Borgmann’s emphasis on focal things is as much about a particular way of seeing things as it is about the things themselves.
The problem, notes Borgmann, is that the contemporary world seems to be forgetful of the goods conferred by focal practices and wages war on our capacity to make such commitments. The price of technological convenience, he notes, comes at the expense of focal practices and things. Instead of cooking, we eat out or microwave prepackaged food. Instead of going for a walk, we stare at screens to unwind. Rather than seeking meaningful things to see and attend to, we are surrounded by generic, mass-produced things. Pitchers, cups, books, shoes, and homes are simply facsimiles—replications of an original. Things thus lose their singularity, and there is no reason for us to grant them our singular attention. Objects recede into the background. The tools we use (our keyboard, plastic cups, a disposable pen, a razor) are hardly noticeable, except when they malfunction, in which case they are promptly replaced. Rather than see, appreciate, and experience things, we are conditioned to use them and be done with them. What is at stake is how we are thus conditioned to see and engage with our world. […]
With amusement culture… the thresholds (by design) are minimal, if there at all. I can easily and instantaneously enjoy the pleasure of watching a show or surfing the internet. The bored self is restless, prone to what the Buddhist tradition describes as “monkey mind”—a tendency, both within and without, to flit from one thing to the next. Given this tendency, we are more curious than studious, easily drawn in by gossip and spectacle and all manner of trivial concerns. Rather than one focus of attention, the bored self is captivated by a multitude of interests. While this is not a new condition, the internet has amplified and exacerbated this tendency. The monkey mind within is now greeted by the monkey mind without. Yet the rewards are far less than those that come with a focal practice. Borgmann has identified a key directive for the meaningful pursuit of focal practices: low threshold equals low reward; high threshold equals high reward. Given this, we need accountability—a friend, a partner, a teacher, a community—to develop the necessary practice and discipline that leisure requires.
no other line to follow
A friend recently sent me a link to Kevin DeYoung’s review of Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism. I read the review on a flight from Krakow to Amsterdam last week—and I had most of a reply written before I hit the ground. So I have some thoughts, though they are not likely to be very comprehensive. In short, I appreciate that DeYoung is trying to point people away from Christian nationalism, but his review itself still worries me.
The first thing that caught my attention is DeYoung’s critique of those who “seem to prefer a society hostile to Christianity.” He says, “I’ve seen pastors in my own denomination look wistfully at Christians losing power and becoming a minority in the country, as if Constantine ruined everything and our influence would be so much greater if we only we [sic] could lose power and become more marginalized.”
I think DeYoung is right to be wary of a kind of attitude like the one he’s describing, but I don’t like the way he has phrased it. It would probably be better described as an attitude that fails to appreciate the good things “Christendom” has produced—the things that some us (myself included) might often take for granted. That’s a true and noteworthy warning. (As Nathan warns Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter: To wish away all the things that have made you could be a more dreadful thing than we can know.) But the description he uses is far from helpful, since I don’t know anyone who would describe the decline of Christian culture—if such a thing is even occurring (more on that below)—as a means of increasing our “influence.” The closest thing might be the hope that a decline of influence—or, better, a decline of desire for influence—would result in a stronger Christian life/community. Less focus on influence should lead to better, more authentic practice. To the degree that the people DeYoung has in mind believe a more authentic Christian community would also have more influence, then sure, he could put it in those terms. But that would simply be to describe the paradox of Christian life and practice, and the paradox of Christ’s death on the cross. Again, the way DeYoung is framing his criticism seems very unhelpful to me, since I am sure that most of the people he’s speaking of, like myself, have little or no interest in making decisions about Christian life based on what might be most effective; we simply believe that it is not the role of Christianity—or any religion—to claim state power for itself.
(I think DeYoung is similarly unfair in his criticism of Russel Moore. I think Moore has been more thorough in his critique of Christian culture than either Wolfe or DeYoung give him credit for, at least in this article.)
DeYoung goes on to give a summary of a “mini-speech” which he says he has used often. In that argument he says “people are drawn to [popular defenders of Christian morality in the culture war] because they offer a confident assertion of truth. Our people can see the world being overrun by moral chaos, and they want help in mounting a courageous resistance; instead, they are getting a respectable retreat.” He has a point about sympathizing with the attraction to strong voices in the culture war, and I think that learning to first sympathize is crucial for all of us, no matter where you find yourself on any given divide. But, for me, everything in DeYoung’s mini-speech is useless unless we’ve answered a couple questions: What do we think constitutes a “courageous resistance”? And how exactly are we describing a “respectable retreat”? We only need “courageous resistance” over “respectable retreat” if those terms are properly defined, and for the Christ-follower, they will be particularly difficult and counterintuitive. The fact that those tempted by Christian nationalism continue to seek out the leaders that they do, whether they be politicians or the popular writers and speakers DeYoung mentions, suggests that many of us who grew up in the Evangelical world were not given good definitions—or were not shown a life consistent with the definitions we were given. (Is it not also a problem that, if I didn’t know any better, DeYoung’s mini-speech could just as easily be describing how the disciples of Jesus felt when their leader failed to mount a “courageous resistance” and instead chose a “respectable retreat” to a cross?)
Granted, as DeYoung says, “many Christians are tired of always being on the defensive,” and I truly, truly want to sympathize as much as I can. But, speaking very personally, as long as I have known anything of the evangelical community, local and national, that raised me and thrust me out into the world, being defensive in politics is almost all they have ever known or been taught how to do—whether they needed to or not. I am not saying that Christian concerns for the culture and its direction are never valid, nor am I denying that many of the Evangelicals I know live wonderfully praise-worthy lives, but their engagement in American politics is characteristically inflammatory and insecure. A Christianity that calls for boycotts of businesses that don’t sufficiently support their favorite religious holiday and then complains of being tired of always having to defend itself is a Christianity that is asking to be taken less seriously. Likewise, a Christianity that will not take the time to count their many and compiling legal victories, for themselves and for their Black brothers and sisters, is a Christianity that will and can never be anything but defensive in all the ways that it says it does not want to be.
Most of these things are critiques of Christian culture that I have held in general, and increasingly, for the last seven(ish) years, and even of DeYoung himself, at least ever since he threw his hat into the David Frenshism ring. The main feature of this Christian culture, the central problem as I see it, is the ability to make excuses for itself—or, rather, an inability to not make excuses for itself. As DeYoung himself admits in the review, for all our faults in the U.S., “you’d be hard-pressed to find a country where orthodox Protestants wield more political power, have more cultural influence, and have more freedom to practice their faith according to the dictates of their conscience.” And yet, he still goes on to praise Aaron Renn’s “negative world” thesis and to say that “a big sort is underway” to determine “which Christian institutions and individuals will remain faithful.” I won’t go down the rabbit hole of Renn’s negative world thesis (about which I have my doubts/completely disagree), but, as I’ve said before, maybe there is some big cosmic sorting going on in the culture wars of America in which God is seeking to prove his true church, and maybe there isn’t. But I sincerely doubt whether our Christian legitimacy will be based on our commitment to being strong, mighty, powerful cultural warriors—nor on our commitment to finding a warrior who will do the fighting for us. More likely, our faithfulness will be found in our ability to accept that true courageous resistance will often look like respectable retreat—and in learning not to mind that this is The Way.
While I have listened to Wolfe explain and defend his book, I have only read the introduction to it (and have no plans to read further, for now), and I’m not even a good layman historian, so it’s hard to know what to do with the references to early Protestant political thought. Assuming that DeYoung is correct that Wolfe has been faithful in his retrieval of that thought—so what? The argument being made by Wolfe (and others) is that a nation such as ours can and should be “Christianized”—he wants what he calls “nationalism modified by Christianity.” This way, all the people who call themselves Christians can have good and trustworthy neighbors, because of course it’s good that we should always prefer to be around others that are just like us. Is this not clearly, based on his own descriptions, a movement in the other direction: a Christianity that itself becomes nationalized (and ethnicized—he uses the terms “almost synonymously”). Honestly, I cannot see how Wolfe’s book is anything other than self-defeating. He can pull from early Protestant sources all he likes, history will only prove the point: it was a bad and bloody idea then and it is the same today. Besides what should be the obvious terror in Wolfe’s idea of state-sponsored religion and ethnicity, the reason this seems worth pointing out is that, behind the question of whether Christian nationalism is a good idea, there is a more essential question: is Christian nationalism, as a practice or even as an idea, anything other than a contradiction in terms? Is it even possible? I think not. And I think that something-called-Christianity has to be significantly distorted to even begin to go down that road. No matter how faithfully Wolfe has treated his 16th and 17th century sources (which I am sure is debatable), the fact that many early Protestants distorted the faith in exactly the same way is not a moving argument to me.
(It’s interesting that the topic of early Protestant support for state power also came up in the one book that I had with me while I was travelling for the last month, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. I could not summarize it well, but suffice to say, I did not expect to find it there. DeYoung touches on Wolfe’s treatment of the subject, and while he happily points to the development of Protestant political thought away from state control, he does not offer a helpful critique of Wolfe’s reference to earlier practices. Of the horrors involved in Martin Luther’s support for merchant princes and the suppression of the Peasants’ rebellion, and much more, DeYoung only shrugs. Wolfe is apparently to be commended for having the courage of his convictions. Needless to say, Wolfe’s entire approach bothers me, and the fact that The Gospel Coalition is publishing a review that seems modestly to conclude “this is not the best way” is more worrisome still.)
I want to be grateful for DeYoung’s critique, since he is, ultimately, saying “no” to Wolfe’s argument. “‘The world is out to get you, and people out there hate you’ is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed.” This is exactly right, and I hope that DeYoung and others repeat it often and widely. Equally to the point, DeYoung says “we should hold to our political blueprints . . . loosely and charitably. I fear the practical payoff from this discussion will be very small, but the potential for division in the church will be great.” I hope I am wrong about this, but I am guessing that the only result will be more division. And I also worry that DeYoung’s (in my opinion) charitable review itself will only add to it.
Again, I do want to cheer on many things DeYoung preaches, particularly in his closing paragraphs, but I can’t get very far without tripping. Just when I think I’m reading a paragraph I can agree with wholeheartedly, he drops back again to “lament that America is much less Christian than it used to be.” Really? Whose America is “much less Christian” and in what way? There may be understandable reasons why many Christians feel this way, but, as a statement of historical fact, I would be hard-pressed to defend it as much more than a slightly subtler declaration of victimhood, which DeYoung has tried to denounce.
As I mentioned before, sympathy is crucial, absolutely crucial. To quote a very often used line from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an un-uprooted small corner of evil.”
More than anything else this passage should move us to have all the sympathy toward other people that we can muster and then some, and it is a sympathy that we should want from others, one that we should, in fact, be very afraid to live without.
That said, I want to point to a few things from the bookshelf that seem relevant and worth considering.
The first comes from one I’ve been picking at called Balkan Contextual Theology. In it, one of the authors quotes Branko Sekulić, who says, quite harshly, of “ethnoreligiosity” that it is a “cardinal facet of confessional desertion and perpetual treason, entrenched in the incessant denial of Jesus’ life and martyrdom, for the satisfying of superficial interests and worldly needs.” (Yikes.) Granted, not every proponent, or temptee, of Christian nationalism is deserving of quite so harsh a response, but, to his point, I have never heard a description of anything even close to Christian nationalism that did not seem entirely antithetical to the gospel of the crucified God. But, equally importantly but more practically, the author also goes on to describe the collection of essays that Sekulić was contributing to: “What emerged from this first step towards a ‘Balkan Theology’ was a prophetic type of judgement, a theology aware of and very critical towards the ‘sins’ of the church, as well as those in the church who are responsible for those transgressions.” If there is one thing that Christian nationalism, by any definition that I have ever heard, will certainly not produce, it is a confessional and sacrificial church which takes its own sins more seriously than the sins of others. What it will produce is pharisaical purification of the church in conjunction with strong and perpetual condemnation of the church’s many (perceived) enemies.
Second, both DeYoung and Wolfe would benefit from a piece of advice from the prelude of Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnnally-Linz’s recent book, The Home of God:
Narratives of crisis and decline do offer their own sickly sort of comfort, but pseudo-romantic nostalgia is a Siren’s song. Many things have always been amiss, and we gain nothing from a quantitative accounting of the degrees of amiss-ness at various times and places. In an important sense, everything is awry and has been awry, the primordial and indestructible goodness of the creation notwithstanding. There is an abiding out-of-jointness to things, witnessed (but not exhausted) by the abiding disquietude of human hearts. The pressing need isn’t that we accurately divine the overall trend line in the course of history but that we carefully discern how things are in fact awry—the texture of our dislocation—her and now.
Beneath or alongside or mingled with the disquietude, perhaps you have felt an amorphous but insistent longing—a yearning for truer modes of belonging, for fulsome forms of resonance that do not depend for their depth of intensity on the thrill of novelty, fascination with the forbidden, or the gravity of violence. In a word, a longing for home.
This is the message that those tempted by something-called-Christian-nationalism need to hear. DeYoung sometimes seems to get this, but what he gives with one hand he takes away with the other. To Wolfe and to those drawn to his argument, the desire for home, even a national home, is normal, but the means of finding or establishing it that they are seeking is not just wrong—it is historically naïve and it is entirely antithetical to Christianity itself.
Lastly, I’ll end with a quote from Karl Barth, which I consider one of the closest descriptions of my own theology:
“When he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion” (Mt. 9:36). And the fact that He was moved with compassion means originally that He could not and would not close His mind to the existence and situation of the multitude, nor hold Himself aloof from it, but that it affected Him, that it went right to His heart, that He made it His own, that He could not but identify Himself with them. Only He could do this with the breadth with which He did so. But His community cannot follow any other line. Solidarity with the world means that those who are genuinely pious approach the children of the world as such, that those who are genuinely righteous are not ashamed to sit down with the unrighteous as friends, that those who are genuinely wise do not hesitate to seem to be fools among fools, and that those who are genuinely holy are not too good or irreproachable to go down “into hell” in a very secular fashion.
The solidarity of the community with the world consists quite simply in the active recognition that it, too, since Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world, can exist in worldly fashion, not unwillingly nor with bad conscience, but willingly and with good conscience. It consists in the recognition that its members also bear in themselves and in some way actualize all human possibilities. Hence it does not consist in a cunning masquerade, but rather in an unmasking in which it makes itself known to others as akin to them, rejoicing with them that do rejoice and weeping with them that weep (Rom. 12:15), not confirming and strengthening them in evil nor betraying and surrendering them for its own good, but confessing for its own good, and thereby contending against the evil of others, by accepting the fact that it must be honestly and unreservedly among them and with them, on the same level and footing, in the same boat and within the same limits as any or all of them. How can it boast of and rejoice in the Saviour of the world and men, or how can it win them—to use another Pauline expression—to know Him and to believe in Him, if it is not prepared first to be human and worldly like them and with them?
[The church] manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with it. The world only too easily sees itself as a community which has no care but for its own life and rights and manner and which thus tries to separate itself from those around. The world itself constantly divides into individual cliques, interested groups, cultural movements, nations, religions, parties and sects of all kinds, each of which is sure of the goodness of its own cause and each anxious within the limits to maintain and assert itself in face of all the rest…. As distinct from all other circles and groups, the community of Jesus Christ cannot possibly allow itself to exist in this pharisaical conformity to the world. Coming from the table of the Lord, it cannot fail to follow His example and to sit down at table with the rest, with all sinners.
Not a cunning masquerade, but an incarnational unmasking in which we make ourselves known to others as akin to them, rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep. Truly, there is no other line for us to follow, no other kind of Christianity—no matter if it uses the name or not.
against “Christian nationalism”—or whatever you want to call it
“When he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion” (Mt. 9:36). And the fact that He was moved with compassion means originally that He could not and would not close His mind to the existence and situation of the multitude, nor hold Himself aloof from it, but that it affected Him, that it went right to His heart, that He made it His own, that He could not but identify Himself with them. Only He could do this with the breadth with which He did so. But His community cannot follow any other line. Solidarity with the world means that those who are genuinely pious approach the children of the world as such, that those who are genuinely righteous are not ashamed to sit down with the unrighteous as friends, that those who are genuinely wise do not hesitate to seem to be fools among fools, and that those who are genuinely holy are not too good or irreproachable to go down “into hell” in a very secular fashion.
The solidarity of the community with the world consists quite simply in the active recognition that it, too, since Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world, can exist in worldly fashion, not unwillingly nor with bad conscience, but willingly and with good conscience. It consists in the recognition that its members also bear in themselves and in some way actualize all human possibilities. Hence it does not consist in a cunning masquerade, but rather in an unmasking in which it makes itself known to others as akin to them, rejoicing with them that do rejoice and weeping with them that weep (Rom. 12:15), not confirming and strengthening them in evil nor betraying and surrendering them for its own good, but confessing for its own good, and thereby contending against the evil of others, by accepting the fact that it must be honestly and unreservedly among them and with them, on the same level and footing, in the same boat and within the same limits as any or all of them. How can it boast of and rejoice in the Saviour of the world and men, or how can it win them—to use another Pauline expression—to know Him and to believe in Him, if it is not prepared first to be human and worldly like them and with them?
[The church] manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with it. The world only too easily sees itself as a community which has no care but for its own life and rights and manner and which thus tries to separate itself from those around. The world itself constantly divides into individual cliques, interested groups, cultural movements, nations, religions, parties and sects of all kinds, each of which is sure of the goodness of its own cause and each anxious within the limits to maintain and assert itself in face of all the rest…. As distinct from all other circles and groups, the community of Jesus Christ cannot possibly allow itself to exist in this pharisaical conformity to the world. Coming from the table of the Lord, it cannot fail to follow His example and to sit down at table with the rest, with all sinners.
“reality is never spent”
In his new book, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, cultural critic Adam Kirsch observes that humanists are at an impasse: They must either reject continued progress (and the freedom and moral autonomy bound up with it) or acknowledge, on rational grounds, the merit of transhumanist and posthumanist arguments that a world without human beings is superior to one in which humans exist. The latter view, he suggests, might even be considered the humanistic equivalent of those held by various religious traditions that have “always seen the end of days as both wonderful and dreadful.” If the end of humanity is the consummation of humanism, Kirsch concludes, “there may be no choice but to accept the paradoxical promise that Franz Kafka made a century ago: ‘There is hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.’”
A thousand times in history—a million, more likely—visionaries, prophets, artists, and philosophers have wandered away from the social world that made them and sat themselves in nature, to see what could be seen when you stop demanding that nature echo back precisely the creeds of your community. We can think here of Elijah or John the Baptist, Muhammad or the Buddha, or Christ. Closer to our own time, Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson went to nature to find a renewed, energized version of America. Analogous solitudes have been sought and found even in prison cells—think of Martin Luther King Jr. or Fyodor Dostoevsky. As much as all of these men’s cultural formations accompanied them into solitude, shaped what they would see, there is also—in nature, in reality—more than is contained in any philosophy or culture. The main things that are needed are silence and trust—and not just for the would-be prophets among us, but for all of us: teachers, policymakers, clerics, parents, humans of any stripe. Panicked catastrophism will only ensure that our challenged cultures stay brittle and stuck.
The turn to panic has been an immensely frustrating aspect of the past several years. The liberal establishment has gnashed its teeth, shrieked, buried its head in the sand, blamed its comeuppance on omnipotent Russian bots, anything to avoid going back to reality and seeing what it might have missed, how its cultures have been blind, how they could be refreshed. The ongoing advancement of postwar liberalism is not guaranteed by the dictates of nature. That is fine, or it had better be, because it is true. But what should we do with that fact? Here there are infinite options. We have to say it again, and keep saying it: There is always more to see in the world; the process of understanding is unending. There are ways for America to stay America, while gathering back in its various warring factions. One thing we can say for sure is that to keep giving voice to the shouted slogans of yesterday is not one of those ways. If America wants to return to a state of relative social peace, if it wants its various peoples to be at home in its world, it had better dispatch its incumbent prophets from the noisy, contentious town square immediately. New, more capacious visions are needed—great awakenings and reformations and renaissances still to be seen. Thankfully, beautifully, reality is waiting, and reality is never spent.
“confessions of an apostate”
Tom Nichols (with whom I could not agree more):
“Back then, this kind of partisanship didn’t seem like a problem: In the Before Times, we still argued over politics instead of whether communist Muslims had taken over our Venezuelan voting machines with help from the Italian space program. I felt like it was safe to throw elbows and do some partisan high-sticking; I believed that we were all in a giant bouncy house called the Constitution, a place where we might bump skulls or sprain an ankle now and then but where there were no sharp edges and there were only soft landings.
I don’t believe that anymore.”
Neither do I.
(There’s a similar line of thought for “the church,” but I’m still working even the description of that one out.)
“such is the hypocrisy of this moment”
The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships. Social networking had its problems—collecting friends instead of, well, being friendly with them, for example—but they were modest compared with what followed. Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.
A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.
But now, perhaps, it can also end. The possible downfall of Facebook and Twitter (and others) is an opportunity—not to shift to some equivalent platform, but to embrace their ruination, something previously unthinkable. […]
[It could be] tragic for those who have come to rely on these platforms, for news or community or conversation or mere compulsion. Such is the hypocrisy of this moment. The rush of likes and shares felt so good because the age of zero comments felt so lonely—and upscaling killed the alternatives a long time ago, besides.
If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.
Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation (although the risk of instrumentalizing one another was present from the outset). The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain. Someday, eventually, perhaps its web will unwind. But not soon, and not easily.
… To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often—and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well. We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.
love alone is credible
As I imagined a call to pastoral ministry, all I really imagined was preaching. And the only thing I could envision as preaching was teaching: didactic induction into the truth. The pulpit was where one dispensed instruction. I look at my sermon notes from this period and cringe. I want to go back to these congregations and apologize—for boring them to death, sure, but also for a youthful selfishness, imagining my abstractions and speculations had anything to do with living the Christian life. Here were people quietly burying their elders, terrified for children bent on destroying themselves, facing death and loneliness and loss, never given permission to doubt, carrying any number of secret burdens and sins they longed to confess; and here’s a 22-year-old kid who’s read a lot of books trying to parse trinitarian personhood through 19th-century scholasticism as if it matters. […]
As a young Christian philosopher, I wanted to be the confident, heresy-hunting Augustine, vanquishing the pagans with brilliance, fending off the Manichaeans and Pelagians with ironclad arguments. As a middle-aged man, I dream of being Mr. Rogers. When you’re young, it’s easy to confuse strength with dominance; when you’re older, you realize the feat of character it takes to be meek. I used to imagine my calling was to defend the Truth. Now I’m just trying to figure out how to love.
It’s not that I’ve given up on truth. It’s just that I’m less confident we’ll think our way out of the morass and malaise in which we find ourselves. Analysis won’t save us. And the truth of the gospel is less a message to be taught than a mystery enacted. Love won’t save us either, of course. But I’ve come to believe that the grace of God that will save us is more powerfully manifest in beloved community than in rational enlightenment. Or, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has put it, “Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed.”
useful links floating in the air
The distinction between instrumental and intrinsic goods is crucial, because friendship (real friendship, not the ersatz friendship we practice today) is an intrinsic good, while politics is an instrumental good. Thus, to lose a friendship over politics suggests that something is deeply disordered in our souls. […]
When politics is understood as war, genuine friendship becomes difficult because friendship contributes nothing to the cause. What it is replaced with is “allyship” or “comradeship.” And comrades are not, strictly speaking, friends. They are rather partners in a cause. …
[A] culture that views politics as war will inevitably struggle with meaninglessness. Of course, there is some sense of meaning in fighting for a cause. But in pluralist societies like ours, political causes will never be fully achieved, not only because there is no place to dispose permanently of our enemies—every victory is thus subject to reversal over time—but also because what the “warmakers” are ultimately seeking in politics is a resolution possible only on the far side of the eschaton. We are seeking perfect justice, perfect agreement, and perfect stability over time. Because perfection in this world constantly eludes us, politics is like that chain suspended in midair. Each link seems meaningful, but the chain is anchored in nothing. The war to end all wars has no end. What ends is only our healthy relationship to intrinsic goods that bring happiness and meaning to life. […]
Some people I know worry that genuine friendship is less possible in a pluralist age than in contexts where citizens share a robust conception of the good, or of God. But this is not my view. From experience I have learned that friendship does not require that friends love all the same things, much less that they love the same ultimate things. Friendships based on such common loves of course do exist, and perhaps they are of a higher order than those in which ultimate truths are not shared. But friendship is possible where what is loved is simply the person, not the person’s metaphysics or theology. Pluralism thus need not be the death of friendships that are genuine and deep.
But if pluralism does not render meaningful friendships impossible, the tendency to understand politics as a form of war certainly makes them less likely. That was the claim I supported above by distinguishing between friendship and allyship. The second claim I made was that how one understands friendship can affect how one practices politics. Why would this be so? It is because the experience of genuine friendship, which is not merely an intrinsic good but a peak intrinsic good, cannot help but put politics in its place. Politics today makes great claims about its own importance. Yet politics cannot bring meaning to our lives—not deep meaning at any rate—because it is never more than an instrumental good.
Politics is also always incomplete, while friendship is complete in itself, in that it needs nothing else to deliver such satisfaction as is possible here on earth. Of course, friendship is incomplete in its own way, in that it cannot make us perfectly whole. But this incompleteness differs in kind from the incompleteness of politics. Politics is incomplete because its work is never done. Friendship is incomplete only insofar as its complete success intimates something even higher, a kind of friendship with God that awaits us at the end of time. Those who understand what real friendship is, and what it ultimately foreshadows, will place less value in politics because they will have better things to do. They will know through experience where their deepest longings are most fully satisfied.
“aggressive performativity”
There is, it seems, a pervasive loss of nerve about what we might want to convey about value or purpose to a new generation. And there is our tolerance of public rhetoric – not only online – in which aggressive performativity substitutes for truthfulness, analysis and negotiation. It’s as if we have lost not only a sense of positive continuity with the past but any kind of thoughtful capacity to imagine the future, and everything collapses into the hectic theatre of the present moment and the hunger to be made to feel better instantly.
“a unifying thread”
We answer for everything—for every deed and every word—and memory invites us to consider why we have lived, what we have done with our lives, whether we had a preordained purpose, and if so, whether we have fulfilled it; whether our life had a unifying thread of meaning, or whether it consisted only of random and absurd happenings.
If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line—starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.