1. Fun news: yesterday marked the first recording session of The Mockingcast since May (ptL!), and one of the articles we decided to highlight was Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s recent opus in the New Yorker, “The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism.” The article profiles both philosopher William MacAskill and the philanthrophic movement that has sprung up around him, “Effective Altruism.” E.A., as it’s commonly known, is a movement of very smart and earnest young people looking to do the most good in the most efficient (and least sentimental) way possible. Usually, this involves passionate debate on how best to re-allocate income so that it benefits the maximum number of humans/animals/biospheres, even if that re-allocation looks bizarre on the surface. Think of it as Utilitarianism meets Big Data meets, well, Seculosity.
E.A. may be Spock-like but it’s undeniably impressive, especially in the near-monastic degree of sacrifice it inspires among its adherents — to say nothing of the amount of resources being donated to help suffering people. MacAskill comes off as the genuine article, too, very much aware of the pitfalls such fanaticism can foster. As with all world-saving schemes, there’s a #seculosity aspect that goes far beyond tithing and is already threatening to invert the righteousness at hand. The crushing burden of the law(-sans-grace) and the anxiety of “doing enough” are evident at several points in the article, and quite a bit of ink is spilled over the sectarian in-fighting already starting to hamper the movement.
Still, if you’re going to purity spiral over anything, I suppose curing blindness is a great place to start:
Effective altruism … furnishes an all-encompassing world view. It can have an ecclesiastical flavor, and early critics observed that the movement seemed to be in the business of selling philanthropic indulgences for the original sin of privilege. It has a priestly class, whose posts on E.A.’s online forum are often received as encyclicals. In the place of Mass, E.A.s endure three-hour podcasts. There is an emphasis on humility, and a commandment to sacrifice for the sake of the neediest.
It does, in any case, seem convenient that a group of moral philosophers and computer scientists happened to conclude that the people most likely to safeguard humanity’s future are moral philosophers and computer scientists. The movement had prided itself on its resolute secularism, but longtermist dread recalled the verse in the Book of Revelation that warns of a time when the stars will fall from the sky like unripe figs. Rob Reich, the Stanford political scientist, who once sat on the board of GiveWell, told me, “They are the secular apocalypticists of our age, not much different than Savonarola — the world is ending and we need a radical break with our previous practices.”
I asked [MacAskill] what made him most apprehensive, and he thought for a moment. “My No. 1 worry is: what if we’re focussed on entirely the wrong things?” he said. “What if we’re just wrong? What if A.I. is just a distraction? Like, look at the Greens and nuclear power.” Panic about meltdowns appears, in retrospect, to have driven disastrously short-term bets. MacAskill paused for a long time. “It’s very, very easy to be totally mistaken.”
2. Next, Mockingbird hasn’t been the only publication eulogizing writer Frederick Buechner this week. Several national outlets have thankfully gotten in on the action. David Brooks penned a remembrance in the NY Times under the title “The Man Who Found His Inner Depths,” cataloging some of the writer’s apparently bottomless supply of brilliant aphorisms:
Too literary for many Christians and too Christian for the literary set, [Buechner’s] faith was personal, unpretentious and accessible. “Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward.” It is sensing a presence, not buying an argument.
He described the Gospel as a great fairy tale that happens to be true. The fairy tale has pain and danger, goodness is pitted against evil, people are transformed, and in the end all the characters are revealed for who they really are. To live within this fairy tale is to experience the “joy and beauty and holiness beyond the walls of the world.”
Christians, he wrote in one novel, should get up every morning, read The Times and ask themselves, “Can I believe it all again today?” If you say Yes 10 days out of 10, he wrote, then you probably don’t know what believing means. But on the days you can say Yes, “it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and … great laughter.”
Elsewhere, in the Washington Post, Michael Gerson paid tribute to the man he calls “the mentor I had never met,” claiming that Buechner “showed how a modern person, schooled in skepticism, pursued by appropriate doubts, could find the frequency of grace, as if he were tuning an old radio.” Wowza…! I think we may have hit on a new mission statement for Mbird. Oh, and I was delighted by Buechner’s endorsement of abreaction:
Life’s temptation, of course, is to move from place to place on cruise control, which means, for me, focusing on failures in the past or worries about the future. So how, some questioners would persist with Buechner, do we start getting into the habit of fully inhabiting our experience? “Pay attention to moments,” he said, when “unexpected tears come to your eyes and what may trigger them.” He was talking about those sudden upwellings of emotion we get from the sublimity of nature or art, when we see a whale breaching, or are emotionally ambushed by a line in a film or poem. We are led toward truth and beauty by a lump in the throat. […]
Someone asked him whether he had ever considered putting his talents to work for God, which he had not. And then his whispers organized themselves into a faith. “Something in me recoils from using such language,” he said, “but here in the end I am left with no other way of saying it than that what I finally found was Christ. Or was found. It hardly seems to matter which.”
Amen to ALL of that. We’ve got another Buechner post coming this week, which will include reading recommendations. I’ve got some serious catching up to do.
3. Shifting gears, my primary response to the ending of Better Call Saul was one of awe. Gratitude, also, that I got to be alive to witness Gilligan and Gould crafting their masterpiece in real time. Such confidence, such richness, such creativity, such SUBSTANCE — I can’t imagine a higher peak of Peak TV. And most reviewers seem to echo that sentiment. Favorite write-up I’ve seen thus far was Brad East’s “Jimmy’s Change.” Spoilers galore. While we’re on the subject of TV, though, Alissa Wilkinson’s essay on What Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal says about us for Vox blew me away. I haven’t actually watched the HBO series yet, despite every intention (you can only hear something called “criticism-proof” so many times before needing to see for yourself). Clearly it’s time to take the plunge #lowanthropology:
[The Rehearsal‘s] beginning feints in a completely bananas direction: that it’s possible to recreate all the possible outcomes of a complicated interaction, practice them to perfection, and somehow control the outcome. But it spirals fast, with Fielder inexorably moving away from his initial perch as creator, the god of the machinery who observes people from the margins, and toward being the center of the show.
This is not really a show about Nathan … No. The Rehearsal is definitely a show about us … It’s a show filled with characters who we kind of think we know after they say a couple things but who keep shapeshifting on us. Nathan keeps changing categories. Angela seems like one kind of familiar religious fanatic, but at moments she’s genuinely surprising. (She loves violent movies! She gives Nathan great advice in the finale!) Her antonym seems to be Miriam, the Hebrew tutor, who seems like a brilliant badass, but then turns out to be her own kind of fanatic by the end of the episode. […]
As Nathan puts it near the end of the fourth episode, “When you assume what others think, maybe all you’re doing is turning them into a character that only exists in your mind.”
I hate to say the thesis of The Rehearsal is to escape screens and touch grass a little more, but I don’t think it’s not … It’s when the I-it transmutes to I-Thou that real emotions start to flow. “Could it be,” he says aloud in the finale, “that the path to forgiveness lies in someone else’s eyes?”
4. Official podcast rec this week would be Missed Fortune on Apple, which concerns the search for one man’s buried gold in Yellowstone. The producer of the cast, Peter Frick-Wright, wrote a great little piece for Newsweek on “the dark side of treasure hunting,” in which he offered the following observation. I dare say the applications extend further than the Indiana Jones’s among us:
You’d think the most seductive part of a treasure hunt would be the money, but money is just an excuse to go on a treasure hunt. The main attraction is how straightforward everything becomes. You know what to do with each day, each moment, when you’re consumed with a hunt. Every time you go out searching you learn where it’s not. Every day feels like progress. You can organize around it, and people understand. They may think you’re crazy, stupid, or delusional but you don’t have to explain the value of treasure to anyone. It can fill a gap in your life that you didn’t even know was there.
5. Humor-wise, kinda thin pickings this week. But The Reductress made me laugh out loud with “Help! I Googled My Symptoms and WebMD Is Telling Me to Check If My Hand Is Bigger Than My Face.” And then The New Yorker scooped one of the later chapters of #LowAnthropology with “Live-Stream Your Authentic Self!”
6. Can’t say I didn’t chuckle a couple times whilst reading Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s column in The Cut on novel baby names, “Why R U Mad at the Name Kayleigh?” Course, that was before the piece morphed into a convicting rumination on ladder-climbing and status-signaling:
The world of momfluencers, which I’ve been studying for the past few years, is full of interesting baby names … Recent names deemed tragic by the groups are Kymburleigh, Jexson, Hindryx, Kourttlyn, Crystaleanor, and Racelynn. These are obviously unusual names. But what’s less obvious to me is exactly why they piss people off — why they seem like absurd acts of hubris on the part of the parents.
It’s always interesting to observe the circumstances under which otherwise perfectly nice people give themselves permission to be mean. In this case, I think the group is united by what they perceive as obliviousness to status on the part of parents who give their kids “made-up” names. How can they not know how stupid these names are, right?? Calling out this obliviousness gives them purpose as a community.
This resonates with me, a person who was socialized to be nice (and tries to be!!!) but is also deathly terrified of being perceived as oblivious. That’s my hell. Whatever’s going on, I’m determined to indicate that I “get it” — I feel like my life depends on it, unfortunately. I bet a lot of these groups’ members feel the same way sometimes. In fact, their rules about what names are and aren’t okay to make fun of sort their members into an even more precise tier of those who fully “get” the rules of engagement and those who only kinda do.
For influencers, children’s names become extensions of their mothers’ brands — modern or traditional, zany outfits or floral prints. The women who choose Madysyn over Madison are not dumb to status and class. They’re just chasing a different iteration of it.
7. You’ll want to be sitting down for this last one. I’m referring to Chad Bird’s exquisite, and exquisitely gut-wrenching testimony, The Day We Buried Our Son. After narrating — in shattering detail — his son Luke’s funeral, Chad offers the following reflection:
Our Christian cemeteries are sacred fields in which we sow the bodies of our loved ones. The church is a farmer. We do not sow wheat or barley or corn; we plant bodies in the earth. And, like all farmers, we wait for the harvest. When it will come, we do not know. But come it shall — this year, next year, a thousand years hence. Who knows? The Lord of the harvest knows.
On that day, like champagne corks, gravestones will pop from the earth. The soil will split, coffins burst open. Luke’s grave will have reached its expiration date, as will all our graves, wherever they may be.
The trumpet will sound. Jesus will descend. And with upraised arms of victory, full-throated shouts of Hallelujah, and bodies radiant with the immortal life of the resurrected Jesus, we shall stand, an innumerable company of the redeemed.
Until that glorious day, we wait in faith, hope, and love. And as we do, limping down this dark and forlorn pathway of grief, we cling to the truth uttered by the mouth of the Lord in whom we believe, and with whom Luke now rests in peace: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.”
Indeed, Jesus, yes, you are. Come quickly, O Lord, we are waiting.
Strays
- RIP Lamont Dozier, aka Black Bach and architect of the Motown Sound, someone whose work has brought this music-head countless joy. I’ve embedded a few of my favorite productions of his (that aren’t on Spotify).
- Vox explored Why we keep falling for fitness fads.
- Mbird contributor Ian Olson has a great one up over at Plough this week on “Wesley, Whitefield, and a Gospel that Disrupts.”
- Look for the new Mockingcast on Monday. Thank you for your patience with us while we took a break!
COMMENTS
One response to “August 20-26”
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It gets me every time.
I click one of your links. I am reading an interesting article. I am ankle deep into it, and BAM! The New Yorker paywall slaps me in the face and prevents me from finishing the article.
Seriously, does every other reader of Mbird have a subscription to the New Yorker online?
I guess I am not in the club. Maybe we just aren’t right for each other.