1. Every once in a while you run into a theory that feels like a skeleton key. A framework that gets beneath or above everyday experience and explains it in a way that you cannot unsee afterward. Moral Foundations Theory is one example. Attachment Theory is another. Hartmut Rosa’s thoughts on Acceleration is yet another. Well, here comes “The Uni-Context.” The word was coined by philosopher Agnes Callard, who defines it like this:
For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around. Am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar? You would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and at the people around you and how they were acting.
The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.
Sounds a little dry on the surface, but Callard claims that this collapsing of contexts accounts for much of the strangeness of the world in which we now live. Why does everything feel so inescapably negative? Why do we focus so much on identity and so little on character? Why is everything so competitive (and why are those competitions getting more cutthroat)? When and why did we start to conceive of attention as a commodity?
Needless to say, The Uni-Context is a new name for the sort of thing that Wendell Berry spent his life agitating against. Yet it is not (solely) a function of the internet. In an interview with Derek Thompson this past July, Callard traced the Uni-Context back a full century. You can watch the full video of their exchange below. A few takeaways:
DT: For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity. Two, character is context-dependent, so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity. [Three,] if everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life.
The uni-context puts us in a universal room, where we become aware of more ideas, more people, more things that we could be paying attention to but are not. Our response to this is to develop a theory of attention that treats it as a resource to manage. We think, “I have to only focus on the perfect things!” And this makes us obsessed with, and fearful of, distraction in a way that is historically unique.
It’s hard not to judge the Uni-Context as an exclusively bad development, and indeed who among us doesn’t grieve the flattening and in some cases total disappearance of the specific trappings we once knew. One reason I found hotdogmaxxing so, er, life-giving this past summer is that, as a food item, it’s proven so resistant to homogenization. The best hot dog spots are almost never chains. But Callard warns against rushing to judgement about the Uni-Context — and for decidedly #lowanthropology reasons:
AC: The question of whether the uni-context is good or bad is loaded, because the uni-context struggles to see good things. It’s better at seeing bad things. Pretty much everyone who hears me talk about the uni-context immediately responds that it’s bad. I’ve never had anyone say, “The uni-context sounds great!” But the thing is that this supposedly bad thing is a thing we’re creating. We’re choosing it over and over again.
The uni-context is a space of unruliness. It’s a space in which a certain thing about humanity gets expressed, namely our deep aversion to “world closure.” For almost all of human history, we have lived in closed little worlds, and those worlds presented themselves as the only world. A series of contexts presented the person with direction — here’s what you should do. What we are moving toward is a “world openness” that we hunger after, where I’m not just going to do things a certain way because that’s how we do things or where I was born.
In other words, we very often experience our context(s) as law. The context in which we were raised is not just a house and town and a hotdog joint, it is a set of dos and don’ts, a collection of inherited and proscribed possibilities with all sorts of moral overtones that original sinners cannot help but rail against (and then get nostalgic about). Our drive to collapse every context, you might say, betrays a deep yearning for the grace of a more “open reality.” Unfortunately, the result thus far has not been freedom from norms so much as the establishment of far more punishing ones.
We’ll talk about this on the Mockingcast, which returns in a little over a week.
2. For a concrete example of what Callard is talking about, I give you “The Pay-to-Play Model Has Broken Youth Sports” by Caitlin Moscatello in New York Magazine. I’ve said it elsewhere, but if I wrote a sequel to Seculosity, Youth Travel Sports would be the first chapter. Therapy would be the second. The third would probably have something to do with running.
Moscatello’s essay is an example not just of turbocharged acceleration but of the Uni-Context on steroids. After all, youth sports were once the definition of local, something that brought communities and families (and churches!) together rather than tore them to shreds — and kids’ sense of themselves in the process. I realize there are exceptions to this rule.
“Harrowing” is the only word for what Moscatello reports, though “cursed” might fit too, as most of what these venture capitalists are leveraging is the simple love of one’s children (and fear of exclusion, vicarious or otherwise). That said, I wish she’d spotlighted some of the not-so-subtle spiritual rewards of youth sports (e.g., the ritual, the meaning making, and even the atonement they offer in such abundance to the parents). For that, Kathryn Jezer-Morton is still the best source. But here’s Moscatello:
Around 5 million children in the U.S. now compete on travel teams. Parents find themselves trapped. They know the benefits of sports — better health outcomes, higher self-esteem — and want that for their children, yet giving it to them often means buying into a sports ecosystem that’s inherently flawed. As the pay-to-play model increasingly takes hold, so does the idea kids should start competing at younger and younger ages, risking their sense of self along with their shoulders and ACLs. “I think the word isn’t specialize; you are professionalizing your kid early …,” said John Van Benschoten, a former MLB player who has coached travel baseball in Nashville.
Words like elite and select are thrown into team and league titles as bait. Leagues tell parents, subtly or not, that their child is special: This summer, a private-equity-backed youth baseball program in New York City with children as young as 7 sent parents an email that read, in part, “Players on our Travel Teams represent the top 5% of all players in our program” and reminded them that “travel baseball here isn’t something that players and families choose to ‘do’ but something that requires a high level of desire, commitment, and competitiveness.”
Overall, families spent 46 percent more on a primary youth sport in 2024 than they did just five years prior, according to Project Play, an initiative of the Aspen Institute. It estimated that youth sports generate up to $40 billion in annual revenue — nearly twice as much as the NFL.
One reason parents accept these conditions is they are anxious about what will happen if they don’t. In a time of justified concern for children’s mental health and unease about the future, parents have latched on to sports as a lifeline — a kid throwing a ball around is a kid not scrolling YouTube. No parent wants their child to feel left out, and more and more, parents may worry that a travel league is the only way to set their child up to play beyond grade school.
The moment that made me laugh/wince hardest was the soundbite from Tom Farrey at the Aspen Institute.
“You look at the high-school team, and all those kids played club starting from a fairly early age, and just to preserve the opportunity that my kid could play in high school, I’m like, Well, I might as well go with it,” he said. “And the next thing you know, it’s Mother’s Day and you’re in Poughkeepsie at some Drury Inn.”
Preach, brother. I was glad the article touches on the very real (if needless?) grief that kids cope with, not just when they get hurt but when they fail to advance in some way that feels existential.
But hey, if they get a little sad, maybe that’s not the end of the world — least not if it means they pick up instruments and come up with stuff like this:
3. Only one more verse of the Optimization Blues before we hit the chorus, I promise. “What happened to Yoga?” asks Rheana Murray in the Atlantic, and the answer contains some hope:
Simply exercising and eating well is no longer enough — “biohacking” has become hot. Some of today’s wellness devotees wear continuous glucose monitors to clock blood-sugar spikes in real time as well as $400 titanium rings to track heart-rate variability and REM sleep. The goal: 24/7 self-improvement. Although people surely sign up for yoga to better themselves, the practice typically encourages them to do so slowly, with humility. Yoga tends to be about letting go of ego and striving, and about surrender — principles that don’t quite fit into a culture obsessed with optimization […]
Of course, what people consider a well life could change again. In fact, this year’s report from the Global Wellness Summit, an influential industry conference, suggests that the interest in maximizing every moment has already peaked: “Optimization itself has become a stressor.” Laura Munkholm, the president of the fitness app Walla, told me she knows many people who have given up on tracking entirely. “People are shifting into a conversation of I don’t care what the numbers are. I just want to live well.”
4. That yoga piece reminds me of the incredible study we spotlighted last year at this time about workplace wellness initiatives. The one that found, of a hundred different stress-reduction strategies tested in corporate settings — meditation, massage, breathing exercises, you name it — the only one that consistently made people feel better was serving others. Cue “I Study Successful People. They Have One Habit in Common” by Angela Duckworth in the New York Times.
Alas, the only way to frame an alternative to optimization these days is by borrowing the vocabulary of optimization itself (for example: Cal Newport’s endorsement of reading as way to increase “cognitive fitness.” My eyes rolled so far back in my head I almost passed out). In this instance, it’s more a matter of self-divestment being put forward as the most effective way to self-actualize. Still, service is service and involves surrender, no matter how it gets framed:
Without exception, every high performer I’ve studied credits a host of supporters for success. Research has found that a willingness to ask for help is crucial to achievement. […] Studies show that knowing when to ask for help is an essential skill for children’s learning and achievement. College students who proactively seek assistance from others typically outperform those who avoid doing so. In adulthood, seeking support is an effective strategy for regulating our emotions, and having a support network is a reliable predictor of overall mental health. […]
From an early age, we suffer from what cognitive psychologists call the illusion of self-sufficiency, overlooking how much we owe our skills to other people. In one experiment, two groups of children were given a machine they’d never seen before. In the first, none managed to figure out how it worked on their own. In the second, the vast majority succeeded after seeing someone else use the machine and getting hints along the way. Still, after the experiment, 70 percent of the second group claimed they would have learned to use the machine without help. […]
Don’t assume you’re being a burden when you reach out asking for help. Research shows we consistently underestimate how happy it makes others to lend a hand.
To love and be loved, to help and be helped, this is what we are made for, I’d venture. Toward the end of the tour for Low Anthropology, when people would ask what the title phrase meant, I resorted to saying, It means that human beings are fundamentally in need of help. I think that’s true, if a bit understated.
5. Humor: Not the funniest week, what with a pair of America’s favorite saints meeting their Maker, but a few gems, nonetheless. “Woman Praying That The Lord’s Will Be Done As Long As It’s The Same As Her Will” in the Babylon Bee hit close to the bone. The Onion re-upped their classic “Woman’s Solo Hiking Trip Shockingly Doesn’t Have To Do With Inner Journey Or Anything,” and the Hard Times’ “Opinion “Eat, Sleep, Pretend Your Hobby Defines You as a Person, Repeat” made me laugh a bit.
Fortunately, my personal St. Peter delivered some joy:
6. Next up, writing for Comment, Susan Bruxvoort Lipscomb reviews Francis Spufford’s glorious recent novel Nonesuch, tracing its roots as a “lost” Narnia chronicle in which Susan Pevensie is redeemed. While I was aware of its origins, I’m not sufficiently Lewis-fluent to realize that part of what Spufford was doing in the book was redressing the “Problem of Susan, who in the last of the Narnia books is famously left out of the apocalyptic happy ending.” Bruxvoort Lipscomb takes the opportunity to put Nonesuch in, uh, context of the erstwhile Mbird Conference speaker’s larger oeuvre:
Each of Spufford’s novels is very different from the one before. He has written historical fiction (Golden Hill), contemporary realism (Light Perpetual), an alternative-history noir crime thriller (Cahokia Jazz), and now fantasy. A recurring element in his novels is a Christian assumption about grace. Characters emerge out of deep brokenness and are offered second chances. They make serious moral mistakes but are given opportunities to atone for their sins. Sometimes they accept. In Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, Spufford sums up the good news of Christianity thus: “Far more can be mended than you know.” If you didn’t know these novels were written by a Christian, you could miss it. But grace and redemption, possibilities of mending broken things, are integral to Spufford’s fiction. […]
In Nonesuch, [protagonists] Iris and Geoff go to a Christmas Eve carol service at Chelsea Old Church on the Thames embankment in 1940, in the middle of the Blitz … As she sings carols, Iris thinks about what faith means: “They were putting their faith, Iris and Geoff and everyone else there, in promises they didn’t know could be kept. Promises with no guarantee of safety, or of happy endings, any more than there was a happy ending for the baby in the manger. And yet they were trying to trust them anyway.” The Blitz lasted from September until May. At Christmas 1940, there was no end in sight to the bombings. What Iris and the people around her have, as Iris notes, is a conviction of something not seen: that suffering and redemption are bound up together.
7. We’ll close with a story of suffering and redemption from this side of the Atlantic Ocean. My childhood hero Darryl Strawberry has been having quite a summer. Not just because the ’86 Mets, AKA the best team ever anywhere, have been celebrating 40 years since their miraculous championship, but also because he has a memoir out, Another Life: Discovering the Healing Power of Purpose on My Long Journey from Player to Preacher, in which he tells his remarkable story. Christianity Today ran a short profile of the slugger, and I praise God for every word, “Darryl Strawberry: ‘I Was Already Free Because of God’s Love‘”:
Strawberry’s salvation was a mother’s prayer answered. After Ruby Strawberry died in 1996, a journal found under her mattress contained prayers for each of her five children. For Darryl, she had asked God to “knock him off of his throne and save him.” […]
When the future major leaguer was 13, his father Henry Strawberry, a postal clerk, came home after midnight in a drunken rage. With a shotgun in hand, he threatened to kill the entire family. Strawberry’s older brother Michael grabbed a skillet, older brother Ronnie a butcher knife, and Darryl a frying pan. A stand-off across the dining room table ensued. It was the first time the boys had ever stood up to their physically abusive, alcoholic father. Henry backed down, left, and never returned to the family’s South Central Los Angeles home.
Years later, Strawberry hears from his father, who is dying in a hospital, and cannot bring himself to visit.
“After all the things he’d done to our family,” Strawberry writes in Another Life, his just-published memoir, “the hurt went too deep. I didn’t think I could find the forgiveness.” But when he remembered that God had forgiven his own sins, he went to the hospital — and was shocked by the words coming out of his mouth. He first asked for his father’s forgiveness for keeping him out of his life. The elder Strawberry said yes.
Then Strawberry asked his father if he wanted to experience the same forgiveness. The answer: yes. “The Lord wanted to give [grace] to my father without being concerned with whether he’d earned it or not,” Strawberry writes. “He used me to extend the very grace I’d received.”
“When I left his hospital room, I was free. Truly free for the first time in my life.” Strawberry told me, “No matter how much we want to hold someone else hostage, basically you’re holding yourself hostage.”
Strays:
- Mockingbird is on Substack!! These Another Week Ends columns will be going out automatically every Friday to every subscriber. Plus a ton of other goodies.
- Careful readers will note that I made it through an entire weekender without talking about AI even once. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t read some good stuff on the topic — sigh — two favorites being Matthew Milliner’s “The Perfect Mirror” and Meghan O’Gieblyn’s “Wishing It So.”
- I had the privilege of guesting on the Faith after Faith podcast, in which host Katie Langston and I talked about the deconstruction phenomenon as well as the relation between grace and shame.
- There are too many beautiful Dolly Parton tributes to link to. “The Gospel According to Dolly Parton” by L. Patrick Burrows and “Why Did Dolly Mean So Much to Us?” by Heidi Schlumpf were two that caught my attention.
- Plough published SIX new Wendell Berry poems! We’ve got a pair of tributes to WB coming next week, so keep your eyes peeled to our homepage.
- Finally, Mbird magazine editor Belle Tindall-Riley buried some pretty fantastic news in “In Defense of Oversharing” over on Seen & Unseen.
