Connecting Some Apologetic Dots

[_Symmachus]

It'd been sometime since I'd listened to Mormon Stories; John Dehlin is a man of many talents, but his project is, by definition, more about personal stories than ideas and so just doesn't interest me except when the ideas people come on. When that happens, it's thrilling, and I don't care what anyone says: Dehlin is a good interviewer because he gets his guests to talk and keep talking.

The Ritner podcast is a watershed in Mormon history. The real meat, of course, is Ritner's edition of the Joseph Smith papyri, but this podcast is on par with the 1912 Spalding affair. What was notable about that was not Spalding's book, a collection of then current Egyptological opinion of the Book of Abraham, but rather its wide publication by the New York Times. As in all things to do with Mormons and publicity since Utah statehood, these big stories are only a momentary flash for the non-Mormon public and quickly forgotten, but that flash burns a deep scar, slow to heal, on the imagination of Mormons. The 1912 NYT stories basically removed the Book of Abraham even from Mormon view until the late 1960s. Even Nibley didn't write about the Book of Abraham until he was nearly retired (and the first he did write was an attack on the contributors to Spalding's book half a century earlier). The fake rediscovery of the papyri in the late 1960s inaugurated a train of apologetic activity that in turn conveyed a new confidence to the Church's attitude the Book of Abraham and by extension the Pearl of Great Price. It seems paradoxical now, but apologetics was quite successful on the Book of Abraham front for a few decades. Refutations were amateurish, and scholarly pushback was tepid. Certainly there was nothing comparable to Ritner’s lectures these past weeks. Back then, Nibley himself, as I understand it, would lecture the general authorities about the Book of Abraham and the Book of Moses; it's not the reason why the Church began a massive temple building program, but it is tempting to speculate on the influence of their nascent confidence, derived from Nibley's apologetics, in the development of this policy. I imagine some of those Church people felt a certain thrill from all of Nibley's meandering gobbledygook: all those Egyptian pictures towards the back of the book that kept you awake during many a sacrament meeting so much more than that; they were physical proof that you were managing something extending back to Abraham and up to Kolob (admittedly, only a few were physically and emotionally capable of experiencing a thrill). It is that same thrill that shot through all the baby boomer Nibley wannabes who graduated into FARMS and comfortable employment at BYU.

That era is officially over now. For good. It's been ending for more than fifteen years, obviously, but it has been a war of attrition, with skirmishes here and there in places that are obscure to most members (internet boards first, Dialogue—which no truly believing Mormon reads—FAIR presentations, and so on), but this feels different. On the Book of Abraham front, this is total victory. It is one thing to see bits and pieces of this in the amateurish CES letter, yet for all but a few with enough energy and interest to read Ritner's book or to do the kind of research that Shulem has done, there was also the small possibility that Gee or Muehelstein might have something. Not now, though. This is final. Ritner published all of this of course in his book and in his response to the Church's essay in 2014, but a podcast and Youtube video are going to get attention in a way that no other medium will: the rest were guerilla pin-prick campaigns with many casualties but this a final blow to the Book of Abraham because of the medium transmitting it. Nobody needs to watch or listen to all 9 hours; like the Spalding book in 1912, it will be enough to know that a top Egyptologist has said it's all nonsense and that there is a live link to Youtube where this professor who taught John Gee has ripped apart the entire Book of Abraham and all the essential apologetic arguments. It will serve the purpose that Nibley's books served but for a generation that doesn't read books (or anything, really). It's hard to imagine John Gee mustering a response to this; he himself essentially conceded defeat back in 2018, as I noted at the time (on this thread), and it's telling that his latest book has nothing to do with Mormon scripture at all.

Instead it's about identity maintenance, arguing basically that people who leave the Church are just bad and the way to keep people in is to get them more committed to the Church. Maintaining that Mormon identity, and narrowing it down, is the solution he implies. He may be right. I was initially unsure why John Gee decided that he was a sociologist and wrote this book. It's hard not to see it as a sign that he had failed as an Egyptologist in so far that his Egyptological work wasn't helping the cause—but why this topic? Added to that, the recent discussion here about Kwaku and Hanna Seariac (I prefer Syriac, but whatever) and the sense expressed here that they represent a new crop of apologist on the verge of ripening was something I found equally confusing. Kwaku seems like an affable and entertaining person, but he clearly is not motivated by intellectual concerns. His primary apologetic seems to be that he is Mormon, and that having a Mormon identity is great. Hannah Seariac seems on the surface more concerned with ideas, but scanning her Twitter feed it becomes quite clear that ideas like the Trueness of the Church are vehicles for traditionalist identitarianism. The buzz around her here led me to the FAIR podcast, the first I'd ever listened to, where the only lively conversation (i.e. more than "I totally agree") with John Gee was about the distinction between "prog Mos" and progressives. Unfortunately, this never developed into a discussion of the ideas supposedly motivating them. But I was struck too by John Gee's obvious interest in categorizing people according to identities; it seemed vaguely identitarian too.

I have said here for a long time that Mormon apologetics after Nibley never developed any new ideas. It is an idea-less exercise in imitation of the Master (that is, Nibley) in terms of style (be a dick) and approach (anything roughly old that Joseph didn't know proves the Church is true). But unlike him they never developed a wider vision of Mormonism to advance. Their vision is much more limited because their horizon extends little beyond the act of being a BYU professor in Provo, Utah. That's the end goal. Daniel Peterson does not appear ever to have had an original thought, but it's difficult to discern his shallowness as unique because hardly any of the others have either; he is conspicuous because he is an impresario of apologetics, but not a practitioner. The practitioners are even duller. I have a hard time even calling them "apologists" because classical apologists that come to my mind didn't fend off attacks through mere rhetorical games and (at best) focusing on irrelevant details; no, writers like Tertullian or Justin Martyr or even Hugh Nibley actually offered ideas to replace their opponents'. It was more offensive than defensive. Nibley's whole vision of the ancient world is just so much more interesting than that of many academic historians, let alone his vision of Mormonism. The effect of reading Nibley after a long stretch is almost that you feel his version of Mormonism better explains this or that feature of the ancient world. It may be totally wrong, but that's beside the point I'm making; he wasn't simply brushing off attacks but actually attempting to displace the contemporary intellectual orthodoxies around him. Mormonism was a grand key that explained things. He was an unyielding traditionalist in his Mormonism but he was not intellectually reactionary. Not so his successors. But what do those successors have in common with Kwaku and Seariac? What makes them all apologists?

Forgive me my limited understanding, for I"m sure it's obvious to those who have studied apologetics as a social phenomenon much more deeply than I, but to my thinking identitarianism is a symptom of intellectual hollowness; it's what fills the void caused by an absence of ideas. People need to live their lives in stories because that is how we orient ourselves in the world, and ideas are the beginnings of story. A myth is a vehicle for an idea, but when you have no ideas, identity becomes the vehicle for a myth. People resort to a form of tribalism where identity takes the place of ideas, or at least where identity becomes paramount and any idea is merely a tool subordinate and subservient to the identity or where the identity and idea become indistinguishable. This is phenomenon observable almost everywhere in the culture now, which is one of the reasons I am skeptical of claims that ideas are behind, for example, the current iconoclastic movement in the urban United States. No one loots an Apple Store because they are motivated by some idea. But such criminality, interestingly, is justified by appealing to identity. To me it is a sign that ideas (expressed as myths) that once structured the social order have disappeared. I don't know whether it is a symptom or a cause, but it is certainly a sign of fast crumbling social cohesion.

I wonder if Mormons apologetics is not following a similar course. If so, it wouldn't be the only part of Mormonism going this way. It is not for nothing, perhaps, that the most prominent Mormon space outside of the Church itself is something called "Mormon Stories," a place predicated not on any idea about Mormonism but merely the identity of being or having been Mormon. Or consider the Snufferites, people who explicitly reject the Church because it no longer sustains its own myths; they are right about that, because the Church as I knew it growing up was largely a managerial mechanism, and it seems even more so now from what I can tell. Their ideas are whacky but they seem more interested in those ideas than in simply being Mormon for the sake of being Mormon. Whatever ideas Mormonism contains, you don't hear much about them at General Conference. But I think apologetics ran out of ideas even before Nibley died, and it is about that time that FARMS (and then Maxwell Institute) shifted their approach to identity maintenance. The collapse of the distinction between the idea and the identity associated with the idea is what fueled the hostile tone: attacking a claim made by the Church was equivalent to attacking them. Nibley could be a dick, but he was mostly dismissive, and one of the most revealing facts about his attitude towards disagreemtn was that he was close friends with Klaus Baer (as well as all kinds of apostates and other unsavories throughout his life). Baer was an intellectual antagonist, not a personal one. Compare their relationship to John Gee (Nibley's successor) and Robert Ritner (Baer's successor), and you see the shift I mean. Gee and his compatriots see Ritner not as attacking the Book of Abraham but as attacking the Church at the center of their identity, but that is not how Nibley viewed Baer. Nor did Nibley write screeds against fellow Mormons as such (with one famous exception), nor about lukewarm Mormons or liberal Mormons because he was not policing what being a Mormon was; that is, he was not busying himself in Mormon identity maintenance. His successors, however, having been making that their primary activity for a long time now, even when it seemed like they were doing traditional FARMSian scholarship—what other way is there to see their attacks on amateur archaeologists who think that the Nephites lived a little south of Chicago rather than Costa Rica? One or two posts about the faults of the "Heartland Model" look like a conceptual disagreement; 10+ involving reviews by four people over a single book (actually, merely the commentary in the book), and you start to think something else is going on.

The lack of ideas in apologetics has resulted in a project deformed from the original apologetic goals of Nibley. Rather than advancing Mormonism, the new goal is to project Mormon identity (as Kwaku does) and to delineate it (as Seariac and Smoot do). The older apologists have been doing this for a while though in a subtler form. Come to think of it, that is hardly different from what the new MI has been doing, too. I dislike liberal Mormons because I think that, beneath their inclusive rhetoric and chummy demeanor, they are a more sophisticated form of identitarian—the only reason any of them stay in the Church is because they have a Mormon identity but it's hard to find one who believes the claims made by the Church or takes them seriously—and they strike me as authoritarian and boringly careerist: what is an original idea that has come out of anything they have done? All they do is update Mormonism to whatever the latest academic trend is. But these "progmos" aren't a threat because of any idea they have; they are threat because their view of Mormon identity is so broad as to be meaningless, which is in effect the denial of someone like Hannah Seariac.

They will still do ancient stuff that Joseph couldn't have known about, but it will be ancillary and vestigial. Apologetics will be on the offensive again, but to judge from Seariac, Kwaku, and Smoot, it will be primarily about advancing a particular version of Mormon identity, and it will have a different target. Ritner's podcast on the Book of Abraham isn't as emotionally satisfying as Jenkins' takedown of the Book of Mormon, but I think its effects will go much deeper, because from here on out the apologists are going to go for easier targets. John Gee obviously feels Jana Riess is much easier than Robert Ritner, which is to say that "easier targets" means other Mormons. So I can't help but wonder if this is all that we're going to get from the apologists from here on out, and whether this shift to a blatantly identitarian apologetics portends a breakdown of social cohesion within the Church.

[_Shulem]

The Ritner podcast is a watershed in Mormon history. The real meat, of course, is Ritner's edition of the Joseph Smith papyri, but this podcast is on par with the 1912 Spalding affair. What was notable about that was not Spalding's book, a collection of then current Egyptological opinion of the Book of Abraham, but rather its wide publication by the New York Times.

Yes, it's 1912 all over again only this time it's worse. Much worse! Instead of being published once on disposable paper that gets thrown away in the nightly trash it is forever etched in stone on the INTERNET. The conversation doesn't end with a newspaper clipping but multiplies and divides like a virus until it makes its way into every computer.

The Ritner exchange is going to advance the cause in getting to the bottom of the Anubis jackal snout in Facsimile No. 3. John Gee is now on notice and it won't be long before the apostles ask questions. Smith's deliberate act of sabotage to the ancient depiction of another religion's god is not going to be so easy to defend as was making innocent additions to the damaged Hypocephalus in order to make it conform with assumed convention or aesthetic purpose.

Clearly, now, everybody can see for themselves that Joseph Smith brutally hacked the nose off the jackal god! The apologists are going to have to answer for this. But even worse, the Church is going to have to answer for it. Their best course of action will be to remove the Facsimiles from the next edition of the Pearl of Great Price and to include a footnote that the Facsimiles and Explanations printed in earlier editions were the speculations of a news article produced by the Times and Season and do not reflect the inspired message of the Book of Abraham chapters.

You can bet the Facsimiles are on their death bed.

[_huckelberry]

Symmachus, I am puzzled by your comment here:
"The fake rediscovery of the papyri in the late 1960s inaugurated a train of apologetic activity that in turn conveyed a new confidence to the Church's attitude the Book of Abraham and by extension the Pearl of Great Price. It seems paradoxical now, but apologetics was quite successful..."

I remember reading a Nibly article in the late 60s about the church receiving the papyri and that this was an exciting occasion for study and understanding. It also occasioned a very weird theory of secret coding embedded in the text which transmitted the Book of Abraham text to Joseph Smith, but not to other people like Egyptian scribes.

Do you mean to say that the Papyra were not actually the ones Joseph Smith had and many people including Nibley were wrong about that? Or are you just saying you are not convinced by the original Nibly apologetic theory but many other people were.

There are times it seems that outlandish things can become believable just because they are unlinked from competing reality.

[_Shulem]

Symmachus, I am puzzled by your comment here:
"The fake rediscovery of the papyri in the late 1960s inaugurated a train of apologetic activity that in turn conveyed a new confidence to the Church's attitude the Book of Abraham and by extension the Pearl of Great Price. It seems paradoxical now, but apologetics was quite successful..."

I take it to mean that the Church felt relieved and confident in stressing that the actual papyrus Smith used to translate was not included in the fragments returned to the Church by the Met. With that came the Missing Roll theory and other wacky theories conjured up by apologists of every stripe.

[_huckelberry]

Shulem, I have read comments in recent years about a missing scroll theory. My memory of Nibley's article does not include any missing scroll theory. It was a long time ago so I could have forgotten something. I was mostly impressed with the idea that if Nibley was going to do somersaults like he proposed there must be a serious problem with the discovery.I stopped involvement with the church a bit before that article so did not follow what happened next at that time.

Its possible that Nibley was fond of mental acrobatics.

[_Shulem]

Shulem, I have read comments in recent years about a missing scroll theory. My memory of Nibley's article does not include any missing scroll theory. It was a long time ago so I could have forgotten something. I was mostly impressed with the idea that if Nibley was going to do somersaults like he proposed there must be a serious problem with the discovery.I stopped involvement with the church a bit before that article so did not follow what happened next at that time.

Its possible that Nibley was fond of mental acrobatics.

Nibley must have been sorely disappointed in 1967 when the fragments proved that a conventional translation had nothing to do with the Book of Abraham. He explored the idea of a non-conventional translation wherein he posits that there was some kind of hidden meaning to the hieroglyphs that could only be deciphered by revelation through a seer stone. The Kirtland Papers indicate this was the case because the transcripts show that whole paragraphs or sentences were derived from a single character so there must be some kind of hidden code that only the initiated could know or a seer using a Urim and Thummim.

The Missing Roll theory was the immediate backup theory (the only thing to fall back on) in case the other theories proved to flop -- which they did.

[_Gadianton]

"Hugh Nibley actually offered ideas to replace their opponents'. It was more offensive than defensive. Nibley's whole vision of the ancient world is just so much more interesting than that of many academic historians, let alone his vision of Mormonism. The effect of reading Nibley after a long stretch is almost that you feel his version of Mormonism better explains this or that feature of the ancient world. It may be totally wrong, but that's beside the point I'm making; he wasn't simply brushing off attacks but actually attempting to displace the contemporary intellectual orthodoxies around him"

I totally agree. He was a holist theoretically, and about as an expansive of a practitioner that you will ever come by. A professor I had at BYU, who I got along with pretty well, was a junior colleague of Nibley's, and explained to me that when Nibley talked about the ancient world, he was almost always right, but when he talked politics, he was almost always wrong. This seems to be the way his understudies regarded him. The entire FARMS crowd, a bevy of unhinged right-wingers, worshiped his historical insights and then fell embarrassed over his politics. They even had a right-wing buddy of theirs skewer Nibley's "economics" in the FARMS Review.

It's hard to see how the two are so easily separated. His most heavily footnoted work (I think) The Arrow, Hunter and the State, is the obvious example of the unity of his research. So you believe his historical research is spot-on, but also believe free-market capitalism is a gift from God? Maybe Lehi in the Desert can be read totally separated, but his historical stuff isn't really the kind of research people end up being "always right" on. I don't know how or if he reacted to accusations of "parallel mania" but it isn't just parallels, it's half-baked insights that never get rigorous treatment. Maybe that's because he an entire world to re-invent and didn't have a lot of time to spend in one place, but you can get the gist of where he's headed.

The LGT would be a distant second as a research paradigm for the apologists, far less encompassing, but it could be quite a project if they could ever have gotten it off the ground. They seemed satisfied with letting it die as a "defense" -- a plausible objection to routine criticisms of historicity. Sorenson and Gardner certainly took it on themselves to flesh it out and get into it as a true, positive research project that needs working on, but it never gained a community or scholarly backing.

[_Dr Moore]

What an insightful post, professor. I enjoyed reading it very much. Thank you!

If I understand your point about the rise of identitarian apologetics, it occurs naturally and predictably because the only “idea” that endures in the church is its claim to a singularly restored priesthood authority, granting leaders carte blanche to speak for God and revise and prioritize doctrine, scripture and even history itself, at will. All other ideas have begun to fail for lack of evidence and plentiful evidence to the contrary.

But the model of LDS authority still rests on the bedrock of prophesy, and because all of the scholarly “ideas” put forth to prove prophetic ability in church history are failing, the apologetic of last resort is to appeal to present day success. It’s the “we”, not the “he” that best proves our case.

This is not a new apologetic. I seem to recall a number of apostles and prophets over the years who conveyed one or other version of “the greatest proof of our truth is the lives of our members.” Obviously such statements will evoke a feeling of identity pride among members, of wanting to affiliate with an organization whose members are admirably noticed.

Even if the Book of Abraham is proved a fabrication, does that matter at all if “16 million” members happily live the gospel?

Humans all live in multiple systems — family, town, religious, political, national, career, social/caste, ethnic, hobbies, economic — what would a panel of independent sociologists say of the Mormon identity vs any other?

If members inside the system are mostly happy, provided and cared for, is there any logic whatsoever to arguing that system a fraud? On what basis? By what normalized standard? So maybe identitarianism IS the most favorable apologetic field of battle?

[_Symmachus]

Do you mean to say that the Papyra were not actually the ones Joseph Smith had and many people including Nibley were wrong about that? Or are you just saying you are not convinced by the original Nibly apologetic theory but many other people were.

...

There are times it seems that outlandish things can become believable just because they are unlinked from competing reality.

What I meant was what you put in that last sentence: Nibley threw out several arguments from the late 60s onward, including the argument that source text of the Book of Abraham was on lost papyri. My description of that period I think is accurate, namely that there was no sustained response to Nibley and his successors until Ritner, so nearly four decades. As I recall from the biography by his son-in-law, Nibley referred to this early work as "sparring for time," but of course he never came up with a comprehensive position. I believe Ritner said in the most recent podcast that he counted four different positions that Nibley took regarding the Book of Abraham. It was all sparring for time, as it turns out. There was the series in Dialogue with articles by Klaus Baer and John Wilson and others in the late 1960s, but none of these was as thorough and final as what Ritner has done with the podcast (and the book), as I don't think any Egyptologist took any real interest in this stuff after that, thus leaving the field wide open for the apologists for the next forty years. To anyone following this at the time, the apologetics surrounding the Book of Abraham therefore appeared to be a success.

I totally agree. He was a holist theoretically, and about as an expansive of a practitioner that you will ever come by. A professor I had at BYU, who I got along with pretty well, was a junior colleague of Nibley's, and explained to me that when Nibley talked about the ancient world, he was almost always right, but when he talked politics, he was almost always wrong. This seems to be the way his understudies regarded him. The entire FARMS crowd, a bevy of unhinged right-wingers, worshiped his historical insights and then fell embarrassed over his politics. They even had a right-wing buddy of theirs skewer Nibley's "economics" in the FARMS Review.

It's hard to see how the two are so easily separated. His most heavily footnoted work (I think) The Arrow, Hunter and the State, is the obvious example of the unity of his research. So you believe his historical research is spot-on, but also believe free-market capitalism is a gift from God? Maybe Lehi in the Desert can be read totally separated, but his historical stuff isn't really the kind of research people end up being "always right" on. I don't know how or if he reacted to accusations of "parallel mania" but it isn't just parallels, it's half-baked insights that never get rigorous treatment. Maybe that's because he an entire world to re-invent and didn't have a lot of time to spend in one place, but you can get the gist of where he's headed.

Ha! I had a discussion once with somebody at BYU who basically said exactly this: "he's right on everything except he is so ignorant about how markets and capitalism work." My liberal Mormon friends took the opposite tack: "He's wrong about everything but he is spot on when it comes to markets and capitalism." I take the view that he is simply wrong on all accounts: he is a fundamentalist on Mormon scripture, and his fundamentalist reading leads him to juvenile tantrum against capitalism, all in total ignorance and indifference to any kind of economics.

The LGT would be a distant second as a research paradigm for the apologists, far less encompassing, but it could be quite a project if they could ever have gotten it off the ground. They seemed satisfied with letting it die as a "defense" -- a plausible objection to routine criticisms of historicity. Sorenson and Gardner certainly took it on themselves to flesh it out and get into it as a true, positive research project that needs working on, but it never gained a community or scholarly backing.

It's almost sad. If FARMS had been serious about the Ancient Research and not just being a Foundation ostensibly engaged in Mormon Studies, then we should have seen a host of subsidiary projects that would have made BYU a leading center of Meso-American studies, Semitic linguistics, Near Eastern Archaeology, excelling in any number of technical fields. Suppose the ultimate goal is the ridiculous task of proving the Books of Mormon and Abraham ancient: so what, if it there are a host of ancillary benefits? Apologetics has traditionally been a creative endeavor; so many of the greatest scholarly discoveries and even whole fields of study came out of the apologetic fever boiling out of the the Protestant Reformation and the Counter Reformation. Very few classical scholars, for example, are aware of just how much their field owes to arguments between Catholics and Protestants (e.g. Scaliger and the Jesuits, or Erasmus vs. Cardinal Cisneros). Our entire understanding of Homer would have been impossible without the groundwork laid by arguments over scripture that lead to the Documentary Hypothesis. A book could and maybe should be written about this. But what has come out of all that activity of FARMS and its MI successor? Beyond publishing or republishing Nibley's work—which is not a small accomplishment but not an original one either—they gave us some fan service pseudo-scholarship, bloated and snarky book reviews, the embarrassing shorts-with-a-tucked-in-Polo-shirt Boomerism of the FAIR conference, and finally the comments section at Sic et Non, a medium at last small enough to contain their intellectual powers.

This is not a new apologetic. I seem to recall a number of apostles and prophets over the years who conveyed one or other version of “the greatest proof of our truth is the lives of our members.” Obviously such statements will evoke a feeling of identity pride among members, of wanting to affiliate with an organization whose members are admirably noticed.

Even if the Book of Abraham is proved a fabrication, does that matter at all if “16 million” members happily live the gospel?
...
If members inside the system are mostly happy, provided and cared for, is there any logic whatsoever to arguing that system a fraud? On what basis? By what normalized standard? So maybe identitarianism IS the most favorable apologetic field of battle?

I think this is somewhat distinct from what I mean, although I agree with a lot of what you say here. The claim that you are referencing here is really an ethico-utilitarian one, rooted in post-WWII American culture of self-improvement. Matthew Bowman has a chapter about Mormonism is period that I found really insightful in this regard. He takes all of the "be your best self" and "how to win friends and influence people" pablum of the post-war USA as the backdrop of the self-improvement messages that used to appear in conferences until all of that generation passed away (by the early 2000s), and their claim being that Mormonism is really the best and highest form of self-improvement. I have heard even Richard Bushman make this claim in a Dehlin podcast ("Mormonism makes me a better person"), and Roger Hendrix in his Mormon Stories interview expressed a similar view of Mormonism as being dominant while he was growing up in the Church. I know this was a very big theme for a long time. And it provides an escape, for some people anyway, from the true-or-false approach to the Church: is the Church good or bad? The trouble is that for pretty much every Mormon who grew up in the 1990s or after, the Church feels bad because it leads to unpleasant existence with no discernible improvement of self or situation in most cases.

So, in short, the Church has been losing on the true-false conflict and on the good-bad conflict. I see this identitarian apologetic as a response to these defeats: it's conflict is an us-them one, and the fight exists solely to keep the fight going, which maintains the group (cf. Oaks's comments about providing answers, whether or not they are the right answers). It's not framed that way explicitly, and there are vestiges of the old questions that appear in the rhetoric, but you can see in effect that this is really a social conflict and not an ideological one or ethical one. Obviously, these are always going on to one degree or another, but the degree of the identitarian apologetic now seems to me so much higher. It's really a kind of exercise in self-preservation.

[_Dr Moore]

... in effect that this is really a social conflict and not an ideological one or ethical one. Obviously, these are always going on to one degree or another, but the degree of the identitarian apologetic now seems to me so much higher. It's really a kind of exercise in self-preservation.

Agreed.

It's like the abusive husband making a last ditch bullying cry to preserve his status quo and keep her from leaving: "you're nothing without me, and you know it!"