1. What a privilege last week to attend the premiere of the documentary above, Daughters, an ugly-cry-inducing grace-fest of a film about holding a daddy-daughter dance in prison. I cannot wait to see the wake it leaves once it’s widely released later this year. The viewing came on the heels of that absurdly eucharistic Fargo finale two weeks ago, which I still cannot believe happened. And now Billy Joel is releasing new music?! We are surrounded by signs of life, my friends, and they are worth keeping in mind, especially as we absorb this first piece.
Back in April Michael Roth reviewed Mark Edmundson’s new book The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in an Online World, which is an attempt to contend with, from a loosely Freudian point of view, the judgmentalism that pollutes the Interwebs so thoroughly. “What Would Freud Say About our Online Behavior?” is the title the Washington Post gave the column. As you may recall from high school:
Freud introduced the idea of the superego in the 1920s to describe how one part of our personality judges other parts. The superego is an internalized authority that at once holds us to a standard we are incapable of meeting and punishes us for our deficiencies. When we torture ourselves with self-recrimination or simply feel guilty for not living up to our aspirations, it’s the superego at work. The online world offers a way to displace this work by satisfying the desire for judgment with social media outrage. Instead of punishing oneself, one can share one’s judgments and be “liked” for having high, or at least crowd-approved, standards. The internet is “the great enforcer of super-ego socialization.”
Today, there are so many opportunities to get away from nasty self-judgment by judging others. To escape our own feelings of guilt, we attack others, or we douse ourselves with what Freud called “palliative measures” just to feel less. Canceling strangers in highly performative ways, we show ourselves to be not so bad. “When you dep-loy the super-ego in the world, you gain some temporary relief,” Edmundson writes. “You judge and you judge, and for a while it seems that your sins have been forgiven.”
“For a while” being the operative phrase here. For our purposes, I’ve long felt that Freud’s ‘super-ego’ syncs pretty closely with the voice of persistent accusation we call the little-l law, i.e. a voice that can never be satisfied, only extinguished. To the extent that Edmundson is right — and I believe he is, diagnosis-wise — he describes ideal conditions for the gospel of grace. Who knows, all this prolonged exposure to super-ego-driven scapegoating online might prime the pump for a Christian understanding of vicarious redemption: the ultimate displacement of guilt.
2. Edmundson’s book was brought to mind by Russell Moore, who wrote about it in a stirring column a couple weeks ago on CT, “Grace in the Age of Guilt.” I found the following portion particularly trenchant:
For so long, so many have assumed that sin and guilt are outdated categories, suited for a medieval era but not for this one. The prophets and apostles, though, told us that sin and guilt — along with the search for a meaning to life, the fear of death, and an answer to shame — might be culturally amplified realities, but they are not culturally created.
Guilt and shame are fallen human conditions, not ancient or premodern or modern or postmodern ones. The question is not whether the world around is grappling with guilty consciences but how.
For a catalog of such How’s — and the exhaustion they produce — might I suggest a certain volume? Moore really gets going when he talks about how Christians aren’t immune from deploying super-ego strategies:
We assume that we should get our failures under control and then come into the presence of God. We want to rely on the superego to fix us until we’re good enough to face the God who loves us. The presence of God with us in Christ, though, isn’t a reward for good performance; it’s the way that we are transformed.
We don’t give up, then. We don’t wallow in self-loathing or project that loathing onto other people. You might not feel okay. You might not be okay. But behind the veil of what you can see, the anchor holds … There’s a God who is actively moving toward us, not with condemnation but with mercy.
Preach! Speaking of Dr Moore, it was cool to hear him reference brother Simeon’s Mbird article on “How Do People Actually Change?” in his podcast interview with Kate Bowler this week.
3. Over at her Brooding newsletter, Kathryn Jezer-Morton asks, “Why Are Parents Fixated on Core Memories?.” We talked about this quite a bit on the latest episode the Mockingcast (out Monday), but the gist is that this trend, like so many others in the parenting sphere, presumes more control than we actually have.
For example, I lived in the UK for a couple months when I was in second grade during my father’s sabbatical. I know from photos that my parents took us to visit Hadrians Wall and countless country homes and museums. We went to London and even Paris. Yet what I remember most clearly from the entire three months was being forced to sing “Morning Has Broken” at a school assembly. That and the way the sidewalk we took to the park had a lot of cracks in it. Fortunately, Jezer-Morton points out how the fad, while susceptible to the same performative pitfalls as every other social media trend, is born at least in part from love (and pain). Parents want their kids to have happy childhoods and, I suspect, avoid (redeem?) the painful memories they themselves harbor.
I’ve watched a trend on parenting TikTok and Instagram in which parents claim to be “making core memories” for their kids. These captions typically accompany vacation or holiday content, or pictures and videos of kids playing in nature.
Today’s parents are famous for their instincts to control and engineer outcomes for their children, but it’s supremely hubristic to assume that you can stage-manage the content of your children’s memories. Child psychologists are constantly reminding us that the world of kids is, and should be, separate from the world of adults. What’s important to them is not what’s important to us. Presuming to know what experiences will be most formative for your children, and then taking the next step and boasting about that presumption to everyone you know, is a new level of buy-in to the charade of happy-family cosplay on social media.
Parents just want to make sure their kids are happy, and they are desperate to feel a sense of reassurance that, yes, they’re doing a good job. I suspect that core-memory content is a form of self-soothing. But I do wonder if the urge to rabidly protect our children from sadness is costing them something.
Those searching for the next rung on the Core Memories ladder need look no further than Bustle’s bonkers profile of Proposal Planners. Good Lord. Sounds like the release of Charlie Kauffman’s (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) children’s movie could not be more well timed:
4. Watch out, this next one’s electric. The Atlantic published a scathing critique of Molly Roden Winter’s new memoir, More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage entitled, “Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s New Fad,” by Tyler Austin Harper. Not sure I fully buy the ‘class’ aspect here — every demographic is pretty pathological in its pursuit of personal happiness (and sexual fulfillment) — nor would I say the piece fully acknowledges the id factor that’s lurking under this conversation, i.e. human beings, independent of ideology, just really like sex. But Harper’s argument toward the end about Americans conceiving of ourselves as start-ups and smuggling a (dehumanizing) Growth Mindset into every corner of existence strikes me as germane. I was also grateful he highlighted Christopher Lasch’s compassionate observation about narcissism being a means of survival in a world of despair rather than, well, a conscious choice.
More — and the present interest in polyamory more broadly — is the result of a long-gestating obsession with authenticity and individual self-fulfillment. That obsession is evident today in Instagram affirmations, Goop, and the (often toxic) sex positivity of an app-dominated dating scene, but its roots go back decades.
We might call this turbocharged version of authenticity culture “therapeutic libertarianism”: the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints — whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people — should impede each of us from achieving personal growth. This attitude is therapeutic because it is invariably couched in self-help babble. And it is libertarian not only because it makes a cult out of personal freedom, but because it applies market logic to human beings. We are all our own start-ups. We must all adopt a pro-growth mindset for our personhood and deregulate our desires. We must all assess and reassess our own “fulfillment,” a kind of psychological Gross Domestic Product, on a near-constant basis. And like the GDP, our fulfillment must always increase.
Winter is trapped in her therapeutic worldview, one imposed on her by an American culture that has made narcissism into not simply a virtue, but a quasi-religion that turns external obstacles into opportunities for internal self-improvement.
In his 1978 best seller, The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch argued that American narcissism should not be understood as simple self-obsession. Narcissism is a survival strategy: If we are fixated on finding fulfillment and endless self-reinvention, it is because our own inner lives feel like the only thing most of us have control over. The therapeutic cult of personal growth is a response to external problems that feel insoluble, a future that feels shorn of causes for hope.
5. In humor I gotta say, it’s been a while since McSweeney’s made me laugh rather than smirk. But Ysabel Yates’s “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Possibly Flirtatious Texts” finally did the trick. Genuinely hilarious. Dog owners will chuckle at Reductress’s “REPORT: Dog Understands It Is Him in the Mirror, He Just Wishes It Weren’t So.” Next, “Fur Falling Off Elmo In Clumps After Asking Twitter Users How They Doing” was funny from the Onion, but not as funny as the actual responses that Elmo elicited from real people when the character asked his followers how they were doing this week.
But people like yours truly have eyes for only one source of laughs this week: Larry David. His show Curb Your Enthusiasm kicks off its 12th and final season this weekend, and in anticipation the Ringer ran a lengthy reflection on the show’s genius:
[At the time it debuted] Salon noted a major aspect of the show that made it both satisfying and difficult to watch: “[Larry] David punishes his characters — well, here, he punishes himself — with retributions on an Old Testament scale.”
Yet these reviews, along with a slew of others during the show’s first few seasons, did not mention any form of the word “cringe,” a feat that seems truly unimaginable today. In the year 2024, the notion of cringe is in the ether; it is everywhere around us, like it or not. It is an adjective, a noun, a verb, and a vibe. And for that, it’s fair to say that David is among the people most worthy of both praise and blame.
Plenty of humor has long been measured in laughs per minute, but in the 21st century, a good deal of comedians seem to be going for something closer to gnaws-on-fists per laugh, a sort of sabermetrics of squirm in which Larry David is the Bill James.
6. On Seen & Unseen, Jonathan Rowlands considers the surprise resignation of beloved Liverpool football manager Jürgen Klopp, “Even the Best Have Their Limits,” which has sent shockwaves through football fandom worldwide, especially in the UK. By all accounts, Klopp is a remarkable man, not just as a coach, but as a Christian. We are now watching him willingly give up power and influence rather than consolidate and cling to it, a rarity in pretty much anyone not named John the Baptist (or JC):
Jürgen Klopp, manager of Liverpool Football Club, has the best job in the world, is outstandingly good at it and, at only 56, feels as though he doesn’t have the energy for it anymore. What a thought. Surely there has to be more to his leaving than this? It can’t be that simple.
But no; it really is that simple. Jürgen hasn’t been sacked for poor results; Liverpool are flying at the moment and, at the time of writing, could still win every competition they’re in. He hasn’t been offered another job somewhere else; he says he won’t manage anywhere else for at least a year. He just hasn’t got the energy to do this anymore. Despite what everyone at Liverpool wants — himself included — he feels it’s the right time to acknowledge that he has simply reached his limit. He can do no more.
Finitude is an inalienable part of being human: to be human is to be limited rather than limitless … This finitude can certainly lead to difficult moments (like, for example, having to watch one of your footballing heroes suddenly announce he’s leaving your club). But despite this, there is goodness in finitude. Our creaturely limitations remind us that we are not God. It reminds us that we need those around us and, in turn, that they need us.
Like Jürgen, we are all running out of energy. This need not be a cause for sadness; it merely points us towards the one from whom that energy comes and reminds us of our dependency on Him, and on those around us. Our finitude is a gift, releasing us from the burden of being all things to all people. I still wish Jürgen was staying, though.
Limitation as a doorway to love and service … sounds downright low anthropological to me.
7. We’ll close with a remarkable tale recounted by Nicholas Allmeier in Plough, “The Conversion of Johann Georg Hamann.” I’ve long heard Hamann’s name mentioned in hushed tones, especially in Lutheran circles, but have never ventured into his prose myself. Sounds like all that is about to change, praise God:
Hamann documented his conversion experience in the London Writings, recently translated into English by John Kleinig. These works, unlike those of his post-conversion authorship, are written plainly and earnestly, reflecting the experience of a young man undergoing the most radical and important transformation of his life. Critical editors Bayer and Weißborn rightly place it in the same genre as Augustine’s Confessions.
Hamann compares his own heart to the barren scene at the outset of creation. The Spirit entered in, permitting and prompting Hamann to undergo “a new beginning” — a re-creation of himself through reading the Bible “with more attention, in a more orderly way, and with more hunger.”
He first focused upon Exodus, writing, “I recognized my own offenses in the history of the Jewish people.” The books of Moses, far from being only history and law, were typologically and providentially written about him and his sin: “I read the story of my own life and thanked God for His forbearance with His people, because nothing but such an example could justify a similar hope for me.”
Both [Hamann and Augustine] understood themselves through conversion, both in their prior follies and their task of not only living but thinking in light of the truth they had come to know. We learn that conversion does not lead to the cessation of a thoughtful life but enables and transfigures it, drawing on the radically particular material of one’s story which might otherwise seem a merely private obstacle to understanding oneself and others. Reading Augustine and Hamann side by side may reveal that conversion, far from confusing us, is that which makes the world more fully intelligible.
Strays:
- Must Listen: the podcast Search Engine recently aired an episode “When Do You Know It’s Time to Stop Drinking?” in which host PJ Vogt interviews AJ Daulerio, the infamous Gawker editor (responsible for that company’s implosion). The final 15 minutes in particular, in which the two (cancelled) men talk about looking for, and finding, grace in an unexpected place is truly beautiful. You’ll also discover the only context in which the sentence “there are murderers here” is heard as a consolation.
- Commonweal published a powerful conversion account from former VICE editor Aaron Lake Smith, “Finding God in Punk Anarchism.” Here’s a taste:
“the fundamental contradiction of anarchism is that for all its alleged atheism, it relies on moral, spiritual, and religious impulses to gain traction. In that way it is unlike Marxism, which, in its orthodox form, isn’t intended to inflame your emotions — it’s “scientific” and attempts to appeal to data and economic facts… I began to notice how eaten through anarchism and punk were with religious themes, most of them just turned upside down to appear secular — martyrdom, asceticism, purity, beloved community, moral righteousness.” “When the hearse came [for my father] and the dust cleared, the youth culture was not there for me or my family. But the church was.” - Attention North Carolinians! I’m thrilled to be speaking this Sunday 2/4 at First Presbyterian in Salisbury, NC. I think it’s about 45 minutes from Charlotte. Three different talks: 9:30am, 11am, 5pm. Would love to see you.
- Finally, I’ve just gotten word that beloved friend and mentor Dr. Rod Rosenbladt has been received into the arms of his savior. I am so grateful to have known (and learned from) such a giant of the faith. We’ll certainly run some tributes in the coming days. May he rest in peace, glory be to God.
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One response to “January 27-February 2”
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Love this write-up, week after week! I enjoy getting a different flavor from each compiler, too.
I figured you’d touch on the Elmo thing, which I hadn’t heard about til a friend mentioned it to me earlier this week. I have to admit, my initial reaction was kind of like Larry David’s…I thought, well, if you ask people how they’re doing on a social media platform that attracts the most neurotic, unhinged weirdos on the internet, of course you’re going to get a huge reaction. And isn’t it a sad state of affairs when people feel like all they can do to vent their poor mental health is yell at a fictional character’s Twitter account? Sheesh. Then, well, maybe the Holy Spirit had a word with me… after all, don’t those insane Twitter neurotics deserve some comfort too? Isn’t the response of the Sesame people pretty inspiring, coordinating with government health agencies and trying to give people real tools to help? I’ve been trying to hold on to that. Cynicism may be useful in small doses, as it can be a tool for staying sensitized and rooting out b.s., but it has its limits. I mean, God, I used to love Sesame Street when I was a kid. Let it be my balm, too.