Dan Miller critiques Josh Hawley’s Masculinity, exposing his straw-man "modern-day Epicureans"—liberals caricatured as rejecting family, religion, and tradition for unconstrained self-invention—while Hawley paradoxically argues identity is purely socially determined. Miller counters with Hawley’s own fatherhood choices, proving agency exists beyond rigid constraints, revealing a false conservative binary. The episode frames Hawley’s selective historical nostalgia as a tool to justify present-day MAGA politics, where tradition is weaponized to dismiss nuanced selfhood. [Automatically generated summary]
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 Swedge, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J at 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 heading, if you would, 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 and looking to build that out.
And I'm just going to dive in here this week to this week's episode.
Caricatures of Modern Epicureans00:16:00
As I mentioned a minute ago, we are still looking at Josh Hawley's book, Masculinity.
We're looking at that to explore sort of 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, you 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, as vision is not all that compelling to me.
I acknowledge I could just be biased, but I don't think that it is.
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 understands what Epicureanism was.
He doesn't.
But everybody he disagrees with, he calls the modern-day Epicureans.
And that's his favorite, I think 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 like social science research and things like that.
The things he never cites is when he says the modern-day Epicureans say whatever, then it's just, it's just, we just got Josh Hawley's word 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 are easy to critique.
And the reason that they're presented by Hawley is to make his positions seem more compelling than they are.
But I think this caricature still matters.
Somebody could say, if they're not real, if he's not describing what people really think and so forth, if he's just presenting a caricature, as you suggest, Dan, like, why spend time worrying about it?
Like, why not just move on?
The reason is, because if you think about it, 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 like 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 he 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.
Okay.
So I think that's part of what makes it significant.
And I think that 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, 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, bear, understand that.
But it is a defining feature of the MAGA movement.
It 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, I'll just maybe switch to the first person, what we, the modern-day Epicureans, think.
And I'm not picking this at random.
We could, we could tackle what he says about the Epicureans every episode.
I know I've talked about it in different parts, a lot of different themes to it.
But I've chosen this because it gets at a really significant, I think, false conception that drives the discourse that Hawley has and of everybody like him.
Okay.
And what I want to look at is his statement.
It comes in a section of the book.
I'm going to actually read from the book.
It's Josh Hawley story time here.
It's a section of the book 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 sort of actually seem to limit it to that.
This opens up the topic that came up last episode of, you know, he says that these are the virtues of a father, but then he sort of opens them up beyond fathers, whatever, work of sacrifice.
Okay.
And what he wants to do here is he wants to set up a contrast between the idea of what he's calling sacrifice and the position of the modern day Epicureans.
And here's part of what he has to say.
Okay.
For those who want to keep score, this is page 92.
He says this.
He says, 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 sort of shaped them, to their origins, what have you, in this process of, I don't know, self-invention and self-aggrandizement, what have you.
And so he kind of presents it as, you know, the modern day Epicureans have this kind of anything goes, choose your own venture idea of selfhood.
And he then contrasts it, and we started getting into the contrast, the transition to that.
He contrasts it with his view, with his supposedly, I guess, non-Epicurean understanding.
So here's what he goes to contrast it with.
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.
And I just want to say the places we grew up in, just places we grew up.
You don't need two prepositions right next to each other.
Josh Hawley.
Sorry, the professor who teaches writing here.
Let me back off.
Okay.
When you throw off the places we grew up in, the ways they shaped us and the thousand and one other things we didn't choose at all, yet that 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.
Okay.
Notice, just by the way, there's nothing about sacrifice or fatherhood in those couple paragraphs.
That's what he's supposed to be talking about.
Here's what he's really doing, okay, in these two visions, contrasting what he calls the modern day Epicureans from his own perspective.
What he's really talking about here is individual identity formation, the formation of who we are as individuals in relation to, let's say, group identity.
And I think 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, how we come to be individuals.
The position he just dismisses, the position what he calls the modern day Epicureans, I'm going to call it a model of libertarian selfhood.
And 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.
It is, we live in a way that is unconstrained and so forth, any way we please.
And this is what Holly 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 all that off to be whoever or whatever we want to be.
Okay, that's what he's critical of.
Now, Holly is right that that's not possible.
I don't agree with Holly 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 like dump all over people who talk about being their authentic selves and so forth, but the language of authenticity can move in that direction.
The language of self-actualization can move in this direction, that we give this idea that we're just throwing off everything.
And Holly 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, and we could, I don't know, religion and language and culture and hell, genetics, any number of different things we could add to it.
And again, there are people who kind of talk that way.
So Holly would have a point there if that's what he actually said.
If he just sort of stopped there, he'd have a point.
But that's not what he says.
It's not what he stops.
He doesn't stop with a reasoned response to an unreasonable and I think very naive position.
No, he has to do what Holly does and he has to set up an impossible contrast.
So he can't just say, here's a vision of selfhood that's problematic.
No, 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, what he articulates in that second quotation I read, it's 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.
He says that without these, we are nothing.
And if we take these away, there's nothing left.
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 and everything else.
Put all those together and you have us, period.
Who we are is just that.
It 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.
And 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 dumb and sweeping and whatever.
And then he'll go on to say something else that actually undermines what he said.
But 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 could come up with plenty of my own like parenting fail or spousehold fail or sibling fail or child fail moments in my life.
But what he describes is a heated argument he had with his wife.
And it's this argument 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 whatever.
And he kind of looks up and his kids are watching.
I think he says wide-eyed and they're 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.
Again, I think a lot of us have been there.
I'm with him so far.
I remember thinking to myself, this is the worst.
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 the 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 this heated debate and seen them not being kind to each other.
Again, all of us have been in long relationships and things like that, or friendships or whatever, I think we can identify with being in that position.
It sounds like a kid who walked in and saw that and said to himself, man, when I'm growing up, I'm not going to do that.
What's the point?
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 what?
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 and something that he tries not to do and so forth.
Okay.
What's the point?
He's describing here a break from his upbringing.
He is looking back on his story and something that he might have seen in some parent or friend or somebody important in his life and 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 is he telling us?
What he's telling us in a really, 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.
Choices and Constraints00:06:41
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 a different direction.
He could not have gone a different direction.
If that's all we are, then making a change would be impossible.
It's that simple.
People want to make statements like we are only this.
It means you cannot be something else.
People do other things.
Ergo, 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 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, you either hold 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 one must be true, but then he undermines it himself.
And what that shows is the reality of really 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 Holly allows.
And this is something that's really important to me.
It's something I think about a lot.
And so much so that I actually have, I have a tattoo that illustrates this.
And people who have seen me live, if you've seen me online, if you're seeing this right now, I'm holding it up.
It's a chain.
It's a chain wrapped around my wrist, and the ends of the chain connect at a final link.
But the final link, I'm pointing to it if you happen to be watching, the final link is not closed.
So the chain is connected, but not closed.
And 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 with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
It's a topic I talk about with a lot of them.
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.
And the chain represents constraint.
The link represents the possibility of freedom.
We could free ourselves of those constraints, but sometimes we do.
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 he 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.
It's 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 or something like that, 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.
I was like, you know what?
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 culture 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 freedom or like libertarian self-selection of your own selfhood and who you are 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 get from that.
We also know the people who don't acknowledge or recognize the way that they have been shaped by their past or their background or what have you.
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 be aware of.
Maybe it takes somebody else, a loved one, a partner, a trauma experienced in life.
It could be therapy, whatever it is.
It takes some other sort of external perspective to bring it into view.
But we're aware that those things are there.
But 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 and so forth.
What's the point?
Who we are, who we become, is always the result of a complex and continuous interplay of creativity and freedom.
On the one hand, creativity and freedom.
And on the other hand, constraint.
We never simply throw off the constraints.
Holly's right about that, but we are never just the sum of our background, as he suggests.
So Holly here is fundamentally misrepresenting, I think, and misunderstanding the nature of selfhood and individuality.
Why does it matter?
Okay.
Why am I talking about this?
Why am I geeking out on conceptions of individual selfhood and so forth?
Here's why.
How Conservatism Idealizes the Past00:05:37
It's because Holly's move here, it isn't just his failure to understand how self-identity works.
This is not just an empty philosophical kind of question or a point of interest.
You know, 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 Holly.
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, what?
Again.
Well, 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 repetition of the past.
The past tells us where to go.
But like Hawley, and please don't hear me say there's nothing for the past to teach us.
There are all kinds of things for the past to teach us.
But the trick is, and this is what Holly does, is that 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.
That's why they panic anytime somebody wants to talk about something bad from the past.
That's why you have a movement that now is based on simply erasing the past.
We're going to prohibit the teaching of particular topics, get rid of entire majors at colleges and universities, change 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 Holly 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 Holly will tell us the nostalgic stories about his grandfather or these other things, but he just kind of ignores the ways in which he's not like that, in which it's not a simple repetition of the past.
There's an irony here where, for example, and I think this is a theme we'll return to from time to time.
He's always referring back to his grandfather, the farmer, and like elevating farmers and land and all of this kind of stuff as this quintessentially American masculine kind of thing.
And the reason he's talking to the grandpa all the time is because it's not what he did.
The quiet part that he's not sort of explicitly saying out loud is, I've got to talk about grandpa doing that because I didn't.
My past did not determine who I was and what it 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 Holly.
Get worked up on this.
This just drives me nuts.
This appeal to the past that just leaves out all kinds of things or masks all the ways in which our existence in the presence is present rather is always creative.
It's always innovative.
It's 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 Holly has a lot to say about the modern day Epicureans throughout the book.
But here I wanted to highlight this one because I think one of his contrasts with the Epicureans here, it really cuts to the heart of how Holly understands himself and the rest of the MAGA world he represents.
His statements about individuality and individual identity and 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, you know, bygone golden age.
Thank You For Listening00:01:48
More we're going to say about this.
I think next chapter, excuse me, next episode, we're going to finish up on the chapter on fatherhood.
We're going to turn it and take a little bit more of a look specifically on what Holly says about fatherhood.
As we're finding out here, he has sometimes these chapters where 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 about what he says about fatherhood in particular.
This whole notion of sacrifice, fatherhood is 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.
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