Bad Feminism, Facebook's Metaverse, and the Shape of Christian Hope

The enduring lure of Nostalgia and Progress. Plus, why feminism only works for elites.

Greetings, 3T readers. We have something special for you coming later this month on Black Friday: a Three Things Christmas book list!

We want to help you Christmas shop for the bookish people in your life.

What kind of books are you looking to gift this year? Comment on this post or reply to this email to let us know. We’ll do our best to find just the right thing for you and put our suggestions on the list.

Yours,
Phillip & Andy

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The Metaverse is Coming

Nicholas Carr on the meaning of Facebook’s rebrand

“Facebook, it’s now widely accepted, has been a calamity for the world,” writes Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. “The obvious solution, most people would agree, is to get rid of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has a different idea: Get rid of the world.”

The metaverse will be its replacement. Announced by Zuckerberg in late October via a cringe-worthy and bizarre keynote, the metaverse is a gigantic leap forward into virtual and augmented reality for the masses.

This was inevitable, of course. What wasn’t inevitable is the metaverse resting in the hands of a single private company, a company that already as an authoritarian grip on world nations: Facebook, now rebranded as Meta. As Carr writes,

His goal with the metaverse is not just to create a virtual world that is more encompassing, more totalizing, than what we experience today with social media and videogames. It’s to turn reality itself into a product. In the metaverse, nothing happens that is not computable. That also means that, assuming the computers doing the computing are in private hands, nothing happens that is not a market transaction, a moment of monetization, either directly through an exchange of money or indirectly through the capture of data. With the metaverse, capital subsumes reality. It’s money all the way down.

Zuckerberg’s cash cow is part of his longstanding vision for “an embodied internet”, a phrase thrown around repeatedly in October’s Connect event. But Zuckerberg’s vision of embodiment, Carr explains, is deeply inadequate:

When embodied as an avatar in virtual space, we may feel as though we have a physical body, but because that feeling of embodiment is purely a projection of our own mind, we will not experience other avatars as physical, full beings. They will remain shadows, cartoon figures — like the characters in videogames. Virtual embodiment, in other words, is essentially and inescapably solipsistic. Present only to ourselves, we will be embodied but estranged.

Read Meanings of the metaverse over at Rough Type. And as the metaverse seeks to invade your life in the coming years, remember the words of another tech giant who learned his lesson the hard way: “As terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place that you can get a decent meal. Because, reality ... is real.”

On Christian Hope

Kirsten Sanders on the lure of Nostalgia and Progress

Faced with a confusing and unjust world, Christians can quickly find themselves yearning for a bygone past or striving for immediate social change. But neither Nostalgia or Progress should be confused with Christian hope, writes theologian Kristen Sanders.

Nostalgia has a “false memory” and looks at “the past as without moral complication, without despair, without sorrow.” Progress quickly forgets the reality of human sin and often sees “weakness, frailty, and need as moral deficiencies.” Christian hope is different:

The object of Christian hope is, as Thomas Aquinas writes, “a future good, difficult but possible to obtain.” But it is not a generic hope; rather, hope is only properly Christian when its source is God himself and its end the eternal happiness found in communion with God. Hope, therefore, is not the correct word to speak about human optimism or the desire for the betterment of the human condition, conceived in human terms. It is not remote wish fulfillment (“I hope the sun comes out today”) or vague future desires (“I hope next year’s markets are stronger”). Christian hope is not a theological emotion. It is, at least in the Catholic tradition, considered a theological virtue.

Aquinas was clear that hope is a virtue of the will. But unlike the acquired virtues, hope is infused, given by God as a gift of grace. Hope works to nurture and urge the soul on its journey toward God; it is a virtue that both invigorates the soul and prevents it from moving toward presumption or despair. 

Progress is afflicted by presumption, Nostalgia by despair. Both can be paralyzing in their own ways. But Christian hope “invigorates the soul” with a lively apprehension of God’s eternity. It discovers three things, Sanders writes:

• Because all of time is God’s own, we can move in it without hurry.

• God’s eternity can allow us to act with rest.

• Divine eternity can afford us the opportunity to live without fear of tiring.

Read On Christian Hope over at Mere Orthodoxy. It’s one excellent part of Mere O’s inaugural print issue.

Liberated Enough

Mary Harrington on the incoherence of contemporary feminism

“Feminism is about giving women choice,” quipped the actress Emma Watson a few years ago. “It’s about freedom. It’s about liberation. It’s about equality.”

But is it really? According to “reactionary feminist” Mary Harrington, today’s popular feminism only ends up benefitting an elite class of woman. Brace yourself:

The outcome is a kind of liberation for women, available in direct proportion to their position in the social hierarchy: the higher, the freer. At the top sit professional-class women who compete on equal terms with men across the white-collar career spectrum, while outsourcing not just domestic life but even gestation itself to paid proxies. Further down the food chain, women who cannot afford to deploy all available technological resources to obliterating sex differences find themselves incarcerated with male-bodied rapists, returning to work while still bleeding postpartum, or aborting wanted babies they cannot take time off work to raise. Discussion of this tension has in recent years become increasingly taboo, while its ramifications have left a growing body of broadly feminist-inclined women politically homeless.

Contemporary feminism, in other words, is deeply incoherent. At the centre of this incoherence is the frequently unquestioned notion of the sameness of men and women, a sameness that should (so they say) result in equal participation by everyone in public life.

But, as Harrington points out, it simply isn’t working. A coherent feminism would advocate for “the explicit ordering of state power to shield women, children, and the relational space of family life from the market.” In terms of public policy, this looks like a shift away from our old social contract with its emphasis on rights toward a new social covenant. As Harrington puts it:

A politics oriented toward the interests of the wider population must aim to shore up an infrastructure within which not greater freedom, but greater and healthier obligations may take shape for both sexes.

Read Liberated Enough: Feminism, Liberalism, and Conservatism over at American Affairs. For more from Mary Harrington, check our her column at UnHerd.

Phillip and family just returned from a refreshing holiday in West Sussex. Home is wonderful, but you think less about dust and clutter when away. A journey to Arundel also led to the discovery of French glace fruits. Thank heavens they are prohibitively expensive lest Phillip’s time on earth be cut short too quickly.

Reading: Given how much he loved A Gentleman in Moscow, Phillip picked up Amor Towles’ new novel Lincoln Highway. What a tome! A hundred pages in and things are still getting started, but it seems worth the ride. Rebecca Eklund’s The Beatitudes Through the Ages is also affording page-after-page of surprises. Did you know that meekness is actually about the proper management of anger? Neither did he!

Watching: On holiday, Phillip and Christa watched the restoration of Howards End, a 1992 film that has always beguiled Phillip with its lush 70MM cinematography, devastating irony and satisfying performances (Emma Thompson! Vanessa Redgrave! Anthony Hopkins!). But the plot has gaping holes, so they decided to follow it up with the recent BBC version. It’s no Merchant Ivory, but it is more E.M. Forster – and with a Nico Muhly score. What a nice surprise.

Reading: Andy is reading Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. In the genre-fiction category, he is finally reading Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga and an odd but delightful reimagining of the space opera genre in which every character is a copy of a self-replicating spacecraft named Bob. (It’s a real thing. Someday.)

Listening: Andy added new songs to his Charles Taylor-inspired “Malaise of Modernity” playlist, including Jon Bellion’s Ungrateful Eyes (“I made a hundred grand this year. Clap clap. So what? I’m still feeling anxious. Still worried about the same shit.”) And here are some other songs Andy’s had on repeat lately.

Darkling Psalter: Catch up on the first ten Psalms and the first ten poems in Andy’s Psalm translation project. And here are two new ones: Psalm 14 and Psalm 86.

Still Point: Andy launched a series on deconversion and deconstruction on his other Christian newsletter. Read “I Outgrew Christianity”, “I Found a More Authentic Faith”, “Why Would I Believe In Something That Hurt Me So Much?”, and “I’m Not a Christian Because I Found a Better Way to Live."

Deconversion Reading List: Here are a few new additions: The Sacredness of Questioning Everything and Life’s Too Short To Pretend You’re Not Religious by David Dark. Read the whole list on Still Point.

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