardly anything about the facts of life, to encouraging them that it'd be a fine idea to medically transition or think of themselves as nonbinary--all things I'm not in favor of! I think, regardless of what they're doing with their own or each other's bodies, young people are having sexualities and adults are having to convey messages and rules about sex/uality to them, in view of some notion of what a proper adult life, including sex/uality, is (however vague or contradictory the notion might be).
As to whether something like the liberal humanist autonomist self-reflexive ideal I sketched, maybe very off-handedly, is a good one--one that could be measured up to by anyone ever, or one that could be lived out by someone who hasn't yet 'had sex' (although again I'd say that sexuality is having us long before and beyond our inserting or receiving any particular organ into or from someone else)--well that'd be a longer essay, or rather a conversation... I'm not sure for instance about the analogy with politics (because like, well, if I were really thinking about what I think is true about political wisdom rather than what I think is expedient within the horizon of our own society, I'm not sure I'd be letting more than a few people vote... or at least I wouldn't take voting as having anything to do with knowledge!)... and there is something in fact troubling, or weird, about people's ability to consent to things that they can't possibly understand, in any meaningful way, the consequences of! which is a position that I think most of us are in much of the time about many matters political and sexual....
Of course part of liberal education is allowing young people to have sort of play-opinions as if they understood what they were talking about, with a certain kind of encouraging condescension (and if this is the stance that we take towards people who opine about matters they have no proper experience of, then I suppose it's also the right attitude by which liberals should respond to the sexual morality taught by Catholic clergy...)--I'm hardly sure what I think about how we help people to become self-reflexive, and indeed I've suggested elsewhere that encouraging people to think for themselves is an illusion by which supposed liberal enlighteners beguile and rule us (and I suggested it's a good thing, too!): https://im1776.com/2021/02/19/foucault-through-strauss/#:~:text=Foucault%20is%20not%20usually%20read,the%20shaping%20of%20public%20opinion
"You are capable of thinking for yourself" and "You are thinking for yourself" may much of the time be such ruses, the political equivalent of saying that an inappropriately young lover is "very mature for his/her age"!
Well, sure, there are some people who remain vulnerable and susceptible to strong personalities and/or questionable forms of seduction for much of their lives, but we can't define teaching as predation for their sake. Or b/c by its nature, teaching is practiced on more or less ignorant recipients. That's like the "power imbalance = rape" discourse that seeks as a prerequisite for sex an equality so complete that the only practicable solution is universal celibacy. The whole concept of an age of majority at which we become reasonable and "autonomous" deciders is of course a formalistic fiction; people become reasonable at different points, and many, probably most, never do so at all. Yet, as Locke says, we "suppose" them to be so at a uniform, universal point. We can't do otherwise, b/c individual evaluations would invite state tyranny (ie, the government says, "Sorry Blake, we continue to deem you insufficiently mature for citizenship. Reapply in 5 yrs."). But age of majority, before which is a period of rightless minority, is a basic premise of liberalism, so we have to take it seriously as a social structure even though it's obviously not individually precise.
There is an argument in Rawlsian liberal theory that, in order to educate children adequately for democratic citizenship, their schooling should consist in practicing the forms of democratic citizenship. So they should exercise free speech rights, due process rights, make group decisions about procedural matters (but not the curriculum, though it's not clear why not), and of course go out and protest for causes like gun control and climate change, etc. This seems completely wrong, because citizenship is not learned this way at all (although a certain posture of perpetual grievance can be habituated this way). There are certain experiences and skills that schools teach - how to persuade people, how to work with them, etc. that eventually translate into civic skills, but they are not taught *AS* civic skills or even taught explicitly at all. And of course there is the basic historical/political knowledge that schools convey about the Constitution, the three branches, etc. But mostly, we become citizens by growing up in the US, which indirectly teaches us 95% of what is politically desirable and undesirable.
My intuition is the same about sex ed. Schools can't teach it and should not try. They can teach you about the mechanics of the reproductive system, sure, or how STDs get spread. But they can't teach you how to be in love, how to be in a relationship, how to be a good spouse, how to approach or enjoy sex, how to decide whom to engage in it with, etc. And when they try, I can tell you from experience, it is horrific cringe. Nothing worse and less educative than your 8th grade algebra teacher playing Alanis Morissette's "Head Over Feet" to exemplify a "healthy relationship" and then telling you all about her courtship with your 7th grade biology teacher and how they now share a beautiful mutual affection and friendship and...well, let's just stop there. This is what you learn by watching and doing in a totally social and nonacademic way, and it's a kind of technocratic illusion to hope that we can build an educational institution to inculcate the "right" teachings about it.
Of course, you're right that schools convey all sorts of norms and mores about sexuality in inexplicit ways, but in that sense, heterosexual monogamous marriage and family seems unwise to dislodge (we need more babies!) as the background norm. That is, most of the literature you're going to read in English class is going to feature this, or the people you encounter in history class will live like this, without dwelling on either the particular excellence of this way of life (which no one sane does anyway, there is no "Let us pause for a moment to note that Romeo and Juliet are CIS-MALE AND FEMALE") or dilating on the excluded alternatives ("Let us pause for a moment to note that they could be ANY GENDER"). Can't children's sexual exploration continue to be something that occurs outside of school, and the individual working out of reflexive views about sexuality as well? In what ways can schools even ideally can do a better job than our individual fumblings via watching family, friends, and trashy TV/movies/social media?
I'm not sure that we're disagreeing about anything, or at least anything that I have a clear idea about, since it's not like I have a particular thought about say, how sex education should work, or what either K-12 or college curricula should be... both of the essays for the Chronicle were more thinking about the contradictory wishes I take it we all have in regards to students, whom we want to be 'free' and also to turn out, whatever this means for us, right...
I probably more or less agree with your last paragraph, in that class, at any level, is more about supplying students with a kind of cultural background material that's not explicitly thematized as being about sex, morality, how to live etc--and about modeling a better unstated ethic of how to be interested in such material--than it ought to be about giving explicit sermons, norms, etc... (I have very vivid awful memories of teachers telling us, via the Song of Solomon, how great sex with your spouse can be!)... and likewise I don't have much sympathy (although I've never thought much about it) for classroom democracy--as I said in my review of your book back in the day, I think education for liberal public adult life is probably necessarily illiberal, and indeed many of our most important adult relationships also have a distinct non-liberal character (in the spheres of family, romantic/erotic, religious, educational etc life--even, in some senses, among friends, I doubt that what's happening can be adequately characterized in terms of reciprocal respect for autonomy between two equal contracting subjects...), a point that Foucault, for instance, makes in his late work...
It's true, I'm not responding at all to your contentions about the ambivalence of mentoring and university education, but you know I basically agree there. I just want to draw a sharper line between minors and adults, and to draw it right before university rather than after it, b/c that is my preoccupation - that our politics is increasingly adultifying children while infantilizing adults. The precise line between them is blurry, but that doesn't excuse a complete reversal in the wrong direction.