Through no plan or design of my own—though still by a fair amount of choice—I spent the first two weeks of April drowning in self-help books. I would consider even one of this type enough to drown in, but in this case there were four. Why I would do that to myself is a question I have neither the ability nor the desire to answer. But for all my avoidance of the genre, it really wasn’t bad. And it helps that, while I would describe them all as being somewhere on the self-help spectrum, they were each a very different book.

First was Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. I passed by this book no less than a hundred times in dozens of bookstores over the years and finally picked it up. Though it can be difficult at times to get past the self-help language, that “now we know” kind of rhetoric, I did enjoy it, and I found many points insightful. In particular, the history Cain traces in the early chapters is instructive. A history she calls “the rise of the Extroverted Ideal”:

America had shifted from what the influential cultural historian Warren Susman called A Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality—and opened up a Pandora’s box of personal anxieties from which we would never quite recover.

From advertisements for Serentil to Lux detergent to “the ever onward” IBM, “the pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up.” None of which, however, is limited to advertising or marketing. In fact, the pressure to “sell ourselves” seems inherently and terrifyingly limitless.

Describing the similarities between a Tony Robbins seminar and a Rick Warren church service, Cain finds that she would ultimately write them both off for the same reasons.

Events like this don’t give me the sense of oneness others seem to enjoy; it’s always been private occasions that make me feel connected to the joys and the sorrows of the world, often in the form of communion with writers and musicians I’ll never meet in person.

A woman after my own heart. (As I’m writing this, I’m surrounded by the four books I’m talking about, plus two books I’ve since moved on to, plus four books of poetry for added company.) The fact is, I have not just felt the exact same way but also in very similar situations. You couldn’t pay me to attend a modern nondenominational church service today, and I feel eight thousand times more connection to a dead person by simply holding a book he or she wrote. I remember James K. A. Smith offering a similar message in You Are What You Love, to the effect that the average nondenominational church almost certainly confuses genuine Christian faith with something like being “extraverts for Jesus.”

(In the same vein, I remember hearing Dr. John Patrick of Ottowa’s Augustine College , who I once saw give a lecture in Louisville, describe one of the reasons he says he attends a “liturgical” church. “When you sing first,” he said, “you are practicing pop psychology.” Alternatively, when you enter church quietly and begin with something from the Book of Common Prayer— “We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts . . . There is no health in us”—you reflect a humbler and therefore truer reality. After a reflection on the forgiveness we are all granted and the life we get to live, then we rejoice. “Now I am ready for communion and for song,” he said.)

Early in the book, Cain struck me as having a similar vibe as Oliver Burkeman in his 4,000 Weeks, in that they both seemed to be writing anti-self-help self-help books (though Cain much less so). If Burkeman wants us to stop fretting about our productivity and accept finitude, Cain is aiming to downplay the more obvious, outward signs of intelligence and friendliness that we as a culture have come to take for granted and instead to appreciate the quieter, more subtle ones. In other words, both Burkeman and Cain are in the business of self-help myth-busting and in favor of reality-embracing.

Whether or not the introvert-extravert scale is the best place to have the entire conversation—that seems less clear to me. I can’t help thinking that the best advice and the best qualities encouraged throughout the book boil down to good advice for all personality types: slow down and be more thoughtful.

Very often you can find yourself a ways down some path in a chapter talking about “sensitive people” without ever realizing that this has become implicitly synonymous with introverted people. Qualifying sentences abound, but the assumption littered throughout the book is that only introverts want to talk about values or morality, and that extraverts are happier with chatting about the weather and holiday vacations. A potentially more blunt and problematic assumption might be that only introverts are interested in “thinking in more complicated ways.” The fact is, no matter how many disclaimers a writer offers, the focused message of a book can ultimately ignore—if not completely undo—those disclaimers.

Quiet is filled with great stories, good advice, and thoughtful commentaries, and I do highly recommend it. If you call yourself an introvert or if you know someone who is and want a better understanding, this book will help. But while it’s a book on a broad topic that very often applies to a personality type we call “introversion,” much of it ultimately speaks to a cultural and moral problem for anyone, anywhere. This, in my mind, gives the book an even broader (potential) appeal than it aims to have. However, periodic disclaimers notwithstanding, one would be forgiven for coming away from Cain’s book with the thought that only “introverts” are capable of reading and responding to the Question that readers are encouraged to ask and to face in Miroslav Volf’s new book.

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Which brings me to the next book: Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz. The book is named after the undergraduate course the authors teach at Yale Divinity. If I had to boil the message of the book down to a sentence, it would be this: Ask the Question and be ready for potential answers to change your life. You might say that the Question is essentially the subtitle: What matters most? But, as the authors put it, no matter how you try to phrase it, the Question being articulated always exceeds the phrasing.

It always escapes full definition. . . . Hard as it is to pin down, it is the Question of our lives. The Question is about worth, value, good, and bad and evil, meaning, purpose, final aims and ends, beauty, truth, justice, what we owe one another, what the world is and who we are and how we live. It is about the success of our lives and their failure.

And when the Question is asked, faced, answered, “it threatens (or promises?) to reshape everything.” What’s more, asking the Question is not just about defining “how one ought to live” but about realizing that we are unavoidably living an answer to the Question whether we know it (or like it) or not: “We live answers to the deep questions of life even if we couldn’t give those same answers if we were asked for them point-blank.”

In other words, the authors seek to elicit a moral articulation and consistency in their students’ lives. Rather than simply living answers implicitly, Volf et al. seek to encourage a deeper living-out, a challenged knowledge of life and goodness that goes beyond knowledge per se:

There’s an attunement of the self with what Confucius takes to be worth living for and living within: the Way, the Dao, the will of Heaven.

This is why Confucius affirms, “One who knows it is not the equal of one who loves it, and one who loves it is not the equal of one who takes joy in it.” Knowing is only half the battle. Our lives inevitably follow what we love and what brings us joy. If we can fall in love with the good we have found, and if we can tune our inner self to rejoice in the Way to flourishing life, we will find ourselves naturally drawn to the good we want to do and be. And that sort of alignment can sustain us for decades.

That’s not a bad quote from the book to describe what the authors are aiming for. And as you can see, to galvanize the Question, the book draws from numerous thinkers (Immanuel Kant, Peter Singer, James Baldwin, E. O. Wilson, Friedrich Nietzsche) across numerous philosophies, religions, disciplines (Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, atheism, stoicism), and the result is a lot of ground covered in a very short amount of time. This is both a strength and weakness.

I love the For the Life of the World podcast, which regularly features all three of the authors, and I’ve been a regular listener since it started three years ago. If I’m being honest, however, whatever it is I often find in their podcasts, I don’t think I found it in their book. My guess is that in their effort to reflect on broader answers to the Question, there was less of any substance to find. Given that their point in the book is to get the reader to ask these questions for themselves, that may be more than okay. I just wasn’t very profoundly motivated by the book to do this for myself. And that may be for another reason which kept me from enjoying book the way I thought I would: I felt too old for it. Given that their book is a product of their undergraduate class, and despite having finished my own undergraduate a few years ago at the age of 34, I suspect that if I had read this book fifteen years ago, I would have found it more inspiring.

That said, I don’t not recommend the book, especially if you are in your early twenties. But my preferred advice would be to dig into the archives of conversations on their For the Life of the World podcast, hosted by Evan Rosa. I have found that to be a much richer source of inspiration for, as they put it in each episode, “seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.”

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Next up was Alan Noble’s On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living, which was more of a long essay than a book. While I’ve seen Noble’s name pop up here and there, I had not read any of his work. But after listening to an interview with Noble about the book, I was excited to pick it up.

I should point out that Noble does say his book is not meant to be a self-help book. Maybe I’m using the term a little loosely, but it certainly felt to me like one, albeit in the more spiritual genre. And I’m not meaning to use the term in a derogatory way. I just don’t know what else to call it.

Noble is writing to encourage any and all who experience mental suffering. He does use the term “mental suffering” in a broad way, which should give the book maximum appeal. No one should start reading the book and think, “I’ve got a diagnosed mental health issue, so this book isn’t for me.” And, no one should pick it up and think, “I don’t have any diagnosed mental health issue, so this book isn’t for me.” As Noble makes very clear, sometimes we can put a finger on the cause of suffering, and sometimes we cannot.

“We put unrealistic expectations on [scientific and medical fields] when we demand objective answers for something so deeply subjective and personal, something that can have genetic, biological, interpersonal, spiritual, economic, and circumstantial causes all at the same time.”

This echoes something in Cain’s Quiet that I had hoped would get more attention from her: the infinitely multitudinous ways that life can begin and unfold for each of us.

Here’s Cain:

Remember that heritability statistics derived from twin studies show that introversion-extroversion is only 40 to 50 percent heritable. This means that, in a group of people, on average half of the variability in introversion-extroversion is caused by genetic factors. To make things even more complex, there are probably many genes at work, and [Jerome] Kagan’s framework of high reactivity is likely one of many physiological routes to introversion. Also, averages are tricky. A heritability rate of 50 percent doesn’t necessarily mean that my introversion is 50 percent inherited from my parents, or that half of the difference in extroversion between my best friend and me is genetic. One hundred percent of my introversion might come from genes, or none at all—or more likely some unfathomable combination of genes and experience. To ask whether it’s nature or nurture, says Kagan, is like asking whether a blizzard is caused by temperature or humidity. It’s the intricate interaction between the two that makes us who we are.

Each and everyone one of us has an “unfathomable combination of genes and experience” at play in our lives. I think Noble has a deep appreciation for this fact of life. And when it comes to the suffering that inevitably and sometimes horrifyingly results, Noble understands how deep and dark things can get, not just in those experiences, but in our memories of those experiences.

Remarkably, we can even struggle to communicate an episode of mental illness to ourselves once we are past it. The memory remains but not the experience of it. How can something so intensely intimate and vivid become so alien to us? How can your mind be completely consumed by a thought, a fear, an oppressive weight, and yet years or even months later you can remember that period only in glimpses, shadows, the odd mood in the afternoon? But it is never quite the same unless it consumes you again. And then it is all too real.

My one critique of the book is that, in the opposite direction from Volf’s book, I was surprised by how narrow Noble wrote his. He seems to have written it with the nearly explicit assumption that his readers will be dedicated Christians and active church-goers, and for that reason, it felt like the book carried its own unintended sort of alienation. It’s not that the encouragement or advice is bad. I’m glad I read it and I appreciated everything he had to say. But in my reading I felt like Noble has the capacity (the heart, the mind) for broader guidance for the increasing number of people who are further and further from any sort of healthy church community.

That said, these are some quotes from Noble that I think are worth sharing:

• “There are diseases and disorders and burdens you have never imagined, carried like boulders on the backs of the same people who smile and tell you that they are doing ‘good.'” (9)
• “Human existence inescapably involves suffering. For all of human history we have known this to be true. But it’s hard to recall this truth when we are surrounded by forces that promise us greater and greater explanations, control, and strategies of happiness. So, remember this: tremendous suffering is the normal experience of being in this world. Beauty and love and joy are normal, too, but so is suffering.” (27)
• “You need to know that your being in the world is a witness, and it ‘counts for something.’ Your existence testifies. There is no mitigating this fact. There is nowhere you can hide where your life will not speak something to the world.” (33)
• “And don’t think that you can control who witnesses your life, like a celebrity carefully curating their public image—as if you could contain your life, hiding the shameful parts so that they only affect you. That’s not how life works. You are not your own and neither is your suffering.” (51)
• “No, you can’t bear the weight of the world on your shoulders, but neither can you deny the efficacy of your paltry offering of love.” (73)

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Finally, I’ve had one on the shelf for a while and I figured, since I was already neck-deep in the genre, I might as well get it over with. So I finished my self-help reading binge with the most unapologetically self-helpy of them all, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, by James Clear. Much like Cal Newport’s Deep Work, I was pleasantly surprised by this one. In fact—and I can’t believe I’m about to say this—I liked this one better than any of the others. Maybe because it felt like it had less to hide, or maybe because the advice it offered was, from front to back, very practical. But, out of all the books I’m talking about, Clear’s is the only one that I intend to reread.

For starters, I am fairly certain that no significant piece of the advice in Clear’s book is unique to Clear, and that is a good thing. It’s simply a helpful compilation of good habits.

Building better habits isn’t about littering your day with life hacks. It’s not about flossing one tooth each night or taking a cold shower each morning or wearing the same outfit each day. It’s not about achieving external measures of success like earning more money, losing weight, or reducing stress. Habits can help you achieve all of these things, but fundamentally they are not about having something. They are about becoming someone.

Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.

I mentioned James K. A. Smith’s You Are What You Love earlier. Though Clear’s books has no intended spiritual dimensions, with a few tweaks, that quote could channel Smith’s book perfectly.

Atomic Habits is not without its flaws. Like all self-help books of this unapologetic type, it’s not soul-craft, so it lacks some of the advice that any of the previous three books abound in. Simply put, the best habits and the best practices are no guarantee that life will go well for you. More importantly, those habits cannot teach you the deep and enduring answers to life’s questions—about its goodness and its suffering.

Also on the list of flaws in Clear’s book: he confuses “imitating the admirable” with “imitating the powerful”; he can miss quality for the sake of “effectiveness”; in his focus on increasing friction for bad habits and decreasing friction for good ones, he seems to miss the idea that friction can have other (good) uses than the ones associated with intentional habit formation; he can display a (shockingly) naïve appreciation for technology; in focusing on the “outsized impact” of “decisive moments,” he fails to appreciate the space for surprises—both good and bad, but usually unavoidable.

That said, each chapter in Atomic Habits is now well marked. And I’ve already started writing out notes on how to implement those habits in new ways. As I said, they aren’t new or groundbreaking. But they are certainly valuable insights and needed reminders for good habits that, while not central, are part and parcel of a healthy life.

There’s one thing from Clear’s book that I want to end on. In one of the last chapters, Clear describes a conversation with someone he calls “an elite coach.” He asks the coach about what separates the best from the rest. “What do the really successful people do that most don’t?”

He mentioned factors you might expect: genetics, luck, talent. But then he said something I wasn’t expecting: “At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”

. . . People talk about getting “amped up” to work on their goals. Whether it’s business or sports or art, you hear people say things like, “It all comes down to passion.” Or, “You have to really want it.” As a result, many of us get depressed when we lose focus or motivation because we think that successful people have some bottomless reserve of passion. But his coach was saying that really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom. […]

[N]o habit will stay interesting forever. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey to self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.

My last thought is this: most of the topics and the problems dealt with in each of these books can be aided by that last bit of advice. Whether you are an introvert or an extravert, seeking meaning and answers to the deeper questions of life, struggling to get out of bed in the morning, to face fears describable and indescribable, or simply looking to for-once-in-your-goddamn-life stick to a good habit and make a real change—learning to, if not fall in love with, at least be comfortable with boredom is pretty good advice. To me, learning to bear the boredom sounds a lot like learning to bear the pain, the misery, the unappreciated, the exhausting. It’s learning to bear with those parts of you that don’t seem to offer any immediate benefit to yourself or to others.

This is most explicit in Cain’s book, which emphasizes qualities of thoughtfulness and inaction that are not often encouraged in day-to-day life but that are desperately needed in the world. That will mean both attempting to practice and bear with these things in ourselves, and it will mean listening to those around us in whom we notice those qualities or temperaments.

One of my favorite quotes in the world I took from a chapter heading in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World. And it seems like a good place to end.

The truly real takes place almost unnoticed, and is, to begin with, lonely and dispersed. . . . Those among our young people who, thirty years hence, will do the things that matter are, in all probability, now quietly biding their time; and yet, unseen by others, they are already establishing their existences by means of an unrestricted spiritual discipline.

– Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (1931)

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“. . . if the foundations be destroyed,
what can the righteous do?”

Psalm 11:3

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I hear this verse quoted from time to time. It goes something like this: “Culture is falling apart. The traditional family is no longer valued. Sexual immorality is rampant. No one fears God. The Bible says, ‘If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?'”

My quibbles with this line have always assumed that the Psalmist was at least being given a fair shake, that he was being quoted accurately, or at least relevantly. “Surely the Psalmist has a point,” I would want to grant. “But aren’t we being a little hasty in apply his situation to ours? And shouldn’t we figure out what the Psalmist meant, and what we mean, by ‘foundations’?” In short, shouldn’t everyone first have a conversation about what exactly we think constitutes the sine qua non of civilization before we go assuming that those things have been or are being destroyed? (Though, of course, it goes without saying that this destruction was brought about by our perceived enemies.)

It shouldn’t be very surprising that I have never had a conversation that was able to offer any firm, good, or agreeable conclusions on the topic of civilization’s foundations, destroyed or otherwise. (Though I love the conversation and wish it happened more often. And in a different essay, I’d be attempting to say why that conversation is itself a foundation.) Usually what ensues is pretty good proof that we don’t really have a clear understanding of what we mean when we flippantly talk about foundations. That lack of clarity doesn’t strike me as being a bad or surprising thing. (As I’ve mentioned before, one of my favorite mental images comes from a Robert Nozick quote: “It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it. Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us?”) The problem is that we can so easily talk and act as if we do have a clear understanding.

The fact is, regardless of the uncertainty, much will be said without question. I would not be surprised if 9 out of 10 preachers could, at the drop of a hat, give a lengthy and convicting sermon on worldly wickedness and the concomitant “destruction of the foundations.” And I would not be surprised if many of those preachers could and would give a sermon on Psalm 11:3 and never once tell you why the Psalmist said it in the first place. Heck, I’ve heard it quoted, I am sure, hundreds of times in my life, probably even quoted it myself a few times, and I didn’t have any idea why he said it until just a few days ago.

As far as I can tell, everything in Psalm 11 turns on the first verse:

In the LORD I take refuge. How can you say to my soul, “Flee like a bird to your mountain…?

The Psalmist has said where he stands (with God) and whom he trusts (God). Then he asks, “How can you say to my soul…?” Perhaps the “you” is a friend, or an advisor, or simply him speaking to himself. But the question immediately places two voices in this Psalm, an “I” and a “you”: I trust in God; how can you say thus to me?

And what is the “thus” being said? This is probably a good place to quote the entire opening to the Psalm as most people read it:

Psalm 11:1-3

The LORD Is in His Holy Temple

To the choirmaster. Of David.

[1] In the LORD I take refuge;
how can you say to my soul,
“Flee like a bird to your mountain,
[2] for behold, the wicked bend the bow;
they have fitted their arrow to the string
to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart;
[3] if the foundations are destroyed,
what can the righteous do?”

The placement of the quotations here is pertinent, because the one being quoted is the “you” who speaks to the Psalmist. Here’s how Robert Altar puts it:

It makes sense to view everything from “Off to the hills…” through to the end of [“what can a righteous man do?”] as the words of the fearful and despairing friends of the speaker. With the vicious and destructive enemies prevailing, they say, there is no recourse for the helpless righteous person except flight.

Hear that? These are the words of the “fearful and despairing” one. I say to trust in God; they say the foundations are being destroyed. There are two clearly opposing voices here. One is fretting, the other trusts in God. One says to run, the other trusts in God. One says that your enemies are out to get you, the other trusts in God. One says the foundations are being destroyed, the other trusts in God.

The irony could not possible be any thicker. Every… single… time… that I have heard a Christian quote the Bible about the foundations being destroyed, they have spoken as if they are the ones being faithful to God. The Psalm they quote, however, spins them on their heads. In quoting Psalm 11:3, they unwittingly display the fear that the Bible—indeed that that very same verse—is meant to speak against!

So the next time a Christian points Leftward and starts to remind you of the consequences of foundation-demolition, just tell them to trust in God. Tell them that their own book tells them, the alarm-raisers, that they are being cowards, probably contributing to the destruction they lament, and they should instead trust in God.

The conversation, the debate, about the foundations will always take place. They have never not been taking place. That is part of what civilization, and humanity, is. The call is to be faithful and good and kind always, regardless of whether you feel your side is up or down in the ongoing struggle. But all those people who say that the foundations are being destroyed, that we need to fight, or to remove and protect and defend ourselves—the Psalmist says that they are controlled by their fear, not by their faith.

This is from C. K. Williams’s poem, “Risk“:

How do we come to believe that wrenching ourselves to attention
is the most effective way for dealing with intimations of catastrophe?
Consciousness atremble: might what makes it so
not be the fear of what the future might or might not bring,
but the wish for fear, for concentration, vigilance?
As though life were more convincing resonating like a blade. . . .

. . . We engorge our little sorrows,
beat our drums, perform our dances of aversion. 

Always, “These gigantic inconceivables.”
Always, “What will have been done to me?”
And so we don our mental armor,
flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.
A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk,
though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?

At the end of the day, remember that this is not so much an accusation as it is a sympathy. A sympathy with my past and often present self, and therefore a sympathy with others, and a desire for us all to do much better than we are currently doing. And it’s not a bad idea for each of us to start by asking why it is we are so ready to be afraid.

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Addendum: Perhaps we are so ready to be afraid (or angry or bitter) because it is much easier to extricate ourselves than to do the hard work of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “coresponsibility”:

We may not and do not desire to act like offended critics or opportunists. Case by case and in each moment, as victors or vanquished, we desire to be those who are coresponsible for the shaping of history. The one who allows nothing that happens to deprive him of his coresponsibility for the course of history, knowing that it is God who placed it upon him, will find a fruitful relation to the events of history, beyond fruitless criticism and equally fruitless opportunism. Talk of going down heroically in the face of unavoidable defeat is basically quite nonheroic because it does not dare look into the future. The ultimately responsible question is not how I extricate myself heroically from a situation but [how] a coming generation is to go on living.

This seems to me to be exactly what the Psalmist is getting at in Psalm 11.

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Elizabeth Bruenig:

Suppose my children are playing together when my younger girl discovers a dress-up gown that she would like to put on. As she begins to shimmy it on, my older daughter notices it and decides that she would like to wear the dress-up gown, so she pulls it off my younger daughter and puts it on herself. In retaliation, my younger daughter pulls her big sister’s hair, demanding that her gown be given back. The scuffle summons me, and after hearing both of them recount roughly the same story, I lightly chastise my younger daughter for pulling her sister’s hair, but then direct my older daughter to give the dress-up gown back to her little sister and strongly chastise her for taking it in the first place. From my older daughter’s point of view, her little sister is having all the fun: not only did she get the gown in the end, she got to pull her sister’s hair and got little more than a gift for it!

But this is because my younger daughter was operating in a state of moral exception. She was behaving in a state where the normal rules of morality—such as the general prohibition on pulling her sister’s hair—did not apply. I would like her not to attack her sister generally, so I chastised her for it, but I clearly didn’t rule against her, and she wasn’t ultimately punished—in fact, she got what she wanted in the end. You can imagine how tantalizing a loophole like this is to a child—it represents the opportunity not only to get what one desires, but the opportunity to indulge a darker, typically repressed desire too, and the only precondition for doing so is being wronged in the first place. As you can imagine, “she hit me first!” is something of a prized status among small children for this reason.

But are these states of moral exception equally attractive to adults? That is to say, knowing for a fact that we will hurt one another—nothing seems so clear-cut or obvious to me as that fact—is it possible that adults, too, are attracted to states of moral exception, in which they can not only pursue projects of vengeance that would normally be socially proscribed, but also do so with full social sanction? I certainly think so. Consider the state of social media, where people frequently go in order to find something to be angry about, so that they can express their anger in ways that would typically be forbidden but are permissible in cases only of having been wronged. Had the social media user not sought out an example of someone doing something offensive or outrageous, they wouldn’t have anger to discharge, but it seems to me that acquiring anger and the right to discharge it is precisely the point. 

A Conversation About Crime:

A: Look, I’m gonna level with you here. Like the vast majority of leftists who have been minted since Occupy Wall Street, my principles, values, and policy preferences don’t stem from a coherent set of moral values, developed into an ideology, which then suggests preferred policies. At all. That requires a lot of reading and I’m busy organizing black tie fundraisers at work and bringing Kayleigh and Dakota to fencing practice. I just don’t have the time. So my politics have been bolted together in a horribly awkward process of absorbing which opinions are least likely to get me screamed at by an online activist or mocked by a podcaster. My politics are therefore really a kind of self-defensive pastiche, an odd Frankensteining of traditional leftist rhetoric and vocabulary from Ivy League humanities departments I don’t understand. I quote Marx, but I got the quote from Tumblr. I cite Gloria Anzaldua, but only because someone on TikTok did it first. I support defunding the police because in 2020, when the social and professional consequences for appearing not to accept social justice norms were enormous, that was the safest place for me to hide. I maintain a vague attachment to police and prison abolition because that still appears to be the safest place for me to hide. I vote Democrat but/and call myself a socialist because that is the safest place for me to hide. I’m not a bad person; I want freedom and equality. I want good things for everyone. But politics scare and confuse me. I just can’t stand to lose face, so I have to present all of my terribly confused ideals with maximum superficial confidence. If you probe any of my specific beliefs with minimal force, they will collapse, as those “beliefs” are simply instruments of social manipulation. I can’t take my kid to the Prospect Park carousel and tell the other parents that I don’t support police abolition. It would damage my brand and I can’t have that. And that contradiction you detected, where I support maximum forgiveness for crime but no forgiveness at all for being offensive? For me, that’s no contradiction at all. Those beliefs are not part of a functioning and internally-consistent political system but a potpourri of deracinated slogans that protect me from headaches I don’t need. I never wanted to be a leftist. I just wanted to take my justifiable but inchoate feelings of dissatisfaction with the way things are and wrap them up into part of the narrative that I tell other people about myself, the narrative that I’m a kind good worthwhile enlightened person. . . . Now I’m an adult and I have things to protect, and well-meaning but fundamentally unserious activists have created an incentive structure that mandates that I pretend to a) understand what “social justice” means and b) have the slightest interest in working to get it. I just want to chip away at my student loan debt and not get my company’s Slack turned against me. I need my job/I need my reputation . . . So can you please fuck off and let us hide behind the BLM signs that have been yellowing in our windows for three years?

Of course, almost everything here has mutatis mutandis its own application across the isle.

But here’s the more important point: For most people everywhere, their “principles, values, and policy preferences don’t stem from a coherent set of moral values, developed into an ideology, which then suggests preferred policies.” Incoherence is the norm. And that’s okay.

To quote Brandon Sanderson in his short story “The Emperor’s Soul”:

A person was like a dense forest thicket, overgrown with a twisting mess of vines, weeds, shrubs, saplings, and flowers. No person was one single emotion; no person had only one desire. They had many, and usually those desires conflicted with one another like two rosebushes fighting for the same patch of ground.

I have never met anyone for whom this is not true. At the very least we can say that every single one of us will spend a significant amount of time being conflicted and incoherent as we try to work through the weeds and the flowers. We are creatures with messy imaginaries. And a normal response to this norm-which-has-always-been-our-reality is to be more forgiving of people who violate those very messy and often incoherent values, principles, and policies.

An honest politics is a forgiving politics. You can’t have one without the other.

As Elizabeth Bruenig points out in her recent essay / talk on The Limits of Forgiveness, one reason forgiveness is so difficult, both to practice and to pin down, is that it “burdens the wronged party with moral work.” But, as she also puts out, “there is no getting around this fact.” And if she is right (which she is), then our first instinct, or first priority, should be to approach all of it with a certain kind of character.

But perhaps the most important thing about this broad reading of forgiveness is that it recommends not so much a specific kind of practice as a specific kind of person—a forgiving kind. . . . It isn’t so much that every case of wrongdoing ought to be forgiven on the same terms or in the same way as much as every case ought to be viewed with a forgiving eye . . . We should find ourselves ever open to changing our minds about people and their actions, both in direct interpersonal interactions wherein we have standing to forgive, but also in the spectator relationships we tend to engage in contemporarily, wherein we form moral judgments about one another without direct interactions.

It might be helpful to ask: What would it be like to enter the public square, or any relationship, without a forgiving eye, without that burden of moral work? Look around the world. Any country, any city, any family, any friendship. There is no other way to live with each other.

Margaret Atwood:

So when we give someone a book, we are also delivering a complex message. It may be: “I love this book and I love you enough to share it with you.” It may be, a little more bossily: “You need to read this.” It may be: “I understand you and know you will like this.” It may be: “I respect you.” It may just be: “I see you.”

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different. 

So when you give a well-loved book to someone else, it is above all an act of trust: you are trusting the recipient not to massacre the book in his or her interpretation of it. Tonight , therefore, we will be witnessing not only a million Quixotic acts of giving, but a million Quixotic acts of trust.

“Go, little book,” authors used to tell their creations, in the end-of-the-book convention called the envoi . “Into the hands of strangers I confide you.” And when we give away a book we have loved, this is what we ourselves are thinking: Farewell, we wish the book. May your new owners treat you well; may they not throw you against the wall or use you for kindling. May they pardon your faults and praise your virtues. May you bring wisdom or knowledge. May you bring joy.

Freddie deBoer:

Years back, Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach fame) worked with his research assistants at Indiana University, training a program to solve jumble puzzles like a human. By jumble puzzles I mean the game where you’re given a set of letters and asked to arrange those letters into all of the possible word combinations that you can find. This is trivially easy for even a primitive computer – the computer just tries every possible combination of letters and then compares them to a dictionary database to find matches. This is a very efficient way to go about doing things; indeed, it’s so efficient as to be inhuman. Hofstadter’s group instead tried to train a program to solve jumbles the way a human might, with trial and error. The program was vastly slower than the typical digital way, and sometimes did not find potential matches. And these flaws made it more human than the other way, not less. The same challenge presents itself to the AI maximalists out there: the more you boast of immensely efficient and accurate results, the more you’re describing an engineered solution, not one that’s similar to human thought. We know an immense amount about the silicon chips that we produce in big fabs; we know preciously little about our brains. This should make us far more cautious about what we think we know about AI.

Freddie deBoer:

I’m sure you can fit this all into a culture war frame if you’d like to. Over time, an attitude has congealed that suggests that my perspective, the insistence that some things in the world are just broken and need to be understood in those terms, is inherently conservative. But I think it’s horseshit, personally. The left has never stood for pleasant fantasy or cheap idealism that occludes basic apprehension of the world as it actually exists. The socialist mantra is that a better world is possible, not that a perfect world is possible. And as time goes on my weariness with all of the various pleasant-and-false visions of our affairs grows and grows. I have no time for it anymore, no patience. The world is broken. We are obligated to cobble together the best life we can for everyone. Make material security wherever you can and comfort from there if you’re able. If you want to insist that saying there are limits to the possible is conservative, enjoy your dream world, but leave it out of my politics. The question is pre-political.

A friend recently linked to a Matthew Parris article that included perhaps the most horrifying use of Jesus saying, “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” To summarize Parris’s use: “Stick with me, and forget about the poor and their disgusting self-pity. I’m your hero.” This, Parris insists, is the Jesus he prefers. In short, Parris sees bullshit martyrdom and would like to see it replaced with what can only be described as bullshit heroism. How he manages to squeeze in this line from Jesus with a straight face is beyond me. As I told my friend, some forms of stupidity deserve to be left alone.

While I can’t say exactly what Jesus meant, I can say that what deBoer is describing above is almost exactly what I imagine every time I hear or read that saying. I’m not claiming any strict adherence to any informed hermeneutics. I’m just saying that, experientially, whenever I think of genuine (i.e., difficult and rooted) forms of social justice, this line from Jesus pops into my head: “The poor you will always have with you.”

In C.S. Lewis’s essay “Why I Am Not a Pacifist,” he describes a certain “mode of thought” that “consists in assuming that the great permanent miseries in human life must be curable if only we can find the right cure; and it then proceeds by elimination and concludes that whatever is left, however unlikely to prove a cure, must nevertheless do so.” Nowadays, it seems like, rather than finding cures, most of us are content to label the disease that we think is causing all our problems. But, like deBoer, Lewis is skeptical of the “purity” and effectiveness of these broad brushes:

But I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can. To avert or postpone one particular war by wise policy, or to render one particular campaign shorter by strength and skill or less terrible by mercy to the conquered and the civilians is more useful than all the proposals for universal peace that have ever been made; just as the dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race.

As neither defeatists nor purists, “the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.” That is not a copout, not some way to avoid real change. You don’t have to look very hard to find a hero who sets a very high bar for that phrase “as well as we can.” It includes everything from the smallest act of kindness to the biggest act of Congress to the ultimate act of sacrifice. It’s the project of every human being qua human being—because the poor, the troubled, the sick, the lonely, the grieving, the dying, the ever-broken you will always have with you.

It’s worth noting that deBoer places at the heart of MacFarquhar’s article “a profound, obviously-motivated incuriosity.” I think that “incuriosity” is a nearly perfect word for the problem he’s describing. It is a lack of any real desire to know. And you know what I think the opposite of incuriosity is? Incarnation:

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

R. S. Thomas

A (Short) Essay on Essays:

An essay may take the form of an army of arguments where polemical points are paraded out in force in order to capture the citadel of the unpersuaded (or otherwise persuaded) mind. While it is legitimate to refer to such a thing as an essay, it would be foolish to argue that is what an essay is. […]

So just what is an essay? An essay is that which argues or not, or tells a story or not, or describes or not, or something else or not. This is what we might call opaque clarity. Such is the problem with nouns. Nouns are nearly impossible to understand until theydo something. I can get a better grasp on the thing when it isn’t sitting still. So when I think of an “essay,” I think first about a verb.

When an essay gets up and walks around it becomes an attempt. To essay is to try. To essay is to venture, to risk. To essay is to endeavor. Thus, an essay is a venture, no, it is an adventure. An essay is that bit of words welded together by potentiality; it’s that pile of predications built upon the foundation of possibilities. Arguments are not essays, but essays may attempt arguments. Stories are not essays, but essays may strive to weave worlds together by spinning golden yarns. Descriptions are not essays, but an essay may seek to turn your eyes into traveling feet, or grasping hands, or savoring mouths, or well-tuned ears. In every case the essay does what essays do; it attempts, it strives, it seeks.