Another Week Ends

1. The school busses are trundling up and down my street every morning, football season is in full swing, and the pumpkin spice pump has returned to my local coffee shop. It is undoubtedly the best time of year. Among the various rites of passage late August bring is the first year college drop off, and in the Atlantic, Ezekiel J. Emanuel has a word of wisdom for parents who plan to give their departing students a word of wisdom: university, and life in general, is more than job training.

First, parents often think in too short of a timeframe, focusing on the first job out of school and its starting salary. But students entering college today will likely work until they are about 70 years old, and probably live beyond 90 — retiring around 2075 and perhaps living to see the next century.

If you know what the best, most rewarding, and most fulfilling careers will be over that time span, you have extraordinary clairvoyant powers. Remember that scene in the 1967 film The Graduate? At a cocktail party thrown by his parents, Benjamin, the recent college graduate of the title, is taken aside by a family friend who tells him that the future is “plastics.” And in 1967, that must have seemed like sensible advice, even if “microchips,” “computers,” or even “sneakers” would have been much wiser.

Similarly, for the past decade or more, well-intentioned parents have been pushing their children to learn how to code. As AI now threatens to make coding by humans nearly obsolete, that no longer looks like a surefire strategy for success.

Parents have to remember that their children will have long, long working lives. Pushing a student into one of today’s hot careers is unlikely to produce a lifetime of self-realization and happiness.

And when parents focus on narrow careerism instead of seeking to raise inquisitive and ethical children, they not only risk preparing kids for the jobs of yesterday; they also tend to create bored and unfulfilled careerists.

2. Political prognosticator and number cruncher Nate Silver is making the rounds with his newly released book On the Edge, which proffers an apologetic of sorts for Silver and his online cohort of “Bayesian” statisticians. The book outlines Silver’s worldview, in which a proper understanding of statistical risk, mixed with the courage to bet big, leads to a life of winning. It’s a worldview he shares with a certain cadre of professional gamblers, sports betters, venture capital investors, Shark Tank viewers, and hedge fund managers.

At the Point magazine, Leif Weatherby and Ben Recht take Silver to task for his big-bet worldview. In his book, Silver and his fellow risk takers are “The River,” the pioneers betting big and taking risks to push society in new directions. The River is held back and restrained by “The Village,” the sort of stagnant bureaucracy of east coast elites and DC technocrats. Weatherby and Recht argue that this dichotomy isn’t right:

This is the mindset behind the world that Silver played a large role in establishing: one of ubiquitous prediction where everything is bettable. Silver insists that viewing all decisions through this lens of gambling is the underappreciated characteristic of Very Successful People. It is true that, as Silver suggests, quantifying everything, and then betting on the outcome, has become a pervasive and powerful technique, at work in fields from finance to culture to sports to politics. But what Silver willfully ignores is that the successful players in this world aren’t the bettors. They are the bookies and casino owners — the house that never loses.

Today, the ideology nurtured in the 2000s blogosphere is mainstream, and Nate Silver is a highly paid establishment pundit. The Village made Nate Silver. Silver became a millionaire by promoting this overquantification to his denigrated Village. He insists on the chasm between what he identifies as the two types of technocrat: woke liberals in D.C. and orthodox Bayesian warriors in the wilds of Vegas, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. But his Riverian interviewees keep telling him that this taxonomy is faulty. In Silver’s discussion with far-right billionaire Peter Thiel, Thiel tells Silver that statistical modeling has become a part of our world, not the best way to grasp it or make decisions. It is a factor you have to negotiate, one you can take advantage of by playing to people’s desire to quantify the unknown. Thiel knows that the most successful Riverians aren’t the gamblers. They are the casino owners.

This, it seems, is what Silver can’t accept: that the River is the casino itself, rather than the gamblers who play there. And at the casino, the house never loses.

As Silver’s Bayesian outlook continues to grow and influence American culture, Weatherby and Recht offer an important rejoinder. The invitation to bet big and beat the house of life remains, but the invitations to beat the house always come from the house itself. It’s not just that those who are risk takers are arguing that taking risks is the key to a good life. That perspective could be forgiven as a case of hammer-sees-nails philosophical myopia. It needs to be pointed out that the voices espousing this big-bet outlook are the ones raking in the steady not-as-risky profits through celebrity, influence, publishing deals, speaking engagements, and media rights. Cognitive psychologists call it Survivorship Bias — we only see the successful voices who beat the house, but the big bets that flopped and paid the house’s salary are swept under the rug.

3. “What if thine own self is not so good? What if it’s pretty bad? Wouldn’t it be better in that case not to be true to thine own self?” It’s a famous quote from Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, shared by a character fleeing to Spain to escape his life problems. Heather Havrilesky offers a similarly fresh take on the idea of authenticity after her move from the loud and self-important world of Los Angeles to her childhood home in North Carolina. She imagines a way of being in the world defined by authentic self-understanding, but also, that authentic self-understanding must be marked by humility, curiosity, and an ear to the needs of neighbors.

Sometimes being an authentic mess or an authentic show-off isn’t that relaxing or useful. Occasionally we have ask ourselves, “Does this behavior serve me at all? Does it serve anyone else?” And we have to allow ourselves to be humbled, to listen, to question our oldest, most stubborn stories about who we are and what we deserve.

There isn’t one answer to every situation, every friendship, every great partnership. You can’t just invent a philosophy and follow it and ignore what other people need. Because everyone needs connection. Everyone. It’s not optional, no matter how vehemently we might tell ourselves that it is when we’re isolating ourselves. Even if you’re never lonely, you still need connection sometimes.

Life is compromise. And compromise might surprise you by making you feel even more alive. That’s what your inner herd of recalcitrant assholes needs to hear sometimes: “We are still lovable, but we need to simmer down and join the party on its own terms. Let’s try it their way for a minute. Let’s trust that when we’re learning and growing, even when it feels uncomfortable or scary, all of our horizons are expanding.”

That’s what authenticity is to me. It’s not becoming something precious and special that everyone admires, like a slab of marble or a hunk of gold. It’s not being the exact same person in every situation. It’s not even being painfully honest everywhere you go.

Authenticity is honoring yourself and others with equal sensitivity to the shifting conditions on the ground. When you are humbled, when you need to adjust your behavior, when you recognize that you’ve strayed from your ideals, those are the exact moments when joy is knocking on your door, asking to come in and light up your life in new ways.

4. In humor this week, the Onion takes gold with “Crows Intelligent Enough To Steal Trinkets, But Foolish Enough To Think Material Goods Will Solve Problems.”

And echoing a classic insight from theologian Gerhard Forde, the Babylon Bee reports: “Man Unsure If He’s Becoming More Virtuous With Age Or Just Too Tired To Sin“:

Michael reportedly began pondering the process of his own sanctification shortly after he wanted to get up from the couch to gluttonize an entire bag of sea salt and vinegar Ruffles, but decided to not indulge his fleshly appetites because it was just too hard.

“I realized — maybe I’m being conformed to the image of Christ here,” Michael recalled, musing over the goodness of God’s sustaining grace. “But I had to wonder — maybe I’m just too tired for this whole sinning business after all. I mean, it takes so much energy, you know? You’ve actually got to get up and do stuff like anger or greed or whatever and it’s like who’s got time for all that noise anyway?”

Also getting laughs this week: “We Have Updated Our Children’s Menu Options to Better Reflect What We See Your Children Doing in Our Restaurant” hits too close to home, especially the “Cheerio Your Child Just Spotted on the Floor” option.

5. In entertainment this week, Rings of Power returns to Amazon Prime (whether you like it or not), but yours truly was not expecting a Lord of the Rings full length feature anime hitting theaters this December. Any occasion to bring back that Rohan violin theme is fine by me. Also: the Super/Man biopic of Christopher Reeve looks like quite the living parable of power in being made perfect in weakness (see below).

6. Stat of the week: 39% of Americans believe that we are living in “the end times” and that the apocalypse is imminent. Patricia Marx outlines as much in her New Yorker exploration of the real estate market for doomsday bunkers. The article recounts her trip across America meeting with the real estate agents, manufacturers, and sellers of doomsday bunkers, and she examins the whole trend with a sense of detached irony. Let’s just say that many of these million dollar survivalist compounds aren’t furnished with Ikea purchases. As Marx underscores the irony of trying to sell a piece of land that is supposed to remain hidden and inaccessible, the stats she presents in the article are where the real interesting facts lie. To wit:

Sixty-six per cent are worried that the human race will be wiped out by nuclear weapons; roughly the same number worry that we will be killed off by a world war; fifty-three per cent think the next pandemic could do us in; fifty-two per cent bet on climate change; forty-six per cent on A.I.; forty-two per cent on an act of God; thirty-seven per cent on an asteroid; thirty-one per cent global inability to have children; twenty-five per cent an alien invasion. Only a small chunk of people believe the end will come in the next ten years. But for the eight per cent who believe it’s “very likely,” that’s soon enough to make their starter home their finisher home, too.”

Also, according to one bunker installation company, 99% of customers are conservative Christian. That said, my favorite character in the article is the yarmulke-wearing orthodox Jew with a holstered glock on his hip explaining why, according to Biblical numerology, there will be a major war against Israel within the next six years where “the Messiah gets personally involved.”

It’s not just that the stats tell us people are worried; it tells us that most people are worried, and as absurd as a bunker may sound, would you reconsider your real estate portfolio if your financial situation was better?

7. We’ll give the last word this week to Stephen Paulson, theologian and Mbird conference speaker, who offers a short revelation on the limits of natural theology over at 1517. Natural theology encompasses what we learn about God through our study of the natural world. A careful study of the hard sciences reveals knowledge of God’s creative power, our miniscule power in comparison to God’s power, and God’s laws that govern the world like gravity and time. Insightfully, Paulson adds that the tragedies of life also teach us of a God who punishes. Even the ancient Greeks, notes Paulson, understood suffering and death and misfortune were punishment from the heavens, results of some violation of divine command. The question of “who will deliver us?” is a direct result of natural theology, but someone else will need to share news if there’s more to the world outside of that.

I tried to find God this way in the green state of Minnesota by communing with nature in my backyard. One day, I saw a tree swallow’s nest with three precious little chicks stretching their beaks so that momma birds could feed them. I mused that this, after all, is the natural order established by God at creation, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:22). The great Jewish sages liked to expound on this phenomenon using Job 35:11, “Who teaches us through the beasts of the earth, and makes us wise through the fowls of heaven.” Elihu, one of Job’s “friends,” came up with this idea in an attempt to assuage Job’s suffering through “natural law theory” — that nature reveals its God-given function to guide human desires on their way to “the good” (as Aquinas put it). Elihu thus said, “Job, you may be suffering now, but consider the birds of the air!” As Rabbi Johanan said of this passage: “Had the Torah not been given [to the Jews through Moses on Mt. Sinai], we could have learnt it!” The birds would teach us God’s law if Moses had not done so already. However, that “law of the birds” was not just knowledge of an “order of nature. ” The birds cannot guide a person to happiness; instead, they teach us that God judges sin, finds us guilty, and destroys us in the end. There is no way out. Natural law may guide some of your choices, but it is put there by God — in things — to confirm what we already suspected: God judges all, including me.

As the baby birds chirped and stretched for more insects, a Cooper Hawk swept down and desiccated all three before my virgin eyes. I was horrified. God does have a law that he gave to Israel on Mt. Sinai to which they pledged their solemn lives, and then they sacrificed a golden calf because Moses was taking so long. God also has a “natural” law that he gave to Gentiles. By it, we learn both the amazing “cycles” of nature as well as the fact that all life ends in death. Worse yet, we learn that death is not “normal.” Nature ends in stinging judgment from its Creator. That is why Elihu did not help Job one bit by teaching him the wisdom of the birds. Such teaching only made Job want to vomit.

The bird-law tells us about our own end. Nature is not just a course of repeated seasons infinitely turning — spring to summer, summer to fall, fall to winter, and winter back into spring. Life is not simply exit, return, and repeat. If you didn’t watch closely enough, you would think there is no real death in nature since there seems only to be an endless change of seasons. Yet, nature’s law does not teach infinity; it teaches an inevitable and harsh death — God’s final, legal word. The law does not depict eternal cycles of life: its birds teach us that no one and nothing overcomes death. Neither Jew nor Gentile can claim he failed to get God’s memo about the result of sin. There is no second try at life or endless reincarnation. Instead, when you go out into nature, you will find these three divine revelations:

1) God exists, meaning you did not create yourself
2) God has an order, law, or command that you cannot ignore
3) God judges you with death for not fulfilling this command.

That is what a life coach can teach you: God exists, he has a law, and he is going to kill you with that law. Ponder that next time you are on your bike or in the RV and see a bird.

Then, one more thing: the birds cannot teach you what happens if your “cycle of nature” is interrupted by Christ, the Savior. What happens if, in the middle of communing with nature, you get a preacher who says: “Rise from the dead”? What will you do then?

Strays:

• Are we all beginning to have the same taste? A look into the rising monoculture of music.
• Phil Christman on Marilynne Robinson — why bad works of art (and bad Christian music!) can still succeed.
• Our weekly lectionary podcast, Same Old Song, got a visual refresher this week. A great listen for Bible readers of all stripes!