1. I hate to break the news, but if you live in the northern hemisphere the summer is pretty much over. I hope the warmth and lengthened days were everything you dreamed it would be. It seems like summer just started, no? Of course, it was that great philosopher Ferris Bueller who said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” And he’s right. Time is the one commodity that is irreversibly finite. There never seems to be enough of it to go around.
I’m aware that any reference to Ferris Bueller immediately flies over the heads of anyone under thirty. Time comes for everyone — boomers, Gen-X (not to be forgotten), and yes, even millennials. Which is to say that I found Kate Lindsay’s Atlantic article on the “millennial pause” hilarious. How quickly the tables turn:
Now that Gen Z has all the attention, the internet quirks that Millennials have called their own for years can feel a bit stale, if not downright cringey. The first generation to grow up with social media in the mobile web era, Millennials are now becoming the first generation to subsequently age out of it, stuck parroting the hallmarks of a bygone digital age.
Once my eyes were opened to the Millennial pause, I started noticing my age in every part of my internet experience. I get confused whenever Instagram changes its layout. I use GIFs to make jokes in Slack. I have posted song lyrics on my Instagram Story. The range of mannerisms is so broad, the signs such a staple of my online behavior for the past 15 years, that it’s not even worth trying to fight them.
Naturally, Gen Z has picked up on them too, and the mockery that was once reserved for Boomers is now coming for me.
Trading “OK, boomer” for “Ok, millennial” feels like karma to me. Now, one could always try and fight the passage of time. The feeling of being so yoked to a cliché is an unpleasant one. But as Lindsay observes, “a 35-year-old desperately adopting the mannerisms of a 20-year-old” is pretty cringe — to say nothing of a 45- or 55-year-old chasing the fountain of youth(fulness).
If nothing else fails, there’s always comparative righteousness: “You Have To Tell Me Your Age So I Can See if I Should Feel Bad About Where I Am at in My Career.”
Congratulations! I am so happy about your success! Also, I’m spiraling and I need to make this about me. Just so I can compare, how old are you? If you’re older, you’re aspirational. If you’re younger, I’m going to cry for a week.
2. Accepting that there’s only so many hours in a day (in one’s life) might sound like a liberating kind of wisdom. And it certainly can be to the kind person who has been crushed by the belief that their lives have infinite possibilities. “Accepting our finitude,” as the sophomore philosophy student might say. But accepting finitude really just makes the burden of what we actually do with our time all the more urgent. Time is short! Don’t waste your life!
Along these lines, apocalyptic clamor is the currency of the day, in part because there are so many things vying for our very limited attention. For any issue to rise above the fray, it must be framed as an emergency requiring our immediate response. The endless competition for our attention creates a feedback loop of “whataboutisms,” writes B.D. McClay in the Hedgehog Review:
The Internet, however, has only one currency, and that currency is attention. On the Internet, we endlessly raise awareness, we platform and deplatform, we signal-boost and call out, and we argue about where our attention should be directed, and how. What we pay attention to and the language in which we pay attention are the only realities worth considering, which is one reason why stories are so often framed by the idea that nobody is talking about a problem, when the problem is often quite endlessly talked about — just not solved.
Framing every issue as a crisis might seem like a short cut to garnering attention, but the trade-off in doing so far outweigh the clicks. A blaring alarm is not a suggestion, but a demand — a “thou shalt” call to action from the summit of Sinai itself. The greater the moral alarm, the weightier the the implied condemnation, regardless of “correctness” of the alarm.
3. It seems that alarmism is simply judgment by a different name, a dynamic well captured in the New Atlantis this week in Taylor Dotson’s article, “Unsustainable Alarmism“:
Even if the extension of catastrophic rhetoric to longer-term and more complex problems is well-intentioned, it unavoidably implies that something is morally or mentally wrong with the people who fail to take heed. It makes those who are not already horrified, who do not treat the crisis as an undeniable, act-now-or-never calamity, harder to comprehend: What idiot wouldn’t do everything possible to avert catastrophe?
This helps to explain the some of the backlash to what Adam Ellwanger in the American Conservative calls “The Tyranny of the ‘Current Thing’,” which recognizes how alarmism and righteousness go hand in hand: “Current Thingism is a way for these people to comfort themselves.” The “these people” in question, Ellwanger believes, are the liberal elitist media. So perhaps the article also well illustrates how people respond to judgment — by turning the tables with accusations in kind (see also the whataboutism article above).
But Dotson and Ellwanger both demonstrate, I think rightly, how the rhetoric of urgency is employed to forestall debate and reasonable disagreement (hence all the debates going on about the value of free speech). And both authors, in their different ways, recognize inefficiency of moral panic, that judgment cannot save us. For Ellwanger, it moral panic hides “the unpleasant truth that the experts and the establishment can’t save us.” For Dotson, it’s the opposite conclusion, that moral alarmism shifts the burden for change squarely on the individual while simultaneously failing to account for human frailty:
When we look at long-lasting challenges as though they are impending cataclysms, we suffer a circumscribed political imagination that cannot see beyond the logic of individual sacrifice. […]
Seeing personal virtue as a necessary condition for victory turns our shortcomings into moral failings. We shame others and ourselves about our individual carbon footprints. We make promises to have the courage of our climate convictions, resolving to forgo flying, meat consumption, or fossil-fuel vehicles, even though we invariably fall short. These promises appear to be little more than politically charged New Year’s resolutions. Why do we expect personal sacrifices we know we can’t make and then resort to shaming when we fail? […]
The greatest cost of catastrophism about long-term problems is that it insists on highly visible, instant solutions while neglecting less-flashy, incremental improvements. […] Catastrophism has failed us because it has turned our attention away from the broad arsenal of tools available for averting catastrophe.
There’s something to be said for withholding judgment, I mean, alarm. At the risk of sounding glib at the potential catastrophes facing humanity, what if public debates were approached with the same dullness one might have when discussing what to eat tonight. The kind of conversation that at least presumes mutual goodwill and a constructive outcome. I know … it’s naïve to hope for politics to be boring. Until then, take it away Marcus:
4. In humor this week, there’s the aforementioned Hard Times satire “You Have To Tell Me Your Age So I Can See if I Should Feel Bad About Where I Am at in My Career.” For generational humor, there’s “Fixing Gen-Zs Etiquette Problem.” And Reformed sabbatarians might find themselves inadvertently skewered by “Woman Suffers Panic Attack Trying to Pack Week’s Worth of Relaxing Into One Sunday.”
“I work upwards of 60 hours a week,” said del Fuego, 26, a marketing analyst. “So I usually have to jam all my relaxation and fun into a short period of time. Recently, I organized the perfect Sunday Funday for my friend group. First, we’d have brunch; then rent some bikes for a ride by the river. I blocked out 45 minutes for the farmer’s market, followed by kickball in the park and then drinks downtown. There was more, too. However, around midday, I started to have a hard time breathing, felt nauseous, and nearly passed out. The girls brought me to the hospital, even though I begged them not to. We hadn’t even gotten to the escape room!”
5. Writing in the Christian Century, Sam Wells shares some of his pre-marital counseling curriculum in, “Three Words That Can Unravel a Marriage.” Spoiler: the first two words have a lot to do with law and gospel.
The first word to unlearn is if. It’s a word that pervades human arrangements. If you keep your side of the bargain, I’ll keep mine. If you weren’t so annoying, exasperating, and infuriating, I’d be kind, gentle, and understanding. On the wedding day the two people being married dispense with the word if — and replace it with the word always. Their love is no longer conditional; it’s permanent.
The second word to unlearn is for. For is the curse of a marriage. Do you know how many hours I’ve spent making a nice dinner for you? Have you any idea what it costs me to work so hard for you to have a comfortable future? For names the accumulation of unspoken resentment, until like a bursting dam it floods a relationship. For is based on guesswork, assumed benevolence, a private sense of unrecognized moral superiority.
Ages ago, I had a certain seminary professor who would contend that marriage is not a 50/50 contract. If it were, then you could calculate (with absolutely certainty!) how much more you are contributing to the relationship. A 50/50 split, no matter how collaborative this might be conceptualized, introduces conditionality into the marriage, mixing the law with the gospel. Marriage, he said, must be like grace: 100% one-way love.
6. The Guardian this week profiled Marina Cantacuzino, who spent eighteen years studying forgiveness and tragedies. Cantacuzino doesn’t have much time for Christianity, which seems like a glaring oversight, but her research does underscore how forgiveness can provide healing to the wronged:
There is, however, one through-line that Cantacuzino will trace between one story and the next. She tells me about the father of a girl killed in Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 terrorist attack in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people and injured hundreds more. “For the first year after, the father’s life fell apart: his marriage, his other relationships. He drank. He used to go to the bomb site every day and look at it,” says Cantacuzino. “Then, after one year, he realised he had to do something differently, because what he was doing wasn’t working. His route out of it was to choose to forgive McVeigh. That is very common — it’s a choice, an intention to do it, to alleviate the pain.” People who are not living with tragedy can underestimate how much work it is to hate.
Cantacuzino also found how often the law can get in the way of forgiveness. How the demand for forgiveness can be counterproductive to the reconciliation process.
In many contexts — from restorative justice programmes in prisons, to families, to forgiveness ceremonies after civil wars — she has seen bridges collapse where forgiveness is expected or demanded. “I remember talking to an architect of the truth and reconciliation commission [after apartheid in South Africa] and he said: ‘At one time, we considered making forgiveness mandatory. And then we saw sense.’”
Strays:
- Gawker’s “Failure to Cope Under Capitalism” threads the needle between social forces and personal responsibility.
- Arthur Brooks commends taking walks in nature and this urbanite is now planning to go hiking this weekend.
- Christianity and the Working Class highlights data on the increasing class divide in American Christianity.
- Lots of chatter this week after the New York Times‘ recent “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church.” I mean, maybe? But there is something to be said for rethinking some of the assumptions of modernity.
COMMENTS
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There is so much good stuff here, as always. The humor headlines alone! (And that marriage piece – yowza). Thank you Todd