The online reaction to Harrison Butker’s graduation speech at Benedictine College shows us many broken things about our broken culture, but one of the more disturbing lessons involves technology and how our brains have evolved.
It was totally predictable that folks on social media and in the news media would freak out that a man said things that cut against current feminist teaching. Matters of marriage, homosexuality, and gender roles have been extremely contentious for decades, if not longer. “The Battle of the Sexes” was a thing in the 1970s that extended far beyond a tennis match.
But here’s what would have shocked even the most ardent culture warriors a generation ago: Major newspapers, rock stars, and commentators all over the nation are angrily reacting to life advice a Catholic graduation speaker gave to graduates of a Catholic college in Atchison, Kansas.
Why do Eddie Vedder or a feminist writer in New York City opine on this matter? Sure, there’s interesting stuff to say, but the reaction of outrage at Butker’s comments seems totally out of place.
That is obvious unless you believe that everyone, everywhere, is speaking to everyone, everywhere.
And in the modern, hyperconnected world, many folks have come to believe that.
In the always online age, there is no longer any such thing as tailoring your speech to a particular audience.
Some chronically online millennials think this is the natural order of things. Internet hall monitor Taylor Lorenz fretted that users of the social audio app Clubhouse had “unfettered conversations” that included one user who “discouraged people from getting the shots” of the COVID vaccines.
Media watchdogs complained that Clubhouse and podcasts might be private, and as a result, reporters wouldn’t know if people said controversial things on them.
This is a creepy mindset, that everyone should be accountable to everyone for whatever they say to anyone. Humans need private spheres. We need little platoons. We need local pubs, religious institutions, book clubs, and semipublic venues in which we can speak to a particular audience whose premises and values we share without needing to defend ourselves to other audiences who reject our values.
Subcultures have not only their own premises but also their own intellectual history: their own vocabulary or jargon, their own literature, and their own common texts.
For instance, consider the response to Butker from Laura Bassett, a liberal feminist writer. Bassett’s essay is a heartfelt and personal one that touches on fertility and romance and life in general. But it also betrays a disconnect between the way the human mind works and the way social media feeds information into our minds.
Bassett writes, “The first thing I see every day, via the online discourse that I have to monitor for my job, are men who know nothing about me or my life yelling that my very existence is a scourge on society.”
In this “discourse,” she included Butker’s speech. If we excuse, as standard culture-war hyperbole, her inaccurate summary, we can focus on why his speech upset her: Because who the hell is Harrison Butker to tell her how to live?
That’s a normal reaction. But here’s the thing: Butker never told Bassett how to live or how to feel about the choices she made. Just as she never asked for his advice, he never asked her to listen to him. Butker gave advice, which is what college commencement speakers do, to graduates from a Catholic college. He gave advice that liberal feminists and 90% of the news media would never give, but that should be OK.
Also, note this passage from Bassett:
“‘Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values in media all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder,’ Butker told students in Benedictine College’s graduating class in the speech heard ’round the world.”
“‘Disorder’ is an interesting word. It really says the quiet part out loud, which is that the conservative movement isn’t genuinely concerned with the birth rate, in general, or women’s happiness and fulfillment; it’s about controlling the kinds of families that should exist and the role of women within them. It’s about keeping women out of competition with men in the workforce and economically dependent on them.”
Sure, I agree with Butker, and I know Bassett doesn’t. In this case, though, I want to point out how I think Bassett misunderstands his point. She misunderstands it not because he’s smarter than her or out of uncharitability but because he is using Catholic terminology for a Catholic audience.
Bassett assumes this is about economic order or the ordering of individuals. But it’s not. It’s about how individuals order things within their own hearts.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church includes the words “ordered” and “disordered” 55 times. For instance, covetousness is defined as “a disordered inclination or desire for pleasure or possession.”
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Desiring pleasure and possession is not bad, but if we properly order things, then pleasure or possession isn’t at or near the top of the list. If we value nice stuff more than we value loving our neighbor, then we are putting things out of order.
I’m not saying Laura Bassett or Eddie Vedder should be familiar with Catholic lingo. I am saying that Catholics speaking Catholic-y to a Catholic audience is normal and good — and that a media atmosphere in which this triggers outrage is an unhealthy one.