1. Leading off this week is an article by Heather Havrilesky entitled, “Let Your Kids Be Bad at Things” (an excerpt from her excellent new book, Foreverland). Of course, parents want their children to succeed, to be good at something they enjoy. But this otherwise noble aim is precisely what leads to an overbearing parent who ruins the fun, something Havrilesky learned when her child signed up for a school talent show. She wanted perfection from her daughter, but it was precisely her imperfections that made the talent show so perfect:
On the night of the talent show, I wasn’t thinking about magic. I was bracing myself, as the curtains parted. I felt like a jerk for leading my poor lambs to the slaughter of public humiliation.
But as the first wobbly-voiced performer fumbled with her microphone, a different sort of magic slowly took over. I could see that these were charming flaws I was witnessing — irreplaceable, once-in-a-lifetime sorts of flaws: the gymnast who doesn’t quite get her handstand vertical, the distorted microphone squeals in the midst of a breathy Les Misérables ballad, the horn players with their strange alternative Star Wars rhythm. It was actually the non-greatness that made each kid’s performance so memorable and unique.
When my daughter and her friends took to the stage, I could see that was part of what made them so engrossing. These were the details that could break your heart: The girl who is always off beat. The girl who smiles but never sings. The girl who sings but never smiles. The girl who moves in the opposite direction from everyone else, no matter how many times you correct her. Together, they form a kind of ragged, vulnerable tribute to being 9 years old, awkwardly poised between very young and too old too soon. Together, they represent how it feels when you’re trying to choose between caring too little and caring too much.
I was trying to stay aloof, but tears started pouring out of my eyes and wouldn’t stop.
See also the Mbird interview of Havrilesky five-plus years ago for the “Mental Health Issue” of the magazine.
2. Around in my neighborhood, packages are routinely stolen from front porches. I once had 90 pounds of dog food disappear within a few hours after delivery. The state of New Jersey recently made such theft a felony, with a sentence of up to five years in prison for convicted porch pirates. Going to prison for stealing a $30 shirt is a bit ridiculous, if you ask me, but truth be told, the news felt gratifying. Perhaps I should buy a doorbell camera. You know, for when a beloved book purchase disappears. But writing for Wired, Meghan O’Gieblyn takes a principled stand against such neighborhood surveillance.
One might assume that a good neighbor is a kind of detective, a citizen who is willing to sniff out interlopers, collect evidence, and work in conjunction with law enforcement to keep the neighborhood safe. […] Loving one’s neighbor, it would seem, is an act best practiced within the constraints of the law, which draws perimeters, enforces boundaries, and makes clear distinctions between what belongs to you and what belongs to others.
As reasonable as this vision for communal order might seem, it’s also profoundly un-Christian. O’Gieblyn continues by exploring Søren Kierkegaard’s understanding of the command to love your neighbor:
The existentialist philosopher argued that the commandment offers a far more radical proposition, one that requires us to surrender our commitment to justice, fairness, and private property. Just as major crises—revolutions, wars, earthquakes—erase the line between “thine” and “mine,” forcing people to relinquish their material belongings and attend to the more immediate needs of their communities, true love for one’s neighbor is a fundamentally disruptive practice that rules out petty questions of ownership. Thieves also disregard the distinction between mine and thine, Kierkegaard points out, and love is the inverse of theft, a willingness to cheerfully surrender what belongs to you for the sake of your brother. This advice might seem impossibly lofty, or even absurd, though as far as I can tell, Kierkegaard meant it to be taken literally, drawing as he did on the radical Christian ethic that insists if someone steals your coat, you should give them your shirt as well — or, to update the analogy: If a porch pirate swipes your Amazon package, throw in your FedEx parcel to boot.
To truly love in this way, Kierkegaard argues, it’s necessary to abandon the role of a criminal detective, those “servants of justice who track down guilt and crime.” This is the impulse, inherent in each of us, to investigate the behavior of others, to unearth their sins, to ferret out clues of potential wrongdoing. Instead, the person who truly loves their neighbor must assume the best. The investigative mindset might even become a force for good if it’s turned in a more positive direction, toward finding charitable explanations for others’ behavior and interpreting it in the best possible light. Perhaps the stranger wandering the halls of your building is house-sitting for one of your neighbors. Perhaps the unfamiliar person approaching your porch is simply returning a misdelivered piece of mail. If no explanation is possible, Kierkegaard advises, we must simply forgive the person. In the end, he offers a firm warning to citizens drawn to the enthralling drama of the digital neighborhood watch: It is the job of public officials to track down crime and wrongdoing. “The rest of us are neither called on to be the judge nor the officer of justice, but, on the contrary, we are called … to love, hence by the help of the extenuating explanation, to cover the multitude of sins.”
And if that wasn’t radical enough, O’Gieblyn stays with Kierkegaard long enough to turn the tables on us entirely:
[Kierkegaard] argued that the command to love one’s neighbor “as oneself” does not entail a moral symmetry but rather relies on a “heightened inequality,” as it demands that we spare ourselves the leniency that we must extend to others. It may be virtuous to respond to another’s limitations with generosity, but we should not apply this same optimistic outlook toward ourselves. We should not presuppose that we are our best selves, that our motives are entirely pure. Instead, one should practice a vigilant self-doubt and “treat oneself as a suspicious character,” as he puts it. It is with one’s own conscience, in other words, that the procedure of a criminal detective becomes virtuous.
That neighbor playing loud music until 2am and keeping your baby awake? Perhaps it’s a lower-budget wedding reception for a recent cancer survivor. Seriously! And if not, there’s always forgiveness (oh yeah, that), because after all you’ve been that neighbor many times before. It turns out that love and legal retribution simply aren’t compatible.
3. Speaking of Kierkegaard, Ryan Kemp at the Hedgehog Review examined the 19th century Danish philosopher’s writings for the key to happiness. What follows from the dour Dane is, to my eyes, an ingenious reading of the apostle Paul’s contrast between law and faith — a life lived according to conditionality and deserving vs. one lived in the gratitude of faith:
An ethical person … approaches life with specific ideas of what she is owed if she plays by life’s rules. Those rules are largely moral: If I respect you, you owe me respect in return. Many of these rules receive, if only implicitly, a cosmic emphasis when a person regards right conduct as having earned her a life free of pain and hardship, at least of the most traumatic kind. When the universe breaks the rules (a cancer diagnosis, car accident, or failed relationships), bitterness and resentment are justified. This is why one will often say of a particularly good person who is also dealt a bad hand, “He deserved better!” The fact that the language of “desert” recommends itself in these moments suggests that many of us move through life in this mode of ownership. Since most of us at least tacitly acknowledge that the universe doesn’t really respect these rules of ownership, we also carry around a constant low-level anxiety that the things we love can be robbed at any moment.
Now, Kierkegaard contrasts this with faith. Imagine a person who acknowledges that all of the attachments that the ethical person regards as objects of ownership are anything but. To the contrary, God insists that one’s personal happiness must be absolutely sacrificed for the sake of one’s neighbor. The particular goods that fill one’s life are not owed in any strong sense; they are gifts. What the ethical person sees as objects of ownership, the person of faith gives up to God in order to receive again as objects of grace. Not only does this transformed disposition liberate one’s loves from a kind of domineering co-dependence, it frees one to enjoy those same objects in a different way. Kierkegaard supposes, credibly it seems, that the ethical person’s tacitly precarious sense of ownership actually diminishes her ability to engage wholeheartedly with the goods of the world. This means, against Hägglund, that the person best positioned to love and enjoy life is precisely the one who has made peace with its loss. In the language of Fear and Trembling, Abraham can’t really love Isaac until he is prepared to give him up.
Writing on the very same topic for the Atlantic, Arthur Brooks believes happiness is found by “managing what we want instead of what we have,” so that “we give ourselves a chance to lead more satisfied lives.” Not bad as far as advice goes, but the difference between Kierkegaard and Brooks is illuminating. For Brooks, happiness and desire are incompatible: want less, and you’re more happy with what you have now. Kierkegaard pushes this logic to its impossibility to get at the more profound issue. We want to control and dominate the world; we believe the world owes us happiness. But if life is a sheer gift from start to finish, so too is our happiness.
4. It’s Valentine’s Day on Monday (FYI!) so romance and love are in the air. Over on Vox, the topic remains somewhat a mystery to scientists, which may not be much of a surprise. If you’re trying to understand love, it might be better to read Shakespeare or Jane Austen … or even the Bible. Researchers aren’t entirely in the dark, however, and their studies disproving folk wisdom about dating and marriage are head-turning:
People who go on dates tend to make guesses based on what they like, says Paul Eastwick, a psychologist at the University of California Davis who also studies relationships. We might think, “I click really well with people who are interested in anime or people who are really interested in vegetarian cooking,” Eastwick explains. “The issue is that we really can’t find any evidence that any of those kinds of factors matter in terms of matching people.” […]
“It is very, very hard to study relationships before two people will officially call themselves a couple,” he says. It’s just too chaotic of a system.He suspects that a lot of the course of an early relationship is the product of chance. In a chaotic system, small changes in starting conditions can lead to widely divergent paths later on.
When you’re looking at a happy couple, he says, it’s like looking at a chessboard in a game that’s 16 moves in. “Maybe a master could have predicted [the position of the pieces] from the first move, but most people can’t,” he says. There are often many paths the game can take to get to the same position. “It’s worth having some humility about the role of luck and chance in getting this couple to this point,” he says.
I think there’s something to be said for the accidental, unpredictability of love. It can’t be manufactured by an algorithm — or by ourselves, for that matter. We don’t really know what we want, or perhaps those preferences don’t really matter in the long run. Romantic love is the product of innumerable, small circumstances that almost mysteriously add up to an arrow shooting from Cupid’s bow.
5. In humor, the New Yorker’s “Metrics I’m Glad My Phone’s Health App Doesn’t Track” is close to perfection:
See also: “Study Finds Majority Of Americans Die Without Ever Fulfilling Narrative Function” by the Onion. And this one isn’t satire, but it’s no less hilarious: “Security Guard Doodles Eyes on $1 Million Painting on First Day.”
6. To close this week, Philip Yancey wrote in Christianity Today on the seemingly infinite expanse of space and the smallness of our earth by comparison. The sheer scale is enough to make you dizzy, but Yancey stares at the sky and recalls the book of Job — and Jesus.
Scientists now believe that if you had unlimited vision, you could hold a sewing needle at arm’s length toward the night sky and see 10,000 galaxies in the eye of the needle. Move it an inch to the left and you’d find 10,000 more. Same to the right, or no matter where else you moved it. There are approximately a trillion galaxies out there, each encompassing an average of 100 to 200 billion stars.
In the years since, our home — this pale blue dot called Earth — has not stopped shrinking in comparative stature. Now it is found to be a mid-sized planet orbiting a mid-rank star in one galaxy out of a trillion.
How should we adapt to this humbling new reality? […]
Job got a closeup lesson on how puny we humans are compared to the God of the universe, and it silenced all his doubts and complaints. I’ve never experienced anything like the travails Job endured, but whenever I have my own doubts, I try to remember that perspective — the Hubble telescope view of God. In the words of a Broadway musical echoing God’s speech to Job, “Your Arms Too Short to Box with God.”
In my less self-absorbed moments, however, I turn to a very different passage from the Bible.
In his letter to the Philippians, the apostle Paul quotes what many believe to be a hymn from the early church. In a stately, lyrical paragraph, Paul marvels that Jesus gave up all the glory of heaven to take on the form of a man — and not just a man, but a servant — one who voluntarily subjected himself to an ignominious death on a cross. (Phil 2:6-7)
I pause and wonder at the mystery of Incarnation. In an act of humility beyond comprehension, the God of a trillion galaxies chose to “con-descend” — to descend to be with — the benighted humans on this one rebellious planet, out of billions in the universe. I falter at analogies, but it is akin to a human becoming an ant, perhaps, or an amoeba, or even a bacterium.
Yet according to Paul, that act of condescension proved to be a rescue mission that led to the healing of something broken in the universe. […]
We hear the roar of God at the end of the Book of Job, a voice that evokes awe and wonder more than intimacy and love. Yet Philippians 2 gives a different slant on the Hubble telescope view of God. A God beyond the limits of space and time has a boundless capacity of love for his creations, no matter how small or rebellious they might be.
Strays:
- I Gave Myself Three Months to Change My Personality
- It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart
- A review of Ross Douthat’s The Deep Places, “The Evidence of Bugs Unseen“
- Lots of people forwarded us this article by David Brooks.
- David Zahl guested this week on the Laymen’s Lounge podcast, talking about the importance of the law-gospel distinction.
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[…] is trusting oneself and it’s only a matter of time until that option loses its appeal. Recalling Megan O’Gieblyn’s critique of holding our neighbors accountable via doorbell cameras, “we should not presuppose that we are […]