Another Week Ends

1. It wasn’t enough for our devices to track our steps. It never was. Now they track our heart rates and calories burned, audio exposure and … happiness? Yes, now wearable devices track our passing moods to report whether we were happy that day or whether we spent our waking hours stressed, depressed, or angry. Mental health has been big business for decades, but now the tech companies are trying to capitalize on our need of eternal bliss. What could go wrong? As told by Emily Laurence Sardinha in GQ this week, quite a bit:

Laurie Santos, PhD, a psychology professor at Yale and the host of The Happiness Lab podcast, warns that there’s a danger in obsessively tracking your happiness. “Research by UC Berkeley’s Iris Mauss and her colleagues shows that the more you value happiness, the less happy you are,” says Dr. Santos. “So there’s a psychological paradox when it comes to the pursuit of happiness — the more you seek it out, the worse you feel. I do worry that happiness trackers like these can exacerbate this tendency.”

Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has written several books on happiness, adds that monitoring your mood nonstop will ultimately worsen it. “Constantly asking yourself, ‘Am I happy yet?’ is not good,” she says. “If you monitor your happiness too much, you’re focusing on the end goal, but research suggests that it’s better to focus on the journey. It sounds hokey, but there’s truth to it.”

Wearables also present the question of what you’re supposed to do with all the emotional data at your fingertips. Pulling up an app and seeing a chart of your tanking mental health doesn’t solve the problem for you; it just shows that you’re not doing great.

Lots to unpack here. For starters, it’s worth questioning whether the happiness that a digital mood ring reports is the real thing. One may be content while playing a video game or listening to music or sitting in the park on a sunny day, all with same the telltale biological markers, but those are just passing dopamine hits of fickle creatures. No, true happiness has far more to do with what you cannot choose or manufacture. Happiness is a gift received with gratitude from that which you cannot control.

2. Happiness, it turns out, looks like Ben Sasse. Grab some Kleenex for this next one … The former U.S. senator and college president is now a hospice patient literally wearing death on his face. This week he sat down with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss politics, the state of the humanities, and his own faith on Day 99 of a 3–4 month prognosis.

Douthat: God hasn’t answered those prayers yet. Are you angry at God ever?

Sasse: No.

Douthat: Not at all?

Sasse: No. I wouldn’t want a sovereign God to defer to all of my prayers with a yes. I’m not omniscient. I don’t know what the weaving together of the tapestry of full redemption should look like, but I know going through the period of suffering that I’m going through is a benefit because it is a winnowing.

I’m filled with dross. This suffering is not salvific, but it’s sanctifying, and I’m grateful for it.

Tim Keller, who I know you knew, who’s in my denomination — a Presbyterian pastor in New York who also died of pancreatic cancer — said: I hate pancreatic cancer. I would never wish it on anyone, but I would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer of pancreatic cancer.

Meaning I now, in the midst of this disease, know much more the truth of my finitude than I ever let myself believe in the past. The hubristic nonsense — I believe in God, and I’m grateful and blessed, but I can build a storehouse that can be pretty deistically persuasive.

My storehouse can have enough resources that I can operate without a need, but that’s not true. I can’t keep the planets in orbit. I can’t even grow skin on my face.

Douthat: For the listener or viewer who — whether for Ehrman’s reasons or others — doesn’t believe in God and finds your cosmic optimism admirable but maybe thinks that you’re deluding yourself on the brink of actual finitude, what would you say to that person?

Sasse: Let’s read the Book of Romans together. In Romans 1, where Paul’s essentially laying out a catechetical argument for the structure of Christianity against a Jewish messianic hopeful backdrop, he says there are lots of intellectual arguments you can make against God, but you have to start with a fundamental question about what do you do with this moral issue of our own conscience?

And does the individual in your hypothetical really start with the claim that things are right in your soul? Because I can’t relate to that. Things are not right in my soul.

My soul thinks Ben should be God, and I want that to die. Cancer sucks. But I’m pretty grateful that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-idolatry.

Douthat: Do you think you’re ready to die? Do you feel ready?

Sasse: I don’t feel ready. But to whom would I go? I have confidence that when Jesus says to the disciples he didn’t want to be identified as the Messiah yet, keep these crowds away, don’t tell about the water-into-wine miracle at the feast — how amazing is it that Jesus’ first miracle is a big-ass party? Let’s drink more together.

But he says: You can’t keep the children from me. And we’re told that we get to approach the Almighty, we get to approach the divine and call him Daddy, Abba, Father? That’s pretty glorious. And I know that that’s what I need.

It’s difficult to watch the video of the interview and not be moved. Sasse’s witness here is unfathomable. To be on the brink of death and yet to decide to spend your last days on earth dying in public while praising God with the “old, old story.” Sasse has also launched a podcast entitled Not Dead Yet, which has instantly jumped to the top of my queue. Perhaps he’ll spend an episode on Romans before the season ends.

3. If you’ve ever found yourself feeling resentful at being told — for the fifth time in two weeks — to go to the trendy new bakery down the street, there’s a term for that: “psychological reactance.” It turns out the more one is told they should do something, the more they recoil at the idea. For Anna Holmes, her own psychological reactance rears its head in a resistance to the perpetual hype machine of online promotion. No, she will not be watching The Pitt, no matter how many awards it wins. Or better, especially if it wins awards.

Does this make me a jerk? I don’t like to think so. Contrarian doesn’t quite describe me; my rejection of The Pitt isn’t an attempt to appear provocative or argumentative. And nonconformist doesn’t work; it suggests a person allergic to the zeitgeist, which I’m not. (After all, I covet Clare V. bags. I own a pair of Stan Smith Adidas.) I’m also not a dissenter. Dissent suggests a protest against something that a person has previous experience with, or doesn’t believe in; but my pop-culture resistance is different from having seen something and deemed it wanting or boring. I’m not necessarily worried about encountering pop culture that turns out to be bad. I just don’t care to act on it if it’s supposed to be good.

I’m not alone in this. (As a matter of fact, the impetus for this inquiry was an unscheduled conversation between me and one of my Atlantic editors, with whom I bonded over a reluctance to watch The Pitt.) Roland Imhoff, a social psychologist at the Psychological Institute of Gutenberg University, in Germany, told me that he relates as well, and suggested that what I’m expressing is less a need for uniqueness than a form of “psychological reactance” — a defensive response that occurs when someone thinks their freedom of choice is being constrained.

In the end, Holmes thinks such self-preservation is a noble reason to not watch The Pitt, but I’m not so sure. Not because I’ve seen the show and wish to add my recommendation to the tsunami of fans, but because psychological resistance is the root of so many of our problems. It’s less of an issue when it comes to the trivial aspects of life, like where to eat lunch or what music we listen to, but our rebellion against the law is as old as time.

4. On the other side of rebellion, there are two options available. You can double down and claim you reside on the higher ground — and maybe you’d be right. Oftentimes, though, our rebellion creates irreparable harm to ourselves and others. The only other alternative is repentance and forgiveness, a script that, as Max Heine reports in the Dispatch, is rarely seen today.

[Those on the right] are quick to whitewash any misstep. Even when evidence of wrongdoing emerges, apologies never follow. Blame gets shifted to Joe Biden or Democrats or alleged radical nutcases. […] On the left, the blame game has evolved with more finesse … Each victim had its perpetrator. The perps needed to repent and, ideally, make atonement, even if it failed to yield forgiveness.

For its part, the church has likewise shifted away from language of sin/repentance/grace toward a different kind of gospel:

In the following centuries [after Nietzsche], in spite of its excesses and mistakes, the church enjoyed some degree of respect as a moral arbiter. It defined sin. It offered atonement. Then the Age of Reason, with its secularism, scientific empiricism, and challenges to authority, began chipping away at its throne. That trend’s acceleration in our lifetimes created a growing tolerance for sin. The denial of traditional absolutes — moral relativism — overlaps with what theologian Carl Trueman and others have called expressive individualism, a celebration of self-exploration and redefinition. When self trumps communal mores, there’s little consensus about shame, sin, or repentance.

So it’s no surprise to see people avoid the institution behind the Thou-Shalt-Nots. Even before the church decline got so severe, critics had noted the use of shinier bait by desperate leaders aspiring to be fishers of men: In addition to the therapeutic, non-confrontational messaging … there’s no shortage of large churches offering recreational buildings, retreats, classes, stylish worship bands, and the like.

Placing the decline of moral language alongside similar shifts in the church isn’t necessarily new. But it does clarify how and why the peripheral aspects of Christianity have risen to the fore — at the expense of the “old, old story.” In this way, as much as left and right Christianities might disagree on doctrine, they both reflect the same shift. Both spend a great deal of time talking about community, self-actualization, and service. Though the kinds of each may be vastly different, they’re still two sides of the exact same coin.

5. For laughs this week, Reductress ran the one-liner, “Friend Getting a Little Too Good at Not Being a People Pleaser,” and the New Yorker had a lot to say about influencer culture in their “How to Be Deep in a Marketable Way“:

Post vague quotes about self-realization that are universal but ultimately mean nothing. For instance, “Follow your own light,” with a picture of you holding an unlit match. Mention cutting toxic people out of your life (but don’t reveal that the people in question are your friends who, at lunch, discouraged you from posting that).

Carry around thick, intimidating novels. Quote Victor Hugo and insist that the Disney version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” really “got the ending wrong.” Everyone will be impressed that you read nearly a thousand pages about French Gothic architecture. An airline will fly you out to Paris to lead an “H.B. of N.D. Tour.” Quasi-modo; fully sponsored.

And in an apparent follow-up to a recent article about starting a band (discussed in this week’s Mockingcast episode), SNL had this:

6. I want to close with an accessible deep dive into an unfashionable but nevertheless vital idea: divine impassibility. Simply stated, God is unchanging, always and forever the same. I say “unfashionable” because it bumps up against more personal, intimate portrayals of God. God is with us, yes, but not changed in the process. God might know and experience our pain, but not in the same way we know and experience pain. To some, that sounds like Bad News, putting God one step removed from daily life. But the opposite, Richard Beck contends, is the case. A God who can change cannot be trusted:

Most of us, though, experience our love relationship with God as a parental relation, paternal and maternal. Here the experience is less a torrid love affair than one of constant nurture and care. The pathos of God’s emotions shifts toward the delight and dismay a parent feels toward a child. Here our conversation becomes less entangled in God’s “feelings,” because in this parental framework the definition of love shifts away from emotions toward commitment. What defines parental love as parental love is not the storm of its passions but the unconditionality of its acceptance and care. Which is precisely what is highlighted by the good news of God’s impassibility, the constancy of God’s love. […]

In short, the pathos of love is less about turbulent emotional swings between two unsteady lovers than about the fierceness of a relational commitment, like a parent’s love for a child or the love found in a lifelong marital union. God’s feelings and emotions are always expressions of that fierce relational commitment, the constancy of God’s love and care. Because of our unsteadiness and inconstancy, there is a drama and pathos to God’s relational commitment, and we describe that drama and pathos using the language of emotions as analogies of relation. But that relation is loving precisely because it doesn’t wobble or change.

This has been a key point I’ve been trying to make. Love shouldn’t be “emotional.” Because emotions are, by definition, variable and volatile. We know this. When we describe someone as “very emotional,” we are not describing a steady, constant person. A “very emotional” person is an unpredictable person. In a similar way, we don’t want an “emotional” God. It is not good news if God is a hot, unpredictable mess. True love, we know, loves despite emotion. So this whole debate about whether God has “feelings” or “emotions” is really a waste of time, because what is good news in this debate isn’t the emotionality of God but God’s constant posture of commitment and love. And it’s this constant posture that makes the doctrine of God’s impassibility such good news.

Indeed, it’s the kind of God who Ben Sasse can look to when everything falls apart — to know that there is a fixed point amid the ebbs and flows of time that holds it all together. If divine impassibility appears to make God less relatable, or less human, it does so precisely in the way that matters most. Though we are unreliably fickle, God is not.

Strays: 

• For the theology geeks out there (Part One), Mbird contributor Jeb Ralston’s Ph.D. thesis on Reformation readings of Romans 5 is available for free. Bravo, Dr. Ralston!
• For the theology geeks out there (Part Two), check out the recent Lenten lectures by John Barclay, the world’s leading expert on the apostle Paul’s understanding of grace.
• “Words: What Are They Good For?” asks Tara Isabella Burton.
• Alan Jacobs’ ruminations on Easter “visitors”:

To those of you who are Christmas and Easter Christians: Come without guilt, without shame, and without hesitation. We are all people who have gone astray; we are all in need of God’s mercy. Christmas and Easter tell us that we’ve got it. In Christ God has dealt definitively with our offenses, and if that’s not something to celebrate, I don’t know what is. So here’s something each of us can say to our neighbors in the church: Greetings, fellow miserable offender!